OOOps: No Rapture Yesterday! Did God Die?

For those who are disappointed that the "prophecy" of the Rapture did not materialize yesterday, I have one solution: STOP BELIEVING THE GARBAGE OF THE "SCRIPTURES". The scriptures (Torah or Old Testament) are NOT GOD's words. There isn't a God to write such balloney. These "holy texts" ('Holy' here is an adjective of "hole", i.e. empty) were written by smelly old men in the burning desert of Bronze Age Arabia - hence hallucinations cannot be excluded - about how great and magnificent they were and about how they fooled their own god Yahweh into believing that they fear no other god but him, in exchange of which he issued an executive order making them his FAVORITE PET PEOPLE and granting them somebody else's land - the Canaanite Palestinians - who he ordered must be exterminated. 

Perhaps people who believe this crap should take a moment and imagine themselves in the desert some 3,000 years ago. Imagine yourself with your fellow tribesmen walking long distances in the sun, searching for watering holes for your family and your animals. Then a nutcase, the shaman, the voodoo priest, the healer.... from the tribe decides to tell a story about the tribe, and launches into a self-serving praise of his tribesmen, about his ability to predict the future, and about having conversation with the spirits and their leader Yahweh. 

You know, there are a million stories like this, each culture at some point wrote down its own greatness and its preferential treatment by the gods.... The garbage of the Torah-Old Testament is identical to the garbage of all these ancient myths, sagas, stories and legends.... We do owe them respect because they represent our past, but to grant them veracity and truth and make them into a bellicose deadly religion is absurd, idiotic, and dangerous.

But this is where we are: Humanity - particularly around the Mediterranean - in its ignorance of the material world has created religions out of bulls - - - stories. Billions of people take this BS as true and make wars on its account: My BS story is better than yours, so I must kill you. From the Hebrews who started it all by telling their story - most of it they brought with them from Mesopotamia when they left Ur in Bagdad, Iraq, to wander the desert. All of it is crap: Eden, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Flood .... Then as the centuries went by, other smelly old men with long beards added, edited, modified, inserted, deleted, etc... to make the story even better and more fantastic: Splitting oceans, raining frogs, impregnating virgins, rising from the dead.... and the climax of it all is the ethnic cleansing of the people of Canaan who never did anything to the barbarian Hebrew nomads. 

I mean, what fool would take these self-serving fantasies as real? Unfortunately there are billions of fools who do. 

How many times are you going to be taken for a sucker by a priest, reverend, rabbi, pastor, imam etc. who tell you they speak with God and God told them when the end of the world is coming? Haven't you yet realized that it is all one big primordial soup of bullshit from our Age of Ignorance? Yet, you can't help yourself. But living with religion is like living with a distateful spouse, staying in a broken miserable marriage. Luckily, since the Age of Reason we now have the possibility to divorce ourselves out of these destructive arrangements. 

Why don't you divorce your bullshit religion (particularly any of the three monotheistic barbaric ones), whichever it may be, and liberate yourself from the Bronze Age juggernaut that has warped your brain ever since you were born and were brainwashed into it?

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The Rapture Was Predicted to Happen Today. TikTok Has Some Advice.

There are thousands of videos to help prepare those who may or may not ascend into the heavens on Tuesday.

According to many on TikTok, the Rapture will take place Sept. 23, 2025.Credit...Tim Gruber for The New York Times

By Yan Zhuang reporting from Seoul.
Sept. 23, 2025

The Rapture is upon us, according to TikTokers, some of whom have latched on to a prediction that on Tuesday, Sept. 23, Jesus Christ will return to Earth and take true believers to Heaven.

Some evangelical Christians believe the Bible predicts such an event, known as the Rapture, which essentially marks the beginning of the end of human history. They interpret parts of the Christian New Testament as describing the Rapture, including a passage from First Thessalonians that says followers of Christ “who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”

It is not uncommon for various individuals and groups to predict specific dates for the Rapture, sometimes through interpreting passages and events in the Bible, and sometimes claiming they received visions. None of the predictions have obviously come to pass. In recent days, a prediction spread through social media that the Rapture would occur Tuesday, and on TikTok, the hashtag #rapturenow has over 311,000 videos — some of which endorsed the prediction, while many others poked fun at it.

For those who believe in the prediction, the TikTokers had some advice: Don’t make any weekend plans, leave your phone unlocked and your passwords accessible for those left behind, and maybe leave your house and car unlocked. With the keys easily accessible if possible.

Why Sept. 23?

The date of Sept. 23, 2025, appears to have originated from Joshua Mhlakela of South Africa. Though news reports have widely described him as a pastor, he said in a YouTube video from June: “I’m just a simple person, no title. I’m not an apostle, I’m not a pastor, I’m not a bishop. I’m just a believer.”

In the video, he says that Jesus came to him in a dream in 2018 and told him, “On the 23rd and the 24th of September, 2025, I will come to take my church.”

The context, as Mr. Mhlakela understood it, was the 2026 FIFA World Cup. “He was telling me that by June 2026, the world is gearing up toward the World Cup,” he said, but because chaos would descend after the Rapture, “there will be no World Cup in 2026.”

His prediction somehow gathered momentum on the internet. Searches for “rapture” and “the rapture Tuesday” started to climb around Sept. 20, according to Google Trends.

While some TikTok creators appeared to believe that the Rapture was imminent and were encouraging their followers to convert to Christianity, more greeted the prediction with satirical advice.

One creator said that those who wanted to ensure they would ascend to Heaven should place items that might contain demonic energy, like designer clothing, outside their houses. Another discussed how to style outfits to match the angel wings they would soon receive.
It’s not the first Rapture prediction.

Predicting the Rapture is a longstanding practice.

Some would-be prophets come to their dates by examining numbers found in the Bible. In 2011, Harold Camping, an evangelical broadcaster, predicted that the Rapture would come on May 21 that year. He arrived at that date through a series of a calculations that assumed the world would end exactly 7,000 years after Noah’s flood. When the Rapture failed to materialize on that day, he revised his prediction to Oct. 21. (The Rapture did not happen then, either.)

There is a long history of people using numbers and dates in the Bible to try to calculate when end times will come, according to Peter Sherlock, a professor and theologian at Charles Sturt University in Australia.

“The Bible is full of patterns and symbolism,” he said in an email. “It’s no wonder that in trying to interpret this sacred text, many readers end up decoding these patterns to arrive at prognostications of doom, sometimes even dates for when the world will end.”

But, he added, the fact that people want to believe that the world will end on a certain date usually “says more about the uncertainty of our own times than it does about what is actually in the Bible.”

What happens the next day?

After every predicted Rapture has failed to materialize, believers have at times struggled to explain what happened, or what didn’t.

“Some people may suffer a crisis of faith, others may wait for the next prophet to tell them when the end will be,” Professor Sherlock said.

But more generally, Christian theology says that all Christians should live each day as if it were their last, he said.

“After all, Christ could return at any moment,” he said, adding, “So living like today is the end of the world is not so strange after all.”

Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.