How You Can Use the Bible, and Your Own Intellect, to Dissuade Yourself from Christian Fairy Tales

According to modern Christian eschatology, there will come a day when a man named Jesus comes back from heaven to claim his kingdom, as supposedly promised in the Bible. Christian leaders have capitalized immensely off of this crazy idea, particularly as seen in Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" bestselling series of poorly-written books. This idea is roughly built around the imagery of the book of Revelations. The events preceding the Second Coming include massive war, the corruption of the church, and the rise of several figures who will each be called "the Antichrist," the greatest and last of which will be blind in one eye. These events, also referred to as the Parousia, have been predicted as imminent throughout history.

Adapted to fit the modern geopolitical situation, Second Coming mythology predicts a nuclear war between Israel, and Russia and Iran, who are symbolized by the figures Gog and Magog. Sometime around this war, God will begin saturating the Earth with various supernatural punishments, reminiscent of the plagues of Egypt. In most Christian belief structures, this belief is called the "Tribulation." Shortly thereafter, Jesus will return to Earth, all members of the true Christian church will ascend to heaven, and Satan will be bound for a thousand years. After this millennial imprisonment, there will be one last battle called the Apocalypse, the kingdom of God will be restored, and Judgment Day will come, in which everyone not currently in heaven will be divided between eternal life in heaven and incineration in hell.

Sounds neat, doesn't it? These events, being reliant upon the existence of a unified, homogenously Jewish Israel, have been popularized lately as excited fundamentalists conjure up wild and intricate explanations for how day-to-day events throughout the 20th and 21st centuries imply the imminence of the Tribulation. Former President Reagan, the man singularly responsible for the rise of Osama bin Laden who also compared fascist guerillas in South America favorably with the Founding Fathers, was so caught up in this absurd notion that he once actually used taxpayer money to meet with evangelists like Hal Lindsey to discuss the implications of Biblical prophecy on American strategic assets in the Middle East. Lindsey went on to get divorced three times, predict that the Earth would end in 1988, and have an illegal insider relationship with Ralph DeVore, whose company (Zion Oil) he owned stock in.

Lindsey was certainly not the first to make an idiot of himself by predicting the end of the world based on entirely arbitrary factors, and by no means will he be the last. That is, not until we are able to at last free ourselves of the idiot notion that this Second Coming myth is ever going to occur at all.

But how can we know this? I could editorialize for pages and pages- the Bible is a collection of contradictory Semitic fairy tales, the bloodthirsty malevolence shown by this war-god called Yahweh is appalling, and so on. Such appeals, unfortunately, only work so far before the other person falls back on their unshakable faith and that no appeals to reason, no matter what, will ever dissuade them. We can illustrate this dogmatism factually; a study by Bruce Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer, published in 2006 under the title "Atheists; A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers" found that 100% of religious fundamentalists -every single one who answered their survey- are so firm in their beliefs that no amount of objective evidence will affect them.

So I will not make that effort. I will make no further effort to convert a Christian to atheism. Instead, I will simply share what the Christian holy book- the Bible -says about the Second Coming. This is not to imply the inferiority of Christianity to religions such as Islam, whose apocalyptic imagery contains several equally absurd ideas, but then, I think that any ethical system founded by a bloodthirsty child molester like Mohammed is doomed to failure a priori.

What does the Bible actually say about the Second Coming? Where do these modern ideas come from? For our purposes, I shall be using the New Revised Standard Version, but I assure you, the textual references I make do not differ significantly between translations in any of the passages I cite below.

Let us first understand that Messianic prophecy originates in the Old Testament, and is not a uniquely New Testament, or even a uniquely Christian phenomenon. The book of Psalms is very clear about the nature of the coming Kingdom: the Messiah, upon his return, will return to rule over "the very ends of the Earth. (see Psalms 2:6-9 and Psalms 22:27-31). This is problematic first of all because the Earth has no ends! This is but one example of the undeniable Biblical absurdity that the Earth is flat, which I will try not to digress upon too much now, but will return to later. This clearly is an impossibility: if we are to believe that the Messiah is going to rule over the ends of the Earth, it is just as believable that some day, Poseidon will reemerge from the Mediterranean to reclaim his dominion over the tides and the storms at sea.

And even if we play along with this rather odd theory about Earth's geography, the Old Testament provides even more obstacles to the return of Jesus. Prior to the return, Joel 2:30-31 cautions the weary adherent that "the sun will turn to darkness and the moon to blood." Now this is just silly. How can the sun "turn to darkness?" Darkness isn't something tangible! Darkness is just the absence of the light, which is just as problematic, because the sun isn't just light, it's a superheated collection of mostly hydrogen and iron, which emits light under the guiding laws of the photoelectric effect. And as for the moon turning to blood, well, I'll try not to editorialize too much, but this view was obviously not constructed with reality in mind. The moon is a massive and very solid collection of metal elements wrapped with heavy metals such as aluminum. If I am to be weary of the Coming on account of its transformation to blood, then I know that I am safe from Jesus' return because this simply can not and will never happen. To believe such an absurdity as this would be to voluntarily reject everything that you know about the objective universe in favor of a fairy tale.

Insanity abounds in ignorant free-for-all that is the Old Testament, however, I shall dwell on this part of the Bible only for one more verse, as it is entirely possible to pen out volumes on the stupid and bizarre claims made by the natural sciences of the ancient Semites. Daniel 7:19 gives yet another warning to the true believer about how to recognize the coming end times: you will know the end is drawing near when a beast with "teeth of iron" and "claws of bronze" walks the Earth! Ooooh, shiver in your sandals, young man, because you may yet live to see the day that the mechanical dinosaurs tromp through Jerusalem! This is just a campfire story told to scare uneducated and excitable adherents. The fact that some people treat this, as well as the rest of the Bible, as literally true, is obscene and laughable. Anybody who holds honest belief that the Kingdom's imminence will some day be genuinely forewarned by a metallic animal, please, I'm sure that evolutionary biologists everywhere will be extremely interested to know how Earth animals could metabolize heavy metals in quantities sufficient to coat their teeth and claws.

As we transition into the New Testament and a whole new world of lunacy, I wish first to address an opinion I have heard from people who claim to be adherents of the Christian dogma but who clearly have no understanding of the words or ministry of Jesus. "Doesn't Jesus roundly repudiate the words of the Old Testament? Isn't this some sort of New Covenant, in which the words of the old prophets are simply meaningless? Doesn't the New Testament set my irrational mythology to rights?" No, no, no. Matthew 5:17-19 makes it explicitly clear that each and every single word of the Old Testament stands as unabridged and literally true until AFTER the Kingdom has returned. Anyone who says otherwise has either never actually read the Gospels, or believes that Jesus was a liar.

This is also interesting because, if we combine this with some of Jesus' own statements about the Coming, one can draw the general impression that Jesus really doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about. In each of the synoptic gospels, the very first time the disciples ask Jesus about the Kingdom, his immediate reply is a warning against paying attention to people who say they know anything about when it is coming, because it will come as a surprise, as a "thief in the night." Yet this is contrary to everything we know about the Old Testament, which is laced with prophecy and promises from God about the coming Messianic Kingdom. Jesus believes that the Old Testament was authored by charlatans making false promises about his return, but also believes that it stands literally true until said return? This is sort of like the parable of the mustard seed, in which Jesus reveals that, for all his divinity, he doesn't know that the mustard seed isn't the smallest seed on the earth, nor even the smallest that the ancient Semites were aware of: he is just wrong. He is confused; he is covering his own statements by avoiding any concrete promises.

But there is another contradiction at work here. Early in the book of Romans, Paul retells Jesus making it expressly and undeniably clear that he will return during the Apostolic Age. This is firstly problematic because all the apostles are certainly dead by now and Jesus (we assume) hasn't returned yet. This also poses a problem for Christian eschatology because Jesus himself said to beware anyone who claims any certainty about the return. Not only are we to doubt the Old Testament, its prophets, and its God, but we are to doubt Jesus himself, because he has revealed himself to be as much a liar as Joel and Ezekial.

That being said, let us fast forward to the very last book of the Bible, Revelations, and examine the insanity it promotes as truth, truth that such an offensive number of Americans take to be literal and imminent. The first aspect of the Return that should leap out at any intelligent person as being instantly problematic is the promise made by the prophet John in Revelation that "every eye shall see [Jesus return]." This promise is echoed in Matthew and Luke. This is simply a problem of geometry and geography similar to the problem presented by Psalms: the Earth is round. Worse yet, both hemispheres of the Earth are inhabited, contrary to St. Augustine's less well-known idiotic belief that even if the Earth is round, its other half must be uninhabited because Scripture does not allow for the existence of these non-Eurasian humans. It would indeed be quite a trick of smoke and mirrors for Jesus to be simultaneously visible to all humans upon his return. I'd say this means that we should watch out for the time when the entire population, or at least those that have the capacity to see, migrates to the same contiguous hemisphere, but then I might end up getting on Jesus' list of liars for making promises about the End Times like he did.

The next criticism comes from later in Revelations, and occurs twice. In Revelation 6:12-14, John claims that, PRIOR to the end of the world, at least a third of all the stars will literally fall onto the Earth and make contact with the Earth's surface, and more hilariously, Revelations 8:10 promises that, some day, not only will stars make literal, physical contact with the surface of the Earth, they will fall into its rivers and poison them. This belief is rooted in the natural sciences of the ancient Semites, which held that the stars were simply smallish points of light in the distance that could be reached and touched would only that a high enough mountain could be found.

Stars are thousands of times the size of the Earth! If even one average-sized star got much nearer the Earth than the Earth is to our own sun, there would be no need for a Second Coming because all of the life on Earth would be fried and irradiated beyond recognition, so everyone would already be at St. Peter's gates. The idea that not just one star, but SEVERAL stars will make literal, direct contact with the Earth's surface is clear illustration of the fact that anyone who believes seriously in Christian eschatology has probably never actually read much of the Bible with a serious intent to understand or even absorb.

I wish to make it clear that I single out Christianity for no reason other than that I believe that the majority of the audience who reads this article will be of the Christian hypnotism. The claims Islam makes about the apocalypse are every bit as crazy and impossible, including the simultaneous dimming of every star in the sky, and the tearing open of the sky as though it were some giant sheet or pocket that can just be ripped in half and yet still have people living underneath it. I subscribe to no such idiotic fairy tales; I will believe in one of these bizarre mythologies when they show even the slightest glimmer of attention to reality. But I digress.

Over the past few pages, it has been my intention to illustrate the absurd physical impossibilities that constitute the Christian view of the end of the world. Some of the language I have used has no doubt offended some of the cultists in the audience, and I wish to make it clear that I do not apologize for my frankness. Language such as this is used freely in political commentary and rational debate on any other subject. If someone says the Holocaust never occurred then he is an idiot, if someone believes that hydrogen has ten protons then he is being absurd; religion is not above the language of rational discourse. For millennia it has been protected by "well, that's just what I believe" and I have had quite enough.

Hopefully, if any Christian-leaning audience members yet remain, they won't hesitate to ask me questions about where they have gone astray.