SCHOLAR ISLAND
ANTI-CHRIST
"All wise men believe that we are not far removed from the times of Antichrist."
Roger Bacon (13th century)
"to fashion a mirror that all the rays falling on its whole surface may converge to a single point, and what is more, at any distance from the mirror desired. This is the ultimate that the power of geometry can do. For this mirror will burn fiercely everything on which it is focused. We believe that the Antichrist will use these mirrors to burn up cities and camps and armies...."
Roger Bacon (In a letter to the Vatican)
"Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that AntiChrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour."
1 John 2:18
"The times of Antichrist will be necessarily deadly, like the times when Antiochus tried to make people commit apostasy under his reign. The antichrist will attempt to do what Antiochus could not, since he had not the time."
-Quintus Julius Hilaranus, from The Progress of Time
"The much misunderstood term "AntiChrist" best known from the New Testament's apocalyptic Book of Revelation, in fact refers to anyone presenting himself as both prince and priest. Zorobabel is an "Antichrist" as is Darius. The Roman Emperor-gods were Antichrists, too, and-some television evangelists will be happy to learn-so are all the popes.
Paul William Roberts
In Search of the Birth of Jesus
"The Roman church, once the holies of all, has become the most licentious den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the kingdom of sin, death and hell. It is so bad that even Antichrist himself, if he should come, could think of nothing to add to its wickedness."
-Martin Luther
"Any religious idea, any idea of any God at all, any flirtation even with a God is the most inexpressible foulness....the most dangerous foulness, the most shameful 'infection'"
Vladimir Lenin
"Our blight is ideologies-they are the long-expected Antichrist!"
-Carl Jung
"The subsequent developments that led to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution have produced a world-wide situation today which can only be called "Antichristian" in a sense that confirms the early Christian anticipation of the "end of time."
-C.G. Jung
"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion…the one immortal blemish of mankind."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The hatred of intellect, of pride, courage, freedom of intellect, is Christian; the hatred of the senses, of the delights of the senses, of all delight, is Christian….The concepts of "the other world, the last judgment, the immortality of the soul," "soul" itself. They are torture instruments, they are the systems of cruelty by which the priests become masters."
Nietzsche
The Anti-Christ
"Why I am a Destiny': I am by far the most terrible human being there has ever been; this does not mean I shall not be the most beneficent....What defines me, what sets me apart from all the rest of mankind, is that I have unmasked Christian morality....The Unmasking of Christian morality is an event without equal, a real catastrophe. He who exposes it is a force majeure, a destiny-be breaks the history of mankind into two parts. One lives before him, one lives after him...."
Nietzsche
Ecce Homo
"The Antichrist does not look like what he is, and therein lies the danger. He is a young man with a strong personality and seductive power of speech and writing. He is an ascetic and a vegetarian. He will win fame first by a book in which ‘respect of the ancient traditions and symbols stand side by side with a bold and thorough radicalism in social and political problems….absolute individualism with an ardent fidelity to the common weal. He is an absolute genius, and he may, wear a comic mustache."
Soloviev (written many years before Hitler's birth)
"Coe is, in fact, a striking man in both appearance and personality, gifted with a force field of charisma far greeter than the more conventional appeal of Halverson and Robinson, backslappers both. he is tall, with strong facial bones and dark skin, he has been mistaken for an American Indian more than once. He is both ugly and handsome, in the manner of Lincoln, his features oversized and his entire being dominated by his broad smile. he dresses in golf shirts-after Jesus, golf has always been his passion-or in suits that look like they had to be pinned together around him, as if he's some loping, natural creature not meant to be bound by jacket and tie. he speaks with slow-motion intensity, his words languid and separated by silences in which listeners can ponder their meanings. There is something about his voice, a resonant, solid sound like an old oak tree talking, that makes you want to listen even if you disagree with everything he's saying. His fascination with the leadership secrets of Hitler extends to the Fuhrer's speaking style, made over in Coe's loose-limbed mannerisms. he emphasizes his points by making the right hand into a fist and shaking it, even as his left hand slips into his pocket, a mixture of ego and insecurity that suggests an inner conversation the speaker would like to keep private. it is perhaps a tribute to his magnetism that small group of fringe fundamentalists have dedicated themselves to investigating the question of whether he is the anti-Christ, believed to be a charming fellow with international inclinations. Coe would not be insulted; almost nothing insults him."
-Jeff Sharlet
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism At the Heart of American Power
"The de-Christianization of our world, the Luciferian development of science and technology, and the frightful material and moral destruction left behind by the Second World War have been compared more than once with the eschatological events foretold in the New Testament. These, as we know, are concerned with the coming of the Antichrist."
C.G. Jung
"The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction-it is an inexorable psychological law."
-C.G. Jung
"Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour."
1 John 2:18
"The Hussites had tossed around the word Antichrist pretty much the way most medieval reformers did. It was anyone who actively worked against the Christian spirit. The Taborites took the term much more seriously. There was only one antichrist for them and they were determined to identify and destroy him. For the first time in Europe since the fall of Rome an apocalyptic Christian sect turned into a political revolutionary movement."
-Sharan Newman
The Real History of the End of the World
"The Antichrist will soon annihilate Troy,
His war of blood will last twenty-seven years,
The dead heretics, captives, exiles,
Blood, human corpses, reddened water, pockmarked earth."
-Nostradamus, Century VIII, Quatrain 77
"I feel much freer now that I am certain the Pope is AntiChrist."
Martin Luther
"My friend," said the orator, "do you believe that the Pope is Anti-Christ?" "I had never heard so before," said Candide, "but whether he is or isn't- I am starving."
Voltaire
Candide
"What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtu, virtue unadulterated by morality). The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity."
Nietzsche
The Anti-Christ
"God on the Cross-are the horrible secret thoughts behind this symbol not understood yet? All that suffers, all that is nailed to the cross, is divine. All of us are nailed to the cross, consequently we alone are divine. Christianity was a victory, a nobler outlook perished of it-Christianity has been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far."
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Anti-Christ
"To Christianity's "the last shall be first," somnolently intoned from countless German pulpits, Nietzsche reacts-like a madman in the back pew-with outraged astonishment. The last first! Why should the first not be first? Do they not deserve it? What have the last done that they should displace the first? Leave the losers at the bottom where they belong! The madman's outburst disrupts the church service, but the opening outrage, in truth, was that verse droned from the pulpit. The madman's offense was to take it seriously, as a statement that, if it could not be accepted, would have to be forcefully rejected. And the ushers who struggle to subdue the madman must struggle as well, if they are sincere Christians, with their human, all too human, tendency to agree with him."
Jack Miles
Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God
"The Antichrist first appeared in the form of an utter ne'er-do-well. He is the human scum of all classes. He is the sort of man who in a normal civilized world is totally useless and unsuccessful, but who in a disintegrating society conquers and seizes all. The burning heavens are mirrored in a mud puddle. A world revolution has blown these uprooted existences from all directions to a table in a Munich beer hall; from the wreckage of dead classes arises the new class of intellectuals, and at the head march the most ruthless , those with the least to lose, hence the strongest: the armed bohemians, to whom war is home and civil war fatherland."
Konrad Heiden
Der Fuehrer
"My father was a cosmic outlaw. He shared his power with no one. Worshipped no one and nothing. Bowed to no one. Stood before no judges.....But there are certain universal laws that no man is above. He considered himself to be above the truth, and in this he was very much mistaken."
L. Ron Hubbard Jr
L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman? by Bent Corydon
(Ed note: Hubbard might be an 'anti-Buddha)
"The church is always in danger of becoming Anti-Christ because it is not sufficiently eschatological. It lives too little by faith and hope and too much by the pretensions of its righteousness."
-Reinhold Niebuhr The Church and the End of History
"There is a question we should put to ourselves. Does the fact that Aristotle drew to himself both earlier and later ages prove him truly great? Oh, great without a doubt; but no greater than the greatest of impostors. For this is the prerogative of imposture, and in especial of the Prince of imposture, the Anti-Christ. 'I am come', says the Truth Himself, 'in the name of my Father, and ye do not receive me; but, if one cometh in his own name, him ye will receive' (John 5,43)....Christ says that he who comes in the name of the Father....will not be received; but he who....usurps authority to himself and comes in his own name, him men will follow. Now if any man in philosophy ever came in his own name, Aristotle is that man."
Francis Bacon (Refutation of Philsophies).
In Der Antichrist (1934) his first published work in exile, written under the impact of the National Socialist rise to power, as well as the influence of Max Picard, author of Das Menshengesicht (the human face) (1930), Joseph Roth reformulated his criticism of modernity from a mystical and theological point of view. Arriving silently and without any apocalyptical display, the anti-Christ was henceforth thoroughly to permeate the modern world. Lost in a cold, rationalized, technologized reality, and surround by objects that had no meaning and were without content, twentieth-century Western man had been reduced to a shadow. Modernity was a kind of 'Hades on earth, home of dead men who had become shadows. If the realm of shadows in antiquity belonged to the dead, in contemporary society it described the condition of the living. The allegorical express of this alienation was the cinema: 'The Hades of modern man is Hollywood.' Haunted by shadows (the actors or men understudied by their own shadows), the cinema seemed to him the perfect type of art for an alienated, aberrant society."
-Enzo Traverso
The Jews & German
"In Al-Masih al-Dajjal*, Ayyb makes a single narrative of the world's past and future. It's a particularly dark telling of the divine novel , dominated by the antagonist-the dajjal, the Antichrist, at once a person and a faceless force, center of a Jewish conspiracy whose machinations explain history. In Ayyub's telling every pope was a Jew. So was Martin Luther-who sent Jews to colonize America. So the U.S. "is now the principal center for Jews, " Ayyub says, and 'History bears witness that the United States of America, which has been occupied in all areas by the beliefs of the dajjal, is the chief enemy of Islam...."
* The Antichrist
Gershom Gorenberg
The End of Days
"Why do I think McDonald's is the Antichrist?"
-Bill Hicks, comedian, Dominion Theater, London 1993
*Bill Gates seems to be the prime suspect for "Anti-Christ" on the web
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Book: "Naming the AntiChrist: The History of an American Obsession." by Robert Fuller
Book: "Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil" by Bernard McGinn
Book: "War, Progress, and the End of History" by Vladimir Soloviev
© 2010