Mitch wrote:davemanddd wrote:
i think obama is the anti-christ. armageddon is nigh. it's the end of days. go ahead & elect him, but be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.
Why I don't post on this lunatic fringe reacharound. Nothing like a religious fundaMENTAList idiot to put things into their correct perspective.
Yeah, I don't dig this stuff either and I'm categorized as an evangelical.
I've had to spend quite a bit of time debunking emails about Obama being the Anti-Christ. For one, St. John actually says in his epistles that there are several anti-Christs. By nature they would be those who fly in the face of Christ's teachings and persecute His followers. While Obama may not like some of the more traditional teachings of Christianity he is far from persecuting members of the church.
I find it amazing that people attempt to read Revelation in a way in which it was never meant to be read. When John speaks to the churches in Asia Minor of something coming "soon" he literally means SOON. The Greek is not ambiguous. John was writing to the people of THAT time, not our time. While we can use the teachings from Revelation we must be wary not to get involved in the crazy paranoia that sees the Beast of Revelation in every newspaper headline or every politician that surfaces on the scene.
The Beast of Revelation was pretty clearly Nero Caesar. Ancient languages used their letters to denote numbers back in the first century and Nero Caesar rendered in the Greek totals Six Hundred and Sixty Six. There is another number in ancient copies of Revelation and it is Six Hundred and Sixteen. Nero Caesar rendered in Hebrew totals 616. The people of the first century knew who John was speaking about. Revelation internally and externally appears to have been written around 60-65 AD. It is a warning of coming persecution and destruction, something the people it was written to would know "very soon" as John indicated. The book does fast forward to the Last Judgement at the end, but much of it deals with what happened in 70 AD with the utter decimation of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the end of the age. Nero was the sixth king of Rome, as John indicated. All the pieces fit for anyone who pays attention to history but too many love the allure of cutting newspaper clippings to identify the Beast.
Barack Obama is a politician. He is not the Anti-Christ. I disagree with his stances on many, many things because my political philosophy is radically different from his, but I do not like mixing my political philosophy with my faith. My faith does inform many social stances that I have; my belief that life is sacred, that we are all called to be charitable and loving towards one another, even those that are engaged in bad or sinful behavior.
I'm a free market guy. I think government involvement in the mortgage market, in the stock market, etc has actually helped to cause many of our economic problems just as it did in 1929. It was the Fed back then that failed to keep the money supply in step with the economy, causing massive deflation (nearly 33% of all US Dollars in the economy by 1928 were out of the economy by 1932). It imposed a tariff in 1929 that raised tariffs by 20% and caused European nations to jack up their tariffs on US goods in an economy where the money supply was constricted. That means booming businesses began to downsize, knowing that Europeans would not buy goods. They could not get loans to expand anyways because the money supply was thin, so they stagnated and ended up shrinking. The tariff is what really caused the crash in 1929 and thus caused the panic. Coolidge's laissez faire approach had created an economy that was a juggernaut and Hoover tore it down by introducing programs that FDR would continue. The Fed lost control of the money supply at the end of Coolidge's tenure, though they failed to replace money in the supply even earlier when regional banks failed due to bad loans to farmers. The money just ended up disappearing and the Fed didn't issue new currency to compensate which is what should be done.
The Fed actually has caused some problems now by keeping interest rates too low for too long. That encourages more lending than is good to have. That coupled with the Clinton Administration getting Fannie and Freddie to take on far more bad loans than they should on the secondary market (a trend that was continued in the Bush Administration, though Clinton's appointed head still stayed on top of Fannie) caused an inflationary trend on home prices and loans to be written for very risky applicants. Jimmy Carter was the first one who did this and it was a disaster. It all comes from the idea that everyone is entitled to home ownership regardless of any shown ability to pay for it or work for it.
There's a lot of Dems who still think that way, but there's just as many of us who're just as tired of him.
not funny HAHA) that he says this about Palin when he first announced his support for Obama for President when Obama had only been a U.S. Senator for 22 months.
