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Apocalypse Tourism: Where To Celebrate Doomsday?
PolygamousRanchKid writes "December 21, 2012 marks the end of the current cycle of the Mayan 'Long Count' calendar. And while this has had some fearful types preparing for the end of the world, others have been preparing to travel. The Mexican government is expecting 52 million tourists as part of their "Mundo Maya 2012," campaign to visit the five regions — Chiapas, Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Campeche, over the next 12 months. So, if you're wondering where to spend the last tourist dollars you'll have as a breathing human being or just want to see the looks on those faces when December 21 comes and goes uneventfully, President Felipe Calderon hopes you'll choose Mexico."
I'll spend it in the Y2K vault I built the last time the world ended.
The whole 2012 thing all started as a joke. Michael Coe (one of the world's top Mayanists) noticed that the calander ran out in 2012. In one of his papers, he put s footnote to the effect of: "Perhaps it is the end of the world." That is where this whole thing started from.
I get to work with a number of Mayan groups for my chocolate factory (Amano Artisan Chocolate) who grow some of our cocoa beans. Every group that I have had the opportunity to work with has told me that they see life and the calander as cycles. Given that, they don't see it as the end of the world so much as the beginning of a new cycle. They don't see it as the end of the world at all. It is really humorous to see folks in the "modern" world taking this end of the world thing far more seriously than the Mayan groups I work with.
Just a point of note, these native Mayan groups are composed of some really wonderful people. If you ever get a chance to go down to Mayan territory and are able to get away from the tourist haunts and into the more remote areas, I highly recommend it.
I'm going to spend it the same way I spent the last eight apocalypses - standing near the eastern edge of my time zone to see what happens on the other side. Then I'll have 59 minutes to decide whether to head for a church or a whorehouse.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The ability of theists to extract reasons for whatever nastiness they may want to commit has shown no limits so far.
This ability is not limited to the religious; it is a universal human affliction. An overwhelming majority of mass murders in the 20th century were justified by long-standing ethnic grievances, pseudo-scientific claims of racial superiority, pseudo-scientific claims of historical inevitability, pure revanchist nationalism, and sheer paranoia. Arguably the most egregious example was the attempted elimination of an ancient religious group by followers of a very modern ideology that never took on overtly religious trappings. (Granted, the Christian churches in Germany could have done more to stop the Nazis, but they were hardly the instigators, and at worst allowed themselves to be co-opted.) Probably the largest single pool of victims were killed by governments that actively suppressed religion (and in many cases continue to do so today), but which themselves espoused a messianic ideology. Historically speaking, the heyday of religiously-motivated massacres was the millennium between approximately 650 AD and 1650 AD, and one need look no further than the campaigns of the Mongols (~500,000 killed in the sack of Baghdad) or Timur (pyramids of skulls) to see that religion was frequently unimportant.
The sad fact is that some people simply enjoy brutalizing their fellow humans, and will latch onto any justification they can find for cold-blooded murder of innocents. The perpetrators of the killings of last century all believed that history was on their side, and that violence was essential to usher in the perfect society. There is no shortage of delusional belief systems that the violent elements can abuse to gain popular support for their actions. It would be folly to believe that only religion is to blame for this, or that atheism is any indicator of a reduced propensity for murder and mayhem.
And before you ask, I'm an atheist, and militant secularist.