December 21, 2012: Judgment Day

Science can neither confirm nor discredit the validity of many religiously or prophetically deemed judgment days of the future, the soonest of which will be arriving December 21, 2012, the final day of the Mayan Calendar. Although the Mayas reached their conclusion astrologically, many religious beliefs and prophets have also independently attached different earth-shattering events to take place during relatively the same neighborhood in time. As the winter solstice of 2012 draws nearer, scientists and skeptics alike are paying close attention to the world's development and potential signs that might support the Mayan calendar's End-Time date or the religious belief of others in a prophesied Judgment Day.

Most religions throughout history that believe in a God or a Creator have had some sort a judgment day within their belief system. In each case, this is a time when the earth shall be destroyed or cleansed of the wrong-doers and those that believe in their God shall be saved or brought to heaven to reside in His Kingdom. Although many predicted judgment days have already come and gone without incident, the fact that several others fall relatively close to the Maya's astrologically derived end-time has been the cause of some special attention given to this particular date in the near future.

Both the Jewish and the Islamic faiths have specific end-time dates arriving within 229 years of the Mayan prediction in 2012. The Jewish date is in October of 2240 while the Islamic date falls in the "Year of the Haj" in 2076. The Jewish faith maintains that each one thousand years marks one day for God. Both the Jewish calendar and the Old Testament of the Bible state that on the seventh day of God, everything that belongs to Him shall be returned to Him. Likewise, many Christian prophets have claimed that He shall return on the third day of God, which could be anytime between January 1, 2001 and December 31, 3000, each day of God again being represented by a thousand years.

The Christian faith gives no specific date for when God is going to return to earth and destroy all evil while taking His followers with him to Heaven. Instead, the Book of Revelations talks of diminishing faith, increased violence, world wars, world catastrophes, and natural disasters mounting shortly before His reappearance. Many religious leaders look at today's crime rates, Tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, wars being fought between nations, and the growing number of atheists as signs that God's return will be soon. In 2005, La Voz De Aztlan reported, "...many of the Old and New Testament biblical prophecies of the end-times correlate amazingly with religious beliefs of the Mayas and other indigenous civilizations of the western hemisphere."

The Mayan calendars use astrology rather than faith in pin-pointing their version of the last day on earth as we know it. The Mayas were well ahead of their time in regards to tracking the stars and motions in the skies. They managed to track patterns in the universe that scientists were unable to rediscover until hundreds of years later. Their calendars are based on the alignments of Venus in relation to the Earth, or the positions of particular stars and their relation to the planets and solar system. The mere fact that they were aware of a solar system and the difference between planets and stars without the use of high-powered telescopes baffles scientists and historians to this day. Nonetheless, their calendars have been proven to be by far the most accurate in existence.

The Mayans claim that time will no longer be able to be measured after December 21, 2012 because it will no longer consistently travel in the same pattern that it does today. This could very easily be a description of what would happen to time if the earth got thrown off its axis. Once it starts spinning at a different speed and angle, the days will be longer or shorter. Likewise, if its orbit around the sun is changed, so is the length of a year. Their explanation was that the solar system will reach the conclusion of a 5,125 year natural cycle on December 21, 2012, at which time drastic changes will take place. These changes will be the cause of a day no longer consisting of twenty-four hours and a year no longer being three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days. Scientists have confirmed that, in much the same manner as a year cycles through the four seasons, the Mayas were once again correct in regards to the 5,125 year seasonal cycle of the solar system.

Along with the different religious beliefs and the ancient astrology of the Mayas, there is one major prophet that has earned the right to be listened to who also confirms that the world is soon in for a major change. Nostradamus was born more than 500 years ago in France in 1503 A.D. From 1555 to 1566, he wrote hundreds of quatrains. Each of these quatrains is a prediction, a vision he claimed he had gotten from the future that had been delivered to him by God. Most of his predictions were related to the political and economic conditions of his own era, the late 1500's and into the 1600's, but he also counted the number of future world wars correctly, going so far as to name "Hizler" as the second anti-Christ behind World War II. In the early 1560's, he described wars fought from the air and from below the ocean's surface. He goes on to write about 'the new city' that gets flattened soon before the third and final world war. Many scholarly translators of Nostradamus' work believe this prediction came to fruition on September 11, 2001 with the World Trade Center's collapse in New York City.

From his quatrains that are considered relevant to today and potentially coincide with the type of dramatic changes that would take place during the prophesied end-time days, some experts translate to state that a war will begin out of the Middle East and the third anti-Christ will be a man with a turban and a beard. He predicts that there will be massive, worldwide loss of life, both militant and civilian. He then claims that a millennium of peace will follow this final world war, which some interpret as starting over, or not enough people left in the world to fight.

Nostradamus was well-known and not appreciated by the government in power at the time of his writings. Much of his work was written in a coded language that he himself invented while constantly traveling throughout Italy and France in case the government got their hands on them. It is for this reason that his predictions cannot be taken to the bank. There is no doubt that Nostradamus had an incredible insight of some sort to be aware of world wars, planes, and submarines, to name but a few, hundreds of years before they took place or were invented. Precise dates, and many times the event itself, however, are subject to translation of his original work, which not every translator sees eye to eye on.

In light of so many unrelated sources pinpointing the same relatively small span of time for a cataclysmic event to occur, many scientists are carefully tracking the numbers and severities of today's natural disasters and comparing them closely to the past. In Revelations, as the world as we know it nears its final days, natural disasters are on the increase. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, a government funded organization, in the 1900's there were 110 earthquakes large enough to cause 1000 or more deaths throughout the world. Breaking the century down to first half and second half, there were exactly fifty-five earthquakes of this magnitude during the first fifty years. There were also exactly fifty-five earthquakes during the second fifty years of the 1900's. So they have not increased in numbers. However, using the number of deaths as a determining factor in history is irrelevant because of the growth and greater densities of the population as time progresses. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, for example, caused 3,000 deaths. With today's population, that same earthquake could easily be responsible for 30,000 deaths.

This leaves us to look at the severity of the earthquakes. The Richter Magnitude scale is used to measure the strength of each quake. During the first fifty years, the 1.1 earthquakes per year averaged a 6.6 on the Richter scale. During the second fifty years, the average was 6.9. This may not look like a very large difference, but in this point system, each tenth of a point is almost double the strength of the previous tenth. And having pointed that out, we should take note of the fact that the U.S. Geological Survey team also has recorded seven such earthquakes thus far in the 2000's. The average in numbers is only half an earthquake more per year, but the average Richter scale level has risen quite a bit to 7.5.

Hurricanes and tropical storms are also being closely tracked. According to the National Hurricane Center, the United States had more hurricanes in the first half of the 1900's than the second half by twenty-three, but the percentage of those hurricanes that were ranked in the most severe categories rose from 32% to 39% in the latter half.

On the most recent years, CNN News reports that a record number of storms hit the U.S. in 2005. The seasonal average for named storms is ten. Six of those are hurricanes and two of those are major. In 2005 alone, there were a record twenty-seven named storms, thirteen of which were hurricanes, and seven of which were major. That puts over 50% of the hurricanes into the higher categories, a dramatic increase from the last century.

Another natural phenomenon going on right now that scientist and governments alike are very concerned about that could potentially cause the realization of the Mayan prediction regarding the fate of the earth, is global warming, or more specifically, the melting of the earth's ice caps. CBS NEWS reported on February 19, 2006, that the ice caps have been frozen for more than 100,000 years but will have melted by the end of this century. "Temps in the arctic are rising twice as fast as they are in the rest of the world" (Bill Owens).

Bob Corell, one of the world's top authorities on climate change, recently joined with 300 scientists from eight countries and put together The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. Their reported conclusion was, "The entire planet is out of balance...In 10 years, here in the arctic, we [will] see what the rest of the planet will see in 25 or 30 years from now." Corell adds, for CBS News, that sea levels which have risen 10 inches over the last century will have risen an additional three feet during the next 100 years. The result of this would cause the lowlands in virtually every country in the world to be under water. The Netherlands would simply no longer exist.

On August 23, 2005, the India Daily Technology Team, released a study about the overall condition of our planet, stating "The tectonic plate shifts, underwater volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and Tsunamis are increasing at rates never seen before...The number of floods and droughts has increased beyond imagination in the last ten years." The numbers in some cases are indeed up, but in most there is little change. However, the intensity or magnitude of these natural disasters has most definitely increased and currently show no signs of changing this trend.

The increased severities of these storms and earthquakes, as well as the predicted melting of the ice caps, are all natural phenomenon that may be taking place as part of the natural cycle of the solar system. Just as every summer melts away the winter snow and ice, the rising temperatures here on earth could be a part of a change of seasons in the solar system. Since the end of this cycle occurs December 21, 2012, it stands to reason that a new cycle will begin on December 22, 2012. We know that the solar system, as well as the planet we live on, has been through this cycle countless times in its billions of years of existence. We also know that the earth has been through many of these cycles without falling off its axis. Since the ice caps are not predicted to melt completely for another century or so, and the new solar season begins in less than six years, it is quite possible that the new season could begin to correct these natural phenomena before they contribute to the destruction of life on this planet as we know it. It is virtually impossible to know what daily or even yearly changes in the earth's climate may have taken place in the last decade or two before the end of the last solar cycle 5,119 years ago.

Something cosmic may indeed happen on December 21, 2012, but all we need to do is look back a few years to 1999 when the world held its breath as the calendar shifted to a new century. People were stocking up on supplies and preparing for a world-wide economic collapse just before the turn of the century based purely on the suspicions of a few paranoid folks in power. By 2010, the paranoia that the Maya's might be correct will undoubtedly reach discussion levels to equal the intensity of Y2K, if not surpass it. But without concrete scientific evidence that the structure of time is going to change as in the Mayan prediction, or that the earth is going to change its rotation or orbit around the sun in less than six years, in my opinion, we will more than likely see another prophesied judgment day come and go once again. Then after a collective, global, sigh of relief, we will undoubtedly shift our attention to the next potential judgment day in 2040 when all nine planets of our solar system line up in a straight line for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years.

References:

CNN News - Hurricane Season - http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/hurricanes

Fisher, Mark - Judgment Day Theories - http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/judge.html

Goodnews Christian Ministry - "The Last Days of Babylon Part 8, Age of Deliverance" - http://www.unexplainable.com/artman/publish/article_2058.shtml

Jenkins, John Major - "The How and Why of the Mayan End-Date in 2012 A.D." - Mountain Astrologer - May 23, 1994

Morris, Earl H. (1931) - The Temple of the Warriors - New York: Charles Scribner's SonsTeresi, Dick (2002) - Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science-From the Babylonians to the Mayas - New York: Simon & Schuster

Roberts, Henry C. (1947) - The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus - Oyster Bay: Nostradamus Co.Union of Concerned Scientists - Global Warming - "Arctic Climate Impact Assessment." - 2004 - http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/arctic-climate-impact-assessment.html

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) - Earthquakes With 1000 or More Deaths Since 1900 - http://www.earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/world/world_deaths.phpU.S. Public Interest Research Group - "Global Warming - " U.S. PIDG - http://uspirg.org/uspirg.asp?id2=5235