I feel bad picking on poor Harold Camping. So just to keep him company, here’s an excerpt from an early Mormon regarding Joseph Smith’s prophecy a century or so earlier.
On the 14th of Feb. 1835, Joseph Smith said that God had revealed to him that the coming of Christ would be within 56 years, which being added to 1835 shows that before 1891 and the 14th of Feb. the Savior of the world would make his appearance again upon the earth and the winding up scene take place. In connection with this event, was related by my brother Dimick Huntington, the fact that when Joseph and Hyrum Smith submitted in their feelings to consent to give themselves up to the state mob at Nauvoo Illinois, after they had passed the Mississippi River. Joseph said “if they shed my blood it shall shorten this work 10 years”. That taken from 1891 would reduce the time to 1881 which if the true time within which the Savior should come much must be crowded into 6 years.
This is from a transcript of the Journal of Oliver Broadman Huntington, vol 2, p129. A little farther down the page, he adds:
I testify that every word that Joseph Smith spoke, will be fulfilled that has not been fulfilled.
Um, well, he’d better hurry if he wants to make it by 1881.
For a world that supposedly ended in 1881, I look around and it all seems to be carrying on nicely…
You forget that God lives very far out in space. I believe, according to the latest scientific information, that Heaven is somewhere in the Oort Cloud. It takes roughly 3,514 earth years for heaven to make one complete orbit around the sun. So it’s understandable that some confusion arrises when people don’t realize that God is talking in Heaven years. So the actual end of the world will be in the end 198,619 AD.
(On a side note, heaven’s rotation is very slow, and almost with in tide lock with the sun. The average heaven day length is roughly 640,000,000 years, which explains how God could create the earth in seven days from his view point, and yet it looks like 4.5 billion years from our point of view.)
FSM