Tag Archives: Paul

Christianity’s Greatest Failures: 3. The Prophecies

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Jesus fulfilled somewhere in the region of 350 prophecies from the Jewish scriptures. Or so many desperate Christians tell us. The mere mention of something – anything – in the Old Testament that might be stretched far beyond its original meaning to apply to Jesus is interpreted as pointing to him. I’ve looked at many of these non-prophecies and supposed foreshadowing episodes before (here and here, for example), so let me make mention of another. John 5:24-29 is, according to newtestamentchristians.com, the fulfilment of Job 19:23-27, which goes as follows:

Oh, that my words were recorded, that they were written on a scroll, that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead, or engraved in rock forever! I know that my redeemer[ lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me! If you say, ‘How we will hound him, since the root of the trouble lies in him,’ you should fear the sword yourselves; for wrath will bring punishment by the sword, and then you will know that there is judgment.

And here’s John 5:24-29:

Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.

According to newtestamentchristians.com, the Job passage presages the John in predicting the resurrection. Specifically, the passage from the fourth gospel shows how the Job prophecy has been realised. But the Job is not a prophecy. Just because it is supposedly fulfilled by the fourth gospel doesn’t make it one. To say it does is tautological; A proves B proves A. The author of Job was reflecting his character’s anguish at the trials and tribulations he had been through with the God-approved inflictions that had befallen him. The passage might also be symbolic of the trials the Jews had also suffered according to their mythic history. It had, and has, nothing to do with Jesus. You have to read a lot into it to see any connection between the two (they both mention judgement and the fact a redeemer lives, but that’s it).

Perhaps the authors of John detected an allusion to resurrection in general and then ‘reimagined’ it as applying to Jesus. Perhaps it’s only today’s Christians who do it. Either way, this is how gospel Jesus came to be created: he’s an amalgam of ‘prophecies’, incidents and characters from Jewish scripture. Nothing he does or says is historical or even original; it can all be found in the Old Testament (and in the case of Mark’s gospel, in Paul too). This isn’t because Jesus miraculously and supernaturally fulfilled 350 prophecies as he lived, died and revived. It’s because he was written that way. Everything he did while he supposedly lived, everything surrounding his death and certainly everything about his resurrection is recreated from Old Testament episodes and Paul’s ramblings about his heavenly Messiah. To see it otherwise, is to fall for the trick and succumb to the illusion. As the Religious Studies Center puts it:

What becomes clear from these varied techniques for using scripture is that the earlier Old Testament scriptures were an important resource from which to draw upon in the creation of what would become new or additional scripture, the New Testament. It also becomes evident that these scriptures were read, recited, and known well enough by the listeners and readers to use as support and authority for their teachings (my emphasis).

The New Testament shows us repeatedly that this is the case:

Mark 4: 11-12 (quoting Isaiah 6:9-10): Jesus told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding;
otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”’’

Matthew 16: 13-17: Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. (Wasn’t Jesus ‘flesh and blood’ at this point? And weren’t ‘the people’ not far off the mark in equating JC with the ancient prophets? Fictional Jesus also stresses that Peter is a descendant of Jonah, another hint we’re dealing with revamping of older characters.)

Matthew 17: 2-3, 6-7: Jesus was transfigured before (the disciples). His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus… They fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

Acts 1:3: After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.(That’s ’proofs’ from scripture: what else could it be?)

Acts 18:28: …(Paul) vigorously refuted his Jewish opponents in public debate, proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Messiah. (Not from Jesus’ amazing life, feats or resurrection?)

Hebrews: Every quote attributed to Jesus is lifted from Jewish scripture. (eg: Hebrews 2:12-13), likewise Revelation.

1 and 2 Peter quote nothing but Jewish scripture when talking about Jesus (this supposedly from a man who supposedly knew Jesus in the flesh.)

So no, Jesus doesn’t fulfil the innumerable ‘prophecies’ Christians claim. He was just written that way.

Strike up another big fail.

Christianity’s Greatest Failures

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It was a very strong field, but I’ve finally narrowed down Christianity’s greatest failures to a shortlist of four.

Coming in at number 4, it’s…

The Resurrection.

Yes, you’d expect this to be at number one, central as it is to Christianity. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19, if Christ has not been raised then believers are to be pitied. But this depends on how he’s defining ‘risen’.

Paul didn’t seem to know anything about an actual person who had risen physically from the dead a decade or so before he thought he’d seen him. Paul’s Christ is a heavenly being who may only have existed for him in the spiritual realm where his Christ lived, was sacrificed and then rose again. Here’s 1 Corinthians where, in typical Pauline theobabble, he suggests just that:

The first man (Adam) was of the dust of the earth; the second man (Jesus) is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.  I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

So it’s possible to believe in the resurrection of a spiritual being which doesn’t entail an actual ‘earthly’ body dying beforehand. Indeed there are Christians today who believe this. Even though they might cling to the idea of a man Jesus who experienced an earthly existence, they don’t see the need for Jesus to have risen bodily from the dead. After all, ‘flesh and blood’ cannot inherit the Kingdom. For these believers, Jesus was reanimated in a spiritual sense. As Dr John Shepherd of the Anglican Centre in Rome put it in 2019:

The Resurrection of Jesus ought not to be seen in physical terms, but as a new spiritual reality. It is important for Christians to be set free from the idea that the Resurrection was an extraordinary physical event which restored to life Jesus’ original earthly body…

Jesus’ early followers felt His presence after His death as strongly as if it were a physical presence and incorporated this sense of a resurrection experience into their gospel accounts. But they’re not historical records as we understand them. They are symbolic images of the breaking through of the resurrection spirit into human lives…

Jesus lived … as a transformed spiritual reality.

 

Indeed the early gospels themselves suggest this. Matthew and Luke’s risen Jesus is ephemeral, never quite tangible and not always recognisable. He materialises and vanishes at will while passing through walls and locked doors. This spirit spends a lot of time (Acts 17:3) explaining to others how he’s really the resurrected Messiah, presumably by citing scriptures that point to a dying and rising Messiah (though as we’ll see later, none do). Would his followers and associates really need this reassurance if he had risen physically from the grave? It hardly seems likely. They’d know him surely and be convinced by his miraculous return alone that he was who he said he was.

No, the risen Jesus of the New Testament is a spirit that the religiously disposed saw in their heads, as Paul did (Galatians 1:15-16), or imagined they’d had a visit from. They then convinced themselves he was the resurrected Messiah by searching through the scriptures for confirmation, and believing they’d found it. The New Testament is awash with people doing just this. Such a Jesus didn’t need to have an earthly existence as a human. That would come later with the allegories that are the gospels.

The Christians who today believe in a spiritually risen Jesus are closer to the beliefs of the earliest Christians than those who think he resurrected physically from the grave. That bodily resurrection fails any test we might apply to it: there is no historical, scientific or rational basis for it. Safe to say, it didn’t happen.

The resurrection as most Christians now proclaim it is an emphatic Fail.

We Will Judge Angels

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The guy in this video has had his mind bent by Paul’s crazy assertion in 1 Corinthians 6:3 that Believers will judge the angels at the Final Judgement.

This is pretty mind bending, I think you’ll agree, not to mention totally insane. The video incidentally turned up in my Facebook feed; I didn’t go looking for it. I’m not that masochistic. My Facebook is back to being inundated with posts and videos from evangelicals. That algorithm certainly needs attention. Just because I write about Jesus doesn’t mean I want to receive wacky posts about him from Christians.

Anyway, Mr Mind-Bent (I can’t track down his name) got me thinking what this judging will be like. For a start, and despite the video’s claim, Paul doesn’t specify that the judgement will be part of the Final Judgement. This is what he actually says:

…do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! (1 Corinthians 6:2-3)

My God, the Lord’s people will not only judge angels: they’ll judge the world too. We’re really in trouble if God is going to hand the job over to some of the most unstable people in existence. They are also, as the video claims, going to be unleashed on the angels. You might wonder, as I did, what the angels might need to be judged about. The Masked Singer maybe, or which of them farted in the elevator? It could be the Lord’s people will be required to sit in judgement on the Bad Angels: Satan and his minions who rebelled against God back at the beginning of time. Paul doesn’t specify, though elsewhere in the infallible, never-contradictory scriptures, the devil has already been judged (John 16:11) and his fate sealed (Revelation 20:10).

Why in any case would beings who can never sin merit judgement? Sin doesn’t exist in heaven. The presence of God makes it impossible, which doesn’t account for how Satan and his mob managed it. I’m sure there’s a Bible verse somewhere that gets round it some way or other.

Of course none of this judging of the world and angels is ever going to happen. Angels, God, Heaven: none of them exist. Our man in the video has had his mind bent for nothing. While he admits he doesn’t fully understand Paul’s claim, nevertheless he believes it. He has faith in it, he preaches it (‘preach it brother, preach it!’) and wants other people to believe it. He’d be better thinking it through then he’d realise – maybe just maybe – that the Bible is full of crap.

Falling By The Wayside

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Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity was short lived. Those who trumpeted his being ‘saved by the blood if the lamb’* in 1979 were strangely silent about his leaving the faith in 1982.

Didn’t Jesus say this sort of thing would happen? Sure he did. In Mark 4:1-20 he warns that not everyone who heard ‘the word’ about the coming of the Kingdom of God would take it to heart. He dressed it up as a story about a sower who scattered seed willy-nilly so that most of it was wasted. Some fell by the wayside, some in shallow soil, some the birds carried away. Only a fraction of the message took hold, and those who in whom it did endured.

It’s as if Jesus knew in advance that many of those who heard his message once he’d gone would lack the resolve to persist in ’the way’. Or did he? Isn’t it more likely that by the time Mark wrote his gospel, 40 years after the cult had got underway, there were may who’d given up on the idea that the Messiah was soon going to come through the clouds to inaugurate God’s Kingdom on Earth. They had abandoned such a ridiculous notion and had left the cult behind.

How then to explain such a destabilising and unexpected course of events? Wouldn’t the Saviour have known this would happen? Of course. And so the parable of the Sower was invented to ensure it looked that way.

The writers of the fourth gospel try a different tack by having Jesus pray for unity (John 17:20-23) which of course they wouldn’t have had to do if there wasn’t already disunity. We know there was division in the early church because Paul and the authors of Hebrews and 1 John (2:!9) write about it. Hence the sticking-plaster solutions to the problem in the gospels – the parable of the Sower and Jesus’ unity prayer. It surely couldn’t be ‘the word’ itself that was the problem. No, it had to be the shallowness and flightiness of those who heard it. Or maybe, as Paul suggests, it was simply that God hadn’t chosen them, back at the dawn of time, to be part of his glee club. They were deluded if they thought so. Nevertheless, they needed a means of letting God and Jesus off the hook.

Bob Dylan and those like him in the centuries that followed didn’t stand a chance with this kind of reverse-engineered thinking. 

*Dylan’s own words in his song ‘Saved’ (1980)

Like a Virgin. Or Not

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To arrive at the nativity story most of us grew up with and which your kids and grandkids might well be performing this Christmas (mine are), the one with a stable, shepherds and wise-men, involves some cunning sleight of hand, not to mention a liberal dollop of invention.

The biblical ‘account’ of the story is spread across two gospels, Matthew and Luke. Mark hadn’t heard of it when he wrote his gospel so you won’t find it there. In fact, Mark’s Jesus doesn’t become God’s son until his baptism. Paul, writing earlier still, thinks God adopts Jesus only at his resurrection. Paul has no knowledge either of the nativity myth. John has no time for it: his Jesus is an eternal being who has existed with God from the beginning.

For Matthew, however, Jesus comes into existence when the Holy Spirit impregnates a virgin. Luke likes the idea and so copies it into his gospel. And now we have a problem: the idea that a virgin will bear the Messiah is lifted from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scripture, which renders Isaiah 7:14 as –

Therefore YHWH himself will give you a sign: the virgin (almah) will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

In the Septuagint, the Hebrew word almah, meaning ‘young woman’, is translated as virgin. However, the word for virgin in Hebrew is betulah, an entirely different word. Isaiah 7:14 is not a prophecy that a virgin will bear a son: only that a young woman will do so; in other words, a commonplace event. Matthew allowed himself to be misled: in his eagerness to find prophecies of Jesus in Jewish scriptures, he alighted on a mistranslation. He wrote his story accordingly, riffing freely on the error. Luke picked up on it a decade later, adding his own embellishments.

Neither does Isaiah 7:14 suggest the child being talked about will be the Messiah, nor that he will appear hundreds of years in the future. As subsequent verses make transparently clear, a short period of time is all that is suggested; no more than a few years:

He (the child) will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. YHWH will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah – he will bring the king of Assyria (Isaiah 7:15-17).

These are all events contemporaneous with the writing of this part of Isaiah. All that is being said is that a young woman will become pregnant and produce a child in the near future. Even before this child properly knows right from wrong, YHWH will bring Israel’s enemies down upon it. (Because he’s such a caring God.)

None of this has anything to do with a virgin becoming pregnant, nothing to do with a Messiah, nothing to do with Jesus. It is not a prophecy about him, even if Matthew persuaded himself it was. Shamefully, almost all modern ‘translations’ of Isaiah retain ‘virgin’, when they know perfectly well it is not the word used, and that the context neither supports it’s use nor makes it necessary. They do so to maintain the lie that Isaiah 7:14 is about Jesus and to give credibility to Matthew and Luke’s ridiculous fiction that he fulfilled ‘prophecy’ by being born of a virgin. It’s a deception that will be repeated in church services around the world over the next couple of weeks.

There May Be Trouble Ahead…

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Prophets, from left to right: Elijah, Julie Stephens,
Cindy Jacobs and er... Ed Miliband

Prophets don’t exist. A bunch of people intoxicated by religious fervour who think God has given them a special message that they must deliver to whoever will listen, are not prophets; they are a collection of extremists intoxicated with religious fervour.

We know this because no God exists. He can’t, as a result, drop messages, special or otherwise, into the heads of fanatics.

That’s it, really. No more to be said.

But so-called prophets exert quite an influence on our modern world. According to Abraham (I know, he’s a mythical figure but bear with me), God selected an ancient Jewish tribe to be his favourite buddies, so long as they did whatever he demanded of them, including hacking off their foreskins and that of their sons. What sort of prophet – what sort of God – comes up with this kind of lunatic fetishism?

Later the creators of a new prophet, whom they called Moses, came up with a story in which their hero encountered God in a bush (the symbolism is lost on us today.) This time he wanted his special buddies to invade their neighbour’s territory, slaughter them and take their land for themselves. This his favourite, de-foreskinned tribe did (modern genetic analysis of the peoples in the region suggests this isn’t what happened.)

After these fictional madmen came some potentially real fanatics who thought God had assigned them to lambast their fellow Jews for their shortcomings. These prophets promised the rubes rewards if they behaved as the prophets thought they should. These guys also came up with the idea that God would send a warrior Messiah to help his special little tribe take over the world. This is what happens when fanatics are allowed to get a hold of things.

A couple of centuries later, another self-proclaimed prophet turned up (or is invented) who seemed to think he’s the most special-est of all the prophets so far. This guy, called Yeshua (meaning ‘salvation’, so obviously not in any way symbolic) prophesied that the Messiah would be arriving real soon to sort the world out. He’d then hand it over to the Jewish people to manage. This guy’s script writers weren’t sure if Yeshua was talking about himself or some other supernatural character called the Son of Man. It doesn’t matter really. Nothing he prophesied happened when he confidently predicted it would: there was no Messiah who flies down from heaven, no final judgment, no great reset for the Earth. He was an absolute failure as a prophet; evidence, if more is needed, that those who claim to speak for God don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t worry, though, this guy was recast as a resurrected Godman, just like the ones in pagan myths.

A few other prophets appeared around about the same time. In fact, the extremist who changed his name to Paul seemed to think that just about anyone could become one so long as they ‘edified’ the brethren. It was a few years though before the next really big so-called prophet came along.

In the 8th century, a guy called Muhammad said he was told by an angel who represented a different version of God that, amongst other things, Islam would spread worldwide and there would be an increase in senseless murders. These rather nebulous and self-fulfilling predictions are even now coming to pass. Muhammad’s future followers are indeed spreading Islam across the globe while senseless murders continue being committed, a good many of them by Muslims themselves.

While Muslims have made it clear that Muhammad is the final prophet, history has blessed us since with a few more. Joseph Smith in the 1880s was commanded by a different God (or maybe by the same one who’s changed his mind again) to start a new church and to obliterate anyone who stood in his way. He was successful in this enterprise, despite managing to get himself killed in the process.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that given their abysmal success rate and the number of people who have suffered or perished as a result of their endeavours that we’d have had enough of prophets. While churches cannot agree on whether ‘genuine’ prophecy still exists, the prophets keep coming. Fanatics the world over, every bit as barmy as their predecessors, appoint themselves some deity’s spokesperson, and the ‘prophetic’ pronouncements begin: meaningless theobabble spattered across the Internet.

The Real Jesus

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Dear Christian,

When you became a Christian, did you meet the man who wandered around Galilee 2,000 years and who, according to ancient stories, died on a Roman cross? Was it an actual human being you met at the moment you ‘saw the light’ (the clue’s in the term)? Or was it something – an emotional experience perhaps – that you interpreted as the presence of a heavenly, supernatural being? If you’re honest you’ll acknowledge you didn’t meet a real person but felt something that you took to be one.

When you pray to Jesus, exactly who are you praying to? Is it the man who drifted around Galilee 2,000 years ago? Are your thoughts magically transported back in time so he hears you, somehow or other, in his head? No? So do you pray to a supernatural, celestial Jesus who for the past 2,000 years has been sitting at the right hand of God in a mythical never, never land? I’m guessing you’ll say this is the Jesus you commune with (while disputing my calling heaven never, never land).

When you worship Jesus are your honeyed words whisked back 2,000 years to sustain a man who meandered around Galilee spouting profundities before getting himself killed? Or do you envisage your prayers reaching a supernatural figure living out there in space or maybe in another dimension? (C’mon, you know it’s the latter.)

When you say Jesus was present at the creation of the world as described at the start of Genesis, do you mean the man who, billions of years later, would roam around Galilee? Or do you mean a celestial  Jesus who was a part of the Godhead in some mysterious, inexplicable way? (I’m guessing, again, it’s this latter.)

When you say Jesus will judge the living and the dead at the End of the Age, do you refer to the man who lived 2,000 years ago, trudging around Galilee? Or do you mean some mystical manifestation of this character who’s eager to separate the sheep from the goats while hovering in the sky prior to massacring the goats? (It’s this version, isn’t it.)

In the Bible, did Paul meet the flesh-and-blood man who had slogged around Galilee a few years earlier? Or did he hallucinate a celestial being as a flash of light? (It was the latter, wasn’t it.)

When you speak of the Jesus who died on the cross to save you from your sins, do you quote the individual who supposedly drifted round Galilee 2,000 years ago? Or do you more often reference Paul, who never met him and knows nothing of his supposed earthly life? (You know which.)

Yet despite your belief in mystical, spiritual versions of Jesus, you are adamant he was not a mythical being. Not at the start of time, not at the end, nor in Paul’s writings; not in your own conversion, not in your prayers or worship and especially not in your own inner experience of him. No, he was, according to you, a very real person.

Yet there are no signs you believe in this historical Jesus, the man who allegedly roamed around Galilee two millennia ago. You ignore him and his teaching if favour of a celestial superman. How do we know you ignore him? All the examples above for a start, but there’s also the way you don’t do what he says. You don’t love your neighbour and enemies alike, you don’t sell all you have to give to the poor, you don’t give to everyone who asks, you don’t despise riches, you don’t refrain from judging others. You rarely turn the other cheek or go the extra mile and you are not prepared to forgive endlessly. You don’t accept that this man believed the End of Age was coming in his own time (or at least that his script-writers did) nor that he was disastrously wrong. It’s the cosmic super-being you go for every time.

How very strange. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful phenomenon, don’t you think?

Do You See What I See?

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Christianity with its visions of God, angels and resurrected god-men, is not distinctive. It emerged from a culture in which such epiphanies were commonplace and highly esteemed. Appearances of deities, other supernatural beings and dead people were valued as genuine encounters with a reality on the other side of this mortal life. Paul was a Hellenised Jew and a Roman citizen (if Acts 17 can be believed); it was perfectly natural for him and his contemporaries to see and hear things that weren’t there.

Not only was the fledging Christ-cult influenced by the superstitious culture around it, but was born too of Judaism, itself awash with visions, apparitions and revelations. How could the new religion fail to be when its originators existed in such a milieu. One or other of these ‘visionaries’ believed they’d seen a resurrected Jesus. Of course they did. This is how gods manifested themselves then; everyone knew it. There were even those who hadn’t really had any inner-visions but wanted to be regarded as mystics themselves so would pretend they too had had direct contact with the deities.

The human mind has always been susceptible to illusions, to the potency of dreams and to misinterpreting what is going on around it. It’s also prone to a spot of fantasising now and then. This propensity didn’t cease once Christianity established itself. Muhammed claimed to have been visited by angels who revealed new truths about the nature of God – not least a change in name.

In the 19th century, a young farmer, Joseph Smith, living during a widespread and particularly intense religious revival, imagined (or pretended) he’d been visited by God and Jesus. Later, he said he’d been visited by a hitherto unknown angel with the unlikely name of Moroni. The result of course was multiple wives for Smith and the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Sufficient numbers of people believed Smith’s cockamamie stories about his alleged visions to commit to Mormonism. Smith wasn’t alone; others had visions of deities, including but not restricted to the Big Two, Jesus and his Father God. Hundreds recently saw the Virgin Mary hovering above New York City. They couldn’t all be wrong could they? Of course not, but they were all be deluded. Just like Joshua Mhlakela whom Jesus appeared to and told him the date of the Rapture was 22nd September, or possibly the 23rd, then with ‘billion percent’ certainty 7th October. Or maybe 8th…

This is how religions are made, changed and adopted: on a bed of illusory sand. If we need any further evidence that such experiences are illusory, created by the mind itself, then consider this: each time God, his angels or his Son appear in the religion-soaked brains of mystics and fraudsters, they reveal a message at odds with that revealed to previous visionaries. Each revelation has to be different of course. There would be no reason for such ‘visits’ otherwise.

Hence Abraham (or his script writer) imagining YHWH promising an eternal covenant and a new land.

Moses (or his script-writer) claiming YHWH had issued new laws while at the time commanding the slaughter of tribal enemies.

Cephas thinking he’d seen a risen Jesus who may or may not have told him of the imminent the End of the Age.

Jesus himself reportedly talking with his ‘Father’ about the necessity of his execution.

Paul flying to heaven so that Jesus could explain in great detail a new covenant, negating the original ‘eternal’ covenant with Abraham.

John of Patmos envisaging Jesus coming to Earth to slaughter the enemies he purportedly instructed his followers to love. (And Christians claim the Bible presents a unified message!)

All of these are manifestations of, and within, the minds of fantasists. Such manifestations are a naturally occurring malfunction of the brain.

And so it continues. Beware anyone who claims to have seen or heard from a deity of any sort. They, like their biblical counterparts, are deluded and almost certainly ill.

The Day After The Rapture

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Are you still there?

Either the rapture didn’t happen or there aren’t many True Christians round where I live. I watched all day for them jetting into the sky to meet Jesus but didn’t see a single one.

What went wrong? That South African preacher Joshua Mhlakela who saw Jesus surely can’t have been mistaken. Jesus told him clearly that yesterday, or maybe today, would be when he’d be back to collect his Chosen and judge the great multitude of sinners. I even turned on the TV last night to see if it had happened elsewhere. I thought the Final Judgement was underway with some dude ticking off the UN. Turned out just to be some big orange guy, not Jesus in disguise.

So what now? I think I can guess. Jesus’ message to Joshua Mhlakela will be reinterpreted: it wasn’t that the Rapture was going to happen yesterday, or today. It’s the events leading up to the rapture that he promised would kick off this week. That’ll be it. The Rapture itself is still some time off, as it always is.

Mhlakela’s vision of Jesus was no different from the ones the earliest Christian believers had: those character with fake names like Peter and Paul. Dismiss the good pastor’s vision of the Lord and what JC purportedly said and you have to dismiss the visions of those early fanatics who operated under aliases. Visions, dreams and hallucinations have no bearing on reality, as Mhlakela and the thousands who believed him have demonstrated yet again. Christianity and many other faiths are founded on such imaginings. As Luke puts it in Acts 2:17 during ‘the Last Days’ of 2,000 years ago:

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams (misquoting Joel 2: 28-29)

This is the basis of the Christian delusion, and every other.

Spiritual Forces of Evil in the Heavenly Realms

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Original AI image from Night Cafe

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12)

…you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. (Ephesians 2:2)

…the prince of this world now stands condemned. (John 16:11)

The first-century worldview of early Christian cultists was that somewhere above the Earth a battle raged between God and Satan. The powers of darkness – the devil and his demons – had in ages past launched an attack on the Lord and his angels. This war in the spiritual realm continued unabated up to the time when a cultist wrote Ephesians, pretending to be Paul. Paul himself had already alluded to Satan as the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4), while the authors of the fourth gospel would later refer to him as the archon – ruler and prince – of this world (John 12:31; 14:30).

Which just goes to show how the Almighty God they believed in was nothing of the sort. He had tussled with his arch-enemy for eons without quashing his rebellion and putting an end to his persistent attacks. The stand-off had gone on for millennia, and, according to today’s Christians, is still happening. A puny god it is who cannot get the better of one of his far less powerful creations.

And what are God and Satan fighting over? Us, apparently. The devil wants control of human beings.

Why? Who knows. In fact, according to Paul, Satan already has control over us. He enslaves us to sin, which in turn leads to death (Romans 5:12, 6:23). 

Not to worry though, Paul, fake Paul and the fourth gospel writers assure us that their enfeebled God has a cunning plan! He’ll allow a being who is precious to him – like a son, in fact – to be sacrificed so that anyone who believes in him will no longer be enslaved to Satan and sin and will be granted eternal life. How’s that for special magic!

Who shouted out from the back that that sounds like a cop-out? It’s a fantasy bordering on the insane. Like it or not, we are somehow embroiled in heavenly warfare, specially if we’re of the number who’ve bought into this malarkey.

While we’re at it, have you noticed how so many of the wars and skirmishes currently afflicting the world have religion at their heart? YHWH is scrapping with Allah, Allah is up against the Great Satan while Jesus – no stranger to war-mongering himself – presides over it all, leading the world to Armageddon and his own ultimate ‘return’.

Here’s my suggestion. All the gods and demons need to get their act together. They should agree to an ultimate slug-fest, a final battle in the spiritual realm to decide who’s really the Supreme God – the last deity standing – and leave us humans out of it entirely. Surely, being gods, they’re up for finding out who can piss furthest up the wall.

A preposterous idea? Of course it is. None of these fantasy beings exist. There’s no YHWH, Allah, Heavenly Father, Jesus, Krishna, angels, archons, Satan or ‘spiritual forces of evil’ to duke it out. There’s no ‘heavenly plane’ where they can get to it. Everyone of these despotic characters is a human creation, as are the wars, disputes and skirmishes they underpin. It follows that none of them can be the supreme god and certainly none of them are worth fighting over. It’s time we grew up and put away all of our childish imaginary tyrants.