Rise of the Radical Religious Right-(Read it first, b4 you decide to lynch me)

....This is a joke right?.....There are fewer Christians in the nation now than at any time in the past....leave the poor Christians alone...and dont you realize that about 40% of Christians are Democrats?

a reply to: mOjOm

They are systematically making a bad name for Christians--who as far as I've ever known ALWAYS preach to love one another and to practice forgiveness. These radicals are delusional and are doing rather evil things, which I find very disturbing. Good to know that others have noticed as well.

Am on the outside looking in on this one as I'm not from America so have no idea what its like to live there but it seems like although Christian fundamentalists may be proportionately small in comparison to the general population; they appear to be incredibly vocal and wield an inordinate amount of lobbying power. A lot was made of them almost driving Dubya's foreign policy decisions, whether that was just empty appeasement to cultivate a voter base or not I don't know.

originally posted by: GeisterFahrer
We all know what the "secret" agenda of the left is.

Subversion of Constitutional Rights. We have seen the assault on the 2nd Amendment, the 1st Amendment and the 4th Amendment by the current Administration. Should the "unknown secrets" of the left be exposed?

To paraphase:

WE all know what the 'secret' agenda of the right is.

Subversion of Constitutional Responsibilites.

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: NightSkyeB4Dawn
I think 5% is a high number for the average American Christian. They are just not extreme enough to get out of the bed on Sunday, so I don't see them as being much of a threat.

All very true. I just do not think people really understand the true magnitude that a religion like Islam plays into the livs of people. This is a religion that they live 24/7 in every waking moment. Every act they do is connect to their religion and is deeply embedded in their culture, and as you said an hour on Sunday is a big deal in America and about the best we do...lol

There are likely more secular (non-reglious or just obsevant in public) as there are secular Christians.

a reply to: MagnaCarta2015

A lot was made of them almost driving Dubya's foreign policy decisions, whether that was just empty appeasement to cultivate a voter base or not I don't know.

They are pretty powerful in D.C. Huge lobbyists. And more than a couple of them are in office already - even running for POTUS.

The governor of my state is one of them.
Dominionism Theology. It's more widespread than people want to admit.

originally posted by: Awen24
Here, let me fix that for you:

originally posted by: aethertek

remember Catholocism was forced on our people at sword point.

Nothing was fixed, you merely conveyed that the robe wearers aren't your sect of choice.
This vile philosophy of slavery & willful ignorance was never meant for the northern peoples.
It was forced on the Europeans at sword point, even this "high holy" christmas was an appropriation.
Stolen from the Yule traditions to help ease the transition to the goat humping sand sucking slavery teaching silliness that is the abrahamic religions.

K~

a reply to: rukia

Yes , I agree. And to the author of the thread , I would venture to say they aren't true Christians. A true follower of Christ does not adhere to the right nor left politics of any given Christian sect. Certainly not the ones you describe. Hopefully people can get to meet one some day , to break that stereotype . A person who is a sincere and true follower of Christ , and those are the ones that would live the example Christ taught , and no other agenda or politics would interfere with how they believed and lived their faith in Christ. they would not be judgmental , demonizing the poor or affiliate with the terse and extremes you described . You would probably like one if you met one. They are kind , loving , giving , and compassionate.. humble and helpful. Not the preachy , self righteous prideful people you described... those are just people claiming to be Christian , but not living it and far , far from behaving or being an example of any kind , like Christ taught and showed us . Not all Christians are like the stereotypical 'Christians' that most secular people have in their mind , and have learned to identify as "Christian". There are some , that hear what they are taught by their own careful study of the the scriptures and through prayer... not what the current status quo is from the Church they attend . The hypocrites the Lord will weed out .. it will be harder and harder to be a Christian or associate with that name.. and if your faith is founded on hypocrisy , and judgment of others ,and not doing as Christ did , you will not have a strong integrity or testimony to fall on when things get very bad for the name of Christ .

2003 ?

A lot has changed since 2003.

I hardly see today's Republican politicians as any where near radically religious, now or in 2003,look at Trump.

Then there is this,

Will Franklin Graham Lead an Evangelical Exodus From the GOP?
Franklin Graham announced this week he was leaving the Republican Part

www.thedailybeast.com...

Naw, I could hardly call them radical even back in my day.

About as radical as the majority of Christians get is saying merry Christmas.

a reply to: Stormdancer777

2003 ?

A lot has changed since 2003.

Yep! It sure has!!

I hardly see today's Republican politicians as any where near radically religious, now or in 2003

But, they are.
They have gotten even more powerful since 2003.

a reply to: FyreByrd

Jeff Sharlet. Yes, his books, incredible reads. From an article by him Sex and power inside “the C Street House”

If sexual license was all the Family offered the C Street men, however, that would merely be seedy and self-serving. But Family men are more than hypocritical. They’re followers of a political religion that embraces elitism, disdains democracy, and pursues power for its members the better to “advance the Kingdom.” They say they’re working for Jesus, but their Christ is a power-hungry, inside-the-Beltway savior not many churchgoers would recognize.
.....
The Family likes to call itself a “Christian Mafia,” but it began 74 years ago as an anti-New Deal coalition of businessmen convinced that organized labor was under the sway of Satan. The Great Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for what they viewed as FDR’s socialism. The Family’s goal was the “consecration” of America to God, first through the repeal of New Deal reforms, then through the aggressive expansion of American power during the Cold War. They called this a “Worldwide Spiritual Offensive,” but in Washington, it amounted to the nation’s first fundamentalist lobby
........
One needn’t be a Marxist to find fault with the Family’s mash-up of New Testament and unfettered capitalism — Adam Smith himself would have recognized that theology as a disingenuous form of self-interest by proxy. Such interests have led the Family into some strange alliances over the years. Seduced by the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s militant anti-communism, they described the murder of hundreds of thousands that brought him to power as a “spiritual revolution,” and sent delegations of congressmen and oil executives to pray to Jesus with the Muslim leader. In Africa, they anointed the Somali killer Siad Barre as God’s man and sent Sen. Grassley and a defense contractor as emissaries. Barre described himself as a “Koranic Marxist,” but he agreed to pray to Grassley’s American Christ in return for American military aid, which he then used to wreak a biblical terror on his nation. It has not yet recovered. More recently, the Family has paid for congressional Christian junkets to bastions of democracy such as Serbia, Sudan, Belarus, Albania, Macedonia and Musharraf’s Pakistan.

a reply to: BuzzyWigs

Yes. And Dominionism is alive and well in 2015...

Ted Cruz: Born From The Heart of the Dominionist Christian Right

As I covered in 2013, Cruz' ties to the dominionist Christian right are deeply woven into Senator Cruz' life story [see: Ted Cruz Worked With Religious Right Founder Paul Weyrich, To Elect George W. Bush (Talk To Action)]; and so frequent public appearances by Ted and Rafael Cruz, onstage with leaders from the most extreme factions of the Christian right, must be viewed in this context, that Cruz and his father have been close to the leadership heart of the movement which has since the late 1970s given America its notorious culture wars [see: Video: Ted Cruz Anointed by Antigay, Pro-Religious War Pastors (Huffington Post), and Ted Cruz's Father Suggested His Son Is 'Anointed' to Bring About 'End Time Transfer of Wealth' (Alternet).]
......
During the Reagan years, Christian conservatives, bearing a covert, revolutionary pro-privatization, anti-government agenda that would be quite familiar to today's Tea Party flooded into government; Under George W. Bush, that influx resumed, and the Overton Window was further shoved towards religious supremacy as dual Bush initiatives - both the Faith Based Initiative but also George W. Bush's far-less noticed PEPFAR program and simultaneous shift of US foreign aid money to conservative evangelical charities, redirected billions of federal dollars towards the partisans of the Christian and religious right. Both initiatives continue to this day and help enable the movement to thrive and, beyond American shore, expand.

And the members of the Cruz family, Ted and Rafael, helped make that possible.

originally posted by: MagnaCarta2015
A lot was made of them almost driving Dubya's foreign policy decisions, whether that was just empty appeasement to cultivate a voter base or not I don't know.

It was appeasement, but, even bigger, Bush used their "End Times" belief to garner support for his Iraq War. I don't know how many times I saw "Middle East expert" Mike Evans interviewed on tv in the run up to Iraq. He was always the "Middle East expert", never being identified as a leader in the religious End Times prophecy movement.

End Times as a Growth Industry

Among Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists, belief in the literal meaning of Biblical prophecy and discussions about the contemporary signs of the end times are considered unremarkable. In 1993 a national poll found that 20 percent of the US population thought the second coming of Christ would occur near the year 2000. During the Gulf War, 14 percent of respondents in another national poll thought the conflict might signal the end times battle of Armageddon prophesied in the Bible's Book of Revelation. According to academic Philip Lamy, during the Gulf War, "American bookstores were experiencing a run on books about prophecy and the end of the world."

a reply to: desert

Exactly. I've posted many times about them....
strangely (or perhaps not so odd after all), many nominal Christians deny that they exist, or that they have anything to do with government.

It seems to blow a fuse in some synapse when they are presented with the information.
The article in the OP very astutely states what I've noticed on my own.

ISIS is not dissimilar, just more violent.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: GeisterFahrer

Just an FYI...

There is no left in the States. The United States of America, as has been previously demonstrated, wouldn't know a socialist program if it jumped up and kicked them full in the sack. Your left out there, is our right over here, and since European systems established the paradigm, it is not the poorly understood miasma that is US politics, that gets to be the benchmark for left and right, but the politics of an older group of nations and states, Europe.

This... a million times over. If only the people in the United States did a little bit of reading and studying history without their very narrow red-white-&-blue lens, there would be a lot greater understanding of where we are as a country, how we got here, and potentially, where we are going. This comment will fall on deaf ears though, but keep pushing, it can only help to be heard. The way the US redefines terms is in of itself agenda driven, and for the most part those that take part in the redefining don't even know they've been completely guided to do so.

originally posted by: okrian

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: GeisterFahrer

Just an FYI...

There is no left in the States. The United States of America, as has been previously demonstrated, wouldn't know a socialist program if it jumped up and kicked them full in the sack. Your left out there, is our right over here, and since European systems established the paradigm, it is not the poorly understood miasma that is US politics, that gets to be the benchmark for left and right, but the politics of an older group of nations and states, Europe.

This... a million times over. If only the people in the United States did a little bit of reading and studying history without their very narrow red-white-&-blue lens, there would be a lot greater understanding of where we are as a country, how we got here, and potentially, where we are going. This comment will fall on deaf ears though, but keep pushing, it can only help to be heard. The way the US redefines terms is in of itself agenda driven, and for the most part those that take part in the redefining don't even know they've been completely guided to do so.

Ah, the redefining of terms you say?

Like .. for example ... "marriage"?

There are many American's who do a little bit of "reading" and "studying history". I understand that our rejection of the King, was a rejection of Europe. It was a rejection of the King appointing himself as head of the church. That is kind of important to study when trying to subvert freedom of religion, indirectly, while attacking a very specific segment of religious Americans directly.

a reply to: mOjOm

In addition to what you quote, I'd add that many Catholic fundamentalists quietly grew up in numbers and strength. Practically they deny any significant reform done in Vatican 2 Council and through the reign of popes St John 23, Paul 6, StJP2, Benedict, and now Francis. Some of those "strictly catholic circles" who have their loudspeaker websites and even TV online, do not hesitate to assume the pope might be connected to the antichrist, if not being he himself. That is a dangerous trend in the Catholic Church that is a host predominantly of moderate Catholics worldwide who do not understand, know or care of the fundamental attempt of takeover the leading positions.

If such fundamentals capture the throne of Peter, they would have returned the inquisition. Thanks God, the jeusit pope Francis promotes pretty much the opposite agenda. More is needed to be done, but frankly I do not see how a 79 ill pope will find the strength to do it with all passive defiance of bishops. He has his chance though, being the last in the list of Malachi, to do what is considered impossible by some, and to return the Catholic Church at the helm of world history, to repair centuries old errors and crimes, Let give one only example, the burning of the monk Giordano Bruno, for his claim that there are many other worlds (stars) in the Universe as ours created by God. By now, he should have been reinstated and canonized. Because now we encounter exactly that with our most modern telescopes - thousands of new planets capable of supporting life. The Contact is a matter of time (if it didn't happen yet). 7 min

The Catholic Church has obligation towards its people as well as towards the rest of the world to tell us the truth. Good if it makes it in the 11th hour. If it does not, the truth will make its way, using other consecrated persons, perhaps some of them part of the Catholic church. But we will never see again the structure established centuries ago, that was never referred in the Gospel by Jesus. Isn't it better the Catholic church leaders to come to their sense and to explain to us EZEKIEL ONE the extraterrestrial presence? Is it a sin, is it contrary to any dogma? The inertia of centuries is strong, but may be the survival instinct and demand of Jesus himself "go to the entire Universe" is even stronger. For some.

I am sure the next successor of Peter will do much bolder and will cancel archaic rules from Day 1, will recognize the extraterrestrial brothers from Day 1, and many other things. But he may not be strictly the next pope, there might not be next pope at all. If we encounter multi-world reality, partial destruction of Rome, and disintegration of today's structures. A pope from one planet may not be willing to obey another pope from another planet. Let start talking of galactic Christianity because this is the only survival mode of the Church of Jesus Christ, in the apparent absence of His Glorious Second Coming, reserved for the Ends of the Universe.


P.S. let those cardinals who find those ideas fruitful, start finally speaking. They are old people, they shouldn't be afraid of the transition called death. They should be afraid of the mass murder of christians around the world, presented as "voluntary sacrifice" and in fact a massacre comparable to the holocaust but much bigger in scope, that the nuclear and other weapons/natural disasters would bring. It is strange how they stay quiet in the perspective of such end game, willing to sacrifice not themselves, as Jesus did, but their millions flocks. That is not the position of the Good Pastor.

Let see what "Il Papa Buono" St John 23 allegedly wrote in his diary. He wrote of personal encounter with extraterrestrials. On another occasion, George Adamski presented him with a cup of liquid medicine (extraterrestrial ) capable of curing his advanced cancer of stomach. He refused to be healed and died in Christ, to be canonized several decades later by pope Francis. Now his legacy remains. We need the full truth, not only internet leaks. Those responsible for hiding the truth will be judged by the next generation of survivals.

Because today's children who are already on survival mode, on extraterrestrial mode if you will, with movies like Star Wars and the rest movies, will see a number of their classmates abandoned and ultimately dead by whatever catastrophic scenario is prepared to us (nuclear war or mega natural catastrophe). They will know they survived not thanks to, but against the odds of absurd advises reseived by elderly religious. They will know their classmates could have been saved too. There won't be ANY gratitude in History when it comes to judge the early 21st century, for those in position now, who let it go year after year, who didn't tell us the truth to prepare, and practically let us die off en masse, for their sinister goals. God is not man-killer, Satan is, said St John the beloved disciple of Jesus.

Let make it clear my personal position about all that: I do not want to be any successor of pope Francis and do not write all of those posts as preparing an election platform. If someone thinks like that of me, that is absurd, having in mind I am nobody in the catholic hierarchy.

What I want, upon the arrival of the ET angelic forces, is to assure for myself and my loved ones secure shelter from earth for the time being, and continuation of family probably on another planet.

In regard to the matters discussed here and in other threads, what I want to inspire is more, not less, people including religious to start writing about that. It is strange no cardinal ever took a stance on ET while the pope speaks about, although rare. Do they wait the first Contact -first? Then it will be too late. When you have massive landings of shuttles and hovering giant craft over cities. Let notice also, that They already read all our communications including my writings and yours. So hypothetically (because I don't know how They think) they know what level of awareness the humanity and its individual members have reached to. That matters for them, even only 10 people think on similar ideas. If my awareness helps others, if it counts for the level needed up there, I will be satisfied. I receive no money for what I am doing, and I am doing it ad hoc. That ma stop the moment ET come, because I hope to join them at that moment and to bring my efforts to theirs, as probably many thousand people from all over the world will do at that moment. Perhaps new perspectives for offering better way to humanity will arise at that time. If the ET have a need of these volunteers, I will agree to help the ET to help humanity to get out of the mess it entered voluntarily all those centuries. That's about my personal involvement.

It is a pity there aren't many more volunteers who would say similar desires from their own perspectives. It is a pity there aren't cardinals (as highest clergy that has free action) among them. They wait, ...what? 3 years with baptizing Martians phrase of pope Francis, were good time for reflection, but apparently not enough. People were not ready? Clergy and politicians are those who are not ready. People are more ready than the common reader assumes, having all the recent Sci-Fi movies and books, and the children are generally much more ready than their parents. That's why I say, if the Churches don't answer now to the demand to speak the truth, tomorrow will be too late - we will simply have another source of information coming directly and ultimately from God, not hindered for centuries by human interests. We may have the entire Gospel 33 year filmed 3D every word of Jesus Christ pronounced on planet Earth. 33 years long....but surely there will be shorter versions for several hours


Because the tread is about the fundamentalists, those people will deny everything as coming straight from the pit of satan with its earthy /ET representatives. Too pity! I will not try to "convert" those people into a different worldview. They have already sealed their personal choices and try to impose them to others, sometimes using Machiavelli's "the cause justifies the means". Perhaps upon arrival of ET in the first PUBLIC contact (and I stress Public because they may have arrived 20-30 years ago in secret), those fundamentalists from all Christian churches and outside, will try to demonstrate and then to retreat from the "coming antichrist" who will be empowered from the "dark forces from other stars/galaxies that we cannot resist except by going into wilderness". They will call in mind Revelation 12 the flee of the Woman. Forgetting that the Flee the real one, is preceded by the rapture of the manchild, event never happened yet, and then by the war in heaven/galaxies, event also never happened as far as we have not see n it (even if they have that war over there). Only then satan is cast down to earth, in the form of dragon/draconians, and beast of iron (is it the transformers, don't know). Paradoxically, by withdrawing from the world and from the possibility to be saved with the arrivals of God's angels - ET, the fanatics from all religions will conveniently gather in the wilderness, expecting the earth changes to fall upon them. If they survive, they may expect the next scene that I just described. Ironically, running out of God's ET-angels, they will rush into the laps of exactly the enemies of God - the cruel aliens who will come next after some predetermined time period. But now that is all closed for the fundamentals, who do not want even remotely and theoretically to discuss the presence of ET civilizations out there, with some of them, most of them, being on God's service not for millenia, but for millions of years. (Universe is pretty older).I cannot help but turn towards those who can still be saved. And those are our youngsters who would prefer to believe a movie than outdated lecture of grandfather or priest who will call "falen angel" everything that flies beyond the atmosphere and is not "ours". I guess the new generation is capable of making its own choice and it will be a better choice than that of the old generations.

a reply to: Rapha

Dying by the sword looks pretty good compared to being reduced to a money sucking corpse waiting to happen in some hospital bed.
THOU shalt not MURDER is the correct wording of the commandment, and is what was meant, it was changed later.

originally posted by: GeisterFahrer

I do like your cute attempt to somehow ridicule what I have said as if I am somehow part of a lynch mob. I have seen an increased level of paranoia growing from the left - I think Trump scares you guys.

I'm not ridiculing you. It's your tactics. I'm neither "part of the left" nor am I paranoid. Also I don't see how Trump is even part of this conversation. Pay attention.