How not to make Christianity believable

h/t: Hairy Eyeball

One of the leading characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace – Pierre Besukhov – spends a considerable amount of energy playing with numbers in the Bible to prove that Napoleon was the antichrist.  As is often the case in a Tolstoy novel, his fictional character is pretty close to reality: what obsesses some – I hope it’s fringe, I really do – Christians is just that: identifying the antichrist.

Napoleon may have been disagreeable, but he wasn’t the antichrist; neither is Barack Obama, in spite of a popular youtube video declaring that he is. I disagree politically with Obama and I think the adulation he has attracted is foolish, but I don’t thinks he is about to usher in the Great Tribulation – well, other than the trillion dollar debt.

Nevertheless, there are some who take this sort of thing seriously. This article does an effective debunking job:

More than one Christian friend has suggested to me, in all seriousness, that President Obama is the Antichrist. I haven’t taken such suggestions too seriously, but recently a video has shown up on Youtube that seems to claim that Jesus identified Obama as the Antichrist. Some Christians have been startled by this (and the video is wildly popular) and believe that the evidence is compelling. The video is found here.