There will be no Second Coming

Why the Second Coming will never happen

Introduction

The Bible used by Christians comprises the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the New Testament. Both contain a number of different literary genres, including historical narrative, like the books of Kings and Chronicles, poetry, such as the Psalms, wisdom literature which includes Proverbs and apocalyptic literature, which mainly consists of Daniel and Revelation. Within existing gospels small samples of apocalyptic sayings can be found, in the gospels and epistles. As defined by Wikipedia: “Apocalypticism is the religious belief that the end of the world is imminent, even within one's own lifetime. This belief is usually accompanied by the idea that civilization will soon come to a tumultuous end due to some sort of catastrophic global event.”

We find evidence of the origins of apocalypticism in the Persian Empire, where the rulers and teachers of Israel were exiled from 587 BCE to 517 BCE, initially under the Babylonian Empire and later under the Persians who conquered the Babylonians. The Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, is a dualistic religion, with two opposing forces vying for control of the cosmos. On the positive side is Ahura Mazda and opposing Ahura Mazda is Angra Mainyu. The religious text of Zoroastrianism is the Avesta, and it describes how these two cosmic forces battle for control, but, in the end, Ahura Mazda will be the victor and order will triumph over chaos. This is the common theme in apocalyptic literature. This dualism is seen in the Pauline ideas of powers and principalities in high places, battling against God and his saints (Ephesians 6:12). The parallels between Zoroastrianism and Christianity are obvious.

Pauline authorship of Ephesians is disputed by most scholars, but the principle remains. There is a tension between the forces of good, in Christianity represented by YHWH and his angels, and another force determined to destroy YHWH’s creation and rule, and this is Satan and his minions. Satan is entirely a New Testament period creation, and reflects Greco-Roman influences as well as the influences brought back from Babylon. For apocalypticism, the resolution of the problem ends with an ultimate and sweeping victory by the forces of evil and the establishment of a new kingdom and a righteousness people. The book of Daniel is an apocalyptic book, written in the 2nd Century BCE, containing the formulaic ex eventu prophecies about the future and the ultimate reign of YHWH. In Daniel 7:13, a mysterious figure, the Son of Man appears, and this idea is later applied to Jesus when he came preaching a couple of centuries later.

The origins of apocalypticism in Israel

Israel in the 2nd Century BCE was ruled by the Seleucids, and there were intermittent rebellions against them, but they never really came to anything. Seleucus was a general under Alexander the Great who took over Palestine and Syria after the death of Alexander. Israel had a long history of prophets telling the nation that the Davidic throne would endure forever. This promise ended in 587 BCE when the last of the kings of the Davidic were removed when Nebuchadnezzar conquered the country and took a substantial part of the population into captivity. The promise of God that the line of David would never end failed to be fulfilled. As an aside, Jesus isn’t from the line of David. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was of Davidic descent, but only descent from the line of the father determines your lineage, not your mother.

For centuries Israel lived with the knowledge that God hadn’t restored the Davidic kingship and they were a subject nation, ruled by Babylonian pagans, then Persian pagans and now Greek pagans. As God’s people, this was untenable. They were a minor player in the history of the Ancient Middle East, and chafed under the rule of nations that were unclean in their eyes. The final and most destructive event was about to take place. The Seleucid ruler from Syria, Antiochus 4 Epiphanes, found himself in a power struggle with another Seleucid, and attacked Jerusalem to remove him, then proceeded to commit enormous atrocities against the Jewish population in 168 BCE. He suppressed the Jewish religion, and as a final indignity, sacrificed a pig, the most unclean of animals, in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. A more abhorrent act couldn’t be imagined by the Jews.

This was the absolute low point of Israel’s history, and an uprising happened under John Hyrcanus and his sons, which became known as the Maccabean Revolt. The Book of Daniel dates from this period and the idea of a conflict between good and evil with an ultimate resolution, that being God triumphant begins at this time. The Book of 1 Maccabees explains much of the aftermath of this. The book is part of the Apocrypha but a pdf can easily be found and downloaded.

The idea that history had a start and end time was a novel idea to the people of the time. Until apocalyptic writing began to be produced; everyone just assumed that life went on without change and the nations came and went, but there was no defined end to history. In modern western society which has been saturated with Judaeo-Christian ideas, the idea of a final judgement on the human race and the end of all evil, seems almost normal. We fail to see how utterly bizarre as an idea it is, because nothing like that has ever happened, or probably ever will happen. The Second Coming means that an unseen, unproven and unprovable God, exclusive to a small people group in an obscure corner of the world, is the supreme God of the universe, and he will intervene in human history and bring human history to an end. Of course, believers must accept that the creation account in Genesis is the beginning of human history, and the apocalypse the end of history.

In place of this present evil world, God will usher in a new Kingdom on earth, his Kingdom, with a new Jerusalem (Ezekiel 40 – 48), which will 1,220 kilometres on all sides and also in height. That means the city would extend further than from Cairo to northern Turkey, and then east by the same distance, engulfing Syria and Iraq. By comparison, Israel is now 420 kilometres long, and 115 kilometres at its widest part. A height of 1,220 kilometres would put the top of the city up past the stratosphere. The dimensions of the new Jerusalem are fanciful at best, nonsensical at worst.

The effects of belief in the Second Coming

The Second Coming is such a pervasive idea in the more fundamentalist churches that it actually affects attitudes towards such diverse subjects as climate control, environmental destruction, and political affiliation. Christian fundamentalists are far more likely to be anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-vaccine and pro right-wing politics, not because they are the best options, but because they are fed a steady diet of misinformation and lies. The poorly educated religious leaders and their local pastor, who stopped anything resembling serious study when he did his basic degree to become a pastor, are invested in this idea, and refuse to see its absurdity. They then go on to feed the sheep a steady diet of the same fatuous nonsense they were brought up on.

The idea of a Second Coming grew up from the messianism of the Hebrew Bible, where YHWH promised a Messiah who would restore Israel and return its sovereignty. We find the gospel writers quoting Isaiah 40, completely out of context, because there is nothing in the Hebrew Bible about a suffering and dying Messiah making atonement for sin. This is an entirely new idea created by Paul the apostle and the gospel writers who came after him.

The theology of the Messiah being equal to and coexistent with God is thoroughly repudiated by the Jews, and the idea of the Trinity was a theological position pushed hard in the 4th Century by Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers. God coming as a man, dying for the sins of mankind, and being raised from the dead is anathema to Jewish religion, and to any right-thinking person. Nonetheless, it gained traction and is central to the Christian doctrine of the atonement. If there is no Trinity, and Jesus isn’t divine, but a failed 1st Century apocalyptic preacher, the Church ceases to have anything to sell, and Christianity is dead in the water.

Apocalyptic writing in the New Testament

Jesus and John the Baptist were both apocalyptic preachers. Apocalyptic preachers in the 1st Century were a dime a dozen. The author of the Gospel of Mark quotes the messianic passage Isaiah 40:3 to describe the preaching of John. In Matthew Chapter 3, the author ramps it up, threatening the Pharisees and Sadducees with judgement, and carries on to quote Malachi 3 which promises a spiritual cleansing of God’s people, and a promise of a future Messiah. Luke continues on this theme in Luke Chapter 3. The main point is that John the Baptist was pointing to a future Messiah, who would be instrumental in establishing a righteous kingdom of some form. Jesus continues this in his preaching ministry, but takes the idea much further. All this is predicated on the belief that the words of Jesus are accurately reported, which is exceedingly unlikely, given that Luke, for example, dates from 95 CE, at least 65 years after the death of Jesus. Given that, Luke 17:20 – 36 describes an apocalypse consistent with a final judgement of the world and the end of human history. Luke is writing a religious history with an agenda, promoting the idea of an apocalypse. Mark Chapter 13 is another famous apocalyptic passage put into the mouth of Jesus, promising judgement for evildoers and rescue of the faithful by his angels. Again, we see the dualism of God’s kingdom and his forces, and evil and its forces.

Here we come to the most important prophecy made by Jesus in his earthly ministry. In Mathew 16:28 Jesus says the following; “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Here we are, 2000 years later, and there is no kingdom of God on Earth, and the ones to whom he made this promise, are long since dust. Luke 9:27 says the same thing, so it’s likely he copied Matthew. There have been as many attempts to reconcile reality with the words of Jesus, some suggesting the Kingdom of God did come, but spiritually, and the presence of the Holy Spirit, promised by Jesus, is a token of a future event. The Pentecost event in Acts is something they point towards. This is not the place for a full discussion on the apologetics on the subject, but the failure of a visible kingdom to appear should be a fatal flaw to belief. However, believers are committed to believing that neither Jesus not Paul could have been mistaken, or that the Bible can be anything but always correct. They refuse to believe that Jesus and Paul were wrong about the imminence of the coming of the kingdom of God and will go to any lengths to deny this is a mistake. This is cognitive dissonance at work.

The value of apocalypticism for the Church

The world is a place of terrible uncertainty, and reality is harsh when hope is removed. The Israelites in the 2nd Century BCE had seen the steady erosion of their political power as great nations like the Assyrians and the Babylonians ruled. Egypt was still a force to be reckoned with, and the southern kingdom of Judah saw the entire northern kingdom based in Samaria wiped out by the Assyrians, and were terrified the same would happen to them. We see in Isaiah 7:14 a promise from the prophet to King Ahaz that the threat to Judah wouldn’t result in their destruction, but in the time it took a child to grow up, the threat would be removed. This verse is explained in 2 Kings 16. Isaiah 7:14 isn’t a prophecy about a future messiah, but about Judah’s salvation from the same fate as Northern Israel. It does not have anything to do with Jesus, and the word is mistranslated as “virgin” when the Hebrew actually reads “young woman”, “almah” meaning a young woman of child-bearing age was translated as “parthenos”, Greek for a virgin. Paul’s use of the Septuagint cemented this error in place and made Jesus out as born of a virgin. This error is well documented by scholars. Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin, and Mary wasn’t a virgin.

Judah was religiously very similar, and ethnically also very similar to the people of Northern Israel. Was Judah going to be wiped out also? Apocalyptic writings provided a worldview with a God who was in charge of history. The faithful could rest assured that God had a plan and he was in charge of history. In time, perhaps in a long time, he would bring everything to a just and fitting end, and the faithful believers would be rewarded with a new Israel, dominant over the pagan nations. If God was in charge, then pain and suffering wasn’t pointless. It meant God wasn’t indifferent to the needs of his people, but he was working on a different time scale to bring about his purposes.

Dr. Kipp Davis on a podcast described apocalypticism as the ultimate theodicy. If God has a plan, then the suffering of the present is part of his plan, and he will marshal his forces to overcome the forces of evil, and suffering will end at a time appointed by God. This gives God an excuse. He’s not negligent and indifferent to our suffering. He’s not the author of evil and wickedness. He’s not powerless. Instead, he has a divine plan to overcome the forces opposing him in bring about a new kingdom, where righteousness is the rule and his people will be vindicated for their faith. Literally, the just shall live by being faithful, which is the correct translation of Habakkuk 2:4. In other words, by following the law and being faithful, not having some nebulous “faith”.

The damage apocalypticism causes for modern society and believers

Apocalypticism exercises far more influence than it should. It’s influence is disproportionate to its size. I always believed that the Sermon on the Mount was a template for Christian living, but the idea of the Second Coming is a destructive idea, introducing a triumphalist attitude to some sections of the church. The list of its negative influences is long and some of these have very harmful real-world consequences.

1. Apocalypticism is always future, never now. It demands that believers trust in pseudo prophecies that will never eventuate and then force believers into lying and dishonesty when they have to interpret scripture to fit the prophecy and not the historical facts. Jesus promised that some of his listeners would still be alive when the Kingdom of God came. Of course, they weren’t and neither was Jesus. In Mark 15:34 we read “Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” in Aramaic). Jesus fully expected to see the Kingdom of God come as a result of his preaching, but what came was the retribution of the Roman Empire on him for declaring himself the King of the Jews by entering Jerusalem on a donkey as the Davidic successor. His cry is not surrender to God’s will, as the apologists would have you believe, but of desolation that God was silent, as he always is, and was allowing him to die a horrible and pointless death. God’s promises of the future victory over the forces of darkness are never fulfilled. And there are no forces of darkness, only human failings and evil. There is no Satan, no demons, no principalities and powers in heavenly places. There is just us, fragile, flawed humans.

2. Apocalypticism is the definition of false hope. It promises that God will intervene in history to vindicate the believers who are faithful, and sweep away everyone who isn’t. Revelation was written after the Neronian persecution (54 CE – 68 CE). It was looking at the events of the day and the continuing persecution under Domitian, and was trying to understand why God was allowing this to happen to his people. One key message of Revelation is that the faithful in Christ would be vindicated for their faith and the martyrs would sit beneath the throne of God and see their persecutors get their comeuppance. Of course, persecution in varying degrees of severity continued until Constantine won the Battle of Milvian Bridge and became emperor. He instituted the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, ensuring that Christians were no longer persecuted by the Roman authorities. The Book of Revelation, like all apocalyptic literature is written for the time in which it was written, but it lends itself to reinterpretation for each age, because it always fails to deliver. A perfect example is the mark of the beast. This is an entirely fabricated idea about being marked by and for the Roman Empire (the Beast) that was repressing the Jews. It has no future application, because it didn’t happen back then, and it’s not a prophecy for the future. The utter drivel we see in conspiracy theories about how Satan is creating barcodes to force people to give up money and only use their mark to buy and sell, and how vaccines contain microchips that will control us (they have no idea how big a microchip compared to the diameter of a hypodermic needle). These are theories inspired by a belief in the final collapse of society and the forces of evil taking over. They owe much to Christian apocalypticism.

3. Another distraction is the Antichrist who is numbered 666. This is Nero, whose letters value comes to 666 when the full name Nero Caesar is used with gematria. There is no future Antichrist that the world has to be afraid of, and all the drivel being preached, particularly by fundamentalist churches is wrong and harmful, and grows out of ignorance and fear. The “Antichrist” has been and gone, and he died at his own hand, by suicide. This is not a prophecy of the future.

4. Apocalypticism provides a false theodicy for God. As defined by Alvin Plantinga, a theodicy is "an answer to the question of why God permits evil". Theodicy is defined as a theological construct that attempts to vindicate God in response to the problem of evil that appears inconsistent with the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. At its heart, apocalypticism started out as a means to explaining suffering, given that it should be within the power of an omnipotent and omniscient God to create and supervise a universe in which evil wasn’t present or dominant, and where God was actually in control. Instead, Jewish philosophers came up with a dualistic idea, which I have already mentioned, of two opposing forces, only one of which would ultimately be successful and overcome the other. Many of these ideas come from the non-canonical Book of Enoch from the 4th Century BCE – 2nd Century BCE. The belief in Satan being cast from heaven with a third of the angels is one of these ideas. There is nothing in the Hebrew Bible about this. Isaiah 14:12 is another scripture often used to claim Satan is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, the verse refers to either a Babylonian king or an Assyrian king who fell in battle, possibly Sargon 2. Calling him “Lucifer” is ironic, not describing a divine being who fell from heaven.

5. In the meantime, human beings, even the elect of God, Israel, would suffer, and God’s Promised Land would continue to be overrun regularly by uncircumcised pagans. This was the opposite of their expectations. After all, God promised to make them great, not a minor power, always paying tribute to bigger neighbours. Now, they reasoned, there were evil forces opposing God, and he would ultimately triumph, but in the meantime, there would be trials and tribulations for the human race before the ultimate victory. Apocalypticism fails to explain why God was incompetent or impotent, if he couldn’t create a universe without opposition. If he’s unable to, then he is not God, but a human construct and concept. These have no intrinsic power in and of themselves, but require humans to make them real.

6. To truly believe that books like Revelation are actually anything other than religious fantasy, the believer has to live in a state of constant denial. If you accept that 666 was talking about a long dead Roman persecutor, and that the Mark of the Beast is a completely fictitious literary creation of the author, then the banality of that explanation should defuse the hysteria of believing that some future antichrist will rule the world and take your gas guzzling SUV and guns from you and enslave you. The absurdity of the idea can be seen by a quick search on YouTube. I am writing this immediately before the 2024 US presidential elections. I found videos arguing for the Antichrist being Elon Musk, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, King Charles of Great Britain, and if I want to go down that particular rabbit hole, I’ll probably find Biden, Obama, possibly JFK, and every Democrat who ever held office.

7. The Antichrist was Nero Caesar, emperor of Rome who died at his own hand in 68 CE. Such navel gazing is fruitless, because it’s looking for a black cat in a dark room, when it isn’t in there anyway. There is no future Antichrist because this isn’t a prophecy. Meantime Christians ignore the weightier matter of the law as Jesus says in Matthew 23:23 “But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former”. Followers of Jesus are specifically told to not get caught up on this trivia, but to care for the poor, the hungry, the oppressed and those without hope in this world. Apocalypticism takes focus from the real point of Christian belief and action.

8. Continuing on that theme, this obsession with the end of the world and the return of Christ has led to some appalling acts of stupidity. Starting with the Qumran society where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the community were expecting the coming Messiah and the fulfilment of history. They hunkered down in their religious community, isolated up at the end of the Dead Sea. Instead of the Kingdom of God coming, the Roman Empire came, destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the Qumran community. We can look at the Millerites. From Wikipedia; “Millerism was a movement founded by William Miller, who predicted the Second Coming of Christ in 1843-1844 based on biblical prophecies. The movement experienced a major disappointment when Christ did not return, and split into various groups with different doctrines and practices”. The Millerites were awaiting a non-existent Second Coming, which would be a disappointment to anyone, but the followers, for the most part, continued on with the movement, leading to the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Denial of facts, objective truth and historical evidence make no difference to their beliefs. This is the definition of cognitive dissonance. It is from the fertile soil of apocalypticism that powerful and destructive cults grow up, and people’s lives are damaged and families destroyed. There is none worse than Jehovah’s Witnesses, who shun family members who don’t follow their particular brand to Christianity. Nothing good will ever come from belief in the Second Coming. Jesus died. He didn’t rise from the dead, he wasn’t the Messiah and if there was no First Coming, there can be no Second Coming.

9. The obsession with the Second Coming leads to an unhealthy hyper-spirituality that demands perfection of the believer, because the days are short and they must be ready. In 1Peter 1 we read: As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy. “ I have seen this in my Pentecostal church, which actively discouraged their members from having any involvement with environmental destruction, global warming, social welfare issues, overexploitation of the seas and lands by overfishing and farming and anything that might actually be of any practical value. Instead, the believer should be focussed on their own spiritual growth and preaching to friends, family and strangers, because the Second Coming was just around the corner, which it isn’t. This leads to a doctrine of perfectionism which is very unhealthy and is focussed totally on self. The believer then follows a path that is the antithesis of a Christian ideal.

10. Finally, what might the Christian Church both then and now have been if Paul, the apostle, was not so obsessed with the imminence of the Second Coming? In 1Corinthians 7:25 – 40, Paul says he is sure the time is short, so believers shouldn’t marry, or divorce, or live as normal people, but devote themselves to the service of God. Paul is setting up the believers for truly unhappy and unfulfilled lives. If they serve God, they are doing better than living normal lives and marrying and having families. Such a false dichotomy. Followers of this apostle are being asked to put their lives on hold because he is convinced the end is nigh. Paul was no better than Miller whose errors and foolishness led to the Great Disappointment or the Raelians who believed aliens from outer space were coming for them. Paul denies reality, in favour of some celibate purity that will impress God. Paul’s own personal problems with sexual purity led him astray, and also his followers. People in the real world marry, have sex, children, relationships, jobs, and lives apart from a life of being in a church, waiting for a Second Coming that never happened. Paul’s error is far from a small one, and proves he was neither apostle nor prophet. Paul was obsessed with his own sinfulness. Look at Romans 7:

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.

For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

11. I believe Paul had some serious issue with sin, specifically sexual sin, that led him to this conclusion. It is abnormal to be so obsessed with sin that you want to impose your decisions concerning life and celibacy on others, and create you own religion with an atoning Messiah dying for your sins. This has no precedent in Judaism. There is such a degree of focus on sexual morality in the evangelical churches I attended over the years, you might be led to believe that only sexual morality mattered to God. Sexual morality is only an opinion of a religious organisation. Looking broader, true immorality is politicians giving special favours to big corporations to rape and despoil the environment in the quest for endless wealth, the refusal by corporations making billions of dollars to provide fair living wages and conditions to workers who depend on them for employment, the church turning a blind to domestic violence and child abuse in the church, and ministers and religious leaders being caught with their pants around their ankles but then being restored to their position because they “repented”. Please feel free to express your own outrage on the many other examples of immorality you can think of. I’ve barely scratched the surface.

12. The worst arbiter of what is immoral is the Christian Church, and that comes from Paul and his conviction that there was no time to deal with the real world, because Jesus would be here soon. It’s the reason I believe Paul is the ultimate religious fraud, peddling false claims about his qualifications and being a Pharisee. The evidence against Paul’s credibility is very strong. He makes a claim to be a Pharisee who was born in Tarsus and went to Jerusalem. Only Hebrew would be used by the Pharisees studying the Torah in Jerusalem. Paul only ever uses the Greek Septuagint, never the Hebrew. He is a self-proclaimed apostle, and no one can confirm that he ever saw or met Jesus. This is a key point. All Pauline theology relies on us believing this claim. We have to take this on faith. He claims he learned the gospel directly from Jesus (Galatians Chapter 4), never being taught by the other true apostles (contradicting Acts Chapter 9), and he is at pains always to denigrate and belittle the original disciples, trying to establish his own credentials as superior. I will follow this up in a later essay, but I think there is good reason not to accept Paul’s claims and teachings at face value.

13. It’s important to keep some perspective here as well about the nature and consequences of the Kingdom of God they are proclaiming. This isn’t some place of perfection where people live in harmony with God and pain and suffering are gone. Rather it will be a place of enforced worship, with the people of God spending their days worshipping the God who overcame the evil he actually created. In a later essay, I will address the very troubling information we have about the Kingdom of God and the Christian concept of heaven.

14. The coming of the Kingdom of God ushers in the end of human history and the end of all chance of conversion to the true religion and salvation from God’s wrath. Those un-evangelised at the coming of the Kingdom are eternally lost, estimated at three billion currently, with no hope of redemption, (See my essay on The Fate of the Lost). This isn’t good news for anyone, except the smug authors who wrote this genre of literature and believed they had a message for God’s people.

Conclusion

There will be no apocalypse of God’s making, but that doesn’t preclude an apocalypse happening. If the human race continues on its present trajectory, the apocalypse will be a collapse of all agriculture and fisheries worldwide and the end of being able to grow enough food for the human race. The Earth has about sixty years of topsoil remaining for growing crops. The Amazon, once the lungs of the planet that produced so much oxygen, is now a carbon dioxide producer. Fishing has destroyed the fisheries in places like the North Sea and desertification is reducing arable land in Africa every year. Add to that global warming and rising sea levels, and by the start of the next century, we will have destroyed our habitat and the wars we fight will be over resources like food and water, and no one will win. And Jesus will still not have returned!

That will be the apocalypse that ends human history, because history proves we never learn and never change, and that human greed and stupidity have no limits. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and for every person committed to saving the planet, there are ten corporations determined to rape the planet for every last cent of profit, before it all falls apart. Will humanity survive another one hundred years? Some will, but the standard of living we now take for granted in the west will be a distant memory.

Apocalypticism offers false hope and is clouds without rain. It is distracting and was never intended to be read and used beyond the time in which it was written. Every time the world edged ever closer to the brink of another war, whether World War 1 or World War 2, or the Cold War and so on, people tried to find truth in books like Daniel and Revelation. They are no more reliable than reading the entrails of the goat you are going to cook for dinner. They offer nothing of ethical or moral value, and lead people astray, wasting their time in endless speculation when they could be leading a fulfilling life. Truth is not in them and history does not have a start date, and it definitely won’t have an end date that a non-existent God decides. We are in this alone, and only we can make the decisions that will avert a catastrophe of our own making.