2nd December, 2012
Simon Ateba
Two Nigerian pastors have dismissed the fears that the World will come to an end on 21 December 2012, according to a rumored prediction by a Mayan calendar.
According to Pastor Ituah Ighodalo, founder of Trinity House Church in Victoria Island, Lagos, there should be no fear or anxiety as the world will not end on 21 December.
“There would be nothing wrong. The world will not end on December 21,” he said.
To Pastor Tunji Babajide of the Triumphant Assembly Church in Yaba, no one knows when the world will end.
“The Bible said no man knoweth when he (Jesus Christ) will come,it’s just a waste of time. No man knows when he will come,” Babajide said.
The prediction is triggering panic stockpiling of foodstuffs and unusual behaviour in Russia and France, according to the New York Times.
“Inmates in a women’s prison near the Chinese border are said to have experienced a “collective mass psychosis” so intense that their wardens summoned a priest to calm them. In a factory town east of Moscow, panicked citizens stripped shelves of matches, kerosene, sugar and candles. A huge Mayan-style archway is being built — out of ice — on Karl Marx Street in Chelyabinsk in the south.
“Last week, Russia’s government decided to put an end to the doomsday talk. Its minister of emergency situations said Friday that he had access to “methods of monitoring what is occurring on the planet Earth,” and that he could say with confidence that the world was not going to end in December.
“In France, the authorities plan to bar access to Bugarach mountain in the south to keep out a flood of visitors who believe it is a sacred place that will protect a lucky few from the end of the world. The patriarch of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church recently issued a statement assuring the faithful that “doomsday is sure to come,” but that it will be provoked by the moral decline of mankind, not the “so-called parade of planets or the end of the Mayan calendar.”