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Fanatical Moslems Aren't That Different From Our Fanatics 9/12/2012 9:09:18 AM
Radical Moslems are American
fundamentalists' first cousins.
6th District Congresswoman, Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota recently caused a stir when she accused the Obama administration of being overrun by the Moslem Brotherhood. That’s the fundamentalist Moslem Brotherhood. Bachmann herself is a fundamentalist Christian. There’s not a whole lot of difference. Radical Moslems would impose Sharia law on their subjects. Bachman advocates a Christian government in the United States. Theocrats like Bachman and presidential candidate Rick Santorum are not democrats. Democracy protects the rights of everyone, including atheists and, yes, Moslems.
Among other things, Christian fundamentalists believe the Earth is only six thousand years old and that dinosaurs existed during Biblical times. They cite the Bible to prove it. But the Bible, including the Old Testament, was written by many different people. Many theologians attribute Deuteronomy to Baruch ben Neriah, Jeremiah’s scribe. Linguists have identified as many as four different “voices” in the Old Testament. The New Testament is quite a mishmash of “holy” books which were extant during the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity in the early Fourth Century. He told the Christian bishops to get their act together, since there were so many disagreements about Christian theology, including a debate about whether God had created Jesus out of nothing as he had his other creatures or whether there were really three persons in one God. The Arian heresy was decimated. It took approximately another hundred years for the bishops to come up with a Christian canon, The New Testament. But they left out books such as the Gnostic gospels and The Book of Enoch. The Gnostic gospels were more humanistic in that God would be internal rather than external, a Greek influence.
Fundamentalism of any stripe causes a lot of problems, especially when they get involved in politics. They oppose public education for that reason. What self respecting science teacher is going to argue that the Grand Canyon was created during the Flood in the Bible? And so theocrats support such issues as home schooling and vouchers for poor people who could then choose their own schools. Trouble is that would destroy public education. Ronald Regan, that mastermind of conservative ideology, saw a Republican base among fundamentalist Christians. He met with Jerry Falwell once a week during his presidency. The notorious James Watt was his Secretary of Interior. Watt believed we were in the End Times and as a result opposed protection of endangered species, and condoned using up our natural resources etc. We saw a bit of that when George W. Bush appointed fundamentalists to important positions in his administration, namely Alberto Gonzalez’s right hand woman Monica Gooding a graduate of Pat Robertson’s law school, Regent University, the same law school Michelle Bachmann graduated from when it was stationed at Oral Roberts. She was implicated in the federal prosecutor scandal.
Perhaps the most harmful aspect of religious interference in politics is their failure to agree with 97% of climatologists who claim human activity has contributed to global warming. We are presently suffering through an almost nationwide drought, something that didn’t happen during the Dust Bowl. People from Oklahoma, the eponymous Okies, moved to California, so that state must’ve been in better shape. I remember my mother saying she and her brothers and sisters had to heard their cattle fifty miles from St. Rosa, Minnesota (near St. Cloud) to Camp Ripley to find fodder. So, parts of the state were not under drought. Even if that three percent is correct, you just don’t take the chance. You do things like Cap and Trade. Even such backwaters as Australia have moved in that direction because of drought.
And now we have people in Libya attacking and murdering American diplomats because some fundamentalist American insulted Muhammad. Hey, Muhammad freely admitted he plagiarized most of the Qur’an from the Christian Bible. He called the Jews “The People of the Book.” And now we have religious fanatics biting the hand that fed them. There would be no modern Libya without the United States. Terry Jones also needs to shut the “f” up. Those are his first cousins he’s criticizing.
