Villify ‘Em All!

Right off the bat, let me state I’m no huge Gary De Mar fan.  He’s pretty solid as long as he stays on the topic of history – specifically American history as viewed through a Biblical lens – but he has a tendency to veer off into tirades about eschatology, pontificating on the merits of postmillennialism and preterism.

He’s perfectly entitled to so so; postmil and (non-Hymanaean) preterism are both theologically orthodox positions.  And I suppose I’d get more out of his stuff if he’d come up with newer, better arguments; but he doesn’t, and I just don’t want to read the same hackneyed platitudes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and again and again and again…and again…

Look, Gary, I get it.  Margaret Macdonald invented the entire rapture thing out of whole cloth, Edward Irving was a boob, Darby was a flake, Paul really didn’t mean what he sure did seem to think he meant when he talked about us not being appointed to wrath which is to come…etc.

Gotcha.

Move along, or come up with something else – something which isn’t so easily answered and which hasn’t already been dealt with a googolplex times over.

Sheesh.  It’s enough to make me think postmil preterists don’t have much else to offer the discussion.

But that having been said, so long as Gary refrains from knocking over pretrib straw men, hastily righting them, and then gleefully knocking them over once more, he’s actually got some good stuff to say.

Enter today’s article, Scapegoating Christians: The New Nazism. In it he uses John Sack’s very disturbing book An Eye For An Eye to point out the somewhat obvious parallels between the progressive and programmatic dehumanization and eventual destruction of political enemies in totalitarian states (like Nazi Germany or Communist Russia) and the hauntingly similar process already at work to marginalize and disenfranchise Christians in today’s America:

The final tactic is to disenfranchise the opposition by keeping them from making a living or holding positions of authority in government, law, and education. The Communists understood the strategic necessity of policing every open gate to the institutions where ideas can get out to the masses without the sanction of the State. Leon Trotsky stated the following in 1936: “The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” If a person does not follow the Party line, he cannot get a Party job. As government increases its power and reach, there will be more government jobs that Christians will not be permitted to hold if religious ideology becomes a prerequisite for employment.

Guillermo Gonzalez, who received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Washington and did his post-doctoral research at the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Washington, received fellowships, grants, and awards from NASA, the University of Washington, Sigma XI, and the National Science Foundation, authored nearly 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles, and has had his work has been cited over 1500 times in the scientific literature, was denied tenure (also see here and here) by Iowa State University because he had the audacity as a scientist to question naturalistic evolution. He is not alone.

It’s an interesting read.