Tag Archives | Eschatology

A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?

By on May 21, 2012 in News 20
Judgment Day

Photo: O'Dea (CC)

There will be someone new to take Harold Camping’s place, these end-timers never seem to go away. Writes Tom Bartlett on Religion Dispatches:

For a while, their message was everywhere. They paid for billboards, took out full-page ads in newspapers, distributed thousands of tracts. They drove across the county in RVs emblazoned with verses from the books of Revelation and Daniel. They marched around Manhattan holding signs. They broadcasted day and night on their network of radio stations. They warned the world.

That warning turned out to be a false alarm. No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth, nor were any believers caught up in the clouds. Harold Camping, the octogenarian whose nightly Bible call-in show fomented doomsday mania, suffered a stroke soon afterward and mostly disappeared from sight. The press coverage, which had been intense in the weeks leading up to May 21, 2011, dwindled to nothing.

… Read the rest

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Guatemalan Mayans to World: 2012 is Not the End, and We Should Know

By on January 27, 2012 in News 8
Iximche

President G. W. Bush at a demonstration of a Mayan ritual at Iximche, Guatemala in 2007.

This breezy seemingly fluffy travel article in the Guardian just days before NYE that somehow got overlooked as the apocalyptic hysteria surrounding the Mayan Long Count date of 21 December 2012 reached a pots-New Year crescendo (for now).

In it, author Kevin Rushby reminds us that unlike the Atlanteans, the ‘noble savage’ and other imaginary creatures Mayan culture still exists and continuous with its more grandiose past.

When Rushby asks a local Guatemalan shaman about the end-of-the-world prophecy, he says, “It is the end of a 5,126-year cycle, that’s true, but there is no mention of the end of the world. People seem to have got that from the Dresden Codex (a pre-Columbian volume of Mayan writings now in the State Library of Dresden). But in that record there is no mention of 2012.” According to Rushby, “Some millenarian-minded person had put these two separate records together and made a doomsday scenario.”

Read more about contemporary Mayan culture over at the Guardian.… Read the rest

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