AWOLangel

Fri May 20, 2011 3:55 pm

inheritor: "i shouldn't have to pay estate taxes. uncle bob didn't die, just ascended"
tax person: "yeah, sure. like i haven't heard that one 500 times this week."

Quote:

 

The man who spent his life savings to tell New York the end was near.

Twelve days before Judgment Day, Robert Fitzpatrick saw a sign. And thank goodness, because he’d paid top dollar for it. Fitzpatrick, a 60-year-old retired engineer, boarded the Staten Island Ferry on the afternoon of May 9. When he reached Manhattan, he walked to a subway station and picked up the Metro, a free newspaper. There it was on page four—one of the spooky, apocalyptic ads Fitzgerald has placed all over town. “Global Earthquake: The Greatest Ever!” the ad read. Below that, in large letters: “Judgment Day: May 21, 2011.”

In the last month, Fitzpatrick has done for the Rapture what Dr. Zizmor did for skin care. Fitzpatrick’s ads line subway cars, subway platforms, and bus shelters. The Staten Island Advance carries them, and so does the trade publication Defense News, out of Springfield, Virginia. Fitzpatrick says that “blowing the trumpet” about Judgment Day cost him a sum in the low six figures—his life savings. The mortal certainty of the message made me curious about the certainty of the man who’d paid for it.

Fitzpatrick meets me one afternoon in a building in the Financial District. The sun is shining, and from our perch we can see cars crawling across the Brooklyn Bridge and financial wizards going about their rounds. “Inundated, yeah,” Fitzpatrick says glumly, imagining what downtown will be like after the great earthquake. “This is a low-lying area, and the water will be up here pretty quickly, I think.”

Fitzpatrick is extremely thin, and at certain angles his body seems to vanish inside his blue checked sports coat, as if he has already been raptured. He was born in the Bronx and attended St. Peter’s Boys High School on Staten Island. He has since determined that, doctrinally speaking, the Roman Catholic Church of his boyhood was “a million miles away from the truth.” He tried the New York City Church of Christ but left when a congregant announced he was marrying a divorced woman; only Fitzpatrick thought this didn’t jibe with biblical law. “I was reading the Bible on my own and always looking for the truth,” he says.

In 2006, Fitzpatrick retired from the transit department with visions of moving to Maui and “marrying a pretty Japanese girl.” He’d started work on a book of nature haikus. Then he heard a terrifying proclamation that sounded, finally, like the biblical truth he’d been seeking. He says, “I wasn’t exactly thrilled to learn what I did about the end of the world.”

He heard the news on the radio. Every weeknight at 7:30, the religious chatter on New York’s WFME is interrupted by an octogenarian with a compellingly odd and reedy voice. Harold Camping isn’t a credentialed minister. But since the 1950s, Camping has been harvesting secret messages from the Bible at a clip that would impress Dan Brown. He reveals them on his call-in show Open Forum. Some few years back—no one can pin down the date, strangely—Camping told listeners of his greatest discovery: the date of the Rapture.

I call Camping at his office in California one afternoon in the final run-up to the Rapture. He is hard of hearing, and I have to shout some of the questions. One a scale of one to 10, how certain is he that on May 21 the saved will ascend to heaven and the unsaved will be marooned in a hell on earth? “Oh, it’s 10-10-10-10,” he says. “It’s so solid you can’t even put it on a scale like that.”

wissaboo

Sat May 21, 2011 8:29 am

you have time. Doesn't happen till 6 pm. though I'm not sure what time zone that is.

MeliKoritsi

Sat May 21, 2011 4:47 pm

Crap! I took a nap and slept through it!

Last I heard, it was supposed to be 6pm in each time zone... the rapture would go through the world hour by hour.

wissaboo

Sat May 21, 2011 6:05 pm

MeliKoritsi

Sat May 21, 2011 4:47 pm

Crap! I took a nap and slept through it!

Last I heard, it was supposed to be 6pm in each time zone... the rapture would go through the world hour by hour.

what the hell kind of sense does that make?

AWOLangel

Sat May 21, 2011 6:12 pm

so....who's still here?

should we do a head count?

Quote:

 

May 21 was NOT the Rapture: What will Harold Camping and his faithful followers do now?

By Michael Sheridan
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

As May 21 came and went without the world coming to an end, Harold Camping has yet to offer up a reason for why he was wrong... again.

In fact, the 89-year-old preacher is keeping out of sight in the wake of his failed prediction. The website to his Family Radio ministry hasn't even been updated, and still proclaims Judgment Day to be May 21, 2011.

"It's going to happen," Camping insisted repeatedly leading up to the fateful day.

Meanwhile, those who believed in his much-hyped prognostication -- many of whom gave up their homes and money to Camping -- are left wondering what to do next.

"I do not understand," said Robert Fitzpatrick, a 60-year-old MTA worker from Staten Island, said after the Rapture never arrived. "I do not understand why nothing has happened."

"I had some skepticism but I was trying to push the skepticism away because I believe in God," said Keith Bauer, who drove his family across the country from Maryland to California for the supposed Rapture to visit Camping's Oakland headquarters of Family Radio International.

"I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth," he said.

Some expect that Camping will eventually explain away his erroneous prediction, just as he did in 1994 (a mistake he waved off as a mere mathematical miscalculation).


Robert Fitzpatrick (r.) waited for the end of the world in Times Square. And waited, and waited, and waited. (Debbie Egan-Chin/News)

"I fully expect he's going to have an explanation," said Steve Wohlberg, an Idaho minister who last week openly challenged Camping's prediction the world would end on May 21.

Wohlberg, who has written several books about the end of the world and believes the Apocalypse is approaching, argues that anyone claiming to know the date of the End of Days is simply wrong.

"The climate that we're living in, with so many things happening in the world, lends itself to people believing something is going to happen," he told the Daily News.

However, despite Camping's claims that his method for predicting the Rapture is based on information in the Bible, the Holy Book does not give an actual date, Wohlberg said.

"He claims so strongly that everything he says, his predictions, are solidly based in the Bible," he said. "But he's confusing and misleading a lot of people."

Wohlberg, who admits to doing drugs and living an "unholy life" before finding religion, fears that those who believed in what Camping preached will turn away from God as a result of his fake claims.

"There's a damager they're going to be disillusioned with the Bible," he said. But hopefully, he added, his followers will simply accept that "Harold Camping was wrong."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/05/22/2011-05-22_may_21_was_not_the_rapture_what_will_harold_camping_and_his_followers_do_now.html#ixzz1N6Bj0len

AWOLangel

Sun May 22, 2011 11:21 am

yep. all those people that gave up their homes & money.

wissaboo

Fri May 20, 2011 4:55 pm

AWOLangel

Fri May 20, 2011 3:55 pm

inheritor: "i shouldn't have to pay estate taxes. uncle bob didn't die, just ascended"
tax person: "yeah, sure. like i haven't heard that one 500 times this week."