By Dr. Bruce Gerencser, resident scholar, specializing in snarkiness and smartassery
Evangelical preachers have been preaching about the “rapture” — the sudden, imminent return of Jesus to the atmosphere of Earth to remove all living Christians and transport them to Heaven — my whole life. I am now sixty-six years old. I can’t remember a time when an Evangelical preacher wasn’t predicting that Jesus would soon return to Earth and snatch away born-again believers. Some preachers even give dates for the rapture. Dozens of dates have come and gone without the rapture taking place. Famed Southern Baptist evangelist Bob Harrington was fond of saying, “I am not looking for the undertaker, I’m looking for the uppertaker.” Harrington died in 2017. He may have not been looking for the undertaker, but the undertaker was looking for him. Jesus was nowhere to be found.
Hal Lindsay, Jack Van Impe, Harold Camping, Edgar Whisenant, and countless other preachers have set a date for the rapture. None of their predictions has come true What are we to make of their failed predictions? Does this mean that these men are false prophets? Should we stone them to death?
As a lifelong follower of rapture pronouncements, I have come up with a new explanation for why the rapture never happens — all straight from the Bible.
First, the earth is flat.
Second, an ice wall surrounds the earth.
Third, there is an atmospheric dome that covers the earth.
Fourth, when Jesus returns to earth, the angel Gabriel will play his trumpet, announcing the rapture is nigh.
Fifth, as believers are pulled naked out of their clothes as they rise to the heavens, all of a sudden they slam into the dome and fall back to earth! Physics, Jesus.
What’s strange is that there are no past news reports of millions of naked Christians exposing themselves in public. Weird, right? I suspect that Jesus — in Men in Black fashion — wipes from the minds of humanity any thoughts of recent events. Evidence? Think of how many times Evangelical preachers have predicted the rapture — without success. Believers never seem to remember past failed predictions. Remember all those preachers who predicted Donald Trump would win the 2020 presidential election? Nary a word about their false prophecies. Instead, they have moved on to predicting Trump will win in 2024 and take America back for God. So it is for these rapture preachers. They want you to forget past predictions, and focus, instead, on their latest pronouncement. “Jesus’ return is imminent! He could return today!” they say. “And while you are waiting for Jesus to show up, please send a donation to my ministry.”
I predict that Jesus will not rapture away the church. Until Elon Musk sends a spaceship to the upper atmosphere and cuts a hole so believers can escape when the trumpet sounds, Evangelicals will just have to wait patiently to be raptured.
What I have written here is every bit as true as a dead Jewish man miraculously coming back to life, ascending to Heaven, never to be seen or heard from again, only to one day have an angel blow a trumpet announcing his return to Earth so he can rapture away millions of Christians.
Prove me wrong! 🙂
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Years ago, I wrote a post titled Ken Ham Warns Atheists Are Out to Steal Your Children and Eat Them Too. While this post was lost in a server crash, I was able to recover the part of the post that resulted in Ken Ham asking his devoted Facebook followers to pray for me:
Teaching children the earth is 6,000 years old, that God killed with a flood every human being save eight a few thousand years ago, and that anyone who does not accept the Evangelical version of the Christian God will be tortured by the Evangelical God in hell for eternity, is quite harmful to the intellectual development of children.
The waiting rooms of mental health professionals are filled with people who have had their sense of self-worth damaged or destroyed by Christian teachings like original sin. Being told you are wicked, that you can be oppressed or possessed by Satan, and that God holds absolute power of your life, does not make for a healthy mind.
So, to Ken Ham, I say this: Yes we are coming for your children. We hope to expose them to the wide, wondrous universe we live in. We hope to teach them to think critically and not to accept something as fact just because a preacher said or God said __________________.
I am not anti-Christian or anti-religion. I am, however, anti-ignorance. I think parents hurt their children when they keep them from ALL the knowledge available about the universe and their place in it . . .
Instead of praying for me, the Hamites went on the offensive, and in doing so, they exposed their ignorance about atheism and their hatred for atheists. Here’s what some of Ham’s disciples had to say (all spelling and grammar in the original):
Start of Quotes
The level of pure hatred in their writings are almost palpable. They are the blind, leading the blind right into Hell!
Should not their own venomous hatred be a warning to them that they are not thinking clearly and rationally? How can they possibility imagine that they are walking in truth when they are eaten up with bitterness and loathing?
And as is highly typical of skeptics, they use lots of insults and personal attacks. In fact, insults are their personal mark and business card. Remember too – Satan is called the accuser of the brethren.
Sad for them. Their hearts are hardened.
evil is cancer…it spreads quickly everywhere…it destorys the ability to think or even reason…the worldly mind just cannot understand the wisdom of God. Praise God for grace.
So much anger and hatred. Just proves, in my mind, that this is a spiritual battle.
I really think the average Christian needs to have a better quick come back for the “God said” “God is speaking to me” and why the Bible is true… Those objections are voiced over and over again and I find the average Christian raised in our churches today simply has no good quick answer….
Jesus said we would be hated by this world because it hated Him first. Also all those who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.
“we are coming for your children.” Over my dead body.
“We are coming for your children” … Arrogant, conceited, rude and intrusive, aren’t they?
This may be the most difficult part of being a Christian, Ken: standing in the face of uncalled-for hatred. Perhaps we should all think of Jesus being nailed to the cross as we hear this kind of nonsensical hatred. Their pride will destroy them. Repentance is the only way….
While we MUST expose the wiles of the evil one, we must also remember that apart from the Grace of God, many of us would likely be in the same position they are in. Jesus warned us that in the End Times there would be a great deception and this is obvious. It is only by the Grace of God that we do not fall for this deception. We are indeed in a war and our enemy does not play fair. Fortunately, we fight with a Commander-in-Chief who also does not fight fair. Our Commander wins…PERIOD because he overcame death, sin, the grave, deception, and every other weapon the enemy throws at us. NO WEAPON formed against us shall prosper. The lies, the hate, the slander, the fear, all the weapons these atheists throw at us shall not prosper.
These atheists are not as secure as they present themselves to be. The truth of God’s Word dispels darkness. Be encouraged Ken. “But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more.” Romans 5:20
The claim that Bible belief and teaching retards the thinking of young people is not true. Since the Bible is true, that would be impossible! If science from the beginning had believed and searched the scriptures, there would have been more progress. For example, science once believed in bleeding people to make them feel better, a flat earth, and more. Bible knowledge would have prevented those errors of “science” along with the impossible theory of evolution – the “belief” that everything came from nothing with no influence from any power or intelligence. Now that’s retarded thinking.
And again we see the humanists’ “tolerance”!
I’m interested in reading these updates, but I’d like to follow up on something you wrote above. I have NEVER met anyone who hates God, ever. I’ve never heard anyone say that. They do hate us and our interpretation of God’s word (truth!).
Thank you for sharing. It is so sad that the lost cannot understand the truth and their deception turns their anger towards those who proclaim the truth. We need to understand those on the other side to know how to combat their influence.
Wow…such hatred. I think it is sad that the Christians use to be dogmatic, and that crowd was quiet, and now it has flipped around. They are dogmatic, and the Christians have become the quiet ones. And the gall of people like this to discredit all Creationists, and especially to discredit the credentials of scientists who are Creationists, is unjust. These scientists have payed for their education, and spent as much of their life in school, as the secular scientists, and so it is unjust to claim that these guys are dumb and stupid.
Never forget a man got up and walked out of the grave……….Atheists are such fools.
He needs to know that we don’t believe in the 7 day creation because a pastor said “God said,” but because God said! We need to stick to the word. Thanks Mr Ken.
if God is not real, why would I waste my time arguing or caring about what Christians thought….nothing meanings anything if there is no God….so I would spend my time in as much pleasure and selfishness as possible as I only have maybe 80 years of meaningless existence…I would not want to waste a second on science or Christianity…who cares?…the fact they oppose so strongly shows they are scared and insecure in their own beliefs
I asked a few Athiest once, why do you talk about God so much if God doesn’t exist? Why do you mock it? An Athiest told me its because of all the violence and wars. And I asked if that is true. Why is it a Christian God and not any other gods, for example Allah the god of Islam?.. I have personally paid attention to the media and tv shows that would make fun of religion. And also been in Philosophy classes where they would bring up a Christian God most of the time. Even they say Christianity copied other religions when it was the other way around they pic and choose things. Indeed we are living in the End times I believe. More Christians are being persecuted there was/still is being more Christians being persecuted in the last century than the 1900 years after 0A.D all together. The Lord has really told me that He is my shield. And to have full Faith in Him. As I’ve been reading Scripture lately.
The claim that Bible belief and teaching retards the thinking of young people is not true. Since the Bible is true, that would be impossible! If science from the beginning had believed and searched the scriptures, there would have been more progress. For example, science once believed in bleeding people to make them feel better, a flat earth, and more. Bible knowledge would have prevented those errors of “science” along with the impossible theory of evolution – the “belief” that everything came from nothing with no influence from any power or intelligence. Now that’s retarded thinking.
Let’s see:
“The claim that Bible belief and teaching retards the thinking of young people is not true.” Why? The “Bible is true,” Swearingen says. Talk about circular reasoning: the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true.
Bloodletting? A procedure performed on the sick for 1,900 years, long before the modern scientific era. Christian doctors bled numerous Christians and clergymen. All of them had the Bible at their disposal, yet none of them found the “truth” about bloodletting. It took scientists, not theologians, to find out that bloodletting does not help the sick.
There would be more progress if science believed the Bible? Really? What about the scientists who were killed for going against the Bible and the Christian church’s teachings? What does history tell us about countries that have a religious-text-based science? Look at the Muslim world and see what happens when theology trumps science.
Science does make errors, but it corrects them. When’s the last time the Don Swaringens of the world have “corrected” an error in their Bible or theology? Everyone together now . . . NEVER!
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
This is the latest installment in the Songs of Sacrilege series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a song that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please send me an email.
Today’s Song of Sacrilege is Thoughts and Prayers by Drive-By Truckers.
When the carnage was over you could hear the cellphones ringing
You could smell gunpowder in the air
On the bloody ground the LEDs were blinking
Deliver us from evil, thoughts and prayers
They’re lined up on the playground, their hands all in the air
See it on our newsfeed and we cry out in despair
They’re counting up the casualties, everyone’s choosing sides
There’s always someone to blame, never anywhere to hide
Thoughts and prayers
Thoughts and prayers
This white noise in my head, I think I need a filter
A pressure valve to keep from blowing up
And when the shit comes down I pray I can rise above it
Hold me closer when I’ve had enough
Thoughts and prayers
Thoughts and prayers
Glory, hallelujah
You are in our thoughts and prayers
Glory, hallelujah
You are in our thoughts and prayers
The Flat Earthist realized as he flew through the skies
The curve of the horizon as he fell
He saw the world was round just before he hit the ground
And gravity called out to close the deal
When my children’s eyes look at me and they ask me to explain
It hurts me that I have to look away
The powers that be are in for shame and comeuppance
When Generation Lockdown has their day
They’ll throw the bums all out and drain the swamp for real
Perp walk them down the Capitol steps and show them how it feels
Tramp the dirt down, Jesus, you can pray the rod they’ll spare
Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers
Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers
Glory, hallelujah
You are in our thoughts and prayers
Glory, hallelujah
You are in our thoughts and prayers
Glory, hallelujah
You are in our thoughts and prayers
This week, the businessman attended the third annual Flat Earth International Conference, held at an Embassy Suites hotel in suburban Dallas, Texas. Organizers told CNN that about 600 others went too.
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The event’s schedule resembled any corporate conference, with some fairly noticeable twists. Speakers gave presentations including “Space is Fake” and “Testing The Moon: A Globe Lie Perspective.” Awards for the year’s best flat Earth-related videos were handed out. And believers reveled in an opportunity to meet several of the movement’s most influential minds.
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People in every pocket of this spherical planet are rejecting science and spreading the word that the Earth is flat.
There’s no clear study indicating how many people have been convinced — and flat Earthers like [David] Weiss will tell you without evidence there are millions more in the closet anyway, including Hollywood A-listers and commercial airline pilots — but online communities have hundreds of thousands of followers and YouTube is inundated with flat-Earth content creators, whose productions reach millions.
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A YouGov survey of more than 8,000 American adults suggested last year that as many as one in six Americans are not entirely certain the world is round, while a 2019 Datafolha Institute survey of more than 2,000 Brazilian adults indicated that 7% of people in that country reject that concept, according to local media.
….
When [Robbie] Davidson first heard that people really do believe in a flat Earth, “I just laughed and said, ‘they’ve got to be the stupidest people ever.’ Who in their right mind could believe something so dumb?”
A couple of years later, Davidson was setting up the first international flat Earth conference. Like most of the speakers at the event CNN spoke to, he was convinced after he decided he couldn’t prove the Earth’s roundness.
For Davidson, a born-again Christian [a common trait among flat-eathers], the most logical explanation for the conspiracy of the millennium goes like this: “Let’s just say there is an adversary, there is a devil, there is a Satan. His whole job would be to try to convince the world that God doesn’t exist. He’s done an incredible job convincing people with the idea that we’re just on a random speck in an infinite universe.”
The reality, says Davidson, is that the flat Earth, sun, moon and stars are contained in a “Truman Show”-like dome. From there, pitfalls can be easily dismissed — like photos of the Earth from space, which flat Earthers believe are photoshopped. “This all goes away if they put a 24/7 camera feed on the moon,” he adds.
And Davidson quickly found a large online community believing the same thing. “I thought doing a conference would just take it to the next stage where the media and the world will look at it and say, ‘wait a minute — something must be going on. This is not just some internet fad, or a bunch of crazy people online. They’re now meeting in buildings.'”
He has a few things he wants to make clear to a flat-Earth novice.
Firstly, and most importantly — “none of us believe that we’re a flying pancake in space.” The community merely believes that space does not exist, the world sits still and the moon landing was faked. The jury is out on gravity — but as Davidson notes, no one has ever seen it.
Secondly — no, you won’t fall off the edge. While flat Earthers’ views of the world vary, most believe the planet is a circular disk with Antarctica acting as an ice wall barrier around the edge.
And thirdly, modern flat Earthers have little in common with the Flat Earth Society, a group that has existed for decades and has more than 200,000 followers on Facebook.
That organization, some speakers told CNN, is a government-controlled body designed to pump out misinformation and make the flat-Earth cause sound far-fetched to curious minds. Davidson calls their theories “completely ridiculous.”
Most [flat-earth] adherents say they’re just curious, as all good scientific minds should be. “We love science,” Davidson insists.
Still, most adherents demonstrate plenty of anti-scientific tendencies. It’s hard to find a flat Earther who doesn’t believe most other conspiracies under the sun; a flat-Earth conference is invariably also a gathering of anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers and Illuminati subscribers, to name a few.
It’s that hyper-skeptical mindset that helps flat earthers answer the big questions — like who’s hiding the true shape of the planet from us?
“The ruling elite, from the royal family to the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds … all of those groups that run the world, they’re in on it,” says Weiss.
….
Scientists have also noted that a social motive draws people to conspiracy theories — the desire to “maintain a positive view of the self and the groups we belong to,” as social psychologist Karen Douglas of the University of Kent says.
And few groups have as strong a community as flat Earthers.
“This (conference) is an outlet for a lot of people that might otherwise get ostracized by friends and family and co-workers. When they come here, they know it’s absolutely a safe space,” [Mark] Sargent says of this week’s event.
….
But perhaps the most important driver is an underlying need for power and control. “People want to feel safe and secure in the world,” Douglas says. And power comes from knowledge — no matter how questionable it may be.
….
“It seems that increasingly, people don’t trust scientists and experts, or their motives,” Douglas says. “More research needs to be done in this area, and I’m sure there are some positive consequences to believing in conspiracy theories, but early indications suggests that they are more harm than help.”
NASA Fact Sheet for middle school students titled, What is Earth?
About Bruce Gerencser
Bruce Gerencser, 62, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 41 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.
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Yes, it has been exactly 50 years ago since the Moon landing hoax. I thought I would put up some videos of documentaries showing this but when I did a search on YouTube I didn’t find any. This is not surprising in that the social media giants have banned free speech. So, I went to archive.org to see what I could find. All I found was some short stupid videos including those by Walt Disney. I even went to another flat earth blog and didn’t find what I was looking for.
The video I was looking for was is called, “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Moon,” but I could not find that. There used to be a website with that name as the URL.
All of this is not surprising as the social media giants already scrubbed a lot about the flat earth. If these videos are still up there, you can not find them by typing in the key words. With that in mind there is a substitute video you can watch here.
One thing that this tells us, is that what we have been saying is true, otherwise why hide it. If, what we believed was a lie, the tech giants would make available information like the fake Moon landing, as it would be easy for the globe earth believers to dispute it and make us look like fools, which is what they really would like to do. But they know they can’t defend their position, so the only thing for them to do is silence us. This shows they are liars!
Now, the next step, when the Communists come in full power it to put us in gulag camps. This is what had been done historically. After all, the anti-Christ Communists can’t allow people who live in society to tell others what’s wrong their system. So they put them in prison/work camps where many died there and those who did live through their sentence their health was broken.
….
As I was posting this article I had two videos that I embedded, as I’ve done many times before. Then I published it. When I went to the live page I did not see my videos there! So, I did it again, thinking that I made a mistake, and sure enough, my videos did not show up. This prove that the Satanic powers do not want the truth out. I’m sure they know that people like me would be posting something about the fake Moon landing as it’s the big 50th anniversary.
….
Anyhow, I guess we can say “thanks” to the evil people for proving that they can’t answer our questions concerning the hoax Moon landing (as well as a 1,001 other questions we have for them, and showing the world what liars they are.
This is the one hundred and fifteenth installment in The Sounds of Fundamentalism series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a video clip that shows the crazy, cantankerous, or contradictory side of Evangelical Christianity, please send me an email with the name or link to the video. Please do not leave suggestions in the comment section. Let’s have some fun!
Today’s Sound of Fundamentalism is a video clip from dinosaur denier Eric Dubay. Dubay is a flat-earther and a consummate conspiracy theorist. You can check out his blog here. Let me give you an excerpt from Dubay’s blog:
QR – If the earth is indeed flat, then where does it start and end, and why don’t we fall off it?
I could similarly ask NASA and modern astronomers, “if outer-space is indeed real, where does it start and end, and why can’t we go beyond that?” Antarctica is not the tiny ice-continent found confined to the underside of astronomer’s globes, but is rather a gigantic ice wall/plateau 200 feet tall that surrounds the Earth and holds the oceans in 360 degrees around us. How far the Antarctic ice extends southwards and whether it terminates in an edge, barrier/firmament, or whether it is infinite is currently unknown and unknowable to the public thanks to the Antarctic Treaty which prevents ordinary people from independent exploration of Antarctica.
QR – What happens to the oceans at the ends of the earth?
The oceans are all connected, are completely flat (it’s called “sea-level” for a reason), and are held in by the surrounding Antarctic ice wall/plateau. How far the Antarctic ice extends southwards and how it terminates are still unknown to the public at this time.
….
QR – Where does the atmosphere start and finish?
This is another question which even NASA refuses to answer. They claim that at some undetermined height, “gravity” becomes weaker and weaker until it magically gives way to “outer-space” which is a vacuum which allow astronauts to free-float forever without falling back down. First of all, it is physically and philosophically impossible for “infinite non-gravitized vacuum space” to exist adjacent to and not separated in any way from non-vacuum, gravitized atmosphere. Secondly, no amateur rocket, balloon, or other technology has ever been able to reach this alleged height where instead of falling back down to Earth like a skydiver, people are able to simply free-float. This is because astro-nots are not in outer-space at all and are simply filming the free-floating effect using camera tricks, green screens, wires, dark pools, and so-called “zero-g planes.” The reality is as the old adage states, “what goes up, must come down,” and not because of “gravity” but because objects always rise/fall based on the relative densities of their surroundings. A helium balloon rises upwards because it is lighter than the oxygen, nitrogen and other elements in the air surrounding it. A rock drops right to the ground because it is denser than the air surrounding it. That is all. The helium balloon doesn’t mysteriously escape “gravity” while the rock is subjected to it, but rather, as was known for millennia before Newton’s silly theory, objects naturally rise/fall towards their own density.
….
QR – There really is some compelling evidence that the Earth is flat and that we’ve all been deceived for centuries. In your opinion who is pulling the wool over our eyes and, more importantly, why?
The Jews, Jesuits, Freemasons and other embedded secret societies in the current New World Order establishment have been lying about the Earth and many other subjects for centuries.
The following video is thirty minutes long. I know 99.9% of you won’t listen to all of it, but I hope you will listen to the first five minutes. You will learn everything you need to know about Eric Dubay.
