BoardRoom/Soapbox Archive
	Article

re: Christian world takeover
By Mike Doughney

Time: Fri, 01-Oct-1999 23:15:36 GMT     
IP: 207.239.111.82

:You know if there were in fact a legitimate
:"Biblical America" agenda of Bible believing
:Christians trying to take "back" America, I
:think you'd see a gradual move towards a more
:and more moral and Biblically based country.

No, what you have is an illegitimate "Biblical
America" movement that's making a real mess.
Plans to move toward a "more moral and Biblically
based country," or to claim to re-impose such a
thing that has never existed, are an unattainable
pipe dream to organize their people.  In most
people's view, "moral" doesn't equate with a
fundamentalist's conception of a "biblically
based country" which will never come to pass.

:A Bible believing Christian understands that
:this world is in a state of decline and has been
:since sin entered the world.

"Bible believing Christians" may think so
(somebody define that term, willya?) but the rest
of us know that you're full of shit.  Get your
nose off the carpet and take a good look around
at the world.

I guess anyone who willingly subjects themselves
to indoctrination once, twice, three times a week
that insists that some awful decline is in
progress might actually buy this crap, but most
people do not agree.  Not that some things don't
need fixing, of course, but overall decline?
Look around you, you moron!  How the hell do you
even get up in the morning believing that today
is going to be worse than yesterday?  Or do you
really not believe this?

:Our country, which was established by people who
:recognized that our rights have their source not
:in the authority of a king or a legislative body
:or any man but from our God and Father in Heaven
:is in a perilous state of decay. By almost all
:accounts, our country is becoming radically less
:moral.

I'm a firm believer in the "law of man."  And
"all accounts" or even some portion of them show
that this country is improving.  Turn off your
"CBN news" and take a look around your
comfortable suburbia, will you?

Of course I wouldn't want to intrude on your
pessimistic fantasy world with some real facts.
As I've heard Jack Hayford claim during one of
his apocalyptic rants based on the book of
Revelation (a good excuse as any for
Bible-burning as I've ever seen), "I don't need
statistics."

:Most people are well aware of the shameful death
:of Matthew Shephard, the young gay man who was
:tragically beaten and murdered in the
:midwest. The interesting thing about that
:horrible situation is that it's become a clarion
:call for "hate crime legislation". Although I
:completely disagree with any kind of hate crime
:legislation,

I have a postcard in my collection that springs
from the mind of Janet Folger, head of D. James
Kennedy's so-called "Center for Reclaiming
America."  It's designed to be sent to your
elected officials.  Besides the predictable
"don't vote for hate crimes legislation" (which
was signed into law today in the state of
California, I understand) it also says "I don't
want any of my tax money to be used to
investigate hate crimes."

Now I don't think I've ever seen this particular
string of "I don't want my money to be used to
investigate... crimes" before in any of the
lunatic right/Biblical American propaganda.  It
really does come right out and make clear their
agenda: they want to make it clear to local law
enforcement and elected officials that there's
support for not vigorously prosecuting a crime
even under existing statutes if it's been labeled
by someone somewhere as a "hate crime."
Particularly when the victims are the members of
a particular group whose existence just can't be
accepted under the Biblical American agenda.

After all, if some people are going to run around
and call Shephard's murder a "holy killing" that
was justifiable since he was queer - and some
people have done that - it would follow that
"holy killings" should not be prosecuted under
that supposedly biblical morality system that you
and others want to impose on the rest of us,
doesn't it?
 
:one can easily understand that when someone is
:harmed because of something like their sexual
:orientation it causes a reaction that one can
:only describe as righteous indignation. Right? I
:mean isn't that what happened in Nazi Germany?

Yup. A system that spits out people who think
it's justifiable to murder queers, or doctors who
do abortions, or whatever group that's
unacceptable in their supposedly Biblically-based
morality system is just like the Nazi system that
spat out people who killed off queers and other
groups under the Nazi morality system.  Thank you
for pointing that out for us.

:OK, so now I submit that recently a man walked
:into a Wednesday night Church service and
:murdered 7 people because he disagreed with their
:beliefs.

Prove it.  There is no evidence to suggest that
the shooter was anything other than a deranged
psychopathic murderer who was eventually going to
kill himself and probably take a few people with
him. The choice of venue was not rational in the
slightest.

:Where is the righteous indignation and the calls
:for hate crime legislation? I still will never
:believe in any kind of legislation related to
:"hate" but can you see the strong and compelling
:evidence that we are a society with an unclear
:standard of morals and righteousness?

Only one slight problem.  In Fort Worth, there's
nobody to prosecute, since the random lunatic (it
was a random lunatic, not someone who rationally
thought it was his time to persecute Christians,
right?) is now dead.  No one to prosecute.

In the Shephard case, the accused are two people
who didn't just go and commit suicide afterward;
they quite clearly thought Shephard was a valid
and acceptable target because he was queer.  Why
would they think this, and how does that connect
to these large organizations that think queers
are to be second-class citizens, who are
ineligible to hold public office, jobs or even
rent an apartment? Verminization eventually
results in violence like this.

Now if you like so many of those wingnut
Pentecostal fundamentalists who've lost the
ability to connect cause and effect (not to
mention even get a timeline in the right order)
are trying to convince me that what happened in
Fort Worth was an act of religious persecution,
it was no more that than if the same shooter
walked into a McDonalds and pulled the same stunt
(as has happened in the past.)

:I'm not casting aspersions on Mr. Shephard's
:death at all...

Oh, bullshit.  To equate the two as you're trying
to do just shows you can't figure out cause and
effect, you can't even rationally evaluate the
evidence that the events were completely
different.

:that was tragic and senseless and rightly so,
:caused a lot of outrage. Where is the outrage
:over what happened in Texas?

Why should there be outrage of the kind that you
suggest?  There was no persecution (again, see my
last post.)  A nut had a gun and decided to go
out and take as many people as possible with him.
There are some events like this that have no one
cause.  He had a legally purchased gun in his
possession.  He wasn't committed to a psychiatric
institution even though he probably needed to be
- he was even trying to get help.  His
recently-deceased father was a minister, which
might have had something to do with his choice of
targets.  A long fuzzy chain of reasons that
finally ended with a well-armed lunatic sitting
in a crowd firing away.

Those with fantasies that everything happens for
a (single) reason perhaps have a fantasy reason
to get outraged over that which couples with
their need to be persecuted (anyone else watch
TBN on the evening of 9/19?).  The rest of us
look at a long chain of precursor events and
wonder if something could have been done to stop
it, and not coming up with any easy answers nor
any one thing to be outraged about.

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