Thursday, January 24, 2008
Let's Try This Again
My post below entitled "Don't Tell ME What To Do" turned into another debate on homosexual rights. Not what I had hoped for it. So this thread is strictly to deal with the subject of the alleged attempts of Christians to control. I don't feel such allegations are warranted in the least. Thus, I offer the chance for any to relate anything that might serve as an example.
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12 comments:
Sorry.
No problem, my friend.
Marshall,
Sorry I didn’t comment sooner – Time!
Great points! Those whom can’t win a debate on its merits constantly use the evangelical boogey man. Much like those who use the race card or conspiracy theorist. “You can’t possibly understand” because you’ve been duped, don’t ya know!
The media has built up such a caricature of any that are Christian; it’s almost comical. Watch any TV series (Law and Order comes to mind) or any movie and 9 times out of 10 the Christian in the story will be the bad guy. Not much effect on old timers like us, but you have to wonder how it may influence the younger generation. And don’t think for a minute that the writers/producers
Most liberals in the higher echelons of leadership feel threatened by any expression of religious faith, most especially Christian faith. It’s a conspiracy in order to “force” a theocratic viewpoint. I think you covered in an earlier post why this is – basically an unwillingness to confront that which they know is wrong.
They attempt to persuade us by making the argument that our belief is nothing more than an old wives tale, a fable, a fairy tale, used to calm the masses (for they can’t handle the truth don’t ya know).
I’m going to quote Tom Brewton here, because he sums it up much better than myself. (Who has a tendency to jump from one topic to another, all the while fooling myself into believing I’ve made sense of the jumbled mass of thoughts fighting for control in my mind)
He’s basically speaking on the “flip side” of the coin. Traditionalist and those of the Christian faith on one side and:
”Atheistic materialism, unfortunately, is not a unifying set of traditions and morality. It is merely the Darwinian doctrine enunciated by Thomas Huxley that there is no such thing as sin, that human life is merely survival of the fittest, with no meaning beyond self-indulgence. A world dedicated to nothing more than every-man-for-himself, in-your-face “doing your own thing” is inherently Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all, in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.
Traditionalists merely wish to sustain the ethos that underlay the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution from the 18th century until the 1930s. They may attempt to persuade liberals of the error of their ways, but that is hardly the liberals’ imagined theocracy.
The liberal jihad, in contrast, leaves traditionalists with no choice but to surrender their faith or fight. The jihad seeks to impose atheistic religious doctrine upon all of public education and politics and to scourge all expressions of of Judeo-Christian religious belief that are not confined to the closed quarters of churches, synagogues, or private homes. As under the sharia of Islam, Christians and religious Jews are tolerated, so long as they keep their faith private and pay their taxes to support teaching atheistic materialism in the public schools.
The liberal jihad also has the full backing of the Federal and most state judiciaries and the benefit of unending propaganda from the self-designated mainstream media, including taxpayer-financed NPR and PBS.
Quietly keeping religious faith as a personal matter is not an option for traditionalists. With public education controlled by the doctrines of atheistic materialism, we already have three generations of citizens who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the gospel of materialistic social-justice. It’s as if the body snatchers of the 1978 movie were replacing the souls of our children with alien, amoral sensuality.
The gray-beards of today’s liberalism were, in the 1960s, the anti-establishment rebels on college campuses who perceived the entirety of existing society – from New Deal liberals to Republican conservatives – in C. Wright Mills’s expression, as the power elite. Student anarchists of that era added a guerilla-tactic edge to the normal rebelliousness of youth. Even Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) became too tame for the violent wing, who split off into the Weatherman underground of bank robbers, murderers, and bombers.
From the perspective of those rebels, who are today’s politicians, judges, and educators, even the bland society of the 1950s had to be obliterated, under the impetus of solidarity with the “black colony” in the United States and Vietnamese freedom-fighters in Southeast Asia. That militant spirit remains the subtext in today’s paranoid reaction against any questioning of the gospel of atheistic materialism.
Ross Douthat in his essay on the First Things website concludes:
What all these observers point out, and what the anti-theocrats ignore, is that the religious polarization of American politics runs in both directions. The Republican party has become more religious because the Democrats became self-consciously secular, and the turning point wasn’t the 1992 or the 2000 elections but the putsch of 1972, when secularist delegates — to quote Phillips, quoting Layman — suddenly “constituted the largest ‘religious’ bloc among Democratic delegates.” . . . it’s the second half of the story, the Republican reaction against the Democrats’ decision to become the first major party in American history to pander to a sizable bloc of aggressively secular voters . . . So the rise of the Religious Right, and the growing “religion gap” that Phillips describes but fails to understand, aren’t new things in American history but a reaction to a new thing . . . The hysteria over theocracy, in turn, represents an attempt to rewrite the history of the United States to suit these voters’ prejudices, by setting a year zero somewhere around 1970 and casting everything that’s happened since as a battle between progress and atavism, reason and fundamentalism, the Enlightenment and the medieval dark.
Damn!!! That just about sums it up. We can all think of first hand examples of things Mr. Brewton has alluded to.
Make no mistake, we are in a war, a decades long war that many are not aware of. We don’t wish to shove our views down others throats, at the same time don’t try to erase our legacy while shoving your views down our throats!!!
Re, "Most liberals in the higher echelons of leadership feel threatened by any expression of religious faith, most especially Christian faith."
Piffle. The next president of the United States, a liberal, is a Christian. (True whether it's Hillary or Obama.)
Hey, MA.
Well, this is one of the one's that scares me...just so you know, he ALSO recommends stoning as the best meathod of executing people because it builds a sense of community and rocks are cheap.
:-0
"As a tactic for a short-run defense of the independent Christian school movement, the appeal to religious liberty is legitimate. Everyone who is attempting to impose a world-and-life view on a majority (or on a ruling minority) always uses some version of the liberty doctrine to buy himself and his movement some time, some organizational freedom, and some power. . . . So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." --- Gary North
Gary wrote a glowing eulogy for his father-in Law, R.J. Rushdoony over at Lew Rockwell.
One of my favorites from Rushdoony is this one:
Deuteronomy 13 cites three cases of instigation to idolatry, first, in vv. 1-5, by the false prophet; second, in vv. 6-11, by a private individual; and, third, by a city, vv. 12-18. The penalty in every case is death without mercy. To the modern mind, this seems drastic. Why death for idolatry? If idolatry is unimportant to a man, then a penalty for it is outrageous. But modern man thinks nothing of death penalties for crimes against the state, or against the "people," or against "the revolution," because these things are important to him. The death penalty is not required here for private belief: it is for attempts to subvert others and to subvert the social order by enticing others to idolatry. Because for Biblical law the foundation is the one true God, the central offense is therefore treason to that God by idolatry. Every law-order has its concept of treason. No law-order can permit an attack on its foundations without committing suicide. Those states which claim to abolish the death penalty still retain it on the whole for crimes against the state. The foundations of a law-order must be protected.
--R.J. Rushdoony.
Howard Ahmanson is one of R.J. Rushdoony's disciples (he is generally reported to have been at Rushdoony's deathbed), and due to a huge inheritance his foundations are the primary backers for the IRD and the Discovery Institute, among other such organizations. He's a member of the Council on National Policy.
he's very influential, but compared to most of his compatriots, he's an old softie.
My favorite quote of his is:
"It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things. But I don't think it's at all a necessity."
Welcome Teresa. I have to say that at present, I'm not following where you're trying to go, for some reason. But I will return and try again later and comment in some manner. This post is not archived, so I entered this comment to let you know I read your remarks (more or less) and that I intend to comment after a 2nd read, in case you check back.
I hope that made sense.
Marshall Art,
Hmmm...maybe I read your request wrong. I interpreted your post as a challenge to come up with examples of Christians who were trying to control.
I thought that quotes from guys working for a Christian theocracy in the U.S. would fit the bill (one of whom is a major funder of the conservative movement).
Obviously, I misunderstood something. Sorry to have wasted your time.
Not at all, Teresa. But a more obscure reference you could not have found. I'd have to say his influence must be minimal to remain such an unknown. I just don't think there's really much call for a theocracy within Christendom. Of course, if everyone would just live a Christian life, then a theocracy is unnecessary. But then it has to be by choice or it's a fraud.
Marshall,
I don't think Ahmanson is that obscure. For example, hes a major funder of the IRD and the Discovery Institute, for example.
Time named him one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals in America
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050207/
Sure, he's reclusive and prefers to work behind the scenes with funding, (reportedly, because he suffers from Tourettes Syndrome), but he's quite influential.
R.J. Rushdoony was instrumental in the success of the homeschooling movement.
Nonetheless, a theocracy is not on the front burner for the lion's share of Christians. It just isn't. That a man of means and some influence might be does not mean that his influence in this area is strong. Again, I've never heard of the guy, thus, he can't be too strongly supporting such a thing. By this I mean that for the efforts I make to try and stay abreast of new developments, you'd have thought knowledge of this guy or his "agenda" might have trickled down by now. This is of course assuming that he is indeed in favor of a theocracy and not simply being spoken of in this manner. It wouldn't be the first time that spiritual rhetoric is misconstrued as a call for a theocracy. If you have something more substantive in this regard, I'd be happy to review it. But one or two guys does not a movement make.
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