Are we close to the end of the world as the bible predicts?

No

No

No

No

No

No

Maybe. Okay, no.

Every day through out the AD years some people have thought it was the end of the world. The problem is the signs are very vague and can apply to so, so many things, so as other people have said, NO

I don’t know about the world ending, but we do seem to be losing intelligent people at a rapid pace.

what about the mayan calendar 2012…..and we are due for another ice age. Are we so self-centered as to think the last 200 years of civilization can conquer mankind?

What was nostradamus saying?

What Nostradamus was saying was incredibly vague like most fortune tellers. The mayan calender was rescheduled from a couple years earlier to 2012, and archeologist are discovering that they might have been wrong in the translation, and might be 200 years off. I dont understand the 200 years of civilization thing

Ha! The Roman Legions were the friends of all, and spread tranquility throughout the ancient world after crucifying Christ. The Persian Empire consolidated its hold on the Middle East without so much as a single scuffle. In China, the Qin empire was such a blessing to all they immediately replaced it with the Han Dynasty which never harmed a flea. Genghis Kahn spread peace and light throughout Asia and Europe.

There sure wasn’t any evil in the Dark ages, or in the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or the great plagues. The Spanish Conquistadors were so incredibly tolerant of the native American culture, and the American settlers went out of their way to be a great blessing to the indigenous peoples they encountered. And the slave trade was not at all evil, it was meant only to rescue poor African tribesmen and give them all the benefits of civilization. The Civil War was so named because it was characterized by civility and brotherly love. WWI didn’t involve any poison gas, and WWII was a love-fest in which 60 million people were granted the chance to go to heaven early. Hitler was a great hero of tolerance and the war didn’t end when Hiroshima and Nagasaki got vaporized. Evil only broke out yesterday.

Now, setting aside that alternate universe and returning to the one based on reality, the Bible doesn’t give us a clue about when the end will come. In fact, it tells us that No man knows that time, not even the Angels in Heaven. But that hasn’t stopped doomsday prophets from declaring themselves better than the angels. And after 2,000 years of being eternally wrong, one of these days, or years, or centuries, or millennia they will probably be right.

We are close, certainly, and have been since about 34 A.D. I do not think that we’re looking at a countdown timer, but more like nearing a tipping point. The End will begin when we’ve reached certain critical masses.

@ETpro By some reckonings (particularly those running along lines similar to the above), we’ve already pushed back Judgment Day a number of times.

At the least, we are not close to some people’s interpretation of the “end times”.

@Nullo I do not for a moment doubt that.

@Japannet77, the premise of your question is flawed.

It is true that at no time in history have individual terrorists have had so much power to kill people. However, I think it’s plainly nonsense that “evil” is greater or more pervasive today than at any previous time.

Consider: 150 years ago, slavery was legal. War was fairly constant in almost every place in the world. Women had few, if any, political rights, and were basically considered property. Are you serious going to argue that the world is a “more evil” place today than back then? Or shall we go back further, to medieval times, or to the ancient Empires, with their inventive forms of torture, inquisitions, and tribal morality?

@Nullo You must be waiting for the Rapture.
http://raptureready.com/

Sure, why not, By galactic standards, even a few million years out is still “close.”

No The “New Testament” “prophesy” for the end of days scenario is totally unconvincing and unbelievable.

I also say NO. First off the bible hasn’t “predicted” anything. It gives an implausible possibility that 2000 years after its writing is so far removed from real history and reality that it can only be considered a joke. Biblical Prophesy sticks around like glue on wallpaper because of a few human failings.

1) Even a broken clock is write 2x a day. Write enough gibberish and eventually after its been translated enough times you will be able to read anything into it.
2) Metaphors are universal. There are only so many ways to write about human lives. Just because some of what the bible says is universal doesn’t make it predictive.
3) Anyone can predict the obvious. Were I to predict that war would persist over the next 2 decades, I would be very unlikely to be wrong since there has only been 150 years of peace since man began recording history.
4) Selective memory. Humans remember the predictive successes and forget the predictive failures. Yes the bible predicts the coming of an evil ruler (duh that one is hard). But completely leaves out the computer, MRI’s the internet and space travel. These are basic stuff that changed the world irrevocably. Yet there is no mention of these.

I don’t know how long human beings have been predicting the end of the world, probably since they have had the cognitive capacity to understand that there is a world and that it might end, but each and every, every single prediction of the world’s end, so far, has proved to be false, unless the world has already ended and whatever we experience of the world is an illusion, which it doubt. Anyway, bottom line? People have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time and it has yet to happen. REALLY! THE WORLD HAS NOT ENDED YET, DESPITE COUNTLESS PREDICTIONS THAT IT WOULD. So, believe what you want, I don’t get it I have no idea why so many people over the course of human history have been so gung ho about the idea of the world ending. People actually seem to look forward to it, which is totally demented to me. If you think the world is going to end soon and you want the world to end soon, act accordingly. Personally, I still hope, naively, that the world is going to get better, the longer we work at it, but I’m kind of an idiot.

On average the past was far more evil. But without mass media having to please shareholders by broadcasting bad news.

The bible records myths that have in parts to do with human psychology and cataclysmic events. Massive earthquakes, fierce volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, meteorite impacts.

The Earth has survived 4.57 billions already. Crocodiles have survived more than 250 million years. Human beings have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. Why should the world end within the next 30 years? That’s highly unlikely.

@lillycoyote Yes, a little knowledge of history would be useful in these debates. For example, people find the notion of beheading to be horrifically barbaric, and I suppose it is by modern standards, but compared to the ways in which people were killed/executed by the Romans, it’s positively humane and merciful.