LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Rigorous Intuition talks about "Heavenly Deception" in this interesting post:

There was a thoughtful and rather uncomfortable piece by Bill Moyers that appeared a couple of weeks ago, one I'm sure he never expected to write, entitled "There is No Tomorrow":

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
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I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.... The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 -- just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

I think Moyers misses something important here, but I can't fault him. When the lights are going out, it's hardest to see the darkest things. And especially hard for someone like Moyers, who's accustomed to reading events by the light of liberal Reason. But while Bush's evangelical base is undoubtedly, for the most part, sincere in its convictions, I believe the Bush White House is no more Christian than it is genuinely conservative. Which is to say, not at all. And the same, I suspect, goes for many of the religious leaders who stump for an agenda which seems cribbed from a comic book version of the Book of Revelations.

In other words, the top-down expressions of apocalyptic, fundamentalist faith represent a screen theology, to deceive the sincerely devout - for instance, that Bush is a "godly man" who holds power by the "will of God" in these "Last Days" - and to mask the true hearts and intentions of the gangster elite. At best, they are hypocrites. And if they are worse than that, then they are much worse.

Many of America's conservative Christians may be surprised to learn their Christian Right isn't so Christian anymore. Over the past 15 years, it's been largely bought, borrowed, compromised and blackmailed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And what Moon represents is yet another hub in the fascist/intelligence/criminal nexus of money laundering, drug trafficking and arms dealing we frequently see behind the thinning veil of America.

In my last post I speculated that Moon may have dangled unsavoury details of the White House call boy scandal over the head of George HW Bush in order to gain influence. It's certainly true that, just a few years before, Moon was either an embarrassment or a pariah to Republicans and evangelicals alike. (That was when they were merely alike, and not, effectively, one and the same.) In 1978, Jerry Falwell told Esquire that "Reverend Sun Myung Moon is like the plague: he exploits boys and girls, and he should be exported [sic]." Then, in 1994, one of Moon's many front organizations gifted Falwell's Liberty Baptist University $3.5 million, and otherwise forgave tens of millions of dollars in debt. Falwell's college was saved, by Moon, and surprise: Falwell changed his tune.

The writer goes on to detail Moon's influence in the Republican party, and other interesting things, including a report about a service that mixed military and religious imagery in a very disturbing way.

This passage got my attention:

And speaking of mind control, survivor Kathleen Sullivan told the late Jim Keith in his book Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness, that she heard of plans to use Christian evangelists to push belief in the "tribulation" and the "Last Days" as one means of achieving social mastery.

That would sound like a flight of fantasy, if only this were a different world.

That is a subject that I am also exploring- mass mind-control tactics, meme planting, and apocalyptic imagery to 'soften up' the populace for something really nasty.