By: Don Caldwell
Wow, that was close. I almost sold all my possessions preparing for the 2012 end of the world thing :o)
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It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will - or if it has already.
A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)
Aldana doesn't have any answers as to what the correct calendar conversion might be, preferring to focus on why the current interpretation may be wrong. Looks like end-of-the-world theorists may need to find another ancient calendar on which to pin their apocalyptic hopes.
How often do you hear about the 2012 thing? Does a part of you suspect there may be truth in it? Anyone who reads enough history knows that the past 1000 years has been full of “End of the world” predictions. Most notably, perhaps, was the belief that the world would end at the year 1000 (There was real fear in the medieval world), or even Y2K. Are we in such a rush to see the world end? Do we fear that it may be? What are you afraid of losing? If the world was in fact going to end 2 years from now, what would you do differently in life? Why could you not do that anyway?
(ORIGINAL LINK) End of the Earth Postponed - Yahoo! News
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