Dr Adequate writes:
At least one already tried; she cut the throats of her two little girls and then tried to do the same to herself. Luckily, she failed in all attempts; they all lived.
I think this is exactly the kind of inciting speech that should be prosecuted.
But Camping told people how to avoid the apocalypse: they should have faith (which apparently she did), turn to Jesus, and get raptured. In his theology, if she'd enquired, that despair and suicide would get one straight to hell, which is even nastier than Armageddon.
If a doctor tells me that smoking has a high chance of giving me lung cancer, so I should quit, it's not his fault if I think that a better way to avoid this would be to cut out my lungs with a rusty knife. Again, if I'd bothered to find out about
his belief system, I'd have found out why that was a bad idea.
Of course Camping was wrong and the doctor is right, but I think the two cases are of a kind: you can't be blamed for the actions of someone who ignores your advice.
I agree that Camping is certainly not guilty of actually inciting people to commit murder or suicide.
On the other hand, I
would say that he's guilty of inciting
panic. He didn't tell that woman to slit anyone's throat - he
did, however, convince her of a scenario so frightening and stressful that one could reasonably expect a large number of people to behave irrationally out of sheer panic. A person who's already emotionally less than stable or who has invested too much of their self-identity into this doomsday cult could be expected to do something like this - we've seen it before, after all.
I don't know that that's an actual crime. It's definitely not saying "okay everybody, take up your glasses and lets drink the phenobarbital-laced Kool-Aid, don't forget to help the kids first." It's not quite screaming "fire!" in a crowded theater either, but it's not too far off.
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