Many people are aware of Christians holding signs claiming, "the end is near!" and warning people to become Christians and follow the Christian Bible before it is too late. Many Christian sects, including the Assemblies of God, Southern Baptists, Pentecostal and Evangelical churches, etc., claim Jesus will return very soon. Some of them even give a specific date of when the return of Jesus and the end of the world will take place. Current Christian sects such as the Seventh-day Adventists, Advent Christian Church and Christadelphians, and the Jehovah's Witnesses indirectly, actually came about because their followers believed Jesus would return on a specific date in the 19th century, and when Jesus was a no-show, they decided to make a new Christian sect out of it!
Many people are not aware that Jesus, or the anonymous authors of the Christian Gospels who wrote what they believed Jesus said decades after it is said that Jesus lived, believed he would return to Earth within the lifetime of the people he was preaching to 2,000 years ago. Matthew 16:28 has Jesus saying,
"Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."
The anonymous author of the Gospel of Luke, at Luke 9:27 has Jesus saying,
"But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God."
The anonymous author of the Gospel of Mark, at Mark 9:1 claims Jesus said,
"And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power."
Either there are some very, very, very old people still alive on Earth, or Jesus/the anonymous authors of Matthew, Luke and Mark were NOT telling the truth. It's best to go with your gift from The Supreme Intelligence/God of innate reason and realize Jesus/the anonymous authors of Matthew, Luke and Mark were not telling the truth.
The belief that Jesus would return during the lifetime of the people who were alive and who listened to Jesus has its roots in Jewish apocalypticism. If Jesus actually existed as a mortal, he would have been a religious/superstitious Jew. As such, he would have been heavily influenced by apocalyptic beliefs of Judaism, which taught that "... the end of the world is immanent and that vindication of God was going to happen very soon. Standing in the tradition of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, apocalypticists maintained that God had revealed to them the course of history, and that the end was almost here."
The false belief held by Jesus/the anonymous Gospel authors that the end was near and God was going to send the Jewish Messiah to earth did not come to fruition. Instead, Roman legions smashed a Jewish revolt and destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. If Jesus was wrong about that, what else was he wrong about? Was he also wrong about the biggest selling point of Christianity, salvation??
Today millions of Christians believe the end is near. They believe God will send Jesus to come down from Heaven close to Earth to rapture/collect true Christians before the tribulation starts. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 states,
"For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord."
(The last verse of this chapter instructs Christians to "... comfort one another with these words". To anyone who values and uses their gift from The Supreme Intelligence/God of innate reason will never be able to find comfort in nonsense like this.)
Many Christians believed Jesus would fly in close to earth and the Rapture would happen on May 21, 2011, due to Christian clergyman Harold Camping's claims and Bible-based predictions. That did NOT happen. When it did not happen, the Christian clergyman changed the date to October 21, 2011. Still no Jesus, no Rapture. Many of his followers dropped off from his ministry.
Recently Christians believed the Rapture was going to happen on September 23-24, 2025, based on claims made by Joshua Mhlakela, a Christian clergyman from South Africa. It did NOT happen. However, the belief that it would happen, and/or curiosity by non-Christians about the Rapture, caused such a large number of people to Google the Rapture happening soon that it eclipsed the number of people who did searches regarding Taylor Swift!
If people followed their innate God-given reason, they would not follow any of the man-made "revealed" religions and they would not fall for such nonsense as the Rapture, etc. As Thomas Paine pointed out in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition,
Deism, once Deists reach a large enough number of people with Deism, will put an end to the harmful nonsense of the "revealed" religions through God-given reason, not through violence. Humanity will then focus on reality and making the world a much better place!"Nonsense ought to be treated as nonsense, wherever it be found; and had this been done in the rational manner it ought to be done, instead of intimating and mincing the matter, as has been too much the case, the nonsense and false doctrine of the Bible, with all the aid that priestcraft can give, could never have stood their ground against the divine reason that God has given to man."
