Obamessiah

From a chain letter circulating the internet:

According to The Book of Revelations the anti-christ will be a man, in his 40s, 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. Is it OBAMA??

If you haven't seen McCain's latest attempt to mobilize the crackpot fringe, check out his new political ad, The One, which portrays Obama as the antichrist.  From the comments thread at Beliefnet:

I'm not offended by the ad. Being a person of the Christian faith, I have to admit that I have seen some qualifying qualities in this man that makes his being the antichrist a "possibility". I think people are spending waaaayyy too much time thinking about that, though. If Obama turns out to be a regular guy, and this is most likely, then the people who have been running around and sounding this alarm are going to feel embarrassed, and in the long run it's just going to create a mockery of the whole subject that will only do harm to the message when the real deal comes along.

Do I believe Obama is the antichrist? I give it a very strong maybe. What will I do about it? Nothing, and that's what everybody else should be doing. This may surprise you, but it really doesn't even matter whether Obama is the/an antichrist, or not. When this prophesied leader does make his appearance, the primary responsibility of the Christian community will be to concentrate on spreading the good news of Jesus Christ and monitoring our own spiritual health. It's that relationship with Jesus that will keep peope from taking the mark, not by having a Salem Witch Trial-like process where people start finger pointing.

In defense of the religious commentors posting on Beliefnet, most of them seem pretty reasonable.  This remark isn't representative, and I can't imagine that most ordinary, reasonable Christians will find McCain's attempt to portray Obama as a minion of Satan remotely plausible.  When you're campaign is floundering so badly you have to start running ads the subtext of which is (literally) that your opponent worships the devil, you're in trouble. [via Majikthise]

Comments

[Noumena]

How does being "of MUSLIM [sic] descent" work? It makes sense to say that someone is of Jewish descent if (a) they're not Jewish, but (b) are descended from people who were, what with Judaism being the religious beliefs of a particular ethnic group in the Middle East.

But Islam, like Christianity, is an evangelical and universal religion -- doctrinally, it's not identified with any ethnic or racial group.

Alternative, shorter snark: I guess we're all of tribal polytheist descent.