The Late Great Planet Earth

by Revilo P. Oliver

THE OTHER NIGHT I attended a cinema for the first time in twelve years to inspect at first hand a particularly malodorous heap of film cuttings entitled The Late Great Planet Earth, based on the book of the same title by a Christian dervish who operates under the name of Hal Lindsey.

That holy man appeared frequently in the film as a commentator who assured the audience that the prophets of the Bible spoke with the Voice of God and accurately predicted just what is happening now. Wearing about his neck a golden locket that conspicuously displayed the Seal of Solomon, Lindsey had obviously refused to visit a barber shop for several months and was dressed in an odd costume, a kind of jacket and trousers of the material from which overalls are usually made, which, I understand, is particularly affected by homosexuals. He had the mannerisms of one who is strenuously trying to appear masculine and spoke with the affectation of sincerity that one normally sees when the occupants of pulpits are pitching woo at their congregations.

The film opens with a scene in which a group of fanatics pursue and barbarously murder a prophet who guessed wrong about something (subject not identified). This is supposed to prove that prophets whom the ancient Hebrews did not murder and whose hariolations are supposedly recorded in Ezekiel, Jeremiah, et al., were speaking with the Voice of God in their rantings and never made a mistake. These ancients were portrayed realistically, so they seemed somewhat comic.

The continuity of the film was frequently broken by appearances of the rather repulsive mug of Lindsey who expounded, with the rather crude mendacity of his kind, the meaning of the “prophecies” and actual events. And for persons whose cerebra are not atrophied, the whole show was given away at the very end when the Reverend’s voice was heard reciting, in what were intended to be impressive tones, the well-known lines from the New Testament, “This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.” Since this was supposedly said early in the First Century, persons not in an hypnotic trance must have reflected that not only this generation but sixty-five more passed away while the “Kingdom of God” failed to make an appearance.

The whole gob of pictorial hokum was intended to prove that a world war will soon occur with a Battle of Armageddon, after which the Messiah will pop out of the clouds to save his Chosen People and some of the properly indoctrinated non-Chosen.

I need not add that Lindsey is a typical Christian preacher and, like so many others, has no overly religious attachment to the truth. Practically every one of his “expositions of prophecy” that is now being “fulfilled” was simply an imposition on the gullibility and laziness of the audience who, as he rightly judged, would not look up the passages he pretended to quote.

As an example of his effrontery you might look at page 230 of the paperback edition of his Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth, which is said to have been sold to 2,000,000 of the feeble-minded. On that page he says — and I copy verbatim — “The word ‘baptism’ is from the Greek word baptizo and it means to totally identify one thing with another.” Now, as everyone either knows or could ascertain in half a minute from a Greek dictionary, the verb baptizo means “to immerse in a liquid” and is principally used (as in bapto, from which it is formed) to describe the process of immersing fabrics in a dye, though it may be used metaphorically in other connections, e.g., a ship that sinks, a man who is drowned, or a region that is flooded may be said to be “baptized,” and the verb is used metaphorically of a man who is “drowned in his debts,” or of a debater who “got in over his head” and finds himself vanquished in an argument.

But, of course, if a man is going to milk the Christian kine, the first thing he must learn is how to obfuscate with a straight face and some simulation of sincerity. This reminds me that when I was a youngster I heard one Christian cleric tell his flock that he had done some philosophical research and discovered that oinos means, not “wine,” but “grape juice,” whence the comforting fact that when God or 33 1/3 of him — Christians seem never able to make up their minds which it was — appeared at a wedding and performed a miracle, he changed the water into grape juice and thus did not violate the Eighteenth Amendment (which was still in force at that time).

The Late Great Planet Earth was merely another confirmation of my opinion that Christianity is now an instrumentality of the enemy. Christians are sheep led by shamans who know how to work on their credulity and sentimentality and the holy men, without significant exceptions, are simply confidence men. As William Gayley Simpson in his admirable Which Way Western Man? says, there is “no way in which” a man can “be an honest man and remain a minister.” When he realized that fact, he left the church and we may be sure that most honest men in the salvation business, if not totally ignorant and irrational, have done likewise.

I once knew two men, both advanced in years and priests in an established and then conservative church, who believed that the superstitions of the Christians could be used to stabilize society. That was doubtless true in the first two or three decades of this century, but it is true no longer. The church of which they were members has, like all the others, sold out to the enemy, to the race that Tacitus called hostis generis humani, the race which invented Christianity and is now using it again for its own purposes.

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Source: Instauration magazine, August 1979