THE WORLD WILL END SOON!

Don’t plan on taking out a lengthy mortgage. Don’t plan on buying a car or truck with payments beyond 48 months. Don’t plan on your eighth grader going to college. In fact, don’t plan anything beyond December 21, 2012.

Why? According to the ancient Roman Sybil, Nostradamus, Merlin the Magician, the I Ching, the Ancient Mayan calendar, and other prophesies - after this date civilization as we know it will cease to exist.
Yep! You guessed it - Chicken Little is at it again. The sky is falling… And, the Y2K people have jumped on a new beer wagon.

For those who lend a crooked ear to this frightening and impending news, you may as well sell everything you own, give the proceeds to charity and hope that God will smile upon you for your gratuitous act. It’s amazing how many people actually do believe this stuff. Personally I think a lot of doomsday theorist will be rather upset on December 22, 2012.

According to researchers who provided data for an end of the world scenario ran on the History Channel, all of the above (reliable?) sources mention that Planet Earth will face a catastrophic event on this date. The book The Orion Prophecy claims that the Earth's magnetic field will reverse with the North Pole moving into the Pacific Ocean. Others claim an asteroid will collide with the earth, still others predict earthquakes, massive sunspots, and other geophysical activity.

One of the most ominous bits of data came from the Ancient Mayans who possessed an astronomical calendar that was supposedly more accurate than our own. They could allegedly predict a solar eclipse hundreds of years in the future. Their calendar ends on December 21, 2012.  This date also coincides with other ancient predictions.

The fear mongers didn’t positively state that the human race would end on this date, they noted that far too many prophets have targeted this date for something special. They also didn’t stress the fact that the Ancient Sybil was on hallucinogens, that Nostradamus also engaged in hallucinogens, that the I Ching was a mathematical system with many possible answers and that one possible reason the Mayan calendar ended when it did was the fact that Mayan civilization ended.

Let’s look at another, much better scenario, one they failed to mention.

As most historians know (even amateur historians like me), the modern calendar as we know it isn’t exactly on the money. Between the Roman calendar, early Christian calendars, the Gregorian calendar, and a mish-mash of others, nailing down a positive date in time is a very tricky scenario. Add this to the fact that the Roman Church messed with a few years here and there and leap years weren’t always scheduled, and the Old Testament talks about a day lost, we have a time/date flux.

If you had a working time machine set on our modern calendar and dialed your destination for the year of Christ’s birth, chances are very good you would either arrive long before he was born, or possibly long after. That’s how accurate our modern historical calendar is.

It is therefore possible (maybe not probable), that twelve or more years have gone unaccounted for in one way or another.

What if (and this is a really big what if), Jesus Christ decides to come back exactly 2,000 years after his birth. Since there’s an outside chance that our calendar can be off quite a bit, perhaps December 21, 2012 is the day that Jesus has selected to begin His return.

In this scenario it wouldn’t be the end of mankind as predicted above, but a wonderful new beginning.
So, it would behoove you to get your act together if you don’t want to be – Left Behind!