The Religious Wrong

There is a pastor of a Baptist church in Waynesville, N.C., who took it upon himself to excommunicate all church members who will be voting democrat in the 2008 presidential election.

"Repent" or "get out" were the options dictated to any and all left-leaning members of the congregation, no matter their dedication to the church or Christian doctrine.

This incident is an extreme but telling illustration of a misinformed notion held by far too many Americans today: Faith belongs solely to those occupying the right margin of the political spectrum.

The religious right has rewritten the book on faith in the United States, guiding the aim from social justice and reconciliation to judgment and division. The right votes on so-called "moral values," supporting candidates who attack individuals based on a self-conceived moral high ground, but at the same time ignore their own contributions to economic inequality, environmental ruin and encouragement of war through support of hawkish candidates.

According to the Children's Defense Fund, right now in the United States a child is born into poverty every 44 seconds. Every three hours, a child or youth is killed by a gun. Here in the wealthiest nation in the world, every minute, a baby is born without health insurance, and 90 percent of these children live in working families.

There are three million Americans in prison, many of whom are drug addicts serving time but not receiving the help necessary to overcome addiction. In Sudan, innocent people are victims of slaughter, rape, starvation and displacement at the hands of the government-backed Janjaweed.Yet the Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress - the self-appointed stewards of Christianity - have yet to address these issues.

The number of Americans living in poverty has increased every year President Bush has been in office. The same goes for the number of uninsured Americans. Conservatives adhere to the tenet of law enforcement over treatment when it comes to drug offenders despite the fact that most studies show treatment to be more effective, according to the PBS Frontline special "Does Treatment Work."

For the most part, it is liberal America calling attention to these problems and feeling the moral responsibility to bring them to an end. The United States government cannot solve all the problems facing the world nor its individual citizens, and in many instances it should not.

Personal responsibility is a conservative tagline that gets thrown around quite often but is still an important principle to those with other political leanings.

However, the government can and should make life a little easier for the average American - make college tuition affordable for young adults who dream of a better future, ensure that every child receives care when ill, help those trapped in a substance dependence so strong that they cannot lead productive live and guarantee that every soldier who serves his country honorably receives a living standard and healthcare worthy to match his sacrifices.

And when an entire nation such as Sudan is suffering daily due to atrocities sanctioned by its own government, the United States has the moral obligation to condemn those responsible, not sit idly by and remain indifferent.

"Feed the hungry! Help those in trouble! Then your light will shine out from the darkness, and the darkness around you shall be as bright as day," the Bible tells us in Isaiah 58:10. We have the ability to do these things, to reach out to each other and help those in need. To hold this capacity and refuse to act may be our nation's greatest sin.

IF I was to believe in this shit.

Fred Phelps - Closet Fag

I don't care that he's gay.

I care that he's a fucking hypocrite.

A Good Christian Man

Somewhere in the Middle East, Jesus Christ is strapped to a bench, his head wrapped in clingfilm.

He furiously sucks against the plastic. A hole is pierced, but only so that a filthy rag can be stuffed back into his mouth. He is turned upside down and water slowly poured into the rag. The torturer whispers religious abuse. If you are God, save yourself you fucking idiot. Fighting to pull in oxygen through the increasingly saturated rag, his lungs start to fill up with water. Someone punches him in the stomach.

Perhaps this is how we ought to be re-telling the story of Christ's passion. For ever since the cross became a piece of jewelery, it has been drained of its power to sicken. Even before this the Romans had taken their hated instrument of torture and turned it into the logo of a new religion. Few makeovers can have been so historically significant. The very secular cross was transformed into a sort of club badge for Christians, something to be proud of.

Two weeks ago, the most powerful self proclaimed Christian in the world vetoed a bill that would have made it illegal for the CIA to use waterboarding on detainees. "We need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," said George Bush in a passable impersonation of Pontius Pilate. "This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe."

Throughout his time in office, the president has frequently been photographed in front of the cross. Yet as his support for torture demonstrates, he has understood little of its meaning. For the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is supremely a moral story about God's identification with victims.

The story of the crucifixion turns this world on its head. The task of all Christians is to further this kingdom, "on earth as it is in heaven".

Yet, for all his years in office, it is hard to think that bush has done anything much to make this kingdom more of a reality. Instead he has given us rendition, so-called specialised interrogation procedures, and the blood of many thousand innocent Iraqis.

Given all this, what can it possibly mean for George Bush to call himself a Christian?

McNasty And His God

This past week, Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, has taken an exceptional amount of heat in part for comments that suggested the U.S. government had introduced AIDS into black communities.

But let's look at other religious confidants to the presidential candidates.

They are the ones that want to bring their religion to their campaigns.

Reverend Wright's comments seem like the actions of a choirboy in comparison to Hillary Clinton's flavor of Christianity. We explored that dark road a couple of days ago. CLICK HERE

Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio -- whom Sen. John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser -- has suggested on several occasions that the U.S. government was complicit in facilitating black genocide.

In speeches that have gone largely unnoticed, Parsley (who is white) compares Planned Parenthood, the reproductive care and family planning group, to the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis, and describes the American government as enablers of murder for supporting the organization.

"If I were call for the sterilization or the elimination of an entire segment of society, I'd be labeled a racist or a murderer, or at very best a Nazi," says Parsley. "That every single year, millions of our tax dollars are funding a national organization built upon that very goal -- their target: African Americans. That's right, the death toll: nearly fifteen hundred African Americans a day. The shocking truth of black genocide."

He goes on.

"Right now our own government is allowing organizations like Planned Parenthood to legally take the innocent lives of precious baby girls and baby boys and even footing the bill for it all with our tax dollars, turning every single one of us into accessories to murder," he says. "You know who their biggest fans must be, that must be the Klu Klux Klan, because the woman who founded this organization detested black people.... African Americans were number one on Margaret Sanger's list. So this 'Lady MacDeath,' as I like to call her, studied the works of Englishman Thomas Robert Malthus, and embraced his plan of eugenics."

I LOVE IT when these idiots call the termination of an UNBORN FETUS as the "murder of baby boys and baby girls."
Unlike Wright's statements, Parsley's are more accepted in conservative circles, in which a strict anti-abortion sentiment is not only tolerated, but applauded. The asshole Reverend Don Spitz of the "Army of God" (who by the way has threatened my life on several occasions) actually thinks of Eric Robert Rudolf as a fucking hero. (remember him - the serial abortion clinic bomber)

Moreover, as a white pastor expressing anger on behalf of black populations, Parsley's testimony may come off as more sympathetic and less conspiratorial than Wright's.

However, there are issues with Parsley's stats. While black populations in America do have higher abortion rates than white populations, there are far more abortions among white mothers than among blacks. Meanwhile, Sanger, who founded the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood), was an advocate of both birth control and eugenics. And while she did not publicly denounce Nazi Germany's eugenics program, privately she expressed deep concern.

This is the second time that controversial remarks by Parsley have surfaced on the campaign trail. Last week, David Corn of Mother Jones reported that the televangelist "called upon Christians to wage a 'war' against the 'false religion' of Islam with the aim of destroying it."

In late February, McCain attended a rally in Cincinnati, in which the Arizona Republican was praised as a "strong, true, consistent conservative."

Yep. He fits the profile perfectly.

Hillary And HER Religion

Has anyone found it rather odd as to why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright?

When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

For 15 years, Hillary Clinton has been part of a secretive religious group that seeks to bring Jesus back to Capitol Hill.

READ THE ENTIRE MOTHER JONES ARTICLE HERE - CLICK HERE - VERY INFORMATIVE

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka the Family.

Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells" -- their term -- and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, writer Jeff Sharlet joined the Family's home for young men, foreswearing sex, drugs and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners -- alone.

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of right-wing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian.

In the 1940s, the Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration, the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

At the heart of the Family's American branch is a collection of powerful right-wing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, and Rick Santorum. They get to use the Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, the Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by the Family's young women's group. And, at the Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already-powerful.

Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the Senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Sen. George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential spiritual mentors during her White House days, including new age guru Marianne Williamson and the liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family association that stuck.

Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's involvement to the underappreciated depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define the Family's theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worships Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the "meek." They believe that, in mass societies, it's only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God's "dominion" on earth. Insofar as the Family has a consistent philosophy, it's all about power -- cultivating it, building it and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with power where we can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."

Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity Unity Church of Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain -- or, better yet, renounce -- her longstanding connection with the fascist-leaning Family.

A Dose Of Reality

Pretend you're a Hollywood studio exec and you have a pitch meeting with a writer.

He comes in and says: "O.K., let me start with a little back story:

It's the twenty-first century, but still millions and millions of people believe in this invisible super-ghost who lives somewhere way, way up in space, see, and he created the entire universe and saw everything and knew everything that had ever happened or will happen -- like a super giant security camera in the sky. The people who believe in him think of him as a magic helper who protects and watches over them. It's as if Santa Claus worked for the NSA -- He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake and engaged in suspected terrorist activities, etc.

"Yet, even though this ghost has, like, all the super powers of all the superheroes rolled into one, plus other powers that no superhero has even conceived of, and he has hundreds of millions of followers, he is so insecure and possessive that he demands everyone on Earth follow him or else he condemns them to an eternity burning in a nonstop forty-hundred-alarm fire, boiling in lava-like shit and battery acid and other really fiery stuff and being constantly stabbed by devils with pitchforks.

Also, two thousand years ago, he sent his bastard bron out of wedlock son back to Earth to redeem humanity from their wickedness by getting hung on a Cross and, you know, the whole Mel Gibson treatment.

"Now, here's where the story takes off: After two thousand years watching humanity slaughter each other and get really shit-faced and have wild orgies and just, like, slack off, except for a few people that invented stuff or tried to urge people to follow the super-ghost, the son plans to return to Earth from outer space. But before he does, he's going to beam up to heaven all those people who believed in him, levitate them right out of their clothes, wherever they are -- on an airplane, asleep, on the toilet, in the fuckng grave!

"Yeah, corpses and cadavers and ghouls blasting out of the ground! It's Saw Meets Night of the Living Dead with a touch of Superman. I mean, throngs of people filling the sky like locusts -- it's an air traffic controller's nightmare!

"Meanwhile, the people left behind are just freaking out -- I mean, imagine you're on this airplane going to France and suddenly the pilot just disappears! Whoa! Then you look outside and you see like hundreds of naked people whooshing up past you -- I mean, we'll make most of them really bodacious babes, and then throw in an old dude going 'Whoaaaa!' for laughs. And the plane just nosedives. Boom! Planes are crashing -- trains, boats, computers -- it's complete chaos. We see another plane and the pilot suddenly sees all these naked flying people coming right at him and he has to swerve to avoid them and plow! Right into the side of a mountain!

"Cut to a scene where this Mafia wiseguy is about to hit this guy when the guy just flies up into the sky, and the wiseguy is like 'Madon! What the hell?' and he crosses himself.

Huge laugh. And families are broken up and companies have to close because, like the entire sales department just took off ... right through the AC vent!

"Anyway, nobody knows what the hell's going on! We show the news reports and CNN's blaming it on the Muslims and Fox News is blaming it on the liberals. We cut to the White House and the President is chewing out his Cabinet because, like, 'Is this some secret Pentagon weapon? Why wasn't I informed?' Cut to close-up of this pious secretary, and she says, 'Sir, it's the Rapture.' And then the President is like, 'What are we going to do about it?' and some other Cabinet guy goes, 'There's nothing we can do.' And as the Secret Service sweeps the President away to an undisclosed location, where they fill him in on what the Rapture is.

"Then we cut to our hero, Bradley Dunn. He's a physicist and his wife used to believe in the super-ghost but kind of gave it up as a concession to Bradley when they got married because if it got out that she worshipped the super-ghost, Bradley's egghead friends would mock him and he would never get to work on the new super particle-accelerator that's his big dream.

Now she confronts him and like a typical chick says I told you so. And she fills him in on what they're in for, and that by being such a man of science/unbeliever, he's jeopardized both of them, plus their precocious eight-year-old super-nerd son Lared -- it's a combination of Jared and Larry. Never mind. But when they go into Lared's room, they find just his clothes and realize he's been Raptured, and Bradley goes to his wife, 'You were teaching him all this time about the super-ghost?' And she's like, 'Yeah,' and they both realize they've lost their son and they're happy for him but sad and scared for themselves, and it's a big heavy drama moment where he asks her why she hasn't been Raptured and suddenly she vanishes and the audience is, like, 'Was she really there and then disappeared or was he talking to her in, like, his imagination?'

"And that is only the first 20 minutes. In the rest of the movie, the people left behind on Earth are going to suffer a seven-year nightmare of wars, plagues, attacks from supernatural creatures, asteroid collisions, and rivers of blood ..."

Would a Hollywood studio buy that pitch?

Yet as many as a hundred million Americans believe in this story, which is known as the Rapture, a boffo scene they've extracted from the Book of Revelations, the last book of the Bible. The crazy, hallucinogenic, paranoid part. The part with the Apocalypse and its Four Horsemen, the Whore of Babylon, a seven-headed dragon, and a panoply of fantastical creatures and cataclysmic calamities straight out of Lord of the Rings.

This is an excerpt from Jim Gerard's book, Beam Me Up Jesus: A Heathen's Guide to the Rapture.