There are no “signs of the times” and the world is not ending

Far too many people are caught up in speculation about the end of the world. While we are doing a good job at ignoring actual climate change, the hurricanes currently ravaging parts of Earth are not the end of the world, nor do they have anything to do with Jesus Christ, the book of Revelation, or any other such nonsense. Yet, in a letter to the editor to the Star-Herald, a reader thinks that is exactly what is happening.

We have heard the term, “Sign of the Times are everywhere.” We also know that Jesus said we cannot know the day of his return.

Well, right there you should stop writing, because you’re also going to start telling us what those signs were. You don’t even see that the bible says there are going to be signs everywhere, but you won’t know when he’s returning. Why does that statement not make your head hurt?

He also said in Matthew 16:3: “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky. But you cannot interpret the signs of the times.” Matthew 25 encourages us to be ready, not like the unwise five virgins who had no oil in their lamp when the bridegroom arrives. God has always warned His people of judgment to come.

Did you also know Matthew 16: 2b-3 does not appear in many early manuscripts? When you look at contextual and grammatical similarities and differences between the passage and Luke 12:54-56, they seem similar in English. But we all know the bible wasn’t written in English. Some scholars, such as Bernard Weiss, professor emeritus of languages and literature at the University of Utah, argue the Matthew passage is older than the Luke passage and came from an earlier source.

In “Q: A Reconstruction And Commentary,” Harry Fleddermann argued, “In addition the form πυρραζει appears only in Byzantine writers, a further sign that the passage is a late interpolation into Matthew’s text.” (Pg. 652)

You can’t quote from something that shouldn’t be in your holy book. However, both this passage and the quote from Matthew 25 are dealing with the end of the world. Matthew 25 is telling you to be prepared for the day of judgment, which you don’t know when it will occur.

It’s supposed to be a lesson about being good every day. By not knowing when this judgment is coming, you’ll be good all the time.

Are you aware that some Jewish Rabbis and others who have spent their lives studying the Word of God, believe that a total eclipse is a sign, a warning of judgment to a nation?

It’s not just Jewish Rabbis who spend their lives studying. Many ultra orthodox Jewish men do this while their wives do all the work, in and outside the home. It’s a bit controversial. Also, they are studying the Torah, not the Christian bible, so Old Testament only.

Is it supposed to make a difference that two religions misinterpret the same information? Have you researched every single eclipse in history and what happened after to a nation which had experienced such a scientific phenomenon? If you have, you wouldn’t says it’s a, “sign, a warning of judgment to a nation” because you would know that’s wrong.

His protection may no longer be present for a nation who chooses to take him out of their schools, kill unborn babies, disobey his law regarding marriage, live lives of immoral behavior and lawlessness. We reap what we sow.

Here we go with this bullshit again. God was not taken out of schools. Anyone in a school is allowed to pray to their god. What is not allowed is for faculty or staff to preach to children in the school. It’s a form of proselytizing and is illegal. As long as my tax dollars are going toward public schools – about 70 percent in Scotts Bluff County – you’re not preaching any religion within a public school.

We shouldn’t kill unborn babies? Tell that to your god. There are many examples of the bible being pro-abortion. And don’t give me that bullshit excuse “it’s in the Old Testament” because you follow the entire bible. You don’t get to pick the nice bits out or the bits that adhere to your personal beliefs. You take the whole thing.

Hosea 13:16: The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.

II Kings 15: 16: At that time Menahem, starting out from Tirzah, attacked Tiphsah and everyone in the city and its vicinity, because they refused to open their gates. He sacked Tiphsah and ripped open all the pregnant women.

Numbers 5:11-21 describes how to induce an abortion. In Numbers 31:17, Moses is commanded by God to kill women that might be pregnant. Hosea prays for God’s intervention in Hosea 9:11-16. God responds by making all the women who are pregnant miscarry.

God has also clearly laid out what biblical marriage is, yet Christians get upset at same-sex marriage. I’m more horrified by biblical marriage. If we are bad people because we “disobey his law regarding marriage” then I’m a terrible person because I don’t want any part of it.

Within a few days after the eclipse, I was not surprised to hear words like “unprecedented,” in describing the flooding.

Yeah, people always say this when catastrophic things happen. Also, please go read some books about climate change. This has nothing to do with total solar eclipses or a god, or anything else “end timers” people want to grasp onto.

Are you aware that after the last total eclipse in 1918 approximately 670,000 people lost their lives from a pandemic flu?

There are total solar eclipses every few years. You don’t see most of them because they occur over the ocean and/or are difficult to get to. The last total solar eclipse in the United States was February 26, 1979.

“After the last total solar eclipse in 1918” is an inaccurate statement. Here’s a list of other total solar eclipses that touched some part of the United States:

• June 24, 1778
  October 27, 1780
  July 18, 1860
  August 7, 1869
  July 29, 1878
  Jan 24, 1925
  Aug 31, 1932
  July 20, 1963
  March 7, 1970
  February 26, 1979
  July 11, 1991
  August 21, 2017

Do you notice something missing there? Oh yeah, there’s nothing around the time of the Spanish Flu in the United States. So let’s look at the entire world. Looking at NASA’s website on May 29, 1919, we have a total solar eclipse passing through South America and Africa. It also touched a teeny bit into Central America. It was during this eclipse that Einstein tested his theory of relativity.

Okay, we have a date, but the author of the letter to the editor is claiming “670,000 people lost their lives from a pandemic flu” after a total solar eclipse in 1918. I’ve already shown there was no total solar eclipse in 1918. It was in 1919. So let’s look at the claim.

The Spanish Flu pandemic lasted from January 1918 to December 1920. It infected 500 million people worldwide and killed 50-100 million people, or 3-5 percent of the world’s population at that time. The letter’s claim of 670,000 is not accurate. According to a page that no longer exists for the U.S. Government, “An estimated 675,000 Americans were among the dead.” Stanford University concurs with this number.

This claim still isn’t completely accurate, because the letter to the editor claims these deaths happened after the eclipse, which I, scientists, and people who were there, established as happening in 1919. Researching before writing the letter to the editor would have helped clear up this erroneous information.

There never has been any correlation between a solar eclipse and deaths of any kind, flu or otherwise. It’s delusional to think this is true.

The only place you’re going to find any connection between the 1919 total solar eclipse and the Spanish Flu is on websites filled with fear about “the end times.” You won’t find it anywhere logical, thinking human beings go.

How I feel right now.
(Photo: http://cdn.iwastesomuchtime.com/October-18-2011-20-12-49-DoubleFacePalm.jpg)

I read an article recently by Anne Graham Lot. I quote in part: “A few years ago I was teaching through the book of Joel when the ancient words of his prophesy came up off the page. Joel 2: 31: ‘The sun will be turned to darkness … before the coming of the great dreadful day of the Lord.’”

So what? Do you realize how many eclipses – lunar, solar, and hybrid – have occurred over the centuries? Which one was supposed to be this dreadful day? Are we supposed to cower in fear each time an eclipse happens?

Most of us are not knowledgeable of the relevance of the Jewish feasts and God’s appointed times.

Then why bring it up? Are you just taking someone’s word for it instead of doing your own research? I’m sorry you like to be ignorant of these things.

We are not aware of the signs in the heavens that speak of his program. (Not the astrology that is commonplace.) The wise men of the Christmas story used their knowledge of the star that led them to the Christ child.

What the hell do these two sentences have to do with each other or the overall point? Seriously. You’re just writing word salad at this point.

The year 2017 is the year of Jubilee of Israel’s being back in their homeland as a nation. (1967)

No. This is not happening. You’re misinterpreting the 49th and 50th year listed in the bible and assuming it’s going to happen. According to biblical law, the year of Jubilee cannot happen because the 12 tribes of Israel are not united. It doesn’t matter that some people think it can happen when some of the tribes are united.

The Revelation 12 woman is seen in the constellation for the first time since the approximate time of Adam and Eve.

Again, this is more “end times” bullshit. The book of Revelation doesn’t have anything to do with the end times.

If you want to get a grasp on the book of Revelation, you should read “Revelations” by Elaine Pagels. This partial review in Salon will give you an idea of what Pagel’s book is about.

The Revelation of John of Patmos, however, did make it into the official Bible, and in “Revelations” Pagels explains why. It qualified not because it was written by John of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ apostles, as the text’s great champion, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, claimed. It wasn’t. In fact, the author of the Book of Revelation “belonged to the second generation of Jesus’ followers,” part of a cohort struggling to come to terms with the fact that Jesus’ promise — that Judgment Day and the Kingdom of God would arrive within the lifetimes of some of his disciples — had not come to pass.

He was also not a Christian as we currently understand the term. Pagels makes a persuasive case, using what should be obvious to any careful reader of Revelation, that John regards himself as a Jew who has recognized Jesus as the messiah. That’s why he’s so exercised about “them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.” Pagels believes that these “false” Jews were, like John, members of the radical sect founded by Jesus. John regarded them as dangerously corrupt and idolatrous because they did not observe traditional Jewish strictures surrounding food and sex. Many of them, she suspects, were Gentiles converted by the faction of Jesus’ followers led by Paul, the religion’s first great evangelist.

The Book of Revelation was written at a time when the significance of Jesus’ legacy was furiously contested, and that’s one reason why it gets hauled out so readily at times of similar discord. Presented as a divinely bestowed vision, filled with rains of fire, burning mountains, seas turned to blood and angels with swords flying from their mouths, as well as costarring the ever-popular Four Horsemen, the Whore of Babylon and, of course, the Beast, the text is essentially an over-the-top cry of “You’re doing it wrong.” John of Patmos felt that his religion was being threatened by purported faithful who had assimilated into the dominant culture of the Roman Empire (eating meat from pagan temple sacrifices was a big issue for him), and he wanted to remind them of the hideous fate awaiting that evil empire and anyone who had gotten too cozy with it.

Because the prophetic imagery of the Book of Revelation — much of it derived from the Hebrew Bible and legends — is so figurative and surreal, it has proven remarkably adaptive. John had to cloak his meaning in bizarre symbols because his text was, as Pagels puts it, “anti-Roman propaganda,” of the sort that had probably gotten him exiled to begin with. In the following 400 years or so, John’s Revelation continued to be interpreted in this way, as Roman authorities smashed Jewish rebellions and persecuted Christians who refused to participate in the obligatory civic tributes to Rome’s gods.

Then Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 and gave the religion a favored place in his empire. The Book of Revelation was refitted by leaders like Athanasius for use as a hammer against Christians who did not bow to Church hierarchy. Ironically, a prophecy intended to demonize Rome (in the figure of the Whore of Babylon, that ancient oppressor of the Israelites) was used by those who, with Constantine’s approval, “adopted the Roman army’s system of rank, command and promotion to create effective control over a wide network of congregations,” a network that become the Catholic (“universal”) Church. Then, in a doubled irony, the same old Whore was, centuries later, said to symbolize the Catholic Church by Protestants who viewed Roman Catholicism as depraved and despotic.

Pagels’ sympathies clearly lie with the small religious communities that had sprung up throughout the region (though particularly in Egypt) in Athanasius’ time. These are the inward-looking, simple-living mystics who incorporated into their Christian worship spiritual ideas and practices from all over the ancient world and who preserved the gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi. Some of those texts are as weird and visionary as the Book of Revelation, and some are far more beautiful, egalitarian and inspiring to many modern eyes. But they were not politically useful, and the Book of Revelation was. So it ended up in the New Testament and they did not.

The book of Revelation is merely a political tool to keep you in line. It has nothing to do with an eclipse or any “end times” garbage.

I’m watching with interest the Jubilee Feast of Trumpets this September.

Your “Feast of the Trumpets” is more commonly known as Rosh Hashanah (רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה), is the Jewish New Year. Its biblical name is Yom Teruah (יוֹם תְּרוּעָה‎), literally, a day of shouting. It is the first of the Jewish high holy days, described in Leviticus 23:23-32. It is a celebration which takes place over two days and marks the traditional anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve.

The celebrations include a ram’s horn, or shofar, festive meals, symbolic food and lots of noise. The Mishnah, the first major written redaction of Jewish oral tradition and first major work of Rabbinic literature has the second known reference to Rosh Hashanah. In the Mishnah, it is known as the “day of judgement.”

So, Rosh Hashanah is the new year, but it is also Yom Hadim (sometimes seen as Yom HaDin), judgment day. On Yom Hadim, three books are opened – the book of life, the book of death, and a book for those living in doubt with non-evil sins.

During this time, God balances a person’s good deeds against their wrongdoings for the past year. Rosh Hashanah is a time of reflection, penance, and to ask God for forgiveness. (As a side note, I miss this time of year in New York. There is fresh Challah bread everywhere.)

Rosh Hashanah gets even more complicated when you learn about Yom Kippur and Sukkot and how they all relate to one another. I don’t know why the author of this letter to the editor is “watching with interest.” If they think it’s a day of judgment like in Revelation or the “end times,” that is wrong. Rosh Hashanah happens every year.

God is in control and He is faithful. I’m listening, watching and want oil in my lamp.

Then go fill your lamp. Did you not read the passage? You’re supposed to be prepared with your own oil, not waiting on other people to fill it for you.

“Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”

He’s not coming. He doesn’t exist. Stop wishing on a fantasy and live in the here and now and make a difference in the world today.

This nearly 3,000 word refutation is far longer than I intended it to be. When I read this letter to the editor, I knew instantly all the inaccurate claims. I couldn’t let it pass without refuting it.

I’m just going to say, don’t believe what you are told. Take the time to find the truth. Then, you won’t share lies and misinformation and I won’t have to spend five hours refuting you.