Religious belief...

he Bible prophesies an end-time figure who opposes Christ—the Antichrist—but the meaning of the term antichrists encompasses more than just the end time. This term literally means “against Christ” and is variously defined as “adversary of Christ” or “opponent of Christ” and as a title or proper name for a specific individual who opposes and claims to be Christ. The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains by Louw and Nida offers a more comprehensive definition: “The term . . . appears to have become increasingly equivalent to a proper name as the personification of all that was opposed to and contrary to the role and ministry of Christ.” According to the apostle John’s writing, there is a spirit of antichrist, which is a spirit of opposition to the identity of Christ. Specifically, he was writing to warn of the dualistic heresy that denied that Christ lived as a physical human being (1 John 4:3; 2 John 1:7). The Bible does not reveal specifically wh

Animism (from Latin anima, "breath, spirit, life")[1][2] is the world's oldest religion according to which all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, even spoken words, buildings and other artifacts—are experienced as animate and alive. It is sometimes described as a religious belief that various objects, places, and creatures possess distinctive spiritual qualities.[3][4][5][6] Animism is the oldest known type of belief system in the world. It is still practiced in a variety of forms in many traditional societies.[7] Animism is used in the anthropology of religion as a term for the belief system of many indigenous tribal peoples,[8] especially in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organized religions.[9] Although each culture has its own different mythologies and rituals, "animism" is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspecti