The end of the world is near ... and has been forever | Opinion

According to a November 2022 article in Newsweek, 39 percent of Americans believe we are living in the end times. Fundamentalists have long quoted Biblical Scriptures to warn of the imminent end of the world based on the clues they see in events in the news. This is no different than psychiatrists using Rorschach inkblots to identify underlying psychological characteristics in their patients. People see what they want to see, but since their answers are subjective, there are no right or wrong answers.

All religions believe there will be a final reckoning, but Christianity has built a cottage industry of predicting end of days. Early Christians thought that Nero was the Antichrist. Since then hundreds of prophets have specifically identified the dates of Armageddon.

In 365, the French bishop Hilary Poitiers claimed the world would end that year.

Gregory of Tours predicted the world would meet its demise between 799 and 806.

Many Christian clerics, including Pope Sylvester II, chose the year 1000 as the end of the world.

Pope Innocent III predicted the world would end 666 years after the rise of Islam in 618.

Thousands of people thought the Black Death that ravaged Europe between 1346 and 1351 was the Apocalypse.

The artist Sandro Botticelli said the world would be gone three and a half years after 1500.

Martin Luther, founder of the Reformation, decreed the world would face Judgment Day in 1600.

Christopher Columbus wrote in his 1501‘Book of Prophecies’ that the world would be destroyed in 1656.

John Napier, the mathematician who invented logarithms, used clues in the Book of Revelations to predict 1688 as the end of days.

Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister, claimed the demise would be in 1697; when that failed to materialize, he revised the date two more times, 1716 and 1736.

In 1757, the Lutheran minister, Emmanuel Swedenborg, proclaimed that year would bring Judgment Day.

The Shakers predicted the end would come in 1792 or 1794.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, predicted the end times would start in 1836.

A Baptist minister, William Miller, promised that Jesus would come again on March 21, 1844.

In 1914, Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Bible Student Movement, said the final battle would begin in October 1914.

A Seventh Day Adventist, Margaret Rowen, predicted the world’s end on February 13, 1925.

In 1936, Herbert W. Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God, told his congregation that the Rapture would occur that year. When it failed to occur, he revised the date three more times.

Florence Houteff, the leader of the Branch Davidians, said the Apocalypse would start on April 22, 1959.

The American fortune teller, Jeane Dixon, predicted the end would be on February 4, 1962.

In 1967, the notorious Jim Jones of the People’s Temple, told his followers that a nuclear holocaust would bring destruction in 1967.

The murderer Charles Manson expected the end to be a race war in 1969.

David Berg, the leader of the Children of God, prophesized that a cataclysm tied to the Comet Kohoutek would destroy the world in 1974.

In 1982, Pat Robertson told his 700 club the world would fall that year.

Jimmy Falwell predicted that the world’s end on January 1, 2000.

The list of these alleged prophets of God continues several more pages in an article I found online. How did these so-called prophets miss Jesus’s words in Matthew 24:36 when he was asked about Judgment Day?

‘But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.’

Rational people may laugh at people who are being played for fools by these charlatans who are mostly driven by financial gain, but there is a darker side. During the elections of 2020, some politicians claimed that there was need to worry about climate change because the world was going to end soon anyway. I suppose we could use the same argument about addressing soaring gun violence, nuclear buildup, or polluting the environment with deadly chemicals.

In other words, we might as well give up because our efforts are futile while we wait for God to fulfill a prophecy more than 2,000 years old.

Just to err on the side of caution, I am not buying any more green bananas.

Roger Guffey is a retired math teacher.