End Of The World

Hundreds of people gathered near the Golden Gate Bridge over the weekend to ponder the enigmatic date of Dec. 21, 2012, the last day of the ancient Maya calendar and the focus of many end-of-the-world predictions.

Our trip to the Parowan Prophet began with a letter to the St. George Spectrum. It was set among missives proposing that oil companies bail out Detroit automakers, that county inmates be forced to winter in tents, that lawyers be barred from public office. A rough crowd. This particular letter to the editor in the St.

The keepers of the "Doomsday Clock" plan to move its hands forward Wednesday to reflect what they call worsening nuclear and climate threats to the world. The symbolic clock, created in 1947 and maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, currently is set at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight marking global catastrophe.

For nearly 2,000 years, each succeeding generation of Christians has tried to puzzle out whether the Book of Revelation's spooky riddles and symbols has meant its own time was the end of time. Over the last six decades alone, the beast with seven heads and 10 horns rising out of the sea at the start of Chapter 13 has been variously pegged as Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Saddam Hussein, or the nations they represented.

IN one, a thick layer of ash covers everything as a nameless man and his son push their cart through a shattered land of absolute silence and darkness without end. In another, the world inexplicably floods, sending a watertight hospital full of sleep-deprived doctors and their young patients bobbing on the waves like a new Noah's Ark.

Today is the sixth day of the sixth month, six years into the second millennium, and for some people that adds up to Apocalypse. For others, 666 -- the mark of the beast in the New Testament -- is a marketing opportunity. Hollywood today is releasing a remake of "The Omen," a 1976 thriller about a family raising a child, born on June 6, 1966, who is destined to become the antichrist.

For thousands of years, prophets have predicted the end of the world. Today, various religious groups, using the latest technology, are trying to hasten it. Their endgame is to speed the promised arrival of a messiah. For some Christians this means laying the groundwork for Armageddon.

It is one of the best-known symbols of the Atomic Age: a simple clock with only the last quadrant marked, whose hands are moved toward midnight (indicating nuclear Armageddon) or farther away (meaning global harmony). The Doomsday Clock hangs inside a tiny room on the University of Chicago campus, a short walk from the laboratory that first harnessed the power of the atom.

America has a bad case of the doomsday jitters. You don't have to be a Glenn Beck follower to know that whenever things go wrong in this country, you can always find all the anger, bitterness and fear-mongering bubbling up and over into our popular culture. With Wall Street fat cats still cashing in while the rest of the country suffers from double-digit unemployment, with partisan bickering at an all-time high and a war in Afghanistan threatening to suck up 40,000 more troops, the country is in a sour mood, full of nasty, dark suspicions about the future.

Ever since Jesus Christ said that only God knows the hour or day of the Second Coming, preachers and self-appointed doomsayers have been trying to predict when it will happen -- and watching the sun rise on yet another generation. Even those who chastise date-setters often say, "God's final judgment is coming soon -- probably in our lifetime -- so get ready." In recent weeks, prophecy interpreters have been citing a new reason they believe the end is coming: the impending U.S. war against Iraq.