End of World in 2011? Debunking Doomsday Predictions
Posted: Tuesday, January 18, 2011
by Kevin Baum
Survival Outpost
While visiting with one of our SurvivalOutpost 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," he replied, "And one scholar even predicts the very date it will happen -- May 21, 2011."
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 a previous end-of-world prediction, that is, September 6, 1994. After his entire congregation dressed up in Sunday garb and held an all-night vigil for the return of their savior, I can only imagine the consternation they felt when the clock ticked to September 7 and they were all still there, safely snuggled up in their best dress.
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, by the way), and even the Mayans themselves, we are led to believe, foretold that the end of the 13th Baktun would be met with cataclysm by fire. This occurs in 2012 of course.
But my favorite oracle of all - and the winner of the fortune telling Snipe Hunt - is the Webbot. If you haven't heard of the Webbot, 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 can serve as a instrument of precognition, a collective mind which has predictive elements, or so the inventers surmise. Actually, the concept of the Webbot is really quite cool with the one 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 which was predicted for November of 2010 (A big Oops) -- that continually come up wrong. Dreadfully wrong. But, strangely enough, people keep believing in the Webbot and wait feverishly for the next Webbot run and resulting report - The Shape Of Things To Come, (or maybe not).
All this fortune telling mumbo-jumbo would be funny if it wasn't so incredibly dangerous.
Why is it dangerous? 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 really is going to end soon, quite frankly, who gives a damn about anything? And if people don't give a damn about anything, then 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, as we have recently witnessed in America. Now consider millions of people that don't give a damn because they have been foolishly convinced that the End Is Coming. What might they be capable of?
Sounds a whole lot like the end of the world to me.
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 shut up 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, and it usually is, they will all be wrong anyway.
Stay safe. Stay informed. Be prepared.
Kevin Baum is co-founder of SurvivalOutpost, an Austin-based on-line business specializing in Emergency Preparedness Supplies, Survival Kits, and Freese-Dried Food for individuals, families and businesses. The SurvivalOutpost philosophy is to balance reason with readiness and to encourage knowledge, independence and self-sufficiency as tools to survive in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Join us for reasonable discourse on events and trends that are shaping the world around us at the SurvivalOutpost Blog.
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