Topic Tuesday #22 2012/12/18 - "The End of the World..?"

Yes, I had to jump on the bandwagon. How often do you get to live through an 'Apocalypse' complete with dooms day scenarios and movies? Well... Quite a few times as it turns out.

Apocalypse/Dooms Day/End of Days predictions and cults that we didn't die from.

1) If you read this on or later than the 21st of December, 2012 - You have survived the end of the Mayan Calendar cycle. NASA put together a very nice treatise as to why we will still be here Saturday morning and beyond. http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html

Harold Camping

2) Harold Camping (born July 19, 1921) of Family Radio predicted the world was going to end in 2011 using numerology in his interpretations of Bible passages. Camping predicted that Jesus Christ would return to Earth on May 21, 2011, whereupon the righteous would fly up to heaven, and that there would follow five months of fire, brimstone and plagues on Earth, with millions of people dying each day, culminating on October 21, 2011, with the final destruction of the world. He had previously predicted that Judgment Day would occur on or about September 6, 1994. Mr. Camping had a stroke after the failed 2011 predition, apologized, and retired as president of Family Radio.

3) In the days leading up to September 9, 2009, fans of Armageddon insisted that the world would end - 9/9/9 being the emergency services phone number in the UK and also the number of the Devil - albeit upside down. Surprisingly there wasn't the same hyperbole on June 6, 2006.

4) Heaven’s Gate (March 26, 1997) followers believed in UFOs and impending doom, for which the only escape was to voluntarily “turn against the next level” by committing suicide. The leaders of the group, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, convinced members that their “evacuation” plan would be a fast-approaching UFO which would act as their mode of transport to beyond.

5) Waco, TX Branch Davidians a deeply religious cult that originated in 1955 from a schism in the Davidian Seventh Day Adventists("Davidians"), a reform movement that began within the Seventh-day Adventist Church ("Adventists") around 1930. The 1993 actions of this religious sect were predicated on the notion that they lived in the final times according to the Book of Revelation. Vernon Howell (who changed his name to David Koresh in 1990) claimed himself their final prophet. The Davidian movement went up in flames during the 55 day "Waco Siege" (February 28 - April 19, 1993)

6) “Aum” was a Japanese religious movement founded by Shoko Asahara. His 1984 doomsday prophecy described a final conflict culminating in a nuclear "Armageddon", borrowing again the term from the Book of Revelation. According to Robert Jay Lifton, author of “Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism,” Asahara predicted Armageddon would occur in 1997, and that humanity would end, except (surprise!) for the elite few who joined Aum. Shoko Asahara was convicted of masterminding the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway and several other crimes, for which he was sentenced to death in 2004. In June 2012, his execution has been postponed due to further arrests of Aum Shinrikyo members.

7) Edgar Whisenant wrote a bestselling book called “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988.” and the following year he published “The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989,” and continued selling millions of these books with the same title and a revised year through 1993.

8) 50 members of a group called the Assembly of Yahweh (less familiarly known as Messianic, as well as Spiritual Israelites) gathered at Coney Island, New York, in white robes, awaiting their 'rapture' from a world about to be destroyed on May 25, 1981

9) The “mad messiah,” James Warren "Jim" Jones (1931 – November 18, 1978) was founder and leader of the “People’s Temple.” In 1965, Jones claimed that the world would be engulfed in a nuclear war on July 15, 1967. When that didn't happen, Jones went about establishing his communist commune in “Jonestown” in Guyana. The events of November 18, 1978, in Guyana, in which 920 people died at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (informally, and now commonly, called "Jonestown") and nearby airstrip at Port Kaituma, and Georgetown in an organized mass suicide/killing. The mass suicide and killings at Jonestown resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural non-accidental disaster prior to the events of September 11, 2001. Casualties at the airstrip included, among others, Congressman Leo Ryan. On the evening of November 18, in Jonestown, Jones ordered his congregation to drink a concoction of cyanide-laced, grape-flavored Flavor Aid. Parents were instructed to inject their children with the same drink should they be under a certain age. (This is also a plausible origin of the phrase, "drinking the cool-aid.")

10) Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) In one account is said to have foretold the end in 1948, but in a manuscript he wrote in 1704 (in which he describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible), he estimated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. In predicting this he said, "This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail."

11) Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) proclaimed that 'the kingdom of abominations shall be overthrown' within 300 years. Anywhere from (1546 - 1846)

William Miller

12) William Miller (1782 – 1849) American Baptist preacher. Among his direct spiritual heirs are several major religious denominations, including Seventh-day Adventists and Advent Christians. Later movements found inspiration in Miller's emphasis on biblical prophecy. His own followers are known as Millerites. Miller prophesied The End in 1844, based on Bible passage Daniel 8:14: "Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed."

13) John Napier (1550 – 1617) though best known as the discoverer of logarithms, predicted the world would end either in 1688 or 1700 in "A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John" (1593). He also dated the seventh trumpet to 1541.

14) Christopher Columbus (1451 – 1506) predicted the world would end in 1656 in one of his books, a "Book of Prophecies" (1505).

Nostradamus

15) Michael Stifel (1487 - 1567) a German monk, proselytized that the end of the world would come on Oct. 3, 1533, at precisely eight o’clock in the morning. When the hour came and went, he was then summarily ejected from his ecclesiastical quarters and flogged in the streets.

16) Nostradamus (1503 – 1566) in his book "Les Propheties", published in 1555, had this quatrain that still befuddles people into thinking the end is near: Century I Quatrain 46

“Very near Auch, Lectoure and Mirande a great fire will fall from the sky for three nights. (Anytime now...)