The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Magenta:

I wish you would NOT refer to W as the "hermetic" president. I know you are using it in the sense of "hermetically sealed", but there are those of us who practice magical traditions, and hermetic means something very, very different. Google hermetic and you'll see what I mean.

On the other hand, the Manchurian president is much more useful - the reference is scarily accurate. Are there any people of Manchurian ancestry who would object, though?

Perhaps the illegitimate president is the most accurate - there is more evidence he was not elected either time than for any other president, to the best of my knowledge.

"In German or English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
- Tom Lehrer

from (http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/vonbraun.htm)

Maybe we all need to start learning Chinese.

(lecture mode)
I think the significant difference between the current "revival" and most past ones is that premillennial dispensationalism is a relatively recent concept. That's right, all the stuff that the books like the "Left Behind" series are based on come from a highly unorthodox reading of Revelations. It does not really have room for many of the usual tropes of Christianity.

A man named J N Darby came up with a lot of these ideas about 150 years ago, but they were mostly considered non-mainstream by most churches until the last 20 or 30 years. The ideas that "we are living in the End Times" has been an element of Christianity since it's inception. But most of the time, that aspect is ignored or subsumed to more useful tropes.
I think there is a qualitative difference between most of the previous American revivals and the current one. As mentioned, the others, with the possible exception of the original Puritans, brought widespread and progressive social change. These were not at odds with the culture at large, rather they revived and opened up the culture as a whole. This one seems to be the first that is contracting it, and, as mentioned, seems to be almost anti-social, and certainly is anti-progress.

For more information try:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/beliefs/end_times/index.shtml

Or read:
"Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform" by William G. McLoughlin. The University of Chicago press reprinted it a couple of years back, so it's around, and many university libraries have it.

(/lecture mode)

And some of it is that religion has stopped "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted". We are all too comfortable now, and much of the current revival is to give certainty rather than doubt.

I don't whether I'm living in Germany circa 1934 or the end of "I Claudius".

I'm depressed.

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