Ripheus23

A Novel Eschatology

Let us suppose (we are going to make a good number of extreme suppositions) that, long ago, humankind had developed a civilization that, while not as powerful as ours is, nevertheless was much more powerful than even Rome or elder China, say. While it is unlikely that they manufactured nuclear weapons in the modern sense, there is a small amount of evidence that radioactive materials might have been used in an “elevated” form (e.g. in Mohenjo Daro) at various remote points in antiquity and before. At some point, wars relating to these and other materials consumed this ancient civilization to naught, leaving us the remarkable structures of Macchu Picchu, the Giza pyramids, Stonehenge, and so on, as a testament to the might of what was then lost.

            Among the survivors of those days were the precursors to the Israelites. There is some evidence that YHWH, among those (hypothetical) survivors, began His “life” as a god of metal. But inasmuch as the Hebrew scriptures “translate” the tetragrammaton as a code for the divine self-assertion, “I am that I am,” we might suppose that “YHWH” is ultimately no more a simple proper name than it is just a descriptive term. Suffice it to say that the proto-Israelite metallurgical YHWH was not really the One God YHWH of the Hebrew scriptures.

            Now the Book of Daniel (and the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, implicitly citing the Danielite text) says that the human enemy of the Messiah (now known variously as the Antichrist or the Beast from the sea), in the “last days,” will set himself up as a god in himself, as the embodiment of a heretofore unknown, unrecognized “god of fortresses” placated by offerings of precious metals and other such treasures. The Gospel of Matthew notes that representatives of the false eschatological religion will perform signs and wonders so as to deceive “even the elect, were this possible.” This religion, therefore, must appear very similar in form and content to Judaism and Christianity. The easiest sum of this and the rest of the above is: the antichurch will present itself as worshiping YHWH, but this will be the forsaken god of metal from the end of an older human world, not the Father of the Son, Jesus Christ.

            Why would an evil lord of metals be the image of ultimate darkness as such? Uranium is not emerald ooze or ore, but a typical metal in regular appearance. By means of its power, humankind has formed a “god of fortresses” (to contain and uphold the dire weaponry) that has subverted the political integrity of every people, nation, tribe, and tongue: all are beholden, directly or not, to the forbearance of the “great powers,” such that the threat of nuclear holocaust holds all humanity hostage to itself—trapped in the “fortresses” of the great lands. The discoverers and inventors of the threat sometimes saw themselves as having achieved divine stature, as unleashing a deity of death and destruction (“I have become Death, destroyer of worlds,” as Oppenheimer said).

            America on some (fundamental) level has always imagined itself to be the truest example of the New Rome, not only the inheritor but the transcendental successor to the apex predator of human antiquity. We can see how far America has carried out its antichristian foundations in this, that when the US state made of itself an ideological soldiery (in the holocaust of Vietnam), the prerequisite explanatory appeal was to a clearly Beastly system:

The conquered people are not [always] forced at gunpoint to change their ways, but “all participation in public life, whether political, cultural or economic, is conditioned on acceptance of the new faith.” (Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, chapter 12)

            Rarely do we find such an explicit (if unintended?) evocation of the “prerogative” of the Antichrist, his False Prophet, and the image of the Beast thereof: “It forced all the people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be given a stamped image on their right hands [their deeds] or their foreheads [their beliefs], so that no one could buy or sell except one who had the stamped image of the Beast’s name or the number that stood for its name” (Revelation 13:16-17).

Fire from heaven

Although YHWH in the “Old Testament” is depicted as having entire cities destroyed by fire from heaven, Christ mysteriously enough claims that it will go better for Sodom and Gomorrah, at the final judgment, than it will for several other cities (Matthew 10:15). According to some copies of the Gospel of Luke, Christ actually goes so far as to ask His disciples once, “Do you know what kind of Spirit it is that we serve? For the Son of Man came not to destroy life but to save it” (Luke 9:56), and this in reply to a request by the disciples for celestial incandescence to be visited upon some unfaithful village in Samaria. Now there is apparently little to no archaeological evidence for the story of the ancient Israelites under Moses and Joshua going about physically slaughtering entire peoples in the land of Canaan, and it fits with the typological method of scriptural interpretation to suppose that those genocidal legends are allegorical for the ideological efficiency of monotheism versus polytheism: as Jewish philosophers (prophets, as per the definition of Maimonides) testified to the intellectual and emotional superiority of faith in One God instead of many, pagan regions variously converted en masse to monotheism of various forms (exclusivistic Ra-worship in Egypt for a time, say, or Zoroastrianism in Persia, being seeds or samples of such foreign processes).

            Accordingly, the False Prophet, however, will as his preeminent “sign” of power unleash “fire from heaven” on behalf of the Beast and the Beast’s image. Now there is one nation, above all others, who has indeed unleashed “fire from heaven” at many times and in many places: America, first and foremost in Japan, also to some degree in France and Germany (and a few other countries, during the Second World War, I believe), then massively in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. (Granted, other nations have inflicted the same or similar flames on this or that land, but no other to the degree or extent that the US military has.) It is in America that the falsest forms of Christianity have taken pride of place in much government decision-making, public or covert (by this I mean that even notions like “Christian Identity,” a racist formulation that is brother to Nazism, are on the minds of at least some of our leaders, here or there, now or then). It is America that has the unique potential to betray the reconstituted Israel—the means, the motive, and the opportunity, even.

            Who is like the Beast, therefore? I think it is easy enough to see who is so in our day, at least.