Thursday, December 22, 2022
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
The Study Of The History Of The End Of The World, Part 8
Though history is linear in that it is moving towards an ultimate destination rather than circular in the sense of rigid absolute recurrence, it cannot be denied that the dynamics of human development and unfolding events do often follow a cyclical path over time. For example, eventually the sects of the nineteenth century that began with considerable apocalyptic and utopian fervor such as the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses tempered these impulses to an extent in favor of the stabilization brought about by leadership focusing more upon continuity of organization rather than the cessation of human affairs as presently known. The cultural change of the nineteenth century continued onward well into the twentieth. As such, it was to be expected that fringe movements outside the mainstream of conventional American religious life would continue to increase. But given the exaggerated pace of contemporary life, a number of these would prove to be far deadlier than their counterparts originating in what might be considered more tranquil bygone eras. In his analysis of the fringe groups embracing a form of apocalypticism arising from the tumult of the counterculture, Richard Kyle categorizes these as Western, occult, or racist.
The groups described as Western would be those that would be described as cults deriving inspiration from Christian theological terminology even if these sects no longer imbued the words with their original meanings. A number of these ended tragically in episodes of dramatic violence. Foremost among these ranked Jonestown in the jungles of Guyana and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.
In the early days of his ministry, one would not have necessarily thought that the name Jim Jones would become synonymous with cultic violence and abuse. Jones began his ministry loosely affiliated with the Disciples of Christ with a concern regarding what he perceived as the racism of his day. Eventually, Jones' apocalyptic views focused more upon pending disaster rather than Christ's actual return. Initially, this prompted Jones to uproot his congregation from Indiana to settle in California where Jones thought it would be more likely to survive an inevitable nuclear catastrophe. However, it was this desire to protect his flock from the perils of the world through the fanatical withdrawal from society without relying on the power of Christ that would ultimately doom this experiment in integrated communal living.
As a result of increasing allegations of abuse within the People's Temple and out of a fear that even California would not prove to be a refuge from the pending tribulation, Jones relocated to the sect's compound in the Guyanese wilderness known as Jonestown where he descended into deeper levels of insanity and evil. The straw that broke the camel's back occurred when Senator Leo Ryan and an NBC news crew arrived to investigate claims of abuse alleged by families of group members as well as those residing at the compound. The desperate there reached out to the legislator after an initial meeting actually seemed to go well. These souls confided that they had not found a sanctuary from the hardships of the world but had actually become trapped in a Hell on earth.
Fearing retaliation on the part of authorities for assassinating the Senator along with others at the remote jungle airstrip, Jones attempted to convince his followers to commit what he categorized as an act of revolutionary suicide. It is often assumed that the residents of Jonestown embraced death in this manner willingly as it is what comes to mind when admonishing someone not to drink the Kool Aid, a reference to the toxic potion concocted to bring about this disturbing end. However, many only relented at gunpoint and others were actually shot. And though Jonestown no doubt stands as perhaps the most infamous example of the tragedy likely to result when people surrender good judgment and discernment for promises of a blissful tomorrow if all they do is surrender in total to a leader claiming direct revelation from or a unique understanding of God to which other believers are not privy, it would certainly not be the last.
Another example of such a group meeting a tragic demise as a result of an out of control belief in the Apocalypse was the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were themselves derived from Seventh Adventism, which adherents of this splinter group believed had grown lax in doctrine over the years as the emphasis of the mother movement switched from eagerly awaiting the pending Advent to organizational expansion. Deadbeat Vernon Howell was able to smooth talk his way into the sect's leadership by pitching woo at the elderly matriarch. With his knack for quoting Scripture (even if pulling it out of context), Howell was able to rebrand himself as David Koresh, claiming that he was the Lamb referenced in the Book of Revelation who would open the seven seals described in that prophetic text. As a result of a series of tactical blunders on the part of both Koresh and the government, eighty-eight Branch Davidians died in this attempt at actualized eschatology when the compound caught fire after a siege lasting well over a month.
Another form of fringe eschatology to gain a foothold towards the close of the twentieth century was noticeably racialist in nature. One of the early forms of what might be categorized as genetic apocalypticism could be found in the Worldwide Church of God as established by Herbert W. Armstrong. Central to the teaching of Armstrongism was the doctrine of Anglo-Israelism, the belief that the Anglo peoples of the world such as Great Britain and the United States were the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. As such, these nations were as every bit as eligible for the promises made to the Chosen People as were the Jews. Like the Jews that Armstrong hoped to mimic, his sect also held to Old Testament dietary laws, Sabbatarianism, and the rejection of the Trinity. In terms of his eschatology, Armstrong was influenced by dispensationalist notions of history spanning roughly for six thousand years with Christ returning at the Second Advent to establish the Millennial Kingdom which would follow the Tribulation during which the Antichrist would rule the world from his power base of a European confederacy consisting of ten nations.
But whereas Armstrong's form of ethnic millennialism might have admired the Jews a little too enthusiastically to the point of wanting to be part of a pan-Israelite family, the other forms of End Times speculation focused upon ethnicity actually went to the other extreme of explicit hostility towards the Jews and the exclusion of those not belonging to a preferred racial group. These movements were Christian Identity and the Black Muslims.
Christian Identity was similar to Anglo-Israelism in that both believed that the Caucasians of northern Europe were the true Chosen People of God. However, Christian Identity parted ways with the Worldwide Church of God in insisting that those now categorizing themselves as Jews in fact had no connection to Biblical Israel genetically. Instead, the vast majority now identified as part of that nation or ethnicity are actually descendants of a group known as the Khazars that converted to Judaism in the seventh century (Kyle, 160). Unlike traditionalist Christians who (despite instances of racial animosity or misgivings) admit that all humanity shares a common ancestry back to Adam and Eve and most directly from Noah following the Deluge, Christian Identity believed that non-Whites are not fully human in that such groups are the result of carnal relations between Satan and Eve in the case of the Jews or the result of a creation prior to the divine intervention resulting in Adam and Eve.
Interestingly, the tyrannical government known as the New World Order warned of by adherents of Christian Identity sounds quite similar to that of the Tribulation period under the Antichrist probably described in the greatest detail by dispensationalist scholars. However, beyond that, the two schools of eschatological interpretation have little else in common. For example, Christian Identity rejects the Pretribulational Rapture outright. Perhaps most disturbingly, in order to being about the Kingdom of God the faithful will be required to wage a race war, a prospect most often eagerly anticipated rather than dreaded by those mired in this spiritual delusion. The hope of the practitioner of Christian Identity is not that the Jew will be brought to Christ during the time of upheaval but will instead be eliminated so that the Earth and the surviving bloodlines might be spared genetic contamination or purified.
At the other end of the spectrum of racialist Armageddon could be found the Black Muslim movement. Despite being called the Nation of Islam, the sect was rather more of a cult than an expression of of orthodox or mainstream Islam. The Nation of Islam was founded in the 1920's by Wallace Farad, a mysterious figure many within the sect believed to be a theophany or God manifested in human form. His chief prophet and successor as leader was Elijah Muhammad.
In terms of eschatology and doctrine, the Nation of Islam advocated a militant anti-Caucasian Afrosupremacism. Whites are believed to be a genetically engineered inferior subspecies that will be obliterated when pious Blacks are taken up in a Rapture-like event to the Motherwheel --- a craft reminiscent of a UFO inspired in part by the Book of Ezekiel --- which will rain nuclear annihilation down upon those remaining upon the Earth at that time. Unlike orthodox Islam, the Nation of Islam held that there was no life after death and thus no literal Heaven or Hell. The religion's golden age would consist of the Black subjugation of the planet Earth.
The third variety of apocalyptic group to arise in the contemporary world could be categorized as New Age or occult. The groups, sects, and teachers falling into this particular category foretold of a pending golden age often proceeded by cataclysmic upheaval. However, unlike those drawing their prophetic inspiration from Christian sources, the primary focus of those in the occult or New Age was not so much the Second Coming of Christ but rather more about communal or personal transformation. Richard Kyle writes, “The coming New Age will be based not on some doomsday scenario but on a paradigm shift (154).” Through this paradigm shift, humanity will actualize the deity within. The result will be a new order characterized by equality, ecological restoration, international cooperation and galactic harmony.
Unlike strict Marxist Communism with its absolutist materialism, the New Age movement allowed for the existence of higher order intelligences or spirit beings it believed would guide humanity along the path to cosmic awareness. Most often now such entities are depicted as extraterrestrials like those their proponents believe responsible for UFO phenomena. The movement that developed surrounding the study of encounters began to take on characteristics noticeably beyond that of mere scientific curiosity and more like those of a religion or form of spirituality following George Adamski's claim in 1952 that he had met and talked with an extraterrestrial (Kyle, 157). Soon a sort of gospel affirmed by a number of others also claiming to be contactees developed professing for the need of our species to move beyond crass materialism and hostility into a more comprehensive awareness of reality if we wanted to avoid widespread destruction such as that embodied by nuclear weapons the recent development of which on Earth brought the planet to the attention of interstellar authorities.
At this point, Christian and New Age eschatology seem to parallel one another but diverge in distinct interpretative directions. In Dispensationalism, prior to the Tribulation, Christ catches His saints both the living and the dead into the air so that they might escape the judgments about to be poured out upon the Earth. In the spin placed on events by adherents of the New Age, Christians are still the the ones removed from the Earth at that time. However, that action on the part of extraterrestrials is not seen as a reward for dedication to Christ but rather as punishment. For it is the tendency of the true Christian to stick to morality as described in the pages of the Bible and that belief in Jesus Christ is the only way to gain access to Heaven. These notions are perceived as a profound impediment to the kinds of changes that need to take place in order for this utopian golden age to be actualized. Likewise, the cataclysms described in passages such as the Book of Revelation will not so much be viewed as God deliberately instigating the judgments. Instead, these disasters will be viewed as the Earth repairing itself after centuries of neglect at the hands of a culture based on Judeo-Christian principles rather than the balance claimed to be found in pantheism.
by Frederick Meekins
Bibibliography
Abanes, Richard. End-Times Visions: The Doomsday Obsession. Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1988.
Kirsch, Jonathan. A History Of The End Of The World: How The Most Controversial Book In The Bible Changed The Course Of Western Civilization. San Francisco, California: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006.
Kagan, Donald, Ozment, Steven and Turner, Frank. The Western Heritage Since 1789 (Fourth Edition). New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991.
Kyle, Richard. The Last Days Are Here Again: A History Of The End Times. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1988. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1996.
Ladd, George. The Blessed Hope: A Biblical Study of The Second Advent and The Rapture. Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1956.
Thompson, Damian. The End Of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium.
Sunday, December 18, 2022
Friday, December 16, 2022
Hit & Run Commentary #140
At the Trump campaign rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, one could not help but notice two individuals appearing to be Amish standing behind the President. The individuals stood out because of their distinct hats and mustacheless beards which ranked among the very few countenances not concealed behind a mask. Will the conspicuously pious condemn the duo for exhibiting an “obstreperous spirit of rebellion” as one online theologian condemned his coreligionists that did no more than articulate a skeptical dislike while actually complying in venues where the garment was required under threat of law enforcement intervention. If these Amish were in touch enough with what their sect condemns as the Luciferian English to know that there was some sort of political hootenanny taking place, shouldn’t they have also known about the face covering mandate? More importantly, do Christians requiring their average fellow believers to obey these sorts of intrusions against their will possess the backbone to impose it upon those sects the majority have been conditioned to dare not question?
Given the number of Black Lives Matter as well as the Biden campaign yard signs lining the streets, I am reminded that, while I live in this town, I don’t really live in this town.
Should the Biden campaign succeed in seizing power, if the crime rates rise in light of leftwing policies, it is my sincere hope that if there must be victims that they will be from among those that erected BLM signs in their yards that will be brutalized or have their property violated. The resultant world, is after all, the inevitable outcome of their brand of activism.
A Dove Soap commercial declares that Black men care about Black women. So would an advertisement supposedly about soap but rather about propagandistic indoctrination as boldly proclaim White men care about White women? For if Black men can affirm a preference for their own sort or breed, why should White men remain silent as to their prefered mating preference?
So where is the rationality of compelling individuals against their will to intake into their bodies a substance likely to elicit in at least five percent of cases a negative response (some of them permanent) for the purposes of soliciting an immune response only about half of the time to a disease that nearly 99% of the population is not going to die from in the first place? Such a requirement has nothing to do with science. This is about the forced implementation of a technoshamnistic religion.
Quasi-senile coot Joe Biden, in one of the rare instances where he was allowed out of the convalescent ward, in Atlanta droned on that if Americans would wear a mask for just a few months, the nation would get the Coronavirus plague behind us. But the vast majority of Americans have been wearing masks in public for nearly half a year now, particularly in areas with significant concentrations of population. It is an historic or even fact of human nature that there is never 100% compliance with any law or government edict. So what exactly is Biden advocating? Are we to assume that he wants an all-pervasive surveillance state? And perhaps as important, so long as there is a single case of coronavirus will Americans be forced to shroud their most basic form of individuality through this form of intervention bordering on tyranny now through the close of the present Dispensation? For somewhere out there there will always be a concern regarding this microbe lurking and its looming resurgence.
According to senile coot Joe Biden in Atlanta during one of those rare instances where his Illuminist handlers likely deemed him sufficiently medicated to be allowed out of his sanitarium cell, a “season of protest” erupted over President Trump’s refusal to articulate the liturgical injunction “Black Lives Matter”. In the instances of his rare public pronouncements, Biden insists that his regime will be about bringing people together. So what will be done to those that refuse to vocalize ascent to this creedal formulation if Biden invokes such as the root cause for the violence and looting perpetrated by his most ardent co-belligerents if not outright supporters?
President Trump categorized Joe Biden as a “touchy and feely sort of guy.” That has got to be of the most explicit examples of “takes one to know one” to have ever transpired.
Virginia Military Institute is considering the removal of a statue of Stonewall Jackson on campus over that figure’s connection to the Confederacy. But to be consistent, shouldn’t that institute now vote to abolish itself out of existence?
Luxury New York apartment complexes have hired armed guards to protect the occupants in anticipation of post-election upheaval. Parts of Beverly Hills are being cordoned off beforehand for the very same reason. Mind you, these are the very same locations inhabited by those the foremost demanding that Trump denounce the Proud Boys for that movement’s vigorous defense of Western civilization. These elites now invoking the Second Amendment in the attempt to protect all that they have accumulated have for decades insisted that the right to the implements of self-defense exist nowhere in the text of that constitutional provision.
Joe Biden laments President Trump utilizing so-called loopholes in order to pay the minimum amount of tax possible. But having been in high elected office for well over forty years, weren’t many of these provisions by definition been promulgated under Biden’s tenure?
In an anti-Halloween sermon, a pastor instead suggested an alternative where congregants could come to church dressed as Bible characters. In the homily, the pastor fondly recalled one such occasion where he came costumed as Eglon. For those not familiar, Eglon was the obese King of Moab that was so fat that Ehud could not pull the dagger out of the abdomen of when the tyrant was assassinated as detailed in Judges 3. Following this logic, if one is free to adorn oneself as a villain of the Bible at these social events, on what grounds does one get bent out of shape if a participant came decked out as Satan, the Antichrist, the Witch of Endor, or the Loose Woman of the Book of Proverbs?
In an anti-Halloween sermon, a pastor said it is the Devil (not God) that likes blood and guts. Such was articulated in regards to a highly detailed hunting video game. But wasn’t it God that required a detailed system of blood sacrifices on behalf of the Israelites? So apparently the blood fascination comes from somewhere and it not apparently all bad.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has promulgated an edict that those entering the jurisdiction should submit to a mandatory Coronavirus test. However, the measure will not be enforced. Then why would anyone willingly submit to such an intrusion voluntarily? And does this stipulation apply to protesters coming to town to loot and riot?
If the Biden regime imposes a national mask mandate, states that value liberty should refuse to implement or enforce it.
Interesting how questioning the results of an election is being rhetorically categorized as a greater outrage than efforts to undermine the legal observational oversight of the process.
Those questioning the legitimacy of the election have still looted less property than Antifa or Black Lives Matter.
What part of the First Amendment does not allow a skeptic to question the legitimacy of election results?
By Frederick Meekins
Thursday, December 15, 2022
Thursday, December 08, 2022
Pelosi Now Fawns Over Police Despite Once Backing Defunding
Continuing to keep the January 6th pot stirred nearly two years later, the Termagant Pelosi bestowed Congressional Gold Medals on two police officers that did not die technically from any injuries sustained in the infamous kerfuffle.
One passed later as a result of natural causes and the other by his own hand in an act of suicide.
At the ceremony, Pelosi categorized January 6, 2021 as “the most staggering assault on democracy since the Civil War” and celebrated law enforcement for “staring down deadly violence and despicable bigotry.”
How quickly those that constantly harp the shortcomings of history over the heads of the American people in order to silence opposition to their particular agendas forget the events that they themselves participated in or abetted.
For Pelosi did little on behalf of law enforcement when she bent arthritic knee in submission to Black Lives Matter an Antifa terrorists as they looted their way across America hooting chants about defunding the police.
These subversives destroyed monuments every bit as historic as those Democrats constantly now describe with the modifier “beloved” in the attempt to milk these events of every drop of sympathetic propaganda possible.
From an objective standpoint, only those deluded by the most demoniac of ideologies will insist that the U.S. Capitol faired worse than the destruction inflicted upon St. John's Church just blocks from the White House in the name of tolerance, justice and inclusion.
By Frederick Meekins
Tuesday, December 06, 2022
Does Disputatious Nature Of Fundamentalist Movement Leave Vacant Pulpits Empty?
In a sermon, an independent fundamentalist Baptist pastor lamented that he heard more than 75 churches needed pastors.
Even more troubling to the pastor was that, when a class was asked who among the assembled was ready to fill these vacancies, only two raised their hands.
But isn’t the nature of the independent fundamentalist Baptist movement in part at fault?
For often if a potential applicant disagreed with a congregation or more likely a pastoral search committee over a minor peculiarity or secondary doctrine, the individual often ends up being viewed as little better than an outright unbeliever.
As to the class where most did not respond in the affirmative, they probably figured if they had, they were likely to get a verbal reaming about the sins of presumption, pride, how no one is really good enough, and how the truly pious wait upon the moving of the Lord but to claim you hear from Him would then disqualify you as a crypto-Charismatic.
By Frederick Meekins
Monday, December 05, 2022
Tolerancemongers Now Triggered By Comments On Triggering
The thing about revolutions is that, unless they are opposed, they are never concluded.
Those advocating systematized social upheaval and transformation are so perennially unhappy that their particular understanding of reality can be the only one granted the sanction of recognized existence.
That is why the end game is described as totalitarian.
For example, now that the progressivist mindset is on the verge of assimilating nearly every institution in sight akin to the Borg from Star Trek, it is not enough that you comply with whatever demands are imposed upon you.
Apparently you are not even allowed to notice or point out that these demands are being imposed.
Online woketopians are unhinged that Tim Allen dared observe how it is, to use the very word invoked to intimidate traditionalists into silence regarding nearly everything else that ticks off the chronically offended but over which an actual reason as to why cannot be articulated, problematic to say “Merry Christmas”.
At Decider.com, opposition to Allen daring to express himself was expounded by an article titled “Tim Allen Pulls The Santa Clauses Into The War On Christmas With A Lazy, Inaccurate Joke”.
Humor is a thing that cannot be controlled, to paraphrase a patron saint of these aspiring tyrants Chairman Mao, through the barrel of a gun.
Something is either funny or it is not.
You might feign applause to avoid interrogation either by Stalin's secret police or the administrators of the corporate human resources department.
However, genuine amusement in the form of outright laughter or even internalized agreement (perhaps the thing the thought police despise and fear the most) cannot be as easily faked.
The column goes on to condemn the cultural meme of the war against Christmas as inaccurate, inflammatory and perhaps, most of all, a myth.
Yet Western civilization as a manifestation of what was once right with the world now totters along the brink of ruination because of the extent to which these ideological subversives have successfully harnessed the refrain often with accompanying threats of violence such as rioting and looting that no such thing as objective truth really exists and that the greatest offense of all is to question the myth or narrative through which someone construes existence.
Thus if someone believes that there is a war against Christmas, tolerancemongers that have spent entire careers insisting that the notion of an objective reality is the epitome of oppression don't have much of a leg to stand on when attempting to hand down pronouncements as to which interpretation of subjective experience is correct.
The commentary concludes, “Do I sound triggered? Yeah, I do, because this nonsense argument is one that continues to divide people more and more every year...”
Yet how is that any worse than the antics of those that have learned that shouting the allegation of “racism” is the key to getting their increasingly strident demands by spineless and facile Whites.
Thus, the advocates of the cultural revolution going on around us for decades admit that what they really can't stand most of all is the gift inherent to you as a human being to articulate basic disagreement with the prevailing herd mentality.
By Frederick Meekins
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Woketopians Declare Certain Individuals Deemed Unworthy Of Continued Existence
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