Praying For The Apocalypse

[Ex-COG]

Interesting article from Truthdig on the Apocalyptic vision of the Christian Right. By Chris Hedges, author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."

 

 

The Gilead Baptist Church, outside Detroit, is on a four-lane highway called South Telegraph Road. The drive down South Telegraph Road to the church, a warehouse-like structure surrounded by black asphalt parking lots, is a depressing gantlet of boxy, cut-rate motels with names like Melody Lane and Best Value Inn. The highway is flanked by a flat-roofed Walgreens, a Blockbuster, discount liquor stores, a Taco Bell, a McDonald’s, a Bob’s Big Boy, Sunoco and Citgo gas stations, a Ford dealership, Nails USA, The Dollar Palace, Pro Quick Lube and U-Haul. The tawdry display of cheap consumer goods, emblazoned with neon, lines both sides of the road, a dirty brown strip in the middle. It is a sad reminder that something has gone terribly wrong with America, with its inhuman disregard for beauty and balance, its obsession with speed and utilitarianism, its crass commercialism and its oversized SUVs and trucks and greasy junk food. It is part of our numbing assault against community and connectedness.

 

Ten or fifteen minutes of negotiating the traffic down South Telegraph Road makes the bizarre attraction of the End Times—the obliteration of this world of alienation, noise and distortion—comprehensible. The manufacturing jobs in the Detroit auto plants nearby are largely gone, outsourced to nations with cheaper labor. The paint is flaking off the cramped two-story houses that lie in ugly grid patterns off the highway. The plagues of alcoholism, divorce, drug abuse, poverty and domestic violence make the internal life here as depressing as the external one. And those gathering today in this church wait for the final, welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast, bloody cleansing that will lift them up into the heavens and leave the world they despise—the one that was devastated by corporatism—to be racked by plagues and flood and fire until it and all those whom they blame for the debacle of their lives are consumed and destroyed by God. It is a theology of despair. And for many, it can’t happen soon enough.

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/prayin...the_apocalypse/

[Requiem]

I totally hate Tim La Haye, Hall lindsey, jack kinsella and all those others with their semi scary end times hell drivel

[Requiem]

I totally hate Tim La Haye, Hall lindsey, jack kinsella and all those others with their semi scary end times hell drivel

 

 

From the text of the URL:

 

“We are at war with the religion of Islam,” Gary Frazier, another popular leader, tells the crowd in the church outside Detroit, “and it is not a handful of radical Islamists who are taking over the religion and hijacking it. The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, today if you read the Koran, and any person who reads their Koran, the holy book of the Muslims, and believes what the book says, over a hundred times it calls for the putting to death of any person that does not embrace the teachings of Mohammed."

 

You can alter this text very easily to see it from a muslim jihad point of view: Just change the words Muslim and Koran by Bible and Christians and the rhetoric stays the same.

 

“We are at war with the religion of Christianity,” says Ayatollah Khameney, another popular leader, tells the crowd in the Mosque outside Teheran, “and it is not a handful of radical Christians who are taking over the religion and hijacking it. The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, today if you read the Bible, and any person who reads their Bible, the holy book of the Christians, and believes what the book says, over a hundred times it calls for the putting to death of any person that does not embrace the teachings of Jesus."

 

The fucking religious looneys should be put to death before they fking kill us all

[Requiem]

The radical Christian right has no religious legitimacy. It is a mass political movement. It is interchangeable, in many ways, with other traditional political movements ranging from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty. It also embraces a world of miracles and signs and makes war on rational, reality-based thought. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy. It places a premium on action. It dismisses those who do not bow down before its god—and the leaders who claim to speak for God—as heretics and traitors. This movement shares with corporatists, who are busy cannibalizing our society for profit, the belief that there are a chosen few who know the truth and therefore have the right to impose it. The citizen, the individual, no longer has any legitimacy in this new world. All legitimacy is assumed by groups, whether they are corporate groups herding us over the cliff of globalization or religious groups that give popular vent to corporate-generated despair through faith in the Christian utopia. In this paradigm—corporate and religious—we become disempowered, afraid, passive and easily manipulated.

 

So true! Over here in the netherlands we have the most fundamentalist party in the freaking gouvernment-partycoalition. They already put in a request to forbid an advertising poster campaign over here which contains a sexy lady wearing a lingerie bra and string!

 

Nothing destructive in a FUCKING POSTER WITH A SCARCELY DRESSED LADY ON IT IMO!! :P BWAHAHA

[WCrystal]

They have been made into movies, as well as a graphic video game in which teenagers can blow away nonbelievers and the army of the Antichrist on the streets of New York City.

 

Yeah, that's something really great to teach kids.

[Robbobrob]

They have been made into movies, as well as a graphic video game in which teenagers can blow away nonbelievers and the army of the Antichrist on the streets of New York City.

 

Yeah, that's something really great to teach kids.

 

This plays into a pet theory of mine where the Fundies will become the army of the Antichrist, deluded into believing their cause is the right one. And it will be up to all the rest of us to stop them from forcing Armageddon onto us.

 

I do fear the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy with these nutjobs.

[Lycorth]

This is why I call Xianity a deathcult. Going by the zeitgeist encouraged by the Babble, Xians should hope for the end of the world to come as soon as possible. No matter how much death and suffering (and damnation) results, the Apocalypse means that Jebus will cum again and they will live with their heavenly boyfriend. In any sort of literal Xianity, that's all that really matters.

 

This life has no meaning, ultimately, and neither does any sort of actual joy found in this world. The end of the world is what ushers in the goal of the Xian religion - salvation for the lucky believers and damnation for all the "wicked sinners" of the world. Xianity is not a religion that revolves around life and the celebration and betterment of it, it revolves around some pie-in-the-sky next world and whether or not you exclusively worship its god to gain a special pass into that world. It's no wonder Xians have done the most insane things throughout the centuries, considering the goal of their religion. That's why you have religious violence, forced conversions, extreme sects practicing things like flagellation and whatnot.

 

Any religion that centers on insanity will produce insane followers. See the sad legacy of the Abrahamic cults for further study