Doomsday: Is it May 21, 2011 or Dec. 21, 2012

Looks like it’s the doomsday season, again! Signs and newspaper ads across the U.S. and in other places around the world have been warning that the judgement day is coming, but the question remains whether it is on May 21, 2011 or December 21, 2012.

May 21, 2011 Doomsday

Harold Camping, the head of a Christian broadcast group called Family Radio, has been predicting for years that the day would take place on May 21, 2011, although he had claimed earlier that the world would end in September 1994. But when it passed without cataclysmic results, he said he miscalculated and that the end, saying instead that it would take place this Saturday.

Harold Camping bases his strange, convoluted and idiosyncratic theory of apocalyptical flood on Bible, but it is obvious that he picks and chooses anecdotes, verses and Biblical stories conveniently so he can stitch together the theory of a flood that will happen in his own lifetime.

In the Bible, it is said that Noah had been given 7 days to prepare for the flood. According to 2 Peter 3:8, "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." Camping says the '7-day warning notice' has been in place and he has actually decoded it precisely. Camping says though, that instead of a 7-day warning, it's really been a 7,000-year-warning.

The Oakland preacher Camping's doomsday prediction stated that the apocalypse will unfold with a fierce earthquake in New Zealand at 6 pm local time, which will "continue across the Earth at such a rate that every Richter scale in the world and every news organization in the world will have no doubt - Judgment Day is here." According to his theory, those who remain alive after May 21 will be the sinners whose turn of destruction will come six months later, in October.

But for Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, the Bible "explicitly forbid(s) Christians to claim the knowledge of such dates and times."

"Camping claims to be basing his predictions on the scriptures. That sounds promising. But the Bible does not contain hidden codes that we are to find and decipher. We are not to look for hidden patterns of words, numbers, dates, or anything else. It is an act of incredible presumptuousness to claim that a human knows such a date, or has determined God's timing by any means," Mohler said in an interview with IBTimes.

December 21, 2012 Doomsday

Earlier, several scientists and speculators had proposed numerous astronomical alignments hinting at the planet’s demise, based on the view that the calendar of the ancient Mayan civilization ends on December 21, 2012.

There is a range of eschatological beliefs that cataclysmic or transformative events will occur on December 21, 2012, which is said to be the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mayan long count calendar.
According to English archeologist John Eric Sidney Thompson 0.0.0.0.0 of the Mayan calendar corresponded to the Julian date 584283, which equals August 11, 3114 BC in Gregorian calendar. This means that the end date of 13.0.0.0.0 of the Mayan calendar, some 5,125 years later, is December 21, 2012 AD.

However, many researchers have disproved the theory. Gerardo Aldana, associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at University of California Santa Barbara, has said the correlation of the ancient Maya calendar with the modern Gregorian is inaccurate by 50 to 100 years or more.

Aldana has challenged the accepted Gregorian dates of all Classic Mayan historical events, as well as the doomsday 2012 prophecies, in a book titled, "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World".

"One of the principal complications is that there are really so few scholars who know the astronomy, the epigraphy, and the archeology," said Aldana. "Because there are so few people who are working on that, you get people who don't see the full scope of the problem. And because they don't see the full scope, they buy things they otherwise wouldn't."

The supporters of doomsday theory say December 21, 2012 is the date that ends one precession of the equinox that began 26,000 years ago, the last time that the winter solstice sun crossed the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The Mayans believed that there were five great ages and we live in the last one.