You still haven

You obviously feel threatenend by faith, and I’m sorry for that. You don’t have to be.

1: You never saw it, so it must not exist. I’ve never seen Old Faithful – what do we conclude?

2: This isn’t about concocting a “conspiracy theory” – nice try with rhetorical marginalization device, though. All people here are doing is quoting facts and eyewitness accounts. You have conveniently pretended that my post above never happened, but let’s review anyway. Depending on the survey, over 70% of Americans are some variety of Christian. I’ve seen a number of surveys, and nothing shows Christians comprising less than a supermajority. Nearly all of Congress professes to Christianity. And for the heck of it, can you point to the last president or major party presidential candidate who wasn’t an avowed Christian? I don’t think it’s happened in my lifetime, and I was born a few days after Kennedy took office.

I do love your last line: “There

There’s a difference here, though, and that is the apparent counter-reaction against Christians. There’s a very real desire here to marginalize Christians.

The point is that there are people who are callously using folks like you as tools and a source of funds to destroy our country. You’re just a walking wallet to them. Religion is just a tool for them. You’re being used to advance a political agenda, not your faith.

I cannot make myself any clearer than that. Go ahead and lump me in with the firebrands if you must- but there’s a pattern here that is not a good one for the future of this country. We are NOT coup-proof. We are not immune to corruption or collapse from within, no matter what people believe about God’s blessings on this nation.

If your builder told you that you had a rotting floor in your home, would you dismiss him? Probably not. You’d get it fixed. Our country is rotting right out from under us, and these faith-based phonies are accelerating the process. I don’t think anyone- believer or not- will want to live in such a place. And even if you are a Christian, you will probably not be the ‘correct’ sort.

But you have the right to see things as you wish- all I am trying to do is open eyes. You can choose to keep them closed.

Rev. Chuck Currie on “Steeplejacking”

More about this growing problem.

Steeplejacking

I served graduated from the Air Force Academy (a few years after Mikey Weinstein’s time there) and served for 24 years. In all that time I never witnessed any of the scattered abuses that you, Sunfell, or Weinstein claim. They may have happened, but if you were in a court of law, your evidence of a Grand Theocratic Conspiracy would be circumstantial at best.

Again, the American military is driven more by political correctness and opportunism than religion. This is a free country – if you or Sunfell or Weinstein are offended by religion, stick your fingers in your ears and walk away. Stop making up conspiracy theories that don’t exist.

Maybe she just imagined all those things that happened to her firsthand?

Christianity can’t be mandated or legislated.

1: Yes, it has always been a “Christian nation,” statistically if not Constitutionally. I think we all get this.

2: Why are we not a theocracy? Well, I think you need to ask yourself what you’d call a system where all legislation must run the gauntlet of the situation I describe in my previous comment. What is it called when you can’t be elected president unless you active pronounce your commitment to a particular faith. What do you call a society where scores of activities are outlawed because they contravene the laws of a particular faith?

3: What’s changed? No, Steve, we have not evolved a new class of folks. What’s happened since the mid- to late-70s is that Christianity has been politicized. As Sunfell’s comment notes, we have have the religion hijacked by powermongering political interests.

Of course, I guess none of this is particularly disturbing – maybe not even noticeable – to those who are a part of the fundie takeover machine….

- the president
- the vice president
- most of the Supreme Court
- a vast majority of both houses on Congress
- a vast majority of the governors and legislators in the 50 states
- all the major presidential candidates in both parties
- a significant majority of the population of the nation

Gee, maybe it’s a Christian nation, after all. Surprise, surprise. So why hasn’t the fever dream of an American theocracy comes to pass in the last 250 years? After all, there was certainly a greater percentage of the population that professed and practiced the faith in the past. Why the sudden paranoia? Abraham Lincoln was actually more vocal about his faith than George Bush ever was.

I think it comes down to a new class of folks who feel they have a right to be offended, and that somebody better do something about it, by God. A handful of Christians in positions of authority transmogrifies into a dominationist conspiracy. Help me, Obi Wan, you’re my only hope.

But you’re probably not interested in that. Or interested in mainline churches being ’steeplejacked’ and their congregations taken apart by hard-right Christians. Or the huge schism that creedalized the Southern Baptist Convention and turned it into an element of the hard right. Or the deliberate and systematic takeover of low power community FM radio licenses by large hard-right religious broascasters- a trend that was so bad that the FCC finally had to halt processing of licenses in that area.

I’ve been studying and tracking this trend in religion for years. I have been watching religious people get swept away by politics, and watched people play the ‘faith card’ to get into the pockets and the trust of the faithful, who are constantly filled with fear, uncertainty and doubt to keep that money flowing.

It isn’t religion I am worried about, it’s a political takeover using religion as the Trojan Horse. In my studies and travels, I have run into people of faith who are as baffled and horrified with what is happening as I am. Genuine Christians are an endangered species. They are being overrun and silenced by fanatics using them as a means to get into power.

- the president
- the vice president
- most of the Supreme Court
- a vast majority of both houses on Congress
– a vast majority of the governors and legislators in the 50 states
– all the major presidential candidates in both parties
– a significant majority of the population of the nation

Thankfully, we have bright-eyed thinkers like you noting that you just can’t mention Jesus in public anymore…

But let’s have a reasonable conversation about what differentiates a healthy patriotism from unhealthy nationalism, rather than these absurd allusions to the “Talibanization” of the military and the “fragging” of Pat Tillman.

And if you’re going to claim that yours is the side that sees the ambiguities and subtleties in the world, then you can start by recognizing the differences between fundamentalist and evangelical, and then the differences between left, right, and centrist evangelical, and then the differences even within conservative evangelicalism. The world is far too complicated a place, and human nature far too fractious, for any group so large to be painted with a single brush.

To equate this with the Taliban, however, to say it’s just as dangerous as al-Qaida terrorism, to suggest Tilman was killed for this, and then to raise the prospect of a fundamentalist millenarian military turning against all non-Christians is absurd and paranoid. This is what’s called demonization, and it’s an excellent illustration of how demonization is the enemy of rational thought. You have ascribed such horrible motives and character to a group you dislike that now you believe they’re capable of anything.

What’s your evidence that evangelicals in the military are going to enforce evangelicalism in the US and purge the rest. This is it, this is all you have: someone said, and you suspect this of others too, that they believe their commitment to God outweighs their commitment to country, and that they are interested in sharing the gospel along the way. Yeah, man, really scary stuff.

When you find yourself thinking things like this, you need to get outside of the echo chamber. You owe it to yourself, and you owe it to intellectual integrity, to try harder to understand different points of view. Make sure you’re not getting all your news from one “side” or the other. Find the best opposing argument you can find to your own; don’t deal in paper tigers.