The NPR piece continues, "This announcement comes from Harold Camping, the doomsday prophet who said Judgment Day would come on May 21, 2011."
Catherine Wessinger marked her calendar. She's an expert on doomsday groups at Loyola University in New Orleans and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism. She says she's seen this before.
No matter what, Wessinger says doomsday movements will always be with us because they play into a primal fear. "We don't want to suffer and we don't want to die," Wessinger says.
Doomsday movement promise escape from the human condition.
Next up, says Wessinger: December 21, 2012—when the Maya calendar seems to indicate the world will end.
Hmm—not exactly. The end of baktun 13 will indeed occur on December 21, 2012, but it marks the end of a baktun—, which occurs only once approximately every four hundred years, not the end of history itself.
Still Curious?
Here's the link to the NPR story that prompted this post: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/18/141427151/doomsday-redux-prophet-says-world-will-end-friday
Here's the link to an earlier Jenny's post debunking the so-called Maya doomsday prediction: http://jennysmexico.blogspot.com/2011/10/maya-prediction-doomsday-2012.html
Here's the link to an article that appeared first in the Mexican newspaper Milenio, which features an interview with National Autonomous University of Mexico Researcher Erik Velásquez García in which this scholar explains the erroneous assumptions on which the "New Age" prophecy so-called is based (my translation from the Spanish): http://jennysmexico.blogspot.com/2012/03/unam-researcher-debunks-maya-end-of.html
Doomsday movement promise escape from the human condition.
Next up, says Wessinger: December 21, 2012—when the Maya calendar seems to indicate the world will end.
Hmm—not exactly. The end of baktun 13 will indeed occur on December 21, 2012, but it marks the end of a baktun—, which occurs only once approximately every four hundred years, not the end of history itself.
Still Curious?
Here's the link to the NPR story that prompted this post: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/18/141427151/doomsday-redux-prophet-says-world-will-end-friday
Here's the link to an earlier Jenny's post debunking the so-called Maya doomsday prediction: http://jennysmexico.blogspot.com/2011/10/maya-prediction-doomsday-2012.html
Here's the link to an article that appeared first in the Mexican newspaper Milenio, which features an interview with National Autonomous University of Mexico Researcher Erik Velásquez García in which this scholar explains the erroneous assumptions on which the "New Age" prophecy so-called is based (my translation from the Spanish): http://jennysmexico.blogspot.com/2012/03/unam-researcher-debunks-maya-end-of.html
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