Now Maps are Racist

In our modern, enlightened, and tolerant society, it seems increasingly evident that in the eyes of some people whites can't do anything without revealing what awful racists they are.  Apparently the list of things that constitute white supremacist crimes against humanity now includes drawing world maps.

This came to my attention when I overheard someone claiming that America is bigger than Australia on world maps "because of ethnocentrism."  This prompted me to do some quick Google searches, which revealed that the claim was completely unfounded.  For one thing, most maps portray Australia and the lower 48 (or contiguous) states of America as being roughly the same size—because they are.  In fact, the contiguous United States is a little bit larger, coming in at 3,119,884 square miles to Australia's 2,969,907 square miles.  If one discounts the 160,820 square miles of massive lakes included in America's contiguous borders, the result is a much closer 2,959,064 square miles of land—very close to the Australian total (which does include some large lakes, like Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens of South Australia).  So it was clear that portraying the United States as a close match and slight superior of Australia in size is a move rooted in geographical fact rather than ethnocentrism.

But looking up this claim made me wonder if there really were people out there who saw maps as racially motivated.  That led me down the rabbit hole that ended at the obviously enlightened blog "stuff white people do" which included this article on how whites allegedly use world maps (specifically the popular Mercator Projection) to "imagine the world as literally eurocentric"[sic].  It was not the only one to do so.  One need only search for "Mercator Projection ethnocentric" and dozens of results pop up, most citing episode 16 of the second season of The West Wing as their inspiration, and many of them from ostensibly academic websites one would expect to know better.  So the resounding answer is yes: in our modern world real people, college educated people, actually think that maps are racist.

No matter where you look in these articles, all of the same complaints are listed, all focusing on the Mercator Projection.  The map is ethnocentric because it literally places Europe near the center of the map.  The center line, the prime meridian, even runs right through it!  The map is white supremacist because it puts the countries of the white-majority Northern Hemisphere on top.  And of course, the final and most oft stated proof that the Mercator Projection promotes racism is that it depicts white majority Europe and the United States as disproportionately enlarged—and even depicts that European isle of Greenland as bigger than the whole continent of Africa, when it's actually only 1/14th the size!  The solution most of these writers will offer is the same: get rid of that abhorrent ethnocentric Mercator Projection and bring in the socially-conscious and far superior Peters Projection.

The problem is that in writing these articles the authors all really just proved one thing: they know less about maps than you can learn from fifteen minutes on Wikipedia.

Let's start with the size issue.  In the Mercator Projection, white-majority Europe, the United States, and (especially) Greenland are all shown as bigger than black-majority Africa.  Bigger equals better and more important, therefore the map is a clear product of and promoter of racism, right?  Wrong.  If this were true, than the biggest thing on the map should be Germany or Belgium, since its creator (Geradus Mercator) was Flemish.  But instead the whole of Europe, most of North America, and even Australia are dwarfed by the colossus which is Greenland—a far northern island which in reality is much smaller than any of them.  Was Mercator a secret proponent of Greenlandic supremacy then?  Hardly.  In Mercator's day Greenland was an almost total unknown, with only one coastline being portrayed with any accuracy on his original 1569 map.  While in centuries past Greenland had been colonized by Europeans (or more specifically, Vikings), those colonies had failed, vanishing into historical oblivion to the point that some Europeans didn't even realize they'd existed and erroneously thought the frigid isle their ancestors had written off as a backwater a mere hundred years ago was actually some newly discovered land.  Greenland was still inhabited of course, by native Inuit peoples, who make up 88% of the population of Greenland to this day.  Worse still for this theory, however, is the enormous size of Antarctica, which appears to be large enough to comfortably swallow every other landmass on Earth (when it's really smaller than both Africa and Asia, being roughly the same size as South America).  So unless the Mercator Projection is secretly a propaganda tool of Inuit supremacists and ethnocentric penguins, I think we can write this explanation off!

Instead of racism, the real explanation for the size inaccuracies of the Mercator Projection lies in the mathematics of cartography itself.  The Earth is a sphere, but most maps are rectangles.  Projecting a spherical surface onto a flat one presents an enormous challenge, and it simply cannot be done without some inaccuracies.  Cartographers approaching the task of making a world map must choose which inaccuracies they're willing to tolerate and which they will not.  Will they preserve the relative shapes and sizes of the contents at the cost of introducing huge gashes and discontinuities that make the map all but unusable for navigation?  If they keep the map whole, will they distort the shapes of the landmasses by stretching or squashing them in order to preserve their relative size, or sacrifice their relative size for fidelity of shape?  These decisions really depend on the purpose of the map.  The purpose of Geradus Mercator's map was to create a world map which could be used for reliable navigation by early sailors (one so reliable that iterations of it continue to be used by mariners of all nationalities to this day).  For that purpose, it was imperative to avoid as many gashes and discontinuities as possible (sailing off the edge of the map would mean difficulty finding where your course picked up on the other side).  It was also necessary to preserve the shape of the coastlines, since these shapes would be used as points of reference for ocean-going navigation.  To that end, size had to be sacrificed, but distorted size could easily be fixed by adjusting the scale—distorted shape and discontinuities would be much harder for a sailor to adjust to on the fly.  That explains at least why the sizes of the various landmasses on the Mercator Projection are inaccurate, but why choose to enlarge the places he did?  It's not a racial prejudice in favor of penguins.  Rather, Mercator, like many 16th Century European cartographers, was motivated by geographical accuracy.  While we in the 21st Century have adapted to the idea that many lines on our maps are arbitrary, the cartographers of Mercator's day were not prepared to accept this.  Mercator needed a line of latitude to serve as the center-line for his map, the line off of which the rest of the map would scale up to preserve shape.  He picked what was, in his view, the center-line of the world: the equator.  The equator, of course, runs through Africa and South America, but not through Europe (so much for a Eurocentric worldview).  Because these continents were the closest to Mercator's center-line, he was able to portray them with the greatest fidelity of size while maintaining the all-important shape of their coastlines.  But as lands became further away from the equator, to the north or to the south, Mercator was forced to scale up their size in order to prevent their coastlines from becoming distorted and useless for navigation.  As the map moved further and further from the equator, the necessary size distortions became larger and larger, culminating in a massive Greenland (due to its extremely high northerly latitude) and a mindbogglingly huge Antarctica (due to it being at the extreme southern end of the globe).

So the size distortions of the Mercator Projection were clearly not motivated by racism or European ethnocentrism.  Some might argue that, even if these weren't the cartographer's motive they were certainly the effect his size distortions have had on the minds of young children, who see the larger size of northerly white-dominant nations compared to Africa and interpret the map as reinforcing white supremacist worldviews.  To those people I would ask this: how many of these young children grow up to be Inuit supremacists or believe that Antarctica is by far the best and most important place in the world?  If children can recognize that the hugely distorted size of Greenland and Antarctica doesn't make these lands and their inhabitants (or wildlife, in the case of Antarctica) inherently better than everyone else in the world (in their smaller-scaled lands), then surely they can recognize that the relatively small size difference between Europe, the United States, and Africa isn't an endorsement of white supremacy.

But what about that prime meridian, passing problematically right through Europe.  The prime meridian—the designated line 0 in the longitude system—is, as we know, basically arbitrary.  Surely Mercator's decision to place this arbitrary vertical center-line in Europe is a clear reflection of his ethnocentric worldview, right?  Wrong again.  Espousing this view reveals a fundamental ignorance of the history of cartography.  While we today realize that where the longitudinal system begins and ends is an arbitrary decision, cartographers of 16th Century Europe did not.  In fact, they expected that, just like the equator, the prime meridian would turn out to be a global line with a real geophysical significance.  The consensus was that this line was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, just beyond the shores of Europe.  Christopher Columbus fueled this consensus when he reported that in the mid-Atlantic his compass had pointed to true north (with no deflection due to the north pole and geomagnetic north pole not lining up), but the idea of a prime meridian in that area predated him by over a thousand years.  In the year 150, the Greek mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer Ptolemy produced the Geographia, which became the foundation of all European map-making when it was reprinted by the Italians during the Renaissance.  In it, Ptolemy became the first person to use a near-European Atlantic prime meridian.  As a Greek living in lands far from this line, he wasn't motivated by racism but by practicality: lines of longitude counted west to east with the positional changes of the Moon by which they were mathematically determined, but the mathematics of Ptolemy's day lacked a system for negative numbers.  The zero of the prime meridian was a necessary stopping point for his map, so he pushed it out into the western ocean to the farthest isles he'd heard about.  Over a thousand years later, European cartographers continued to place the prime meridians of their maps in the same general area, revering Ptolemy's legacy and trusting that he'd been on to something after all by placing the 0 longitude line where he did.  Mercator, as hopeful as any of them, followed suit, placing the prime meridian in the same general area as Ptolemy's, running through the Canary Islands, off the coast of Europe and West Africa.  This happened to place both Europe and Africa fairly near to the center of the world, but the reasoning came down to history and the legacy of a Greek cartographer, rather than a Flemish man's ethnocentrism.

But today the prime meridian has shifted east.  It now runs through Greenwich, England.  Surely this is the result of racism?  Well, not really, just an artifact of further history.  You see, eventually, the European cartographers realized that the prime meridian didn't have a geophysical basis, and that Ptolemy's line and every other line before or since had been essentially arbitrary.  The question then became whose arbitrary line would become the most widely used and thus eventually be adopted as the official prime meridian of the world.  The answer was English astronomer Nevil Maskelyne.  The reason wasn't that Nevil was white, but because in the 1760's he published a series of astronomical tables painstakingly charting the position of the Moon for use in navigation—which allowed cartographers and navigators to plot lines of longitude more accurately than ever before.  He placed the prime meridian of his work through Greenwich, England, and due to the importance and influence of his work, it became the officially adopted prime meridian of the world.  His choice of location wasn't entirely arbitrary, though, nor was it motivated by ethnocentrism.  Rather, it was a pragmatic choice: Greenwich was the town where his observatory was located, and thus was the easiest place to start his intensive calculations.  Thus, Greenwich became the prime meridian in his work and, by extension, the prime meridian of the adjusted Mercator Projection maps that would come after him.  No racism was required.

But again, one might argue that even if the location of the prime meridian came about through developments of history and science rather than racial prejudice, it still communicates ethnocentrism to children today.  Again, I would have to ask such people if they think these children will grow up to believe in the inherent superiority of Africans.  The prime meridian passes through Greenwich, England and Europe, but it also passes through Accra, Ghana and Africa, and Africa is a lot closer to the intersection of the equator and the prime meridian—putting it dead center on most world maps.  If the arbitrarily central location of Europe communicates white superiority today, then surely the even more central location of Africa fosters ideas of black supremacy, right?  If we find the latter notion ridiculous, there's no reason we should hold the former in any seriousness either.

Only one complaint remains, the "ethnocentric" notion of putting white-dominant northern nations on top.  Surely this idea holds, as the decision of which direction to put "up" is purely arbitrary, right?  Well, again, history shows this to be false.  Again, the idea of north being "up" goes back to Ptolemy's Geographia.  No one's sure why Ptolemy put north at the top of his maps, but the best guess is that he knew less about sub-Saharan Africa (with which there was little trade, due to the desert's natural barrier) compared to Northern Europe.  There wasn't any good racially biased reason for him to arrange the map like this, since the blacks of central and southern Africa would have been as strange to him as the blond Germanic tribes moving in from the northern reaches of Europe.  He certainly would have had no reason to consider them his superiors.  Of course when the Renaissance came, Ptolemy's work became the cornerstone of cartography in Europe and his every decision was seen as endowed with wisdom on the inner workings of the world, even the ones that later turned out to be arbitrary or made merely for convenience.  Putting north at the top of his maps was one of these decisions, and the discovery of a geomagnetic north pole that attracted the needles of a compass seemed only to cement the brilliance of Ptolemy's map orientation in the minds of Europeans.  Naturally, then, when Mercator made his projection, he did what every other European before (and most of them since) has done and put north at the top of his map—a decision determined by history rather than racial prejudice.

Still people might argue that even if Mercator's intentions were innocent, placing north on the top of the map still communicates the idea of white superiority.  Again, I have to question how familiar these people really are with geography.  Even if north did automatically equate to superiority once it was put at the top of the globe, the real demographics of the world would preclude children coming to the conclusion that white people were the best people.  Rather, they'd decide that some white people (those in Canada, England, Scandinavia, and northern Russia) were pretty good, some were terrible reprobates (those in Australia), and scientists and explorers were sent to Antarctica because they were absolutely the worst people on Earth.  And, of course, they'd be staunch Inuit supremacists, since Inuits are the predominant demographic on the most extreme northern areas of the Mercator Projection (along with the indigenous peoples of extreme northern Siberia, who would also be seen as better than whites).  Since there is no movement among today's youth demonizing Australians and promoting Inuit ethnic superiority, we can safely conclude that children can tell the difference between using North-as-up as a convention and enforcing ethnocentrism.

The real question is, why can't academics tell the difference between conventions of cartography rooted in math and history and the propaganda tools of ethnocentrism?  There the answer may be too much of The West Wing and not enough of real history.  Take the proposed solution: the much-touted Peters Projection which is going to iron out all the "problematic" aspects of the Mercator Projection and become the map of a new, ethnically tolerant and enlightened world.  If the authors of these pieces knew a little more about history and cartography (again not in-depth knowledge, just a very basic overview from a quick fact-check), they'd quickly realize they were being taken for a ride.  The Peters Projection is more appropriately known as the Gall-Peters Projection.  It was first created in 1855 by James Gall, who presented it along with a couple other projections.  It joined the line of many similar equal-area projections which were interesting for their ability to preserve the relative size of the landmasses, but not particularly useful or influential because they introduced such distortions of shape that they were impractical for navigation.  In 1974, however, the map was resurrected by German film-maker and multi-cultural historian Arno Peters, who claimed to have invented it himself and touted it as the most accurate and all-around best map ever made.  Unsurprisingly, the cartographic community saw right through these claims, recognized the map as something they'd rejected as inaccurate and useless more than a hundred years ago, and blew him off.  Peters, however, would not be dissuaded.  He went after folks who were more socially inclined and less map-savvy and tried to win them over with arguments that his map was the best because it showed the continents in the correct relative size, trying to persuade them to buy and use his map instead of the more popular (and more accurate) Mercator Projection maps everyone was using.  And why would they do that?  Because, Peters argued, the Mercator Projection was racist!  That's right, the TV shows, social justice warriors, and academics are all quoting almost verbatim from the sales pitch of a plagiarizing cartographer desperate to get people to buy "his" map.  The worst part is that absolutely none of Peters' claims were true!  The Mercator Projection, as we've seen, isn't racist in the slightest.  The vaunted solution, the Peters Projection didn't really solve any of the Mercator's alleged problems.  Oh, sure, it resized the United States and Europe to be less offensively enlarged—by making them some of the only places in the world were the map was accurate (the map distorts the shapes of landmasses more and more the further they are away from the 45th parallel, which runs through North America and Europe).  It didn't do a thing about any of the other alleged offenses of the Mercator Projection though.  The prime meridian is still running through Greenwich, England, and is dead-center of the map.  North is still up.  If Mercator's map promoted racism, Peters' did nothing to fix it.  And of course, it wasn't even his map in the first place: it was Gall's, and it was just one of a dozen other equal-area map projections doing the exact same thing (and most of them doing it better)!

Why do so many academics, college students, educated social justice warriors, and other supposedly enlightened elites fall for this?  Why are they still falling for it (the latest article I found, in my very brief search, was from June, 2016)?  This is what worries and bothers me more than the pushing of a narrative that everything white people do is subtly racist (which is saying something, because that's a falsehood that bothers me a lot).  These people are supposed to be a part of the best, the brightest, and the most educated in our society.  The one most essential thing they should have picked up in their educational experience is the ability to apply critical thinking and sift through the glut of information at our fingertips today to sort fact from fiction.  If anyone should be expected to have that skill, it is them.  And yet in this area and others, I see such people falling victim to haphazardly constructed propaganda that anyone with access to Google can see through almost immediately.  Even without access to Google, they should have been able to see through this one.  Come on, seriously: this map is Eurocentric because it places Africa in almost the exact center, and white supremacist because it depicts every country with a white majority as being dwarfed by an island overwhelmingly populated by Inuits—how do you not see right through that?!  The only answer I can think of is because they just aren't trying.  Peters' propaganda tells them a story they want to hear, and they just don't critically think about it.  It tells them a story about how all the white people before and around them are and have been racists, but they can fix it and bring about racial harmony by making a series of profoundly easy and basically meaningless choices with no impact other than to declare them as well-intentioned and ill-informed—choices like trading one distorted world map on their wall for another.  Frankly, it's disappointing.

What is Rape? Why our answer matters.

The word rape originated from the 14th Century Middle English word rapere which meant "to seize prey, abduct, or take by force."  Today rape is generally understood to refer to sex acts or sexual intercourse extracted from the victim via violence or threats of violence.  Rape is classified as a violent crime, and in the popular consciousness of America, it is one of the most severe criminal acts a human is capable of, rating just below murder.  It is a form of physical assault which is especially dehumanizing and damaging.  Whether the victim is an adult or a child, rape can have a lasting, traumatic effect on a person's psyche and those who commit rape are rightly stigmatized and severely punished in our society.

From these ancient roots, we as a society have expanded the definition of rape to include "statutory rape"--that is adult molestation of a child.  In some cases, these rapes would have fit under the old definition, since they were extracted by violence and threats of violence, but in many cases they are extracted via manipulation by a person in a position of trust (a parent, relative, teacher, spiritual leader, etc).  Since we consider children ignorant and naive in sexual matters, we believe they are so vulnerable to these manipulations that they are essentially helpless victims of the manipulative sexual predator and therefore legitimate victims of rape even if violence or violent threats were not involved.  The long-term damage of sexual molestation to a child backs up these beliefs and reinforce the stigma that the rape of a child is an especially gross violation of human decency.  Even in prisons, child molesters are viewed by other prisoners as the lowest of scum.

But we have not stopped there.  We have expanded the definition of rape to include taking sexual advantage of someone who is incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.  Since drugging someone is already termed as a type of assault, this was a good move, but as a society we have not been very strict to the definition of incapacitated.  While normally this would mean that the person was incapable of taking action to prevent or refuse the rapist, in many cases a woman is now considered incapacitated if she is drunk or has consumed any amount of alcohol.

Yes, while I have been striving to be gender neutral throughout the rest of this piece, you did just read that last sentence right.  Women are considered unable to legally consent to sex if they are intoxicated.  Women, not men.  There may or may not be legal jargon backing that discrimination between the sexes, but it is clearly a practical reality.  Take a look at this 2008 poster used by the Coastal Carolina University to advocate against date rape:

"Jake was DRUNK.  Josie was DRUNK."  But only Josie was incapable of consenting to sex.  Only Jake could be accused of rape.  There are several problems with this.

First of all, from a female perspective, this means that if a woman has a drink she essentially becomes a legal minor--too naive and immature to handle adult decisions like whether or not to have sex.  The person urged to "be responsible" and make the right decisions for her?  A man.  This is a giant leap backwards as far as equal rights for women is concerned.

Second, from a male perspective it denies that men are vulnerable to drug-based rape.  The lopsided application of this seems to imply that either (A) men cannot be incapacitated by any amount of drugs or alcohol (which is absurdly untrue) or (B) men always implicitly consent to any sexual activity with anyone simply because they are male (which is grossly offensive, sexist, and completely untrue).  Either way, this steamrolls over the real horror stories of many actual male rape victims, including four of these nineteen real stories.  More than that, it makes men who are incapacitated by drugs or alcohol "perpetrators of rape" if they are climbed on top of and held down by a woman who had a single sip of alcohol.  She's drunk, so she isn't held responsible for the sex act she just forced him through: he is, even though he spent the whole time muttering "no...no..." and flailing in a drugged stupor.  That scenario may sound like a fiction, but it is an actual reality.  Last year an Amherst student was expelled for allegedly raping a young woman when he blacked out at her place and she decided to have oral sex with him without his knowledge or consent.  Under these definitions of rape men who are raped are not only completely without protection, they can even be charged as the perpetrators of crime against their rapists.

The third and final problem is that people choose to get drunk and have consensual sexual encounters all the time.  That's not to say that rape is common, though some statistical studies (including the one that came up with the famous "one in five women" statistic) have been using it to say that ("she had sex and she was drunk: I don't care what she says about it, it was rape!").  But men and women very often consciously use alcohol or drugs to improve their moods and help them loosen up their own inhibitions when they're going out looking for consensual sex.  People of both genders commonly go to bars to meet members of the opposite gender for casual sex.  Established couples who want to have sex will often plan for it at the end of an evening that includes dinner and alcohol.  Newlyweds often drink socially at their weddings and afterwards may even ask for a bottle of champagne or wine to be sent up to the honeymoon suite.  According to our over-expanded definitions, all of these sexual encounters count as rape (of the woman, and only the woman).  But are they really?  Does a woman really lose her ability to make adult decisions about what to do with her own body when she consumes any amount alcohol?  Can a man who is passed out on the floor from alcohol or drugs really rape a woman who climbs on top of him and forces him inside her?  No, and by answering otherwise we are skewing the definition of rape.

But many in our society seem to be afraid that we have not inflated the definition of rape enough.  They have started an "affirmative consent" movement which seeks to redefine consent and lower the standards of proof in rape cases to preponderance of the evidence (which means 50% likely to be true, as opposed to the Constitutionally mandated beyond reasonable doubt, which is over 99% certainty).  According to this movement, explicit, verbal, sober, voluntary consent must be given at every stage of a sexual encounter or it becomes "rape."  The problem is that this isn't how human intimacy or even communication works.  Studies have shown that the majority of human communication in person is non-verbal.  Nowhere is this more true than in a sexual encounter, where one's mouth is usually otherwise occupied.  While bits of verbal communication happen and are helpful to finding out what a partner does and doesn't like, non-verbal communication is even more critical.  If a partner pulls away, they probably don't like something.  If they lean in and smile or become more enthusiastic in their own actions, you're probably doing something they like.  But that's not enough for affirmative consent. If you want to start passionately kissing, you must stop and ask for consent first.  If you proceed from foreplay to intercourse, you must stop and ask for permission first.  This from an article supporting affirmative consent, which tries to reassure worried readers by telling them that if they forget to ask consent in these instances they will probably be okay.  After all, "If both partners were enthusiastic about the sexual encounter, there will be no reason for anyone to report a rape later."  Note: there will be no reason to report a rape later not a rape did not occur.  According to the article, not asking for explicit permission before any intimate act does count as rape...but if you're good enough and she's enthusiastic enough you can persuade her not to report you for it.  That's a wonderfully heartening message for both genders (women: if you're raped under our standards, don't report it if you like the guy--basically be a rape-enabler; men: if a woman doesn't like your performance during sex, remember she can always report you as a rapist later).  Opponents of the movement have spoken out about its absurdity as well, including a Washington Post article which points out that it basically makes everyone a rapist because everyone who's engaged in any from of intimacy has probably done it without explicitly asking for permission first (including four-year-old girls who hug their dads or brothers without asking for explicit legal consent every time).  Another article raises the valid point that affirmative consent entirely misses the point.  The more welcome the action is the more unnecessary and even offensive asking for permission can be (imagine an old married couple asking, "Can I sit with you?"  "Can I hold your hand?"  "Can I put my arm around you?").  Verbal permission is generally only needed and sought when intimacy isn't very desirable to one or both parties (prostitutes make a verbal agreement to certain activities beforehand because they're only in it for the money).

It also points out that affirmative consent is causing more problems than it's solving.  Real rapists under the first and second definitions know what they're doing is wrong; they know they don't have consent.  That's why they're using violence, drugs, or manipulation of vulnerable minors to get what they want.  The best affirmative consent can do is clear up cases where there's a miscommunication between a couple as to how far they want to go in a given sexual encounter.  But is criminalizing misunderstanding really a solution?  Is a woman really raped if she agrees to a kiss and winds up in an unplanned make-out session?  Is a woman really raped if she agrees to foreplay and dry humping with a guy but he forgets to ask for permission before they both enthusiastically engage in intercourse?  Is that really the same as a person being beaten and thrown into the bushes by a masked attacker who then proceeds to forcibly penetrate them?  No, and by saying that these things are the same our inflated definition of rape has belittled the very real physical and psychological trauma of actual rape victims.

They have also led to a huge increase in men being accused of rape when they are not rapists.  There are, of course, the men who are accused of rape because of a miscommunication.  Is a man a rapist if he thought she wanted sex when they were rolling around naked in bed engaging in enthusiastic foreplay (and she remained enthusiastic throughout), only to find out later that she regretted taking things that far?  Is that really the same as a man who grabs a little girl by the head, threatens to kill her, and shoves his penis in her mouth?  By saying it is, we are trivializing the crimes of real violent rapists, and criminalizing people who are merely doing their best to please their partner.  But the expansively and absurdly broadened definition of rape has combined with the new lowered bar for determination of guilt (only valid in informal college tribunals which can, at most, expel students and label them publicly as rapists--because any criminal court in the civilized world would be ashamed to endorse such a low standard for such a severe crime), has led to a lot of people being found guilty for rape who actually just had consensual sex.  A man was expelled from St Joe's for allegedly raping a girl who explicitly and in writing invited him over to her place for sex via text message.  One student faced disciplinary action for rape after he hooked up with a girl who was cheating on her boyfriend by being with him, and she reported him for rape to protect the relationship.  Another was reported as a rapist and expelled after a woman he'd hooked up with became concerned that the casual sex she'd just consented to would damage her reputation (citation).  Most bizarrely, a few months ago a student from CSU Pueblo was expelled as a rapist for having what he and his girlfriend (the alleged rape victim) both explicitly, repeatedly, and unceasingly have maintained was consensual sex--because one of her friends assumed it was rape when she saw the girlfriend had a hickey and reported him.  Are we really willing to stand up and say that each of these men is a violent criminal on the level with someone who puts a knife to a girl's throat and tells her not to make a sound while he pulls off her pants?  On the level of a woman who duct tapes her boyfriend to the wall and shoves a vibrator up his anus while he screams in agony for her to stop and let him go?  Are we really willing to say that these women are rape victims of the same caliber as the victims of real physical trauma?  We are really sick as a society and really committed to ignoring the plight of real rape victims so we can push our political agenda if we answer yes to these questions.

And yet, increasingly, at universities at least, we do.  Something is terribly wrong with us.

Postscript:
Someone very close to me mentioned that a lot of these measures are designed to protect victims of rape from being blamed for the rape and ensuring that real rapists can't get away with their crimes.  I will say this: rape is a real crime that definitely deserves severe punishment and no one who commits such a heinous act should get away with it, or get off lightly.  As a society, we should make certain we are doing our best to protect and assist victims and exact justice upon perpetrators, especially with severe violent crimes like rape.  We should also never blame the victim of anything.  Survivors of trauma have to deal with their own psychological backlash and dark (and totally untrue) thoughts that maybe it was their fault or that they deserved it as they struggle to make sense of the senseless brutality they have suffered.  They do not need anyone reinforcing these post-traumatic psychological injuries from the outside, and blaming a victim for being a victim is also utterly senseless.  We don't tell people who get stabbed that it's their own fault for not wearing a stab-proof vest all the time.  And while it is alright to encourage people who are at risk of violence to take preventative measures, we need to understand these are stopgap measures meant to prevent attacks by perpetrators we can't catch, not actual solutions to the problem (the solution is catching the perpetrator) and that even if someone ignores these measure it doesn't make them responsible for being the victim.  If they weren't the one perpetrating the act, then they are not responsible for it, especially if it was done to them.  Period.

We should take steps to close loopholes that allow this kind of unacceptable behavior and the unacceptable escape of rapists (via excuses like: "well, she said yes to kissing, so it doesn't matter if she was screaming, crying, and crawling out of her skin when I initiated intercourse--she never actually said no"...or via ineffective investigations, weak courts, or unconscionably light sentencing).  At the same time, we have to really think about how we do this.  We have to realize that when we set these systems up, there will be some people out there who will try to game the system by claiming victim status and making false accusations.  We have to realize that when an accusation is first received, it is only one side of the story and we do not automatically know the truth of the matter.  That is, just because we have someone who's come to us claiming to be the victim, we cannot know without investigation whether or not they are the victim.  For all we know (as the above-linked case of the rape victim expelled from Amherst illustrates), the victim is the person they are accusing.  The founders of our nation realized this when they established constitutional rights for the accused.  We should not be hasty in discarding the measures they felt necessary and denying the accused due process of law.  If we decide to do so in the name of female rape victims it will give justice to, we also have to be willing to live with the fact that it will also be used to perpetrate injustice on innocent males (some of whom may even be the ones who were actually raped).  How to balance the need to bring justice for the victim with the need to protect innocents who are falsely accused is not an easy or light question.  We should not approach it as if it is, and I certainly confess I do not have the answers.

Even so, I don't feel like I should keep silent about this.  Keeping silent about a problem just makes it impossible for any dialogue on a solution to occur.  Also, I confess I have a personal stake in this.  While I have never been accused of rape or faced criminal charges of any kind, I was falsely accused (to church leadership, which wielded significant power over our lives) of stalking and harassing a young woman in the Rock--which behavior would fall under the umbrella of sexual crime, if true, and it was compared by various leaders to rape.  I had been friends with the young woman in question and for a while before we discussed the idea of getting involved romantically, I just wanted to remain her friend thereafter, and in the end I just wanted to pursue my other friendships in peace.  But false accusations and her claim to status as a victim of my supposed wrongs were used to control me, justify measures against me, and expel me from the group.  In a sense, I am one of those falsely accused of sexual misconduct--not rape, but not more than a stone's throw away from it.  I had to live for a few years with the constant fear that she would make more serious allegations about me, or even go to the police to try to gain more power over me and further punish me for wanting to go out with her.  I had to spend some time wondering whether I should go to the police first, whether I should get a restraining order against her, whether that was even a morally justifiable thing for a Christian like me to do, even though I did feel threatened by her and the leaders who were sympathetic to her.  I am free of her now, she took no legal action against me, and in the end I'm glad that my conflict with her got me out of a subtly-toxic and overly-controlling church group...but I can't help thinking about and sympathizing with victims of false accusations who aren't so lucky.  I can't help thinking, That could have been me, and someday, that might be me.  I have to say something.  Even if I'm wrong, it's better than being silent.

Comparable to the Bible: The Joseph Junior Prophecy

So it's been a long time since I wrote anything on my blog. I'd like to continue my Comparable to the Bible series.  Right after the Book of Mormon's discussion of Duelism, how the Fall was a good thing, and how God actually lengthened human lifespans after the Fall (2 Nephi 2:21)--in contrast to the Bible's strict monotheism, consistent stance that the Fall was a bad thing, and repeated shortening of human lifespans (Genesis 6:3)--Lehi continues his sermon. Ostensibly, he's blessing his youngest son, Joseph, but he gets sidetracked into a lengthy discussion of the prophecies of Joseph (the son of Jacob, of Genesis fame) about the coming of Moses and about the later coming of one super important prophet: Joseph Smith, Jr.

Trying to argue that this whole chapter isn't blatant self-promotion fabricated by Joseph Smith, Jr, himself runs into a host of problems.  The most immediately apparent of these is the fact that the Joseph of the Bible never made any such prophesies. Oh, he did make a number of prophecies which came true during his lifetime, and he did actually prophesy about the coming of Moses. But this is what he said:

And Joseph said unto his brethren, "I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he swear to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob."  And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, "God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from hence." Genesis 50:24-25 (KJV)

That's literally the only prophesy Joseph ever made that wasn't fulfilled in his lifetime, the only one touching on Moses (whom God would use to do the aforementioned visiting and bringing), and that's enough for the Bible.  But it's not enough for Joseph Smith. Smith wants to build himself up with an impressive prophetic pedigree. He wants to be foretold by someone famous, someone he feels a connection toward, and he wants them to build him up as a super-important figure. And so in the Book of Mormon, he has Lehi quote the following prophesies as coming from Joseph, in Genesis.

For Joseph truly testified, saying: "A seer shall the Lord my God raise up, who shall be a choice seer into the fruit of my loins." Yea, Joseph truly said: "Thus saith the Lord into me: 'A choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins; and he shall be esteemed highly among the fruit of thy loins. And unto him will I give commandment that he shall do a work for the fruit of thy loins, his brethren, which shall be of great worth into them, even to the bringing of them to the knowledge of the covenants which I have made with thy fathers. And I will give into him a commandment that he shall do none other work, save the work which I shall command him. And I will make him great in mine eyes; for he shall do my work. And he shall be great like Moses, whom I have said I would raise up into you, to deliver my people, O house of Israel. And Moses will I raise up, to deliver thy people out of the land of Egypt. But a seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins; and unto him will I give power to bring forth my word unto the seed of thy loins--and not to the bringing forth [sic, missing word, "of"] word only,' saith the Lord, 'but to the convincing them of my word, which shall have already gone forth among them. Wherefore, the fruit of thy loins shall write; and the fruit of the loins of Judah shall write; and that which shall be written by the fruit of thy loins, and also that which shall be written by the fruit of the loins of Judah, shall grow together, unto the confounding of false doctrines and laying down of contentions, and establishing peace among the fruit of thy loins, and bringing them to the knowledge of their fathers in the latter days, and also to the knowledge of my covenants,' saith the Lord. 'And out of weakness he shall be made strong, in that day when my work shall commence among all my people, unto the restoring [sic, "of"] thee, O house of Israel,' saith the Lord."  

And thus prophesied Joseph, saying: "Behold, that seer will the Lord bless; and they that seek to destroy him shall be confounded; for this promise, which I have obtained of the Lord, of the fruit of my loins, shall be fulfilled. Behold, I am sure of the fulfilling of this promise; and his name shall be called after me; and it shall be after the name of his father. And he shall be like unto me; for the thing, which the Lord shall bring forth by his hand, by the power of the Lord shall bring my people unto salvation." 

Yea, thus prophesied Joseph: "I am sure of this thing, even as I am sure of the promise of Moses; for the Lord hath said unto me, 'I will preserve your seed forever.' And the Lord hath said: 'I will raise up a Moses; and I will give power unto him in a rod; and I will give judgment unto him in writing. Yet I will not loose his tongue that he shall speak much, for I will not make him mighty in speaking. But I will write into him my law by the finger of mine own hand; and I will make a spokesman for him.' And the Lord said to me also: 'I will raise up [sic, missing word "him"] unto the fruit of thy loins; and I will make for him a spokesman. And I, behold, I will give unto him that he shall write the writing of the fruit of thy loins, unto the fruit of thy loins; and the spokesman of thy loins shall declare it. And the words which he shall write shall be the words which are expedient in my wisdom [sic, missing word] should go forth into the fruit of thy loins. And it shall be as if the fruit of thy loins had cried unto them from the dust; for I know their faith. And they shall cry from the dust; yea, even repentance unto their brethren, even after many generations have gone by them. And it shall come to pass that their cry shall go, even according to the simpleness of their words. Because of their faith their words shall proceed forth out of my mouth unto their brethren who are the fruit of thy loins; and the weakness of their words will I make strong in their faith, unto the remembering of my covenant which I made unto thy fathers.'" 2 Nephi 3:6-21

Obviously that's a whole lot more than Joseph ever actually said in the Bible. It's nearly a chapter of prophecies! To help organize things, I made the following outline:

• The seer will be a descendent of Joseph the son of Jacob
o His name and his father's name will be Joseph
o He will be really awesome
o He will convert and bring peace to the descendants of Joseph (the Native Americans)
o His writings (the Book of Mormon) will combine with the writings of Judah (the Bible) confound false doctrines and end contentions
o His enemies who seek to destroy him will be confounded
• God will deliver Israel from Egypt via Moses
o Moses will have a powerful rod
o Moses will be given God's law, written by His own finger
o Moses won't be good at speaking and will have a spokesman
• Also the author really likes the phrase "fruit of thy loins" and keeps forgetting necessary words (in the "most correct" book)
Contrast to what the Bible says:
• God will bring the Israelites out of Egypt to Canaan

This problem wasn't lost on Smith, who produced the following revised passage from Genesis 50 to resolve the crisis later in his life:

And Joseph said unto his brethren, "I die, and go unto my fathers; and I go down to my grave with joy. The God of my father Jacob be with you, to deliver you out of affliction in the days of your bondage; for the Lord hath visited me, and I have obtained a promise of the Lord, that out of the fruit of my loins, the Lord God will raise up a righteous branch out of my loins; and unto thee, whom my father Jacob hath named Israel, a prophet; (not the Messiah who is called Shilo;) and this prophet shall deliver my people out of Egypt in the days of thy bondage.  And it shall come to pass that they shall be scattered again; and a branch shall be broken off, and shall be carried into a far country; nevertheless they shall be remembered in the covenants of the Lord, when the Messiah cometh; for he shall be made manifest unto them in the latter days, in the Spirit of power; and shall bring them out of darkness into light; out of hidden darkness, and out of captivity unto freedom. A seer shall the Lord my God raise up, who shall be a choice seer unto the fruit of my loins. 

"Thus saith the Lord God of my fathers unto me, 'A choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins, and he shall be esteemed highly among the fruit of thy loins; and unto him will I give commandment that he shall do a work for the fruit of thy loins, his brethren. And he shall bring them to the knowledge of the covenants which I have made with thy fathers; and he shall do whatsoever work I shall command him. And I will make him great in mine eyes, for he shall do my work; and he shall be great like unto him whom I have said I would raise up unto you, to deliver my people, O house of Israel, out of the land of Egypt; for a seer will I raise up to deliver my people out of the land of Egypt; and he shall be called Moses. And by this name he shall know that he is of thy house; for he shall be nursed by the king’s daughter, and shall be called her son. 

 "'And again, a seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins, and unto him will I give power to bring forth my word unto the seed of thy loins; and not to the bringing forth of my word only,' saith the Lord, 'but to the convincing them of my word, which shall have already gone forth among them in the last days; Wherefore the fruit of thy loins shall write, and the fruit of the loins of Judah shall write; and that which shall be written by the fruit of thy loins, and also that which shall be written by the fruit of the loins of Judah, shall grow together unto the confounding of false doctrines, and laying down of contentions, and establishing peace among the fruit of thy loins, and bringing them to a knowledge of their fathers in the latter days; and also to the knowledge of my covenants,' saith the Lord. 'And out of weakness shall he be made strong, in that day when my work shall go forth among all my people, which shall restore them, who are of the house of Israel, in the last days. And that seer will I bless, and they that seek to destroy him shall be confounded; for this promise I give unto you; for I will remember you from generation to generation; and his name shall be called Joseph, and it shall be after the name of his father; and he shall be like unto you; for the thing which the Lord shall bring forth by his hand shall bring my people unto salvation.'" 

  And the Lord sware unto Joseph that he would preserve his seed forever, saying, "I will raise up Moses, and a rod shall be in his hand, and he shall gather together my people, and he shall lead them as a flock, and he shall smite the waters of the Red Sea with his rod. And he shall have judgment, and shall write the word of the Lord. And he shall not speak many words, for I will write unto him my law by the finger of mine own hand. And I will make a spokesman for him, and his name shall be called Aaron. And it shall be done unto thee in the last days also, even as I have sworn. 

 Therefore, Joseph said unto his brethren, "God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land, unto the land which he sware unto Abraham, and unto Isaac, and to Jacob."  Genesis 50:24-36 (JST)

There are some problems with this though. First off, this quote doesn't match the quote given by Lehi in the Book of Mormon. A few of the words and phrases are the same, but many are different and the passage here is visibly shorter. More importantly, the content of the prophecy is different. Let me break it down with the same outline from before. Additions have been marked in italics, subtractions with strikethroughs.

• The seer will be a descendent of Joseph the son of Jacob
o His name and his father's name will be Joseph
o He will be really awesome
o He will convert and bring peace to the descendants of Joseph (the Native Americans)
o His writings (the Book of Mormon) will combine with the writings of Judah (the Bible) confound false doctrines and end contentions
o His enemies who seek to destroy him will be confounded
• God will deliver Israel from Egypt via Moses
o Moses will have a powerful rod
o Moses will divide the Red Sea
o Moses will know his heritage because of his name
o Moses will be raised as a son of the daughter of a king
o Moses will be given God's law, written by His own finger
o Moses won't be good at speaking and will have a spokesman
o Moses' spokesman will be named Aaron
• Also the author really likes the phrase "fruit of thy loins" and keeps forgetting necessary words (in the "most correct" book)
• The Messiah is coming and will be named Shilo

On the essential points of the coming Seer (Joseph Smith Jr) the prophecy agrees, but with regards to Moses and other figures, the prophecy is different. Some parts are left out and others are added in. Why would this be? Taking the Book of Mormon at its word, both Lehi and Nephi had access to the full text of Joseph's original prophecy, and Joseph Smith claimed to have "translated" the above Genesis quotation himself under divine inspiration...but how can both of this quotes be right when they are not the same?

But there is an alternate explanation. Remember the first quote from Genesis in this post and how it didn't have anything like this huge prophetic passage at all? That's because no such passage appears in any of the ancient manuscripts. It was never a part of Genesis at all. Then where did Joseph Smith find it? Simple, he made it up. The "JST" following that last quote stands for the "Joseph Smith Translation" which he liked to call, the "Inspired Version" of Scripture (the man had an ego). The problem with it is the same as the problem with Joseph Smith's quotations from Isaiah in the previous book (1Nephi): it's basically a rehash of the KJV with extra archaic words thrown in to make it harder to read and numerous alterations thrown in to change the meaning of the original text. This is one of those changes, and it's nowhere to be found in any ancient text. Joseph Smith simply made it up. Even the LDS Church itself admits it and refuses to recognize the Joseph Smith Translation as canon. Instead they hold it as "Bible commentary" by their prophet. In other words, even they believe that none of the additions in the Joseph Smith Translation, including this one, actually belong there--all of them were made up by Joseph Smith himself.

Some have tried to defend Smith's flagrant additions by quoting 1 Nephi 13 and its claim that parts of the Bible have been removed. However that claim doesn't work here because the Book of Mormon promises that the Bible will remain untarnished until after the death of the Apostles, but the oldest copies of Genesis we have predate the Apostles by hundreds of years and don't contain any prophecies about Joseph Smith: they match the original text we have today. So, if the Book of Mormon is true, Smith could not have simply been restoring missing passages to the Bible. There is, in the end, no other explanation but that he made these prophecies up himself.

And of course if Smith did make these up himself and if he is a false prophet, then we would expect some of these prophecies to be untrue. And that is exactly what we find in returning to the outline.

• The seer will be a descendent of Joseph the son of Jacob

There is absolutely no evidence that Joseph Smith Jr was of Jewish descent, much less of the family of Joseph.

o His name and his father's name will be Joseph

This is true, but also true of every other kid named Joseph Jr in the history of the world

o He will be really awesome

This claim needs to be broken down some. Specifically, the prophesies claim he will be "highly esteemed" among the offspring of Joseph, meaning the Native Americans. That definitely isn't true, as we'll see later. They also claim he will "do no other work" but what God commands him. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that Smith was sinless, which he certainly never was.

o He will convert and bring peace to the descendants of Joseph (the Native Americans)

This prophecy is a huge bust! As I've mentioned before, the Mormons and the Indians don't have a great history. Joseph Smith himself never really interacted with them to start with. Later on the LDS Church tried to convert the Indians and live in peace with them, but this plan fell apart when the Ute tribes weren't interested in a white people claiming they were a degenerate race (who would be?) and the Mormons and Indians came to blows over scarce resources, with the Indians ending up trapped on reservations in poverty. Needless to say, they do not think to kindly of Mormonism or Joseph Smith.

o His writings (the Book of Mormon) will combine with the writings of Judah (the Bible) confound false doctrines and end contentions

The Book of Mormon spawned numerous false doctrines, including some the Mormon church itself doesn't believe (like eternal hell and other things right in the Book of Mormon but not in the Mormon Church). It caused quite a lot of contention by starting a cult, which itself split into several smaller sects. So if anything, the opposite of this is true.

o His enemies who seek to destroy him will be confounded

Far from being confounded, the vigilantes who killed Smith were very successful in destroying him and ending his martial law over the area and his bid for presidency.

• God will deliver Israel from Egypt via Moses

True, but easily faked by Smith.

o Moses will have a powerful rod

True.

o Moses will divide the Red Sea

False in that the prophecy says he will part it by hitting it with his staff. He actual held his staff and hand above it.

o Moses will know his heritage because of his name

Absolutely false, as Moses' name was given to him by his adoptive mother, the Pharaoh's daughter, and had nothing to do with his Hebrew heritage.

o Moses will be raised as a son of the daughter of a king

True.

o Moses will be given God's law, written by His own finger

True.

o Moses won't be good at speaking and will have a spokesman

Moses claimed this as an excuse, but it's doubtful that he really needed a spokesman that badly. After all, he had no trouble speaking against Aaron when he got out of line during the golden calf incident.

o Moses' spokesman will be named Aaron

True.

• Also the author really likes the phrase "fruit of thy loins" and keeps forgetting necessary words (in the "most correct" book)

The overuse of there words and the appearance of grammatical errors leads one to conclude this is not of God.

• The Messiah is coming and will be named Shilo

False. The Messiah was Jesus. Shiloh appears once in the Bible and could refer to a person or place...and it's spelled with an h!

With so many of these being false and the whole passage being a blatant addition to scripture, it's pretty plain that Joseph Smith the false prophet made this one up to promote himself.

The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn...

If you’ve been following me on Facebook (and if you haven’t, the truth remains the same), I’ve had what is to me a major life event in the past week. For the first time in my life, I am in a Relationship with a capital R. I am someone’s boyfriend, and I have a girlfriend.

Questions abound, I’m sure. To start, her name is Amy. We met online. Occasionally, it seems, online dating does pan out. In my case, it panned out very well. Amy is a very attractive young woman, very pretty with gorgeous long hair and dazzling eyes. She’s a nerd, and a writer with a snarky sense of humor. She’s also a sophomore at a Christian college, studying English and Theater, and while she goes to school out of state, her hometown is in Colorado. But this only scratches the surface of who Amy is.

Amy is, in my honest opinion, a very amazing person. She is brave, able to face her fears and take risks for what she wants, even to initiate with a guy—which is not terribly common to find in a girl, even online. She is also passionate, caring deeply about the people she’s with and capable of feeling very deeply, as she has with crushes in her past. She is loyal and committed. As a friend she stuck by and supported even those who were actively and knowingly wounding her, and when faced with insurmountable difficulties at a job which—at times—was probably not even treating her legally as an employee, she still felt immense guilt and quit only reluctantly. She is not the sort of person who gives up or gives in easily. I am persuaded that she has in her that sort of heroic kindness that would give you the shirt off her back and think it no big deal, certainly nothing worth mentioning. She is amazing, and more amazing still, she really, seriously likes me.

Even before we were boyfriend and girlfriend (which we haven’t been for long), that part was taking some getting used to. It’s not that I’ve never had anyone like me before. There were a couple girls in high school, one who was, awkwardly enough, my then-crush’s sister, and another who came off as being clingy toward everyone in my family. So while I have had the experience of being liked, it was brief, shallow, awkward, and certainly not from anyone I felt anything like what I feel for Amy. Our relationship began as a mutual crush, and that in itself was strange to me. I’m no stranger to crushes, my earliest dates back to grade school! But I’ve never had anyone I like like me back. I’m so used to being the only one in a friendship who has these feelings, so used to having to suppress them and respect the other person’s cooler, platonic affections. It is still something I’m getting used to, to realize that when I really miss hearing her voice, she really misses hearing mine. That as magical as the act of holding her hand is to me, it gives her butterflies as well. It’s a strange idea to get used to, that someone feels that strongly for me, especially someone as awesome as Amy.

But it puts me in mind of stranger, greater things. As amazing as Amy is (and she is), there is One who is far more excellent than words, whose monikers include “the King of Kings” and “the Everlasting God.” While Amy has without complaint made sacrifices for disloyal friends, He silently endured a sham trial, public mocking, mutilating beating, and literally excruciating death for His enemies. Where Amy is creative, He created the world, the heavens, and everything therein, including Amy. While she is loyal, He has such faithfulness that it is quite thoroughly impossible that He should ever break His word or fail in performing it. Where Amy’s beauty dazzles, His has (on the record) struck men dumb and sent them to their knees gibbering their unworthiness to behold Him in his glory. Most amazing of all, everything Amy and I feel for each other—everything we do for each other, now and even if our relationship should be able to progress to the uttermost extent of human romance—is at best a pale shadow of the unfathomably deep love He has for us.

I am no stranger any longer to the idea that God loves me. It took some getting used to. Still, it is certainly not a truth to be taken for granted. It should change everything. I should live my life in awe of this one truth. Knowing, being liked by, and becoming the boyfriend of Amy has helped me remember this wonder, and has made me consider that the line from the old song may indeed be right: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.”

Comparable to the Bible: Dualism

I'm taking a break from the Egalitarian series (even though it's not yet finished) and coming back to my series on The Book of Mormon.  It's been a while since I wrote about it, but since last writing I've run into a sort of Mormon seeker coming to my church and he asked to study The Book of Mormon with me, hoping to get back into the swing of evangelizing and sharing the good news of Mormonism.

He's had some rather eye-opening surprises.

Meanwhile, reading with him has put me well into the "book" of 2 Nephi and given me lots to write about.  The book opens where 1 Nephi left off.  For those of you who've slept since my last post (I know I have), the story so far is that Lehi, a Jew living in Jerusalem around 600 BC, is told by God to pack up his family and get out before the city is destroyed (by the Babylonians, though I don't think they're ever really mentioned).  Lehi has a number of sons, three of which are important to the plot.  Leman and Lemuel are the eldest sons who are constantly doubting God, antagonizing their brother, and falling into egregious sins, such as rudeness.  Nephi, the younger son, is faithful.  He is also the first-person narrator who wrote these books.  He will let you know that he is Nephi, the author!  He will say it again, and again (one of the most common phrases in the book is I, Nephi, just in case we might have forgotten who he was in between sentences).  He will waste whole chapters telling you that he wrote these books, named them after himself, and wrote them in the language of his own Jewish subgroup (reformed Egyptian, naturally)...and then he will complain about how much he has to leave out because of all the space he wasted telling you the above (not to mention how much space he wastes telling you he's having to leave stuff out...or all the other unnecessary stuff he does).  He goes on to have many adventures with many teachable moments, such as how to murder someone in cold blood when the spirit of god commands you to in a highly uncharacteristic manner, nearly starve your entire family to death because you broke your (historically impossible) steel bow and everyone else's bows "lost their springs" (exact quote, I kid you not), and be given divine instructions on how to build a very special ship to cross the ocean to the Americas and somehow forget to write them down.  And to be honest, that's just the highlights reel.  I could go on all day.  But anyway, after faithfully following god's directions via a magical compass powered by one's own belief (because one of the major lessons of this book is that all truth comes from direct revelation of God and that it's completely dependent on us believing the truth as hard as we can before we get any proof) to the Promised Land (by which we mean America...somewhere), Nephi, his brothers, and his aged parents (who were left ambiguously hanging on the edge of death when the narrator forgot about them in chapter 18) finally arrive at book two.

Here, having just completed an important journey by God's grace and power alone, anyone familiar with the Old Testament Jews and their habits might expect Nephi and his family to offer a sacrifice in thanks or build an altar of some sort as a memorial (as did Noah in Genesis 8:20 and Joshua in Joshua 4:5-9), but despite professing multiple times to be a faithful follower of the Law of Moses (which is full of sacrifice requirements), Nephi has yet to mention offering a sacrifice of his own even once.  Apparently, he's just that kind of Jew.

But I don't want to get too bogged down here in the many, many details I could nit-pick—like how The Book of Mormon is consistent with saying that everyone in Jerusalem was killed and the city was completely destroyed, whereas history and the book of Jeremiah in the Bible tell us that there were a significant number of survivors still living in Jerusalem at the time (including Jeremiah himself), or how it explicitly claims that God hid the Americas from every other nation except Nephi and company because otherwise it'd be overrun with other peoples, even though history and even The Book of Mormon itself tell us there were other people in the Americas long before the children of Lehi.  Yeah, I could go on for a while, but I want to get to the titular issue for this post: Dualism.

Dualism, strictly speaking is a theology wherein both an evil and a good deity exist, equal in power.  Almost always, these two have each been around as long as the other and will always be around because neither can conquer the other.  In fact, in some way, they need each other.  It's this last part of Duelism that's most popular today, and that finds its way into the most places.  It's a popular idea that good and evil coexist in some way, even with their obvious conflicts, and that one really can't exist without the other.  It's a sort of justification for evil in all of its forms, an answer to the Problem of Evil.  Why are there bad things in the world?  Well, because without them, we wouldn't have good things either!  So the story goes, anyway.

In 2 Nephi, Lehi opens the book by going into a multi-chapter sermon, in which he's supposedly blessing his sons on his deathbed, but gets very distracted along the way.  One of the points he winds up talking about is definitely an endorsement of Dualism.  "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things," he says in 2 Nephi 2:11.  Right there, you have the definition of Dualism embraced in a nutshell.  But just in case you missed it, Lehi will reiterate it and spell it out several times in the rest of the verse, and the verses that follow (even Mormons call this the Gospel of Repetition).  Specifically he claims that the following cannot occur outside of opposition "[neither] righteousness...[nor] wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad."  This need for "opposition" (that is, Dualism) is expounded upon until it becomes clear that it encompasses all of existence, and even the existence of God, for "if these things are not there is no God," as 2 Nephi 2:13 asserts.  Even life cannot exist without death, sense without insensibility, purity without corruption (2 Nephi 2:11).  Though it is not stated outright that there is a second Dualistic god out there, it's an almost inescapable conclusion from the text.  If God is good, if God is love, if God is life, and wisdom, purity, joy, and peace, and if none of these can exist outside of opposition (and even god is not immune to this principle, as per 2 Nephi 2:13), then surely there must exist a deity who has been around as long as god and who is his opposite in every way: evil and hateful, a god of death, folly, corruption, misery, and war.  Some outside The Book of Mormon have proposed Satan to be that very god, an eternal, undefeatable, and necessary opposite to the God of the Bible.

However, when we examine the Bible, we find that the Dualistic good-god is, in fact, not the God of the Bible.  First and most obviously, the God of the Bible stands alone.  He does not even know of any other gods that do or ever have (or ever will) exist (Isaiah 44:8).  Satan, certainly, is not a Dualistic equal and opposite god to our God.  Satan cannot even inflict the most basic of miseries without God's express permission (Job 1:8-12), and He is a created being who has not always existed, nor will he always be free to cause trouble.  That alone should make it clear that the Bible does not share Lehi's Dualism.  But for further proof, we need look no further than the creation account in Genesis.  At the end of chapter 1, God declares His creation finished and "very good."  He has made a wonderful paradise full of life, love, purity, joy, and peace...and there is not a trace of evil, hate, folly, misery, war, or death anywhere in creation.  Clearly all things do not have to exist in opposition.

In fact, claiming the need for Dualistic opposition leads to some very strange interpretations on the creation story, particularly the Fall.  Lehi spells it out for us.  Was man made to serve and glorify God (as per Isaiah 43:7, and numerous other Bible passages)?  Not at all!  According to 2 Nephi 2:16, man was created to "act for himself."  Here, the Humanistic all-importance of man's agency in Mormonism appears (it's so pervasive that they explicitly teach that Satan's evil plan is essentially just predestination—and must be rejected because it takes away our agency!).  Humankind needed to have a choice to do good or evil from the beginning.  Going further, Lehi claims that they needed to do evil, in order to balance out all of that good and secure their own existence in the cosmic Dualism.  "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy," says 2 Nephi 2:25.

That verse might be a little surprising to anyone familiar with the Bible.  In fact, it should be.  That's because there is no passage anywhere in the Bible giving a positive spin to the Fall.  Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Adam's Fall was necessary.  Nowhere does it say that it was ultimately a good thing.  In fact, in Genesis 3, God pronounces a terrible curse on all of Creation because of Adam's Fall.  Paul in Romans goes on to elaborate that it was this one act of Adam that brought sin and death down upon all mankind, and that Christ came as a type of second Adam specifically to free us from these.  In the Bible, the Fall was such a terrible thing that it wrecked all of creation and fundamentally broke all of Adam's descendants in such a way that, in order to make healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness possible the very Divine Son of God had to suffer and die on a cross thousands of years later.  That's what the Bible says the Fall was like. It's not exactly the portrait of a positive and liberating necessary event.

Nor should it be.  There's a very simple reason why the fundamentally Dualistic theology and philosophy of The Book of Mormon clashes so badly with the Bible: Dualism isn't a Biblical idea, nor does it come from any culture that existed in Lehi's time.  It comes from the ancient Greek philosophers.  From them, the idea passed on to us and has gained a certain credence, despite its logical problems (like how it would, logically, require that logical principles such as squares not being able to be triangles could only exist in opposition with some nonsense place where squares could be triangles if they wanted to be).  It became popular with humanism, which saw it as a way to excuse our flaws and turn a blind eye to the evils of the world.  After all, there's no use sweating over your own shortcoming when you believe that, without them, you couldn't be great!  Evidently Smith found this train of thought appealing.  He certainly would have been exposed to it, the Burned-Over District where he came from being a melting pot of Christian-like philosophies.  This of course, explains exactly how Dualism found its way into The Book of Mormon and exactly why it doesn't agree with the Bible...because Smith was it's human, uninspired author.

Why Obama isn't the Antichrist

I'm not the greatest fan of our president, but lately someone showed up on a Christian forum where I'm an admin purporting to be a prophet, revealing with absolute certainty that Obama was the very Antichrist prophesied to come in the end times.

His name has been removed, as has is post and account, but let his argument live on as a shining example of how not to study prophesy in the Bible.

Original Post:

100% PROOF THAT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IS THE ANTICHRIST AND THAT WE ARE ALREADY IN THE GREAT 7-YEAR TRIBULATION!!!

Why would Jesus pray this if it was God's will that we be raptured out instead of going through the tribulation? If it wasn't God's will that we remain on this earth, then it would mean that this prayer that Jesus prayed to the Father was a sin, and we all know that Jesus was sinless. Like I said, the tribulation already began a few years ago, and it won't be long before Jesus arrives on His white horse with ten thousands of His saints (See Jude 1:14-15).

The Tribulation Will Soon Be Over and Obama Revealed as the Antichrist!

By Prophet/Evangelist [name redacted]

Matthew 24:27-31 "For as the lightning (HEBREW WORD FOR LIGHTNING IS "BARAQ") cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west (HE WAS BORN IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THEN CAME TO BE PRESIDENT OF AMERICA IN THE WEST); so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together (WHERE THE CONGREGATION OF THE DEAD IS, THE ELECT, THE ONES WHO ARE WAITING ON THE LORD, WILL MOUNT UP WITH WINGS AS EAGLES). Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other."

In fact, Jesus even gives the antichrist's full name in Luke 10:18 "And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." Remember what I said about the Hebrew word for "lightning" being "baraq"? Well, the Hebrew word for "fall from" is a simple "o" and the Hebrew word for "heaven" is "bamaw." So, put them all together and the actual pronunciation that Jesus said in Luke 10:18 was "I beheld Satan as baraq o bamaw."

Isaiah 24:22-23 "And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited. Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the LORD of hosts shall reign in mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before his ancients gloriously."

Hebrews 11:32a "And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae;...."

Hebrews 11:35b-40 "......and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect."

Revelation 6:15 "And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;"

1 Samuel 13:6 "When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait, (for the people were distressed,) then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in high places, and in pits."

Obama has secret underground bunkers all throughout the United States which house the 30,000 top-secret guillotines along with the millions of plastic caskets that he has purchased. This is where the missing people of the United States are beheaded including children so that Obama can harvest their organs for money. He is pure evil! These next verses tie into Hebrews 11:32 up above:

Daniel 7:3-4 "And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another. The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to it."

Daniel 7:8 "I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things."

Yeah, there's a lot of great things that come out of Obama's mouth, but they're all lies!

Daniel 7:17-21 "These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth. But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever. Then I would know the truth of the fourth beast, which was diverse from all the others, exceeding dreadful, whose teeth were of iron, and his nails of brass; which devoured, brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with his feet; And of the ten horns that were in his head, and of the other which came up, and before whom three fell; even of that horn that had eyes, and a mouth that spake very great things, whose look was more stout than his fellows. I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them; Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom."

Daniel 7:25 "And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time."

Yeah, Obama has nothing good at all to say about Christians, and he's worn out a lot of saints because of it. He's attempted to rewrite the constitution since he was elected. "a time and times and the dividing of time" = 3 and a half years.

Revelation 13:5-7 "And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations."

Obama's most famous blasphemous statement is "The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet Muhammed."

Revelation 13:15-18 "And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."

Yeah, Christians who won't worship the "image" of the beast which is the fake god "Allah" are being beheaded! Also, Obama has a mandate for all humans to be implanted with a microchip in their right hand or forehead by the year 2017 or else they won't be able to buy or sell. This chip will contain GPS and he will be able to hear anything the people say. The ones who are Christians, he will have them tracked down and beheaded. His plan is to collapse the U.S. economy before the next election so that martial law will be declared, allowing him to remain in office indefinitely!
Obama calls same-sex marriages and abortions good, and those who condemn them he calls evil. Here is a verse about him:

Isaiah 5:20 "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"

Matthew 24:15 "When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)"

Mark 13:14 "But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains:"

(WHEN YOU SHALL SEE THE "OBAMA NATION OF DESOLATION")

2 Thessalonians 2:8-12 "And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness."

Yeah, let those who read this understand.........Hold on till the end of the tribulation, saints!

Daniel 12:10 "Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand."

For those Christians who are mourning the death of loved ones whose heads have been cut off by the evil Muslims, here is what Jesus said:

Matthew 5:4-5 "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth."

Psalm 37:9-15 "For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be. But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth. The Lord shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is coming. The wicked have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow, to cast down the poor and needy, and to slay such as be of upright conversation. Their sword shall enter into their own heart, and their bows shall be broken."

Matthew 24:13 "But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved."

Revelation 20:4 "And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years."

Revelation 2:26-28 "And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations: And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father. And I will give him the morning star. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches."

Revelation 6:9-11 "And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled."

Hold on saints! It won't be much longer! Wait on the Lord! He will be worth the wait, and then everything will be worth it!

Isaiah 40:31 "But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."

Jesus in John 16:33 "These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

Not satisfied with plopping this boisterous tome on the forum by itself, the self-proclaimed prophet then added the following instructions for forum members:

Please, no comments without first reading the entire message. Everyone who reads it ends up having their jaw dropping wide open, their eyes getting really big, and saying something like "Wow! I see what you mean now!"

Normally I'd ignore drivel like this, but this time I wrote up a response.  While the reply never made it to him, as he was banned by another admin too quickly (and yet not quickly enough!), it too will live on here, for the sake of anyone who might actually get drawn in by the words of such a charlatan.

Okay, well, consider my jaw dropped for all the wrong reasons.

 First off, the use of Matthew 24:27-31 is an excellent example of how not to use scripture, ignoring context. By context I mean that little verse that comes just AFTER the end of the quoted section, Matthew 24:36, wherein Jesus says, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." In a parallel passage, Jesus says that even the SON does not know when the end times will take place. By putting forth this essay, the writer has implicitly made the claim to know more about prophesy and the end times than the Son of God.

The writer has then helpfully dismantled his own claim by making a number of major mistakes that render his entire argument absurd.

First, at the very start, the writer attacks the “pre-trib” view of the end times by referencing (but not citing) John 17:15, which reads “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.”  The writer takes this to be emphatic proof that Jesus was not in favor of a pre-tribulation rapture for believers.  Unfortunately the writer forgot to check his context on this one, because the section of the prayer where Jesus prays for believers today (John 17:20: “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;”) doesn’t start until 5 verses later and this section is devoted to the 12 disciples who were alive and following Jesus at that time (hence the reference to the loss of Judas in John 17:12: “none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled”—same “they” as in verse 15).  While the writer’s argument is at least a decent attempt, it is far from being as watertight as he’d like to believe it to be.

 But I digress.  Getting back to Matthew 24, the writer not only ignores the very critical verse 36 by determining to know what no one but the Father knows, but also butchers the meaning of his chosen passage beyond recognition in order to set up his wordplay.  While in the original context the all-important “lightning” refers to the suddenness and undeniable nature of Jesus’ Second Coming, he makes it refer to the Antichrist…which strikes me as not only unjustified by the context but also borderline blasphemous.  But it’s all okay, right, because the wordplay between “lightning” and “Baraq” (is that even pronounced the same as Barack Obama’s name?) provides “100% proof” that our current president is the Antichrist, right?

Well, no, actually.  You see, underlying the wordplay is an assumption that either the New Testament passage in question was originally written in Hebrew or Jesus originally said it in Hebrew.  Unfortunately, he is wrong on both counts.  The New Testament was written in Greek.  The Greek word for “lightning” in this verse is “astrape.”  “Astrape” does not bear even a passing resemblance to Obama’s first name.  Furthermore, it is certain that Jesus did not speak those words in Hebrew either.  The ancient Hebrew language was, in that period, on its way out and very rarely used in Jewish culture (analogous to the way Latin clung on for centuries among certain Catholics: they had sacred texts and services in it, but nothing else).  Greek was the world language of the time, and the locals spoke Aramaic.  We can know that Greek and Aramaic were Jesus’ preferred languages by looking at the other things He said.  When He quoted from the Old Testament, you can tell from the differences between His wording and our modern Old Testament’s wording that He was quoting from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the scriptures.  Furthermore, when He hung on the cross His cry of “Eli Eli lama sabachthani” is Aramaic, not Hebrew.  In Aramaic the word for “lightning” is “barqoa” or “barqao” (depending on pronunciation), which is, again, nowhere near “Barack.”  Bottom line, the writer, in his excitement and ignorance, is not only butchering Jesus’ meaning with this passage but also quite literally putting words into our Lord’s mouth.

These same inconvenient facts plague the writer’s analysis of Luke 10:18, where he attempts to seal the deal by proving beyond doubt that Jesus is actually talking about (and name-drops) Barack Obama.  Unfortunately he proves nothing of the kind.  The context of the verse is not only ignored, it’s completely trampled on.  It doesn’t even make sense for Jesus to mention the name of the Antichrist in this passage, but the torturous way the writer tries to make Him do so anyway is so obviously forced that it destroys the basic grammar of the sentence.  In his version, instead of saying, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven,” He says, “I beheld Satan as Barack Obama.”  What is that even supposed to mean?  Is he saying Satan is like Barack Obama (and if so, in what way?  In his actions?  In his authority?)  Is He instead trying to say that He, Jesus, saw Satan just like Barack Obama saw Satan?  Throw in the fact that (again) Jesus was speaking either Greek or Aramaic and the whole attempt becomes just sad.  Rather than saying something that can even remotely be taken as “baraq o bamaw” Jesus said either “astrape pipto ek ouranos” or “barqoa danpal men shmayoa.”  Did you get “Barack Obama” out of any of that?  Yeah, neither did I.

 Next comes a rather interesting one which can only generously be called a bit of a stretch.  Less generously, it’s a lesson on how not to read the Bible.  This lesson comes in three steps.  First, grab five totally unrelated verses from opposite ends of Scripture (in this case Isaiah 24:22-23 [talking about the final fate of the wicked kings of the earth], Hebrews 11:32 [referencing great men of faith in the Old Testament who were left out of the “Hall of Faith” chapter due to time and space constraints], Hebrews 11:35-40 [explicitly talking about martyrs who died BEFORE the time of Christ, see Hebrews 11:39-40], Revelation 6:15 [talking about the suicidal reaction of the wicked in the face of God’s judgments during the end times], and 1 Samuel 3:16 [talking about how the Israelites reacted to a Philistine invasion during Saul’s reign]).  Second pretend all these verses are somehow secretly talking about the same thing.  Then grab an unsubstantiated conspiracy-theorist-fringe rumor from the internet (notably without fact-checking it) and try to present it and the above verses in such a way that they vaguely seem to be talking about the same thing.  Need I say more?

Oh, but I must, for the writer continues pounding on poor Hebrews 11:32, completely distorting its real meaning.  The writer is very pleased to have found a verse that, honest to goodness, actually contains the name “Barak.”  He wants to make it a reference to Barack Obama, who is, of course, the Antichrist.  Unfortunately, in the actual verse, it’s a reference to the Old Testament’s man of faith and military leader, Barak, son of Abinoam (better known as the male half of the “Deborah and Barak” team).  Trying to make it about our president instead doesn’t even remotely make sense.  Trying to make it about the Antichrist (here being praised for his faith?!?) is absolutely ludicrous.

But the writer’s not done, unfortunately.  He continues with a reference to Daniel 7:3-4 and 8 that can only be called weak.  Sure, the “little horn” said great things and was lying, and I’m sure Obama has said great things and been lying.  However, here’s a news flash: lots and lots and lots of leaders throughout history and in our present day have lied about great things.  Hitler lied like a rug all the way to and through World War 2.  Evil he was, Antichrist he was not.

In similar vein, the writer alleges that Barack Obama’s slight (in the big picture of what other world leaders say about Christians, VERY slight) verbal harassment of Christians is actually the “little horn’s” prophesied physical harassment and wholesale slaughter of Christians.  In an attempt to bolster this argument, the writer throws in a reference to Daniel 12:7’s “a time, times, and half a time” interpreting this as the prophetic 3-and-a-half year presidential term of Obama.  This reference embarrassingly dates the original writing.  The writer should really update the math on that one, because Obama’s been in office now for just over six years, a figure with precisely zero prophetic significance.  This is why re-reading and editing your own work is always a good idea as a writer.

The stretched prophetic allusions are growing tired by this point, but the writer tries one more, alleging that the great blasphemies of the world-leader (not powerful-nation-leader, as Obama) are actually Obama’s remarks that the future should not belong to those who “slander the Prophet Mohammed.”  First off, did Obama even say that?  Even if he did, how is that blasphemy?  How is that a great blasphemy foretold in prophesy?  I think I’M guilty of uttering greater blasphemies whenever I slip up and swear.  Nobody prophesied about that.

Well, after that, the writer decides to revisit one of his previous tactics and try to match Bible prophesy with internet conspiracy theories, pulling up absolute nonsense about Obama’s supposed plans, which cannot be backed by any facts because they are simply not real.  People have been spouting the same nonsense allegations about every leader or political figure they dislike since the invention of the microchip decades ago.  It still hasn’t come true, and it isn’t going to this time either.  Let’s be realistic: Obama had to fight tooth and nail for four + years to get through a healthcare reform bill which, while objectionable in many parts, was universally acknowledge as needed (or at least we can all agree that some kind of healthcare reform was necessary), and that with the full support of an overwhelmingly Democrat Congress.  Now Congress is overwhelmingly Republican.  The president won’t be able to get out of the bed in the morning without them objecting that he’s not doing it right and trying to hamstring him in some way.  The odds of him passing any major legislation in the next two years are very slim.  The odds of him passing some sweeping and EXTREMELY objectionable (as in no one, not even Democrats, would support him) piece of legislation mandating the tagging of and committing genocide against American Christians (many of which are part of the current Congressional majority—and minority: yes, there are Christian Democrats, it’s a thing) are so tiny as to make the entire idea comically absurd.

 Finally, mercifully, the writer makes his last argument, using Matthew 24:15 and 13:14.  This is the part where my jaw dropped.  I had to re-read the section because I could not believe that the writer was seriously trying to use an English PUN as a legitimate argument.  Both passages mention the “abomination of desolation.”  Rather than trying to interpret and understand that, the writer distorts it into a pun: the “OBAMA NATION OF DESOLATION”.  I wish I was making that part up, but no, that is really the level to which the writer stoops in his flat-out desperation to make his case.  First off, even in English you can tell the difference in pronunciation between “abomination” and “Obama-nation.”  Even if you couldn't, a pun does not an argument make.  Second, when we look at Matthew 24 and Matthew 13, we are looking at TRANSLATED texts, as in, the original words Jesus spoke were NOT English.  The terrible pun that this argument stands on works ONLY in English (and that only if we define the phrase “the argument works” loosely).  I’m shocked, completely blown away, that the writer would make this kind of an obvious error when fully the first third of his argument was spent trying to derive secret meanings from the (supposedly) original Hebrew.  So at the beginning of the article, the real meaning of Matthew 24 can only be decoded in Hebrew, and at the end only in English?  Is the writer deliberately trying to deceive us, or is he just dense?  In case it does need to be said at this point, no, Jesus never said, “Obama-nation” anything because He spoke Aramaic or Greek.  He said either “bdelygma” [Greek] or “msaybuotoa” [Aramaic].  Either of those look like “Obama”-anything to you?  Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Lest anyone should think this too difficult or think too much of me, all of the information I used can be found in 10-15 minutes on Google, counting time needed to scroll to specific references.  It's disgustingly easy to debunk stuff like this, and it makes me sick to think that false prophets actually deceive and rob people blind with this level of garbage.