2012: End of the World? Part 1: Introduction

This is a revised introduction to the 2012 series that I began writing a couple of months ago. In light of the massive earthquake that devastated Haiti a few days ago, I will be revising and reposting all articles in this series over the next couple of days.

The Myth of the Mayan calendar

The movie ‘2012’ that opened on November 13^th, 2009 is the first big Hollywood production to capitalize on the hype surrounding the year ‘2012’ that is supposed to be the beginning of the end of the world. I wonder if the release of the movie on the 13^th of the month had any symbolic significance, just wondering! If you haven’t seen the film this trailer will give you a pretty good idea of what to expect in it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz86TsGx3fc

THE MAYAN CALENDAR AND 2012: The underlying theme of the movie is soon coming planetary destruction, beginning on winter solstice, December 21, 2012. This date is based primarily on the interpretation of the Mayan calendar that supposedly ends on that date. I have read varying interpretations of the Mayan calendar and not all ‘experts’ agree that the calendar ends on the preceding date or even if it ends at all. However, like Y2K, this date has caught the fancy of ‘doomsayers’ and is breeding many new ‘doomsday’ cults that may even see ‘Jonestown’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate’ type mass suicides as the date draws near. The movie actually depicts a ‘Jonestown’ type mass suicide at the base of a Mayan pyramid that once served as a site for mass human sacrifices at the hands of bloodthirsty Mayan priests. Watch the movie ‘Apocalypto’ if you wish to understand a little bit more about the actual practice of the Mayan religion. Here is a quote from http://www.religionfacts.com/mayan_religion/index.htm / “In fact, human sacrifice seems to have been a central Mayan religious practice. It was believed to encourage fertility, demonstrate piety, and propitiate the gods. The Mayan gods were thought to be nourished by human blood, and ritual bloodletting was seen as the only means of making contact with them. The Maya believed that if they neglected these rituals, cosmic disorder and chaos would result. At important ceremonies, the sacrificial victim was held down at the top of a pyramid or raised platform while a priest made an incision below the rib cage and ripped out the heart with his hands. The heart was then burned in order to nourish the gods”.

Though the Mayans are credited as being great scientists and astronomers, the fact of the matter is that theirs was a brutal inhumane civilization swimming in the blood of innocents. Though their scientists were supposedly great astronomers that had mapped the heavens better than we can with modern technology yet they were unable to invent the wheel. What benefit was derived by the general populace from their great scientific discoveries is a mystery. The average person lived in servitude to the priesthood and royalty, and lived a short painful life filled with hard labour, that is, if they were fortunate enough to live out their natural lives and did not end up becoming a sacrifice to the gods. Though the purpose of this article is to separate ‘2012’ hype from possible reality and not a history lesson, it is important to understand that mankind in general, and Hollywood in particular has a great affinity for romanticizing past civilizations and their history, even when facts would dictate otherwise. Therefore this 2012 date and its relationship to the Mayan calendar is suspect at best. If their gods that they so diligently and brutally worshiped were unable to save their own civilization from destruction, it would be unwise to put much faith in their powers of prediction. So it would serve us well not to become ‘fearful’ about the prospects for the future continuity of our planet based on Mayan predictions and Hollywood movies based upon such predictions.

2012: SHORT MOVIE REVIEW: The movie ‘2012’ is rather mediocre as far as the story is concerned and is filled with one too many ‘close call’ special effects that become tedious after about the second time when the protagonists escape death miraculously even as the earth is literally swallowing everything up around them. The roadway splitting in two behind them, the runaway literally being swallowed up by the earth even as the airplane wheels are no more than a cm. above the ground, a pilot who has never flown a twin engine plane expertly guiding it between two skyscrapers crashing into each other, these are all examples of the cartoonish nature in which the director has chosen to portray the end of the world. Nonetheless there is much truth that can be gleaned from the film if one has ‘eyes to see’. In subsequent articles in this series I will discuss some of the cataclysms portrayed in the movie and the probability of such catastrophes devastating the planet in the near future. The potential end of the world should be a matter of grave concern to us all, something not to be taken lightly. Hollywood, being in the business of entertainment, not education, can be excused for trivializing the seriousness of the subject by making the movie seem as unrealistic as possible. However, throughout history, grim prophecies and predictions of the end of the world have abounded and are to be found in all cultures, civilizations and religions. From the Bible to Nostradamus to the Mayan calendar to the Hopis of SW United States to I Ching of China, the list of such prophecies and predictions is seemingly endless.

A careful examination of such predictions and prophecies reveals that most of them are vague and subject to just about any interpretation. Some, such as the Mayan calendar, are not prophetic at all, despite all the hype the Mayans have no specific prophesies or predictions concerning the end of the world, all the hype is simply based on the fact that the calendar supposedly ends in 2012.The Bible is unique in this respect that the prophecies in it are rather detailed, especially in the book of Revelation. Approximately ¼ of the Bible is prophetic, dealing with events that were in yet the future when it was first written, a major part of those prophetic events concern the events that will occur in a very short period of time that is termed ‘the end of the world’, and are still in the future. The end of the world in the movie 2012 is caused by a series of massive solar flares hitting earth that destabilize the earth’s core setting in motion the cataclysms to come. This activity is first observed by a physicist in India in 2009, and based on his calculations, and that of a fellow American physicist, a conclusion is drawn that only a limited amount of time remains before the earth’s crust breaks apart and the earth literally sinks into the sea. Many of the other catastrophic events depicted in the movie such as massive earthquakes, giant tsunamis covering continents, and super volcanoes erupting are also prophesied by the Bible to begin happening in quick succession, and in ever greater magnitudes till the very end.

BIBLICAL PROPHESIES REGARDING ‘THE END OF THE WORLD’: Before going any further let me emphasise that according to the Bible, the end of the world is not the same as the end of the planet Earth, or even the end of all life on it. Biblically speaking ‘The World’ is the system that dictates life on Earth, so ‘THE END OF THE WORLD’ is literally a disintegration of all present world systems particularly those of Economics, Politics, and Religion. In this ‘2012 Series’ I would like to use the movie 2012 as a visual aid to reference many of the events prophesied in the Bible, particularly in the book of Revelation. Biblical prophecy regarding the end of the world that signifies the end of this present age rather than the end of planet Earth may be divided into the following categories based on Jesus’ prophesies recorded in the book of Matthew, chapters 24 and 25, Old Testament prophesies, and the whole of the prophetic book of Revelation. Biblically speaking ‘the end of the world’ will be imminent when all of these ‘signs’ begin to be seen simultaneously or in quick succession over a short period of time, a decade or two at the most. The list of categories of catastrophes and cataclysms of unprecedented proportion soon to overtake mankind may broadly be classified as follows:

• WARFARE / (both civil and international) on a planetary scale. In all likelihood WWIII will be fought across Asia and Europe, and may include North America. Most of Africa and South America will see internal strife and civil war as is already on going in many African countries.
• DEPOPULATION / A loss of life on an unprecedented scale mainly through warfare, famines, and pandemic disease. Unlike even a decade ago talk of pandemic diseases with mass casualties is no longer considered improbable, most experts now predict ‘when not if’ such plagues will wipe out a large percentage of human life on earth.
• ECONOMIC COLLAPSE / It seems that overnight the world went from ‘booming economy’ that brought unprecedented prosperity worldwide to a ‘bust’ of titanic proportions. The bust must be complete, and on a worldwide scale before the end.
• NATURAL ‘EARTHLY’ DISASTERS AND COSMIC ‘HEAVENLY’ DISASTERS / Planet wide devastation on a scale greater than the 2004 Indonesian tsunami and the recent Haiti earthquake. Bombardment by heavenly projectiles such as asteroids and other bodies is a distinct possibility, even a certainty.

Many of the above listed events were depicted in the movie ‘2012’ and many were cryptically hinted at by the makers of the film. As this series progresses I will expound on each of the above categories in detail and make reference to many scenes and sub plots within the film to give readers a visual frame of reference for these Biblical prophesies that ‘must surely come to pass’ before the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ. Readers who follow this series will realize that though much credit for ‘doomsday’ prophesies is given to sources such as the Mayan calendar and people like Nostradamus, the fact of the matter is that there is no greater work of prophecy regarding the end of the age (among other subjects) than the Bible. The Bible identifies ‘Doomsday’ itself as the ‘Day of the Lord’ and from Genesis to Revelation a significant portion of the Bible addresses this very subject. So even though many are making a business out of what we may call Y2K12 by referring to the mystical and cryptic information contained in the Mayan calendar, the fact remains that the Bible gives more details about the end in one chapter (Matthew 24) than all of the prophecies of the Mayans, the Hopis, the I Ching, the Tibetan book of the dead, and Nostradamus put together. It stands to reason that if the one who gave the prophesies is also the one who has the power to make them to come to pass then it’s a no brainer to figure out where we should be looking for accurate information regarding future events; it’s all in the book called THE BIBLE. To be continued...