Australian premillennialists murder police

[Pottapaug1938]

This story is not about sovereign citizens per se; but as the article notes:

Premillenialism is an extremist Christian-identifying movement that believes Christ will reign over the earth for a millennium after a period of extreme earthly suffering. Many of its adherents have ties to the "sovereign citizen movement," a largely U.S.-based extremist movement that posits the federal government is fraudulent, or secretly a corporate entity with no authority, and individual citizens hold lawmaking power.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/family-of ... ist-ambush

[The Observer]

I was unable to access the entirety of the article since the Daily Beast has it behind a pay wall. But I think it is safe to assume, based on the definition of premillennialism that you quoted, that the author is very ignorant about the actual Christian theology of premillennialism. It is not a radical, extremist belief. It is a belief system that has been around since the 2nd century BC and developed along other interpretations of Christian eschatology, including amillennialism, chiliasm, and post-millennialism. The point of these differences related to interpretation of the religious texts regarding prophecies of what would occur during the "last days." A number of religious sects, such as Anabaptists, Huguenots, Calvinists and Puritans, were premillennialists. None of these could be defined as terrorists or be seen as a religious institution founded for the purpose of terrorism.

Given the fact that I hold premillennial beliefs, I presume that the author and editor will just classify me and millions of other Christians as being extremist radicals and capable of carrying out violent acts. But I can truthfully say that I and those millions of other premillennials don't spend time planning violent acts based on our held beliefs.

I am guessing that the author, if not the editor of the DB, went with this article due to their confirmation bias against Christianity. Is there the possibility that an individual involved in a particular belief system could purposely or ignorantly misinterpret religious texts to justify their own illegal behavior? Of course. But that is not the same thing as alleging that the same belief system is in itself extremist or radical. If I were to claim that the Boy Scouts of America is an extremist organization that supports and endorses pedophilia merely because a Scoutmaster was arrested for molesting the youth while on a camping trip you would be rightly offended that I painted the organization with such broad and unsupported strokes. And you would be able to point to many events that the Scouts hold throughout the year that result in positive outcomes to refute such a stupid allegation.

Given that your opening statement that the article link doesn't really have anything to do with the sovereign movement, I am at a loss to understand why you would post this in the first place. And seeing that it is behind a pay wall, I doubt that a significant number of the readership are going to be able to read the article at the link anyways. Finally, this thread seems to be a violation of the "no-politics, no-religion" rule that is in place, given that we cannot see context of the article and the quote is inflammatory and ignorant of the history behind the belief it is attacking. Therefore, I am locking the thread down.