Who is the Antichrist? A 2,000-Year Fantasy Journey

 

Meet the Antichrist: 

In the Bad-Theology (Burn-at-the-stake Heresy) Novel Series Titled Left Behind 

the Antichrist is the Secretary General of the United Nations. Currently Antonio Gutierrez. 

When Trump held his Nazi-revival meeting at Madison Square Garden last week, one of the vile warm-up acts called Vice President Kamala Harris the Antichrist.  

Unlike Trump and the majority of his followers I have actually read the Christian Scriptures--in the language they were written in. If you haven't you may not know that the Antichrist is mentioned just twice in the entire 27 books that comprise the Christian Scriptures.  Both mentions are the letters the Apostle John sent to new Churches during his lifetime.  In another letter (2 Thessalonians) there is a reference to a "man of lawlessness" and the "beast" of Revelation that are taken to be the Antichrist, but the references are ambiguous.  

More importantly, the prefix anti in Greek has multiple meanings.  In can mean against or in opposition it can also mean equality or correspondence as in antitype.

But if we take Antichrist as in opposition to Christ, the context of both letters is to men acting against the Church at the time the letters were written. 

But for those besotted with prophecy, identifying the Antichrist has been a source of endless vain speculation for two millennia. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins wrote the bestselling Christian-market novel series in history in the 1990s turning a very bad interpretation of Bible prophecy into the Left Behind novels.  

In the first of the seven novels the Antichrist is identified as the Secretary General of United Nations.  Maybe the LaHaye and Jenkins had Kofi Annan in mind or Boutros Boutros Ghali.  They did not get their supervillain from the actual citations in 1 John or 2 John.  They were using the Beast of Revelation.  

Novelists can and do "make shit up" but their readers took as "gospel" their wacky reading of Christian Scripture.  If you wonder how Donald Trump became King Cyrus of Persia in the minds of prophecy obsessed Christians, the sales of Left Behind (upwards of 50 million copies) shows a very plausible path.

Neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor the Secretary General of the United Nations is anything like the actual references to the Antichrist in the letters of  John. The best candidate for that office in modern America is the proud commandment breaker Donald Trump.   

Bad Religion Kills Good People

The book "Prisoners of Geography" by Tim Marshall begins, "Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church."  

Vladimir Putin with Orthodox Christian Priests

And yet, Putin, a self-declared Christian has just invaded a neighboring country.  Rather than turn the other cheek, Putin is killing and maiming his neighbors. 

But Putin is certainly not alone when it comes hating and killing for Jesus.  Ever since the Church took secular power in the late 400s AD, killing and conquering in the name of the Prince of Peace has stained every century for the past millennia. It's worth noting for those who rationalize armed Christianity, Jesus was a penniless Jew who told his followers not to love or even care about this world, even to hate their father and mother and pursue the Kingdom of God.  

The worst of murderous Christianity in America was certainly when eleven states rebelled with the express purpose of keeping men and women in chains for life.  Sometimes the slavers even told those they oppressed about Jesus: as strong a declaration as could ever be made that their victims deserved love and were handed hate.   

A victim of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Every organized patriarchal religion with power uses that power to advance its own beliefs.  For some religions, killing heretics, invading neighbors and other expressions of secular power can be reconciled with the traditions of the faith.  Jews can defend Israel.  Muslims have a mandate to create a caliphate. 

I have read every word of the New Testament in several translations and a lot of it in the Greek in which it was written.  There is no way to twist the words of Jesus into an invasion or a Crusade.  A Buddhist government has the same flat contradiction. I have read a lot about the Buddha and his beliefs and life. No one created a Buddhist army reading Buddha.

Every day the world hears about how the "Christian" Vladimir Putin bombs, blasts and murders the mostly Christian people of Ukraine.  Right now, the bad religion of Vladimir Putin, his twisted version of Christianity, is killing innocent people in Ukraine.  

War Between Science and Religion? The Real Enemy was Catholic Immigrants

Hating immigrants is nothing new in America

The anti-immigrant tradition in America is old and deep in America.  People accepted now as "white" people were hated and reviled more than 100 years ago, none more than Catholics.

In the 1870s two acclaimed American academics each published blockbuster books about the "War Between Science and Religion."  They were both brilliant men in their disciplines.  John William Draper was one of the first presidents of the American Chemical Society and was a pioneer in photographic chemistry. Andrew Dickinson White was the first president of Cornell University.

It is an old truism that being brilliant in your own area of expertise makes one libel to spout off with idiocy in an area where one has no training.

But fame and publishing best-selling books in the 19th Century turned to derision in the 20th Century.  Draper and White today are known today as the chief promoters of the discredited "Conflict Thesis" describing a two millenia war between science and religion.  The thesis is simply anti-immigrant bullshit.

Larry Principe, a professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University, teaches a course in which he uses Draper's book as an example of how not do history.  If you are interested in the field, Principe's lectures on "The Great Courses" are brilliant.

But the smell lingers.  Wretched writers like Dan Brown use the lies and half-truths in Draper and White to write trash thrillers like The "DaVinci Code."

So why did Draper and White trash the history of the Church?  Their target was not all religion, but the Catholic faith. Draper and White were rabidly anti-Catholic and were writing propaganda, not history.  In the 19th Century, anti-immigrant people tried to take control of the political system through secret groups.  The Whig Party fell apart in 1856 and was replaced by the Republicans in part because of internal divisions over slavery and immigrants.

Draper and White, for example, popularized the myth that the Church taught the earth was flat and Columbus proved otherwise.  That the earth is round and has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles was known to every educated person since about 300 B.C. Anyone reading the Divine Comedy, written in the late 1,200s is quite aware of the earth as a sphere.

But like any propagandists, Draper and White began with a message and massaged all their facts to fit the message. So in order to prove the Catholic Church is anti-science they twisted facts to fit their message.

A secondary effect of their campaign against Catholics was to make add another layer of anti-intellectualism to a country already prone to making lunacy into policy.

Although they were both men intellectuals in their own fields, their real legacy in America putting stupidity in power.  The anti-vaxx movement, the John Birch Society, the Young Earth Creationists, the climate change deniers, birthers, and every kind of anti-immigrant movement can look back to Draper and White and see inspiration.