Crucifiction

This is taken from my post here- http://www.religionisbullshit.com/fo...p?showtopic=86

If there is a more appropriate board, please move this there; as this deals more with a prophecy that has yet to come to pass:

Prick your finger- it is done
The moon has now eclipsed the sun
The angel has spread its wings
The time has come for bitter things
The time has come it is quite clear
Our Anti-Christ is almost here...
It is done
- Marilyn Manson, Anti-Christ Superstar

As a brainwashed Christian {Read: A seven year-old}, I was always fascinated with the horror stories in the Bible, namely the Book of Revelation.

I watched several programs on the Book {Including the actually informative Revelation Revealed miniseries by Jack van Impe}, and garnered quite a knowledge of the Book.

But now, looking back at it, I have noticed some extremely illogical scenarios in the mainstream Fundie interpritation of the prophecies.

Most Christians believe that a diabolical Anti-Christ will come to power, take over the world, and slaughter millions of Christians.
There are several inherint problems with this idea, however:

- If he was out to set himself up as a "God-man", wouldn't he need to eliminate ALL religions? What about the one billion Hindus, and the hundereds of millions of Muslims, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, etc.?

- What about the subcultures that value democracy and personal freedoms? Such as white supremacists {Gag. Most of them are Protestant, BTW}, Anarchists and my fellow Metalheads, and numerous militia forces both in the U.S.A. and all over the globe? Wouldn't these need to be wiped out as well?

- Most Fundies believe that the Anti-Christ will be the leader of the U.N. and/or the European Union. If he does come from Europe, how could he convince the leaders and millitary to wipe out millions of Christians, seeing as how Europe has extremely high concentrations of Christians and was basically an all-Christian continent for several millenia?

- Speaking of Europe, why would the continent usher in a "self-proclaimed Messiah dictator" again, when they've already had plenty of those? {Read: Hitler, Musolini, Lenin and Stalin, etc.}

- Why should America {And by extension most other free democracies in the world} submit to him, when the idea of a dictator goes against everything democracy stands for?

- Equally, what about Communist countries and dictatorships? They obviously don't want any other dictator to come in and ruin their own dictatorships.

- Do you take the Bible literally? If so, then look for a beast with seven heads and ten horns running the EU sometime in the future.

- Finally, why would any modern, civilized society accept a monster that makes Hitler look like a choirboy, after having experienced the Holocaust, the Cold War, the War on Terrorism, etc.?

Also, several other problems with the Apocalyptic scenario:

- If the pre-Tribulation Rapture is, in fact, what will happen; why wouldn't that tip off millions of people to the truth of the Bible, especially when there are so many videos, books, magazine articles, etc. on the subject?

- If there is no Rapture, how could God possibly keep from killing many thousands of Christians in his indiscriminate bombardment of Earth?

- If God really does unleash plagues that wipe out a great majority of the population of Earth, where does the army of "one hundered million" come from that fights at the Battle of Meggido? {van Impe believes that the "kings of the East" for whom the Euphrates is dried up are the Asian countries; and China alone has over a hundered million troops. If he is correct, this is a huge number.} Also, where do the "144,000" redeemed come from, if a geat majority of the population of Planet Earth are destroyed? {Note: For modern armies, why should God have to dry up a river? We have the ability to cross rivers nowadays in under an hour, not to mention the bridges that go across that river.}

- If God does send a spirit to decieve millions of people from seeing the truth during those days {2 Thess 2:11- "And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie"} wouldn't that make God a liar, as well as forcing people to go to hell? Again, where do the "144,000 redeemed" come from, if the world is posessed by a spirit that causes everybody to follow the Anti-Christ?


These are just the tip of the iceberg concerning the absurdities in the Book of Revelation. It does make for a good horror story, however. Fuck Stephen King or Dean Koontz, God is by far the best author of horror stories in history.

Nat=BS, this is for you. Please, enlighten me.

{For a complete list of all those slaughtered in Revelation, see this page- http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/rev/cr_list.html - at different times, a third of the Earths population {Around 2.5 billion}, one quarter of the Earths population via "Hell" and "Death" {about 1.7 billion people}, one sixteenth {The army of one hundered million}, and 7,000 people are specifically going to be killed, with countless others not numbered via the plagues. Combined with the Rapture of roughly a billion people, and there would nary be a human left on Earth by the time the Tribulation ended, including the unnumbered dnizens of the city of "Babylon the Great"; if van Impe is correct and this is America, there's another several hundered million down the proverbial shitter. Wow, we're pretty damn disposable to Gawd, ta'int we?}

The Book of Revelation {if one ignores the spiels of seven headed beasts with ten horns being magically undeadened after suffering a head wound} could possible work back in an age where one man was given power over everybody regularly in most societies {Read: The Roman Empire, ironically the same Empire in existance when the Book was written}, but with todays complicated political systems and the understanding of basic democratic ideaologies and the quest for more personal freedom, there can never be a global dictator. In fact, dictators are getting more scarce as time goes on. Once, practically the entire world, from the South American Indians to Rome to China, we controlled by dictators, but now we have but a handful in the entire globe. No reason to believe one will emerge to control the ENTIRE WORLD anytime in the forseeable future.

Actually, if he does rise to power, I might have to vote for him. Beats voting for the other guy, whose gonna drop hailstones the size of small European cars on me.

I'm on a campaign for pain, and when I get elected, I'll wipe the white off your house, the smile off your face.
- Marilyn Manson, Use Your Fist And Not Your Mouth

CX

The fundamentalist interpretation of the Apocalypse assumes that it is more prophetic than apocalyptic. It is a recent invention (as is fundamentalism which is a 19th century American Protestant response to biblical text criticism), and such is unwarranted. Most of the Apocalypse refers to present history and near future from the perspective of the author. Additionally it appears to have been written by an ecstatic apocalyptic prophet so much of it is simple gibberish. The Apocalypse, in fact, was contested for centuries as a canonical book. In the end it is not a book of prophecy so much as a book of apocalyptic. The Greek word APOKALYPSIS means "revelation" and apocalyptic literature is not so much a prophecy of things to come as it is a revealing of the hidden meaning of things that are currently coming to pass. The eschatological implications are secondary.

Madkins007

Wow. Jack Van Impe being used in a positive light- surely THAT is a sign of the end times!

I love it when someone outside my tradition tells me what I am supposed to believe about a passage in the Bible, and this is no exception.

The book of The Revelations of St. John the Divine IS an odd book, and I have learned to steer clear of anyone who claims to understand it- ESPECIALLY Van Impe. There IS NO common consensus on ANY aspect of the book. 'Most Christians' believe in none of what you outlined. In fact, the Catholic Church (which is composed of the largest percentage of Christians) takes a pretty low-key appoach to the entire book.

As a budding preterist, for another example, I believe that most of Revelations was fulfilled in the Jewish Wars of 70AD, and that most of the imagery used is symbolic.

fallingblood

First, just the name in itself should tell you that it is about future times.

Some people think that it is a story about the son of Jesus Christ (Jesus Justus). But they had to encode it because it was forbidden back then. This would be a logical explanation if you believe that Jesus survived the crucifixation.

Madkins makes a good point saying that most of it was fulfilled in the Jewish Wars of 70AD. That is true. Some people think that Revelation has a double meaning though. That it represents the Jewish War and also the end times.

gregor

If by "fulfilled" you mean written after the fact. The Revelation was written in at least 80 C.E. Randall Helms (I think) makes a good argument for writing in 115 C.E.

And the preterist position is not defensible in light of 2 Peter

The Midge

"The majority of Christians believe..."

No one has done a Revelation Census so no one knows what a majority of Christians think about this books. The volume of media published can be inverse proportion to the number of people who seriously agree with it. If only as they did what a title of a popular series suggested and it were Left Behind! There are much more profitable ways to spend one's time.

The true answer is that we know very little about the end times. We are not told very much. The main message of Revelation is "take heart because Good Guys win in the end". We don't know when or how or what order anything happens. It is stuffed full of metaphors and symbolism and much of it is opaque (at least to our generation, it may have made more sense to John's buddies if they new what some of the symbols meant). If we needed to know we would be told. Our main concern should be about the here and now and sorting out the more mundane issues of day to day life.

dado

i hear you. that's pretty much how Jews feel about x'ian attempts to proslytize them using whacky interpretations of the hebrew texts.

Crucifiction

Madkins, I've attended five seperate churches in my lifetime, and they all said the same thing about the Book of Revelation; so while your "tradition" may not accept it, I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts most DO.

dado

i can't tell for sure - it's a long document - but it appears the single largest block of x'ians have the "it already happened" interpretation as the official one...

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01594b.htm

Crucifiction

I was under the impression that many Catholics like to close their eyes and wish the Book of Revelation would go away. In fact, my Catholic GF tells me they never had a single sermon or whatever out of the book in all the years she attended Church.

But whatever. Then, a great deal of Christians believe the above. How's that? Because I know most evangelical Protestants believe the above.