It’s been over six months since John Hagee’s four blood moons finality turned into a fiasco. The silence of his apology is deafening.
Poor John Hagee—I think I’ll send him some money to make him feel better.
And I’m still elated at the other end-times bullets we’ve dodged in recent years. The earth should be a smoking cinder by now, at least according to a couple of prophecies, but God stayed his savage hand. But don’t worry about our reality being controlled by a savage Bronze Age god. Fortunately, the evidence points to him not existing at all, and those end-times predictions are all nonsense.
The much-edited parchment above shows just some of the Christian end-times predictions that have come and gone in the last 2000 years, and it’s already out of date.
At the top, it takes us back to the mother of all failed predictions:

Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God (Mark 9:1, Matthew. 16:28, Luke 9:27).

Apologists will argue that the prediction actually did come true because seeing “the kingdom of God” turns out to be not as big a deal as you might imagine. It’s the destruction of the Temple, for example, or it’s some sort of new age. But if that prediction was fulfilled, where is the prediction of the second coming of Jesus? A single prediction can’t be both fulfilled in the first century and also unfulfilled so that the second coming sword of Damocles hangs over our heads even now.
More to the point, it’s harder to handwave away the stars falling from the sky and the other cosmic calamities (Mark 13:24–31) and the comparison of the end times with Noah’s flood, where the unworthy are swept away unexpectedly and the master “will cut [them] to pieces and assign [them] a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 24:36–51).
It’s been close to 2000 years since those “standing here” reportedly heard those words. Whoops!

Faith is just gullibility dressed up in its Sunday best.
— commenter Machintelligence

The artwork above was created by the talented Kyle Hepworth, who also did the covers of my books Cross Examined and A Modern Christmas Carol.
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/27/13.)