Originally published at: War With Iran? A Blood Moon on Purim? For Some Christian Influencers, That Can Mean Only One Thing: The End Times - TPM – Talking Points Memo
On Sunday, two days after President Donald Trump ordered the start of “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran, John Hagee, the 85-year-old televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), delivered a sermon at his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Standing in front of a banner that read “God’s Coming… Operation Epic Fury,” Hagee…
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This is the same end times nonsense that has been going on for 2000 years. Every single time the end times have been predicted the date has come and gone. People who believe is such nonsense are all fools. People who make such predictions are mostly grifters.
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When religious freedom is used to obliterate the planet and wipe out humanity in pursuit of some fan fiction bullshit, we really need to address the mental illness that is religion. Are we really going to allow the world to go up in flames because a handful of profoundly stupid people believe a fucking fairy tale? If that’s not the limit to “religious freedom” then we can stop pretending that democracy or humanity for that matter are even worth saving.
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Aren’t we out of straws yet, haven’t these End Times lunatics (literally in this case) grasped them all?
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and Jesus’s eventual defeat of the Antichrist at the Battle of Armageddon.
Hey, evangelicals, Trump is the Antichrist.
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Reading Revelations, I came away with the distinct impression that the author either had a serious psychotic episode or had ingested some bread rust and was tripping balls.
Either way, he spawned centuries of fearful naval gazing and worse. Here’s an example of worse from emptywheel:
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has already fielded 110 complaints from service members being instructed that they are fighting Armageddon.
A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
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And these tax free fucks have taken over the military and have their ambitions set on education.
If your faith supported the Confederacy, it needs to close, and its monies distributed to those who suffered their interpretation of God’s will.
So: Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, and Mormonism.
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“Hagee also has spent decades arguing that Iran is central to this sequence of events, leaning heavily on the story of the Jewish holiday of Purim, celebrated this week. The holiday commemorates the biblical story of the heroism of Queen Esther, the secretly Jewish wife of the Persian king, who saves the Jews from an extermination plot by the villainous court official Haman.”
The Book of Esther, from which Purim comes, is the only one (in either Hebrew or Xian scripture) that makes no mention whatsoever of Hagee’s god, of anything supernatural, or of anything “revealed.”
It’s a completely secular story.
And its central characters, Mordecai and Esther, are almost certainly named after the Babylonian god Marduk and the Assyrian god Ishtar.
That buffoons like Hagee, with millions of ignorant megachurchers, are cheering on secular protagonists named after “pagan” deities from the very cultures they view as their “Antichrist” enemy would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.
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Oh, look, another crazy old man praying for the end of the world. Bet he’s wrong…again.
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People have been writing fiction since the day they started writing
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You can all stop assuming the military will rescue democracy in some spectacular third act.
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In August 2017 I went to Kentucky to see the solar eclipse. That morning I stopped in a McDonald’s to grab a quick breakfast and while waiting in line had to listen to a group of people debating whether Jesus would appear when the eclipse began, when it hit totality, or as it ended. Given the number of filled gun racks on pickups in the parking lot, I held my tongue, grabbed my Egg McMuffin and hightailed it out of there.
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You’ve obviously never made it to Fleet Week.
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QOTD – Trump’s Good And Bad Reasons For War
"…The difference between him and the neocons of the Bush era is that they had grandiose ambitions of spreading democracy across the Middle East and beyond, and they convinced themselves that they were acting for the good of those populations and the whole world. Trump couldn’t give a rat’s ass about democracy or the people of the Middle East. But that doesn’t mean he has any qualms about launching a vigorous bombing campaign every month or two. In the first year of his second term, Trump bombed seven different countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Somalia, and Nigeria).
"The Trumpian view isn’t that the U.S. shouldn’t intervene militarily around the world, it’s that there are good reasons and bad reasons to do so, and we should only do so for the right reasons. In his view, bad reasons include: fostering democracy, protecting human rights, discouraging imperialist aggression, and supporting allies. Good reasons include: plunder, culture wars, revenge, pique, and because war is cool… " – Paul Waldman , in his “Cross Section” Substack on “What Both Journalists and MAGA Voters Misunderstood About Trump and War.” He’s been a narcissistic sociopath all his life. It takes some powerful self-delusion to think of him and what he would do with enormous power any other way.
Since we’re on the topic of “the end of times,” I think Josh has made several good and factual points about the short-term future direction of the megalomaniac currently sitting in the White House. During the entirety of both terms (so far), he has done absolutely nothing to stabilize anything, or assist our allies, or to make this world better for everyone in any way. Instead, he’s found the simplest ways to make things worse for nearly everyone on this planet, save on the billionaires who buy his protection. He has zero clue what to do with Iran. I fear that it will soon become a much larger regional conflict which he alone will “end” with only one push of a button. He wants his name planted on as many things as possible. What could possibly be bigger than the use of a nuclear bomb to prove to the world that he, alone, is the only human being that is capable of finishing what he started? Good or bad means nothing to him. He only wants his name recorded in history for all eternity.
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Uh, people who make such predictions are not mostly grifters. They are all grifters.
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True dat. They are not prophets. They expect to make a profit.
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I used to have an office in Independence Missouri overlooking the big grass plot of land called the temple lot that a bunch of LDS and RLDS folks tussled with a third group over because it was where they all thought Jesus was going to appear. For decades I looked at that empty lot every day 5 days a week and smiled. Jesus never appeared and never will. End times bullshit is just that—bullshit.
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Only a thousand years Jesus is going to rule? What then, sell the whole thing to extraterrestrials? Who wants a smoking ball of radioactivity?
If these clowns would apply small bits of logic here and there they could reduce the heat damage from their tiny brains working so hard.
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[Hagee] then quickly pivoted to a familiar refrain for anyone who — like me — has followed Hagee’s career since he founded CUFI in 2006: that the American and Israeli attack on Iran will trigger a series of biblically prophesied events, including the invasion of Israel by a Russian-led army, and Jesus’s eventual defeat of the Antichrist at the Battle of Armageddon.
So, lemme see if I get this:
When these folks appoach Saint Peter and he asks them if they wished and prayed for suffering to be spread amongst humanity to hurry their ascendance to paradise, they will answer, “Yes?”
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