Look Out That Nobody Misleads You

This is the second part of the article titled "The Time of the — Almost — End."

 

Four Moons

San Antonio, Texas, autumn 2013.

An evangelical pastor with a twenty-thousand-seat church, a television network, and a publishing house at the ready puts out a book. The title: Four Blood Moons.

The thesis: between April 2014 and September 2015 there will be four total lunar eclipses, one after another, and all four will fall on Jewish feast days — Passover and Tabernacles.

It had never happened, he says, except on three occasions: in 1493, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; in 1949, after the birth of the State of Israel; in 1967, with the Six-Day War. Every time, something enormous for Israel. So something enormous is about to happen.[1]

The book sells hundreds of thousands of copies. They make a film of it for the theaters.[2] Television talks about it. The four eclipses arrive right on schedule — the last, on 28 September 2015, was even a supermoon, and half the world photographs it.

And then something truly incredible happens!

Nothing.

And the beautiful part isn't even that nothing happened. The beautiful part is how the sign had been built.

First thing. Lunar eclipses occur only at full moon. Passover and Tabernacles fall, by definition, on the fifteenth of the month — that is, at full moon. So any lunar eclipse that happens in spring or autumn falls near one of the two feasts. It is not a miracle: it is the Jewish calendar, which is lunar.

It is a bit like claiming to have found a bachelor with no wife. It is not a strange astral conjunction: it is the very definition of a bachelor. The sign was already written into the way the Jews have counted their months for three thousand years.[3]

Second thing. The dates. The expulsion from Spain is 1492; the tetrad is 1493-94. Israel is born in May 1948; the tetrad is 1949-50. In two cases out of three the "sign" arrived after the event it was supposed to announce. An omen that shows up the next year is not an omen. It is a comment.[4]

Third thing. The number of tetrads is not constant: it swings wildly from one century to the next, because the lunar orbit swings. There are centuries that have not a single one. And there are centuries that have as many as eight — which is the maximum. Guess which of the two kinds we live in. Between 2001 and 2100 astronomers count eight, the maximum possible: ours is not a century in which tetrads are rare, it is one of the most crowded there is.[5] So when someone announces that it "had never happened," he has not discovered a wonder: he has compared our century, which is at its peak, with others that were starving. He picked the right century to say it in.

Three moves, not one of which is a lie, which is what makes it a perfect lie. The eclipses were there. The feasts were there. The dates were there. They were merely put in the right order, with the right words, in front of people who did not have a calendar on hand and perhaps did not understand much about Jewish feasts.

This is not a simple falsehood, and it is not occasional. It is a product — deliberate, and engineered.

And products come with a manual.

A word before we go on. What follows holds, broadly, for every religious organization: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Adventism, the historic Protestant churches, and so on. The vice is old and hard to kill.

But so as not to speak in the abstract, let us take two concrete examples, the handiest ones in our part of the world: the Watchtower of Jehovah's Witnesses, which counts from 1914, and the evangelical preaching of the "rapture," which counts from 1948. Two different addresses, the very same manual. If the techniques that follow are used by others too — and they are — so much the worse: it only means the manual has more readers than we imagine.

What follows is the manufacturer's manual, and we did not invent it: we drew it out by reading the products.

But do not mistake the purpose of these pages. This article does not mean to teach you cold communication techniques, nor to make you craftier than the person selling you smoke.

It means to take seriously what the Lord urged on his followers, more than once, opening with our very title: "Look out that nobody misleads you" (Matthew 24:4). Because that, in the end, is what this is about: not winning an argument, but no longer being led where you do not want to go.

And Scripture, on how one manages it, is ancient and blunt. "The naive person believes every word, but the shrewd one ponders each step" (Proverbs 14:15). The remedy is to stop being "children, tossed about as by waves and carried here and there by every wind of teaching by means of the trickery of men, by means of cunning in deceptive schemes" (Ephesians 4:14).

Look out that nobody misleads you.

 

Step 1 — Remove the Denominator

Take a number of dead. A big one. Say it whole, with all its zeros. Do not say out of how many: say only how many died. And if someone, at the back of the hall, raises a hand and asks "out of how many?", you look at your watch and change the subject.

We already know the idea: we spoke of it in the previous article. But there we looked at it as a principle, in the abstract. Here we take it in hand already assembled, already packaged, just as it comes out of the mouth of the one selling it — and with a few extra details we had left behind then.

A 2008 Watchtower magazine: since 1914 wars have killed more than a hundred million people, and — citing a research institute — in the twentieth century the victims were three times those of the nineteen preceding centuries combined.[6] A hundred million. Three times nineteen centuries. Figures that lodge in your head. And nobody, in the whole page, to tell you "out of how many."

The evangelical side, a 1970 book, thirty million copies sold: in the twentieth century more people died in war than in all of previous history.[7] Same sentence. Same missing zero. Two different shops, the very same item in the window.

Now let us do the thing they never do. Just once, because the arithmetic is simple and we can all do it.

In 1900 there lived on the earth one billion six hundred million people. In 2000, six billion. In the nineteen centuries before, for almost the whole stretch, between two and five hundred million.[8]

The twentieth century had ten times the people of any century of the past. If it had "three times" the war dead, it means that, in proportion, it had fewer. Less than a third. The number is true: it is the conclusion that has been flipped.

This is not a detail for the fussy. It is everything. Because without that "out of how many," one death in two and one death in a thousand make the same scene: lots of zeros. The denominator is the only thing that tells a rare slaughter from a frequent one — and it is precisely the thing that disappears.

And we know it well, because we used that trick ourselves — on you — in the previous article: when we wrote "one death in three" without telling you which century we were talking about. We even confessed it to you. And it worked all the same, and it still works now that you know, because it plucks at our emotional strings. That is exactly why it is the first tool in the box: it does not stop working even once it has been explained to us.

Three thousand years ago Moses sent twelve men to scout the Promised Land. They came back, and ten of them gave a devastating report. They did not lie… not entirely.

There really were people of great height, there really were large fortified cities. "The people living in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very great" (Numbers 13:28).

They even said, "We saw the Nephilim there… and we seemed like grasshoppers in comparison, and so we seemed to them" (Numbers 13:33).

Grasshoppers against giants. Case closed, game lost. Let us go back!

And the people, having heard that report, spent the night weeping, longing to return to Egypt.

They removed the one factor that would have flipped the count.

But two men, Joshua and Caleb, had done the exact same reconnaissance, seen the same "giants," measured the same walls. And their answer is a lesson in itself. They did not start quarreling over the adjective — "grasshoppers, who are you calling grasshoppers? let's not exaggerate, we weren't that small." That would have been the surest way to lose: a whole day spent haggling over how tall anyone is, while the people weep. They let the exaggeration drop without even picking it up, and they put on the scale the one entry that truly counted and that the ten had removed: "Jehovah is with us. Do not be afraid of them" (Numbers 14:9).

Do you see the move?

A rigged count is not dismantled by arguing over the inflated figure — that is the trap, and the one who inflated it asks nothing better than for you to lose yourself in there. It is dismantled by putting back what was taken away. Because the ten had made two mistakes, not one: they had inflated the balance of forces — "grasshoppers," precisely — and at the same time they had erased the one factor that would have flipped the count. Joshua and Caleb did not waste a breath on the first. They went straight to the second.

A false report. And of those ten, not one entered the Promised Land.

What, then, of the one who forces the Word of God to push the vision of his own heart? There is no need to change a comma. It is enough to choose what to make it say — and what to make it keep quiet.

Look out that nobody misleads you.

 

Step 2 — Leave Out Whatever Ruins the Picture

There is a way of falsifying the Word of God that touches not a single word. It adds nothing, deletes nothing, rewrites nothing. It merely chooses. And the most effective choice is not what to say: it is what not to say.

Tell what gets worse. Keep quiet about what gets better.

This is the cleanest move there is, because it leaves no fingerprints. The one who omits writes nothing false: he simply "forgets" the half of the picture that ruins his thesis. And you cannot accuse him of having written something he did not write. You can only notice, if you are paying attention, what is missing.

Take the star item of the catalog: pestilences.

The Watchtower lists the great epidemics of the twentieth century: the Spanish flu, the Asian flu, AIDS, the new influenzas. Every entry is true. And the conclusion, served hot, is that pestilences are advancing, just as foretold.[9]

From the other address, the evangelical one, the same goods with a fresher label. Pastor John Hagee puts "the increase of pestilences and earthquakes" among the signs of the end, and as proof he brings the 2020 pandemic: who, if not God, could have foreseen it?[10]

Look at what never appears — not on the Watchtower's page, not in Hagee's book. That in that very century, the century of "rising" pestilences, average life expectancy went from a little over thirty years to nearly seventy by the century's end, and above seventy today.[11] More than doubled. That line, on the page, is not there.

"Hold on," someone will say, "I saw my own grandparents live to ninety-five, and not a trace of modern medicine."

True. The ninety-year-olds were there back then too. And that is exactly where the number hides its trick. That average of thirty does not mean people died at thirty: it means so many died young that they dragged down everyone else's average. The one who reached ninety was the survivor, the one who slipped through the net. He is the one they tell you about.

Of the many who set out with him and did not make it — in the cradle, as children, as youths — they tell you nothing.

One child in three did not reach the age of five.[12] Today it is fewer than one in twenty.

Smallpox, which in the twentieth century alone had killed three hundred million people — more than all the wars of the century combined — was wiped from the face of the earth in 1980: the only human disease man has defeated completely.[13]

Every epidemic they cite is true. But so is everything they do not cite. The perfect lie is the one that formally is not a lie. It is simply what the pencil does when it deliberately chooses where to stop.

Same move, different counter: earthquakes.

Here two things are said: that earthquakes have increased in number, and that they have become more lethal.[14]

On the second point we grant it, and in earnest, because it is honest to do so. It is true that today an earthquake kills more. But not because the earth shakes harder: because there are more of us, and we are packed exactly where once there was almost no one.

The same tremor, same intensity, same spot, a century ago found a valley with four farmhouses; today it finds a metropolis of twenty million people — and of metropolises like that, back then, there was not a single one. It is not the earth that has turned nastier. It is man who has crowded in where before there was no one. And when the earth shakes, in a city of twenty million it does not kill only by the wall that collapses: it kills by the crush, the panicking crowd that tramples whoever falls. Deaths by crowding, which on the registers will end up under a single heading all the same: "earthquake victims."

And this is, if you notice, the denominator of the previous point merely in disguise. They count the dead; they do not count how many we were or where we lived.

On the first point — that they have increased in number — the omission lies entirely in one word.

The rise in earthquakes recorded over the twentieth century is cited, and it is true: today's catalogs contain many more events than those of 1900.[15]

Only, in 1900 there were a few dozen seismographs in the whole world, and today there are tens of thousands.[16] The earth does not shake more: we listen better.

When you count only the strong earthquakes — the ones that a century ago were felt with the naked ear, without instruments — the frequency has been flat since records began: about fifteen above magnitude seven every year, one above magnitude eight, then as now.[17]

"Recorded earthquakes have increased": true.

Take away the word "recorded" and you get "earthquakes have increased," which is false.

And here the other address puts its signature, with a precision that leaves no escape. Hal Lindsey was writing about earthquakes on the rise back in 1970, in the thirty-million-copy book.[21] And he repeated it thirty-five years later, this time with the numbers in hand: look, he said, the American geological institute counted 22,256 earthquakes in 2000 and 31,199 in 2004 — if that isn't a spike, nothing is.[22]

Except that the institute had published those very numbers with the exact opposite caveat: it is the number of recorded earthquakes that has grown, not of ones that occurred. They have had to repeat it so many times, to the Hal Lindseys of the day, that in the end they put an official clarification in black and white.

Two addresses, two eras, the very same word pickpocketed: "recorded." They write it small, in a corner, and bet that no one reads it. Usually they win the bet.

And if anyone believes that at least the great catastrophes are ours, modern, he is wrong by centuries.

The deadliest earthquake on record is not from the twentieth century: it is the one in Shaanxi, China, in 1556. Around eight hundred thousand dead.[18] At Antioch, in 526, perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand.[19] Lisbon, 1755: an earthquake and a tsunami that razed not only a city but shook the philosophy of an entire continent.[20]

None of the three needed our century in order to happen. And mark this: back then we were a handful of people compared with today, and the megacities did not exist. Fewer people under the walls, no city of twenty million — everything was in favor of fewer dead. And yet the deadliest earthquake in human history, even ignoring the denominator, is five hundred years old.

So, from this step, take one thing away with you. It is not a technique: it is a habit. Every time someone sets before you a number that is rising, ask him three questions.

What other number, on the same page, is falling?

How many of us were there, when that number was lower?

And in a century far from the one you are selling me — was that number not perhaps already higher?

Three questions. They topple almost every "never like today."

Here, though, the one selling the sign has one last move in the chamber, and it is the cleverest, because it does not deny the numbers: it goes around them.

"Jesus did not necessarily say earthquakes would increase," he will answer. "He said they would come 'in one place after another': that is, that we would hear of them from all over the world. And this is true only today, with modern communications."

Nice move. Let us grant it, and watch where it takes us.

First. If the sign is "we come to know of it from everywhere," then it depends on how well we listen — and we listen better with every passing year. In 1914 the news traveled by telegraph; today by satellite; tomorrow by something we cannot yet imagine. It is, again, the "greatest war up to that time" of the previous article: a yardstick that stretches along with the instrument, and that therefore fixes nothing at all — least of all 1914, which is one of the lowest rungs of that crescendo.

Second, and more serious. If it holds for earthquakes, it holds for the whole list. Even "the love of the greater number will grow cold" becomes "we notice wickedness more, because now we see it live." Even the famines: no longer "there is more hunger," but "there is more hunger reported." And at that point the time of the end no longer begins in a precise year: it begins when we have enough newspapers to notice it.

It is no longer an event in history: it is a threshold in our sensitivity.

Whoever opens this door to save his own interpretation will soon find he has emptied the entire sign of meaning.

Is it really worth emptying Scripture of meaning in order to keep your own interpretation standing?

We said it opening this step: one can falsify the Word of God without touching a single word of it. It is not our bright idea. It has an inventor, and an illustrious precedent.

Two thousand years ago, in the wilderness, someone quoted a Scripture. And he quoted it well, word for word.

He said, "It is written: 'He will give his angels a command concerning you,' and, 'They will carry you on their hands'" (Psalm 91:11-12). No falsehood. Not a comma out of place. The text, the real one.

Only, that Psalm did not begin there. The protection it promises is for the one who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, for the one who walks in His ways — not for the one who throws himself into the void to put God to the test. This subject tore the promise from its frame and kept only the piece that served him. The verse was intact: it was the meaning that had been emptied out.

And the person to whom those words were addressed did not argue. He did not set about explaining the true meaning of Psalm 91. He set another verse beside that one: "Again it is written: 'You must not put Jehovah your God to the test'" (Matthew 4:7).

Again it is written.

Three words, and that is the whole defense. The half-quotation is dismantled with the whole of Scripture. Whoever knows and respects the Book senses at the first instant when he is being served only a slice of it.

Whoever today lists the pestilences for you while keeping quiet about the doubled lifespan, whoever counts you the "recorded" earthquakes hoping you will not read that word, has invented nothing. He inherited the tool from the same bad teacher.

Look out that nobody misleads you.

A compass that has already led you off the road does not deserve a second journey. Especially if this journey carries your life

Step 3 — Get a White Coat to Sign for You

Find an expert who says something convenient to you. Put his signature under your thesis. From that moment it is no longer you maintaining that we are in the last days: it is the professor. And who would ever dare contradict the professor?

It is the most refined technique, because it asks you to prove nothing. It asks only to borrow an authority. The coat does the work, not the argument.

After all, whoever has no scruples about cutting Jesus' words — keep the verse about wars, throw out the one about "flee from Judea" — imagine whether he has any qualms about enlisting an academic.

Let us step back and look at the scene from a distance.

A man climbs into the pulpit. He presents himself as a minister of God. He opens the Bible, explains a prophecy. And then, to convince you he is right, what does he do? He calls the professor. "The scientist says so too."

Let us stop a moment, because here already something does not add up.

If the sign Jesus speaks of needed an expert to be seen, it would not be a sign. Jesus does not say "when the scientists confirm the data for you." He says to look at the fig tree putting out its leaves: something the farmer sees, not the scholar. A sign, to be a sign, must be visible to anyone. The moment you need the professor's chart to see it, you have already admitted that it cannot be seen with the naked eye — that is, that it is no sign at all.

And underneath there is a hypocrisy worth looking at up close.

At least one of these organizations, until yesterday, told its people to forget about education. University? Worldly stuff, a waste of time — become a pioneer instead, since the end is near. Today the same pages fill up with citations of experts: that is, of precisely those people, the ones who fortunately did not listen and went to university. First I advise you not to study, then I use the degree of the one who studied as a seal of guarantee.

And the masterpiece is the column.

Because a column like that really existed, films and all, and not by chance: for more than ten years, issue after issue, the same series ran. "A physicist talks about his faith." "A mathematician talks about his faith." "A biochemist talks about his faith." An embryologist, a neuropathologist, a surgeon, even a robotics expert. One after another, by catalog. All telling us about their faith.

And from the other side, same soup, the very same display window, a different sign over the door. The evangelicals compile lists of "scientists who believe in the Bible": lists of PhDs, presented openly as a tool to show the unbelievers that highly educated people believe. Two worlds that detest each other, the same coat hung in the window.

Now let us grant what is fair.

If the question is technical, an expert in that field can be useful.

Against evolution you do not put the street sweeper: you put a biologist, a geneticist, a former evolutionist. Degrees matching the question one legitimately wants to debate. So far the window would have its logic, and we do not latch on to it.

But look at who is really there, in those lists.

Next to the biologists — who would have a reason to sit there — you find the physicist, the chemist, the mathematician, the aeronautical engineer. The most famous list of all, that of the "twenty-one great scientists who believed in the Bible," goes so far as to line up the Wright brothers. The inventors of the airplane. In a company drafted against Darwin.

What do the Wright brothers know about natural selection? As much as a pastry chef.

An engineer's wind tunnel, a mathematician's theorem, a surgeon's scalpel: not one of these touches the question of evolution, not even in passing. Yet they are on the list. And they are there for one reason only: they have a degree. Not the right degree for the question — a degree, and that is all.

The same thing, mirrored, in the Watchtower's house. "A robotics expert talks about his faith." What does robotics have to do with the Word of God? Nothing — as much as the Wright brothers with Darwin. The same coat, borrowed from a field that shares nothing with the question.

The criterion, then, is not "he understands it" but "he has a degree." And a degree earned in a field that has nothing to do with the question is not competence. It is a halo.

And now the blow that dissolves it all, because in the Witnesses' column the data are not even discussed: faith is discussed. It is not "the expert confirms the figures," which would at least have a logic. It is "the expert believes." Look: someone who studied, someone with a degree, someone smarter than you, believes. So you believe too.

And so a question, an innocent one. How is it that, in more than ten years of the series, the episode "A street sweeper talks about his faith" never came out? Or the metalworker, or the tomato picker, or — why not — the unemployed man, who has no trade to show off but perhaps has faith to spare?

Do not laugh too quickly, because the question is serious.

Make no mistake: of humble people finding faith they have indeed written, and plenty. Some fellow who comes to God off the street, a conversion here and there. It is part of the universal tale of the calling, of course. But that is a scattered article. A column is another thing: it is a fixed appointment, a series with a criterion. And if the criterion were faith, the street sweeper would be the perfect guest — he believes exactly as the physicist does, and before God his faith is worth as much as the other's.

It is Paul who recalls it: God did not choose many wise or many of noble birth, but the simple folk, "so that no one might boast in the sight of God" (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).

If the street sweeper never gets into the column, the criterion is not faith.

And if on the other side, to make the list, it is set down in black and white that a doctorate is required — they wrote it, the entry rules — then the criterion is not even competence on the question. It is the piece of paper, the one hanging on the wall.

It is not faith being put on display. It is the title.

And this is where the idol comes out, because that is what it is. An idol.

In that window the white coat has become the true authority: not the Bible, not the One who inspired it, but the degree-holder giving his opinion.

Must we believe the Word of God because it is the Word of God — or because a professor, in a video, assured us he believes it too?

The individual preacher does the same thing, every time he climbs into the pulpit. The one who declares himself a minister of God — not a minister of public education — what need has he of the expert's stamp?

Whoever, to give weight to his reading of the Word, must add "the professor confirms it too," is admitting without realizing it that the last word on the Bible belongs to the professor.

The atheist scientist, who believes in nothing but reads the data for what they say, has a consistency of his own: he has nothing at stake. This man does.

It is one or the other.

Either the sign is guaranteed by God, and then the professor is one too many. Or it is guaranteed by the professor, and then — with all due respect — it is the Bible that is one too many.

Two thousand years ago a minister of God, one of the real ones, and moreover a genuinely educated man, warned his people against what "is falsely called knowledge," against the wisdom of this world that before God is foolishness.

And he spoke from experience, because he had the credential. He had been trained at the feet of Gamaliel, the most authoritative teacher of his time: the most prestigious chair a Jew could desire.

Yet he never made a shield of it.

No one remembers him as "the one from Gamaliel's school."

He never opened an argument with "Gamaliel said…" The coat, in his case, he had in the closet — and he left it there.

Indeed, he said more. All his titles — and he had them to spare — he put on one pan of the scale, and on the other he put what he now had before him: Christ, the hope, the prize of the calling. And he called them by a single word. Garbage.

Not "less important": garbage, refuse, trash to be thrown out, compared with that.

A man who could flash the highest credential in circulation considered it rubbish — because he held in his hands something that no title could remotely certify or equal.

Whoever, instead, is so eager today to show you the white coat, perhaps it is because he has nothing else to show.

And so a question, to you who climb into the pulpit and declare yourself a minister of God: if to prove you right you need the world's stamp — its science, its titles, its wisdom that before God is foolishness — whose minister are you, exactly?

What is your trade, exactly?

Because it is one or the other. Either you preach God, and then the world's authority is of no use to you — you abhor it. Or you need the world's authority, and then it is of that authority that you are the minister — James 4:4.

Look at their values and keep looking out that nobody misleads you.

 

Promise Nothing, but Make Them Believe You Did

So far we have seen people who handle the evidence: they remove the denominator, hide the half of the picture that proves them wrong, and get a white coat to sign so as to give themselves weight. But there is a move that comes before all of them, and it is the slyest, because it does not even require dirtying one's hands with a number. It is the move of the one who predicts nothing — and makes you believe it anyway.

We call it ground zero, because beneath it there is nothing left.

Take a Watchtower book, the one on the climax of Revelation. At a certain point it tackles the famous cry of "peace and security" — the one that, according to Paul, comes shortly before the sudden destruction. And it asks itself a question: might the peace efforts of the world's leaders be "the beginning of the fulfillment" of that prophecy?

Let us pause on three words: beginning of the fulfillment.

Let us go and reread the verse. "Whenever it is that they are saying, 'Peace and security!' then sudden destruction is to be instantly on them, just like birth pains on a pregnant woman, and they will by no means escape" (1 Thessalonians 5:3).

Instantly. On them. They will not escape.

This verse does not describe a schedule, a series of stages that lead little by little to destruction. It describes a flash: an announcement, and at once the blow. Like labor pains, which arrive all of a sudden. Either there is the sudden destruction, or there is not.

So how can it have a "beginning of fulfillment"? A lightning bolt has no beginning of fulfillment. It is there, or it is not.

But here is the stroke of genius.

"Beginning of fulfillment" is the policy that covers every case. If tomorrow the destruction really comes: "see? we said it had begun." If nothing comes, for twenty years, for fifty: "it was only the beginning, the process continues, follow us and stay alert."

They have taken the most instantaneous event Paul could describe and turned it into a building site left open indefinitely. And a building site open forever you can never declare a failure: it is a prophecy that never finishes failing to come true.

Take it the way you take astrologers. "It will be a month of changes, and an important person will enter your life."

They have said nothing — but whatever happens to you, within a month, fits inside it. A family quarrel? Change. The new mailman? Important person. And you, in the end, would swear they had got it right. Not because they had foreseen anything: precisely because they had foreseen nothing at all, and nothing sits well on everything.

And do not think it is the quirk of a single house. From the other side they do the same, with one word: imminent. The return is imminent, the rapture is imminent, it can happen at any moment. It has been preached that way for a century — never with a date, because the date is the thing they do not want to give. "Imminent" does not promise when: it promises only soon. And "soon" always depends on the point of view of whoever is alive at that moment, and until it arrives you can never disprove it.

But the principle, on its own, is still abstract. Let us look at it assembled into a product, with a name, a cover, and a catalog number. Let us go back to the four moons we started with.

Remember the pastor with the book? That book has a subtitle, and the subtitle is already everything: "Something Is About to Change." Not what. Not when. Something.

Inside, the move is chiseled. The sky, he writes, is "God's billboard," and those moons announce that "something big is about to happen."

It lodges in your head that it is at the door. What? Something.

But in the last chapter — when by now you have bought the book and the suggestion has taken effect — he inserts the clause: the four moons of 2014-2015 do not mean the rapture will happen in that period. He connects all the dots to conclude that "something is about to happen," while declaring that he does not know what.

Reread it, because it is a masterpiece. Heads I win: something big happens for Israel — and in the Middle East something always happens — and there is God's billboard that had announced it. Tails you lose: nothing happens, and then "I never said what, nor that it was the rapture." He promised nothing, but made you believe he did.

And the moons, right on schedule, came and went. As eclipses have done for millions of years. Nothing changed. And no one came back to call those words to account.

And it is not as if the other firm, the one that counts from 1914, behaves any differently: it too has its "something is about to change," only with more years on its back. At the end of the 1980s, when Reagan and Gorbachev were shaking hands and the papers spoke of a thaw, the Watchtower wrote that one could not yet say whether that climate was the prelude to the "peace and security" foretold — but that it was exactly what Christians should expect. Translated: if the thaw leads to the end, we said so; if it leads to nothing, we predicted nothing. The Cold War ended without Armageddon, and no one ever went back to reread that line.

Now, the thing that should make your antennae go up is that both of them — the one who counts from 1914 and the one who sells moons by the pound — at a certain point grab the same verse to cover themselves: the end comes "like a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2).

Nobody knows the day — so it is not our fault if we do not know it. You just stay ready, and keep following us.

Except that the verse does not end there. And whoever quotes it halfway — again the scissors we already know — hopes you will not read the two lines after, or will not understand them. Let us read them.

"But you, brothers, are not in darkness, so that the day should overtake you as it would thieves, for you are all sons of light and sons of day" (1 Thessalonians 5:4-5).

Stop here, because it is decisive. The thief catches off guard the one who sleeps, the one who is in the dark. To his own, Paul says the exact opposite: not you. You will not be caught off guard. The son of light sees that day coming, because he keeps watch and knows.

So let us flip the pan. If someone, to keep you tied, keeps telling you that everything is dark, undecipherable, hanging on moons and on building sites that never close — that you cannot understand anyway, and must only stay tuned to them — he is treating you as a son of darkness.

Is your guide really enlightening you, or telling you that the dark is "differently light"?

 

Say Everything — and Its Opposite Too

Let us return for a moment to ground zero. There the trick was to say nothing and seem to say. Now let us climb to the opposite extreme of the same scale — which leads, however, to the exact same place: saying one thing, and its opposite too. Because if you keep both answers ready in the safe, whatever happens you will have a right one to fish out at the right moment.

It seems impossible to do without getting caught. And yet.

The trick of the "light that shines ever brighter" we have already dismantled elsewhere[23]: the quotation is bent to a purpose the verse does not have, to justify the continual changes of understanding without ever calling them errors — Proverbs 4:18.

Still, someone might say that, at least, once a doctrine has been abandoned, relegated to "old light," it should never be taken up again, right?

That by now should be a closed door.

But it is not so.

Take the fate of the inhabitants of Sodom — whether, destroyed by God with fire, they will ever have a resurrection. An old question, and a wobbly answer. For years the answer was yes: the city was destroyed, but the people might rise, the text does not rule it out.

Then, at a certain point, the answer becomes no: a re-examination of Jesus' words leads to the conclusion that they suffered the destruction from which there is no return. We are in 1988. "A re-examination of Matthew 11:20-24," they write — and the door of resurrection, for Sodom, closes.[24]

End of story? One more change of mind, to add to the list?

No. Because that "no" of 1988 is not the first word on the subject. It is the last of a row.

At the start: yes, they might rise.

Then the answer goes dark.

Then, all through the 1960s and 1970s, it lights up again — and this time in black and white. "Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed forever as cities, but this would not have precluded a resurrection for people of those cities." And again, in no uncertain terms: "Peter does not say that the Sodomites and Gomorrites were destroyed forever."[25]

Then, in 1988, no again.

Yes. No. Yes. No.

Look well at this light, because it closely resembles a broken traffic signal. We had granted that a withdrawn doctrine would stay withdrawn: that when they close a door, that door is closed. And instead here a closed door they reopened. Then re-closed. Then reopened. The same door.

Then it was not a door: it was a revolving door.

And a revolving door has a flaw that cannot be forgiven: you never know which way you will find it tomorrow. That "no" of 1988 looks as final as the "yes" that preceded it looked final. But "final," in those parts, is an empty word. It is final only for you: because whatever they say — yes, no, or yes again — you are not in a position to contradict them.

Two thousand seven hundred years ago Isaiah looked at the spiritual guides of his people — the prophets, the priests, the ones who were supposed to see clearly for everyone else — and described them like this:

"These also have gone astray because of wine and have wandered about because of intoxicating liquor… they have gone astray in their seeing, they have wavered in their judgment" (Isaiah 28:7).

They stagger in the vision. They no longer see straight, and they keep on prophesying all the same — with the same unsteady step of the one who has been drinking: one foot here, one there, yes today, no tomorrow, maybe the day after. Whoever goes to them to learn what time it is comes home more confused than before.

And Paul puts it even more bluntly, with an image that — as it happens — comes from the very book those people claim to explain to us: Revelation, the book of the seven trumpets.

"For if the trumpet sounds an indistinct call, who will prepare for battle?" (1 Corinthians 14:8).

Let us stop here, because the question is sharp and should be left to fall just as it is.

A trumpet serves one purpose only: to give a clear signal, so that whoever hears it knows exactly what to do. If the sound is indistinct — a bit advance, a bit retreat, one blast meaning everything and its opposite — the trumpet has woken no one. It has merely made noise.

That is what the "beginning of fulfillment," the "something is about to change," the "old light, new light, old light again," the yes-no-yes-no on one subject after another really are. They are an off-key trumpet, grating, with an uncertain sound.

Whoever blows it has kept you at attention for a century, without ever telling you against what, or when, or where, or why. And you prepare for nothing: you wait for them — people who have already shown who they are — and that is all.

There is someone who claims to explain to you the trumpets of Revelation. Before believing him, ask yourself what sound his own makes.

 

THE TAIL-END

The Warning Label

Every serious manual closes with a page of warnings. This one has none — obviously: no manufacturer warns you against his own product. So we write them.

Over the course of these Steps you have filled your toolbox. Let us count the tools.

Faced with a rising number, ask for the denominator: out of how many? And the three questions — what other number, on the same page, is falling? how many of us were there, when that number was lower? in a far-off century, was it not perhaps already higher?

When the expert in the coat arrives, ask yourself whether that title has anything to do with the question, or serves only to make you bow your head.

When the prediction is packaged so as never to be able to be wrong — "beginning of fulfillment," "something is about to change" — demand the one thing they never give you: what, exactly, and when.

Having said that, however, these tools have a limit.

They are good tools and they work, but they have to be used every single time, on every sentence, and for the rest of your life you will find yourself chasing after them. And if you are forced to chase them, you are already at a disadvantage.

But there is an active defense, faster and more practical, and it comes before, not after.

Let us stop looking at the single sentence and look at the one who utters it.

Because one thing is to ask "does this claim hold up?" Another, far cheaper, is to ask "has this guide, over the years, ever held up?"

Let us go look at the record. And let us go look at it for everyone, by the same measure.

The faithful slave. For decades we were taught that in 1919 the Lord had appointed a certain group "over all his belongings": done, accomplished, dated. Then, in 2013, the same organization writes — and I quote them, not a critic — that "in the past our publications stated" that very thing, and that there was "a need to adjust our understanding": the appointment over the belongings is no longer in 1919, it is moved into the future.[26] Thirty years of "it already happened" turned into "it will happen." We are not the ones saying it. They confess it, in the very article in which they ask to be trusted.

The generation. Jesus said that "this generation" would not pass away. Who was "this generation"? For years: those alive in 1914. Then those of 1914 began to die, and the ruler was remade — seventy, eighty years, leaning on Psalm 90:10. Then that too was expiring, and along came the "overlapping generation," overlapping with another generation.[27] Every time the measure touched zero, a new measure sprouted. A ruler that lengthens on its own every time you are about to measure with it no longer measures anything.

And it is not only a matter of prophetic dates. The very same pattern — forbidden in the name of God, then permitted — has touched the living flesh of people: vaccines (prohibited, then allowed), transplants (ditto) and, most recently, blood: the longest and gravest prohibition, the one for which some went so far as to die, overturned right now, as we write.[28]

And, again, the flaw holds for everyone — we have seen it at every step. Whoever sold you the four moons of 2014 as "God's billboard" corrected nothing when the moons passed leaving the world exactly as it was: he moved on to the next sign, with the same confidence as before. Neither of the two shops, when the prediction fails, closes down. It changes the window display.

Let us count, then. An appointment claimed and withdrawn. A ruler remade several times. Various prohibitions decreed in the name of God and revoked. A sky announced as God's signboard, and gone by without a word. All verifiable, all theirs, all already on file.

And now the question that settles the accounts. A guide with this record — would you believe its next prediction?

The Bible, on this point, leaves no room for interpretation.

Deuteronomy 18:22: when someone speaks in the name of the Lord and the thing does not happen, "that is a word that the Lord did not speak." And the conclusion is "you must not fear him": take from him the power over your tomorrow. For now, at most, a false prophet gets a bit of criticism and takes offense. In Israel he did not get an exegetical critique: he got death (Deuteronomy 18:20). God did not take the matter lightly.

And Paul, who points the measure at himself, goes so far as to say that if he were to announce of God a thing that God did not do, he would be found "a false witness of God" (1 Corinthians 15:15). A false witness.

Not an absent-minded one, not one who had a bad day: a false witness.

And a false witness, in a serious court, is not called back to testify a second time, once he has already proved false. By now he has lost his credibility. He has already shown that his word does not hold, and the stakes are too high to put him back on the stand a second time. The same goes for a compass that read east where it was west: you do not mend it with affection. You throw it out.

Here is the defense upstream. You do not have to dismantle every single future prediction — that would be endless labor. It is enough to look at the record, once.

Whoever has set public dates after declaring himself a minister of God and has seen them fail, whoever has claimed fulfillments and withdrawn them, whoever has forbidden in the name of God what he then in the name of God permitted, has already disqualified himself as a guide for next time. Not out of malice. On his résumé.

Jesus opened the discourse on the last days with four words, the same that give these pages their title: "Look out that nobody misleads you" (Matthew 24:4).

And he warned that the false prophets would increase, not decrease (Matthew 24:11).

He did not say: learn to counter each of them, to dismantle every single word, to imagine what they will invent next time, to re-argue every single claim. He said: look out. Be on guard beforehand.

The way not to be misled is not to win every argument.

It is to know, in advance, whose door it is no longer worth opening.

 

The Defense They Cannot Take From You

"My sheep listen to my voice… and they follow me. But they will by no means follow a stranger; rather, they will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers" (John 10:27, 5).

The sheep do not recognize the stranger by studying him inside out.

They do not carry in their pocket a manual of false voices. They know one — the shepherd's — and they know it so well that every other, the moment they hear it, rings wrong. It is not expertise about swindlers. It is intimacy with the right voice.

So far, in this article, we have handed out some weapons. Now let us lay the foundations.

Reread the two defenses from before. The first dismantles the single sentence. The second discards the one who has already lied. Good ones, and useful.

But look at them closely: both speak of them. Of their moves, of their record. In both, you are still seated on the defendant's bench.

You react. You chase. And as long as you chase, the one pulling the strings has already won half the match: he chooses the topic.

There is only one way to rise from that bench. And it is the shepherd's: stop studying the false, and study the true — that is, the Bible without outside conditioning.

As they do at the bank. They do not teach the teller the thousand counterfeits that exist — tomorrow they will print a new one. They have him pass the genuine banknote through his fingers, for days. Until the fake, when it arrives, does not need to be analyzed: it is felt. It is wrong to the touch, before it is even wrong to the eye.

This is the first barrier, and it has one name only: to know.

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" (Hosea 4:6). Not for lack of zeal. Not for lack of meetings or of sincerity. Of knowledge.

And think back: every Step of this manual worked for one reason only — the reader was missing something. The Jewish calendar. The denominator. The sentence after. The source at the end of the chain. Knowledge does not plug one leak: it plugs them all.

But here there is an obstacle, and it must be said without velvet.

You will never know a text thoroughly if someone, every time you open it, stands beside you to tell you what it means before you have read it.

And you will not know it by blindly entrusting yourself to the one who claims to explain it to you: you will read his explanation, not the text.

And here we must be clear, because it is easy to misunderstand. The problem is not the concept of a guide. God has always worked through men: Moses, the prophets, the apostles, Christ himself, the "one mediator between God and men" (1 Timothy 2:5).

Guides sent by Him there have always been — and we ourselves wait for Him to send more, to restore pure worship. The problem is not the one who brings you the Word. It is the one who puts himself between you and the Word to keep you from checking it.

Because look at the difference, which is all here. The true commission never feared scrutiny. Moses did not say "just believe me": he brought signs to be examined. The prophet said "my word will come true, and then you will know where it comes from." Paul — the apostle, one who wrote under inspiration — found at Beroea people who, instead of swallowing his words, "examined the Scriptures carefully each day to see whether these things were so" (Acts 17:11).

And how did he react? He did not take offense. He called them "noble-minded." The true mediator invites verification. Only the false mediator forbids it.

Here, then, is the second barrier, and it is the most uncomfortable, because it is a matter of taking your own responsibility.

To love God "with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind" (Matthew 22:37). God does not want mannequins that repeat, he wants children who understand.

And instead the mechanism, call it by its name, is always the same under every label: someone places himself between you and the page, hands you the text pre-chewed, tells you in advance what you will see — so that, when you read, you read what he wants and how he wants, with your brain switched off.

There is a name, for the mind switched off on command, and the Bible itself gives it. Drunkenness.

One thing is certain: sooner or later one sobers up. Always. No binge lasts forever, not even the doctrinal kind.

And the waking — for the one who poured the drink in the name of God, and also for the one who let his glass be filled without asking what was in it — will not be pleasant for many.

Now let us open a parenthesis on "good faith."

In every religion there are honest people who love God, and we do not doubt it for an instant.

But it is precisely of them that the most uncomfortable thing must be said, and we say it softly, pointing the finger at no one: those people, in perfect good faith, keep that mechanism standing. Not on purpose — no one wakes up in the morning deciding to prop up a system. They keep it standing by the mere fact of staying inside it, lending it their own sincerity as a seal of guarantee, that is, making the one who looks on from outside think: "if there are so many good people in there, there must be something true to it."

Good faith, unfortunately, is the fuel of the mechanism.

And there is a bitterer step. Because those people, most of the time, do not sit still acting as a signature. They are sent out. Into the street, onto the doorstep, to the neighbor, into the classroom to instruct the children: amateurs thrown into the fray, dispatched to explain to others what they themselves were never allowed to verify. They teach what was taught to them, with the same good faith with which they received it — and with that same good faith they hand it on to the next person.

So the misled one becomes, without wanting to, one who misleads. Paul said it of his own people, and with tenderness, not contempt: "they have a zeal for God, but not according to accurate knowledge" (Romans 10:2). Much zeal; little knowledge.

And Jesus, referring to the teachers and not the pupils, was even more direct about the outcome: "they are blind guides. If a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit" (Matthew 15:14). Not one. Both. The guide ends up in the same ditch into which he drags the one who trusted him.

That is why staying in there, switched off and sincere, is not neutral. It is not just that it fails to shelter you: it is that it makes you an essential link in the chain. As long as you stay in there with your eyes closed, the machine has not only captured you. It has enlisted you.

How, then, does one become free again? Not by looking for the right organization in place of the wrong one — that would be handing yourself back the manual with a new cover. One becomes free by being a Beroean: switching the mind back on and passing everything through the sieve of Scripture, whoever is speaking. If you can — indeed, if you must — check even Paul with the Bible in hand, then there exists in the world no man, no body, no organization whose word stands above the text. No one.

"Even if we or an angel out of heaven were to declare to you a gospel other than… let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8-9). What counts is the message, not the messenger — were he an angel. Let alone a man with a title, or an organization with a logo.

"Make sure of all things; hold fast to what is fine" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). All things. This one you are reading too.

We say it as those who have been through it. None of us was born with the Bible in hand and a clear head. We were misled too — some one way, some another, some for twenty years, some for thirty.

We do not speak from the height of a pulpit: we speak from below, as those who had to redo everything from scratch, and discovered that it could be done.

This defense no one can take from you. Only you can take it from yourself.

But you can choose, this very day, to be misled no longer.

 

And If a Friend Were to Ask You…

"Wait, though. The war dead from 1914 to today are millions, an enormity. That is a fact, isn't it? I can't tell myself otherwise."

And indeed no one is telling you otherwise. The number is true. The point is not the number: it is the question they did not let you ask beside the number. Out of how many? In the twentieth century we were ten times as many as in any century of the past. The more people live, the more people die — of everything, wars included. If you count only the dead and hide how many we were, any crowded era will look like the worst of all time. They did not lie to you about the number. They took away your denominator. And without that, you can play with the numbers as much as you like and teach you anything at all.

"All right. But when they get it wrong, they correct it. They change their mind. Isn't that, at bottom, a sign of honesty?"

It would be honesty for me, or for you. Not for the one who has declared himself God's channel on earth.

Whoever does not claim to speak for God can get it wrong and correct himself as much as he likes: he is a man, men err, he imposes nothing on anyone, no problem. On we go. They, instead, have errors so numerous they can no longer hide them, and so they have pulled out the first lifebuoy: "we are not inspired." Fine. Too bad that, with the other hand, they keep calling themselves "the faithful slave appointed by God," "the channel," "guided by holy spirit." And here the question becomes simple: since when can the slave God set in charge get God's things wrong? Since when does one "guided by the spirit" blunder on the very thing the spirit is supposedly guiding him toward?

The whole game rests on a distinction they have stitched onto themselves: "guided by the spirit," they say, is not the same as "inspired." The first gives the authority; the second would give the responsibility. They want the one without the other. Only, that distinction, in the Bible, does not exist. The men whom the spirit guided are the same ones the spirit inspired: "men spoke from God as they were moved by holy spirit" (2 Peter 1:21). Guided and moved by the spirit, there, are the same thing. There is no middle rung — "guided but fallible" — the one that lets you take Heaven's stamp and man's alibi at the same moment. Either the spirit guides you, and then you do not get its things wrong; or you get them wrong, and then do not call yourself its channel.

"But I believed in good faith, and so did you. And so many people in there are truly sincere, you love them. Is it possible that sincerity counts for nothing?"

Stop, because this is the question that hurts you most, and I want to answer it well. Your sincerity was never in question. You were not stupid: you were honest. The problem is another, and the Bible states it with a precision that is almost frightening: "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" (Hosea 4:6). Not for lack of sincerity. Of knowledge. History is full of disasters committed by people sincerely convinced they were doing good — sincerity, on its own, has never saved anyone from error. In fact, hear this uncomfortable thing: it is precisely the sincere person who is the perfect target. The distrustful one checks; the honest one trusts. Your good faith was not your fault. It was their handle.

"So whom do I trust? If I can be wrong, if they can be wrong and you can and everyone can, how do I know who is right?"

Fair question, and the answer is not "trust me instead of them" — that would be changing masters. The answer is: learn the voice. The sheep do not recognize the stranger because they have studied all the strangers in the world; they recognize the one voice they know, and every other rings off-key. Know the text yourself, directly, so well that you feel the fake by touch — like the teller with the banknote. And whoever speaks to you, check him against Scripture, us included. Because look: a guide who has already got the course wrong is not like a friend who made a blunder — that one stays a friend. It is like a compass that reads east where it is west. A friend who erred you forgive. A wrong compass you throw out — because to that one you entrust your life. And here the stakes are not arriving late for an appointment: they are where you find yourself on the day the accounts are truly settled.

"But if I leave… where do I go? I'm left with nothing, with no one."

Perhaps. But look at what you gain. You are left without someone standing between you and the Sacred Text: that is another thing entirely, and it is a liberation, not a void. We are not handing you a new address — we have no house to offer you, and out of consistency we have founded none. What remains, when you remove the intermediary, is not nothing: it is the Book, open, and your head switched on to read it. And the waiting — not for a new master to hand yourself over to, but for God Himself to set things right, in His own times and ways, which is a real hope and no longer an illusion. In the meantime you do not sit idle: you read, you examine, you keep the shepherd's voice so close to your ear that you can no longer mistake it for any other. That way you will be clear-headed. And only clear-headed can you look out that nobody misleads you.

 

And Us?

We have all fallen for it, at least once. We have been misled.

And precisely for that reason the risk that it happens again is real.

But the Bible does not ask us to become craftier than the false prophets: there are some, and there will always be more of them.

It asks us something else. To "make sure of all things." To keep our mental faculties switched on. To compare Scripture with Scripture.

Jesus did not ask us to memorize all the techniques of the false christs: he asked us to look at their fruits, and to love God and His Word with all of ourselves. And this drives us to put ourselves back in play, from the start, whole, in order to conform ourselves to It — and not the other way around.

The most heartfelt warning in his whole discourse on the time of the end, despite the gravity of the events, is not "flee to the mountains." It is "Look out that nobody misleads you."

Let us look out that nobody misleads us.

Never again.

 

 

FOOTNOTES

[1] John Hagee, Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change, Worthy Publishing, 2013. The author is pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas.

[2] Four Blood Moons, documentary film based on the book, 2015.

[3] Lunar eclipses occur only at full moon. Passover (15 Nisan) and Tabernacles/Sukkot (15 Tishri) fall by definition at full moon, the Jewish calendar being lunisolar: every spring or autumn lunar eclipse therefore falls near one of the two feasts.

[4] Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Alhambra Decree): 31 March 1492; the tetrad followed in 1493-94. Establishment of the State of Israel: May 1948; the tetrad followed in 1949-50. (Eclipse dates: F. Espenak, NASA, Five Millennium Catalog of Lunar Eclipses.)

[5] In the period 2001-2100 there are eight tetrads, the maximum possible in a single century (F. Espenak, NASA, lunar-eclipse catalog); there are historical centuries with no tetrad at all.

[6] "Deliverance by God's Kingdom Is at Hand!", The Watchtower, 15 May 2008 (w08 5/15, pp. 12-16) — https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2008363: since 1914 wars have taken more than 100 million lives, with the Worldwatch Institute's estimate that the twentieth century's war dead were "three times" those of the preceding nineteen centuries combined.

[7] Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, Zondervan, 1970 (about 30 million copies).

[8] World population ≈ 1.6 billion in 1900, ≈ 6 billion in 2000; in earlier centuries, for most of the time, fluctuating between 200 and 500 million (Our World in Data; UN estimates).

[9] The Watchtower lists the great twentieth-century epidemics as proof that pestilences are advancing: Awake! 8 April 1988, "The Last Days—Famine, Plague, Pollution—And Kingdom Preaching" (g88 4/8, pp. 7-13) — https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101988244; Awake! 8 May 1983, "Sickness Will Be Conquered Forever" [⚠ EN title to confirm on CD — g83 5/8, pp. 8-11]; The Watchtower, 1 April 1991, "It Is Later Than You Think!" [⚠ EN title to confirm on CD — w91 4/1, pp. 4-7]: Spanish flu, one billion infected, 20 million dead.

[10] John Hagee, The End of the Age (Thomas Nelson, 2021; a reworking of the earlier From Daniel to Doomsday): among the signs it lists "the increase of pestilences and earthquakes" and offers the 2020 pandemic as proof.

[11] World average life expectancy: from a little over 30 years at the start of the twentieth century to about 67 in 2000, over 70 today (Our World in Data; J. C. Riley, 2005).

[12] Child mortality: historically about one child in three did not reach the age of five; today, worldwide, fewer than one in twenty (Our World in Data).

[13] Smallpox declared eradicated by the WHO in 1980, the only human disease eradicated so far. The WHO estimates about 300 million smallpox deaths in the twentieth century alone (academic estimates run to 300-500 million): more than all the wars, genocides and man-made famines of the century combined (estimated at around 190 million).

[14] "How We Know We Live in the 'Last Days'", The Watchtower, 1967 — https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1967241: after 1914 earthquakes are said to have caused more damage and loss of life than ever before, continuing with increasing intensity (Avezzano 1915, Kansu/Gansu 1920, Japan/Kanto 1923…). (The Italian edition appeared the following year, La Torre di Guardia 1 April 1968, w68 1/4, pp. 197-201.)

[15] Today's seismic catalogs contain many more recorded events than those of 1900 (USGS).

[16] The number of seismic stations worldwide rose from a few dozen or hundred at the start of the twentieth century to many thousands today (USGS).

[17] Strong earthquakes have remained roughly constant since instrumental records began: on average about 15 of magnitude ≥ 7 and about 1 of magnitude ≥ 8 per year (USGS, Earthquake Facts/FAQ).

[18] Shaanxi earthquake (China), 23 January 1556: about 830,000 dead, the deadliest on documented record.

[19] Antioch earthquake, 526 CE: ancient estimates up to about 250,000 dead (John Malalas). Uncertain figure: it is an estimate.

[20] Lisbon earthquake and tsunami, 1 November 1755: it shook not only the city but the European thought of the age (Voltaire, Kant).

[21] Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, Zondervan, 1970, p. 52 (earthquakes on the rise, among the signs). Pagination varies between editions: check against the copy (the book is available on archive.org).

[22] Lindsey recycled the USGS figures (22,256 earthquakes in 2000, 31,199 in 2004) in his 2005 column; the USGS points out that the increase concerns recorded earthquakes, not ones that occurred, and has published an official clarification on the matter.

[23] The meaning of the scripture cited to justify "progressive light" (Proverbs 4:18) and why it does not hold: dealt with in the article "Let Us Respect the Context and Meaning of the Scriptures" (in Italian).

[24] "Questions From Readers", The Watchtower, 1 June 1988, pp. 30-31 (w88 6/1): "a reexamination of Matthew 11:20-24" leads to the conclusion that the inhabitants of Sodom "underwent the destruction from which there is no return."

[25] "Who Will Be Resurrected?", The Watchtower, 1965 (w65 15/8, pp. 489-496) [⚠ EN edition date / title to confirm on CD — old publication, possible IT/EN year gap]; "Sodom" entry in Aid to Bible Understanding (1971): "Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed forever as cities, but this would not have precluded a resurrection for people of those cities"; "Peter does not say that the Sodomites and Gomorrites were destroyed forever."

[26] "Who Really Is the Faithful and Discreet Slave?", The Watchtower (Study Edition), 15 July 2013, ¶3 — https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2013533: "In the past, our publications have said the following: … In 1919, Jesus appointed the faithful slave 'over all his belongings'… However, further careful study and prayerful meditation indicate that our understanding of Jesus' words about the faithful and discreet slave needs to be clarified." The appointment "over all his belongings" is moved to the future.

[27] The "generation" redefined: detached from 1914 and tied to Psalm 90:10 (70-80 years) ("A Time to Keep Awake", The Watchtower, 1 November 1995, pp. 14, 20; w95 11/1), then reinterpreted as "overlapping generations" (The Watchtower, 15 April 2010, p. 10; w10 4/15).

[28] The pattern "forbidden in the name of God, then permitted," applied to medicine. Vaccines: opposed as a violation of God's law (The Golden Age, 1920s-30s), the ban lifted in The Watchtower of 15 December 1952 (Questions From Readers). Organ transplants: forbidden and likened to cannibalism (The Watchtower, 15 November 1967), then permitted again as a matter of conscience (The Watchtower, 15 March 1980). Blood: the total transfusion ban introduced in 1945, then dismantled in stages. Since 2000 the blood fractions (albumin, immunoglobulins, clotting factors, etc.) have been left to individual conscience (The Watchtower, 15 June 2000, Questions From Readers), while whole blood and the four primary components remained forbidden. Then, in 2026: on 20 March (Governing Body Update No. 2) pre-donated and stored autologous blood became a matter of conscience; on 18 September (Governing Body Update No. 6, with an accompanying "Questions From Readers") so did the four primary components — red cells, white cells, plasma and platelets — acceptable even from an unrelated donor. In the end only the transfusion of another person's whole blood remains formally prohibited: everything that composes it is now allowed.

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