Some Americans are uncomfortable when their secular neighbors warn of the threat of American theocracy from the activists Religious Right. They say that no Christian would ever try to impose religion on anyone else. They say that theirs is a religion of peace, and that we progressives need to learn to accomodate ourselves to the language and beliefs of the Religious Right. They say that mixing religion into politics is a good, healthy thing.
Take a look at the consequences of mixing religion and politics, and then you can be the judge.
Two days ago, at a gathering of activists from the Religious Right entitled Justice Sunday III, Reverend Herbert Lusk of the Greater Exodus Baptist Church in North Philadelphia shouted out the following message to an audience that gave applause in response:
“I want to say, first of all, be careful how you fool with the church. You mess around with the church, something stirs up inside of me! You be careful because the church has surviving power. My friends, you know this and know this well. Don’t fool with the church because the church has buried many a critic, and all the critics that we have not buried, we’re making funeral arrangements for them!”
That sounds like an incitement to violence to me. That sounds like a death threat. That sounds frighteningly similar to the fatwas issued by Muslim clerics against their critics, against people like Salman Rushdie.
I think that every secular American deserves an explanation from Reverend Herbert Lusk. I’m a critic of your church, Reverend Lusk. Are you making funeral arrangements for me? Are you issuing a fatwa against me, Reverend Lusk?
Justice Sunday III was not just a gathering of a few disgruntled cranks. The Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, two organizations that are closely allied with the George W. Bush and the top Republicans in Congress, were the sponsors of the large gathering. Republican Senator Rick Santorum was there, listening to Reverend Lusk’s death threat, and clapped along with everyone else.
Now, read that passage again and tell me that there is no threat of theocracy in the United States of America.
Kevin,
You never did answer my questions.
1: Those who called themselves christians and practiced that faith, and then raped, tortured, and killed witches in the name of god; were they “real christians” or a whole bunch of splinter groups?
2: Do the actions of those people not count because they weren’t covered in modern media?
3: What’s the difference between christians then and christians today?
Also, don’t start pointing fingers. The arguments you’ve made have killed most of my brain cells from sheer the stupidity they contain.
Damen: Yes, I did. And you continually asking for clarification will not change that. Unless you’re willing to answer (and take responsibility) for your ancestors’ actions 200 years ago, I suggest you find a different angle. If you can prove that I somehow lived back in the times of the Salem Witch Trials AND was somehow responsible for the meting out of punishment AND that practice is still continued among Christians in the United States today (after all, the trials took place in America), I will be willing to give your posts an ear. Otherwise, please stop.
And you’d better watch your brain cells. With counterpoints such as you have provided, conservation should be of the utmost importance.
Maybe you should try paying more attention yourself, we already covered this in a forum discussion.
As for your “Christians know more about Christians than atheists” argument, here I’ll counter it with your own similie.
It is ENTIRELY possible for me to know more about Chemistry than a Chemist. For one, I could do all the research without taking the degree (i.e. making it a big part of my life), and for two once history comes into it it’s easily possible that historians know more about the history of Chemistry through the years.
I hardly think you represent all Christians here, Kevin. You haven’t even stated your branch of Christianity, though, so I take it that you think you may. My mother’s a Christian, and she has always been willing to debate with me on the subject, without ever implying that I can’t possibly understand because of my current religious beliefs.
Besides, if that were true, no one would ever convert to Christianity.
As I pointed out, there is a huge ethical distinction between the idea of biologically inhereted guilt and the idea that guilt is assumed when one joins an organization with a bloody past. Damen and Kevin’s argument cannot progress until that point is acknowledged.
But, beyond that, we have previously established here the existence of several CONTEMPORARY lines of violent Christian extremism. That doesn’t go to the point that all Christians are violent extremists. Rather, it refutes the early claim that Kevin made that there is no Christian equivalent to the violence of Islamic fundamentalism. There are several equivalents around right now – and as with the case of the Lord’s Resistance Army, some of these are doing at least as much killing as Al Quaida, if not more.
The idea of killing people who are not “good christians” is a very christian idea. Christianity (arguably along with Judaism and Islam) has at its core a belief in a supreme being, a patriarchal figure who demands absolute unquestioning obedience, and who will pursue those who disobey Him, smite them and kill them in horrid ways, and even worse, take their sentient essence ( a “soul” which christians believe persists after death) and torture THAT eternally in ways too vile to contemplate.
With this vindictive uberfascist as a supreme being and “father” to them, is it any wonder that so many christians are bloodthirsty fascists? Really, they are no better off than if they had Hannibal Lechter as a role model.
And as for the claim that christians have done nothing in current times to equal the WTC attack or the beheadings done by Islamic extremists, must I remind you that King Dubbya is a devout Christian? So we can put the deeds of the Islamofascists up against the decisions to torture detainees, use incidiaries and daisycutters on civilian targets, to bomb Baghdad back to the stone age, to ethnically cleanse Fallujah. Contemporary enough?
The Final Judgment
by
Ross Aranipour
The word on the street is that a few of the world leaders including George W. Bush are living John’s Revelation and are making it happen. Most people think that the Moslems and the Christians are fighting each other. Although, it may appear this way on the cover, the truth is that reliable sources are saying that behind seens the Christian and the Moslems are mobilizing against the Jews.