{"id":136,"date":"2008-11-08T15:07:58","date_gmt":"2008-11-08T20:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/?p=136"},"modified":"2008-11-08T15:07:58","modified_gmt":"2008-11-08T20:07:58","slug":"seriously-he-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/08\/seriously-he-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Seriously? He is?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve read quite a bit recently about Barack Obama being the Anti-Christ. There’s a chain email (in multiple versions) going around giving the Biblical predictions for this. It’s been covered on Snopes<\/a>, but I just wanted to re-emphasize the nonsensical nature of it because I personally know someone who claims this to be true, citing the email as one of the pieces of evidence to back up her claim.<\/p>\n

Here’s the gist of the email.<\/p>\n

According to The Book of Revelations the anti-Christ is: The anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal…. the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything. Is it OBAMA??<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the Snopes post for the full debunking, but there are a few points I want to reiterate here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The actual chapter in the Bible is called “The Book of Revelation.” It’s not “Revelations” (plural). So from the first sentence, anyone who is a Biblical scholar should be at least skeptical.<\/p>\n

What the big point is, however, is that the Book of Revelation says none<\/strong> of those things about the Anti-Christ. It doesn’t even use the term “Anti-Christ” at all. The Anti-Christ is mentioned a few other times in different books of the Bible, but they don’t call out specific identifying details.<\/p>\n

So there’s no mention of a man in his 40’s of Muslim descent or is there a mention of a person with persuasive language or “Christ-like appeal.”<\/p>\n

However, here’s the real kicker to debunk the email. The Book of Revelation was completed before the end of the second century… but Islam didn’t begin until 400 years later, so the word “Muslim” couldn’t have been used because it wasn’t even a word when the Book of Revelation was written. Go figure.<\/p>\n

Now… all that aside, the whole email is irrational silliness from the get-go because it’s based on text from the Bible. Unless you’re talking about<\/strong> the Bible, literary works based<\/strong> on the Bible, or religions based on the Bible, using quotes from the Bible as evidence is an automatic disqualifier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve read quite a bit recently about Barack Obama being the Anti-Christ. There’s a chain email (in multiple versions) going around giving the Biblical predictions for this. It’s been covered on Snopes, but I just wanted to re-emphasize the nonsensical nature of it because I personally know someone who claims this to be true, citing … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Seriously? He is?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,18],"tags":[66,111,130,581,682,692,749],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-politics","tag-anti-christ","tag-bible","tag-books","tag-obama","tag-religion","tag-revelation","tag-snopes","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}