Glenden BrownBe Very Afraid - Joel’s Army
I’ve read some dribs and drabs about the movement calling itself Joel’s Army. The upshot is:
Joel’s Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian “dominion” on non-believers.
Large swaths of the rightwing conservative Christians seeing current events through an apocalyptic lens is dangerous - to America and the world. People like John Hagee and Jack van Impe and a host of others have regularly broadcast tv shows in which they read headlines and then say (more or less) “Okay now if we look at what is says in Ezekiel 21, verses 8, 17, and 52 we see this exact even prophesied. We know that is part of the end times story and we know what happens here is followed by what happens in Isaiah 12, verses 3, 6, 8 and 85 and connects with what we read in Revelations chapter 2 verse 3 and 4 and this lines up exactly with the end times. We know that this nation is in the service of the anti-christ who has already been born!” (And if it Jack van Impe, his simpering wife Rexella then says something, in a breathy voice, like, “Oh, these times are dangerous Jack but we know we have the LORD JESUS in our hearts to guide us.”)
I have to be cautious here - it’s easy for me to mock the kinds of statements these preachers make. They are utterly devoid of anything like intellectual seriousness, they are ahistorical and quite frankly, they are often unintentionally funny. It rests on the idea that true Biblical scholarship is about finding hidden messages scattered in the bible that predict future events. As a result, these end times preachers will often connect disparate passages from different books as if they are supposed to be read together.
The whole genre of belief got its start with the 70s era book The Late Great Planet Earth - which claimed to link biblical prophecy with current events and point to the End Times and the second coming of Jesus. You get notion of “The Rapture” in which true believers will be “raptured” to heaven (literally bodily raptured) and the rest of us sinners will be left on earth to suffer the tribulation - a time of war and destruction and suffering.
In seeing the world through this apocalyptic lens, these believers in essence abdicate any responsibility for the world around them and instead embrace a notion of themselves as separate and special and requiring that separation from the world’s temptations. End Times believers don’t see world events as being rooted in history or economics or natural resources; instead they see war in the Middle East as preparation for Armageddon. One apocalyptic belief holds that Israel must rebuild the Solomonic Temple to bring about the second coming of Jesus. As a result, you can hear about Christians raising money to help Israel pay for a temple to be built on the Temple Mound. Right wing Christian support for the nation of Israel is often rooted in the idea that Israel must exist before Jesus can come again.
Christian Dominionists - and there are probably more of them than most of us would like to admit - believe they are justified in using force to create a Christian dominion - one in which their interpretation of Biblical law is enforced - including burning witches, stoning adulteresses, and killing gay folk (that’s just the tip of the dominionist iceberg).
As PZ Myers writes:
These people are insane. They’re fed on a diet of lies and encouraged to believe that violence will be the answer, and reason is to be rejected.
The anti-intellectualism is overt. They’re actually proud of their contempt for learning . . .
Groups like Joel’s Army are built on a mishmash of bad ideas, shoddy scholarship and blatant ignorance. It’s fear, anger, arrogance and disdain for actual knowledge wrapped in a package of lunatic, apocalyptic, messianic, self-aggrandizing crap. And given a healthy veneer of Christian language.
There’s an old prayer that says something like, “god help me with my disbelief.” These days, I think it could be changed to “God help more us disbelieve.”
September 1st, 2008 at 10:06 am
The mercenaries of Blackwater are led by Erik Prince, a dominionist.
September 1st, 2008 at 10:58 am
Christian dominionists. Black Panthers. Trilateral Commission. Council on Foreign Relations. Bildeberger Society, Eagle Forum….
Yep, nothing like a little alarmism to get the day going.
September 1st, 2008 at 11:16 am
BREAKING: Palin’s 17 year-old, unmarried daughter is pregnant! My, oh my!!!
September 1st, 2008 at 11:18 am
Another poster child for “abstinence-only.”
September 1st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Shame on the idiots at the Daily Kooks who, which I believe to be at the direction of the DNC, floated a damned lie about Sarah Palin not being the Mother of her Down Syndrome baby saying she was covering for her 17 year old daughter. The DNC, the Obama campaign and the Daily Kooks all owe Gov. Palin and her 17 year old daughter an apology.
September 1st, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Ken:
Hold on, Brother, it’s going to be a rocky ride with candidate Palin. Less than a week on the campaign trail and the bombs are dropping left and right: pregnant daughter; shady ties to Ted Stevens; husband a convicted drunk driver (ok, we can forgive this one under the new standard for alcohol and cocaine abuse set by monkey man); and troopergate. All this, and the DNC hasn’t even cranked up its own investigation yet.
Palin is a gift to Obama that is bound to keep giving!!!
PS. Ken, do I detect a tone of hysteria and frustration in your comment? Bwahaha!!!
September 1st, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Ken– You have no proof of anything, any more than I can prove the RNC and Karl Rove are behind the “Obama-is-a-muslim” e-mail campaign. However, thanks to DailyKos we learned something that otherwise probably would not have come out until after the election.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I wish all you college folks around here were more worried about the voting machines, I can assure you all of the computer scientists are. Maybe us high school grads have more common sense, huh?
Here is an excerpt from an article in the Rolling Stone, the only magazine in America that has been consistently covering election fraud:
I don’t know if the Dominionsists and the Christian reconstructionists are connected, but they certainly have the same goals. Here is an article by one of the people in the “Uncounted” movie that proves their money is involved in a corporation which became Diebold voting machine division. Republican senator Chuck Hagel, whose involvement in religion or voting machine corporations is very low key is also involved, and it looks like he used those machines in the first election theft using them.
I’m not so sure Hagel isn’t going to be the president either before or after the election somehow. He’s been portrayed as the sensible Republican senator so far, and it wouldn’t be good to have his ties to election fraud or Christian conspiracy exposed before this election.
Hell, I don’t know! I just read this vetted, credible stuff and wonder!
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Richard W:
Why isn’t DailyKos and the entire democratic party worried about this election fraud stuff besides Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich?
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Larry– You want me to answer for DailyKos? I hardly ever even comment over there anymore. As for “the entire Democratic Party,” I’m not a member of that.
IMHO there is nothing we can do between now and Election Day to fix this, except try not to have any close elections!
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
The election will only be as close as it needs to be to prevent a recount, just like last time.
If the Republicans can swing it, Obama may even be our president, but the congress won’t be a danger to the republicans, (blue dogs and such). I don’t think they really wanted the democrats to have the house and senate in 2006.
A couple of lowly poll workers took the heat in Ohio in 2004 while the guy who put them up to some election fraud, (Michael Vu, a man who worked here in Salt Lake previously), got a nice job in California after being kicked out of Ohio. I don’t think the informed poll workers elsewhere were interested in that in 2006.
Some hard evidence has come out about that Max Cleland race covered in one of the above links. We aren’t going to know a thing about it before this election. We’re cooked. I asked “what should we do” at the end of my post about the “Uncounted” movie. I didn’t get one response.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Some good news though! Jeremy Scahill, the undisputed expert involving the Blackwater private Christian army cornered Henry Waxman at the convention, and Waxman said he thought Blackwater should be “disbanded.” We can only hope!