Is 2012 Truly the End of the World?

I watched a US television report recently and one of those who were at a Republican Party event ended a brief interview with a curious and somewhat glib non-sequitur: it will ultimately not matter who wins the Republican Party nomination because the world is coming to an end on the 21st of December anyway. Anyone who wins the November presidential election will not even be sworn in, by January next year all will have become dust. 

My somewhat automatic reaction was to say to myself: oh, America. The place is never short of cranks - or kooks as they would say - especially when it comes to matters that bear on religion, matters like God, the beginning (or ‘creation,’ if you will) and of course eschatology (the end).

In modern times, no country has produced more end-timers than the United States. Some of these doomsday prophets are merely pesty and self-indulgent like the poor old fundie, Harold Camping, who swore by his eternalist God that the world would come to an end on May 21 of 2011. And there are crazed apocalypse orchestrators and scenario-setters like the baneful Reverend Jim Jones who murdered more than a thousand of his followers while incanting a lot religious balderdash.    

The germ of the notion that the world is coming to an end in 2012 originated from the time-honoured calendar of the Mayan people of South America, and perhaps more than any before, the end-time talk has bulked into a vast mushroom cloud of inconsequential hoo-ha. There is no point trying to rehearse the runic Mayan algorithm which made a lot of people to conclude that the world will end this year.

Historically plausible and sophisticated as the Mayan calendar is, it cannot foreordain anything more than fairly predictable cycles of the moon and the seasons (just like the received Gregorian calendar), and even if one reads the calendar closely what people have interpreted as denoting the end of time is only the end of a cycle and the beginning of another age, another epoch.

End-of-the-world predictions may just as well be old as homo sapiens, or as old as when humans began to invent religion and gods - particularly the invention of ‘organised’ religion and a monotheistic God who plays a wacky and wicked game of solitaire using its supposed creatures as objects, pawns. From bemused soothsayers of any bygone biblical empire to modern-day half-clever Jesus-freaked doomsayers, the notion that the world will one day be extirpated has never been out of currency.

Both the Qur’an and the Bible harp on the end, but the description of the pending apocalypse in the Qur’an is one of the most inhumane, antihuman and sadism-soaked literature I have ever read. If any god had indeed dictated such things to anyone, then the god must have a mean sociopathic streak in him.

As is usual the Bible’s depiction of what will happen in the end is not as vicious as the Qur’an’s. Or is it? The Book of Revelation revels in arrant bloody-mindedness of its own, but what strikes the reader more is the layered phantasmagoria with which the putative author of the book, John, couched the coming Armageddon. George Bernard Shaw dismisses Revelation as the ‘record of the visions of a drug addict.’ In other words, the Book of Revelation might very well serve the sole article of faith for members of the American Church of Peyotism.

Christians, particularly, are still echoing the end-of-time scare which began in ancient Judea even long before Jesus was born. When those people of antiquity could not make head or tail of the meaning of life and the inevitability of death, they invented a singular God alongside rather sophisticated, heavily codified, religions. Coming up with things like 'doomsday' was just one of the ways those who promulgated both God and ways of worshipping him believed they could cry their deity up and give relevance to their religions, it was meant to inspire fear, or what denizens of the medieval world would call terribilita - before the word became synonymous with the more awesome of Michelangelo’s art.                             

Disciples of Jesus couldn’t stop repeating that within their collective lifetime, Jesus would return and sit in judgement over people, that there would be an end-of-time rapture in which the righteous would be charioted away to heaven – that was 2000 years ago. Today, followers of Jesus are still talking about the Second Coming,  they are still catastrophising about the end, about the final judgement.

Now I must be categorical about this. There is not going to be any second coming of anyone - not this year, not for ever. Earth is not going to incinerate this year, either. And from all appearances, the world is not coming to an end soon. I’d rather depend on what mathematics and astrophysics say - speculative as that may be - about the chances of anything happening to the earth soon than wild and wide shots of religion and superstition.

Okay, an asteroid might strike a corner of the earth. But that will not happen this year - even if it does, it is not likely to lead to a global cataclysm. Or maybe the world is going to end this way: Israel will attack Iran and Iran will counterattack by nuking the world as we know it - but then that is as far-fetched as North Korea making any significant dent even if its new rotund leader suddenly loses it and presses the button.

The Red Giant? Well, we still have a few billion years before that happens, before the sun snowballs - pardon the oxymoron -  into an infernal monstrosity and subsumes the earth. What would earthlings look or be like then? Billions of years old cinders. So, indeed, the world might come to an end, but science explains this better than religion - and the probable end is still a great deal of light years away.