Shock Horror - Soldiers Act Violently just what do people think goes on in war? It is basically inevitable that if we invade Iraq, several Iraqis heads are going to get caved in and pissed on by confused, angry, brainwashed, tooled up British/US meatheads. Why are people under such illusion that war is this clean, just, surgical thing where the bad elements get neatly cut out? War is always messy and horrible and always brings out the sadist in young men and women exposed to these horrors. It rarely brings democracy and always brings the worst form of 'anarchy', where guns + meaness = power.

Report of British Torture in The Mirror
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What is the "rapture" and when will it happen?

The rapture is an event that will take place sometime in the near future. Jesus will come in the air, catch up the Church from the earth, and then return to Heaven with the Church. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, we are given a clear description of the rapture: "the dead in Christ will rise, then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord."

The main thrust of this web site is to prove that the rapture will occur prior to the beginning of the tribulation. This has been well researched and documented throughout the site. But, whether Jesus returns for the Church before, during, or after the tribulation, the primary goal is that all people are ready to face the Lord and give an account for their lives.

Truly weird and scary US religious nutters...

Monbiot reports

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans. The best-selling contemporary books in the US are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a "fictionalised" account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don't believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking".

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

see the whole article

In lighter news....

Tony in new "cool" smear - may have come into close proximity to "funny shaped cigarettes".