Hal Lindsey
From RationalWiki
Hal Lindsey is the author of The Late Great Planet Earth, a book promoting fundamentalist Christian end-times rapture dogma and Dispensationalism. Somehow, this book managed to become the best-selling non-fiction book of the entire 1970s, proving that the public's appetite for fiction is so strong that a fiction book can even top the non-fiction list.
He followed that up with Satan Is Alive and Well On Planet Earth in which he sounded the alarm over hip young people getting into astrology, Tarot cards, Ouija boards, marijuana, LSD, and of course Satanism in the 1970s, and went on to become a major promoter of the Satanic Panic and Satanic ritual abuse myths in the 1980s, most notably when he championed the fraudulent "testimony" of serial fake-victim storyteller Lauren Stratford.
Today he has a TV news/commentary show in which he mostly rants and raves about "Islamofascism" and recites prose and poetry of praise and worship to the holy name of George W. Bush.
[edit] Track record
In the 1970s Hal Lindsey predicted that the Soviet Union would play the role of antagonist during the End Times. But now that there is no Soviet Union, he says it will be radical Islam. Then he made a prediction that a pre-tribulational rapture would take place in 1981, seven years before Israel’s fortieth anniversary as a reestablished nation, because the founding of Israel set off a "prophetic clock" which committed Jesus to wrap things up within a "generation" (ie 40 years).. He even wrote a book about the 1980s being the "Countdown to Armageddon". When Jesus didn't return in 1981 or 1988 he said that a generation could be 70 years, so Jesus should return before 2018. Then in "Facing Millennial Midnight: The Y2K Crisis Confronting America and the World" Hal Lindsey predicted widespread confusion and panic over the Y2K crisis, seven years before the 40th anniversary of the capture of Jerusalem by the Israelis, which was the event which really started the prophetic clock ticking all along. Of course, Y2K was a bust, and 2007 passed without Armageddon happening, so we're back to the 70 year generation idea. So maybe 2018, but 2037 for sure.
