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Actually, they were good at maths. One example: the invention of the number zero radically magnified the scope and power of mathematical calculations, and it was invented independently twice, in India and among the ancient Maya. They also made great strides in agriculture, art, social organization, architecture, astronomy and many other fields of human endeavour. There were Einsteins and Sun Tsus and Rembrandts among them, too. Some moderns label them 'primitive' because they didn't have cars, Reeboks and McDonald's. I question that view.
Their religion included human sacrifice, because in their world view the Gods who had given of their own life force required blood to replenish their energy. Without that, the world would end. We 'advanced, modern people' don't sacrifice humans to our gods. We just sacrifice our God and consume his body and blood every Sunday. Oh... well, except for our interminable crusades over 'my God is better than your God'.
The trouble matching the two calendars, Maya and Gregorian, stems mostly not from errors in the Mayan calendar. There were issues such as irregularities introduced into carved dates for political purposes, but their system predicted things like astronomical events such as solar and lunar eclipses. Also the full long-count calendar was out of use in most places by the time the Spanish showed up, so we can't know for many particular dates, in which 256 year segment they happened. The main problem comes from the fact that 99%+ of Mayan documents were destroyed by the Spanish in their 'my God is better than your God' zeal, and so we don't have enough information about events and their dates that can be matched to our own calendar. So there is a lot that is open to interpretation, and different academic factions follow different interpretations. Sound familiar?
The 'end of the world' hysteria among us moderns comes from a mis-/re-interpretation (It's not RAW!) of the ancient Mesoamerican cyclical view of time. The linear, long-count calendar which we try to match to our own was used to measure time both forwards and backwards for millions of years. Along side that calendar were cycles of 260 days, 365 days, 584 days (related to the cycle of Venus, off by a fraction which they knew about and for which they corrected) and more. The concept of constant ending and renewal was ingrained in Maya thinking. They also believed that there had been other worlds before theirs, each born, shaped and then destroyed in a unique way. It's not clear whether the ancient Maya saw the roughly 5128 year Great Cycle measured in the long-count system as the length of the life of a world. Modern maya mystics argue that it was not meant to do so. Modern Maya mystics may not want us to think a) the real end of the world is coming or b) the mystics themselves are 'primitive' people.
EDIT: Sorry, it was the Aztecs who had different versions of the end of the world. Each of the Maya worlds ended in a deluge.
I didn't say they weren't good at maths. I'm saying that being good at maths doesn't make your culture the ultra enlightened be-all end-all, especially when it comes to something as crazy insane as predicting apocalypse (or whatever) thousands of years ahead of time. And that humans tend to ignore the things that don't fit their theories, and pay attention only to the things that do. So the Mayans calculated some dates and had religious ceremonies/celebrations on those dates, yipee. But if I'm trying to start an end of days cult, or join the millions of people trying to make money off the 2012 hype, then I'm going to take the dates but either ignore the religious festivities that come with them, or twist them in a way that suits my purpose.
And no, not all of us sacrifice our god and consume his SYMBOLIC body every Sunday. At the risk of starting a flame war, modern belief in religious superstitions and mythology is as "primitive" as ancient ones. It's about the powerful few trying to maintain their stranglehold over the masses by any means necessary, including mass hysteria. Heck most people who claim to be of a judeo-christian denomination have never actually read their holy book. And I'd file the crusades, and the people involved, under primitive as well.
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Ancient texts aren't always translated properly. Many, the Bible, the Qur'an, and the Mayan calendar included, are often interpreted by a few charismatic and/or influential individuals to meet their own agendas with the resulting flames fanned by the masses who feel they need to make their lives mean something.
Exactly.
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Then of course, if the world is gonna end because the *insert name* calendar is about to end, then this world should've ended thousands of times over from the Gregorian and Julian calendars alone.
Which further underlines my opinion about it all being bullshit.
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also there's the element of mistransation that comes into the ancient stories that happened before it gets to modern en. look at Atlantis. Probably, RL, the Minoans with an advanced culture but after the Greeks got their story tellers into it they became larger than life with alien science and people lookin in the freaking Atlantic for it.
Actually Plato says quite plainly in Timeus that Atlantis is a hypothetical city. A thought experiment that never actually existed. It wasn't taken seriously in antiquity for that very reason. The Atlantis people are always harping over today is a modern invention made to sell books/films/cultist dogma.
Could it have been based on Minoan Crete? Probably, but it was by no means a misinterpretation.
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As with anything and everything, it pays to be skeptical. Anyone know anything about the Violet and Indigo children that are supposed to correlate with this? Or am I simply off and groggy from just waking up?
Never heard of Violet children, but Indigo I have heard of. Supposed to be super intelligent, empathic children, supposedly psychic etc. who will lead us to a better world yatta yatta. More new age hippie bullshit to sell books.
One of the major Indigo authors published a list of like 50 symptoms of being an Indigo online a couple years back. I checked positive for EVERY. LAST. ONE. Am I an Indigo? No. I just had some decent genes and parents who gave enough of a shit about me to pay attention to me as I grew up.
All hype trying to make money and kids trying to beg for attention they don't get at home while dealing with the changes of puberty.