What are you doing this summer? You might want to change your vacation plans. There is going to be a lunar eclipse tomorrow night, and according to Pastor Hagee, that means disaster. I don’t know what he’s talking about; he’s a minister, he gets loads of tax breaks, so 15 April is no big deal to him.
"I believe that the heavens are God’s billboard, that he has been sending signals to planet Earth," he explained. "God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon.’"
So what’s going to happen?
Hagee predicted that the four eclipses were signaling a "world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015."
A world-shaking event
, some time in a span of a year and a half? That’s pretty vague. Could you at least say something like an event that starts with the letter ‘m’, or maybe ‘j’ or ‘t’, on a planet with a name that definitely begins with an ‘e’
. Come on, try a little harder.
But this surprises me:
"God sends planet Earth a signal that something big is about to happen! He’s controlling the Sun and the moon right now to send our generation a signal, but the question is, are we getting it?"
He’s controlling the Sun and moon? But these are phenomena that are reliable and mathematically predictable, a pattern determined by the movements of the bodies involved. It’s like announcing that twice today, God will make both the little hand and the big hand on your clock point straight up — it’s a non-power. We don’t need prayer for it to happen, and praying won’t stop it from happening, and it won’t mean anything other than that it is noon and midnight.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and predict that sometime today, god will make me hungry, and then god will make me find something to eat, and later tonight god will make me sleepy.
Uh-oh, how will I be able to remain an atheist with proof like that?
Tides!
Magnets!
I thought the election and then the re-election of Obama was supposed to be the signal of the End Times.
Or was that the Bat Signal?
John Hagee is proof positive that the only trait necessary to be a successful preacher is a well-modulated baritone voice.
Fucking geometry. How does that work?
Maybe you should eat magic crackers, then you won’t be hungry for a while…like until late afternoon or early evening, just in time for dinner when god again makes you hungry.
Perhaps Hagee saw tonight’s eclipse called a “blood moon,” which has been repeated many times in the lead up…dramatic headlines catch eyes, get clicks. No doubt he is unaware that the moon always looks red during a lunar eclipses, probably having never seen one. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
… and comments disabled on the video.
Typical. Fella can’t even ask a question about the specifics of the cataclysm (which is surprisingly difficult to spell). Flood? Fire? Global warming? The GOP taking control of the Senate? Stock market downturn (other than the current sell-off)?
This is one of those “anything even remotely clysmic counts as a successful prophecy” things, isn’t it?
Blood Moon was a great expansion for Morrowind, and Hagee has just discovered it. Hey, Hagee, we already moved past that, you know, already a lot of newer games to play in the mean time.
“God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon.’”
Everybody have your umbrellas handy. You don’t want to get any of THAT on you.
When Hagee goes into the counting room he must laugh and laugh and laugh,
Sheesh, PZ, you must be Chosen or something. God has never made me something to eat. The only time I waited for him to make me lunch, I starved to death. Literally, to death. The only reason I’m here to post this is because Satan reincarnated me as an atheist.
It turns out that the earth shaking event was that King Joffery was kill in the HBO series, “Game of Thrones.” God had read the books and knew that Joffery was going to die, but kind of hoped that the show would deviate from the books on that point. Because as God said, “He reminds me of a young me. Handsome, Brave, Caring, a Great King. Everything, like I was, but you know without all that incest.” Now that his favorite character is dead. God will send earthquakes to California, famine to the Horn of Africa, and political strife to the middle east. Also he will punish those bastard Dornish who think that they are so high and mighty.
@5, Kevin Kehres
Well, yeah. Have you seen YouTube comments? I’m not sure if you can really hold that against anyone. ;)
Hagee counts anything as a success, evidently. The other day he was gassing on about Moses having accurately listed the steps of creation while writing Genesis. He went on a big rant about how many lottery machines you’d need to match the odds of getting all the steps in the right order. Then he came up with a couple of other illustrations of the fantastic improbability, while his audience applauded dutifully.
But he never said how we knew the steps were actually listed in the right order. Maybe he thought they must be what God said they were, and Moses got it right because God, and then Jesus. I really don’t know.
But however he got there, the account of creation in Genesis is fantastically, impossibly improbable, therefore it is true, therefore God.
So Hagee will count any damned thing as proof of his prediction.
PZ, you may want to change “tomorrow night” into “this coming night”. The eclips starts around 12:15 pm ET. So tells me NdGT, and he should know.
They’re in that order because Genesis lists them in that order, which makes Moses’ feat all the more impressive since Genesis wasn’t even written yet when he wrote it.
This cold- reading for Christ stuff is fun!
René: It starts 12:54 AM, not PM, ET. Full eclipse is between 3:07am and 4:25am ET. So, it is tomorrow on the east coast. Middle of the night here in California. Perhaps I’ll take a peak.
Sometime in the next week, God’s gonna make me want to eat a burrito.
that guy is so close to being totally corrupted as it makes no difference
sorry there is no way I am going to listen to him bad enough just looking at is face
uncle frogy.
The stupidest thing I heard him say, is “the sun and the moon will eclips at the same time”. Does he take that out of his book?
Then, you lot are the lucky ones tonight, as this eclips, and the next, will not be visible from Western Europe.
Robro, thanks for putting me straight.
Come on. Most reverend Hagee has made a scientifically testable prophesy. Sometime in the next two years, the sun and the moon will eclipse at the same time! Because the light from the sun will be blotted out, we’ll be able to see the blood moon at the same time. I’m going to be watching for it, because this makes the end-times so scientific.
Earth shaking event.
The Dems get there act together and take the House and get 60 seats in the Senate, Now that would scare the Holy Carp out of Hagee.
Piece of historical trivia: The earliest event we can definitely date is a battle between the Medes and the Lydians in Anatolia (modern Turkey) on 28 May 585 BCE. A solar eclipse occurred during the battle which so shook up both sides they agreed to an immediate truce. Herodotus wrote about this event in his History and gave an approximate date. Modern astronomers were able to determine when a solar eclipse would have been visible in Anatolia and came up with the date.
And it’s all explained in my new book, available now for a love offering of only $24.99. But if you act now I’ll also include a miracle blood moon rock which can be used to ward off demons and homosexual invasions!
Mr Hagee, if he is actually a Christian, has an overactive imagination.
The blood-moon theory is full of holes. See this debunking from Chris White. http://bibleprophecytalk.com/bpt-blood-moon-theory-debunked-and-more/ (The text below the video is all you need to check out).
I can’t help but think of that scene from Ghostbusters II where Bill Murray’s character has a cute little talk show where he interviews psychics. It goes something like…
Seriously? In 2014? A lunar eclipse is an omen? Good thing Hagee won’t live to see Halley’s next appearance, he’d piss himself.
This is the guy that John McCain made famous.
Mr Hagee gets his astronomy from Bill O’Reilly.
Come on now, he’s really not, is he? Impressive as eclipses are if you’re into that ind of thing, they don’t actually make any noise at all, let alone speak in intelligible words at any volume.
This kind of misuse of words annoys me enough I really should be a sub-editor or something. Or maybe for sanity’s sake I shouldn’t.
Well, he’s right about one thing. If the sun and moon are both eclipsed on the same day, there’ ll be some serious shit coming down!
And to put icing on the omen cake: the eclipse is in the constellation Virgo near Spica, and Mars appears relatively bright near by. So there! Bad moon’s on the rise.
I tell you what, if we have a solar, AND a lunar eclipse at the SAME TIME, they I’ll become a Christian right then and there.
God is off his meds again, hence all the screaming.
11 hours to go, at dusk here in Adelaide we get to see both a sunset and a blood moon rising, all at the same time. I’m predicting this will signal the End Times for some chicken patties and some steamed vegetables. How prescient of him to predict that!
Perhaps you’ve seen it: Blood Moon = Heartbleed. Another omen that the end is nigh:
Heartbleed is about to get worse, and it will slow the Internet to a crawl.
Coincidence? I think not. Disaster looms. Prepare to meet your maker you internet atheists. Take That!!!! Apocalypse Now has been a popular movie for 2500 years, and it’s still selling ad space.
Oh and the next lunar eclipse in April is suppoosed to be a partial one, hardly a blood moon.
I like the way he is reading far far too much into a lunar eclipse, while using the imagery of a solar eclipse.
Eclipses happen pretty frequently (in the grand scheme of things). It’s just that they tend to spread around the globe, so they seem relatively rare for someone who is uninformed….
Newton’s laws of planetary motion: how do they fucking work?
Oh my Glob! An event that comes a few times each year heralds the End Times! Repent! Repent!
I’m hoping the Old Ones return, and Hagee’s head falls off and mouths open in his palms. I can dream.
I think LaPlace (dead more than 150 years) would be very much surprised at someone inserting the god hypothesis into the business of celestial mechanics.
It isn’t god, Hagee. Its the Sky Goat who is coming to gobble up the moon tonight only to shit it back out a couple of hours later.
England are going to win the World Cup? Impossible. Clear evidence he’s just another delusional idiot.
If “god” really wanted to be effective in his use of a lunar eclipse as a “signal,” then it was pretty stupid of him to have scheduled it for the middle of the night when most of the Northern Hemisphere’s people will be sleeping, and also to have arranged for overcast skies and rain this evening (in my region).
Idiot.
The whole point of we already knowing the eclipses will take place is that they’re nothing out of the ordinary! Ugh.
I hope people download that video so when nothing happens we can all throw it back into that fat frauds face.
I’ve been beat to it, but I have to add my solemn vow: if the Sun and Moon eclipse at the same time (just think of it! the Moon covers the Sun, just as the Earth’s shadow covers it! Either a HUGE bending of space-time happens or a new STAR suddenly appears behind us!) I’ll have no recourse but to immediately start worshiping Satan!
> Hagee predicted that the four eclipses were signaling a “world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”
What vexes me the most is that (a) I have to wait another 18 months until the fateful day and (b) somebody else will have seen other signs for a later doomsday by then.
And obviously, he is right. Something world-shaking is definitely going to happen. Perhaps the Ukraine crumbles, or earthquakes and fires rage in Chile, or Glenn Greenwald makes new revelations about NSA practices.
Atheism is like cooties yikes. It is contagious, and infects your brain destroying you completely and all your morals in the process. Check out this delusional youtube video, it is fucking hilarious.
I tell you what, if we have a solar, AND a lunar eclipse at the SAME TIME, they I’ll become a Christian right then and there.
Get a-prayin’, then, because simultaneous with tonight’s lunar eclipse visible from the earth, there will be a SOLAR eclipse visible from the moon.
Checkmate, atheist!
So, he’s really sure this time? Not like his prediction back in 2012, which passed rather undramatically?
Source: http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2012/03/john-hagee-explains-how-and-why-world.html
In the time travel novelA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which Mark Twain bashes medieval ignorance, the narrator manages to wow the King by knowing when an eclipse is going to take place.
mikeyb #49
It’s satire.
“The stars predict that tomorrow, you’ll wake up, do a bunch of stuff, then go back to sleep.”
— Weird Al, “Your Horoscope for Today”
Important: This eclipse is tonight after midnight, which effectively is April 15th, but that means that this is tonight NOT tomorrow night. In North America in the Central Time zone, where I am at, it begins at 11:55 pm TONIGHT. Total eclipse begins at 2:08 am CDT and ends at 3:28 am CDT. Here is further information: http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/lunar/2014-april-15
“Oh Me, oh Me, oh Mmmmeeeee!!!!!”
Presumably.
But these eclipses occur at significant times on the Jewish calendar!!!!
Which is a lunisolar calendar.
John Marley @ #54:
I see your Weird Al, and raise you George Carlin:
“Forecast for tonight…Dark!”
– Al Sleet, “Your Hippy-Dippy Weatherman”
“Get a-prayin’, then, because simultaneous with tonight’s lunar eclipse visible from the earth, there will be a SOLAR eclipse visible from the moon.”
All depends what you mean by ‘eclipse’. Tonight’s event is not a lunar eclipse technically because it will not be covered up by any celestial object at that time. What we have is an eclipse of the Earth visible from the moon.
Since the Earth itself is a “heavenly body” we might say that there is both a lunar and a solar eclipse every day, called respectively “moon set” and “sun set”. The eclipsing object being the earth.
I thought Jesus had his second coming on his wedding night….
PZ, you really shouldn’t make fun of him. The Necronomicon is very clear on this:
Why shouldn’t fuckwittery be made fun off? Sincerity of the idjit? Or true unskeptical fuckwittery on the part of those making inane claims?
Boy, Nerd of Redhead, I’m going to have to start hitting them REALLY low to keep them from going over your head.
Oh, you think you are funny???? Think again real hard. If nobody gets your lack of humor, it should tell you something….
Al Dente @#22
Interesting, but I would be cautious assuming we have a specific date for the battle. The scribes who linked the astronomical event with the human event may have been aggrandizing one by juxtaposing it with the other. A fairly common practice in that date. These Iron Age folk seemed to appreciate the propaganda value of big sky events, much like Hagee.
“I believe the heavens are God’s billboard…”
Wrong. Everyone knows the heavens are FSM’s strainer, duh. Where does he think rain comes from?
Lol, and tell God to hurry up and come already, the world has got to be up early for work in the morning.
Sally in comment 27 said that McCain helped make this Hagee idjit famous. (Yet another reason why politicians should have a senility and sanity-based term limit.) I was thinking this preacher was one of those in an extramarital adulterous affair or prostitution scandal, but I can’t keep any of them straight any more. Well, apparently, neither can their deity. But I guess if insanity, fraud, covetousness, and breaking many other of their commandments isn’t a bar to their doing “good works”, what’s one more whopper of a lie?
John Thuggee is using the Sollog method: Vaguely predict something bad will happen between two dates. When something “interesting” happens, no matter what it is, you can claim it’s proof of your prophecy powers. In fact he’ll likely take claim for it even if it happens a bit after October 2015.
You’d think he’d be worried about looking like another Harold Camping. Then again Camping was wrong more than once, and still managed to find new suckers to fleece.
timgueguen wrote:
He’s already been wrong once. There’s a video on the link I posted above where he suggested the end of the world would be in 2012 (with appropriate question marks and hedging so that he had weasle room to get out of his prediction if necessary).
The history of the Millerites shows that being wrong about the end of the world doesn’t mean the end of a preacher’s career in fleecing their flock, though. If anything, being wrong after investing so much just makes many of them even more devoted to the next prediction.
Just to be the buzzkill pedant: That emphasized portion of your statement is *wrong*. An “eclipse” occurs when 3 celestial bodies are collinear ( 3 points forming a single,straight line ). For the 3 bodies being Earth, Moon, & Sun; colinearity occurs rarely, NOT everyday, by any means. Tonight is one instance of colinearity, and there won’t be another for a few more months.
The extraordinary thing about this year is there will be 4 of these alignments in a much shorter span of time than typical. They are calling it a Tetrad of eclipses. The occurrence of a Tetrad is much rarer, but not totally unique; and for some reason, this year’s tetrad is driving some loonies totally bonkers: like the Rev. Hagee of the OP.
Well, Brillig, I consider myself to be a heavenly body, so there.
People living on the international space station will see around 18 lunar and solar eclipses every day. I think anyone will admit the space station into the list of heavenly bodies because it’s out in space. So about 18 times a day the Earth will be between the space station and the moon, and about the same for the sun.
And your definition fits the term “syzygy”, not the term “eclipse”, at least if the Wikipedia article is right, which I cannot personally vouch for, although a quick google search shows several other sites agreeing with it.
I am disturbed by news and discoveries happening in the world. I think the impact of humanity has reached a point of critical mass such that multiple massive systems finally collapse to make the world inhospitable to life as we know it, especially to ourselves. We have definitely reached a point of irrevocable harm done to the ecosystems on a local scale, and we’re only now waking up to the devastation left in our wake on a global scale.
All I’ll have to look forward to in my old age seems to be survival. It’s all pretty bleak in my world, even without religion as the “trumpet call” (out of the ass). So I’ll look at the blood red moon and hope that the next intelligent beings which look upon it have the sense to not disturb the balances which are beyond control, and that it acts as a reminder about the damage which beliefs not grounded in reality, contradictory to reality, or in spite of reality had wrought before their age. And if that is absolutely impossible for any intelligence then may life forever remain dim.
Lofty @#36 — Tonight’s lunar eclipse is a total eclipse in North America, but perhaps not in Australia.
Unfortunately, the Bay Area’s air conditioner has brought it a high layer of fog/cloud. You can see the moon at the moment, but not sure how things will look in a couple of hours.
I see the moon but we have overcast skies.
Maybe if I pray…
If a sequence of eclipses are “God screaming” then it has to be assumed that God had penned this session of screaming onto his calendar a billion years ago. These things are highly predictable is you understand the structure of the solar system and orbital mechanics. Given such a long lead time it is very hard to interpret this as any sort of judgment or judgment about what humans have done.
Ah, but you’re thinking linearly. As a being that exists outside of time, God can react in the past to things that will happen in the future, as all times are essentially the same to a transcendent extra-temporal being.
(Where’s the part of the Bible that explains all this? Oh, it’s there. You just have to look deep. Really deep. Waaaay past all the bits where God does things in sequential order, and is surprised, and changes his mind, and all the other bits where it implies he’s as temporal as the rest of us. You just need
to make stuff upa proper exegesis.)Robro @74, I meant the next lunar eclipse in May would be partial. Tonight’s will be full from wherever you get to see it on Earth as the moon will be in complete shadow, so the viewpoint matters not. This is because the moon is that much smaller than the Earth and it fits entirely in the shadow cone cast by our perching place. Hopefully you’ll see the eclipse somehow, anyway there’s bound to be a live stream or three from a bunch of observatories to watch.
Waugh! I went out to look at the moon, and saw two misshapen dark forms, inhuman and incoherent. I don’t know how Hagee would have reacted, but I put them in their carrier and gave them some rawhide chews.
Yes, and for God “controlling” the moon and sun for him to really send a message would be for him to not have the predicted eclipse happen. I think this guy is simply a dimwit and doesn’t get the difference between something happening because it’s predicted and something happening that takes us by surprise.
*but* to be fair. In this video he never actually said God was sending the message as a judgement in response to anything we did; simply that it’s a message. So it’s possible it’s a message God had always intended to send us even before humans existed…. or I’m giving the guy too much credit.
=======
So, um, the weird thing for me about turning fifty, is discovering that all this weird archetypes of people from my childhood are being replaced by identical weird archetypes of people but they are all my age. This guy is at most ten years older than me; probably more like only four or five years older. Why would anyone my age choose to live a life that would have turned him into a jowly “signs of god” preacher like this when he could have had choices to be anything else. It’s really upsetting to me.
Went out and saw the blood red moon*, destruction of dinner is now iminent.
*Actually just a bit grubby rather than really reddish.
OMG it’s a total lunar eclipse; those only happen once or twice a year!
Which is a much rarer occurrence than religious nuts predicting the end of the world!
Does this shaman think he’s dealing with illiterate goatherds? There are really only two ways this sort of thing works:
1. You predict an eclipse which nobody else does.
2. An unforeseen eclipse happens, and you yell about it afterwards.
In a society where I can look up the dates of eclipses for the rest of my life and beyond… meh. He might as well predict that there will be a Tuesday within the next seven days.
timgueguen #69
And don’t forget that they always have the fallback position of just claiming that something remarkable happened “on a spiritual level”. That’s an excuse going as far back as the very origins of Christianity, turning the physical military and political victory of the expected Jewish Messiah (which obviously didn’t happen) into the spiritual salvation of Jesus; from the actual liberation of Israel to “the kingdom of god is within you”.
Argh, no, god made me post this!
Wow, that’s bizarre.
It’s like those cliché stories, where the adventurer is captured by the natives and about to be sacrificed, but luckily he knows a solar eclipse is about to happen, so he “predicts” it and styles himself as a prophet to save himself.
Except in this case, the native (Hagee) is fully aware of the calculations that allow the adventurer to predict the astronomical phenomenon. He should know it’s not any sort of special intervention but a mathematically predicted event, so why would he believe anything the adventurer is trying to tell him about his supposed divinity?
Oh, right. Because he started with the conclusion that the adventurer, his god, is divine. Math just proves his divinity!
If Revered Hagride predicted four consecutive lunar eclipses that astronomy missed or pulled out his rod and staff, waggled them about and prevented the upcoming eclipses I’d take notice.
On the other hand, the entire concept of prophecy implies the actions of man as well as the heavens are fixed. So a fixed event as a message isn’t really inconsistent. But it sure seems to expose logical wierdness when you actually place such in terms of such precise and explicitly predictable celestial phenomena.
You kind of have to give up free will (which was a heresy at first anyway) and also have to pretty much require predeterminism. Not appealing to the modern american fundy.
You misread. :-)
…There are no comments between yours and anuran’s. You have no evidence that nobody got it.
*FLOOSH*
(I got it immediately, BTW.)
I vote for replacing FLOOSH by PCHSSSSSGORGOLGLOGLOGLO, following the great Ibáñez the Greatest.
For what it’s worth, I usually assume anyone quoting the Necronomicon is joking. Or at least kidding. Never serious in any sense of the word at any rate.
Oh, I can be serious about the Necronomicon. If someone wanted “The real thing. Not that Lovecraft crap” I’d have the most serious look on my face you ever saw. I’d be VERY convincing when I told him he wanted the leather-bound limited edition hardcover with marbled endpapers, not the paperback. No checks or credit cards, cash only please :)
@92: Isn’t that supposed to be bound in human hide, not just any leather?
re @72:
erp, maybe. I just describe the geometry of what I consider a lunar or solar eclipse. ‘Cause the moon’s orbit is sometimes a little higher or lower than being in a perfectly straight line; new moons aren’t always solar eclipses and full moons aren’t always lunar eclipses. Never heard of the word ‘syzygy’, so I quote the wiki definition, and the wiki defn of ‘eclipse’:
Wikipedia:
Still not seeing how my defn of ‘eclipse’ mismatches wiki’s.
BUhhhhTT this is not an astronomy blog, So any further discussion should be moved over to Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog.
Thanks for your consideration.