"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." -- Charles Schultz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip.

After examining some of the most dramatic events that have happened throughout history, I have concluded that there aren’t any links between the major disasters and doomsday predictions. They have failed to overlap in almost all cases. The only correlation, in fact, is that there seemed to be fewer predictions in years that there have been severe upheavals. It is possible that mayhem distracts people from worrying about the world ending, as they may have worry enough at that particular time. That really is the answer to my initial question; there are not any catastrophic events that have caused people to predict the end of humanity. I believe that it is in human nature to crave the dramatic. I think most of us know many people who want to surround themselves with drama. If there is none they create it. My sources were unrelated to each other, aside from the fact that I was in the middle of these sources trying, unsuccessfully, to find a connection between them.

As I continue researching what causes people to foretell Armageddon, I am not sure what my final thoughts will be for the argument essay. I still want to do more research on the psychological causes behind these predictions. While many of these predictions are in people’s heads, some of them do have scientific evidence that supports them. This is another aspect that I plan to investigate. I would also like to look into the lives of some of the people who have made these claims, so that I may see in what mindset they may have been at the time of their assertion. At this time, I haven’t found any conclusive evidence as to why people have predicted and continue to predict the end of the world. While I am looking for hard “black and white” evidence, I have found only theories and conjecture. As I look forward to the argument essay, I am still thinking about any evidence I might find to explain reasons why many people are anxious to declare the date that the world will cease to exist.

Maybe Some People Are Just Pessimists

In my second blog post I explained that Lev Grossman states, fear is an underlying cause of our obsession with the end of the world, in his article "Apocalypse New" from Time Magazine Arts.  Ecconomic uncertainty has been know to cause people to jump from highrise office windows.  I also believe that having loved ones away at war would cause fear in a large number of people.  Since both these subjects have the ability to cause fear it seems logical for me to compair their dates against dooms day predictions.

The first source I turned to was Thayer Watkins of the San Jose State University Department of Economics and his website page "Economic History of The United States".   Watkins lists nine periods of time America has been in a poor economic state (depression or recession).  In five out of nine depressions or recessions people believed that the world was going to keep right on spinning.  I would say that these statistics make the ups and downs of the economy an unlikely candidate as the sole cause of Chicken Little like attitudes.

Next, to find out the dates of American wars I decided to use the Navy Department Library website and its page titled "American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics."  I have found that only the three most recent wars, from the Vietnam War to the current the War on Terror, are the only three that coincide with any predictions of the apocalypse.  That makes a ratio of wars that had predictions during their span to the that didn’t three to nine, and very likely not a cause for the fear which grips citizens so strongly as to make them predict the end of the planet.

So as it turns out, I’m pretty good at finding out what doesn’t cause people to forecast the end of the world.  However, I have yet to find the answer to what does cause people to panic.  I am left wondering if this is something some people are predisposed toward?  Are people perhaps too distracted during times of war, extreme poverty, and sever natural disasters to have time to worry about Armageddon?  I have been quite certain up until this point that there has to be some combination of EXTERNAL stimuli, but so far I feel our imaginations are stimulated by a war we battle within ourselves rather than those we fight against others.

Sources:

Watkins, Thayer, "Economic History of The United States" sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins., n.d.

Fischer, Hannah, "American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics."  www.history.navy.mil/library/online/american, 13, July, 2005 

Image from Dreamstime.com

Don't blame mother nature

The two sources that I have chosen for this blog post are far different than the ones from the previous post.  As I have been unable to find any credible sources that directly compare external forces, e.g. natural disasters, economy, and the like, I am forced to do a comparative study.

First I needed to find out, in what years there were higher levels of predictions that the world was at or near its end.  Choosing a valid list of predictions was not easy.  Since the subject of eschatology, i.e. a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind, is for the most part a religious one, I chose to use religioustolerance.org.  The article “Predictions of TEOTWAWKI (The end of the world as we know it),” was written by B.A. Robinson and published 4^th of May, 2006 on the religioustolerance.org website.  With links to every time frame from 30 CE to “the not so distant future,” this is just the source I was looking for as a timeline for comparison.  I noticed that at the turn of both millenniums there is a drastic spike in the number of people whom were forecasting doom.  I can’t help but wonder if there are any other parallels between these two periods aside from the end of a millennium.

I found a list of the top ten most severe natural disasters so that I could compare the two side by side.  The article is “The Worst Natural Disasters by Death Toll” and is on the website docs.lib.noaa.gov.  Worldwide there are natural disasters on a weekly basis, so I decided to limit my inquiry to the very worst natural disasters on record.  As I compared these two articles I realized that, with the exception the year 2004 CE, none of the other dates that have been predicted for the apocalypse have coincided with any of the more dramatic destructive forces of nature.  Is it possible that it is not one incident, but a combination of events that cause people to speculate upon our demise?  I would also like to find out how economic down times have affected the frequency of doomsday forecasts.   These are areas that I plan to spend time researching this week.


References:

Robinson, B. A.   “Predictions of TEOTWAWKI (The end of the world as we know it)”              religioustolerance.org 4 May 2006

“The Worst Natural Disasters by Death Toll”,.  docs.lib.noaa.gov,. 15 June 2007,.   Updated 6 April 2008

Do We Want The World To End?

I have found two sources thus far that allude to the fact that we actually may feel on some deep level that we want the world to end.  Time Magazine Arts published an article by Lev Grossman titled  "Apocalypse New" in its Thursday January 17, 2008 issue.  This article discusses literature such as The Last Man by Mary Shelley and T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, and movies like Cloverfield, and I am Legend.  Grossman points out some underlying reasons for the popularity of this genre.  One reason for end of time prophesies is that we are able to use these as tools to process fear.  Mary Shelley had lost three children, a husband, and a very good friend when she wrote her apocalyptic book, and death and fear are strong catalysts for our imaginations.  Godzilla, according to Grossman, was used to give imagery to the fear many Japanese felt after the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.  The Cloverfield monster is to have played a similar role for New Yorkers after the September 11^th attacks.  I have to ask then, is the reaction the same in all tragedies?  Or is it only when the death and destruction we face is at the hands of other men?

Another article that I found was published by The New York Times on October 9, 1994.  “The World; A Passion to Know the End Is Nigh” is written by Gustav Niebuhr who begins by saying, “There is something in the human psyche that simply wants to know about the end.  When will it come?”  The world’s time is abundant, while our time on it is relatively short.  If we are living in the last days of humanity, it would seem to make us feel important explains Niebuhr.  Are we so narcissistic that we wish our own demise if only we may feel more important?  I can’t think that the general population feels like this.

Sources linking historical events to our desire to know when the world will end are surprisingly scarce.  While I continue to explore and research I would like to leave you with this quote from Wallace Stevens which I found in Stephen D. O'Leary's Book Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric—“The imagination stands always at the end of an era.”

Sources:

Gustav Niebuhr, “The World; A Passion to Know the End Is Nigh” The New York Times         9, October, 1994

Lev Grossman, "Apocalypse New" Time Magazine Arts,. 17, January, 2008

  Image Credit: Photo "Apocalypse Road" by Cumbrian Snapper from flickr

The End of The World is Here...Again

The end of the world is going to happen September 10^th 1979, December 31^st 1981, October 28^th 1992, December 31^st through January 1^st 1999/2000, May 21^st 2011 at 6:00 P.M., and December 21^st 2012.  This is just a handful of the dates that have been predicted for the end of the world according to www.bible.ca. As a matter of fact, there have been 242 recorded predictions made as to when the world would cease to exist as we had thus far known it, according to Bible Ca's 

website "242 Dates for the end of The World!!! Date Setters!"

I query, why are there so many predictions throughout  time, that the world is going to stop turning soon?  For generations as far back as time is recorded our ancestors have been worried about the end of humanity.  In 44 A.D., one of the first “cult leaders," as we would call him today, showed up on the scene.  Though the compulsion to worry is as old as time, it certainly seems that in recent years I am hearing that “The end is here,” every time I turn around.

I can not help but feel that there has to be a common thread in what events, economic, military or weather related  and so forth, with eras in time when there has been a higher concentration of, “THE END IS HERE,” predictions.  The aim of this blog is to find just that, the link or links which bind these eras.    

I don’t believe I shall have the slightest bit of trouble finding sources to research this topic sufficiently.  With a minimum of 240 predictions I feel that there are plenty of separate predictions to perform an accurate study.  I plan to analyze aspects including occurrences in society as well as natural events so that I may compare frequency between certain events and spikes in doomsday predictions.  By this methodology I hope to find out just what the link(s) could be that cause the hysteria, which I believe is behind these pessimistic predictions.

Sources

"242 Dates for the end of the world!!! Date Setters",.  http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm,. n.d.