Harold Camping has apologized to his followers for being wrong on the Rapture - twice - and essentially costing them a lot of money. "Come now, let us reason together," said the Lord in Isaiah 1:18 and so we cannot be too harsh on him for doing the flawed, worldview-focused math I dissected in So The Rapture Is Saturday - Luckily The Grey's Anatomy Season Finale Was Last Night. Paul Krugman does the same thing every week in the New York Times and still hasn't repented and he bilks Americans out of a lot more money than Camping did.
When May doomsday failed to materialize, he changed it to October, then he apologized. Why apologize again? It's humility and that is where he is separate from those with religious fervor about their pet culture wars. "Of that day and hour knoweth no man" (Matthew 24:36&Mark 13:32) critics were right and Camping was wrong.
"He will end time in His time, not ours!" Camping wrote recently and that was the point I was making. His numerology relied a very specific place - Earth. A day on Mars is a different scale. Here's hoping economists learn that same lesson. It's easier not to take a stand on anything, of course, and ultimately spineless, but telling people to lose all their money based on flaky numerical supposition is a bad idea, whether it comes from political pundits or radio hosts.
