Harold Camping Devotee Loses Life Savings, Yet Still Believes New Prediction
Harold Camping surprisingly still has people believing in his End Times prediction despite being wrong three times.
Robert Fitzpatrick of Staten Island, the man famous for spending his entire life savings – about $140,000 – on bus and subway ads warning about the end of the world, says he believes Camping’s post-May 21 claim that the spiritual judgment did come on Saturday.
The 60-year-old man, who now lives off his pension, says he is waiting for the new date, Oct. 21, when he believes the rapture and the complete destruction of the world will take place simultaneously.
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“We’ve always had Oct. 21 as a date for the end of the world,” Fitzpatrick told the Staten Island Advance. “We understand May 21 now as the date in which God brought spiritual judgment.”
The only difference now, he explained, is that what they believed would happen physically on May 21, is now to happen on Oct. 21.
“I just can’t see us getting past 2011 with nothing happening,” he added.
Previously, Family Radio President Harold Camping told listeners of his radio program that May 21 is Judgment Day and the rapture. But on Monday, an unapologetic Camping recorded a radio and TV response at the Family Radio headquarters in Oakland, Calif., during which he asserted that he was right about his prediction. The part he got wrong, Camping insisted, is that he took the Judgment Day on May 21 too literally when it should have been understood as spiritual.
“We didn’t see any difference but God brought Judgment Day to bear upon the whole world,” Camping said. “The whole world is under Judgment Day and it will continue right up until Oct. 21, 2011 and by that time the whole world will be destroyed.”
“We have not made a mistake as so far as the timeline, the unfolding,” he maintained.
When pressed by a Christian Post reporter to respond to the responsibility he has in financially damaging followers, Camping basically wiped his hands of any wrongdoing.
“I don’t have any responsibility. I don’t have any responsibility of anybody’s life. I’m only teaching the Bible. I’m simply saying, ‘This is what the Bible says,’” said Camping.
“We at Family Radio never tell anyone what [to] do with their possessions. That’s totally between them and God,” he said.
Camping’s message has reached across the country to New York, where Fitzpatrick not only accepts the new Oct. 21 date but apparently holds no grudges against Camping for causing him to lose his life savings.
But Fitzpatrick’s sister, his only family besides his mother, “wants nothing to do with any of it (Judgment Day prophecy),” according to International Business Times.
Fitzpatrick is the author of the self-published book The Doomsday Code: God is Warning Us Through the Bible, based mostly on Camping’s teachings.
