Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

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rab
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Re: Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

Post by rab » Fri Dec 09, 2011 9:58 pm

Kudus to Blitzer for calling the asshat out on his BS on Obama's "war on religion."

Perry (and others like Rep. Steve King) think that not supporting these organizations because they discriminate is equal to a "war on religion." He said the Obama administration will not support religious organizations with federal dollars. Bullshit! Obama hasn't eliminated the faith based initiative nor has he eliminated the Nation Day of Prayer, and actually participated in it.

The reality is that it's not, with federal dollars, supporting organizations that discriminate . Big difference!
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rab
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Re: Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

Post by rab » Fri Dec 09, 2011 10:01 pm

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Re: Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

Post by Warren Dew » Sat Dec 10, 2011 12:35 am

Could we have a spoiler tag on the nsfw video picture?

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Re: Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

Post by rab » Sat Dec 10, 2011 1:12 am

People actually look at this site while at work? We have people on here with bouncing boobs avatars (among other things)?!
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Re: Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

Post by Warren Dew » Sat Dec 10, 2011 3:39 am

They're clothed boobs. And they're small enough to be difficult to discern from the next cube.

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Re: Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

Post by JimC » Sat Dec 10, 2011 8:00 am

If all the Republican candidates compete with each other on how far they are prepared to travel towards the lunatic religious right, it may actually mean they go over the event horizon for a sufficient number of US voters...

Go boys! Do the ultimate Jesus shuffle!

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Re: Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

Post by Animavore » Sun Dec 11, 2011 1:38 pm

Libertarianism: The belief that out of all the terrible things governments can do, helping people is the absolute worst.

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Re: Rick Perry's Shameless Promotion of Faith in Government

Post by Hermit » Sun Dec 11, 2011 4:34 pm

Going by an article in the Time magazine, Perry seems a little too chummy with the dominionists for my liking.
In God We Trust
By Jon Meacham
Monday, Sept. 26, 2011

He knew his audience. In August, Texas Governor Rick Perry convened the Response, a seven-hour prayer rally in Houston. In his drawling sermon, Perry quoted Isaiah and Ephesians. Invoking the prophet Joel, however, drew perhaps the most emotional reaction from his listeners. "Blow the trumpet in Zion," Perry quoted from Joel 2, "declare a holy fast, call a sacred assembly." Knowing murmurs and amens rang out at Reliant Stadium. They loved the message--and the messenger.

The cheers, though, may have had as much to do with what he didn't read as with what he did. The context of Joel 2 is the prophet's call for repentance to avert calamity before "the great and dreadful day of the Lord." The fate of the nation then lies in the hands of the faithful.

By citing Joel, Perry was drawing on imagery familiar to Christian dominionists. Driven in part by the verse in Genesis giving man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth," devoted dominionists believe it their obligation to control (the hard-line term) or influence (the softer version) what are called the "seven mountains" of business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion. The more extreme elements of this movement seek conquest and theocracy. Others insist they want only to transform the culture into something more in keeping with God's kingdom of justice and mercy.

Dominionism draws on sundry strands of American Evangelicalism. Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, a contemporary of Billy Graham's, believed in preparing Evangelical ambassadors for the wider world. After Roe v. Wade, Jerry Falwell and others abandoned their civil-rights-era aversion to politics and hurled themselves into the nation's partisan wars. Add a theology of witness and evangelism--a key text for dominionists is a literal reading of Jesus' Great Commission to his apostles to go to make disciples of "all nations"--and you wind up with a theologically and politically militant culture whose language about their ambitions for authority does not always seem metaphorical.

Evangelicals and politics is a given in America. What is new in the 2012 race is the emergence of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which was named by C. Peter Wagner, a Colorado Springs--based minister who writes books with titles like Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World and believes the world is in the grip of evil. Even the Capitol--or at least the Democratic side of it--is considered under demonic control. The NAR's mission: to achieve dominion over the darkness through Christian activism in politics and beyond. (It's no surprise that Mormons and Jews don't fare well in this system.) As Wagner sees it, the Lord is calling 21st century apostles like him to do God's will on earth.

As the Texas Observer's Forrest Wilder detailed, several of the figures who organized and headlined Perry's August prayer rally come from the NAR fringe. Alice Patterson, who stood with Perry during his sermon, has written that the Democratic Party is controlled by a "demonic structure."

Such dominionist themes echo those of other schools of Christian thought that argue that the laws of civil society should be biblically based. (Imagine courts with the power to enforce the Ten Commandments or punish gays and you get the idea.) A defining text of the cause is by a leading figure in the spread of the Christian homeschooling movement, Rousas John Rushdoony, who published The Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973; a popular dominionist vehicle is the Call ministry, led by Lou Engle, who has played prominent roles in anti-gay measures in California and Uganda.

There is an ironic dynamic at work: the traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school. With so little to show for its four decades of political engagement, some strains of religious conservatism have become more strident, not less--a reaction, I think, to the defeat of the Falwell--Pat Robertson generation's agenda. For the true believers left behind, it is more comforting, oddly, to think that the right's political difficulties are not about democracy but about demonic possession.

Rick Perry has never said anything to embrace dominionism. A canny politician, he may be able to repeat the successes of Ronald Reagan, who managed to win Evangelical votes without many tangible concessions. Perry seems more interested in waging war against Mitt Romney than against Wagner's satanic spheres of influence. God, Perry said in Houston, "is a wise, wise God, and he's wise enough to not be affiliated with any political party, or for that matter, he's wise enough to not be affiliated with any man-made institutions." That's a text Perry should keep close to heart.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould

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