As has almost always been the case in times of economic and political uncertainty, and as always is the case under oppressive regimes and police states, interest in religious solutions to the problems of reality have once again become widespread and intensified. The hopes of terminating these bad-old-days, of ending magically in an instant the collective societal woes which humankind has been millennia in bringing down on ourselves, is fashionable for fun and prophet alike once more. It may be called the end-time, or the end of time, the end of days, or the last daze. It may be said to end with a whimper or to go out with a bang, but the commonality is that all of everyones' troubles will end with a surely supernatural certainty and suddenness; so long as they all adhere to the same dogma as I do.

Biblical descriptions of the anti-god apply to any modern political or religious figurehead as readily as they once did to Saul of Tarsus or Dagobert II. Dependance upon foreign oil is as despicable a situation as being damned to hell for consuming meat on Friday or storing meat and dairy products in the same icebox. As much as I hate to admit it, the televangelist are quite right when they say that all of the signs that were predicted in that most ancient of tomes - you know, the one compiled in the sixth century - are in place for the world to end. That having been said, let me also point out that sending a check for one's life's savings to the televangelist who pointed this out won't change anything but the depth of poverty anyone foolish enough to do such a thing deserves to dwell in. The tiny detail they always neglect to mention is that there has never been a time in human history when those selfsame signs have not been in place.

Once the christian church had successfully brought about the fall of the Roman empire, they proceeded to assassinate most, if not all, of the Merovingian bloodline, then set about raping, torturing and murdering every living soul in northern Europe who had the slightest inkling of what that meant; or who possessed any knowledge at all that was not sanctioned by the church. That thousand year reign of a self-proclaimed divine power on the earth is referred to today as the dark ages, and did not end until a small group of intellectuals and artists in the village of Florence renewed the acceptance of pre-christian ideas and ideals. This neopagan renaissance spawned dangerously open protests against the christian church, but not so dangerous as for the protestants to divorce themselves from the church altogether; they simply fine-tuned what had been the universal faith for a millennium to their own liking in order to throw off the yoke of Rome.

Those who remained faithful to the universal - or, in Latin, 'catholic' - church of Rome were not in the least dissuaded by the reformation of their belief structure by the protestants. Contrariwise, they continued mass murder and genocide as a means of proselytizing Africa, Asia and, once they 'found' them, the lost lands of Atl Antis - hastily renamed the americas lest anyone protest the extermination of the hundred million or so inhabitants of the legendary culture that the Celts, Egyptians and others had, prior to the cancer-like spread of the christ cult, claimed that their old gods had come from. The predictable insincerity of a faith in a foreign god being forced down one's throat had many unexpected results, ranging from santaria's renaming of the old African gods after christian saints to the backlash phenomenon of some individuals worshiping that wholly christian invention, Satan.

Renegades from European aristocracy, who ruled by divine right thanks to forced marriages of all the royal houses to Merovingian princesses, fled to the 'new' world. There they learned from the descendants of the Atl Antians of a belief system in many ways similar to the ancient pre-christian Greeks and Romans, where the forces of nature were each and all gods, as were the elements of nature themselves, including human beings. The most astute of these refugees from the skewed European value system also learned of an egalitarian system of politics and, building on what they had learned, adopted and adapted the combined knowledge gleaned from the Atl Antians together with newly re-learned principles from the then recent neo-pagan Florentine renaissance and revolted against rule by divine right - and against the very concept of christianity itself.

For colonial subjects of a European throne, all claiming to have been sanctioned by the christ himself, to declare themselves independent from those thrones and subject only to the laws of Nature's god, was an unprecedented and entirely unforseen act. The French grasped the idea more quickly than any other European nation, and followed suite with a revolution of their own. After more than a dozen generations of careful breeding to the Merovingian line to ensure that scions of the christ sat on every throne in Europe, the en masse rejection of the idea of rule by divine right was a blow that royalty might very well never recover from. The French went so far astray from their sun-king’s genetic link to the christ as to gift America with a goddess-sized statue of the principal pagan diety acknowledged by the new nation’s revolutionary founders, the roman goddess Liberty.

Ironically, america, the first nation to have been founded on non-christian principles since the fall of rome, and which recognized no god but Liberty herself, may very well prove to also become the retropolitic re-birthplace of totalitarian rule by divine right. Using the global political unrest and world-wide economic instability as certain signs that the end is nigh, religious fundamentalists of every imaginable stripe are seeking to undermine the very concept of Liberty in america. What a sad situation that would be; for the land of Liberty to be turned topsy-turvy into the land of Moses, or Allah, or Jesus.

Misinformation has been the basis of all, or nearly all, public education in these united states since the end of world war two, and the misinformation has been wrought with religious overtones. The only effective measure against such transparent lies is the truth; the whole truth and nothing but the truth. To add the name of any deity other than the name of Liberty to that truth is a slap in the face to the men and women who chased the redcoats under George IV back across the Atl Antic ocean.