LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY raven_oreilly) AKA: "The Unites States was founded on Christianity and here are all the reasons proving it"

I got this at work from one of my co-workers, who is a Christian. I think she means well, but doesn't understand the scope of this email. LJ Cut because it's long and I wasn't going to go through the tedious process of putting in all the photos the email includes. lol I also edited it to be more reader friendly. There's no evidence that I can tell from the email who put it together. With the way email forwards are, it's probably impossible to tell.

Needless to say, I passed it on to a few friends who might find this interesting and not the kind that would forward it around because they believe in it and then deleted it, after making a copy to post here. 

My favorite part is underlined and bolded there at the end. Somehow I don't think Jesus would agree with that.

Anyone want to make our own version to forward around as a rebuttle? *evilgrin* 

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY azzy23)

This is very long, but I would appreciate any and all input. A friend and co-worker of mine received the below letter from her 13 year old daughter's school. My friend is an atheist, and is raising her child as an atheist.

Re: HB3678 - Religious Viewpoint Antidiscrimination Act

( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The Christian Science Monitor takes up the ongoing investigation of religious coercion in the US Military.

At Speicher base in Iraq, US Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.

Months earlier, Hall charges, he had been publicly berated by a staff sergeant for not agreeing to join in a Thanksgiving Day prayer.

On Sept. 17, the soldier and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed suit against Army Maj. Freddy Welborn and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, charging violations of Hall's constitutional rights, including being forced to submit to a religious test to qualify as a soldier.

The MRFF plans more lawsuits in coming weeks, says Michael "Mikey" Weinstein, who founded the military watchdog group in 2005. The aim is "to show there is a pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense."

For Mr. Weinstein – a former Air Force judge advocate and assistant counsel in the Reagan White House – more is involved than isolated cases of discrimination. He charges that several incidents in recent years – and more than 5,000 complaints his group has received from active-duty and retired military personnel – point to a growing willingness inside the military to support a particular brand of Christianity and to permit improper evangelizing in the ranks. More than 95 percent of those complaints come from other Christians, he says.

It's an interesting thing, seeing something that I have been personally writing about and investigating for over two decades finally come to light. When a publication like the "Christian Science Monitor" takes up the subject, it is truly serious.

The irony was that I started my own studies of coercive religious practices while I was enlisted in the USAF 27 years ago. A roommate who could not abide my having 'occult' books and who took it upon herself to burn some of them- including a rare Franz Bardon book that I haven't yet replaced- was the catalyst for me to start learning why people did things like that. After reading "Holy Terror" and dozens of other books, and talking to many people, I had a grasp on it for the most part.

Creating this community was meant to help me answer other remaining questions on this subject, which I must say, has been a greater success than I've ever dreamed.

An earlier poster asked about the purpose of 'Dark Christianity'. Its purpose is to reveal political ambition wrapped in the false flag of religion, and to teach people how to spot it, and if they can, counter it. Theocracies are only good for those who lead them. Everyone else is subject to their interpretation of Scripture and 'God's Will'.

The infiltration of our armed forces by hard-core religious people is alarming, but predictable. What better captive audience can such people have than wartime military members? Feed them some scripture and some rapture ravings, and then send them out to shoot at 'Hadjis'- after all, their god is a mere idol, right? Get them while they're young and idealistic, get them battle hardened, and maybe they'll lead the assault on our own country, shooting at 'libruls' and 'lukewarm' people instead.

Not a pretty picture.

...namely, that dominionism and "Christian Nationalism" have their heart in the neopente movement, and it is not restricted to the US.

According to one of the first worldwide polls on politics in pentecostal churches conducted by the Pew Research Forum, we have some of the first views on how widespread neopente movements--and the "Joel's Army" flavour of dominionism--may be.

( Pew's survey...and the implications for how widespread dominionism and dominion theology really are in neopente churches in general )

For those with the stamina to do so, the entire 233 page report is online; a 131 page report on the survey results alone is also available. The latter is particularly interesting, as it indicates--among other things--that "Charismatic Mormon" and "Charismatic Jehovah's Witness" groups (meant as steeplejacking efforts in these two denominations) may in fact exist as well--which shouldn't be too surprising, seeing as some of the "Joel's Army" folks are promoting "Messianic Moslems".

The 131 page document *does* confirm that a majority were in fact from the "Assemblies family" of neopente churches; roughly thirty percent of the "pentecostals" in the US were from various Church of God groups (which split early from the pentecostal movement, around the same time the Assemblies did) whilst the rest were all Assemblies, Assemblies daughters, and a few "oneness Pentes". The results also confirm problems with steeplejacking and "cuckoo churches" (in the US) in Episcopalian, Baptist, and Roman Catholic congregations (where practically all the "charismatics" came from that were not from neopente "nondenominational" churches).

The patterns are even more stark where pretty much the entire "revivalist" movement constitutes Assemblies and Assemblies-daughter churches (such as in Brazil and Guatemala); in these countries, a pattern of steeplejacking and "sheep-stealing" from Catholic churches emerges. Guatemala has already made the shift to "Assemblies daughters" having most of the neopente population; Kenya (which actually has two separate Assemblies churches--an international one and a Kenyan-based one) is in the process of transition; Nigeria's dominionist movement is almost entirely comprised of native neopente "Assemblies daughters". Steeplejacking patterns vary by country--South Africa, for instance, is apparently having steeplejacking issues with Dutch Reformed churches, and India still has Catholicism largely targeted for steeplejacking as well as the Syrian Orthodox Church.

The South Korean pattern is especially apparent in showing the general "bad behaviour" of Assemblies churches in steeplejacking; pretty much the "traditional pentecostal" movement IS the Assemblies of God (and in fact one particular Assemblies church--Yoido Full Gospel, the world's largest megachurch and effectively the world headquarters of the Assemblies throughout most of the 1990s), but South Korea shows quite possibly the highest percentage of steeplejacked churches despite a relatively low population of neopentes total--a measurable number of Catholic churches with "cuckoo congregations", again, but also extremely aggressive steeplejacking and "cuckoo church" planting in Korean Presbyterian churches (where in at least one denomination, almost 40 percent of the members were neopentes of some sort).

And--disturbingly--very large majorities of neopentes in the US stated they would choose religion over country (83 percent of pentes, 67 percent of "charismatics"); this should be of special note to everyone in light of an increasing body of evidence indicating a full-scale steeplejacking of the United States military.