It's The End of the World as We Know It

(And I Feel Fine)

Seriously now. It's fun to satirize forays into eschatological waters. But enough is enough. People have been proclaiming the end of the world since the world began. In case you hadn't noticed, it hasn't happened yet! These days everything is a sign of the end time. Any time something happens in the Middle East some evangelical nutcase comes out to tell us it's a Sign of the End Time.

Sometimes it's politics that signal the End of Days. Visit a church in October 1962 they would tell you it was all over, man. World War III was about to break out. The Cuban Missile Crisis would be the catalyst of Armageddon. Oops, that wasn't it. Fast-forward five years to June 5, 1967. Israel attacked Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Ack! This is it! God's Chosen People are back in Jerusalem! We waited another six years. October 1973, the Yom Kippur War. Nope. All was quiet, as far as I can remember, until 1988, when Edgar Whisenant published his 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988. Definitely between September 11-13th. 15th. Um, October. I mean 1989! Nevermind, sheesh...

Everyone has his or her own favorite prophecies to follow. It turns out we live in a great period of time--so many predictions for the end of the world fall within the scope of my projected lifetime. So far, the prognosticators have come up short. A few examples:

July, 1999: Nostradamus specifically named this date. He wrote:

The year 1999, seventh month,
A great king of terror will descend from the skies
To bring back the great king of Angolmois.
Around this time Mars will reign for the good cause!

Sounds pretty dramatic! Maybe something happened and we didn't notice? Some people try to blame it on the Julian/Gregorian calendar shift and move the date to 9-11. Sorry, no. The calendar shift spanned only 10 days, not two years.

January 1, 2000: I'm sitting at home wishing the news teams were out interviewing all the people who spent their life savings building bomb shelters and stockpiling canned vegetables. "Well, it's the new year, and nothing happened! How do you feel now?"

September 17, 2001: the "Pyramid Inch" theory says that The End will come on September 17th. Christians were really into this one, convincing themselves that Jesus is the chief cornerstone (capstone) of the Great Pyramid of Cheops--a monument built to house a non-Judeo-Christian pharoah who was himself a god back in the day.

So far you gotta admit, they've all been wrong. Wrong! Yet people make excuses or blame misinterpretations, mistranslations or the Julian calendar. So what's left? Here are a couple for you to look forward to:

The Pope List: In the 1590s, Dom Arnold de Wyon "discovered" a prophetic list of 112 popes that had languished, he claimed, in the papal archives for 400 years. In 1138, the purported author, the Irish St. Malachy, had a vision of all the popes to come. A list of his prophetic descriptions indicate something about each pope from his era to the End. For example, he described the 99th entry, corresponding to Pius VIII (1829-1830), as vir religiosus, which is translated “a religious man." Wow! Why do we care? Well, people have been talking about this list for 400 years, trying to prove or disprove it. There are only two Popes left after John Paul II, but the believers have already found an "out" if the next one doesn't turn out to be the penultimate. Google it.

December 21, 2012: the Mayan longcount calendar, which began in 3114 B.C., will end. What did these ancient mystics know that we don't?! Probably not much--the calendar doesn't so much end as roll over to a new number--much the way we did with 2000.

If you're so sure this is the End of Time, bet me a million dollars and put it in a trust fund, payable to me on December 22, 2012. Whatever you're expecting should have happened by then.