May 17, 2018--End Times Come to Jerusalem

I've written about this so often that I wouldn't blame you if you moved quickly to something else.

The subject of this is the real reason Christian Evangelicals are obsessed with Israel and the Jews. We got a glimpse of that obsession the other day when Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner presided over the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. 

The real reason this is a big deal not just for Jews but for all Americans is because Evangelicals have an inordinate amount of political power in America now that Trump is president. He shamelessly panders to them as they constitute the heart of his base.

Hint--the real reason is not because Evangelicals are concerned about anti-Semitism. Quite the contrary. One could argue that the ways in which Evangelicals view Jews is in its essence anti-Semitic.

Evidence for this is the fact that Trump arranged to have Texas televangelist John Hagee deliver one of the prayers at the embassy's dedication. 

Hagee is well known in Evangelical circles for having said that Hitler was doing "God's work" when he slaughtered six million Jews. It was God's work because to millennialist Evangelicals such as Hagee to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the millennium all Jews must emigrate to Israel to participate in awaiting his return.

According to Hagee and his millions of followers, when the Messiah appears, Jews will be given one final opportunity to convert to Christianity. All those who do not will be killed and relegated to an eternity in Hell.

In this mad scenario Jews who go along with Evangelicals' apocalyptic assignment for them will be the ultimate dupes. According to the Hagee crowd millions of Jews needed to be murdered during the Holocaust to motivate or scare the rest of us to flee to the safety of the Promised Land. Safety only if we convert to Christianity. 

What an unholy bargain.

At the very hour the embassy was being dedicated, those watching on live TV, via split screen, could witness another slaughter taking place just a few miles away--Israeli solders killing scores of protesting Palestinians and wounded well over a thousand more.

On the left side of the screen, at the new embassy, glamed-up yiddisher maidella Ivanka Trump was unveiling a plaque on the wall by the entrance, a plaque on which Trump's name was emblazoned in typeface at least as large as that identifying the embassy itself. In effect--not unlike Trump Tower, The Donald J. Trump Embassy in Jerusalem.

And on the right side of the screen we could watch young people from Gaza, living in apartheid Israel, being murdered by the dozens in cold blood by Israeli security forces using live ammunition.

Meanwhile, U.S. ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, said those killed and wounded along the walled border between Gaza and Israel brought it on themselves. They deserved what they got. 

What they got was killed and wounded.

Then there was Evangelical minister Robert Jeffress, head of one of the largest megachurches in the South, who delivered the opening prayer at the opening of the new embassy. He is highly regarded among Evangelical for having said repeatedly that unconverted Jews cannot be saved. He claims that this is confirmed by the words of Jesus, Peter, and Paul, who he misquotes as saying, "Judaism won't do it." Only faith in Christ.  

This is why for all Americans, not just Jews, this is a very big deal.

September 28, 2015--Blood Moon

Sunday night saw the last in a series of four total lunar eclipses that occurred within the past two years--a so-called tetrad.

This doesn't happen very often, especially when one of the eclipses, best when it is the last of the four, is a Blood Moon. The previous one was in 1982, the next in 2033.

This occurs when the moon is in its perigee, when it is closest to the Earth, and thus the reflected light of the moon, before it is eclipsed, has to pass through a maximum thickness of the Earth's atmosphere which causes the light to red-shift.

If this sparks our contemporary imagination, as Sunday's did, one can only imagine how it struck native people, who even at their most knowledgable (the Incas and Mayans come to mind), had limited astronomical and scientific sophistication.

For all ancient peoples, this occasional lunar phenomenon (and concomitant solar eclipses) was imbued with spiritual portent, often with concern expressed about the cycles of nature that people depended upon for their survival.

So any tribal leader, priest, or shaman who could understand these occurrences, their spiritual meaning, and predict when they would occur and, perhaps more important, offer assurances that they would soon end, wielded uncommon power among his people.

This was true as well for more modern and scientifically advanced people.

For example, in 1504, Christopher Columbus was on another of his voyages to the New World, this time along the north coast of Jamaica. Short of food, to dupe the natives into supplying his men with what they desperately needed, he knew it would help if he was able to appear god-like. To do so, knowing from his astronomical tables that a lunar eclipse was about to occur, he "predicted" it; and when it occurred on schedule, he was regarded as having supernatural powers.

This was especially true when after the Jamaican Indians begged him to make the moon reappear he "did" so as asked. The next day the natives gave Columbus and his men all the food and fresh water they has asked for.

Closer to our own time, there have been a number of apocalyptical prophesies associated with Blood Moons.

Perhaps most recent is the one propagated by the Reverend John Hagee. In 2007, like Columbus, anticipating an upcoming tetrad of special significance, he claimed that this one, which coincides with the Jewish Holidays, with no less than six full moons in between, including four consecutive lunar eclipses with no intervening partial eclipses, is a sure sign of the End Times and the beginning of the Millennium, which he asserts are described in the Bible in Acts 2:20 and Revelations 6:12.

I assume you are reading this on Monday, a day after the End Times were to commence. I don't know about you, but I have not as yet seen any evidence of this. Oh well.

If Hagee is still around in 2033, I assume we will be hearing more from him.