Sign of the Beast

The Sponge family has quite a few friends and relatives who are active in various Protestant churches throughout Oklahoma and Texas, namely the non-denominational evangelical variety.

The benefits of such relations are that yours truly gets to have his mind blown a couple of times per year by out-of-this-world sermons on gays, Israel, and Investment Jesus; as well as being the recipient of some totally-awesome pro-McCain emails not unlike the kind that sent Gayle Quinnell to the mic in Lakeville:

Subject: Beast in Revelations
To: (removed by editor)
Date: Sunday, October 12, 2008, 4:46 PM

Beast in Revelations


This will make you re-think: A Trivia question in Sunday School:

How long is the beast allowed to have authority in Revelations?

Revelations Chapter 13 tells us it is 42 months, and you know what that is. Almost a four-year term of a Presidency.

All I can say is 'Lord, Have mercy on us!' According to The Book of Revelations the anti-Christ is: The anti-Christ will Be a man, in his 40's, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with Persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal....the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything..

Do we recognize this description??

I STRONGLY URGE each one of you to post this as many times as you can! Each opportunity that you have to send it to a friend or media outlet..do it!

I refuse to take a chance on this unknown candidate who came out of nowhere.

From: Dr. John Tisdale

Dear Friends,

As I was listening to a news program last night, I watched in horror as Barack Obama made the statement with pride. We are no longer a Christian nation; we are now a nation of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, . . .' As with so many other statements I've heard him (and his wife) make, I never thought I'd see the day that I'd hear something like that from a presidential candidate in this nation. To think our forefathers fought and died for the right for our nation to be a Christian nation--and to have this man say with pride that we are no longer that. How far this nation has come from what our founding fathers intended it to be. I hope that each of you will do what I'm doing now--send our concerns, written simply and sincerely, to the Christians on your email list. With God's help, and He is still in control of this nation and all else, we can show this man and the world in November that we are, indeed, still a Christian nation!

Please pray for our nation!

To be fair to Dr. Tisdale, his crazy email is tacked-on to another crazy email to create the appearance of a super crazy combo email. Dr. Tisdale wants everyone to know that while he believes that the idea of Obama as the antichrist is laughable, he is perfectly comfortable with being horrified by Obama's suggestion that...well, I'll let George Washington take it from here:

In his autobiography, Jefferson recounted with satisfaction that in the struggle to pass his landmark Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), the Virginia legislature "rejected by a great majority" an effort to limit the bill's scope "in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan." George Washington suggested a way for Muslims to "obtain proper relief" from a proposed Virginia bill, laying taxes to support Christian worship. On another occasion, the first president declared that he would welcome "Mohometans" to Mount Vernon if they were "good workmen" (see page 96). Officials in Massachusetts were equally insistent that their influential Constitution of 1780 afforded "the most ample liberty of conscience … to Deists, Mahometans, Jews and Christians," a point that Chief Justice Theophilus Parsons resoundingly affirmed in 1810.

It's almost like there's an alternate bizarro version of the United States out there.