Category: [Religion & esoterica]

Remember the Rapture?

Cos evidently this guy hasn’t forgotten it like the rest of us:

This… possibly not altogether there chap, Tilahun Desalegn, stood out to me in the coverage of the non-event of September 2025 by virtue of being noticeably Australian (I alluded to him here before). And, well, yeah, per the video above, he’s got new evidence that the Rapture would in fact finally happen at Christmas. It’s a bit unfair to single him out, cos a quick search on Youtube reveals several dozen other channels there predicting the same thing, or at any rate it would apparently happen at Hanukkah. Seems all those prophets never predicted what did happen at Bondi at the start of Hanukkah… but hey, they were only Jews so who cares, not like they were fully human to the people posting this bullshit… Anyway, I think it’s safe to say the Rapture didn’t exactly come off as scheduled this time either, just like all the other times it’s failed and will continue to do so. Not, of course, that this has ever convinced these morons it won’t happen eventually so they’ll keep predicting it…

Merry Griftmas to all…

Look who’s found religion…

Daniel’s going to be weirdly disappointed if Edolf turns out to be Muslim now, eh? Needless to say, none of his commenters are buying it, and quite a few are speculating about what charges are coming his way that he’s going down this route so suddenly, or whether he’s just in another ketamine spiral… To be honest I believe Russell Brand’s conversion more than this; I’ve said before that I think Brand’s Christian beliefs might actually be genuine, but I do not think this of Edolf. I doubt the latter believes in anything except himself and his bank account; if I still feel Brand’s conversion was suspiciously timed (even if genuine), Musk’s putative conversion to something or other is equally suspicious and even less real. No season of goodwill to this character.

Talking of Tucker…

…I forgot to add this to that post I made about him the other day:

That’s a screenshot I took from Youtube of the most recent shorts posted to Fucker Carlson’s YT channel… one of Milo Hanrahan apparently explaining that the real reason you’re gay is that you actually aren’t (?), and four rather… Biblical clips that I gather come from another interview with someone called John Rich. Look at the titles:

The Antichrist’s Biggest Lie Exposed
Is the Mark of the Beast Real?
Diddy’s Demonic Ties Exposed
The Worst Sin According to the Bible?

John Rich is a country musician, by the way; he is not a theologian, he’s just hopped up on God in the way Kyle Kulinski speculates Carlson is hopped up on nicotine in that video. Also he’s got an understandable hate-on for pedophilia and child trafficking (hence the presence of that Puffy fellow) which… I don’t know, it’s the sort of thing I know I shouldn’t be cynical about because it is obviously awful, but… why do I not entirely trust him somehow? Is it just the number of times we’ve seen right-wingers being really vocal about things they hate, like, I don’t know, gay sex, trans people, etc, but then they turn out to actually be kind of into those things? Quite often they’re loudly professing Christians too. Not that I actually think John Rich is secretly into kiddie fiddling cos I’ve no evidence that he is, but I’ve just seen too many vocal hypocrites of the kind I described…

Oh, and…

…Did the world end for anyone yesterday? Cos you may recall it was supposed to… Indeed, there was supposed to be a months-long solar storm, ongoing since the start of June, and the world was supposed to explode or something. I don’t know, the prophecy didn’t seem entirely coherent to me at the time… Anyway, here we still are, it’s not quite midnight yet in… *checks* Hawai’i, so it’s still the 15th in Honolulu, meaning the world might still end in the next half hour or so and this post will look foolish indeed to anyone still alive to read it. Don’t think it will, though. I wonder if her majesty (vegan)’s message did inspire anyone to go vegan to save them from the apocalypse? If so, then those poor bastards improved their health and moral standing for nothing…

Iesous Inside

An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’

In March, three months after being forced out of his position as the CEO of Intel and sued by shareholders, Patrick Gelsinger took the reins at Gloo, a technology company made for what he calls the “faith ecosystem” – think Salesforce for churches, plus chatbots and AI assistants for automating pastoral work and ministry support.
The former CEO’s career pivot is taking place as the US tech industry returns to the political realm as a major revenue stream. Some of its most prominent present-day leaders have funded Donald Trump’s re-election and renewed their pursuit of government contracts as the second Trump administration has revitalized religious conservatism in Washington DC.
Now Gloo’s executive chair and head of technology (who’s largely free of the shareholder suit), Gelsinger has made it a core mission to soft-power advance the company’s Christian principles in Silicon Valley, the halls of Congress and beyond, armed with a fundraised war chest of $110m. His call to action is also a pitch for AI aligned with Christian values: tech products like those built by Gloo, many of which are built on top of existing large language models, but adjusted to reflect users’ theological beliefs.
“My life mission has been [to] work on a piece of technology that would improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ’s return,” he said.

I feel like if you were wanting to make things better for everyone, you wouldn’t be doing it with AI… but you would want to hasten Christ’s comeback, cos if he waits much longer he won’t have much of a world to return to…

How about that crapture, then?

Think I’m safe to say the rapture failed to happen again in the same way it did a couple of weeks ago, but don’t worry, the goalposts have already been moved again. To next week. Obviously.

There’s a Tiktok by this guy who made a bunch of videos about the rapture, but tonight I saw one by him in which he said he wasn’t fussed if it didn’t happen on the rescheduled date because this is a year of Jubilee, and apparently in a Jubilee year the final trumpet of the festival doesn’t get blown until the ninth day or something. Meaning that the rapture’s going to happen between the 15th and 17th. Obviously.

I have no idea if that latter detail is correct or not, cos I can’t find anything about it online, but that character’s right about one thing. It IS a Jubilee year.

In Catholicism.

I’m going to suggest that, since this fellow believes in the rapture, he’s not actually Catholic and probably comes from one of those American sects that considers Catholicism not just the wrong sort of Christianity but also un-Christian. And he’s probably even less enthused about THE JOOOOOOOOOOS which is where the idea of the Jubilee year originates. However, apparently it hasn’t been practised in Judaism for centuries, possibly not since 722 BC after the end of the Northern Kingdom. The Catholic church has been doing it since 1300, and I think it’s a somewhat different affair with them.

Either way… yeah, I don’t think this Jubilee year idea makes a lot of sense, but then again nothing about the rapture does, really. Mind you, I suppose that tying it to a Jewish feast makes slightly more sense than Jesus adhering to a calendar devised by pagans? I don’t know. In any case, something else to look forward to not happening next week…

Rapture rescheduled?

I remain perplexed by the whole rapture thing from last week, mostly by why there was so much hysteria about this particular instance compared with its predecessors… I mean, did Harold Camping generate this much fuss? I can’t remember but I don’t think he did… then again he didn’t have idiots on Tiktok to push his particular idiocy. Youtube has been abuzz for days with videos about the non-event, obviously, of which I particularly want to note this one:

Savannah Marie mostly does anti-MLM content, but she also comes to this as a lapsed Christian herself, so she has a certain sympathy that not many of the other creators I’ve seen discussing it have had. I’ll take the liberty of quoting myself from her comments section (the Australian guy I mentioned appears a couple of times, with the bit I was particularly referencing around the 51 minute mark; the “let’s fly 9/25” thing was, according to him, the date Jesus gave him which he interpreted as September 25th—i.e. in American style and notably after the supposed rapture date—rather than the ninth month of 2025 as we would here in Oz):

The ones that bothered me were the mothers saying their children wouldn’t be getting raptured with them. I saw one by someone claiming a neighbour of hers surrendered her own child to child protective services because she thought she would be raptured but somehow the child wouldn’t. That “prepper” woman is, I think, the same one I’ve seen in other videos; she at least seems to have some kind of self-awareness, she says her own kids laugh at her over what she believes and she acknowledges how strange if not mad it seems.
I’m very perplexed by the Australian guy. Not only because we don’t usually get caught up in this sort of bullshit like American Christians do, but “let’s fly 9/25”? MATE. We use dd/mm/yyyy in Australia. 9/25 is not an actual date here. If God is speaking to someone in this country, why would he be using the American dating convention instead of the right one? Plus it’s the 27th here now, so… how much further do you want to shift those goalposts?

Well, Joshua’s answer to that at least is, apparently, October the 7th or 8th, because he didn’t realise that Jesus works on the Julian calendar and not the Gregorian. UM… really? I don’t know enough about my Roman history to know whether or not the Romans insisted on their calendar being imposed throughout the empire, but I feel like a middle eastern Jew like Jesus (because yes, that’s what he was) would be operating more to whatever the Hebrew calendar of the period was. Whatever, though, it looks like we all have some more of this shit to look forward to next week…

Rapture time again

Someone must’ve known what they were doing with this comic. Surely.

Yeah, it’s end of the fucking world again, apparently, some “prophet” from South Africa reckons Jesus told him the 23rd of September was the big day that Jesus also insisted in that book only God knew the date of, and, well, Christian people around the world have gone nuts for this guy because obviously…

Anyway, as I write, it is now technically the 24th here in Australia and, once again, by the looks of it I haven’t been swept up  to Heaven, unless of course Heaven looks oddly like my house… which, if it does, is unexpected at best, thought there might be more streets of gold… but I’m fairly sure I’m actually still on Earth and destined for Hell after all. That said, it is still the 23rd elsewhere in the world—the day’s barely begun in some places like Alaska, and it’s still morning in America as someone once said—so it could still happen over the next 20-odd hours… cos Joshua never specified a time nor a time zone, maybe he’s expecting it to run to South African Standard Time… in which case he’s got about seven hours left to be proven correct. Personally I can’t wait for the results…