December 21, 2012 Judgment Day Will Arrive
By Krzys Wasilewski

Time is ticking away. If we should believe the Mayan calendar, we only have four years until planet Earth turns into another phase - that is, until the world as we know it now disappears. The deadline is December 21, 2012. Hurry up then!

Friday, December 21, 2012. Three days to Christmas Eve and Santa's coming, but huge lines at shopping centers are the last thing you worry about. Although in your Gregorian calendar, it is another ordinary day, in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar this is the last 24 hours that mankind is given. Tomorrow, there will be no Thursday; instead, Earth and everything that lives on it will experience a fundamental shift.

"No one knows for sure what exactly is going to happen on December 21 2012, or in the days leading up to that day. What we do know for sure is that things are changing, and not necessarily for the good of mankind," writes John on his website, www.december212012.com. John and his friends decided to start the website in 2006, to inform and warn people about the significance of the upcoming Armageddon.

But not everyone wants to believe.

"I'm in a difficult situation at the moment concerning the fact that my parents need to believe this stuff. I have no idea if there is anyone around me that actually knows about this. In other words, I'm kinda scared," says Aideen ("Little Fire" in the old Irish), a 16-year-old girl from Wales, Great Britain.

Aideen's parents and others may change their minds, though, since recent signs leave no doubts. If the prophecies of the Mayan were not convincing enough - after all, they let the Spanish conquistadors wipe them out in the 18th century, two hundred years before the alleged end of the world - then the coming of the Anti-Christ could not be brushed under the carpet so easily.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, together with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, are the harbingers of doom. It is their faces that appear on a video published on John's website, to the accompaniment of Enya's eternal hit, Only Time. Only time will tell whether Sen. John McCain will be able to prevent the Democrats from moving into the White House, but the election of the new and (as we are told) last pope is, unfortunately, a matter of a more distant future.

Although the signs portend something bad, there is a distinct division among the movement members over what will actually happen on December 21, 2012. According to Ross Blaine, a graduate of the Healing the Light Body School, there are two theories. One speaks of "this [December 21, 2012] being a spiritual event." The other theory takes the Mayan prophecies literally and expects the physical end of the world.

Whatever happens, we should be on guard.

"The next few years are going to be difficult beyond your imagination. Everything that is false is going to fall away," writes Blaine in her article, titled Conscious Mind Journal - 2012 Update.

The majority of the believers are young people, usually in their teens. According to the messages posted on the website's forum, they come from every corner of the world, from the United States to Great Britain to Japan to Russia. Most of them live in affluent societies where traditional religions such as Christianity or Judaism have become too unattractive and obsolete to win people's hearts and minds.

"It is very lazy to think that Jesus or Buddha, etc., will give you the reason of life etc., its comfortable to think that," argues Valeri, an Estonian interested in "spiritual enlightenment, time and space."

Not everyone, though, agrees with the boisterous Estonian. Those who have decided to comment his post appear to belong to one Christian denomination or another. But their religiosity goes only as far as the end of the world is concerned. "How did the guy who wrote the Bible knew that there will be war and a meteor strike?" asks Bojan from Macedonia.

Four years is enough to change your life. You can always find the people you have hurt and apologize to them, or those to whom you owe a "thank you." And what if the Judgment Day does not come?

"Then after a collective, global, sigh of relief, we will undoubtedly shift our attention to the next potential judgment day in 2040 when all nine planets of our solar system line up in a straight line for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years," says David Brooks, a suspense and thriller novel writer.