The rallying cry of those who admire the enlightened wit of David Hume might as well be “a pox on your apocalypse.” I suspect that there has hardly been any era since prophecies filled the imagination that prophetic fulfillment did not seem immanent. The biblical prophets clearly had real blood and flesh enemies in mind, and they are mentioned literally. Yet one can lionize a prophet like Daniel to such an extent that his multi-purpose end-time scenario is always in play. In the past year alone there have been the usual predictions of a fundamentalist “Rapture” when all the “true” believers get transported upwards in an eye-twinkling nanosecond and the rest of us are “left behind” for the worst hell-on-earth yet experienced. Those perpetual latter-day preachers who revel in the vials of Revelations are having a heyday with the current wave of political protests in the Middle East. New anti-christs can be christened; conniving Beasts are waiting in the wings for that one-world-government to finally take form. And, of course, the enemy these days is “radical izlam.”

As a Yemen watcher, a friend sent me a youtube video by Paul Begley, co-paster of the Community Gospel Baptist Church in Knox, Indiana. Begley has a string of youtube talks in which all the Satanic evil in the world is condensed into the religion of Islam. His latest video, produced on Friday, begins by reading the news about the reaction in Yemen to President Ali Abdullah Salih’s signing of the GCC agreement to step down. Begley’s disdain for Muslims and Arabs spills over into his linguistic mumblings, as he takes obvious delight in pronouncing Abdallah as abdalalalalalala. I beg your pardon, Pastor Begbegbegbegbegally, but r u serious?

Here is the gist. Just read your Daniel, where prophecy lovers have locked horns for more than two millennia. There you have a road map for the Arab/Israeli crisis and just about any other Nostradamuscene an imaginative conspirator can devise. But this invidious youtube video is about the fall of Yemen’s Salih and the people demanding a new kind of leader, indeed a “radical Izlamic” “Beast from the East.” Now that the dictators have fallen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen (and prophetically for Syria), Islam will become the impetus for a world government with one currency using the magical Michele Bachman numerical triad of 666. So let’s assume for a moment that Paul Begley out there in Knox, Indiana has finally resolved the tricky predictive art of divining the future. Since the dictators are out of style, perhaps the new world leader will be the Saudi King; he certainly is rich enough to make a run. And thus the new world currency will be neither the dollar nor the euro, but the Saudi riyal. It is a good thing we here in American use “Arabic numerals” since we will be looking at those before we go metric. This means that women will have to stop driving cars and wear hijab: bad news for the auto industry but think of the boom in new clothing sales. Steeples will become minarets, since Izlam (well, this is how Begley pronounces it) will become the only religion allowed.

You may be wondering what the proof is for Begley’s Youtube sermons. Well, just read your Bible. Take a verse from Daniel like the following: “But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians [shall be] at his steps.” See, it mentions Egypt and Libya and we should not forget Ethiopia because the communists used to be there and there are Muslims there as well. And why not mix in some verses from Revelations: the Bible talks about four horsemen and the purest breed of horses is the Arabian. Need I say more? R u taking me serious or not? Begley notes that 571 people have been “saved” by his youtube videos since February. I suspect some were not aware they were “lost” until they encountered Begley, who has his share of critics.

if there is a resurrection of the dead, I firmly hope that the first man exhumed out of the grave is David Hume. David, we need you today more than ever…