LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY meta4life)

I caught this one on The National Post (Canadian):

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist. (Read More...)

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I am trying to assemble a comprehensive lexicon of terms that are commonly used in Dominionist parlance. I am especially interested in 'End Times' and apocalyptic terms, that seem to be the focus of many of these congregations. Here are some of the words I desire definitions for:

A-millennial
Pre-millennial
Post-millennial
Dispensation
Tribulation
Pre-tribulation
Pre tribulation tribulation (yes, I heard that mentioned last week!)
Rapture
Armageddon
Apocalypse (I know what the original traditional meaning is, but it has been coopted by the Dominionists to mean something entirely different)
End-times
Heavenlies
Revelations

Any related words or terms are welcome. Since it seems that these congregations concentrate on 'end times' events, and are even actively trying to make them happen, a good solid mini-Wiki for those of us who have not gotten this instruction would be helpful. Plus, I am attempting to assemble a comprehensive lexicon for the mini-conferences on the Religious Right that I've been inspired to do because of that conference I attended.

So, dig out your para-biblical material, and help me out. If you have cites from books or websites with additional definitions on them, please include them. I want this to be as accurate and scholarly as possible.

Thanks!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dabroots)

From today's Publishers Weekly Daily newsletter:

Skipping Toward Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire by Michael Standaert, will offer both an exegesis of the book and a criticism of LaHaye's business and personal connections. "The Left Behind books are functioning not just like a Christian John Grisham but as a highly organized effective tool for evangelizing and generating a great deal of money to support a network of organizations that are doing a lot of things the booksellers wouldn't like," says Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash. "We want to be able to let independent bookstores know what is going on behind these books that they're selling." ( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Tom Paine talks about the Right's 'siege mentality'.

To hear them tell it, conservatives are always the underdog, besieged and kept down by those with the real power. The act of hanging an American flag on their porch could bring a Molotov cocktail thrown through their front window by roving gangs of thought police; a cross worn on a necklace sure to bring arrest; the ordering of a Budweiser greeted with withering contempt from the microbrew cognoscenti. The triumph of liberal totalitarianism, with the abolishment of the family and religion and free speech that all honest people hold dear, is forever around the next corner, at the bottom of a slippery slope down which we find ourselves eternally tumbling. Like end-timers assuring us that though they were wrong last year and the year before, this New Year’s Eve will surely bring Armageddon—they are slowed not a bit by being proved wrong again and again—the coming American Sodom always a result of next year’s wedge issue.

Look at some of the titles offered by Regnery, the right’s premier publishing house: Invasion Within: Overcoming the Elitists' Attack on Moral Values and the American Way; Epidemic: How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids; Mugged by the State: Outrageous Government Assaults on Ordinary People and Their Property; Outrage: How Gay Activists and Liberal Judges Are Trashing Democracy to Redefine Marriage; Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity; Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children; Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security .

The message of each is the same: Sinister, powerful liberals are attacking you, your children and everything you believe in. While good Americans lie slumbering in their complacency, the mighty liberals continue their assault, and if we don’t wake up soon it’ll be too late, as our nation tumbles into a moral abyss and the streets run red with the blood of innocents. The end is near.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY britzkrieg)

The Atlanta edition of the free weekly Creative Loafing contains a cornucopia of satire concerning the doctrine of the Rapture:

The Rapture, A Special Report: Your fun-packed guide to the end of time. Who goes, who stays, what to wear.

Rapturous Politics: There's a reason the right rejoices at a heresy
What to Wear?
How Can I Leave This Behind? Reading LaHaye's blockbusters about the Rapture
Learn more!

The first article also concisely explains the (fairly recent) origin of the Rapture idea.

Enjoy.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY britzkrieg)

Can anyone point me to an accurate, objective assessment of the origin of the Rapture doctrine? I've googled, but most of the hits are religious propaganda. Thanks.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This AlterNet article talks about the tactics of Dominionist churches.

Calvary Chapel-style Christianity is a complex system with intricate rules. Think of it as God's game.

Because certain trees are sprouting in the Middle East, the world will soon end. Because the European Union has grown to its current size, fiery death and plagues of locusts are about to descend on the planet. Because Israel established a homeland, non-believers will, in a short while, suffer agonizing horrors before being damned to an eternity of pain.

And now a word from our sponsor -- a real estate agent helping Christians find their dream homes.

This summer, I joined the rush hour in San Bernardino. Every day, descending the final hill from Los Angeles into the fastest growing region in California, I tuned into Christian radio station K-Wave. The station broadcast lessons on Christ-sanctioned financial planning as well as sermons on faith-rooted marriages. But its mission of missions was to map out, just the way the Weather Channel describes approaching storm fronts, the end of the world now bearing down upon us.

The deep voice of Pastor Chuck Smith filled my car each morning. Founder of Calvary Chapel, a "mega-church" with a publishing company, Bible colleges, and franchises in every state, Pastor Chuck inspired two followers to write the best-selling Left Behind novels about the Apocalypse. Soon obsessed with the station, I started wishing my Democratic friends in L.A. would join me in K-Wave's freeway congregation.

Each evening I returned home to find them wringing their hands over the possibility that a born-again Christian president, who laced his speeches with secret signals to fellow worshippers and considered praying his most important action before starting an unjust war, might be re-elected -- and re-elected by religious nuts so stupid they believed Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie were lovers.

As it happened, those "nuts" won the election for the president. Ill-prepared newscasters promptly relabeled them "moral voters," showing how little they understood about the new religion practiced in Calvary Chapel.

Democrats could, of course, have turned on K-Wave (or its equivalent), but even then they might not have grasped the most basic element of Calvary Chapel: It isn't guided by the outside world's concept of the Christian right's stern and unforgiving morals code.

While Calvary Chapel encourages Christians to enjoy "fellowship" with God, the doctrine it preaches is guided not by any ordinary sense of morality but by a gruesome vision of the end of the world and a set of instructions for how to deal with it.

Listening to that doctrine each morning and evening, I felt the sensations American audiences first discovering Hong Kong action flicks must have known: a fascination with the exotic combined with awe at the extreme violence it displayed. Granted, my perspective is unusual. Unlike most of my Democratic friends, I was raised in a church that practiced New Thought Christianity just up the freeway from Pastor Chuck's compound. It offered a new agey cocktail of faith, drawing heavily from Buddhism, Hinduism, and transcendentalism. Just the type of stuff Calvary Chapel abhors.

My childhood of crystals and sunshine made Calvary Chapel-style evangelism, with its emphasis on conversion and its belief in testifying to God's power, something strange and deeply mysterious. I felt like an anthropologist investigating a new culture as I listened to its broadcasts, and what I found makes me refuse to picture the organization as an army of moral voters.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

An article in Salon talks about the upcoming "Revelations" series premiering tomorrow:

Welcome to the latest nugget in a hailstorm of fundamentalist invective, from "The Passion of the Christ," to Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' bestselling "Left Behind" series, in which skeptics and agnostics are left to fight for their lives against the forces of the Antichrist (centered in Baghdad, led by the head of U.N.), while true believers are whisked away to the comfort and safety of heaven like the lucky winners on "The Apprentice," whisked off to shop for $600 Jimmy Choo sandals at Bergdorf Goodman. All of the divine signs point to the same conclusion: The rest of us, it seems, are headed to the boardroom.

But what better way for NBC to round up a full month of hand-wringing and candlelight vigils for Terri Schiavo and the pope, than by ushering in a miniseries sure to capitalize on the fear whipped up by these two deaths, not to mention more terrorist arrests, the tsunami disaster, the war in Iraq, you name it? "All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days," breathes Sister Josepha, and we believe her, because she looks like the Virgin Mary, except with cheekbones like Isabella Rossellini's. But is she talking about the latest tragedy in Baghdad, or the upcoming made-for-TV movie "Locusts"?

Like "Locusts," which airs Sunday, April 24, at 9 p.m. on CBS, surely "Revelations" is just another bit of crassly commercial entertainment to flesh out May sweeps, custom-fit though it may be for mass Bible Belt consumption. After all, Seltzer has been importing creepy Bible verse into the horror genre since he wrote the hit movie "The Omen" in 1976. As dark and foreboding as his series might be, Seltzer must have a sense of humor about it all.

"We're looking at 35 wars going on in the world, any one of which could become a flash point that would end our lives," Seltzer solemnly told a handful of reporters on a recent conference call. "And with all the geological-social-political events lining up with what the Book of Revelation says are the End of Days, it is time to start taking it seriously."

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This article talks about the very serious consequences of Dominionist rule of the government:

There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges.

In the just-concluded election cycle, as Mark Silk writes in Religion in the News,

the assiduous cultivation of religious constituencies by the Bush apparat, and the undisguised intrusion of evangelical leaders and some conservative Catholic hierarchs into the presidential campaign, demonstrated that the old rule of maintaining a decent respect for the nonpartisanship of religion can now be broken with impunity.

The result is what the Italian scholar Emilio Gentile, quoted in Silk's newsletter, calls "political religion"—religion as an instrument of political combat. On gay marriage and abortion— the most conspicuous of the "non-negotiable" items in a widely distributed Catholic voter's guide—no one should be surprised what this political religion portends. The agenda has been foreshadowed for years, ever since Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other right-wing Protestants set out to turn white evangelicals into a solid Republican voting bloc and reached out to make allies of their former antagonists, conservative Catholics.

What has been less apparent is the impact of the new political religion on environmental policy. Evangelical Christians have been divided. Some were indifferent. The majority of conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, have long hooked their view to the account in the first book of the Bible:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

There are widely varying interpretations of this text, but it is safe to say that all presume human beings have inherited the earth to be used as they see fit. For many, God's gift to Adam and Eve of "dominion" over the earth and all its creatures has been taken as the right to unlimited exploitation. But as Blaine Harden reported recently in The Washington Post, some evangelicals are beginning to "go for the green." Last October the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an "Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," affirming that "God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part." The declaration acknowledged that for the sake of clean air, clean water, and adequate resources, the government "has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation."

But even for green activists in evangelical circles, Harden wrote, "there are landmines."

Welcome to the Rapture!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY hummingwolf)

Cal Thomas takes on evangelicals who dare to address global warming.

Do evangelicals have time on their hands because they've finished the mission to "go and make disciples of all nations"? Is this not a great enough commission that "global warming" and a host of other "issues" must be added to make evangelicals contemporary and relevant?

The Rev. Rich Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, a Washington lobbying group, was quoted in The New York Times as saying, "I don't think God is going to ask us how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created."

Rev. Cizik offers no biblical citation for his view. There is no biblical expectation that a "fallen" world can, should or will be improved prior to the return of the One to whom evangelicals are supposed to owe their complete allegiance.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY hummingwolf)

Another Bill Moyers editorial, this one from The New York Review of Books.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle talks about The Rapture.

Let us consider the Rapture Index. This is a real thing prepared by serious people. If it makes you laugh, you have not gotten the memo. You probably have not read any of the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series, the best-selling books in America today.

Those Left Behind are those who did not experience the Rapture, which is an instant in time when all the truly holy people are taken directly to heaven, leaving their clothes in small neat piles behind them. The rest of the ungodly losers are left to deal with natural disasters and wars and the armies of the Antichrist, after which they die in various colorful ways while the ranks of the saved watch with compassion tempered with an understandable sense of satisfaction.

The Rapture Index, as of this writing, stands at 153. Anything over 145 is labeled by the Rapture Actuaries as "Fasten your seat belts." In other words: Repent for the End Is Near. You may see all this for yourself at RaptureReady.com, should you think I'm making it up.

The Rapture Index is based on 45 prophetic categories, things like drought, plague, floods, liberalism, beast government and mark of the beast. "Beast government" is apparently the European Union; the news that the EU is looking for a new president is seen as a sign that the end time is drawing nearer. The latest "mark of the beast" is a plan by the Antichrist that will result in said mark being implanted in the right hand or forehead of unbelievers. The relatively high number of this indicator is explained thusly: "Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio tags." There are some parts of this belief system I have not yet grasped.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ekajati)

Features > February 9, 2005
Blind Faith
By Bill Moyers



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. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The offspring of ideology and theology are not always bad but they are always blind. And that is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This essay from Rense talks about the mindset inculcated in Dominionist churches.

'I'm Ready To Die'

By Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
2-9-5

Six weeks ago, a young man sat down next to an older woman waiting for him and stated grimly, "I don't care. That's it. He can say what he wants. As for me, I'm ready to die".

Referring several times to nearby CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network), he laid a Bible on the table at the Norfolk coffee shop where I was writing a book proposal. I felt badly for him; he seemed to have an incurable disease. The woman mumbled something.

He quickly retorted, "I don't care what he said. I won't work with him." His voice was clipped as he emphasized his refusal to negotiate with a particular coworker.

The older woman sat holding her coffee, rarely even sipping it, with a hopeless-looking expression on her face. She showed no sympathy, looking at him as if she knew what he was about to say. Now I doubted that he was dying of a terminal illness.

The slender dark-haired 20-something, looked straight ahead without touching his coffee. The older lady asked quietly, "Don't you think that maybe-"

He cut her off: "Look, the end is coming. I know that and you know that. You've seen the signs. I just don't care about this guy, I don't care what he says. The end is coming very soon. None of this is going to matter." For the first time showing emotion, he added angrily, "I'm ready to die-I'm ready to go today, right now!"

I immediately recognized this as rapture talk. This young man does have an incurable disease, but it's spiritual, not physical: It's called fundamentalism (aka "millennialism"), the kind of Christianity to which Bush and his "conservative" advisers ascribe. ( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

My perusal of the news this morning (and I am not done yet...) has dug up some interesting articles. One is pretty good, one is pretty bad, and the third is downright ugly in what it predicts.

The good: The Greening of Evangelicals (Washington Post article, registration required.) An Excerpt:

Thanks to the Rev. Leroy Hedman, the parishioners at Georgetown Gospel Chapel take their baptismal waters cold. The preacher has unplugged the electricity-guzzling heater in the immersion baptism tank behind his pulpit. He has also installed energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs throughout the church and has placed water barrels beneath its gutter pipes -- using runoff to irrigate the congregation's all-organic gardens.

Such "creation care" should be at the heart of evangelical life, Hedman says, along with condemning abortion, protecting family and loving Jesus. He uses the term "creation care" because, he says, it does not annoy conservative Christians for whom the word "environmentalism" connotes liberals, secularists and Democrats.

There is growing evidence -- in polling and in public statements of church leaders -- that evangelicals are beginning to go for the green. Despite wariness toward mainstream environmental groups, a growing number of evangelicals view stewardship of the environment as a responsibility mandated by God in the Bible.

"The environment is a values issue," said the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals. "There are significant and compelling theological reasons why it should be a banner issue for the Christian right."

Even for green activists within the evangelical movement, there are landmines. One faction in the movement, called dispensationalism, argues that the return of Jesus and the end of the world are near, so it is pointless to fret about environmental degradation.

James G. Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first interior secretary, famously made this argument before Congress in 1981, saying: "God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back." The enduring appeal of End Time musings among evangelicals is reflected in the phenomenal success of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic potboilers, which have sold more than 60 million copies and are the best-selling novels in the country.

Haggard, the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, concedes that this thinking "is a problem that I do have to address regularly in talking to the common man on the street. I tell them to live your life as if Jesus is coming back tomorrow, but plan your life as if he is not coming back in your lifetime. I also tell them that the authors of the Left Behind books have life insurance policies."

This argument is apparently resonating. Green said the notion that an imminent Judgment Day absolves people of environmental responsibility is now a "fringe" belief.

Unusual weather phenomena, such as the four hurricanes that battered Florida last year and the melting of the glaciers around the world, have captured the attention of evangelicals and made many more willing to listen to scientific warnings about the dangers of global warming, Haggard said.

***

In Seattle, Hedman says that evangelicals should worry less about the moral authority of the president and more about their biblical obligation to care for Earth.

"The Earth is God's body," Hedman said in a recent sermon. "God wants us to look after it."

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY hat_lights)

There Is No Tomorrow"
By Bill Moyers
The Star Tribune
2-1-5

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.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts. ( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The BBC has an interesting encyclopedia of religious beliefs, including information about End Times beliefs.

Sunfell

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Dominionists have a habit of presenting destructive concepts in 'friendly' looking packages. Take Intelligent Design, for example. It is presented as an 'alternative' to standard science, which teaches evolution, but is actually meant to discredit science altogether and replace it with religious beliefs.

But they don't stop with ID- they also want to put a friendly face on their desire to destroy the planet to hasten Christ's return. There are many websites that look official, but are masquerades for Dominionist-driven programs that will do more harm to the environment than good. Here are some examples. ( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This article in Alternet talks about why the current administration doesn't seem to care that they're flying the US straight into the ground: Jesus is going to come and do a 'planetary makeover'!

Near the beginning of Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta's Tony Manero, frustrated that his boss thinks he should save his salary instead of spending it on a new disco shirt, cries out, "F – - the future!" To which his boss replies: "No, Tony, you can't f – - the future. The future f – -s you! It catches up with you and it f – -s you if you ain't prepared for it!" Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but America has morphed into a nation of Tony Maneros – collectively dismissing the future. And nowhere is this mindset more prevalent than at the Bush White House, which is unwavering in its determination to ignore the future.

The evidence is overwhelming. Everywhere you look, it's IOUs passed on to future generations. Record federal debt. Record foreign debt. Record budget deficits. Record trade deficits.

And this attempt to f – - the future is not limited to economics. You see the same attitude when it comes to energy policy, health care, education, Social Security and especially the environment – with the Bushies redoubling their efforts to make the world uninhabitable as fast as possible. (See their attempts to gut the Clean Air Act, gut the Clean Water Act, gut the Endangered Species Act, gut regulations limiting pollution from power plants.)

And the even bigger problem? They don't see this as a problem. In fact, it actually all may be an essential part of the plan.

If this last sentence doesn't make a wit of sense to you, then you are clearly not one of the 50 million Americans who believe in some form of End-Time philosophy, an extreme evangelical theology that embraces the idea that we are fast approaching the end of the world, at which point Jesus will return and carry all true believers – living and dead – up to heaven ("the Rapture"), leaving all nonbelievers on earth to face hellfire and damnation ("the Tribulation"). Christ and his followers will then return to a divinely refurbished earth for a thousand-year reign of peace and love.

In other words, why worry about minor little details like clean air, clean water, safe ports and the safety net when Jesus is going to give the world an "Extreme Makeover: Planet Edition" right after he finishes putting Satan in his place once and for all?

Keep in mind: This nutty notion is not a fringe belief being espoused by some street corner Jeremiah wearing a "The End Is Nigh!" sandwich board. End-Timers have repeatedly made the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic books among America's best-selling titles, with over 60 million copies sold.

And they have also spawned a mini-industry of imminent doomsday web sites like ApocalypseSoon.org and RaptureReady.com. The latter features a Rapture Index that, according to the site, acts as a "Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity" and a "prophetic speedometer" (the higher the number, the faster we're moving toward the Second Coming). For those of you keeping score, the Rapture Index is currently 152 – an off-the-chart mark of prophetic indicators.

Now I'm not saying that Bush is a delusion-driven End-Timer (although he has let it be known that God speaks to – and through – him, and he believes "in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans"). But he and his crew are certainly acting as if that's the case.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The post below about 'Jews for sale' had some interesting references. One in particular was Public Eye's collection of excellent articles about Dominionism and its offshoots.

Understanding Christian Zionism

Apocalypticism, Christian Evangelicalism, & God's War Plans

Apocalyptic Millennialism

Conspiricism

These articles do a lot to describe and explain the Dominionist mindset, and what we're up against, and why our country is in danger from these people and their beliefs, now that they are in power.