IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT... AND I FEEL FINE

Personally, I feel that these crackpots and any credence given to them by the media do more damage than good to the trust people place in their spiritual leaders.

I have no problems with belief in the end of the world (or, to put it another way, simply being conscious of the imminence of one's personal death,) but I do have a problem with these people that think they are privy to divine information the rest of us don't have.
That particular aspect is a clue (to me) that they are not all that right. Why would any divine being feel any need that this (or any other particular) guy should be chosen to tell us the exact date of the end of the world?

It is already well established (to sensible people) that no one of us knows the time of their own death, and, supposing one were to die a couple of hours before the end of the world, then what good is knowing the time of the end of the world?
Thus the lack of knowledge of the time of personal death overrides exact knowledge of the time of the end of the world.

Some people already died this morning, and more will die before 6:00 pm Pacific. What possible good did it do them to be told that the world would end at that time only to have missed it?

But preaching about personal death is not as sexy as preaching about a cataclysmic end of the world, is it?
And yet that, to me, indicates the difference between a responsible spiritual leader and an irresponsible (or nutty) one who merely seeks to be noticed by the public for whatever psychological need or any other material reason.

Instead of telling one's flock to repent at the last minute just before the meteor strikes, a good leader's focus should be on the necessity of leading a moral life every day. Claims of the knowledge of the exact date of the end derail this message.

There are good leaders and bad, and yet I'm sure this guy will have an excuse as to why things did not work out as he claimed, and some of his followers will still bite. He'll still be around for a while.

This, of course is my own opinion, and I mean no insult to whatever your own beliefs are.