When
a blogger like me warns of Christofascist violence, people think I'm
just a leftist crackpot. However, when a former VIP (and son of a
founder) to Christofascists warns people...
From The Raw Story:
"The bestselling status of the Left Behind novels proves that, not unlike Islamist terrorists who behead their enemies, many evangelical/fundamentalist readers relish the prospect of God doing lots of messy killing for them as they watch in comfort from on high," he added. "They want revenge on all people not like them -- forever.""The scary thing is that there are a number of pastors on record as saying they are praying for the President's death. Can you imagine what some gun-toting paranoid who hears that in a sermon is thinking and might do? And to them the fact that 'the world' likes this black man is reason enough to hate him. You wait. The reaction to Obama winning the Nobel Prize will be entirely negative from the far Religious Right. 'See the world, all those socialists like him that just proves he's a -- fill in the blank -- communist, secret Muslim, the Antichrist, whatever.'"
Frank
Schaeffer was the son of Francis Schaeffer, one of THE men who helped
shape The Moral Majority and The Christian Coalition. Thanks
to Francis (and Frank, to a certain extent) we've got people like Pat
Robertson, James Dobson, Rick Warren, Ralph Reed, Ken Copeland, James
Hagee and Rod Parsley trying to gain the political upper hand in
America. The title of Frank Schaeffer's first book says quite a lot:
Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back
On Obama's controversial Chicago Pastor:
"If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters ... history will hold you responsible for all that follows."
Violence
is almost never attributed to the church. Christendom has never had to
atone for the (approximately) 140,000,000 deaths committed by "Good
Christians." It was, in fact, Mark Twain who pointed out that
"Christians are the most efficient killers in the history of the world.
(The Mysterious Stranger.)"
In microcosm: it has never atoned for the miserable lives it took
advantage of in the Magdalene Laundries* nor the children kept as
science experiments in the Canadian orphanages (now termed The
Duplessis Orphans).*
Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back
On Obama's controversial Chicago Pastor:
"[W]hen my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr."To Senator McCain during the '08 Presidential race:
"If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters ... history will hold you responsible for all that follows."
Yes,
the Duplessis example was more direct in its intolerance for life.
Frank Schaffer gives us indirect, cause and effect violence. So what
would be worse: if a minister told his flock that there were "evil
doers out there" who should be punished and one (or several) persons
went out and shot someone, or if a minister takes it upon himself to
shoot people "in the name of God"?
Three years ago, in the wake of Katrina, I wrote a piece called "God's Ambulence Chasers."
It dealt with people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who seemed to
relish disasters and plagues so that they could rain Bibles down on
people. And indeed, with these disasters, Christofascists get two
benefits: a) they can point out their enemies as the cause and b) they
can take advantage of a dire situation to proselytize to huge captive
audiences consisting of the most desperate people imaginable.
Guns, bigotry, manipulation, rhetoric, proselytizing, paranoia, revenge.
There are all sorts of ways to kill people and the Christofascist Right knows them all. They are armed and dangerous.
There are all sorts of ways to kill people and the Christofascist Right knows them all. They are armed and dangerous.
*The Magdalene Laundries
*The Duplessis Orphans
Both of the above institutions were among the world's worst child abuse cases involving tens of thousands of children and young adults. Both were built by the Catholic Church to shelter or "reform" children.
1
1
