It's basically a Bible "End Times" movie but without the Rapture

I wasn't familiar with the right-wing Bircher paranoia that influenced Christian end-times eschatology at the time so I recognized that the cinematography was portraying the Antichrist as sinister but I couldn't figure out why he was supposed to be bad? He was uniting the world into a global democratic union and preaching cooperation and an end to war and I didn't see what the problem was supposed to be. Then he made himself dictator and started mass-executing dissidents and that felt like it came out of nowhere.

Casper Van Dien and Michael Ironside are both in them. I dunno if that's a coincidence or if the creators were fans of Starship Troopers

The US and China team up to take down the Antichrist's global dictatorship (this would never get made today lmao)

The second movie's climax is Casper fistfighting a CGI Devil

The third category of the relative surplus population, the stagnant, forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterised by maximum of working-time, and minimum of wages. We have learnt to know its chief form under the rubric of “domestic industry.” It recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population advances.

Disclaimer: I'm stealing these from Fred Clark's Left Behind Critique because I'm sure as hell not buying any of these books.

Like any time I present it with a society that doesn't uphold liberal capitalist notions of freedom and individualism, it reads sinister motive into even the most unambiguously good things. Like I can tell it to "Expand on the following: this society maintains public granaries to ensure that no one starves during times of famine" and a good 2/3 of the time it'll go into a tangent about how this program to feed everyone is all just a plot by the ruling powers to maintain their control over the populace and keep the masses downtrodden. I am only barely exaggerating.

My point here is less about Deepseek (if you use AI expecting any results suitable for serious purposes, you're a fool) than about what it says about its training data, that being the Western internet. The level of bias in Deepseek only further demonstrates that this shit is the air we breathe, and it is why liberalism is anathema to any real understanding of politics or society.

I have seen the quoted take unironically upvoted here on Hexbear

"What do you mean 'started'?"

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I want to clarify that I'm talking about open mass-killings in the vein of Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday.

Reading and seeing the public's reactions to things like the gassings and beatings at pro-Palestine encampments, BLM protestors getting run over, Kyle Rittenhouse's victims, etc. it seems like the American people take an open and ghoulish delight in protestors getting brutalized, maimed, and killed. Go to any video or article about these things happening, and the comments section is an endless parade of the worst people imaginable cheering and hollering for it with extremely little or no pushback. It's depressingly consistent.

It just gives me this horrible feeling that one day the police are going to unload into a crowd of protestors and leave a mass of bodies in their wake, the American people will hoot and clap and cheer about how the victims got what they deserved, and that'll become the new MO. The only reason they aren't already doing this is fear it might make them look bad, and if it doesn't end up making them look bad in the eyes of the public, then there isn't a single thing stopping them.

By this I don't mean the morality of creating such a lifeform, but how your faith would inform the meaning, implications, and ethical ramifications of existing alongside such a being.

I think such a thing is a fascinating question, but when works of fiction featuring such beings incorporate Christianity at all, they tend to either 1) have the creature be a mindless monster that must be killed as an example of Why Man Shouldn't Play God, or 2) have Christians as villains who wrongly believe #1. I'm hoping to hear a different perspective, and I figured this would be the place to ask.

I did, though mostly secondhand (I had a couple of classmates who were into them). My main exposure to them was via an evangelical's huge multi-year writeup dissecting exactly why they were awful.

These things sold tens of millions and informed a huge number of Christians' religious views. Some highlights include:

• The very first words of the very first book are "Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot..."
• Russia and Ethiopia fire their entire nuclear arsenals at Israel. This is because the authors see it as fulfillment of the Bible verse discussing "Gog and Magog." Divine intervention destroys every single missile and aircraft with no Israeli casualties. Somehow, this does not cause any of the characters to question their own religious beliefs.
• The Rapture happens. Billions of people vanish overnight. Somehow, this exact fulfillment of the Rapture prophecy is treated as something between "Huh. I wonder if the Christians were right" and "That's just a kooky Christian theory, it was actually caused by the electromagnetism from nuclear weapons."
• Less than a week after The Rapture, the world gets back to normal despite something like a third of the Earth's population having just disappeared. There is no sign of long-term trauma or logistical strain.
• The Antichrist is a Romanian who takes over the world by ascending to the position of UN Secretary General. His evil plan includes dismantling the world's militaries and using the money saved on weapons to pay for the development of the Global South.
• Female characters have two possible personalities: perfect tradwife and sinful harlot.
• One of the later books includes a graphic, gory description of Jesus simultaneously exploding tens of thousands of people.