I Was Wrong: Harold Camping

Doomsday preacher writes a letter to his followers with a new tone.

It may come as no surprise to anyone but one man that the world still exists.

Harold Camping, the 90-year-old Alameda preacher was incorrectly predicted the end of the world twice in recent months, is still trying to figure out what happened.

But one thing he has figured out is: He was wrong.

The man who convinced hundreds of people across the country through his radio lectures to abandon the world and prepare for the end told his followers in a letter this week that he made a mistake.

"Events in the last year have proved that no man can be fully trusted," Harold Camping wrote in a letter Thursday to listeners of his evangelical Family Radio program, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. "Even the most zealous of us can be mistaken."

Camping had last predicted the rapture would occur last May 21 and while non-believers would be elevated to heaven, the rest of the world would be left to deal with a forsaken world until Oct. 21.

The preacher suffered a stroke about a month after his prediction proved to be wrong. He later updated his prediction to say the world would end and the rapture would both occur on Oct. 21.

Thursday he pronounced his own humanness and left the predicting to a higher being.

"God has humbled us through the events of May 21," Camping wrote. "We have learned the very painful lesson that all of creation is in God's hands and he will end time in his time, not ours!

"We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing."

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