Rick Perry’s Hardcore History of Investment in Porn

August 16, 2011 - PoliticusUSA

By Sarah Jones

Here’s the story of how Rick Perry’s name became synonymous with “Teens with Tits” in some circles. I’ve tried to make this safe for work, but if it’s not, blame Rick Perry, for such are the perils of reporting on good “Christians” like Mr James Richard Perry. If your employer has a problem with this, tell them to see Rick Perry; it’s his money trail we’re following.

Perhaps when you see Rick Perry’s bouffant pompadour, you don’t immediately think “cheerleader”, but pom-pon carrier he was, albeit for Texas A & M instead of the Bush Yale pom-pons that heralded the destruction of America’s economy. But you’re all right with pom-pons on a man. To each their own. You might not be OK with the whole Lieutenant Governor to George W Bush thing. You might not be OK with Perry’s theocratic beliefs. But truthfully, when you picture the handsome, smirking Rick Perry and his Texas down home drawl, are you thinking about pornography?

“Teens Never Say No” kind of pornography? How about “Teens with Tits”? No? How about “Bisexual Barebacking Vol. 1” or “Big Tit Brotha Lovers 6”?

Kinda makes you all warm and family values-ish.

Rick Perry, God’s Chosen to pray Texas into prosperity, invested as a private citizen in Movie Gallery corporation to the tune of between 5-10k according to his 1995 personal financial reports. Movie Gallery was, at that time, the largest distributor of porn in America, and able to sell and rent regular videos for much cheaper than the competition due to their heady porn profit. The ultra conservative American Family Association (AFA), a self-described “Christian organization promoting the biblical ethic of decency in American society with primary emphasis on TV and other media” known for “(i)nitiating, encouraging Christian Activism,” but also now an officially designated hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, begged the government to investigate Movie Gallery.

In the ensuing years, the AFA went so far as to undertake a national ad campaign to draw attention to Movie Gallery’s porn practices, and wrote the DoJ and state AG’s demanding, “DOJ and State Prosecutors throughout the country should begin immediate investigations to determine if the products and practices of Movie Gallery Video Stores violate Federal and State laws regarding distribution of obscene material. Movie Gallery is one of America’s largest retailers of hard-core sex videos. Their attempt to acquire family friendly neighborhood Hollywood Video stores across the U.S. poses a serious threat to our communities!”

The AFA has also boycotted such companies as 7-Eleven, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Airlines, American Girl, Blockbuster Video, Burger King, Calvin Klein, Carl’s Jr., Clorox, Comcast, Crest, Ford, Hallmark Cards, Kmart, Kraft Foods, S. C. Johnson & Son, Microsoft, MTV, Mary Kay, NutriSystem, Old Navy, IKEA, Sears, Pampers, Procter & Gamble, Target, Tide, Walt Disney Company, and PepsiCo with varying degrees of success.

Burt Orange Reports said it appeared as if local authorities in Texas dragged their feet responding to the cries for investigations, in spite of the fact that The Politics In Porn (note that this link from 2006 is no longer working and the domain name is now available — don’t say I never did anything for you) wrote, “Government Officials who have been given the evidence of this illegal operation are … the U.S. District attys for the Northern Districts of Alabama and Texas.”

Not only is the AFA is a core constituency of an extreme, far Christian-right candidate, but as Hrafnkell Haraldsson reported for PoliticusUSA, Perry teamed up with the AFA for his recent prayer day rally, “The Response, a Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis.” Just this March, we saw then Presidential candidacy hopefuls Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour and Mike Huckabee courting the AFA by appearing on Bryan Fisher’s radio show. So it’s puzzling that Perry invested his money in something he must have been aware violated the very core of his alleged pro-life, pro-family, pro-conservative values. However, Perry put his holdings into a blind trust in 1998, and hence, no one knows if he is still profiting off of pornography. Perhaps the AFA doesn’t care if their Presidential pick is profiting off of pornography so allegedly obscene that they demanded the DoJ investigate.

Rick Perry later passed laws to help companies like Movie Gallery avoid “frivolous” tort suits, after they were sued for allegedly violating the law by illegally distributing porn across state lines. This move was seen by some as a move to protect his investment in Movie Gallery, as he used the very word Movie Gallery used (“frivolous”) regarding the lawsuits they were fighting at the time.

Written on Jun 26, 2006, the Burnt Orange Report elaborated on Perry’s porn problem:

Coincidentally, Rick Perry used similar language when signing the tort-reform bill that limited the liability—thereby increasing profits—of companies like Movie Gallery. Perry said the bill would “remov[e] the incentive for trial lawyers to file frivolous lawsuits.” Continuing Perry said, “we will save thousands of jobs, generate millions in new revenue to the state;” only some of those jobs come at the price of young girl’s physical and psychological health.

The AFA has undertaken a nationwide campaign—advertising in USA Today and Washington Post—urging government officials to investigate Movie Gallery. Many local authorities—like the U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Texas—are allegedly dragging their feet. With Gov. Perry owning stock in Movie Gallery, his financial interests contravene the success of any such investigation….

“Titles that Gov. Perry helps bring to Texas’ shelves include Teens with Tits Vol. 1, Teen Power Vol. 4, and Teens Never Say No.

While many disagree over society’s correct policy towards pornography, Perry’s political posturing caters to pornography’s opponents. Duplicitously, Rick Perry’s supposed politics contravene the interests of his own pocketbook. There is the Governor who endorses a plan to monitor sex offenders with satellites; then there is businessman who enjoys profits by funding such titles as Bisexual Barebacking Vol. 1 and Big Tit Brotha Lovers 6. There is the proud husband and father who announced an award of $7.4 Million to the S.T.O.P. Violence Against Women Act programs; then there is the man who invested in North America’s largest pornography distributor. In the coming weeks, there will doubtlessly be the ignorant, apologetic Governor, but under that thin veneer of good hair is the cunning financier who still hides his assets in a blind trust fund.

Given that traditionally conservative states consume the most online porn, according to the Journal of Economic Perspectives (which looked at zip codes of credit cards used for online adult entertainment), we can’t assume that just because a group is against something in public they aren’t engaging in it in private. But the Dominionists like Perry and Bachmann are taking us a step down even from that perilous perch — to a place where women are expected to be subservient to the men in their life.

If you’re still slightly confused as to why the AFA isn’t calling Rick Perry out, and how conservatives can ignore such glaring hypocrisy, it’s because they worship at the altar of a political movement based on belief in authoritarianism and a sense of entitlement for “the Chosen”. Anything that Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, or Sarah Palin do is OK. God said so.

And their cult-like followers will contort themselves into a breathless internet rage in order to explain to you that none of this matters, what really matters is that the President is a Muslim Socialists Kenyan Nazi. Apparently this line of “thinking” suffices for them because they are in a cult based on belief and not real values, but also because they have bought into the meme that these special leaders are exempt from accountability for what they say. This is why you see the outrage over “gotcha” journalism from the same folks.

What kind of man are we dealing with in Rick Perry? Is he still profiting off of what the AFA calls obscene pornography? Is he still making money off of titles like “Teens with Tits”? In keeping with this line of inquiry into his purported “family values”, we note that Perry also kept on the director of the Texas Film Commission who was disciplined for sexual harassment…twice.

The Statesman reported, “Gov. Rick Perry’s outgoing director of the Texas Film Commission has been allowed to stay on the job despite being disciplined for sexual harassment in 2009 and after a subsequent investigation found similar behavior again this year.”

What disturbs me about these two facts is how well they dovetail with the Dominionists’ ideas about women being subservient to the patriarch.

The twin balls of decorative fluff known as the cheerleader’s Pom-pons aptly sum up the depth of Rick Perry’s alleged Christian family values. On one hand, we have a man invested in and profiting off of what the AFA called “obscene pornography” and a man who allowed a man twice found guilty of sexual harassment to remain in his government position. On the other hand, this same man calls himself a “family-values” Christian, and nary a peep comes from the Right to call him out.

It’s not about whether you agree with conservative values or not (but this is often how the conservatives distract people from calling their leaders out, by making it about the alleged values rather than the failure to uphold said values), but rather whether or not the candidate actually stands for what they say they stand for.

If Rick Perry doesn’t walk the talk of a conservative Christian, just what does Rick Perry stand for?

How Did Jesus Go From Being a Socialist in the New Testament to a Selfish Ayn Rand Anarcho-capitalist?

by mark karlin on Wed, 08/17/2011 

How did Jesus go from being a socialist in the New Testament to a selfish Ayn Rand anarcho-capitalist in modern-day America? After all, one of the most well-known bible verses is from Mark 10:25: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Sociologist Gregory Paul stated the paradox clearly in an August 12 Washington Post op-ed:

Many conservative Christians, mostly Protestant but also a number of Catholics, have come to believe and proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated, union busting, minimal taxes especially for wealthy investors, plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations. And many of these Christian capitalists are ardent followers of Ayn Rand, who was one of - and many of whose followers are - the most hard-line anti-Christian atheists you can get. Meanwhile many Christians who support the capitalist policies associated with social Darwinistic strenuously denounce Darwin's evolutionary science because it supposedly leads to, well, social Darwinism!

But Paul points out that the New Testament primarily promotes what would nowadays be called socialism:

But to understand just how non-capitalistic Christianity is supposed to be we turn to the first chapter after the gospels, Acts, which describes the events of the early church. Chapters 2 and 4 state that all "the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need ... No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.... There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need."

Now folks, that's outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx - who likely got the general idea from the gospels.

Paul further notes that "we have Christian creationists like Jay Richards writing books titled Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Can a stranger amalgam of opposing opinions be devised?"

In essence, the modern prosperity theologians who dominate the right wing of the Republican Party are essentially heretics. They've grafted on a post-industrial-age emphasis on the acquisition of capital and material goods to the alleged son of God, Jesus, who was himself essentially the father of socialism (as recounted in the bible).

At the next Republican debate, we would like to see a test of faith. All the candidates should be required to thread a camel through the eye of a needle.

If they can't do it, they have to shut up about Jesus, Christianity and the bible.

Now that would be refreshing.

The End Times

Thursday, June 30, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Robert C. Koehler

 

“All the evidence shows that we are nearing the end of man’s tragic experiment in independence from God.”

Wow, I thought. They get it. And suddenly I felt a burst of solidarity with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The words are from one of their tracts, which was given to me because I have this passion for talking about God — a wild glee, almost, for stepping up to The Big Serious and wrestling theology with the neighborhood proselytizers.

There are other ways to express the urgency of our situation, leaving God out of it. An eco-conscious soul might warn that the human species must reconnect with indigenous wisdom and the circle of life. But no matter. What strikes me is the growing recognition, in so many quarters, of the unsustainability of our global culture and the need for, and inevitability of, profound change.

Indeed, it’s more than mere “recognition” — it’s a primal disorientation. The culture of moneyed interests, war and techno-diversion, which is global in scope, is killing us at the same time that its media apologists, and the anonymous experts and authorities they quote, reassure us that everything is fine and under control.

I think the Christian End Times movement (the message of my Jehovah’s Witness tract), the growing buzz over the Mayan calendar prediction (we shift into a new age on Dec. 21, 2012 . . . you can even order end-of-world mugs and T-shirts) and the science-based urgency of climate-change warnings all emanate from the same rawly intuitive sense: An unprecedented planetary shift is under way, which we can aggravate and perhaps turn into Armageddon if we continue ignoring our own thoughtless contributions to the situation.

“All the evidence shows that we are nearing the end of man’s tragic experiment in independence from God.”

Here’s another way this thought gets put:

“The world’s oceans are faced with an unprecedented loss of species comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory, a major report suggests today. The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative impact of a number of severe individual stresses, ranging from climate warming and sea-water acidification, to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing.”

Thus began an article last week in the U.K.’s Independent by environment editor Michael McCarthy, on the recently issued report of a panel of leading marine scientists convened in Oxford earlier this year by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

The human contribution to oceanic dead zones is significant:

“. . . new scientific research suggests that pollutants, including flame-retardant chemicals and synthetic musks found in detergents, are being traced in the polar seas, and that these chemicals can be absorbed by tiny plastic particles in the ocean which are in turn ingested by marine creatures such as bottom-feeding fish.

“Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms — which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.”

And then there’s the Las Conchas fire, one of several wildfires now tearing across the state of New Mexico. The blaze has already forced the evacuation of thousands of people in Los Alamos, home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a vast complex housing much of the nation’s nuclear weapons research.

But not to worry. A Reuters story assures us that — what else? — everything is fine: “Explosive materials on the laboratory’s grounds are stored safely in underground bunkers made of concrete and steel, as well as earthen berms,” according to a spokesman for the lab (and not simply the lab, but the entire military-industrial status quo).

The story abandons us in a state of feel-good pseudo-security, not bothering to report the technical concerns of environmentalists, e.g.: “One (concern) is the fact that over six decades the Lab has blown up a lot of uranium and depleted uranium in dynamic high explosives experiments in the general area in front of the fire,” according to an update from New Mexico’s Nuclear Watch blog, quoted by former lab scientist Subhankar Banerjee. “We don’t know to what extent the shrapnel or debris has been cleaned up and could possibly be aerosolized.”

Speaking of the entire nuclear industry — both the weapons- and energy-production components — which is reeling from environmental disasters from Japan to Nebraska to New Mexico, Harvey Wasserman writes: “We know only two things for certain: Worse is yet to come, and those in charge are lying about it — at least to the extent of what they actually know, which is nowhere near enough.”

In a sense, “those in charge” is all of us. We’re in charge of our own awareness, and we can remain in denial or grope, individually and collectively, for the wisdom that will help us face, and survive, whatever is to come.

Rick Perry: Calling All Texans to Prayer!

(Cue MC Hammer--"We got to pray, just to make it today". This is a simplistic show of support for an event for which the cost of it would be better spent feeding the homeless. Rather than renting out the Reliant Stadium (an NFL stadium) for hundred of thousands of dollars and having people spend their hard-earned greenbacks traveling there, wouldn't "Jesus" rather have those people volunteer in their communities, pray together with their friends and neighbors. In a down economy this is just a silly waste of funds for a forgettable symbolic effort that would not please Jesus, as far as the description of Jesus in the bible claims. I'm not attacking Christians, just poking fun at that small number of Christians (reflected below) who believe Jesus was white and preached a diversified stick portfolio and tax breaks for the wealthy are the paths to heaven. That Jesus NEVER existed.--jef)

Is There a Place for Atheists in Alcoholics Anonymous?

(I've heard this time and again from my fellow atheist/agnostic friends regarding AA and NA. The AA/NA line is "You must have faith in a higher power" or else you're screwed. That's just some ol' bullshit.--jef)

++++++++

A long-simmering feud is spreading around the world, after one AA establishment voted to expel two atheist/agnostic groups in Canada. 

The Fix / By Jesse Beach

Was Alcoholics Anonymous meant to be a mosaic or a melting pot? Does its culture embrace one and all who have a desire to stop drinking, or is the intention to blend everyone into a single AA homogeneity? These were the questions raised by a recent furor in Toronto, where two AA meetings were banished from the city’s official directory for catering to atheist and agnostic members with an adapted version of the 12 Steps. Not surprisingly, given AA's reach, the controversy has spread around the world.

"Just tell me what to do ’cause I hurt so bad," was David R.’s attitude when he first joined AA. “I really wanted to stop drinking and I was truly ready to ‘go to any length’—and I did.” The trouble was that God “as we understood Him” meant, in David’s case, no God at all. “Because I am a people-pleaser, I faked it with the theistic elements, half-knowing I was faking," he says. "I was afraid that I would drink if I didn't. I am grateful to be sober. I couldn't have done it without AA: the meetings, the support of some understanding people and activities not related to drinking.”

You sense a “but” coming next. Says David: “There are many concepts that didn't seem right, helpful or logical to me, right from the beginning. They didn't fit my experience of how I got sober and was staying sober.” Having worked through, and taken others through, the 12 Steps, he heard about an agnostic group—one of Toronto’s first “Freethinker” meetings, called Beyond Belief—and checked it out.

“Because I had been so compliant in traditional AA meetings,” he says, “I found it difficult to hear people complain about ‘the God thing’ and how they had felt excluded at other meetings. I was uncomfortable when people questioned AA dogma, or were firmly atheist. I went through a period of not feeling at home in either Beyond Belief or traditional meetings; I called myself ‘agnostic’ in the strict sense of ‘not knowing and not possible to know.’”

Gradually, he had an attitude adjustment. “The main thing I got from Beyond Belief at first was the concept that AA didn't know everything, that there were people with very long-term sobriety who questioned core dogma and didn't get drunk or struck by lightning. Eventually that realization became very liberating.”

As a Secular Humanist, David is now an active member of Beyond Belief and recently served as group secretary, responsible for the AA literature supply, making weekly announcements and handling the group’s monthly commitment to take the AA message into a detox at a local hospital. His initial hope that the agnostic position can strengthen the will to sobriety, rather than threaten it, has grown into a conviction. “The purpose of rational thought and skepticism is not to comfort, but to uncover the truth," he says. "My sobriety feels safer the more based on truth and rational thinking it becomes.”

David was part of a growth surge for Beyond Belief, which started with a dozen members who agreed on a format of ideas posted by some of the other North American and European agnostic groups that have been welcoming AA members since 1975. Every meeting started with this preamble:

"This group of AA attempts to maintain a tradition of free expression, and conduct a meeting where alcoholics may feel free to express any doubts or disbeliefs they may have, and to share their own personal form of spiritual experience, their search for it, or their rejection of it. We do not endorse or oppose any form of religion or atheism. Our only wish is to assure suffering alcoholics that they can find sobriety in AA without having to accept anyone else's beliefs or having to deny their own."

Beyond Belief attracted up to 50 attendees at its Thursday meetings, and added a Saturday evening Step-study. A new group, We Agnostics, also started on Tuesday nights. Each group had its share of 25-to-35-year sober members, living proof that AA works without God. David and his comrades also witnessed half a dozen one-year celebrations from members who had found that the new groups succeeded for them, when others had failed. Agnostic AA was working in Toronto.

Only for literalists, it wasn’t AA at all. Tradition Three—“The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking”—wasn’t their focus. It was “God as we understand Him.” They took this to mean that a primary requirement for being classified as an AA group was a belief in some sort of God. No God? No AA.

So where does that leave Hindus, Taoists, Native Americans, Buddhists, Humanists and the many other non-monotheistic creeds in our culture? Atheists aren’t the only “No God, please” people who struggle with alcoholism.

Members from several local God-focused AAs started talking about how to put a stop to this agnostic “sect,” and got in touch with the General Service Office’s Mary Claire Lunch. She told them, “What the other AA group does is none of your group’s business. Taking another group’s inventory with regard to the Traditions is just not done. What a slippery slope that could be! You might offer to bring this observation about the other group changing the Steps to the attention of your Area Delegate.”

So Robb W., Panel 61 Delegate for Area 83, was the next to hear from the aggrieved parties. His response, a precise parsing of the fellowship's abstruse Traditions, is worth quoting in full, above all for his final sentence, which could not have been more conclusive or less ambiguous:

"I have received numerous emails and phone calls about a particular group in the GTA that is using their own version of the 12 Steps. The only rules that we have in Alcoholics Anonymous are those which we impose upon ourselves. We do not force people (or groups, districts or areas) to conform to our will. While conformity to the principles set out in our 12 Steps is suggested, it is still only a suggestion.

"That being said, Tradition Four states that ‘Each Group is autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole.’ Many things are done in AA groups, districts and areas under the banner of 'group autonomy.' This is rightly so although we need keep in mind the second half of the Tradition: ‘except in matters affecting other Groups or AA as a whole.’ It is the responsibility of the General Service Conference to preserve the integrity of the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous.

"If a group chooses to use its own interpretation of our Steps and Traditions, they should have the freedom to do so. However, this should be kept within that group for those who agree and not placed in the public domain as representing or related to Alcoholics Anonymous.

"We need always keep in mind that wherever two people gather to share and recover from Alcoholism, they may be called an AA Group provided that, as a group, they have no other purpose or affiliation.

"There is only one requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous and it does not include belief in God."

And that might well have been that. But the anti-agnostic contingent somehow found in this letter a mandate to ask the Greater Toronto Area Intergroup to strike the two GSO-sanctioned groups from their directory. And so, with the support of about 30 other groups—in a city of about 200 groups and over 500 meetings—the agnostic AA groups were cast out and denied all future AA services and publicity. Quoted in The Toronto Star, a supporter of the Intergroup action said of the agnostic AAs: “They’ve changed [the Steps] to their own personal needs. They should never have been listed in the first place.”

Across the continent in California, Doug L. had a comparable experience. He lives in South Orange County now, but got sober in the hipper Laguna Beach area. “Sobriety was good. I spent much time with my sponsor discussing my higher power," he recalls. "He was into yoga and encouraged me to get serious about my calling to be a Buddhist practitioner.”

Moving to a new town meant a new AA environment. “It did not take long for people to realize I was not going to accept a Christian concept of God," Doug says. "The more I tried to help newcomers who questioned the God stuff, the more I alienated myself in the fellowship. You see, we have a lot of fundamentalist Christians in South County.”

Doug’s attempts to start a Freethinker meeting met with hostility. “When I posted a notice about AA Freethinkers online, members would come immediately behind me and tear it down. When I discussed the idea, I was told I was going to get drunk if I didn't admit I was powerless! The idea of removing God from the 12 Steps was met with righteous indignation.”

Soon Doug was read the riot act by his fellow 12-Steppers: “I was told that our Intergroup would not list any Freethinker or agnostic meetings. I was told that I was not to discuss Freethinker issues. I was told that AA is all-inclusive and there was no need to have splinter groups; I reminded the Steering Committee that our meeting directly lists separate gay meetings. I am now labeled a troublemaker.”

Still committed to establishing a Freethinker group in his area, Doug now works the 12 Steps “on concurrent paths with the 12 Steps of Buddhism—there are many similarities between the two sets of steps.” But there are some differences, too. “The teachings of the Buddha tell me I am not powerless.”

AA had one million members when agnostic groups joined the scene in 1975. That figure doubled in the next 25 years. New York, San Francisco and Chicago are examples of cities where groups that accept God and groups that reject God can tolerate each other. But in the last 10 years AA has been shrinking. According to the GSO service manual, membership dropped from 2,160,013 in 2000 to 2,044,655 in 2008, a fall of 5.6%. Is the 76-year-old fellowship experiencing shrinking pains? And is there a need for a scapegoat?

The anonymously-authored White Paper on Non-Believers was circulated last year to Intergroup reps and Executive Committee members. It makes a passionate plea:

"Fellow members, we are allowing in our midst the initiation and promotion of a path called ‘Sobriety without God.’ What if the newcomer of the future is encouraged to choose that selection instead of the traditional 12 Step path? And what if, as a result, he ends up with a somewhat acceptable ‘water-wagon sobriety’ instead of the promised ‘spiritual awakening’ of the 12 Steps? Are we not guilty of duplicity of the highest order and can we any longer think of ourselves as ‘trusted servants?’ After all, the power we are serving is clearly God Himself!"

The White Paper promotes the mythology of how much better AA was in the good old days, when harmony reigned and newcomers all got sober by finding God. Agnosticism wasn’t a creed, but an intellectual holdout from the one truth: God keeps us sober. (But AA would "love" non-believers to health until they got better and found this one truth.)

The problem with this position is that the “one truth” never existed in the first place. Jim B., an AA founder, didn’t believe in a Supreme Being. He was the reason for the only requirement for membership being a desire to stop drinking. He outlived Bill W. and died sober, having brought AA’s message to new cities and new members from Philadelphia to San Diego.

The White Paper argues that two fundamental beliefs cannot coexist in AA, that belief in God is superior to all other creeds, and that believers in AA must suppress or eliminate the agnostic or atheist voice in the fellowship. Otherwise, AA will perish.

Most of AA remains moderate and accommodating, but in the post-Bill Wilson era the voice of moderation hasn’t always won the day. One delegate, who voted against the motion to expel the agnostic groups at the GTA Intergroup, marked the occasion by reading out a definitive statement by Bill W. from the 1946 Grapevine:

"Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an AA Group. This clearly implies that an alcoholic is a member if he says so; that we can't deny him his membership; that we can't demand from him a cent; that we can't force our beliefs or practices upon him; that he may flout everything we stand for and still be a member. In fact, our Tradition carries the principle of independence for the individual to such an apparently fantastic length that, so long as there is the slightest interest in sobriety, the most unmoral, the most anti-social, the most critical alcoholic may gather about him a few kindred spirits and announce to us that a new Alcoholics Anonymous Group has been formed. Anti-God, anti-medicine, anti-our Recovery Program, even anti-each other—these rampant individuals are still an AA Group if they think so!"

AA faces serious challenges. Just as BP would have preferred to keep the Gulf of Mexico oil debacle inside the boardroom, AA would have preferred what happened in a church basement in North Toronto to remain AA’s little secret. But the story broke in The Toronto Star and went viral. What would once have been an internal matter is now aired in the full sight of the public.

Another challenge is that there are now three times as many atheists in North America as there were in the 1960s. So if AA wants to move away from inclusivity, it will surely be a smaller fellowship when it celebrates its 100-year anniversary.

“AA is a religion in denial,” says Jim Christopher, founder of Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS). “Belief in a path of faith can work, and that is great. No one can deny that AA works for a lot of alcoholics.” SOS is a fellowship of 20,000 recovering addicts, 90% of whom have been to AA. “I would be afraid of a 100% intellectual approach, too,” adds Jim, “Becoming addicted isn’t an intellectual process. According to my intellect, booze brought euphoria, a lie that my intellect called a life-affirming experience. Recovery is a fusion of head and gut.” SOS is neutral on religion.

Jerry T., an agnostic AA member from Florida, points out: “AA's history is one of it knowing better and being proven wrong. First it was the women who couldn't be alcoholics, who had to fight for their place. Then it was the non-smokers. Most every specialty meeting had some kind of fight or controversy surrounding its existence. The wonderful thing about our struggle is that it is going to force recognition of a lot of elephants in the room.”

Back in Toronto, David R. has attended SOS since the AA creed divide took place. “I have been alternately angry and sad, yelling and crying. But, like hitting bottom, there's relief, too," he says. "I am livid at the unfairness and injustice. There was no dialogue, no attempt to address the issue of the rewritten 12 Steps, no acknowledgement of the service we've provided and the people we've helped. There was no fellowship, just ideology, power play and dogma. I believe the controversy is less about belief in God, and more about the fact that we challenged power.”

One thing is clear, however: given demographic trends, AA’s power struggle over the "God Question" is far from finished.

Apocalypse Not Now: The Rapture Fails to Materialize

 (False prophet, anyone? Weren't christians warned about people like Camping in the very book he says he used to calculate the end of the world. What about the tribulations? What about the doctrine of eminence? Learn your book, folks. That way you can keep things like this from happening.--jef)

Saturday, May 21, 2011 by the Guardian/UK
"I guess on Sunday when the #Rapture people feel really upset, we can't console them by saying 'Cheer up, it's not the end of the world.'"
by David Batty

Christian doomsday prophet Harold Camping looks likely to be less than rapturous after his prediction that the world would end on Saturday failed to materialize.

The 89-year-old Californian preacher had prophesied that the Rapture would begin at 6pm in each of the world's time zones, with those "saved" by Jesus ascending to heaven and the non-believers being wiped out by an earthquake rolling from city to city across the planet.

But as the deadline for the Apocalypse passed in the Pacific islands, New Zealand and Australia, it became apparent that Camping's prediction of the end of the world was to end not with a bang but with a whimper.

Only on Twitter did the supposed Armageddon sweep the world, with users expressing their mock disappointment at the lack of dead people rising from their graves.

New Zealander Daniel Boerman tweeted: "I'm from New Zealand, it is 6:06PM, the world has NOT ended. No earthquakes here, all waiting for the rapture can relax for now. #Rapture"

In Australia, Jon Gall of Melbourne was unimpressed by the lack of fire and brimstone. He tweeted: "#Rapture time here in Melbourne. A rather quiet sort of rapture if you ask me.

"Well we have had the #Rapture going for 50 minutes now. So far it hasn't interrupted my fish & chips and glass of stout."

In Brisbane, KillaJeules, was similarly disappointed by the lack of a Hollywood blockbuster ending: "So it's 6:37pm here in Brisbane, Australia. No earthquakes. No beaming up of Christians. No zombie apocalypse. No surprises haha."

Camping, a retired civil engineer, has built a multimillion-dollar, non-profit ministry based on his apocalyptic predictions. He previously predicted that the world would end in 1994. (0-2--jef) It is difficult to know how many of his followers took his latest prophecy seriously, though his Family Radio Worldwide reaches millions of listeners in the US and around the world.

Some have reportedly sold all their possessions and taken to the streets to warn people to prepare for the second coming of Jesus. In recent weeks, callers to Christian radio stations in the US have debated what to do about non-believing friends and neighbors who will be left behind to endure the wrath of God. (oh, well, obviously we'd have been fine--jef)

But it looks like it will be atheists and other skeptics celebrating this weekend, with tongue-in-cheek doomsday parties planned across the US.

TV scientist Professor Brian Cox summed up the mood of the non-believers. He tweeted: "I think we should all pretend the #rapture is happening so that when Harold Camping gets left behind later today he'll be livid."

But Kieran Healy had a slightly more comforting message for those disappointed at not joining Jesus: "I guess on Sunday when the #Rapture people feel really upset, we can't console them by saying 'Cheer up, it's not the end of the world.'"

Is The End Nigh? May 21, 2011 Judgement Day! Wheeeee!

We'll Know Soon Enough
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR
May 7, 2011

LISTEN TO THE STORY

Brian Haubert grabs some pamphlets and marches toward the flea market in Palmyra, N.J. Armed with a poster that trumpets Judgment Day on May 21, 2011, he braces for rejection. Announcing God's wrath is not always a popular message.

"I've been called a heretic," says Haubert, a 33-year-old actuary. "I've been told I read the wrong Bible. And then there's the occasional person who seems to be genuinely interested," he says.

His friend and fellow believer, Kevin Brown, uses a gentler approach, not confronting people or engaging in conversation, just politely handing out Judgment Day pamphlets.

Brown, who owns his own nutrition and wellness business, is soft-spoken and polished, not someone you'd imagine giving away doomsday tracts. But he says the clock is ticking.

"People need to know," Brown says, "and God commands us to share the Gospel about the end of the world. He says if we do not share the Gospel then their blood will be on our hands, whether they believe or not. God's been moving me to do this."

Spreading The Word

Haubert and Brown are two of a small — or not so small, who knows? — army of Christians sounding the alarm. They drive caravans and put up billboards, hand out tracts and try to convince friends and family that Judgment Day is upon us. Brown says this message is laced throughout the Bible, but only some can decode it. It will happen this way:

On May 21, "starting in the Pacific Rim at around the 6 p.m. local time hour, in each time zone, there will be a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth," he says. The true Christian believers — he hopes he's one of them — will be "raptured": They'll fly upward to heaven. And for the rest?

"It's just the horror of horror stories," he says, "and on top of all that, there's no more salvation at that point. And then the Bible says it will be 153 days later that the entire universe and planet Earth will be destroyed forever."

Most Bible scholars note that even Jesus said he had no idea when Judgment Day would come. But May 21 believers like Haubert are unfazed.

"I've crunched the numbers, and it's going to happen," he says.

Haubert says the Bible contains coded "proofs" that reveal the timing. For example, he says, from the time of Noah's flood to May 21, 2011, is exactly 7,000 years. Revelations like this have changed his life.

"I no longer think about 401(k)s and retirement," he says. "I'm not stressed about losing my job, which a lot of other people are in this economy. I'm just a lot less stressed, and in a way I'm more carefree."

He's tried to warn his friends and family. They think he's crazy. And that saddens him.

"Oh, it's very hard," he says. "I worry about friends and family and loved ones. But I guess more recently, I'm just really looking forward to it."

Haubert is 33 and single. Brown is married with several young children, and none of them shares his beliefs. It's caused a rift with his wife — but he says that, too, was predicted in the Bible.

"God says, 'Do you love husband or wife over me? Do you love son or daughter over me?' There is a test. There is a trial here that the believers are going through. It's a fiery trial."

As May 21 nears, Brown says he feels as if he's on a "roller coaster." What if he is raptured but his family is left behind?

"I'm crying over my loved ones one minute; I'm elated the next minute," he says. "It's all over the place."

Family Radio

No one knows how many people believe Judgment Day is right around the corner. But it appears that many became believers in 2009 after turning on Family Radio, a Christian network worth more than $100 million.

Harold Camping, the network's 89-year-old founder, has been interpreting the Bible on the air for years. He says that everyone knows there would be a judgment day at some point.

"We just happen to be in that time in history," he said in an interview. "And whether we like it or not, we're here."

Camping's predictions have inspired other groups to rally behind the May 21 date. People have quit their jobs and left their families to get the message out.

"Knowing the date of the end of the world changes all your future plans," says 27-year-old Adrienne Martinez.

She thought she'd go to medical school, until she began tuning in to Family Radio. She and her husband, Joel, lived and worked in New York City. But a year ago, they decided they wanted to spend their remaining time on Earth with their infant daughter.

"My mentality was, why are we going to work for more money? It just seemed kind of greedy to me. And unnecessary," she says.

And so, her husband adds, "God just made it possible — he opened doors. He allowed us to quit our jobs, and we just moved, and here we are."

Now they are in Orlando, in a rented house, passing out tracts and reading the Bible. Their daughter is 2 years old, and their second child is due in June. Joel says they're spending the last of their savings. They don't see a need for one more dollar.

"You know, you think about retirement and stuff like that," he says. "What's the point of having some money just sitting there?"

"We budgeted everything so that, on May 21, we won't have anything left," Adrienne adds.

Nothing, except for the fervent hope that all of them will be raptured.

"There Is No Plan B"

Camping is not the first person to fix a date for the end of the world. There have been dozens of such prophets, and so far, they've all been wrong.

Camping himself, has had to do some recalculation. He first predicted the end would come Sept. 6, 1994. He now explains that he had not completed his biblical research.

"For example, I at that time had not gone through the book of Jeremiah," he explains, "which is a big book in the Bible that has a whole lot to say about the end of the world."

So he's not planning for May 22?

"Absolutely not," Camping says. "It is going to happen, There is no Plan B."

I've asked a dozen of Camping's followers the same question. Everyone said even entertaining the possibility that May 21 would come and go without event is an offense to God. They all hope they'll be raptured. Some worry about being left behind.

"If I'm here on May 22, and I wake up, I'm going to be in hell," says Brown. "And that's where I don't want to be. So there is going to be a May 22, and we don't want to be here."

On the other hand, he will presumably have lots of company.

Those claiming there is a 'War on Xmas' Ignore its Pagan Roots

Christians' Worries About So-Called 'War on Christmas' Ignore Holiday's Pagan Roots 
By SKEETER SANDERS

Monday, 20 December 2010

Ah, December.

'Tis the season when most of us are thinking about opening gifts under brightly lighted trees. Of kissing someone special under the mistletoe. Of eating, drinking and making merry. And, above all, of hoping for peace on Earth and goodwill to all.

But in 2010, on what ought to be the most festive time of the year -- despite the lingering recession -- "goodwill to all" again appears to be in short supply in America among certain people, who continue to rail against what they perceive as a so-called "War on Christmas" because of what appears to be a lessening in recent years of the Christian symbolism of the holiday.

And a new survey out this week is likely to add to the conservatives' worries.

IT'S CATHOLICS VS. ATHEISTS AGAIN -- THIS TIME WITH DUELING BILLBOARDS

A battle of dueling holiday billboards has erupted between the New York-based Catholic League and the New Jersey-based American Atheists, with the atheist group's signs blaring "You Know It's a Myth! This Season, Celebration Reason!" -- referring to the birth of Jesus, and the Catholic League's billboards blaring back, "You Know It's Real! This Season, Celebrate Jesus!"

The League, angered by what it saw as an anti-Christmas billboard put up by the atheist group at the New Jersey entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel that connects New Jersty and New York City, countered by putting up one of its own on the New York side of the tunnel.

"We decided to counterpunch after a donor came forward seeking to challenge the anti-Christmas statement by American Atheists," Catholic League president William Donohue said on the organization's Web site.

But David Silverman, president of American Atheists, insisted, in a statement to CNN, that his group's billboard isn't aimed at believers, but at "the 50 million atheists in this nation" and to get passing commuters to "think hard about whether or not they actually believe in what is, in reality, an invisible magic man in the sky."

This isn't the first time that atheists and Catholics have clashed over Christmas. In 2008, the atheist group Freedom From Religion erected a sign in Olympia, Washington that didn't sit well with some christian conservatives.

Freedom From Religion's sign, aimed at staking its own claim on the holiday season, proclaimed the atheist reliance on reason, rejects common religious beliefs and asserts the independence of the natural world:

At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail.
There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell.
There is only our natural world.
Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

The sign drew a sharp rebuke from conservative Fox News talk-show host Bill O'Reilly, a devout Catholic, who branded it part of a "War on Christmas" by secularists that he's been railing against on his TV program every December since 2003.

NEW SURVEYS FIND MANY AMERICANS IGNORE RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF CHRISTMAS

Two new surveys released Monday aren't likely to quell conservatives' anxiety about Christmas becoming less and less about the birth of Jesus.

The polls -- conducted by Gallup and by LifeWay Research, a Nashville-based Christian research organization -- found that more than 90 percent of Americans observe Christmas, regardless of whatever faith they follow -- or not follow.

But the surveys, published Monday in USA Today, also found a wide discrepancy in how American view the religious aspects of the holiday. In the LifeWay poll, 74 percent regarded Christmas as primarily a religious holiday, but in the Gallup poll, only 51 percent felt that way.

The LifeWay survey found that more than a third of Americans who celebrate Christmas place little to no emphasis on the holiday be a celebration of the birth of Jesus -- as USA Today put it, for this group, "O Come-all-ye-partiers trumps O Come, All Ye Faithful."

"A lot of Americans celebrate Christmas like they participate in yoga: Unaware and unconcerned about its religious roots," Ed Stetzer, LifeWay's president and a Southern Baptist pastor, told the newspaper.

DECEMBER 25 HOLIDAY PRE-DATES BIRTH OF JESUS BY THOUSANDS OF YEARS

Yet Stretzer and other Christians who lament what they see is the "de-Christianization of Christmas" are ignoring the fact that the holiday's roots go back farther -- much farther -- than the birth of Jesus.

They're also ignoring the fact that there are literally millions of Americans who are not Christian and have December holidays of their own. Why should Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Yule not get the recognition they richly deserve? Why should those holidays be ignored or subsumed under Christmas?

And contrary to what O'Reilly and other conservatives say, Christmas is not a strictly Christian religious holiday in the first place. If it were, Christmas could not, under the U.S. Constitution, be designated a public holiday without violating the First Amendment's ban on the government favoring one religion over another -- Good Friday and Easter Sunday aren't public holidays for that very reason.

Christmas is observed not only by millions of non-Christians in America, but also by billions of non-Christians around the world and is a public holiday even in countries where Christians are a minority, including Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China (Hong Kong and Macau), India, Indonesia, Israel, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Singapore and Taiwan.

Christmas has never been -- and will never be -- a Christian-only celebration and the time has come for Christian conservatives to stop denying the holiday's true origins, for it didn't start with the birth of Jesus in a Bethlehem stable. The truth is, the holiday the world celebrates each year on the 25th of December is the most ancient holiday on the planet.

What we now call Christmas is actually the Christian adaptation of the many millennia-old Pagan celebrations of the Winter Solstice. With the notable exception of the Nativity creche, all of the symbols and decorations that we associate today with Christmas -- the tree, the wreath, the holly and the ivy, the lights, the mistletoe, the eggnog, the Yule log, the caroling and even Santa Claus -- are of Pagan origin and have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus.

Indeed, the very word "Christmas," with its direct reference to Jesus as "The Christ" -- which is derived from the Greek word kristos, or "savior" -- is almost exclusive to English-speakers. In only nine other languages -- Dutch (Kerstfeest), Farsi (Cristmas-e-shoma), French (Noel), Greek (Kristouyenna), Indonesian (Natal), Italian (Natale), Portugese (Natal), Spanish (Navidad) and Ukranian (Khrystouvym) -- does the name of this holiday come even close to referring to the birth of the Christ child.

Many Americans often refer to Christmas as "the Yuletide." And no wonder: Yule is the Winter Solstice. Most modern Pagans still celebrate Yule. Even most Christians use "Christmas" and "Yule" interchangeably to describe the season without even thinking about its Pagan origins.

Yule celebrates the beginning of the sun's light and warmth returning to the northern hemisphere after reaching its southernmost point on the Earth at the Tropic of Capricorn on the Winter Solstice -- which this year will occur this evening (Tuesday) at 6:38 pm EST, some 13 1/2 hours after the end a spectacular total lunar eclipse that took place during the pre-dawn hours of this morning. It is one of the two very ancient Pagan holidays that are still widely celebrated in the Western world -- and beyond -- relatively intact. The other is our modern celebration of Halloween.

[In the interest of full disclosure, this writer is obliged to state for the record that I, a former Roman Catholic, am a Pagan; more specifically, a Wiccan. Yule has special significance for me personally: It marks the anniversary of my conversion in 1984 to Wicca, the largest and best-known "denomination" of modern Western Paganism.]

THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE

If you really want to be historically accurate, then the Christmas tree should rightly be called the Yule tree, for it dates back nearly 5,000 years to the Celtic Druids. They revered evergreens as manifestations of deity because they did not "die" from year to year, but stayed green and alive when other plants appeared dead and bare. The trees represented everlasting life and hope for the return of spring.

Best known today for their celebrations of the Summer Solstice in June at Stonehenge, the Druids decorated their trees for the winter solstice in December with symbols of prosperity: a fruitful harvest, coins for wealth and various charms such as those for love or fertility.

Scandinavian Pagans, particularly the Norse, became the first to bring their decorated trees indoors, as this provided a warm and welcoming environment for the native fairy folk to join in the festivities.

The Saxons, a Pagan tribe from what is now Germany, were the first to place lights on the their trees in the form of candles (an extremely dangerous fire hazard by today's standards). For centuries, the ancient Romans decorated their homes with evergreens at the winter solstice festival of Saturnalia -- which also marked the Roman New Year -- and exchanged evergreen branches with friends as a sign of good luck.

Christians' use of the tree symbol for the December holidays did not begin until the 16th century, when devout Catholics in what is now Italy brought decorated trees into their homes. The German-born Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, is credited with starting the tradition in England in 1841 when he brought the first Christmas tree into Windsor Castle.

THE EIGHT PAGAN HOLIDAYS

Nature's cycles of winter, spring, summer and fall (and everything else in between) are so much a part of human life and society on Earth that to acknowledge, celebrate and even sanctify those cycles is a primal need we simply cannot ignore. Just ask any ski-resort operator in winter or swimming-pool operator in summer -- or any farmer, for that matter.

Yet those who follow the world's three great monotheistic religions -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- have long been reluctant to do so and instead instituted their own rituals, holy days and festivals. The fact that many of the major Christian, Jewish and Muslim holidays -- and even some civic and national holidays -- often occur in tandem with the eight major Pagan holidays during the course of the year is no accident.

In addition to the Winter Solstice celebration of Yule on December 20-22 (depending on the actual date of the solstice itself from one year to the next), the other seven Pagan holidays are:

• Imbolg or Candlemas (Groundhog Day, February 2) -- also known among Catholics as St. Brigid's Day;

• Eostre or Ostara (Spring Equinox, March 20-22);

• Beltaine (May Day, May 1);

• Litha (Summer Solstice, June 20-22);

• Lammas or Lughnasadh (Midsummer's Day, August 1);

• Mabon (Autumn Equinox, September 20-22);

• Samhain (pronounced SOW-en), the Wiccan New Year (Halloween, October 31).

This is one reason why Easter (whose name in English is a derivative of Eostre) always falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring Equinox and why Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, almost always falls in close proximity to the Autumn Equinox.

Jews transformed the three ancient harvest festivals of the Canaanites into the three festivals of Creation (Tabernacles), Revelation (Pentecost), and Redemption (Passover). Likewise, Christians and Muslims transformed their ancient, Nature-based festivals into celebrations of the singular events in, respectively, the life of Jesus and the career of the Prophet Mohammed.


HOW AN ANCIENT ROMAN HOLIDAY BECAME CHRISTMAS

After Christianity was proclaimed the state religion of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine in 312 C.E. (Common Era), the early Christian church -- now the Vatican -- used the transformation of the ancient holidays and festivals as a tool to convert Pagans to Christianity throughout the empire and beyond.

Yet the church barred Christians from holding any kind of celebration to honor the birth of Jesus, primarily because the actual date of his birth was unknown -- and remains unknown to this day, although there is some astronomical and archaeological evidence suggesting that Jesus was actually born in the spring.

The church's ban was lifted in 350 C.E., when Pope Julius I proclaimed a feast day to celebrate Jesus' birth -- and deliberately chose December 25 as the date to hold "Christ's Mass" to absorb and Christianize not only Yule, but also Saturnalia, which honored Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.

Saturnalia was celebrated with feasting, gift-giving and role-reversal between men and women and between slaves and their masters. It was also marked by the unabashed enjoyment of sensual and erotic pleasures, which many conservative Christians today strongly condemn as wanton debauchery, but still survives in our time (primarily around New Year's Eve).

And because Saturnalia also marked the Roman New Year under the Julian calendar, the changeover to the present-day Gregorian calendar in 1582 resulted in the one-week interval between Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Upper-class Romans also celebrated the birthday of Mithra, the sun god, on December 25. It was believed that Mithra, an infant god, was born of a rock. For them, Mithra's birthday was the most sacred day of the year -- especially since the daylight from the sun began to lengthen on the 25th, following the winter solstice.

CHRISTIANITY VS. PAGANISM

The current debate in the United States over "Christmas" versus "Holiday" trees, decorations and greetings is part of a much deeper clash of cultures that has gone on for centuries: Christianity vs. Paganism.

Paganism is pantheistic and circular; Christianity is monotheistic and linear. Pagans celebrate the eternal natural cycle of being. Christians venerate the linear concept of progress, from creation to ultimate redemption.

Pagans live in the realm of the eternal recurrence. Pagan rites maintain harmonious relationships among the gods; thus, these rituals guarantee the continuity of Nature's cycles, which Nature-based human societies depend on for their sustenance.

Christians (as well as Jews and Muslims) worship the God who created all natural things and stands above them. To them, when God intervenes in the world, it is not to create a disruption of natural events, but rather to generate some wonderful new direction in human affairs.

It is at the Winter Solstice -- more so than at any other time of the year -- that people of Judeo/Christian/Muslim faith feel most acutely the tension between the origins of their religion in Pagan Nature worship on the one hand and the evolution of their faith into belief in a single God and a linear remembrance of historical events and teachings on the other.

SURVEY REVEALS AMERICA'S GROWING RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY

And for many conservative Christians in particular, that tension could only have grown sharper in recent years as the number of Americans who do not identify themselves as Christian has been growing sharply since 1990, according to data compiled by the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), a private poll conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Posen Foundation.

The U.S. Census Bureau is constitutionally barred from directly compiling data on the religious affiliations of Americans, thus the ARIS survey -- the third conducted by Trinity College since 1990 -- is considered authoritative.

The latest ARIS survey of more than 54,000 people conducted between February and November of 2008 and released in March of this year showed that the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christians -- inclusive of all its denominations -- has fallen to 76 percent of the population, down from 86 percent in 1990.

Those who do call themselves Christian are more frequently describing themselves as "nondenominational" "evangelical" or "born again." Significantly, the ARIS survey found, this increase corresponds strongly with a dramatic decline in the number of Americans who identify themselves as so-called "mainline" Protestants -- particularly Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians -- which fell from 17 million in 1990 to only five million today.

A SHARP RISE IN 'SPIRITUAL, BUT NOT RELIGIOUS' AMERICANS -- ESPECIALLY IN NEW ENGLAND

At the same time, the ARIS survey found the proportion of Americans who declined to state any religious affiliation has skyrocketed, from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent today, with the vast majority of this group identifying themselves as "spiritual, but not religious."

This group is most heavily concentrated in northern New England and the Pacific Northwest. Vermont leads all other states in this category by a full nine percentage points, with a record-high 34 percent of its residents identifying themselves as "spiritual, but not religious."

Out of a total U.S. adult population of 175.4 million people who professed a religious or spiritual belief system in the first ARIS poll in 1990, 151.4 million, or roughly 85 percent, identified themselves as Christian.

In the second ARIS survey in 2001, 159.5 million out of a total 207.9 million believers -- 76 percent -- identified themselves as Christian.

Now, out of a total U.S. adult population of 228 million believers, 173.4 million identified themselves as Christian, unchanged in percentage terms from the 76 percent the ARIS survey found in 2001.

A SHIFT IN ROMAN CATHOLIC POPULATION TO THE SOUTHWEST

The 2009 ARIS survey notes that America’s religious geography -- particularly of the nation's 57.2 million Roman Catholics -- has been transformed since 1990. "Religious switching along with Hispanic immigration has significantly changed the religious profile of some states and regions," the survey's principal authors, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, reported.

"Between 1990 and 2008, the Catholic population proportion of the New England states fell from 50 percent to 36 percent and in New York state, it fell from 44 percent to 37 percent, while it rose in California from 29 percent to 37 percent and in Texas from 23 percent to 32 percent."

BAPTISTS, MORMONS, MUSLIMS AND PAGANS UP; BUDDHISTS, HINDUS DOWN; JEWS HOLD STEADY

Other key findings in the 2009 ARIS survey:

• Baptists, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, have increased their numbers by two million since 2001, to 36.1 million, but continue to decline as a proportion of the population, from 16.3 percent in 2001 to 15.8 percent today. 

• Mormons -- members of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints -- have increased in numbers enough (3.1 million) to hold their own proportionally, at 1.4 percent of the population.

• The number of Muslim Americans continues to grow, from 527,000 in 1990, to 1.3 million today. Immigration accounts for the most of the increase, including Iranian refugees from the 1979 revolution, Bosnians from the 1990s war in the Balkans and Somalians from the still-ongoing violence there.

• Adherents of co-called "new religious movements" -- including Wiccans and self-described Pagans -- have grown faster this decade than in the 1990s. While there was no census of American Pagans in 1990, the 2001 ARIS survey did report at least 307,000 Americans identifying themselves as such, with 134,000 professing to be Wiccans, 33,000 as Druids and 140,000 as eclectic "neo-Pagans" of a wide spectrum of traditions.

(For the 2009 survey, there was no faith-specific breakdown of adherents in the "new religious movements" category, instead listing 2.8 million such Americans today, compared to 1.7 million in 2001.)

• The number of American adherents of Eastern religions -- Buddhism, Shinto and Hinduism -- which more than doubled in the 1990s -- has declined slightly, from 2.02 million in 1990 to 1.96 million today. However, the number of Buddhists alone edged up slightly from 1.08 million in 2001 to 1.18 million now.

(Buddhists have their own major holiday in December: Bodhi Day -- December 8 -- which celebrates the story of how the philosopher Siddartha Gautama of India became the Buddha by sitting under a bodhi tree and vowing to remain there until he achieved total enlightenment.)

• In strictly religious terms, Jewish Americans continue to decline numerically, from 3.1 million in 1990 to 2.7 million today -- 1.2 percent of the population. However, when defined more broadly as an ethnic group, including those who do not practice the faith, the American Jewish community has remained remarkably stable since 1990.

ATHEISTS, AGNOSTICS REMAIN SMALL PROPORTION OF U.S. POPULATION; SECULARISTS DROPPED FROM SURVEY

The number of Americans who call themselves atheists or agnostics remains relatively small, the new ARIS survey found. But based on stated beliefs, 1.62 million, or 2.3 percent, are atheists (believe there is no God) and 1.98 million, or 4.3 percent, are agnostics (unsure if God exists or not).

The 2001 ARIS survey counted an even smaller number of Americans -- 53,000 -- as identifying themselves as "secular" and still fewer -- 43,000 -- calling themselves "humanists." There was no accounting of either group in 1991 and they were dropped from the 2009 survey as statistically insignificant.

The truth is, America at the close of the first decade of the 21st century is more religiously and spiritually diverse now than it's ever been before in its more-than-234-year history -- and conservative Christian majoritarians are going to have to deal with it, whether they like it or not.

IS IT A PAGAN CHRISTMAS OR A CHRISTIAN YULE?

If they wanted to, today's Pagans could reclaim the Christmas tree -- indeed, all the decorative trappings of Christmas, save for the Nativity creche -- as being rightfully theirs, since Pagans created them in the first place.

But modern Pagans are a practical lot, with most viewing Christmas simply as the Christian world celebrating Yule in their own way -- albeit, three to five days after the actual winter solstice -- and thus see no conflict in celebrating at least the secular aspects of Christmas themselves.

And December isn't called the holiday season for nothing. There's also Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day and scores of other holidays and festivals around the world this month -- all of which culminate in the ringing in of the new year at midnight on December 31.

Thanks to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar as the universal calendar used worldwide and the global system of 24 time zones, New Year's Day is our only truly global holiday -- which we all got to watch unfold on our TV screens in all its joyful glory a decade ago as we greeted the turn of the millennium (albeit, a year too soon, since there mathematically never was a Year Zero).

So whichever way you celebrate the holidays, may yours be filled with joy, peace and love.

Pope calls Christians the most persecuted

(What a fraud! Who is persecuting christians? They have all the power and wealth for crying out loud! He looks like a lizard.--jef)


Pope calls Christians the most persecuted
By The Associated Press
Thursday, December 16th, 2010

Pope laments religious persecution as threat to world peace, says Christians suffer most

Pope Benedict XVI singled out Christians as the religious group that suffers from the most persecution on Thursday, denouncing lack of freedom of worship as an "intolerable" threat to world security.

The message reflected a pressing concern by Benedict in recent months for the plight of Christian minorities in parts of the world, especially in the Middle East.

"Sadly, the year now ending has again been marked by persecution, discrimination, terrible acts of violence and religious intolerance," Benedict lamented in the message for World Peace Day, celebrated by the church on Jan. 1, but traditionally released in advance

He wrote that he was especially thinking of Iraq ",which continues to be a theater of violence and strife" as it aims for stability and reconciliation.

Benedict singled out the "reprehensible attack" on a Baghdad cathedral during Mass in October, killing two priests and more than 50 other worshippers, as well as attacks on private homes that "spread fear within the Christian community and (create) a desire on the part of many to emigrate in search of a better life."

The Vatican voiced concerns that the steadily flight of Christians from Iraq will effectively eliminate the ancient community there.

"At present, Christians are the religious group which suffers most from persecution on account of its faith," the pontiff asserted, and cited Christian communities suffering from violence and intolerance particularly in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Holy Land.

"This situation is intolerable, since it represents an insult to God and to human dignity" as well as "a threat to security and peace," Benedict wrote in one of the 17-page-long message's strongest passages.

He appealed to authorities to "act promptly to end every injustice" against Christians.

Benedict didn't cite countries, but in past years church officials have lamented that Christians — most of them migrant workers — are forbidden to worship in Saudi Arabia.

He blasted what he called "more sophisticated forms of hostility to religion, which, in Western countries, occasionally find expression in a denial of history and the rejection of religious symbols which reflect the identity and the culture of the majority of its citizens."

Benedict has been continuing a campaign launched by his predecessor, the late John Paul II, to reinvigorate Europe's "Christian roots."

The Vatican has criticized initiatives in some Western countries to ban crucifixes from public places, ranging from classrooms to courtrooms, including in predominantly Catholic Italy.

How Neo-Cons Became Honorary Christians

Losing the Apocalypse
By LAWRENCE SWAIM

The expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and the disastrous decision to lie about it made an Israel Lobby in America necessary. Christians were willing participants in this destructive process from the beginning. The stated purpose of “interfaith dialogue” in the US after 1945 was for Jews and Christians to work together to oppose anti-Semitism on American soil—and there’s no reason to suspect that that most participants weren’t completely sincere about that. But Christians were also looking to Jews to help them manage their guilt and their bewilderment about the Holocaust. In some ways this was relatively easy to do, because US Christians did not have the same tradition of anti-Semitism as European Christians. But helping people manage their trauma is a tricky business, because those who do so can quickly learn to exploit it, if there is something they want very badly. Of course, Jews were more traumatized by the Holocaust than Christians, but they understood it better—it was simply a much larger and more terrifying version of what they had always gotten from Christians. On the other hand, the immensity of the Holocaust was too much for most American Christians to comprehend.

This was to some extent because Americans also have a kind of willed innocence where certain unpleasant realities are concerned—thinking and talking about the Holocaust upset certain middleclass sensibilities, although most decent American Christians probably would have admitted that it was an important subject. The entire Holocaust seemed unbelievable—nobody could really explain why it had happened, or even how it happened. The world turned to Jews for an explanation, since they had been most directly impacted. And indeed it was Jews (Hilberg, Arendt, Milgram) who generally came up with the most reliable writing about the Holocaust, with Stanley Migram arriving at perhaps the most satisfying explanation of why it had occurred. But Jews concentrated on the psychological aspects of systemic evil in Nazism, whereas those aspects of Christianity that had for many centuries been most closely associated with Christian anti-Semitism were ignored by both Christians and Jews.

If American Christians really wanted to know what caused German Christians to murder millions, they might have looked closely at their own belief in the redemptive violence of Christ’s crucifixion. Throughout the history of Christianity in Europe, it was usually when public displays of emotion about Christ’s crucifixion were most visible—around the time of Easter week, for example—that anti-Semitic outbursts were likely to happen. If Christ’s bloody death redeemed followers to eternal life, what about the Jews that voted to crucify Jesus, and continued to reject him in modern times? But it was precisely this troubling core dynamic of Christian thaumaturgy, and its historical association with anti-Semitism, that Christians didn’t want to look at. Such an inquiry was likely to lead American Christians to a dark place where they weren’t ready to go.

In addition to reading the writing of Jewish intellectuals, meeting with leaders of the organized Jewish community offered Christians some sense of meaningful response to the horror of Auschwitz. And both Jews and Christians could do this in the name of community-building in the US, without either side required to go explain or explore their own beliefs. By simply showing up for “interfaith dialogue” with Jews, Christians were able to convince themselves that they were doing something important about ending anti-Semitism. That, in turn, helped them get a handle on the guilt they were beginning to feel, as it became clearer that the political anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust had arisen directly from Christian anti-Semitism. The power of the Israel Lobby was prefigured by the rich irony of American Jews absolving “good” American Christians of guilt by association with “bad” German Christians, which became un unspoken and often unconscious dynamic of interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews.

But why had anti-Semitism been a part of Christianity for so long? The unwillingness of US Christians to look critically at their own theology turned out to be a missed opportunity, for the liberal Protestant establishment was soon overwhelmed by a rightwing evangelical movement that greatly outnumbered them. The ultra-conservative Christians of the Religious Right generally belonged to denominations or embraced theologies associated with anti-Semitism in the past, but were quickly adjusting to the loss of anti-Semitism (which had now become a supreme example of politically incorrectness) by finding new objects of hatred in gays, Muslims and “secularist humanists.”

By the late 1960s and 1970s Jewish leaders were, on the other hand, beginning to identify with the new Jewish state Israel, which they saw as a kind of living representation of Judaism in the world of realpolitik. For the more important Jewish leaders, supporting Israel suddenly gave them legitimacy—now they were associated not merely with a religion but with an important geo-political entity. And there was another reason, again mainly unspoken: it made Jews look good in the eyes of the goyim—they were a people with no land who had taken over a land with no people, as the Zionists liked to say, and they had made the desert bloom! No more would they been seen as cloth jobbers, money speculators and subversive intellectuals with coke-bottle glasses—now their excellence as soldiers, farmers and nation-builders would be crystal clear to the non-Jewish world.

There was apparently no downside to the dream of Zionism—Judaism in search of Jewish identity need look no more. One became a good Jews by uncritically supporting the Jewish state, whereas Christians could prove how free of anti-Semitism they were by uncritically supporting it. After sixteen hundred years, major reconciliation of Christians and Jews! This happy picture was not sullied by any mention of the Palestinians’ tragedy, partly because information about it had been suppressed in the West, and partly because those who knew something kept their mouths shut rather than face a firestorm of denunciation by ecstatic Jews sincerely convinced that it was all a lie. The role of the Israel Lobby would be precisely to make sure nobody ever found out about what had happened to the Palestinians in 1947-49, and to keep those who did know something from talking about it. They would do this by keeping the Holocaust in the public eye as much as possible. If Jews were always the victim, how could the Palestinians be victims? Public opinion in the US tended to accommodate only one victimized group at a time.

Because of the confluence of these mainly unspoken needs, Christians and Jews adopted certain unconscious but highly charged roles that would govern “interfaith dialogue” between Christians and Jews for the rest of the 20th century. The main rule was, Don’t say anything bad about Israel. After a decent (or indecent, if you prefer) interval this was followed by its inevitable corollary: Say anything bad about Israel, and you will be publicly denounced as an anti-Semite. But these extreme conditions didn’t faze most Christians—if uncritical support for Israel was required for overcoming anti-Semitism, Christians were willing to do it.

None of this was conducive to speaking frankly, of course—nor, one must add, did it encourage anything like trust or respect. It did create an elephant in the interfaith parlor which only got larger and more fractious as the years went by. The name-change of the National Conference of Christians and Jews to the more mundane National Conference for Community and Justice may have occurred partly because of a claustrophobic sense of divisions that nobody was allowed—or could allow themselves—to talk about. To speak candidly about the origins of Israel in front of certain audiences, to mention the undeniable fact that ethnic cleansing had been used to dispossess Palestinians, and that torture and death squads were regularly used on Palestinians inside and outside Israel, was to invite a riot. Even today, campus speakers on Israel/Palestine are the only oneds that regularly require police protection.

Christians also used interfaith connections for their own corrupt purposes. As Peter Novick convincingly demonstrates in The Holocaust in American Life, Catholic leaders used interfaith connections to try to suppress the American production of The Deputy, asking “their Jewish dialogue partners to put pressure on the Jewish producer and director to cancel the play, or at least to join them in denouncing it.” The Deputy (a play that questioned Pope Pius’ unwillingness to speak out against the Nazi Holocaust) had been produced at a time of “tense politicking at Vatican Council II in Rome over a declaration repudiating anti-Semitism and absolving Jews of culpability in the death of Jesus.” According to Novick, the American Jewish Committee “did its best, albeit unsuccessfully, to prevent the play from going on—and made sure that church officials knew that it had tried.” The national tour was canceled, probably as a direct result of combined Catholic/Jewish pressure to do away with it.[1]

Needless to say, a play should never be closed down because it criticizes organized religion, any religion; and using it as a poker chip in such backstage tummeling is another example of how the Nazi Holocaust corrupts everything. If American Catholics and Jews had to suppress a play about the Holocaust to get the Pope to stop blaming Jews for the death of Jesus, the entire project of reconciliation had, certainly for the people involved in the suppression, no meaning whatsoever. Similarly, the postponement of candid discussion about Israel was both stupid and tragic, because as time went on the elephant in the parlor got bigger and bigger; and in the total absence of tough love from American Jews, the political class in Israel kept moving to the right until it had completely embraced the neo-fascist Jabotinsky form of Zionism. There was still no talk about what had happened to the Palestinians, because few people knew about it, and most Americans didn’t want to know about it.

But the few people who did know were often Jews such as Noam Chomsky, who insisted on telling the truth. Chomsky was universally condemned by major Jewish leaders and organizations as a monster, a crypto-Nazi and a betrayer of all Jews everywhere. As a young man involved in union politics, I was told by “progressives” that Noam Chomsky suffered from a form of mental illness that caused him to criticize the government of Israel because he could not come to terms with the fact that he was Jewish. He was, in other words, a self-hating Jew.

It is important to remember, however, that the unspoken decision of Christians not to discuss their doubts about Israel to their “interfaith dialogue partners” was to a large extent the creature of institutional Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic. Why? Christians overlooked the evil of Zionism because they were overwhelmed by the evil of Hitler. Christianity, the single social instrument in the West that could both explain and expiate evil, had been itself complicit in the greatest example of evil the world had ever seen. If the only way Christians could reconcile to Jews was to support Israel uncritically, they felt they had to do it. Remember that there was no theory of evil, either secular or religious, that could even begin to explain why German Christians had behaved as they did. Nor was there any immediate explanation for the next potential genocide that was now looming on the horizon in the threat of nuclear war.

Indeed, it was because nobody could explain the sudden emergence of so much evil in the middle of the 20th century that evangelicalism arose in Christianity, and extreme religious nationalism in Judaism. Both evangelicalism and religious nationalism actually fed the evil that had driven people to create them; but both, in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, seemed to serve the need for apocalyptic solutions to apocalyptic problems.

Most Jews had never had enough organization power to engage in systemic evil, either in Europe or the US; but in Israel, for the first time, Jews had some power. With that power, they were to learn the addictive nature of sadism and aggression, which are not things that most people are anxious to discuss. And since nobody dared to talk about it, the political class of Israel, once they got a taste of it, naturally wanted more. How nice not to be the victim for once, and to try one’s hand at a little oppression of the natives!

This was formulated in memorable form by the German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder:

“Israel is presently more perpetrator than victim. But that is good and it is right. After all, for nearly two thousand years the Jews were in the role of the perennial victims, and their experiences in this role were bad indeed. Perpetrators mostly have a longer life expectancy than victims, and it is much more fun to be a perpetrator.”[2]

This disgusting endorsement of brutality was made by Broder in the German forward to A Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz.

What Zionists now wanted, in other words, was what Christianity had always had, which was redemption through violence—but the Zionist settlers of Israel had no idea how habit-forming it was, and especially they had no idea how dangerous it was to the future of the Jewish people. Nor did they realize how fast the world was changing, and to what extent people outside Israel were internalizing the idea of universal human rights. Meanwhile Israelis were still stuck in 1948, in a time when human rights for Jews could only be guaranteed by taking away the rights of Palestinians.

* * *

Christians were desperate to expiate their guilt for the Holocaust, and Zionists were more than willing to take advantage of that desperation. It was also for this reason that those Christians and Jews that engaged in “interfaith dialogue” were engaging in a kind of hypocritical game that neither could control. Certain they never arrived at anything like real dialogue—or at least the kind of dialogue one has with people if one happens to care about them. When they sat down to have dialogue with Jews, Christians really cared more about expiating their own guilt than they did about the Jews with whom they were supposedly in dialogue. One reason for this desperation was no doubt a growing (sometimes unconscious) lack of confidence in the ability of Christianity to expiate sin. Christians were ready to let anti-Semitism go, but they did not really want to know why it had been there so long, nor did they want to know what was likely to take its place.

The evangelical movement in America quickly filled the vacuum with Islamophobia, the strident projection of guilt, anger and fear onto Muslims, and a world mission of defeating Islam and converting Muslims to Christianity in the “10-40 window,” those 28 or so Muslim-majority countries located in the forty degrees north of the equator. Many rightwing evangelicals, including Franklin Graham, supported both the Gulf and Iraq wars because they saw it as a chance to proselytize Muslims; and almost all the evangelical churches that had missions began to concentrate on the “10-40” window. As always, there was little introspection about how much of that mission would be various forms of cultural imperialism, and whether evangelicals could really help people in those countries, and how.

For Jewish leaders in the US, the rise of the ecstatic rightwing evangelicals were not such a bad deal as one might imagine. In fact, the growing political power of the Religious Right in the US produced a new kind of inclusive nomenclature, proving that American meritocracy extended to entire religions as well as to individuals—as long as the Jewish leaders involved did not look to closely at, or protest too strenuously about, the grandiose specifics of evangelical Christian world mission.

Jews were now to be upgraded to something known as “Judeo-Christianity,” a bogus expression invented by rightwing evangelicals to promote Christian nationalism and advocate in the public square for certain evangelical values without being called anti-Semitic. Jews were now to be allowed into that part of the conservative establishment that was encouraging coalition with the evangelicals of the Religious Right; and the expression “Judeo-Christian values” was unveiled to pre-empt any question of anti-Semitism. Jews were perceived as a difficult group that had a baffling tendency to vote Democratic, but whose institutional leadership was practically a domestic extension of the rightwing parties of Israel; it could therefore be used to whip the intelligentsia into line when American corporate interests were threatened in the Middle East. The expression “Judeo-Christian civilization” was used to reassure Jews that if and when the evangelicals succeeded in making their form of Christianity a state religion, Jews would have nothing to fear.

The entire issue of whether Christian evangelicals in America would continue to proselytize Jews was finessed in an interesting but dishonest way: the Religious Right would give uncritical support to the government of Israel; in return, institutional Jewish leaders would say nothing regarding the fact that evangelicals taught that Jews would go to hell unless they converted to Christianity. Later the issue of proselytizing Jews would be even more subtly finessed by a little-known provision in the dispensationalist playbook — namely, that during the End Time (the Christian evangelical term for the Second Coming of Christ), Jews would for reasons unknown suddenly convert to Christianity as the New Jerusalem arrived. The recalcitrant ones, those Jews who for some reason refused Jesus’ kind offer of conversion to Christianity, would be mass-murdered by God, who would thereby neatly finish in the End of Days what Hitler had started back at the Wannsee Conference in 1942. As long as Jews kept quiet about the essentially anti-Semitic nature of this juvenile and astonishingly bigoted theology, evangelicals would give uncritical support to whatever government had gotten itself into power in Israel. In concert with this cultural development, the Protestant old-boy network that still controlled most of the capital in the American corporate upper class would let some of “them” into the conservative establishment.

The turning point was the emergence of Henry Kissinger as a modern Mandarin of American imperialism. Some report a moment in the early 1980s when Kissinger derisively referred to a roomful of people at the Council on Foreign Relations as “You Episcopalians—“ Many of the Christians present were not Episcopalians (the days when Anglicanism dominated the boardrooms of America had passed some time before) but they all knew what Henry meant. There were going to have to open their ranks to let in some new blood. And the new ones would have to have power, not just vague and—to them—meaningless trappings of prestige.

This set the state for the empowerment of the neo-conservative movement. Neo-cons in those days were—and many still are—essentially upper-mobile, rightwing Zionists afflicted by an extreme case of ambition, aggression and power worship. They understood that if America continued to uncritically support the Likudniks in government in Israel, no concessions to the Palestinians or the Arab states would ever be necessary. Of course, the result would be permanent war, sometimes covert and sometimes hot, but their sons would never have to fight in it; and it would enable—and even encourage—the corporate upper class to set up a new neo-colonial apparatus in the Middle East. In return, Israel would become the mafia enforcers of American “interests” in Arabic-speaking lands, becoming in the process a super-militarized, highly armed camp of Arab-hating soldiers and fighter pilots, bristling with the will and the psychological need to kill Arabs on a regular basis. Jewish leaders in the US were seen—correctly—as uncritically supporting this process, by destroying or de-legitimizing every person or organization that questioned it. But the neo-conservatives went beyond the goals of most Jewish leaders, whom they wished to manipulate but not emulate. If the US could intervene in the affair of the Middle East, why couldn’t it intervene everywhere in the developing world, openly and unapologetically?

The neo-conservatives hit upon the idea that America would be in a much better shape to intervene on Israel’s behalf if overt or covert intervention were central to American policy everywhere in the world. Neo-conservatism was the Jabotinsky school of Zionism writ large, applied not just to Palestinians but to everybody in the developing world; and since this translated into a new and particularly lethal version of early 20th-century gunboat diplomacy, a great many old-time conservatives were attracted to it, including people who cared nothing about Israel or the Middle East. People in the Third World who did what American policy-makers demanded of them would be rewarded; those who didn’t would be imprisoned or killed. The idea of international cooperation would be completely abandoned. Behind the policy-makers would be the US corporate upper class and its phalanxes of hired intellectuals, because only those leaders created by the marketplace could really be trusted.

The neo-cons were extremely savvy about public relations and influence generally, since they, like other Zionists, tended to see the defense of Israel as mainly a public relations problem. They invented extremely effective new methods (neo-con foundations, for example) to provide political cover for their activities and goals, also providing money to buy off their political opponents and marginalize the rest. Under the tutelage of neo-cons, the “Judeo-Christian” label was more about promoting American “interests” (that is, empire) throughout the developing world, in which effort the Israelis were to be the errand boys and arms suppliers. But this idea existed and was promoted on pretty much the same wave-length as the rightwing evangelicals of the Religious Right during their rise in the 1980s and 1990s.. Call it “Judeo-Christianity,” or simply the neo-con’s unapologetic appeal to American domination, it boiled down to the same thing: some lucky Jews were to be allowed to sit at the table of empire if they did as they were told, kept the Arabs in line, and agreed not to say anything bad about the ancient Protestants that still controlled the corporate upper class, particularly that part of it interested in keeping energy based on fossil fuels (the same part that would later swing the entire Republican party behind climate denial). The old-boy network of Episcopalians and other Protestants that had mainly controlled the corporate upper class before the 1980s would now do their part by increasingly including Israel, and certain of its rich American proxies, into their imperial calculations.

The Zionist part of the Faustian bargain was to help get the Likudnik political class in Israel get what it wanted, after the collapse of final status talks in 2000, which is the ethnic cleansing of the remaining Palestinians, either slowly (by making life unbearably difficult), in installments, or all at once. By controlling almost half of the West Bank, the Israelis have made the two-state solution nearly impossible. Under a one-state solution, on the other hand, they will be able to do whatever they want to the Palestinians; and without question they will—if there is no external or internal pressures to stop them—kill and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians by the millions. The will finish the job of ethnic cleansing begun in 1947-1949.

Zionism, and then neo-conservatism, were the outgrowth of western-style imperialism, and were only incidentally a religious phenomenon at first; but this desperate and mistaken collaboration has gradually become one in which religious nationalism is by far the most dynamic, unpredictable and dangerous factor within the conservative foreign policy coalition. It is all the more volatile because of the guilt, fear and anger arising from the Holocaust and the Nazi nightmare, a free-floating trauma that nobody has been able to explain or deconstruct. For that reason, it still drives decisions made about the present and the future. Christian evangelical leaders have recently striven to adopt a more mainstream image, and embraced centrist and even progressive concerns; but the evangelical voting bloc within the Republican Party will be a reliable source of support for imperial wars for some time, not to mention torture, Muslim-baiting and obscurantism generally. But the most problematic reality is that both evangelicals and Zionists are still quite prepared to give religious labels to their organizational behavior—in other words, both are likely to support and promote the idea of a worldwide religious war against Islam, whether covert or overt. This is the most dangerous outcome of the Zionist collaboration with the Religious Right.

For neo-cons, the irrational and tribal side of the evangelical/neo-con deal has far out-stripped every other consideration; and that is what increasingly makes neo-conservatism a cult rather than a considered geo-political worldview. This has alarmed the paleo-conservatives, first because there are now almost as many Jewish billionaires as Protestant ones, but also because the old-boy Prods can no longer control the volatile Zionists they had originally hired on as errand boys and mercenaries.

The paleos are alarmed for a reason that should also alarm us, but not because it inconveniences a few rich Protestants. The neo-con approach to problem-solving is no longer rational, or based on enlightened or even informed self-interest, but has become an apocalyptic movement based on identification with the Holocaust, driven by an almost complete internalization of its trauma and an ever-present and semi-hysterical death worship of the six million. The basic neo-conservative idea is that both America and Israel must exist in a state of permanent war, an idea that neo-cons first expressed in their public letter to Netayahu in 1996 pleading against a peace deal with the Palestinians. But what country can remain in a state of permanent war? Why is that better than peace? Permanent war is an abomination, and people who believe in it are insane.

The apocalyptic, victimology-driven Jewish neo-cons who want permanent war do not flinch for a moment at the potential loss of Jewish lives; indeed, they have lived for years in a moral and emotional universe in which it is assumed as self-evident that the world hates the Jews, everybody is against them, and a new Holocaust is on the way. In fact it is so self-evident and so necessary to their weltanschauung that the neo-cons that believe in it will do almost anything to make it happen.

The more Jews that die: the more children murdered: the more the neo-cons can trumpet to the world that everybody really does hate them. Their solution is an apocalyptic one, borrowed from the most hysterical and blood-obsessed form of Christianity, but going the Christians one step better—to the neo-cons the objective is not to win the Final Battle, but to lose it, thereby acting out to ecstatic completion the total authenticity of their victim status. The apocalyptic solution is, at bottom, a dangerous, narcissistic form of public suicide that seeks the destruction of the world as its answer to the paradoxes of the human dilemma.

Notes.

[1] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), 143-144.

[2] Hajo G. Meyer, The End of Judaism (Amsterdam: G. Meyer Books, 2007), 188.