The Little Book of the End of the World (21 page)

Facing media and political pressure – following rumours of abuse within the People’s Temple – Jones set up a mission in Guyana. The People’s Temple relocated to the South American country with several hundred followers, founding a commune and naming it Jonestown.

In 1978, Californian congressman Leo Ryan led a delegation to Jonestown to continue his investigations into the Church. His visit also had a secondary purpose: to reunite some of the Church’s members with the families that they had left in the United States.

It’s unclear if Jones had misrepresented Jonestown or was making people stay under duress, but during Ryan’s visit, several members of the Peoples Temple approached the senator and asked for his assistance to leave Jonestown and return to the USA.

As Ryan, his delegation and the defectors boarded aircraft at the nearby Port Kaituma airstrip, a number of Jonestown security men arrived and fired on the group, killing Ryan and four others. At the same time, Jones spoke to the inhabitants of Jonestown, telling them that Ryan’s visit would spell the end of their peaceful community. He urged them to join him in committing ‘revolutionary suicide’ by ingesting a lethal concoction of drugs.

A total of 909 people died in Jonestown with a further four lives lost at the Temple’s offices in Georgetown.

AUM SHINRIKYO

On 20 March 1995, several terrorists affiliated with the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo carried out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen people and injuring up to 6,000. While initial reports suggested that these attacks were the group’s attempt to bring about the Apocalypse, group leaders were adamant that this was an independent attack that, while carried out by group members, was not based on the beliefs of Aum Shinrikyo.

Aum Shinrikyo was formed in 1984 by Shoko Asahara, combining elements of Christianity with New Age practices and a liberal dose of Nostradamus’ prophecies. The group believe in the impending start of a Third World War, which will fulfil the biblical prophecy of Armageddon.

Like most conspiracy theorists, the group also believes that Jews, Freemasons and the US government are complicit in the events that will bring about this End of Days.

Aum Shinrikyo has since become known as Aleph. Both incarnations have been recognised as a terrorist organisation by several member states of the United Nations.

CHUCK SMITH AND THE SECOND COMING OF 1981

The Calvary Chapel – not a single Church, but a collection of Churches operating under one banner – was formed in 1968 by American pastor Chuck Smith.

Smith’s writings on the End of the World are interesting, even though they have failed to come to pass. Smith mathematically proposed that the ‘generation’ of 1948 – the same year as the foundation of Israel – would be the last. Suggesting that each of these generations lasts forty years, Smith put forward the theory that the Second Coming would come to pass in 1981, leading to a seven-year tribulation to lead to the End of the World in 1988.

Needless to say, Smith’s predicted Second Coming didn’t come to pass; it remains to be seen if someone born in 1981 will later lay claim to being the Antichrist or some other figure involved in the End of Days.

JEANE DIXON AND THE BIRTH OF THE ANTICHRIST

During the 1950s and ’60s, American astrologer and psychic Jeane Dixon became a minor celebrity after a number of public predictions – like any psychic, not all of them came true.

Dixon was a contemporary Mystic Meg, complete with a syndicated newspaper column; accounts suggest that both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan kept a close, unofficial watch on her predictions via their secretaries and partners.

Dixon appeared to foretell the death of John F. Kennedy, suggesting that the winner of the 1960 presidential election would be assassinated or die in office, but given that this had already happened to seven previous presidents, Dixon’s prediction is not as dramatic as it might sound.

However, Dixon did have a clear idea of how the End of the World would come to pass, with her eyes resting on a child who would be born in the Middle East on 5 February 1962. By the end of the century, he would bring humanity together in a new form of Christianity.

Despite the New Age leanings of prophecy and fortune telling, Dixon claimed to be a practising Catholic, and her predictions have been adopted by different Christian Churches with myriad different meanings: while some suggest that Dixon had predicted the Second Coming, others believing that this child would be a false messiah or the Antichrist, who would bring humanity together in resistance.

UFO RELIGIONS

As the worlds of advanced science, philosophy and religion began to grow ever larger, the lines that kept each distinct began to blur.

The twentieth century saw the rise of several ‘UFO Religions’: some of these religions suggest that humanity was actually created by extraterrestrial forces; others blur the lines between aliens and angels, suggesting that the two may actually be one and the same.

All of these religions have their own interpretations on both the creation and destruction of the world, with many of them building upon adaptations of existing religions: Raëlism goes so far as to suggest that figures like Jesus and Buddha were, in fact, sent by extraterrestrials.

Science is an important element of these religions, with many focusing on a scientific advancement as a means to achieve this enlightenment. Scientology has become a well-known and somewhat notorious UFO religion, as practised by several well-known celebrities, which suggests that the immortal soul, or Thetan, is capable of bringing about great change on the Earth.

THE BIBLE CODE

The concept of hidden messages in the Bible has long been considered, and there are even some references that we can assume to be wholly true, definitive hints and hidden meanings in the book’s pages.

However, in his 1997 book
The Bible Code,
Michael Drosnin claims the Bible was written by an extraterrestrial who left these messages with the explicit intention that they be decoded. He also claims that the Bible has predicted other world events, including assassinations and an Apocalypse set to occur in the first few years of the twenty-first century.

Drosnin’s claims have met with sceptical analysis from religious and scientific communities due to his seemingly arbitrary methods: some critics even suggest that the same methodology can be used in other books to obtain similarly ominous messages.

LELAND JENSEN

Born in 1914, Leland Jensen was a member of the Bahá’i Church until the death of Church leader Shoghi Effendi in 1957. Jensen publically backed Mason Remey’s claims to be Effendi’s successor, thereby ignoring the traditional Bahá’i rules about the appointment of religious leaders. Jensen, along with Remey’s other supporters, was excommunicated, and went on to form his own offshoot sect of Bahá’i.

Having spent four years in prison for sexual assault, Jensen was released a changed man and claimed enlightenment over the events that would lead to the End of the World.

He suggested that the year 2000 would see the arrival of God’s kingdom, but only after nuclear war had broken out. He also had a specific date for this nuclear holocaust: 29 April 1980.

Jensen oversaw the construction of several fallout shelters, and on the fateful day, led his followers there to wait out the impending disaster. When nuclear Armageddon didn’t come to pass, Jensen revised his prophecy and claimed that this was just the start of a seven-year tribulation and test of faith.

By 1987, Jensen had modified his prediction away from nuclear war and suggested that the approaching Halley’s Comet would collide with the Earth.

Jensen died in 1996 and never got to see that the world didn’t actually end in the year 2000.

THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM

As the year 2000 approached ever closer, many people believed that the End of the World was nigh: much of this belief was simply because a whole 1,000 years had gone by during which humanity had successfully managed to avoid self-destruction.

Many of the religious fears involving the year 2000 revolved around the concept of 1,000 years: with several biblical references to the Millennium, many religious sects feared that the new Millennium could kick-start the Endtimes, with either the Second Coming or arrival of the Antichrist. However, throughout the twentieth century, debate arose as to when exactly the new Millennium would begin: since there is no year 0, this would suggest that any 1,000-year period should run from 1 to 1001. But the current Gregorian calendar has also only been in use since the sixteenth century, rendering both arguments invalid for the most part.

Most of these fears were unfounded: the year 2000 – and 2001 –seemed to roll in and out without the world ending.

However, in the lead-up to the Millennium, a new technological threat emerged that we learned to know and love as the Millennium Bug, or Y2K. The problem of Y2K arose because of the convention used in computer programs where two digits identified the year – meaning 1990 would be written as ‘90’ and so on. This could have created a problem for the year 2000, with certain programs refusing to recognise the year ‘00’ and others becoming convinced that they had actually travelled 99 years back in time.

The Millennium Bug presented a number of terrifying situations in which the computers responsible for missile launches and defence satellites might have experienced issues.

Interestingly, the Millennium Bug was not a unique problem and was preceded by a far more likely issue on 9 September 1999, since ‘9999’ is used by many computer programs as reference to an unknown date.

Most of these issues were easily fixed by upgrading systems to include a ‘century’ option, with many companies and organisations setting up specific taskforces to ensure that IT departments were prepared for any crises that might emerge. There were only a few small issues reported from the year 2000, and it seemed like the world would survive for another 1,000 years.

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APOCALYPSE NOW

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Although we’re still in the relatively early days of the twenty-first century, there have already been a few close shaves when it comes to the End of the World, or events that might mark its approach. The twenty-first century has brought us international warfare, scientific experiments to recreate the Big Bang and an act of terrorism that would change the face of international politics forever.

11 SEPTEMBER 2001

Anyone over a certain age clearly remembers the events of 11 September 2001 where three separate planes crashed into US landmarks, bringing down the World Trade Center and damaging the Pentagon. The events of that day, the lead-up to it and its aftermath have been discussed many times since, and are probably too recent to discuss with the same broad hindsight as some other historical events in this book.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 led to intensive commentary on international politics and the role of religion and politics in the End of the World. With the attacks carried out by fundamentalist Muslims, racial tensions in the USA rose to an uncomfortable high and remain incredibly complicated. Blame for the attacks was levelled at Osama bin Laden, rumoured to be orchestrating an al-Qaeda terrorist empire from Afghanistan: even as the world joined in mourning with the USA, all eyes were focused on the Middle East.

Although more information has been revealed about the terrorist attacks, there are still many conspiracy theories, including suggestions that the US government was aware of the planned attacks and allowed them to happen to urge political and military action in the Middle East, or that the attacks were orchestrated by the New World Order/Illuminati in an attempt to kick off a Third World War.

After the events of 9/11, pastor and political commentator Jerry Falwell appeared on
The 700 Club
, a popular Christian TV talk show. He suggested that the attacks had been caused by the absence of God in daily American life, and he blamed ‘pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians’ – amongst others – for having allowed the attacks to happen. Falwell later apologised for his comments, but he was not the only pastor to suggest that, even in the twenty-first century, punishment from God was something to fear.

THE PREDICTIONS OF PAT ROBERTSON

Jerry Falwell’s statements were made in conversation with broadcaster and conservative Christian Pat Robertson, who is no stranger to controversy. Although Robertson partly retired from media appearances shortly after 9/11, he continued to remain an active voice with comments and opinions on world events.

On numerous occasions, Robertson has suggested that natural disasters have been sent by God to clear away unclean communities or as punishment for accepting sin – usually in the form of pre-marital sex, same-sex relationships or non-Christian beliefs. He became so well known for these controversial opinions that some are even falsely attributed to him, as occurred in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. These views are in keeping with the Old Testament depictions of God and His divine punishment, with Robertson claiming that these ‘sins’ will bring around the End of Days.