Sunday, March 11, 2012

The Mayan 2012 Doomsday Prediction

   Unless you live under a rock and commune only with cave critters you’ve heard about the Mayan doomsday prediction for Dec. 21st 2012. I tend to not readily believe what I hear, read or even see. My skeptical nature encourages me to question, research and cross-reference information rigorously until I have a better understanding of each position on a given issue. I’ve discovered that the lens from which information has been filtered through can greatly influence the interpretation of said information, often making the truth of it all a bit difficult to conclude. After thoroughly seining the 2012 Mayan Doomsday Prediction theory through my skeptical filter, this is what I’ve come to believe…
   First of all, the debunking myth that the Mayan calendar does not account for leap days and therefore the end date of the Long Count calendar has already come and gone without fanfare, is not only not factual, because it apparently does, but to suggest that horological scholars forgot to factor that in is simple ridiculous. The Mayan way of counting the days is dramatically different from our Gregorian way, but time is time, and every reputable horologist has concluded that the Mayan Long Count Calendar end date corresponds to Dec. 21st 2012 on our calendars. I’ll have to take their word for it because the complex calculations are all but a nest of snakes to me, but since most of them think the doomsday scenario overreaches the evidence and their findings are from a historical perspective, their reasoning is more credibility to me than a debunking post on Face Book.
   There seems to be no clear evidence that the Mayan’s themselves considered the end of the Long Count calendar to be a “Doomsday Event”. By all cultural accounts they merely considered this to be the passing of one World Age into another and an easily survivable period. The “Doomsday” interpretation mainly comes from the imagery found on the last page of one of the few remaining Mayan documents, the Dresden Codex, which depicts what some consider clearly ominous, and others a mere social warning.
   Despite rampant speculation of the looming threats our world faces, on the surface there appears to be no scientific evidence that anything dire is inevitable to happen on Dec. 21st 2012, or any other time soon, but I’m not entirely comfortable blindly skating on fragile surfaces. Take it from the Nat Geo program “Doomsday Preppers” where at the end of every segment they make sure to point out that “experts” think these people are wasting their time. History tells me that in reality, if there was cause to be alarmed there’s no way these experts would tell us -and if you think your government would not lie to your face -you need a history lesson.
   In all honesty, the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy is not what worries me -many dire prophecies have already come and gone without so much as a cosmic fizzle- and the very real threats we face on a planetary scale are nothing new. There does in fact, happen to be millions of well-armed people among us that are not only afraid something dire is going to happen in 2012, but many of them are hoping it does. Fear is a dangerous factor in any equation, and when people act on their fears -innocent people tend to get hurt. Then there are the Doomsday Preppers that are more hopeful for change than afraid of it because they’re sick of the way things are and they want to start over. History also reminds me that passionate rebels need little encouragement. It’s the propensity for human beings to fulfill their own dire prophecies that truly worries me. God forbid it rains somewhere on Dec.21st 2012 –it will likely spark total chaos.

1 comment:

  1. The Mayan Doomsday Prediction Dec 21, 2012???

    Take the under... We are not likely to make it to December

    ReplyDelete

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