Based on Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World, a (imho) truer-to-life alternative future to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four!

APOCALYPTICISM,  OR  THE  BELIEF  THAT  THERE  WILL  BE  AN  APOCALYPSE,  IS  THE  BASIS  FOR  THE  TIME-HONORED  THEOLOGICAL  FIELD  OF  ESCHATOLOGY.

Ah, armchair pop theology at its finest. “Tribulation,” “Rapture,” “Millennialism,” “Antichrist”…three out of four ain’t bad. As best as I can tell, most of these apocalyptic, revelational or eschatological terms (with the distinct exception of “Rapture,” which seems to have been quite embellished by every proponent I’ve heard) are derived from the prophetic books of Daniel in the Hebrew Scriptures (sometimes called the “Hebrew Bible,” referred to by Christians as the Old Testament), Jesus in the Gospels (which you would think any sincere Christian would instinctively give pride of place [!]) and Revelation in the Christian Scriptures or New Testament.

Of all the things people seem to pretend to know more than they do, the “Rapture” takes home the golden idol. The assumption within most Baptist and other sort of Puritanical groups (who emphatically claim the Bible is their only guide yet in practice lean too heavily for my taste on their gurus’ [pastors’ and televangelists’] views) is that the “Rapture” will take all the good eggs into heaven, leaving the faithless/unrepentant/chain-smokers to suffer some unspeakably nasty catastrophes. This novel and seemingly unbiblical understanding of the (allegedly immanent) end-times does not seem to account for Jesus’ words when He says “It will be like in the days of Noah.” Anyone who knows the Bible’s account of Salvation History knows that in the days of Noah those who were taken from the earth were the wicked. So if Jesus is to be trusted on the subject, to be blunt, most Evangelical pastors probably aren’t.

I think we all want the world to end because we lack mysticism, contemplation. Radically reformed “Christians” reject formal (i.e. scripted) prayer–even the prayer Jesus taught us–but they replace them with really contrived, cliquish prayers. G. K. Chesterton, renowned atheist-turned-Catholic, observed that the only replacement for good ceremony is bad ceremony, and history certainly seems to bear him out on that one!

People who are ignorant/indifferent toward history tend to latch onto prophecy (or rather Pastor X’s commentary thereupon); they simply cannot bear their obscurity. It seems largely symptomatic of what the Ancient Church calls vainglory. We cannot conceive of a world without us. That is why we ignore history and obsess about the world ending in our lifetimes. So we’re not above editing Scripture’s testimony to suit our self-importance rather than, say, taking the Word at its word and letting it inform our lives: “Thy will be done.”

Relinquishing our will is the essence of Orthodox religion’s divine relationship and spirituality. In fact, the words religion and relinquish share a common ancestor. What we tend to see in Calvinism and most modern heresies is a spirit of presumption. The Bible becomes not a living covenant but a legal contract. The prophets would call this spirit “hard-heartedness” and “stiff-neckedness.” But it is surely the prevailing spirit of American Protestantism in all of my experience thereof. When the Bible is viewed purely legalistically, when God is more Architect than Judge than Father (which is the essence of Jesus’ teaching), hearts are relegated to Pharisaism, to trying to get God over a barrel. This saved concept where you’re once saved, always saved makes salvation more of an external, one-time, individual act than a work of the heart over a lifetime and in community, or Church.

This cheerless, Bible-thumping spirit of “Christian” minimalism, championed by such bloodthirsty tyrants as Oliver Cromwell, seems to have its most ardent heirs in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were founded by a Baptist, celebrate no holidays, constantly predict the world’s end and deny Jesus’ divinity.

I was brought up Catholic, and we had our own version of this via Marian apparitions, i.e. appearances of the Mother of Our Lord which (particularly at the documentedly miraculous Fatima phenomenon) made dyer predictions pertaining to Russia and the whole world. We even have our own version of Tim LaHaye (author of the Left Behind Series) in one Bud Macfarlane, Jr. (author of Pierced by a Sword, Conceived without Sin and House of Gold, who was once a member of the now-disgraced Jesuitical cult known as the Legion of Christ and has, since writing his novels, seemingly broken down, abandoning his wife and children). His father, Bud Macfarlane, Sr., whom the Mary Foundation touts as perhaps the top expert on (Roman Catholic) Marian apparitions. The Roman Catholic Magisterium/Pope rejects most novel Protestant theories and usually discourages the initiation of End Times topics by clergy.

Here is an Orthodox Christian perspective, which has got to be the most weighty and reliable, objectively speaking: http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_new_year_and_the_end_of_the_age

On Apocalypticism in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypticism

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THIS  POST  IS  MEANT  TO  BE  A  “BRAIN  MASSAGE”  TO  ADDRESS  HOW  OUR  MIND-SETS  ARE  ADVANCING  THE  GLOBALIST  AGENDA  AND  HOW  TO  CUT  IT  OUT.

There are many levels on which humans exist and operate. This is one of the reasons all people have had a general assumption that there must exist a God, an afterlife, spiritual entities, dimensions and a multiverse that quite boggles the mind and calls us to childlike wonder not childish cynicism. Most of the content of Orthodoxy, Paganism and every syncretism in between is actually quite common-sense, organic and intuitive. A very thin sliver of these systems is forced, and those are what separate one system from another. Theosophists, who claim to want a universal brotherhood, tend to focus on what makes all religions seem the same–their intuitive content–but you see how in so doing they reject revelation, generating among themselves  THE  AWFUL  DOGMA  THAT  THERE  MUST  BE  NO  DOGMA.

But what afflicts you and me is mostly materialism and positivism, an unhealthy obsession with first-hand knowledge and systematization, with how things can be streamlined, mass-produced, industrialized, centralized, institutionalized, brought under the direct purview of the élite experts, at all cost  STRIPPED  OF  SPIRIT!  All of these feed global Communism because, just as depriving religions of their dogma makes them all seem the same, depriving man of his soul makes all men seem the same. And if no one is special or super or sacred, then murder, while never sought, is viewed as a very minor inconvenience upon the organism humanity. (This is one sound clue as to abortion’s underpinnings.) Socialism is rooted in bad anthropology. Those who actively coerce the world’s peoples to be united in one religion (whatever that religion may be), are looking after the interests not of the peoples, not of the human spirit, but of the world’s spirit. They cannot conceive of humans as being above animals. They are driven by a Satanic drive to perfectly contravene God’s command to “subdue the earth and fill it”: they want to force you and me to “submit to the earth and empty it”! I touch on some of these evils and how they mask themselves in religious garb in my post “Pious Socialism.”

Positivism and materialism are a modern myth and superstition. I do not say this to be smart, snarky or snide. I say this because it is the Honest-Abe truth. Anyone who has thought past its limits stands to receive the ability to perceive its underpinnings. Before there was positivism/materialism, there was rationalism. Before there was rationalism, there was an acquiescence by the schismatic Western Church to secretive military orders. Before all of these, there was male chauvinism. Women are better than men at perceiving the spiritual. So, a psycho-chauvinist will, of course, do everything possible not only to subdue women in a way that is well-ordered and propagates offspring as in God’s first orders to our first parents, but to demean and abuse women in a way that showcases his fallenness, his sickness, even his insecurity and self-loathing! Hence a man will cut off his nose to spite his face, and he will deny the existence of a spirit-world, just to deprive women of all authoritativeness and keep them perpetually out of their element and completely emotionally dependent! There I have aptly outlined the history of the positivist/materialist myth and superstition. To idolize reason, as the heretical “Christian” West has been doing for centuries without admitting to doing it, is an eminently unreasonable activity. But worship of man’s own faculties side-by-side with, and eventually in preference to, worship of God, is a matter of the Occult, whose codes secretive military orders brought back from their Crusades, launching the “Enlightenment,” in presumable opposition to the true Christian Enlightenment (the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost); this “Enlightenment” has cast the West into the anti-spiritual darkness that today compels our political contemporaries to return to the Earth-cult mind-set of ancient Canaanites that necessitates globalism.

Since God is pure spirit, I don’t have to tell anyone that those who pooh-pooh the spiritual as “imaginary” engage in soft-core blasphemy. Such attitudes, as I’ve explained, stem in the human heart from a diseased machismo, and let’s note here that where they land man is squarely in the degrading worship of matter, of the earth, of Satan’s kingdom. For the spirit of the Occult is one of dissection, disembodiment, refraction. In The Lord of the Rings, Saruman of Many Colours has decided that pure white is boring and he needs to dissect it into all its component hues. Man today wants an exorcism, a cleansing of his mind that we might return from dead cynicism to live wonder; from this base we can rebuild our view of the world around us, reintegrating spirit and matter (which Orthodox Christianity terms Incarnation).

Neither are women free of male chauvinism. What has the feminist movement been about but women becoming men? The sick excess of dominance swings both ways here. What our culture needs is no less total a revolution than a New Oxford Movement. We must learn the mental habits and attitudes that enable us to insist on harmony, on peace, on Orthodoxy. Then globalism, which feeds on corruption, perversion and cynicism will have nothing on which to build!

A final exhortation:  BE  EVER  READY  TO  COMBAT  THE  ENEMY  WITHIN!