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Dominionists in the United States

Started by Recusant, April 14, 2019, 02:50:51 AM

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Icarus

Trump has played the christian card to the hilt. He has lied to and conned ordinary people into completely believing that he is the Messiah. A frighteningly large number of US citizens have drunk the Kool Aid.

In general the Trumpers are the less educated, and more easily beguiled. Sad to say that they outnumber the more cerebral citizenry.  Worse still, the bible believer, gullible hillbillies, can and do, vote.


Asmodean

Quote from: Icarus on February 27, 2024, 03:40:09 AMIn general the Trumpers are the less educated, and more easily beguiled.
The first part is typical enough for a populist candidate - the second is typical enough for people. The likes of extinction rebellion, The Woke(tm), the academia and, of course, the faithful, drink their Kool Aid too.

Being intellectually (or otherwise) gifted does not bar entry to any Kool Aid society, as I see it.
Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on July 25, 2013, 08:18:52 PM
In Asmo's grey lump,
wrath and dark clouds gather force.
Luxembourg trembles.

Icarus

Quote from: Asmodean on February 27, 2024, 07:44:36 AM
Quote from: Icarus on February 27, 2024, 03:40:09 AMIn general the Trumpers are the less educated, and more easily beguiled.


Being intellectually (or otherwise) gifted does not bar entry to any Kool Aid society, as I see it.

Quite so, however the educated are less likely to fall for the con jobs that the pols and the preachers put forth.

Asmodean

Mmmmh... It sounds as though it should be true, and yet... It may or may not be - depends on what the preacher in question is peddling.

The second one ventures beyond the exact sciences, educated people get about as full of shit as everyone else, at least in my opinion, though they tend to be more eloquent about it.

A polished turd is still a turd, unfortunately, and smells as turdy beneath that shiny surface.
Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on July 25, 2013, 08:18:52 PM
In Asmo's grey lump,
wrath and dark clouds gather force.
Luxembourg trembles.

Icarus

Part of being educated is the ability and propensity for weighing alternatives. Perhaps the term educated needs a finer definition.

Taking a flier here........... round number statistics suggest that the less educated are also less rational.  The US state of Alabama is among the less educated. They have one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, the highest divorce rate, the largest rate of incarceration,the highest rate of religiosity, and a few more highest rates of not doing well.

The state of New York has an upper division record for educating their citizenry. The murder rate in New York state is five per one hundred thousand. That is pretty serious but Alabama has a murder rate of 15 per hundred thousand. Do we dare entertain the notion that education, thus a higher degree of sophistication, or a better understanding of risk/gain ratio, has anything to do with those statistics?..........but wait a moment......New York is far less religious than Alabama, or Mississippi, or Arkansas, or Louisiana. Could that play into the murder rates too?

Disclaimer:  Alabama, perennially, has the the most successful college football teams in America. Mississippi and Louisiana are not far behind in college football power..........one must wonder about the priorities. 

   

 

Dark Lightning

All you need is to be big, strong and stupid (mostly) to play football. Remedial classes are provided for the culturally educationally deprived. I paraphrased that from a tune some of you guys may recognize...  ;) Left some clues, though.

Asmodean

Quote from: Icarus on February 29, 2024, 01:27:40 AMPart of being educated is the ability and propensity for weighing alternatives. Perhaps the term educated needs a finer definition.
Perhaps it does. Here, I'm speaking in terms of people generally having completed a level of education beyond 10 years of what is compulsory in Norway. Otherwise, we pretty much have "no" uneducated people, aside from some who come from abroad and the discussion turns "terminologically meaningless." "The uneducated are more likely to..." "-Who cares? 'nobody's' uneducated."

QuoteTaking a flier here........... round number statistics suggest that the less educated are also less rational.  The US state of Alabama is among the less educated. They have one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, the highest divorce rate, the largest rate of incarceration,the highest rate of religiosity, and a few more highest rates of not doing well.
Mmh... Very "round" (in the sense of sweepingly broad) numbers, as you put it, those. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's not a variable in a much larger consideration, but do let us examine the issue more closely because interesting.

In the case of Alabama, what is Huntsville contributing to their murder statistics? Now, what is Hillbillyville with its 100 stereotypically-related people who "can't even read" contributing? Because it may well be that the murder rate in comparatively well-educated Huntsville is orders of magnitude that of Hillbillyville, which last saw a murder in 1903. Of course, if we zoom in again, perhaps there are poor areas in Huntsville, dominated by gangs, and that's where the discrepancy comes from. In fact, perhaps the kids of Hillbillyvillians move to Huntsville, find gang-related work and drive the statistics up there, while Hillbillyville remains "quiet?"

Disclaimer: Alabama is a hugely diverse state - something that is not being reflected well in my illustrative example. I picked Huntsville because it's Alabama's "tech center," while Hillbillyville is a hypothetical "dying town" in the "middle of nowhere."

QuoteThe state of New York has an upper division record for educating their citizenry. The murder rate in New York state is five per one hundred thousand. That is pretty serious but Alabama has a murder rate of 15 per hundred thousand. Do we dare entertain the notion that education, thus a higher degree of sophistication, or a better understanding of risk/gain ratio, has anything to do with those statistics?..........but wait a moment......New York is far less religious than Alabama, or Mississippi, or Arkansas, or Louisiana. Could that play into the murder rates too?
As rates go, 0,005 is reasonably comparable to 0,015.

Let us not get diverted by that observation too much though, because you do pose a very interesting question. I think that to say that religion specifically is a "deciding" (Or, significantly co-deciding) variable here would be "just off-center." ("Not-wrong," as I usually put it) I think it comes down to held values, rather than the professed/institutional(-ised) ones. Why is a life in Alabama statistically "cheaper" than one in New York, which is in turn statistically cheaper than one in Torsken, a fishing "middle of nowhere" here in Norway?

QuoteDisclaimer:  Alabama, perennially, has the the most successful college football teams in America. Mississippi and Louisiana are not far behind in college football power..........one must wonder about the priorities.
It's nice to not be the only one to disclaim. :smilenod:
Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on July 25, 2013, 08:18:52 PM
In Asmo's grey lump,
wrath and dark clouds gather force.
Luxembourg trembles.

Recusant

#232
Correlation and perhaps some causation.  ;)






First, get their Cyrus back into office, then on to the Seven Mountains . . .

For reference: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (PDF) | Heritage Foundation

"Decoding Project 2025's Christian Nationalist language" | Salon

QuoteIn George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, characters engage in doublespeak, a way of distorting language to obscure its true meaning. Christian Nationalists have mastered their own doublespeak. Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation's manifesto for transforming our government into a Christo-fascist regime.

Christian Nationalists are taught to be "in the world but not of it." This means they are called to live alongside the world's non-Christians, but they are called to remain separate and apart from secular behavior and influence. One way they attempt to remain apart is with language. They speak in a language I call Evangelicalese. I grew up in the world of Christian Nationalism. Evangelicalese was my second language.

By studying Project 2025 and the specific language Christian Nationalist politicians use, we can translate the words they say into what those words really mean to them. A Christian Nationalist's use of a word or phrase may mean something very different to someone outside their community. It is vital to grasp what Christian Nationalists mean when they say things. because they deploy Evangelicalese to hide extreme positions in plain sight.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading Project 2025.

On pornography

QuotePornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
- Project 2025, [page 5 of PDF]

To many media outlets, this was a throwaway paragraph. Why would anyone make more of it? The average American understands pornography generally includes mediums like adult websites, adult films, fetish sites and similar.

To a Christian Nationalist, pornography means those things, but it also means a lot more.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has called homosexuality pornography. Oklahoma state representative Tom Woods has deemed transgenderism to be filth, a stand-in word for pornography. A Florida school pulled images of Michelangelo's David because parents considered it to be pornographic.

Is an artist who paints a nude artwork a pornographer? What about a romance author who writes racy love scenes? Or a columnist like Dan Savage who pens sex advice? A Christian Nationalist's definition of pornography goes far beyond what the rest of the country considers to be porn. This difference matters because they intend to imprison creators and consumers of anything they consider to be pornography.

[. . .]

Orwell understood that the manipulation of language is an insidious tool of autocracies. Christian Nationalists have been working for decades to pollute the discourse as a means to power and control. The future of American democracy depends upon understanding what Christian Nationalists mean when they say things. It is vital to drill down into their doublespeak, or we may find ourselves living in a dystopian reality created in the image of their Christian Nationalist faith.

[Link to full article.]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Dark Lightning

^ Those people have issues, and I hope that they don't prevail.

Tank

If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

Icarus


Recusant

:lol:

This thread is only four years old--I've been watching the progress of the Dominionists for at least a decade, but . . .

"It's a Good Time to Start Worrying About Christian Nationalism" | Mother Jones

QuoteIn response to rising concern among liberals and others about the spread of Christian nationalism, conservative voices have been pressing a counterattack, claiming all this fretting is just lefty hysteria from secularists who are not willing to acknowledge the role of Christianity in American society and who want to brand all politically active Christians as extremists. Last year, the far-right Heritage Foundation published an article declaring that Christian nationalism is a term "mostly used as a smear against conservative Christians who defend the role of religion in American public life" and that the "lack of standard definition allows critics to bundle evils like white supremacy and racism with standard conservative views on marriage, family, and politics." More recently, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, addressing liberal unease, wrote, "Today's religious conservatives are mostly just normal American Christians doing normal American Christian politics, not foot soldiers of incipient theocracy." He added, "It's not clear to me that secular liberals should really fear Christian nationalism more today than in 2000 or 1980."

Really?

By now, you've heard of Project 2025, the enterprise established by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing outfits to both set a radical-right agenda for a possible second Trump term and recruit Dear Leader loyalists for government posts in that administration. As I've noted, this venture has cooked up plans and measures with an authoritarian bent. It also has been preparing to inject Christian nationalist ideas into a Trump 2.0 presidency. One example from the Project 2025 handbook: "maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family." That does sounds a bit Gilead-ish.

The anti-anti-Christian nationalists' effort to cast libs as the-sky-is-falling worrywarts is either naive or a purposeful effort to deflect attention from this threat to civil society. And though it usually is best to avoid dependence on one data point, allow me to zero in on a single tweet that appeared recently to highlight the danger.

Following President Joe Biden's recent State of the Union speech, William E. Wolfe, a midlevel official at the Pentagon and the State Department during the Trump administration and a Christian nationalism advocate, tweeted out his response. Here it is in full:

QuoteMy response to the #SOTU:

We need to see the deeper spiritual realities at play. This ain't just a political fight, it's a spiritual war. Heaven and Hell are real. Demons exist.

And there are two main demons being worshipped in America right now:

1) Molech, who demands child sacrifice (abortion)

2) Baphomet, whose demonic goat-like representation is gender-bending (LGBTQIA+) The "Equality Act" and "Reproductive Rights" aren't just "policies" that the radical Left/Democrats support

 They are sacraments, acts of worship to their demon gods

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12 

It's time for Christians to call on America to repent of our idol worship of demons and return to the One True Living God and His Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ

Maybe God raise up more idol smashers for our days yet.

This tweet illustrates a basic component of Christian nationalism: spiritual warfare. That's the notion that all that transpires in our world is a manifestation of the mammoth and eternal clash between God and Satan. The tussle over abortion is not an argument between fellow citizens with conflicting views on bodily autonomy or the question of when life begins; it is a battle between Jesus and Lucifer. Consequently, those who support reproductive freedom are demons or, at the least, in league with or controlled by demons.

[. . .]

Now why should we care about the radical view of this one fellow? Wolfe is a close associate of Russell Vought, who was budget director for the Trump White House and now is president of the Center for Renewing America, one of the right-wing organizations behind Project 2025. As Politico recently reported, "Vought's beliefs over time have been informed by his relationship with Wolfe. The two spent time together at Heritage Action, a conservative policy advocacy group. And Vought has praised their yearslong partnership. 'I'm proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism,' he posted on X, then Twitter, in January 2023."

Wolfe, who is now the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership (which battles liberalism within the Southern Baptist Convention) and who has advocated ending sex education in schools, surrogacy, and no-fault divorce, is far from a rando. He's intimately tied to the fellow who is the architect of the next possible Trump administration and who has been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff for Trump.

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Icarus

The Southern Baptist Convention annual census reported 241,000 fewer members and 292 fewer churches in  2023 than in 2022.  Not a serious decline because there were 49,906 SB churches and 12.9 million members in 2023. Down by 3.3 million since its peak in 2006.

The Methodist church is not nearly as uptight as the Baptist counterpart but some of them are conflicted. . There remain a lot of them that use strict interpretations of their bible. Over the last two years the Church has seen about 40%  withdraw from membership in the main conference.  The arguments are because the separating ones tend to recognize LGBT people as worthy church members.  The hard shell segment of that faith will have no part of it.






Recusant

#238
Oh yeah it's time for another installment of "Appeal to Heaven" ~or~ "The Plausibly Deniable Banner."  It's been mentioned previously in this thread, and now has another appearance in the political headlines of the US.

Samuel Alito, one of the vociferously right wing Catholic justices on the US Supreme Court, has been trolling the secularists and their fellow travellers with his choices in vexillary expression. That is, flying the US national flag upside down at his house in Virginia in apparent support for the mob who stormed the Capitol Building. Also, flying the "Pine Tree" flag at his other house, in New Jersey.

It's been the case for several years now-- There is a logical inference evoked when a known Christian zealot flies that flag, which is that they believe in Dominionism regardless of whether they call it that. The United States has always been a Christian Nation, and its laws should better reflect that fact (etc.). The article gives a synopsis of how this came about.

Former vice president to Trump, Mike Pence, who sounds like a Dominionist (he's repeatedly expressed Dominionist sentiments), says that the flag symbolizes "our proud heritage of Faith and Freedom," and therefore "every American should be proud to fly it."  A near perfect example of Pence's way of signifying.

The thing is, the majority of citizens of the US do not want to live in a right wing Christian theocracy. The Dominionists would prefer not to admit that but they know it's true.

For now, apparently a number of public figures who want to maintain plausible deniability in regard to their Dominionist sympathies while still signalling those same sympathies by flying the "Appeal to Heaven" flag have chosen a party line. "I'm just a patriotic American who thinks George Washington was a great man."

"A Benign 18th-Century Foam Finger" | Slate

QuoteWhen the New York Times reported last week that Samuel Alito, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, had been flying an "Appeal to Heaven" flag at his vacation home on the New Jersey shore last summer, the legal world was confronted with yet another classic case of how to deal with the current warring textual methodologies for interpreting the law. One could either "read" this obscure-to-some pine-tree flag in the way the New York Times and its experts did—as a signifier of insurgent Christian nationalism. Or you could read it as a kind of benign 18th-century foam finger: "Gooooo George Washington!"

In the week since, most defenders of the flag have doubled down on the foam-finger defense. In much the same way they claim that the right to bear arms is codified in the Second Amendment and has not acquired any new popular understanding since ratification, they urge that the Appeal to Heaven flag means only what it meant to the founders, because history ended on that day. Welcome to the world of flag originalism, in which the only winning answer is ... 1775!

Most commentators understand that flags, like words, have changing meanings over time. "Until about a decade ago," notes the Times, "the Appeal to Heaven flag was mostly a historical relic." That meaning shifted fairly recently, when it was "revived to represent a theological vision of what the United States should be and how it should be governed," according to Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies.

Per the Times, Dutch Sheets, a right-wing Christian author and speaker, and a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, rediscovered the almost forgotten flag in 2013 "and made it the symbol of his ambitions to steep the country and the government in Christianity." As Sheets laid it out in his 2015 book: "Rally to the flag ... God has resurrected it for such a time as this. Wave it outwardly: wear it inwardly." Sheets has since made it his business to present the flag to people like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and others. When Trump lost in 2020, Sheets and "a team of others formed an instant, ad hoc religious arm of the 'Stop the Steal' campaign, blitzing swing state megachurches, broadcasting the services at each stop and drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers." At that moment, one might contend, were one being truthful, the flag took on a new, let's call it "evolving" meaning. And of course on Jan. 6, the Appeal to Heaven flags were everywhere. We know this because the Times has photos. As do others.

This suggests that a clear look at rather recent history reflects precisely what this flag means. But that assumes recent history holds value to you. The problem is that there is a second interpretive methodology being deployed to read the Appeal to Heaven flag. And, surprise! It's originalism. Mike Johnson, for instance, hung it at his office last fall shortly after becoming speaker of the House. A spokesman for Johnson explained, amid the outcry, that Johnson "has long appreciated the rich history of the flag, as it was first used by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War." Johnson himself told The Associated Press that he did not know the flag had come to represent the "Stop the Steal" movement. "Never heard that before," he said, because mumble, mumble, George-Washington-and-the-Sound-of-History roaring in his ears. Instead, as Johnson then explained, "I have always used that flag for as long as I can remember, because I was so enamored with the fact that Washington used it." Originalism Translator: Let's all agree to ignore the contemporary meaning of this flag in favor of broad, outlandish claims that the centuries-old meaning is the only reasonable one.

[Continues . . .]

"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Icarus

 :felix:  My nation has some serious problems wrought by millions who know no better.