The things I do for you….

Intrigued by the concept of Gog in the last post, I had to google gog. I found a truly scary websmite. Contender Ministries’ “the Coming War of Gog and Magog” basically sees the world in terms of two camps – Israel and the West vs the Muslim world.

(And guess which side He is supposed to be on? No prizes, sorry. Though someone offered the Contender websmite a million dollars if they could actually prove that the Sodom and Gomorrah bit in the Bible meant homosexuality. They scathed the email writer.)

With a claim to Biblical authority – now there’s a first -it says:

the stage seems set for the war that will usher in the tribulation and the rise of the Antichrist; a war that will end with the destruction of Israel’s enemies by God Himself, and lead to the signing of a peace treaty with the Antichrist.

Ignore the whole question of why anyone would choose to worship a clearly demented superbeing who is blithely carrying out some cosmic variation of engineering destruction tests on his creation – the only answer clearly being fear of getting mightily smited.

These people are promulgating a Christianity so militant that it regards Buddhism as a sworn enemy, let alone Islam. And the constantly persecuted Ba’hais – adherents of a religion so innocuous that it’s almost hard to fault it on anything – appear to be the dominant evil demonic force behind the evil demonic United Nations to the Contenders….

So, when they are trying to identify the evil giant Gog (from some Bible passage) they are ready to consider a few candidates for the title. Like mainly Russia (ever suspect these prophecies have had a few altered airings over the past few decades?) However, their money is on –

…the nations descending from Japheth: Russia, the Caucasus(Turkey), Iraq, and the Islamic republics of Central Asia. The coalition is an alliance of Arab nations, Muslim republics, Georgia, southern Russia and the Black sea area

plus a bit of another option that takes in the rest of Russia. In fact overall they seem to have settled on the territory of the Muslim parts of Russia, including Afghanistan, as contenders for the role of Magog.

Wait. Phew, this is the war described in Ezekiel, not the rapture war, then… That’s OK then. But wait some more, doesn’t that just mean the smiting without the good bits for the believers?

This had already confused the hell out of me, Magog being a place, having somehow assumed that Gog and Magog were two giants from Celtic mythology. But that’s just me. Obviously reading Celtic fairy tales as a child rather than the Bible doesn’t put you at an advantage with this stuff.

But then, obviously, neither does a capacity for logical reasoning. Or in fact, any human trait apart from the fabulously-named and disturbingly appropriate to the context “weapons grade stupidity.”