Fascination with the end of the world

Recently there were two prophecies concerning the end of the world. One was done by a pastor who first predicted the world will end on May 21 ,2011 save for Two Hundred Million people who will be beamed up and saved and then he changed his stance to October 21, 2011 and when that did not happen, he confessed that his predictions and calculations were wrong. Then in December of 2012 there was another prediction that the world will come to an end because of some Mayan calendar coming to an end. So people were huddling up who believed in this. There were two groups in this camp, one said that the world will come to an end and nobody will be saved and the other camp said that if you are well prepared, you will survive the world end. Now with both the above predictions, the world did not end and the people who were literary suckered into these predictions either lost a whole lot or entire savings or made a killing and were laughing all the way to the bank. I read that some people literary quite their jobs, gave away their savings and did outrageous things that no rational person should have done in order to reach heaven. The people who did this were not completely out of their minds but even so called smart people got fooled by this prediction and now since nothing has happened they are looking like fools losing their life cases in some circumstances, getting unemployed and what not.