58 – End of the World As We Know It: Missed Apocalypses Throughout History
For some reason, humans love to believe that the end of the world is coming soon and with September 28th being the final Blood Moon of the Blood Moon Prophecy and ( even CNN is getting in on the apocalyptic clickbait ), we thought it would be good to explain what the Blood Moon Prophecy is and tie it to the multitude of missed apocalypses that have been prophesied through history.
During a lunar eclipse, we see the earth’s shadow on the moon. Sunlight gets scattered through the Earth’s atmosphere and it filters the other colors of the spectrum out except for red and we see that on the moon. It’s the same reason that sunsets are red.
A c ouple of fundamentalist Christian preachers were saying that this latest Blood Moon was going to be a big deal because there was a series of four lunar eclipses ( tetrads ) that cause the scattering of light to create the “Blood Moon” and that they matched up with the Jewish Holidays (Passover of 2014 to the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles on the 28th.)
Mark Biltz is a pastor in Washington State and John Hagee is in San Antonio, Texas. Biltz originally proclaimed on his website in 2008 that the fall of 2015 would be the “Second Coming of Jesus”. A few years later, Hagee seized on that and a passage from the Biblical Book of Revelation where “the sun becomes black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon like blood” and turned it into an apocalyptic book called Four Blood Moons . That book eventually made it to the New York Times’ Bestseller List and there’s been a “documentary” film made about it. Biltz then released his own book in April of 2014 to get in on some of the bestseller list action and his publisher is suing Hagee to recognize Biltz with the discovery of the Blood Moon phenomena.
Biltz has deleted the “Second Coming” language from his website now, but Hagee has continued with saying that the series of Blood Moons during the Jewish Holidays is God showing that he is displeased with America’s nuclear deal with Iran and mad that we have turned our backs on Israel. While he doesn’t specifically say that the world is going to end, he does say that something major is going to happen involving Israel and it probably has to do with Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon (and blaming the Obama administration for the Iran Nuclear Deal that will lead to the development of the weapon.)
Online news sources love apocalypse headlines so there’s been plenty of links to these “blood moon prophecies”, Biltz has been featured on Coast to Coast AM (which doesn’t have a crazy-filter, but to be fair, either do we), and the desire to sell books as well as the controversy between who “discovered” the Blood Moon tetrads is helping to fuel the flames. Mark Biltz and John Hagee are getting headlines which gets more views for their churches and eventually more dollars in their coffers.
The apocalyptic rumors on the Internet were gaining so much momentum that even NASA felt like they had to say something about it. That’s ridiculous in its own right, that the US space agency had to quell rumors of a coming asteroid strike just because a couple of preachers were trying to sell books and get attention, but that’s the world we live in.
Of course, before this one, there was the entire 2012 end of the Mayan Calendar thing , which was even predicted in The X-Files as the date of the coming alien invasion (I wonder how they’re going to explain that in the new series!)
Before that, the big End of the World prediction was in 2011 when Harold Camping, a preacher from California, predicted the end in May of 2011. When that didn’t happen he revised the dates to October, but when it comes to the end of the world, the media only gives you so much leeway and people stopped caring shortly thereafter.
Over a decade ago, it was Y2K that was scaring the crap out of everybody. The idea that because of the first two numbers in the year field were going to change and the computers weren’t ready for it, that the power grid would go down, nuclear facilities would melt down, the banking system would go kablooey, etc… Even our man, Leonard Nimoy , hosted a video about the upcoming disaster.
A few small systems in various countries went down for a very short time but the worst thing that happened was that the bug caused a UK hospital to calculate some patients’ ages wrong and that resulted in giving the wrong test results to pregnant mothers for indications of Down’s Syndrome in their babies , which well, that was pretty horrific.
The first episode of Family Guy is even all about the Y2K fallout, and it’s pretty hilarious.
But that’s just the apocalypses that didn’t happen that we can remember, in fact, they’ve occurred throughout history from the Jehovah’s Witnesses predicting it would happen in 1914 to the Norse myth of Ragnarok. We’ve always thought the world was going to end in our lifetimes, in fact the earliest Christians thought that Jesus was coming back sooner rather than later (and in the podcast, we talk about this Mad TV sketch that was my favorite thing they ever did…)
We are a hysterical species that for some reason is always caring on like it’s the end of the world ( just check out this list of dates for an example of the hundreds of missed apocalypses.) We love apocalyptic thinking , maybe because we’re hoping for some kind of world renewal, maybe because we just want to be alive when it all comes down, maybe it’s because we hate the idea of the world going on without us after we die so it’s a sour grapes kind of thing. So I think we’re going to be just fine, but if the world ends next week, well, I guess I owe everybody a beer.
The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the whimper,
that sounds the end.
The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the death rattle,
of the condemned.
I spent my life high on the notion,
that I could do something great.
But I bravely ran away,
and gave myself a Section Eight.
Daydreaming my life away,
and bored with everything,
Slouching towards Bethlehem,
and tied to apron strings.
This is the end,
of the bloodline,
that had a purpose,
that had a spine.
A generation,
on the bread line,
runs out of purpose,
runs out of time.
We’re picking up the pieces,
of the Baby Boom chaos,
who navel-gazed in a purple haze,
and became the new Boss.
We Ragnaroked and Rolled,
and passed the buck and pissed the time,
the revolution was webcast,
the execution was half-assed.
This is the end,
of the bloodline,
that had a purpose,
that had a spine.
A generation,
on the bread line,
runs out of purpose,
runs out of time.
The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the whimper,
that sounds the end.
The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the death rattle,
of the condemned.
This is the end,
of the bloodline,
that had a purpose,
that had a spine.
A generation,
on the bread line,
runs out of purpose,
runs out of time.
This is the end,
of our time,
We ran out of rope and The Cosmic Joke,
has hit its punchline.
The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the whimper,
that sounds the end.
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