The Antichrist Doesn't Wear Tights (Part 2 of 3)‏

Hello Friends!

 

Here is the second article in our recent three part series.  Catchy title, huh?

 

Antichrist Doesn't Wear Tights

 

Recently the Christian world has been impacted by a rash of end-times "Home Alone after the Rapture" novels and movies offering the same tired recipe:

 

(1)    The world is in a political and economic crisis;  woe is us!

(2)    The Middle East is in conflict.

(3)    Suddenly all sorts of people are rap-zapped and disappear.

(4)    Kapoof!  Mr. AC himself appears on the scene, dressed in red Spandex tights with horns and a tail, as obvious as a Christmas cracker. Well, I guess he wears an expensive three-piece suit instead of the tights but you just know he's got them on underneath!

 

Mr. AC persecutes the post-rap-zapped believers and requires everyone to get their hand stamped so they can get into Globoland.  Finally he proposes his great cure for the world's ills, which for reasons totally obscure to a thinking mind are accepted universally without a moment's critical thought by anyone.

 

Just one problem with this starched scenario: it lacks subtlety.  Antichrist doesn't wear tights and traditionally, evil is far more clever and subtle than that.  So much so that in the last century whenever it befell a church, the church never saw it coming, even though the clues were always there for anyone who cared to look.  No "world citizen" would ever buy into the things the Biblical book of Revelation describes would happen without being psychologically prepped for it ahead of time.  Perhaps the greatest fallacy of popular rapture-reasoning is that the western church will be "out of here" before anything bad befalls it and this philosophy has become a paralyzing narcotic in the face of rapidly encroaching danger.

 

Magnum Opus Malum [1]

 

Right now Christians are witnessing a tremendous change in western culture and belief, which is a harbinger of very troubled times to come.  The battle for the West began in the wee years of the 20th Century when humanism seized control of academia and declared its goal of dethroning Christianity as the core western belief system.  H.G. Wells referred to the process as an "open conspiracy" in his book "The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution," where he argued the case for a global government.  It's open because the "conspirators" are not hiding anything in dark rooms.  They are like-minded individuals in positions of influence, who have made their goals and objectives clear.  Marilyn Ferguson reiterated this in her best-seller "The Aquarian Conspiracy," which appeared in the early 1980s.

 

The process continues today as atheistic humanism yields to global socialistic pantheism [2].  The changes began first among philosophers and academics, moving into the arts, then into common culture and finally as the new disciples came of age into the legal and political system.  Now we are seeing the total conversion of western society and a great utopian vision of a global governance controlled by socialism.  In reality, we are embracing bad ideas of the past which have resulted in much bloodshed and destruction of civilizations throughout the world.

 

The Great Prepping Away

 

The West has been subjected for 50 years to a process of being unfrozen from its traditional Christian belief systems and being tricked into accepting a new belief system, without even realizing that the transition was taking place; even thinking it was somehow a normal progression into "enlightenment."  The West is now being refrozen in the new belief system, without realizing its core beliefs and values have been sacrificed bit by bit.

 

(1)    The educational system has moved western culture from a didactic, fact-based system of thought rooted in logic and absolute truth to a dialectic feeling-based system of thought rooted in constantly-changing, non-absolute values.  The only mortal sin is failing to believe absolutely that there are no absolutes. (Note the inherent contradiction here, but that doesn't seem to stop the politically correct crowd).

 

(2)    History has literally been rewritten so that people can't remember the miserable lessons of the past or the greatness of their own heritage (granted that no heritage is perfect).  Good things have been called bad and bad things good.  Westerners have been subjected to an ever-present demonization of their culture.  The U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, for example, are said to be the outdated products of dead white slave owners, who also slaughtered Indians rather than being one of the most liberating documents of history, along with England's Magna Carta.  The British indeed are trading in a 1,000-year tradition of freedom under law as they buy into another one of Europe's attempts at failed socialism.  Sadly, America is following closely behind.

 

(3)    Communism has been minimized or exalted (despite having left more than 100 million people slaughtered by evil dictators in the 20th Century).  Capitalism is condemned as a great evil of rich men, despite its record of having provided the most prosperity and freedom for the most people in history.

 

(4)    Important distinctions between cultures have been minimalized and all beliefs are said to be of equal value with no way of discerning which values might be better or worse (known as Deconstructionism), although history teaches otherwise.  If that's true, by the way, why are some overweight and others starving?

 

(5)    Tolerance has been substituted for love of neighbor and truth.  A corollary is the switch from law based on absolutes to more complex and nebulous laws, which float with current understandings of "good" or "evil", about which there is much debate among "experts."

 

(6)    Religion has been forced into a small corner, being told that it is a personal thing only and has been prohibited from making any claim to absolute truth or the right to impose itself on the culture.

 

(7)    Science and science alone - with or without ethics and morals - is permitted to make any claim to truth.  Science is said to be the salvation of the human race. (Tell that to those who died in the Holocaust's "scientific" gas chambers).

 

(8)    Socialism has been substituted for capitalism as "democracy" and the free market system decried as evil.  In reality this belief system is Marxism lite, wherein virtually all the major English-speaking countries have accepted the following major tenets of Marxism without so much of a struggle:

(a)    Atheistic government with no influence from religion.

 

(b)    Abolition of private property in the name of the common (soviet or collective) good.  This includes abolishing any rights of property inheritance.  (This philosophy is under way in various stages and countries, utilizing various legal mechanisms.  It is by no means complete but the principle is growing in acceptance).

 

(c)    The populace must be disarmed (for their own safety, of course).

 

(d)    Government must maintain control of education and what is taught in schools (and in the home).

 

(e)    Heavy progressive taxation must be ever-increasing (Europe's VAT is perhaps the most abusive), so that government can...

 

(f)    Maintain control over its citizens' lives from womb to tomb, including constant surveillance on their activities and private lives.  Big Brother is watching you!  (Remember the book 1984?).  In essence, law is becoming a means of defending government from the populace rather than the populace from government.

Hostile not Neutral

As we arrive in the 21st Century, the prevailing western paradigm is hostile to traditional monotheistic religions (Christian, Jewish and Muslim), being a mix of atheism and pantheism.  It decries belief in absolute truth, including absolute law.  It has set itself up as the determiner of "right"and "wrong" even though those change continually.  Traditional religious beliefs are being labeled as extremist and radical.

The new system views itself as utopian in nature, above any religion, viewing religion as a major cause of all the world's problems (such as the French Revolution).  If we really examine the emerging "new" system, it is merely a recapitulation of old failed Marxist and occult beliefs with a generous dose of pantheism.  Unfortunately we're about to do it again, only this time around, on a global scale.


What does this mean?

One only need to study history to know where we will wind up.  Cultures rejecting God invariably degenerate into wickedness, when left to their own devices without a counter-balancing force of morality to stop them.

The signs of rot are apparent and abundant.  The West now routinely sacrifices millions of babies annually (to which the church has only a weak response) and the elderly are next as euthanasia becomes prevalent through socialized medicine.  Instead of the value of all human life through the eyes of God, we will make decisions based on the "quality of life" through the eyes of man which will most certainly be decided by persons other than you or I and will largely be determined by economic forces and how well your beliefs conform to the current norms.  If your life benefits the collective (the "state"), you will be permitted to live,  If not, adios!

In a Christian culture, people are generally self-governing, knowing God watches their every move and civic laws are merely a formal framing of what the people already believe as a whole.  But in a culture where there are no moral absolutes, everyone does what he or she wants as long as they can get away with it.  This produces chaos.  As the chaos brought on by the new belief system increases, freedoms diminish as governments attempt to deal with the chaos.  They do this by becoming more and more police-oriented as a plethora of laws are emitted, designed to control the ongoing crisis - Saul Alinsky style.

As government continues to dictate its own atheistic, ever-proliferating standards of conduct and belief, many of these will be unpalatable to the beliefs of orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims.  There will be constant increasing pressure on Christians to conform to the new standards.  This pressure will range from social pressure to formalized pressure in the job place, where it may mean jeopardizing a job or promotion to a steadily increasing series of regulations.  Finally, as more and more people espousing the new paradigm gain control of the legal process, they will use the mechanism of law to impose their utopian vision on the churches which do not conform.  This means fines, penalties, increased taxation or loss of tax-free privileges, inability to build churches as well as prison sentences, all designed to enforce conformity to the new wisdom of the day, which is currently embodied by the push for the amorphous notion of "tolerance."  Sounds great, huh?

 

Five Stages for Establishing the Persecution of Christians in the West

 

History has proved that Christianity and all that God holds dear has been under direct persecution for millennia's.  The following stages have consistently been enacted upon to bring about the "change" that the ungodly desire: 

 

Stage one: Define the opposition (Christianity, Conservativism, Tea Party movement, etc.)

Stage two: Marginalize the opposition (characterize the "opposition" as "extremists" and/or "hater mongers")  

Stage Three: Vilify the opposition (convince the populous that the "opposition" is responsible for all of the world's problems) 

Stage Four: Pass laws criminalizing the activities of the opposition (create legislation to silence the "opposition") *I believe we are currently in this stage. 

Stage Five: Enforce the new laws against the opposition (total oppression of the "opposition" is the law of the land)

 

The Diabolical Choice

 

In this "new" system, there is a place for Christianity, as long as it conforms to the new values, which will be forever changing.  Religions will not be permitted to claim:

 

(1) they are the only way or 

 

(2) to have absolute truth of any kind or 

 

(3) attempt to force their belief and value systems on the culture at large (i.e. evangelizing is out!).  Those minor considerations aside, religion will be permitted to exist in the new system as a "personal thing" and as long as it yields to the prevailing political correctness (cultural Marxism), which if you hadn't noticed is growing more evil every day.

Traditionally, churches facing this dilemma have made one of two choices:

(1) in loving defiance, take a stand and pay the penalty or

(2) continual compromise with the prevailing system until it is shameful to even call it a Christian church.  As Sabine Wumbrand (Voice of the Martyrs) once remarked, "they are spitting in the face of Christ."  In our next installment, we'll see historically how churches in similar circumstances lived or died.

Notes:

[1] Magnum Opus Malum:  (Latin) Great Evil Work.  A "magnum opus" in the arts usually refers to an artist's greatest work.  Adding the word "malum" makes it the greatest evil work.

[2] Global Socialistic Pantheism:  The new government will be global governance; Socialistic:  it will not be representative in the way we have known in the past and government will control all; Pantheistic: The "all is God and God is all" religion will be tolerate as long as it conforms to all of the politically correct norms that government dictates.

Blessings on your success!
Shane <><

 Lighthouse Publications <><
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