The Chinese Menu of Truthiness

Christian and Islamic Endtime prophecies are often so vague that people can interpret them in widely disparate ways. This theme runs throughout the Revelation trilogy . These prophetic seers in effect claim to know the mind of God i.e. Truth with a Capital T. However, scripture also teaches us that human beings are fallible and may just, from time to time, edit the voice of God, Allah, or whomever, to suit their purposes. The characters in the Revelation trilogy , for various reasons, pick prophecies, aphorisms, and truths from a sort of Chinese menu -- the essence of what Steven Colbert labeled truthiness.

This week, the South Carolina government provided a parable of this process. In the state's brief to the Supreme Court opposing same-sex marriage, they have taken an 'originalist' argument that the 14th Amendment clearly allowed discrimination against married women should the states choose to do so. Because the 14th Amendment provided African-American males with the right to own property and contract with whomever they wished, but did not provide the same rights to females of any ancestry, it clearly left to the states the rights to determine marital rights. For the record, the South Carolina Attorney General has made it clear the state does not plan to deprive women of property rights they currently have. He just wants you to know that doing so would not be unconstitutional.

At least one Supreme Court justice has made this argument before. Justice Antonin Scalia, in an interview with California Lawyer made the statement "The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws."

I argue to be consistent with that argument, let's do the same with the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment does not guarantee Freedom of Religion to any religion that did not exist in 1787. Similarly, the Right to Bear Arms enshrined in the Second Amendment does not include any weapon that was manufactured after Constitutional ratification. Under the Seventh Amendment all civil trials involving more than $20 must be held before a jury. The Eighth Amendment prohibits excessive bail, let's use 1787 values for that as well.

Running the Apocalyptic Numbers

Ever since mankind learned to count, it seems, we have asked numbers to tell us more than how many cows we had in a field. We have in many instances asked them to tell us the future, as if the numbers themselves held some insight into future events or even God.

Numbers, like letters, are symbols. Some numeric symbols take on a meaning all their own. Consider the number 666. It is the mark of the beast from Revelation, a symbol of evil, of man trying to be God. Let's forget for the moment that some Revelation translations use the number 616, it's just not as sexy. The number 666 in various forms seems to have a grip on the Christian imagination.

When a South Carolina boater, the aptly named Louis Jordan, recently claimed to have been rescued after 66 days at sea spent largely reading End Times prophecies, it seemed to tick all the apocalyptic boxes. Some skeptics considered it a little too convenient. Newspapers consistently described him as more "robust" than one would expect a person who survived on rain water, fish and kelp for 66 days to be.According to his story, his boat capsized, but remained afloat. He therefore could get into the boat for shelter from the sun, hence his lack of sunburn or even decent tan. Commenters on the story were already taking bets on when the saved sailor would become a "fisher of men."

The number 6, however, does not have an apocalyptic monopoly. According to another article, a mystic Rabbi in Southern Israel is obsessing over the number 4. He has noted the Blood Moon Tetrad where the blood moons in 2014 and 2015 occurred on Sukkoth and Passover in each year with a solar eclipse in between. Blood moons are lunar eclipses. The Rabbi Amran Vaknin, according to the story, claims that the four blood moons with the 2015 Passover lunar eclipse lasting four minutes and 44 seconds on 4/4/15 means that Jews should pray to repent because the 44th President will bring blood upon Israel.

Time for a deep breath. First, the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar. While the lunar eclipses lining up on the holidays is an unusual event, the phase of the moon is not. It's designed that way. Secondly, the 4/4/15 date is taken from a solar calendar known as the Gregorian calendar or civil calendar. Thou shalt not mix calendars for cheap prophetic thrills.

Finally, as in a previous post, the facts seem a little thin. A search for Rabbi Amran Vaknin seems to indicate that the man came fully blown into existence on or about March 25 of this year. All the articles are almost verbatim recountings of blood moon warnings spiced with hints that a coming messiah will undo all the damage that evil Barack Obama has done. The article claims the Rabbi foretold the Gaza Flotilla and other recent events in Israel, but the modern day's excuse for research, Googling, does not reveal any mention of the good Rabbi before last month. Sadly, he has been accurately prophesying in isolation.

Of course all this coincides with the Iranian nuclear deal. Perhaps all the blood moon hype comes from the Book of Netanyahu.

I understand people want to sell books . So do I. But my books are fiction speculating about how people would react if they believed they were in the End Times. If you find a kernel of truth in them, great. That's what novels are supposed to do. Don't look to them for facts.

Invisible White Privilege

A few weeks ago a YouTube video surfaced showing two University of Oklahoma white frat boys leading a song that pledged to keep their fraternity racially pure even if it meant lynching a few students. The University moved quickly to close the fraternity's chapter and expel those involved.

The video and its contents did not surprise me. What struck me was that the young men in the video were only 19-years-old, yet they held sway over other students' futures. They possessed what I call invisible white privilege. Invisible to those who possess it, that is, seen by those who do not.

While I have been unable to find a study that places a dollar value on fraternity membership, it is most likely very high. A look among the country's leaders and you will find few who have not emerged from Greek Life with valuable contacts that helped them ascend the ladder to power. One study posits that only two US Presidents since 1825 were not members of fraternities (I actually doubt this because the Military Academies do not have fraternities and two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Harry Truman did not attend college). Still, the number is likely high and the study's more rigorous elements showed a high correlation between fraternity membership and prestigous jobs. In short, fraternities are deeply woven into the mechanics of upward mobility. Blocking someone because of race exhibits the worst traits of the old boy network.

The Oklahoma video comes shortly after the U.S. Department of Justice's report on Ferguson, Missouri. The two events show clear evidence that keeping poor people poor, whether out of prejudice or greed, is a working business/governing model in the U.S. Factor in the student loan industry, the judicial-industrial complex, and the plethora of businesses that benefit from poverty and the decline in upward mobility over the last four decades is no surprise.

The subject of class and race have provided much fertile ground for writing projects. Currently, along with my wife and partner, Anniken Davenport, I am developing a book proposal for a non-fiction book, tentatively titled, The Business of Poverty in which we hope to explore the various interests who benefit from perpetuating poverty. Anniken is also writing a dystopian novel that follows the exploitation curve into the future entitled Labor Force. To get a feel for the novel, check out the Labor Force novel blog.

Finally, a short story I wrote recently attempts to address invisible white privilege in its native habitat, the southern gated community. The story, entitled Lovely People, is now being considered by several magazines for publication.

The Southern gated community is a post-civil rights era phenomenon. As cities became more integrated, upper middle class whites moved to the suburbs. When the suburbs started integrating, the gated community filled the need of the paranoid well-to-do.

Lovely People is an homage of sorts to Flannery O'Connor. I firmly believe that if she were alive today, she would be writing about gated communities. In her staunch Catholicism, Flannery referred to the South as a Christ-haunted land. Her stories exaggerate and ridicule the hot, emotionally-driven fundamentalism so popular in the South. While those elements remain, I would posit that Nat Turner's ghost also haunts the South and his specter has built more gated communities than the carpenter from Nazareth.

The Power of Myth

A recent article circulating around the Internet claims that Christian missionaries rescued a wounded Jihadist whom they took for dead. He miraculously awoke several hours later and claimed God had sent him to hell where all his sins including the beheadings he carried out were shown to him. He repented and was sent back to earth where he converted to Christianity a few days later.

The story ticks all the boxes: selfless Christian missionaries, an epiphany at the gates of hell, and salvation through conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately, I've found it difficult to verify any details associated with the story. The wounded Jihadist was allegedly picked up by missionaries from the Saint Dominican Catholic Presbytery of Ayyash. A search for the Saint Dominican Catholic Presbytery of Ayyash only produces multiple copies of this story. In other words, no Internet site independently lists this organization. I even searched the vatican site and found no mention of this supposedly Catholic mission.

To get down in the weeds on this, the term presbytery describes an architectural portion of a church (the area around the altar) or the house where a parish priest lives. A search for Ayyash does not reveal a place as the title would indicate, but rather is a popular Arabic name meaning bread seller. Further the grammar is wrong. The Dominican order takes its name from Saint Dominic, therefore the name should be Saint Dominic Catholic, etc., not Saint Dominican. Don't believe me, just ask Pope Franciscan.

If a story is too good to be true, it probably is. The story is almost verbatim one I heard in the 70s where an ex-US special forces was struck by lightning and forced to relive all the killings he committed in Vietnam. He repented and changed his life. Same story, different details.

One of the themes the Revelation trilogy is how susceptible we can be to deeply engrained myths. When events seem to reinforce those myths, it provides a sort of comfort. Of course, that means that those who manipulate events to conform to those myths may have for less than pure motives.

Eyes Wide Open Heading for the Abyss

When I began work on Revelation 11 two years ago, I thought it was a pretty straight forward story centered around a group of people who either genuinely believed or claimed to believe for their own reasons that we were in the endtimes. I explored this from a purely Christian point of view. Near the end of writing the book, I decided to throw a curve into the mix and have the second witness be a Muslim.

As I began to look for a historical or scriptural basis for this assumption, I found that Islam has a parallel eschatology to the Christian narrative. Most Islamic endtime prophecies are contained in the Hadith. A one-eyed leader called, Masih ad-Dajjal, is the Islamic version of the Anti-Christ. Both religions point to a climactic battle in the Middle East. For Christians this is Armageddon and for Muslims it is Dabiq. As I explained in my previous post, Dabiq is generally considered to be the hamlet of Murj-al-Dabiq that sits just across the border from Iraq in Syria

The Hadith claims that Jesus (Isa) returns to earth to "break the cross" -- meaning He explains that Islam is the one true religion. This may simply be the Islamic version of "from whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead."

The parallels seem to have taken on a life of their own in the last two years. Islamic State leaders and fighters apparently believe they are and should be fulfilling the endtimes prophecies--in effect dragging the world toward a climactic battle between Islam and what the Hadith calls the "army of Rome." Under Islamic prophecy, the battle cannot take place until the Caliphate is re-established. Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claims to be the new Caliph.

According to a recent Atlantic article, a legitimate Caliph requires three things to fulfill the prophecy, "being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority." Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is of Quraysh decent, the tribe to which Mohammed belonged. He claims the second requirement, but the article notes there is more to the third requirement than meets the eye. To have "authority" in the sense the prophecy indicates, the Caliph must rule territory and hold the authority over the people living there by enacting and enforcing Sharia law. Islamic State fighters currently control or operate freely in an area larger than the United Kingdom.

Thousands of young Islamic men and women have traveled to the "Caliphate" from Europe and around the world to join the jihad. What is it about this ideology they find so appealing? The article quotes George Orwell when he was asked a similar question about Nazi fanaticism. Orwell describe Fascism as "psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal."

You say Armageddon, I say Dabek

Think Christians have a monopoly on the apocalypse? Not really. In the sequel to Revelation 11, tentatively titled, “Continuing Revelation”, I touch upon some Islamic prophecies that dovetail with Christian eschatology. However, events may be overtaking my story.

Some Quranic teachings say that Islamic warriors will square off against Christians at the city of Dabek (also known as Dabiq) in an apocalyptic battle. Dabek is generally considered to be the modern day Syrian hamlet of Murj Dabek.

Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL) head, Abu Al-Baghdadi, set his sights on the town of about 4,000 because he apparently subscribes to the Islamic doomsday prophecy. Currently, forces loyal to Syrian President Assad hold the hamlet.

Al-Baghdadi places such importance on Dabek or Dabiq that he has named the official ISIS publication Dabiq. In its initial issue, Dabiq contains 50 plus vivid color photographs showing the organization’s military successes in an attempt to build an aura of inevitability to its mission. Like its other slick media presentations, Dabiq, is equal parts propaganda and recruiting tool.

The Dabek prophecy predicts that the Islamic forces will destroy both the forces of “Constantinople” and “Rome”, referring to the two early branches of Christianity, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic. In Islamic prophecy, Jesus (Issa ibn Maryam) descends from heaven near Damascus to lead the Islamic forces and “break the cross” a term meaning Christ will reveal Islam to be the one true religion.

Both Christian and Islamic prophecies foretell the two witnesses mentioned in Revelation 11 and both claim their appearance foreshadows the return of Christ. The question ISIS raises is the same one I pose in all three of the novels. Are these events fulfillment of prophecy or are individuals choosing actions that mimic prophecy to develop a following while pursuing their own agenda? Of course, some of them could just be crazy. We won’t know until either the Second Coming, or the end of the books.

End Times and the Class Divide

Fitzgerald observed that the “rich are very different”, apparently so are the poor. Of course, one person’s different is another’s normal depending on where you sit on the socio-economic ladder. A recent Upshot Article in the New York Times examined how Google searches vary by geographic location and by extension socio-economic status. The study suggests that the well-off want to know about digital cameras while the poor obsess about the Antichrist.

Specifically, the study looked at what searches correlated with what the researchers deemed the hardest places to live in the country and the easiest. The study employed a six-factor index (education, household income, unemployment, disability, life expectancy, and obesity) to determine the difficulty of life in each county in the country.

The top ten highest correlated searches to the hardest places to live include “antichrist”, “the antichrist”, “rapture”, and “about hell”. Apparently, where life is hard, people like their religion hard as well. Admittedly, a search for “rapture” may indicate an escapist fantasy but it also has a dark side. Those left behind will go through the “tribulation”—an ironic analogy to the divide between rich and poor.

At its heart, tales of the endtimes are ghost stories, albeit “Holy Ghost” stories. Fearing something that is not real, or cannot be proved to be real can be a diversion from a very real life of grinding poverty. It also suggests that fate or “God’s will” plays a part in one’s station in life. In some ways, accepting the “God’s will” argument parallels the final stage of grief, acceptance. But what happens when the hopeless suddenly have hope?

Revelation 11-First in the Revelation Trilogy is set in a small Central Pennsylvania mining town where the coal and iron veins have been exhausted. The people who remain eke out a living by commuting long distances or running marginal small businesses. When a mega-church set up in an old high school broadcasting fire and brimstone to the world via satellite starts pumping money into the local economy, the residents are all too willing to believe their long-awaited salvation is at hand. Whether it is or not is the story’s essential mystery.