More current events

Before I start talking economy and anyone who reads this in the next 2-3 months wonders why I can't see that things are improving, let me start with a little anecdote that may serve to get us into the proper frame of mind.

I read an article in the paper last week that pondered why the general public thinks that crime rates are on the rise when statistics show that crime in this country has been dropping for the last twenty years. The author quoted a slew of sociologists and basically interpreted the divergence as a function of the natural human tendency to idealize the past. Ha ha ha. Oh, you silly rubes.

Of course there is an alternative explanation. It could be that the reason people think that crime is on the rise is because... um, crime is on the rise.

I know. I know. But the stats. How do you explain those away? Pretty easily actually. Since I'm not a socialist looking at bar graphs, but a police officer who has spent the last fifteen years looking at real, honest-to-goodness crimes, I can tell you exactly what those stats are worth. And no, the answer isn't toilet paper. It's not even worth that because the ink from the paper would just come off on your butt, and nobody wants a bar graph smudged all over their butt.

What the stats don't tell you is that law enforcement doesn't tally crimes the same way that it did twenty years ago. The three big drivers for this are the district attorneys: who place additional barriers on the prosecutions of certain crimes to try keep their dockets from overflowing, some police administrations: who discourage the reporting of certain crimes to make themselves look good, and finally -- and most importantly -- the demographic changes in the criminal world itself that none of these rosy charts seem to have any interest in documenting.

The next time you hear someone tell you that thefts are down, and that robberies have dropped by such and such, or that burglaries are down so and so just ask, "When you say 'theft', you are including identity theft in those statistics. Aren't you?" Then sit back and enjoy the stammering on the part of the sociologist or politician or whoever.

Put simply, the stats are lying. The reason that robberies, burglaries, and petty thefts are down, is because a lot of the people who used to get their hands dirty committing those sorts of crimes have found that it's much easier these days to just go online and take someone's personal information and steel money that way. In most states this isn't actually a kind of theft, it's considered a fraud and that little bit of hair-splitting keeps those bar graphs from having to include the one bar that has skyrocketted over the last few years. So although technically yes, thefts and such are down, the underlying premise that you are any less likely to become a victim of crime (and a crime that feels suspiciously like a theft) is simply not true.

Now, for the economy.

Last week's jobs number told the tale that the US had added 162,000 jobs. Simply the fact that we didn't shed jobs is seen as a sign that the recovery is well under way. The major markets are all trending up. Commodities are moving higher. The housing market is improving. So why am I still pushing the cart and calling, "bring out your dead," to anyone who will listen? Because the stats don't tell the whole story.

Nation killer #1) At the current rate of increase the United States will reach something economists call 'debt saturation' within four years. Unless something changes -- drastically -- in four years time we will have reached the point that additional increases in debt do nothing to add to our overall productivity. That means that stimulus will no longer be very 'stimulating' and the possibility of jump-starting the economy through short term debt increase will have evaporated. That will leave us with three options: hyperinflating the debt away (this means your dollars will become very nearly worthless. Coupon cutting will take on a whole new significance when a loaf of bread cost ten bucks!), defaulting on the debt (this will have a number of effects, but the first thing you will likely notice is your aging relatives calling and wanting to move in with you because their retirement funds suddenly ceased to exist) and the third -- and probably most likely -- is that we can try and seize the necessary assets from other nations (you may have heard of this; it's called war, and the upshot here is that we are running out of countries like Iraq that have resources but lack viable militaries. In other words the next country we shoot at may actually shoot back).

Nation killer #2) Did I mention that commodities are moving higher?

Considering how contentious the whole drill/don't drill debate was two years ago it's interesting that Obama's announcement to open up offshore drilling barely even made the news. Another 'non-newsworthy' event occurred when the US Department of Energy announced that the DOE was expecting world oil supplies to start dropping within the next few years unless someone starting ponying up 1.3 trillion dollars a year to find and drill more oil. Oh, in case you're curious, no one is spending even a fraction of that at the moment. In fact Conoco Phillips recently added their name to the list of companies (Exxon, etc.) who are cutting the search for new oil fields altogether. This government admission was odd for a couple of reasons. First, the last time I checked, the DOE was insisting that oil supply would continue to increase for the next 20 years or so. Second, at the moment those oil supplies actually start to show a measurable decline you're going to see the price shoot up in something that looks very much like the fun we had when gas went to $4.00 a gallon two years ago. And that will only be the beginning.

The maximum price for oil that still allows for reasonable economic growth is somewhere in the area of $70 a barrel. Right now it is at $86 a barrel (owing to the fact that the dollar gets a little weaker every time we print a couple hundred billion new greenbacks) and the only reason it hasn't gone higher still is that worldwide demand is in the gutter. If we see something like a bonafide recovery that'll change in a hurry. Even without a recovery the potential for another run up is looking more and more likely. It could happen this summer.

I haven't even gotten to the nation killers like Iran's soon-to-be nuclear arsenal, the continuing climate change problems, social breakdown, etc. etc. This is enough for now.

To sum up: I think we're in for a mild spring on the news front. America's privileged place in the world economic pecking order is allowing up to continue to rack of staggering debts without any of the messy debt implosion stuff that is currently taking Greece and starting to spread to Spain and Portugal. The summer could be unpleasant with high energy prices and the global political instability that comes with them breathing uncomfortably down our collective necks.

By the fall the economy should take its next serious leg down. Any marginal job growth will have been snuffed out by the rising business costs associated with high energy prices and by then the worst of this year's municipal and state employee layoff should be well under way. The public will scream at the usual suspects -- politicians and oil companies. In November I think we will see massive turnover in Senate and the House. This will accomplish nothing.

If we can stay out of any major wars during this time we may have two to three relatively prosperous years left. After that, shrinking oil supplies will turn the world into a madhouse of fear and uncertainty. Servicing all that debt will be impossible, and that fact will be obvious to everyone. The final resource grab will get well and truly underway. Saudi Arabia is going to find itself the last eligible male in a world of psychotic old maids desperate to court, and to undermine the competition any way possible. War will be inevitable at this stage.

And that brings us to the tribulation.

Current events

So the Dems "answered the call of history". That might explain why they couldn't answer all those calls from their constituents begging them not to vote for that crazy health care thing.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of universal health coverage, but I am a tad curious how Uncle Samuel plans to pay for it. Heck, I loved the idea of the 24 buffet on that cruise ship... it's the reality of a week and a half of stomach upset afterwards that I wasn't too keen on. The health care debate does serve as a nice launching point for some thoughts on the current events and how much longer we may have before some of the more gruesome of the end times prophecies come to fruition.

Issue 1) Why did we need health care reform in the first place?

When I was a freshman at the University of Texas, some twenty odd years ago, I took a basic macroeconomics class with about sixty other just-give-me-the-diploma-and-shut-up drones. I only remember one lecture out of the whole business; it was the one that made me change my major. The prof was explaining the concepts of elastic and inelastic demand. For his example of "inelastic" demand he brought up insulin and described how chronic diabetics would give almost anything in exchange for the medicine. That was the goal of a thriving company, he said, to make their product or service so inelastic that the consumer would become utterly dependant. I distinctly remember looking around the room to see if anyone else was even raising an eyebrow at the notion of consumer-slavery being job number one. To my surprise, no, I was the only one who wasn't dutifully taking notes -- sickening.

In the past couple of decades America has lost its moral will. All the the nasty stuff that our founding fathers told us would happen if we turned our backs on God is happening. But America has been a immoral corporate shill for more than just a decade or two, you say? I don't think so. Not entirely.

I think it works something an immune system that has been compromised to a critical degree. Ninety years ago our nation may have caught a bad case of Rockefeller, but it eventually fought it off with chicken soup and anti-trust legislation. Now the white blood cell count is so low that we've got a bad case of Exxon and we can't shake it; we've got Monsanto in our blood stream and worse yet, we've contracted a case of Goldman Sachs so bad that I'm not sure how much longer we've got.

When a nation loses its moral fiber its wealth migrate inexorably from weak hands to strong hands. The vulnerable become progressively poorer and something like health care is a perfect example for how this happens.

Health care prices have been consistently rising by something like 10% to 12% a year. At the same time real wages (wages measured against inflation) have been falling for the last decade or so. How does health care command a higher price against consumers who are steadily less able to pay for it? Because it can. It sells insulin -- and things like it. Now if you have health insurance (and if you don't, you're about to) you may have noticed that you and/or your company has to pay more for the privilege every year, it takes a bigger chunk of your salary, and it was going to keep taking a bigger chunk of your salary every year until a government entity looking out for your interests finally stepped in... unfortunately we don't have that kind of government. Here's what actually happened:

The bill is contrived in such a way that is intended to get the people who voted for it reelected -- once. The goodies (universal child coverage, new rules for dropping coverage, etc) kick in immediately. The paperwork and bureaucratic fun-times don't go live until 2014. By 2018 everything is in place, it becomes obvious to all that this was never meant to benefit you, and hopefully you've forgotten who voted for it in the first place.

2) Who actually benefits from this thing?

The large pharmaceutical companies are probably the biggest winners. They got all sorts of perks with very few strings attached. If you watched Fox News you may have heard that a small group of large insurance providers were also popping champagne corks. I don't think so. Big pharma is sitting at the top of that informational food chain that I talked about in the Man of Lawlessness segments (see: Who is the antichrist). The only value that the insurance companies bring to the table is that they allow the government to offload a certain amount of unpleasant responsibility. In other words: they make a convenient scapegoat. Right at this moment the government of our fine nation is promising to pay for a whole host of things that they can't possibly pay for. when they don't, someone has to take the blame, someone who isn't up for reelection. Yes, I realize the insurance exect's are probably already counting the extra cash from the 32 million new customers. I just don't think that becoming a pseudo-government entity a la Freddie Mac and AIG is going to be a cakewalk at this stage of the game. As we'll see in the next post "government bailout" is going to mean something different very soon.

As a final note, consider that the Bible never endorses one form of human governance over another. Democracy is never propped up as "blessed", monarchies are never derided, etc. God doesn't waste any ink telling us how to govern a country. It wouldn't do any good. No system of government can overcome the moral failings of its people. Communism never looks anything like a "commune", it looks like a tightly controlled caste system where one "comrade" gets the goodies, the other gets a paltry government job. And if you watched the wrangling around health care bill you saw what democracy looks like. It looks like 300 million in perks for Louisiana, it looks like special giveaways for a bank in North Dakota, it looks like the revelation that "universal" health care for children with preexisting conditions doesn't quite mean that -- it looks like 2,700 pages of fine print and promises that have no basis in reality.

Next: the economy and geopolitical rumblings.

What is the whore of Babylon - part 6

Okay, so I've spent five posts telling you that the whore of Babylon is the intellectual wing of an anti-God movement doomed to destruction. I've told you that this intellectual wing is made up of persons who have turned intellectualism into a religion and that a high concentration of these religious-gnostics can now be found in the scientific mainstream and are cranking out enough books calling for the end of Christianity that they now have their own section in the bookstore.

Who cares?

The first thing to realize is that when the Bible gives you a long, drawn out description of God's judgement upon a certain group it is not giving you this information so that you can get your jollies laughing at all the poor saps who failed to reach your level of personal holiness. It's a warning. You are being told to avoid a certain thing and being given an explanation of why that thing is to be avoided.

But I'm not a gnostic, you say, so can't we just leave it at that? It's not that simple. One of the teachers of one of the largest Sunday school classes at my former church was teaching a largely gnostic platform. Now, this was a very large group, and this man had a ministry that went beyond the church (he's deceased now, so I see no value in giving his name). How did a man with gnostic leanings get that sort of influence at a megachurch pastored by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention? Because nobody had any feelers out that would have fired off a warning siren at the sound of a teaching system that emphasized the acquisition of arcane bits of theological minutiae over simple trust and obedience in God.

What I am saying is that the traditional view of the whore of Babylon does nothing to prepare the modern church for the threat has long infiltrated it and is right now marshaling outside of it for a prolonged campaign of aggression. We Christians tend to think we are immune to deception -- particularly self-deception -- because we are identified as the "saints". It's true of course, the Bible calls those who have found salvation in Jesus as "saints". The problem is that we have polluted the definition of the word "saint", imagining a perfect creature clad in a shining white toga that levitates from one good deed to the site of his next miracle. This impression came to us from Catholicism, and the pagan demi-gods that the so-called Catholic "saints" replaced in the lives of the ancient Greco-Roman converts.

The Biblical truth is that a "saint" is nothing more than a sinner who has been given a promise of something better by their creator. A saint isn't set apart by his or her own intrinsic goodness, they are set apart by the price that their savior was willing to pay for them. People who put this truth at the center of their lives begin to look more and more like Jesus. They start to sacrifice of themselves for others -- in a host of different ways -- just like He did for us. Contrast this with the disciples of that Sunday school teacher I mentioned before; these young men went around trying to impress everyone with their superior knowledge. Learning is wonderful, it is not, however, a means of salvation, and if you try and make it one you are destined for disappointment.


Now, what is this going to look like when it goes down for the final time?

In a few short years our nation's economy is going to collapse. How long we flounder in bread lines and political gridlock is any one's guess. There's enough national angst to reduce the years to months, but our nation is such a lazy, docile bunch these days that it could take a decade. On top of that there is a host of international facts that could go one way or the other. All in all, I think a fair over/under for this is something like five years. This will end with a national -- at the very least -- and very likely international beast of the apocalypse that goes after the world's remaining resource base (Saudi oil fields, Canadian arable land, ect) with a vengeance. You'll know this stage when it hits because you'll be bombarded with political "mission" statements on your television: these are kind of like Roosevelt's "fireside chats" except that the glorious leader will try and sell you on a grandiose vision of the future where salvation (in both the physical and metaphysical senses) will be achieved through national supremacy and... uh... there's no fireplace.

Along about this time it is going to be "scientifically proven" that Christianity is harmful to psyches and the development of all people, especially children, and will come under government regulation. The teaching of certain Biblical passages will become illegal (in some countries this has already happened) and Christians will be martyred to degree and in places (like the US Bible Belt) that you probably never thought would happen. Those of us who reject the new, sanitized version of Christianity will be going to concentration camps and whatever method of execution this version of the beast wheels out. The scientists who wrote all those peer-reviewed papers proving that we were no good will watch our fates on their televisions and gloat... then the knock at the door and they get to join us in the oven/gas chamber/sausage press.

Somewhere in all this New York city will cease to be something that you and I would recognize as a city. It may get bombed, it may just hollow out when the stock market suddenly goes to zero, whatever form it takes I think New York fits the Biblical description for the representative city in a way that London just can't anymore. In the first "time" the city of Rome was sacked. In the second it was Byzantium. During the third round both Rome and Byzantium got sacked. Next up, during the "half a time", it's the Big Apple's turn. It may not be a "sacking" in the medieval/renaissance sense (Although I wouldn't completely rule that out), but it will be ugly nonetheless.


And this brings us to the final verdict. A whore, or prostitute, is someone who gives away something of immense value (her intimate affection) for a very small and temporal reward. Gnosticism prostitutes the rational mind that God gave each one of us for the small potatoes of a claim to intellectual elitism. And for all its claim to brilliant thinking it does something very stupid when it crawls into bed with the beast. The beast is a very insecure creature and when it has what it wants it turns on the whore. This has already happened historically, and it's already starting to happen again. Bigger than before. Worse than before.

Yeah, I'm depressed too.

Next post, current events: I catch up on the events that were going on while I was cruising around the Caribbean.

What is the whore of Babylon - part 5

Charles Darwin didn't use his theories to attack Christianity. Not exactly. No, that mantle was picked up by a man who called himself "Darwin's Bulldog", Thomas Huxley. Huxley, in his scientific paper Man's Place in Nature took a basic scientific observation (that successive generations of living organisms seem to adapt to their environment through a process called natural selection) and began the process of crafting it into a religion. but it was his grandson, Julian, that just went all crazy with it.

Julian Huxley developed a system of belief that he called, "evolutionary humanism". Huxley famously stated: "Many people assert that this abandonment of the God hypothesis means the abandonment of all moral sanction. This is simply not true. but it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture, that we must construct something to take its place."

And so he did. This 'new' religion was going to meet in places like a church, sing songs like hymns, and study all the moral goodies that evolution compelled them to believe.

Of course nobody much went along with this. You see, evolution doesn't compel you to believe anything in the moral sphere. Huxley should have snapped on this being one of the main members of the British Eugenics society (eugenics is the study of selective breeding and weeding out of humans) during the same time that one of the main members of a little German eugenics club-- an Adolf Somebody-or-other -- was busy "weeding out" 13 million human beings in his concentration camps.

Science is like that. It can tell you what you are seeing. But it can't tell you what it is worth; it can't tell you whether it is good or bad. At least it's not supposed to. The funny thing is -- that doesn't seem to be stopping anybody. Evolution should state that more complex living organism derive from more simple organism over time through the process of natural selection... and that's it. But it doesn't. There's a 'company line' of sorts that is attached to evolutionary teaching that says things like: evolutionary theory teaches us that God is a product of the human mind (uh, it does?), evolution teaches us that women are wrongfully repressed by the male dominated culture (I don't remember seeing that in the fossil record), or evolution shows us that homosexuality is a valid form of sexual expression, (actually evolution has a problem even explaining homosexuality. You know, natural selection and all).

The 19th century was where we said goodbye to science 'the method of discovery' and began to say hello to science 'the religion'. The same century that gave us a whole new host of objects of idolatry (like the icons of romance stories) also gave gnostics a new and potent foundation for religious use. With Christianity, it was like trying to manipulate a person who doesn't want to do what you're telling him. But with science, it's like moving a puppet. Science makes no attempt to defend itself. It crunches the numbers and then stands dumbly while the person viewing those numbers uses them for whatever purpose they choose.

Not all scientists are gnostics of course, but quite a few are. The concentrations gets ever higher if you look at something like the modern "skeptic" movement. Two centuries ago a spirit of gnosticism had sufficiently infused the scientific community to create the battle lines that we see today between science and "faith". Make no mistake, that battle is not between observation and faith-based revelation, it is between one religion and another.

Because this battle rages, many of my fellow Christians get angry with me for defending evolution. They think I've sided with the enemy. It's the same thing as when a scientist like Stephen Jay Gould tries to assert that science has no business making religious claims for any sort of moral judgement, and then a whole host of his colleagues ask him if he would kindly shut the hell up.

This is a conflict between two ideologies. And it is about to turn bloody.

Next post: what is this going to look like in the 'half a time'.

What is the whore of Babylon - part 4

Let's be clear: our world appears to be over four billions years old. There were no dinosaurs when man first came on the scene. There was never any "water dome" surrounding the earth and if you saw the individuals that we refer to as "Adam" and "Eve" you might be surprised that they didn't look like the nearly hairless caucasian teenagers that we somehow always depict on felt boards and in movies. Oh, and you probably have a great grandmother somewhere who has outlived Methuselah.

The sad part is that you probably think that I just contradicted the Bible one or more times. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I am disputing is a pattern of interpretation; a pattern that picked a certain outline of what it decided Biblical truth must be and has now spent the last four centuries or so working backwards trying to create some sort of evidence for itself.

Well... at least we got rid of the gnostics.

What am I talking about? Where do I start? There are so many points at which the current -- oh, what do I even call this thing? It doesn't deserve terms like evangelical or even conservative... only about half or so of Bible believing Christians go in for it... let's just call it Young Earth for now -- crumbles into a heap of irrational mishmash:

The age of the planet? The creation story from Genesis was spoken long before it was written down and let me tell you, even if Adam had have been born in October of 4004 there still would not have been a language in existence that could have said the things that we try and make that passage say. By the time it was rendered into Hebrew the Hebrew language had two words to denote the passage of time. Two. No hours, minutes, or seconds, no millenniums, centuries, or years.... and no word that meant, "a period of 24 hours". Time keeping was tricky for primitive man and our earliest two words meant something like, "a period of darkness in between two periods of light", where darkness can either literally mean nightfall or can mean something more vague like, "a period of the unknown". The second word means the reverse, "a period of light in between two periods of darkness and it can express the same sorts of multiple meanings. Context is the key. The same word that Young Earthers take in Genesis as meaning 24 hours is taken by the same folks to mean "7 years" when it is given in the context of, "the great and terrible day of the Lord."

I'm going to get to the point for the sake of time. In debates with atheists I can do something fancy that always leaves them thinking I've just cheated in some way or another -- I can take the current scientific theory of our universe's creation and the evolution of life on this planet, place it next to the Genesis account and make the two match. It's simple. You just have to apply a couple basics rules that any primitive group of humans would have employed when understanding such a story.

The Bible is an amazing thing. It doesn't need our help to defend itself. Trust me. We are not doing God any favors when we create our own little fictions that supposedly will explain everything.

Methuselah? The Genesis genealogies are old enough that there are not a lot of other surviving pieces of literature to compare them to. But there are a few. And from the little we have it seems clear to me that the word we translate "year" in those genealogies did not mean "a period of 365 days" to Methuselah and his contemporaries. If I had to nail down a guess, I would say that the figures added up their ages using a lunar cycle (basically a month) starting from some sort of rite of passage event. If I'm right Methusaleh lived to be about 90. Whatever it was, the ancients did not use their genealogies the way that Archbishop Ussher did.

Dome of water? I feel silly even answering this sort of thing. A dome of water surrounding the earth? Seriously? You don't need God holding a giant bucket over the earth to make it rain for forty days. A nice-sized meteor hitting the ocean will do that for you. And no, sitting under a water screen would not make you live for a thousand years either.

So what does any of this have to do with Gnostics and the end times?

Christianity isn't just a religion, it is also a pattern of thinking -- a way of looking at the world and decided what to think/do about those observations. This is what Paul is alluding to when he says, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be changed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:2), where renewal leads to a Christian was of thinking and a casting off of the Roman pagan religion/thought patterns. When Christianity was the dominant pattern of thought across the western world it was only natural that Gnostics would use it for their foundation of spiritual increase. When observational-based thinking began to separate from the Christian church, in other words when a person could either be a scientist or a Christian, but it started to be a little tricky to consider themselves as both, the gnostics suddenly had a choice. And science works better as a foundation for gnosticism than Christianity ever did.

Next post: Gnostics, the where are they now episode.

What is the whore of Babylon - part 3

For a thousand years the whore dressed up in church clothes and did a pretty good rendition of a "nice" girl. Then the church did something that began the process of flushing them out into the open: the church decided that it couldn't be wrong anymore.

The official claim of Papal infallibility (the notion that a pope can never be wrong while carrying out his official duties) didn't come until the 1800's, but it had been the normal working order since medieval times. The medieval church was the one that decided to consolidate its power and prestige, and to do that it couldn't go around admitting that it made mistakes.

Now the church in Western history had actually been the prime supporter of scientific progress, and that lasted up until Renaissance times. Most of the Western advances either came at the hands of monks or through the support of some church agency. But once the church leaders decided to agree with certain scientific theories it was stuck, because now if you remember, it could no longer admit to being wrong. Thus Copernicus and Galileo and a host of others would make discoveries and then find themselves in the peculiar position of either keeping their finds to themselves or going to prison.

At this point there is something that needs to be clarified. I've previously said that all the world's major religions have a gnostic variant, and that's true... to a point. It ceases to be true if you consider Mormonism a 'major world religion'. Gnostics don't care much for the Mormon faith. You see, it's hard for a gnostic to put much stock in a system of knowledge if that system has no internal logic and can be best described as... well... stupid.

Mormonism works very much like a classic mystery religion. For the Mormons, as you progress in the faith, you get to go to a special study room and see presentations on all the really "special" elements of the faith -- this involves a churchmen giving a multimedia presentation on how you are going to one day zip around the cosmos keeping your long-suffering wife pregnant for all eternity. The Mormons lose members as they teach these special "truths". A good number of ex-Mormons describe the difficulty in putting their faith in a system that made no logical sense.

Christianity is not Mormonism. At least, it's not supposed to be.

The Christian Bible invites skepticism. It holds itself to the standard of logic, so much so that John actually refers to God as the great "Logos" or logic in the first chapter of his gospel -- your Bible likely translates this as "Word" as in, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made man...." and "Word" isn't a bad translation since most folks would scratch their heads if it read, "In the beginning was the 'Logic', but you need to understand 'Word' is correct because of what a 'word' is; it's a discrete piece of rational thought. In other words it's the difference between "hello" and "olhel" where the first one contains a rational thought and the second one doesn't. What I'm trying to say is that the Bible makes a very fundamental claim to logic and reason. A Mormon can look you in the face and explain why they accept Mormonism in spite of the logical inconsistencies in the Book of Mormon and the lack of any archaeological support. A Mormon has "faith" and it's okay for their faith to run contrary to logic and observation. A Christian does not have this luxury.

Case in point -- right now professing Christian Kirk Cameron is going around handing out copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species that have a preface which tries to undermine the theory of evolution and in stead prop up the "Christian" theory called young earth creation. Now, I guarantee that Mr. Cameron has no little, and very possibly no idea where young earth creation comes from and that he likely doesn't care; he has faith, and why should rational observation stand in the way of something grander like faith.

Most people think that young earth creation comes from the Bible. It doesn't. It comes from a man named James Ussher, an Irish Archbishop in the 1600's, and no, he did not say that the world was formed in the year 4,000 BC. What he actually said was that the world was formed on October 22, 4004 BC... in the evening... I am not joking.

The way he came up with this astonishingly precise figure was to add up the ages found in the Genesis genealogies, apply it to the Julian calender and voila, an exact date of world creation. His timeline found popularity and was inserted into the back of the King James Bible, at a time when everyone was buying and reading the King James Bible. Now Christians are funny in that sometimes we don't always discriminate between "Scriptural" and "Biblical" and by that I mean that we often tend to assign the same sort of 'infallibility' to the footnotes, inserts, maps, and whatnot, that we do for the actual text.

I personally have no problem attempting to defend the claim that the writers of Scripture were divinely inspired, I would have a much harder time trying to lay that at the feet of the modern day Biblical scholars. But Renaissance believers had no prior experience with Biblical scholarship and they accepted what they were given, cover to cover. The 4004 date became institutionalized as if it were the work of an apostle, rather than a Renaissance Catholic archbishop. "Faith" has keep it alive since. But I will give Archbishop Ussher this: working with the assumptions of the time his theory was actually semi-logical. That's three and a half centuries ago. Today, it's nothing short of ridiculous.

Next post, I pick up with creation/evolution and hopefully start explaining where those pesky gnostics went after Renaissance times.

What is the whore of Babylon - part 2

Remember the book 'Animal Farm'? They probably made you read it in high school and if you're like me you thumbed through the Cliff Notes version so you could pass the test and forget the whole bloody thing the next day.

Too bad. It's a classic book. It's also a longer, more in-depth version of Revelations 17.

In Chapter 17 we are introduced to a pattern of destruction that goes like this: Whore seduces Beast to kill the Saints. Beast kills them. Beast then turns on Whore and kills her. The rock-paper-scissors ends with God avenging the Saints by destroying the beast, but that part comes later. For now lets focus on the events of chapter 17.

In Orwell's Animal Farm a group of farm animals decide that they aren't going to take it anymore and rebel against the farmer. A pair of pigs named Snowball and Napoleon lead the charge. When the dust settles the two pigs write up a manifesto for animal rights and proclaim all the animals equal. Napoleon then decides to do away with Snowball and trains the dogs to become a kind of animal Nazi secret police so that he can assume absolute power.

The book is an allegory of the totalitarian regimes that were sprouting all over Europe in those days. And just like with good food and bad movies it all started with the French:

The French Revolution was the first of the high-minded "let's make everybody equal (oh, and while we're at it lets kill off all those religious nuts)" political movements. A group of "enlightened" thinkers overthrew the king, created this new-fangled thingie called the guillotine and started chopping off heads. Then something strange happened. They turned on each other. The more violent, or "beastly", among them starting killing off those high-minded thinkers. Eventually Napolean (the man, not the pig) siezed power and started marching his armies across Europe.

Then it happened again. This time in Russia. King overthrown, Christians and Jews killed, manifesto written... and then the more violent faction turned on the thinkers and slaughtered them. Then it happened in Germany, then Italy, eventually China got in on the act. Each time the same: thinkers incite killers, killers kill establishment and Christians/Jews (and this part happens even in places like China, where the Christians weren't truly a part of the "oppressive" establishment. Once the killing of the former rulers and religious types is complete, the violent arm of the movement seems to get fed up with all the noise and high ideals coming from the thinkers and turns on them. Whore gets Beast to kill Saints ---> Beast then turns on Whore.

Animal Farm was considered a visionary work of literature. Revelation 17 -- written almost 2,000 years earlier... not so much.

The Bible gets no respect....

So what is the whore, really? It's a religious movement (verse 5) centered on a city (verse 18) whose citizens stretch all over the world in some way (verse 15). The dittie about seven hills (verse 9) is a give away since Rome was famous for it's seven hills. The trick is that the Beast upon which the whore is sitting is also Rome. This is where something like Animal Farm comes in handy to help us flesh out the concept:

We are talking about two separate faction operating within one single regime.
Now, as we continue to flesh out the concept of the whore of Babylon, and why it matters to us, let's see how Gnosticism compares to Christianity.

Christianity may not classify as a "mystery religion", but it certainly has elements of the 'mysterious' connected to it. We are told that God works in "mysterious ways" (meaning that His ways are not predictable to our finite minds), we are also told that His ways are foolishness apart from a spiritual experience -- this certainly sounds a little like Gnosticism. But don't be fooled. The difference between the two is as basic and fundamental as it gets: Christianity doesn't have a score card. Gnosticism does.

Example: two people accept Christ as their lord and savior, one spends the rest of their life trying to understand God and how He relates to His creation, the other one doesn't. Which one is justified in the eyes of God?

The answer of course is that they both are since it is God's work that is important for their salvation, not there own. The Christian journey is one where a person gradually becomes more Christ-like, or more Holy (a loaded word which boils down to "whole" or "complete"). Now, one element of this journey is knowledge about God, but it is just one element; it's not even the most important. No, that one would be desire. We see this played out in 1 and 2 Samuel with David and Solomon. Solomon is the more knowledgeable, whereas David is the "man after God's own heart", meaning that David wants what God wants. At the end of Solomon's reign we are told that God would judge the man and his kingdom if it were not for the vow he had made with David. Despite David's inferior knowledge, his life and legacy were viewed as a success; in spite of Solomon's superior knowledge, his life and legacy were mixed between success (wrote three Bible books, enriched the country) and failure (integrated foreign paganism into the royal line which directly led to the nation's downfall, burdened the people with crushing taxes).

In God's economy the mind is good, but the heart is better.

In Gnosticism the ultimate desire is always self-serving and the mind is the way that the self is going to get served.

Historically, what happened was that in each one of the Biblical "times" we see intellectual faction that inspires a militant faction to kill believers. The first one of these is obvious -- the pagan thinkers in Rome wanted to kill the Christians because they blamed Christians for the ills of the empire. The Christians did not sacrifice to the pagan gods, and this made the gods angry so the thinking went. These thinkers inspired the more military minded Romans to kill Christians. So did these military minded individuals then turn on the pagan intellectuals? They did. After those military types became Christian. It started with Constantine. After him, it came in waves, with a pagan emperor persecuting Christians followed by a Christian emperor turning around and persecuting pagans. Good times.

In the medieval "time" it gets a little harder to spot. Remember that Gnosticism is a shape-changer. It's like a body snatcher and in the medieval phase I feel like a b-movie victim pointing and screaming at someone that looks perfectly normal to everyone else. In this age, there was certainly an intellectual faction within the Roman Catholic establishment that incited the military faction to violence (you might have heard of this, it was called the crusades). And those military "dogs of war" killed Christians with the passion that they killed Muslims. But is that enough to classify them as "the Whore".

Remember that "the Whore" is a personification, something like a team mascot. We'll talk more about why a whore is the right mascot for this particular belief system, but for now just notice a funny little connection -- in medieval times the church actually got into the prostitution business. In fact, in you were in Rome 13th century and you wanted to pay for sex there was just one place to go: church. Well, usually the brothels were just somewhere close to the church buildings, not actually in them. They were however owned and operated by the churchmen of that age.

The history behind this is a little strange (you might have guessed that). In earlier times the church outlawed prostitution and on several different occasions tried to stamp it out. This never worked, and there was always an outcry as to what to do with the women who would be indigent without this kind of work. The church gradually changed it's stance to a grudging acceptance. Next it took on brothels as a charitable outreach. But as the church became increasingly corrupt it couldn't help but notice that there was money to be made in this business.

This is a broad statement that wasn't true everywhere in Europe, but to an astonishing degree, the medieval church was the sponsor of it's prostitution.

Next post, Gnostics vs. Christians in 20th century American court, or as it was more commonly called: the Scopes trial.