I got a sawbuck that says you’re wrong, bro. (About the apocalypse. I’m not interesting in arguing about Mayans.)
… and Wikipedia says you’re (mswas) wrong about the Mayan calendar.
From what Wikipedia says, the Mayans abbreviated their calendar and the real end is 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0, while December 21, 2012 is 0.0.0.0.0.0.13.0.0.0.0. Of course, that’s a completely different discussion…
Quite simply December 21, 2012 is a date that is significant because many people have applied significance to it. There are a lot of people out there that believe in it, and there are even greater numbers who have an apocalypse fascination right about now.
The word “Apocalypse” means revelation. The idea of it being the “End” is kind of silly, it’ll be the end of something, but not the end of everything.
I like that you ask me for cites about my future predictions though. I find that kind of amusing.
Erek
Heh, I don’t know how to calculate the Mayan calendar, but for some reason that’s the date that entered into my textbooks when we spent our day learning about Central America in High School. It’s the day all the Mayan Calendar cultists who think they will save the world by getting everyone to switch over to a calendar 7 years before it ends, believe is the day.
Me I know it’s all a big consentual hallucination, and that whatever people believe is gonna happen en masse, is quite likely to happen.
Erek
Head to church sooner.**1 Thessalonians 5:2 For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.
2 Peter 3:10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
**No one knows but God himself.
How could a calendar “stop”? Our calender stops every December 31, but then it starts over again.
A remnant will be saved. The stars don’t really fall, it just looks that way because the earth will suddenly rotate reaaallly fast all of a sudden. And when he does come back, a bunch of people will try and fight him!
It is the end of a cycle in the Long Count, not considered (by all) to be the end of time. Of course, we’re not dealing with facts here, which is why there are so many differing theories. December 21, 2012 is exciting because it happens in our lifetime, which is why I believe it is focused on more frequently than what some consider to be the complete calendar, it makes history more interesting.
Personally, I don’t think the Mayan calendar is well known and that those that believe the end of the current cycle in December 2012 marks the end of the world is a minority rather than the majority and that anything that occurs as a result of them, will only effect a small percentage of the world’s population.
I asked for “What makes you so sure? Proof? Cite? Anything?” where anything implies anything that has lead you to believe that Jesus will return and the apocalypse will occur when you say it will. I understand it is a prediction, but I’m interested in what it is based on. You must have a reason, even if it simply is a feeling. To expand on my question, what makes you so sure it will happen? Did you have a dream, a vision, are you using some mathematical formula, basing it on other scholarship, tarot cards, weegie board, astrology, what?
Heh, and silly me, I was going to quit smoking today. I guess I don’t need to now.
Thanks, Erek.
[lights up another cancer stick]
According to whom? Some anti-Catholic groups have been calling the pope the Antichrist for centuries.
Its the next Pope. So, if this one starts looking ill, get ready, since we won’t know who the new guy is, we must be gone before he is elected. And I guess he will call hisself Peter. Eh.
But is it gonna happen for the unbelievers, too? 'Cause if not, that means more pie for me. And I’m behind that 100%.
There can’t be a second coming until there is a first coming.
At the time I posted this message, 696,066 days, 11 hours, 26 minutes, and 4 seconds have passed since Jesus promised that he would return. Should be any minute now.
It’s complicated actually.
The reason why Christmas this year. I was born on Christmas Day in 1977 at noon in Albuquerque New Mexico, thus mountain time. I have decided that this would be the year that I make peace with Christ and accept the hold he’s had over my life up until this point and try to resolve exactly what that means for me. It happens to coincide 7 years before the Mayan Calendar ending which will be apocalyptic in some fashion, kind of like the Apocalypse in 1666 which sort of marks a transition between two eras.
Now, with advances in Nanotechnology, Genomics, AI, and Quantum Mechanics moving at leaps and bounds right about now, I think science will advance more in the next 7 years than it did in all of the 20th century, and that’s my conservative estimate. The dotcom boom that America saw in the 90s will be pale in comparison to the boom of all the other countries that are going to suddenly be wired in the next few years. Access to technology will be unprecedented, and the next tech boom is going to be energy technology, which is happening right now as we speak. Energy Boom means less dependence upon centralized authority structures. Things like Friendster and MySpace will become ubiquitous in all of our social networking applications, and statistical analysis will become commonplace amongst the generation that is now toddlers. I believe these things because I know people working in many of these fields and I see a lot of old world big corporations that have ridiculous bureaucratic structures that aren’t even going to see a lot of the little emergent companies coming until they are suddenly making millions.
A lot of our logistical distribution structures are based upon a system where the average person cannot communicate with people on the far side of the globe, and the structure of middle-men that we currently use is going to shift dramatically.
Apocalypse obsession is quite big right now in pop culture, so people are going to be looking for a date. Now I am involved with a lot of the underground artists and musicians who will be the ones determining the fads that mainstream pop culture gloms onto in about five years and they are the ones who give some credence to the Mayan Calendar. A lot of these people however, are not going with the old structures but are building their own corporate networks behind the scenes, circumventing traditional structures in completely legal manners, only with a different set of ethics, a lot of these structures are coming into play about now. The Mayan Calendar is to today’s version of the hippies what Hinduism was to the hippies in the 60s. Its an underground phenomenon and hasn’t totally hit mainstream culture yet, but toward the end of this decade we are going to be seeing a 60s era revolutionary underground culture coming to the forefront much like they did in the 60s, the big difference is this time around all the kids know exactly how to form a corporation and get it running, because a corporate structure is not that different from the hierarchical concepts we grew up with using computers, so the hippies of this era will be far more businesslike than those of the past and much more savvy with the system, as many of them built corporations and watched them go bust in the dotcom boom.
The War on Terror itself is a war on an abstract concept, fear. It’s tools are fear, both sides are using fear as a weapon, and people are being confronted with their irrational fears and how they create their own nightmare scenarios. It is becoming increasingly clear that old methods of warfare are obsolete now. 7 years of Hell on Earth, ie everyone being faced with their deepest darkest fears, not necessarily some kind of global war, but that’s a possibility also.
So, I won’t predict what the change after 2012 will be like, but I feel like it’s a fair date to set as a delineator between a major shift in the way humanity conducts itself here on Earth, and what it sets as its priorities. I also believe that if one were to set a changeover date, that December 21, 2012 would be the date that were chosen as a handy demarcation by historians.
So to sum it up: Christ returns this year because I have decided that it is appropriate and fitting. The Apocalypse is in 7 years because of a confluence of technology, and human expectation for something to happen.
Of course remember that I am not proposing what the Apocalypse will be like, merely that I believe it is going to happen.
Erek
Hey, no argument from me. The cowboy hat density is increasing dangerously. When driving through, I sometimes let loose with a couple of Yee-haws, just to blend in with the population until I can make my escape.
No, I kid the Calgarians. I kid because I love.
So… you’re proposing yourself as Messiah? Or does “The Return of Christ” just refer to your life personally, not to the rest of us?
Honey, what he said about just going down to the corner deli for a pack of smokes? Well, I hate to to tell you this, but he ain’t gonna be back.
I didn’t propose myself as the messiah. I said that Christ would return, I didn’t put any stipulations on the manner of such a thing.