Another term, another round of biblical ignorance.
I was treated this morning to an email that asked my opinion of this link. Another pseudo-Bible “student” passing around the idea that the Bible names Barack Obama as the Antichrist. This monument to interpretive incoherence was the result of a viral YouTube video (and where else would we look for sound biblical scholarship than YouTube?) that first surfaced back in 2009. I blogged about it here on PaleoBabble. I’d invite new readers to have a look and then decide if they should laugh or cry.
Let me add one footnote to this tale of biblical illiteracy. Back in 2009 this “story” was birthed by World Net Daily (WND). Here is where that story lives. To their credit, WND published my rebuttal. However, that can only be found with Google or some other search engine. That is, WND buried it. Check out the original WND story link above — you won’t find my rebuttal linked on the story page (at least at the time of this post!), so WND readers would never know the whole idea is hermeneutical garbage. But there are plenty of other links surrounding the original article selling prophecy books of equal value. I’ve complained about the pseudo-archaeology pimps in the popular media on this blog plenty of times, but you all need to know that journalistic prostitution of the Bible for page views is alive and well, too.
Thanks for this post… One of the teens in my youth ministry breathlessly texted me that a girl at school told her Obama was the antichrist. (Ok, she wasn’t breathless… That’s me reading into the text. Ha). Anyway, I simply went to your twitter feed, copied and pasted it and sent to her, to send to her friend. Our youth group has talked about the fruitlessness of trying to predict endtimes using scripture, and this teen said her friend looked at her like she was crazy when she tried refuting this Obama nonsense.
hope it helped — but more, that it helps people think better in general about biblical interpretation.