Eight days from now (according to some) the world will come to an end. Well, not the world exactly, but civilization as we know it.
They (whoever “they” are) base their assertion on the contention that the Mayan calendar predicted it. More specifically, that a cycle in the Mayan calendar called by Mayan scholars “the long count” ends on December 21, 2012 (check out the Wikipedia writeup) and that, since the Mayans ended their count then “something really, really bad” must be going to happen next week. (I’m paraphrasing here.)
When I was a kid growing up as a JW, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society did some pretty fancy calculations based on the Bible and came up with the fall of 1975 (September or October) as “the end of 6,000 years of man’s existence.” Add the 1,000 year millennial reign of Christ’s foretold kingdom, and you have a nice, round number of 7,000 years and wouldn’t it be wonderful if Armageddon, God’s righteous cleansing of the earth (which, not coincidentally, ushers in Christ’s kingdom) was to happen then (September or October of 1975, if you’re not following me here). This was all based on a blend of literal interpretation of the Bible, figurative interpretation of the Bible, and some rather shaky history and archeology. To summarize: many of us could be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion to which we were rather obviously being led: Armageddon was highly likely to hit in the fall of 1975. The fact that this was only the latest in a string of such predictions was lost on many of the faithful (such as your humble blogger). But I digress.
Cut to a last spring (May 21, 2011 to be exact) when Harold Camping made similar predictions (and stuck to his guns right up to the day of the prophesied Apocalypse), only to have to publicly eat humble pie when May 22 rolled around and the world had not been relieved of the presence of Mr. Camping and his somewhat gullible followers. He apologized to the aforementioned followers on no less a venue than the BBC, only to take another crack at it a few weeks later by saying that, indeed, the theocratic cleansing of the earth had begun on the predicted day, but only in a spiritual sense; the real deal would in fact happen in October of 2012. Hmm. You’d think he’d learn.
So here we still are several months later, or several decades later in in the case of lots of Witnesses, and still the same old world.
Full disclosure: The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society can say with some accuracy that they never published a specific date nor claimed Armageddon would come in 1975. I would respond that hundreds of thousands of people (faithful Jehovah’s Witnesses) don’t come to the same conclusion serendipitously. And we did come to that conclusion. I admit as September 1975 closed in most of us came to our senses, but some sold houses and “got ready.”
So a reasonable person might ask “Why are so many people (myself included, at one point) so prepared to believe in this kind of “end-of-the-world” prediction?
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
Apocalypse redux
Eight days from now (according to some) the world will come to an end. Well, not the world exactly, but civilization as we know it.
They (whoever “they” are) base their assertion on the contention that the Mayan calendar predicted it. More specifically, that a cycle in the Mayan calendar called by Mayan scholars “the long count” ends on December 21, 2012 (check out the Wikipedia writeup) and that, since the Mayans ended their count then “something really, really bad” must be going to happen next week. (I’m paraphrasing here.)
When I was a kid growing up as a JW, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society did some pretty fancy calculations based on the Bible and came up with the fall of 1975 (September or October) as “the end of 6,000 years of man’s existence.” Add the 1,000 year millennial reign of Christ’s foretold kingdom, and you have a nice, round number of 7,000 years and wouldn’t it be wonderful if Armageddon, God’s righteous cleansing of the earth (which, not coincidentally, ushers in Christ’s kingdom) was to happen then (September or October of 1975, if you’re not following me here). This was all based on a blend of literal interpretation of the Bible, figurative interpretation of the Bible, and some rather shaky history and archeology. To summarize: many of us could be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion to which we were rather obviously being led: Armageddon was highly likely to hit in the fall of 1975. The fact that this was only the latest in a string of such predictions was lost on many of the faithful (such as your humble blogger). But I digress.
Cut to a last spring (May 21, 2011 to be exact) when Harold Camping made similar predictions (and stuck to his guns right up to the day of the prophesied Apocalypse), only to have to publicly eat humble pie when May 22 rolled around and the world had not been relieved of the presence of Mr. Camping and his somewhat gullible followers. He apologized to the aforementioned followers on no less a venue than the BBC, only to take another crack at it a few weeks later by saying that, indeed, the theocratic cleansing of the earth had begun on the predicted day, but only in a spiritual sense; the real deal would in fact happen in October of 2012. Hmm. You’d think he’d learn.
So here we still are several months later, or several decades later in in the case of lots of Witnesses, and still the same old world.
Full disclosure: The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society can say with some accuracy that they never published a specific date nor claimed Armageddon would come in 1975. I would respond that hundreds of thousands of people (faithful Jehovah’s Witnesses) don’t come to the same conclusion serendipitously. And we did come to that conclusion. I admit as September 1975 closed in most of us came to our senses, but some sold houses and “got ready.”
So a reasonable person might ask “Why are so many people (myself included, at one point) so prepared to believe in this kind of “end-of-the-world” prediction?
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.