Doomsday

Humans have always tried to explain the unexplainable, which includes predicting the end of the world.

Both the secular and non-secular world attempts to pinpoint the moment the world shall come to an end. Though many people, both religious scholars and scientists, have made false predictions of when the world will end, we continue to readjust our calculations. As we schedule our lives based on dates and times, we try to do the same with our demise.

There are different perceptions of time, spanning religion and culture, yet we still try to make the imminent Apocalypse fit into our schedule. Millennium and even centuries become triggers for fear, creating “a perpetual calendar of human anxiety,” according to Kermode. “We are only asserting a permanent need to live by the pattern rather than the fact.”

The human perception of time has always been very linear. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to every story. They parts are only understood in relation to one another. It is argued that God, as an omnipresent and omniscient being, exists in all time simultaneously, therefore predicting the end of days can be difficult.

Mathematicians such as Newton tried to predict the Apocalypse through calculations and theologians tried to predict it using cues from Bible, depending on their own interpretations of signs. The years bookmarked for destruction have come and gone and the world still continues to exist. The miscalculations are seen as just as that. The end is coming but we just don’t know when exactly.

The question remains: Why does man continue to try to understand what cannot be understood. It is because we find comfort in the fact of knowing when the end is happening. We can plan accordingly. In the past, when religion played a far greater role in human lives, the coming Apocalypse was used to scare people to behave in accordance with the Bible. There will be fire and brimstone issued forth by the angels like in the visions of John. Today, the end is seen as something that man plays a far greater role in. Not only will man be judged at the end, he will be the cause of it.