Showing posts with label Christian Fundamentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian Fundamentalism. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Sarah Palin and the New American Fascism


With a dying Old Age of Boomers and Boomer Parents, there was an attempt to stir up rage on the right about the recent ruling that the so-called National Day of Prayer as mandated by Congress in 1952 was unconstitutional.

Indeed, Boomer Franklin Graham and his unmeasured hate sounding anti-Islam statements got him thrown off a scheduled National Prayer Day invite list at the Pentagon.

Franklin should do some research. The Air Force Academy makes room for Druids and any other religious beliefs of its cadets. The Pentagon at least on the spiritual side does not want to hear boilerplate Cold War sounding rhetoric from Franklin dissing Muslims. Franklin of course is trying to protect a meal ticket event like the NPD campaigned for by his Dad and company and imposed on the population in Harry Truman’s time.

The Prayer Day thing got greatly unnoticed. One and a half generations are fading away. The American Town Square and the forced compliance to be Politically Correct about religion or join the right white church on Town Square does not matter anymore. The world is global and nobody cares except Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin, is turning herself into the spokesperson, a product line icon identifying with what appears to be fascist themes that make her paid sponsors happy.

Sarah Palin, who along with the far right wants to return America to the so-called Christian nation started by the founding fathers.

SARAH PALIN ON NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER CONTROVERSY

O'REILLY: All I have to do is walk into the Supreme Court chamber and you'll see the 10 Commandments. And so we know that you're absolutely correct. The Founding Fathers did base not only the Declaration of Independence but the constitutional protections on what they thought was right and wrong. And what they thought was right and wrong came from the 10 Commandments, which is Judeo-Christian philosophy. That is beyond a reasonable doubt.But here is what's happened. America has, as they say in California, evolved. And now we're a much more secular nation than we were back in 1776. So the opponents of spirituality in the public marketplace say, "Hey, this is a violation. We can't be pushing any kind of spirituality." And you answer?
PALIN: Well, that new kind of world view that I think is kind of a step towards a fundamental transformation of America that some want to see today, I think, again, that it is an attempt to revisit and rewrite history. I think we should kind of keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They're quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 Commandments. It's pretty simple. I think what's missing in...
The founding fathers did not found a Christian Nation. They founded a Secular Nation. They did not want anything to do with religion. They and their immediate ancestors fled Europe and Europe’s religion obsessions and religious wars.

One of the founding fathers in the following quotes later on does not reflect Sarah Palin’s valium induced visions for a future Christian America.

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814


The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814
That if anything, considering the twelve million dollars Sarah Palin earned last year speaking, “Writing” etc., she is becoming a Betty Furness of the Right Wing Causes. (Betty was an early famous TV spokesperson for Westinghouse products 1950s, 1960s.)

Even if Sarah does not know what she is endorsing for a price on FOX etc., she is in fact becoming IMHO spokesperson for a not growing as yet but very vocal through her – an American Fascist Party movement not unlike the one described below. With the Tea Party being a slice of and seeds of that movement.

Is the Christian Right a Fascist Movement?

In his new book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2007), veteran journalist and bestselling author Hedges argues that the Christian fundamentalist movement emerging today in the United States resembles the early fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the beginning of the last century. This radical Christian movement, known as Dominionism, promotes the Christian faith and patriotism as a means to gaining more political power.

Hedges contends that the Dominionist movement has many of the same characteristics as fascism: a claim for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians; blind obedience to a male hierarchy that often claims to speak for God; intolerance toward non-believers; and disdain for rational intellectual inquiry. This movement’s goal is for America to become a theocratic, totalitarian country.
The founding fathers were more interested in a democracy of slave and factory owners.

National Days of Prayer and references to the Christian Nation of the founding fathers is pure delusion Sarah darling.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Mosque of Miriam Paris?


America used to be called the dumping ground of Europe. Europe, now with so many immigrants, will be twenty percent Muslim by 2050 by stats I have seen lately. Nothing outwardly wrong with that unless you fear Islam. (And the GOP vehemently complains about the many Catholics coming north from Meso-America.)

Is it possible to envision the sale of an unused obsolete house of worship like Notre Dame in Paris around 2075 with the plaza outside to accommodate daily Muslim prayers? Anything is possible. Whatever.

Anti-science campaigns by fundamentalists in this country have brought forth a kind of false science with the resurrection of dinosaurs to stand along side Jesus in popular local belief and myth as creationism.

Creationism, by default, would seem to be slipping into Islamic common beliefs or lack of them. It is not that I am campaigning for or against Charles Darwin, patron saint of modern science, but only three or so of twenty-two Muslim majority population countries even touch upon the topic of evolution in their education systems.

Creationism would seem to happen by default by either believing in the literal myth of creation in Genesis or by the lack of any Genesis like text in Islam.

As such, educated scientific minds of all persuasions, Muslim or not, gathered in Cairo this week to discuss the western, European concept of evolution.

Egypt’s Darwin debates
She (Dr. Eugenie Scott) objected to science being viewed through a religious filter and said the two should not be confused. "A biologist who studies enzymes that cause cell division does not bring the Qur'an or Bible into it. It does a great violence to science to run your explanation through a religious filter for this understanding to be accepted."
Lots of uncharted grounds here in the merging of cultures, religions, sciences, myths and human nature.

Islam as a culture carried on basic science while Europe wallowed in the ignorance of the Dark Ages. It would appear that there is at present no real dividing line, concepts set in stone by words, by culture, or in thought about the idea of science or evolution or even the strictest sense of creationism across the Islamic world.

Creationism Gains Ground in Europe
Prof Reiss will tell the gathering that many European nations are yielding to pressure exerted from both East and West in the growth of creationist beliefs, with Muslim immigrants on one side and the importation of Christian fundamentalism on the other…

“What the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries,” he told The Guardian newspaper yesterday. “These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries.

In London ... there are increasingly quite large numbers of highly intelligent 16, 17 and 18-year-olds doing advanced-level biology who do not accept evolution. That’s either because they come from a fundamentalist Christian background or from Muslim backgrounds.”…

But Prof Reiss said although Islam does not suggest that the world was very young – a tenet of Christian creationism – its texts say different organisms had separate origins.
The world continues to merge in thoughts and deeds. The future global society is one of a mix of many things both of scientific and religious myth.

The future is full of possibilities real, imagined and unimagined. The tidal wave of humanity and mixed ideas are already washing over the landscape in the growing Global Culture. Many perspectives are too close to focus on at present. I do not care whether Darwin or Jesus’ pet dinosaur wins in the end. I will not likely be alive in any case to see that future cultural landscape.

Food for thought.