By: Jim Hoover
We’ve had the Barney Madoff scam affecting hundreds and the Wall Street scam perpetrated by hundreds and affecting millions. Now it’s the Harold Camping scam affecting billions.
Scams are all around us. We have conmen in politics who fool voters into voting them into office and then cheat them out of their livelihood. We have executives in boardrooms plotting our demise with catchy words to seduce us like outsourcing, right-sizing and resource rationalization.
Harold Camping, a spokesman minister and president of the “Family Radio Station,” spent $100 million he collected from his radio listeners over the last 7 years to convince us that the world will come to an end, starting yesterday.
Millions of Americans were in a frenzy – at least until 6PM Saturday night – about the end of the world. They believe the world would end because some charlatan minister, Harold Camping, said it would. Perhaps he actually believed it.
One representative of too many vulnerable creatures in our world, Robert Patrick (above), saved $100,000 for retirement, working for the Transit system. He spent it all on subway and bus ads like the one above, because he did not think he would need it after yesterday.
But Harold Camping, the minister who started this whole thing, didn’t do likewise with his $70 million in assets.
Camping is the president of “Family Radio Station” which is worth over $70 million. He brags that he takes no salary and is just a humble 89 year old volunteer.
His prediction hinged on a New Zealand earthquake starting on May 21st that will roll through the whole world. Rapture will occur today at 6PM when true Christians – some 200 million of us — will be taken up (in the air) to meet Christ.
It is based on a passage in the Bible, 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17:
… and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
Stage two involves God completely destroying the Earth and the universe five months later on October 21st.
It’s not like his history of predictions engenders confidence. He had previously predicted that Rapture would come in September of 1994.
Can scams get any bigger? Supposedly, not.
According to Camping, this one started in heaven.
