Planet Bahá'í

The world is going to end soon. Twice.

Unless you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard that doomsday is December 21, 2012. You might also have heard that the end will come a bit sooner, on March 21, 2011. The former date is based on speculations about the Mayan calendar, which supposedly foretells either widespread destruction or perhaps a great spiritual transformation, while the latter stems from an interpretation of Biblical prophecy that supposedly pinpoints the date for the Rapture, the name given to an event that it is believed will see all saved Christians translated out of this world. In either case, there will be major upheavals.

I don't know about any of you, but myself I'm planning on going to work on March 22, 2011. I won't be going to work on December 22, 2012, but only because that's a Saturday and unless something changes between now and then I don't have to work on Saturdays. Of course, any of a number of things could prevent me from doing what I expect. I could start working on Saturdays. I could become independently wealthy and quit my job. (Ha ha.) I could meet with misfortune and be either dead or disabled (not that I like to think too much about stuff like that). But I'm pretty sure that both of these predicted ends of the world are completely unworthy of any serious attention.

First, let's look at the track record of doomsday prophets and dawning-of-the-Age-of-Aquarians. As long ago as 1666, and probably even before then, the world's end has been nigh according to somebody or another. How many such warnings have been raised? How many of them have been right? How many times has Jesus been about to float down from the clouds? How many times has destruction been poised to rain from the skies? How many harmonic convergences have come and gone? We don't actually need to know the number, although there have been plenty. If we just compare as a ratio actual ends of the world to predicted ends of the world, we come up with, basically, zero. Even random guessing ought to produce a better result than that. One has to really try to be wrong every single time!

Next, consider the facts of the case. Most of these predictions read like a spam email, such as the one about how Mars will soon be closer to Earth than it will be for the next 50,000 years. According to the emails, that rare event has happened every year for the past six years. To be fair, there was a grain of truth in the first one: the actual event occurred in August, 2003. But the emails made wildly inflated claims for what it would be like, and then every year since then somebody with nothing better to do than waste everyone else's bandwidth has updated it for the current year and started it circulating again. And every year, at least one person has asked your friendly neighborhood amateur astronomer if it's true. Anyway, the 2012 thing, like the so-called "harmonic convergence" in 1987, is similar, based a tiny bit in fact but then careening through wildly inaccurate statements and wholly unsupported speculations. For those who care about actual facts, the current issue of Sky & Telescope (available at your library or newsstand) has an article on the subject.

On the flip side, some good probably comes of this stuff for at least a few people. Someone's making money off of it. There's even a big-budget disaster movie about 2012 due to hit the theaters soon.

At least the Biblical doomsday scenario can't be faulted for getting facts wrong. It relies on interpretation of Scripture, not on science, so even though there are a lot of ways to read prophetic Scripture, the most anyone can say about anyone's pet interpretation is that it's not the only one available. I find a lot of the prevailing interpretations of prophecy to be flawed if not downright silly, but people are entitled to their opinions about such matters. I happen to find Bahá'u'lláh's interpretations of Biblical prophecy far more reasonable and meaningful than most others, but that's only my opinion. So while I'm pretty sure that December 22, 2012 will just be another Saturday because there are holes in the 2012 "theory" (a term I use very loosely here) big enough to pilot an aircraft carrier through, the only reason I'm planning on being at work on March 22, 2011 is that I trust Bahá'u'lláh's insight far, far more than I trust the insights of certain preachers.

That brings us to one more reason to ignore these impending doomsdays: even when someone has managed to figure out the correct timeframe for some bit of religious prophecy, they were so wrong about the nature of the event as to miss it entirely! If you know much about the Bahá'í Faith, you likely know that Bahá'ís believe that much of Biblical prophecy about the "end times" has to do with the advent of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh, who we believe to be God's Messengers for the present age. The Báb revealed His mission to His first disciple on the evening of May 22, 1844. As it happened, a number of people had been expecting some key event to take place right about that time based on the prophecies of their religions. In the U.S., William Miller actually calculated, based on Biblical prophecies, that the second coming would take place in 1844. In Europe, a group known as the German Templars sold their worldly possessions and moved to the Holy Land to set up camp on Mt. Carmel, from where they expected to see Christ descend to Earth around that same time. These and others all looked for some Big Event in the mid 1800's, and all ended up sorely disappointed.

Yet a new independent religion, destined to spread around the world, did in fact have its origins on that night. Bahá'u'lláh, exiled from place to place by His powerful enemies, spent the end of His days in the vicinity of Mt. Carmel and even paid a brief visit to the German Templars, who were still there, still waiting. Even as the One they had for so long hoped to see moved among them, they did not recognize Him. Why not? Because He did not float down from the sky, as they were expecting.

Religious history suggests that this is the rule, not the exception. For example, if Jesus was the Messiah for whom the Jews had waited for centuries, how is it that they failed to recognize Him when He came to them? Every divine Messenger has, according to the stories about them, faced rejection and opposition, some even being put to death. And yet arguably all of them were in some measure expected by the very people who rejected them. The lesson is clear: what people expect, based on prophecies or ancient calendars or pseudo-scientific gibberish is never what actually happens!

We seem to have a fascination with disaster, the bigger the better. None of us really wants to be visited by disaster, of course, yet we constantly dream up scenarios in which nature or God (or both) run amok to the ruin of all. Yes, sometimes horrific disasters do occur. About 65 million years ago, a chuck of space rubble slammed into the sea off the coast of what is now Yucatán, decimating life on Earth, and this was not the biggest of mass extinctions our planet has survived. But the most serious threats to our planet today come from its most intelligent life form, not from elsewhere in the universe and certainly not from imagined mystical powers arising from chance alignments of objects in space—especially not when those alignments are fabrications to begin with! Neither is the spiritual regeneration we require in order to successfully meet and overcome those real threats waiting in the wings. It was given to us over a century ago through the life and teachings of Bahá'u'lláh and is even now diffusing around the planet.

The end, in other words, is not coming soon. It is already past. We are on the flip side of the end: that is, the beginning!