What's the difference between fundamentalist and secular false prophets?

Yesterday evening, our Monday night Bible study group was discussing the Rapture that didn't happen (well, not physically, to hear Mr. Camping tell it), and the point was raised about how fringe Christian groups such as Camping's Family Radio are (rightly) called on the carpet for failed predictions, but secular prophets of doom usually get a free pass. Not only a free pass, but encouragement to keep up the ecolological dance of doom—after all, it's all so scientific. (Speaking of which, see William Happer's recent First Things essay, "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases: The dubious science of the climate crusaders".) James Taranto—who is agnostic, if memory serves me—takes up this very point in this Wall Street Journal "Best of the Web Today" post:

Something else bothers us about the media mockery of Harold Camping, as justifiable as it may be. Why are only religious doomsday cultists subjected to such ridicule? Reuters notes that "Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994." Ha ha, you can't believe anything this guy says! But who jeered at the U.N.'s false prediction that there would be 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010? We did, but not Reuters.

Doomsday superstitions seem to fulfill a basic psychological need. On the surface, the thought that God or global warming will destroy the world within our lifetimes is horrifying. But all of us are doomed; within a matter of decades, every person alive will experience the end of his own world. A belief in the hereafter makes the thought of death less terrifying. But so does a disbelief in the here, after. If the world is to end with us--if there is no life for anyone after our death--we are not so insignificant after all.

To reject traditional religion is not, as the American Atheists might have it, to transform oneself into a perfectly rational being. Nonbelievers are no less susceptible to doomsday cults than believers are; Harold Camping is merely the Christian Al Gore. But because secular doomsday cultism has a scientific gloss, journalists like our friends at Reuters treat it as if it were real science. So, too, do some scientists. It may be that the decline of religion made this corruption of science inevitable.

Read the entire piece, "The Christian Al Gore".

I plan to post one more time about the Camping Commotion, something along the lines of "Ten Reasons People Root for the Rapture", with a focus on a particular aspect that few, if any, commentators give attention to. I'm not into making predictions, but it should be posted sometime today or tomorrow. Or on October 21st. Whichever comes first.