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 Praying for the ApocalypsePosted on Apr 9, 2007
By Chris Hedges The Gilead Baptist Church, outside Detroit, is on a four-lane highway called South Telegraph Road. The drive down South Telegraph Road to the church, a warehouse-like structure surrounded by black asphalt parking lots, is a depressing gantlet of boxy, cut-rate motels with names like Melody Lane and Best Value Inn. The highway is flanked by a flat-roofed Walgreens, a Blockbuster, discount liquor stores, a Taco Bell, a McDonald’s, a Bob’s Big Boy, Sunoco and Citgo gas stations, a Ford dealership, Nails USA, The Dollar Palace, Pro Quick Lube and U-Haul. The tawdry display of cheap consumer goods, emblazoned with neon, lines both sides of the road, a dirty brown strip in the middle. It is a sad reminder that something has gone terribly wrong with America, with its inhuman disregard for beauty and balance, its obsession with speed and utilitarianism, its crass commercialism and its oversized SUVs and trucks and greasy junk food. It is part of our numbing assault against community and connectedness. Ten or fifteen minutes of negotiating the traffic down South Telegraph Road makes the bizarre attraction of the End Times—the obliteration of this world of alienation, noise and distortion—comprehensible. The manufacturing jobs in the Detroit auto plants nearby are largely gone, outsourced to nations with cheaper labor. The paint is flaking off the cramped two-story houses that lie in ugly grid patterns off the highway. The plagues of alcoholism, divorce, drug abuse, poverty and domestic violence make the internal life here as depressing as the external one. And those gathering today in this church wait for the final, welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast, bloody cleansing that will lift them up into the heavens and leave the world they despise—the one that was devastated by corporatism—to be racked by plagues and flood and fire until it and all those whom they blame for the debacle of their lives are consumed and destroyed by God. It is a theology of despair. And for many, it can’t happen soon enough. The guru of the End Times movement is a small, elderly, gnome-like man with dyed coal-black hair, a battery-powered earpiece and a pedantic, cold demeanor. He is Timothy LaHaye, a Southern Baptist minister and the co-author, along with Jerry Jenkins, of the “Left Behind” series of Christian apocalyptic thrillers that provide the graphic details of raw mayhem and cruelty that God will unleash on all nonbelievers when Christ returns and raptures Christians into heaven. The novels are the best-selling books in America, with over 62 million in print. They have been made into movies, as well as a graphic video game in which teenagers can blow away nonbelievers and the army of the Antichrist on the streets of New York City. The global nightmare that leads to the end of history is a visceral and disturbing expression of what believers feel about themselves and our world. The horror of apocalyptic violence—the final aesthetic of the movement—at once terrifies and thrills followers. It feeds dark fantasies of revenge and empowerment. This theology of despair is empowered by widespread poverty, violent crime, incurable diseases, global warming, war in the Middle East and the threat of nuclear calamity. All these events presage the longed-for obliteration of the Earth and the glorious moment of Christ’s return. But until then believers are told they must battle Satan. And Satan comes in many guises. In churches across the United States believers are being girded for a holy war, one as self-destructive as that preached by radical Islam. “We are at war with the religion of Islam,” Gary Frazier, another popular leader, tells the crowd in the church outside Detroit, “and it is not a handful of radical Islamists who are taking over the religion and hijacking it. The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, today if you read the Koran, and any person who reads their Koran, the holy book of the Muslims, and believes what the book says, over a hundred times it calls for the putting to death of any person that does not embrace the teachings of Mohammed. “Can you explain to me how in the West that we would understand a person who would strap dynamite upon themselves and blow themselves up along with innocent men and women and children with the promise that they would have 70 brown-haired, I mean blond-haired, blue-eyed virgins for their unlimited sexual pleasure in this place called Paradise? And the parents of that person then throw a party celebrating the destruction of their child. You want to tell me you understand that kind of mentality? Because I don’t believe that. There’s no one in the Western world that can comprehend that kind of mind-set, but, ladies and gentlemen, that is the mind-set of the religion of Islam around the world. “Islam,” Frazier says dramatically, “is a satanic religion.” He warns of Muslim “sleeper cells” in America waiting to carry out new terrorist attacks. “You may have a Muslim doctor, and he may be a wonderful person,” he says. “He may love his family, but you know what’ll happen? One day, they will come to him—I’m just using this as an illustration—they will come to him and they’ll say, ‘We have a mission for you, and you will either do as you’re told,’ [or,] and they’ll whip out the pictures, ‘Here are your three children. We’ll send their heads to you in a box.’ Now, the difference is, is that if somebody told you that, you’d call the FBI or Homeland Security or somebody like that. They’re not going to do that. Do you know why? Because they know the Muslim will do just what they say, and when it comes right down to where the rubber meets the road, boys and girls, they’re going to save the lives of their own children before they’ll save your own. And you most likely would probably do the same thing yourselves.” He pauses and slowly scans the crowd, which sits silently, expectantly awaiting his next sentence. “I thank God for our men and women who are fighting over there because if they weren’t fighting there, we’d be fighting right here in the streets of America. I’m convinced of that,” he says, and the sanctuary erupts in loud applause. America, the crowd is told, is being ruled by evil, clandestine organizations that hide behind the veneer of liberal, democratic groups. These clandestine forces seek to destroy Christians. They spread their demonic, secular humanist ideology through front groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the Trilateral Commission and “the major TV networks, high-profile newspapers and newsmagazines,” the U.S. State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the United Nations, “the left wing of the Democratic Party” and Harvard, Yale “and 2,000 other colleges and universities.” All of these groups have joined forces, LaHaye has warned, to “turn America into an amoral, humanist country, ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state.” The radical Christian right has no religious legitimacy. It is a mass political movement. It is interchangeable, in many ways, with other traditional political movements ranging from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty. It also embraces a world of miracles and signs and makes war on rational, reality-based thought. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy. It places a premium on action. It dismisses those who do not bow down before its god—and the leaders who claim to speak for God—as heretics and traitors. This movement shares with corporatists, who are busy cannibalizing our society for profit, the belief that there are a chosen few who know the truth and therefore have the right to impose it. The citizen, the individual, no longer has any legitimacy in this new world. All legitimacy is assumed by groups, whether they are corporate groups herding us over the cliff of globalization or religious groups that give popular vent to corporate-generated despair through faith in the Christian utopia. In this paradigm—corporate and religious—we become disempowered, afraid, passive and easily manipulated. Apocalyptic visions like this one have, throughout history, cowed populations and inspired genocidal killers. They have enticed societies into collective suicide. These visions nourished the butchers who led the Inquisition, the Crusades and the conquistadors who swept through the Americas converting and then exterminating the native population. These visions sustained the SS guards at Auschwitz, the Stalinists who consigned tens of thousands of Ukrainian families to starvation and death, the torturers in the clandestine prisons in Argentina during the Dirty War and the Serbian thugs with heavy machine guns and wraparound sunglasses who stood over the bodies of those they had slain in the smoking ruins of Bosnian villages. Those who promise to purify the world through violence, to relieve the anxiety of moral pollution and despair, appeal to our noblest sentiments, our highest virtues, our capacity for self-sacrifice and our utopian visions of a cleansed world. It is this coupling of fantastic hope and profound despair, along with visions of peace and light and absolute terror, of selflessness and murder, which frees the consciences of those who call for and carry out the eradication of those they have banished from moral consideration. When leaders of this movement, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, sanction, as they do, pre-emptive nuclear strikes against our enemies, and therefore the enemies of God, they fuel the passions of terrorists in love with the same apocalyptic nightmares. They march us to our own doom cheered by the delusion that once the dogs of war, even nuclear war, are unleashed, hundreds of millions will die, but because Christians have been blessed and chosen by God they alone will arise in triumph from the ash heap. In this new world, where those who seek to do us harm will soon have in their hands cruder versions of the apocalyptic weapons we possess, dirty bombs or chemical or biological agents, the vision of those among us who welcome catastrophic warfare, indeed seek to hasten it, who fervently await the apocalypse and the end of time, who believe they will be lifted up into the sky by a returning Christ, forces us all to kneel before the god of death. The prayers these “Christians” near Detroit—and tens of millions across the nation—utter for deliverance and apocalyptic glory only hasten our flight from reality and ensure our self-annihilation. Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School and was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” Previous item: Truthdigger of the Week: Nancy Pelosi Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig.
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By Steve Meikle, April 11, 2007 at 10:27 pm # If this breed of evangelical (for want of a better word, I call them avenge-all-ical) believed that the rapture (I Thessalonians 4:17) happened at the END of the tribulation just as Christ was returning, as I hold, they would know that they would have to go through the creat Crisis at the end of the Age, and would be martyred by the million, (Daniel 7:21) And if they actually interpreted the Bible properly on this issue and expected to go through the tribulation they would not be so cocky about it, nor long to bring it on. It is not the Bible’s fault that they are so gladly twisting it and blaspheming God’s name in the process. This is the trouble, all their noise makes people think that their ranting is what the Bible actually says. It is not. I appeal to you not to reject the Bible because of nonsense from evangelicals of this heretical ilk
By Ben Takin, April 11, 2007 at 2:47 pm # Fear and depression—now all you need is some religion: “Members of ‘Christians United For Israel’ (CUFI) lobby for, among other things, a US or Israeli nuclear attack on Iran they hope will provoke catastrophic war and trigger the ‘Rapture’ of Christians but also kill most Israeli Jews or even most Jews on Earth.”
By Janwillem Vandewetering, April 11, 2007 at 12:05 pm # too late. 6 billion folks on a planet that can, maybe, sustain one billion (which is still too many products of a failed experiment) - does anyone think we will diminish by ourselves? Let’s be patient, a giant wayward heavenly rock is looking at us right now, or some virulent virus. Soon we’ll be gone and forgotten: nothing more to gripe about. And the creation? It will still be mysterious, beautiful, home to future species. Intelligent and self-efacing this time. There’ll be music and advanced technology and beautiful women,animals, dance, mathematics. So this thing here went wrong. So what?
By Zena, April 11, 2007 at 11:26 am # Mr. Hedges reported this man saying: ..."“Can you explain to me how in the West that we would understand a person who would strap dynamite upon themselves and blow themselves up along with innocent men and women and children with the promise that they would have 70 brown-haired, I mean blond-haired, blue-eyed virgins for their unlimited sexual pleasure in this place called Paradise? And the parents of that person then throw a party celebrating the destruction of their child. ...” Yes, I can. And what has he done for America’s children lately? Is there really a difference in those who believe in a GOD of vengence, and those who worship money and power? These Con-Men, these workers of inequity that call themselves ‘Christian’ neglect to mention that they are sending and supporting the soldiers who are willing to sacrifice their lives for Corporate interests, whose main agenda is to grow richer and fatter off the broken backs of poor and suffering Americans. THEIR CHURCHES ARE THE CORPORATIONS THAT ARE THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE ARMS FACTORIES AND OTHER DEALERS OF DEATH. Our Soldiers say they are fighting for Christianity, yet their preachers misrepresent the religion of Christianity. For usury’s sake. No virgins for them. To destroy human rights and violate the Constitution that many Americans still hold dear; which I might add is alot closer to Christianity that True Christians know and love than their vision of death and destruction for the sake and worship of Mammon. It becomes very clear, when we take all the facts and add them up and see there is no more danger to us from those we kill than the ones who are sneaking into our country. These workers of inquity, this Den of thieves cares no more for GOD’S children than does Satan. When a person calls himself a preacher and preaches death and destruction, it’s plain to me what god he is worshipping. No wonder they deny people like me to practice my religion in the way I SEE FIT! And I bet they thank their GOD everyday, that their members don’t read the bible for themselves, for it would mean the end for their evil plans. Christ once overthrew the money-changer’s tables. And I believe he can do it again. “Those who diggeth a ditch for others, shall fall into it themselves.”
By GrannyGeese, April 11, 2007 at 11:03 am # One day, a block was cleared, construction crews moved in and what promised to be a monstrous building began to emerge from the mounds of dirt and noise of construction equipment. Was it going to be a new Wal-Mart? An Auditorium of some sort ... what? Community members descended on City Hall demanding to know why there had been no public hearing on this monstrous new Sports Arena or Wal-Mart, or whatever that was coming to City Center. Only to find there had been, but nobody had showed up. Apparently nobody cared that there would be a new Church in town. But they care now. Easter Sunday, “members” of the new congregation stood in the road and stopped traffic for the 45 minutes it took to empty their Church parking lot. Cars and trucks were backed up into the next town and up the freeway exit, and a lot of folks are hopping mad! This kind of complete indifference to the reality of “others” around them seems to be a hallmark of these Mega-churches. Perhaps it is motivated by a feeling of desperation and hopelessness. But that’s not what it looks like! It looks like plain old-fashioned selfishness. This building is so huge and so glitzy, if it weren’t for the cross on top you really would think it was some sort of “for fun and profit” super center. [But then, maybe that’s exactly what it is, the profit part anyway.] This building has a name I can not recognize or identify with the handful of wealthy and traditional Christian organizations. But does have that cross on top. This community is not big enough to fill that building, so obviously thousands of people came from all over the area Sunday to fill it up. Which tells me the following. This church is doing a lot of area “marketing” to bring the numbers in. The building was funded by person or persons with a lot of money and more than likely a personal agenda. And, the building was designed to appeal to the person attracted by glitter and glitz and the in-your-face flaunting of wealth. OK, I’m the first to admit I haven’t been inside and I don’t know the gist of their message. But, I’ll bet it’s pretty similar to the message blared on the Holy Roilers TV channels 24/7. Gold chairs. Dyed wigs. Velvet clothes. Precious gems and precious medals. And a clear message. Send me money and I will send you to heaven. [Following the great destruction of everybody else, of course, particularly those folks in the Middle East.] Carefully wrapped in Gods word, hate in the name of love. Perhaps the obvious success of packing them into this new Church reflects a feeling of desperation and hopelessness in the population, but that’s not what it looks like. It looks like a lot of people need to be surrounded by the trappings of wealth. Need to see the lights and the noise and the glitz to feel comfortable. And most important need to be part of a huge crowd elevating wealth and opulence in the name of God. And, pushing around the other’s.
By lawright, April 11, 2007 at 7:14 am # I’m two-thirds of the way through Chris Hedges book “American Fascists.” Raised in rural upstate NY, I attended a fundamentalist Baptist church, a liberal Congregationalist church, a moderate Methodist church, and a Unitarian church. (Woo hoo!) What I am getting from Chris Hedges’ book is something very important-- that in a democracy, we do not have to tolerate the intolerant. The rampant hypocrisy of hard-over religious types is legendary--how many church scandals have become public? In my little life, there were scandals in almost every church I attended! Pastors who stole from the collection plate! Leering preachers, cheating, spouse swapping preachers, gay folks jumping out of the closet after preaching for years how sinful gays are. There was even a cross-dressing gay man who left his family to live with his lover after participating for over a decade in the church and with a missionary daughter--in my small town! It would all be quite funny if these warped people didn’t have power--but they do. Jimmy Carter, a few years back, rang some alarm bells about eschatology and the end days folks who want to bring it on. His worries have been justified. But the people in power who believe they can create their own reality need to be forced to succomb to a higher power-- the rational American public. We need to step up or keep getting stomped on. I’ve seen a lot of
By Steve Meikle, April 11, 2007 at 1:27 am # The ghastly caricature of Biblical prophecy the author here presents is not entirely his fault, for it is a ghastly caricature that the followeres LaHaye and his ilk luxuriate in. But it is still a ghastly caricature, an egregious straw man fallacy. And of course Mr Hedges totally misses the possibility that one can believe the literal scriptures as the inspired word of God and still be opposed to the Religious Right. As such therefore his piece only contributes to the hatred and the mutual incomprehension, for he only encourages the Religious Right in their error with his own misrepresentations of Biblical Endtime prophecy as a doctrine of despair. The issue is too important for such poor thought as this
By Akwekon, April 11, 2007 at 12:54 am # There has been some incredible studies done on this Right Wing Authoritarians and the Religious Right. Everyone should read Bob Altemeyer’s - The Authoritarians. You can find it free, at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
By Finii, April 10, 2007 at 10:39 pm # The hate they hold is so strong they cannot see the truth. http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports.html
By Finii, April 10, 2007 at 10:06 pm # The hate you hold is so strong you cannot see the truth.Once you know the truth, there is no doubt who are the criminals and murderers. We Bosnian paid the price just for being Muslims. Yes, 250.000 slaughter and 50.000 raped Muslim Women bay Christian Serbs and Croatians.
By Kol Klink, April 10, 2007 at 4:59 pm # Re: Doug Tarnopol, Tao Walker I believe Doug would be correct to call for a mobilization of a ‘grass roots’ movement to combat the forces of right wing christians if curcumstances were ‘normal’; ie, if America faced a threat such as a Hitler or a Stalin with no looming mitigating circumstances. In the very short run we do face a fascist christian threat but the right wing christians will not have the time that they need to carry out a complete fascist take over of our government. Notice the word ‘complete’ for they have already made progress in that direction. Their efforts will be overwhelmed by much larger events lurking on the near horizon. Global warming, peak oil, resource wars, and a great die off of the human species will utterly destroy the fascist christians, or most of them, and any ambitions that they have on gaining complete political power. Any fascists left after the destruction of humanity as we know it in industrialized and so called first world societies will perhaps create a new threat to the remainder of humanity, but that is for the remainder of humanity to deal with. I see no need for me or anyone else to go out and mobilize against these christian nuts. Mother Earth is going to take care of them in short order. I understand Tao Walkers desire to remove himself and the rest of us from the ‘pressure cooker’ in order to get a better perspective on what the problems of ‘civilization’ are and what we might do to remedy them. He would like to see all of us be able to exit this catastrophy that we lable civilization all together and alltogether. So would I. I would also like to ‘reach out of the pressure cooker and turn down the heat.’ Unfortunately I dont have that capability and I dont see that happening. There are not enough rational people to counter the onslaught of ditto heads of all stripe. In about 1955 the brilliant scientist and writer Fred Hoyle made an observation that has remained with me over many years. He said that we have about a 200 year supply of raw materials to use in any manner that we see fit. He reccomended that we use them to perfect a means to get off this world and start colonies on other worlds. This was quite a startaling recommendation if you consider when he made it. No man had yet orbited the earth. The raw materials contained in the earth are a one time find for us, once gone, they will not be replaced. Of course, we have disregarded what Dr Hoyle and other rational thinkers have advocated. We have squandered our resources on wars, suvs, and all manner of other useless material items. At the same time we have created ‘overshoot’ of the Earth’s human population. The earth cannot support 6 1/2 billion people indefinitely. The subject of population control is taboo in almost every religion and culture but it is the main reason for the monumental problems that we now face.
By Lefty, April 10, 2007 at 3:42 pm # Re: #63102 by Kol Klink on 4/10 at 6:29 am “I admire Mr Hedges work but when it is placed in the larger context of what is going on in the world I cannot help but ask myself ‘why sweat the small stuff?’” “We humans now number 6 billion and counting. The earth will support about 2 billion people without the long tail supply of big agribusiness. To sustain its food production big ag needs huge quantities of chemical fertilizers made from natural gas and equally huge quantities of pesticides made from petroleum. Both natural gas and petroleum are growing scarcer. The discovery of new oil deposits peaked in 1963. Peak oil is real and that is the main reason that we are in Iraq. Any supply disruption of natural gas or petroleum will be accompanied by disruptions in world food production (not to mention the accompanying destruction of world economies). As if this were not bad enough we are facing the problem of global warming which will cause a monumental battle for remaining resources, especially water.” But, you can’t just leave me hanging. Tell me, to what use can I put my newly discovered “utilitarian” bible?
By Lefty, April 10, 2007 at 3:31 pm # Re: #62977 by John Lowell on 4/09 at 10:51 am “Hedges laments: ““It is a sad reminder that something has gone terribly wrong with America, with its inhuman disregard for beauty and balance, its obsession with speed and utilitarianism, its crass commercialism and its oversized SUVs and trucks and greasy junk food.”” “America’s obsession with utilitarianism? And this from Hedges? Fascinating.” “Now I can’t be sure I’m assessing Hedges fairly on this point, but a fellow with his denominational sympathies and the type of revisionist theology he was likely spoon-feed at Harvard Divinity School, I’d bet dollars to donuts that he’s an enthusiatic proponent of embryonic stem-cell research. What say, Chris? And you’re moralizing about “America’s obsession with utilitarianism”? If I’m right about you, you can spare us at least your personal complaints about utilitarianism. You wouldn’t be entitled to them.” John Lowell
By Lefty, April 10, 2007 at 3:09 pm # Hedges said: “. . . This theology of despair is empowered by widespread poverty, violent crime, incurable diseases, global warming, war in the Middle East and the threat of nuclear calamity. All these events presage the longed-for obliteration of the Earth and the glorious moment of Christ’s return. But until then believers are told they must battle Satan. And Satan comes in many guises. In churches across the United States believers are being girded for a holy war, one as self-destructive as that preached by radical Islam. . . . Apocalyptic visions like this one have, throughout history, cowed populations and inspired genocidal killers. They have enticed societies into collective suicide. These visions nourished the butchers who led the Inquisition, the Crusades and the conquistadors who swept through the Americas converting and then exterminating the native population. These visions sustained the SS guards at Auschwitz, the Stalinists who consigned tens of thousands of Ukrainian families to starvation and death, the torturers in the clandestine prisons in Argentina during the Dirty War and the Serbian thugs with heavy machine guns and wraparound sunglasses who stood over the bodies of those they had slain in the smoking ruins of Bosnian villages. Those who promise to purify the world through violence, to relieve the anxiety of moral pollution and despair, appeal to our noblest sentiments, our highest virtues, our capacity for self-sacrifice and our utopian visions of a cleansed world.”
By Maire, April 10, 2007 at 10:43 am # I was in Godspell when I was in high school. For some reason, whenever I read about these people and their agenda of annihilation, I hear Godspell lyrics in my head. Originally referring to the Pharisees, suddenly they’ve taken on a whole new meaning for me. From “Alas for You”: Blind guides
By Blueshift, April 10, 2007 at 8:27 am # I am a Christian, consider myself evangelical - and liberal. I share the fears Hedges has about the wack side of the phenomenon that passes itself off as Christianity, because the leaders are truly scary and the followers are massively ignorant. But he doesn’t describe all or even most) Christians....just the nazistic leaders who have money, broadcasting power, and ignorant masses to follow them. I have successfully deprogrammed several (OK, four) of these lemminglike followers, generally by asking them to quote (or show me) the biblical passages that justify their position. Most will admit they have never read their Bibles....and once they do, most come to the same conclusion that I have. Jesus would not recognize the religion, moral values or the practices that claim to represent him. Instead of diagramming Revelation into an implausible and utterly absurd timeline, they may choose to read it for what it is: a warning for the faithful to remain faithful in tough times. They may understand that Christ did indeed return in the apostles lifetimes (the apostles themselves missed it, just 50 days after the resurrection the Holy Spirit infused the church making it the body of Christ...they ARE trinitarians are they not? The Holy Spirit is Christ, as in Father = Son = Holy Spirit.). I could go on. But basically I have this message for Chris Hedges: the Bible warns of ‘those who think they will be heard for their many words.’ Use fewer words and less complex arguments. You might actually deprogram a few of the uneducated masses yourself. These are the people you MUST reach.
By Kol Klink, April 10, 2007 at 6:29 am # I admire Mr Hedges work but when it is placed in the larger context of what is going on in the world I cannot help but ask myself ‘why sweat the small stuff?’
By Joe R., April 9, 2007 at 8:49 pm # After watching Pat Robertson one can kind of see why King Harrod beheaded John the Baptist.
By 2224612, April 9, 2007 at 6:31 pm # These thugs want the apocalypse so they can be off to heaven with their savior. Fine. I am glad I will be “left behind.” I certainly do not want to spend “eternity” (whatever that is) in their company. I quite willingly recognize that when I die, that is the end of whatever I now am.
By Hugh E. Scott, April 9, 2007 at 2:24 pm # Once again last Saturday, Born-again Bush made his evangelical mindset clear by calling the Iraq conflict a “war against evil.” So I looked up the operative term on the Internet. One source said evil referred to the “morally objectionable aspects of human behavior and reasoning which are deliberately void of conscience and show a wanton penchant for destruction.” To me, that sounds like Shrub the Charlatan, not just terrorists. Hugh E. Scott, editor of http://www.King-George.biz—the only website with hardcopy proof of White House corruption.
By john, April 9, 2007 at 1:08 pm # as i was riding my bike to work (for environmental reasons) i was flipped off by someone driving an SUV. i must have been slowing them down. it then occurred to me that the belief in hell, eternal damnation, is a very egotistical position. it would have been easy for me to say, well that person is going to hell, because i’m right and they’re wrong. but practicing living in the Now and loving your enemy, doesn’t mean love them and envision them going to hell. i don’t believe in hell, i think it was invented by the morally “upright” who needed to know that they would be rewarded and their enemies would be damned.
By rowdy, April 9, 2007 at 12:53 pm # i look forward to thermonuclear annihilation as much as the right wing KKKristians do. my reasons are quite different. this is the best way to rid the world of these fools. most of them don’t realize that their basic beliefs have nothing to do with the bible. the most extreme idiocy put forth by these fools is based on 18th and 19th century madness written by men trying to reconcile their own beliefs with contradictory passages in the bible. tax the church, this is the only step that can be taken to slow down this kind of madness. the founding fathers, those fatuous old rich white men,who didn’t want to pay their taxes to king george, had no way of knowing that some day religion would become corporatised and have world wide influence.
By 911truthdotorg, April 9, 2007 at 12:37 pm # How anyone can still possibly believe that bush is a conservative “Christian” boggles my mind! The man is pure evil. The anti-christ. He was involved with 9/11 as the pre-text to push Google video: 9/11 Press for Truth Open your eyes and minds to 9/11 Truth!
By writeon, April 9, 2007 at 12:17 pm # These groups are scary, growing in influence and they are on the move, but I don’t think we need to despair. If we “rationalists” must gird ourselves for “battle” then we need to remain optimistic and positive, otherwise we might as well role over now. The very fact of fighting the good fight against these dark forces give purpose and meaning to our lives, no matter the outcome, and nothing is written in stone. What characterizes these movements is their need for a charasmatic leader and their reliance on his authority. These leaders usually have a deadly flaw, which sooner or later reveals itself and the whole ghastly edifice of their power begins to crumble and shatter. Remember Maoism and the tens of millions of Red Guards waving their littl red books and chanting for the destruction of the West? Well, at the time they seemed frightening, like a tide ready to engulf us, now where are they, who remembers them? All I’m saying is that times change and so do people. However, the United States is entering a difficult period of adjustment, moving from an era of ease and plenty and indulgence, towards scarcity and scrifice. How will America react to this new world? Will it accept that change is inevitable, or will it rail against the times, and strike out in anger, and fall prey to the ravings of the anti-christ?
By Hugh E. Scott, April 9, 2007 at 12:14 pm # Once again |
Newsroom Carnage Continues at The Washington Post
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