Once again, the world was supposed to end at a precise date and time. There were even disaster movies about it, including one big one. That time was the moment of the summer solstice (3:11 a.m. PST) on December 21, 2012. 12/21/12.
Sure enough, the world didn't end. Yet again.
That moment is when the 13th b'ak'tun of the Mayan calendar came to a close and the 14th began. A b'ak'tun is something of a Mayan counterpart to a millennium on the modern Roman calendar. If you remember, the world was also supposed to end at midnight on January 1, 2000. The only thing that happened that day was that some computers went haywire because it didn't occur to their mid- (and even late-)20th-century programmers that the 20th century would end, so the dates they used were two digits rather than four. This was the famous "Y2K bug" that people hoped would bring down civilization so Jesus could return. The difference between the turn of the Mayan b'ak'tun and the turn of the Roman millennium is that there never was a "14th b'ak'tun bug".
The Mayas, of course, are happy to collect the dollars from doomsday-minded tourists. They still exist, you see, and they even still speak their old languages in addition to their conquerors' language, Spanish (and sometimes English for the tourists). Mel Gibson even filmed his movie Apocalypto in the Maya language Yucatec.
So how did this all get started? I suspect it began with one José Argüelles, author of a book called The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology and organizer of the Harmonic Convergence of 1987 (disclosure: growing up in a New Age family, I took part in it). He took the Mayan calendar, added the I Ching and other esoteric influences, and you can guess the rest. Interestingly enough, he didn't live long enough to see the world not end (he died in 2011) — but then, he never said it would. (Trivia note: he was neither Mexican nor Guatemalan, but a Midwestern American: he came from Rochester, Minnesota, not far from where I spent much of my childhood in Mankato.)
Sure enough, memetic mutation took over. Somehow, even before the Harmonic Convergence, the date 12/21/2012 got mixed up in Theosophical expectations of the return of The Christ (i.e. the Theosophical version of the Gnostic Jesus) in the form of Maitreya, the next Buddha. Eventually, cults both New Age and Evangelical formed around the Eschaton they expected on that date. This is the kind of thing my favorite major New Age figure, Dick Sutphen calls "cosmic foo-foo".
And so here we are yet again, stuck in a world that never ended, just like we were last year, twice (no thanks to one Harold Camping, Evangelical end-time prognosticator). Once again, the world has been proclaimed Twitter dead. But Twitter death never stopped the celebrities; why would it stop the world? After all, the world has been about to end since Jesus' time; it never did, and it never will — unless, of course, our leaders manage to blow it up...
Showing posts with label current events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label current events. Show all posts
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Sunday, May 29, 2011
The World Will Not End Next on October 21
Now that May 21 is now past us with the world once again not ending, that Christian radio magnate Harold Camping refuses to give up and now says he got the date wrong: not May 21, saith he, but October 21. Just ten days before Halloween. One can easily guess what the wags will be wearing when they go trick-or-treating this year.
Like I said last post, these Christian end-of-the-world predictors keep insisting on ignoring those Bible verses which have Jesus plainly stating that not even he knows when he's returning, but only God. And yet they persist. I assume that those of them who are Pentecostal or Charismatic get a "word of knowledge" direct from God that tells them that the world is going to end on such-and-such a date. Mr. Camping felt he didn't need even that, apparently; he relied on numerology. No doubt this attracted cries of heresy from many other Evangelicals.
A personal disclosure is in order here. As a kid, I used to love reading those Jehovah's Witnesses books which spelled out exactly how the world is going to end. I found them lying around the house. Later I would find out that, according to the Jehovah's Witnesses, the world was supposed to end in 1914 and then 1976. But I didn't read those books to know the future. They were the tract versions of Bible-movie special-effects extravaganzas such as The Ten Commandments, only about the end of the world according to the Jehovah's Witnesses. You know that scene where Charlton Heston as Moses parts the Red Sea? Yeah. Like that.
It was these kinds of books, and not just from the Jehovah's Witnesses, that eventually soured me on the whole end-of-the-world thing. The world was supposed to end just like it says in the books, but it never, ever does. The dates always turn out to be wrong, and the predicted events never happen. So I leave that kind of thing to the movies.
Movies like 2012. Speaking of which, the world will not end on December 21, 2012, either. You bet I'll be posting about that non-apocalypse, too.
Like I said last post, these Christian end-of-the-world predictors keep insisting on ignoring those Bible verses which have Jesus plainly stating that not even he knows when he's returning, but only God. And yet they persist. I assume that those of them who are Pentecostal or Charismatic get a "word of knowledge" direct from God that tells them that the world is going to end on such-and-such a date. Mr. Camping felt he didn't need even that, apparently; he relied on numerology. No doubt this attracted cries of heresy from many other Evangelicals.
A personal disclosure is in order here. As a kid, I used to love reading those Jehovah's Witnesses books which spelled out exactly how the world is going to end. I found them lying around the house. Later I would find out that, according to the Jehovah's Witnesses, the world was supposed to end in 1914 and then 1976. But I didn't read those books to know the future. They were the tract versions of Bible-movie special-effects extravaganzas such as The Ten Commandments, only about the end of the world according to the Jehovah's Witnesses. You know that scene where Charlton Heston as Moses parts the Red Sea? Yeah. Like that.
It was these kinds of books, and not just from the Jehovah's Witnesses, that eventually soured me on the whole end-of-the-world thing. The world was supposed to end just like it says in the books, but it never, ever does. The dates always turn out to be wrong, and the predicted events never happen. So I leave that kind of thing to the movies.
Movies like 2012. Speaking of which, the world will not end on December 21, 2012, either. You bet I'll be posting about that non-apocalypse, too.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
The Great Disappointment of 2011: or, The Rapture Didn't Happen, Yet Again
The Rapture, in which all devout Evangelical Christians are supposed to be "seized" up into Heaven by Christ, was supposed to happen today at 6:00pm whatever time. Problem is, the Rapture has a long history of not happening, dating back to just after the Crucifixion, around 2,000 years ago. There's also the little thing Jesus said, in Matthew 13:32 and elsewhere, about even him not knowing when he's coming back because that's for only God to know. But don't tell those Evangelical pastors with their Bible maps, Bible codes, Pyramid inches, and convoluted numerologies like the one Harold Camping, Christian radio millionaire, used to precisely date the Rapture to today at 6pm whatever time. They know exactly when the world is scheduled to end, right down to the second. Even though only God's supposed to know such things.
The Rapture is not actually in the Bible itself. Rather, it's extrapolated from various scattered passages in the notes of Cyrus I. Scofield, whose Scofield Reference Bible is the bible of Dispensationalism, that school of Evangelical Christianity started by John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren sect. It holds to the strictest historicism in all Christendom, particularly concerning the origin of the world (creationism is one of its core tenets) and the end times (eschatology). The "Bible map" phenomenon which became so familiar to me years ago when I watched Christian TV, in which the whole history of the world from the six-day Creation back in 4004 B.C. to the future Eschaton is precisely dated and placed on a timeline, is wholly Dispensationalist. Dispensationalism is not an orthodox Christian doctrine, but a strictly Evangelical one, and one not believed by all Evangelicals; non-Dispensationalists, including those Evangelical sects not influenced by the Brethren movement and which reject the Scofield Reference Bible, consider the doctrine heretical. But it's a major force in American Christianity, which is overwhelmingly Evangelical, particularly in the South and parts of the mountain West. As long as this is the case, you'll keep hearing about the Rapture a lot.
What we're witnessing here is yet another in the long series of Great Disappointments that plague the history of American Evangelicalism, the most famous of which is the Great Disappointment of 1844 which destroyed the Millerite movement but, amazingly enough, spawned a host of new sects from the Seventh-Day Adventists to the Jehovah's Witnesses. The next one is scheduled to hit the New Age movement, a religious group not normally susceptible to Evangelical manias, on December 21, 2012, according to the "Mayan calendar code" of José Argüelles, the guy behind the Harmonic Convergence of 1987. December 21, 2012 is when the Mayan calendar is supposed to end, you see, and the world with it. I'll post here about it the day after it doesn't happen.
The Rapture is not actually in the Bible itself. Rather, it's extrapolated from various scattered passages in the notes of Cyrus I. Scofield, whose Scofield Reference Bible is the bible of Dispensationalism, that school of Evangelical Christianity started by John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren sect. It holds to the strictest historicism in all Christendom, particularly concerning the origin of the world (creationism is one of its core tenets) and the end times (eschatology). The "Bible map" phenomenon which became so familiar to me years ago when I watched Christian TV, in which the whole history of the world from the six-day Creation back in 4004 B.C. to the future Eschaton is precisely dated and placed on a timeline, is wholly Dispensationalist. Dispensationalism is not an orthodox Christian doctrine, but a strictly Evangelical one, and one not believed by all Evangelicals; non-Dispensationalists, including those Evangelical sects not influenced by the Brethren movement and which reject the Scofield Reference Bible, consider the doctrine heretical. But it's a major force in American Christianity, which is overwhelmingly Evangelical, particularly in the South and parts of the mountain West. As long as this is the case, you'll keep hearing about the Rapture a lot.
What we're witnessing here is yet another in the long series of Great Disappointments that plague the history of American Evangelicalism, the most famous of which is the Great Disappointment of 1844 which destroyed the Millerite movement but, amazingly enough, spawned a host of new sects from the Seventh-Day Adventists to the Jehovah's Witnesses. The next one is scheduled to hit the New Age movement, a religious group not normally susceptible to Evangelical manias, on December 21, 2012, according to the "Mayan calendar code" of José Argüelles, the guy behind the Harmonic Convergence of 1987. December 21, 2012 is when the Mayan calendar is supposed to end, you see, and the world with it. I'll post here about it the day after it doesn't happen.
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