Scholars Release The Latest Date For The Apocalypse

[dlevere]

June 3-4, 2016

[Combusto Dragon]

No Way! but this year is a leap year! in as 366 days!

[Pyriel]

That doesn't make a lick of sense. They were able to mystically foresee the end of the world 5,000+ years into the future, but they would have been off by about 4 of their years because whatever force supplied them with figures didn't do so in units they had an accurate handle on?

I must say, I'm glad they only arrived at this with about 4 days left in it. It spared us a lot of books, movies, hand-wringing, and Youtube videos about the return of Nibiru. They'll have to find another way to make John Cusack an action star.

[dlevere]

That 2012 movie was a good one.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

Don't panic; the world is not going to end on June 3 or 4 of this year. That's just the date that the Mayan long count ends. It does not mean an end to civilization, let alone humanity. It's merely an end to this long count and the start of another.

*Pause for collective sigh of relief*

[soprano1]

Call me when the sun goes out, then i'll be worried.

[Pyriel]

If I remember right, the Long Count doesn't actually end, it's just that there's some significance to 13 of a particular unit. Something about the creation of Mayan civilization taking place 13 whatevers (a bit over 1.8 million days) after the creation of the first, failed version. The 2012 thing wasn't even a prophecy, it just hinged on extrapolating from a start date and assuming the Mayan legend about the beginning of their reckoning of time represented a mysterious universal cycle that would reach some conclusion after another 13. But really, the Long Count calendar just rolls over to 13 in that position and keeps on going, like every other positional system.

I guess under this new theory, the Mayans were wrong about their start date and the length of the previous creation too. After June 5th happens, someone will try to figure out where that should move to on the Gregorian calendar, and the end will actually come sometime in 2020, or later if the alleged mistakes compound.

[Helder]

How many times has this crap been uttered in the last 30 years? and shit we're all still here. If and when it does come we will be long dead and forgotten.

[Combusto Dragon]

30 YEARS?!

that's 1986! if i remember other one Mayan apocalypse warning was 1994 but it never happens.

agreed with Helder, this Apocalupse alert thing is a motherload of crap!

[xirtamehtsitahw]

Someone else said the world would end on April 20, 2021. That may or may not fall on Easter, but it still seems a bit fishy. There's a verse in the Bible which states that not even Jesus Himself knows when the Rapture will take place. But, it is known that the Rapture will start the REAL Doomsday Clock ticking. The Rapture hasn't happened yet, so we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. For now.

[Pyriel]

In any given year, the world is probably set to end on at least 3 dates that you can find out about easily. It's hard to say what local crazies who never make the news think, but there's always somebody, somewhere who knows that Febtovember Xth is when it all goes wrong.

About ten years ago now, a friend and I came across a site called SaveLivesInMay.net or .org or something like that. This loony Frenchmen who was in psychic contact with aliens had discovered that they were super pissed about a nuclear test that was supposedly scheduled around May 25th. Apparently, the aliens occupied the same space as us in a different dimension, and somehow that particular test was going to breach dimensional barriers and do them massive harm, so they were prepared to chuck an asteroid into the Atlantic if we didn't destroy all our nuclear weapons before that date. Naturally, May 25th came and went without incident, aside from one of the site admins posting the topic, "Heavy Chemtrail Activity Over the Eastern US Today", on their forum.

The whole thing mainly shocked me because I'd never heard of that particular kook before, but he somehow had hundreds of really annoying followers. Among other things, they taught me a reflexive hate of the word "epistemology" because anytime someone called one of their conspiracy theories bullshit and pointed out why, they'd refer to the refutation as "epistemology." As if what they had created was a body of knowledge worth studying.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

Basically, the whole concept of being a doomsayer is pure bullshit. No one, not even Nostradamus or Jesus Christ Himself, knows the date of the End, because no one (including Jesus) knows the date of the Rapture, and it must occur before the End of Days.

[Pyriel]

Well, if NASA had been running that website based on the predicted trajectory of some near-earth object, I would have taken it far more seriously, Dispensationalism notwithstanding. But yeah, people playing at crosswords with the Bible's text, and all the varied gurus and mediums are just guessing. The point is that there are so many people guessing that the idea becomes funny and sad in turns.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

Or perhaps simultaneously...? There are so many supposed prophetic messages in what has been termed "The Bible Code" (such as Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995 or the 9/11 terror attacks). However...the same can be said for more "mundane" literary works such as Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" or Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". In the former, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination date was found. After the fact, of course. In the latter, the date of the failed launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger was discovered. Once again, after the fact.

It's just people grasping at straws. You'd get the same sort of result playing with a Ouija board with your friends. We humans, as a species, have something called "imagination", and we're quite good at scaring each other and ourselves over nothing more dangerous than shadows and random arrangements of letters that just so happen to form "prophetic" messages.