Rock Island
Page 21
filled with Protestant publishing houses that seek to profit off of Christianity. I concentrate on centuries of barbarous cruelty under the sign of the cross because I’m trying to build a case which says the cross is the mark of the beast. If I’m wrong about that, if the cross is sacred to God, this doesn’t mean it is OK to try to make a profit off of Christianity. But if the cross is the mark of the beast, and if you have the evil cross on your forehead, just imagine burning in hellfire for century after century after century, just imagine suffering the never-ending agony of fire, such that after billions and billions and billions of years have elapsed, you really haven’t even begun to feel a slight fraction of the infinite amount of hellish torture that’s in store you.’
Catholic Man - ‘Obviously, you’re a huge fool for rejecting the Church of Rome. As soon as a fool embarks on a course of folly where he scorns Holy Mother Church, the Roman Catholic Church, it is only to be expected that he might soon succumb to the blackest and foulest of diabolical heresies.’
Old Protestant Lady - ‘He’s certainly a vicious disgusting corrupter of all that is sacred, but you, Catholic Man, will be damned to hell if you don’t repent. You’ll be damned if you don’t renounce the whore of Babylon, also known as the Roman Catholic Church. That evil thing is certainly a foul cesspool of filth and depravity, certainly not the Bride of Christ.’
Me - ‘You’re not a complete idiot, Old Protestant Lady.’
Moderator - ‘That remark only serves to re-enforce in my mind the infinite depth of your infinite depravity. To take the holiest symbol in the universe, the cross, and then to insinuate that people will burn in hellfire for billions upon billions upon eternal never-ending infinite billions of years, writhing in agony forever and ever, should they place the mark of a cross on their foreheads or right hands, is the foulest, blackest, vilest, most despicable work of Deviltry one could ever imagine.’
Me - Bill Etem - ‘You’re a cultist. That’s your problem. You’re brainwashed. The early Christians were benevolent. Then the emperors, kings and nobles took over Christendom in the 4th century, about the time that the Emperor Constantine made the cross an official symbol of Catholicism. For century after century, people under the sign of the cross: emperors, kings, nobles, soldiers, peasants etc., perpetrated the vilest and most vicious of crimes and evils. Christ and the apostles never used the sign of the cross. They never said it was sacred…We have two scenarios: 1) the cross, a pagan instrument of torture, or a representation of one, reflects no evil because it is sacred to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or 2) The cross reflects some evil, because it is not sacred to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and because a lot of evil was perpetrated over the centuries by people carrying crosses. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is sacred, but the cross itself isn’t sacred, it’s evil…The benevolent people under the sign of the cross, the nice deluded people under the sign of the cross, failed for century after century to excommunicate the evil vicious vile people under the sign of the cross. The whole lot of them fell away from the True Faith, and therefore they all go to perdition.’
The audience is booing me pretty aggressively after this outburst. I try a moderating tone. I try to sound like some insincere politician these people would vote for to get these Protestant cultists enslaved by satan to shut up for a second or two.
Me – Bill Etem - ‘I know I have to be more sensitive, more loving and caring, more altruistic, more kind and more gentle, when I address you people. Like you I’m a Protestant, but I’m a different kind of Protestant than your kind. Anyways, sometimes you Protestants are just so lost and confused, you know? You just don’t know up from down! It’s as if you went to schools which were forbidden to teach Christianity. It’s as if you were reared in a pagan nation. It’s as if you spent all your time watching football and baseball and basketball and stupid TV shows and worthless movies…You don’t understand the simplest things about Christianity! Suppose, as you say, the sign of the cross is sacred to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This means that some Church under the sign of the cross is God’s True Church. This means, that to attain heaven and to escape perdition, you must not rebel against this Church, God’s True Church. But you people don’t obey any church. You people obey the laws of the USA, but the USA is a secular nation with lots of anti-Christian laws, laws which might well have been dictated by Satan himself – the USA is not the Church which Christ founded on a rock. You don’t obey any Church. I mean you Protestants obey some things which various Protestant churches teach you, but you ignore those Protestant churches whenever you care to ignore what those churches are teaching. Protestant churches don’t command or enforce nearly any rules, because they know you Protestants will rebel immediately if they tried to lay down some rules for you to obey – perhaps perfectly sound and Christian rules. One way or another, you are in rebellion against the Church which Christ founded on a rock, hence you are in rebellion against God. Therefore, even if you are right when you say the sign of the cross is sacred to God, so what? You’re right one issue (though you are, in fact, wrong). Being in rebellion against God, on any number of other issues besides the sign of the cross will drag a person down to hell. You are very much mistaken if you think you are on a road which will lead you to heaven in the afterlife. You Protestants are heading straight for perdition. You are the slaves of satan, though you are too lost and too far sunk in your enslavement to see that it is perfectly obvious that you are the slaves of satan.’
Then that young white woman who was screaming at me earlier, the one with long greasy brown hair, with the sort of a fallen, tawdry and unwashed aspect to her persona, giving every impression that she is either on welfare or is trying to get on welfare, starts in again, starts screaming at me. She’s repeating herself terribly. She’s screaming over and over, with a sort of religious mania in her eyes, with a sort of zealous hysterical howl emanating from deep in her gut and escaping from her mouth and throat:
‘You’re a smug f#&ker! You’re a smug f#&ker! You’re a smug f#&ker, You’re a….’
Me - ‘That’s just crazy, right there.’
So, all things considered, you would have to say that The Rock Island Symposium is not going real great for me. Things have sort of gone from bad to worse for me here in Rock Island, IL which is not too far from Atalissa, IA. But I’m indefatigable, and I start in again.
Bill Etem – ‘We sort of got off on the wrong foot, but I don’t think this relationship between us has to be scrapped entirely…Where in the Bible to we read that the sign of the cross is sacred to God? Nowhere. Now let’s try to follow the development of Protestantism. It crazy to think these reformers of the 16th century were good Christians. Luther ended up saying really nasty things about the Jews. The Jews reject Jesus, so that will obviously lead Christians to have some animosity for the thinking of the Jews, but Christians mustn’t let the animosity lead to violence or nasty strife. Just agree to disagree, or at least find a way to explain your position without throwing too much gasoline on a fire. Paul Johnson, a Roman Catholic historian, doesn’t whitewash any Protestant evils. He tells us that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, supported slavery (presumably the African slave trade) and that John Wesley - the founder of Methodism - supported burning ‘witches’. The quotation marks are used because ‘witches’ were usually innocent women slandered as witches. Does it make any sense to say Fox and Wesley understood the Divine Law mentioned in Jeremiah 31. 31-34? In former centuries, Catholics and Lutherans subjected the Anabaptists to the most frightful tortures. Therefore, these Catholics and Lutherans to suffer the most frightful tortured, which might lead you to believe that these Catholics and Lutherans, though they insisted they didn’t fall away from the True Faith, actually did fall away…For century after century, when Christians fell to their knees to worship God, they envisioned God to be a deity who smiled upon the cruel jurisprudence of the Middle Ages, who smiled upon the African slave trade, who thr
ew His full support behind the Inquisition, who approved the oppression of the peasantry by the nobles, who wanted women accused of witchcraft tortured to determine if in fact they were witches etc., etc. That’s the god / version of Jesus that the people under the sign of the cross worshipped. Therefore, one would think, that millions of intelligent 21st century Christians ought be able to understand that these barbarous Christians of former centuries worshipped a false god: they claimed to worship the True God, but, in fact, they worshipped an evil god…About this falling away mentioned in 2 Thess 2, concerning these people under the sign of the cross worshipping a false evil god for century after century…it’s so easy to find evidence to support these conclusions! For instance, Lord Acton told us in his essay ‘Human Sacrifice’,
‘And yet, long after the last victim had fallen in honour of the sun-god of the Aztecs, the civilised nations of Christian Europe continued to wage wholesale destruction...Protestants and Catholics,