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[above: click on image for YouTube video trailer]"Renewal or Ruin": New Video Documentary By Steve D. Martin Spotlights Secretive Rightwing Effort To Destroy Mainstream Protestant Churches
Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, by Frederick Clarkson
Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort
by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons
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God's Profits: Faith, Fraud and the Republican Crusade For Values Voters
By Sarah Posner
Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History
By Chris Rodda
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
: by Michelle Goldberg
With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush's White House.
by Esther Kaplan
Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement
Tanya Erzen
Attack on The United Churches of Christ
Attack on The United Methodist Church
"The Christian Right, Dominionism, and Theocracy", by Chip Berlet
"Taking Over The Republican Party", a four part series by Joan Bokaer
The Woman in A Mink CoatWhile We Were sleepingAngels On a PinheadUnder Cover of Night
The Indian River Incident : What You Can Do
link > The "Stop the ACLU Coalition" Shaming Project
How you can help stop "Stop The ACLU" just by sending a few emails
The Shaming Projectdoes the violence of "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" bother you ? If so, what can you do ? Well, to begin with you can email Jonathan Hutson's stories to people you know. That will help to bring more public scrutiny of the game. Public shaming really works ! Just click on the "email" icon and link at the top or bottom of the story and you'll be taken to a form that will allow you email the first story, The Purpose Driven Life Takers or the latest installment without leaving this site. Thanks.
CUFI Speaker: "666" is "In the Name of Allah" |
| Tue Jul 01, 2008 at 04:08:23 AM EST |  print story | |
 Shoebat also fancies himself as a bit of a Biblical scholar and palaeographer, and in a video clip that I have just been made aware of he expounds his theory that the "Number of the Beast" mentioned in the Book of Revelation is in fact a reference to...Allah.
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Apparently Shoebat has been promoting this "theory" for a few years, and it appears in an obscure book by a certain Simon Altaf, entitled Islam: Peace? or Beast? (Altaf and Shoebat collaborated on an equally obscure book entitled This is our Eden, This is our End.) Some details are here (and more at sites such as this one), including the supposed evidence, from the Codex Vaticanus:
Very Old Text (Rev. 13:18) in glass display at Bob Jones University Library - Greenville, S.C.The above in fact is from a much later supplement, and the Greek is in a "miniscule" script which came in only centuries later. Irenaeus in the Second Century discusses the text as consisting of the number "666", and there are no fragments of Revelation which predate this source: therefore any ancient copies we have must have been written by scribes who certainly intended to write Greek characters.
Shoebat, meanwhile, prefers to give his credulous audiences his own version of what he says he saw in the Codex Vaticanus, which allows him to elaborate further:
It's worth comparing Shoebat's interpretation with the earliest fragment of the text we have, identified in 2005 from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri:
This follows the "616" variant reading, and so does not include the Greek character which Shoebat finds the most suggestive.
[UPDATE: The Codex Sinaiticus, which Shoebat also assures his audience he has seen, spells out the number in letters:
That's "six hundred and sisxty-six".]
One obvious question is how this strange twist on 666 fits with the wider context, which speaks of a "number of a man" which will be obvious to he who "has understanding" (most scholars take it to be a reference to the Emperor Nero). Shoebat claims that it simply can't be a numerological code, because that would be "Gematria", which God has nothing to do with. I've always found it interesting that fundamentalist Christian Zionists, while appropriating all kinds of things from Judaism, have a horror of Jewish mysticism, which is seen as occultic.
Text has been amended (June 2009) following input from a reader. The "Very Old Text (Rev. 13:18) in glass display" fragment is from the supplement to the Codex Vaticanus; I had originally doubted this.
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