Okay, I missed Monday. It was a holiday, for one, and I was far away from the Internet in Mexico, for two. Also, Ambien. But it's Thursday now, so here you go.
It’s been just about three weeks since Trump moved the American Embassy out of Tel Aviv and into Jerusalem, and still the End Times have not commenced. No one on the American religious right has officially expressed disappointment in this, since keeping your chin up about Jesus not coming back and hauling some of our asses into Heaven and blasting the rest of us into Hell has been something Christians have been forced to do since their franchise came into existence, but their feelings must have been a little hurt.
It's likely only American Christians think moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem is part of the forthcoming Apocalypse. The Bible in its entirety does not mention America at all, let alone any of its official structures. The Temple being rebuilt and the Antichrist defiling it are what the Good Book mentions, and even there, it ain’t so clear. For example:
26 After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing.[a] The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.
Yeah, okay. These are the words of the Prophet Daniel, and while you may think they are just vaguely terrifying old bullshit, people take it and other prophecies equally abstruse pretty seriously and claim that they prove modern events are moving inevitably towards the moment when Jesus returns to punch all our tickets.
The big event that will kickstart the Rapture is not the American Embassy leaving a change-of-address form at the Tel Aviv post office, but rather the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, according to students of Scripture. Itty problem there--the site is occupied by the Dome of the Rock, a mosque built on the spot when Islam became the cool local flavor for religion. The site is sacred to Muslims, too, because it is the allegedly the place where Mohammed mounted a horse and rode it into Heaven. Without dwelling overlong on the likelihood that this actually happened, you have to realize that people who sincerely believe that at least one horse is already stabled in Heaven are not going to take kindly to anyone, no matter how keen on precipitating Doomsday they are, remodeling their mosque.
The problem with the ancients is that they had no way of conceiving of the end of humanity on Earth except by divine intervention. The end of all humans is something, oddly, that some humans have desired since the beginning of civilization, if not before. Probably this is because people have always hated their neighbors and wished to see their lives blotted out. The old prophets knew nothing of asteroid strikes or super volcanoes, because God never mentioned them in the conversations they were having with Him, even though He must have already invented them by then.
In any case modern science has given us many, many other possibilities for us to extinguish ourselves or be extinguished forever, or at least to render the Earth a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by heavily tattooed mutants and decorated by attractive women wearing strategically placed bits of fur. We can nuke ourselves old school into oblivion or bake ourselves in the oven of global warming. We can invent artificial intelligences that decide to terminate us rather than put up with our shit. We can crank a dial the wrong way on the Hadron Collider and reduce the whole planet to the size of a UPS truck.
I uttered a prophesy myself, though, some years ago, and it went like this: When the end comes I predict there is going to be no obvious divine involvement. If there's one thing for certain about God it is that He keeps His existence on the down low. If the end comes as the explosion of the Yellowstone super volcano, Jesus is not going burst out of the top of the ash cloud; if a ten-mile wide asteroid comes gunning for us from the orbit of Jupiter, the Son of God is not going to be riding it like it was the Formula One Racecar of Doom; if it's a gamma-ray burst from a nearby supernova, those death rays are not going to assume the shape of the Cross before they fry us all into protein powder.
I still wait to be validated as a prophet. Others have been luckier. For decades people have warned that moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem would be a major clusterfuck. These people proved to be correct. It’s like God had spoken to them.
Move over, Daniel.