The thing is, I'm a novelist, not a political commentator; this is usually a "blog about stuff," where I'm equally likely to talk about software, junk food, gay issues, movies on DVD, celebrities, writing and editing, publishing and, of course, gay books, which is where I work. I've only recently begun to dabble (or is it babble?) in the realm of politics, and specifically US politics.
Blame the impending presidential election. Or shoot for the heart of the matter, and blame my involvement on an air-head in eye-glasses who comes from the very nice town of Wasilla, Alaska. I've been there many times; it's a lovely place with great people ... except, they have this one church. Sarah Palin's church. And this was the place where the first barrow load of sh*t hit the first fan; but said manure could land in every part of the world.
I honestly wish I had the time to devote to this. If I didn't have to work (you know, earn a living, keep a roof over my head, food on the table, the lights turned on, that kind of thing), I could easily have done the investigative journalist routine, and written the book. However, before anyone asks if Keegan plans to write it: no. Don't have the time, guys; and besides, I rather suspect that a hundred such books are being written right now.
So, let's recap what we know for sure (it's all over the Internet right now; the regular news media will catch up sooner or later), as briefly as possible and then go on to the subject of election fixing.
Sarah Palin is a member of a Wasilla church that is a part of something very big, and very nasty:
The religious background of Sarah Palin is not unrelated to her bid to take the nation’s second highest office. She herself has been extremely vague about that background. Given the details, it becomes clearer perhaps why.
Sarah Palin has spent more than two and a half decades of her life as a member of an Alaska church which is part of a fanatical Christian-named cult project that is sweeping across America. Palin comes out of the most radical stream of US Born-Again Evangelism known as ‘Joel’s Army,’ an offshoot of what is called Dominionism and sometimes also called the Latter Rain cult or Manifest Sons of God. The movement deliberately attempts to remain below the radar screen.
Sarah Palin is a product of an extreme fringe of the American Evangelical movement known variously as the Third Wave Movement, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, or as Joel's Army, a part of what is called Dominionism. Until 2002 according to their own website, Palin was a member of Wasilla Assembly of God with Senior Pastor Ed Kalnins. Online video clips of Palin speaking from the pulpit of this church are revealing. Curiously, between the time this article was begun on September 9th and the 11th, the video was removed without explanation:
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20712.htm.).
- As one researcher familiar with the history of the Third Wave Movement or Dominionism describes, ‘The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form ‘Joel’s Army’ to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.’4
The excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000.
Sarah H. Leslie, a former Christian Right leader, describes the ideology of Dominionism:
‘The Gospel of Salvation is achieved by setting up the ‘Kingdom of God’ as a literal and physical kingdom to be ‘advanced’ on Earth in the present age. Some dominionists liken the New Testament Kingdom to the Old Testament Israel in ways that justify taking up the sword, or other methods of punitive judgment, to war against enemies of their kingdom.
‘Dominionists teach that men can be coerced or compelled to enter the kingdom. They assign to the Church duties and rights that belong Scripturally only to Jesus Christ. This includes the esoteric belief that believers can ‘incarnate’ Christ and function as His body on Earth to establish His kingdom rule. An inordinate emphasis is placed on man’s efforts; the doctrine of the sovereignty of God is diminished.’
Leslie quotes from Al Dager’s Vengeance Is Ours: The Church In Dominion: ‘Dominion theology is predicated upon three basic beliefs:
- 1) Satan usurped man’s dominion over the earth through the temptation of Adam and Eve; 2) The Church is God’s instrument to take dominion back from Satan;
- 3) Jesus cannot or will not return until the Church has taken dominion by gaining control of the earth’s governmental and social institutions.’
Sarah Leslie pinpoints to the central deception behind the current spread of Dominionism among various Protestant denominations across America today:
‘Dominion theology is a heresy. As such it is rarely presented as openly as the definitions above may indicate. Outside of the Reconstructionist camp, evangelical dominionism has wrapped itself in slick packages – one piece at a time – for mass-media consumption. This has been a slow process, taking several decades. Few evangelicals would recognize the word ‘dominionism’ or know what it means. This is because other terminologies have been developed which soft-sell dominionism, concealing the full scope of the agenda. Many evangelicals (and even their more conservative counterparts, the fundamentalists) may adhere to tidbits of dominionism without recognizing the error…
‘To most effectively propagate their agenda, dominionist leaders first developed new ecclesiologies, eschatologies and soteriologies for targeted audiences along the major denominational fault lines of evangelical Christianity. Then the 1990s Promise Keepers men’s movement was used as a vehicle to ‘break down the walls’, i.e., cross denominational barriers for the purpose of exporting dominionism to the wider evangelical subculture. This strategy was so effective that it reached into the mainline Protestant denominations. Dominionists have carefully selected leaders to be trained as ‘change agents’ for ‘transformation’ (dominion) in an erudite manner that belies the media stereotype of southern-talking, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist half-wits.’
- http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10167 ... read it all. Please.
Enter Sarah Palin, spotted years ago as a prime candidate for enlistment to be an "end-time soldier in God's army." This is the church Mrs. Palin attended for 28 years; this is the church where her pastor boasts about being a witchhunter. (You can watch videos of Palin telling proudly, how the witchhunter performed the "laying on of hands" and prayed her into office. using the power of spiritual warfare. You won't need a link for the source of this: it's everywhere on the Internet. This is stuff you already know. )
She's been Governor of Alaska for just 19 months, and was chosen to be the running mate, and veep, for a president who is very likely to die in office. He's old, reportedly frail, and already has what is described as "severe skin cancer." Upon the death of President McCain, his veep will assume the office. President Palin, Commander in Chief of God's Army at the end of days.
Is this who America needs in the oval office of the White House?
She has stated that she believes the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. As a 28-year affiliate of a sect so fanatical it was declared heretical, she will have been taught its beliefs since childhood -- therefore she must also believe that "Jesus cannot or will not return until the Church has taken dominion by gaining control of the earth’s governmental and social institutions." (See above.)
What better way to set up a real, physical Kingdom of God than to get a Dominionist into the White House, enlist the "soldiers of god" by the tens of thousands, clothe them in the uniforms of the American armed forces, and then ... well, subdue the world, one way or another.
You already know how many times the USA can "make the rubble bounce" with surplus nuclear warheads. This is a statistic, not a theory. It's been a statistic for forty years or more. And ... "Dominionists teach that men can be coerced or compelled to enter the kingdom."
Right. And you though Opus Dei was way out there.
You would wonder why in any world anyone would be even considering a vote for McCain, yet the Republicans are running just about neck and neck with the Democrats. Having read the above, if you want to give yourself the scare of your life, go here:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/
These religious extremists (who could teach the ayatollahs a volume or two about dangerous fundamentalism, no matter the religious platform) are so close to the White House, it makes your blood run cold. Americans en masse are inclined to vote their way, and you wonder why. Ignorance? Stupidity? The genuine faith that the Kingdom of God is right around the corner, and they want to live in it, even if living there means slaughtering the 99% of humanity who don't measure up, according to Christian fundamental standards?
The thing is, I believe in the right of free speech and free thoughts. You know me. You know my novels! For my money, people can believe whatever they want -- I'd actually defend their right to believe in pink elephants wearing tutus dancing across these massive lawns on Pennsylvania Avenue. But -- the Dominionists? In order to bring the Kingdom of their specific God into reality, the rest of the world has to be conquered, physically, for real.
If the feather-heads who believed this were a bunch of simple-minded folks in Haiti or Burundi -- or any small country, gods help us! -- I wouldn't be concerned. They could believe God was made of green cheese for all it matters, because they couldn't do enough to hurt the rest of the planet.
But the Republicans are Americans, the leaders of the free world ... with enough nuclear warheads to bounce the rubble at least a dozen times over. They can hurt, badly, anyone who stands against them when the time comes to establish the Kingdom for real: "Dominionists teach that men can be coerced or compelled to enter the kingdom."
To this, add the hard fact that Republican America is 7.5 trillion dollars in debt to China -- a country which can expect to be destroyed utterly in the end-of-days war; and they're still borrowing. Of course they're still borrowing. What makes you think they intend, or expect, to pay back a red cent? The "end of days" could easily be started by simply picking a war with the Godless Horde.
Damnit, where's Jesus when you need him? He's supposed to stop this kind of thing, not ignite it and participate in it. At least, that's what I was taught when I was little. (Born Catholic, raised agnostic, woke up to what I, myself, believed while still a teen.)
There's a article you might like to read, but I'll include a small disclaimer here. Not that it's an article with an iffy pedigree -- it isn't. But it might be a damned "hard read" for a lot of people. It's a professional text, and fairly dense:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html -- "What Makes People Vote republican" by Joe Haidt -- who answers the puzzle of why, no matter what rational people say, how they say it, or how often they repeat it, massive numbers of Americans will always vote Republican.
This time, one hulluva lot of them are voting in sheer ignorance. You can't make me believe every Republican voter wants to nuke the world into submission and wait for Jesus to arrive. They couldn't be criminally insane in such numbers! (Could they?) A lot more are voting with way too much Heaven on their minds; the rest are voting on a knee-jerk, because they always vote this way, and they haven't (yet) bothered to read the fine print, find out who and what they're voting for this time.
The bottom line is, President McCain, and President Palin (due to slither into office about four or five months into 2009) are a whisker away from the White House. And if the vote is too close to be measured, well, now we enter the fascinating, frightening, enlightening realm of election rigging.
Ballot fixing. It appears to be common knowledge to American citizens that this can, has, and will happen, but for the rest of us, who might be less well acquainted with the dank, swampy underbelly of US politics, Go here:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/2004votefraud_ohio.html
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2553
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
Don't take it up with me -- argue with Rolling Stone magazine and the rest of them.
In this post (which I swear up and down will be my LAST political post for a long time, because I find it utterly depressing), I've nominated Sarah Palin as the likely replacement for Mr. McCain, when he answers the bugle call to glory in the sky.
However, in recent days, there's been increasing protest against Mrs. Palin, and now we see the very real chance she'll be dropped as McCain's running mate, and replaced with someone else.
However, there are two thoughts I want to leave you with before I go and grab some coffee and try to get the bloody Apocalypse out of my head, so I can get back to THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE.
One: Palin has put her foot in her mouth many, many times because she hasn't had enough time for the grooming and training needed to take a really good crack at the White House. Give her four years under the tutelage of Republican puppet masters, and she'll be suave and smooth. She'll be back. Four years or eight years will lay some extra time on her, make her look more credible as a wannabe president.
Two: drop Palin next week, and she'll certainly be replaced by another one of the Republican Dominionist "change agents." McCain will still be just as old and sick. He only picked Palin as his running mate to throw the cat among the pigeons ... a woman! A sop, or a bribe, to Mrs. Clinton's camp. Now, replace Palin with a good looking, clean-cut, Christian young man with a wife and five kids, the very model of American manhood, just out of the army, gainfully employed, church-going, with a cute little Republican mom carrying an apple pie with flags sticking out of it. Only the gender of the veep changed.
Where is it written that the midwife who birthed the Apocalypse has to be female?
Tomorrow, I swear I'm going to talk about gay books.
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1 comment:
Seriously, is SP the best the Republicans could do? Is she a better choice than all of the primary-season contenders? Wow.
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