Posts
While visiting with one of our customers on the phone recently, it was brought to my attention that there is an emerging awareness among certain Christian groups that the End of The World - as in Judgment Day - is nigh. "You don't say," was my incredulous response. "For real, and one scholar even predicts the very date it will happen, May 21, 2011."
So let me get this straight, we only have 4 months left? What about my summer trip to the Caymans?
Our customer was referring to Harold Camping, a civil engineer cum biblical scholar (self proclaimed) that, ostensibly, has created a mathematical system for interpreting biblical prophecy. His latest finding? The world will end on May 21, 2011. Shocker!
I don't suppose it matters that this very same biblical scholar has already failed on one end-of-world prediction, September 6, 1994. After his entire congregation dressed up in Sunday garb and held an all-night vigil for the End To Come, I can only imagine the consternation they felt when the clock ticked to September 7 and they were all still there, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Oops.
Camping's reply: It must have been a mathematical error. Now, we are led to believe, he has the arithmetic figured out, and surprisingly enough, people believe him...again. How encouraging.
But Camping is not the only soothsayer making the news nowadays. Nostradamus seems to be making a strong come back, and Lawrence E. Joseph, among others, is predicting some exciting end-of-world scenarios for 2012. We have Terrance McKenna's timewave zero, a mathematical interpretation of the I Ching which predicts the end of time in 2012 (Terrance had this epiphany while under the influence of psychedelic drugs), and even the Mayans themselves, we are led to believe, foretold that the end of the 13th Baktun of the Long Count Calendar would be met with cataclysm by fire. In 2012 of course.
But my favorite oracle of all - and the winner of the fortune telling Snipe Hunt - is the Webbots. If you haven't heard of the Webbots, don't worry, you have not missed much, at least not in terms of accurate predictions; but that doesn't mean people don't believe in it, sometimes fervently. Essentially, the Webbot is a computer algorithm (or bot program) that searches the Internet for key words and then makes future predictions based on what it discovers. The idea is that the Internet serves as a instrument of precognition...a collective mind which has predictive elements. The concept of the Webbot is actually quite cool with the exception that it doesn't work. At all. But that doesn't stop the inventors of the Webbot from making repeated fanatical predictions about the future -- such as Thermonuclear War in November of 2010(Oops) -- that continually come up wrong. Dreadfully wrong. But, strangely enough, people keep believing in them.
All this fortune telling mumbo-jumbo would be funny if it wasn't so incredibly dangerous. Why? Because narratives of doomsday create a spirit of helplessness and hopelessness, which in turn can manifest in deviant behaviors such as violence, selfishness, futility and nihilism. If the world is going to end soon, quite frankly, who gives a damn about anything? And if people don't give a damn about anything, the very fabric of society is subject to unravel because the social constructs that hold us all together -- such as laws governing human interaction and behavior -- suddenly have no meaning. A person who doesn't give a damn is a dangerous person. Millions of people that don't give a damn is tantamount to, well, the end of the world.
Frankly, I don't want to know what a world without rules would look like. But if these so-called prophets of doom don't stop ballyhooing about The End and start working on something constructive, we may find out, and soon.
So don't allow yourself to be seduced by the Masters of Doom. They may mean well, but if history is a good indicator, they will all be wrong.
Stay safe. Stay informed. Be prepared.
