Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – surprise, the world is going to end….again

Since we have the usual claims of “the end times are a-comin’” thanks to the current uptick in world violence, I thought I’d devote a blog entry to the wonderful world of eschatology or as we know it here in the US, TrueChristians and their violent fantasies.

To start out, we have a recent Billy Graham column, a favorite of mine for its entertaining hypocrisy and cherry picking. Here the querent asks if we will ever see “true world peace”.

As expected, Billy/his handlers, are not too crazy about world peace. He grudgingly admits that there can be periods of peace, even in ancient Israel, where per the myth, there was a period of 40 years of peace under a king name Othniel, a king mentioned in Judges 3 where the Israelites are *still* screwing around ignoring their god that supposedly does these amazing miracles. This chapter also mentions how this god has to repeatedly test his subjects. I guess that omniscience doesn’t quite work, eh? And, it has the best Conan-esque scene in it where Ehud stabs a king to the point that the hilt sank into the body and the “fat closed over it”. Billy seems to have missed that there was a whole *80* years of peace after this guy. Perhaps he didn’t want to draw attention to such a sword and sorcery story right out of other Bronze Age mythologies?

Billy is sure that there will never and should never be any world peace, because that would invalidate his book of myths. Violence and hatred is *necessary* to this god and its supposed plan per the bible, where it takes war and the death of anyone who disagrees with this god to get a “peace”, or in Billy’s words “His perfect rule of peace and justice over the whole earth”.. And even after that war in Revelation 19, we have only an “eon” aka “a thousand years” of peace under the reign of the Son of God (Revelation 20). It’s a finite period. Why does it have to end, you may ask? Because this god has no choice(!) and must let his archenemy go to corrupt those people that it didn’t kill before, in order to kill more of them . Satan seems to be a little stupid, first being the mechanism of JC’s “victory” e.g. getting murdered, and then trying to attack this god again. Can’t it read the bible to know what’s going to happen? 🙂

Billy invokes the claim of his bible that there will be “wars and rumors of wars. Do not be alarmed. Such things must happen.” Mark 13. Matthew 24 says the same thing and both go on to say, something that Billy neglects to mention, that anyone who claims that they know that JC is returning should not be believed. We’ve heard the same claims for thousands of years, that any uptick in war and misery is “surely” the sign that JC is returning. And it’s failed every single time. So much for coming “quickly” and “soon”. Billy says pray for peace. Hmmm, how is that to work if war is to happen no matter what, that God *needs* this violence? Is he advocating going against his god’s will? Not that it matters in that prayer does nothing.

A lot of the misery in the world is from religion, witness the nonsense in the eastern Mediterranean where two religions are sure that their imaginary friend gave them some patch of land that they will kill for, and where two sects of one religion are sure that the other should be destroyed for not teaching the religion “right”. Eliminating religion would certainly never eliminate all of the pain of the world, but it would give us humans one less reason for hating each other, one reason that never existed in the first place. Humans need to get through their thick heads that all humans are the same and that we have to work together. No god will ride in at the last minute and save us from ourselves.