2012ology is the new term that the “global doomsday industry” has assigned to the current end of the world brouhaha, according to Matthew Restall and Amara Solari writing in The Washington Post.
Restall and Solari point out that in recent years, science and technology have “…profoundly transformed life on Earth. But science has not replaced religion. Instead, the two have developed a complicated relationship. Science is a religion; religion has become a science. Anxiety and skepticism abound.”
Still, believing that the Maya, an admittedly advance civilization within the context of their time and place, are still hardly the source that a modern, technologically advanced and scientifically vibrant society would select as the source for doomsday prophesy. I mean, they did, after all, commit human sacrifices.
The common method for human sacrifice seems to have been for the "ah nacom" (a functionary) to extract the heart quickly, while four people associated with the rain/lightning god, held the struggling victim's limbs,” explains N.S. Gill in “Human Sacrifice Among the Maya.”
Gill points out that extracting a beating heart wasn’t the only method. “Human sacrifices seem to have been made, as well, with arrows, by flaying, decapitation, hurling from a precipice, and throwing the victim into a limestone sinkhole.”
Charming.
The Washington Post writers point out that the excavations and discoveries in Egypt a century ago spawned a lot of hoopla and that today, with many new discoveries revolving around the Maya culture, 2012ologists have turned to it for their contemporary doom and gloom. Yet, isn’t it odd that people will embrace a bit of ancient lore that was initially misquoted and yet reject the scientific evidence of global warming?
You want a doomsday scenario, figure out what happens when the ice caps melt. Yikes, adios, New York, so long, Los Angeles.
Of course, by pointing that out I may inadvertently add another layer to the doomsday machine and get the 2012ologists all atwitter.
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