the Evangelical Right is a Politcal Creation.

david starling

Well-known member
I just did a bit of binge watching on the "tube" [though I have a flat screen but no one has come up with a suitable term for the tech yet]
I watched the HBO series, "The Brink" starring Jack Black and Tim Robbins. The title is in reference to the expression "On the brink of nuclear war"
IN one of the later episodes the actor portraying the president of Israel is heard to say that "the Evangelists don't really like us, they just want someone here to keep the lights on until their Messiah returns."

I got a good chuckle...bit of a real belly laugh... from that one.
Funny series, even though I've had what I thought to be enough of Jack Black to last me the rest of my lifetime, I enjoyed his performance.

I guess as to how one sees the situation concerning president Trump's and Putin's relationship depends on what one is looking for. One may be looking to see hope or one might be looking for damnation.

I see it as awkward and embarrassing to the nation at present but a far better situation than what the alternative would have provided us.
I also see it as quite possibly, in fact very much as to the "quite possibly", the hope for the future of the freedom of man.

I just finished writing a piece on the very concept and was about to post but thought I'd check in and see what this thread is all about. I was offline for some weeks and just got the old computer humming again.
I'll save you the distraction on you thread by not saying anything more here other than you can check out why I've got my own way of seeing things a bit differently in the thread I'm about to create.... or not?

Graham crackers were never my favorite cookie in the jar and they stale quickly.

What's your prospective Thread-title?
 

rahu

Banned
2239

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/10/ev...ement-saying-want-nothing-toxic-donald-trump/

Evangelical leaders issue statement saying they want nothing to do do with ‘toxic’ Donald Trump

evangelical leaders are seeking to distance themselves from President Donald Trump, the Christian Post reports.
Dozens of progressive evangelical leaders signed onto a statement (PDF) against the “false narrative” that they are conservatives.







“Sadly, in 2018, several false narratives around the identity of evangelicals in the United States undermine Christian witness and distort American politics,” the statement argued.“Often, evangelicals are identified in the media and by the public as
being predominantly white, right wing, and unconcerned about the poor and oppressed,” the statement continued.
“For example, the story that became nationally and globally dominant after the 2016 election was that 81 percent of “evangelicals” voted for Donald Trump, when, in fact, this group only represented the votes of white evangelicals,” they noted. “When evangelicals of color and younger evangelicals are accurately accounted for, the picture changes significantly. For example, evangelicals of color voted
overwhelmingly otherwise.”
The signers committed to “resisting patriarchy, toxic masculinity, and any form of sexism and to always affirm the dignity, voices, and leadership of women.”
 
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rahu

Banned
2246
here is another example of the Kabbalistic attempt to use the Christian people in support of their annihilation of the Palestinians. this quote from the NYT was published in april 1944 when the Zionist were pushing to have unlimited immigration and to establish Palestine as a jewish state in violation of the balfour declaration.
during these months in 1944, the radical Zionists were waging a guerrilla war against the british ,with many fatalities, because the british would not put aside the balfour declaration which limited jewish immigration.

New York Times 1944,april 2,23:2,3
one can not help wondering”said rabbi Williams f. Rosenblum in temple Israel ,210 W 91 st. ,“what if the messiah did return to the earth.would his admission to Palestine be referred to the generals of the armies, the prime ministers of the nations or the conscience of Christian civilizations”. And one can not help wondering what the fate of the redeemer would be in a world that has so glibly turned it back upon his teachings and upon his very people .

(notice how jesus is insinuated to be the messiah..... but that is a blatant falsehood as the jews agree the messiah has not come yet. so rabbi attempts to use the Christian concept of messiah to support the illegal annexation of Palestine.rahu)


New York Times 1944 april 28 ,5-2
in response arch bishop of York,most Rev. Cyril forester garbett. The primate cited the balfour declaration to the effect of providing a “home” with in Palestine(for the jews rahu). It was never stated that the whole of Palestine was to be turned into an independent state of the jews
 

rahu

Banned
23656
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/10/di...tian-grifters-status-seekers-paved-way-trump/

Disgusted evangelical scholar explains how Christian ‘grifters and status-seekers’ paved the way for Trump



derny Belvedere, an evangelical Christian and philosophy scholar, has written a scathing essay at Quillette about the devolution of the religious conservative movement under President Donald Trump.

Belvedere in particular zooms in on the role that greed has played in transforming the evangelical movement from a social cause into a sleazy — and highly lucrative — business for political operatives.

“Since Christian conservatism is built to withstand pressures to adapt, it becomes susceptible to all kinds of grifters and status-seekers,” he writes. “In many ways, belief consolidation sets up the perfect scam: Opportunists seeking fame and wealth can find in Christian conservatism a system that doesn’t require of its leaders continual reinvention—you master a fixed set of values and beliefs and let charisma do the rest.”

Belvedere then explains how political operatives have managed to slip in new ideas into the evangelical belief system — such as a staunch belief in unfettered capitalism — that are nowhere to be found within the Bible.

“Within American conservative Christianity, what these leaders do is funnel biblical content, cultural distinctives, and nationalistic tropes into a mix that ordinary believers imbibe as what it means to be authentically Christian,” he writes.

And it’s this essential corruption of the basic tenets of Christianity, writes Belvedere, that have opened the door for evangelicals to embrace Trump, who is a walking violation of the Ten Commandments.

“Conservative believers are bombarded with a message that conflates support for Republicans with what it means to possess a vibrant Christian faith, with the latter only being actualizable by faithfully and energetically embracing the former,” he concludes. “This is power. And, as an evangelical myself, I do not think we should have it.”

Read the whole essay here.
 

rahu

Banned
2378
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/10/ev...tmare-gops-deeply-troubling-sell-kingdom-god/
Some evangelicals are waking up to the nightmare of the GOP’s deeply troubling sell-out of the Kingdom of God

yes are locked on Texas. And deep in its heart are white evangelicals who could be part of a blue wave many hope will wash over that red state to carry Ted Cruz far out to sea. In tight race between Cruz and his energetic Democratic Party opponent Beto O’Rourke, New York Times reporter Elizabeth Dias suggests that white evangelical women could be open to Democratic candidates. Her interviews with long-time Republican voters point to an increasing disenchantment that could temper the unwavering evangelical support that Republican incumbents and candidates view as their inalienable birthright.
This article was originally published at Working-Class Perspectives
SPONSORED




White evangelical women from Texas, Dias explains, are not poised en masse to bolt from the Republican Party. But Trump’s leadership has down-ticket implications even for Cruz, his bitter opponent in 2016. In this competitive U.S. Senate race, even a slightly depressed turnout among the Republican base combined with a healthy number of party-switching voters could make a decisive difference. The evangelical women whom Diaz interviewed see a “stark moral contrast” between Trump and O’Rourke. They view Trump’s policies and behavior, including banning Muslim refugees, separating children from their parents at the border, and Trump’s disrespect of women, as “fundamentally anti-Christian. ”. When an older white evangelical man said to one of Diaz’s interviewees, Tess Clarke, that she couldn’t be a Christian and vote for O’Rourke, Clarke responded: “I keep going back to who Jesus was when he walked on earth. This is about proximity to people in pain.”
These faint stirrings of discontent among white evangelical women in Texas are connected to larger questions about class and theology. If Jesus really was close to people in pain and suffering in his peripatetic ministry, the transformative possibilities of following thatJesus are revolutionary. Such a Jesus is a human Jesus with whom people can identify. He is also one who cares about the hidden and open injuries of class. For those who suffer with those wounds, the gospel offers the prospect of solidarity and its active healing ministry.
The codependent relationship between white evangelicals and the Republican Party has the whiff of eternal truth to it. But it has not always been so. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was established in 1942 as an effort to gain influence in Washington, D.C. The NAE invited individual churches, whole denominations, and pastors to join in united action to represent evangelicals to a country still dominated by mainline Protestants. What the NAE wanted most of all, though, was to have a freer voice over the radio waves to spread the gospel. The Christian Right had not yet emerged, Moral Majority was two generations in the future, and evangelicals had not yet sold their soul to the Republican Party.
Leading evangelical theologians in the generation after World War II, notably C.F.H. Henry, warned about the dangers of imbuing any economic system or political system with divine authority. Instead, in the spirit of evangelical independence based on a God who transcends all human endeavors, he urged that evangelicals should always remember that earthly economic or political institutions are under the authority of the gospel not the other way around. So the nearly complete alignment between evangelicals and the Republican Party in our time would have deeply alarmed Henry and many evangelical leaders of that era.
Now, however, some evangelicals seem to be waking up to the nightmare of a deeply unevangelical sell-out of the Kingdom of God for a gaudy, earthly imitation. A closed-door consultation of around fifty evangelical leaders convened at Wheaton College (Billy Graham’s alma mater, and often called the evangelical’s Harvard) in April to deal with concerns about the future of evangelicalism and concerns that “their movement has become too closely associated with President Trump’s polarizing politics.” According to Katelyn Beaty, editor at large for Christianity Today, the meeting was an attempt to sort out their alliance with Trump and to be engaged in “self-reflection on the current condition of Evangelicalism.”
Contrary to any hopes raised by even the scant possibility of evangelicals looking for a balm in Gilead outside of the Republican Party, we’re not likely to see evangelicals running to join the Democratic Party. What I’d really like to see are evangelicals who follow the Jesus they claim to know as he walks close to people in their pain and their powerlessness. Jesus the Savior meets Jesus the prophet of social change. If evangelicals followed this Jesus, as Tess Clarke suggests, they would be in a position to challenge both Republicans and Democrats when their politics and their policies favor elites who want to preserve power and status. This would be a major theological challenge, and in Texas, at least, it is coming from white evangelical women who are lightyears ahead of their own leadership.
Evangelicals make a particular point of adhering to the Chalcedonian formulation from 451 AD that affirmed Jesus is “truly God and truly man.” Despite the evangelical commitment to this major creed of the Church, they still emphasize his divinity to the neglect of his humanity. Sometimes it seems that they love Paul more than Jesus. It was Paul, after all, in his letter to the Galatians who argued “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26-28). Paul underlines the power of Jesus Christ to overcome all human divisions so that a universal human family is possible through faith in Christ.
But many evangelicals have relied on Paul’s teaching about being “one in Christ Jesus” to avoid the sharper divisions that Jesus drew. They shrink from a gospel that cuts against the grain call out the well-heeled on behalf of those who are down-at-the-heels. As Jesus emphasized in his discussion with the rich young man who sought the Kingdom of Heaven, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 19:21-23). Granted, it is not impossible, but it is hard.
The power of the gospel that evangelicals teach has been diminished by their own sense of limitation and fear – the limits they place on a God they believe to be omnipotent based on a fear that God can’t or won’t act in human history without help from the GOP. Yet when evangelicals return to Jesus and consider the multitude of possibilities inherent in concrete and tangible ministries with those in pain, as some brave souls are doing in Texas, then they start to do the unexpected. Beto O’Rourke is but the smallest beginning. A new generation of evangelicals is emerging. Who can wager what they might do when a gospel informed by compassion and care replaces the one now chained to party and platform?
 

rahu

Banned
2724
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/12/me...-christians-fleeing-church-getting-bed-trump/

Meet the ‘Exvangelicals’: Young Christians are fleeing the church for getting in bed with Trump


s hardcore Christian evangelical leaders continue to embrace President Donald Trump, younger churchgoers are having a harder time reconciling the words of the Bible with less-than-Christian actions of the Republican Party which supports him. According to Newsweek, exhortations from the pulpits to support Republican positions on war and immigration are causing an exodus of some of the same young Christian voters who helped Trump get elected.



As Blake Chastain, 35, who left the church and created the podcast “Exvangelical” explained his departure: “Conservative Christianity was at odds with the teachings in the Bible.”
The reports states that the flood of young believers who are abandoning the church could be disastrous for Republicans who have become used to depending upon conservative Christian leaders to turn out votes for them.
In fact, data reveals that the effects of abandonment likely impacted the 2018 midterms.
“In the 2018 midterms, exit polls showed, white evangelicals backed Republicans by 75 to 22 percent, while the rest of the voting population favored Democrats 66 to 32 percent,” Newsweek’s Nina Burleigh writes.” But evangelicals were slightly less likely to support House Republicans in 2018 than they were to support Trump in 2016—which may have contributed to the Democrats’ pickup of House seats. Trump’s support actually declined more among white evangelical men than women. The 11-point gender gap between evangelical men and women from 2016 shrank to 6 in the midterms.”
According to Chastain, who once dreamed of joining a seminary, younger Christians are increasingly appalled at continuing attacks at marginalized communities — which they view as being uncharitable compared to the words of Jesus.
“Even people like me, a white male with a lot of societal privilege, can see that evangelical leaders are completely happy to join forces with white nationalist politicians and leaders and to give them the benefit of the doubt while they are attacking marginalized communities,” says Chastain. “And that’s just blatantly hypocritical.”
To make his point, he added, “The fact is that leaders like [Dallas megachurch leader and Trump supporter] Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell Jr. are blatantly power hungry and willing to make these alliances, providing a theology that supports white nationalism.”
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention — who admits he didn’t vote for Trump, — backs up Chastain, but says he is hopeful that he can hang onto younger Christians by adjusting the message to them.
“With Generation X, millennial and Generation Z evangelicals, there is a deep suspicion of any cynical use of religion for worldly purpose,” Moore explained. “So one has to motivate them differently than one would, say, the kind of television evangelist demographic that many secular people think of when they think of evangelicalism. When I am in a group of older evangelicals, my message is typically ‘Seek first the kingdom of God. Political idolatry will kill us. Let’s remember what is transcendently important.’ But when I talk to younger evangelicals, I am dealing with the opposite problem and saying one cannot simply withdraw from political life in overreaction to some dispiriting actions that have taken place.”
Christopher Maloney, 32, who not only abandoned evangelical Christianity but released a documentary film called “In God We Trump,” claims those who left the church may never return.
“People around my age and younger were already deconstructing their evangelical faith in large numbers before Trump came along,” he stated. “What the 2016 election did was accelerate what was already happening. We had begun edging toward the doors, and when evangelicals embraced Trump we bolted outside. To be honest, I don’t see a return of younger generations to the church as we know it.”
You can read the whole report here.
 
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rahu

Banned
2752
(evangelicals are quick to call the death of a unborn child "murder" but the evangelical hierarchy has no problem endorsing bush and drumpf and Netanyahu as they have killed 100s of thousands of children in the 17 year old false flag war in the middle east.

then evangelical love to accept the bible as the word of god, until something is written that goes against their prejudices. then they find it easy to use different translations to sustain their points.

I don't mean to condemn evangelicals wholesale, but the hierarchy seem more interested in the greed and power of mammon than the sacredness of ALL human life rahu)

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/...ist-christians-support-israel-right-or-wrong/

Why Do Fundamentalist Christians Support Israel – Right Or Wrong?





By Henry Kamens for Veterans Today and New Eastern Outlook, Moscow
It appears that many fundamentalist Christians support the hard-line policies of the Israeli Government (currently consisting of the parties Likud, United Torah Judaism, Shas, Kulanu and the Jewish Home) more blindly and fanatically than most Jews do. Christian and Jewish Zionist organizations in the US have combined their lobbying efforts, their targets being governors and state legislatures.
Approximately 26 states – more than half – have enacted laws or executive orders to prohibit their state governments from awarding contracts to companies that support the BDS program, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israeli program. This BDS movement uses boycott-related tactics against Israel or the Israeli-Occupied Territories in an attempt to get Israel to stop oppressing the Palestinians.
This is where American politicians interact with international issues and lobby groups. For instance, Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, a Christian fundamentalist, issued an executive order on November 16, 2018 that states that “the Commonwealth of Kentucky unequivocally rejects the BDS practices and stands firmly with Israel,” noting that these BDS practices “threaten the sovereignty and security of a US ally and friend of the Commonwealth.”
Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer and Consul General of Israel to the Southeast United States, Judith Varnai Shorer, and Dave Wicker, Congressional Liaison for Christians United for Israeli (CUFI) joined Governor Bevin at the signing ceremony of this order in the State Capitol building. The event was presented as if they, the people of Kentucky, and the United States, were collectively making a moral stand in support of the State of Israel.
Politicians such as Governor Bevin have called the BDS movement anti-Semitic and “repugnant.” He referenced passages from the Book of Ezekiel about being a watchman, saying Kentucky was watching and sounding the alarm.
In reality, however, the BDS movement is a nonviolent way to support the Palestinian cause in light of illegal Israeli settlements, the seizure of Palestinian land and the blatant refusal to abide by many UN resolutions over the years. Israel has effectively made Gaza into the world’s largest prison, yet forbids the inmates to even protest against this. Hundreds of nonviolent Palestinian protesters have been shot dead by Israeli troops in 2018 alone.
Bevin is not alone. Many want to paint the movement in the same way, but not in terms of taking a moral stand but because it is not politically expedient to use sanctions against the UN-created Jewish State.
The Israeli Lobby in the US is highly-motivated, well-organized and willing to contribute to the campaigns of politicians who oppose the BDS movement and vote for anti-Palestinian state and federal laws. But in reality all such legislation has more to do with governors and political types looking for campaign contributions and thus caving into pressure from the well-funded Israeli lobby, than anything else.
President Trump gave the Israeli Lobby a major victory when he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – apparently without considering any of the geopolitical implications and ramifications of international law. He actually implemented a previously unimplemented US policy by “illegally” making Jerusalem, for all practical purposes, the legal capital of Israel.
Pushing Back
Taking up the Palestinians’ side, however, is musician Roger Waters, who was one of the founders of Pink Floyd and has been a strong supporter of BDS. He has lobbied his fellow pop stars not to perform concerts in Israel.
Waters has openly called Israel an apartheid state. He has compared its government’s PR to Nazi propaganda efforts, and claimed that Israel is the worst human rights offender in the world. And that was before recent events in Gaza, starting in March, 2018, and the bloody and deadly crackdown on Palestinian protestors.
Ian Halperin, an Israeli film producer, launched a personal counterattack against Roger Waters in a new documentary he entitled “Wish You Weren’t Here.” Apparently this production has more to do with standing up for the political status quo than protecting Jews. With a case of high-powered speakers, the documentary paints Waters as an anti-Semite.
[the_ad id="497740"]


“With this movie, I’m trying to bring people together, not to divide them,” Halperin said. “This particular film is meant to call [Waters] out and bring people together… Music is supposed to spread love, not hate,” he said.​
CNN Effect
A CNN commentator, Marc Lamont Hill, was recently fired after making a speech at a United Nations conference in which he called for “international action that will give us what justice requires, and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” The reaction was immediate, with CNN firing him for telling the truth, a commodity CNN has distanced itself from in recent years.
It must be noted that he was not speaking on behalf of CNN, but only as an American writer and lecturer in communications at Temple University in Philadelphia. The speech was given at an appropriate venue, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People Special Meeting at UN Headquarters on November 28, 2018.
Several Jewish journalists and Israeli Consul Dani Dayan immediately called Dr. Hill’s remarks anti-Semitic, but you can judge this for yourself after listening to the actual speech before the UN body. Consul Dayan tweeted that Hill’s remarks were like a “swastika painted in red,” whilst the Anti-Defamation League said they were tantamount to calling for Israel to be wiped off the map.
Marc Lamont Hill had told his assembled international audience, “Our solidarity must be more than a noun; our solidarity must become a verb.” Recalling the multiple tactics and strategies employed by the black community against Jim Crow laws and slavery in the United States, he called for embracing the movement to adopt boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Moreover, he said, solidarity means recognizing the Palestinian right to self-defence, stressing that Palestinians must not be shamed for resisting in the face of State violence and ethnic cleansing.
He was able to say in a 20 minute speech what the international community has been unwilling to address, describing with great insight the plight of the Palestinian people and how the international community has turned its back on the blatant violations of those same rights.
Hill was fired by CNN the very same day. It is no longer possible to take a stand that is not in step with the Jewish lobby and the American political elites, including Donald Trump.
Gideon Levy, wring in the Jewish newspaper Haaretz, said, “In a matter of hours, the skies collapsed into well-orchestrated hysteria. Seth Mandel, an editor of the Washington Examiner, accused Hill of having called for Jewish genocide; Ben Shapiro, an analyst on Fox News, called it an anti-Semitic speech.”
Gideon Levy concluded: “The Jews and Israel have an incredible degree of influence in the Western media.” Now you can call me, too [the author] an anti-Semite as well, and using Gideon’s language – a self-hating Jew, to boot.
Hill presented a vision deeply rooted in universal human rights, in which Palestinians can gain freedom just as other people have. He made particular reference to the history of the Black struggle against American state sponsored racism, Jim Crow and apartheid.
Holding Israel Accountable
Hill called for the support of boycotts because they are a time-honored nonviolent tactic, which can be used to hold Israel accountable. For some he likely came across as a hybrid of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Yasser Arafat, but those people’s problem is that, in the US, this cannot be used against him.
In light of current efforts to also have him fired from his university teaching position, Witold Walczak told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Under the First Amendment, Temple University cannot punish an employee for making off-the-job statements that it might disagree with. It’s not complicated.”
After apologizing for some of his remarks, Hill has made a number of public statements perhaps designed to keep his position at Temple. “I talked about the need to return to the pre-1967 borders, to give full rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel and to allow the right of return. No part of this is a call to destroy Israel,” he said.
He pushed back against the criticism he has received, saying that he did not support anti-Semitism and that the “river to the sea” reference was a “call for justice” – both in Israel and in the West Bank/Gaza. “I support Palestinian freedom. I support Palestinian self-determination. I am deeply critical of Israeli policy and practice. I do not support anti-Semitism, killing Jewish people, or any of the other things attributed to my speech. I have spent my life fighting these things.”
But still various Zionist organisations and rabid politicians continue to condemn him, and are urging [at the least] for the university where he is employed “to strongly condemn Marc Lamont Hill’s dangerous calls for violence against Israelis and the destruction of Israel, and to fire Hill immediately, or at least suspend him from the prestigious Steve Charles Chair that he holds.”
But the most vocal accusers are the same Christians who speak of love and forgiveness, who nevertheless spout headlines such as “CNN Commentator Marc Lamont Hill Calls for the Eradication of Israel.”
Millions of fundamentalist Christians support Israel because it says in the Bible (Revelations) that Christ will return after the Temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt, and the Israeli government is rebuilding it. Using the scriptural reference in this way supports the essential con of so-called “fundamentalism” – that as long as you can quote scripture to support your position, even if your interpretation of that scripture has been derided for the past two thousand years, you are automatically right and justified, regardless of your conduct.
There is nothing in the actual teaching of Christ which supports such a position – indeed; he attacked the Jews of His day for saying exactly the same. But one only needs to read the articles and comments in many Christian press articles to gain insight into the mentality and collective mindset of many fundamentalist Christians. In their view, the Palestinians, who are also mostly Christians, are getting in the way of progress, and in order to oppose them, we can just forget everything Jesus taught.
Regardless of which side of this argument you take, one thing is certain – Hill made a hell of a speech. It was even better than anything Obama gave, and if a good speech can get you a Nobel Prize for Peace, Hill should get one for speaking truth to power. Fundamentalists Christians may consider themselves above secular powers, but Marc Lamont Hill might be catching them up.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

https://journal-neo.org/2018/12/14/why-do-fundamentalist-christians-support-israel-right-or-wrong/
 

rahu

Banned
2846
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/bu...-evangelicals-sucking-unethical-racist-trump/

Bush speechwriter uses Bible to slap evangelicals for sucking up to ‘unethical and racist’ Trump


Writing in the Washington Post, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush who moved forward writing columns from a Christian perspective, lambasted evangelical leaders who have hardened their positions supporting Donald Trump as more of his less-than-Christian positions are revealed.

According to Michael Gerson, citing a Ron Brownstein article, evangelicals are displaying a “hardening loyalty” toward Trump’s GOP, jumping upward as he has made his anti-immigrant wall the focus of his administration.

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“Headed into a possible impeachment battle, the most ethically challenged president of modern times — prone to cruelty, bigotry, vanity, adultery and serial deception — is depending on religiously conservative voters for his political survival,” Gerson wrote before lamenting, “And, so far, it is not a bad bet.”


“For some, it is nothing less than the end-times conflict of good and evil, which somehow culminated in fights against the Obama administration,” he continued. “In this struggle, many evangelicals believe they have found a champion in Trump. He is the enemy of their enemies. He is willing to use the hardball tactics of the secular world to defend their sacred interests. In their battle with the Philistines, evangelicals have essentially hired their own Goliath — brutal, pagan, but on their side.”

Goliath, Gerson explained, would be a poor example and he elaborated with a little bit of Biblical history.

“It doesn’t take much biblical research to discover that this isn’t quite how God accomplished things in the original story,” he lectured. “He actually employed a scrawny Jewish boy, using unconventional tactics, to demonstrate that His favor mattered more than worldly measures of strength. From a purely political perspective, however, the hiring of a Goliath is what interest groups generally do.”

According to the speechwriter, this will cost evangelicals in the long run.

“The employment of an unethical, racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist Giant is not likely to play well with women, minorities and young people, who are likely to equate conservative religion with prejudice for decades to come,” he warned.

“A hypocrisy becomes unsustainable,” he concluded. “A seed gets planted. And a greater power emerges, revealing new leaders and shaming those who reduce Christianity to a sad and sordid game of thrones.”

You can read the whole piece here.
 
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rahu

Banned
2891
( here's the most ridiculous use of "science" I've seen recently . it ranks right up there with the psychiatric establishment's new mental syndrome that anti authority personalities are pathological syndromes. This has been used by totalitarian regimes for decades.... throw political dissents into mental institutions like the Russians,cubans,chinese,etc.. do,

Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge.

what utter lies......the standard model and Einstein are frauds. scientists throw out any data that does not agree with their prejudicial opinions

as much as i have doubts about the evangelical hierarchy, peoples religious beliefs can not be equated to lines on a brain scan.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.

total Rothschild new world order fascism

Link between brain damage and religious fundamentalism established by scientists

utter lies. this is what happens when you make evolution the technocracy's religion.
one must keep in mind that recent studies have shown that 30% of reports in scientific journals are faulty or outright lies to keep their funding flowing.
rahu)

Link between brain damage and religious fundamentalism established by scientists

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.



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Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.

Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.

To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.

Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.

These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.

The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.
 
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rahu

Banned
2913
Trump desperately seeking help from evangelical Christians as GOP starts to turn on him: report
Donald-Trump-and-Jerry-Falwell-Jr-800x430.jpg



President Donald Trump and Jerry Falwell, Jr. at Liberty University. White










As Donald Trump’s administration continues its spiral into chaos — buffeted by Justice Department investigations and a government shutdown that is angering Democrats and Republicans alike — the embattled president is increasingly seeking help and solace from evangelicals who have refused to abandon him no matter what his sins.

According to a report in the Guardian, the president and evangelical Christians are shoring each other up against their perceived enemies — with Trump increasingly counting on them as a major part of his unwavering base.

What makes Trump attractive despite his many un-Christian faults is his choice of close aides who are deeply immersed in Christian nationalism and a belief in the “end times.”

“In setting out the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, one of the first things Mike Pompeo made clear to his audience in Cairo is that he had come to the region as ‘as an evangelical Christian,'” the Guardian’s Julian Borger reports.

Noting that Pompeo, when he was a congressman once told the congregants at a Wichita church, “It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight,” Borger writes, “For Pompeo’s audience, the rapture invoked an apocalyptical Christian vision of the future, a final battle between good and evil, and the second coming of Jesus Christ, when the faithful will ascend to heaven and the rest will go to hell.”

Elevating Pompeo to Secretary of State, combined with heart-on-his-sleeve Christian Mike Pence as his vice presidential pick, has endeared Trump to evangelicals who are willing to accept Trump’s imperfections.

“Trump himself embodies the very opposite of a pious Christian ideal. Trump is not churchgoer. He is profane, twice divorced, who has boasted of sexually assaulting women. But white evangelicals have embraced him,” the Guardian reports, before adding, “Trump’s choice of Pence as a running mate was a gesture of his commitment, and four of the six preachers at his inauguration were evangelicals, including White and Franklin Graham, the eldest son of the preacher Billy Graham, who defended Trump through his many sex scandals, pointing out: ‘We are all sinners.'”

In his time of need, Trump has turned to evangelicals for support for his reeling administration wall, with Borger writing, “Having lost control of the House of Representatives in November, and under ever closer scrutiny for his campaign’s links to the Kremlin, Trump’s instinct has been to cleave ever closer to his most loyal supporters.”

“Almost alone among major demographic groups, white evangelicals are overwhelmingly in favour of Trump’s border wall, which some preachers equate with fortifications in the Bible,” he continued.

According to Katherine Stewart who writes about the Christian right, Trump and his wall are naturals for militant evangelicals.

“The Christian nationalist movement is characterized by feelings of persecution and, to some degree, paranoia – a clear example is the idea that there is somehow a ‘war on Christmas’,” Stewart explained. “People in those positions will often go for authoritarian leaders who will do whatever is necessary to fight for their cause.”

You can read more here.
 

rahu

Banned
2923
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/he...aping-president-donald-trumps-foreign-policy/

Here’s how evangelical ideology is shaping President Donald Trump’s foreign policy
Screen-Shot-2017-09-05-at-6.29.03-AM-800x430.png

Evangelicals praying over Trump (Photo: Screen capture)
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President Donald Trump’s haphazard foreign policy is driven by a lot of factors. His rollbacks of free trade, for example, are motivated by his pathological obsession with America being “ripped off,” and his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement was motivated by his desire to erase everything related to former President Barack Obama.

One of his more conventional, but no less disturbing, influences could be that of right-wing evangelism.


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Trump’s close relationship with evangelical politicians and voters (or more specifically, white ones), is well-known. Vice President Mike Pence is a well-known fundamentalist culture warrior who tried to make it legal to refuse service to LGBTQ couples and vowed to consign abortion rights to “the ash heap of history.” Other senior members of his administration have hardline views about religion, like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has said she wants to use America’s schools to build “God’s Kingdom.”

One of the less-noticed influencers is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical Presbyterian who once defined his view of the world as “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture” in a speech at a Wichita megachurch. As America’s top diplomat, he more than anyone else brings these views into the foreign policy sphere — and as an analysisby The Guardian shows, that has profound consequences:
For many US evangelical Christians, one of the key preconditions for [the rapture] is the gathering of the world’s Jews in a greater Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is a belief, known as premillenial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism – and it has very real potential consequences for
US foreign policy.

It directly colours views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and indirectly, attitudes towards Iran, broader Middle East geopolitics and the primacy of protecting Christian minorities. In his Cairo visit, Pompeo heaped praise on Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, for building the new cathedral, but made no reference to the 60,000 political prisoners the regime is thought to be holding, or its routine use of torture.

The Trump administration has instituted a number of sweeping policy changes in these exact areas, from moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and going back on the Iran nuclear deal.

A political worldview that is based on a belief in the near-term destruction of the world and the salvation of a chosen few poses obvious dangers. It can, for instance, make certain people’s human rights seem less legitimate.

t is important for the American people to understand the ideology underpinning our current foreign policy — and to have a serious discussion about whether everyone is represented in it.
 

rahu

Banned
2947
(heres another elitist,evolutionist article from the same website trying to demean he importance of the religious experience by saying people with religious conviction are stupid essentially. this site is apparently continuing in the Rothschild/newworld Oder attack of human nature and experiences.
this is the most fascist atheistic article i have ever read and it is full of total lies and misrepresentations amazing. this is pure CIA MK ultra attempt at mind control but it is so transparent i really should not call it mind control. rahu)

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/re...haky-intellectual-foundations-absolute-faith/

Religion has a smart-people problem: The shaky intellectual foundations of absolute faith

Should you believe in a God? Not according to most academic philosophers. A comprehensive survey revealed that only about 14 percent of English speaking professional philosophers are theists.( no wonder most academic philospher say you should no believe in god.. this article gets even more ridiculous.if they are touting deductive reasoning they are falling sort by simply regurgitating their prejudies rahu) As for what little religious belief remains among their colleagues, most professional philosophers regard it as a strange aberration among otherwise intelligent people. Among scientists the situation is much the same. Surveys of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, composed of the most prestigious scientists in the world, show that religious belief among them is practically nonexistent, about 7 percent.

Now nothing definitely follows about the truth of a belief from what the majority of philosophers or scientists think. (WTF does this mean)But such facts might cause believers discomfort. There has been a dramatic change in the last few centuries in the proportion of believers among the highly educated in the Western world. In the European Middle Ages belief in a God was ubiquitous, while today it is rare among the intelligentsia. This change occurred primarily because of the rise of modern science and a consensus among philosophers that arguments for the existence of gods, souls, afterlife and the like were unconvincing.( yeah unconvincing because they believe if you can't hold something, kill something or have sex with something then it does not exist) Still, despite the view of professional philosophers and world-class scientists, religious beliefs have a universal appeal. What explains this?


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Genes and environment explain human beliefs and behaviors—people do things because they are genomes in environments. ( okay the flat out lies are to much to handle. this entire statement is theory and has no proof. here we ae getting pure Darwinian BS. people do not realize that darwin himself implied that this theory was meant to suppress religious thought. there is no objective science to Darwinian theory. specifically Darwin said that he had to believe in evolution because he did not ,then he was contemning his father and uncles to everlasting hell....great reasoning for a scientist.) The near universal appeal of religious belief suggests a biological component to religious beliefs and practices,(more total BS..) and science increasingly confirms this view. There is a scientific consensus that our brains have been subject to natural selection.
(i knew this was a evolutionist rant. the fact is evolution has never been proven. what evolution say when the facts don't add up is... well evolution is a fact so it most be truth.. interesting calling something a fact that has not been proven.what they are up to is to make evolution a religion... so they are replacing religion by saying religion doesn't exit.look up the word tautology )So what survival and reproductive roles might religious beliefs and practices have played in our evolutionary history? What mechanisms caused the mind to evolve toward religious beliefs and practices?

Today there are two basic explanations offered. One says that religion evolved by natural selection—religion is an adaptation that provides an evolutionary advantage. For example religion may have evolved to enhance social cohesion and cooperation—it may have helped groups survive. The other explanation claims that religious beliefs and practices arose as byproducts of other adaptive traits. For example, intelligence is an adaptation that aids survival. Yet it also forms causal narratives for natural occurrences and postulates the existence of other minds. Thus the idea of hidden Gods explaining natural events was born.

In addition to the biological basis for religious belief, there are environmental explanations. It is self-evident from the fact that religions are predominant in certain geographical areas but not others, that birthplace strongly influences religious belief. This suggests that people’s religious beliefs are, in large part, accidents of birth. Besides cultural influences there is the family; the best predictor of people’s religious beliefs in individuals is the religiosity of their parents. There are also social factors effecting religious belief. For example, a significant body of scientific evidence suggests that popular religion results from social dysfunction. Religion may be a coping mechanism for the stress caused by the lack of a good social safety net—hence the vast disparity between religious belief in Western Europe and the United States.

There is also a strong correlation between religious belief and various measures of social dysfunction including homicides, the proportion of people incarcerated, infant mortality, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births, abortions, corruption, income inequality and more. While no causal relationship has been established, a United Nations list of the 20 best countries to live in shows the least religious nations generally at the top. Only in the United States, which was ranked as the 13th best country to live in, is religious belief strong relative to other countries. Moreover, virtually all the countries with comparatively little religious belief ranked high on the list of best countries, while the majority of countries with strong religious belief ranked low. While correlation does not equal causation, the evidence should give pause to religion’s defenders. There are good reasons to doubt that religious belief makes people’s lives go better, and good reasons to believe that they make their lives go worse.

Despite all this most people still accept some religious claims. But this fact doesn’t give us much reason to accept religious claims. People believe many weird things that are completely irrational—astrology, fortunetelling, alien abductions, telekinesis and mind reading—and reject claims supported by an overwhelming body of evidence—biological evolution for example. More than three times as many Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus than in biological evolution, although few theologians take the former seriously, while no seriousbiologist rejects the latter!

Consider too that scientists don’t take surveys of the public to determine whether relativity or evolutionary theory are true; their truth is assured by the evidence as well as by resulting technologies—global positioning and flu vaccines work. With the wonders of science every day attesting to its truth, why do many prefer superstition and pseudo science? The simplest answer is that people believe what they want to, what they find comforting, not what the evidence supports: In general, people don’t want to know; they want to believe. This best summarizes why people tend to believe.

Why, then, do some highly educated people believe religious claims? First, smart persons are good at defending ideas that they originally believed for non-smart reasons. They want to believe something, say for emotional reasons, and they then become adept at defending those beliefs. No rational person would say there is more evidence for creation science than biological evolution, but the former satisfies some psychological need for many that the latter does not. How else to explain the hubris of the philosopher or theologian who knows little of biology or physics yet denies the findings of those sciences? It is arrogant of those with no scientific credentials and no experience in the field or laboratory, to reject the hard-earned knowledge of the science. Still they do it. (I knew a professional philosopher who doubted both evolution and climate science but believed he could prove that the Christian God must take a Trinitarian form! Surely something emotional had short-circuited his rational faculties.)

Second, the proclamations of educated believers are not always to be taken at face value. Many don’t believe religious claims but think them useful. They fear that in their absence others will lose a basis for hope, morality or meaning. These educated believers may believe that ordinary folks can’t handle the truth. They may feel it heartless to tell parents of a dying child that their little one doesn’t go to a better place. They may want to give bread to the masses, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.

Our sophisticated believers may be manipulating, using religion as a mechanism of social control, as Gibbon noted long ago: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” Consider the so-called religiosity of many contemporary politicians, whose actions belie the claim that they really believe the precepts of the religions to which they supposedly ascribe. Individuals may also profess belief because it is socially unacceptable not to; they don’t want to be out of the mainstream or fear they will not be reelected or loved if they profess otherwise. So-called believers may not believe the truth of their claims; instead they may think that others are better off or more easily controlled if those others believe. Or perhaps they may just want to be socially accepted.

Third, when sophisticated thinkers claim to be religious, they often have something in mind unlike what the general populace believes. They may be process theologians who argue that god is not omnipotent, contains the world, and changes. They may identify god as an anti-entropic force pervading the universe leading it to higher levels of organization. They may be pantheists, panentheists, or death-of-god theologians. Yet these sophisticated varieties of religious belief bear little resemblance to popular religion. The masses would be astonished to discover how far such beliefs deviate from their theism.

But we shouldn’t be deceived. Although there are many educated religious believers, including some philosophers and scientists, religious belief declines with educational attainment, particularly with scientific education. Studies also show that religious belief declines among those with higher IQs. Hawking, Dennett and Dawkins are not outliers, and neither is Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

Or consider this anecdotal evidence. Among the intelligentsia it is common and widespread to find individuals who lost childhood religious beliefs as their education in philosophy and the sciences advanced. By contrast, it is almost unheard of to find disbelievers in youth who came to belief as their education progressed. This asymmetry is significant; advancing education is detrimental to religious belief. This suggest another part of the explanation for religious belief—scientific illiteracy.

If we combine reasonable explanations of the origin of religious beliefs and the small amount of belief among the intelligentsia with the problematic nature of beliefs in gods, souls, afterlives or supernatural phenomena generally, we can conclude that (supernatural) religious beliefs are probably false. And we should remember that the burden of proof is not on the disbeliever to demonstrate there are no gods, but on believers to demonstrate that there are. Believers are not justified in affirming their belief on the basis of another’s inability to conclusively refute them, any more than a believer in invisible elephants can command my assent on the basis of my not being able to “disprove” the existence of the aforementioned elephants. If the believer can’t provide evidence for a god’s existence, then I have no reason to believe in gods.

In response to the difficulties with providing reasons to believe in things unseen, combined with the various explanations of belief, you might turn to faith. It is easy to believe something without good reasons if you are determined to do so—like the queen in “Alice and Wonderland” who “sometimes … believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” But there are problems with this approach. First, if you defend such beliefs by claiming that you have a right to your opinion, however unsupported by evidence it might be, you are referring to a political or legal right, not an epistemic one. You may have a legal right to say whatever you want, but you have epistemic justification only if there are good reasons and evidence to support your claim. If someone makes a claim without concern for reasons and evidence, we should conclude that they simply don’t care about what’s true. We shouldn’t conclude that their beliefs are true because they are fervently held.

Another problem is that fideism—basing one’s beliefs exclusively on faith—makes belief arbitrary, leaving no way to distinguish one religious belief from another. Fideism allows no reason to favor your preferred beliefs or superstitions over others. If I must accept your beliefs without evidence, then you must accept mine, no matter what absurdity I believe in. But is belief without reason and evidence worthy of rational beings? Doesn’t it perpetuate the cycle of superstition and ignorance that has historically enslaved us? I agree with W.K. Clifford. “It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Why? Because your beliefs affect other people, and your false beliefs may harm them.

The counter to Clifford’s evidentialism has been captured by thinkers like Blaise Pascal, William James, and Miguel de Unamuno. Pascal’s famous dictum expresses: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” William James claimed that reason can’t resolve all issues and so we are sometimes justified believing ideas that work for us. Unamuno searched for answers to existential questions, counseling us to abandon rationalism and embrace faith. Such proposals are probably the best the religious can muster, but if reason can’t resolve our questions then agnosticism, not faith, is required.

Besides, faith without reason doesn’t satisfy most of us, hence our willingness to seek reasons to believe. If those reasons are not convincing, if you conclude that religious beliefs are untrue, then religious answers to life’s questions are worthless. You might comfort yourself by believing that little green dogs in the sky care for you but this is just nonsense, as are any answers attached to such nonsense. Religion may help us in the way that whisky helps a drunk, but we don’t want to go through life drunk. If religious beliefs are just vulgar superstitions, then we are basing our lives on delusions. And who would want to do that?

Why is all this important? Because human beings need their childhood to end; they need to face life with all its bleakness and beauty, its lust and its love, its war and its peace. They need to make the world better. No one else will.




2891
( here's the most ridiculous use of "science" I've seen recently . it ranks right up there with the psychiatric establishment's new mental syndrome that anti authority personalities are pathological syndromes. This has been used by totalitarian regimes for decades.... throw political dissents into mental institutions like the Russians,cubans,chinese,etc.. do,

Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge.

what utter lies......the standard model and Einstein are frauds. scientists throw out any data that does not agree with their prejudicial opinions

as much as i have doubts about the evangelical hierarchy, peoples religious beliefs can not be equated to lines on a brain scan.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.

total Rothschild new world order fascism

Link between brain damage and religious fundamentalism established by scientists

utter lies. this is what happens when you make evolution the technocracy's religion.
one must keep in mind that recent studies have shown that 30% of reports in scientific journals are faulty or outright lies to keep their funding flowing.
rahu)

Link between brain damage and religious fundamentalism established by scientists

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.




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Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.

Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.

To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.

Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.

These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.

The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.
 
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rahu

Banned
3074

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/tr...ition-civil-rights-national-prayer-breakfast/
Trump credits the faithful for the ‘abolition of civil rights’ at National Prayer Breakfast

Donald Trump apparently credited “people of faith” for their role in helping to rid the United States of civil rights. “Since the founding of our nation, many of our greatest strides from gaining our independence to abolition of civil rights to extending the vote for women have been led by people of faith,” he said.
The president may have misspoken. In the 19th century, many people of faith backed the abolition of slavery, and fought for civil rights for African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.
But in more recent years, the president’s religious followers, and in particular evangelical Christians, have indeed been hostile to civil rights for a wide variety of groups, including African Americans, the LGBTQ community, and immigrants among others


https://twitter.com/i/status/1093520904796205061







 

rahu

Banned
3086
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/...biblical-fakery-to-support-hate-and-division/
Pence and Heresy: Grasping Biblical Fakery to Support Hate and Division

By
VT Network Editor -

February 7, 2019 8

ScreenHunter-496.jpg

The “dominionists” are using a dubious translation of the Hebrew word yirdu.
Karl Grossman / NationofChange /

Those involved in what’s become a major component of the evangelical right in the United States call themselves “dominionists.” They follow “dominion theology.” Pointing to the Bible, they emphasize that in it God gave humans “dominion” over the natural world and life in it. This, they believe, gives them license to exploit the earth. Further, the “dominionists” have expanded this to justify theocratic rule of society.
It is an evangelical segment that Donald Trump has sought to attract. They constitute a significant portion of his so-called “base.”
And, as the just-published book, The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, by award-winning journalists and authors Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner, states: “For most of his life Pence had believed he was guided by God’s plan. He believed that the Lord intended for him to halt the erosion of religious conviction in the United States. And though he avoided stating it himself, many of his evangelical friends believed Pence’s ultimate purpose was to establish a government based on biblical law. That was what they called Christian Dominionism.”
Thus arises a big wrinkle in the Trump situation. If Trump resigns is impeached or otherwise is no longer president and Pence replaces him, it could not only be a change of who is on top but a likely push for a different form of United States government.
As for their use of the word dominion, the “dominionists” are using a dubious translation of the Hebrew word yirdu. They take the name of their movement from Genesis and its passage relating how God said: “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air.”
The Hebrew yirdu is what has been translated to dominion.
But, as Dr. David Ehrenfeld, professor of biology at Rutgers University, and Rabbi Philip J. Bentley, wrote in their essay “Judaism and the Practice of Stewardship,” there is an “inadequacy” of this translation. They quote Rashi, the French rabbi of a millennium ago and famous biblical commentator, as explaining, “The Hebrew [yirdu] connotes both ‘dominion’ (derived from radah) and ‘descent’ (derived from yarad): when man is worthy, he has dominion over the animal kingdom, when he is not, he descends below their level and the animals rule over him.’”
“Here is a whole dimension of meaning which cannot be conveyed by an English translation,” Ehrenfeld and Bentley note.
Further, they cite context within Judaism – as Pope Francis did for both Judaism and Christianity in his encyclical on the environment of 2015.







Ehrenfeld and Bentley write, “There is no evidence, that we are aware of, that these verses of Genesis were ever interpreted by the rabbis as a license for environmental exploitation.” Indeed, “such an interpretation runs contrary to their teachings and to the whole spirit” of Jewish law. They cite numerous passages in the Bible regarding this. “There are, in Judaism, a number of specific rules – together constituting a kind of ‘Steward’s Manual’ – setting forth humanity’s particular responsibilities for its behavior toward natural resources, animals, and other parts of nature,” they relate.
“First among these rules is the commandment of bal tashhit” – Hebrew for do not destroy. They point to the Bible stating that “when thou shall besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shall not destroy” the fruit trees.
They write: “From this source is derived the notion of bal tashhit (do not destroy), an ancient and sweeping series of Jewish environmental regulations that embrace not only the limited case in question but have been rabbinically extended to a great range of transgressions including the cutting off of water supplies to trees, the over-grazing of the countryside, the unjustified killing of animals or feeding them harmful foods, the hunting of animals for sport, species extinction and destruction of cultivated plant varieties, pollution of air and water, over-consumption of anything, and the waste of mineral and other resources.”
“It is also the Sabbath alone,” they write, “that can reconcile the Jewish attitude towards nature.” It’s a time that “we create nothing, we destroy nothing, and we enjoy the bounty of the earth. In this way the Sabbath becomes a celebration of our tenancy and stewardship in the world.” Then there is the Sabbatical year that comes every seven years when Jews are supposed to let land lie fallow to restore itself.
Rabbi Norman Lamm, longtime president of Yeshiva University, in his book Faith and Doubt, in a chapter “Ecology in Jewish Law and Theology,” writes about the Genesis “passage that, it is asserted, is the sanction for the excesses of science and technology, the new ecological villains.” It’s been “proclaimed” as “the source of man’s insensitivity and brutality to the subhuman world” and “equated with the right to foul the air.”
Rabbi Lamm says: “It does not take much scholarship to recognize the emptiness of this charge against the Bible, particularly as it is interpreted in the Jewish tradition.” Judaism on many levels, states Lamm, “possesses the values on which an ecological morality may be grounded.”
Pope Francis understands the “dominion” problem. In his 183-page encyclical devoted to “principles drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition which can render our commitment to the environment more coherent,” the pope wrote: “We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us. This allows us to respond to the charge that Judeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of the Genesis account which grants man ‘dominion’ over the earth, has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature. This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church.”
“The biblical texts are to be read in their context,” declares Pope Francis.
He speaks of Genesis telling “us to ‘till and keep’ the garden of the world. ‘Tilling’ refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while ‘keeping’ means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature. Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.”
The pope cites the biblical admonition that “the earth is the Lord’s” and “to him belongs ‘the earth with all that is within it.” He points to the words in Leviticus: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine, for you are strangers and sojourners with me.”
“Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet,” he wrote. “The worldwide ecological movement has already made considerable progress and led to the establishment of numerous organizations committed to raising awareness of these challenges. Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem, indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity.”
He addresses pollution produced by “dangerous waste…Each year hundreds of millions of tons of waste are generated, much of it non-biodegradable, highly toxic and radioactive, from homes and businesses, from construction and demolition sites, from clinical, electronic and industrial sources. The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”
“These problems,” the pope continues, “are closely linked to a throwaway culture…. We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them.”
“A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades, this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon.”
“The problem is aggravated by a model of development based on the intensive use of fossil fuels, which is at the heart of the worldwide energy system,” he goes on. “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political…It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”
The pope says: “There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own plans will not be affected.” And “economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment.”
“Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster,” he writes. “Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress. A technological and economic development which does not leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress.” The pope called for an “ecological conversion,” an environmental variant of what Jews refer to as tikkun olam, repairing the world.
Nevertheless, the “dominionists” have a completely different view.
In his 2016 article “Dominionism Rising: A Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight,” published in The Public Eye magazine, Frederick Clarkson writes about the roots of “dominion theology,” notably the writings of theologian R. J. Rushdoony. He discusses Rushdoony’s 1973 “800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, which offered what he believed was a ‘foundation’ for a future biblically-based society, and his vision of generations of ‘dominion men’ advancing the ‘dominion mandate’ described in the biblical book of Genesis.”
He notes another theologian, C. Peter Wagner, and his 2008 book Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World in which Wagner states: “We have an assignment from God to take dominion and transform society.” And he cites a speech Wagner made that year declaring: “Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority…and it relates to society. In other words, what the values are in heaven need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings.”
In The Shadow President, D’Antonio and Eisner detail how Trump picked Pence as his running mate largely to cement relations with evangelicals and hard-right conservatives, and also because of the sameness that Trump and Pence have on many issues.
“Humble superiority had been Pence’s default setting during his twelve years in Congress and four as Indiana’s governor, where his blending of religion and politics had alienated fellow Republicans, who noted he could be harsh in his treatment of his opponents and stubborn in his beliefs,” they write. “When Pence denied climate change or questioned the fact that smoking causes cancer, they saw unseemly and irrational arrogance. His disregard for science and other realms of expertise made him more like President Trump than many Americans understood.”
“Amid the churn and uncertainty” of the Trump presidency “Pence reassured many that should Trump leave office, someone with a steady temperament would be there. Although it was never stated openly, he was already functioning as a kind of shadow president, taking on so many domestic, foreign, and partisan political assignments that he seemed more engaged in serious matters than the TV-addicted president himself.”
They describe intense evangelical doings at The White House. They write about evangelist Ralph Drollinger “who imagines himself to be a prophet” and is “the leader of the Trump Cabinet’s weekly prayer meetings, which Mike Pence attended with regularity.” They cite a comment of Drollinger in 2017 that the U.S. government’s “God-given responsibility” and “primary calling is to moralize a fallen world through the use of force.”
If Trump goes, does Pence have to succeed him?
Not so, wrote Professor Michael J. Glennon, law professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, in a just-out op-ed in The Washington Post headed, “If Trump is impeachable, so is Pence.”
The article explores the history of the process of impeachment of a U.S. president. Glennon writes: “Assume, hypothetically, that the upcoming report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, together with other evidence, were to establish conclusively that candidate Donald Trump engaged in electoral fraud or corruption by unlawfully coordinating his activities with the Russian government. Assume also that trump derived a decisive electoral benefit from that coordination. And assume that no probative evidence exists that Vice President Pence was aware of the coordination. Trump would be impeachable. But what about Pence, who himself would have committed no impeachable offense. The question can be argued either way, but the better view is that Pence, too, would be impeachable. The reason is that, had Trump not engaged in electoral fraud and corruption, Pence, like Trump, would not have been elected.”
 
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rahu

Banned
3107
(what the author of this essay is forgetting or covering up is that the instillation of evangelicals in the military forces was instituted under bush before the Iraq war. it was the mossads influence to put evangelicals in power positions because the mossad knew that with the belief system that Jesus was the messiah, then Israel's genocidal plans would be unchallenged rahu
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/06...monuclear-war/
World Teetering on Brink of Thermonuclear War

By
Ian Greenhalgh -

June 21, 2017

The Trump administration has committed what may turn out to be a fatal mistake, and by fatal, I mean not just to the Trump regime but to the entire globe. Trump has surrendered control of the US Military machine to the Pentagon – the President, the Secretary of Defense, all of the politicians no longer control or guide the US military, the Pentagon now holds the reins.
What is really disturbing and scary about this is that the Pentagon is, quite frankly, utterly insane; the place is riddled with fundamentalist Christians, Dominionists obsessed with fulfilling the ‘End Times’ prophecy.
No, this is not an outline for a new Dr Strangelove movie, this is absolutely real. We find a succinct description of the Dominionist mindset in an essay written by Gavin Finley MD:
It is a belief that this world can, and must, be conquered for Christ by militant action undertaken by the Christian Church.
Dominion Theology incorporates a Crusader mindset. It teaches that it is our Christian duty to take over the world, in a political sense, and if necessary, in a military sense, in order to impose Biblical rule. Christ will not return, (they say), until the church has “risen up” and “taken dominion” over all of the world’s governments and institutions.
Dominionists affirm that this is not a matter for us to discuss. As they see it, this is a direct unequivocal mandate from God. We are not to wait upon God, (they say). They say that He is waiting for US! And they are insistent, even bullying, in their demand that we follow them in their wild ride towards world dominion.
So now we have a bunch of religious maniacs who firmly believe they must conquer the world on the orders of God in control of the the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons on the planet. These same maniacs are currently pumping US troops and weapons into Syria in what appears to be a blatant attempt to start a shooting war with the Russians.
 

rahu

Banned
3135
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/...-religious-right-has-laid-bare-its-hypocrisy/

In revering Trump, the religious right has laid bare its hypocrisy

The evangelical fortress around the president can look like a problem, but progressives can use that heresy to fight opponents

he annual anachronism known as the National Prayer Breakfast attracted its usual array of clergy, military, and political leaders in Washington on 7 February. Most prominent of all, of course, was Donald Trump, who used the de facto pulpit to call for outlawing abortion, among other positions dear to the Religious Right.
Yet the presidential comment that most typified all that has gone morally haywire with the supposedly moral majority came when Trump praised the “abolition of civil rights”. You can consider that statement an innocent, if embarrassing, misreading of the Teleprompter. Or you can hear it as a Freudian slip.
As inspired by the Reverend Billy Graham and originated by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, the National Prayer Breakfast served two consensual, almost anodyne purposes. It epitomized the moderate, mid-century civil religion that preached that an American was a better citizen for believing in God and going, at least occasionally, to church or synagogue. And amid the Cold War, American leaders insistently portrayed their nation’s collective faith confronting what was routinely called “godless Communism”.
In fact, the greatest application of religion in the public square during the 1950s and 1960s occurred in pursuit of a liberal goal: civil rights.
 

rahu

Banned
3155

the mossad kabalistic must be worrying as the are pulling all stops to erase the original name of god/gods. which is elohim
3 days ago I was writing about this , the post was terminate and reference to the meaning of elohim were deleted.
my flash drive was even attacked and now has a virus on it.

archeological artifact make it clear that Yahweh was only a cult god in the 11th century and could not have been the creator god

Excavations in 1976 found pottery shard at Kuntillet `Ajrud with allusions to Yahweh and asherah.
http://wbs.edu/2016/09/pondering-spa...-ajrud-pithoi/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/...ptian-god-bes/
http://www.lebtahor.com/Archaeology/...scriptions.htm




i interesting turn of events is occurring here in the north west.
kabbalist disguised as evangelicals are trying to spread the word to local christians that elohim, the original name for the lord god in the bible is wrong. these yahwist propagandist are saying that yahweh is the original name of god and that "some crazy priest" changed the name of yahweh to elohim.

the yahwist propagandist have been distorting the truth of the bible for over 2000 years and this is the latest attempt to accomplish this.

elohim means the lords. that is it is plural and it also is masculine and feminine. that is male and female gods....... of course the levite yahwist have waged war on the feminine goddess for thousands of years and this is just a 20th century attempt to further lie about the true meaning of elohim-god/goddess.

when I was in tacoma couple of months ago , met with an evangelical. I had known them for several decades but we hadn't talk for many years. I mentioned the kabalistic trying to rewrite the bible and they concurred they had heard this. after meeting several times over a week they when to their pastor.
I had been served ice tea during these visits but the next time we met. the tea had been contaminated with nano mrsa, so I realized that the mossad kabalists had already taken over the minds and morals of the evangelicals in
Tacoma

the Kabbalists are enlisting the evangelicals because the evangelical support the war against humanity going on in the middle east .and of course evangelicals with embrace the concept that Yahweh is the true first god because the evangelicals want to keep women subservient as do the kabbalist.
 

rahu

Banned
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/co...ng-racist-evangelical-takeover-gop-led-trump/

(the elephant in the refrigerator here is again that the GOP was not taken over by evangelicals but rather that the beginning of the afghan war , the evangelicals were recruited because they supported netanyahu's war because they believed that jesus christ was in fact jesus the messiah. netanyahu can not even get total support in israel for israel legitimacy because the messiah has not returned yet....most jews agree with this, so netanyahu turned to the evangelical to get the support he does not have in israel . the evangelicals because of their ignorance of the concept of messiah were gung ho to be placed in positions of authority by bush. the evangelicals did not take over the GOP, the GOP was simply kow towing to the neocon zionist who controlled the GOP.rahu)

Conservative apologizes for ignoring racist evangelical takeover of the GOP — which led to Trump

n a series of tweets, a prominent conservative critic of Donald Trump offered up a mea culpa for standing by for years as the Republican Party he proudly belonged to was taken over by Christian fundamentalists, racists and “gun nuts” which culminated with the party embracing Donald Trump.

On Twitter, Tom Nichols — a professor at the Naval War College — responded to a commenter who claimed he left the Republican Party due to the “Christian right wing (American Hezbollah).”

“The Christian right wing (American Hezbollah) is the principle reason I will never vote for Republican again,” the commenter who goes by the Twitter name of LogJammin’ wrote. “They now have 4 of 9 members of Supreme court maybe 5 if you include Roberts although I think he’s a serious jurist. They are the most insidious force in America.”

That set off a confession from Nichols, who detailed what he saw as the decline of the GOP over a period of decades that made him leave the party.

“This comes up a lot, along with the usual liberal carping about the ‘Southern strategy’ and it’s worth a moment of comment, especially since I am stuck in an airport,” Nichols tweeted. “No arguing that mod-con GOPers like me treated the southern evangelical wing of the party with a shrug. I think many of us figured: Meh, we’re stuck with them, not just because of their racial views, but because they were conservative Christians not welcome among the Dems.”

From there Nichols described how more mainstream conservatives like himself let their party be taken over.




“For people like me, the Southern strategy wasn’t a strategy. It was really just a ‘keep them in the tent and harvest their votes by default’ strategy. This was Reagan’s approach, and it definitely pissed off the evangelicals, as GOPers knew back in 1984,” he wrote. “But I always assumed that the GOP was a prudent, rational, conservative party that would never let the wingnuts (as opposed to the mainstream conservative Christians) gain actual power within the party. I was wrong. There were plenty of warnings that it was going to happen.”

He then added, “People like Pat Robertson were canaries in the coal mine. I admit that I brushed this off, as something so irrational and so obviously self-destructive that I really didn’t think it had a future. I did not think the GOP would commit suicide for the fringiest evangelicals.”

“The victory of the hard-core evangelicals is now the election and unbending support of one of the most decadent and un-Christian GOP politicians ever,” he continued. “I knew the political evangelicals were hypocrites; I did not realize they would go to the wall this way.”
 
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rahu

Banned
3485
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/03/je...ong-evangelicals-exposes-really-chris-hedges/

Jesus didn’t come to make us rich’ — and Trump’s popularity among evangelicals exposes them for what they really are: Chris Hedges

— and Trump’s popularity among evangelicals exposes them for what they really are: Chris Hedges







evangelicals-690x460-800x430.jpg


America is a country beset by junk politics. This is one of the main reasons Donald Trump is president. Junk politics is many things. It is an obsession with the “horse race” of campaigns and elections, rather than a substantive discussion of the real issues that affect the lives of the average American and the country as a whole. Junk politics is a form heavily defined by spectacle, distraction, superficiality and novelty. It is not a space for serious, sustained, and in depth discussion of serious matters of public concern. Junk politics is personality-driven and its preferred mode of communication is short slogans and sound bites.Twitter offers a pre-eminent example of how literacy has been gutted by that platform’s arbitrary limit of 280 characters or less. Junk politics is lived through and enabled by the fact that many Americans lack basic civil literacy and have lost faith in the state’s ability to protect their basic rights and ensure opportunities for upward economic mobility — or even basic economic stability. If the American Dream is dead, junk politics struck one of the lethal blows.

Economic precariousness, societal instability and personal loneliness are byproducts of an American society where junk politics rule. They are also preconditions for how junk politics has thrived in the Age of Trump.



In this wide-ranging conversation, I spoke with Chris Hedges about America’s junk politics. He is the author of numerous award winning and bestselling books including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” “Death of a Liberal Class,” “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” and “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”

Hedges has also written for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is currently a contributing writer for the political commentary and news analysis website Truthdig. His newest book is “America: The Farewell Tour.”

In our conversation Hedges offered his insights on Michael Cohen’s hearing before the House Oversight Committee, and also on the ways the Democratic Party has been compromised by the same moneyed interests as the Republican Party. He also discussed Donald Trump’s political cult and whether Trump will leave voluntarily if he is removed from office. We also discussed the role of the Christian right in Trump and the plutocrats’ assault on American democracy, the distinctive status of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and whether Bernie Sanders can overcome his “race problem”


This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can hear our full conversation on my podcast, “The Chauncey DeVega Show.”

What was your reaction to Michael Cohen’s testimony before Congress and what he revealed about Donald Trump? Did you believe Cohen?


There is something very interesting about all of these people who go after Trump. Once they’re tossed from his orbit they are as morally impoverished as he is. They all come from the same moral swamp that Trump inhabits. They are not trustworthy figures. The people who circle around Trump do so because they have no moral core. Was Cohen telling the truth? Probably. How remorseful was he? I don’t really trust any of these people. I do not believe that anyone gets close to Trump if they have any moral consistency. This in turn makes everything they say suspect.

Beyond Cohen’s testimony that Trump behaves like a sociopath and is likely a criminal, I found the whole hearing to be an example of how America’s “elites” are a corrupt class. They are shameless about rigging the system to their own advantage. The casual disregard Trump, Cohen and the Republican Party have for the rule of law is obvious.

I would say that is also true of the Democrats as well. The difference is that Trump and his administration are just a naked kleptocracy. The Democrats did it with more finesse. The Clintons are con artists and crooks too — they are just classier versions of it with Ivy League pedigrees.

I think this is the great failing on the part of the Democratic Party. The Democrats do not grasp the very legitimate rage in this country. When you examine the statistics about what happened to the white working class and, of course, African-Americans by the end of the Obama administration, matters were very dire economically. If you are a black person or a brown person you have nowhere else to go in terms of mainstream politics except for the Democratic Party. Donald Trump is mainstreaming the Ku Klux Klan. Nonwhites are trapped in terms of their political options.

The whole system is a con. It’s just not as naked and as crude as it is under the Trump administration. The Democratic Party has not come to terms with the fact that most people have figured this reality out. Trump’s power is that he speaks, of course, with great vulgarity. But Trump is also ridiculing the elites that sold working men and women out in this country. I wrote a column a while ago arguing that you have to look at Trump as a cult leader, not as a political figure. So, what you want from a cult leader is very different from what you want from a political leader.


I saw this in the megachurches that I covered when I wrote my book on the Christian right. I spent two years on the book, and the stories of personal despair and dislocation, bankruptcies, struggle with addictions, domestic abuse, sexual abuse and the like were heartbreaking. These unfortunate people were suckered into an evil and dangerous system. These megachurch pastors function as cult leaders.

The followers want the cult leader to be omnipotent. You want them to be able to break all the rules, because you identify with them to such an extent that their increase in power is an increase of your own power. You believe that that fealty to the cult leader means that you are protected.

That’s what Trump has going for him. I don’t think people have quite figured it out. It doesn’t really matter how many lists of lies the Washington Post publishes. We cannot look at Donald Trump as though he is a political leader. Trump is a demagogue. Those are different rules. Demagogues have to be fought differently. I am not sure the Democratic Party gets it.

The Democrats cannot defeat Donald Trump unless they accept the fact that he is a cultural force. The Democrats are also wasting time and energy worrying about winning over Trump’s voters. These people are members of a political cult. As such, the more the Democrats go after Trump the more Trump’s cult members are going to support him. I am very worried about the type of national mental breakdown or violence that will occur when and if Trump is forced from power.

Well, Trump’s supporters all have weapons. Trump has already incited violence. The financial system is very fragile. We live in a period of relative economic stability, however dispossessed most of the American working class and working poor actually are.

If the United States falls into another economic meltdown like we did in 2007 and 2008, then there will be a kind of incoherent rage on the part of the white, dispossessed working class. They’re all armed, and there will be a rhetorical green-lighting of violence against those people who are made into scapegoats for the decline of the United States.

The homophobia and Islamophobia, overt racism and other vile behavior will become much more pronounced. All cults are personality cults. All cults are really extensions of whoever the cult leader is. So, whatever the prejudices, the worldview and the ideas of the cult leader are they will be chanted back at him by the crowd. Until massive social and economic inequality as well as the betrayal of the country by the elite are confronted and remedied, this yearning for a cult leader will not go away. Desperate people are looking for somebody to save them.

I could have never guessed that Trump would be embraced by the Christian right. This fact exposes the Christian Right for what they primarily are, which is heretics. The Christian Right is also a political movement that tries to make itself sacred by claiming to be “Christian.” But it actually shares the cultish quality that is now being channeled writ large by the Trump administration.

Do the white Christian evangelicals — the leaders, not the rank-and-file members who have drunk the Kool Aid — actually believe that Trump is a vessel of God’s will? Even by the standards of fundamentalist religion it is all very absurd.

The belief system of the Christian right is utterly heretical. Jesus didn’t come to make us rich. Jesus wouldn’t bless the American empire, and the dropping of iron fragmentation bombs all over the Middle East. Jesus did not exalt the white race above other races. In fact, of course, Jesus was a person of color. The whole thing is heretical, and the failure on the part of the liberal church in the name of tolerance to call these people out has essentially given them a religious legitimacy that I find very frightening. The people who are embraced by this belief system have retreated into magical thinking. It is not rational. Even the Christian right’s fine points of doctrine and argument are not rational.

They are selective literalists. They know that one little Biblical passage that they’ve been fed to buttress or support their ideological worldview, but the Bible itself, they don’t know. The problem is that, once you fall into this world of Magical Jesus, then not only rational thought, but science is discredited. Verifiable fact is discredited, and this movement really set the stage or laid the groundwork for Trump.

This belief system all predated Trump. It’s been peddled by “Christian” schools, “Christian” broadcasting, “Christian” universities. Patrick Henry Law School, Liberty University, etc. Trump is not the instigator. He clung on to a very dangerous social phenomenon that has been building up over the last three decades. These Christian right-wing fascists have been organizing to take power.

And they now have power with Trump. They are rapidly filling the ideological vacuum created by Trump — a man who has no real ideology of his own. The Christian right is filling that vacuum. Kavanaugh is the perfect example. The whole reason Kavanaugh was put on the Supreme Court is because they know he would overturn Roe v Wade. Other senior people in Trump’s White House such as Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson and others all come out of the Christian right.

A little-discussed part of the Christian right’s war on American democracy is a belief in “prayer warfare.” These “prayer warriors” are committed to influencing public policy and American life in general by lying, dissembling, deceiving and otherwise manipulating nonbelievers. They believe that secular laws do not apply to them. This type of radical right-wing Christian fundamentalism now has a beachhead in the American presidency.

That is a very important point. You see Sarah Huckabee Sanders do this every day. Part of this Christian totalitarian mindset is that secular humanists are deemed to be incapable of understanding the “Kingdom of God.” Therefore those right-wing Christians who believe this doctrine have convinced themselves that they are permitted to lie to nonbelievers and others in order to do God’s work. These members of the Christian right, like Sarah Sanders, are certainly aware that they’re lying, but they believe they’re morally justified in terms of that lie. By comparison, Donald Trump is just a pathological liar. The hierarchy of the Christian right is calculated in their lying.

America is a “pathocracy.” The very rich and other members of the elite — there is much social psychology and other research which shows this to be true — are more likely to lie, break the rules, and do other things to rig the system in their interests. They also feel justified in doing so because of social dominance behavior and because the subculture they inhabit normalizes the behavior.

There are gradations, of course, to the rich. But they are bred with a sense of entitlement, they believe that they are above the law. They’re devoid of empathy. They’re utterly self-absorbed, narcissistic. The wealth among the super-rich, as you point out, encourages behaviors that are pathological — and now they have uncontested power. They are reconfiguring the society using their power, privilege and wealth to amass more power and to accrue even more wealth.

The fraternity of the super-rich do not understand the norms of society. There’s no restraint. They don’t understand limits. And because they’re so unplugged from reality, they live in artificial bubbles. This class of people will push and push and push until society collapses — which is what they’re doing. They have to be replaced if we’re going to reclaim control over our own lives, and ultimately over how we deal with the environment so that our children can survive.

Why is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez such a reviled and hated figure among conservatives and the right wing — and many “centrist” Democrats as well? it seems as if the white right has an existential fear of her.

Because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is speaking a self-evident truth about our reality. These same people hated Bernie Sanders too. Remember that until Bernie Sanders ran in the primary, nobody spoke about the fundamental causes of massive income and social inequality in the United States. It was just never discussed. Politicians within the Democratic and Republican parties never even mentioned the word “poor.” All they ever did was talk about the mythical middle class. So the reason they hate AOC is because the public is not buying the ruling ideology of neoliberalism, an ideology which was always a con anyway.

That ideology really has been shredded across the political spectrum. Nobody’s buying it and the elites do not have a counterargument. Ultimately, it is not a matter of AOC being on the left. It is that she is speaking about a reality that the plutocrats and other ruling elites have orchestrated. They don’t have anything to say. That’s why they hate her so much.

And what about Ilhan Omar? She is facing a huge amount of vile bigotry and racism. Is her real sin that she deviated outside the narrow limits of approved public discourse about the influence of Israel in America’s domestic and foreign policy?

I would say the same thing. I like Rep. Ilhan Omar a lot. Every time she says something, she’s amazing. What she says is frank, honest and correct. And, of course, the Democratic Party went after her. I mean, we talk about interference in American elections. Let’s talk about Israel. There’s no country — Russia, China or anything else — that comes close to Israel’s interference in the American electoral process. But you can’t say it. And she said it. I know about the Israel lobby and I’ve been a victim of it. But even I was stunned by the evidence we have seen of their power. And of course those people who are attacking Rep. Omar love the fact that she’s Muslim and a woman and a person of color because it makes it easier to demonize her.

Why is Bernie Sanders running for president again? Do you think he actually has a chance of winning?

First of all, it is really early. We don’t really have politics in America; we have reality TV. How many candidates are there, 16 or something? Sanders thinks he can win because he did Chuck Schumer’s bidding and went around the country telling people to vote for Hillary Clinton. Sanders built a relationship with the Democratic Party and this time around he thinks the party elites won’t steal the nomination from him, which they did last time.

I think that Bernie is mistaken. I think he’s very naive. There’s no way the Democratic Party will allow him to be the nominee because the Democratic Party is funded by the same retrograde corporate interests that fund the Republican Party.

People like Pelosi and Schumer hold power because they are the conduit of that money to the anointed Democratic candidates. And every once in a while we’ll see Ocasio-Cortez or others rise up as insurgents. I don’t think that Bernie Sanders is corrupt like most of the other potential candidates. I look at Beto O’Rourke with a great deal of skepticism.

I believe that Bernie Sanders’ heart is in the right place. But when he tries to talk about race — see for example his recent comments about reparations for the enslavement of black Americans — he has these blinders on where he seems incapable of talking about racial injustice and white racism in a substantive and correct way.

He’s a white liberal. White liberals feel uncomfortable around people of color, especially black people. I would also guess that Bernie probably doesn’t have very many close relationships, if any, with African-Americans who didn’t go to Harvard Law School. I just think he’s completely tone-deaf. I think we saw that early on in his campaign.

Reparations, I would argue, are at their core not really about money. Reparations are about a country coming to terms with and owning its past. I’m talking about the white majority. James Baldwin writes about this. We feed off of a mythology of whiteness and white supremacy, a mythology that is completely mendacious and entails vast historical distortion and historical amnesia. That is very dangerous for any country.

The act of paying reparations is not just about the justice that is owed to African-Americans. Maybe more important, it’s about the ability of the United States and its white majority to face who they are, where they came from and what they did. That inability to face that, as Baldwin points out, has allowed them to confuse willful ignorance with innocence, and turn them into monsters. The face of that is Donald Trump.

I look at Bernie and I see the classic white liberal. I live in Princeton, they’re all around, but they don’t have real relationships with people of color. They might employ them in their homes or do their lawns or they might have a black colleague who has a Ph.D. from Yale. That’s why they were so happy with Barack Obama.

I predicted quite early on that Donald Trump would win the White House in 2016. People thought I was crazy. Unfortunately, I was proven correct. A new prediction. Donald Trump is a symptom of a cultural sickness. The Democrats will not defeat Trump because they do not understand the true nature of their enemies. I predict that Donald Trump wins again in 2020, and wins the presidential election by a comfortable margin. Please convince me otherwise.

That is my fear as well. The Democrats’ strategy is to play to the margins and by doing so slice away enough of the Trump vote to win. But again, the Democratic Party does not want to sever itself from Wall Street and all that corporate money, because the party hierarchy is the creation of that money and they wouldn’t hold power without it. I think that’s an extremely dangerous strategy. I think it misreads the angst in American society which has created a figure like Donald Trump.

When he says, “They’re out to get me,” and, “It’s a witch hunt,” that resonates with the white working class. Because, remember, the white working class, and again this goes back to the great James Baldwin, actually believe in the American Dream. But black people? they always knew there were two sets of rules, “One for them and one for us.” As Baldwin said, “Black men don’t have a midlife crisis the way white men do.”

White men wake up at 40 and realize, “I’m *******.” And I think that’s why most Trump supporters are white and male. I think that’s why mass shooters are white and male. I think that the people in these armed hate groups, that’s why they’re white and male. These are more examples of why Trumpism has more characteristics of a cult than a political movement.

The only way to break the back of Trumpism, this yearning for fascism — or a form of Christian fascism — is to reintegrate these people back into the society by fixing the country’s broken economy.

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