Topics About Which I Know Nothing

by Patrick Ness

  ‘So the scientist who’s a Christian goes, you know, “Fair enough” but he, like, gets out his Bible, ‘cause he keeps it in his desk, and he has a look. And the Bible doesn’t say a whole day, it says about a whole day, right? Right? And so, he thinks again to his Bible readings and remembers Hezekiah, okay? And he remembers - and he looks it up, too, to show the other scientists - he remembers that Hezekiah was on, like, his death bed. And the prophet Isaiah visits him because God said that Isaiah was going to heal him, right? Hezekiah, you know, though, doesn’t, like, believe this, because he’s dying, right? And so he goes to God, he goes, “Show me, like, a sign.” You know? “Something to prove that I’ll be healed.”

  ‘Okay, so God, you know, being God, goes “Okay, I’ll give you, like, a choice.” He goes, “I’ll send the sun forwards or backwards ten degrees.” So Hezekiah goes, “Send it backwards, God, and I’ll, like, believe in you.” So God does, of course. He sends the sun back ten degrees.

  ‘Well, guess what? Ten degrees equals 40 minutes. Right? So 40 minutes plus 23 hours and 20 minutes equals the missing day. They found the missing day. In the Bible.

  ‘One hundred per cent true, I swear.’

  President Woodrow Wilson Tried to Be the Antichrist (and Failed)

  ‘Now, let me tell you a little story, very in-te-res-tin. It was in an article in a magazine I read somewhere, I don’t remember exackly, but it was about how - and not many people know this - President Woodrow Wilson tried to be the Antichrist. True. There’s proof of this, akchull proof which scholars have tried to suppress for decades, but it’s true. It was uncovered by researchers at the Library of Congress. Woodrow Wilson was a secret member of the Church of Satan. What’s more, he was a high priest in the Church of Satan and knew exackly what he was doing. You can just imagine him sitting there, having used his evil ways to become President, and thinking, “Well, how can I get more power? How can I - what’s the word? - consolidate my presidency?”

  ‘Like Lucifer himself, he knew his Bible verses, and so he prayed to the Devil, saying “Oh, Dark Lord, how can I become more parrful in your service?” And the Devil answered him, directing him to the Book of the Revelations of Saint John. Wilson read there of a powerful figure who would rise in the End Times. Well, he was a powerful figure. The Bible said that the figure would be from the East. Well, Wilson was from Virginia, on the east coast and not West Virginia. The Bible said the man would be a charismatic leader. Well, Wilson had been elected president, had he not? Yes, he had. The Bible said, too, that the Antichrist would rule the earth for seven years before the final battle of Armageddon. Well, Wilson had just been re-elected after four years in office and knew he had another four-year term ahead of him. Not only that, he had just signed the act of war that would plunge America into Dubya Dubya One, killing millions of soldiers, which to Wilson sounded like Armageddon itself.

  ‘Now, the Devil is a canny master, and pretty soon, Wilson had himself believin’ that he was the Antichrist, that the signs were there, written in the Bible, that he was the one fulfilling the biblical prophecy, prophecy which his Lord and Master Satan no doubt told him turned out differently than what the Bible says.

  ‘And so when the War ended, with the loss of many, many Murrican lives, Wilson tried to seize the moment to fulfil the final Biblical prophecy of the Antichrist, thereby crowning himself as leader of the earth. He tried to form the League of Nations, the early version of the UN. That’s right, world gubment, with Wilson at its head.

  ‘And he nearly succeeded, too, nearly succeeded in becoming President of the Entire World, but then, of course, God’s in charge of the Bible, not Satan, and so He got to work. Congress at the time had just got a Republican majority (because Wilson, of course, was a Democrat, what else can you expect?) and this Godfearing majority refused to pass Wilson’s grab for personal world domination. They said, “No, Woodrow, we don’t care what you negotiated in Versaylees, you’re not taking the US of A into any such world gubment. We want no part of this.”

  ‘Well, as you can expect, President Wilson was mi-i-i-i-i-ghty upset at what they said. So upset that he had a stroke, which paralysed him. He became a right vegetable. The rest of his presidency was filled pretty much by his, and this is true, his Christian wife. Look in the history books. She ruled the roost and nursed him ‘til he died, a dribblin’ wreck of a would-be devil, livin’ proof of what happens when you take on God Himself.

  ‘And as for the United Nations that finally came about, well, that’s exackly why Republican President after Republican President has ignored them so durned much. No one wants to become the Antichrist accidentallike.’

  The Masonic Bible

  ‘There’s a reason why American Christian churches use either the New International Version or the New American Standard Version of the Bible and not the King James Version. It’s a well-known fact that King James was top of the hierarchy of the secret society of freemasons in England at the time and that he packed the committee that translated his version with fellow freemasons who re-wrote the original Greek to make it look like the Bible endorsed freemasonry. They tried to suggest that freemasonry was around long before the time of Jesus, and even that freemasons were responsible for freeing Jesus from his tomb.

  ‘Let’s look at the facts. The New International Version of the Bible has, in the whole book, only six references to masons, and all of those references are either to the actual people who stuck bricks together or to the mortar of stones itself. The King James Version has over 700 references to masons and freemasons and masonry. Go look it up. Seven hundred references.

  ‘Things like in First and Second John when it talks about the twelve apostles being held together like masonry, hinting that the twelve apostles were some kind of Masonic lodge all to themselves and that Jesus was their Grand Master. Or in Luke, when the Good Samaritan is referred to as ‘a worker of bricks and mortar’, making the Good Samaritan, which should mean the best of a dangerous lot from Samaria, into a Mason.

  ‘The biggest difference in the King James Version is that they made Hiram, King of Tyre, into the first Mason. He’s supposed to be the founder of the Masonic order, because the freemasons in King James’ time wanted to have everyone believe they were founded thousands of years before (when everyone knows they sprung from a plot to assassinate King John, the first Christian king of England). People who have infiltrated the secret Masonic structure say that they even make Hiram, King of Tyre, a part of their rituals. You apparently have to stand naked in a cistern while they pour water over you as you play the part of Hiram getting baptised by Solomon.

  ‘All of which are Masonic lies. They were subtle about it, certainly, but the truth is - and the truth as the New International Version and New American Standard Versions have it - is that Hiram, King of Tyre was an architect, not a mason. He designed buildings for Solomon, he didn’t actually put them together with masonry and stones. This was a fiddle on the part of the masons on King James’ committee (which included Shakespeare, by the way; all of Shakespeare’s heroes are masons, if you’ll notice, and all the villains non-masons). They changed architect into mason to make it look like they were there in the beginning. It surely can’t be a coincidence that all this happens in the first book of Kings in the King James Bible.

  ‘The New International Version arose because some non-Masonic Christians wanted the truth of the Bible to be told, but they were asked to keep their real purpose secret so as not to give any false ammunition to those who would leap on anything to discredit the Bible as a whole. They just quietly let the King James Version fall out of popular use, despite attempts by the masons to keep their version as the official Christian Bible.

  ‘It’s a war they’re losing, praise God, because who ever heard of King James except for his Bible?’

  The Secret Order of the Children of the Popes

  ‘You know the real fuckin’ story, don’t ya? Course you do. It’s a big fuckin’ cover-up, but everybody fuckin’ knows
. The Vatican has its own secret police. Swear to fuckin’ God. They do assassinations and shit for the Pope, innit? Anyone that’s a threat to the Catholic faith gets it in the fuckin’ neck. Why do you think they got JFK? Only fuckin’ Catholic president of the US, and he gets killed because the Vatican thinks he’s takin’ too much fuckin’ power away from the Pope himself. Everybody fuckin’ knows that.

  ‘But what’s not common knowledge is that they’re called La Bambini della Papa. Or Popa. Or summat. Whatever the fuck “Pope” is in Eye-talian. Children of the Pope, that’s what they’re called. Because, and I’m fuckin’ lettin’ you in on somethin’ here, they’re actually children of the Pope. No shit. Each fuckin’ Pope fathers one little kid with a different nun each year. I’m not shittin’ ya. It’s in the fuckin’ Vatican by-laws, small fuckin’ print. You can look it up. And each kid is raised from when they’re small to be a fuckin’ Bambino la Popa. No fuckin’ shit. There’s only one born a year, so there’s only like fifty or sixty of the fuckers workin’ at any one time, but they’re the best fuckin’ secret service in the world.

  ‘Why do you think the Vatican’s got it’s own fuckin’ country, huh? Everyone’s afraid of II Bambinos del Popo. I’m not shittin’ ya. Everybody fuckin’ knows.’

  Daylight Savings Time Is the Work of the Devil

  ‘Putting clocks back for an hour during the summer was invented by a Satanist named Phineas B. Zakdorn in 1799. It’s true. You can look him up.

  ‘The Bible calls the Devil “the Stealer of Time” and Zakdorn found a way to make that real on the largest scale possible. He convinced the government to do it by saying it was on behalf of farmers who needed more daylight hours in which to harvest. This sounded good to the government because farm production was flagging at that time, so they made it law. But what they didn’t know was that Zakdorn’s real intentions were to steal an hour from the life of every man, woman and child in the country, give them to the Devil, who would have the whole summer to fill that hour with evil influence, and then at the end of the summer when the clocks went back - and everyone got back their extra hour - it would be the most demonic sixty minutes of the year. It can’t be a coincidence that the clocks go back to normal right around Halloween.

  ‘Zakdorn wasn’t discovered to be a Satanist until after his death. It was in his will, I guess, but by then, Daylight Savings Time was so entrenched as a part of life that the government covered up the real intent and to this day still claims it’s for farmers. Only one state lawmaker in Arizona found out what the truth really was, and that’s why Arizona is the only state not to take part. It’s hush-hush, but you might find it impossible to book a hotel in Phoenix during the first day of Daylight Savings because a lot of Christians go to Arizona just for that, just so they don’t lose an hour of their lives to the Devil.

  ‘You couldn’t make this stuff up.’

  Dinosaurs on the Ark

  ‘Dinosaurs couldn’t fit on the ark, and that’s why they’re extinct. Duh.’

  Ronald Reagan Was the Anti-Antichrist

  ‘It might be somewhat of a surprise to you to learn that the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as the fortieth President of these United States of America was greeted in some corners with no small amount of trepidatiousness. Yes, we knew he was a great man. Yes, we knew he stood for all the right things: lower taxation, strong moral righteousness, our nation’s defense as a top priority against the socialist, Marxist, communist governments who would seek to undermine and erode the values that we hold so dear to our hearts and minds. We knew that his rhetoricality, his humbility, and his dedication to proper ethics and ideals after the wayward Carter era were exactly the tonic we needed to restore the greatness and superiority of America in the eyes of the larger world.

  ‘But even though he held all these, dare I say, Christian values that were so important to the rejuvenality, both morally and spiritually, of our great republic, some of evangelical Christianity’s brightest and most devout theologians were concerned and troubled by the small fact of Reagan’s name. For you see, the full name of the greatest leader of the greatest nation on Earth was Ronald Wilson Reagan, and if you count up the letters, you get six for his first name, six for his second name, and six for his last name. Even the lowliest of laypersons has some idea of the supernumerary significance of this particular combination of digits.

  ‘And so there were some quarters who saw this as a clear sign. A strong leader had arisen and swept to power, perhaps even using the very promises of Jesus to lie his way into the highest office in the world. So they prepared themselves for what they sadly saw as the inevitable spiritual battlement of the End Times, swathing themselves in spiritual armoury, arming themselves in spiritual armament, loading those spiritual armaments with spiritual ammunition, and quietly and surrepetatiously alerting their various flocks to brace themselves for the Final Conflict.

  ‘But oh, how we were proved wrong, how the Lord in His infinite, infinite wisdom proved us wrong to the very last letter, how we were proved so childish and unworthy to doubt Our Grand Gipper. For, of course, Ronald Wilson Reagan was not the Antichrist - how ridiculous it seems now, how we can all laugh at our unbelievable hubricity in doubting the great man - President Ronald Wilson Reagan of the United States of America was none other than what could only be called the Anti-Antichrist.

  ‘The Lord was clever, always is, praise Him. By appelating our Great Leader with what would appear to be the very number of the nature of the Beast, Our Lord let Ronald Wilson Reagan act as nothing less than a double agent against the forces of Lucifer, Leviathan and Abaddon the Abyss itself. Who else but a double agent against evil could work so closely with the demonic forces of communism to bring about their very own downfall? Who else could simultaneously claim moral victory while also being allowed into the very boudoirs of Beelzebub?

  ‘Because here is some linguistical permutating that I will bet you did not know either. President Ronald Wilson Reagan used the very words of the enemy against them, all the while smiling and acting very much the friendly ally. You may recall perestroika? This is, of course, the Russian word for reconstruction, which was told to the public to refer to the rebuilding of the Russian economy. But the armies of Asmodeus at work in the Evil Empire knew that what perestroika really referred to was the ‘reconstruction’ of the entire world in the image of the dire forces of communism.

  ‘But our Great Anti-Antichrist leader was one step ahead of Moloch. He knew, as all devout and religious Children of God know, that perestroika is entomologically from the ancient Greek for peristalsis, which actually refers to regurgitation. And we all know what that means. Reagan got the Russians to believe they were rebuilding the world when actually they were justly and truly expelling communism from their very bellies.

  ‘The same with glasnost. The Russians told us that this meant “openness” when they really meant it to mean “embracement” which is what they expected the world to do to their demonic, undemocratic, evil and destructive form of government. But Our Great Actor On The World’s Stage was one step ahead once more, knowing full well that glasnost has older, Gaelic roots in the word Glasgow, the famous city in God-fearing Scotland, which, of course, literal-wise means ‘dear green place’. And what other ‘dear green place’ is there but Heaven itself? The Great Man convinced the enemy they were causing the world to fall under communism’s embrace when in actuality they were planting the seeds of Heaven in their own brimstone-smelling backyard.

  ‘You can look it up. It’s all true, though our pink-leaning, left-wing, liberal media wouldn’t like you to know it. Reagan was the Lord’s Own Double Agent, the Anti-Antichrist, the man who caused the Iron Curtain itself to be torn asundrance.’

  Christian Conversion On Crashing Plane

  ‘This was all covered up, but you know that plane that crashed on the Pentagon? Apparently, there was a missionary woman who had transferred at JFK from a flight from Romania where she was working with Romanian orphans. She was head
ing to Los Angeles to do some fund-raising.

  ‘My cousin saw an interview on CNN with a former NTSB investigator who was working on the crash, and apparently, if you listen to the black-box recording for the last eleven minutes before the plane crashes and you edit out all the terrorists making their threats - they can do that now, with technology - you can hear this missionary woman talking to the other passengers.

  ‘The thing is, you can hear her preaching. Not just calming them down, but preaching the gospel and reading from the Bible. And if you listen really closely, apparently you can hear her leading all the passengers in prayer, and just before the plane crashes, she gets all of the passengers to repeat a prayer asking Jesus Christ into their hearts as their personal Lord and Saviour.

  ‘There’s more. Apparently, and this is going by a former NTSB investigator, remember, the terrorists were apparently at the Pentagon eleven minutes before and were going to crash the plane then. But there were mysterious malfunctions to the steering and flight equipment and, no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t get the plane to crash for those eleven minutes. The news usually leaves this part out - and have you noticed that there’s no footage of the Pentagon plane actually crashing? - but the plane apparently had to circle the Pentagon for eleven whole minutes while the missionary woman led the other passengers to be born again.

  ‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, apparently.’

  Screams From Burning Harry Potter Books

  ‘A friend of mine’s mother has a sister who lives in Alabama and the sister’s church got together and were burning books that were bad for children and it was mostly those books where gays try to recruit kids to their lifestyle and horror books and Stephen King and a bunch of others they’d had banned from the local school libraries like Judy Blume and R L Stine and you know just burning them to make sure they never got back into circulation and a bunch of CDs too from people like AC/DC which everyone knows stands for Anti-Christ Devil’s Children and KISS which stands for Kids in Satan’s Service and I guess some gangster rap too like those things about taking drugs and killing cops and raping little kids but mainly rap metal where they I guess really actually poop onstage in a canister or a bag or something and throw it out at the audience and kids are sort of hypnotised by it and become devil worshippers without even realising it plus all those records with backwards lyrics telling kids to smoke marijuana and talk back to their parents and kill their dogs and things like that and so they built up this big bonfire and even had the police chief and the fire chief there cause it’s a real religious town and all the schools too and the schoolteachers and the principals and the mayor and everybody in the town practically and they were singing hymns and preaching and holding hands and praying and you could see the bonfire from everywhere in the whole state I guess and my friend’s mother’s sister wasn’t there because she was sick or something but everyone told her about what happened next which was that there was a young girl in the town who was a big Harry Potter fan you know those books and she was so impressed and moved by the spirit of the bonfire and bookburning that she decided it was time to burn the books because she said they were leading her down the path to witchcraft and that she had already tried to place some spells on her family without even knowing what she was doing or that it was even wrong and that’s how evil the books were without her even suspecting it or even her mother too not knowing that they were sending her little daughter straight down the road to wickedness and other kids started agreeing saying they were almost witches too and that they didn’t want to be witches but the books made them be witches so the whole town got together and gathered up all the Harry Potter books from all their houses even sometimes forcibly taking them off their neighbors who were fighting with them not to take them but it was for their own good so they gathered up all the Harry Potter books from the whole town and threw them onto the big bonfire to burn up the evil witchcraft wickedness and they were singing hymns at the time but the little girl the first little girl who had started the Harry Potter burning said “Listen” she said “Listen” she said you could hear something coming from the fire and so they all stopped singing the hymns and listened to the bonfire and you could hear actual screams coming from the Harry Potter books and the preachers that were there said they were the voices of demons screaming because they were burning in the fire and the screams got louder and louder so the town started praying louder and louder to drown out the voices and the screams and pretty soon it was like a Biblical thing with angels’ voices and demons’ voices until finally the smoke from the bonfire formed into the head of a giant devil probably Satan himself and he was screaming because he’d been defeated again and he disappeared into thin air and the screaming stopped and ever since then it’s been an entirely Christian town and even the people who hadn’t wanted their Harry Potters burned thanked the people who had burned them and converted to Christ even the Jews and now the whole town refuses to have anything to do with Harry Potter despite pressure from the federal government and those liberal groups who all complain about freedom of speech and there’s even somewhere on the web you can donate money to the town’s legal fund to fight the Harry Potter people if you want to.’