Christendom Watch: The Dark Kingdom

2012-02-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

End of controversial property tax breaks leaves the Pope facing €600m-a-year bill

After several years of scandal in which the Catholic Church has faced allegations of financial impropriety, paedophile priests and rumours of plots to kill the Pope, the Vatican is now facing a new €600m-a-year tax bill as Rome seeks to head off European Commission censure over controversial property tax breaks enjoyed by the Church.
As the EC heads closer to officially condemning the fiscal perks enjoyed by the Catholic Church and introduced by the Berlusconi administration, Prime Minister Mario Monti has written to the Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, saying that the Vatican will resume property tax, or Ici, payments.
Mr Almunia said in 2010 that the exemption amounted to state aid that might breach EU competition law. A parliamentary proposal by the Italian Radicals party last August to repeal the exemption, with a successful petition on Facebook, upped the pressure. A spokesman for Mr Almunia appeared to give the thumbs-up yesterday: "It is a proposal that constitutes a significant progress on the issue and I hope will be implemented," he said.
"This is a victory for public pressure," said Mario Staderini, the leader of the Italian Radicals party. "We've managed to break down – a little bit – the wall protecting the Church."
The Vatican avoids Ici tax on about 100,000 properties, classed as non-commercial, including 8,779 schools, 26,300 ecclesiastical structures and 4,714 hospitals and clinics.
Estimates of its annual saving from avoiding the levy range widely from €600m to €2.2bn. The Church, however, says the tax exemption is worth only €100m a year. Neither is it clear from Mr Monti's comments how much Ici tax the Church will now have to pay.
Since 2005 church-run organisations have not been considered ordinary commercial structures and have been exempt. According to Corriere della Sera newspaper, tax authorities will judge how much of a property is used purely for religious purposes and tax it accordingly. Thus a church will remain exempt. But a hostel with a chapel would have to make contributions. In addition, Mr Monti said in his letter that by changing the law, and removing some of the church's exemption from Ici, he expected the EC to relent on demands that tax payments be backdated.
"We think the Church should have to pay the arrears," said Mr Staderini. "It should make the payment back to 2005. Given how much the Vatican stood to pay with arrears, I think they will not be that unhappy with the result."
Monsignor Domenico Pompili, a spokesman for the Italian Bishops Conference said the Church hoped the "social value" of their establishments would be taken into account.
Meanwhile, as the Vatican financial authorities do their sums and continue to lobby, the Holy See has announced an official investigation into a series of embarrassing leaks. After the child abuse and financial scandals of recent years, the prospects for another annus horribilis were underlined last week when a document emerged suggesting there was a plot to kill Pope Benedict XVI this year.
"It's now complete war inside the Vatican," said Robert Mickens, The Tablet's Rome correspondent, who has20 years' experience of reporting on the Vatican. "Things are falling apart."
The rancour has been blamed on manoeuvring surrounding the succession of Pope Benedict and the exceptional unpopularity of the current leadership.

Benedict's A History Of Violence: Christendom vs. Islam

2006-09-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

From COUNTERPUNCH

On Throwing Stones: A History of Violence- Christendom Past was Not Peaceful.

September 26, 2006

The Pope's Evil Legend

Mohammed's Sword

By URI AVNERY

Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes. Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year 306--exactly 1700 years ago--encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern (Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope, demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.
The struggle between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some Emperors dismissed or expelled a Pope, some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor. One of the Emperors, Henry IV, "walked to Canossa", standing for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope's castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his excommunication. But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week's speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush's crusade against "Islamofascism", in the context of the "Clash of Civilizations".

IN HIS lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God's actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah. As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living near the fault-line of this
"war of civilizations". In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul? To support his case, the Pope quoted--of all people--a Byzantine Emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing Eastern Church. At the end of the 14th century, the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had--or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt)--with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the following words at his adversary: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

These words give rise to three questions:

(a) Why did the Emperor say them?

(b) Are they true?

(c) Why did the present Pope quote them?

WHEN MANUEL II wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were already under Turkish threat.
At that point in time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the Danube. They had conquered Bulgaria and the north of Greece, and had twice defeated relieving armies sent by Europe to save the Eastern Empire. In 1453, only a few years after Manuel's death, his capital, Constantinople (the present Istanbul) fell to the Turks, putting an end to the Empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years. During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the
church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countries against the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving politics. In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the present Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against the mainly Muslim "Axis of Evil". Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Pope supports the forces that object to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.

IS THERE any truth in Manuel's argument?

The pope himself threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned theologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur'an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. He quoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meant verse 257) which says: "There must be no coercion in matters of faith". How can one ignore such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues that this commandment was laid down by the prophet when he was at the beginning of his career, still weak and powerless, but that later on he ordered the use of the sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does not exist in the Qur'an. True, Muhammad called for the use of the sword in his war against opposing tribes--Christian, Jewish and others--in Arabia, when he was building his state. But that was a political act, not a religious one; basically a fight for territory, not for the spreading of the faith. Jesus said: "You will recognize them by their fruits." The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to "spread the faith by the sword"? Well, they just did not. For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian. True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the government and enjoy the fruits. In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith--and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.

THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?
What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service--a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion--because it entailed the loss of taxes. Every honest Jew who knows the
history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.

THE STORY about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims--the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions. Why did he utter these words in public? And why now? There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of "Islamofascism" and the "Global War on Terrorism"--when "terrorism" has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world's oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a Crusade.
The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

Pope Benedict Blames God For Holocaust

2006-05-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

In the ultimate display of RANK MINDBLOWING HYPOCRISY Pope Benedict (Arnold?) blames God for being "silent" during the Holocaust.

OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) -" Pope Benedict XVI visited the Auschwitz concentration camp as "a son of the German people" Sunday and asked God why he remained silent during the "unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust."

No Benedict, God was not silent he talked to those who chose to listen. Many people stood up to the Nazi's and paid with their lives. Hitler and the German people paid a heavy price for their evil.

"Benedict walked along the row of plaques at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex's memorial, one in the language of each nationality whose members died there. As he stopped to pray, a light rain stopped and a brilliant rainbow appeared over the camp. "To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible - and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from
Germany," he said later. "In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"

The question is why did the so called German "Christians" support a Satanic belief system and choose to ignore the teachings of God and Jesus Christ? Why were Hitler and members of the Nazi Party never excommunicated from the Catholic Church? Why did Pope Pius conclude a Concordat with the Nazis?

"Benedict said that just as his predecessor, John Paul II visited the camp as a Pole in 10979, he came as "a son of the German people." "The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the Earth," he said, standing near the demolished crematoriums where the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims. "By destroying Israel with the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention."

What role did the German churches and the Vatican play in fueling violent anti-semitism historically in Europe? Why did the Vatican's fear of communism lead it to support murderous fascist regimes? Why does the Vatican continue to try to sanctify war criminals?

Benedict why do you continue to remain silent about the role the Vatican played in the Holocaust?

Vatican Rat Lines & The Destruction of Yugoslavia

2006-05-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

Meddelsome Priests

A look at the case against the Vatican "ratlines", Croation gold and the destruction of Yugoslavia.
DragonSlayerWanted

from Jan Herman's Straight Up blog

January 19, 2006

FOLLOWING THE 'RAT LINES'

While a new translation of Eli Wiesel's Holocaust memoir, "Night," is being touted by Oprah Winfrey to millions of Americans, a much less publicized piece of Holocaust history is being played out in a federal court in San Francisco, where a former U.S. Army intelligence officer has testified that the man who became Pope Paul VI "helped hide and launder property that had been stolen" from Nazi victims in Yugoslavia during World War II. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz has "obtained testimony given last month by William Gowen," who is now in his 80s, which reveals that after the war Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini (elected pope in 1963), right, was personally linked not just to those criminal acts but also "was involved in the sheltering and smuggling of Croatian war criminals, such as the leader of the Ustashe movement, Ante Pavelic." Reporter Yossi Melman outlined the intricate, historical background of the case in a story, "Tied up in the Rat Lines," which appeared earlier this week in Ha'aretz, much of it familiar to experts who have followed the issue for many years. But the case is unusual for, among other things, directly accusing the pope by name. Although reams of original documents have already been published about the Vatican's involvement with the so-called Rat Lines, a network that helped hide Nazi war criminals after World War II to keep them from being arrested and put on trial, the term "papal favorite" is the closest that a collection of documents as extensive as The Pavelic Papers has come to actually naming Montini. Montini served as the Vatican's deputy secretary of state during the war, before ascending to the papacy. (Have a look at a declassified 1947 memorandum by Gowen, commenting about Pavelic's contacts in the Vatican.)
Melman notes:

Hundreds of war criminals were provided with church and Red Cross papers that enabled them to hide in safe houses and then flee from Europe, mainly to the Middle East and South America. Among them were Klaus Barbie ("the butcher of Lyon"), Adolf Eichmann, Dr. Josef Mengele and Franz Stengel, the commander of the Treblinka death camp. The Vatican network was also used by leaders of the Ustashe -- the nationalist Croatian Catholic movement that was active in Croatia and collaborated with the Nazi occupation. Melman cites an American document, based on a report from the Italian police and placed in evidence at the trial in San Francisco, along with Gowen's testimony. Gowen told the court: "The Reverend Dr. Prof. Krunoslav Draganovic seemed to be in cooperation with the Ustasha network. And he was given a Vatican assignment as the apostolic visitor for Croatians, which meant he reported directly to Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini." Melman writes further: The leaders of the Ustashe headed by Pavelic are the ones who stole the victims' property: art and jewelry -- silver and mostly gold. After the war they fled with the treasure and laundered it with the help of Vatican institutions. According to Gowen's testimony, Montini, who in 1964 became the first pope to visit the State of Israel, was also involved in the Vatican's help in laundering the wealth. Montini headed the Catholic Church until his death in 1978. The lawsuit, with an amended complaint added last week, demands restitution for the Jewish, Russian, Serb, Ukrainian and Roma victims. It is "based on earlier investigations and reports from American government agencies, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and committees of historians who researched the matter of the Jewish property in Swiss banks," Melman reports. "Led by the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan order and others," the defendants "deny the charges against them and made every effort to have the charges dismissed," he adds. "So far, the court has rejected these efforts outright and determined that the deliberations would continue. But the defendants are tenacious and now they are demanding that publication of Gowen's testimony be prohibited." (Here's a Web site posted by the plaintiffs' attorneys.) Gowen served as a special agent in an American counter-intelligence unit in Rome after the war ended. The unit was assigned to track down Italian Fascists, Nazi war criminals and their collaborators, including the Ustashe leaders. "To try and find Pavelic you had to discover how the Ustashe network in Italy was constituted, how it operated, what were its bases," Gowen testified, according to Melman. Melman continues: A key person in the Pontifical Croatian college was Rev. Draganovic, the Croatian ambassador to the Vatican. Draganovic and the college issued false papers to Croatian war criminals, among them Pavelic and Artukovic. "I personally investigated Draganovic -- who told me he was reporting to Montini," emphasized Gowen. Gowen related that at a certain stage Montini learned, apparently from the head of the OSS unit in Rome, James Angleton, who nurtured relations with Montini and the Vatican, of the investigation Gowen's unit was conducting. [The OSS refers to the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.] Montini complained about Gowen to his superiors and accused him of having violated the Vatican's immunity by having entered church buildings, such as the Croatian college, and conducting searches there. The aim of the complaint was to interfere with the investigation. Melman writes that "in his testimony, Gowen also stated that Draganovic helped the Ustashe launder the stolen treasure with the help of the Vatican Bank: This money was used to fund its religious activities, but also to fund the escape of Ustashe leaders on the Rat Line." The issue of Vatican complicity in Nazi crimes has echoed for decades long after the war's end, complicated by the Catholic Church's "continuing secrecy," as U.S. News and World Report noted in 1998. This has forced accusers to equivocate, despite mounting evidence. ("We make no charges against the Vatican, but we keep building a very damning picture," Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, told the magazine at the time.) But many of the historical connections, down to current times, have been out in the open in Europe even if less known in the United States. For example, "the Vatican made a huge push to break up Yugoslavia in the early '90s," William Osborne, a longtime observer of Holocaust history, says. "They thus helped provoke the civil war that happened. The Vatican wanted an independent Croatia, which is Catholic." It was "almost an obsession with the Munich newspaper Suddeutscher Zeitung and the ruling political and Catholic elite in Bavaria," where Pope Benedict XVI, above left, comes from. Yugoslavia, which maintained considerable independence from the Soviet Union, did not collapse with the rest of the East Block. But when it did fall as the last communist country of Europe, he says, "the same old dark Catholic forces were a central player in all of it. Croatia supported the Nazis, and those links evolved into the relations Croatia has with Bavaria and the Catholic Church to this day. What goes unmentioned, and which is so ironic, is that the Vatican stands accused of harboring war criminals from the 1990s as well."

http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/2006/01/following_the_r_1.html

PEACE TAKES COURAGE

2006-05-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

Out Of The Mouths of Babes....

A fifteen year old girl asks "What Would Jesus Do?

http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/animations/wwjd.html

Christendom's Misinterpretation of The Book of Revelation

2006-03-25T08:54:00.000-08:00

Christendom has so twisted and distorted the meaning of Revelation, but that's understandable given that they don't understand it. DragonSlayerWanted

March 23, 2006
Apocalyptic Times

by Maureen Farrell Buzz Flash

"We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic." -- Hunter S. Thompson, Nov. 20, 2000 A few years ago, a Time/CNN poll found that that more than a third of Americans search the news for signs of the Apocalypse. Since Sept. 11, they've not had to look very hard. In the immediate aftermath of World Trade Center attacks, for example, the Associated Press reported on Satan's visage in the smoke clouds, an incident Peggy Noonan wrote about in the Wall Street Journal. "If you are of a certain cast of mind, it is of course meaningful that the face of the Evil One seemed to emerge with a roar from the furnace that was Tower One," she wrote, before reminding readers that a cross emerged unharmed amid the falling concrete and wreckage. Of course Jesus made his fair share of appearances, too. A "winking Jesus" from Hoboken, N.J. was featured in the New York Daily News while a Jesus-in-a-window got considerable airtime on a Texas NBC affiliate. One North Carolina TV station was prophetically prolific, reporting on the Messiah's apparitions on everything from tail pipes to dental x-rays to fish bones. Yes, since Sept. 11, the news has gotten more surreal, with divine sightings and apocalyptic musings becoming more commonplace. Such talk has always been with us, of course, but it's no longer tied to David Koresh or Marshall Applewhite or Jim Jones-type cultists. "One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress," Bill Moyers wrote, regarding the shifting political realities fueling this mindset. From the political to the personal, people are reporting on, and preparing for, the end of the world. And though apocalyptic reports have ranged from the superstitious and silly to the sensational and scary, few can argue that they're not on the rise. How weird have things become? Consider the following:

Former GOP Strategist says 'a lot of Americans have stopped worrying about the economy because they're waiting for the Second Coming.' The Emerging Republican Majority author and former GOP Strategist Kevin Phillips bluntly states that "[T]he Religious Right and the would-be theocrats are the danger now," telling Lou Dobbs that many Americans have literally stopped worrying about the economy "because they're waiting for the Second Coming." Phillips' latest book American Theocracy was also the basis for a question posed to Mr. Bush in Cleveland this week when a reporter asked, "Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the apocalypse?" It took Bush five minutes to answer, when a simple "Yes or No" would have sufficed. Why? As Phillips points out, with 45% of Americans now believing that the Antichrist is already on earth, Bush risks alienating a large segment of the population, regardless how he answers. "He can't answer the question weather or not he believes in Armageddon or it's happening in the Middle East," Phillips states. "He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't."Madonna is trying to purchase a front row seat for the return of the Messiah. In March 2006, it was reported that Madonna is attempting to buy a house overlooking the Sea of Galilee, to get a bird's eye view of the Messiah when he returns. "US pop diva Madonna wants to buy a house in the Israeli town of Rosh Pina, where the ancient Jewish Kabbalah tradition expects the Messiah to appear at the end of the world," the AFP reported. According to the Times of London, representatives for the singer have been propositioning homeowners "offering to pay any price to secure a property on her behalf," with one resident already agreeing to sell her house, which is worth approximately $500,000, for $1 million. Will Madonna ante up? Will she find her apocalyptic dream house in time? Stay tuned.

London's Independent runs the headline: 'Apocalypse Now: How Mankind is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth'Is that headline apocalyptic enough for you? If not, the accompanying article offers plenty of food for fretting. Citing urgent warnings from 200 of the world's top climate scientists, the article highlights the climate changes currently taking place and the consensus that time is running out to reverse this disastrous trend. Floods? Droughts? Oceans turning to acid? Oddly enough, some actually welcome such trouble. "Many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire," Glenn Scherer pointed out in Grist Magazine. "They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that
environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming Apocalypse." In Feb. 2006, despite the Bush administration's attempts to muzzle him, Jim Hansen, President Bush's "top climate modeler," and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, reported that Greenland's ice cap is breaking up twice as quickly as it was five years ago. "We don't have much time left," he wrote, giving a scientific slant to Biblical and other prophecies. A talking fish says the end is near. Before the start of the war in Iraq, the New York Times and other major news organizations reported on how a talking fish stunned workers in New York City. "A fish heading for slaughter in a New York market shouted warnings about the end of the world before it was killed" the BBC announced in March, 2003, reporting on two fish cutters who heard the fish say 'Tzaruch shemirah' and 'Hasof bah'," which essentially means [in Hebrew] that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is nigh." The Guardian/Observer reported that "some now believe the fish's outburst was a warning about the dangers of the impending war in Iraq," citing George W. Bush's alleged Messianic beliefs as cause for concern. The 'mark of the beast' is making a comeback. In the 1760s, American colonists believed that the Stamp Act, which required a stamp to be placed on legal documents, might actually relate to the "mark of the beast" the Book of Revelation warned against. In the 1930s, some opined that the mark might be found in the "union label" commercial jingles later told us to look for. These days, however, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has people seeing 666. Though the State Department was set to begin using RFID tags in passports beginning this year, the negative reaction was so overwhelming that the government had to hold off on its plans. "No mark of the beast for me you Luciferian beehivers. You can take all those RFID chips wrapped like a burrito in the HR 4(6+6+6) national id bill and stick it up yor [sic] own arse!" wrote one irate poster on the State Department's Web site. Although anti-RFID activists (who despite Harvard educations, also believe these chips might be "the mark of the beast") continue to rail against this technology, RFID implants are being used by businesses and hospitals and are being marketed to parents. "Why is [former Bush administration official Tommy Thompson] volunteering for the Mark of the Beast?" Blogosphere heavyweight Boingboing.com asked, just months before RFID implants became the talk of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' confirmation hearings.

A Seattle newspaper asks, "Is Bush the Antichrist?"No news of the "mark of the beast" is complete without speculation regarding the Antichrist, of course, and Rev. Rich Lang's sermon "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism," is a perfect place to start. "You sit atop the nations like the Biblical Whore of Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might," Lang wrote in an open letter to the president, accusing the entire Bush White House of a "diabolical manipulation of Christian rhetoric" which is "the materialization of the spirit of Antichrist: a perversion of Christian faith and practice." (In a more secular contemplation of evil, former Wall Street Journal editor and Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts openly wondered if the Bush administration would covertly plot another 9/11 -- and perhaps even set off a nuclear bomb to advance its agenda. ) As Christian leaders squared off in a Seattle Weekly article regarding the nature of the Antichrist and his relationship to the current administration, columnists and bloggers wondered whether or not God speaks to (and through) George W. Bush. Recently, Congresswoman Katherine Harris, of 2000 election fame, told those attending a "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference that she believes God wants her to run for the Senate. If so, God surely works in mysterious ways. Legendary American novelists say the world is coming to an end. I'm trying to write a novel about the end of the world. But the world is really ending!," Kurt Vonnegut recently declared, right about the time that Madonna was reported to be looking for real estate for the event. The late Hunter S. Thompson also made a similar observation. "This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be -- the end of the world as we knew it," he wrote in 2003. The Guardian says the world will 'probably' end in 2006. In 1997, former Wall Street Journal journalist Michael Drosnin wrote The Bible Code, based on the premise that hidden messages are embedded within the Bible. Using a letter-based numerological system created by Jewish mystics and facilitated by computer technology, Drosnin searched for signs of the Apocalypse and found that 2006 and 2012 have special significance. How significant? While followers of the Mayan prophecy often point to Dec. 21, 2012 as the day the world will end, in Jan. 2006, the Guardian/Observer cited Drosnin's sequel, the Bible Code II, to make its own tongue-in-cheek prediction.

Q: Will the world end this year? A: Probably. According to Michael Drosnin's Bible Code II, 'atomic holocaust' and 'world war' are predicted in The Bible for 2006. Many people expect the Rapture, Christ's devastating return to Earth, to start 6 June 2006, due to similarities with the number of the beast 6-6-6. Fingers crossed he'll hold off until 6 June 2106 or 3106. US tabloid the Weekly World News states an oil crisis will mean 'the world will return to medieval status'. Sounds like we're there already." A 'crying' statue is given major mainstream attention. While thousands of divine apparitions are reported each year, they are usually attributed to natural causes or hoaxes and are not taken very seriously. In a 1998 article for Forbes magazine, however, when Peggy Noonan penned her prescient warning regarding "the big, terrible thing [certain to occur] to New York or Washington," she spoke of such matters as if they were Gospel truth. "When the Virgin Mary makes her visitations--she's never made so many in all of
recorded history as she has in this century--she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly!" Noonan wrote.
Noonan's superstitious nature aside, by March, 2006, the mainstream media also began taking such apparitions seriously. A statue of the Virgin Mary -- which is said to be crying blood --grabbed national headlines and was featured on national morning television. Most Americans believe that the prophecy in the Book of Revelation is going to come true. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, sales of the Left Behind series jumped 60%, with Book 9, which was published that October, becoming the best-selling novel that year. Two years later, Time/CNN magazine poll underscored why the series was so popular -- finding that 59% of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation is going to come true. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go berserk," Joe Bageant wrote, of the twelfth book in the series. "Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower."
Why does this matter?

1) Left Behind series co-author Rev. Timothy LaHaye -- the political activist Rolling Stone dubbed "Rev. Doomsday" -- reportedly played a "quiet but pivotal role" in putting George W. Bush in the White House. 2) LaHaye shares the same End Times theology as the Islamofascists we're trying to neuter. "And as far as the imminent apocalypse is concerned, they're on the same page as the Mullahs in Tehran," conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote of America's fundamentalists. "Just in case you were sleeping soundly at night." The "Rapture Index" stands at 'Fasten Your Seatbelts'. To anyone paying attention to the Left Behind series phenomenon, it is no surprise that prophetic activity is currently being analyzed and measured. The "Rapture Index," which founder Todd Strandberg calls "the Dow Jones Industrial Average of End Time activity," has been given widespread attention, something that would have been unheard of just a decade ago. Even more importantly, it's being taken seriously. Last year, Jon Carroll spelled out the significance of this new form of prophetic measurement. "What does it all mean?," he asked in the San Francisco Chronicle. "The Rapture Index, as of this writing, stands at 153. Anything over 145 is labeled by the Rapture Actuaries as 'Fasten your seat belts.' In other words: Repent for the End Is Near." A Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich is auctioned on e-bay. Remember when a decade-old Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich fetched $28,000 on e-bay? Soon afterwards, the Virgin Mother miraculously appeared on a frying pan while Jesus manifested on indoor plumbing. Attempts to auction off these and other miracles, however, did not receive national and/or international attention. The White House consults with End Times zealots before setting policy. While the link between the Bush White House and the Religious Right was clear from the start, the connection between those actually rooting for the End Times and Mr. Bush was not. Before the war in Iraq, President Jimmy Carter explained why the majority of Christian churches were against military intervention (except for those literally praying for Armageddon), but few knew why Mr. Bush was shunning mainstream churches in favor of the more rapture-minded.

"Some wonder if the president might be influenced by evangelical teachings that envision an end-of-the-world battle between Israel and its enemies. It would be dangerous for a president to take a particular theology like that and apply it to world events," former Nixon aide Charles Colson mused, a little more than a year before the Guardian reported that "US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy." Ultimately, however, an e-mail unearthed by the Village Voice proved how entrenched fundamentalists actually are. "Most of all, apparently, we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios," Rick Perlstein wrote, in an article that should scare the bejesus out of everyone. Legislation to Turn the US into a Theocracy is Introduced in the House. Remember when Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt said that we need not worry about depleting our natural resources because, thanks to End Times prophecies, future generations won’t be needing them anyway? Or when Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said he believed that "time is running out ..." as in Armageddon is approaching? Back then, Frank Zappa appeared on Crossfire, shocking panelists when he said that the US was gearing up to become a fascist theocracy. More than two decades later, legislation to complete the transformation was introduced in the House. "If enacted, the Constitution Restoration Act will effectively transform the United States into a theocracy, where the arbitrary dictates of a 'higher power' can override law," Chris Floyd wrote. Columnist James Heflin warned that "If the Act passes, Iraqis would have stronger protection from religious extremism than Americans."
Cosponsored by Sen. Brownback, whose rent is subsidized by the "secretive" religious organization, the Fellowship, the legislation is the work of Dominionists, or Christian Reconstructionists, who call for the "universal development of Biblical theocratic republics."
The crusade to Christianize America in order to prepare for Christ's Second Coming is not one that is going away any time soon. The Act, which was reintroduced in 2005, is currently being marketed by the media-savvy Concerned Women For America, which was founded and is headed by Rev. Timothy LaHaye's wife, Beverly.

Members of Congress try to facilitate apocalyptic prophecy. In the 19th century, a British minister named John Darby came up with a theory of "premillennial dispensationalism," pointing to end times signs such as wars, natural disasters, a global economy, and the return of the Jews to the land promised by God to Abraham. Recently, members of Congress (nearly half of whom are backed by the Religious Right) have expressed their support for what many see as the prerequisite for Christ's return: making certain that Israel fully belongs to the Jews. Though the idea of dispensationalism took root when Darby began preaching in America, Ronald Reagan took things one step further, appointing Late Great Planet Earth author Hal Lindsey as a Middle East affairs consultant to the Israeli government and the Pentagon. But these days, End Times zealots have even greater influence. "Christian Zionist leaders today have access to the White House and strong support within Congress, including the backing of the two most recent majority leaders in the House of Representatives," the Christian Science Monitor explained. Sen. James Inhofe told his fellow Senators that Israel had a right to the occupied territories "because God said so" while former House minority leader Rep. Richard Armey told Hardball host Chris Matthews that he favored "transporting" the Palestinians to other countries. Tom DeLay has been especially active, and George Bush is said to have blessed Christian Zionists with a "videotaped benediction" directly from the White House. While many Israelis welcome such support, author Gershom Gorenberg underscores the underlying ugliness. "They don't love the real Jewish people," he told CBS' 60 Minutes. "They love us as characters in their story, in their play, and that's not who we are. If you listen to the drama that they are describing, essentially it's a five-act play in which the Jews disappear in the fourth act."In a starkly honest essay, Christian Reconstructist Gary North pointed to the elephant in the revival tent. "In order for most of today’s Christians to escape physical death, two-thirds of the Jews in Israel must perish, soon. This is the grim prophetic trade-off that fundamentalists rarely discuss publicly, but which is the central motivation in the movement’s support for Israel, he wrote, regarding fundamentalists' defense of "the doctrine of an inevitable holocaust." Given the Y2K brouhaha, why would anyone take North or any other fundamentalist seriously? Perhaps because, thanks largely to the formation of the Values Action Team, the Religious Right has been given "a direct lobbying line to the US Congress." Middle East Official warns that the "Gates of Hell" will be opened after Iraq invasion. Arab League chief Amr Moussa's famous 2002 prediction that a war in Iraq would "open the gates of hell" in the Middle East was made official in Feb. 2006, when the Australian reported that "the gates of Hell are opened." (Given that prominent conservatives are now issuing mea culpas regarding the war in Iraq, perhaps hell has merely frozen over?) When the war in Iraq began, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story entitled, "War in Babylon has evangelicals seeing Earth's final days" while the Washington Post subtitled one of its pieces, "End-Time Interpreters See Biblical Prophecies Being Fulfilled." Both were criticized by Christianity Today for being inaccurate. Which conjures up the most obvious question. How can anyone measure the validity of any of these predictions? Unless the world actually ends, that is? After all, end times prophecies have been with us throughout history, with each proving more inaccurate than the last. Even so, there is something unique about our post-9/11 world that not only lends itself to bizarre supernatural assumptions, but the idea that such superstitions, if acted upon, could lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. "For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington," Bill Moyers wrote. In other words, prepare for the news to get even weirder.

Maureen Farrell is a writer and media consultant who specializes in helping other writers get television and radio exposure.

Vatican Attempts To Rehabilitate Its Crusader Image

2006-03-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

In a pathetic attempt to mask their bloody history the church seeks to sell a kind gentle version of violent crusaders. The crusaders were motivated by greed not faith and the popes who sent them to the holy land were motivated by a desire for power over new territory. The various popes including Urban II were also motivated by a desire to prevent violent feuding "christian" nobles from turning europe into an endless war zone, encouraging them to fight muslims instead of each other. The crusaders were seduced by false calls to glory as well as the possibility of gaining great wealth, land and markets. Made up of European soldiers and peasants, they managed to slaughter many muslims as well as jews who happened to be in the cities that they marched from along the way to Jerusalem. Consider the scene in this film, Richard the Lionhearted (Henry Wilcoxon): "I fight for the Cross." Saladin (Ian Keith): "No. You wear the Cross of one who gave his life in this very land that men might be at peace. But you have no faith in this Cross." —From Cecil B. DeMille's historical spectacle, THE CRUSADES (1935). DragonSlayerWanted

Vatican change of heart over 'barbaric' Crusades

From Richard Owen in Rome

The Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference at the weekend that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the “noble aim” of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity. The Crusades are seen by many Muslims as acts of violence that have underpinned Western aggression towards the Arab world ever since. Followers of Osama bin Laden claim to be taking part in a latter-day “jihad against the Jews and Crusaders”. The late Pope John Paul II sought to achieve Muslim- Christian reconciliation by asking “pardon” for the Crusades during the 2000 Millennium celebrations. But John Paul’s apologies for the past “errors of the Church” — including the Inquisition and anti-Semitism — irritated some Vatican conservatives. According to Vatican insiders, the dissenters included Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Benedict reached out to Muslims and Jews after his election and called for dialogue. However, the Pope, who is due to visit Turkey in November, has in the past suggested that Turkey’s Muslim culture is at variance with Europe’s Christian roots. At the conference, held at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Roberto De Mattei, an Italian historian, recalled that the Crusades were “a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands and the Muslim devastation of the Holy Places”. “The debate has been reopened,” La Stampa said. Professor De Mattei noted that the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1009 had helped to provoke the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, called by Pope Urban II. He said that the Crusaders were “martyrs” who had “sacrificed their lives for the faith”. He was backed by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, who said that those who sought forgiveness for the Crusades “do not know their history”. Professor Riley-Smith has attacked Sir Ridley Scott’s recent film Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, as “utter nonsense”. Professor Riley-Smith said that the script, like much writing on the Crusades, was “historically inaccurate. It depicts the Muslims as civilised and the Crusaders as barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” It fuels Islamic fundamentalism by propagating “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”. He said that the Crusaders were sometimes undisciplined and capable of acts of great cruelty. But the same was true of Muslims and of troops in “all ideological wars”. Some of the Crusaders’ worst excesses were against Orthodox Christians or heretics — as in the sack of Constantinople in 1204. The American writer Robert Spencer, author of A Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, told the conference that the mistaken view had taken hold in the West as well as the Arab world that the Crusades were “an unprovoked attack by Europe on the Islamic world”. In reality, however, Christians had been persecuted after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem.

The London Times

God: I've Lost Faith in Blair

2006-03-08T18:16:00.000-08:00

Terry Jones cracks me up here is his take on fake Christian Tony Baloney Blair
DragonSlayerWanted

God: I've Lost Faith in Blair

All the signs are that the Almighty is unhappy about efforts to implicate Him in the attack on Iraq.

by Terry Jones
A high-level leak has revealed that God is "furious" at Tony Blair's attempts to implicate him in the bombing of Iraq. Sources close to the archangel Gabriel report him as describing the Almighty as "hopping mad ... with sanctimonious yet unscrupulous politicians claiming He would condone their bestial activities when He has no way of going public Himself, owing to the MMW agreement" (a reference to the long-established Moving in Mysterious Ways concordat). Mr. Blair went public about God on Michael Parkinson's TV show. "If you have faith about these things," he said, "then you realize that judgment is made by other people. If you believe in God, it's made by God as well." As is customary with Mr. Blair's statements, it's rather hard to tease out what he is actually saying; but the gist is clearly that if God didn't actually tell him to bomb Iraq, then the Almighty would certainly agree it was the right thing to do. "If Tony Blair thinks his friendship with George W. Bush is worth rubbing out a couple of hundred thousand Iraqi men, women and children, then that's something he can talk over with me later," said God. "But when he starts publicly claiming that's the way I do the arithmetic too, it's time I put my foot down!" It is well known that God has a very big foot. A source says Gabriel has spent days trying to dissuade the Almighty from loosing a plague of toads upon the Blair family. Gabriel reminded God that Cherie and the children had nothing to do with Tony's decisions. God's response, it is reliably reported, was: "Blair says the Iraqis are lucky to have got bombed, so how can he complain if his family gets a few toads in the bath?" The archangel is said to be ticked off with God's ability to provide glib answers without even thinking. What has particularly incensed the Almighty is that Mr. Blair made the claim on the Parkinson show. "If he'd done it on Richard and Judy I could have forgiven a lot," He is reported to have said. The archangel reported that the Almighty has become increasingly irritated with the vogue for politicians to claim that He is behind their policies - especially if these involve killing large numbers of humans. According to Gabriel, God spake these words: "That George W. Bush once had the nerve to say: 'God told me to go end the tyranny in Iraq, and I did.' Well, let me tell you I did no such thing! If I'd wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I could have given him pneumonia. I didn't need the president of the United States to send in hundreds of heavy bombers and thousands of missiles to destroy Iraq - even though I appreciate that Halliburton needed to fill its order books." "How do Bush and Blair think it makes me look to all those parents who have lost sons and daughters in this grubby business? Don't they know that the Muslims they're taking out worship the same Me that they do? It's a public relations disaster that ought to set Christianity back hundreds of years. Though knowing the fundamentalists, it'll probably have the reverse effect." The archangel further revealed that he had been advised by no less a person than Alastair Campbell to warn God to keep out of politics. "But it's hard to get God to do anything He doesn't want to," sighed the archangel. "It's all to do with what He calls 'free will,' though a lot of us have a problem working that one out, since He's omnipotent and omniscient."
God, the archangel says, is also disturbed by Mr. Blair's remark that while religious beliefs might color his politics, "it's best not to take it too far." "How would he like it if I went round claiming that he gave me his full backing when I sent the tsunami last year?"

Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python. http://www.terry-jones.net/

Another Prime Example of What Is Wrong With Christendom

2006-03-06T08:41:00.000-08:00

Phoney Tony Baloney Blair Claims God's Backing For Iraq War. Well Yeah but which God? Well I guess it all makes sense if you believe what the bible says about Satan being "the god of this system of things". John 14:30, Ephesians 2:2. Why is this man in good standing with his church and why is he allowed to attend mass? Oh, I forgot its Christendom, stupid. Also the article quotes Cherie Blair as being a "strong Catholic". Well the photo to the left shows another "strong Catholic", who by the way was never excommunicated. I wonder why Christendom finds it so hard to take out the trash? DragonSlayerWanted

Blair under fire for evoking God in Iraq war decision

LONDON (AFP) -
Tony Blair' triggered strong reactions from parents of soldiers killed in Iraq' and the political opposition, after the British prime minister evoked God in his decision to go to war. Details emerged Friday of Blair's interview on an ITV1 television talk show where he said God and history would judge his action in joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. "That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that -- well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people," Blair said in the interview with host Michael Parkinson which will air Saturday night.Pressed to clarify what he meant, Blair, a devout Christian, replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well."The words did not sit well with Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, one of the 103 British soldiers to date to have lost their lives in the Iraqi conflict."How can he say he is a Christian?" said Gentle, a campaigner with Military Families Against the War."A good Christian wouldn't be for this war. I'm actually quite disgusted by the comments."Reg Keys, the father of a dead soldier, accused Blair of "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure and I find it abhorrent."His son Lance Corporal Tom Keys was one of six Royal Military policemen killed by an Iraqi mob in Majar al-Kabir in June 2003. Keys, who stood against the prime minister in the last general election on an anti-war ticket, said Blair's remarks reminded him of US President George W. Bush' who was quoted as saying last year that God told him to invade Iraq and "God and religion have nothing to do with this war," Keys said.That view was echoed by the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, Britain's second opposition party, who said "going to war isn't just an act of faith."It requires legal analysis and a close look at the consequences, and Blair's "prospectus for military action was flawed," Menzies Campbell said. Other Liberal Democrats agreed that God should not be part of the equation. "It is a bizarre and shocking revelation that the prime minister claims to have been guided by the supernatural in this matter, especially given the particular religious sensitivities in the Middle East," said Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat member of parliament from the Oxford area, who is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society.We don't want Bush or Khomeini-type fundamentalism in our politics," he added. Blair is seen by some as the most religious British premier since William Gladstone (1809-1898), who gave up his vocation as a pastor to enter politics. Blair's handlers, including his former communications chief Alastair Campbell, have reportedly tried to steer Blair away from references to God, including reputedly removing the phrase "God bless you" from Blair's television address on the outbreak of the Iraq war. During last year's election campaign, BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman asked Blair if he prayed with Bush. Looking decidedly uncomfortable, Blair replied: "No, Jeremy, we don't pray together." But questions of religion surround Blair. There is speculation he plans to convert from High Church Anglican to Catholicism after leaving office. Blair's wife Cherie is a strong Catholic and he regularly attends Mass with her and their children at the prime minister's country residence in Chequers. The Catholic priest of that parish, Timothy Russ, has revealed that Blair asked for advice on moving between the churches. But Blair says he has no plans to convert and only attends Catholic services so the family can worship together.

Christendom Prepares For Another "Hurricane Of The World"

2006-02-26T11:18:00.000-08:00

Interesting thoughts from The Dark Age Blog. It highlights traditional Christendom's inability to forgo violence in a last gasp at the beginning of the modern 20th century. Within Christendom today it is the adherents of fundamentalist Rapture theory who support unleashing the dogs of war in a tragic attempt to maintain power and influence. Note that he correctly points out that Fukyama was wrong its not the "End of History" but the end of Christendom.
DragonSlayerWanted

from The Dark Age blog
Spirit of Storm, Hurricane of the World
by longsword

The First World War occurred because a dying age did not know how to end itself in time. Not knowing how to end itself in time, it took the only option open to it -- fire, violence, conflagration, and twilight of the gods. A French general at the time, upon hearing that war had broken out, intuited its meaning and called it "suicide of Europe". He was almost right. It was really the suicide of the Modern Age. The Second World War was only a continuation of this process of Modernity's self-annihilation. All the "sterling" values of the Victorian Age, the Modern Age, were swept away in an orgy of nihilism. All its contradictions collided, not to produce a new "synthesis", but like the meeting of matter and anti-matter, annihilating each other. It was, in some respects, a mediocre age in any case. Warning signs had not been lacking. Samuel Butler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Dickens had mapped its hypocrisies and its disintegration and decadence well before the war. Nietzsche, however, presciently forecast what had to come as its fate -- the result of a culture unable to sustain itself or its contradictions. And Yeats wrote his great poem "The Second Coming" at the conclusion of the Great War in recognition of this fact: that the era of the First Coming, the Christian Era, Christendom, was finished. The Great War was only "two thousand years vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle". Only the lifeless corpses and the dead forms of its passing remain in the guise of our contemporary institutions, like zombies who also do not know how to die at the right time. It is called "whipping dead horses". Only now, in hindsight, can we recognise the meaning of the early years of the last century. The sins of the Fathers are visited down to the third and fourth generations. We, who are of the third and fourth generations, are at the tail end of this process of Modernity's exhaustion and self-annihilation. Even as this Spirit of Storm and this Hurricane of the World rages through the age at this "End of History", other forces have been slowly gathering strength, completely overlooked by Fukuyama, amongst others. The period immediately preceding and following the First World War are distinguished also by the gradual emergence of a new consciousness. It marks, for example, the ascendency of Nietzsche's life philosophy with its antipathy to "modern ideas" and its contempt for the bigotry of the single "point of view", which comes also to expression in the art of Pablo Picasso with his "cubist" deconstruction of perspectival consciousness. With the emergence of quantum theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Einsteinian relativity theory, it also marks the end of the hegemony of "classical physics", of Newtonian "single vision", and of the Cartesian "cogito". Carl Jung stunned his classically trained peers with his notion (regretable in some ways) of a "collective unconscious". Today, in every field of scientific endeavour, paradox and indeterminacy is the rule of the realm. The very phrase "classical" is a judgement on the Newton-Cartesian paradigm's growing impertinence for our self-understanding or for organising our consciousness of reality. In every field of young endeavour we see the collapse of what Blake called the "single vision". Yet the habits and defects of thought and an institutionalised false consciousness persist as dead formula and empty dogma and ritual -- even as neoliberalism, neosocialism, neoconservatism and, yes, environmental neo-primitivism. John Zerzan's neo-paganism is as much the child of a dying age as Adam Smith, Rene Descartes, or Karl Marx. I also count it as profoundly significant that recently, in Britian, William Blake's unflattering caricature of Sir Isaac Newton was selected as the model for a sculpture of the great man that now stands outside a new Museum of Science and Technology. The new scientist, apparently, has a sense of humour and a touch for the ironic. What unites these new forces is a holistic vision of reality, still in formation, as a transcendence of the limitations of perspectivism, the single vision, and the purely analytical mode of consciousness. Likewise all fundamentalisms (economism, "globalisation", scientism, religionism, modernism) which are also dead formula and hollow dogma, and which confuse totality for wholism. This is not to say anything new. Many have already realised this. Jean Gebser called the new global consciousness "aperspectival consciousness" or "integral consciousness" (also, Haridas Chaudhuri). Aurobindo called it "Supramental" consciousness. Nietzsche knew it as the mode of consciousness realisation of the overman. Others have called it "holistic consciousness" (Willis Harmon), "global consciousness", "ecological mind", "ecodynamic consciousness" (Rosenstock-Huessy), transhumanism, and so on. It goes by many names. In broad theme, holistic consciousness is ecological (which is something more than simply "environmentalism"). I will never tire of warning against this absolutely worst form of confusion, that of taking "total" and "whole" as being synonymous, since the first is a justification for all fundamentalisms and totalitarianisms. One should not confuse what are the remnants of a dead and dying age with what is vital and is a real principle of renewal and transformation. The dominant trend today is still fatalistic and nihilist, and it often misleads the unvigilant into evolutionary dead ends. Suspicion and mistrust of anything that claims itself "new" and "revolutionary", such as the "neo" ideologues and "new age" and all old growth that smothers out new growth, is still warranted. I advocate only mindfulness. The delusions, the hypocrisies, the propagandas, and the mendacities of our time is sometimes beyond belief, amounting to no more than shadows without substance and the weight of a dead hand. We need no more evidence that the old mode of consciousness has become a force for death, decay, annihilation and self-annihilation in the world than to know that more people died from war in the last century than in all previous wars of history combined, that we are now precipitating the sixth extinction event, that our environment is dying. With our own eyes and ears we see this. And seeing this, it is hard for us not to conclude that this catastrophe is linked to a mode of consciousness that has become deficient and false in its expression, that no longer even understands the difference between what is living and what dead, or what is good and what evil. Yet, it is this same spirit that the great physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised when he witnessed the explosion of the first atomic bomb, and recalling the words of the Hindu god Vishnu, recited to himself "Now, I am become Death, destroyer of worlds".

http://www.darkage.ca/blog/_archives/2005/11/24/1420465.html

Right-Wing Evangelicals And War In Iraq

2006-02-24T09:40:00.000-08:00

This is the fruit of centuries of falling away from the truth. Christendom's right-wing evangelicals distort bible truth for political power.
DragonSlayerWanted
Excerpts from the February 24, 2006 article "The Brutal Christ of the Armageddonites: Religious fanaticism in American foreign policy"
by Jon Basil Utley

A few educated evangelicals, however, are now questioning where their brethren are trying to take America. In January, the New York Times carried a piece by Charles Marsh, a self-declared evangelical, about how many ministers agitated for war on Iraq, even telling their congregations that it would help expedite biblical prophecy. Eighty-seven percent of white evangelical Christians supported the attack, and some even linked Saddam Hussein with wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame. Marsh:"Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. That period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, is not one I will remember fondly. Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine."Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. 'We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible,' said Mr. Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. 'God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers.' … "Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the hugely popular 'Left Behind' series, spoke of Iraq as 'a focal point of end-time events,' whose special role in the earth's final days will become clear after invasion, conquest, and reconstruction. For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that 'God is pro-war' in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004."The common theme is that America must do God's work, which is surely the sin of pride for real Christians. One of the "Left Behind" characters muses about how the few survivors in America after Christ's bloody return could "start rebuilding the country as, finally for real, a Christian nation." Their desire to violently reshape society brings us full circle back to Stalin, Pol Pot, and other secular horsemen of the apocalypse.

Marsh concludes,"What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness."Many influential evangelicals reject the Armageddon agenda. For example, Tim Wildmon's American Family Association's magazine, in its review of a movie about the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, notes "the futility of Christian efforts to build the kingdom of heaven here on earth.""Such a 'war of the cross' should strike Christians as a contradiction in terms. A literal war in the name of Jesus – a 'Christian war' – is an oxymoron, like 'hateful Christian.' Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world, otherwise His followers would draw swords to defend Him – and presumably the kingdom itself (John 18:36)."The large World magazine doesn't promote the "Left Behind" mentality, and non-evangelical leaders of the religious Right also disagree with dispensationalism. One of the first critics to write about the phenomenon was Gary North. The Armageddonites, despite their self-proclaimed goodness, are a brutal, ignorant, and vengeful people. They have also become a major force dragging America to the abyss of endless war, a domestic police state (they care little for constitutional freedoms), financial ruin, and the enmity of the world.

http://www.antiwar.com/utley/?articleid=8588

Can A Genuine Christian Be A Soldier?

2006-02-23T10:13:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Vance over at Lew Rockwell does not think so. Here is his review of Mansfields "The Faith of the American Soldier"
DragonSlayerWanted

Can a Christian be a soldier? Stephen Mansfield thinks he can, and tells us so in his new book,The Faith of theAmerican Soldier (Tarcher/Penguin, 2005). But are the two "callings" compatible? Does the combination not rather lead to a cognitive dissonance from which there is no escape Mansfield is a former pastor whose "love of things military has moved him to earn a master’s degree in history and public policy and a doctorate in history and literature." This love of the military runs in his family, for we are also told in "About the Author" that "members of his family have been fighting for their country since the American Revolution." To write this book, dozens of "men and women who have heroically served in their country’s wars" were interviewed. Mansfield and "his research team" visited the battlefields of Iraq, "the plain" of West Point, the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and the headquarters of USCENTCOM at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. The author has also written books about two war criminals: Britain’s Winston Churchill (Never Give In: The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill [Cumberland House Publishing, 2002]) and our own George WMD Bush (The Faith of George W. Bush [Tarcher/Penguin, 2003]). Mansfield introduces his book with the account of Lance Corporal James Gault cutting an Iraqi insurgent in half "almost exactly at the waist" with his .50 caliber machine gun. Gault watched in shock as "the man’s torso tilted forward, left his lower half, and fell to the street." But then we are presented with a paradox: "James Gault is a Christian and a warrior." Mansfield says of Gault: "He has killed, and he will kill again. In fact, he believes ‘the bad guys have to die.’ To kill in a righteous cause is what Gault has come to Iraq to do, and he does not shrink from the charge." But then we read that "Gault is also a Christian, a man who believes that Jesus is God, that He rose from the dead, and that the Bible is the truth of God for all men." Gault is a Christian killer. The fact that he attended church before he deployed to Iraq and heard his pastor exhort the congregation to pray "for our young hero while he is overseas" doesn’t change anything. And neither is anything different because Gault’s pastor, his family, and the leaders of his church laid their hands on his shoulders and prayed that God would make his hands skillful to battle the Lord’s enemies. Gault is still a Christian killer. Ripping a man in half perplexes our man Gault: "He knows he is a follower of Jesus, and he knows that he is called to be a Marine, but the violence he unleashed leaves him needing assurance that he has killed in a righteous cause, that his country is doing the will of God in Iraq." Gault is tormented. He wants his chaplain to tell him that "our enemies are the enemies of God." He wants someone to explain to him "how this is a war between good and evil." Gault needs to know that he is "a servant of Jesus." He needs to be sure that he is "a soldier of Christ." Gault is not alone. There are thousands of Christians who have faced the same dilemma. Christians in the military who can bomb, maim, and kill for the state without thinking twice about it have a seriously defective form of Christianity. Christian soldiers who reason that it is not for them to judge whether a war is just or unjust are deceiving themselves. "Soldiers must know, in clear terms," says Mansfield, "not only why they fight but also if their cause is just." Unfortunately, however, Mansfield never addresses these questions. He aims to explore and celebrate "the religious nature of America’s military heritage" while cautioning us that "this is not to be confused, though, with a celebration of war. Only the immoral or the deformed of soul can exalt war itself, with all of the grinding horrors that it brings." But can "America’s military heritage" and "a celebration of war" be separated? Not when the true nature of this heritage is one of invasion, imperialism, oppression, interventionism, hegemony, belligerency, bellicosity, jingoism, death, and destruction – things never associated by Mansfield with "America’s military heritage." The book fails to deliver on another point as well. According to the dust jacket: "New York Times-bestselling author Stephen Mansfield surveys America’s wars from a religious and theological perspective in order to understand the theological framing and spiritual rationale for each, where they came from, and what effect they had on behavior on the battlefield." Since the book has no index, I have carefully gone through it searching for references to the American wars that the author is supposed to survey. The results are disappointing. Aside from the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are references to fourteen conflicts (the only declared wars in U.S. history were the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American war, WWI, & WWII). Most of these references have nothing to do with surveying the war "from a religious and theological perspective." Mentioned one time each, but just in passing, is the Pequot War of 1637, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the war "to win the American West," and the conflict in Kosovo. The Korean War is mentioned twice. The first time is just a passing reference. The second occasion consists of one paragraph in which Mansfield says that the war had a religious dimension because "the Communist forces of North Korea took pride in publicly persecuting missionaries and desecrating churches" and "subjected captured American chaplains to horrendous torture." The Civil War also comes up twice. The first time is likewise just a passing reference. Four and a half pages are then devoted to accounts of chaplains during the conflict. The Gulf War is cited as the place where "the first hint on the battlefield that a new brand of warrior was seeking a vital faith in the field." It is also mentioned one more time in the context of anti-Semitism. There are three references to the American Revolutionary War if we count the mention of someone fighting "under George Washington." The second mention is of "minutemen in the American Revolution." There are three pages about pastors and chaplains during the American Revolution – hardly a survey of one of America’s wars "from a religious and theological perspective." The conflict in Mogadishu, Somalia, merits four references; however, none of them consist of more than a bare mention of the place.

The Vietnam War comes up on five occasions. It is mentioned in passing three times. Russell’s father "had been a ranger in Vietnam." Vietnam vets were spit on. POWs in Vietnam had courage. The only thing of substance is a discussion of chaplains in the Vietnam War that takes up two pages. Mansfield brings up World War I six times. Twice we are told that a certain man’s father had been a chaplain in World War I. Two other times we are told something else about chaplains. World War I is just causally mentioned the other two times. That’s it. World War II is mentioned seven times. The "ghost of a soldier" from World War II would be amazed at the technology used in modern warfare. A soldier’s uncles fought in World War II. Others fought in World War II. The essential role of the chaplain was recognized "by the advent of World War II." During the war, "The chaplains’ corps ballooned from a few hundred to nearly ten thousand." This leaves one reference of substance to World War II. Mansfield devotes six pages to the account of the American transport ship Dorchester and its four military chaplains. Mansfield’s book is a fraud. It no more "surveys America’s wars from a religious and theological perspective" than the Secretary of Defense pays attention to the number of dead Iraqis. So what is The Faith of the American Soldier about? What is the point the author is trying to get across? Mansfield says that the book is "the product of a search for the meaning of the American warrior code and the faith that gave it birth." Because he considers a nation’s "warrior code" to be "an extension of its soul, the embodiment of its highest ideals," the "guiding dream" of the book is "to understand that code and to honor it as the distilled greatness of a people."

This is gobbledygook. Each of the book’s five chapters contains vignettes of soldiers in Iraq, with a religious element, interspersed with some historical references and psychobabble. The message of the book can be reduced to this: Some American soldiers have been religious, many are religious right now, and others need to be more religious. The first chapter introduces us to the Millennials – the generation who came of age around the dawn of the new century. The Millennial is "better informed about his world than any generation that has been called upon to fight its nation’s wars." He is a "new brand of warrior." Millennials serving in the military in Iraq "take hold of religion as much as any army had in the nation’s history." Their "unique approach to religion" is "changing American at war." Their religion is characterized by an "unchurched faith" that rejects "the structures, doctrines, and standards of traditional faith in pursuit of spiritual experience, loving community, and stories that have power to define their lives." Mansfield explains that Millennials are eager for spirituality but suspicious of institutions, hungry for truth but bored by systematics, inspired by stories but repelled by standards, desperate for religious experience but put off by religious style, hoping for spiritual family but disgusted by empty conformity, longing for God but wondering if he is there. The spirituality of the Millennials is "perfectly suited for adaptation to the battlefield." It is utilitarian, pragmatic, eclectic, and experimental. The second chapter begins with the story of the Shield of Strength carried by many American soldiers – a "God and Country" trinket with a picture of the American flag and the words "One Nation Under God" on one side and the modified words of a Scripture verse on the other. Mansfield calls it "almost the classic Millennial military icon." He claims that it is "the emblem most often carried by members of the military in Afghanistan and Iraq." The amazing diversity of the faith of Christian soldiers is the next theme Mansfield picks up. But they have a "new brand of faith," one that is "more effective in meeting the needs of soldiers than traditional chapel services." This "new brand of faith" results in some strange "Christian" activities like a tank crew quoting aloud the Scripture they have memorized. I wonder what Scriptures they would quote while they were cutting a man in half like the Lance Corporal at the beginning of the book? Isn’t it wonderful that the Christian American soldier today can listen to a sermon from his home church on his iPod or watch his favorite preacher on a mini-DVD player? A "simplistic, one-answer-fits-all kind of spirituality" is out and a "working, experience-oriented, ‘real’ religion" is in. But still the soldiers seek out the chaplains: "What do I want? Sir, I wanna’ know that Jesus is in my Humvee." This assurance is provided by various rituals: praying, saying a blessing, reciting a confession, listening to worship music, making the sign of the cross over a Humvee, and, of course, carrying the Shield of Strength. But after all this, Mansfield ends on a sad note: The diverse faith of the Millennials "cannot be relied upon to guide the conduct of warriors in any meaningful way." The Millennials "informal faith" leads to a "variety of warrior codes" that result in "an unevenness if not an inconsistency to the conduct of warriors in the field."The third chapter is about those "men of cloth and steel" – military chaplains. Mansfield considers them "among the noblest figures in the field." He compares them to the priests of Israel leading the Jews into battle, but also to priests in Roman armies sacrificing animals and reading their entrails. Military chaplains are said to be the successors of the colonial fighting parsons – pastors who led militias into battle. The reader is led to believe that the chaplains of today are doing a great service to the country like those who served under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Mansfield writes as if all the wars that America has been involved in are created equal: "Chaplains continued to earn respect during the wars to win the American West and the Spanish-American War." It doesn’t matter how unjust the cause, chaplains serve the Lord by ministering to the troops. Thus, Mansfield can laud "one bold chaplain" who constantly urged Marines "courage in their task by quoting scriptures and praying aloud" as he accompanied them on their mission – going door to door looking for insurgents in Fallujah. Chaplains who do have doubts about the justness of a particular war certainly aren’t free to express their opinion, as Mansfield’s account of a private questioning his chaplain shows: I went to a chaplain and asked if he thought God was on our side and if we were really fighting evil by fighting the insurgents. You could see he wasn’t sure, or at least that he didn’t want to say. He hesitated. Then he said: "Well, the president says we are fighting for democracy and the values of freedom. So we must be doing a good thing." I thought to myself, Man, that’s the answer I expected from my government professor back home, not from a spokesman for God.The fourth chapter returns to the idea of a "warrior code." Mansfield explains: The warrior code takes a soldier and makes him a knight. It connects the natural life of a fighter to a supernatural understanding of the warrior calling. His duties are transformed into holy sacrifices; his sense of self is reformed into an image of the servant in pursuit of valor. He becomes part of a fellowship, a noble tradition that flows through him and carries him beyond the mediocre and the vain. But is this something that Christians should involve themselves in? Mansfield maintains that "the foundation of any religiously influenced warrior code is a theology of war." He then brings up "the moral basis for war," and insists that Augustine’s "Just War Theory" provides "the basis for any warrior code."

Mansfield claims that "there was some consideration of the Just War theory" before the Bush administration invaded Iraq in March of 2003. He specifically refers to a February 10, 2003, lecture by Michael Novak on Christian Just War doctrine with specific reference to Iraq. The speech was a "brilliant exposition of the Augustinian theory of war as it has been applied through the ages, the contemporary applicability of those teachings, and the moral moorings of the Bush Doctrine." Moral moorings? Bush’s war is one of the most immoral interventions in U.S. history. It is against every Christian Just War principle that has ever been thought of. Any "warrior code" that can’t discern the unjust nature of this war is not a code that any Christian should follow. The fifth chapter opens with "the basic facts of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal as they are presented in the Schlesinger Panel’s report and as they have surfaced in interviews with guards at the scene." But Mansfield considers "a refusal to learn the lessons of Abu Ghraib and thus allow such scandals to reoccur" as "perhaps a greater misfortune." Men and women under "dire stress" may "descend into barbarism" if they don’t have moral leadership, core values held before them, and a noble sense of mission. They need a "faith-based warrior code." Mansfield never even considers that perhaps we just shouldn’t put men and women in situations like guarding the Abu Ghraib prison to begin with. But even worse, he is not averse to war at all. A "heartfelt warrior code" provides the restraint "to immoral behavior under the stress of war." How about the immoral nature of the Bush doctrine and war itself? There is nothing wrong with this war that Mansfield can’t fix with his "faith-based warrior code." We are introduced to a confused, young Christian soldier named Bob Daniels who wonders if true Christians are on the wrong side of this thing. Maybe the terrorists are doing god’s will. Maybe God wants to destroy the America that secular humanism built and restore her to be that city on a hill she is supposed to be. I came over here all fired up thinking we were fighting against evil. Now I’m wondering if we are evil. And what is Mansfield’s solution? Does he tell this young soldier that he has been deceived by the president and the U.S. government? Does he tell this young soldier about the history of U.S. wars and interventions that have helped create terrorists and enemies of the United States? No, "what Bob Daniels needs is what a faith-based warrior code would give him: an assessment of Islam that would frame his fight against terror." It is in the Epilogue that we see in full bloom the real hypocrisy of the American Christian soldier. Mansfield describes how a band of Marines, fully dressed for battle, hold their rifles aloft "as though to say, ‘Here, O Lord, receive this weapon into Your service.’" Then they recite the doxology, quote a verse of scripture together, pause in silence for each man to confess his sins, quote another verse of scripture, sing a hymn, have a responsive reading (during which time some soldiers kiss their Shield of Strength trinket), say "Amen" – and then go out and fight and kill for the U.S. government. In the end, Mansfield is no different than the state-worshipping, Bush-idolizing, Republican Party-adoring, pious Christian warmongers who do all but call for my death as a traitor because I dare to criticize their leader and his war."The only defensible war is a war of defense," said G.K. Chesterton. Perhaps Mansfield ought to read him before he writes another book justifying Christian participation in U.S. wars.

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] is a freelance writer and an adjunct instructor in accounting and economics at Pensacola Junior College in Pensacola, FL. He is also the director of the Francis Wayland Institute. His new book is Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State. Visit his website.

Christendom's War On Iraq

2006-02-17T17:06:00.000-08:00

Again the major churches of Christendom are silent on the Iraq War. Belatedly the Methodists have spoke out but Christendom's efforts are halfhearted in the extreme. No measures like censure or excommunication are being taken to hold her members accountable for their actions. They attend their various churches in good standing and have their pictures taken with the leading lights of Christendom from the Pope on down. Same as it ever was....
DragonSlayerWanted

From the Standford Hoover Institute
100,000 Iraqi Civilian Dead Since US Invasion? Who is Right?

Jon Kofas writes:On 28 October 2004, Emma Ross, AP Medical writer, reported from London that according to one household survey 100,000 more have died in Iraq than would be expected based on the death rate before the U.S. invasion. The unofficial estimates of Iraqi"war casualties range from 10,000 to 30,000. "In a recent response to my views on the costs of war and "terrorism", Istvan Simon argued that "terrorists" deliberately target civilians, whereas the armies kill civilians as "collateral damage" which is only to be expected. If we take the long view of history, we see that the ultimate terrorist machine, the ultimate machine of destruction is the state, not groups of people organized against the state. While there is no doubt that acts of political violence by groups organized against the state may be abhorrent, destructive, and futile as they do often target civilians, there is also no comparison between the hundreds of millions killed in the name of the state, versus the thousands killed by unconventional means in guerrilla or other unconventional warfare that may include civilian targets. Why do societies honor mass killings and justify them in the name of patriotism, but condemn the same acts on a much smaller scale when carried out by unconventional means? Both Gregory of Tours who wrote the History of the Franks and Einhard who was Charlemagne's biographer justified war only when carried out in the name of expanding Christendom, but they strongly condemned it when the Norsemen (Vikings) Saracens (Muslims) or the barbarians from the East carried out the same acts as Clovis and Charlemagne. The medieval Christian doubled standard is with us to this day, and regrettably even among people who have the capacity to reason and know for a fact that it is wrong to engage in such hypocrisy in the name of civilization and at the expense of humanity.

http://wais.stanford.edu/Iraq/iraq_041122_iraqiciviliandead.htm

Fire On Religious Christendom

2006-02-17T16:10:00.000-08:00

I'm fascinated in a horrified way by Christendom's bloodthirsty bloodguilty course.
DragonSlayerWanted

But as a child I was overawed by all the stained glass, magnificent robes, huge cathedrals, ceremonies and mysticism. Once I had a chance to visit the Vatican. I was searching not only for a sense of the seemingly timelessness of the place but for a sense of God, would I sense his presence there? Would He know I was looking for Him, and would He let Himself be found? I remember being anxious to get off the tour bus. All I had to do was to get into His space and something would happen, I was sure. On a humourous note, that was in the 80's. I was decked out in the latest from Express and was sure my outfit showed the proper respect. I was badly mistaken because the guard at the door of St. Peters looked at me with a mixture of horror, amazement and pity. Nobody at the tour company had told our group that you could not wear shorts into St. Peters. Many were turned away however I felt that I had God's favour because I got in anyway. I think it was the pink tights that saved me, and I don't care what anyone says, the outfit was awesome by American standards. It consisted of a white shirt, pink sweater, pink shorts, pink tights, short pink socks, pink shoes and beautiful head of 80's big hair.

But let me tell you what I found, the place was cold, not the temperature but the spirit. Something was not right, and it began with a sense of being overwhelmed but not with happiness. The place did not have the respectful spirit of a house of worship but of that of a business, a very lavish one at that. Also I was amazed at the attitudes of the so-called "Princes of the Church". They were cordoned off in an area we peasants could not walk through. I say peasants because the way they looked at the masses gave me the feeling of being in one of those really bad medieval movies...It felt like we should have been bowing and scraping and "yes milord'ing/no milord'ing". Also what was up with all of the lavish artwork and the foreign art in the basement, from ancient pagan lands ? What was the purpose of the collection? To make a long story short, what I was looking for I did not find. And now I know why, someone else's spirit was there and I could feel it. The stones were crying out, but what were they trying to tell me I did not find out until later? At that time I was ignorant of the history of this organization and of its practices and of the history of all of the sects of Christendom. Now I know. Fire On Babylon (not the ancient Babylon of Iraq) Fire on religious "Babylon". For some reason everytime I listen to that Sinead O'Connor song I cant' help but think of Christendom's religious lies and bloodguilt...

Fire On Babylon She took my father from my life oh
Took my sister and brothers oh
I watched her torturing my child
Feeble I was then but now I'm grown
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Fire on Babylon Fire Fire Fire
She's taken everything I liked She's taken every lover oh
And all along she gave me lies
Just to make me think I loved her
Fire on Babylon Oh yes a change has come Look what she did to her son
Fire Fire Fire on
Life's backwards Life's backwards People turn around
The house is burned The house is burned The children are gone
Fire Fire Fire on Babylon Oh yes a change has come
Fire on Babylon Fire Fire, oh
Fire, oh Fire on Babylon Oh yes a change has come
Look what she did to her son Look what she did to her son
Fire, haha Fire, haha Fire Fire Fire, aha Fire on Babylon
Fire on Babylon

Christendom's Agreement With Nazi Germany

2006-02-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

How did the Church respond to the violent unchristian doctrines and speeches of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party? They promptly signed a concordat with the Nazi government giving it legitimacy. Recognition not excommunication was the response of Christendom's church's both Catholic and Protestant. DragonSlayerWanted

As reported by the BBC, "For its part, the Vatican has always argued that its cautious, non-confrontational policy saved more people than if it had condemned Nazi excesses from the pulpit." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1762448.stm . Hmm, kind of like the cautious non-confrontational approach that all of Christendom, not just the Vatican, used to save so many lives in Rwanda? (Which btw is a predominately Catholic country, go figure?) And what about Iraq, how's that non-confrontational approach working? The latest estimates from the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, puts the Iraqi death toll at approximately 100,000. Read their study at http://wwwbluejayway.net/pdf/lancet_10-29-04_article_on_IRAQ_casualties.pdf
But I digress...Nazi soldiers wore the phrase Gott Mit Uns on their belt buckles, meaning "God Is With Us". Gee, why would they think that? What role did their priest, pastor, bishop, cardinal, reverend or Pope play to make them think that God was with them during their bloody rampage througout Europe? Also were they thinking Gott Mit Uns while they were setting a precedent for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo at Auschwitz? And which God? It is interesting to note from a Christian perspective that the bible says that Satan is the "god of this system of things" and that Jesus refused Satan's offer of political power on earth. "So he brought him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the inhabited earth in an instant of time; and the Devil said to him: “I will give you all this authority and the glory of them, because it has been delivered to me, and to whomever I wish I give it. You, therefore, if you do an act of worship before me, it will all be yours.” In reply Jesus said to him: “It is written, ‘It is Jehovah your God you must worship, and it is to him alone you must render sacred service.’” Luke 4:5-8.

Unlike Christendom apparently Jesus trusted in God as the source of his power.

Christendom And The Holocaust

2006-02-15T16:50:00.000-08:00

Musings on Christendom's role during the Holocaust
DragonSlayerWanted

As noted from the previous post, Christendom was compromised from its inception by merging with the political state of Rome under Constantine in the 4th century. Since then it has continously sought and fought for political power over peoples and nations, drunk with blood and power. We all know about the Crusades and countless pogroms in Europe and Russia, but what about the Holocaust? Where did the Church stand? A picture is worth a thousand words....

Thoughts On The Death Of The Religious Empire Known As Christendom

2006-02-15T14:06:00.000-08:00

Good Riddance!
So long!
Farewell!
Auf Wiedersehen!
Goodbye!
Whew! That said, don't blame God, Jesus, or the bible for fake "christians". Genuine Christianity will survive its thousands of years long duet with paganism.
DragonslayerWanted

The Rise of Christendom from Pennswald.net

The life and culture of Medieval Europe was dominated by a single institution -- the Church. Beginning with the coronation of Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor in 800 A.D., the political entity know as Christendom continued to exist until the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 when German princes were "permitted" to choose to be Lutheran, and therefore, no longer answerable to Rome (although the title of "Holy Roman Emperor" continued to be used until MUCH later). However, even by the 14th Century (the period in which the persona known as Barthel aus Pennswald is rumored to have lived), the cracks in the foundation of Christendom were beginning to show, as evidenced by these songs of Walther von der Vogelweide: "King Constantine's Folly" "The Roman Shrine" . Any of Christianity's critics cite the abuses of Christendom as prime examples of everything that's wrong with Christianity. Some will even go so far as to say that the Church is itself responsible for the "Dark Ages", especially given the attitude of the Church toward the "new knowledge" that came out of the Renaissance. (Can you say "Galileo"?) Obviously, so the argument goes, the Church wanted to keep the populace uneducated, in order to maintain their power. Furthermore, the Church was not above using torture and threats of eternal damnation as a means to that end. Well, yes, that does sound pretty convincing--especially if you know a little bit about Galileo or the Spanish Inquisition. For that matter, I don't think any Protestant Christian can deny that abuses of authority and power did occur, since one of the goals of the Reformation was to eliminate those abuses. (Luther's "95 Theses", which sparked the Reformation, targeted one abuse in particular: the sale of indulgences.) The real problem with Christendom, however, was not Christianity itself, but the political power which the clerical heirarchy enjoyed. The issue is not Christianity or even "religion" in general, but the abuse of power and authority in the name of religion. But the political power of Christianity was not a medieval development: it was Roman. Prior to Constantine, Christianity was either ignored or actively persecuted in the Roman Empire. According to legend, Constantine was moved by a dream1 to legalize Christianity. This was accomplished on June 13, 313 with Constantines Edict of Milan. Within a few years, the Arian controversy threatened to split Christianity into two factions. Constantine quickly realized that his dream of uniting the empire under the banner of Christianity was futile if Christianity itself was not unified. So it came to pass that Constantine convened the first of the seven ecumenical councils, the Council of Nicea in 325. There, the bishops debated over the letter iota: whether whether Christ was of the "same substance" as God (homoousion), or, as Arius argued, of a "similar substance" homoiousion. In the end, the bishops decided that Christ was indeed of the "same substance": God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father. The Arian controversy became the Arian heresy, and the original version of the Nicene Creed anathematized all who did not adhere to that creed. Thus, out of political necessity (or perhaps simply political ambition?) was born the pattern of intolerance among Christians. No longer was it sufficient to believe in Christ--you had to believe in Christ in the right way. In essence, the Council of Nicea was the betrothal of Christianity and Empire. In its best, Christendom was an attempt to restore the glory which was Rome, to rebuild the Roman Empire. (Hence the name "Holy Roman Empire". 2) At its worst, it was every bit as depraved and decrepit as Rome under Caligula. The tension between these two extremes cracked the foundations, and the walls of Christendom began to tumble, even during the height of its power. In these Modern Middle Ages, the crumbling of Christendom has continued to progress unabated. Some are desperately trying to rebuild the colossal edifice, proclaiming that we need the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Others, seeing the destruction that has come to pass, have proclaimed not only the death of "The Church", but also the death of "God", or at least, the concept of "God", since they're not even sure God existed in the first place. However, we must not confuse the death of a corrupted institution with the death of faith or the death of God.