The Mayan Prophecy: Believers and Sceptics

As 2012 passed, many of us ridiculed the ancient Mayan prophecy predicting the end of the world on the 21^st of December. Throughout history plenty of individuals and groups have made similar claims by pinpointing the date of Armageddon, thus, people naturally express cynicism towards these claims. Some of the academics contested that the Mayan scripture did not explicitly predict anything specific as such. It was deliberately exaggerated by the Hollywood industry, and formed part of the wider media sensationalism; the underlying objective was to increase revenue and it worked.

From the interest generated across the globe, it seems the subject of Armageddon is of interest to people of faith and no faith. This could be indicative of something deeper in our psyche about how we view our planet and the universe that it exists in. It implies that we see our planet as finite, with a beginning and an end, hence there is an expectation that the world will come to an end at some point in the future.   

Connecticut school shooting: America gets a taste of its own medicine

Driven by hate, another homegrown terrorist goes on the rampage – this would have been the headline if Adam Lanza had been called Mohammed Lanza. Similar headlines were seen after the Oklahoma bombings; the media spared not time in tarnishing the Muslims even before the basic facts were known. Like Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik, Adam Lanza is also white with Christian heritage. Will the media now scrutinise the link between the ethnicity and religion of these men and the acts of gratuitous violence? 

There is no apparent political motive; the targets were innocent children who could not have caused any harm to Adam Lanza. The only possible ‘justification’ Adam Lanza could have argued is - these children posed a threat to him in the future; hence, he took some sort of pre-emptive strike by killing them. This is the same argument employed by the Zionists when they deliberately target women and children in Palestine, and the US has done the same to some extent after 9/11; shoot first then ask questions.