It is typical for skeptics to claim that every generation speaks of an approaching doomsday. However, 2012 has more than a few coincidental concurrances -- the end of the Mayan Calendar, and Saint Malachi's prophecy of the end of Popes. Some rather impressive Marian Apparitions have implied the End of the Age -- the Garabandal Spain Seers in the mid-sixties, and then the Medjugorje Seers in the early eighties -- the End of the Age would occur in their lifetimes, and the Garabandal Seers are now in their fifties and the Medjugorje Seers are now thirtysomething and early forties.
Now, about Damascus claiming that people who believe in the end of the age will certainly lose all of their moral sensitivities and go into beserk rampages of rape, pillage and violence... Really? Why should immanent death make people lose their dignity. Marie Annoinette went to the guillotine and said "Excuse me" when she accidentally bumped the foot of her executioner. Then from just several generations back we have stories from the Nazy Labor camps and the Death Depots in the Ukraine and Russia where those of Slavic extraction were gathered up for execution. People died with dignity. They formed lines, and though they were somber and there were many tears, everyone quite behaved with the highest nobility.
It makes me wonder what kind of person it is that supposes that people would certainly act disgracefully. Is that the insight he gets from his own inner being. Is that how he will behave?
But it won't be bad for everybody. Seers for the last hundred of years have seen visions of the End, and it the concise version is to say that for the great many it will be misery, but it will be good for a few. Many of the Medjugorje and Garabandal Seers have gone on to have families, so, even knowing the Truth, they are not entirely pessimistic about it.
But honestly speaking, looking at the world today, one can see a World with 10 Billion People as quite pathological. A better level of population would be about 100 Million. So If I had my way, I would snap my fingers and do away with 99% of the World's population. The first thing that would do would be to make real estate affordable. We hear all of the patriots imploring everybody to die for Freedom. Well, let them die for something that would be truly beneficial -- affordable real estate.