You missed it! Avicenna, Richard Carrier, and I had a discussion about doomsday Google+ and youtube. But you can watch it now, at least.
Dec 21 2012
Apocalypse? What apocalypse?
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25 comments
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raven
21 December 2012 at 1:11 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I couldn’t get excited about this Apocalypse. Bad scheduling, right in the middle of the busy winter holidays.
Besides, this was the fourth one scheduled this year. The xians really should keep it down to 1 or 2 a year. People start losing track if they have more.
Janine: Hallucinating Liar
21 December 2012 at 1:17 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I have survived dozens of ends of the world.
I am nigh invulnerable.
sqlrob
21 December 2012 at 1:17 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
There’s a good countdown Here
May or may not work on tablets / phones.
TerranRich, Yet Another Atheist
21 December 2012 at 1:32 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
@raven: Um… December 21, 2012 had nothing to do with Christianity.
Gregory in Seattle
21 December 2012 at 1:40 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
@raven – The December 21 apocalypse is the product of New Age “thought” and not Christianity. Although I agree that it would be nice if religious nutters would coordinate.
sqlrob
21 December 2012 at 1:42 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
@Terran:
Yeah, it does have to with Christianity, just not in the popular view. Warren Jeffs is calling for the end of the world as well.
Reginald Selkirk
21 December 2012 at 1:44 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Happy Solstice to all!
.
Richard Carrier is so awesome, the navy named an entire class of ships after him.
robro
21 December 2012 at 1:48 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Terran — True the Mayan calendar thing isn’t Christian, but the very idea of an apocalypse is Judeo-Christian, not Mayan. Christians have been working overtime on the apocalypse the last few years with many predictions and promoting politicians bent on greasing the wheels. This one seems to have come more from the New Age, spiritualist types, but some of them are very influenced by Christianity.
Rich Woods
21 December 2012 at 1:49 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
What’s wrong with all these doom-mongers? Can’t they just for once get the damn day right?
Usernames are smart
21 December 2012 at 3:21 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Fixed It For You
RobertL
21 December 2012 at 3:53 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
The Mayans were right but The Doctor saved us.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
21 December 2012 at 4:07 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Who saved us? (Sorry, the classic A&C sketch).
hypatiasdaughter
21 December 2012 at 4:16 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I have done a lot of research on Nibiru/PlanetX/2012 in the last few years and have done a couple of talks on it.
While 2012 wasn’t a xtian Doomsday scenario, many average xtians (but not any major xtain leader that I know of) thought it was the expected Apocalypse. I found that every possible Doomsday scenario and every possible Doomsday prophet got rolled into it. Nostradamus, Revelations – you name it – and someone was sure that it was predicting events for Dec 2012.
For nearly 20 years fruitcakes and pseudo-scientists have been predicting doom as the century turned.
REAL scientists have been refuting their false claims.
People (not the people here, who are smarter than this), NOW will you stop listening to the fruitcakes and pseudo-scientists and listen to the REAL scientists? Please? Pretty please?
timgueguen
21 December 2012 at 4:21 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
There’s probably about as much chance of that happening as there is of me hooking up with the girl I had a crush on in high school. In other words, it’s theoretically possible, but it would likely take too many difficult changes for it to happen.
John Morales
21 December 2012 at 4:30 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
robro:
Maybe that use of the word has, but eschatological stories have been around in many, many cultures.
(Never heard of Ragnarök? The Sermon of the Seven Suns?)
Ichthyic
21 December 2012 at 4:42 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
no, it was Bugs Bunny.
Ichthyic
21 December 2012 at 4:49 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
^^ fastforward to about 2:30
sqlrob
21 December 2012 at 4:59 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Yes (sorry, variant on A&C)
Ogvorbis: useless
21 December 2012 at 5:17 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Luckily, the End-of-the-Worldists are still batting absolute zero. They are zero for several billion in predicting the end of the world in recorded history (and unrecorded history). This would be funny as hell if the apocalypsists were not using it as an excuse to let the environment, economy, social services go to hell because we will all be gone/saved in another blah blah blah.
shouldbeworking
21 December 2012 at 5:46 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Good thing I did my marking.
raven
21 December 2012 at 7:36 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Some of them adopted it anyway. It’s not like most of them know much about their religion and they just make it up as they go along.
The Mayans think it is the end of their calendar and the beginning of a new one.
The Apocalypse these days is mostly a xian belief*. A lot of them tacked it onto the Mayan calendar.
Apparently not wondering why jesus needs to use a pagan Mayan calendar. Although the one we use these days, the Julian calendar is also a pagan invention, deriving from the Romans.. To the point where many months are named after Roman gods.
*Very few people are waiting up for Ragnarok.
John Morales
21 December 2012 at 7:41 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
[semi-OT]
raven:
Nope; the current calendar is the Gregorian — due to Pope Gregory in C16.
John Morales
21 December 2012 at 7:44 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
PS
As I noted, eschatological thinking is eschatological, no matter what the nomenclature.
(You have Jesus on the brain, when you attribute every foolishness to Christians)
DLC
21 December 2012 at 7:50 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Hey, don’t knock the End of the World, it had a great marketing tie-in!
Amphiox
22 December 2012 at 3:27 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
As impressive as their math and astronomy was, the Mayans dated the creation of the earth to around 3000BC.
In other words they were over a thousand years more wrong about it than even Bishop Ussher.
That’s hardly a good recommendation for the accuracy of any prediction they made, even if they made any, concerning the end of the world.
(It should be noted, however, that they have in their sets of calendars, units of time that describe periods as long as 60 plus million years. If they believed that the universe was created in 3000 BC, even having such a time unit suggests that they had fair confidence that at least something would be around that would need a time unit to describe, 60 million years from now.)