Obama the Anti-Christ

Sorry to have been gone so long. As you know, life has been a little hectic for me lately. I did have some thoughts with regard to your last post, but I think I'll just leave that for now with the comment that I think that some of the differences we have there are in how you call certain things "soft" capitalism versus hard capitalism. One could also call it "soft" socialism versus hard socialism, the difference being only in the choice of words, which is why I think it is important to define what one means when one uses certain words.

I have a different bee in my bonnet today, partly brought on by President Obama's recent visit to Canada. In Canada he has personal approval ratings of 81 percent, a figure that is pretty well average for countries outside the US.

During the election, I heard (probably the last to hear it too) about the McCain internet ad about how Obama is "the One" with it's clear intent to associate Obama with the Anti-Christ and play to the fears and prejudices of evangelical Christians.

Now I like Obama. I am a huge fan of the man. But what I wonder about is why it is that Christians of a certain stripe are so ready to allow themselves to be manipulated with crap like Obama is really a Muslim (as if it matters, sheesh! So much for freedom of religion!)

Now I don't let myself get all caught up in what seems almost like a game to me, for certain Christians to be constantly anticipating the end of the world and the Rapture. There's a difference between believing in the certain hope that our Lord Jesus Christ will return and coming up with Christian bogeymen and conspiracy theories, which if I may suggest, could well cause those who believe in an Anti-Christ, a Rapture and the end of the world, to miss all the real signs because they are busy chasing their own prejudices.

However, what I don't get is why weren't American Christians who are suspicious now of Obama suspicious of George W. Bush being the Anti-Christ? Or were they and I just didn't hear about it, not being in the anticipating-the-end-of-the-world game?

As I understand the whole end-of-the-world scenario many evangelicals believe in, GWB fulfilled a lot more of the - um - qualifications. His foreign policy consisted in the belief that American values are world values - or should be. That rule of the people by the people counted only as long as "the people" wanted the values that GWB thought they should want. He sent forces to the land that historically has been associated with the Anti-Christ - Iraq, the site of ancient Babylon and as far as the rest of the world is concerned, "by peace, destroyed many."

GWB never showed mercy when he was governor of Texas to any death row prisoner, and took his "my way or the highway" ideas all the way to deliberately circumventing the right of prisoners to a fair trial as is shown in Gitmo. Some example of standing up for "freedom and democracy." A democratic society, a free society, has no need to circumvent its own laws in order to unlawfully hold prisoners, denying them any defense.

How is the rest of the world not supposed to have seen America then as an evil empire when the government preaches "freedom" but denies that freedom when it suits its purposes?

And all the while Americans' own rights were being whittled away in the name of preventing another 9/11. They've now got a Predator (I think it is called a Predator) plane flying the border between the US and the Canadian province of Manitoba. It's a spy plane that can tell what's on the ground. Supposedly it is for stopping any drug smuggling and illegal border crossings and such things.

I have no doubt there is some drug smuggling going on. It's a long border there through thick woods and swamps and lakes and whatnot, but Manitoba is a nothing province. No big time anything. We have had a couple of Americans crossing illegally into Canada from that border the last couple of years. Due to the terrain and the weather, they were very grateful to be found by our police in time for their lives to be saved by our socialized health care system. It is so isolated, you can't just walk across the border in either direction and find yourself in a town. Without being found, you have a better chance of dying than actually making it anywhere at all.

For the sake of one drug smuggler a year being caught, it hardly seems worth a ten million dollar investment. And it hardly seems worth the violation .of privacy to have a spy plane that can track every movement for ten kilometers on either side of the border.

It makes me think of the Berlin Wall and how the Communists told their people it was to keep them safe from all the folks on the western side who might want to illegally enter the DDR. Yeah, right. Canadians will not be flooding the border trying to get out of Canada, and given the erosion of freedom in the US, freedoms that actually count as opposed to freedoms that don't, it would be pretty easy to turn those planes on their own people, to prevent Americans from escaping a right-wing fascist government. Anything used to keep people out, can also be used to keep people in.

I'm not saying GWB is THE Anti-Christ (Cheney just might be, on the other hand *said tongue in cheek*) but it seems to me that given what he did, evangelical Christians should have been all worried about him being the Anti-Christ and yet many evangelicals supported him and his policies, as though he was a small "m" messiah.

I suppose you will think that this is about politics more than religion, but it's not, although I may have worded my thoughts poorly. The gist of what I'm trying to say/ask, is how it is that evangelicals pick one over the other as fitting the idea of an Anti-Christ. In terms of what Jesus said about there being "many" anti-christs, how does GWB not qualify for that job description?