reply to post by tenplayr99
Hope you enjoy, and gain from, your time on ATS. Sometimes it's really annoying, but there's some very informed people around, and most threads
have some great discussion and argument.
Maybe the most likely source of disinfo about the 'end of the world' isn't the 'government', 'TPTB', Illuminati, Freemasons or whatever. Start
with whoever (one person or more) wrote the Book of Revelation, around 100AD, and look closely all the way up to Harold Camping this year. Most
end-times scenarios are Christian, and involve some sort of divine intervention. Over the last 20 years or so we've moved on to pseudo-science and
pseudo-history, imaginary comets, planets and the rest of it, but what brings all of these predictions together are the people who make them.
(Google, as someone said, is a terrible place to look unless you know what you're looking for: you'll only find what you're fed, which is usually
what's been 'trending' in the last week or two.)
But if you look further, you'll find a long history of individuals who want to impress and take some control over others. St John the Divine, or
whoever wrote Revelation was predicting an end in a generation or two. He was writing to young, new churches who were having a hard time, and needed
a, for them, happy ending to look forward to. The Great Beast, 666, was almost certainly the Emperor Nero, who was much reviled at the time but is
pretty much totally irrelevant now.
Since then, using chunks from Revelation, Daniel, the measurements of the Great Pyramid, a single Mayan calendar stone, the incomprehensible (before
the event) quatrains of Nostradamus, and any other scrap of information that can be given a complicated interpretation that might impress others, a
stream of thousands of unsuccessful prophets (hello Mr Camping - two failures so far) has kept at it. Remember, every single end times prophecy for
any date up to today has turned out to be c**p.
So, no, it's the fringe evangelists, new age prophets, peope who post photos of Nibiru, sellers of books on Planet X, cults, people who want to sell
you places in holes in the ground and many more – including good old-fashioned well-meaning crazies - that are disinforming us. I don't see why
the government would want, or need, to even think about getting involved. And I don’t think there’s any convincing evidence that they do.