The end of days is coming, but Christmas is not
ONE in 10 Australians believes the world will end this year in line with ancient Mayan prophecies. Some think it will be the final cataclysm, and some that it will usher in a new era of peace and spirituality. There's even a chance extremists will be tempted to violence, a Melbourne conference will hear today.
According to the Mayan calendar, the world ends on December 21, though there is nothing in the records to suggest how. ''It's like an Indiana Jones movie,'' according to Joseph Gelfer, the key speaker at tonight's 2012 seminar at the State Library of Victoria. ''There is one reference on a monument in Mexico but there's a dirty great crack through middle of the glyph so it's hotly debated.''
If it seems surprising that so many people around the world are familiar with an obscure Latin American dating system, the answer is in the way it has been appropriated by mainstream, media-savvy groups such as fundamentalist Christians, hard-line environmentalists and spiritualists, Dr Gelfer said.
Dr Gelfer, of Monash University, said 2012 believers fell into two broad camps. ''One is the catastrophists, who say the world will come to an end through solar flares and a polar flip which will cause all manner of unknown destruction, or Planet X will hurtle into the Earth. There are lots of survivalists in this camp, but they are the minority The larger group has a utopian interpretation seeing it like the Age of Aquarius, a shift in human consciousness - not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it,'' Dr Gelfer said.
He said Reuters, the news agency, commissioned a recent poll of 16,000 people in 21 countries which found that 9 per cent of Australians believed the world would end this year, along with 20 per cent of Chinese and Turks but only 4 per cent of Indonesians. More - including 14 per cent of Australians - believed the world would end in their lifetime.
Dr Gelfer, an expert on 2012 studies, said he did not believe anything would happen on December 21 but that was only the beginning of the story. ''I don't believe in 2012, but I believe in the power of belief.''
He said much of the debate was polarised between committed believers and those who demanded a Richard Dawkins-style debunking. He would present a middle view about why people held such beliefs.
Monash University counter-terrorism expert Pete Lentini will talk about tribal sub-cultures, such as the Branch Davidians of Texas or Japan's Aum Shinrikyo, which used stories about the end of days to justify violence.
The seminar is the debut of the Sociology of Religion group of The Australian Sociological Association.
