Here is some scary **** for ya:

[speeder]

I never thought in my lifetime that I would be scared so much by fanatical religious zealots, much less by ones who basically believe in the same God as most of my family members. (Christians by definition, but not fanatical).

I know that this is really long, but I suggest at least reading part of it, you will get the drift. It is not meant to be anti-Christian, since I am one, but if you believe what these people do, you scare me.

Check it out:

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted December 4, 2004.
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20666/
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the
delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe to sit in the seat
of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our
history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a
world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.
When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but
they are always blind. And there is the da! nger: voters and politicians alike,
oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior?
Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant
in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he
said, after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was
talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across
the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true –
one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate.
In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls
believing in the rapture. Google the rapture and you will
find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes written by the
Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye.
These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a
couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and
wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of
Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre: once Israel has occupied the
rest of its biblical lands," legions of the anti-Christ will
attack it,
triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not
beenconverted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture.
True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven.
There, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and
religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the
several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up. I've read the literature. I've reported on these
people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are
sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the
rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared
solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their
support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a
warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are
bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of
man.
A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but
welcomed – an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The
last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 – just one point below the
critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of god will return,
the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal
hellfire. So what does this mean for public policy and the environment?
Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer –the road to
environmental apocalypse." Read it and you will see h! ow
millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmenta l destruction is
not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed – even hastened – as a
sign of the coming apocalypse.
We're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are
beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the
recent election – 231 legislators in total – more since the election – are backed by
the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th
congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential
Christian right advocacy groups. They include:

Â_ Â_ Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Â_ Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

Â_ Â_ Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania

Â_ Â_ Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona

House Speaker Dennis Hastert
Â_ Â_ Majority Whip Roy Blunt.
The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was
Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical
book of Amos on the senate floor: the days will come, sayeth the Lord God,
that I will send a famine in the land." he seemed to be relishing the thought.
And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found
that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of
Revelations are going to come true. and nearly one-quarter think the
Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.
Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600
Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250
Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will
come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot
be expected to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the
droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs
of the apocalypse foretold in the bible? Why care about global climate change
when you and yours will be r! escued in the rapture?
And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord
will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book,
America's Providential History. You'll find there these words: the
secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie... that needs to
be cut up so everyone can get a piece. However, the Christian
knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources
in God's earth... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated,
Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of
resources to accommodate all of the people.
No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant
rhymn, Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the
foot soldiers on November 2, including many who have! made the apocalypse a powerful
driving
force in modern American politics.
Let me put all of this on a personal level. I myself don't know how to
be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every
morning
to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist.
Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked:
What do youthink of the market? I'm optimistic, he answered.
Then why do you look so worried?
And he answered: Because I am not sure my optimism
is justified. I'm not, either.
Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the
Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the
natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the
health and lives of their children. Now I'm not so sure. It's not that I don't want
to believe that – it's just that I read the news and connect the dots:
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmen! tal Protection
Agency has declared the election a mandate for Presiden t Bush on the
environment.
This administration wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water
Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and
their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act that requires
the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural
resources.
They want to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle
tailpipe inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility
vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
They wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep
certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.
They wants to drop all of the government's new-source review suits
against polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached
earlier with coal companies.

They want to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase
drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped
barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in
America.
I read just this week that the Environmental Protection Agency planned
to spend nine million dollars – $2 million of it from the
administration's friends at the American ! Chemistry Council – to pay poor families to continue
to use pesticides in their homes, pesticides that have been linked to
neurological damage in children. Instead of ordering an end to their use, the
government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a
camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

[speeder]

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's
f riends at the international policy network, which is supported by Exxon Mobile
and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is
a myth, sea levels are not rising and that scientists who believe
catastrophe is possible are an embarrassment.
I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations
bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to
it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides;
language ;prohibiting judicial review for a forest in ! Oregon; a waiver of
environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by
developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.


I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the
computer– pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of
Nancy,7;Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at mefrom those photographs and I say, Father, forgive us, for we know now
what we are doing I am stopped short by the thought: That's not right. We
DO know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust.
Despoiling their world.
And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are
greedy?
Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustainindignation at injustice?
What has happened to out moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: 'How do you see the world?And
&Gloucester, who is blind, answers:_ I see it feelingly.'I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as ajournalistI know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free – not only to feel but to fight for the future we want.
And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk.
What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called – the science of the heart... the capacity to
see... to feel... and then to act... as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.

[lendaddy]

Comeon Denis, I mean really. I know these people(some), personally. I am here to tell you this guy is the nut, not them. Oh well, if that's what you guys want to believe what can I say?

This is just more silly sensationalism IMHO.

[speeder]

So the stuff mentioned here is untrue? Just asking.

[lendaddy]

What do you expect me to do, go through each of his vague quotes and assumptions and refute them with actual(in context) quotes, etc.... We've been down that road and it goes nowhere.

Read Revelations, it is scary, I'll grant you that. But the idea that Bush & co. are trying to usher in the rapture is silly. This crap just gets old. I refuse to believe even the author believes this is true. Tiresome, maybe that's the goal?

[Porsche-O-Phile]

My Daily Prayer:

"God, please protect me from your 'followers'".

[rrpjr]

The true theological fanatics in the world must be awfully heartened to hear that a smattering of superannuated white Christian congressmen are inspiring such fear in portions of our citizenship.

“The delusional is no longer marginal” all right, it has magnificently congealed in the form of the post-modern Left. What a foolish old frump Bill Moyers has become! The babbling derangement of the Left over what they see as “Christian fanaticism” is interesting though, when viewed against the true fascist fanaticism loose in the world right now. Not truly theological in fact, but nihilistic, it is dedicated to the violent destruction of every humanist, secular value (economic, artistic and ecological) the West has ever stood for.

In the apt words of lendaddy, "really!"

[red ufo]

Originally posted by lendaddy
What do you expect me to do, go through each of his vague quotes and assumptions and refute them with actual(in context) quotes, etc.... We've been down that road and it goes nowhere.

Read Revelations, it is scary, I'll grant you that. But the idea that Bush & co. are trying to usher in the rapture is silly. This crap just gets old. I refuse to believe even the author believes this is true. Tiresome, maybe that's the goal?

I'd say BS. Sharon and Bush and UBL are doing everything they can to bring about WW3 and the rapture. I swear they are following Nostrodaus and every doomsday prediction down to the letter. All three of them are in on it.

Its all Jesus freaks and neocons and UBL puppets that will try to lead this world blindly to its destruction from their delusional talking to the LORD.

Is there anything Orwell said Bush hasn't tried to accomplish?

[cstreit]

Not to take stuff out of context, but the politicians who put riders that are completely unrelated on other bills oughta be horse-whipped.

How many times have good bills been shot down because some sneak-theif put in a rider to spend $10million researching pig-lipstick,etc...

[red ufo]

Originally posted by cstreit
Not to take stuff out of context, but the politicians who put riders that are completely unrelated on other bills oughta be horse-whipped.

How many times have good bills been shot down because some sneak-theif put in a rider to spend $10million researching pig-lipstick,etc...

No doubt!!!

It should be 1 bill per item, per vote. Then a website showing who shot down what. Instead we have large packages of stuff they know will never pass. Its just passing the buck and keeping certain topics to never get resolved for partisan policy issues to run on.

The sky is falling......Oh my....

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Originally posted by red ufo
I'd say BS. Sharon and Bush and UBL are doing everything they can to bring about WW3 and the rapture.

Dude, Sharon probably doesn't even know what "the rapture" is. I know I don't, though I've heard of it before.

PS I don't care what it is, either.

[M.D. Holloway]

IMVHO: I think the vast majority of people have the whole thing pretty mixed up in there heads. First and far most – our belief in our God is pretty westernized. This “thing” that the majority of the west believes that God is a grand technician that has some incredible assembly chops. That to me seems to be humanizing the very concept.

3000+ years ago was it was all externalized. No personal responsibility for actions. No self intraspection. This adds up to no personal or social growth.

All of a sudden, the Middle East gets a flav of the east via the Christ with a bold new concept “Kingdom found within!”, and not to place too much in idols or kings but rather faith. Bang – the concept gets cross wise with the Jews who have a one God religion but tied to tradition (read the book of Matthew), the Romans which renders to Caesar which is Caesars (check out the book of Mark), the Greeks – pagan rituals (see the gospels of Luke), and the Gnostics who were bound by knowing (Gospel according to John). You had four strong groups looking to nail a challenging way of thinking to the cross. And so it was.

As far as the book of Revelations is concerned – take some time and really try to read it. It is a great message of hope, written for Christians under persecution by John. The message is ‘not to worry, God is on control’. It is a book of encouragement, not some dooms day mumbo jumbo.

Biggest mistake people seem to do is to read and interpret the bible, Koran, book of Mormon or for that matter anything that deals with this stuff the same way you would read a tech manual. The stuff is poetry – a singular expression that does it’s best to explain the turmoil that exists between ones ears and ones heart.

Read the religious stuff the same way you listen to great music or read poetry and it will reach you much easier. Taking the stuff literal will only mess it all up. It doesn’t speak in that language.

[911pcars]

Not sure I necessarily agree with Bill Moyer's assessment, but he's a respected journalist with plenty of credible history.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has compelling evidence showing the current administration trashing current environmental laws in "Crimes Against Nature". It's on my reading list. A short article:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/10/09_402.html

and a bit longer one in Rolling Stone:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

As Kennedy says, we (Republicans, Democrats and others) all share the same interest in clean air, water, and taking care of wildlife and the commons (public lands).

Can anyone be against our environment? Well, yes. It's a matter of perspective, and the current administration seems to have their own.

Sherwood

[tabs]

Bill Moyers was a speech writer for the last Great Liberal President of the USA Lyndon Baines Johnson...

Moyers is a hopeless Liberal....so anything he says has to be taken in that context....

And now that you bring up the environment....your/our lifestyle is dependent on 20,000,000 barrels of oil a DAY. Anything less than that and you can live in the same lap of luxury as Ted Kozinsky did in Montana....

But U don't get that...there is a real disconnect there...like it can't happen or sumthin...guess again...

The point being, there has to be a balance between economic interest..keeping the lights on and the environment...U can't have both.....and there is no alternative now or in the next 50 years or so that will change that...

[cegerer]

".... but I suggest at least reading part of it ....."

OK, I got thru the "By Bill Moyers" part and stopped. I'm calling bull***** right there .....

[hardflex]

but Anne Coulter or Neil Boortz are OK....... that's a laugh

[Mike(dat's me)]

Ya know, I am versed in the rapture so I though this might be an interesting thread... but as I read the words all my brain recieves is
"blah, blah blibbity blah, republican democrat blah blah, ann blah, kennedy blah, blah blah blah blah"

Except for Red's post in which I heard "how could I have guessed he'd take that opinion... blibbity blah"

[red ufo]

Originally posted by 911pcars
Not sure I necessarily agree with Bill Moyer's assessment, but he's a respected journalist with plenty of credible history.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has compelling evidence showing the current administration trashing current environmental laws in "Crimes Against Nature". It's on my reading list. A short article:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/10/09_402.html

and a bit longer one in Rolling Stone:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

As Kennedy says, we (Republicans, Democrats and others) all share the same interest in clean air, water, and taking care of wildlife and the commons (public lands).

Can anyone be against our environment? Well, yes. It's a matter of perspective, and the current administration seems to have their own.

Sherwood

I have the RFK jr. book.

While it contains some relevent data and he is pretty wise about what Bush has done. As much as I don't like Bush, I couldn't get over his none stop Bush bash. Some parts of the book were poorly written and he couldn't even come off as nonpartisan.

I was looking for just the facts, not jabs at Bush all the time.

[Halm]

Originally posted by 911pcars
Not sure I necessarily agree with Bill Moyer's assessment, but he's a respected journalist with plenty of credible history.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has compelling evidence showing the current administration trashing current environmental laws in "Crimes Against Nature". It's on my reading list. A short article:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/10/09_402.html

and a bit longer one in Rolling Stone:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

As Kennedy says, we (Republicans, Democrats and others) all share the same interest in clean air, water, and taking care of wildlife and the commons (public lands).

Can anyone be against our environment? Well, yes. It's a matter of perspective, and the current administration seems to have their own.

Sherwood

Sherwood, with all due respect, you are quoting partisans of the highest order. Moyer's in particular has evolved from a "moderate / look at all sides" into a leading secularist. No one in journalism has fallen further on my personal esteem ranking. So please consider the sources.