The Founding Fathers
weren't particularly anti-Islam.
But millions of Americans believe that
Christ will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there is widespread war in the Middle East. Some of these folks
want to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction, so that Jesus comes quickly.
According to French President Chirac, Bush
told him that the Iraq war was needed to bring on the apocalypse:
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog
are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north
and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the
Old Testament prophesy:
“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be
loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which
are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them
together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and
devoured them.”
Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…
There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s
reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally
religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq
was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to
serve as the instrument of the Lord.
And British Prime Minister Tony Blair long-time mentor, advisor and confidante
said:
“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his
cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in
Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle;
good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”
Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair’s mentor,
says that his religion gave him a “total belief in what’s right and
what’s wrong”, leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as “a
moral cause”…
Anti-war campaigners criticised remarks Mr Blair made in
2006, suggesting that the decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately
be judged by God.
Bill Moyers reports that the organization Christians United for
Israel - led by highly-influential Pastor John C. Hagee - is a universal
call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish
settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and
lobby for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. A
ll to bring Russia into a war against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second Coming and The Rapture. See
this and
this.
This all revolves around what is called
Dispensationalism. So popular is Dispensationalism that Tim LaHaye's
Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies. Dispensationalists include the following mega-pastors and their churches:
They are supported by politicians such as:
- Texas Senator John Cronyn
Dr. Timothy Webber - an evangelical Christian who has served as a
teacher of church history and the history of American religion at Denver
Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,
Vice-President at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, IL,
and President of Memphis Theological Seminary in Tennessee -
notes:
In a recent Time/CNN poll, more than one-third of
Americans said that since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they have been
thinking more about how current events might be leading to the end of
the world.
While only 36 percent of all Americans believe that the
Bible is God's Word and should be taken literally, 59 percent say they
believe that events predicted in the Book of Revelation will come to
pass. Almost one out of four Americans believes that 9/11 was
predicted in the Bible, and nearly one in five believes that he or she
will live long enough to see the end of the world. Even more significant for this study, over
one-third of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so
because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their
own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.
Millions of Americans believe that the Bible predicts the
future and that we are living in the last days. Their beliefs are
rooted in dispensationalism, a particular way of understanding the
Bible's prophetic passages, especially those in Daniel and Ezekiel in
the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. They
make up about one-third of America's 40 or 50 million evangelical
Christians and believe that the nation of Israel will play a central
role in the unfolding of end-times events. In the last part of the 20th
century, dispensationalist evangelicals become Israel's best friends-an
alliance that has made a serious geopolitical difference.
***
Starting in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the
popular culture with runaway best-sellers, and a well-networked
political campaign to promote and protect the interests of Israel. Since
the mid-1990s, tens of millions of people who have never seen a
prophetic chart or listened to a sermon on the second coming have read
one or more novels in the Left Behind series, which has become the most
effective disseminator of dispensationalist ideas ever.
***
During the early 1980s the Israeli Ministry of Tourism
recruited evangelical religious leaders for free "familiarization"
tours. In time, hundreds of evangelical pastors got free trips to the
Holy Land. The purpose of such promotional tours was to enable people of
even limited influence to experience Israel for themselves and be shown
how they might bring their own tour group to Israel. The Ministry of
Tourism was interested in more than tourist dollars: here was a way of
building a solid corps of non-Jewish supporters for Israel in the United
States by bringing large numbers of evangelicals to hear and see
Israel's story for themselves. The strategy caught on.
***
Shortly after the Six-Day War, elements within the
Israeli government saw the potential power of the evangelical subculture
and began to mobilize it as a base of support that could influence
American foreign policy. The Israeli government sent Yona Malachy of its
Department of Religious Affairs to the United States to study American fundamentalism and its potential as an ally of Israel. Malachy was warmly received by fundamentalists
and was able to influence some of them to issue strong pro-Israeli
manifestos. By the mid-1980s, there was a discernible shift in the
Israeli political strategy. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), the Jewish state's major lobbying group in Washington, D.C.,
started re-aligning itself with the American political right-wing,
including Christian conservatives. Israel's timing was perfect. It began
working seriously with American dispensationalists at the precise
moment that American fundamentalists and evangelicals were discovering
their political voice.
***
Probably the largest pro-Israel organization of its kind
is the National Unity Coalition for Israel, which was founded by a
Jewish woman who learned how to get dispensationalist support. NUCI
opposes "the establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of
Israel."
***
In their commitment to keep Israel strong and moving in directions prophesied by the Bible, dispensationalists
are supporting some of the most dangerous elements in Israeli society.
They do so because such political and religious elements seem to conform
to dispensationalist beliefs about what is coming next for Israel. By
lending their support-both financial and spiritual-to such groups,
dispensationalists are helping the future they envision come to pass.
***
Dispensationalists believe that the Temple is coming too;
and their convictions have led them to support the aims and actions of
what most Israelis believe are the most dangerous right-wing elements in
their society, people whose views make any compromise necessary for
lasting peace impossible. Such sentiments do not matter to the believers
in Bible prophecy, for whom the outcome of the quarrelsome issue of the
Temple Mount has already been determined by God.
Since the end of the Six-Day War, then,
dispensationalists have increasingly moved from observers to
participant-observers. They have acted consistently with their
convictions about the coming Last Days in ways that make their
prophecies appear to be self-fulfilling.
***
As Paul Boyer has pointed out, dispensationalism has
effectively conditioned millions of Americans to be somewhat passive
about the future and provided them with lenses through which to
understand world events. Thanks to the sometimes changing perspectives
of their Bible teachers, dispensationalists are certain that trouble in
the Middle East is inevitable, that nations will war against nations,
and that the time is coming when millions of people will die as a result
of nuclear war, the persecution of Antichrist, or as a result of divine
judgment. Striving for peace in the Middle East is a hopeless pursuit with no chance of success.
***
For the dispensational community, the future is
determined. The Bible's prophecies are being fulfilled with amazing
accuracy and rapidity. They do not believe that the Road Map will-or
should-succeed. According to the prophetic texts, partitioning is not in
Israel's future, even if the creation of a Palestinian state is the
best chance for peace in the region. Peace is nowhere prophesied for the
Middle East, until Jesus comes and brings it himself. The worse thing
that the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United
Nations can do is force Israel to give up land for a peace that will
never materialize this side of the second coming. Anyone who pushes for peace in such a manner is ignoring or defying God's plan for the end of the age.
***
It seems clear that dispensationalism is on a roll, that
its followers feel they are riding the wave of history into the shore of
God's final plan. Why should they climb back into the stands when being
on the field of play is so much more fun and apparently so beneficial
to the game's outcome? As [one dispensationalist group's] advertisement
read, "Don't just read about prophecy when you can be part of it."
ATHEIST WAR HAWKS MANIPULATE BELIEVERS TO BEAT THE DRUMS OF WAR
Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration.
Indeed, many of the main neocon players - including
Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam Shulsky - were
students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.
The people pushing for war against Iran are the
same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See
this and
this. (They planned both wars
at least 20 years ago.) For example, Shulsky
was the director of the Office of Special Plans - the Pentagon unit responsible for selling
false intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass. He is now a
member of the equivalent organization targeting Iran: the Iranian Directorate.
Strauss, born in Germany, was
an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli. Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that
if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss
thought that:
A political order can be stable only if it is united by
an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if
no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured
(the quote is by one of Strauss'
main biographers).
Indeed, Stauss used the analogy of Gulliver's Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:
"When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated
over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of
Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and
appalled by such a show of disrespect." (this quote also from the same biographer)
Moreover, Strauss
said:
Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic . . . Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
So Strauss seems to have advocated governments
letting
terrorizing catastrophes happen on one's own soil to one's own people --
of "pissing" on one's own people, to use his Gulliver's travel analogy.
And he advocates that government's should
pretend that they
did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally "not know" that
Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one's own people in order to
save them from some "catastophe" (perhaps to justify military efforts
to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from our real threat --
an increasingly-powerful China?).
What does this have to do with religion?
Strauss
taught that religion should be used as a way to
manipulate people to achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not believe in religion.
As Wikipedia
notes:
In the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in
neoconservative magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support
of intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of
secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this –
along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a
"noble lie", intended to protect public morality, or even tactical
politics, to attract religious supporters.
So is it any surprise that the folks who planned war against Iraq and Iran
at least 20 years ago are pushing religious disinformation to stir up the evangelical community?
Conservative Christians were the biggest backers of the Iraq war. And the Neocons are catering to them to try to back them into war with Iran, as well.
I've recently seen a swarm of spam claiming that all Muslims are
evil, that they want to take over the world and establish a Muslim
caliphate, and that they want to nuke Iran. They misquote Muslims and
use false statements to try to stir up religious hatred.
They are simply promoting the Straussian playbook: stir up religious
sentiment - even if you are personally an atheist - to create and
demonize an "enemy", so as to promote war ...
NOT A PROBLEM WITH A PARTICULAR RELIGION ... BUT OF IMMATURITY
Most Americans confuse Zionism and Judaism. But many devout Jews are
against Zionism, and Zionists can be
Christian.
And as I've repeatedly
noted,
fundamentalist Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus are all very much
alike, and often willing to use violence to spread their ideology ...
while more spiritually mature Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus are
all much more tolerant and peaceful than their evangelical brothers:
As Christian writer and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck
explained, there are different stages of spiritual maturity.
Fundamentalism – whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu
fundamentalism – is an immature stage of development. There are peaceful, contemplative Muslim sects – think the poet Rumi the poet and Sufis
– and violent sects, just as there are contemplative Christian orders
and violent Christian groups (and peaceful and violent atheists).
While there are certainly some Arab terrorists, Islam cannot be blamed for their barbaric murderous actions, just as
Christianity cannot be blamed for the Norwegian
Christian terrorist - Anders Behring Breivik's actions. University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs –
points out:
Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism
proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign
military occupations.
The 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with
prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any
mosque. See
this,
this,
this,
this,
this,
this,
this, and
this. So they were not really Muslims.
And even atheists like Stalin can be terrorists, or at least genocidal maniacs.
Indeed,
all religions teach compassion, love and the Golden
Rule. Likewise, atheism teaches respect for the individual, the most
good for the most people, and helping everyone reach their human
potential.
Some within each philosophy follow these teachings, and others want
to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them. The issue is not really
the label of this religion or that, but of maturity and true
spirituality and compassion.
Postscript 1: Neoliberals and Neoconservatives are very similar in many ways. And because Neocons are not conservative, nothing in this post is meant to criticize conservatism.
Postscript 2: Most evangelicals are not dispensationalists, and so do not want to bring on armageddon.
