The End Times are Nigh

[Tonus]

At 49 years old, i have lost rack of the number of "end of the worlds" that have come and gone throughout my life.

It's amazing to watch people continue to fall for it, though. Especially the specific dates or date ranges. The general "end is near and sooner than you think" is laughable enough without giving some sort of time limit or specific date/occurrence. Perhaps people will never stop falling for it.

My mother (a JW) handed me a JW pamphlet for their memorial (their only religious observance, basically a once-a-year mass) and told me that "they [presumably, the Watchtower Society) are saying that this might be the last one, because Armageddon is so close." She reiterated this the other day when a friend (who is still a JW, if nominally so) was with me. She has been a JW since the late 60s, and can remember the hysteria over the 1975 prophecies, but like many JWs she has bought into the revamped explanations ("they didn't say for sure it would happen, people just assumed..."). She has been there for many of their "it's right around the corner" warnings of the past 30 years and yet each new pronouncement seems to her like the very first one.

I guess the desire for the end of the world to happen is so strong that people will revise their memories and discard the many times that previous predictions failed in order to treat the latest one as if it's the first real prediction and therefore must be true. The desire for such a momentous event to happen during our lifetimes is equally strong, making it more likely that we desperately want to believe it.