Antichrist Reveals Himself

A man who says he is Jesus Christ in his second incarnation is now sporting the sign 666 on his arm. Does this mean he is the Antichrist or wants to be or, as he says, that is meaningless anyway since the devil doesn't exist? (h/t NT Today). Read more!

The Religious Right's Hypocrisy on NSA Surveillance

It's been a week since I noted that the stories about the Bush admin's surveillance of US citizens via the NSA should pose some concern for the Religious Right. Their myth of the AntiChhrist says that he will institute some form of surveillance infrastructure to watch and track people.

I suggest that if the Religious Right is truly concerned about this threat, then they should feel threatened by the idea that the US government is now using surveillance technology on its own citizens.

I've monitored CBN website for a week to see how they'd cover this story. Somewhat surprisingly, they have not mentioned it even once. I say surprisingly since the story--simply as a news item--deserves some mention. But the silence speaks volumes. Instead of chancing an anti-Bush backlash, the Xtian media have simply tried to kill the truth through silence. ...

Now comes this story over the wires about the Religious Right's concern over Radio Frequency Idenitification. This technology enables stores to track packages to maintain better inventories and provide faster goods to market. The Xtian Right, however, sees the technology as the work of Satan. According to Opinion Journal:

Critics, however, say the chips--which they call "spychips"--will eventually provide corporations and government with frightfully detailed information about unsuspecting consumers. The bugs, they argue, can be sewn into clothes, inserted in shoes and implanted under the skin; in the fullness of time snoops could use Global Positioning technology to keep us under constant surveillance.

Authors Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntire, whose "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move With RFID" has become the bible of the wary, consider the technology an invasion of privacy. While free-thinking libertarians have worried about such threats for years, "Spychips" reveals a deeper fear: Chip implants could be part of the satanic identification scheme, foretold in the Book of Revelation, by which "no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of the beast, which is 666." Those without the mark, which itself signals obeisance to the evil one, will find themselves excluded from the chain of commerce, unable to purchase even food.

If the Xtians are serious about tracking technology then they should speak out against the Bush policies. If they do not, they show how deceitful they are and how willing they are to play the political game to serve their own ends and purposes.

Why is it okay for Bush to spy on us but not the EU? And why isn't Bush denounced as the AntiChrist for using this technology to spy on us? That the Xtian Right wants to dodge the issue, by their own logic, means they are in bed with the Whore of Babylon and follow the AntiChrist. Read more!

The Anti-Christ in the Heart (Contd)

DH Lawrence, that omnivorously perverse sexual libertarian, once wrote a book about the book of Revelation. This might surprise some, but it does not surprise me. I understand the sense of freedom that the book promises. Lawrence used its powerful images to point at and bring to the light the amazingly darkly ecstatic nature of this thing we call reality.

Simone Weil, for her part, saw in the book's image of the Great Beast more than a metaphor for the modern nation state. In her mystical politics, the Beast is the animial we all idolize and curry favor with in our universal desire for control and power. The Red Virgin, as her friends affectionately called her, was prophetic in her own day. For, certainly her writings analyze the Beast in all its machiavellian machinery. Her analysis of oppression and liberty speaks as much to our own world of the surveillance state as it does to the fascist and communist states of yesterday's concentration camps and gulags.

I love this myth that is multi-valent and which can attract the spirits of an ecstatic sensualist and the politico-spiritual prophet...

Of course, this only goes to show that Luther was probably on to something when he wanted to throw the book out of the Christian canon. It is one of the strangest books in the world and has probably given birth to more bad than it has good. Besides, it distracts from the original messaqge of Jesus, doesn't it? Its grand conspiracy theory makes all this talk about aleins, Kennedy, and the new world order seem like child's play, right?

Then again, if Luther had left the book behind, it would've given Dan Brown more fodder for a new novel... Imagine the conspiracy of paternalistic nihilism he could string together with that one!

I confess, though, that I love to watch the variations on a theme that the mythology can generate. From the Omen (1,2, and 3) to the Left Behind fantasies, it's made Hollywood oodles of cash. You can't tell me that this book's themes haven't influenced everything from Terminator (1,2, and 3) to The Matrix.

Anyway, my own favorite variations on the themes in Revelation--see my poems--is Valdimir Solvyov's work, War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Tale of the Antichrist. I also highly recommend Czeslaw Milosz's seminal essay, "Emperor of the Earth," in the book of essays with the same name.
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Last night, I watched a two-hour special on the AntiChrist. As you many know, the Religious Right uses this mythology to provide a template by which to read current socio-political realities in the US as well as to map out the future direction of this country on the world stage.

[Added 12/28/05: For a taste of how perniciously this mythology can work consider the conversation among evangelical youth about whether Bono is the AntiChrist or not]

While listening to that program, I noticed a new economic survey from the past few years which shows that the gap between those who have and those without has grown in the past 20 years. For many, this will not be surprising. But there are still those who believe that this land of milk and honey actually exists to benefit everyone...

Somewhat ironically, I posted a passage from the book of Revelation to go along with that report on weealth disparity in the US. And today I find an email from my daily biblical readings that has a Revelation passage inside:

Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself. He is clad in a robe... (Revelation 19:11-16)

Now I am not a superstitious person--at least consciously--so when I found articles in my daily news sources chronicling more US lies, deceit and spying on friends and US contractors' efforts to sugar-coat what amounts to human slavery (also see this article), I was not fazed but intrigued at the coincidence.

As today's reading shows, the rider on the White Horse brings war to those who lie and destroy trust. What does spying do if not disseminate lies among friends aand sow distrust among them as well? Perhaps the Religious Right should be looking into their own hearts for the AntiChrist, as St. Augustine advised, rather than seeking abroad to wreak a self-fulfilling prophecy that spreads and empire of rapacious greed, civil war, and suffering and oppression to others that they brand as outsiders.

Human misery is human misery, however much you try to use laws and regulations to sugar-coat it. That American companies are trafficking in human cargo to build the infrastructure of its empire is indeed reminiscent of an apocalyptic landscape. But this trafficking and exploitation of foreign workers is not simply about toil, it is also about prostituion and exploitation of young women to gratify the passions and desires of US contractors. Read more!

Bush in Hot Water with Evangelicals?

Keep an eye on how the Religious Right handles the revelation that Bush ordered the NSA to spy on Americans. The reason why evangelicals might find this disturbing is the following: an important sign that will give away the AntiChrist is his use of surveillance technology to track people.

In some versions of the Rapture mythology, known as Dispensationalism, this surveillance is a sign of the AntiChrist's plan to form a world government. In some versions of the myth this will happen through computer chips implanted in children at birth. Other versions include using computers and technology to surveille people.

No doubt, how the image of his administration carrying out one stage in the AntiChrist's plan will play with the evangelicals might account for Bush's high anxiety when he discovered that the NYTimes was going to publish the story...

Reports have Bush calling in NYTimes editors and begging them to not release the surveillance story. Certainly one reason for his anxiety is the scandal of the US spying on its citizens. But, as we've seen, the secular Right is quite comofortable with that notion. And Bush and Rove don't care what the Liberals think.

But when it comes to their base of evangelicals, a very superstitious lot, were they to connect this story to the end-of-the-world scenario, you are talking about serious repercussions not only for Bush but potentially for the conservative and Republican agenda in the next few years. As I say, watch how evangelical stalwarts spin the story. Chances are they'll try and downplay the story and wheedle Bush some wiggle room.

On the other hand, they have to be pretty careful here. If they don't express any concern then they run the chance of disaffecting their followers who take the Left-Behind scenario so seriously. Evangelical leaders can't simply pooh-pooh this central tenet of worldwide government surveillance, which plays such an important part in the end-of-the-world script.

No matter how they spin it, there might still remain some suspicions of Bush's true agenda after the scandal settles down. This suspicion in and of itself might prove harmful to Bush and his acolytes, further eroding trust in the administration and its foreign and domestic policies. Read more!

Those Who Suckle at the Great Whore's Teats

Just as I find the following article, the History Channel runs a two-hour special on the AntiChrist. Syncrenicity? I wonder...

Feeding the minimum wage debate: some graphs on income inequality, by Jerome a Paris

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. (Rev 18:3)

Read more!

Are We Under Attack from Satan, or just Gays?

The following article discusses the "Left behind" publishing phenomenonm. This series of books deals with the Xtian notion of the "end-times," supposedly outlined in the biblical book of "Revelation." The series itself has sold over 60 million copies worldwide, far outdistancing such counter-Xtian works as "The Da Vinci Code."

According to this author, the series is uniquely American and represents both the paranoia of the Xtian conservative branch of politics, as well as reflecting anxieties in the hearts of American Xtians.

The myths, however, upon which this series, as well as the main framework for the end-times genre (the Hal Lindsay books, the Omen cycle, etc.), although supposedly based on the book of Revelation actually originates in Vladimir Solovyov's great, but little understood work, War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ. The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, has an excellent essay on this work, as well as the entire corpus of end-time scenarios in his work, Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision.
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Fundamentalist mind siege and psychic terrorism
by Michael Standaert

Katrina. Rita. Indonesia. London. Madrid. Gaza. Iraq. Sudan.
In the past year or so, the real world has been battered by natural disasters, terrorist attacks, war, and famine. Even as you read the prequels to the Left Behind series, you're drawn into a fictional world revealing the dark side of life and the coming judgment for those who reject God's redemption.

This vague and fear-filled quote is the lead from the latest monthly ‘Left Behind’ email newsletter from Tyndale House, publishers of the fictionalized accounts of the ‘End Times’, the Left Behind novels, written by Jerry B Jenkins and constructed by Tim LaHaye, one of America’s leading politically active fundamentalist preachers of the past 30 years. The first in a three-novel prequel series to Left Behind, The Rising: Antichrist is Born, [1] came out in early 2005; while the second, The Regime, is due out later this autumn. Since first appearing in the mid-90s, the series has sold over 70 million books, mostly in the United States.

The only other publishing phenomenon that compares to the success of the Left Behind novels in the past decade is the Harry Potter series, which had sold an estimated 250 million copies worldwide before the release of the sixth book in the summer of 2005. The Da Vinci Code has sold somewhere around seven million copies in the US and 15 million worldwide. But where both these books have a worldwide reach, the Left Behind novels are more specifically American. Before the release of the final book of the regular series, The Glorious Appearing, the Left Behind series had sold over 60 million copies in less than 10 years in the US, with another 20 million in spin-offs, mainly comic books and teen versions of the adult series marketed toward children.
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Notes

1 In this most recent novel, we find out that the Antichrist character Nicolae Carpathia has been born form [sic] [b]the combined sperm of two Romanian intellectual, homosexual lovers and the egg of an ambiguously lesbian mother.[/b]

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