The keys to world domination will be telemarketing, computer malware and social media trolling.
I 'unno, man. The Pro-Christ reportedly had some serious charisma and miracle working going for him, yet his religion barely spread across Israel (in his lifetime). And Israel is pretty darn small.
Jesus sort of contradicts this when in Matthew he is quoted as as saying he would return in his father’s glory before some of them standing there listening to him saw death, There are no 2,000 year old people on earth,
Orson Scott Card, is that you?
I thought the antichrist was mentioned in the book of revelations, but it was a dig at Nero.
However yes, the problem of evil is something religion can’t ever answer in a satisfactory fashion. Evolution explains the problem of evil nicely, but religion can only offer questionable hypothesis on it.
The only references to “antichrist” are a couple of remarks in the letters of John. Revelation does not use the word, at all. Note my lack of capitalization. In John’s letters, antichrist is neither the name nor the title of any specific person. Instead, the author uses the word in the same way we now say antireligious or antifreedom or antihuman. It simply identified a way of thinking that was in opposition to the beliefs presented in the letters of John. Early Church Fathers used the word in the same way, although, within a generation of Irenaeus, Tertullian was mixing up ideas from the letters of Paul and the book of Reveation to begin making predictions about the Roman Empire and using the word “Antichrist” as though it referred to a specific, powerful human. Tertullian was projecting his personal beliefs, (no real problem with that), but his ideas and phraseology were then adopted by a whole string of people, down to the current group of Fundamentalist Christians, despite there being no biblical support for those ideas.
You have to view it in proper context. Christianity is the correct religion, at least as long as you use the right doctrine. It is the only proper way to live and believe. The anti-christ does not actually have to conquer the world, he (or she) merely has to destroy christianity, thereby depriving the world of its one true salvation. He cannot successfully wipe out all the christians, but he can deprecate, defame and marginalize them until they have to take to living in bunkers, hiding their communion wafers and talking to each other in code as the skynet-robot-like humans stomp through the rubble of truth and gods-glory seeking out the last of the huddled, shivering true believers to flog, torture and kill them, until at last the golden horns of heaven are sounded, the sog returns on his white horse, with swords coming out of his mouth, and the true and proper doctrine is restored to all the world as the nasty dude is cast into the lake of fire.
Except for the Wandering Jew, and a couple other examples of immortals in the Bible. Ha! Gotcha!
In real life the SG can hardly conquer the Secretariat, let alone the world.
Actually the anti-Christ will hook up with Pinky and the Brain, who has lots of plans for taking over the world.
Can you ask them to show themselves and prove it :o)?
Well sure but they also couldn’t get a letter from Israel to Mexico in his life time either It’s hard for people to warship you if they’ve never heard about you. I think communication might be slightly faster now.
As far as how I’d come to rule the world if I had the magic powers of Jesus. First off I’d start in Africa. I can raise the dead, heal the sick and feed the hungry. So I’d stop a couple of famines, cure AIDs and resurrect a couple of villages. At this point you’ll be developing some low level social media buzz amongst the aid workers and it should be fairly easy to get a halfway decent size following the goal is to gain fame.
The next step is moving to Europe again kick off a couple of low level miracles on a press tour raising money to make Africa better, allow some of them to be caught on film. Once people start calling you out as a fake go full science on them. Do a tour of the top colleges in the country allowing them to study your miracles and prove they are real. Again start in Europe and work your way East saving the US for last. By the time you’ve reached the US you’ve already “saved” Africa and been proven legitimate in many people’s minds. While finishing off on the college tour run a ministry campaign through the South similar to MLM where people in the wealthy countries can pay money to fix Africa and receive your blessings. The trick here is to make it so for each person under you who donates you get either an extra miracle or some of their donation to “make things better in your neighborhood”.
At this point you’re well known have followers on every continent and created a base of people who have figured out a way to make money off of you even if they don’t believe. By uniting some non believers with the suckers you can grow you base to above 51%. Starting in whatever country has the most support for you allow you people to “spontaneously” realize if things are so good with you merely around how much better would they be in you were in charge. At this point you’re playing hopscotch and just picking up countries wherever you can. Now you’ll get people to start joining out of fear or peer pressure. Once you pick up all of your countries with 60% or better supporters it’s time to unite those countries into a single trading block. With economic power you can create a coalition and the countries that you rule will only trade with each other you are willing to bring in the countries that support you though. At this point you pick up your 50-60% countries to show the wave of countries joining you.
From here its just an exercise in hard and soft politics. You continue to you your growing trade base to bring in marginal countries who see it would be better to be on your side of the fence and then develop a reason to go to war against the countries that have less then 30% support for your regime. I would suggest something along the lines of liberating your faithful from their oppressors. In the end you’d have a couple of countries holding out but with a total trade embargo and you resurrecting the troops in your army as they go down I would estimate total conquering of the world in 10 years.
Sez you. And your word against the word of a book that claims that the earth was made in 7 days and that our entire genetic lineage starts 6000 years ago is a pretty easy contest.
True to some extent, but then again ask yourself : if some Sub-Saharian nutjob started an email campaign or hosted a facebook page to tell all about this awesome dude that’s healing the sick out there in Inner Namibia, just by touching them - would **you **think “Holy crap, living god up in this bitch !” or “yeah, right, jeeezus people will fall for any scam these days” ?
Even an honest-to-Randi bona fide messiah’s going to have a hard time convincing a majority of the locals he’s the real deal, nevermind the rest of the world who only get to “see” him through the interwebs and TV - where hoaxes and disinformation is not altogether uncommon. Even if half of Africa is telling the same story, personaly I’m probably still going to call shenanigans.
And then there’s the matter of the Romans, that is to say the established power (and religious !) structure. As soon as they realize you might threaten to fuck up the good thing they’ve got going, they’re going to send the big guns at your demigodly ass. I seem to recall us killing “god almighty” but good once, using fairly artisanal methods. We did it once, we can do it again ! If it bleeds we can kill it, etc…
Sooo I guess what you have to ask yourself before trying to break into the conquering antichrist business is : can you turn high explosives into wine ? On very short notice ? 
I spent some time trying to learn Koine Greek to see if I could pick up on the subtleties in the New Testament years ago. Dropped it when life got crazy. But I found it interesting that the prefix “anti-” isn’t strictly defined a “opposed to” or “against”, but can also mean “instead of” or “as a substitute”. Was that author’s intent? That is to say: the author wasn’t saying that the antichrist was not the opposite of Jesus, but instead a smooth talking, if you will, yet corrupted version of the Christ?
And this whole silly business of Dispensationalism can be traced to this guy, John Nelson Darby.
The RSV is a very literally accurate translation. You can figure out the meaning from here:
I would like to hereby invite all those who believe in the Abrahamic religions to rejoice, for the world is so big and diverse now that it is literally impossible for an anti-Christ to take over the world. Don’t you see guys, through luck and random human actions, we don’t need Jesus or a messiah to come back, earth is literally anti-Christ-proof! No one can take over the world and make everyone worship Satan! Isn’t that great, Jesus or whatever messiah doesn’t need to come back now! Let your fears go, allow whoever to make weird marks on your body, put 666 everywhere, its ok, the anti-Christ can’t take over the world! I doubt they could even take over Poland! So now that religion has finishes its duty, just put away your bibles and korans and torahs, humans have won and Satan has lost, we don’t need religion anymore. Let’s all agree to elect an atheist gay person into office the next chance we get, k?
Thanks.
I think “armageddon” is between God’s people and the anti-christ’s followers - i.e. not all of the world is following the anti-christ. Also if God’s people are raptured up earlier on then that means less opponents for the anti-christ. Also maybe behind the scenes many nations and organisations actually follow the Illuminati or something even if they act as if they’re independent or opponents.
edit:
That link said “all the nations gather together to fight against Christ”
A few Bible passages imply that Satan already rules the world:
but not really obviously.
It’s a basic rule of fantasy (which IMO this is) that if you know about the prophecy, you change the outcome.
So it could never work, if only because of all the movies. If anyone demonstrated the powers of the AntiChrist, people (at least hundreds of millions of Christians) would know he’s the AntiChrist, so they would denounce him, and he wouldn’t be able to conquer the world.
I mean, look how many people are ready to call Obama the AntiChrist, and how much time Fox News is willing to give them, just because they don’t like his immigration policy or whatever. Imagine what they would do if some guy came along who was actually performing miracles and taking over countries.
He/she would use religion, talk radio and fox news.