He then revised that prediction to include a battle of Armageddon in 1986 and the Second Coming of Christ in 1993.
In 1987, author and educator José Argüelles warned that unless 144,000 people gathered in specific places throughout the world on August 16-17 to honor the Harmonic Convergence, Armageddon was inevitable.
NASA scientist Edgar C. Whisenant’s book entitled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988 sold more than four million copies.
Fundamentalist author Reginald Dunlop predicted that since September 23, 1994, was the last encoded date in the Great Pyramid of Giza, the world was clearly not meant to survive beyond that date.
The year 1999 was thought to be the definite end of the world by, to name just a tiny handful, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, linguist Charles Berlitz, spiritual historian Father Charles Moore, retired electronics engineer Gerald Vano, spiritualist Eileen Lakes, rocket scientist Hideo Itokawa, “Messianic Rabbi” Michael Rood, televangelist Jack Van Impe, former NASA consultant Richard C. Hoagland, and former businessman, politician, and cult leader Joseph Kibweteere.
Michael Travesser, born Wayne Bent, is a former sailor and now the spiritual leader of a New Mexico sect called The Lord Our Righteousness Church. Travesser claims to be the long- awaited messiah and predicted that the world would end with an apocalyptic event at midnight, October 31, 2007.
The Lord’s Witnesses, a British sect, after an intricate series of calculations based on biblical prophecies, concluded that the United Nations would take over the world in the lunar month preceding April 24, 2001, which happens to be 666 Hebrew months following the founding of the United Nations. Since that didn’t happen, it’s probably safe to assume that we don’t need to worry about their second prediction—that after the United Nations gains global control, Armageddon will begin on March 21, 2008, killing three-quarters of the world’s population.
We’ll be discussing many more end-of-days prophecies throughout this book, and even then we won’t have scratched the surface of the human search for just one reliable hint about what’s to become of us. I’ll be weighing in with my own predictions as well, not to add to the confusion but because I do think there are aspects to the end of days that aren’t addressed often enough, while other aspects get far more attention and credibility than they deserve.
Three General End-of-the-World Categories
While it’s not true in each and every theory of the end of days that we’re about to explore, it’s certainly true in general that end-of-the-world theories and prophecies fall into one of three categories: millennialism, apocalypticism, and messianism.
Millennialism, which is obviously a derivation of the Latin word for one thousand years, revolves around a belief that the earth will be subjected to a series of devastating catastrophes after which the “saved” of humankind will spend eternity in the bliss of paradise. At first glance it might appear that millennialism means we should all fly into an end-of-days panic at the turn of a millennium, as if there’s some implied doom in any calendar date that has three zeroes in it. And according to history, we weren’t the first global population to fall into that mental and emotional trap.
In reality, though, as we’ll explore in depth in Chapter 3, millennialism has its roots in the biblical book of Revelation, the apostle John’s prophecy (or nightmare, or political essay) on the end-time. In chapter 20 John writes:
Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should
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