Antichrists are popping up everywhere

[Labster]

I'd like to share a little news story.  It's fairly long, but I'm just going to say that I was laughing for about ten minutes straight as I read through this story:  Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

You know how having money makes people think that they're really smart in every field?  Well, someone managed to get a recording of Peter Thiel's four-part lecture series, despite making it clear that recordings were entirely prohibited.  And this guy hates universities so much that he just spent a few hours trying to impress academics with his theories about the antichrist.

What is the antichrist?  Apparently anything to do with world government, like UNICEF or something. And also getting in the way of new technology, like luddites. Who is the antichrist?  People like Marc Andressen, Greta Thunberg, and Eliezer Yudkowsky get mentioned as candidates, fairly close together. (A different article noted: "With enemies like these, who needs friends?")  The whole thing is like SF tech scene inside baseball, but antichrist flavored.

And people kept going to see these things!  I mean, I definitely would have, this is comedy gold, especially if you're in technology.

I'm not really knocking the idea of there being antichrists, there are plenty of people who meet the definition in 1 John. It's that, like, people whom you disagree with in politics are probably not the antichrist just because you disagree with them, right?

[Dartz]

And here I thought the whole point of the Antichrist is you would not recognise the antichrist.

The antichrist is likely to be the one trying their hardest to convince the world they are not the antichrist.

Given that Jesus was executed for bucking against the conventional power structures of the day, and that all his initial followers live in communse with communal property - and there were rules for kicking people out who lied about owning a lot of property - I think, the exact opposite of that would be a good place to start.

I think the original antichrist was supposed to be Nero or something, but somewhere the whole 'Get the romans out of palestine' was forgotten - probably about the time the Christian church became the church of Rome and became the tool of the powerful to enforce their power structures instead.