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Meditation 1189
Blood moons, raptures, and apocalypses

by: John Tyrrell

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I was offered another video by the person behind Earth Shaking News - the same person who gave us what he called TRUTH as Talk Back 128 last week. This time, I chose not to inflict the video on myself, let alone you.

According to the ALL-CAPS message he sent me, the question being dealt with was whether America would be destroyed during the so-called Blood Moons this year. I suspect the answer has to be no, because Earth Shaking News still contains a countdown clock counting down the seconds until Satan has micro-chips installed in everyone - scheduled for 1 January 2017.*

I decided to look into blood moons - because I've seen a fair bit of nonsense being put out with them as end times signs. Of course there's always end times nonsense being promulgated - last months "near miss"** with Asteroid 2004 BL86 generated yet again talk of Nibiru and Planet X sneaking up to collide with Earth and bring the apocalypse - and yet again, nothing happened.

But on googling blood moon, google's auto-complete offered as top choices "blood moon rapture" and "blood moon apocalypse."

So what are blood moons? It seems a couple of end times promoting fundamentalist fools of pastors - Mark Blitz and John Hagee - came up with the term to denote the ongoing lunar tetrad - which happens to coincide with four Jewish holidays over two years - supposedly fulfilling a biblical prophecy.

A lunar tetrad consists of "four successive total lunar eclipses, with no partial lunar eclipses in between, each of which is separated from the other by six lunar months (six full moons)"***

Is a lunar tetrad rare? Well there are 8 expected in the current century - in terms of events in the solar system they are not particularly rare.

Ah - but Hagee and Blitz say this tetrad which we are in the middle of is special. All four of the blood moons coincide with the Jewish feasts of Passover and Tabernacles - two years in a row.

Oh wow! That is so rare it must mean something! The end is nigh! The end is nigh!

Not really. The current one is the eighth time a lunar tetrad has coincided with those specific Jewish holidays since the first century. And when you think about it - given that the Jewish months are based on the lunar cycle - you see that if the first eclipse in a tetrad coincides with one holiday, subsequent ones in the tetrad are going to coincide with the others.

And get this - each of the seven times it has happened before now - there have been precisely zero raptures; precisely zero apocalypses; precisely zero Second Comings. History has demonstrated there is no connection between lunar tetrads falling on Jewish holy days and the occurrences of end times.

Other than Hagee using the event to rake in dollars from the suckers by selling yet another bullcrap book - don't expect anything of religiously apocalyptic significance to occur on April 4 this year; or on September 28.

But do expect self-proclaimed seers to continue to make ever-failing predictions about the forthcoming rapture, the coming Second Coming, the future apocalypse, and the horrifying end times. And you can safely continue to ignore those predictions, putting your immortal soul (if you have one) at absolutely no risk at all.

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Notes:

* John Tyrrell fearlessly predicts Satan's installation of microchips will not happen.

** 745,000 miles - the moon, on average is about 240,000 miles away - so if 745,000 miles is a near miss, then the moon is constantly extremely closely missing the earth.

*** A lot of the material for this article came from earthsky.org.

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