Public Stoning: Not Just for the Taliban Anymore
POSTED BY: misbehaven
UPDATED: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 16:55
VIEWED: 5383
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I came across this article on alternet.org, and think it does a good job of illustrating the potential dangers of religious fundamentalism. As an Atheist and a teacher, I found some sections of this article to be particularly disturbing. For some time now, I've thought of Christian fundamentalists as being simply comical. I think I'm going to have to revisit that opinion. These people have gone from ridiculous to dangerous.
I've only included excerpts from the article, but there's a link at the top of the story, which you can use to access the article in its entirety.
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Public Stoning: Not Just for the Taliban Anymore
By John Sugg, Church and State
Posted on August 15, 2006, Printed on August 21, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/40318/
Two really devilish guys materialized in Toccoa, Ga., last month to harangue 600 true believers on the gospel of a thoroughly theocratic America. Along with lesser lights of the religious far right who spoke at American Vision's "Worldview Super Conference 2006," Herb Titus and Gary North called for nothing short of the overthrow of the United States of America.
Titus and North aren't household names. But Titus, former dean of TV preacher Pat Robertson's Regent University law school, has led the legal battle to plant the Ten Commandants in county courthouses across the nation. North, an apostle of the creed called Christian Reconstructionism, is one of the most influential elders of American fundamentalism.
"I don't want to capture their (mainstream Americans') system. I want to replace it," fumed North to a cheering audience. North has called for the stoning of gays and nonbelievers (rocks are cheap and plentiful, he has observed). Both friends and foes label him "Scary Gary."
Are we in danger of an American Taliban? Probably not today. But Alabama's "Ten Commandments Judge" Roy Moore is aligned with this congregation, and one-third of Alabama Republicans who voted in the June primary supported him. When you see the South Dakota legislature outlaw abortions, the Reconstructionist agenda is at work. The movement's greatest success is in Christian home schooling, where many, if not most, of the textbooks are Reconstructionist-authored tomes.
Moreover, the Reconstructionists are the folks behind attacks on science and public education. They're allied with proselytizers who have tried to convert Air Force cadets -- future pilots with fingers on nuclear triggers -- into religious zealots. Like the communists of the 1930s, they exert tremendous stealth political gravity, drawing many sympathizers in their wake, and their friends now dominate the Republican Party in many states.
A Harvard-bred lawyer whose most famous client is Alabama's Judge Moore, Titus told the Toccoa gathering that the Second Amendment envisions the assassination of "tyrants;" that's why we have guns. Tyranny, of course, is subjective to these folks. Their imposition of a theocratic state would not, by their standards, be tyranny. Public schools, on the other hand, to them are tyrannical.
Hosting the "Creation to Revelation... Connecting the Dots" event was a Powder Springs, Ga., publishing house, American Vision, whose pontiff is Gary DeMar. The outfit touts the antebellum South as a righteous society and favors the reintroduction of some forms of slavery (it's sanctioned in the Bible, Reconstructionists say) -- which may explain the blindingly monochrome audience at the gathering.
DeMar christened the gathering with invective against science.
"Evolution is as religious as Christianity," he said, a claim that certainly must amaze 99.99 percent of the scientific community. Science is irrelevant to these folks.
Everything they need to know about the universe and the origin of man is in the first two chapters of Genesis. They know the answer before any question is asked. DeMar's spin is what he calls a clash of "worldviews." According to DeMar and his speakers, God sanctions only their worldview. And that worldview is
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As one of your former students, I hope you put more time into the class room as apposed to this shit.*kidding of course*
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Misbehaven- "I don't mean to alarm anyone, but..."
Quote:forums.livingwithstyle.com/t313251-atheists-most-untrustworthy-people.html
Americans find atheists to be one of the most untrustworthy brands of people around. Just to get an idea, here are the answers from a 2005 poll that asked whether “your overall opinion of [the group] is very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable?”
Group
Very favorable (%)
Catholics 24
Jews 23
Evangelical Christians 17
Muslim Americans 9
Atheists, that is, people who don’t believe in God 7
---------------------------------
Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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Bet Pagans scored lower 
More animations available at http://desktophippie.googlepages.com
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I've seen polls like this before. I even saw one where Christian parents said they would find it more preferable for their children to marry a Satanist than to marry an Atheist. I guess the logic being that if you believe in Satan, then you believe in God. So what, they might still be able to save them? I also find it fascinating that so many people think if you're an Atheist, then you're somehow lacking in morals and ethics. It's a notion that's particularly amusing to me, when you think of all the horrific things people do in the name of their religions.
"The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation."
-Bertrand Russell
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Damn. Now I don't have Roy Moore to point to and laugh at when I meet folks from Alabama. 
People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy. - Joss
" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "
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Gotta say, I applaud MISBEHAVEN for pointing out these things about the Far Right Christian fringe... Known about them for awhile. Scary is not the half of it. Only shows how narrow-mindedness, fear and ignorance can warp the follower of ANY belief system -- and let's not forget the atheists in Russia and China and elsewhere who have ably added to the death toll perpertrated by fanatical and not-so fanatical religious types throughout history. And it amazes me how the Aryan-nations types don't get the same level of fear quotient as Muslims, when all those armored car heists in the Pacific Northwest that make page 56 in the papers are often the source of Christian white supremacist fund-raising efforts. And that's not even bringing up their whole Impending race-war idea & overthrow of the Zionist Occupation Govt thang.
On the subject of whether you believe in God or not, I've found that many atheists / agnostics reject God based primarily on the reaction they have to (usually) Christian history. I know cuz I was one of 'em for a good while growing up. But if people can examine the true teachings of Islam with an open mind they are almost always astonished at how rational, humanistic (as in pertaining to the welfare of human beings, not existentialism), scientific and spiritual it really is. Course, it helps to study the RIGHT presentation of Islam, and therein I'm biased, cuz if I'd studied Islam from the Wahhabi (Saudi) perspective or the Taliban or similar ignorant yahoo corruptions of Islam, I would not be a Muslim today. Thankfully I studied Ahmadiyyat Islam first, and everything made sense. And from someone who was extremely anti-organized religion, that's saying a lot.
As for the whole "Our Founding Fathers were Christians" line, that just cracks me up every time. I always tell such people to go look up the term "Jeffersonian Bible" on Google and see what you get, or read Thomas Paine's quote about how "Any belief that shocks the mind of a child [referring to the innocent murder of Jesus (the literal Son of God AND also 100% God incarnate in the flesh) as atonement for the sins of mankind] cannot be true." Paraphrased, but basically that's it. The Founding Fathers were no more right wing fundamentalist Christians than regular Christians are represented by the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Metzger, Butler or Scary Gary and his fanatical crowd.
Jus 'nother Browncoat opinion here...
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Quote:
Originally posted by MAGhaffar:
and let's not forget the atheists in Russia and China and elsewhere who have ably added to the death toll perpertrated by fanatical and not-so fanatical religious types throughout history
That's all too true, but it's important to make the distinction that these nations were/are following a Communist ideology that, in my opinion, was the motivation for so much of the horrors they visited/visit on others, not their Atheism. They were/are not the secular humanists that many Atheists, such as myself, identify themselves as being.
Quote:
As for the whole "Our Founding Fathers were Christians" line, that just cracks me up every time. I always tell such people to go look up the term "Jeffersonian Bible" on Google and see what you get, or read Thomas Paine's quote about how "Any belief that shocks the mind of a child [referring to the innocent murder of Jesus (the literal Son of God AND also 100% God incarnate in the flesh) as atonement for the sins of mankind] cannot be true." Paraphrased, but basically that's it. The Founding Fathers were no more right wing fundamentalist Christians than regular Christians are represented by the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Metzger, Butler or Scary Gary and his fanatical crowd.
I'm in complete agreement with you here. Below are just a few of the quotes of our "Non-Christian Founding Fathers." Even the ones who believe in God wouldn't be considered Christian by the standards of so many contemporary Christians.
The early Presidents and patriots were generally Deists or Unitarians, believing in some form of impersonal Providence but rejecting the divinity of Jesus and the much of the Old and New testaments.
Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestos encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the war of Independence:
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of...Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."
From:
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, pp. 8,9 (Republished 1984, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY)
George Washington, the first president of the United States, never declared himself a Christian according to contemporary reports or in any of his voluminous correspondence. Washington Championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray (a universalist who denied the existence of hell) was invited to become an army chaplain, the other chaplains petitioned Washington for his dismissal. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washinton uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.
From:
George Washington and Religion by Paul F. Boller Jr., pp. 16, 87, 88, 108, 113, 121, 127 (1963, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, TX)
John Adams, the country's second president, was drawn to the study of law but faced pressure from his father to become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the lawyers 'noble and gallant achievments" but among the clergy, the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces". Late in life he wrote: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"
It was during Adam's administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
From:
The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw, pp. 17 (1976, North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC) Quoting a letter by JA to Charles Cushing Oct 19, 1756, and John Adams, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by James Peabody, p. 403 (1973, Newsweek, New York NY) Quoting letter by JA to Jefferson April 19, 1817, and in reference to
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RE: MISBEHAVEN'S list of Founding Father quotes...
Much appreciated, MSBHVN... I will copy and paste these babies in e-mails to some friends I know who occasionally raise that old "Our Founding Fathers were fundamentalist Christians" line. Thanks for the research work. Ignorance is bliss... until the truth crops up and kicks it in the head. Then it's time to crawl away like a bitty little punk...
- Ghaffar
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You're most welcome GHAFFAR, and thanks for helpin' to set the record straight.
"The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation."
-Bertrand Russell
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