Soldiers of Christ.....Inside America's most powerful megachurch(Harpers)

[RedEarth]

They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain towns. What Colorado Springs offers, ultimately, is a story.

Lori Rose is from Minnesota and heard rumors about this holy city when she lived on an Air Force base near Washington, D.C. Her husband isn’t a Christian, refuses Jesus, looks at things he shouldn’t; but she has found a church to attend without him and joined a marriage study group there. Ron Poelstra came from Los Angeles. Now he volunteers at his church, selling his pastor’s books on “free-market theology” after services. His two teenage boys stand behind him, display models for the benefits of faith. L.A., Ron says, would have eaten them up: the gangs. Adam Taylor, now a pastor, grew up in Westchester County, an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman fortune, the son of artists and writers. In Colorado Springs he learned the Bible the hard way, each word a nail pounded into sin.

The story they found in Colorado is about newness: new houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were before the culture wars, after the World Wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.

Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of it—the burglary rate in and around Colorado Springs exceeds that in New York City and Los Angeles—but the idea of crime: a faith in the absence of it. And of politics, too: Colorado Springs’ evangelicals believe they live without it, in a carved-out space for civility and for like-minded dedication to common-sense principles. Even pollution plays a part: Christian conservatives there believe that they breathe cleaner air, live on ground untainted by the satanic fires of nineteenth-century industry—despite the smog that collects against the foothills of the Rockies and the cyanide, from a century of mining, that is leaching into the aquifers and mountain streams.

http://www.harpers.org/SoldiersOfChrist.html

[Richard D]

1. Yipes.

[jaxx]

2. Colo Spgs is one of the most bigoted towns in the country

and fingers can point to Dobson for the honors. His backhand to the gays has created a real hatred in the town. What used to be a free soul, truly spiritual community has become so divided it's hard to recognize the place anymore. These fundamentalist god users are nothing but KKK in drag. Preaching hate out of the side of their mouths, while acting like it's such a shame, but the bible tells them they are the only right thinking people, so trash the diversities. Piss on them and their mega-churches. Preacher Ted and his commune.......Charlie Manson would be proud.

If this posts twice.......sorry!! The server got lost :)

[NAO]

3. Can we drop Freethought leaflets or something? (Ingersoll, Paine, etc.)

Antidote to Fundamentalist Nut-Cases is a Revival of the Freethought Movement

I think what we need is a Freethought movement similar to what the US had around the turn of the 20th century. Robert Ingersoll was touring the country, lecturing on secularism and exposing the claims of revealed religion to be false. Unless something breaks the stranglehold of religious fundamentalism in the US - and in the world - I think we are going to continue the slide into Theocracy and destruction.

- Freethinkers could produce TV ads that exposed the claims of Christianity to be falsehoods. "Freethinkers for Truth", or something along those lines, to debunk religious superstition using 30 second TV attack ads. They could feature "Great Moments in American Secularism and Freethought" with "Great American Freethinkers" like Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll.

If TV stations would not run the ads, we could pull the same, "help, help, I'm being repressed!" crap that the fundies are always whining about. And of course the refusal to run the ads would draw attention to the works of Paine and Ingersoll, which are in themselves a very effective antidote to religious superstition.


- Freethinkers could form an 'anti-Gideons' and leave copies of Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" and Robert Ingersoll's "Why I am Agnostic" in hotel rooms.

- Freethinkers produce tracts and pamphlets showing the contradictions in the Bible and exposing the rip-off of dozens of pagan beliefs and their incorporation into Christianity.

We could have a Second Enlightenment, a Second Age of Reason! We could re-secularize a world gone mad with religious superstition.

Robert Ingersoll's "Why I Am Agnostic"
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/why_i_am_agnostic.html

Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason"
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/index.shtml

*****

From "The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine (1795)

EVERY national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven, and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes to near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and therefore I have a right not to believe it. When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing at that time to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.

It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church, sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.

More Freethought Resources

The Freethought Zone
Science and Reason Over Religion and Superstition
http://freethought.freeservers.com /

Freedom from Religion Foundation
http://www.ffrf.org /

Secular Humanism
http://www.secularhumanism.org /

Secular Web
http://www.infidels.org/index.shtml

Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason - Online
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/index.shtml

Complete Works of Robert Ingersoll - Online
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/index.shtml

Dominionism's Theocratic Designs and Radical Clerics

Fundamentalist Radical Clerics such as Falwell, Dobson, and Robertson are not merely medieval throwbacks or misguided religious hacks. They are part of a well organized subversionary movement known as "Dominionism". Dominionism constitutes a serious threat to American Democracy. These Radical Clerics have developed and are executing a detailed plan to gradually replace the free, secular democratic society of the United States with a Theocracy.

It is critical that people become aware of the extreme agenda these people have for the United States and ultimately for the world. The results of the 2004 Presidential Election were not a fluke or something that was drummed up over a period of months. It has been in planning for over 20 years, and what we are seeing take place now is, in the words of Katherine Yurica, "the swift advance of a planned coup".

The Swift Advance of a Planned Coup: Conquering by Stealth and Deception - How the Dominionists Are Succeeding in Their Quest for National Control and World Power
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheSwiftAdvanceOfaPlannedCoup.htm

The Despoiling of America: How George W. Bush became the head of the new American Dominionist Church/State
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm

Video on the Christian Reconstructionist Dominionist Theocratic Agenda
http://www.theocracywatch.org/av/video_dominion.ram

The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party
a public information project from TheocracyWatch.org
http://www.theocracywatch.org

The Religious Right - An Anti-American Terrorist Movement
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8816.htm

Evolve Fish - Your One-Stop Shop for Freethought Materials
http://www.evolvefish.com

[TwentyFive]

4. I stopped off in COLO SPRINGS and was surprised it was as cool as it was.

Not everybody in Colorado Springs is a religious nut. The downtown area reminded me a small Austin, a bit funky and the had a Jamba Juice and few coffee shops and independent restaurants.

Granted, I drive throught the rest of the town and saw the huge FOF mega complex, strip malls. I get the impression there are some old time residents who had their town stolen by religious nut jobs. It's about 30-40 miles due south of Denver. I think the reason it got a start as a religious nut job place is the military base that is near the town.

[megatherium]

5. This church sounds more loony than the average megachurch,

to judge from the article. More loony than the megachurches I'm familiar with, at least, which are merely frighteningly conservative. But in the days when I was more evangelical, I was more on the fundamentalist side of the equation, not the Pentecostalist side.

There's a real difference there not apparent to outsiders: Pentecostalists emphasize miracles and are given to emotional, ecstatic forms of worship such as "being slain in the Spirit" (where the worshiper collapses during an intense emotional state), or speaking in tongues. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, while believing in healing and in answered prayer, de-emphasize these spiritual manifestations, instead preferring a more cerebral worship centered on Bible teaching.

Both camps favor the teaching that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, but fundamentalists focus more on the Bible and Pentecostalisms focus more on miracles and emotion. Some fundamentalists teach that the "age of miracles" ended after New Testament times (the first century), when the Scriptures were complete. A familiar example of a Pentecostalist preacher is Pat Robertson, who receives "words of power" and does healings. A familiar example of a fundamentalist preacher is Jerry Falwell, who does not do these things.

Both camps generally share the same attitudes about homosexuality and similar issues. The more enlightened evangelicals will preach compassion for gay people, whom they say are unhealthy and need help; the less enlightened evangelicals (the Dominionists, who are a relatively small portion of American evangelicals) say the death penalty would be a suitable remedy for homosexuality.

[sarcasmo]

6. One more place I WILL NOT visit.