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 ...
Thank you. So is my original home state of NC, as are all the states of the Bible Belt south, Appalachia, the plains states, with many such enclaves among the others of the 57 states®.
Sarah Palin and the TEA Party voters kicked butt in the 2010 midterms by keeping the message focused on "cut the taxes; cut the spending; and cut the government back to its Constitutionally legitimate functions".
That you surmised such from my well-reasoned reply suggests that you are either stupid (or drunk), or you are dishonest.
Either way, you're not worthy of further debate unless and until you quit drinking and get honest.
I know that Sarah was not a “Jew.” You are talking to someone who debates Rabbis on “Jewish” matters and has stumped them every time. Actually, “Jew,” or “Yehudit” was used as an epithet during the civil war between the Tribes and I would rather not use it to describe myself because I think it is a perjorative that the world at large chose to call us and Hebrews have adopted for common usage. It bothers me.
Hebrew was derived from HaIvri which means simply The People.
There is no such thing, really, as Jew-ish. Just as there is no such thing as Hebrew-ish or pregnant-ish. After Jacob, we were Israelites...but still HaIvri.
I am a kind of rebel within my religion. I don’t like the way it has been split into factions, and I don’t like the idea that “Jews” seek to defend ALL those who take the name for themselves without obedience to The Law. Reform=deform. Conservative Jews aren’t. I am a sort of stand-alone hardliner and would probably be considered a heretic.
Yes. And I can point you to certain prophecies that clarify that a woman will be the one to change things, just as G-d has ALWAYS used women to bring about the most important events throughout Hebrew history. Sarah was the first, but not the last. Most of these women get short shrift in concordances and latter histories because it has always been sort of a “man’s world.” Truth is, the women, whether Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Bathsheba, Esther, Ruth, Naomi, Yael, Deborah, even Delilah, and on and on, were chosen for their brains and/or beauty, whereas men were chosen for their brawn. Did you know that Moses’s wife saved his very life by circumcizing his firstborn son?
In Abraham’s travels, he lied and was a coward. It was Sarah who G-d protected. That is why Hebrews are matrilineal.
I could write volumes....
I think “yort” might be toweling at his local bath house. He sure ain’t toweling here no more.
IIRC, King rejected communism and the violent protests that they desired. It was jesse jackson who tried to push King into it and King threw him out of the movement. Jackson then claimed to have seen the light and King reluctantly allowed him to come back. I will believe until my dying day that jackson had something to do with King’s death.
What I was pointing out when I posted that “Your determined liberal, anti-American, anti-conservative, anti-Christian agenda wishes, cannot change those facts.” was just that, you keep trying to spread a liberal message that is false, and the purpose is to move the GOP left and to assist the liberal goal of marginalizing conservatism by trying to first separate the most fundamental portion of it which is social conservatism and the typical American conservative voter who of course, believes in God.
You cannot pretend to be conservative, and refuse to recognize, and accept that the faithless, anti-God are overwhelmingly liberal, and the faithful, pro-God, are overwhelmingly conservative.
Right.
Again, let me reiterate that his personal philosophy was all over the map, including some communism (but also Gandhi-ism and Christianity) and he WAS a Republican. But no evidence has as yet linked him with any CPUSA activities.
Right. Like that good catholic pelosi, or maybe the late murderin’ teddy kennedy, or maybe john the skerry who wants his communion and he wants it now, or maybe that “orthodox jew” who walks to shul who thinks abortion is fine and just co-sponsored the repeal of DADT...or huck the beast, the evangelical pastor who got his own fat kid off a cruelty to animals charge and released a murderer to do more murder and thinks that mama michelle should control what YOUR kids eat since he onviously couldn’t control his own kids.
You have got to be freaking kidding me.
You named individuals in a nation of hundreds of millions.
What you cannot escape is that the more religious are more conservative, and the less religious more liberal.
Atheists are vastly, overwhelmingly liberal, and regular church goers are vastly, overwhelmingly conservative, and the sliding scale applies in between.
You mentioned an individual Evangelical, but you left out that Evangelicals are the most conservative voters in America, and the backbone of conservatism, and the largest single group of conservatives, you also mentioned the most conservative portion of the Jews, the Orthodox, who probably as a group vote Republican (the best information tells us they do, or close to it), whereas the less religious Jews are over 80% liberal, your group is about the most liberal in America although you as an individual share a little conservatism with we conservatives.
The whole point is that INDIVIDUALS make up groups, not the other way around. I don’t “share” Conservatism with you because YOU OR YOUR GROUP don’t own it. I am a staunch Conservative because I think for myself. YOU have posted groupthink and insist it is conservative. That is silly and dangerous.
Read your own profile page.
On the other side, Athaliah is not a very good role model (but what do you expect from a daughter of Ahab and Jezebel?).
The word "Jew" is used in the King James translation at Ezra 4.12 (the original at that point is an Aramaic letter). I don't know Hebrew (or Aramaic) but I have the Septuagint translation which has Ioudaioi here (II Esdras 4.12 in the LXX).
In Deut. 26.5 Jacob is referred to as an Aramean (rendered as "Syrian" in the King James translation).
I don't know if there are any passages in the Bible before the exile where the people of Judah are called "Jews."
A different point--how long did tribal awareness last among those who were not of the tribe of Judah or Levites? St. Paul claims to know that he is of the tribe of Benjamin (Romans 11.1) and of course Benjamin was the one tribe which stayed with Judah when the 10 northern tribes seceded. St. Luke identifies a woman as belonging to the tribe of Asher, but how many people really knew their tribal origins in the first century of our era?
People who never attend church: Bush 35% Gore 65%
The conclusion to be drawn here, students, is that were it not for the over one-third of America's atheists and agnostics who voted Republican, Al Gore would have been President.
People who never attend church: Bush 35% Gore 65%
The conclusion to be drawn here, students, is that were it not for the over one-third of America's atheists and agnostics who voted Republican, Al Gore would have been President.
You do not build conservatism by being at war with conservatives, learn who conservatives are and who liberals are, and learn to be more supportive of conservatives and conservatism in general.
Being a little bit conservative isn’t enough, and when you try to promote that, then you are trying to weaken conservatism, and are promoting liberalism, and anti-Americanism.
OK Yort, which is it?
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