Harold Camping: I Won't Predict Apocalypse Again

America's favorite doomsday prophet issued a belated apology letter yesterday, admitting he was wrong about the rapture coming on May 21. (No specific mention of his subsequent prediction that the world would end on October 21, but we assume he was wrong then, too.) "We now realize that those people who were calling our attention to the Bible's statement that 'of that day and hour knoweth no man,' were right … and Family Radio was wrong," Harold Camping wrote on his Family Radio website.

Camping called his prediction "incorrect and sinful," and said that "Family Radio has no interest in even considering another date." Still, he argued that his prophesy had spread the good word. "Even as God used sinful Balaam to accomplish His purposes, so He used our sin to accomplish His purpose of making the whole world acquainted with the Bible." Camping made no such admission of defeat after his botched 1994 prediction; instead, he said it "was a cudgel to keep studying."