So there’s this cat named Jesus, see? And he came to Earth, rocked the land o’ Caanan pretty good, said some good things and then checked out for a while. Said he’d be back soon.
Dude ain’t been back, ain’t been seen, but some of them groupies been jonesing for him pretty good.
aka Jesus saves.
I’d like to break this objection down, if I may…
THERE WAS NO FINAL JUDGMENT
Well, of course, final judgment hasn’t happened yet; final judgment is expected to happen at the end of time. (That’s why they call it final judgment. 
)
THE SUN WASN’T SCORCHING HOT, AND A QUARTER OF THE WORLD DIDN’T DIE
I’ve never been to Jerusalem, and I don’t know what the weather was like when the Romans seized it; but I’m given to understand that midday typically gets pretty hot. I don’t think people fighting in the desert heat (and fighting in those days involved significantly more exertion than pulling a trigger) would have a problem describing the sun in that way.
As for casualties, an eyewitness (Flavius Josephus - also the source for the longer quote below) estimates that “the number of those that perished during the whole siege [was] eleven hundred thousand [most of whom] were come up from all the country to the feast of unleavened bread, and were on a sudden shut up by an army.” That might not sound like much to you; but you’re probably comparing it with several billion, and you probably think nothing of zipping from metropolis to metropolis.
Try to imagine growing up in first century Jerusalem. Traveling is a big deal; most people spend their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born. City populations are measured in thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Now imagine something like three hundred Sept 11th’s (1.1 million is approximately equal to 300 times 3K):
It certainly would have felt like half the world had been wiped out, and poetry is all about connecting on an emotional level.
CHRIST DID NOT RETURN FOR A THOUSAND YEARS
Christian music and literature often speak of Christ the King, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to name any king, queen, president, etc. who has had as much influence on world politics as Jesus. It might not be a formal monarchy, but it’s pretty impressive for someone who was publicly executed two thousand years ago.
Yes, many believe specifically those passages refer to the destruction of the Temple in 70AD.
Do you think that those who heard his words thought he was referring to the future destruction of the temple? If I heard what was said in those passages, would I be a total ignoramus to believe he was talking about his own big return?
The Second coming will be good news for all, believers and non-believers alike.
For the believers, it represents Jesus keeping his promise to return to them and begin his millennial reign.
For the non-believers, they are rewarded with the knowing that their coffee will never again get cold.
The Second Coming is Jesus keeping his promise, and his followers realizing that all the other promises he’s made are forthcoming. That’s the simple “lowdown.”
Yeah. Go to Heaven for the climate; to Hell for the company.
(Mark Twain)
In Harlan Ellison’s story collection Dangerous Visions Damon Knight contributed a story titled “Shall The Dust Praise Thee?” that dealt with just this subject-what happens if you don’t keep your promises in a timely manner. After looking in vain for his multitudes to bring to his fold, the story ends with
My friend, I always enjoy how you drag me out of my extremely comfortable comfort zone, which usually involves nostalgia for burning your sort at the stake, by providing alternate takes to distract me. 
Moses invests!
Actually, that figure was probably exaggerated, since it exceeds the entire population of Palestine at the time, half of which were Jews.
Rats! I knew that number was crazy big, but I’m not a real historian and he’s the one who was there. I’ve since looked at several web pages that talk about the siege of Jerusalem; most of them were critical of Josephus’s estimate, but none was willing to go out on a limb with their own estimate.
Anyway, a major city was pretty much wiped out, and cities were kind of a big deal. Travel was more difficult without cars or airplanes; a pilgrimage to Jerusalem would have been a substantial undertaking - something like going to Disneyland nowadays. Most people’s lives consisted primarily of the city where they were born (or a farm and maybe the city they could walk to in a day). A city’s worth of people would be mind-bogglingly huge, and Jerusalem wasn’t just any city either: it was the site of God’s Temple - the Chosen City, if you will.
So I stand by my point: the siege of Jerusalem was psychologically devastating in a way that’s difficult for modern readers to appreciate.
9-11, stretched.
6 represents one from, perfection it’s a human number, no man can be 7 perfection, that’s only for God.
6 repeated 3 times over is just a confirmation of it’s intent.
So it’s a rejection of God and mans works that is at the forefront in the lives of the people, Communism is just as such or slavery to the madness of man.
People will become slaves to a system of corruption and Political Correctness is such a system that the Nazis used and the Communist use to brainwash and control the people.
The leadership of the Political Correct mob plays games with people leading them up the garden path and to make little leaders out of them, who push others around and are very militant types that hate any other view point that’s not of there own and they try to persuade that they are non aggressive and a people of peace and understanding.
Much like a religion that claims it’s of peace that kills others if you are not one of them or they chop your head off and that’s the same thing with Political Correctness when it’s idolised as it is building up it’s strength to dominate all people under the works of man.
It’s a people who want the kingdom but don’t want God in it, such will fail and only bring misery, as dictatorship always does.
There are so called Christian groups who wish to promote or bring in the so called 2ed coming they say, as they want to create war and destruction so as to bring there Satanic man they will call God, thing is with such morons is they believe they will be raptured up and will not go through the hell fire they caused and such believe that the ends justify the means.
Early Christians, like in the first century, generally interpreted the scriptural references to the second coming to imply that Jesus was returning within a relatively short period of time. Their lifetimes even if they lived long enough. When this didn’t happen interpretations began to shift.
By the time of the Nicene Creed in 325 Christendom essentially had abandoned the idea of any particular timeline. The Nicene Creed essentially acknowledges Christ is coming back, but it will be sudden and with little warning. Further, early post-Nicene theologians up through the majority of Catholic and Orthodox thinkers to the present time essentially hold that Christ isn’t coming back to establish an earthly Kingdom (no 1,000 years of his rule on Earth as a literal kingdom), but instead the second coming is when Christ will establish “New Jerusalem” when all the dead will be raised and judged. Essentially an end will have come to the division of the Church in heaven and the Church on Earth, and they will be one and the same.
I was raised Catholic by the way (atheist since my late teenage years), and the relative focus on the second coming at least in my diocese where I grew up just wasn’t very high.
I think a lot of the focus on this comes from Protestantism. When you had that break away from a centralized church, and the acceptance of people on the congregational (or even personal) level promulgating their beliefs a lot of ideas that had largely been settled for a thousand years came back to the forefront. After the Protestant reformation there were lots of Protestant sects that focused heavily on the passages in Revelation and interpreted the Second Coming with more of a focus on a belief that there will be a long period of physical turmoil, reign of Christ on earth and etc.
The concept of the rapture as it’s expressed in pop culture or in fundamentalist Christian churches is largely an invention of the 19th century, although there were heretical sects throughout Christian history that sometimes expressed similar views and also scattered writings of theologians (even some Catholic priests) that laid the foundation for some of these views…
According to who? Estimates vary. Records from that time are nearly non-existent- except Josephus.
Swedenborg wrote a series of books on the meaning of Revelation. They can be downloaded for free if you’re interested.:
Why don’t you give us a brief run-down on his ideas?
Here is an overview on Mr. Swedenborg. I think this
pretty much tells me all I need to know about his interpretations of the Book of Revelation.
No (though he did once mention about tearing down the temple and raising it up in 3 days… albeit that’s incredible poetic to begin with and refers more to His own resurrection, but you know…). However, what truthseeker3 and Nava said applies here, I think about how devastating it would be to have the Temple destroyed. I think there are quite a number of modern scholars tend to look at the most of Revelation as referring to that exact thing (and then it seems to switch in the last few chapters to the hope of the final coming).
I am an Atheist, but my hope for the end times (in case I am wrong) is that all the good Christians* will be raptured away, including their physical bodies ascending to heaven. Then all the bad, pretend “Christians” will die and go to heck or whatever, leaving behind the dead bodies. That way the rest of us will know that “preacher fancy-shirt” was a big fake, and that the aunt who always gave a donation in your name to a charity for Christmas was really a nice lady who did all the good she could.
Then, my friends and I will go take possession of one of the nice big church compounds that have lots of places for crafting and meetings and big musical art events! Anyone who comes by saying it belongs to them will obviously be a liar or were not good enough for God to take them…
I give this outcome about the same chance as me winning the lottery, and it is kinda a fun fantasy in the same way. I almost never buy lottery tickets…like $40 in my whole life, so I’m not counting on either one.
*and other faithful people… at least in the Abrahamic traditions?