A Twisted Crown of Thorns ®

If Harold Camping was trying to predict that the end of Muammar Gaddafi would come before 21st October he would have hit the nail on the head. Just one day before that date Gaddafi breathed his last. But predicting the end of the world has been a feat that has taken its toll and worn out the frail Doom’s day prophet. Not only has his health failed along the way, his voice seems to be closing down as well. What is it this time Harold? Are we surely confident that you have peeked over the shoulder of the Most High and glanced at the most forbidden calendar?

OAKLAND — This time, Harold Camping sounds like a man who has suffered the whisper of self-doubt.

The Oakland minister’s latest prediction of the end of the world – which he’s set for Friday – is couched among words like “probably” and “maybe,” a far cry from the carved-in-stone certitude he projected onto his infamous May 21 forecast.

“I do believe we’re getting very near the very end,” Camping, 90, said during a podcast recorded earlier this month and posted on his Family Radio website. “Oct. 21, that’s coming very shortly, that looks like it will be, at this point, it will be the final end of everything.”

After his last apocalyptic prediction failed to materialize, Camping said he was “flabbergasted” and was reconsidering his calculations.

“We’ve learned that there’s a lot of things we didn’t have quite right,” he acknowledged during the podcast.

A June 9 stroke kept Camping hospitalized until early September, but he’s since returned to the airwaves. He now characterizes May 21 as a “tremendous event” that unleashed a spiritual judgment day, just not the material one that he expected.

Tom Evans, a long time Family Radio employee who believed he would ascend to heaven May 21, declined to comment on Camping’s latest end-of-times prediction.

Probably Harold has discovered that neat little verse in Matthew that says, “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

But even then would he recognise the verse even if it hit him between the eyes? He seems to have stopped using a bible long ago. He prefers using numerology.