It's the end of the world as we know it!

Popular media has recently started discussing what shamans have known for decades: the world as we know it will end on December 21, 2012. Researchers and New Age scholars have noted that on the same day the ancient Mayan calendar ends, our sun will align—for the first time in 26,000 years—with the middle of the Milky Way galaxy. These same experts warn that this event will undoubtedly be accompanied by the greatest spiritual transformation of human history—or, alternatively, the apocalypse.

The reason for the lack of concluding consensus can be attributed to the fact that these so-called experts mainly consist of the 'citizen journalists' that infest the large number of blogs, vlogs, and social networks available to our society. There may even be a legitimate scientist or two caught up in the excitement, but even they have yet to deliver any conclusive evidence that 2013 will be rung in with one killer catastrophe of a New Year’s Eve party. Frankly, it’s sadly reminiscent of the Y2K craze, when the ever-reliable media predicted with cutting edge sound bites and scientifically savvy technocrats, that a panicked public would soon be cutting each other’s throats when the computer fed economy skipped a beat and crashed. Hmm...I must have blinked and missed it.

It is unreasonable to be frightened by superstitious tales spun by doom mongers and magic-eight-ball-gazing pseudoscientists, when so far the only proof they have is speculative, made authoritative only by their own endorsements. The common theme throughout their works is, “We think that…” or “When there is more data it might conclude…” In other words, “Pad our palms, buy our books, and we’ll give you our ambiguous opinion of the future.” If you truly hanker for a vague predication of future events, buy a fortune cookie: they’re cheaper and a heck of a lot easier to swallow.

It is even more ironic that our society, which divorces religion from science, would listen to the calendar of a race so sophisticated, they ritually sacrificed themselves to appease the spirits.

Still, if the earth must be consumed in fire or bathed in an aura of hyper-spiritual rays, so be it. I can only hope that our long-dead Mayan friends are not as fickle at foreseeing the future as were our own spiritual predecessors. Followers of Knud Weiking, a Danish cult leader, built a survival bunker when an alien told him of a nuclear holocaust in 1967. Still another religious sect wrote a book with the frighteningly compelling title: “87 Reasons Jesus is Coming Back in 1987”; and according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses we have already missed the Second Coming of Christ at least five times—in 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, and 1925. I would hate to miss seeing Jesus a sixth, seventh, or eighth time in 2012.

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