I realize that these posts are supposed to be about the readings we’ve done, in their entirety. The thing is, I’d really like to talk about everything – I’d like to talk about the Godless apocalypse, sure, but there’s hardly any time left to write this and I’ll talk about my idea with regards to that in class. The thing that fascinated me the most through all of the reading, however, was the idea of date-setting, and how it had served as the downfall of pretty nearly every other doomsayer – how it had proven them to be either fabulously incorrect, or at the very least ill-informed about the timing of their supposed doomsday.
Having seen all these supposed “doomsdays” come and go within the course of the text, and having lived through a few predicted ends of the world, I decided to come up with a prediction of my own – based entirely on the dates and figures provided in the reading. There are actually two different ones, based on the same date to begin the countdown, after which I’ll give a third and a fourth prediction, based on entirely different dates. Then we can talk about the Mayans.
The first moment to begin the countdown is 5:30 am on July 16, 1945. Then let’s take into account the commonly used Biblical figure of 1,260 days from the beginning of the countdown. Anyone who does the calculations will know that 1,260 days from that date passed a long time ago. But as with almost any other Biblical time length, we should not take a “day” literally – at least not here. Here, let’s take each “day” to equal one real-world month – that means that 1,260 months would have to pass before the end of the world. Divide that number by 12 to get the number of years until “doomsday,” and we get 150 years, or a doomsday that will begin at 5:30 am on July 16, 2095.
The other possible date that one might consider to be the beginning of doomsday (with 5:30 am 7/16/1945 as the starting point) comes when we take “day” to mean “year.” In that case, the beginning of doomsday will be at the appointed time and on the appointed day, but in the year 3205.
A third date to be considered stems from the date of the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union – a date which we will consider to be somewhere in the middle to the end of December, 1991. Going by the “month” logic I outlined earlier, this gives us a beginning of December, 2141 for the beginning of the end of the world (or, by the longer, year-based logic, we get a date somewhere in December of 3251.
Finally, there’s the idea of the “world week,” where each day in the week is a millennium in length. This gives us the most time before the end of the world out of all of my predictions. The countdown begins with the birth of Christ – which for all intents and purposes will be given as the year 0 (understanding that the date can range a bit). Near the end of the sixth day, Christ comes, and the battle with Satan begins – ending at the beginning of the seventh day, when the Millennium-length rule of Christ in New Jerusalem begins. At the end of the seventh day, time ceases, so to speak, and the final battle begins – after which there is no more time – and the end of the world is over, so to speak, letting the eternal kingdoms on Heaven and Earth therefore exist forever. Therefore, according to this logic, the beginning of the end of the world will be somewhere in the range of the year 5993 to 6001.
Then, of course, the Mayans could have been right, and the world will end December 21st, 2012.
