07-20-2017, 06:26 PM
(07-20-2017, 05:39 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-20-2017, 03:42 PM)radind Wrote: My idea of antichrist is from:
1 John 2:22 Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.(ESV)
2 John 1:7 For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.(ESV)
It's been a while since I took the Bible too seriously, but my impression from the old Catholic days was that there would be only one antichrist. John certainly had different ideas. Who am I to argue? During the Reformation era, the usual guess was that the current Pope was the antichrist. This would not be a bad guess given their morality at the time.
The one time Jesus got really upset was while kicking money people out of the temple. Anyone who makes a profit from a believer's sincere attempts to communicate with God would be suspect. When I was in Colorado Springs it was noted that there were two dominant industries, the Air Force (Cheyenne Mountain, several air bases and the Academy) and televangelists. The Air Force came first, building a massive internet access capability. The televangelists looked at all the internet access, salivated, and moved in. Making money off God is a really big time industry out there. I'm not sure which would be more devastating to the area, incoming warheads going after the Air Force, or the second coming.
The 20th Century certainly produced enough murderous tyrants to be worthy of nomination, but they were mostly secular. I'd hit them with other insults. There's no one on the religious side that matches the secular guys. No real opinion.
People that I can imagine having been called the Antichrist at various times:
several Roman Emperors
Attila the Hun
Muhammad
various Ottoman sultans
Jan Hus
Martin Luther
Henry VIII of England
Montezuma
various Popes
Maximilien Robespierre
Napoleon Bonaparte
Joseph Smith (for Mormon-haters)
Karl Marx
Bertrand Russell
Lenin
Mussolini
Stalin
Hitler
Mao
Ho Chi Minh
Pol Pot
Haile Mengistu
Hugh Hefner
Robert Guccione
Larry Flynt
Fidel Castro
Idi Amin
Nicolae Ceausescu
Jim Jones
Ervil LeBaron
David Koresh
Shoko Asahara
Ayatollah Khomeini
Saddam Hussein
Osama bin Laden
Warren Jeffs
Efrain Rios-Montt (Guatemalan dictator)
abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
I have named people for certifiable evil against Christians or Humanity as a whole, people seen as heretics, or real or imagined alleged betrayers of Christian piety. I also named three high-profile pornographers.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.