THIS
IS WHAT THAT THIS ALL ABOUT IN THE MINDS OF THESE INSANE PSYCHOPATHS.
They will not rest easy until we are all wiped off the surface of the
earth.
Millions of Evangelical Christians Want to Start World War III … to Speed Up the Second Coming
Global
Research, February 18, 2012
Washington's
Blog 18
February 2012
Millions
of Americans believe that Christ
will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there
is widespread war in the Middle East.
Some of these folks want
to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction,
so that Jesus comes quickly.
According
to French President Chirac, Bush told
him that the Iraq war was needed to bring on the apocalypse:
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog
and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out
of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of
Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:
“And
when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his
prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four
quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to
battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
Bush
believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:
“This
confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to
erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…
There
can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching
the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven
by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment
of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the
instrument of the Lord.
“Tony’s
Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed
strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone –
Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should
triumph over evil, making lives better.”
Mr
Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair’s mentor, says that his
religion gave him a “total belief in what’s right and what’s
wrong”, leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as “a
moral cause”…
Anti-war
campaigners criticised remarks Mr Blair made in 2006, suggesting that
the decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.
Bill
Moyers reports that the organization Christians United for Israel –
led by highly-influential Pastor John C. Hagee – is a universal
call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish
settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and lobby
for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. All to bring Russia into a war
against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second
Coming and The Rapture.
See this and this.
This
all revolves around what is called Dispensationalism. So popular
is Dispensationalism that Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series
has sold 65 million copies.
Dispensationalists
include the following mega-pastors and their churches:
They
are supported by politicians such as:
Texas
Senator John Cronyn
Former
House Minority Whip Roy
Blunt
Former
House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay
And
others
Abundant
evidence makes clear that millions of Americans — upwards of 40
percent, according to some widely publicized national polls — do,
indeed, believe that Bible prophecies detail a specific sequence of
end-times events. According to the most popular prophetic system,
premillennial dispensationalism … the Islamic world is allied
against God and faces annihilation in the last days. That view is
actually a very ancient one in Christian eschatology. Medieval
prophecy expounders saw Islam as the demonic force whose doom is
foretold in Scripture.
***
The
prophecy magazine Midnight Call warmly endorsed a fierce attack on
Islam by Franklin Graham (son of Billy) and summed up Graham’s case
in stark terms: “Islam is an evil religion.” In Lindsey’s 1996
prophecy novel, “Blood
Moon,”
Israel, in retaliation for a planned nuclear attack by an Arab
extremist, launches a massive thermonuclear assault on the entire
Arab world. Genocide, in short, becomes the ultimate means of
prophetic fulfillment.
Dr.
Timothy Webber – an evangelical Christian who has served as a
teacher of church history and the history of American religion at
Denver Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Louisville, Vice-President at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary
in Lombard, IL, and President of Memphis Theological Seminary in
Tennessee – explains:
In
a recent Time/CNN poll, more than one-third of Americans said that
since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they have been thinking more
about how current events might be leading to the end of the world.
While
only 36 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible is God’s
Word and should be taken literally, 59 percent say they believe that
events predicted in the Book of Revelation will come to pass. Almost
one out of four Americans believes that 9/11 was predicted in the
Bible, and nearly one in five believes that he or she will live long
enough to see the end of the world. Even more significant
for this study,over one-third of those Americans who support
Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches
that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before
Jesus can return.
Millions
of Americans believe that the Bible predicts the future and that we
are living in the last days. Their beliefs are rooted in
dispensationalism, a particular way of understanding the Bible’s
prophetic passages, especially those in Daniel and Ezekiel in the Old
Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. They make
up about one-third of America’s 40 or 50 million evangelical
Christians and believe that the nation of Israel will play a central
role in the unfolding of end-times events. In the last part of the
20th century, dispensationalist evangelicals become Israel’s best
friends-an alliance that has made a serious geopolitical difference.
***
Starting
in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the popular culture with
runaway best-sellers, and a well-networked political campaign to
promote and protect the interests of Israel. Since the mid-1990s,
tens of millions of people who have never seen a prophetic chart or
listened to a sermon on the second coming have read one or more
novels in the Left Behind series, which has become the most effective
disseminator of dispensationalist ideas ever.
***
During
the early 1980s the Israeli Ministry of Tourism recruited evangelical
religious leaders for free “familiarization” tours. In time,
hundreds of evangelical pastors got free trips to the Holy Land. The
purpose of such promotional tours was to enable people of even
limited influence to experience Israel for themselves and be shown
how they might bring their own tour group to Israel. The Ministry of
Tourism was interested in more than tourist dollars: here was a way
of building a solid corps of non-Jewish supporters for Israel in the
United States by bringing large numbers of evangelicals to hear and
see Israel’s story for themselves. The strategy caught on.
***
Shortly
after the Six-Day War, elements within the Israeli government saw the
potential power of the evangelical subculture and began to mobilize
it as a base of support that could influence American foreign policy.
The Israeli government sent Yona Malachy of its Department of
Religious Affairs to the United States to study
American fundamentalismand
its potential as an ally of Israel. Malachy was warmly received
by fundamentalistsand
was able to influence some of them to issue strong pro-Israeli
manifestos. By the mid-1980s, there was a discernible shift in the
Israeli political strategy. The American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish state’s major lobbying group in
Washington, D.C., started re-aligning itself with the American
political right-wing, including Christian conservatives. Israel’s
timing was perfect. It began working seriously with American
dispensationalists at the precise moment that American
fundamentalists and evangelicals were discovering their political
voice.
***
Probably
the largest pro-Israel organization of its kind is the National Unity
Coalition for Israel, which was founded by a Jewish woman who learned
how to get dispensationalist support. NUCI opposes “the
establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of Israel.”
***
In
their commitment to keep Israel strong and moving in directions
prophesied by the Bible, dispensationalists are supporting
some of the most dangerous elements in Israeli society. They do so
because such political and religious elements seem to conform to
dispensationalist beliefs about what is coming next for Israel. By
lending their support-both financial and spiritual-to such groups,
dispensationalists are helping the future they envision come to pass.
***
Dispensationalists
believe that the Temple is coming too; and their convictions have led
them to support the aims and actions of what most Israelis believe
are the most dangerous right-wing elements in their society, people
whose views make any compromise necessary for lasting peace
impossible. Such sentiments do not matter to the believers in Bible
prophecy, for whom the outcome of the quarrelsome issue of the Temple
Mount has already been determined by God.
Since
the end of the Six-Day War, then, dispensationalists have
increasingly moved from observers to participant-observers. They have
acted consistently with their convictions about the coming Last Days
in ways that make their prophecies appear to be self-fulfilling.
***
As
Paul Boyer has pointed out, dispensationalism has effectively
conditioned millions of Americans to be somewhat passive about the
future and provided them with lenses through which to understand
world events. Thanks to the sometimes changing perspectives of their
Bible teachers, dispensationalists are certain that trouble in the
Middle East is inevitable, that nations will war against nations, and
that the time is coming when millions of people will die as a result
of nuclear war, the persecution of Antichrist, or as a result of
divine judgment. Striving for peace in the Middle East is a
hopeless pursuit with no chance of success.
***
For
the dispensational community, the future is determined. The Bible’s
prophecies are being fulfilled with amazing accuracy and rapidity.
They do not believe that the Road Map will-or should-succeed.
According to the prophetic texts, partitioning is not in Israel’s
future, even if the creation of a Palestinian state is the best
chance for peace in the region. Peace is nowhere prophesied for the
Middle East, until Jesus comes and brings it himself. The worse thing
that the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United
Nations can do is force Israel to give up land for a peace that will
never materialize this side of the second coming. Anyone who
pushes for peace in such a manner is ignoring or defying God’s plan
for the end of the age.
***
It
seems clear that dispensationalism is on a roll, that its followers
feel they are riding the wave of history into the shore of God’s
final plan. Why should they climb back into the stands when being on
the field of play is so much more fun and apparently so beneficial to
the game’s outcome? As [one dispensationalist group's]
advertisement read, “Don’t just read about prophecy when you can
be part of it.”
Atheist
War Hawks Manipulate Believers to Beat the Drums of War
Leo
Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including
many leaders of the current administration.
Indeed,
many of the main neocon players – including Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam
Shulsky – were students
of Strauss at
the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.
The
people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons
who pushed for war against Iraq. See thisand this.
(They planned both wars at
least 20 years ago.)
For example, Shulsky was the director of the Office of Special
Plans – the Pentagon unit responsible for selling false
intelligence regarding
Iraq’s weapons of mass. He is now a member of
the equivalent organization targeting Iran: the Iranian Directorate.
Strauss,
born in Germany, was an
admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli.
Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external
threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should
be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought
that:
A
political order can be stable only if it is united by an external
threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no
external threat exists then one has to be manufactured
Indeed,
Stauss used the analogy of Gulliver’s Travels to show what a
Neocon-run society would look like:
“When
Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city,
including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from
catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such
a show of disrespect.” (this quote also from the
same biographer)
Only
a great fool would call the new political science diabolic . .
. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome
burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles,
and it does not know that Rome burns.
So
Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing
catastrophes happen on one’s own soil to one’s own people — of
“pissing” on one’s own people, to use his Gulliver’s travel
analogy. And he advocates that government’s should pretend that
they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally “not
know” that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one’s own
people in order to save them from some “catastophe” (perhaps to
justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it
away from our real threat — an increasingly-powerful China?).
What
does this have to do with religion?
Strauss taught that
religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to
achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need
not believe in religion.
In
the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in neoconservative
magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support of
intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of
secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this –
along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of
a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even
tactical politics, to attract religious supporters.
So
is it any surprise that the folks who planned war against Iraq and
Iran at
least 20 years ago are
pushing religious disinformation to stir up the evangelical
community?
Conservative
Christians were
the biggest backers of the Iraq war. And the Neocons are catering to
them to try to talk them into supporting war with Iran, as well.
I’ve
recently seen a swarm of spam claiming that all Muslims are evil,
that they want to take over the world and establish a Muslim
caliphate, and that they want to nuke Iran. They misquote Muslims and
use false statements to try to stir up religious hatred.
They
are simply using the Straussian playbook: stir up religious sentiment
– even if you are personally an atheist – to create and
demonize an “enemy”, to promote the war that you want to launch.
Not
a Problem with a Particular Religion … But of Immaturity
Most
Americans confuse Zionism and Judaism. But many devout
Jews are against
Zionism,
and Zionists can be Christian.
And
as I’ve repeatedly noted,
fundamentalist Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus are all very much
alike, and often willing to use violence to spread their ideology …
while more spiritually mature Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus
are all much more tolerant and peaceful than their evangelical
brothers:
As
Christian writer and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck explained, there are
different stages of spiritual maturity. Fundamentalism – whether it
be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu fundamentalism – is
an immature
stage of
development. There are peaceful, contemplative Muslim sects –
think the
poet Rumi the poet and Sufis –
and violent sects, just as there are contemplative Christian orders
and violent Christian groups (and peaceful and violent atheists).
While
there are certainly some Arab terrorists, Islam cannot be blamed for
their barbaric murderous actions, just as Christianity
cannot be blamed for
the Norwegian Christian terrorist
– Anders Behring Breivik’s actions.
University
of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in
international security affairs – points
out:
Extensive
research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to
blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.
The
9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with prostitutes
and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any mosque.
See this, this, this, this, this, this, this,
and this.
So they were not really Muslims.
And
even atheists like Stalin can be terrorists, or at least genocidal
maniacs.
Indeed, all religions
teach compassion, love and the Golden Rule. Likewise, atheism
teaches respect for the individual, the most good for the most
people, and helping everyone reach their human potential.
Some
within each philosophy follow these teachings, and others want to
kill everyone who doesn’t agree with them. The issue is
not really the label of this religion or that, but of maturity and
true spirituality and compassion.
Postscript
1: Neoliberals and Neoconservatives are
very similar in many ways.
And because Neocons
are not conservative,
nothing in this post is meant to criticize conservatism.
Postscript
2: Most evangelicals are not dispensationalists, and so do
not want to bring on armageddon.
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