Note to sidewalk doomsayers, end times prognosticators, and anyone off their meds in Time Square: stay away from China. Authorities in the communist bastion have arrested close to 1,000 members of a doomsday cult for spreading rumors that the end of the world is quickly approaching Friday.
Police recently arrested nearly 1,000 members of a Christian group, Almighty God, or "Eastern Lightning," for distributing information both in printed form and online to promote its belief that the world will end on Dec. 21, according to the BBC.
The quasi-religious group is a charismatic organization that strongly opposes the current Chinese regime. State-run forces claim the group has been urging its followers to "exterminate the great red dragon" and "found a country under the rule of Almighty God," and China's state-run media has deemed the collective an "evil cult."
"Dec. 21 is approaching, and on that day half of the world's good people will die, and all evil people will die out," one pamphlets reads, Christiannews.net reports. "[O]nly if you join the Almighty God movement can you avoid death and be saved."
The group believes in the Mayan long count calendar and has said the apocalypse will occur Dec. 21. Almighty God contends after Armageddon the world will go completely dark for three whole days,
Founded in the 1980′s, the Almighty God group believes that Jesus Christ has already returned to Earth, and that has come back in the form of a woman. The woman purportedly lives in central China. The group also urges members to overthrow communism.
Police in Beijing are reportedly attempting to calm anxieties with an online notice telling people that "the so-called end of the world is a rumor."
As the supposed Mayan end of times approaches on Dec. 21, anxiety and fear are running high, inspiring some wild predictions and behavior. People are frantically preparing for Armageddon the world over, flocking to such far off spiritual destinations as Bugarach, France and Mount Rtanj, Serbia to await alien saviors, a new dawn that will "upgrade" human consciousness, a door opening up another dimension and other surreal phenomena to occur.
"At least a once a week I get a message from a young person - as young as 11 - who says they are ill and/or contemplating suicide because of the coming doomsday," said David Morrison, a planetary astronomer and senior scientist for NASA who answers questions from the public about astrobiology, in an interview with Time.
Most Doomsday soothsayers are frightened because the 13th bak'tun (or 144,000-day cycle) of the Mayan Long Count calendar wraps up on Dec. 21, marking the end of a cycle of creation. However, as Space.com notes, "the ancient Maya probably would not have thought the world was going to end Friday, rather, they likely would simply have celebrated and rolled the calendar over to a new bak'tun."
NASA agrees. "Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than four billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012," NASA researchers wrote.
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