Part 8 — Where we learn there’s a Book where you DON”T want to find your name.

The January 2008 edition of Tzedakah Times devoted itself to a review of John Hagee’s In Defense of Israel:  The Bible’s Mandate for Supporting the Jewish State.  The review, by the way, was not kind.  For example, allow me to highlight some of the most scathing observations:

• Stating that he doubts Jewish people will ever become Christians (p. 148)
• Separation of Romans 9-11 from the rest of the epistle (pp. 50-51)
• Referring to Samaritans as Gentiles (p. 116)
• Advocating a position held by the liberal theologian James Parkes (p. 125)
• Exhibiting weak research by only using a single source in his response to Replacement Theology (p. 132, 147, 158).  BTW, his source was Bishop Earl Paulk who was never known as a great source of theological insight.
• However, the most dangerous teaching of In Defense of Israel are his contrived statements that Jesus never claimed to be Messiah (p. 140, 132-145, 148)

“The Jews were not rejecting Jesus as Messiah; it was Jesus who was refusing to be the Messiah to the Jews.” (p. 140)

“It is time for Christians everywhere to recognize that the nation of Israel will never convert to Christianity and join the Baptist church in their town…. But the idea that the Jews of the world are going to convert and storm the doors of Christian churches is a myth.  After two thousand years of a loveless, godless, anti-Semitic Christianity that has saturated the soil of the earth with their blood in the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocuast, they are not about to convert.” (p. 148)

“The message of the gospel was from Israel, not to Israel.” (p. 134)

“Jesus refused to produce a sign for the national leadership of Israel in an attempt to prove he was the Messiah because it was not the Father’s will, nor his, to be Messiah.  Jesus’s repeated response to the Jewish people who urged him to be their Messiah was, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36).” (p. 138)

“The people wanted him to be their Messiah, but he absolutely refused.” (p. 139)

“The Jews were not rejecting Jesus as Messiah; it was Jesus who was refusing to be the Messiah to the Jews.” (p. 140)

“He refused to be their Messiah, choosing instead to be the Savior of the world.” (p. 143)

As you might expect, John Hagee received a lot of “flak” (i.e., trashing) for his book.  I suspect that he did not anticipate the response and had to write a revised edition to soothe, placate, and explain his positions regarding Messiah Jesus, the salvation of the Jewish people, and Israel.  In fact, he even wrote a letter explaining the reason behind and the rationale for the revised edition.

So is this 2009 edition of In Defense of  Israel really revised or more of the same?  Let’s find out …

Chapters 1-9, 11-12 exhibit a virtually word for word repeat from the 2007 edition.  The problems that existed in the first edition for these chapters still exist today:

1. Personal claim that he represents all Evangelical Christians (p. 2)
2. Historical weaknesses similar to those found in Jerusalem Countdown but exhibiting an event more simplistic understanding of history
3. Usage of source material that does not agree with his own position
4. Use of hyperbolic and simplistic statements which exhibit a lack of historical depth — pp. 17, 19, 25, 27, 33, 61, 74, 92-94, 105-106)

So really this review should examine whether or not the changes he made to Chapter 10 really answer the concerns over his doctrine and understanding of the salvific nature of Messiah Jesus.

To give credit where credit is due, Hagee did remove the most blatant of statements that were noted above.  He also sought to provide a more religiously intellectual position for his argument.  And finally, there is more consideration of the words chosen so as to explain and not simply shock.  He should receive credit for this revision of chapter 10.

However … he still exhibits a lack of theological-historical understanding of what Replacement Theology is and is not.  Replacement Theology (aka supersessionism) is an incorrect doctrine that needs to be challenged and negated (see here and here for examples from this blog).  Hagee, however, confronts a very real theological error and chooses to make a hyperbolic statement that draws the attention away from the real theological issue.

“Replacement theology is the underpinning of most of the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity against the Jewish people over the past nineteen hundred years.” (p. 126)

Hagee also chooses to focus in on Romans 9:4-5 and ignore the heartbreaking lament of Paul for the salvation of the Jewish people (pp. 145-152).  And almost humorously, Hagee chooses to interpret Romans 1:16 (“to the Jew first”) as a replacement theologian would interpret it.  In other words, Hagee exhibits a lack of discernment and forethought in the most basic of exegetical exercises (pp. 154-156).

Hagee continues to use Parkes as a source (pp. 159), be ill-instructed on the meaning of the four cups of the Passover table (p. 173), and incorrectly refer to the Samaritan Woman as non-Jewish (p. 176). 

So ultimately has John Hagee reversed course and now understands the importance of Jewish missions/evangelism?  No.  For while he has taken out the offensive sections and passages from the first edition, he still seeks to avoid the very real issue of Jewish evangelism.  And sometimes this reality is found in two areas:  (1) what he does not say; and (2) who he uses for his reference sources.

As noted above, he again refers to the liberal theologian Parkes as a proof-texter for his argument.  In addition, his reference point for his revised argument against replacement theology (which is a lot more constructed than the first edition) is a man by the name of Clarence Wagner. 

Now you probably don’t know much about Clarence Wagner and I personally think that Hagee is counting on this lack of awareness.  Clarence Wagner was formerly the international director for Bridges for Peace – an organization dedicated to showing Christian love to the nation of Israel through humanitarian efforts.  Personally, I applaud the humanitarian work of Bridges for Peace but just wish that they would also focus on the spiritual needs of the Jewish people in Israel.

However, Clarence Wagner is no longer with Bridges for Peace and one of the reasons why could possible be found in his argument regarding “The Error of Replacement Theology” which, by the way, is the source from which Hagee secured most of his information about rebutting replacement theology.

Clarence Wagner, “The Error of Replacement Theology,” http://ldolphin.org/replacement/ (accessed November 18, 2009)

What is the Role of the Church?

3) To the world, the Church is called to preach the Gospel to all nations and make disciples (Matt. 28:19-20); to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength; and to love our neighbour as ourselves (Mk. 12:30-31).

4) To the Jewish people, we are called to show God’s love “for the sake of the Patriarchs” (Rom. 11:28), for without them we would not have had God’s Word or our Saviour who was a Jew from Israel. We are to show God’s mercy (Rom. 11:31). We are to give our material gifts to help them (Rom. 15:27). We are to pray for them and for Israel (Ps. 122:6). We are to be watchman on the walls to protect them (Isa. 62:6,7). We are to help with the aliyah (immigration) to Israel and the building up of Zion (Isa. 60:9-11; Jer. 16:14-16; Isa. 49:22-23).

5) According to Romans 11, we are two distinct groups, both grafted into the same tree, which are the covenants and promises given to Israel; grounded in the same root, the Messiah; drinking of the same sap, God’s Holy Spirit. We do not hold up the tree, but the tree us, and we are forbidden from boasting against or being arrogant to God’s covenant people the Jews (Rom. 11:17-18).

So has Hagee really changed his views on the need to share the Gospel message with the Jewish people?  Or has he simply repackaged, more artfully and more tactfully, the same mantra found in the first edition of In Defense of Israel?  I suppose I should say, “You decide,” but I think the answer is fairly obvious.

On page 142 of the revised edition, Hagee writes, “It is my hope that by explaining the two roles of Jesus as the Suffering Servant and future Reigning King we can shift from condemning the Jews for what they missed to thanking them for what they gave.” 

My question to John Hagee and any others who either ignore Jewish evangelism or abdicate responsibility for Romans 1:16 is simple — “But what about giving it back?”

If you bless Israel, you’re going to be blessed. And on the other hand, Ezekiel 38 and 39 says how God is going to be enraged at how the nations of the world have mistreated the Jewish people and Israel.
My heart’s been blessed already, by a few brief but awesome comments left on a couple of my recent YouTube Vlogs, in which I declare my standing with Israel against the discrimination coming from various corners of the earth. They were simply words such as “Thank you for your support, mate” and “Shalom” from viewers… actually in Israel! Wow, just by my speaking out in a video log, I was able to bless those Jewish people in Israel within a few hours of my Vlog being uploaded. Shalom!

From Rick Hiebert at Benediction blog:

Off evangelist Todd Bentley’s Twitter feed about 20 minutes ago as I type:

IamToddBentley: Rejoicing that its time and were phasing back into some ministry here in Charlotte and morningstar. More info coming on upcoming events.

Of course his various internet “restoration videos” and  ”webinars” have included ministry elements, but this will be the first time that potenentially unfriendly people can see Todd Bentley preaching to the general public in person. Bentley’s brain trust must figure that his critics have gone to ground and the only ones left are fans.

Watch for security to attend events.

Also, it was quietly announced by both Jessa and Todd on an October 29 video that he has “joined” the Revival Alliance. This is a neat trick, as that ceremony late in the Lakeland Revival where he was prayed for by the evangelists was a ceremony where he came under the authority of the Revival Alliance. Most people would define that as “joining”, but as the hyperlinked post explains in detail Bentley and Joyner fell all over themselves trying to lie about what happened.

On another note, its interesting that a connection now exists between John Hagee and Peter Wagner’s International Coalition of Apostles. You may recall a recent post which included links to a story at Talk2Action concerning Sam Rodriguez joining The International Coalition of Apostles, and Rodriguez’s new connection to Hagee and Cufi.

This was posted today at Talk2Action; Hagee, Rodriguez Embrace Signals Massive New Alignments On Christian Right

As JTA News has just reported, John Hagee’s Christians United For Israel (CUFI), which represents many millions of American Christian Zionist evangelicals, has formed an official alliance with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, led by the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez.

Sooo, we have Wagner as the starting point, with tentacles by way of The International Coalition of Apostles embedded within John Hagee’s CUFI, through Samuel Rodriguez. And Bentley now signed on officially with Wagner’s Revival Alliance.

Its interesting isn’t it–to watch all these different groups and “ministries” start coming together under one umbrella. The umbrella of Peter Wagner.

Dominionist power-seekers are uniting.

Wonder if this means Hagee will be forced to support Todd’s return to ministry? LOL

November hurricanes are rare, very rare –

So rare, in fact, that it makes me wonder – is this hurricane just happenstance or is it, like Perry Stone says, the Judgment of Almighty God?

You see, Perry Stone, Chuck Baldwin, Gordon Godfrey, John Hagee, et al, have all stated many times that the hurricanes striking the U.S. gulf coast are the direct result of immoral activity – by “immoral”, they usually mean “homosexual”. Since these gentlemen are Men of God who receive knowledge, insight and wisdom directly from the Mind of Almighty God, one can only assume that God is really angry about something in Pensacola.

Let’s look at the newspaper – all of the “immoral” activity took place over the weekend – there was the Perdido Key Martini Festival, the Nerd Invasion at the Silver Screen movie theatre and Marcy Playground in concert – there was the Gulf Coast Arts Festival in Seville Square, Pensacola (of course, we all know most artists are gay) – and yet, the weekend was beautiful! Absolutely perfect!

But today (Monday, November 9) there’s a hurricane just off the coast – it’s cloudy, windy, rainy – schools are closed – the beaches are empty – the roads flooded – What has changed? – What activity could be going on that would enrage the Almighty?

From the Pensacola News Journal…

Baptists flocking to annual meeting

About 2,000 people expected for event

The 148th annual meeting of the Florida Baptist State Convention comes to Pensacola later this month, the first visit of the state’s largest evangelical group to Northwest Florida since 2002.

About 2,000 Baptist pastors, administrators and church members are expected to attend the gathering, which takes place Nov. 9-10 at Olive Baptist Church.

This year’s theme is “Imagine If …”

Baptist Invasion

Ah – I think we’ve found the source of the trouble – it’s all of those Southern Baptists!

Maybe God has grown weary of Southern Baptists being such lousy tippers at Denny’s.

Maybe God still hasn’t gotten over the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention was originally created because of the belief that African-Americans should stay enslaved and have their own churches.

And speaking of “Southern Tradition”, maybe it’s the fact that the convention is being hosted by Olive Baptist Church – the home church of Principal H. Frank Lay – the public school principal who believes everyone in public school should pray – whether they want to or not – no matter what the law says.

Maybe God has tired of the absolutely awful music composed and performed in His name – Contemporary Christian Music groups (like those headlining the convention) that take the secular elements of rock music and interweave them with quasi-religious lyrics.

Maybe God is upset that the 2009 Florida Baptist Pastor’s Conference and State Convention has ripped off its theme (“Imagine”) from John Lennon…

I don’t know.

All I know is that these Baptists are leaving on Tuesday, November 10 –

– and the forecast for the rest of the week is sunny and clear – with a high in the lower 70’s.

A coincidence?

15 November 2008

MegaChurch Foreclosures: Are They The Devil’s Fault?

This video is about the concepts of “wealth tranfer” (‘the wealth of the wicked [or sinner] is laid up for the just’) and “supernatural debt cancellation” as taught in certain circles in the evangelical Christian church. These concepts support the belief that in the end times, all the world’s wealth will be supernaturally “tranferred” to the Christians. Not only that, but this MUST occur before the return of Christ. This is popularly taught by Kenneth Copeland, Fred Thompson (“Money Cometh!” and “No More Empty Hands”), T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, and many others.

Write us at our ranch:

1 The Way

Dobson Ranch, AZ,

Jesusland, USA

Ranch tours available upon request. Follow us on Facebook as well or else.

Why Did Eli Wiesel Speak at CUFI?

Why has Eli Wiesel, the renowned author of Night, a book which many consider to be part of the canon of 2oth century literature spoken at a CUFI (Christians United for Israel) conference? This is astounding considering that CUFI is an apocalyptic organization which holds some very strange, some would characterize Anti-Semitic views. It is also an organization that is virulently anti-Muslim and Islamophobic.

This is a letter that some concerned individuals in the Jewish Community sent to Mr. Wiesel in the hope that he would cancel his speech at CUFI.

An Open Letter to Eli Wiesel

Dear Mr. Wiesel,

Your years of tireless campaigning for human rights and against anti-Semitism have earned our deepest respect. For this reason we have written the following letter in hope that you will reconsider your support of events sponsored by John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. We realize that the outward show of support for Jews and Israel, on display at Hagee’s CUFI events, can be very enticing but there is another aspect of Christian Zionism which we believe runs strongly counter to Jewish and Israeli interests.

John Hagee teaches “theological racism,” the idea that the destiny of peoples is based on their biblical genealogy. Hagee claims Jewish souls are different from those of gentiles and that, according to divine plan, Jews have no right to live anywhere on Earth but in Israel. Hagee’s fellow Christian Zionists predict that a coming, divinely ordained paroxysm of anti-Semitic violence, a “second Holocaust,” will be necessary to force all Jews to make aliyah. From the pulpit, pastor Hagee and his fellow Christian Zionists preach their theological racism that risks provoking such a catastrophe.

When you attend CUFI events, you will receive a great deal of outward affection and participate in singing and celebration that looks and sounds Jewish. However, this is a manifestation of a volatile millennial cycle, an exuberant embrace of “Hebrew roots” founded on the expectation that this generation will bring about the fulfillment of “God’s plan for Israel.” There is some argument among Christian Zionists about the exact timing and details of this plan, but on one point they are absolutely consistent; the ingathering of Jews to Israel, and the elimination of Rabbinic Judaism as part of Israel’s “restoration,” are required for the 1000 year reign of Christ.

Our combined years of research have produced a substantial body of documentation on the anti-Semitic face of Christian Zionism. Last May, one small piece of that documentation was widely publicized through a video by Bruce Wilson that included a quote, from a sermon John Hagee gave in 2005, in which pastor Hagee stated “…then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.” Amidst the ensuing publicity, presidential candidate John McCain rejected Hagee’s political endorsement.

John Hagee’s attacks on Judaism are well documented and have included calling Hillel an extremist whose followers incited both the killing of Jesus and centuries of anti-Semitism. From the pulpit Hagee has claimed that the anti-Christ is “partially Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler.”

Hagee also preaches that European-based Rothschilds control the US economy, through the Federal Reserve, and conspire to attack the American middle class by devaluing the dollar. According to the ADL, this class of Federal Reserve conspiracy theory, which names Rothschilds, is a “classic anti-Semitic myth.” ADL traces it to Christian Identity, one of the most overtly anti-Semitic sectors of American society but one which uses “Hebrew” symbols and Christianized version of Jewish holidays because, according to Identity theology, Christians, not Jews, are the “true Israelites.”

Christian Identity’s roots are based a millennial movement that was “philo-Semitic,” but which in the early 20th century rejected Jews as impostors descended from Esau and the Edomites. This narrative can still be seen throughout Identity media. In his 2006 book Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee promotes a similar theological claim, that a lineage of “half-breed Jews,” descended from Esau and which included Adolf Hitler, have persecuted full-blooded Jews throughout history. Hagee writes that God intends to exterminate that “half-breed Jew” line.

Christian Identity’s overt anti-Semitism has very limited appeal and reach. Cloaked in the guise of “love” for Jews and Israel, John Hagee’s conspiracy theories and theological racism can be consumed without guilt by listeners in the 190 nations Hagee claims to reach through Christian television and radio broadcast networks.

How can John Hagee so sincerely and convincingly claim to love Israel while introducing theological racism to a international audience?

The widely taught prophecy narrative of the “fishers and hunters” of Jeremiah 16 helps to explain this paradox. Christian Zionists see themselves as the “fishers” who must befriend and cajole Jews, through emotional and financial support, to fulfill their prophetic destiny. Meanwhile, the “hunters” are overt anti-Semites who will force the remaining Jews of the world to flee to Israel. In order for the Christian Zionist prophecy of the “restoration of Israel” to be fulfilled, there must be a future wave of violent anti-Semitism in which the world will turn on Jews and Israel.

The quote which our research team provided to the press from Hagee’s 2005 sermon series, “Jerusalem Countdown,” concerned Hitler’s role as a “hunter” in the “fishers and hunters” narrative. But Hitler did not succeed in forcing all Jews to flee to Israel, and even those Jews who have settled in today’s modern state of Israel have not met the prophetic requirement of “spiritual restoration,” which is acceptance of Jesus. In his 2005 sermon Hagee also stated, “they [the Jews] are physically alive but they’re not spiritually alive. Now how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive…”

Many Christian Zionist leaders describe their prophecy of the “time of Jacob’s trouble” as the second or final holocaust of the Jews. Tom Hess, in Let My People Go, pleads with Jews to leave the U.S. before it is too late, and Hess details his vision of trains all over the world taking Jews from major cities. In her best-selling fictional portrayal of the Jewish people, Israel My Beloved, Kay Arthur has portrayed the coming persecution to be “beyond the horrors of Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.” Richard Booker’s Blow the Trumpet in Zion features a list, on the back cover, of the book’s topics, including “Why Christians Should Love Jews” and “The Jews’ Final Holocaust.” Booker explains that nothing less than this “final holocaust” can bring the Jews back to God, and Jesus can not be king of all the world until Jews accept him. Paradoxically, these Christian Zionists seek to “bless Israel” and show their “love” for Jews through fulfillment of a prophecy in which Judaism is eradicated.

All three of these Christian Zionist leaders have become involved in the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus, which is working to raise millennial expectations to a fevered pitch – with the endorsement of the Israeli government. Some may view their support as politically valuable, but Christian Zionists are helping to spread around the globe a dangerous obsession with Jews and Israel.

Mr. Wiesel, you have spent your life teaching the world about the dangers of anti-Semitism. Please do not provide legitimacy to John Hagee and other Christian Zionists who have spent their careers teaching that the elimination of Judaism is the will of God and the divine plan for Israel. Yes, the exuberant singing, dancing, and tears of Christian Zionists are indeed a celebration of their love for Israel – but that is a strange and terrible love, not too far from hate, which seeks a very different Israel than the one of Jewish hopes and a very different future for the world than the vision of peace and coexistence for which you have fought all of these years.

Sincerely,
Bruce Wilson
Rachel Tabachnick

Notes:
Elie Wiesel is scheduled to speak at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church on Sunday, October 25 for a CUFI Night to Honor Israel event.

Bruce Wilson is the co-founder of Talk2action.org and produced the nationally televised video clip on Hagee’s 2005 sermon series, “Jerusalem: Countdown To Crisis”. (Despite Hagee’s comments, the quote came from a 2005 sermon in which Hagee later referred to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.)

Rachel Tabachnick also contributes to Talk2Action.org and is the author of “God’s Plan for Israel, The End Times Prophecy Narrative of Christian Zionism,” a free teaching resource on CD.

The Huffington Post culled a few instances of Sen Joe Lieberman’s actions over the past few years in addition to his recent announcement that he would support a filibuster of health care reform if it contained a public option. Though we all know most of these, it’s fun to see them stacked side  by side. Trick or treat, indeed.

On Election Day 2008, Lieberman told Glenn Beck he feared America as we know it would not survive if Democrats got a 60 seat majority in the Senate.

Back in 1993, Lieberman called Bill Clinton’s reform “too governmental, too regulatory and too costly.”

Lieberman condemned the 2005 bankruptcy bill as “seriously flawed” and touted his vote against it — but he voted to end a Democratic filibuster, which was when it mattered.

In 2005, Lieberman was part of the “Gang of 14″ that ended a Democratic filibuster of some of President Bush’s judicial nominees and promised that filibusters would end in “all but extraordinary circumstances.”

In 2005, Lieberman voted for Alberto Gonzales to become Attorney General andsaid when the disgraced official resigned that he “deserved our appreciation.”

During Bush’s Social Security privatization push, Lieberman refused to make his position clear. In 2008 he defended John McCain’s privatization plan.

When he lost the Democratic primary in 2006, Lieberman formed his own “Connecticut for Lieberman” party.

Lieberman repeatedly suggested that the U.S. might need to bomb Iran and claimed Iran was going to war with us.

In 2008, Lieberman backed the Republican candidate for president, John McCain.

During the 2008 election, Obama confronted Lieberman for issuing only half-hearted denials about rumors that the Democratic candidate was a Muslim.

Lieberman came to the defense of John Hagee, the pastor who said “Hitler was a hunter” sent by God to get “the Jewish people” to “come back to the land of Israel.”

In 2008, Lieberman refused to condemn waterboarding as torture and voted against banning it.

For years, Lieberman has championed the Iraq war and savagely attacked its critics.

During the 2008 campaign, Lieberman said it was “a good question” to ask whether Sen. Barack Obama was a “Marxist.”

Since Stephen Strang of Charisma Magazine, joined up with John Hagee and the CUFI organization this year, its been interesting to read some of the articles Charisma posts in their new Standing With Israel section.

Not all of the articles are written by Christians, such as this one, (Who Crucified Zion?) written by David Brog, who is the executive director of John Hagee’s “Christians United For Israel” (CUFI). Brog, himself an American Jew, has never accepted Jesus as Messiah, but works along-side Hagee to promote political and financial support for Israel, from among American Evangelicals.

From an interview with CUFI’s David Brog:

Which Christians in the U.S. are most Zionist and why?

“The evangelicals. No contest. Their Zionism comes directly from their theology.”

Was there an event that made this alliance stronger? Has it always been under the radar?

“Evangelical Christians largely shunned politics until the late 1970s, when Jerry Falwell created the Moral Majority and led them back onto the political playing field. Israel was among the priorities of the Christian Right from the start. In fact, when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority he made support for Israel one of the group’s four organizing principles along with the issue of abortion, traditional marriage, and a strong U.S. defense.”

(Concerning Converting Jews to Christ)

“The important question is this: Is evangelical support for Israel merely a tool in the effort to convert the Jews? Is this merely some scheme to soften the Jews up so that they can better sell Jesus to them? And the answer to this question is absolutely not. If anything, the opposite it true. I and others who have worked with Christians in support of Israel all report that no one has ever tried to convert us. In fact, Christians who support Israel tend to know more Jews and to understand their sensitivities better than Christians who do not. Thus, they have learned that Jews find “Jesus talk” offensive, and they tend to leave it out of the dialogue.”

*The underlining of specific words is my doing.

I want to also include a segment from an article concerning Christian Zionism, found at the website of the excellent organization, Jews for Jesus; a ministry, which for over 30 years has been diligent in pushing against the spiritual darkness, in order to evangelize lost Jews.

How “Christian” is Christian Zionism

“…there is a serious problem with Christian Zionism that cannot be chalked up to the biases or lack of balance that some critics demonstrate. That problem ought not go without scrutiny and censure, but unfortunately the average Christian is unaware of it. The problem is, many Christian Zionists are involved (some proactively, others unknowingly) in preventing Jews from hearing the gospel.

So maybe the time has come for us to ask, “How Christian is today’s Christian Zionism?”

Please note the word “today’s,” because the landscape of Christian Zionism has dramatically shifted in recent years.

In the United States, biblical Christian Zionism was promoted by a wide range of theologians, though it became more widespread, in part due to the rise of dispensational theology. William Blackstone championed the cause and rallied four hundred American business leaders and politicians—both Christian and Jewish—to sign a bold statement calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. That petition is known as the Blackstone Memorial. Blackstone was also committed to Jewish evangelism, and founded a Jewish mission agency known as “Life in Messiah.”

When Israel finally became a modern state in 1948, it was a glorious, faith-strengthening confirmation of biblical Christian Zionism. And when Jerusalem was reclaimed in 1967, many believed the “times of the Gentiles” had been fulfilled and the end-times scenario of rapture and tribulation was about to unfold.

Certainly there did seem to be many Jewish people coming to believe in Jesus in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Jews for Jesus came into existence during that time. Yet the numbers of Jesus-believing Jews, especially in Israel, remained few. One might think that Christian Zionism would see this as a challenge to be met by greater fervor and commitment to proclaiming the good news to Jewish people.

But curiously, the opposite occurred.

A new form of Christian Zionism emerged in the mid 1970s and early 1980s; it was more political and actually divorced itself from Jewish evangelism, contending that a Christian’s biblical duty to the Jews and Israel was best carried out through providing material comfort, political support and helping fund Jewish immigration to Israel.

These new Christian Zionist organizations, best represented by Bridges for Peace and the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, made it very clear to Jewish leaders in Israel and abroad they had no intention of evangelizing Jews. Some, not all, of their leaders argued that evangelism of Jews was a waste of time and unnecessarily offensive. Jewish evangelism, in any case, was not a cause that would endear these leaders to the people with whom they were beginning to network. The hope seemed to be that eventually those networks would help open people’s hearts to the gospel in a way that direct evangelism would not. If this has proven to be the case, it is a well-kept secret.

Recently, the two above-mentioned organizations have been dwarfed in scope and influence by the rise of two other organizations: the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) and Christians United For Israel (CUFI). These financial juggernauts successfully tap into the deep reservoir of Christian Zionist sentiment here in America.

(IFCJ raised 75 million dollars last year. CUFI does not disclose its finances but is on record as giving millions of dollars to various Jewish groups in Israel each year). Both organizations are currently run by Jewish people who do not know Jesus: Yechiel Eckstein of IFCJ is an Orthodox rabbi, and David Brog of CUFI an attorney and former chief of staff to Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

These newer “Christian” Zionist organizations have set themselves against Jewish evangelism in ways that their predecessors did not.

In his book What Christians Should Know About Jews and Judaism (as well as in other printed material) Rabbi Eckstein suggests that, “The rejection of Jesus as Messiah is the key to Jewish survival.”

Accordingly, a good deal of the money Eckstein raises from Christians goes to organizations whose agendas include anti-missionary activity.

As for David Brog, in an interview with Katherine Jean Lopez on Beliefnet, he boasts on behalf of the Christians he knows that, “I and others who have worked with Christians in support of Israel all report that no one has ever tried to convert us,” and in his book Standing With Israel he says that

“While there is no evidence that the Christian-Jewish alliance in support of Israel [CUFI] facilitates the conversion of Jews, there is evidence that the alliance actually works to impede efforts to convert Jews” (David Brog, Standing With Israel, Lake Mary, Fla.: Frontline Publishers, 2006, 188-189)

While this is meant to reassure the Jewish community concerning Christian Zionists, it ought to have the opposite effect on Christians who care about the salvation of Jewish people. It might seem like the phrases “try to convert” or “efforts to convert” imply a certain overbearing attempt at sharing the gospel, but the fact is, Brog is referring to any attempt to tell Jewish people the gospel.

Washington Jewish Week interviewed Brog and published an article explaining,

“Brog said the group (CUFI) tells people, ‘If you cannot put aside your desire to share the Gospel with Jews, there’s the door’” (Eric Fingerhut, “Educating on Evangelicals.” Washington Jewish Week. July 4, 2007).

I am absolutely convinced the vast majority of Christians supporting CUFI and IFCJ do not know about these policies and practices. My guess is that many who support these groups genuinely believe in Jewish evangelism and expect that their support will help Jewish people come to Christ. Sadly, their resources are going to projects run by people who are committed to preventing Jewish people from hearing about Jesus.

..please consider this: When someone makes an appeal for Christians to show their love for Jewish people, please remember that our love is incomplete at best and misleading at worst if it does not point beyond ourselves and to the One who loved us so much that He sent His Son to die, so that WHOEVER BELIEVES IN HIM will not perish, but have eternal life.”

Thank you Lord for our Jewish brothers and sisters in Christ at Jews for Jesus. I pray you continue to bless them in their taking the Good News of Jesus Christ to lost Jews. amen.

A few quotes from Brog’s article at Charisma:

It is impossible for a thoughtful Christian to feel such deep gratitude to the Jewish people and not be painfully aware of how poorly this debt to the Jews has been repaid over the centuries.

The flip side of gratitude to the Jews is remorse over the long history of Christian and anti-Semitism. Many of the most passionate Christian Zionists are quick to express regret and even fury over the record of Christian persecution of the Jews. For these Christian Zionists, the need to make amends for the past adds a sense of urgency to the task of supporting Israel today.

For centuries, Christians outraged by the crucifixion of Christ unleashed their fury upon the Jews. John Hagee turns this traditional view of crucifixion on its head. Hagee too is outraged by the crucifixion. But it is the “crucifixion of the Jews” about which Hagee rages. And he is clear about who is responsible for this crucifixion: the Christian church.

Brog quotes Hagee:

“It is time for Christians to stop praising the dead Jews of the past-Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while slandering the Jews that live across the street. They are the same.”

I will not even comment on those excerpts. You either see the ‘wrongness’ in it or you don’t.

But I will answer the question in the title: How “Christian” is Christian Zionism?. Its not Christian or biblical, in any way. Today’s Christian Zionist movements are enemies of the Gospel.

Very interesting article and video.

Devvy Kidd has written a commentary about the constant drumbeat to bomb Iran, which has been coming from certain groups for the last 4 years. And asks the question “Why?”.

She includes the link to a video, “The Israel Lobby. Portrait of a Great Taboo”, which I agree, is a must watch.

Tegenlicht, a documentary program by the Dutch public broadcast organization VPRO, allows several interesting opinion makers to speak on the future of the American and Israel relationship and the reception of John Mearsheimers and Steve Walts article “The Israel Lobby and US foreign policy.”

Includes interviews with John Mearsheimer, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, cofounder of the Christians United for Israel lobbying group John Hagee, neoconservative Richard Perle and historian Tony Judt express their views in Marije Meermans and William de Bruijns documentary.

The video-documentary begins (first minute or so) in Dutch, (the documentary was made by the Dutch public broadcast organization) but all the guests speak English.

Article: BOMB IRAN NOW BECAUSE…UH, WHAT’S THE REASON?

Video: The Israel Lobby. Portrait of a Great Taboo

It seems I’m running a bit late on this week’s blog. Although, mind you,… I am awaiting my impending death from sinus combustion. That slowed me down a little…

Regardless, let’s get to it!

Again, we’re going to touch on one of my FAVORITE topics. FALSE TEACHERS!!!

I probably wouldn’t tackle this subject as often as I do if not for the fact that these people are DANGEROUS! People actually believe them… In fact, at a time when I was weaker in my faith and not nearly as deep in the Scripture, I too bought into the  shenanigans of many of these heretics.

They have a very real appeal. Their promises of gain and happiness… who wouldn’t like that?

But, be well aware. These false teachers are nothing more than charlatans and greed mongers, who will one day have to answer to a Holy and sovereign God for their misdeeds.

In the meantime,… let’s meet the Rogues’s Gallery.

1- Kenneth Copeland: One of my former favorites. With his down home accent and million dollar smile, this man could sell jock-itch by the case and people would buy it.

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland

The foremost face of the Word of Faith teachings, which are so prevalent amongst televangelists today. Copeland teaches that man possesses a power by which God is bound to grant him anything he desires once that “prayer” is spoken and faith is given to it. In essence, God is subject to man, rather than man being subject to God.

While being relatively subtle on his TV programs, Copeland is far more open during his “rallies”.

Copeland also teaches that God is a literal, physical man whereas the Bible teaches that God exists as a spirit. Not bound by human limitations.

²⁴God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. -John 4:24

He teaches that Heaven is an actual planet…

“Heaven has a north and a south and an east and a west. Consequently, it must be a planet.” -Spirit, Soul and Body I, Kenneth Copeland, 1985, audiotape 01-0601, side 1

He teaches that there are spiritual laws that govern God (what..?). That Adam was an exact reproduction of God, not less than, but on par with. Oh,… and that once the bond was broken between God and man in the Garden, the Lord could only act on the Earth is a man invited Him to… (Wow.)

“God had no avenue of lasting faith or moving in the earth. He had to have covenant with somebody….He had to be invited in, in other words, or He couldn’t come. God is on the outside looking in. In order to have any say so in the earth, He’s gonna have to be in agreement with a man here.” -God’s Covenants With Man II, Kenneth Copeland, 1985, audiotape 01- 4404, side

Other doosies are… Jesus never claimed to be God. Jesus never died physically, only spiritually, and that the Believer can eventually become a member of the “god-class” through their faith, making them very much the same as God.

Yikes…

2- Jesse DuPlantis: I really liked this guy. I mean,… who doesn’t love a Cajun?

Jesse DuPlantis

DuPlantis fancies himself a Christian comedian, once stating that in a literal conversation with God, the Almighty commanded, “Jesse, make Me laugh.”

Quite a tall order wouldn’t you say? Telling a joke that God doesn’t know the punchline to…

Anyway, a part of the Word of Faith movement himself, Jesse claims to have physical conversations with God (where God actually talks back in an audible voice) on a regular basis.

He claims to have once been transported to Heaven where he met King David, Abraham, and the Apostle Paul. He also encountered God’s mammoth feet at the base of His throne (so much for Copeland’s theory of God being the same size as us). Oh! He also encountered what he called “proto-babies” which flew around begging God to send them to Earth as redeemed persons (…huh?). I guess they were like goo or something… I dunno.

The gist of the story is that Jesse was given a decree that God NEEDED him to go back to Earth and let everyone know that soon Jesus was coming… *sigh* Another example of God being unable to do anything without man to help Him, I suppose.

3- Benny Hinn: Gotta admit,… I NEVER liked this guy. I’m truly baffled by people who buy into his heresies.

Benny Hinn

Hinn is a self-professed prophet and healer (as if being one or the other wasn’t good enough), claiming to be able to heal on a massive scale. Never mind that he’s never once been able to produce a shred of verifiable proof that he’s healed anyone EVER!

He claims that God has appeared to him on numerous occasions and that the Lord will curse those who question Hinn’s validity.

Benny Hinn also claimed at several different times that the Lord would physically appear, in the flesh, at one of his conferences.

“Ruth Heflin (a supposed prophetess) said, the Lord spoke to her recently, and she called my wife and told her to tell me, that Jesus said to her, that He will appear physically on the platform in one of our crusades. She said, ‘Tell Benny, that the Lord told me that He is going to appear physically appear physically on the platform, and the crowds will see Him, on the platform.’ Dear God my hair is standing up!” It may very well happen in Nashville! She said, thousands will see the Lord, on the platf orm!” -Prophecy given: Praise The Lord, TBN, television program, April 20, 2000:

He claims that God will wipe out the gay community…

“The Lord also tells me to tell you, in mid 90s, about ‘94 or ‘95, no later than that, God will destroy the homosexual community of America. But He will not destroy it with what many minds have thought Him to be. He will destroy it with fire. And many will turn and be saved, and many will rebel and be destroyed.” -Prophecy given: Orlando Christian Center, December 31, 1989

He also made claims of a huge East Coast earthquake and the death of Fidel Castro in the ’90s. Both wrong.

Hinn really goes out on a limb and claims that the Holy Trinity is actually (gasp!) NINE beings!!!

“God the Father, ladies and gentleman, is a person and He is a triune being by Himself, separate from the Son and the Holy Ghost. See, God the Father is a person, God the Son is a person, God the Holy Ghost is a person; but each one of them is a triune being by himself. If I can shock you and maybe I should, there’s nine of them! What did you say? Let me explain. God the Father, ladies and gentlemen, is a person with his own personal spirit, with his own personal soul and his own personal spirit body. You say, I never heard that! Well, you think you are in church to hear things you heard for the last fifty years?” -Benny Hinn

I’m just gonna stop there. I feel dizzy…

4- Creflo Dollar: Loved this guy. Plus,… how cool is the name?

Creflo Dollar

Creflo is the definition of a health and wealth preacher. Not one, not some, but ALL of the sermons I’ve ever heard him preach have somehow came back to gain in one fashion or another.

Aside from just his immense greed, good ol’ Creflo enjoys preaching that we are not wretched sinners in need of a savior. No sir! We are all “little gods”.

“Everything produces after it’s own kind.  That’s the law of Genesis!  Everything produces after it’s own kind.  Will God set a law into motion and then not follow the law that He set into motion?  Absolutely not!  Where did you come from?  Who did you come from?  Everything produces after it’s own kind.  Horses get horses and dogs get dogs and Gods produced gods!  Gods produced gods!  Ya’ll didn’t hear that.  Horses produce horses and dogs produce dogs and Gods produced gods!  Horses produce horses and dogs produce dogs and cats produce cats and fish produce fish and God produced gods!  And then God produced more gods with flesh and then gods with flesh produced more gods with flesh.  And then gods with flesh produced more gods with flesh until THE God of gods with flesh showed up one day with flesh and dwelt among the other gods with flesh to demonstrate to the other gods with flesh how to have authority over the flesh!  So follow Him!  Follow Him!  This is our history I’m telling you about!  This is the history the religious church wants to hide away from you so you don’t know who you really are!” -Creflo Dollar, Audio-Clip, “Creflo Dollar: Christian Celebrity or Charismatic Gnostic?” #0418

“I’m going to to tell you what blasphemy is!  When God says you are the righteousness of God and you go around talking about, ‘I’m unworthy.’  That’s blasphemy!…Blasphemy is when you go against what God has said about your true self!  OOOOh!  We are so unworthy!  Shut up with that blasphemy!….You are not a sinner saved by grace.  You are sons and daughters of the Most High God!  You are gods!  You are God’s reflection on this planet.  For you to say that thing is for you to count the blood of Jesus worthless.  His blood was sent to cleanse you of your sin and you going around saying that you are still a sinner!  What’s the matter with you?” -Creflo Dollar, “Establishing the Word of God Part 2,” January 30, 2005, Product Number: 8442091

Yeah. I don’t think so…

5- John Hagee: Hrmmm.

John Hagee

I’m gonna let Pastor Hagee do the talking on this one…

Jesus didn’t come to be the Messiah? Jesus was wanted for governement insurrection? No!!!

In :59 seconds, Hagee managed to completely trample the Gospel and basically spit in the face of Jesus. Well done.

6- Joyce Meyer: Women love her… Not sure why.

Joyce Meyer

More Health and Wealth nonsense here…

Joyce makes claims of divine revelation from God, saying that the bible doesn’t give you all God wants you to know. She claims that God wants you to be wealthy and if you’re not, you’re not living as God wants you to. Oh, and of course,… we’re not sinners.

“Now whether you like it or not, whether you want to admit it or not, whether you want to operate on it or not, you are made the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. Most people who go to denominational churches never ever hear that! They never hear it! Never! All I was ever taught to say was, ‘I, a poor, miserable sinner.’ I am not poor. I am not miserable. And I am not a sinner. That is a lie from the pit of hell! That is what I were [sic] and if I still was, then Jesus died in vain. Amen?” -Joyce Meyer

…and this fun tidbit. Jesus went to Hell (where is THIS in the Bible?).

“Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ And He meant the Old Covenant. The job He really had to do was just getting started. He really did the job the three days and nights that He was in hell. That’s where the job was done”. -Joyce Meyer

*groan*

Alright,… I’m stopping there for now. There’s SO MUCH MORE to cover, but it’ll have to wait until another time.

If you enjoy watching “Christian” programming on TV, please… be discerning. Compare what the speaker teaches to what the Bible teaches. If it seems wrong, it probably is…

Also, remember this. If they claim a “new” revelation from God… thay’re being un-Biblical.

Be careful. Be VERY careful.

¹⁶They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate. -Titus 1:16

Bimbo makes Ahmadinejad look good

It’s incredible how these media morons are making Ahmadinejad (MA) appear so sympathetic. When he first showed up, I thought, “Who is this ridiculous little man?” — Now he’s been made into the champion of the oppressed of the world.

There’s no escaping the High Priests of Holocaustianity. Day after day after day they’re beating the drums of war. “If they Deny, they are Amalek! Death to those who refuse to bow down to our idol! Yay, even their seed and the very memory of their seed shall be erased from the eye of our pyramid god!”

Miss Katie keeps saying that M.A. “denies” the “evidence” of “The Holocaust”, even after he says that he accepts the “evidence” she presents. (He’s being polite. It could easily  be a picture of the camp inmates who died of typhus etc. under British, Soviet, and American Internazi care.) His reaction to her obscene photograph is strange, but not as strange as she is whipping her death-pic out and waving it around like like a demented Reichsprosekutor.

He should have asked her:

“Bimbo Katie,

“Jews slaughtered millions of Orthodox Slavic Christians. Yes? No?

“Do you confess? Or are you a Denier?”

This woman is so brainwashed that she can’t even understand what she herself is saying, never mind what he’s saying. The notion that the word “Holocaust” might need to be defined is beyond her ken. Pubic lice have scored higher on IQ tests. “Give us a soundbite. Dead Jews. Nazis. Come on! Deny or Submit! We need a soundbite before the viagra commercial!”

He should have asked her, “What exactly do you mean by ‘Holocaust’? Where do you get this figure of 6,000,000? What do you make of the great death-toll drop at Auschwitz? How does that affect your morbid fetish? How do you account for Raul Hilberg’s humiliating confessions at the Zündel trial? Do you ‘believe in’ the Nuremberg Trials? So then you accept that Jews were fried on electric plates and nuked to death and turned into soap, and that the Germans committed the mass-murders in the the Katyn Forest? Do you deny that the Masonic culls at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inexcusable and meticulously planned war crimes of the highest order?”

Why doesn’t somebody ask Netanyahoo or Putzfrau Merkl these questions?

MA is actually very polite. I’d have lost my temper with her stupid questions. When she says she’s worried that his alleged ‘denial’ will hurt his relations with other national leaders (oh, right,, they’re ‘world leaders’ not mere national leaders), he could have responded: “If genocidal maniacs like Sharon and Begin and Truman and Stalin managed to find friends, I’m sure I’ll be okay.”

Some people say that chess is a Persian invention.

My guess is that if this video were to be shown on TV throughout Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, 90+% of viewers would feel sympathy for Ahmadinejad, and see him as reasonable, and wonder what this culturally imperialist woman’s bizarre obsession with this particular historical event is. In fact, these American/Western compulsive obsessives (they really can’t stop themselves, so convinced they are of their self-righteousness) would merely confirm the widespread ‘third world’ view that “America is in the pocket of the Jews.”

War Propaganda

The Telegraph (UK) today reports that Ahmadinejad is Jewish.

And why is this important to the multikulti masters? Will it affect how they deal with MA? On the other hand, regarding conspiracy theories …

So now Zionists are going to attack him for allegedly being a Jew? This should be interesting. I thought it meant that now he’s allowed to criticize Israel.

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews [they don't quoteany of these "hate-filled sttacks"]could be an overcompensation to hide his past.

…

A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that “jian” ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews.

“He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had,” said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. “Sabourjian is well known Jewish name in Iran.”

…

The Iranian leader has not denied his name was changed when his family moved to Tehran in the 1950s. But he has never revealed what it was change from or directly addressed the reason for the switch.

Relatives have previously said a mixture of religious reasons and economic pressures forced his blacksmith father Ahmad to change when Mr Ahmadinejad was aged four.

The Iranian president grew up to be a qualified engineer with a doctorate in traffic management. He served in the Revolutionary Guards militia before going on to make his name in hardline politics in the capital.

During this year’s presidential debate on television he was goaded to admit that his name had changed but he ignored the jibe.

However Mehdi Khazali, an internet blogger, who called for an investigation of Mr Ahmadinejad’s roots was arrested this summer.

[Isn't that what Obama would love to be able to do?]

…

Mr Ahmadinejad has been consistently outspoken about the Nazi attempt to wipe out the Jewish race. “They have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets,” he declared at a conference on the holocaust staged in Tehran in 2006.

Idiocy Personified (“blueprints! blueprints!”) makes Ahmadinejad look good

The idiot says he wants to discuss an academic matter, and then starts shouting “Holocaust! Ja oder Nein!? JA ODER NEIN!? JA ODER NEIN!?”

Gangboss Netanyahoo makes Ahmadinejad look good

What a liar. He knows very well that Ahmadinejad never “promised to wipe out the state of Israel”; he said that there should be a regime change in Palestine. Also, Netanyahoo must be playing to the Western cameras, since every time he opens his big mouth he annoys most UN members, and his arrogant, self-righteous hectoring just pisses them off even more.

Loud Mouth O’Bomber makes Ahmadinejad look good

Netanyahoo and the kind of ass-raping (see Haggard, Copeland…) war-mongers that Israel uses to corrupt Christians

Apostate “Christians” fellate Jews

While listening to this antichrist Brod’s propaganda, keep in mind that:

• Truman was a Freemason Noachide Kabbalist, not a “Judeo-Christian”
• Truman hated Jews, whom he called kikes
• Truman didn’t “recognize” Israel. A US president has no power to do such a thing.  The first country to recognize Israel was Stalin’s USSR.
• Truman said, in reference to Jews, “If Jesus Christ couldn’t satisfy them here on earth, how the hell am I supposed to?”

Russian and Iranian Cooperation: The Politics of Oil and American Decline

Fr Matthew Raphel Johnston

As the Israeli’s continue to beat the drums for war with Iran, Russian involvement in ths Islamic Republic is making that option less and less feasible. Alexander Foumin, the head of the Russian Federal Organization of Military and Technical Cooperation has made the announcement (more than once) that Iranian-Russian cooperation will continue, it will increase and that it will lead to a much needed stability in Central Asia and the Caucuses.

The key to Russo-Iranian cooperation is in the strategic but small country of Armenia. Squished between two hostile powers, Turkey and Azerbaijan, she has always looked to Russia for protection against her Islamic neighbors. Iran has joined this security alliance for several reasons: first, because the two Islamic countries that threaten Armenia are supported by the United States and generally follow Washington’s line and second, that containing the American threat to the region is better served by a pro-Russian rather than a pro-Azeri stance. The military build-up of Azerbaijan is aimed at Armenia and, to an extent Russia, and, notably, is being financed by the United States, to a large extent through Israel’s local client, Georgia. The victor in this increasingly tense Caucasian political space will control trillions of dollars in oil and natural gas and has a strong chance of hurting the Russian economy. This battle’s strategic, global significance cannot be overrated.

Armenia is a central player in Russo-Iranian cooperation and the Iranians know it. Russia is Iran’s trump card in its relations with the United States. For their part, the Russian government and military have consistently made the claim that cooperation with the Iranians is far better for world peace than confrontation. An attack on Iran in 2009 is, ipso facto, an attack on both Russian and Armenia.

[Continued.]

While a large slice of middle America is worried about surviving a tough economy, millions of Americans believe there is a more significant event to be concerned about in the near future – nothing less than the end of the world as we know it.

If you are like me, you probably have heard this kind of chatter in the Conservative media or on Conservative religious television networks, but you’ve tuned it out as nonsense. Perhaps there was something lacking in my Catholic education that might explain why I have a great deal of cynicism toward the more mystical and savage parts of the Bible.

Can I imagine a period of annihilation followed by a second reign of Christ? Not really – to be honest. Yet, according to this book’s author, even today’s liberals sometimes perceive that the world is on the brink of disaster, based on more secular concerns – such as global warming. With nuclear weapons in the hands of so many, it’s not unreasonable to believe in mutual destruction. I guess I live in blind faith that cooler heads will prevail.

Several modern-day writers and clerics have the exact opposite point of view. They believe there are many passages in the Bible that portend the end of times and that current world events are falling in line with those prophecies. Perhaps as soon as the next two to three years, all Hell could break loose, as a result of a war between Muslims and Jews.

Nicholas Guyatt, a history professor in British Columbia, was at once intrigued by the depth of these peoples’ faith and concerned about their influence over American foreign policy. His book, “Have a Nice Doomsday”, was published in 2007, while President Bush was still in office.

Guyatt recounts his interviews with the leading apocalyptic evangelists, including best-selling author Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee, the spiritual leader of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas.

LaHaye’s series of books. the Left Behind series, starts out on an airliner. In mid-flight, several passengers suddenly disappear into the heavens, leaving baffled relatives and cabinmates behind. Those who are called are the chosen ones, the ones with a first-class ticket to the Rapture. Those “left behind’ must wage war against the Antichrist, during a period known as the Tribulation.

Although the stories are a product of LaHaye’s imagination, they are illustrative of the author’s belief in the imminent Second Coming.

Guyatt approaches his interviews with polite skepticism to avoid alienating his subjects. He points to several examples of Doomsdayers who discredited themselves by predicting dates for the end of the world that came and went uneventfully. But he conceded that there is one writer who uncannily predicted – through his fiction – tragic events that would later unfold – most notably the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Some believe that scripture stipulates that the Second Coming will happen within the lifetime of those who were around to witness the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel. The attacks on the World Trade Center marked the beginning of a larger war between good and evil, they say. The impotence that Americans felt following the attacks will be similar to the helplessness we will experience during the final destruction.

Why, Guyatt asks, do the evangelicals bother trying to influence public opinion if they really believe we all won’t be around in a few years anyhow? The answer is that these modern-day prophets feel they have a duty to bring people toward perfect Christianity, so they may be saved.

Considering that I was not very well-schooled on the whole Doomsday subject, this book held my interest. It was a bit wide-ranging, though, and, therefore, a bit difficult to summarize.

Undercover at Cornerstone Church with a Rolling Stone reporter, it’s a mess and why am I not surprised! Be forewarned, adult in nature and a little rough language.

Rollingstone.com
Matt Taibbi Undercover with the Christian Right

I pulled into the hurch parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute. The previous half hour or so I’d spent dawdling in my car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410 in San Antonio, clinging to some inane sports talk show piping over my car radio — anything to hold off my plunge into Religion.

There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats. The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?

“Excuse me,” I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. “I see everyone has blankets. I didn’t bring any. Is this going to be a problem?”

The man was about five feet one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.

“Name?” he said.

“Collins,” I said. “Matthew Collins.”

He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and X-ed me out with a highlighter. “Don’t worry, Matthew,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there.”

I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.

I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone — a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country — to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church’s pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country — not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.

The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.

So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an “Encounter Weekend” — three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the “joy” of “knowing the truth” and “being set free.” That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television — great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don’t get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers — and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director’s cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn’t know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.

The bus was nearly full, and mostly quiet. Here and there a few people sitting together or near each other huddled and chatted, but I could see right away that a great many people on the trip had come alone, like me. They were people of all sorts: younger white men in neat middle-class haircuts, a matronly Mexican woman quietly reading a romance novel, a few scattered weather-beaten black folk in secondhand clothing whom I immediately pegged as in-recovery addicts, a couple of ten-alarm soccer moms who would prove the loudest people on the bus by far, a few quiet older men of military bearing.

The one obvious conclusion anyone making a demographic study of the Cornerstone Church population would come to would be that it’s a solidly middle-class crowd. These are folks who are comfortable eating off paper plates and drinking out of gallon jugs of Country Time iced tea over noisy dinners with their kids. They’re people who grew up in houses with back yards and fences, people with families. This particular journey to God is not a pastime for the idle rich or the urban obnoxious.

I sat down next to a frankly obese Hispanic woman who was carrying what both looked and smelled like a paper bag full of cheeseburgers.

“Some weather we’re having, with this rain,” I said.

“Tell me about it!” she said, introducing herself as Maria. “It truly is an act of God that I even made it here today.” She told a story about having to drive down from Austin in bad weather. God had helped her four or five steps along the way. “It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip,” she said. “Otherwise, I would never have made it.”

“It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all the way to Tarpley,” I heard a voice behind me say.

This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out. When Maria asked me why I’d come on the retreat, I bit my lip. When in Rome, I thought.

“Well,” I said, “since the new year, I’ve just been feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get right spiritually. So here I am.”

I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up one of those “God told me to put more English on my tee shot” lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to all, and he’ll be made the target of one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style point-and-screech mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would understand this better by the end of the weekend.

Maria smiled. “I feel the same way. Have you ever been to one of these Encounters?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said. “I’m really excited.”

“They’re wonderful,” said the matronly Mexican woman in front of me, turning around. “They really change you forever.”

I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I’d seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I’d been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore to you your vigor, confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous — they’re appearing as the “after” photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure.

In these Southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull’s belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual — and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you’re overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you’re ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don’t want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning — they want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.

I was very, very, very good — at everything!” shouted our hulking ex-paratrooper pastor, Philip Fortenberry, into the barely visible mouth mike that curled around his ruddy face. “I was a Green Beret — top of the class. Six feet four, 225 pounds. A star athlete, basketball player. Starting outside linebacker on the varsity football team. . . .”

The crowd cooed as our spiritual leader rattled off his macho credentials. Our supercowboy pastor was the perfect foil for the Revenge of the Nerds-style crowd of fatties, addicts, loners and broken-home survivors populating the warehouse-size building where we were all destined to spend the next three days together. In his introductory speech, Fortenberry did everything but tape-measure his biceps. His autobiographical tale of an angry overachieving youth who fell into a young adulthood of false pride, only to rebound and be reborn as a turbocharged, Army-trained enemy of Satan (“A friend of mine once joked that he saw my picture hung up in a post office in Hell,” he quipped), was to serve as the first chapter of our collective transformation — and to work it had to impress the hell out of us scraggly wanna-be’s.

It did. “I’m going to start tonight by telling y’all two stories,” he began.

The first was a story from his Army days, about having to take a training flight in the Pacific Northwest as a young man and being trapped in the back of the transport plane when the landing went wrong and the plane ended up crash-bouncing along the runway. “If you’ve ever been in the back of a C-130, you know what I mean,” he said, and I saw nodding heads all through the audience. The pastor subsequently would not miss a single chance to drop the name of a piece of military equipment.

The second story was more personal. It was about being a little boy in a small Southern town whose father ran around on his mom with a local barmaid. Dad used to bring little Junior to play golf with him, keeping his arm around the barmaid in the golf cart for the entire eighteen holes; finally Dad left Mom to shack up with the barmaid in a house down the road. Dad was so busy with the barmaid that he never came to see Junior’s ballgames. But from time to time he would come back home to Mom, moving back into Junior’s world, turning his life upside down.

“And every time he came back,” the pastor said, waving his hand up and down and his voice fairly breaking with tears, “it was like one more bounce along that runway, bouncing in that C-130, tearing my little boy’s world apart.”

The pastor fell silent, still using his hands to demonstrate that bouncing transport plane of fate, as he surveyed his hushed audience. Fortenberry then stood staring at his audience in full pre-weep, his eyes wrinkling with incipient tears. The grown macho man unashamedly breaking into boyish tears in public is one of the weirder features of the post-Promise Keeper Christian generation, and Fortenberry — himself a Promise Keeper, incidentally — had it down to a science. “You never came to my ballgames, Dad,” he’d screech, his face wrinkling like a raisin with grief at the word “ballgames.”

I heard sniffles coming from the audience.

Sensing he had his crowd in an emotionally vulnerable state, the pastor then plunged into a story about how his bitterness at his father’s abandonment had pushed him, in high school, to become just about the best basketball player you could imagine. Young Fortenberry, we learned, had scored lots and lots of points in high school and had many great games.

How great were those games? Well, he told us, they were really great. Some of the stories wandered irrelevantly into the specific stats of some of those games; he also punctuated his storytelling with oddly vigorous and adept pantomimes of jumpers and hook shots. It was a weird scene, like listening to a married man wax poetic to a mistress in a roadside motel room. “But after a while I realized that all those thousands of jump shots” — here he mimicked a jump shot — “and all those thousands of moves” — he ducked his head back and forth, Tim Hardaway-style — “hadn’t brought me any closer to Dad.”

The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called “the wound.” The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.

In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry’s tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father’s abandonment had crushed his “normal.”

“And I was wounded,” he whispered dramatically. “My dad had ruined my normal!”

The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.

After introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale before sending us to our first group session. It was about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a training dummy for some Army exercise or other, only to have the dummy’s chute fail to open. The dummy had plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry’s Army buddy had taken advantage of the situation to have a little joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers on the ground who weren’t privy to the fact that the troopers were jumping with dummies. The Army buddy had cried and wailed in asking where the “body” had fallen, leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that someone had just been killed.

The soldiers had felt guilty, Fortenberry explained, because they’d failed to help what they thought was a fallen comrade. Why? Because they’d been afraid to look behind the bush.

“So I’m telling you now, as you go into your groups,” the pastor explained, “don’t be afraid to look behind the bush.”

I wrote in my binder: “LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH.” Then I waited as my name was called out for group study.

The groups were segregated. Men with men, women with women. Each group was led by a life coach, who was actually a recent graduate of the program. At the beginning of the group stage, the coaches were all called up to the front of the chapel, and Fortenberry would call out the coach’s name first, then the names of his group members.

My coach’s name was Morgan. Morgan was a big man, ex-military, with curly black hair, a black mustache and a softening middle. He looked a little like a post-rehab version of Keith Hernandez — soft-spoken, deferential, all nose and mustache.

There were four other men in our group. Besides myself, there was José, a huge Mexican with a sheepish expression and a steam-boiler body; Aaron, a squat and alert Pennsylvanian with a clean-and-jerker’s build; and Dennis, a somewhat vacant and medicated-looking man pushing forty with a bald head and stubbly beard. Dennis looked like a distantly menacing version of Homer Simpson after electroshock therapy. Seated just a few feet away from us in our tight circle, he gazed out at us like he could barely make out our faces.

Once Morgan had us all gathered together, we looked for table space in the cafeteria area of the main building. Ominously, each of the cafeteria tables had a fresh box of Kleenex resting on top of it.

“Well,” Morgan said, “I think what we’re going to do to start is this. I’m going to tell you my story about my wound, and then we’re going to go around in a circle, and each of us is going to just tell his story. Is that OK?”

Everyone nodded. I noted with displeasure that I was seated first after Morgan in clockwise order. Already I was panicking; what kind of wound could a human cipher like myself possibly confess to?

Morgan told his story. Even a perfunctory look at my fellow group members told me that we had people here with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan’s wound was a tale that wouldn’t have even ruined a week of my relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole life — something about being yelled at by his dad while he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose Iron John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again, there is something very odd about modern Christian men — although fiercely pro-military in their politics and prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women’s roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group.

Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. Five minutes into our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10 on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.

Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag and sighed.

“Well, uh, OK, then,” he said. “Matthew, do you want to tell your story?”

My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn’t use my real past — not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process — but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.

“Hello,” I said, taking a deep breath. “My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes.”

The group twittered noticeably. Morgan’s eyes opened to tea-saucer size.

I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I’d made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But there was no turning back.

“He’d be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television,” I heard myself saying. “And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he’d pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know — whap!”

I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought — after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my midtwenties — at least that much was true — and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father’s passing from cirrhosis.

It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.

So it began. Our meetings were a prolonged, cyclical course of group-directed confession and healing that began on Friday evening and continued almost without interruption through Sunday afternoon. The basic gist of our group exercises was this: We were each supposed to reveal to one another what our great childhood wounds were, then write a series of essays and letters on the wound theme, taking time after the writing of each to read our work aloud. The written assignments began with an autobiography, then moved on to a letter written to our “offenders” (i.e., those who had caused our wounds), then a letter written to Jesus confessing our failure to forgive our tormentors.

Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my “autobiography” describing a period of my father’s life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:

I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man’s hands.

Again no reaction from the group, aside from an affirming nod from José at the last part — his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.

After each of these grueling exercises we would have lengthy, fifteen-to-twenty-minute sessions singing unbearably atonal Christian hymns. Then we would have teaching/Bible-study sessions led by Fortenberry on the theme of the moment (e.g., “Admit the Truth About Our Wounds”) that lasted an hour or so. Then, after Fortenberry would waste at least half the session giving us the Marlboro Man highlights of his professional résumé (“I was the manager of the second-largest ranch in America, 825,000 acres. . . .”) and bragging about his physical prowess (“If someone was to slug me, I could whip just about anyone here”), we would go back to the group session and confess some more. Then we would sing some more, receive more of Fortenberry’s hairy lessons, and then the cycle would start all over again. There were almost no breaks or interruptions; it was a physically exhausting schedule of confession, catharsis, bad music and relentless, muscular instruction. The Saturday program began at 7:45 a.m. and did not end until ten at night; we went around the confess-sing-learn cycle five full times in one day.

We were about a third of the way through the process when I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Fortenberry’s blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take place at the end of the retreat (“Tighten your saddle, he’s fixin’ ta buck” was how “cowboy” Fortenberry put it), when we would experience “Victory and Deliverance.” But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to “find your wounds” (“My husband hid my Saks card!”) at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.

True, I could see some other angles to what was going on as well. Virtually all of the participants of the Encounter identified either one or both of their parents as their “offender,” and much of what Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us with God and the church. He was taking broken people and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a new family — your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That connection would become more overt later in the weekend, but early on, this ur-father propaganda was the only thing I could see that separated Encounter Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular world.

But then, midway through Saturday, Fortenberry and the coaches started to show us glimpses of the program’s end game. The wound, it turned out, was something that was inflicted upon us because of a curse, a curse that perhaps spanned generations in each of our families. Alcoholic parents abused their children, who in turn carried their parents’ curse to their adult lives and became alcoholics themselves — only to have children and continue the pattern again. Now, why was that curse there to begin with? Here was where we could get into religious explanations, see the footprint of Satan, etc. We were unhappy because of earthly troubles from our childhoods, but those troubles were the work of a generational curse, inflicted upon us by devils and demons — probably for unbelief, bad behavior, disobedience, worship of the wrong gods and so on.

This little bit of semantic gymnastics helped transform all of us at the retreat from being merely f@$*** up to being accursed carriers of demons. Having ridden an almost entirely secular program to get our biographies out in the open in a group setting, Fortenberry could now switch his focus to the real meat and potatoes of the weekend: Satan and the devils inside us.

He started off slowly, invoking the godly curses of Genesis — the sweat on Adam’s brow, the pain of Eve’s childbirth, etc. — the punishments for eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. “How many of you women out there have had babies?” Fortenberry asked. “Can I see some hands?”

A dozen or so hands raised.

“Now, did it hurt?” he asked.

Laughter. Of course it hurt.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?” He paused. “There are some people out there who will tell you it’s genetics. It’s in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it’s not genetics. It’s a generational curse!”

Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. “Take homosexuals,” he said. “Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created — by pedophiles.”

The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it’s true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a “rod of iron” to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing — but the audience ate it up anyway. When they’re away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That’s because they know that their audience doesn’t give a Sh**. So long as you’re telling them what they want to hear, there’s no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.

A team of twenty of the world’s leading scientists wouldn’t be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.

Fortenberry told a story about a nephew of his who called him up one night. “Both of his kids had fallen on the ground in respiratory distress, half-conscious, writhing around, gasping for air,” Fortenberry said. “And I said to my nephew, I said, ‘It isn’t something they’ve done. It’s something you’ve done.’ “

The crowd murmured in assent.

“I told my nephew to look around the house,” Fortenberry continued. “I said, ‘Do you have a copy of Harry Potter?’ And he said yes. And I said, ‘That’s your problem.’ So I told him to go get that copy of that book, tear it in half and throw it out the window. So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood up completely recovered, just like that.”

He snapped his fingers, indicating the speed with which the kids had jumped up in recovery. The crowd cooed and applauded. I frowned, wondering for a minute what life must be like for a person mortally afraid of toothless commercial fairy tales. It struck me that Phil Fortenberry’s nephew was probably more afraid of Harry Potter than Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this religion and about America in general.

Here I have a confession to make. It’s not something that’s easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the “work” of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

On the final morning of the weekend, we gathered in the chapel for the Deliverance. Fortenberry, dressed in his standard Western shirt and hiked-up jeans, sauntered up to the lectern wearing a solemn and dramatic expression. “This is fixing to be the biggest spiritual battle that ninety-nine percent of you will ever face,” he said. “But let me tell you something. It’s already been won. It was won 2,000 years ago.”

The crowd cheered. As the applause tailed, he held his hands up Mussolini-fashion, asking for quiet. The crowd complied. It was quite dramatically done, this whole business, whatever we were working toward. And at that moment, I spotted a younger kid who had been at the retreat all weekend working a soundboard for the musical parts zipping behind the crowd to some kind of dimmer panel. He turned a switch and the lights dimmed slightly; though it was morning, the light in the building suddenly turned unnatural, like the light during a partial eclipse.

Throughout the whole weekend, Fortenberry had been setting himself up as an athletic conqueror of demons. Now, on the final morning, he looked like a quarterback about to take the field before a big game. The life coaches assembled around the edges of the chapel, carrying anointing oil and bundles of small paper bags.

Fortenberry began to issue instructions. He told us that under no circumstances should we pray during the Deliverance.

“When the word of God is in your mouth,” he said, “the demons can’t come out of your body. You have to keep a path clear for the demon to come up through your throat. So under no circumstances pray to God. You can’t have God in your mouth. You can cough, you might even want to vomit, but don’t pray.”

The crowd nodded along solemnly. Fortenberry then explained that he was going to read from an extremely long list of demons and cast them out individually. As he did so, we were supposed to breathe out, keep our mouths open and let the demons out.

And he began.

At first, the whole scene was pure comedy. Fortenberry was standing up at the front of the chapel, reading off a list, and the room was loudly chirping crickets back at him.

“In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of incest! In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of sexual abuse! In the name of Jesus. . . .”

After a few minutes, there was a little twittering here and there. Nothing serious. I was beginning to think the Deliverance was going to be a bust.

But then it started. Wails and cries from the audience. To my left, a young black man started writhing around in his seat. In front of me and to my right, another young black man with Coke-bottle glasses and a shock of nerdly jheri curl — a dead ringer for a young Wayne Williams — started wailing and clutching his head.

“In the name of Jesus,” continued Fortenberry, “I cast out the demon of astrology!”

Coughing and spitting noises. Behind me, a bald white man started to wheeze and gurgle, like he was about to puke. Fortenberry, still reading from his list, pointed at the man. On cue, a pair of life coaches raced over to him and began to minister. One dabbed his forehead with oil and fiercely clutched his cranium; the other held a paper bag in front of his mouth.

“In the name of Jesus Christ,” said Fortenberry, more loudly now, “I cast out the demon of lust!”

And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I couldn’t see if any actual vomitus came out, but he made real hurling and retching noises.

Now the women began to pipe in. On the women’s side of the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to explain what these noises sounded like. If you’ve ever watched The Houston 560 or any other gang*&^% porn movie, that’s what it sounded like, only the sounds were far more intense.

It was not difficult to figure out where the energy was coming from on that side of the room. Some of the husbands glanced nervously over in the direction of their wives.

“In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!” said Fortenberry.

“Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!” wailed a woman in the front row.

“Bleeech!” puked the bald man behind me.

Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.

“Need . . . a . . . bag,” I said as he came over.

He handed me a bag.

“In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of handwriting analysis!” shouted Fortenberry.

Handwriting analysis? I jammed the bag over my mouth and started coughing, then went into a very real convulsion of disbelief as I listened to this astounding list, half-laughing and half-retching.

“In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!” Fortenberry continued. “In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!”

Cough, cough!

The minutes raced by. Wayne Williams was now fully prostrate, held up only by a trio of coaches, each of whom took part of his writhing body and propped it up. Another bald man in the front of the chapel was now freaking out in Linda Blair fashion, roaring and making horrific demon noises.

“Rum-balakasha-oom!” shouted Fortenberry in tongues, waving a hand in front of Linda Blair Man. “Cooom-balakasha-froom! In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of philosophy!”

Philosophy?

It was obvious that virtually everyone in the crowd was playacting to some degree or another. I was reminded of the Tolstoy story “The Kreutzer Sonata,” when the male narrator described marriage as being like the bearded-lady tent in a French circus he’d seen. You pay a few francs to go in, and when you come out, and the carnival barker shouts at you, “Was that not the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen, monsieur?” — well, you’re too ashamed to admit that you’ve been had, and so you nod your head and agree: Oui, monsieur, it was really something! That’s how people come to say marriage is a blessing, and that’s how you can get fifty-odd high school graduates puking demons into three-cent paper bags for a Deliverance.

The whole thing — the demonic expulsions, the trading of miraculous wives’ tales, the crazy End Times theology based on dire predictions that come and go uneventfully once a year or so — it’s all a con that is done with the consent of the conned. Which is what gives it strength. If everybody agrees to believe, it is real.

The hooting and howling went on seemingly forever. It was nearly an hour and a half before Fortenberry was done. He had cast out the demons of every ailment, crime, domestic problem and intellectual discipline on the face of the Earth. He cast out horoscopes, false gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness, everything, it seemed to me, except maybe E. coli and John Updike novels. At least four of the men and about six of the women writhed and screamed and fussed themselves into sheer physical exhaustion, collapsing in chairs by the time it was over. Several of the coaches actually had to bring Wayne Williams and the other young black man behind the chapel to subdue their demons. By then most of us men were just sitting there mute, looking around absent-mindedly, waiting for it to end. I was sitting there, clutching my demon vomit bag — perhaps the single greatest souvenir of my journalistic career — when I made the mistake of closing my mouth. A coach rushed over to me.

“Matthew!” he snapped. “Keep your mouth open! Let the demons out!”

“Oh, right!” I said. I straightened up and opened my mouth in the shape of a letter O.

Meanwhile, Fortenberry was tiring.

“I cast out . . . uh . . . In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of pornography. I cast out, in the name of Jesus, the demon of disconnect.”

Fortenberry shook his head as though trying to revive himself. He had been at this for a long time. His stamina really was astounding, a testament to his military training.

Afterward, a frightening thought shot through my head. It occurred to me that over the past decades, any number of our prominent political leaders (from Jimmy Carter to Chuck Colson to W himself) had boasted publicly of their born-again experiences, broadcasting to Middle America an understanding of their personal relationships with God. But whereas once these conversions were humble things — Billy Graham whispering and putting his hand on W’s shoulder in Kennebunkport, or even (in the case of Tom DeLay) a flash of recognition while watching a televangelist program — the modern version might very easily be this completely batsh*t holy-vomitus/demon-exorcism deal. The thought that any politician could claim this kind of experience and not be immediately disqualified from public service seemed utterly terrifying.

We were called back to chapel, and this time the drill was speaking in tongues. We were asked to come up to the front of the chapel and let a life coach anoint us with oil, hold our heads and speak to us in tongues. Fortenberry instructed us to “just let it out. Just let it out and it’ll come out.”

He didn’t come right out and say, “Just act like you’re speaking in tongues.” But it was damned close. Once again, Fortenberry greased the process by telling us a story about how he’d once been at a service where folks were speaking in tongues, and he was skeptical, but it had just flown right out of him — and now it just shoots right out of him, almost on command.

I went to the front. One of the coaches grabbed me by the shoulder and sploshed a big puddle of oil on my forehead. Then he began to speak in tongues:

“Gam-bakakasha. Hoo-raaa-balalakasha. . . . Come on, Matthew, let it out.”

American Christians who speak in tongues basically all try to sound like extras from the underworld set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine you’re holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford’s heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka! Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!

But I didn’t think of this at the time and just went another route.

“Let it out, Matthew,” the coach repeated, clutching my forehead. “Just open your mouth.”

I shrugged and rattled off the lyrics to the song “What is Autumn?” by the Russian rock band DDT:

What is autumn? It’s the sky The crying sky below your feet. Flying about in puddles are the birds and clouds. Autumn I’ve not been with you for so long!

It’s actually a beautiful song, but with my eyes rolled back in my head and recited in Russian it sounded demonic enough.

“Hmm, very good,” my coach said. “Good job, Matthew.”

I kept going, on to the next verse. “What is autumn? It’s a stone. . . .”

“OK, that’s good,” the coach said, annoyed, moving on to the next guy.

“It’s important that you practice,” said Pastor Fortenberry. “It sounds silly, but when you’re at home, when you have a little time, just try to let it out. You’ll get used to it, and soon you’ll be speaking in tongues like nobody’s business!”

He then pronounced us baptized in the Holy Spirit and fully qualified now to cast out demons.

He held up his hands in triumph.

“Hallelujah!” he shouted.

The crowd jumped up, and we all threw up our hands.

“Hallelujah!”

He called out Hallelujah! again. We repeated after him. And we repeated after him again. Arms in the air. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

I felt a twinge of recognition from somewhere as I threw my arms up over and over again.

We had graduated.

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this — once you’ve gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no “anything else.” All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this “our thing,” a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.

Adapted from the forthcoming book “The Great Derangement” by Matt Taibbi. Copyright © 2008 by Matt Taibbi. Published by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted with permission. Names of Encounter Weekend participants have been changed to protect their privacy.

(HT) Interesting article at the Guardian.

Anticipating the antichrist

Claims that the end of days is near have never been far from the evangelical surface. The question: Have extremists retaken American Christianity?

For at least the past century, mainstream American evangelicalism has been eyeing global events for signs of the second coming of Christ.

Were events such as the Bolshevik Revolution, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, or the establishment of the United Nations fulfilment of the prophesied sequence leading to the battle at Armageddon and Christ’s reappearing? Were these events a sign of the establishment of the one-world order evangelicals believe will be created by the false prophet – the antichrist – who will rule the world for seven years before that apocalyptic showdown? Were any of the players the antichrist himself, or at least a sign of his impending emergence?

This view, says Matthew Avery Sutton, a historian at Washington State University at work on a book about evangelical political engagement, “was fringe among conservatives 150 years ago” but “is now mainstream. It’s just the air they breathe.” (more)

1. The Holy Overseers and Lovers of Yerushalime Secret High Implementers of the Talmud Council has issued an emergency binding declaration to all Zionist Jews declaring that the Day of Atonement for 2009, set to begin at sunset Sunday, September 27, has been lengthened to two days this year. So it will now end on Tuesday night instead of Monday night.  This is a dire emergency and all lovers of the Talmud have been directed to get the word out immediately. John Stadtmiller at RBN will no doubt broadcast this information all day today and tomorrow on the Rabbinical Broadcasting Network, but just in case you all have quit listening to that network the tuyuur here at Mantiq al-Tayr really wanted to help get the word out.

The Seat of the Holy Overseers and Lovers of Yerushalime Secret High Implementers of the Talmud Council

Why this emergency declaration? Speaker of the  Council, Nancy Pelosi, Likud, California, told Stadtmiller on RBN that “With all the evil shit we’ve pulled this year, we knew that one day of asking for forgiveness wouldn’t be enough.”

Council Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Likud, Virginia, barely back from his trip to Israel and without even having had the time to wipe all the shit off of his nose, agreed saying “I think what tipped the scales this time was butchering all those women and children in Gaza.” Though Jane Traitor Harman, Likud, California, disagreed. “It’s all the money we’ve looted from the US taxpayers this past year plus the Bernie Madoff scandal. Yeah, we kicked ass this year. So we really need to say we are sorry.  Plus, it’ll give us another day off from work.”

Council members on their way to the historic meeting

Eliot Engel, a leader in the US Knesset as well as a member of the Council, chimed in saying “Jane, you ignorant slut. It was the organ selling fiasco that made me vote in favor the two-day resolution. Man, we were getting away with murder on that one but that inglorious basterd at Mantiq al-Tayr exposed us.” Engel added, if you don’t believe me, go here.“

US President, Benjamin Netanyahu, had his own interesting take. “Look, Mantiq, it really is about the settlements. We are going to take every fucking inch of the land and we will kill or drive out, preferably kill, every single Palestinian living in Ersatz Israel. We need the two days to atone for the future as well as the past.”

Council member and Rahm Emmanuel confidant, Steven Israel, Likud, New York, just laughed when he heard what President Netanyahu had said.  Oh, before quoting Council member Israel, I want to remind you that the highlight of this traitor’s life was being Michael Collins Piper’s roommate years ago. Piper has been in recovery every since. But I digress.

Israel said that the two days were needed because of the Charles Freeman fiasco that Israel himself (and itself) caused. “Yeah, we fucked Freeman alright. It was almost as much fun as giving away state secrets to Israelis who give us blow jobs. ” Harman agreed “Yeah, the whole espionage thing on behalf of Israel is huge. I sure got caught with my panties down” she said laughing and sipping Israeli wine while eating Sabra hummus. “But” she added “I am just one paid-for Israeli whore among many. I can’t even compete with some of the guys. Maybe next year – in Jerusalem.”

Steve Rosen, let off Jew-free for spying, agreed. “Man, I thought my ass was grass for a while. But I’m free at last and can get back to work. And as for Charles Freeman, fuck him. Ooops, I’m sorry. So sorry. Have to go atone” he said, laughing like Tom Cruise.

Ben Shalom Bernanke, a council member and who actually owns the United States, said “The truth is, and Rahm Emmanuel will confirm this, the dirtiest thing we did, aside from the disappearing trillions of dollars, was put a guy in the White House whose name rhymes with the most famous terrorist in the world and who is so blackmailable, if I can coin the phrase – pun intended on both counts – that he has to do everything we tell him. We even gave him a copy of Michael Collins Piper’s book “Final Judgment” and told him to read it (if he can). We think he got the point. And I got reappointed. Fuck you taxpayers.”

John Hagee, the third chief Rabbi of Israel, had one last thing to add. He said, man we dicked with the United States and the world so f’ing much this year that not only do we need two days to atone, we’ll even have to say the kol nidr twice – once at the start of each day.”

As he always does, Rahm Israel Emmanuel got in the last word “With what we’ve got planned for the coming year, next year we are gonna need three days.”

Speaking of perverts…

“I and My Father are one.” (John 10:30) “Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. (1 John 2:22)

Who’s the Executive Director of “Christians” United For Israel?

David Brog. A Jew. Yes. As in Judaism. Not a convert. A Jew. Seriously.

“The Antichrist is a Jewish Queer”? Is he describing himself?

What a scam.

Zionists and the Israeli government and their Neocon Christ-hating traitors:

• Set up this Satanic cult of “Judeo-Christianity”
• Control the puppet “leaders” through cash, dope, whores or blackmail
• Get them to sponge cash for Israel off of idiotic American “Christians”
  
• Get them to advocate for war, theft, hate, invasion, death
• Get them to preach hatred for Arab Christians
  

Then American Jews complain because these “Christian Zionist” idiots are “too Christian” when they’re not even Christian in the first place, but liars or apostates.

Zionism, and the state of Israel as it is today, can only be maintained by corruption, treason, deceit. They should withdraw from the West Bank, tell the Jewish settlers there that they’re on their own, stop the occupation of Jerusalem, stop corrupting America, give up the apartheid laws and the phony “right of return”, try getting along with their neighbors for a change, stop lying about history, and try some humility. (What are the chances that will happen?)

Translation: “In Tel Aviv we laugh our guts out!”

Lunatics

“The Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created a racial law for themselves—the law of Moses, which says, ‘If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women.’ And that, Gentlemen, is of tremendous importance in judging the Nuremberg Laws. These laws of the Jews were taken as a model for these laws. … Jewry…which introduced these racial laws, has survived throughout the centuries, while all other races and civilizations have perished.”

— Julius Streicher, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946, Volume 12, Secretariat of the Tribunal, Nuremberg, Germany, p. 315.

(a) Slaves (b) Morons or (c) Whores?

Blackwater Founder Accused In Court Of Intent To Kill

Washington Post Staff Writer

The founder of Blackwater USA deliberately caused the deaths of innocent civilians in a series of shootings in Iraq, attorneys for Iraqis suing the security contractor told a federal judge Friday.

The attorneys singled out Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who is the company’s owner, for blame in the deaths of more than 20 Iraqis between 2005 and 2007. Six former Blackwater guards were criminally charged in 14 of the shootings, and family members and victims’ estates sued Prince, Blackwater (now calledXe Services LLC) and a group of related companies.

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