Frank Schaeffer: Palin, FOX and the Franchise of the Apocalypse

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/palin-fox-and-the-franchi_b_420116.html

"Reconstructionism" and Palin

I knew the founders of the dominionist movement -- people like the late Reverend Rousas John Rushdoony, the father of "Christian Reconstructionism" and the modern evangelical/fundamentalist home school movement.

What most Americans don't know is that someone like Palin -- who says God is "leading her" -- believe that what God wants them to do is implement the reconstructionist agenda.

Rushdoony (whom I met and talked with several times) believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as "unequal yoking," should be made illegal. He also opposed "enforced integration," referred to Southern slavery as "benevolent," and said that "some people are by nature slaves." Rushdoony was also a Holocaust denier.

And yet his home school materials are a mainstay of the right-wing evangelical home school movement to this day. In Rushdoony's 1973 book, The Institutes of Biblical Law, he says that fundamentalist Christians must "take control of governments and impose strict biblical law" on America and then the world. That would mean the death penalty for "practicing homosexuals." We see his agenda in the American groups like the Family connected to recent legislation in Uganda to give the death penalty to gays.

Many evangelical leaders -- including Palin -- deny holding Reconstructionist beliefs, but Beverly and Tim LaHaye (of Concerned Women for America and the co-author of the novels we're talking about here), Donald Wildmon (of the American Family Association), and the late D. James Kennedy (of Coral Ridge Ministries and a friend of mine before I left the movement) served alongside Rushdoony on the secretive Coalition for Revival, a group formed in 1981 to "reclaim America for Christ." I went to some of the early meetings.

Many evangelical/fundamentalist's can't get enough of the "end times" rush. And they are Palin's bedrock. They've been sucking doom up up since the early 1970s, and now, in the Left Behind books and Palin's rise, the message has gone viral.

[Arugula Latte]

1. I'm always amazed how many people are stupid enough to believe this absolute craptastic nonsense.

Many of them, apparently, are my former high school classmates. :eyes:

[rd_kent]

3. Why is THIS craptastic nonsense and less plausible than any other religious belief?

IMO, ALL religious belief is craptastic nonsense.

[Arugula Latte]

4. That is true.

It always amuses me how certain folks think, for example, that the virgin birth is completely plausible but Mormon magic undies are way out there. It's all silliness and superstition and you need to perform vigorous mental gymnastics to believe any of it.

[mmonk]

6. Parthenogenesis

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/parthenogenesis.aspx

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6681793.stm#graphic

[rd_kent]

7. Wow, pretty cool! But I don't think that parthenogenisis is what xtian have in mind

when they refer to the virgin birth.

But I will use that in my next argument with a fundie. Thanks.

[mmonk]

8. Nope, it isn't.

I was just showing that it exists in biology. Nature finds a way.

[niyad]

2. k and r--he certainly knows whereof he speaks

[ClayZ]

5. K and R