They’re always grasping at straws, though. The folks who are rabidly into a supposedly “literal reading” of a bunch of parables and metaphors simultaneously came up with a highly specific end-times narrative and also the most absurdly tortured explanations for why random shit fulfills some part of that narrative. I mean, the “mark of the beast” is whatever they fuck they want it to be at any given time - whatever new thing has come along that they don’t understand.
They want to believe that they would see through the Anti-Christ when he shows up. Of course, by making him a liberal Christian type, they wouldn’t so much see through him as reject him for what he is at face value, as that’s pretty much the worst thing as far as the Christian right is concerned. (Quite literally - I was reading something about Evangelical romance novels, and apparently the completely unacceptable male romantic interest is a liberal Christian. Actual Nazis are more acceptable.) That’s the kind of guy who’s going to engage in un-Godly behavior, like… talk of tolerance and peace. The Christian right Jesus is going to show up and shoot lasers out of his eyes to blow up the Jews and gays, etc. (Actual plot point in their narratives.)
Plus, the “real” Christians get persecuted and murdered for a while as part of the story, because reasons. (The modern jokes that create a creed for the Cthulhu cult, where Cthulhu eats the faithful first is just a riff on White Evangelical Christianity - only a lot less nasty.)
It is amazing how blissfully unaware the of people who claim literal reading of the bible manage to be that it was written in a different lanuguage, alphabet, culture, and millenium, and pretty much all language is metaphor that rarely translates across those
Not to mention that for a lot of it, “written” is a generous term.
You can’t read oral history, literally. People who understand how oral history works (including those who eventually wrote things down for the first time) know this. Even early written history is highly influenced by the oral tradition over our relatively recent “just the facts” that we think history is supposed to be.
IKR? The actual “virgin” birth, a cornerstone of their whole freaking deal, is a well documented mistranslation. But they insist the Bible in their sweaty little hands is The Literal Word of Gawd To His Creation.
It says “King James Version” right on the fucking cover, come on!
The American conservative Christians get around this frequently by deciding that the King James version is the standard Bible inspired directly by God, and they can safely ignore everything before that. This also leads them to insist that the English spoken during James’s time is the standard English, as well, that we should all be speaking.
Though they’re confused about that, too - they say that English was created only at the point when the Normans made their contribution, and that this is the “true” English. Which requires them to ignore the fact that in the 500 years between that point and when the King James Bible was written, the language changed quite a bit. The idea that anything evolves, including a language, is a blasphemy they won’t even think about.
It’s such a weird world-view, relying on absolutist positions based on ignorance, which end up requiring other absolutist positions based on ignorance until every possible area of knowledge has been encompassed.
Those that I’ve engaged on the matter neatly explain that god controlled the authors and translators to ensure that the words in their bible is the true word of god.
I’ve been unable to convey the idea that no person could possibly fully comprehend anything reasonably called god, and that people can’t put our comprehension (of anything) into words without relying heavily on metaphor and imagery from unrelated aspects of our experience, so the idea that any human words could possibly encompass god is beyond absurd
Of course, God could just be puppeting them in writing the texts, which rather makes a mockery of the whole idea of free will that’s so important in the religion.
But Roberts’ decency is one more teachable moment for the conservatives. They despised Souter for straying and vowed to never let another “Souter” on the SCOTUS. Now that Roberts has shown how “untrustworthy” he is, the Federalist Society is going to re-vet their endorsements with renewed vigor to weed out any possibly decent (ie, bipartisan) candidate. It will be Alitos and Kavanaughs and Thomases and Justin Walkers and Quislings all the way down. Even Gorsuch wouldn’t be able to make the cut if they were to review him today.
