Re: the World's Last Chance website (Part 2)

As I said, I was not finished with this yet... To my mind, the World's Last Chance (WLC) website oscillates between the absolutely ridiculous and the genuinely surprising, many times; but here are some examples:

Ridiculous

"The official title of the pope is 'Vicarius Filii Dei', which translated is, 'Representative of the Son of God'... Since in Latin certain letters have numerical values, we only need to add them up to come to 666."

Surprising

"We hold upon this earth the place of God Almighty." Pope Leo XIII, in an Encyclical letter, dated June 20, 1894...

"The Pope is not only the representative of Jesus Christ, but he is Jesus Christ, hidden under a veil of flesh." The Catholic National, July 1895...

"But the supreme teacher in the Church is the Roman Pontiff... [who] requires... complete submission and obedience of will... as to God Himself." Pope Leo XIII, the Great Encyclical Letters, p. 193.

WLC go on to use Revelation Ch 17:1-18 to indicate that the Roman Catholic Church went into its "wilderness experience" in 1798 and came out of it in 1929, by virtue of the Lateran Treaty, by which Benito Mussolini allowed the establishment of the Vatican City as a sovereign state.

I find it amusing to note that, just as the Roman Catholic Church went into her wilderness experience, "God's true church" (i.e. the one that, by then, had supposedly been wrongly observing Sunday as the Sabbath for 300-odd years) came out of it... although I would not contest the assertion that the Catholic Church has used suppression and oppression quite a lot over the centuries to retain "the unity of the faith"...

From 1929, then, it is but a short step to the conclusion that... "Bible Prophecy Reveals Next And Last Pope Will Be A Devil Impersonating John Paul II".

However, since Pope Benedict is not as young as he once was (God bless him), we probably don't have long to wait in order to find out if WLC are right!

Re: the World's Last Chance website (Part 1)

Could it be that the Seventh Day Adventists (who were the first to postulate the idea) are right to suggest that Pope Benedict will be the penultimate pontiff before the final fulfilment of prophecy in the Book of Revelation?... Before dismissing the idea out of hand, on the basis that Jesus said no-one would be able to predict His return, it is important to note that what World's Last Chance (WLC) are predicting is not the Second Coming of Christ (i.e. not the end of the world), but "the beginning of the end..."

Having had to give them some credit for not being so foolhardy as to go against the eschatological teaching of Christ himself, I felt compelled to read on, to see how they justify their ideas, which are built upon the visions of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar (c.550BC) and the Apostle John (c.100AD), as recorded in Daniel Ch.2:26-49, and Revelation Ch.13:1-8 respectively.

King Nebuchadnezzar had a vision of a statue made up of four parts, which (as the prophet Daniel revealed) represented 4 empires - that of the Babylonians of his day; and the three that were to come after it. On the other hand, John's vision (the whole book of Revelation) has proven to be much hard to interpret with any certainty. It is generally not contested that the former vision predicted events up to and including the fall of the Roman Empire in 476AD. However, despite some entirely credible interpretations of the "beast", "dragon", and "woman", WLC go and blow it all on a very dubious interpretation of the mention of "42-months, as follows: "...This period is equivalent to three and half years (42 divided by 12 months). And the Bible was written based on the Jewish calendar where every Jewish year is 360 days (30 days for each month). So, three and half years and forty-two months are both equal to 1260 days. The reason why we are changing the months to their equivalent in days is that when God gave time prophecies, He often equated a day for a year "...even forty days , each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years..."; and "I have appointed thee each day for a year..." (Numbers 14:34 and Ezekiel 4:6)."

Thus the 42 months becomes 1260 years; and is equated to the 1260 years for which, as it happens, the Roman Catholic Church held both religious and political power over Europe (538-1798AD), which was brought to an end by Napoleon. However, the key point is that, even if most people would equate the fourth empire of Nebuchadnezzar's dream with the the Roman Empire, WLC equate "the Beast out of the Sea" in Revelation 13, to Church of Rome rather than the Roman Empire.

For many, this will be a leap of faith they feel unable to take, but this is not the half of it. WLC also drag the USA into the picture (as "the Beast out of the Earth" in Revelation 13), and conclude that the worldwide, post-reformation, protestant Church (in it's widest possible sense) has been duped into wrongly adopting Sunday as their Holy Day. Please note, here, that I am deliberately avoiding use of the word "Sabbath" here, because I do not accept arguments about this that are based on a literal interpretation of the Creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. I am also mindful of Christ's warning that, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." [Mark Ch. 2:27].

I am not finished yet, but this will do for now...

George W. Bush - Are You Mad ?

I really thought that the President might actually take heed of the advice offered by the Iraq Study Group, despite the fact that it would require the consumption of a large serving of "Humble Pie" (...it was stupid of me - I know).

Can you believe it, though, this guy makes Tony Blair's behaviour over Iraq seem entirely rational. In fact, in the face of such madness, one might be forgiven for even considering the World's Last Chance website to be credible!

Jesus Christ should be our Rock

"JESUS CHRIST IS THE ROCK ON WHICH WE STAND...
...AND THE ROCK OF WHICH WE SHOULD BE MADE!"
(Thank-you to Jeremy Simpkins, the Pastor of Jubilee Church, on Teesside (UK),
for being the "divine spark" of inspiration for the above illustration)

What exactly is a Hybrid Embryo (?)

The announcement that the UK Government may ban this scientific research has prompted a lot of discussion in the media (e.g. BBC News website).

Before ranting on about the moral and ethical implications of this, it is always useful to check the facts... If scientists are taking the egg from a cow and removing all its contents before putting in human DNA from a stem cell, resulting in an embryo that is 99.99% human, that is a bit like putting a Snickers bar inside a Mars bar wrapper, and an ethical or moralistic argument against it cannot really be sustained...

However, the question that remains - and on which a variety of objectors should continue to focus - is, "From where and how are the stem cells obtained?"