Is Romney the Antichrist?

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For the neo-cons it is always 1938, and every mid-East dictator is 'worse than Hitler'.

For the fiscal-cons there are no taxes on the 1% that can't be cut, no capital gains rate that shouldn't be lower or eliminated, regardless of the state of the economy.

For theocons it is always the end times 'real soon', and every world leader is a potential anti-Christ.

[Grig]

Do you have ANY idea just how bat-crap crazy this makes you look CC? Probably not.

There is always a risk involved when engaging a fool of others not being able to tell the difference, so I'll just make this one post here. After all, you've already established you are not above misrepresenting the facts so I don't see any point in debate. Anyway....

- He claims to be Christian, but rejects Christian monotheism.

And accepting the trinity is not a requirement to be a Christian, it is only a requirement to be an orthodox Christian, and orthodoxy is only defined by what the majority think, NOT by what is actually true or what side has a valid claim.

- He is a bishop who rejects the Nicene (orthodox) understanding of the Holy Trinity

Generations of Bishops before the Nicene creed never accepted it either. But lets follow the logic here. If Romeny is actually a Bishop, then his ordination as Bishop by another Mormon was valid, likewise that Mormon's ordination and so one and so on right to Joseph Smith which would mean Joseph truely was a prophet of God, and orthodox Christianity was an apostate form or original Christianity and the Nicene Creed is a false doctrine, and so Romney could not be the antichrist, but a bishop from an orthodox faith might.

while claiming we become gods in the afterlife

Something explicitly taught by many early Christian fathers and others:

Saint Irenaeus
- “Do we cast blame on him [God] because we were not made gods at our beginning, but first we were made men, then, in the end, gods?'
(Against Heresies 4, 38)

- How then will any be a god, if he has not first been made a man?
(Henry Bettenson, The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection from the Writings of the Fathers from St. Clement of Rome to St. Athanasius (London: Oxford University Press, 1956)

- Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, of his boundless love, became what we are that he might make us what he himself is.”
(Against Heresies 5, preface)

Clement of Alexandria
- “Yea, I say, the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god.”
Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks, 1.[

and

- “if one knows himself, he will know God, and knowing God will become like God. . . . His is beauty, true beauty, for it is God, and that man becomes a god, since God wills it.”
Clement of Alexandria, Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor, 3.1 see also Clement, Stromateis, 23

Justin Martyr
- “[in the beginning men] were made like God, free from suffering and death,” and that they are thus “deemed worthy of becoming gods and of having power to become sons of the highest”
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 124.

Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria
- “The Word was made flesh in order that we might be enabled to be made gods. . . . Just as the Lord, putting on the body, became a man, so also we men are both deified through his flesh, and henceforth inherit everlasting life.”
Athanasius, Against the Arians, 1.39, 3.39.

and

- “He became man that we might be made divine.”
Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.

Augustine of Hippo
- “But he himself that justifies also deifies, for by justifying he makes sons of God. ‘For he has given them power to become the sons of God’ [John 1:12]. If then we have been made sons of god, we have also been made gods...”
Augustine, On the Psalms, 50:2.

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were “gods” and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him-for we can prevent Him, if we choose-He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said”

Westminister Dictionary of Christian Theology:
Deification (Greek Theosis) is for orthodoxy the goal of every Christian. Man, according to the Bible, is ‘made in the image and likeness of God’...it is possible for man to become like God, to become deified, to become God by grace. This doctrine is based on many passages of both O.T. and N.T. (Psalms 82: (81) .6; 2 Peter 1:4), and it is essentially the teaching both of St. Paul, though he tends to use the language of filial adoption (Romans 8:9-17, Galatians 4:5-7) and the fourth gospel (John 17:21-23).

William R. Inge, Archbishop of Canterbury:
"God became man, that we might become God" was a commonplace of doctrinal theology at least until the time of Augustine, and that "deification holds a very large place in the writings of the fathers...We find it in Irenaeus as well as in Clement, in Athanasius as well in Gregory of Nysee. St. Augustine was no more afraid of deificari in Latin than Origen of apotheosis in Greek...To modern ears the word deification sounds not only strange but arrogant and shocking.

- He was once pronounced officially dead by state authorities, but made a "miraculous" recovery.

Quite an exaggeration. An inexperienced policeman on the scene through he was dead when he was not so badly injured by the drunk (orthodox) priest who ran into his car. Hardly official, and while you could say it was miraculous that he was not injured worse than he was, the recovery was quite normal.

- He is attempting to claim both the highest secular political office in the world and high ecclesiastical office.

He isn't seeking to be the prophet of the church, nor could he if he wanted to. Likewise for pope or any other ecclesiastical office in any church.

- Even devout Christians, in their dislike of Obama, are willing to believe that Romney is christian.

Or perhaps because they have a better grip on reality than you.

He's been put forward as the subject of his own religion's prophecy that he's the rider of the white horse of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, whom many early Christians identified as the Antichrist.

The white horse prophecy is something somebody cooked up and it has been denounced as a fake by the church. It included a reference to something Joseph Smith actually said, that a day would come when the elders (plural) of the church would play a key role in PRESERVING the constitution of the USA. No first hand account of what exactly he said exists, but numerous second hand accounts of this exist so there can't be any certainty that it was in fact a prophecy, but even if you assume the common theme of all the second hand accounts is accurate, it is still the fact that it talks of the elders, not one man, and it talks about the preservation of the constitution, not the destruction of America to form some new world order.

Face facts CC, Mitt Romney is going to be the next POTUS. You can't stop it. And four years from now all your fearmongering will even funnier than it is now. Thanks for the laugh.

[CrunchyCon]

Do you have ANY idea just how bat-crap crazy this makes you look CC? Probably not.

Or, I don't care. My first duty is toward Christ. And as He said Himself: A prophet is seldom welcome in his own home.

Many on FD - including several former critics - thought I was bat crazy when I predicted very early on that John Tory would self-destruct in a head-to-head with Dalton McGuinty.

- He claims to be Christian, but rejects Christian monotheism.

And accepting the trinity is not a requirement to be a Christian,

Yes it is. Those who claim to be Christian but reject the Trinity are not of Christ. They may be nice people, sincerely misguided, but their doctrine is still of God. There can be no compromise on this point.

while claiming we become gods in the afterlife

Something explicitly taught by many early Christian fathers and others:

[snip]

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”

The fact you and LDS Mormons are trying to co-opt C.S. Lewis to support this doctrine first spoken by the serpent in the Garden of Eden will hopefully be a wake-up call to evangelicals who have been lulled by their distaste for Obama into believing that Romney is essentially harmless.

Face facts CC, Mitt Romney is going to be the next POTUS.

I agree that if he's "The" Antichrist, he is unlikely to be stopped, since God is allowing it to be his time. Even so, I can face God with a clean conscience on Judgment Day, knowing I did not support Romney's rise. If, however, Romney is merely "an" antichrist, he will likely be smooshed by Obama since there is no enthusiasm for Romney among the conservative or Christian base.