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Old 20-October-2007, 12:31 AM
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JayUtah JayUtah is offline
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I'll try to simplify.

Calendars each just start counting at some arbitrary day. To connect one calendar to another, you need a single day for which each calendar gives a date. So you need a historical record that says "June 16, 1320 A.D. is also Smarch 43rd, 24,601 on Bob's Calendar." If you have that, and you know how each calendar counts days, months, weeks, years, fortnights, or whatever, then you can count forward and backward in each calendar to reconcile any date.

IIRC, the work done to connect the Maya calendar to our Gregorian calendar was all done in relatively modern dates. So it doesn't matter that we now think Jesus may have been born in some year other than the Zero Year of the Gregorian Calendar. As long as we keep using the same "wrong" dates that the scientists worked out, the correspondence holds between the Maya and Gregorian calendars.

So the "magic" date at which the Maya calendar's odometer rolls over is still 2012 A.D. in our current "wrong" reckoning.

If you want to reset the origin of the Gregorian calendar to account for the new postulated birth year of Jesus, then that might make this year 2012 V.A.D (vero anno Domini, in the "real year of the Lord"). But then you'd have to go back and re-do the connection to the Maya calendar according to the new reckoning, which would change the "magic" Maya date to 2017 V.A.D.

No matter how you slice and dice the Gregorian calendar, the "magic" Maya date is still five years away from now.

Now there's a separate issue whether the Maya writings actually predict that something dire will happen when their calendar rolls over. The old writings say that the last time something Mayanly icky happened, it was on a previous calendar rollover. That doesn't mean the next calendar rollover portends something disastrous.

Then of course you may choose not to believe Mayan mysticism at all.

But this year doesn't "really" have to be 2012. It's 2007 because we say it is.
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