Harvard professor Dr. James Adams In a few decades we would all be fighting Christian fascists

seemslikeadream

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Fri Nov-16-07 01:23 PM
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Harvard professor Dr. James Adams In a few decades we would all be fighting Christian fascists

Edited on Fri Nov-16-07 01:27 PM by seemslikeadream

AMY GOODMAN: On the back of your book, Chris, is a quote from your professor at Harvard, Dr. James Luther Adams, who said that in a few decades we would all be fighting �Christian fascists.� Who was he, and why did he think this?

CHRIS HEDGES: James Luther Adams was my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School. He had spent the years 1935 and 1936 in Germany working with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Confessing Church or anti-Nazi church and eventually was picked up by the Gestapo and told to leave the country. He came back -- and this was in the early 1980s, when I was in seminary -- and saw the articulation of this new political religion, this religion that talked about seizing control of mainstream denominations, as well as institutions, creating a parallel media empire through Christian radio and broadcasting, and ultimately taking control of the government itself.

And he understood, in a visceral way, how when countries fall into despair -- of course, this began -- it was the time that began the assault on the American working class, which has been accelerated and essentially left tens of millions of people within our own country dispossessed -- he understood how demagogues use that despair. And I think we can say there, in many ways, has been a kind of Weimarization of the American working class. And he saw what we were doing through globalization, what we were doing to our working class and our middle class, coupled with the rise of these so-called Christian demagogues, as a frightening and toxic combination, which, if left unchecked, would destroy our democracy.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4102638726170063607&q=The+Cannons+of+Christianity&total=29&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

The Cannons of Christianity

Christian cannons have fired at my days
With the warning beneath the holy blaze
And bow to our authority
Say the cannons of Christianity

Oh the children will be sent to schools
Minds of clay are molded to their rules
Learn to fear all of eternity
Warn the cannons of Christianity

Holy hands will count the money raised
Like a king the Lord is richly praised
On a cross of diamond majesty
Say the cannons of Christianity

Missionaries will travel on crusades
The word is given, the heathen souls are saved
Conversions to our morality
Sigh the cannons of Christianity

Come the wars and turn the rules around
To bend your soul on the battle ground
And the Lord will march beside me
Drone the cannons of Christianity

Cathedral walls will glitter with their gold
And the sermons speak through silver robes
Building castles amidst the poverty
Say the cannons of Christianity

Worship now and wash your sins away
Drop the coins, fall to your knees and pray
Cleanse the world of all hypocrisy
Smile the cannons of Christianity

Christian cannons have fired at my days
With the warning beneath the holy blaze
And bow to our authority
Say the cannons of Christianity

By Phil Ochs

Democracy Now: American Fascists Pt. 1

Democracy Now: American Fascists Pt. 2

Chris Hedges's new book examines how Christian dominionists are seeking absolute power and a Christian state. According to Hedges, the movement bears a strong resemblance to the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s. Hedges is the former New York Times Middle East bureau chief and author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=genera_tim_rile_070906_nuclear_insanity_ord.htm

http://ianmasters.org/ian_masters_021807_80.mp3 (direct link to mp3)

http://www.ianmasters.org/archives.html (site link - scroll down to Feb. 18)

Chris Hedges on the religious right in the United States. Mr. Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran war correspondent, who now writes about religion and politics. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and is the author of the just published "American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America." In this book, Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the Christian fundamentalist movement from the point of view of a believer, as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian tradition. He points to the hundreds of members of Congress with high approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement is burrowing deep inside the American government, in order to subvert it. The movement's call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. He shows that the movement's yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the foundation for an unrecognizable fundmentalist America. His thesis: we face an imminent threat. Chris Hedges earlier books are highly acclaimed. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know about War and another religiously themed book, Losing Moses on the Freeway.. He has worked for various publications including the Christian Science Monitor and the Dallas Morning News. He was part of the New York Times team that shared the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for global terrorism coverage. Hedges has written extensively about his experiences on the front lines of war. He has reported about his experiences in Sarajevo, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, the Middle East and other places around the world. He is lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. (In a 2003 Commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Ill., Hedges raised the intense ire of audience members when he spoke out against the war in Iraq. Many regard Hedges as a "philosopher of the experience of war." According to Hedges, the experience of being in a war zone, where there is very little distinction between life and death, fills a person with a sense of "meaning" and brings him to a "high" that cannot be experienced so strongly any other way, producing a kind of addiction.)

http://ningens-blog.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-chris...

It's long and rambling, but it links to some stuff about Christianist fascism in the Air Force and also links to articles by Antipas Ministries, which is an interesting evangelical website that heavily criticizes right wing evangelicals for basically dealing with the devil.

http://militaryreligiousfreedom.org/

Michael L. Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, wrote "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military."

click on Public Forum and you'll see this blog post from May:

Saturday, May 26, 2007
FOR MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND
FROM MICK FARREN BLOG POSTING

I�ve been aware of various news reports concerning Fundamentalist Christians making increasing efforts to turn the US Military into a �Christian� fighting force, but other things, some epic, some trivia, have been absorbing my attention, but when activists and Air Force veterans like Michael Weinstein make statements like the one below I kinda think it�s time to take notice. I mean, I don�t feel exactly comfortable with the idea that megaton loaded nuclear bombers are flying around with crews who believe the Book of Revelation is going become reality anytime.

�The Christian Taliban is running the Department of Defense, It inundates everything. Can you imagine a contingent of religious zealots, with their contempt for secular values (and such manifestations of secular order as the U.S. Constitution) � and with their zest for holy war � in control of the most potent fighting force and weaponry in human history? Is this possible? Well, said Weinstein, consider the 523rd Fighter Squadron, based at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M., which calls itself The Crusaders, and whose emblem consists of a sword, four crosses and a medieval knight�s helmet. They fly F-16s with payloads consisting of �a wide variety of conventional, precision guided and nuclear weapons.� And listen once again to Commander-in-Chief Bush, speaking in 2003 to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: �God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If this is a religious war � a �clash of civilizations,� waged by competing agents of God�s will � victory may be indistinguishable from Armageddon. God help the human race.�

Here's another blog post that talks about the AF:

Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Because I love America: Reagan's Assistant General Counsel, Mikey Weinstein Speaks Out. with God on our side
By Mikey Weinstein

When I began asking questions about what I saw going on at Colorado Springs in 2004 I never expected that the inquiry would lead me to the horrifying conclusion that our country had been taken over by people who have used our own freedoms to enslave us. But that is what happened. When I began I, like most people, was focused on the personal. I believed that what was happening at the United States Air Force Academy, the harassment of cadets and staff with unwanted evangelism, was limited in scope. As the months passed, however, I found myself forced to constantly reassess my basic assumptions. The logic of events was stark and undeniable. Promises of an open inquiry were ignored; decent and courageous people like former Air Force Chaplin MeLinda Morton were intentionally muzzled to ensure the truth would not be heard and the wrongs righted.

As a Republican and an Academy graduate I find myself in head on conflict with my own oath to protect the Constitution. As a Jew I confronted a situation through ears that still hear the cries of my people walking silently into the brick buildings that would reduce them to ash. I cannot stand still and let that happen to my country.

You know about the law suit we filed; that suit took on the issue directly, based on the1st Amendment Right of members of the military to choose their own spiritual paths, unhampered by those placed in positions of authority and on the basis of the Establishment Clause and Clause Three of Article Six, which prohibit the existence of a national religion. That is what has happened. America now has a national religion whose tenets extend to a foreign policy that sees war in the Middle East as the fulfillment of its core mission . The power block responsible for the take over are now, effectively, in charge of the mightiest weapon the world has ever known, the United States Military.

My law suit was one element in the larger battle to take back America. That might seem excessive or alarmist; I only wish that was the case.

more...

http://militaryreligiousfreedom.org/events.html#4