Posted on 12/29/2010 11:40:27 PM PST by yort
W. Cleon Skousen's book "The Five Thousand Year Leap" has been reissued, and after an endorsement from Glenn Beck, it was even briefly the No. 1 best-seller at Amazon.com. This is bad news for religious conservatism.
Skousen's book is a slipshod mixture of tendentious history, bad theology and paranoid politics in the John Birch Society mold. It ought to be treated as a curiosity of the pre-Reagan right, a fantasy world where communist agents such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Dwight D. Eisenhower worked to undermine America....
The revival of Skousen-esque thinking via Glenn Beck's teary-eyed presentations on the dangers of creeping socialism and the tea party's darker prognostications on President Barack Obama's secret totalitarian agenda present problems for serious religious conservatives....
...Beck's neo-Skousenism is a distraction and a dead end. His ready use of religious imagery appeals to many religious conservatives, but ultimately it is political and spiritual junk food: tasty to some but without substance and poisonous in large quantities.
Forget debates over gay marriage; the traditional kind seems to be in free fall among those vulnerable citizens who could benefit the most from it. This is surely an issue where the republic would benefit from serious religious voices, as opposed to paranoid fantasy presented as saccharine political spirituality.
Over the long term, the revival of the worst strands of Cold War conservatism on the religious right is bad for America and bad for religious conservatives. If vigorously pursued, it will render conservative religious voices irrelevant to serious political discussions. Sadly, the irrelevance will be deserved.
(Excerpt) Read more at 2.timesdispatch.com ...
” You just joined FR to post this crap? Move along please “
DITTO !!!!!
Yesterday? This individual signed up 23 December. How can you say yesterday??????
“in the John Birch Society mold”
That’s one of the best possible recommendations.
Sarah: Princess (in Hebrew)
Louise: Renowned Fighter
Heath: From the Outer Lands
Palin: Who will serve at the table…..
The Princess who is a Renowned Fighter from the Outer Lands who will sit at the Table.
Tell me how she doesn't run with a name like that, She is the one....
See Post No. 64....
Probably neither you, nor the author has ever read "The Five Thousand Year Leap."
Kiss my ass. If you think our view that abortion is EVIL does not belong in political discussions, YOU DO NOT BELONG ON FREE REPUBLIC, as Jim Robinson has said on multiple occasions.
They rarely fail to announce their social conservatism at every opportunity.
They are anti-abortion, anti-homosexual rights, pro-prayer in schools, pro-2nd Amendment, etcetera etcetera.
Yet amazingly enough they elect liberal, big spending, nanny state Democrats to national office again and again and again. (If the national Rat platform had not been anti-coal, Gore, Kerry, and Obama would certainly have carried WV).
That's my definition of a pro life liberal. They are the Mike Huckabee demographic to a T.
yort which is not conservative has been sterilized!
AW, common!
At least let it live long enough to learn what IBTZ means!
He was sterilized before he could be informed. I think he understands now.
The Samaritans are probably mostly descended from the 10 northern tribes (although according to 2 Kings 17 the king of Assyria brought in settlers from elsewhere after he captured Samaria--probably the deportation of the earlier population of the kingdom of Israel was only partial).
Ever once in a while I get aubscription invitation from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Article like this they publish is why I write them little love notes in return.
That is something that impresses me. There amount of research he has to do for a single show is tremendous. Its one thing for me to shoot off my mouth, based on some hints I've picked up here or there on the internet. Its another thing altogether when you have to be right or be sued.
He has done research into this administration that no one in the straight press has done even to this day, which means he has not been able to do what most talk show hosts do, which is simply comment on the straight press. He has sailed right past them.
And he comments on events in history that some of us know (if you're old and educated before) and some of us don't know. I've heard him make mistakes from time to time but usually minor and usually not germane. I wrote him on one mistake and a few days later he did a program correcting himself (with the amount of research necessary, I know I'm not responsible, but I like to kid myself that I am...)
"Broke" is an excellent book. He has pulled together information into one place that no one else has attempted to do. He obviously had a large staff working on that one too, what did he say, 90 people? And it shows.
Is Beck "perfect"? No one is. But he is doing work no one else is doing, and taking on people most of the other talk show folks never even heard of. And doing it successfully.
That’s the one. Thank you.
I did it one day thinking about a CPA friend, kind of a self taught biblical scholar. He would always asked for newborns names and would look up the meaning of said names. He had a pet theory that kids grow into the meaning of their names, I hope this time he is right :-)...
You are wrong. Church attendance is not a reliable predictor of who will vote conservative and who will vote liberal. The 10% of people who have no religious beliefs at all do not constitute 50% of the vote, and never will.
Across this country, people attend a wide variety of churches and many of these church-attending people do vote for Democrats; many of them do vote for people like Pelosi, Reid, and even Obama; many of them do vote for pro-abortion candidates of any stripe; many of them do vote for stealth and outright communist candidates; etc., etc.
Some of these church-attending people might vote exactly like you do, but it won't be a vast majority, or a slim majority, or even a large minority. You can post your little graphs from 2008 again, but they won't show anything significant except that Obama won in 2008, and that 90% of the people who voted for him are church-attending people or people with some kind of religious belief that most likely is different from yours.
You can jump up and down, and stomp your feet, and declare that up is down, and yellow is purple, but it won't change the facts. And guess what -- you don't get to decide whether someone else's religion or religious beliefs meets the Constitutional guarantee of: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Frothy emotionional appeal from any religious perspective does not win court cases, or elections, or legislative policy battles. Logical, reasoned arguments, based on our US Constitution and the rule of law, do not always win either, but the successes on this basis far outnumber the cases and elections won by rabble-rousing mobs of irrational protesters of any sort.
I expect you will try to twist what I've said forty ways from Sunday, but facts are facts.
Kiss my ass. If you think our view that abortion is EVIL does not belong in political discussions, YOU DO NOT BELONG ON FREE REPUBLIC, as Jim Robinson has said on multiple occasions.
The more religious, are OVERWHELMINGLY CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS.
Your determined liberal, anti-American, anti-conservative, anti-Christian agenda wishes, cannot change those facts.
Seriously, speak from the heart, how do you think that atheists, and those that are hostile to the religiosity of America vote?
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