Category: [Religion & esoterica]

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…

Ten cents feels like too much…

I don’t know, I feel like this is a bad title for a book at any time, but especially coming from 50-something reverend Billy Graham in 1969 (apparently when it was published). Mind you, I don’t see it in the list of books in his Wiki entry, so I don’t know if it just got left off the list or is another book retitled. Whatever the case, something about this thing gives me the ick…

Oh the irony?

Furious Christians Sue Dr. Phil Over $500 Million Fraud Claim

Talk show guru and ICE champion Dr. Phil has become embroiled in a legal battle so dramatic that it might have made for a compelling episode of his eponymous old talk show.
On Tuesday, the world’s largest Christian TV network accused Dr. Phil and his production company of fraud and breach of contract as part of a “years-long fraudulent scheme” to enrich the TV personality.
Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) alleges that Dr. Phil, whose full name is Phil McGraw, overpromised and underdelivered when he struck a $500 million deal with TBN to produce and distribute his show after he left CBS in 2023. […]
Those new episodes were supposed to be 90 minutes each and be filmed over six to seven months.
However, the network claims that the new episodes never arrived, despite TBN building a new state-of-the-art production space in Texas expressly for their production. […]
A spokesperson for McGraw denied the new allegations to The Hollywood Reporter, claiming that 214 new episodes of Dr. Phil Primetime aired on Merit TV. “To say otherwise is false,” the spokesperson noted.

I gather that Merit TV is part of the company he and TBN formed to make these hundreds of new episodes, and that it has in fact recently filed for bankruptcy and filed its own suit against TBN for not fulfilling its side of the deal. I don’t know which side is the more mockable here, cos McGraw is grotesque trash who needs a good beating, but, frankly, so are TBN, which spent decades promoting prosperity gospel bullshit. Phil screwed them out of half a billion dollars? How much have TBN and the people they exhibit screwed out of their audiences in the half-century or so that they’ve been around? Amazing how these cunts are full of the Bible but they always pretend this story isn’t in there…

Oh not again

Well, that’s ANOTHER apocalypse I’ve lived through, and I didn’t even know this one was coming. However, in an interesting twist, this particular doomsday prophet is actually denying being one:

Renowned preacher Prophet David Owuor has distanced himself from viral claims suggesting he prophesied the end of the world would occur on August 2, 2025.
In an official statement released by the Ministry of Repentance and Holiness on Friday, the church dismissed the circulating reports as false, misleading, and deliberately twisted to damage the reputation of the preacher and undermine his ministry’s message.
“The leadership and congregation of The Ministry of Repentance and Holiness strongly denounce the recent spread of false and misleading information about The World Ending on August 2nd, 2025,” the statement read.
“Prophet Dr Owuor has always been very categorical on the fact that nobody knows the day or the hour when the Messiah will return, as the Bible clearly states in Matthew 24:36,” it added. […]
This was not the first time such news emerged online.
Last year, similar claims attributed to the prophet also went viral, claiming that his prophecy had pointed to November 2, 2024 as doomsday.

We should be fair and note that this denial was also published before this putative apocalypse was supposed to happen so, unlike Harold Camping, for example, he’s actually not going for a post-facto rationalisation of an event that conspicuously failed to happen. Dave is so not wrong about something he supposedly said, he never even said it in the first place! Unless, of course, he was right nonetheless and the world DID end… but only in Kenya. That’s a possibility, I suppose…

Well that took long enough

So Swaggart kicked the bucket at last, clearly holding on to life with grim determination for two weeks after his impending death was announced. Hopefully we may see his fellow scumbag Jim Bakker, who Swaggart described as “cancer” before his own downfall—wow, WE were a paragon of moral uprightness and superiority to our fellow Christians, weren’t we? Not wrong about Bakker, but Swaggart really was the last person who should’ve been sniping at him—HOPEFULLY, I SAY, we may see Bakker follow him sooner rather than later. For his sake, of course; may the Lord bless him by saving him any more embarrassment at having to hawk those fucking food buckets for the apocalypse on his show so much…

Thou hast sinned, O Jimmy

Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart hospitalized

Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart went into cardiac arrest at his home Sunday morning and is in intensive care at a hospital, his son said Sunday evening. […]
His son Donnie says Swaggart went into cardiac arrest around 8 o’clock Sunday morning and “has never regained consciousness.”
He said paramedics responded to Swaggart’s home and were able to get a heartbeat before rushing him to a local hospital.
“Right now he is in ICU and without a miracle, without a miracle, his time will be short,” Donnie Swaggart told the congregation during a special prayer service held Sunday evening at their church in Baton Rouge.

His time is short? His time has been ninety fucking years, Donnie. Per Wikipedia, he started as an evangelist in 1955, started on radio in 1960, and then on TV in 1971; he’s had DECADES to screw people out of their money (which family business you’ve carried on yourself) and he’s been doing it up to now. Everyone’s time comes, Donnie. Mine will, yours will, and it looks like your fraud of a father’s time is upon him too. I know how hard it to lose family members, I’ve lost too many of mine over the last five decades of my own existence, but… you know. Just… fuck Jimmy Swaggart.

“We’re going to give the Lord an opportunity to work,” he added.

Well, why did you send the old cunt to hospital, then? You could’ve let God prove himself by making him intervene directly, instead of letting the hospital do all the work but giving God the credit if it does in fact go all right. Why yes, I am in thoroughly mean spirits at this news. I really can’t summon up any sympathy for anyone here.

Well, we’re fucked again, apparently

Terribly sorry for being so late in announcing the latest apocalypse about to end everything, I know it doesn’t give you much time to get ready, but I only just saw this nonsense now in the PIAT Facebook group… I gather this is Ching Hai (vegan), and there’s been some debate on Reddit about whether or not she’s a cult leader… and despite never having heard of them until now, I’m going to say “yes she fucking is”; let’s face it, most normal organisations don’t refer to their CEO as their “Most Compassionate Supreme Master”. Can you imagine Macca’s calling Ray Kroc that? And as a general rule I don’t think most businesses of that sort issue proclamations about the world coming to an end… that sort of shit’s bad for the bottom line. I think it’s probably safe to call Ching Hai (vegan) some sort of cult leader, then… and yes, they DO keep specifying that she’s vegan (kind of like the “peace be upon him” in Islam?) on her official website, per which “the Worshipped Son of God Jesus Christ” was a mere vegetarian; I presume that business with the loaves and fishes disqualifies him from full enlightenment or something.

I’m just not sure quite how being vegan will actually improve your chances of surviving a months-long solar storm, which I feel would be statistically likely to include a number of vegans among its putative death toll… nature doesn’t really discriminate like that, I don’t think. Also, she says in another video on her site that God told her the Earth would explode during the dates specified, which is a somewhat different affair… it’d be a weirdly slow explosion for one thing, but also I presume there would be no Earth left at the end of it, which would kind of wipe out all the vegans, wouldn’t it? However, I do notice the day the chaos apparently ends will be my birthday! So, assuming I’m not one of the 67% that gets killed in it before then, I wonder how many corpses I’ll wind up getting to mark the occasion…