by Jolly Roger
About twenty years ago, I read the English translation of a book titled "Juliette," which was written by the Marquis De Sade. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone waste their time reading the book, because it was basically 600 pages of anti-moral philosophy mixed in with another 600 pages of insanely violent pornography. Throughout the book, the reader’s morals would be systematically attacked by several pages of this "philosophy," after which the amoral and violent thinking would be reinforced with a few pages of pornographic reward. By the end of this overly long book, many readers would be convinced that anything resembling morality was an abomination in the eyes of nature, and anyone who believed in God, or lived a moral life, deserved to be abused. The Marquis De Sade died in jail, and we owe thanks to his son for burning most of what he had written.
What the Marquis had discovered, is that the human mind is incredibly pliable, and that a person’s assessment of what’s good and what’s evil can be changed. I assume that his goal in writing was to destroy all decency in the world, and although he didn’t succeed, he certainly didn’t fail completely either. Although"Juliette"is an extreme example of an attempt to change someone’s moral standpoint, it serves to illustrate that your opinions concerning what’s right and what’s wrong might be different tomorrow than they were yesterday, unless of course, you posses the strength of character required to resist such influences. I guess that’s why the Ten Commandments had to be burned into stone tablets. If we had to rely on our government to preserve these laws, the word "not" would probably be missing wherever it served their purposes to delete it.
I make this point because I’ve seen a moral transformation in people I’ve known for a long time, and I’ve seen this change in the entire nation as well. Only a few short years ago, torture was completely unacceptable in our society, and was considered so totally barbaric that its practicality never even had to be discussed. It was something that was only done by completely uncivilized people, usually hundreds of years ago, and if anyone practiced it in this century, that fact would be used to completely demonize them, and they would be considered to be inferior humans due to their barbarity. Since that time, we’ve been somehow changed into a nation of many people who sit idly by while those who represent us have people tortured all over the globe, and a nation of many others who actually condone the practice. It doesn’t matter who you voted for, or even that the election process is fraudulent. We’re still allowing these people to hold the office of someone who acts in our behalf.
What’s most disturbing about the incidents of torture that have been in the newspapers is not so much that they happened, but that they were reported in the newspapers. The sad fact is that agents of our government have always practiced torture, in many parts of the world, but they made sure the American people didn’t find out about it.
Today you can read a few pages of the Marquis de Sade in the daily newspapers, and allowing our government’s torture tactics will be rewarded for many people with feelings of justified revenge, and these feelings will be reinforced with acceptance by our new society. This acceptance is very important to humans. We’re a species that has never survived in solitude. We formed tribes since we were cavemen, and nations when our population grew. As cavemen, ostracization meant death. As nations, ostracization has always been used as punishment, or to suppress certain ways of thinking. Human beings have a need to be accepted by the rest of their society, and this need forces them to conform to the common way of thinking. Today, that common way of thinking is delivered by the mainstream media, and it is teaching Americans that inflicting torture upon the enemies of the United States is an acceptable practice. Since they’ve always practiced torture secretly in the past, obviously there must be a reason why they’re now teaching us publically that it’s acceptable.
If you haven’t already guessed why we’re being taught to accept torture, the reason is that they want you to turn a blind eye to the practice when it’s inflicted upon other Americans. Now that we’ve been taught that our enemies should be tortured, anyone can be tortured by simply declaring them to be an enemy. It’s only a matter of time before anyone who disagrees with the actions of our government is branded an enemy, or a terrorist. The political rhetoric might describe how dissenters are hurting the war effort, or aiding terrorism, and possibly even causing stock market declines, but whatever their story, you can expect that torture will soon become common practice in your local police station, and identically to what is happening in Iraq, the cops who sodomize your children to induce you to reveal the names of other dissenters will feel like true patriots for their efforts.
I would like you to address that fact that your moral view might have been changed. If you’re old enough, I would like you to ask yourself how you might have reacted twenty years ago to knowledge that our government was torturing people. If your present reaction is any different that it would have been twenty years ago, you should examine the information you received since then that has caused this transformation. I’m willing to bet that the events of 9-11 had a lot to do with any changes that may have occurred.
I would also like you to consider the simple and obvious difference between good and evil, without allowing that view to be tainted by bigotry, racism, wealth, or nationalism, and to see the actions of men for what they are, rather than judge their actions with regard to who they are. I ask this because it’s the only possible foundation of justice.
The simple and obvious examples I’m asking you to judge are the actions of mass murder, torture, genocide, and the forcible rape of children. I use these examples because they’re impossible to justify in the name of anything good, and I use these examples because they happen to be common practice among people who comprise the majority or our government.
This is not a matter of Republicans verses Democrats, or liberals verses conservatives, or any other non-sensical label the mainstream media uses to keep Americans divided. It matters not whether you’re Christian, Muslim, Jewish , or Atheist. The difference between good and evil is not disputed by any religion, secular humanists, or by any other adult capable of making decisions without the help of anti-psychotic medication.
If you’re well-informed, you know that the behavior of those ruing this nation epitomizes evil, and threatens to bring about the destruction of all that’s decent in the world. If you’ve been duped by the mainstream media, you’ve probably found a way to justify their practices.
Americans need to learn and accept that we’re no longer dealing with a government that responds to our letters, cares how we vote, or fears our protests. What America has arrived at is unbridled fascism, and this type of government doesn’t have a very cheerful history of tolerating political dissent. Regardless of what visible remnants remain of political charades such as justice, equality, and the rule of law, Americans are now living in a place that has nothing to do with why America exists.
I have to ask you once again to return to the basic question of the difference between good and evil, and to make a decision regarding which side of this division you stand on. Either you support the actions of our government, or you support the hope that goodness and decency may someday prevail in this world. There is no middle ground, and since the consequences are so dire, there is no room for apathy . Either you’re part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem.
The U.S. government incites a holy war, while Dr. Griffin unites the religions toward peace. The mainstream media gets rich by deceiving and conditioning the masses, while the impoverished blogger struggles to expose the truth. The murderous agenda of the New World Order advances, but the education of the 9-11Truth Movement disarms them. The poor face oppression and extinction, while the rich squander any hope for the poor, and scoff at all morals and laws.
The world has never been so divided as it presently is, and you should not make the mistake of seeing this division as existing between Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Blacks or Whites. The division that exists is the simple and obvious difference between good and evil, and the only decision anyone has to make is which side they will fight for.
There is a conflict in all people between the temptations of evil and the rewards of goodness, and this conflict is represented in all we create. Whether it be gods, devils, art or literature, the battle between good and evil is always present, because this conflict defines who we are. No one has ever questioned what evil is, but the debate is over whether humans are able to conquer it. While I wouldn’t advise that anyone read "Juliette," one book I would definitely recommend is John Steinbeck’s "East of Eden." Are mere humans able to conquer evil? Timshel.*
Many people might be overwhelmed by the horrors of today’s world, and they may fret over complexities of modern existence, when in fact, the reality is extremely simple. The wages of sin, are death.
My death will prove which side I’m on, because my life will only continue in peace under the provisions and dictates of the Constitution of the United States of America, and anyone who opposes this constitution while holding any office of the United States government is an enemy of mine, who lives in imminent danger of losing his head. — Jolly Roger
"The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.
With patience stands He waiting, with exactness grinds He all." –
Friedrich von Logau
* Thou mayest
http://timshel.org/timshel.php
Anything written by Jolly Roger is the property of the American people, and the author hereby grants permission to anyone who so desires to post, copy, forward or distribute this letter as they see fit, and in fact, the author encourages you to do so.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Is Bush the Antichrist
By Tim Appelo
first published by:
Seattle Weekly
12-9-4
When President George W. Bush was appointed by five Supreme Court justices in 2000, right-wing Christians sang hosannas for the triumph of God's will over the electorate's. "President Bush is God's man at this hour," said Tim Goeglein, Bush's liaison to evangelicals. Though the Methodist president dishonestly conceals the whole truth about his apocalyptic religious beliefs, he has acted as an evangelist in office. As Esther Kaplan demonstrates in With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush's White House, he's doled out millions to far-right Christian groups, systematically crushed secular left and nonright mainstream organizations from Head Start to the Audubon Society, and replaced policy and scientific experts with comically ignorant yet politically cunning fanatic provocateurs. Out with the American Medical Association, in with the American Family Association. Before Bush, the Internal Revenue Service hounded the Christian Coalition; now that Bush is, in extremist Gary Bauer's opinion, the de facto leader of the Christian Coalition, the government selectively harasses non-Christian groups, and a rightist apparatchik tried to sneak through Congress a bill legitimizing the kinds of politically targeted IRS abuses that would have made Richard M. Nixon proud.
Televangelist and onetime presidential candidate Pat Robertson once rallied millions to lobby God for the deaths of liberal Supreme Court justices, recommending prayers for coronaries and cancer. "We ask for miracles!" preached Robertson. Today, the judiciary's Clinton-era moderates haven't even a prayer against the Reagan/Bush rightists. Author Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind thrillers based on the Bible's "end times" stories are America's best-selling books for adults, once helped destroy the Jack Kemp presidential campaign he co-chaired by demanding 25 percent of government jobs for the Christian right's 25 percent of the population. Today, no way does Bush's "Evangetaliban" - which claims responsibility for winning Bush a second term in 2004 - intend to settle for less than 100 percent.
But not every follower of the Prince of Peace is shouting amen to Bush/Robertson/Falwell's Killer Christians. Granted, the fastest-growing churches are either evangelical - Bible believers out to win your soul - or fundamentalists, out to bend your soul to their bluenose will and so literal when it comes to the Bible that some insist Christ's parables refer to actual people and events. Fundies also incline to the authoritarianism of Oswald Chambers, the 19th-century Christian whose harsh sermonettes against rational analysis and for a gut response to God Bush reads each morning (perhaps on this Web site: www.gospelcom.net/rbc/utmost).
Yet the more love-thy-neighbor-advocating mainstream church is not dead. In The American Prospect magazine, Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter charges the fundamentalists with "the abandonment of some of the basic principles of Christianity." And in his brilliant 1997 book, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, author Bruce Bawer accuses fundamentalism of replacing Christ's Church of Love with a Church of Law, lamenting "the horrible monster that 20th-century legalistic Christians have made out of their God and Savior and the hateful institution that they have made out of his church." He notes acidly that the movement got its biggest boost in reaction not to the Supreme Court's 1963 school-prayer ban but to the Carter-era IRS crackdown on segregated Christian schools. "The Religious Right didn't grow out of a love of God and one's neighboróit grew out of racism, pure and simple."
"Kids growing up in Church of Law families nowadays think that the only two sins, or at least the only two really, really important ones, are having an abortion and having gay sex," Bawer told Seattle Weekly. "The notion that love, tolerance, and inclusiveness are moral values has been dropped down the memory hole."
A soldier in the U.S. Army e-mailed Seattle Weekly, "I'm just a citizen who was raised in a Christian community and is tired of having my values hijacked by a conservative movement that only applies them selectively at home and hardly at all overseas." The soldier asks to remain anonymous.
Perversion of Christian Faith?
"Bush is one of the key figures leading the church away from Jesus," says Christian author Bob Miller, who wrote the nonbluenose Christian best seller Blue Like Jazz. Miller is no pantywaist - he had the balls to run a ministry at Reed College in Portland, Ore., which is so godless that its soccer team is said in campus legend to have once staged a halftime crucifixion in a game against a Christian school. But he couldn't stomach it when, for instance, Texas Gov. Bush not only allowed the execution of his fellow born-again Christian, the penitent ax murderer Karla Faye Tucker, but made vicious fun of her on TV ("Please don't kill me!" Bush said, mocking her prayerful plea for God's mercy). Miller classifies Bush Christians as modern Pharisees - the allegedly proud, rigid, legalistic hypocrites John the Baptist called "a generation of vipers." "The worst condemnation that Jesus has for anybody, I mean the worst, is for Pharisees," says Miller. "If you asked Jerry Falwell who the Pharisees are in our society, they can't point anybody out." There are no mirrors in Bush's church.
"People of faith - especially those whose moral values differ from the values exploited this time around - need to figure out a way to be figured into the political landscape," Philadelphia Presbyterian minister Cynthia Jarvis editorialized in The New York Times. "Maybe four years from now, when the number one issue cited by voters in exit polls is again 'moral values,' those values will have something to do with economic justice, racial equality and the peaceable kingdom for which we all were made."
But few have preached harder against the Christian right's wrongs than the Rev. Rich Lang of Seattle's Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard. "This administration is a culture of death, and so is the religious right," says Lang. In his Open Letter to George Bush, published in Real Change, Lang thunders, "You claim Christ but act like Caesar. There is blood all over your hands with the promise of even more blood to come. You sit atop the nations like the Biblical Whore of Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might." His sermon "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism" (posted like Luther's theses on the church Web site, www.tumseattle.org) rails that "the power and seduction of this administration emerges from its diabolical manipulation of Christian rhetoric . . . the mirror opposite of what Jesus embodied. It is, indeed, the materialization of the spirit of Antichrist: a perversion of Christian faith and practice."
Lang is not using "Antichrist" in a tone of bitter sarcasm, as many do. Google "George Bush is the Antichrist," and you'll get a startling list of Web sites that argue the case, but with sardonic intent and whimsical 666-numerological riffs. Unwhimsical pundit Robert Wright, who attended Calvary Baptist in Bush's Midland, Texas, hometown, uses modern science to puzzle out what may be God's plan in his bold book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. When he notes in Slate magazine that he supported John Kerry because "He's a long way from being the Messiah, but at least he's not the anti-Christ," Wright says not to take this as gospel. "Obviously, I was kidding - Bush isn't literally the Antichrist. But I do think he could conceivably do some pretty cataclysmic damage to the world. . . ." Even Christian Bush-basher Miller urgently distances himself from the Bush-as- Antichrist meme that's sweeping the Web: "The last thing I want is for someone to say, 'Bob Miller thinks Bush is the Antichrist!'"
"He's not the Antichrist, he's just a cynical, callous politician," objects Stealing Jesus author Bawer. "I gather some liberal Christians have gone off the rails." He refers to Lang's identification of Bush with the "spirit of Antichrist" warned against in the Bible's 1 John 4:3. "This kind of inane proof texting is the province of the Church of Law types, the right-wing Darbyites," believers in Left Behindñstyle apocalyptic prophecy. "It's depressing to see it practiced by liberal Christians, too." Bawer is appalled by Bush's attempt, "in the name of Christianity, to add to the Constitution what would be far and away its most un-Christian amendment. But I'm also unsettled by the extreme way in which he's been personally characterized by many people."
Granted, Bawer says the right "worships evil," and has "warped Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and sadism [and] denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who reject its barbaric theology." But "when people start calling somebody the Antichrist, we're in right-wing fundamentalist, Church of Law territory, and I don't like it one bit. . . . Demonizing (literally) individuals in this way is ugly, scary. . . . "
Lang, though, stands his ground against his famous accuser, and insists that he's missing some crucial distinctions. "This is not about George Bush, this is about this whole administration. It's about Karl Rove, it's about the neocons, some of whom are Christian, some who aren't, but who are using Christian rhetoric. James Dobson [of Focus on the Family] has direct access to the highest echelons of American government. And Robertson and Falwell."
Still, Lang means what he says about Bush. "He has the spirit of the Antichrist. Literally, break the word apart. It is a spirituality that is anti-Christ."
Meet the Beast
So what's an Antichrist, anyhow? The concept has evolved bewilderingly throughout biblical history (see sidebar, p. 25). As definitively explained in Bernard McGinn's Antichrist: 2,000 Years of the Human Fascination With Evil and Robert Fuller's Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession, the character can be traced to Old Testament authors' horrified response to the oppression of ancient colonizers. When Alexander the Great's conquests led to a statue of Zeus in the Temple in Jerusalem, Jews envisioned a final conflict story wherein the Syrian Greek tyrant Antiochus, reimagined as a beast, got burned in God's "fiery stream" on Judgment Day.
Early Christians grafted the Roman Emperor Nero onto the tradition as the Beast from the Abyss in the Apocalypse, known to current Christians as the book of Revelation, the Bible's astonishing finale about the final days. Nero dressed in animal skins to ravage men's and women's genitals, burned Christians in ghastly dramas, demanded to be worshiped as a god, and was rumored to have disappeared to the East, threatening to return one day to rule the world from Rome, or Jerusalem. Actually, he killed himself, but he lives on in beastly legend. To this day, the word for Antichrist in Armenian is "Nero."
Though the story of the Beast and various other biblical verses are associated with the Antichrist, the word itself, "Antichrist," only appears four times in the Bible, in the letters of John. Christians have eternally argued about the Antichrist. Revelation was nearly banned from the Bible, and permitted strictly on condition it should never be used as it is by fundies today. Church father Augustine ordered Christians to quit reading apocalyptic Left Behindñstyle scenarios into scripture and think of the Antichrist as anyone who denies Christ - and he said the first place to hunt for him is in your own heart.
In my evangelical Lutheran childhood I often feared the Rapture had left me behind, even though my church was liberal with Christ's love. But now I'm with Augustine - and also with Robert Wright, who finds in his book The Moral Animal a biological basis for original sin. For a Darwinist Christian, the Beast is within: the lizard brain fighting the higher mind for control of one's soul. As Darwin cried out to heaven in his notebook: "The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!"
But people crave apocalyptic stories and an easy answer to spiritual struggle. As the narrator says of a character in Left Behind, "He wanted to believe something that tied everything together and made it make sense." The most popular story today was concocted by an English law-student-turned-self-taught-theologian named John Nelson Darby in the 1840s, and popularized by a Kansas City lawyer named C.I. Scofield with his best-selling 1909 Scofield Reference Bible. The Scofield Bible cross-referenced Old and New Testament verses to illuminate the hidden figure in the bewildering carpet of scripture, weaving the phantasmagoria of apocalyptic visions into a single system - a magic carpet of narrative to whisk them safely out of time and into heaven. Its systematic beauty was designed as a kind of counterscience to rebuke and refute Darwinism and historical biblical scholarship.
And man, is it a great story. It's not a literal interpretation, but an imaginative deduction as breathtaking as Charles Kinbote's commentary on John Shade in Nabokov's Pale Fire, or Charles Manson's prophetic interpretation of the Beatles' White Album. The Bible describes Christ's Second Coming and the Rapture of the Saints - the whooshing of Christians bodily into heaven. Anybody reading it for the first time would think these are supposed to happen at the same time, at the end of time. But Darby hawked the notion that the Rapture happens first. Exeunt Christians. Enter the Beast/Antichrist, who perpetrates a hellish seven-year Great Tribulation. Then Christ returns, kicks Beast butt, and reigns for 1,000 years - the Millennium. Fifty-one percent of Americans voted for Bush; 59 percent believe Revelation will come true. Without one scrap of scriptural evidence, almost one-quarter of Americans believe Revelation predicted 9/11.
The Independent newspaper called Revelation "that earliest of airport novels." LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind dazzlingly turns it into one. Planes and cars crash, deprived of pilots by the Rapture. Even fetuses get Raptured, deflating their mamas' bellies. The Antichrist becomes Nicolae Carpathia, People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, seizing control of the U.N. to impose one world government! The faithful get saved! The secular humanists get what they deserve! Since latter-day Darbyites believe end times scripture predicts and mandates Israel's resurgence to usher in Christ's return and the Antichrist's smackdown, they help drive Bush's rubber-stamp policy for Israel. The real Middle East road map may be the Scofield Reference Bible.
"That's a completely foolish and erroneous interpretation of the scriptures," snaps Jimmy Carter. "But this administration, maybe extremely influenced by ill-advised theologians of the extreme religious right, has pretty well abandoned any real effort that could lead to a resolution of the problems between Israel and the Palestinians."
"It's deeply dismaying that millions of Americans who call themselves Christians are believers in something that has virtually nothing to do with the gospel message," mourns Bawer. "Darby, Scofield, and company have been a disaster for Christianity in America. Millions of people think they are adherents of 'traditional Christianity' when, in fact, they have been roped into a newfangled religion based on bizarre theological propositions that Jesus would never recognize."
"It's so ludicrous!" laments Lang. "Such a twisting of scripture. That history is scripted is something that it seems to me Christians ought to have an instinct to be repulsed against. You follow a code, there's magical meanings in the text."
But Lang knows why people cling to millennial dreamsólike Dubya's, his life was saved by a fundamentalist church. "It attracted me because I came out of chaos. Alcohol and drugs; 19 years old and I was dyin'. I needed a strong fence around my life and people who cared for me, and I got both. But after about a year of reading what they taught me, I started to raise questions."
Further study convinced him that Augustine was on the right track, after all, in reading apocalyptic literature as spiritual advice, not a sneak preview of tomorrow's headlines. "Revelation is written to the churches in its time, not to the churches in the 21st century. It's written to seven churches in Turkey." As for the Antichrist warnings in John, he reads them not as a literal prediction of Bush but as a warning against the eternal danger of his hypocritical, Mammon-worshiping, proudly elitist, heartless, narrowly legalistic spirit. "1 John seems to be obsessed with language like this: 'How can you say you love God, who you have not seen, if you do not love your brother and sister, who you have seen?' Who are in need of food, clothing, shelter? The implication of the doctrine of the Antichrist is that there is an economic disparity in the community, and people are using their religion, not practicing it."
Bush policy is based on what he told his Harvard Business School professor - "Poor people are poor because they're lazy." Responds Lang, "Again, anti-Christ. It's just the opposite [of Christ's teaching]. The thrust of right-wing Christianity - their solution to poverty is to discipline the poor. Now, there's a lot to be said for that. I mean, if people would clean up their negative habits. There's some common ground where we can meet. But the right never addresses what Jesus called 'that fox Herod' - the systematic problem that has given rise to homelessness and poverty."
Bringing Back Heresy
Lang argues that followers of Jesus, not Bush, should call an Antichrist an Antichrist - or rather, its spirit. "The progressive church should bring back - and this sounds so crazy - the word 'heresy.' The end times theology and this other thing called Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction - those are heresies." Lang says not to believe Christian Coalition leaderñturnedñWhore of Enronñturned Bush/Cheney campaign lieutenant Ralph Reed when he claims the Christian right has no plans to upend the Constitution and impose its religion on civic life. "He's a liar," says Lang. "Dominionism is the notion that God has given the dominion, the governance of the world, to the church. And so Christians literally are born to rule, by force if necessary, to bring the Kingdom of God on Earth. I believe that the theology that drives the Bush administration affirms this." When Falwell preached, "We must take back what is rightfully ours," his ambitions did not stop at U.S. borders. This is a Church of a Law Unto Itself.
In the Greek, the word "anti" doesn't just mean "against." It also contains the meanings "equivalent to" or "a substitute for." Nero was anti-Christ because he falsely claimed to be God. The idea of deception is crucial. The Antichrist isn't the devil, the opposite of God. He's an evil human masquerading as a golden god. The Antichrist appears to humanity not as the hideous Beast but as handsome Nicolae Carpathia, who resembles Robert Redford without the facial erosion. "That could be our next Republican president," quips Lang.
In this sense, the Bush church is Antichristlike indeed. It is institutionalized deception, anti-American ugliness with a beguiling face, a neocon job. Only when necessary does it employ the perilous bald-faced lie, the outrageously transparent duplicity - the political equivalent of Robertson arguing that "Do unto others" indicates Christ's support of capitalist selfishness. More often, a smoothly dissembling surface is preferred. Rove notoriously emulates Machiavelli; the Christian right is a stealth movement, infiltrating school boards and mainstream churches and every institution of democracy like a thief in the night - in order to undermine, overthrow, and replace democracy with theocracy. Bush is the father of lies. The Union of Concerned Scientists proclaims Bush's lies about science "unprecedented." In With God on Their Side, Kaplan concludes, on mountainous evidence, "The goal is not to engage your opponents in the public square, but to kneecap them, or send them into exile."
"It is a conspiracy in the sense that they have not been public and accountable to their ideology," says Lang. "Follow the money! The same filthy-rich foundations that have funded the rise of neocons are funding the rise of the religious right." He suggests that you check out the exposÈ Web site www.yuricareport.com for the terrifying particulars.
But - to cop a line from the late Christian-right author Francis Schaeffer, how then should we live? Should we turn the other cheek to the Antichrist? Forgive LaHaye for saying that "Old Testament capital punishment" was less cruel to gays than modern acceptance is? Or counter Robertson's prayers for a divine Supreme Court fatwa with our own? As a self-scrutinizing Christian, isn't Lang in danger of succumbing to hate?
"Yeah, I'm there. I have a physical, visceral reaction to Bush, to his image, to when he speaks. I mean, I think the guy is evil. They are willfully deceptive people, and I'm very angry. But . . . hatred is not a very useful strategy of resistance, nor is it very useful to create an alternative."
Bawer preaches that the alternative must not employ the church as a weapon. "For liberals to join in the right-wing game of bashing one's opponents with the Bible only further erodes the wall between religion and government. This, to me, is a major concern - and Bush's reckless contribution to this erosion is, for me, a major offense. It's especially offensive in light of 9/11, which was the work of people who hate the West because it is secular, tolerant, inclusive, and democratic. What distinguishes America and the West from most of the Muslim world is those values. I wish we had a president who recognized this fact and helped Americans recognize it, too."
So does Lang. But he thinks the secular left has to inspire its own flock - with better ministers than dull, brainy Parson Kerry of the Church of God's Frozen People. "Even though I don't like him, Bush is probably a funner person," Lang admits. He insists that the Christian left has its own work to do in saving what he calls "the nation with the soul of a church." "The right has won. I mean, they've seized the language of the church. So against Bruce, I would say, no, the progressive wing of the church has got to reclaim its language and redefine those words. Turning the other cheek wasn't passive, oh, hit me, it hurts so good - it was a form of resistance. You're turning your cheek to strengthen your backbone."
Lang is convinced that secular efforts alone can't reverse the Antichrist tide. "Evangelical churches have a sense of urgency about the doing of 'good' in the world that the mainline church has lost. If the church can't show a positive, enticing, seductive vision of the future, where people fall in love with God and fall in love with this community, then it really doesn't have anything to say." Revelation teaches us what happens to lukewarm Christians.
It won't be easy. The political and religious left are not organized. "And part of the reason it cannot organize is that the people in the pews benefit from the system as it is," says Lang. "They can't work up any kind of passion to change it. As those benefits stop, we'll see the left arise. But it might be too late."
Ultimately, despite his despair, Lang is a man of faith. "I really do believe that we're in for several decades of a very dark time. But that's not the end of the world."
© 1998-2004 Seattle Weekly
first published by:
Seattle Weekly
12-9-4
When President George W. Bush was appointed by five Supreme Court justices in 2000, right-wing Christians sang hosannas for the triumph of God's will over the electorate's. "President Bush is God's man at this hour," said Tim Goeglein, Bush's liaison to evangelicals. Though the Methodist president dishonestly conceals the whole truth about his apocalyptic religious beliefs, he has acted as an evangelist in office. As Esther Kaplan demonstrates in With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush's White House, he's doled out millions to far-right Christian groups, systematically crushed secular left and nonright mainstream organizations from Head Start to the Audubon Society, and replaced policy and scientific experts with comically ignorant yet politically cunning fanatic provocateurs. Out with the American Medical Association, in with the American Family Association. Before Bush, the Internal Revenue Service hounded the Christian Coalition; now that Bush is, in extremist Gary Bauer's opinion, the de facto leader of the Christian Coalition, the government selectively harasses non-Christian groups, and a rightist apparatchik tried to sneak through Congress a bill legitimizing the kinds of politically targeted IRS abuses that would have made Richard M. Nixon proud.
Televangelist and onetime presidential candidate Pat Robertson once rallied millions to lobby God for the deaths of liberal Supreme Court justices, recommending prayers for coronaries and cancer. "We ask for miracles!" preached Robertson. Today, the judiciary's Clinton-era moderates haven't even a prayer against the Reagan/Bush rightists. Author Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind thrillers based on the Bible's "end times" stories are America's best-selling books for adults, once helped destroy the Jack Kemp presidential campaign he co-chaired by demanding 25 percent of government jobs for the Christian right's 25 percent of the population. Today, no way does Bush's "Evangetaliban" - which claims responsibility for winning Bush a second term in 2004 - intend to settle for less than 100 percent.
But not every follower of the Prince of Peace is shouting amen to Bush/Robertson/Falwell's Killer Christians. Granted, the fastest-growing churches are either evangelical - Bible believers out to win your soul - or fundamentalists, out to bend your soul to their bluenose will and so literal when it comes to the Bible that some insist Christ's parables refer to actual people and events. Fundies also incline to the authoritarianism of Oswald Chambers, the 19th-century Christian whose harsh sermonettes against rational analysis and for a gut response to God Bush reads each morning (perhaps on this Web site: www.gospelcom.net/rbc/utmost).
Yet the more love-thy-neighbor-advocating mainstream church is not dead. In The American Prospect magazine, Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter charges the fundamentalists with "the abandonment of some of the basic principles of Christianity." And in his brilliant 1997 book, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, author Bruce Bawer accuses fundamentalism of replacing Christ's Church of Love with a Church of Law, lamenting "the horrible monster that 20th-century legalistic Christians have made out of their God and Savior and the hateful institution that they have made out of his church." He notes acidly that the movement got its biggest boost in reaction not to the Supreme Court's 1963 school-prayer ban but to the Carter-era IRS crackdown on segregated Christian schools. "The Religious Right didn't grow out of a love of God and one's neighboróit grew out of racism, pure and simple."
"Kids growing up in Church of Law families nowadays think that the only two sins, or at least the only two really, really important ones, are having an abortion and having gay sex," Bawer told Seattle Weekly. "The notion that love, tolerance, and inclusiveness are moral values has been dropped down the memory hole."
A soldier in the U.S. Army e-mailed Seattle Weekly, "I'm just a citizen who was raised in a Christian community and is tired of having my values hijacked by a conservative movement that only applies them selectively at home and hardly at all overseas." The soldier asks to remain anonymous.
Perversion of Christian Faith?
"Bush is one of the key figures leading the church away from Jesus," says Christian author Bob Miller, who wrote the nonbluenose Christian best seller Blue Like Jazz. Miller is no pantywaist - he had the balls to run a ministry at Reed College in Portland, Ore., which is so godless that its soccer team is said in campus legend to have once staged a halftime crucifixion in a game against a Christian school. But he couldn't stomach it when, for instance, Texas Gov. Bush not only allowed the execution of his fellow born-again Christian, the penitent ax murderer Karla Faye Tucker, but made vicious fun of her on TV ("Please don't kill me!" Bush said, mocking her prayerful plea for God's mercy). Miller classifies Bush Christians as modern Pharisees - the allegedly proud, rigid, legalistic hypocrites John the Baptist called "a generation of vipers." "The worst condemnation that Jesus has for anybody, I mean the worst, is for Pharisees," says Miller. "If you asked Jerry Falwell who the Pharisees are in our society, they can't point anybody out." There are no mirrors in Bush's church.
"People of faith - especially those whose moral values differ from the values exploited this time around - need to figure out a way to be figured into the political landscape," Philadelphia Presbyterian minister Cynthia Jarvis editorialized in The New York Times. "Maybe four years from now, when the number one issue cited by voters in exit polls is again 'moral values,' those values will have something to do with economic justice, racial equality and the peaceable kingdom for which we all were made."
But few have preached harder against the Christian right's wrongs than the Rev. Rich Lang of Seattle's Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard. "This administration is a culture of death, and so is the religious right," says Lang. In his Open Letter to George Bush, published in Real Change, Lang thunders, "You claim Christ but act like Caesar. There is blood all over your hands with the promise of even more blood to come. You sit atop the nations like the Biblical Whore of Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might." His sermon "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism" (posted like Luther's theses on the church Web site, www.tumseattle.org) rails that "the power and seduction of this administration emerges from its diabolical manipulation of Christian rhetoric . . . the mirror opposite of what Jesus embodied. It is, indeed, the materialization of the spirit of Antichrist: a perversion of Christian faith and practice."
Lang is not using "Antichrist" in a tone of bitter sarcasm, as many do. Google "George Bush is the Antichrist," and you'll get a startling list of Web sites that argue the case, but with sardonic intent and whimsical 666-numerological riffs. Unwhimsical pundit Robert Wright, who attended Calvary Baptist in Bush's Midland, Texas, hometown, uses modern science to puzzle out what may be God's plan in his bold book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. When he notes in Slate magazine that he supported John Kerry because "He's a long way from being the Messiah, but at least he's not the anti-Christ," Wright says not to take this as gospel. "Obviously, I was kidding - Bush isn't literally the Antichrist. But I do think he could conceivably do some pretty cataclysmic damage to the world. . . ." Even Christian Bush-basher Miller urgently distances himself from the Bush-as- Antichrist meme that's sweeping the Web: "The last thing I want is for someone to say, 'Bob Miller thinks Bush is the Antichrist!'"
"He's not the Antichrist, he's just a cynical, callous politician," objects Stealing Jesus author Bawer. "I gather some liberal Christians have gone off the rails." He refers to Lang's identification of Bush with the "spirit of Antichrist" warned against in the Bible's 1 John 4:3. "This kind of inane proof texting is the province of the Church of Law types, the right-wing Darbyites," believers in Left Behindñstyle apocalyptic prophecy. "It's depressing to see it practiced by liberal Christians, too." Bawer is appalled by Bush's attempt, "in the name of Christianity, to add to the Constitution what would be far and away its most un-Christian amendment. But I'm also unsettled by the extreme way in which he's been personally characterized by many people."
Granted, Bawer says the right "worships evil," and has "warped Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and sadism [and] denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who reject its barbaric theology." But "when people start calling somebody the Antichrist, we're in right-wing fundamentalist, Church of Law territory, and I don't like it one bit. . . . Demonizing (literally) individuals in this way is ugly, scary. . . . "
Lang, though, stands his ground against his famous accuser, and insists that he's missing some crucial distinctions. "This is not about George Bush, this is about this whole administration. It's about Karl Rove, it's about the neocons, some of whom are Christian, some who aren't, but who are using Christian rhetoric. James Dobson [of Focus on the Family] has direct access to the highest echelons of American government. And Robertson and Falwell."
Still, Lang means what he says about Bush. "He has the spirit of the Antichrist. Literally, break the word apart. It is a spirituality that is anti-Christ."
Meet the Beast
So what's an Antichrist, anyhow? The concept has evolved bewilderingly throughout biblical history (see sidebar, p. 25). As definitively explained in Bernard McGinn's Antichrist: 2,000 Years of the Human Fascination With Evil and Robert Fuller's Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession, the character can be traced to Old Testament authors' horrified response to the oppression of ancient colonizers. When Alexander the Great's conquests led to a statue of Zeus in the Temple in Jerusalem, Jews envisioned a final conflict story wherein the Syrian Greek tyrant Antiochus, reimagined as a beast, got burned in God's "fiery stream" on Judgment Day.
Early Christians grafted the Roman Emperor Nero onto the tradition as the Beast from the Abyss in the Apocalypse, known to current Christians as the book of Revelation, the Bible's astonishing finale about the final days. Nero dressed in animal skins to ravage men's and women's genitals, burned Christians in ghastly dramas, demanded to be worshiped as a god, and was rumored to have disappeared to the East, threatening to return one day to rule the world from Rome, or Jerusalem. Actually, he killed himself, but he lives on in beastly legend. To this day, the word for Antichrist in Armenian is "Nero."
Though the story of the Beast and various other biblical verses are associated with the Antichrist, the word itself, "Antichrist," only appears four times in the Bible, in the letters of John. Christians have eternally argued about the Antichrist. Revelation was nearly banned from the Bible, and permitted strictly on condition it should never be used as it is by fundies today. Church father Augustine ordered Christians to quit reading apocalyptic Left Behindñstyle scenarios into scripture and think of the Antichrist as anyone who denies Christ - and he said the first place to hunt for him is in your own heart.
In my evangelical Lutheran childhood I often feared the Rapture had left me behind, even though my church was liberal with Christ's love. But now I'm with Augustine - and also with Robert Wright, who finds in his book The Moral Animal a biological basis for original sin. For a Darwinist Christian, the Beast is within: the lizard brain fighting the higher mind for control of one's soul. As Darwin cried out to heaven in his notebook: "The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!"
But people crave apocalyptic stories and an easy answer to spiritual struggle. As the narrator says of a character in Left Behind, "He wanted to believe something that tied everything together and made it make sense." The most popular story today was concocted by an English law-student-turned-self-taught-theologian named John Nelson Darby in the 1840s, and popularized by a Kansas City lawyer named C.I. Scofield with his best-selling 1909 Scofield Reference Bible. The Scofield Bible cross-referenced Old and New Testament verses to illuminate the hidden figure in the bewildering carpet of scripture, weaving the phantasmagoria of apocalyptic visions into a single system - a magic carpet of narrative to whisk them safely out of time and into heaven. Its systematic beauty was designed as a kind of counterscience to rebuke and refute Darwinism and historical biblical scholarship.
And man, is it a great story. It's not a literal interpretation, but an imaginative deduction as breathtaking as Charles Kinbote's commentary on John Shade in Nabokov's Pale Fire, or Charles Manson's prophetic interpretation of the Beatles' White Album. The Bible describes Christ's Second Coming and the Rapture of the Saints - the whooshing of Christians bodily into heaven. Anybody reading it for the first time would think these are supposed to happen at the same time, at the end of time. But Darby hawked the notion that the Rapture happens first. Exeunt Christians. Enter the Beast/Antichrist, who perpetrates a hellish seven-year Great Tribulation. Then Christ returns, kicks Beast butt, and reigns for 1,000 years - the Millennium. Fifty-one percent of Americans voted for Bush; 59 percent believe Revelation will come true. Without one scrap of scriptural evidence, almost one-quarter of Americans believe Revelation predicted 9/11.
The Independent newspaper called Revelation "that earliest of airport novels." LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind dazzlingly turns it into one. Planes and cars crash, deprived of pilots by the Rapture. Even fetuses get Raptured, deflating their mamas' bellies. The Antichrist becomes Nicolae Carpathia, People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, seizing control of the U.N. to impose one world government! The faithful get saved! The secular humanists get what they deserve! Since latter-day Darbyites believe end times scripture predicts and mandates Israel's resurgence to usher in Christ's return and the Antichrist's smackdown, they help drive Bush's rubber-stamp policy for Israel. The real Middle East road map may be the Scofield Reference Bible.
"That's a completely foolish and erroneous interpretation of the scriptures," snaps Jimmy Carter. "But this administration, maybe extremely influenced by ill-advised theologians of the extreme religious right, has pretty well abandoned any real effort that could lead to a resolution of the problems between Israel and the Palestinians."
"It's deeply dismaying that millions of Americans who call themselves Christians are believers in something that has virtually nothing to do with the gospel message," mourns Bawer. "Darby, Scofield, and company have been a disaster for Christianity in America. Millions of people think they are adherents of 'traditional Christianity' when, in fact, they have been roped into a newfangled religion based on bizarre theological propositions that Jesus would never recognize."
"It's so ludicrous!" laments Lang. "Such a twisting of scripture. That history is scripted is something that it seems to me Christians ought to have an instinct to be repulsed against. You follow a code, there's magical meanings in the text."
But Lang knows why people cling to millennial dreamsólike Dubya's, his life was saved by a fundamentalist church. "It attracted me because I came out of chaos. Alcohol and drugs; 19 years old and I was dyin'. I needed a strong fence around my life and people who cared for me, and I got both. But after about a year of reading what they taught me, I started to raise questions."
Further study convinced him that Augustine was on the right track, after all, in reading apocalyptic literature as spiritual advice, not a sneak preview of tomorrow's headlines. "Revelation is written to the churches in its time, not to the churches in the 21st century. It's written to seven churches in Turkey." As for the Antichrist warnings in John, he reads them not as a literal prediction of Bush but as a warning against the eternal danger of his hypocritical, Mammon-worshiping, proudly elitist, heartless, narrowly legalistic spirit. "1 John seems to be obsessed with language like this: 'How can you say you love God, who you have not seen, if you do not love your brother and sister, who you have seen?' Who are in need of food, clothing, shelter? The implication of the doctrine of the Antichrist is that there is an economic disparity in the community, and people are using their religion, not practicing it."
Bush policy is based on what he told his Harvard Business School professor - "Poor people are poor because they're lazy." Responds Lang, "Again, anti-Christ. It's just the opposite [of Christ's teaching]. The thrust of right-wing Christianity - their solution to poverty is to discipline the poor. Now, there's a lot to be said for that. I mean, if people would clean up their negative habits. There's some common ground where we can meet. But the right never addresses what Jesus called 'that fox Herod' - the systematic problem that has given rise to homelessness and poverty."
Bringing Back Heresy
Lang argues that followers of Jesus, not Bush, should call an Antichrist an Antichrist - or rather, its spirit. "The progressive church should bring back - and this sounds so crazy - the word 'heresy.' The end times theology and this other thing called Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction - those are heresies." Lang says not to believe Christian Coalition leaderñturnedñWhore of Enronñturned Bush/Cheney campaign lieutenant Ralph Reed when he claims the Christian right has no plans to upend the Constitution and impose its religion on civic life. "He's a liar," says Lang. "Dominionism is the notion that God has given the dominion, the governance of the world, to the church. And so Christians literally are born to rule, by force if necessary, to bring the Kingdom of God on Earth. I believe that the theology that drives the Bush administration affirms this." When Falwell preached, "We must take back what is rightfully ours," his ambitions did not stop at U.S. borders. This is a Church of a Law Unto Itself.
In the Greek, the word "anti" doesn't just mean "against." It also contains the meanings "equivalent to" or "a substitute for." Nero was anti-Christ because he falsely claimed to be God. The idea of deception is crucial. The Antichrist isn't the devil, the opposite of God. He's an evil human masquerading as a golden god. The Antichrist appears to humanity not as the hideous Beast but as handsome Nicolae Carpathia, who resembles Robert Redford without the facial erosion. "That could be our next Republican president," quips Lang.
In this sense, the Bush church is Antichristlike indeed. It is institutionalized deception, anti-American ugliness with a beguiling face, a neocon job. Only when necessary does it employ the perilous bald-faced lie, the outrageously transparent duplicity - the political equivalent of Robertson arguing that "Do unto others" indicates Christ's support of capitalist selfishness. More often, a smoothly dissembling surface is preferred. Rove notoriously emulates Machiavelli; the Christian right is a stealth movement, infiltrating school boards and mainstream churches and every institution of democracy like a thief in the night - in order to undermine, overthrow, and replace democracy with theocracy. Bush is the father of lies. The Union of Concerned Scientists proclaims Bush's lies about science "unprecedented." In With God on Their Side, Kaplan concludes, on mountainous evidence, "The goal is not to engage your opponents in the public square, but to kneecap them, or send them into exile."
"It is a conspiracy in the sense that they have not been public and accountable to their ideology," says Lang. "Follow the money! The same filthy-rich foundations that have funded the rise of neocons are funding the rise of the religious right." He suggests that you check out the exposÈ Web site www.yuricareport.com for the terrifying particulars.
But - to cop a line from the late Christian-right author Francis Schaeffer, how then should we live? Should we turn the other cheek to the Antichrist? Forgive LaHaye for saying that "Old Testament capital punishment" was less cruel to gays than modern acceptance is? Or counter Robertson's prayers for a divine Supreme Court fatwa with our own? As a self-scrutinizing Christian, isn't Lang in danger of succumbing to hate?
"Yeah, I'm there. I have a physical, visceral reaction to Bush, to his image, to when he speaks. I mean, I think the guy is evil. They are willfully deceptive people, and I'm very angry. But . . . hatred is not a very useful strategy of resistance, nor is it very useful to create an alternative."
Bawer preaches that the alternative must not employ the church as a weapon. "For liberals to join in the right-wing game of bashing one's opponents with the Bible only further erodes the wall between religion and government. This, to me, is a major concern - and Bush's reckless contribution to this erosion is, for me, a major offense. It's especially offensive in light of 9/11, which was the work of people who hate the West because it is secular, tolerant, inclusive, and democratic. What distinguishes America and the West from most of the Muslim world is those values. I wish we had a president who recognized this fact and helped Americans recognize it, too."
So does Lang. But he thinks the secular left has to inspire its own flock - with better ministers than dull, brainy Parson Kerry of the Church of God's Frozen People. "Even though I don't like him, Bush is probably a funner person," Lang admits. He insists that the Christian left has its own work to do in saving what he calls "the nation with the soul of a church." "The right has won. I mean, they've seized the language of the church. So against Bruce, I would say, no, the progressive wing of the church has got to reclaim its language and redefine those words. Turning the other cheek wasn't passive, oh, hit me, it hurts so good - it was a form of resistance. You're turning your cheek to strengthen your backbone."
Lang is convinced that secular efforts alone can't reverse the Antichrist tide. "Evangelical churches have a sense of urgency about the doing of 'good' in the world that the mainline church has lost. If the church can't show a positive, enticing, seductive vision of the future, where people fall in love with God and fall in love with this community, then it really doesn't have anything to say." Revelation teaches us what happens to lukewarm Christians.
It won't be easy. The political and religious left are not organized. "And part of the reason it cannot organize is that the people in the pews benefit from the system as it is," says Lang. "They can't work up any kind of passion to change it. As those benefits stop, we'll see the left arise. But it might be too late."
Ultimately, despite his despair, Lang is a man of faith. "I really do believe that we're in for several decades of a very dark time. But that's not the end of the world."
© 1998-2004 Seattle Weekly
The Christian Dominionistas Just Don´t Get It
by
Karl W. B. Schwarz
first published at
Rense.com
December 8, 2004
I have decided that our American lexicon needs a new word - Dominionistas, noun, plural, definition - groups whose religious beliefs obstruct critical thinking on matters of fairness, equity, Christ-like qualities, confusion between goodness and sin; cultists; persons of Neocon beliefs, fascists, persons of narrow mindedness.
The commentary today is yet another open letter to Christian Dominionistas who need to step away from the Kool-aid and have a long talk with God and Jesus Christ about what Christianity is, and more importantly - what Christianity is not. They might as well call themselves Zionist Christians, for some erroneously do and do not "get it" when myself or anyone else explains to them that Zionist Christians is in fact an oxymoron, or two words that have no business being used together. Sort of like "jumbo shrimp", or "military intelligence", or "Bush Compassionate Conservatism" being just three operative examples of what to look for when seeking an example of an oxymoron.
Most Christians do not "get it" when it is explained that there is a massive movement in Judaism, simply named Jews Against Zionism, fighting to rid their religion of Zionist. Many Christians just do not get it that the term Zionist can be pushed to such an extreme that it is a substitute word for fascist. It has happened in Judaism and it is happening in Christianity and neither are "religious based movements". They are based on evil, greed, power, domination; all things that are quite Un-Christ-like. They are "cults" in their sheerest definition and are not God and Christ centered, they are people, power and greed centered. They call wrong right and right wrong.
This article provides more information that demonstrates that far from being the saviors of the Jewish People, the Zionists are the true self-hating Jews who have had nothing but contempt and outright hatred for the Jewish People and Judaism.This article proves that anti-Semitism has been the oxygen and lifeblood of the Zionists throughout the ages to the present day ."By contrast, we anti-Zionist Jews having been doing all we can to reduce hatred of Jews by proclaiming the true nature of the Jewish religion in contrast to the heresy and idolatry of Zionism. We hope this will help Jews awaken from the brainwashing of the Zionists."
I know many Christians that need to start weaning themselves from the brainwashing of the Dominionistas and the Republican Neocon Fascists that have taken control of the RNC. Christianity is not about power, greed, entitlement, world conquest, Empire building, or looking the other way on the evil that is going on inside of our government ñ in our name - and wrapping that up in the flag and pretending that evil and wrong conduct is Christianity.
Such a recent example is Congressman Tom DeLay, R-TX, the powerful House Majority Leader who was reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for shady dealings, is apparently going to be indicted in the State of Texas for election law violations, and articulates a dominionist theological imperative and even spoke of such in a recent interview in Worldview Weekend:"He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for a biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me."
Well Tom, next time you pray to God ask him to give you training in Biblical worldview as it relates to Christian love, tolerance, forgiveness, evenhandedness, and even honesty, all words that do not describe your politics or political warmongering in the least bit, and while you are at it, Tom, talk to God about obeying the election laws in the State of Texas, since they are in your own Dominionist views God based. Also, take the God Course of Accountability and when you break the law, do not go running to the majority leadership of the U.S. Congress to grant you a waiver from being held accountable. You talk it, now walk it. Be a man and face your punishment for being a fraud Christian and a dirty politician.
Yes, Tom, you can consider that a Christian rebuke, from a Christian that clearly sees that you are a Dominionista Fascist. If you don't like that Mr. Delay, here is something from the Bible just for you: NIV, Proverbs 17:10: A rebuke impresses a man of discernment more than a hundred lashes a fool.
The website TheocracyWatch.org also provides interesting reading on this phenomenon of Christians who suddenly think that globalization, warmongering, liars in power, dead and maimed soldiers due to those lies, and the sheer corruption in DC is "okay" because the overall objectives of conquering the world for Christ, by the shock and awe technique so to speak, is what they are after. They just don't get it that such actions prove beyond a doubt the shallowness or absence of Christianity in them, not that they are somehow "Super Christians".
They don't seem to grasp that their conduct is not Christian; it is pure, unadulterated fascism.
"The twin surges of Christians into GOP ranks in the early 1980s and early 1990s have begun to bear fruit, as naive, idealistic recruits have transformed into savvy operatives and leaders, building organizations, winning leadership positions, fighting onto platform committees, and electing many of their own to public office."
It would be helpful if these Far Right Dominionistas woke up and realized that such was the groundwork for Hitler's takeover of Germany, but then they would have to admit that they are not Christians, there are mere Neocons that are neo-conning all of us and they are Dominionista Fascists. They would have to come clean in the Christian sense of that concept and that would unseat them from the power and ill-gotten gain they covet.
The terms "Christian Conservative" used together are misnomers and for describing some of the Far Right, actually yet another oxymoron. Most Christians I know, both lay and clergy, believe the dominionist movement is an aberration of Christianity [much like Zionism is to Judaism] and the movement is anything but conservative in nature, tone, or deeds.
One can see from the record budget deficit and record growth of government that dominionist care more about winning votes and staying in power than managing the budget responsibly, which is an example of "bad stewardship" any way one wants to analyze it. Christians are required to be "good stewards" but in Dominionista thinking the concept is not supported nor it is operational in daily lives. To a Dominionista, greed is good and if others go without that is okay too. It is even okay if the Dominionista's policies plunder people into the poor house, just as long as those plundered are not other Dominionistas. As the Dominionistas climb that ladder of power and greed, wealth attainment, if they walk on others that is okay too in their warped interpretation of Christianity. To a Dominionista, fascism [evil] is good because it works to achieve their goals.
In fact, that is quite Zionesque - of them to do so. One of the primary fiscal requirements of being a good Christian is that one must exercise "good stewardship" and the rampant spending of the Bush Administration is about the worst example of "good stewardship" in the history of government, period, not just the "Worst in U.S. government history". The Bible warns to "recognize them by their fruits" when it comes to sinners, false prophets, etc and we have plenty of examples of that in DC right now all day, every day.
Dominionistas also seek radical change, not on what the Bible says or what Christ would do, but the "Dominionista interpretation" of what the Bible says. That is one of the ways to spot a cult, that the theology is based not on Christ principles but on the interpretation of a person here on Earth and not within the historical guidelines and theology of Christianity . Some of the most whacked out things I have ever heard recently did not come out of the mouths of the shrill Liberal Left, the words and ideas came out of Dominionistas on the Far Right that have a long way to go to even be marginal Christians. " George Grant was Executive Director of Coral Ridge Ministries for many years and is a dominionist author and educator. He wrote in The Changing of the Guard, Biblical Principles for Political Action: "Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less... Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. (pp. 50-51)"
Well, it seems Mr. Grant needs to go back and take Civics 101 to get a better handle on why the separation of church and state is such a fundamental right of every person in this nation, including the fundamental, God given right to not be under the heel of overzealous Christians or other pseudo-Christian Dominionistas that have gone off the deep end. He also needs to show me the "real estate title section" of the Bible relating to World Conquest as a Christian imperative, for it does not exist.
I wonder if Mr. Grant or other likeminded people know that the Federalist Papers are full of evidence that this nation was not "founded" on Christian principals and was intended to embrace any religion, any free worship of God by anyone of any religion?
I wonder if he would honestly re-examine his motives of interjecting his faith into government's laws if he knew more about this Nation's history, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or Civics 101?
I wonder if Mr. Grant or other likeminded people were presented with the TRUTH that the Founding Father's of this great nation felt that the imposition of ANYONE'S FAITH on another was a violation of that American's civil rights and God given rights?
I wonder if they would "get it" if explained to them and would they accept it?
I wonder if they could grasp the concept that their rights end where mine begin? Or, that my personal relationship with God is frankly between me and God and none of their business.
I wonder if Mr. Grant or other likeminded people grasp that the Founding Fathers considered legislating morality and during the discussions, and their lifelong experiences as God-fearing men, came to the conclusion that no government should have the right to legislate morality?
Evangelical means to spread the Word of God by good example ñ and hint by good example, not as murderous, bigoted heathens bent on world dominion of anyone who thinks differently than Far Right Fascism. It does not mean to conquer the world and subjugate the peoples of the world as a preparation for the Second "democratic" Coming. Bad example equals bad Christian, and no, they don't get that either.
The dominionist movement is not a movement of tolerance and they prove it over and over again in the way they attack anyone who disagrees with them. I circulated a recent article written about the use of government money to sway the Christian Far Right vote , and even though 50,000 received it only six responded negatively. It was one response from an "ecumenical minister" that really stood out when he threatened bodily harm on me or would destroy my computer if I circulated my writings again to Christians.
Sure thing Bubba, let's not awaken any of the sleeping sheeple and have them stampede towards the truth. We can't have that epiphany happening on his watch! We cannot have the stiff-necked people wake up and smell the coffee that they have been lured into "cultist thinking".
Maybe this is a third addition to the lexicon along with Dominionistas and the Zionesque I snuck in above that being "ecumaniacal". What a mockery of a Christian that pseudo-Christian proved to be. His hateful words made it clear to me he was a Dominionista true, blue and redneck, and a terrorist too. Dominionism believes there is only one truth, and they want to impose that truth on the rest of the country regardless of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights even though their very conduct cannot be found as "authorized" anywhere in the Bible without twisting the words into something the Words of God do not mean. Such people see sin everywhere except in their own actions.
In the words of the Christian Coalition field director, Bill Thomson , the "leftist" foes should be destroyed: "You're going to run over them. Get around them, run over the top of them, destroy them - whatever you need to do so that God's word is the word that is being practiced in Congress, town halls and state legislatures. That's your job."
These Dominionist Christians would do well to take an in-depth course on the Biblical chapter of Revelations to get a better understanding that when there is a Second Coming of Christ, he will then have authority over all Nations, and then and only then will he be the King of Kings on earth and over all Nations. At this point in time, demanding, pushing, intimidating, bullying, etc to "hold title to all things" are being anything and everything but a Christian in the truest sense of the word. They are being hedonists and pagans in some very sinful ways and only pretending to be Christian. Furthermore, when that day comes ñ democracy is an irrelevant concept.
There is nothing in the Bible that teaches that Christians are to conquer the world, plunder it, and when the Second Coming of Christ happens we are to deliver it by quitclaim deed to the Son of God. If one digs deep enough to understand what "religious cult" means, these Dominionist are in fact a religious cult[9] that is operating way outside of what the Bible teaches and what the Bible means.
God and his Son Jesus Christ do not need the Dominionistas to twist government policy into a warped sense of Imperialism, greed and world conquest, and while doing so wrap up sheer evil and fascism as if it were a Godly act. In fact, the Bible is full of warnings about such people but they conveniently overlook those passages that clearly show that DOMINION IS GOD'S, not the Dominionista's right of entitlement as an erroneous reading or application of the Word.
God has no need for any Christian to "pave the way" for the Second Coming and any evangelist that presumes to know the mind of God, the Will of God and teaches such things to their flocks is what the Bible warned of ñ i.e. False Prophets. Instruments of Satan that are to be shunned and not followed, yet these Dominionistas are bound and determined to have us all living under the heels of their Fascist Dominionista boots.
That is not American and such conduct is a long way from being Christian. They just don't want you to know that.
It is time for all Americans to wake up for there are huge problems ahead for this nation and gay marriage and abortion are not what is about to put this nation under.
Please sign the Justice for 9-11.org petition if you, too, demand the truth and justice regarding September 11, 2001. There is much truth to be found and we have a National Capitol that is full of people that have an aversion to the truth. It is time that we as American Citizens get to the bottom of what they fear so much and why they fear the truth.
- Karl W. B. Schwarz lives in Little Rock, AR and is the author of "One-Way Ticket to Crawford, Texas, a Conservative Republican Speaks Out".
He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Patmos Nanotechnologies, LLC and I-nets Security Systems, a designer of intelligence and communications UAV systems.
Karl W. B. Schwarz
first published at
Rense.com
December 8, 2004
I have decided that our American lexicon needs a new word - Dominionistas, noun, plural, definition - groups whose religious beliefs obstruct critical thinking on matters of fairness, equity, Christ-like qualities, confusion between goodness and sin; cultists; persons of Neocon beliefs, fascists, persons of narrow mindedness.
The commentary today is yet another open letter to Christian Dominionistas who need to step away from the Kool-aid and have a long talk with God and Jesus Christ about what Christianity is, and more importantly - what Christianity is not. They might as well call themselves Zionist Christians, for some erroneously do and do not "get it" when myself or anyone else explains to them that Zionist Christians is in fact an oxymoron, or two words that have no business being used together. Sort of like "jumbo shrimp", or "military intelligence", or "Bush Compassionate Conservatism" being just three operative examples of what to look for when seeking an example of an oxymoron.
Most Christians do not "get it" when it is explained that there is a massive movement in Judaism, simply named Jews Against Zionism, fighting to rid their religion of Zionist. Many Christians just do not get it that the term Zionist can be pushed to such an extreme that it is a substitute word for fascist. It has happened in Judaism and it is happening in Christianity and neither are "religious based movements". They are based on evil, greed, power, domination; all things that are quite Un-Christ-like. They are "cults" in their sheerest definition and are not God and Christ centered, they are people, power and greed centered. They call wrong right and right wrong.
This article provides more information that demonstrates that far from being the saviors of the Jewish People, the Zionists are the true self-hating Jews who have had nothing but contempt and outright hatred for the Jewish People and Judaism.This article proves that anti-Semitism has been the oxygen and lifeblood of the Zionists throughout the ages to the present day ."By contrast, we anti-Zionist Jews having been doing all we can to reduce hatred of Jews by proclaiming the true nature of the Jewish religion in contrast to the heresy and idolatry of Zionism. We hope this will help Jews awaken from the brainwashing of the Zionists."
I know many Christians that need to start weaning themselves from the brainwashing of the Dominionistas and the Republican Neocon Fascists that have taken control of the RNC. Christianity is not about power, greed, entitlement, world conquest, Empire building, or looking the other way on the evil that is going on inside of our government ñ in our name - and wrapping that up in the flag and pretending that evil and wrong conduct is Christianity.
Such a recent example is Congressman Tom DeLay, R-TX, the powerful House Majority Leader who was reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for shady dealings, is apparently going to be indicted in the State of Texas for election law violations, and articulates a dominionist theological imperative and even spoke of such in a recent interview in Worldview Weekend:"He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for a biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me."
Well Tom, next time you pray to God ask him to give you training in Biblical worldview as it relates to Christian love, tolerance, forgiveness, evenhandedness, and even honesty, all words that do not describe your politics or political warmongering in the least bit, and while you are at it, Tom, talk to God about obeying the election laws in the State of Texas, since they are in your own Dominionist views God based. Also, take the God Course of Accountability and when you break the law, do not go running to the majority leadership of the U.S. Congress to grant you a waiver from being held accountable. You talk it, now walk it. Be a man and face your punishment for being a fraud Christian and a dirty politician.
Yes, Tom, you can consider that a Christian rebuke, from a Christian that clearly sees that you are a Dominionista Fascist. If you don't like that Mr. Delay, here is something from the Bible just for you: NIV, Proverbs 17:10: A rebuke impresses a man of discernment more than a hundred lashes a fool.
The website TheocracyWatch.org also provides interesting reading on this phenomenon of Christians who suddenly think that globalization, warmongering, liars in power, dead and maimed soldiers due to those lies, and the sheer corruption in DC is "okay" because the overall objectives of conquering the world for Christ, by the shock and awe technique so to speak, is what they are after. They just don't get it that such actions prove beyond a doubt the shallowness or absence of Christianity in them, not that they are somehow "Super Christians".
They don't seem to grasp that their conduct is not Christian; it is pure, unadulterated fascism.
"The twin surges of Christians into GOP ranks in the early 1980s and early 1990s have begun to bear fruit, as naive, idealistic recruits have transformed into savvy operatives and leaders, building organizations, winning leadership positions, fighting onto platform committees, and electing many of their own to public office."
It would be helpful if these Far Right Dominionistas woke up and realized that such was the groundwork for Hitler's takeover of Germany, but then they would have to admit that they are not Christians, there are mere Neocons that are neo-conning all of us and they are Dominionista Fascists. They would have to come clean in the Christian sense of that concept and that would unseat them from the power and ill-gotten gain they covet.
The terms "Christian Conservative" used together are misnomers and for describing some of the Far Right, actually yet another oxymoron. Most Christians I know, both lay and clergy, believe the dominionist movement is an aberration of Christianity [much like Zionism is to Judaism] and the movement is anything but conservative in nature, tone, or deeds.
One can see from the record budget deficit and record growth of government that dominionist care more about winning votes and staying in power than managing the budget responsibly, which is an example of "bad stewardship" any way one wants to analyze it. Christians are required to be "good stewards" but in Dominionista thinking the concept is not supported nor it is operational in daily lives. To a Dominionista, greed is good and if others go without that is okay too. It is even okay if the Dominionista's policies plunder people into the poor house, just as long as those plundered are not other Dominionistas. As the Dominionistas climb that ladder of power and greed, wealth attainment, if they walk on others that is okay too in their warped interpretation of Christianity. To a Dominionista, fascism [evil] is good because it works to achieve their goals.
In fact, that is quite Zionesque - of them to do so. One of the primary fiscal requirements of being a good Christian is that one must exercise "good stewardship" and the rampant spending of the Bush Administration is about the worst example of "good stewardship" in the history of government, period, not just the "Worst in U.S. government history". The Bible warns to "recognize them by their fruits" when it comes to sinners, false prophets, etc and we have plenty of examples of that in DC right now all day, every day.
Dominionistas also seek radical change, not on what the Bible says or what Christ would do, but the "Dominionista interpretation" of what the Bible says. That is one of the ways to spot a cult, that the theology is based not on Christ principles but on the interpretation of a person here on Earth and not within the historical guidelines and theology of Christianity . Some of the most whacked out things I have ever heard recently did not come out of the mouths of the shrill Liberal Left, the words and ideas came out of Dominionistas on the Far Right that have a long way to go to even be marginal Christians. " George Grant was Executive Director of Coral Ridge Ministries for many years and is a dominionist author and educator. He wrote in The Changing of the Guard, Biblical Principles for Political Action: "Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less... Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. (pp. 50-51)"
Well, it seems Mr. Grant needs to go back and take Civics 101 to get a better handle on why the separation of church and state is such a fundamental right of every person in this nation, including the fundamental, God given right to not be under the heel of overzealous Christians or other pseudo-Christian Dominionistas that have gone off the deep end. He also needs to show me the "real estate title section" of the Bible relating to World Conquest as a Christian imperative, for it does not exist.
I wonder if Mr. Grant or other likeminded people know that the Federalist Papers are full of evidence that this nation was not "founded" on Christian principals and was intended to embrace any religion, any free worship of God by anyone of any religion?
I wonder if he would honestly re-examine his motives of interjecting his faith into government's laws if he knew more about this Nation's history, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or Civics 101?
I wonder if Mr. Grant or other likeminded people were presented with the TRUTH that the Founding Father's of this great nation felt that the imposition of ANYONE'S FAITH on another was a violation of that American's civil rights and God given rights?
I wonder if they would "get it" if explained to them and would they accept it?
I wonder if they could grasp the concept that their rights end where mine begin? Or, that my personal relationship with God is frankly between me and God and none of their business.
I wonder if Mr. Grant or other likeminded people grasp that the Founding Fathers considered legislating morality and during the discussions, and their lifelong experiences as God-fearing men, came to the conclusion that no government should have the right to legislate morality?
Evangelical means to spread the Word of God by good example ñ and hint by good example, not as murderous, bigoted heathens bent on world dominion of anyone who thinks differently than Far Right Fascism. It does not mean to conquer the world and subjugate the peoples of the world as a preparation for the Second "democratic" Coming. Bad example equals bad Christian, and no, they don't get that either.
The dominionist movement is not a movement of tolerance and they prove it over and over again in the way they attack anyone who disagrees with them. I circulated a recent article written about the use of government money to sway the Christian Far Right vote , and even though 50,000 received it only six responded negatively. It was one response from an "ecumenical minister" that really stood out when he threatened bodily harm on me or would destroy my computer if I circulated my writings again to Christians.
Sure thing Bubba, let's not awaken any of the sleeping sheeple and have them stampede towards the truth. We can't have that epiphany happening on his watch! We cannot have the stiff-necked people wake up and smell the coffee that they have been lured into "cultist thinking".
Maybe this is a third addition to the lexicon along with Dominionistas and the Zionesque I snuck in above that being "ecumaniacal". What a mockery of a Christian that pseudo-Christian proved to be. His hateful words made it clear to me he was a Dominionista true, blue and redneck, and a terrorist too. Dominionism believes there is only one truth, and they want to impose that truth on the rest of the country regardless of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights even though their very conduct cannot be found as "authorized" anywhere in the Bible without twisting the words into something the Words of God do not mean. Such people see sin everywhere except in their own actions.
In the words of the Christian Coalition field director, Bill Thomson , the "leftist" foes should be destroyed: "You're going to run over them. Get around them, run over the top of them, destroy them - whatever you need to do so that God's word is the word that is being practiced in Congress, town halls and state legislatures. That's your job."
These Dominionist Christians would do well to take an in-depth course on the Biblical chapter of Revelations to get a better understanding that when there is a Second Coming of Christ, he will then have authority over all Nations, and then and only then will he be the King of Kings on earth and over all Nations. At this point in time, demanding, pushing, intimidating, bullying, etc to "hold title to all things" are being anything and everything but a Christian in the truest sense of the word. They are being hedonists and pagans in some very sinful ways and only pretending to be Christian. Furthermore, when that day comes ñ democracy is an irrelevant concept.
There is nothing in the Bible that teaches that Christians are to conquer the world, plunder it, and when the Second Coming of Christ happens we are to deliver it by quitclaim deed to the Son of God. If one digs deep enough to understand what "religious cult" means, these Dominionist are in fact a religious cult[9] that is operating way outside of what the Bible teaches and what the Bible means.
God and his Son Jesus Christ do not need the Dominionistas to twist government policy into a warped sense of Imperialism, greed and world conquest, and while doing so wrap up sheer evil and fascism as if it were a Godly act. In fact, the Bible is full of warnings about such people but they conveniently overlook those passages that clearly show that DOMINION IS GOD'S, not the Dominionista's right of entitlement as an erroneous reading or application of the Word.
God has no need for any Christian to "pave the way" for the Second Coming and any evangelist that presumes to know the mind of God, the Will of God and teaches such things to their flocks is what the Bible warned of ñ i.e. False Prophets. Instruments of Satan that are to be shunned and not followed, yet these Dominionistas are bound and determined to have us all living under the heels of their Fascist Dominionista boots.
That is not American and such conduct is a long way from being Christian. They just don't want you to know that.
It is time for all Americans to wake up for there are huge problems ahead for this nation and gay marriage and abortion are not what is about to put this nation under.
Please sign the Justice for 9-11.org petition if you, too, demand the truth and justice regarding September 11, 2001. There is much truth to be found and we have a National Capitol that is full of people that have an aversion to the truth. It is time that we as American Citizens get to the bottom of what they fear so much and why they fear the truth.
- Karl W. B. Schwarz lives in Little Rock, AR and is the author of "One-Way Ticket to Crawford, Texas, a Conservative Republican Speaks Out".
He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Patmos Nanotechnologies, LLC and I-nets Security Systems, a designer of intelligence and communications UAV systems.
A Pastoral Letter To The US-President
May 8, 2002
By Rev. Rich Lang
first published at:
Democratic Underground.com
Dear President Bush,
When you were running for office you stated that Jesus Christ was your favorite philosopher. You have made a point of proclaiming your Christian faith. You have put time and energy in an attempt to link Church mission with state social security. You have, particularly since 9/11, continually preached God Bless America on almost every public occasion. As a Pastor and fellow United Methodist I need to ask you: "Do you know what the values and vision of Jesus are?"
I ask the question because I am baffled and confused by your behavior. You claim Christ but act like Caesar. There is blood all over your hands with the promise of even more blood to come. You sit atop the nations like the Biblical Whore of Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might, their corporate sponsors, their nuclear madness, and their insatiable hunger for global armament. Is this how you learned Christ?
You claim the benevolence of your Administration toward the rest of the world. But the treaties you make continue to be laced with a tightened rope around the neck of the poor. Is this how you learned to "forgive our debtors"? Is it really Christ-like to insist on cuts in life-supporting infrastructure while increasing military budgets and allowing the plunder of nations to accrue to a very small financial elite? Have you not been taught that Jesus was crucified by these same Principalities and Powers?
You practice a patriotic righteousness that visualizes never ending war against enemies of great evil. You bombed Afghanistan with both guns and butter to show the difference. But do you really think the few crumbs of bread airlifted to Afghanistan shield the reality that you have no intention of assisting in building a sustainable society there? Is this how Christ taught you to avenge the wrongs done unto you?
I am troubled by your spirit George. You claim you are of the Sustainer of Life but you practice the terror of Death. You are spreading the war. Afghanistan is only the beginning. Military presence crops up worldwide. You bait us with Iraq and shield what you are doing in Columbia. You lay the groundwork for disrupting Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina. You allow the dogs of capitalism to sink their teeth into the battered body of a raped Central America. The buck stops on your desk George: is this what Jesus would do?
The Spirit of Death rises and nations tremble. We the people of the United States tremble. We discover how truly powerless we have become. Our military budget grows to obscene levels bankrupting the social infrastructure from which our security and freedom rise. We see basic medical care costs increase even as more and more Americans find themselves without health care. We see environmental treaties subverted, ignored and disappeared even as Mother Earth signals increasing distress. Labor rights are made secondary to the rights of Corporations resulting in wage reductions and growing financial insecurity. Homelessness exposes itself through tented cities. Education becomes the victim of budget knife cuts. A few benefit but the groan of the masses is growing. Whose side are you on George?
Perhaps you think that God has chosen you for this hour. Perhaps God has. So again I ask you, "is this how you learned Christ?" If God has chosen you for this hour then, in Christ's name, serve the values and vision of Jesus: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, release the prisoners, cancel the debt, forgive your enemies, practice Jubilee. Then, through you, this nation and all nations will be blessed.
But beware George: the road of the sword will bring division and much blood. Those who take it up will be devoured by it. Many people, in the name of God, have taken up the sword. And many have come to ruin. Thinking themselves capable of naming evil they have become the very evil they name.
Seek Christ first,
Rev. Rich Lang
Pastor
Trinity United Methodist Church
oddrev@yahoo.com
By Rev. Rich Lang
first published at:
Democratic Underground.com
Dear President Bush,
When you were running for office you stated that Jesus Christ was your favorite philosopher. You have made a point of proclaiming your Christian faith. You have put time and energy in an attempt to link Church mission with state social security. You have, particularly since 9/11, continually preached God Bless America on almost every public occasion. As a Pastor and fellow United Methodist I need to ask you: "Do you know what the values and vision of Jesus are?"
I ask the question because I am baffled and confused by your behavior. You claim Christ but act like Caesar. There is blood all over your hands with the promise of even more blood to come. You sit atop the nations like the Biblical Whore of Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might, their corporate sponsors, their nuclear madness, and their insatiable hunger for global armament. Is this how you learned Christ?
You claim the benevolence of your Administration toward the rest of the world. But the treaties you make continue to be laced with a tightened rope around the neck of the poor. Is this how you learned to "forgive our debtors"? Is it really Christ-like to insist on cuts in life-supporting infrastructure while increasing military budgets and allowing the plunder of nations to accrue to a very small financial elite? Have you not been taught that Jesus was crucified by these same Principalities and Powers?
You practice a patriotic righteousness that visualizes never ending war against enemies of great evil. You bombed Afghanistan with both guns and butter to show the difference. But do you really think the few crumbs of bread airlifted to Afghanistan shield the reality that you have no intention of assisting in building a sustainable society there? Is this how Christ taught you to avenge the wrongs done unto you?
I am troubled by your spirit George. You claim you are of the Sustainer of Life but you practice the terror of Death. You are spreading the war. Afghanistan is only the beginning. Military presence crops up worldwide. You bait us with Iraq and shield what you are doing in Columbia. You lay the groundwork for disrupting Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina. You allow the dogs of capitalism to sink their teeth into the battered body of a raped Central America. The buck stops on your desk George: is this what Jesus would do?
The Spirit of Death rises and nations tremble. We the people of the United States tremble. We discover how truly powerless we have become. Our military budget grows to obscene levels bankrupting the social infrastructure from which our security and freedom rise. We see basic medical care costs increase even as more and more Americans find themselves without health care. We see environmental treaties subverted, ignored and disappeared even as Mother Earth signals increasing distress. Labor rights are made secondary to the rights of Corporations resulting in wage reductions and growing financial insecurity. Homelessness exposes itself through tented cities. Education becomes the victim of budget knife cuts. A few benefit but the groan of the masses is growing. Whose side are you on George?
Perhaps you think that God has chosen you for this hour. Perhaps God has. So again I ask you, "is this how you learned Christ?" If God has chosen you for this hour then, in Christ's name, serve the values and vision of Jesus: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, release the prisoners, cancel the debt, forgive your enemies, practice Jubilee. Then, through you, this nation and all nations will be blessed.
But beware George: the road of the sword will bring division and much blood. Those who take it up will be devoured by it. Many people, in the name of God, have taken up the sword. And many have come to ruin. Thinking themselves capable of naming evil they have become the very evil they name.
Seek Christ first,
Rev. Rich Lang
Pastor
Trinity United Methodist Church
oddrev@yahoo.com
A Vision For Peace
by
Pax Christi
the Catholic Peace Movement
PREFACE
Pax Christi was founded in the ashes of World War II as a Catholic voice for peace and reconciliation. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of that founding we wish to look ahead to the tasks that lie before us as a faith based movement rooted in the realities of current experiences. As national sections of Pax Christi we have shared our understanding of the critical issues facing Christian peacemakers, and our vision of the spiritual, practical and political paths our work should take. Our statement combines the contrasting and complementary elements which come from the varied perceptions and experiences of our members.
SIGNS OF TIME: CHALLENGES
The end of the Cold War, for which we worked, has awakened us more acutely to a broader spectrum of problems across the world. The high objectives of the United Nations Charter, to which more and more nation-states have become signatories, have not rectified the malfunctioning of the world community.
Throughout the regions of Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, Europe and the Pacific there is violence of all kinds, misery, oppression, militarism and acts of terrorism. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War we have been confronted with new kinds of war in the world, causing an ever increasing number of civilian victims.
Security may be less threatened externally from guns and bombs; security is, however, threatened internally by injustice, cultural and social disintegration, and by the weakness or decomposition of political authority.
Our world needs to move forward from a security assured mainly by weapons to a security guaranteed primarily by sustainable human development.
There is contempt on a universal scale for individual and group rights including self-determination for numerically small peoples, and for ethnic and cultural minorities within national states.
The gaps between rich and poor, between North and South, and between humans and nature, grows wider and ever more scandalous. These gaps are the source of future conflicts. The concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few institutional and private decision-makers imposes manifestly unjust structures on the world community. The burden and injustice of international debt for developing countries, and the consequent increasing unemployment, impels us to reject our present global economic and monetary structures.
The worldwide arms trade is used as a means of economic growth or political gain, despite the fact that it encourages and fuels militarism and crime everywhere. The nuclear threat continues. Wars, internal disputes, environmental pollution and economic decline create a large number of refugees. Attempts are made to stop refugees from entering the rich countries.
In spite of a growing awareness of the realities of environmental degradation and the imperatives of conservation, excessive consumption of the earth’s resources is still the basis of the world’s economic systems, and pollution is virtually out of control.
In some parts of the world there is an alarming increase in personal violence and sometimes a total disregard for the dignity and sanctity of human life. Family life is increasingly fragile, especially due to domestic violence. The mass media bombards us with images of greed, anger and violence. Political opponents are quickly demonised, ethnic hatred is encourage and wars are sacralized. No system seems able to diminish racism, sexism, xenophobia, fundamentalism or aggressive nationalism. Even the Christian churches do not always speak and act clear enough against structures of social sin.
SIGNS OF TIME: HOPE
Pax Christi International is deeply conscious of these enormous challenges, but is still encouraged by many signs of hope in this time of change.
Significant political change has taken place in Europe in 1989 without massive violence. The movement towards enduring regional peace, albeit still delicate, in South Africa, the Middle East and Northern Ireland bolster our hope for effective peacemaking.
The activities of non-government and people’s organisations all over the world encourages us. There is a growing interest in the development of conflict resolution techniques, and in exploring nonviolent alternatives, thus continuing the Christian tradition of nonviolence. On every continent more and more women are emerging as agents of change and as new leaders in the struggle for greater equality and peace. There is no lack of goodwill among a large proportion of the population if only ways can be found of harnessing their desire for justice and peace to realistic programmes of social justice.
A growing sense of dialogue between the world primal or traditional cultures and religions also gives new hope. Many discover in their rejuvenated cultures, alternatives to a valueless consumerism. In the military field, chemical and biological weapons have been outlawed by international convention, and there has been some initial reduction in the stocks of nuclear devices. We continue to join forces worldwide to eliminate all weapons of mass destruction on a global scale and support all efforts to eliminate the whole arms trade and overcome negative environmental trends. Grassroots projects of fair trade and ethical investment are embryos of a more just economic order.
VISION
As a movement of reconciliation based on Christ’s gospel of peace, Pax Christi International will continue its prophetic role within the Church and the world. We will dedicate ourselves to the promotion of active Christian nonviolence by living and proclaiming nonviolence, and will promote nonviolent transformation towards the world. We will uphold the belief that waging war, aggression and destruction can never be acceptable. Pax Christi International seeks to be a leaven within the Catholic Church and to help to transform it into a church which gives unambiguous witness to the nonviolent Jesus. In this way we hope to contribute to the development of the Church’s social and moral teaching Within the Church and society we will continue our efforts to foster a culture of nonviolence, to nurture programmes of peace education and training, mediation, reconciliation and nonviolent action. Our aspiration is to realise the vision of Isaiah, when swords may be turned into ploughshares and to implement the words of Paul VI to the United Nations “War never again!” and of Pope John Paul II “War whether nuclear or otherwise may never be used as a means as resolving differences.”
TOWARDS THE VISION
Pax Christi International will develop a greater variety of practical strategies rooted in a vision of a world which revolves on principles of peace with justice.
We proclaim that peace in its fullest sense cannot be achieved unless we treat the whole of God’s creation in a respectful and just manner and recognise our responsibility toward future generations.
Spirituality, prayer, study, research and practical action will shape our work; solidarity and compassion will guide our daily efforts.
We will encourage serious enquiry, debate and fact finding missions on the sources of injustices, violence and oppression.
In the spirit of Jesus we will actively work to eradicate injustices and foster reconciliation among all those who consider one another as enemies.
We will accept the challenge of reaching out to young people and of truly valuing their contribution to our work.
The peace we seek is a peace that flows from justice and a commitment to nonviolence. It stems from a recognition of the innate dignity of all creation and of every human person and the autonomous rights of peoples.
We shall continue to exercise our influence as a non-governmental organisation, accredited to the United Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe.
We shall intensify the struggle to achieve universal human rights, including the right to life, health, housing, education, dignified work and basic material needs, giving special attention to the rights of minorities, refugees and migrant people, in the spirit of the beatitudes.
We will also join in the struggle with greater respect for humanitarian law in war situations, as set out in the Geneva conventions and protocols. We will work to free our world from the dominance of socioeconomic forces which are profit driven.
We will support those who work toward socially just, sustainable and ecologically stable development in all parts of the world.
In our efforts to realise our vision we will continue the ongoing discussion within our movement and the world at large around the scriptural and traditional roots of nonviolent resolution of conflicts by means of dialogue, active resistance and reconciliation. Therefore we will strive to ensure a serious scrutiny of the use of limited military force even when the UN Charter appears to allow it.
We will continue to engage in inter-religious dialogue, and intercultural experience as essential ingredients of peacemaking. We recognise the richness of all the great spiritual traditions, and the consequent strength that comes from a vigorous ecumenical dimension. Thus Pax Christi International strongly affirms the need for people of all faiths and good will to work together for peace, justice and the integrity of creation.
We Christians are called to continual conversion and the institutional church herself is in constant need of reform. We will try to ensure that respect is maintained when controversies arise, which stem from our different perspectives and from the rich variety of spiritual gifts. As a faith based movement in an increasingly secularized world, we face the challenge of being open to the needs of all and of bringing them the hope that comes from a Saviour who was crucified and is risen.
We will endeavour to reflect Christ’s love and acceptance of everyone, especially those who for personal, ethnic, sexual, cultural or economic reasons, are often marginalized. This may not make us popular nor numerous, but it is often through the witness of small groups and minorities that change is facilitated.
As we reflect on our first fifty years we recognise that we now face a vast challenge as we embark on the future. May the Holy Spirit give us the wisdom and courage to accept the challenge of peace with hope, with joy and with openness to God’s creative power.
Assisi (Italy), 1995
Pax Christi
the Catholic Peace Movement
PREFACE
Pax Christi was founded in the ashes of World War II as a Catholic voice for peace and reconciliation. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of that founding we wish to look ahead to the tasks that lie before us as a faith based movement rooted in the realities of current experiences. As national sections of Pax Christi we have shared our understanding of the critical issues facing Christian peacemakers, and our vision of the spiritual, practical and political paths our work should take. Our statement combines the contrasting and complementary elements which come from the varied perceptions and experiences of our members.
SIGNS OF TIME: CHALLENGES
The end of the Cold War, for which we worked, has awakened us more acutely to a broader spectrum of problems across the world. The high objectives of the United Nations Charter, to which more and more nation-states have become signatories, have not rectified the malfunctioning of the world community.
Throughout the regions of Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, Europe and the Pacific there is violence of all kinds, misery, oppression, militarism and acts of terrorism. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War we have been confronted with new kinds of war in the world, causing an ever increasing number of civilian victims.
Security may be less threatened externally from guns and bombs; security is, however, threatened internally by injustice, cultural and social disintegration, and by the weakness or decomposition of political authority.
Our world needs to move forward from a security assured mainly by weapons to a security guaranteed primarily by sustainable human development.
There is contempt on a universal scale for individual and group rights including self-determination for numerically small peoples, and for ethnic and cultural minorities within national states.
The gaps between rich and poor, between North and South, and between humans and nature, grows wider and ever more scandalous. These gaps are the source of future conflicts. The concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few institutional and private decision-makers imposes manifestly unjust structures on the world community. The burden and injustice of international debt for developing countries, and the consequent increasing unemployment, impels us to reject our present global economic and monetary structures.
The worldwide arms trade is used as a means of economic growth or political gain, despite the fact that it encourages and fuels militarism and crime everywhere. The nuclear threat continues. Wars, internal disputes, environmental pollution and economic decline create a large number of refugees. Attempts are made to stop refugees from entering the rich countries.
In spite of a growing awareness of the realities of environmental degradation and the imperatives of conservation, excessive consumption of the earth’s resources is still the basis of the world’s economic systems, and pollution is virtually out of control.
In some parts of the world there is an alarming increase in personal violence and sometimes a total disregard for the dignity and sanctity of human life. Family life is increasingly fragile, especially due to domestic violence. The mass media bombards us with images of greed, anger and violence. Political opponents are quickly demonised, ethnic hatred is encourage and wars are sacralized. No system seems able to diminish racism, sexism, xenophobia, fundamentalism or aggressive nationalism. Even the Christian churches do not always speak and act clear enough against structures of social sin.
SIGNS OF TIME: HOPE
Pax Christi International is deeply conscious of these enormous challenges, but is still encouraged by many signs of hope in this time of change.
Significant political change has taken place in Europe in 1989 without massive violence. The movement towards enduring regional peace, albeit still delicate, in South Africa, the Middle East and Northern Ireland bolster our hope for effective peacemaking.
The activities of non-government and people’s organisations all over the world encourages us. There is a growing interest in the development of conflict resolution techniques, and in exploring nonviolent alternatives, thus continuing the Christian tradition of nonviolence. On every continent more and more women are emerging as agents of change and as new leaders in the struggle for greater equality and peace. There is no lack of goodwill among a large proportion of the population if only ways can be found of harnessing their desire for justice and peace to realistic programmes of social justice.
A growing sense of dialogue between the world primal or traditional cultures and religions also gives new hope. Many discover in their rejuvenated cultures, alternatives to a valueless consumerism. In the military field, chemical and biological weapons have been outlawed by international convention, and there has been some initial reduction in the stocks of nuclear devices. We continue to join forces worldwide to eliminate all weapons of mass destruction on a global scale and support all efforts to eliminate the whole arms trade and overcome negative environmental trends. Grassroots projects of fair trade and ethical investment are embryos of a more just economic order.
VISION
As a movement of reconciliation based on Christ’s gospel of peace, Pax Christi International will continue its prophetic role within the Church and the world. We will dedicate ourselves to the promotion of active Christian nonviolence by living and proclaiming nonviolence, and will promote nonviolent transformation towards the world. We will uphold the belief that waging war, aggression and destruction can never be acceptable. Pax Christi International seeks to be a leaven within the Catholic Church and to help to transform it into a church which gives unambiguous witness to the nonviolent Jesus. In this way we hope to contribute to the development of the Church’s social and moral teaching Within the Church and society we will continue our efforts to foster a culture of nonviolence, to nurture programmes of peace education and training, mediation, reconciliation and nonviolent action. Our aspiration is to realise the vision of Isaiah, when swords may be turned into ploughshares and to implement the words of Paul VI to the United Nations “War never again!” and of Pope John Paul II “War whether nuclear or otherwise may never be used as a means as resolving differences.”
TOWARDS THE VISION
Pax Christi International will develop a greater variety of practical strategies rooted in a vision of a world which revolves on principles of peace with justice.
We proclaim that peace in its fullest sense cannot be achieved unless we treat the whole of God’s creation in a respectful and just manner and recognise our responsibility toward future generations.
Spirituality, prayer, study, research and practical action will shape our work; solidarity and compassion will guide our daily efforts.
We will encourage serious enquiry, debate and fact finding missions on the sources of injustices, violence and oppression.
In the spirit of Jesus we will actively work to eradicate injustices and foster reconciliation among all those who consider one another as enemies.
We will accept the challenge of reaching out to young people and of truly valuing their contribution to our work.
The peace we seek is a peace that flows from justice and a commitment to nonviolence. It stems from a recognition of the innate dignity of all creation and of every human person and the autonomous rights of peoples.
We shall continue to exercise our influence as a non-governmental organisation, accredited to the United Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe.
We shall intensify the struggle to achieve universal human rights, including the right to life, health, housing, education, dignified work and basic material needs, giving special attention to the rights of minorities, refugees and migrant people, in the spirit of the beatitudes.
We will also join in the struggle with greater respect for humanitarian law in war situations, as set out in the Geneva conventions and protocols. We will work to free our world from the dominance of socioeconomic forces which are profit driven.
We will support those who work toward socially just, sustainable and ecologically stable development in all parts of the world.
In our efforts to realise our vision we will continue the ongoing discussion within our movement and the world at large around the scriptural and traditional roots of nonviolent resolution of conflicts by means of dialogue, active resistance and reconciliation. Therefore we will strive to ensure a serious scrutiny of the use of limited military force even when the UN Charter appears to allow it.
We will continue to engage in inter-religious dialogue, and intercultural experience as essential ingredients of peacemaking. We recognise the richness of all the great spiritual traditions, and the consequent strength that comes from a vigorous ecumenical dimension. Thus Pax Christi International strongly affirms the need for people of all faiths and good will to work together for peace, justice and the integrity of creation.
We Christians are called to continual conversion and the institutional church herself is in constant need of reform. We will try to ensure that respect is maintained when controversies arise, which stem from our different perspectives and from the rich variety of spiritual gifts. As a faith based movement in an increasingly secularized world, we face the challenge of being open to the needs of all and of bringing them the hope that comes from a Saviour who was crucified and is risen.
We will endeavour to reflect Christ’s love and acceptance of everyone, especially those who for personal, ethnic, sexual, cultural or economic reasons, are often marginalized. This may not make us popular nor numerous, but it is often through the witness of small groups and minorities that change is facilitated.
As we reflect on our first fifty years we recognise that we now face a vast challenge as we embark on the future. May the Holy Spirit give us the wisdom and courage to accept the challenge of peace with hope, with joy and with openness to God’s creative power.
Assisi (Italy), 1995
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