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The Anti-Christ Has Come
By Kurt Saxon
(This article is from The Survivor, Vol.
4. It has been edited slightly
for it's first appearance on Kurt's web site in the late 1990's ~ Cary)
In early 1964 I attended several lectures by Dr. Wesley Swift, a head of the Identity religion, which evolved from the old Anglo-Israelite theory. He preached a mishmash of bastardized Christianity and extreme right-wing politics.
One night he raved, "There are 60,000 niggers training with guns in Arizona". A few months later the Watts riots broke out. Where were the "60,000 niggers"? Another time he said, "There are 60,000 Red Chinese hidden in Baja, California, brought over here by submarines". (He was hung up on the number 60,000).
Those in the audience were all southern Californians and had to know that Baja is a barren desert peninsula which couldn't hide or support 60,000 field mice, much less 60,000 Chinese troops. Besides, at that time, the Chinese had only 30 WW II subs, hardly enough or the type of vehicles to transport 60,000 men.
The thing that impressed me about this was, first, Swift was a liar. Second, his audience believed him, even though such lies were preposterous and could be believed only by an exercise in credulity. That is, training the mind to accept absurdities as a test of faith and loyalty, in a pathetic desire to belong.
Since then, I have seen this phenomenon often. The speaker tells an obvious lie and the audience swallows it whole to demonstrate their loyalty. In exercising the faith of children, they have somehow joined the ranks of an elite, like those at Jonestown in Guyana.
In the '60's, when certain males were adopting the fashion of long hair, I saw Billy Graham on one of his TV crusades. There were several long-haired males in his audience. Applying the credulity-loyalty test, Graham said, "I see there are a lot of young men in the audience with long hair. Well, there's nothing in the Bible against men wearing their hair long."
Most of his audience were Bible readers who must have come across Corinthians 11:14, where Paul said, "Doth not even nature itself teach you that if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?" I dare you to find any clergyman who couldn't recognize that verse and most could tell just where to find it. Graham, a professional evangelist, was lying.
During the social turbulence of the '60's, many liars and frauds began plucking from the population those who so badly wanted to belong that they would abase themselves intellectually for a leader, any leader. In the '90's, with our changing weather patterns, world unrest, inflation, all this and more, heralding a rapid decline of world civilization, people are going mad with anxiety and helplessness. And in their madness they are increasingly reaching out to any one who will give them the assurance that they will escape the holocaust to come.
A fable tells of a bunch of frogs who wanted a king. They petitioned the Great Frog and he put a log in their pond and called it their king. After awhile, the frogs got bored with their king and raged at the Great Frog to give them a king that would do something. The Great Frog then sent them a new king, a stork, which ate them all up.
The moral to that story is that the frogs didn't need a king. But rather than manage their own affairs, they wanted a leader, and one with clout. The Great Frog simply wrote them off as being of no use to the species.
With the collapse of civilization staring most conscious citizens in the face, desperation is building up. A very few have chosen self-reliance and have become survivalists. Part of the non-self-reliant devote themselves to politics, the gutless and stupid choosing the Republican or Democratic parties, the fanatic and stupid choosing the extreme right or left. But far too many are becoming Charismatic Christians.
The Charismatic Christian believes in gifts from heaven without any effort being needed to secure them; favors bestowed by grace, regardless of the recipient's merits. In short, he wants something for nothing. He may mouth words expressing belief, and send money, but he wants his paradise on Earth without working for it or deserving it.
As a Pagan, I'm only interested in the social aspects of Charismatic Christians and their predators, the collective Anti-Christ. Regardless of the sincerity, or lack thereof, of belief in their doctrines, the prey and the predators are yet another blight on our culture.
Before going on, I'll try to define the term, "Anti-Christ". The term is used only four times in the Bible, and only by John. 1 John 2:18 and 22 and 4:3, then in 2 John: 7.1 John 1:18-19 says, "Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now there are many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. 19 They went out from us, but they were not of us: for if they had been of us they would no doubt have continued with us:...."
These and other verses show that John, who wrote between the time of the crucifixion and 70 AD, believed he was living in the last days of his culture. he was right, since in 70 AD, Titus destroyed Jerusalem, killed many of the Jews and caused most of the survivors to flee to other countries. He also believed that Jesus was coming back any day.
In Matthew 16:28, Jesus said, "Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom." In Matt. 24:34, He said, "Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." See also, 1 Thes. 4:15-17.
So Jesus and his followers believed his kingdom would be established in their lifetimes. But it didn't happen and those who simply gave up hope were the original antichrists. John obviously became unhinged when he saw no evidence of Jesus' return in his lifetime, so he wrote "Revelations", seeming to postpone the date of the second coming. Chapter 20 of Revelations infers that 1000 years from John's time would come the Day of Judgment. But a thousand years passed and still nothing.
Anyhow, despite delay after delay, theologians continue to reinterpret the works of John and the other writers of the Bible to mean that he will finally make it back. It's been over nineteen hundred years, many Christian cultures have been destroyed or died out and the Anti-Christ has evolved from an ex-disciple denying the Christhood of Jesus, to a super pretender, passing himself off as the Christ.
The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible gives a general, updated definition of the Anti-Christ as: "Closely associated with the concept of the Anti-Christ, and at times assimilated to it, is that of a pseudo Christ, who will deceive and lead many astray by his pretensions to be the Christ, by his miracles, and by his false teachings."
Some modernists have interpreted the Anti-Christ as an omnipotent political figure who will take over the world in the guise of a Messiah and bring the world to total ruin. Instead, what I would call the Anti-Christ is the collective gaggle of fraudulent geese known as TV evangelists. Commentator Paul Harvey gave a polite rundown on these people a while back on one of his spots.
He said: "Years ago, broadcast evangelism was mostly Billy Graham, and his success inevitably inspired imitators. I don't know which is the chicken and which is the egg, but when lukewarm and infighting churches moved away from evangelization, the electronic ministers moved in. The Wall Street Journal recently audited the Electric Church and found Oral Roberts collecting $60,000,000 a year and growing at an annual rate of 25 to 30 per cent."
"Roberts spends $8,000,000 to broadcast his sermons and ministry. Roberts and several other superstars of religious broadcasting raise, mostly from listeners, a quarter billion dollars a year."
"Recently my own pastor and I visited the church of Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Virginia. We heard his 3,000 plus congregation, we watched his television ministry and we could not fault his theology. The fact that he receives 10,000 letters a day, most of them containing money, requires computerization and organizational efficiency and makes it look like a big business, because it is. But is that bad? Falwell is doing what every evangelical pastor is doing, only he's doing more of it."
"Herbert Armstrong, from Pasadena, California conducts a world wide ministry that takes in an excess of $75,000,000 a year. The Billy Graham ministry is beginning to appear poor by comparison. The Graham ministry collected only 27.8 million last year."
"And there's Jim Baker of Charlotte, NC and Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach and Rex Humbard of Akron, Ohio and Robert Schuller of Garden Grove, California, each a high-powered preacher with a multi-million dollar annual ministry."
"Should big money, per se, be suspect? Surely the devil's disciples are investing much more in perverting the electronic media. Then why do I feel uneasy? Maybe I'm fearful that they might crowd religion altogether off the air, and that would leave us all poorer."
Paul Harvey is a gentle man and more sympathetic to these people than I. But he hit the mark when he worried that the above evangelists, all frauds, were crowding religion off the air. (I would have said, 'crowding religion out of the community churches', since that's what they're doing).
I have no doubt that church attendance has fallen off considerably since the massive onslaught of TV evangelism hit the country. it is an insidious rotting of community participation in established religions and social activities. Charismatic evangelists, promising Heavenly benefits to their viewers constitute the collective Anti-Christ.
Regardless of whether you are religious or not, you must realize that the community church is a socially stabilizing influence. The members give one another emotional support. Also, the offerings are spent in the community instead of going to various frauds and out of the local economy.
Moreover, the church offers the traditional fellowship and fulfills the Biblical precepts of taking communion, undergoing baptism and participation. Charismatic Christianity does away with all this. It is non-participatory. Without the physical presence of others of the faith, idiocy and blasphemy comes through the tube, which the lone viewer has no defense against.
I remember the late Katherine Kuhlman broadcasting her healings. One case comes to mind of a middle-aged woman stricken with arthritis so badly she had to leave the office where she was an accountant. She was healed and went back to the office. She didn't do anything to deserve healing and when healed, did nothing she hadn't been doing before.
There were many like her. Many weren't even religious. Many of them didn't go to church afterwards. No renewal of purpose, no dedication to a better life. Useless healings to the undeserving. Charismatic Christianity is not even religion.
Once when I worked at the Arizona State nuthouse I was called into the women's ward because a large woman was thought to be on the verge of violence. My job was to subdue her if she refused to go to the padded room. I jollied her into co-operating and she went in without any trouble.
In the next room I saw an eight year old girl who was a mindless animal. At her third birthday party she had swallowed a chunk of cake which lodged in her windpipe, cutting off oxygen to her brain. She'd been in that room for five years. Why wasn't she healed by Katherine Kuhlman's Jesus?
I watched Pat Robertson of the 700 Club, interviewing a guest giving his testimony of Jesus' powers. He told of two girls leaving a meeting at night and going to their car. Two punks were there and the girls thought they were in danger of robbery or rape.
The punks snickered and let the girls get into the car. They told them the car would not start. It did, though, and the girls sped home. Looking under the hood to see if the punks had tried to sabotage the engine, the girls found that they had removed the battery.
Instead of kicking that lying scum off the program, Pat Robertson, his Stepin Fetchit sidekick, Ben and the audience gave out with awed praise the Lord's, hallelujahs and thank you Jesus'. Pat Robertson is no more a Christian than my cat. Nor are any of the other Charismatics who testify to Jesus' healing and literal presence.
A fiend rapes a fifteen year old girl and chops her arms off. Where is Jesus? He's off being a car battery. Two other fiends rape and murder an eight year old girl. Where is Jesus? He's off curing some jerk's alcoholism. A little girl is howling in a padded cell in the Arizona State nuthouse. Where is Jesus? He's off curing a mediocre woman of arthritis so she can go back to the office to be with her girlfriends. Charismatic Christians are turning Jesus into a clown.
What is garbage like that doing to believing viewers? It's turning them into a bunch of paranoid suckers thinking that the Biblical Jesus has already returned and will help them with any problem if they only become born-again Christians and send money to frauds like Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, etc.
It's also keeping them out of their local churches where such fantasies would be squelched. Moreover, as world conditions get worse and their TV fantasies don't materialize, they'll go mad. They will have absorbed so much nonsense in a demonstration of loyalty to their TV idiots that they'll be cut off from all appeals to reason.
A prominent survivalist told me of a man who sent back some of his newsletters with a request for a refund. He said the material was fine, but he had become a born-again Christian and expected to be taken up in the Rapture. The only "Rapture" he'll experience is the taste of human flesh when he's starving.
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