Countdown to Apocalypse: A Dangerous Cosmic Neighbourhood

The Lens of Apocalypticism
There are any number of ways in which armageddon could descend upon us, resulting in an End Times Scenario. And, almost all of those various mechanisms have been feared at one time or another in human history, a phenomenon that Lorenzo DiTommaso finds to be quite understandable.

"The world is often seen as terrible place, filled with oppression, injustice and the menace of death," says DiTommaso. "Apocalypticism provides a powerful response: The world is so bad, it can't be restored. So it will be swept away...Judaism, Christianity and Islam all forecast an apocalypse," he says. "The end of the world, typically with a judgment day and an Armageddon, reflects the desire to escape this existence, punish one's enemies and be vindicated in light of a higher power or transcendent reality."

A professor of religion at Montreal's Concordia University, DiTomasso sees today's apocalyptic worldview as being a product of our times, as much as any impending 2012 deadline.

"More and more people see the world through the lens of apocalypticism," he observes. "One reason is that things appear to be so irreparably broken: the environment, the economy, the political system."
And therein lies the danger, he warns. "At its core, apocalypticism is a simplistic response to complex problems – either good or evil, nothing in between. And it's an adolescent response, since it places responsibility for solving these problems elsewhere."

A Bad Star
Of course, such a response may not be entirely inappropriate if the problem itselfemerges from elsewhere. And, such is the case with one threat sometimes cited as a source of impending apocalypse, the dreaded comet or asteroid strike.
This particular mode of cataclysm probably entered the contemporary dialogue most insistently due to the theatrical release of both Armageddon and Deep Impact, back in the late 90s. The highly coincidental debut of these two films was part of a new renaissance of disaster films, whose popularity as a genre continues today.
Disaster. It's an interesting word, really. Dis-aster, from the Greek "bad star", it reflects a long-held human fear of the appearance of new and threatening celestial bodies in the sky, increasing in size and danger as they approach. It's thought that one reason why comets were so feared as ill omens by the ancients is because of their anarchic behaviour. Unlike other bodies in the heavens which acted in accord with some form of order - setting and rising at certain times of the day, varying only with the change of seasons - comets, with their mysterious elliptical orbits, appeared out of nowhere, mocking human pretensions to knowledge, both esoteric and mundane.