The Anti-Gay KKK Is Emblematic of The Anti-Christ Here And Now In The Republican-Fascist-Putin-Nazi Axis

For even the most hardened atheist and anti-Christian and, perhaps most resistant of all, liberalish member of the First Church of the Brunch* one prophesy in the Bible is on full display, in real life, in the clearest of terms, manifesting in the world,  starting today.

For most of my life I've considered the last book of the Christian Bible, what we called The Apocalypse, what most Protestants call Revelations, to have been a big mistake.  The often misunderstood, easily and often sensationalized vision of some guy named John, is among the most abused books in the collection.  When I was young I thought it was just silly to believe in it, that is at the childish and historically and literarily ignorant hermeneutic of believing it was to be taken as literally true, a literal prophesy of things that were to come.  But those habits of reading, which modern atheism holds in common with modern Biblical fundamentalism aren't the terms under which it was brought into the cannon of Biblical scriptures, it was brought in because it was understood that the book was not literally describing future events but it was a poetic description of how disaster would come, a description, in figures, illusions, symbols, numerological implication, etc. of any enormous disaster, even ultimate, cataclysmic environmental destruction on top of  horrendous violence, oppression, moral decay and mass slaughter on a, well, these days the journalists like to say, "Biblical scale". 

But it was during the 2010 BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico that, hearing the description and seeing the aerial footage of the oil pollution that my thoughts went to the passage that says,

The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead person, and every living thing in the sea died. (16:3)

though that wasn't the first thing that led me to think maybe the author was on to something, it was witnessing the degenerate association of Christianity, of Jesus, with the corporate-Republican agenda that had co-opted the Biblical fundamentalists, integralist Catholics and others who, together with their other political allies made a pretty convincing anti-Christ. 

The "Values" Voters Summit, who turn hate and depravity and injustice and inequality into a perversion of "values" is a particularly evil hate group, well connected, well financed, and powerful, perverting the name and superficial trappings of Christianity to pretty much try to do the evil work of destroying any progress made to make The Gospel, the Law and the Prophets real in law and in life in the United States.   It is addressed by a whole host of people who could either stand in for or easily represent figures in the Book of Revelation as a manifestation of evil, using lies and deception and superficial appearance to sucker the gullible, the foolish and, most of all, those whose own moral failings make them easy prey for Satan or The God of the World or any of the other names given to evil and its emanations in the book.   In that reading of the Apocalypse or The Revelation, I believe completely because I see it unfolding before our eyes and have seen it unfolding my whole life and in recent history. 

It is unfortunate that, with our modern and simplistic expectations of literal truth that the poetic language of the author and the seemingly bizarre and easily and facilely ridiculed aspects in those do more to blind people to the truth behind them than to inform them.  The condemnation of wealth and its accumulation - often expressed in the contemporary equivalent of our billionaire class, kings, emperors and other rulers - and the moral degeneracy and disaster that they promote and practice couldn't possibly be clearer, once you get past the language of dragons with stars on their heads.  Though that can be useful, too.  If Putin is taken to equal "Babylon" Trump would certainly be a good candidate to be his whore, or, in contemporary terms, "his bitch".   I think once you take it on its own terms and see it as a general analysis of what happens when great fortunes rule the world instead of a one-off event in the extended future, there's an enormous amount to learn from it.  John could have written it as a political science or sociological treatise instead of giving it a poetic treatment but, really, who would read it now except for old farts writing papers in little read journals? 

For the record, I don't think a single person who is going to address that coven of anti-Christians really believes in anything they're going to say, they're either trying to rope in the dopes like a carny huckster or they're going through the motions for their patrons.  The whole thing is an exercise in lies on behalf the father of lies, as Jesus, recorded by another John said:

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

I've come to understand a lot more about that most troublesome of the Gospels, too, looking at the signs of the times and to appreciate much that is found in it. 

* The estimable Garrison Keillor's phrase is perfect.  That sort of nominal Christianity,  in its easy-going liberal wing, is not enough to fight against real evil.  It's to busy with keeping up buildings, salaries, etc.  It can, at its worst, be sort of like Trump during the campaign going back to the Presbyterian church where he made a pro-forma profession of faith in his youth but, it having since become a majority minority congregation, he had to ask the pastor if Presbyterians were Christians during the campaign.