An Experiment

Change of privacy settings, now anybody can read this fucker.

I'm gonna give it a while and see what happens, if I feel like it, I'll switch back to the old privacy settings. The web is so wide open that it has always given me a bad case of the squealing bejeebers about letting my admittedly wretched weirdness escape beyond the notice of my like-minded compadres into the swirling cesspool out in the great beyond.

Willful Ignorance

What a mess.
I read as widely as I can and listen pretty carefully to the world around me and I'm now crossing over from exasperated to seriously pissed off.... There was a time when my maternal grandparents were alive and well that my world held promise of better things to come - in fits and starts I have been witness to a great unravelling of the sweater of life. Pick one thread, start pulling on it and, pretty soon, the whole thing disintegrates into chaos.
Our world is on the verge of a great change - greed, ignorance and warfare seem to be the dominant themes currently and what comes after is anybody's guess. The MoneyFreaks who think they run the show are in for a rude awakening, what they have is a fictional delusion sustained by nothing.... When it all falls down, the rest of humanity either grows up or dies.
I might be an old guy but, all things being what they really are, I'd like to stay alive a bit longer to see if I can help make something better out of the inevitable wreckage......

Jesus Taliban update

From Al Jazeera English edition......

With Representative Michele Bachmann's victory in the Ames, Iowa straw poll, and Texas Governor Rick Perry's triumphal entrance into the GOP presidential primary, there's been a sudden spike of attention drawn to the extremist religious beliefs both candidates have been associated with - up to and including their belief in Christian dominionism. (In the Texas Observer, the New Yorker, and the Daily Beast, for example.) The responses of denial from both the religious right itself and from the centrist Beltway press have been so incongruous as to be laughable - if only the subject matter weren't so deadly serious. Those responses need to be answered, but more importantly, we need to have the serious discussion they want to prevent.

For example, in an August 18 post, originally entitled, “Beware False Prophets who Fear Evangelicals”, Washington Post religion blogger Lisa Miller cited the three stories I just mentioned, and admitted, “The stories raise real concerns about the world views of two prospective Republican nominees”, then immediately reversed direction: “But their echo-chamber effect reignites old anxieties among liberals about evangelical Christians. Some on the left seem suspicious that a firm belief in Jesus equals a desire to take over the world.” Of course, she cited no examples to bolster this narrative-flipping claim. More importantly, she wrote not one more word about the real concerns she had just admitted.

Dominionism is not a myth

"What In Heaven's Name Is A Dominionist?" Pat Robertson asked on his 700 Club TV show, one of several religious right figures to recently pretend there was nothing to the notion. Funny he should ask. In a 1984 speech in Dallas, Texas, he said:

"What do all of us do? We get ready to take dominion! We get ready to take dominion! It is all going to be ours - I'm talking about all of it. Everything that you would say is a good part of the secular world. Every means of communication, the news, the television, the radio, the cinema, the arts, the government, the finance - it's going to be ours! God's going to give it to His people. We should prepare to reign and rule with Jesus Christ."

Furthermore, C Peter Wagner, the intellectual godfather of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), actually wrote a book called Dominion! in 2008. Chapter Three was entitled “Dominion Theology”. When pressed, Peter likes to pretend that his ideas are just garden-variety Christianity, based on Genesis 1:26, in which, before the fall, God gives Adam and Eve dominion over the natural world - a far cry from dominion over other people, who did not even exist at the time, as evangelical critics of this dominionist argument have repeatedly pointed out.

Dominionism is not new

Dominionist ideas have circulated throughout the religious right for decades prior to Robertson's 1984 speech. A primary source was the small but influential sect known as Christian Reconstructionism, founded by R J Rushdoony in the 1960s, which advocates replacing American law with Old Testament codes. Centrists like Miller make the mistake of thinking that the small size of Rushdoony's core of true believers is the full extent of his influence. But this is utterly mistaken. As Michelle Goldberg wrote in Daily Beast, “Rushdoony pioneered the Christian homeschooling movement, as well as the revisionist history, ubiquitous on the religious right, that paints the US as a Christian nation founded on biblical principles. He consistently defended Southern slavery and contrasted it with the greater evils of socialism.”

A second source traces back to the roots of the Latter Rain movement of the late 1940s, long rejected by orthodox evangelicals because they contradicted scripture and denied primary agency to God - which is why they insist that Christians must actively establish church dominance over all of society, because God can't do it alone.

The Latter Rain was denounced by the Assemblies of God - the largest American Pentecostal church - in 1949, not solely for dominionist ideology, but for a variety of related beliefs and practices. When similar teachings and practices re-emerged in the guise of the New Apostolic Reformation 50 years later, the Assemblies of God denounced them again in 2000.

This time, however, many Assemblies of God congregations have increasingly accepted the NAR influence. Sarah Palin's long-time church in Wasilla is one such congregation. The most clear-cut example of NAR dominionism is the so-called “Seven Mountains Mandate”, which holds that dominionist Christians should control the whole world by infiltrating and dominating the “Seven Mountains” of culture: (1) Business; (2) Government; (3) Media; (4) Arts and Entertainment; (5) Education; (6) Family; and (7) Religion.

Dominionism is not a left-wing fantasy

A number of authors made charges similar to or derived from Joe Carter, web editor of First Things, who wrote: "The term ["dominionism"] was coined in the 1980s by [sociologist Sara] Diamond and is never used outside liberal blogs and websites. No reputable scholars use the term for it is a meaningless neologism that Diamond concocted for her dissertation."

However, at the same time Diamond was working on her dissertation - published as the book Spiritual Warfare in 1989 - evangelical writer/researcher Albert James Dager was taking similarly critical aim, though from a different direction. In 1986 and '87, he published a multi-issue essay “Kingdom Theology” in the publication Media Spotlight. In that text he also used the terms "Kingdom Now" or "Dominion" Theology. In 1990, Dager, too, published a book, Vengeance Is Ours: The Church in Dominion.

While his main focus was doctrinal error and non-Christian practices and influences, Dager's work traced dominionism back to the 1940s and even earlier. Many more have followed in his footsteps since then. If you Google the words “dominionism” and “heresy”, you'll get more than half a million hits. It should be obvious to anyone that conventional conservative Christians have big problems with dominionism - if only the United States' establishment media could figure out how to use Google.

Dominionism is not an imprecise catch-all term

Despite lingering definitional differences that are common with relatively new terminology, those who study dominionism and related phenomenon in a political framework have an increasingly common and precise terminology that most writers and researchers share. Researcher Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates provided a very useful guide, “The Christian Right, Dominionism, and Theocracy”, which addresses issues of terminology from several different perspectives - for example, between “generic dominionism” and specific dominion theologies.

Berlet also draws a distinction between “hard” and “soft” dominionists. “Soft Dominionists are Christian nationalists,” he writes. “They believe that Biblically-defined immorality and sin breed chaos and anarchy. They fear that America's greatness as God's chosen land has been undermined by liberal secular humanists, feminists, and homosexuals ... Their vision has elements of theocracy, but they stop short of calling for supplanting the Constitution and Bill of Rights.” Hard Dominionists add something more to the mix: “They want the United States to be a Christian theocracy. For them the Constitution and Bill of Rights are merely addendums to Old Testament Biblical law.”

Rushdoony's Christian Reconstructionists clearly fall into the hard dominionist camp. But the NAR seems to straddle the soft/hard division. On the one hand, they clearly do claim that conservative Christians are ordained to run the world, not just US society. Thus, the Seven Mountains Mandate. On the other hand, Wagner and others have argued that the Seven Mountains is compatible with democracy. The state of Hawaii shows how: Early in the 2010 election cycle, both the Republican and the Democratic frontrunners for governor were associated with the NAR. That changed when long-time Congressman Neil Abercrombie joined the race on the Democratic side, and eventually won the race handily. But for a while, the NAR came tantalisingly close to realising their dream, at least in one state - not just to win power, but to occupy all the possible paths to power.

What's more, in a recent article at Talk2Action, Rachel Tabachnick draws attention to another hedge on Wagner's part, quoting from Dominion! In a section entitled “Majority Rules”: "If a majority feels that heterosexual marriage is the best choice for a happy and prosperous society, those in the minority should agree to conform - not because they live in a theocracy, but because they live in a democracy. The most basic principle of democracy is that the majority, not the minority, rules and sets the ultimate norms for society."

This, of course, is utterly false in a liberal democracy, such as the United States. Liberal democracies combine majority rule as a general governing principle with a framework of rights protecting individuals in political minorities from persecution, political repression, and the like. The fact that Wagner so utterly misunderstands the foundations of American democracy shows just how dangerous such “soft” dominionism can be. This same lesson can be drawn from Uganda as well, where several different strains of dominionist theology have combined to bring that nation to the verge of passing a law that will make homosexuality punishable by death. Such is the nature of illiberal dominionist “democracy”.

Europe's bloody theocratic wars

This brings us, finally, to the serious discussions that dominionists and their enablers, like Miller, are trying to prevent. The first of those is about the very nature of American democracy. For nearly 200 years, Europe was torn apart by a series of religious wars and their bloody aftermath - the major reason that the United States was founded as a secular republic. We're potentially on the verge of forgetting all that history and suffering through it again, just as we're now suffering through forgetting the lessons of the Great Depression. Those centuries of war began with the German Peasants' War of 1524-26, in which more than 100,000 died; continued through the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War on the European continent; and lasted until the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). This was the bloody European history of religious intolerance and strife that many, if not most, American colonialists were fleeing from when they came to the New World.

It was also this bloody history that gave rise to the development of classical liberalism, affirming the individual right to religious liberty and replacing the top-down theocratic justification of the state with Locke's concept of the bottom-up social contract, based on the consent of the governed. The ideas that Locke perfected took generations to develop. Religious tolerance, for example, began as simply a matter of pragmatism: unless people stopped killing each other for differing religious beliefs, war in Europe would never end.

But gradually, the idea took hold that tolerance was a positive good, and key to this new perspective was the recognition that torturing someone to change their beliefs could not produce the desired result of a genuine heartfelt conversion. Thus, the moral rejection of torture - another feature of classical liberalism - had its roots in the evolution of the idea of religious liberty. The idea of utterly forgetting the prolonged bloody history that the United States was born out of is no laughing matter.

The same could be said of the myth that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, with laws based on the Bible. Of course most Americans were Christians at the time, but the leading intellects were decidedly less so, much more influenced by Enlightenment thought. There were many, such as Jefferson, who were better described as Deists, who believed that God had created a rational universe, but did not intervene supernaturally thereafter. They deliberately used terms like "the Creator" and "Nature's God" to affirm their distinctive, non-Christian view.

Moreover, God was not mentioned at all in the Constitution, and religion was only mentioned to exclude its influence, stating that no religious test should be required for office. Finally, US law was based on British common law, not the Bible. The Supreme Court itself is a common law court, following common law precedents and practices. And British common law traces back to Roman law, which first came to England centuries before Rome adopted the Christian religion.

Of course the intolerant religious right wants us to forget this. How else could they ever gain power, except through massive forgetting of who and what the United States really is? Not to mention who and what they are: the most fundamental enemies of the United States, who would, if they could, return us to the centuries of blood before the US was born, the nightmare out of which the United States awakened.

Theocratic thinking threatens the US today

There are very immediate consequences that flow from the theocratic mindset. You'll note, for example, that the "Seven Mountains" of culture do not include science. That's not because dominionists intend to leave science alone, but rather because they see no need to dominate what they can simply cut off, ignore and deny. If science tells them that homosexuality is an inborn trait, why fight that in the realm of science when politics, the media, religion and education offer much, much better places to fight? After all, who says that education has to be based on facts? The same holds true for evolution and global warming as well, not to mention the workings of the economy.

One rightwing denier of dominionist influence, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, even framed his attack as “An unholy war on the Tea Party, while another denier complained that instead of describing the Tea Party as a movement united around concern about big government, many journalists seem to be trying to redefine the colour red by overlaying religious intent and purpose on the movement.

Yet the dominionist connection to the Tea Party goes far beyond just the two candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Ron Paul, whose extreme anti-government positions helped to fuel the emergence of the Tea Party, has much deeper dominionist connections than either of the two new darlings. During his first term in Congress, one of his aides was Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law, and a leading Reconstructionist in his own right, who has written extensively on so-called "Biblical Capitalism", an ideology profoundly at odds with traditional Biblical-based teachings on economic justice.

While libertarians once traced their descent from John Locke, and more recently from the deeply anti-Christian Ayn Rand, Reconstructionism represents an increasingly important foundation for their views. A recently released sociology study, "Cultures of the Tea Party", found that Tea Party supporters are characterised by four dispositions: "authoritarianism, ontological insecurity, libertarianism, and nativism". Since traditional libertarianism was purportedly the opposite of authoritarianism, this highlights how radically libertarianism has changed - a conclusion that's echoed by the 2011 Pew Reaserch Political Typology Poll, which found that religious and economic conservatives had completely merged into one single group since 2006 and all previous polling.

What this means in the long run is far from clear. But it strongly suggests a solidfying outlook with deep Reconstructionist sympathies that actually looks at government failure to deal with major issues, such as restoring the economy, as a positive good. If faith in American institutions collapses entirely, then who wouldn't give Biblical law a shot? The more loudly such people proclaim themselves patriots, the more loudly they cheer for US collapse. It's not just Obama they want to fail. It's the very idea of America.

Paul Rosenberg is the Senior Editor of Random Lengths News, a bi-weekly alternative community newsletter.

You can follow Paul on twitter @PaulHRosenberg

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

The Weight

Another one..... Gillian Welch, David Rawlings and Old Crow Medicine Show live in London.
http://youtu.be/zXf-SuBbJa0

It
Doesn't
Get
Any
Better
Than
This.

Warren Haynes

Just heard an interview with Warren Haynes on NPR this morning, He is one of the best singers and guitar slingers I've ever heard and it was very cool to hear what he had to say and listen to some of his new music being broadcast to the world - a prime example of what National Public Radio is all about!
Here's a link to him with the Dave Matthews Band in Central Park doing Neil Young's "Cortez The Killer" - made the hairs on my arms stand up, not too fucking often somebody can cover that one so well...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCiLCo-LoUg

An Asheville, NC native - best of the best.

He Sleeps With The Fishies

The Navy Seals came through; Pakistan apparently missed that one of the whole worlds most wanted humans was living right in the middle of the town that houses their own version of West Point. Makes me wonder about who we call "allies" in this woefully misbegotten war thing our government has been engaged in for a decade.

If you want some background on where this wretched mess bubbled up, read "Charlie Wilson's War" to gain some understanding on how the US set the stage for what is now a reality way back when the old Soviet Union tried to play the Afghan game and we pretty much created and armed their opposition and then (of course) abandoned them.

Osama Bin Laden sleeps with the fishies, hope the sharks don't suffer too much digestive upset.....

A Shitstain on the Underwear of the Universe

Hey, golly, another member of the Jesus Taliban has managed to foul the underwear of life out of all proportion to his actual importance....

If I could, I would happily show up in close proximity to Terry Jones's church with a grinning gang of my like-minded maniacs and conduct a "trial" of the King James Bible for its crimes against humanity and then commit said book to the same flames that he did for the Koran.

While I agree that (in my opinion) that worthless, useless, self-deluded, spawn of anal intercourse between the ghosts of Adolph Hitler and Caligula has every right to spew his vile, despicable, twisted and ugly worldview, that also gives me the right to call him, and everybody who agrees with him, a blot of monumental proportions on everything decent that the rest of humanity aspires to.

Maybe, someday, we can do better.

Until then, as Pat Buchanan once said (forgive me, Pat, if I've got it wrong), "Ride to the sound of the guns!" and lets take these fuckers on and let the world know that our tradition of free speech is still alive and well!

More Heinlein

The Jesus Taliban have been getting on my nerves again, these fuckers are seriously bent on destroying America.

With that, I bring you some thoughts by Robert Anson Heinlein.... these bits are taken from the postscript to "Revolt in 2100" copyright by him in 1953 (!!!). I sincerely hope that his estate will forgive me for not contacting them prior to posting here.

..........
As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.
Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country - Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva's Zion, Smith's Nauvoo, a few others. The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition against each other.
Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not - but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday's efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears, Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti-"furriners" in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the results might be something quite frightening - particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.
..........
Impossible? Remember the Klan in the 'Twenties - and how far it got without even a dynamic leader. Remember Karl Marx and how close that unscientific piece of nonsense called Das Kapital has come to smothering out all freedom of thought on half a planet, without - mind you - the emotional advantage of calling it a religion. The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.
..........



What he said back then remains true today and we must be on guard lest we fall victim to their depredations. Make no mistake, if the Jesus Taliban get their evil hands on the levers of power in totality, terror and death will follow and The United States of America will vanish from the face of the earth.

Vox-Fucking-Who?

Website I randomly became aware of more than a year ago, Vox Popoli. And I quote:

"Featuring Vox Day, Internet Superintelligence, AWCA, WFM"

Wow. This is too good to pass up..... arrogance is bliss, eh? The guy is interesting to read but, upon investigation, his self-proclaimed status is less than all that. I'll go with something like "Internet Interestingintelligence" but can't go much beyond that.

I'm no slouch meself, put the blast to the Stanford-Binet tests as a child, numbers on the far side of genius and then rattled the US military when I took their tests near the end of the fun and games in Southeast Asia.

The Internet is an interesting place but, all things considered, I'll take Fred Reed over Vox Day.......

Been a while, back again

From Robert Anson Heinlein's character, Lazarus Long:

The most preposterous notion that H. Sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all of history.

And again:

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

Just a thought.....