Stan Moody

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War and Prison: Instruments of Christian Darwinism


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Author: Stan Moody

A wise person once said something to me that I never forgot: ³All evil goes
back to µI want to be somebody.¶´
Reflect on the evil that has occurred in your own life or on the evil that you
have inflicted on others. At the root is the scramble to become or to remain
somebody by shoving aside others who stand in your way.
The evangelical wing of the Christian church apparently is not above
wanting to be somebody.
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For 25 years, I have been writing about the impact of the Christian Right on
American policy in hope that professing Christians would return to the doctrine of
the Kingdom of God embraced by the early church fathers. That doctrine envisions
a spiritual citizenship that illogically transcends that of the nation-state by loving
your enemies, doing good to those who oppress you and viewing the roots of evil
as imbedded in the human imagination.
I fear that it is too little too late.
  
The political drift in America is less about right vs. left and more about the
rationalization of abuse of power. While it is true that secularism has its hidden
agendas, the evangelical Christian church has committed a far greater sin ±
abandonment of belief in the sovereignty of the god it professes to worship in favor
of its own ability to enforce by law the appearance of morality to appease that god.
If that all sounds too complicated for popular consumption, suffice it to say
that the god of the evangelical Christian church has devolved into an impassive
judge who accepts or rejects people by how they voted on abortion, gay marriage
or minimum wage.
I have often called that judge, ³The Great Gargoyle in the Sky.´
   
David Barton, the religious guru for Republican ideologues, believes that the
4 legs of society ± government, the judiciary, the family and the economy ± must
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be governed by the Bible, a treatise that readily lends itself to smorgasbord
consumption. Governors and presidential hopefuls who declare themselves as
evangelical Christians are now intent on bringing God back into the public square
by whatever means necessary.
That they may lie, cheat and use every deceptive strategy to get there is
simply the means justifying the end, the end being Jesus¶ instructions to His
disciples, ³Occupy µtill I come´ (Luke 19:13). In context, Jesus was not telling
Christians to run the nation and the world. He was telling His listeners by parable
to invest wisely and be diligent in attending to their own business.
The best way to occupy, especially if you are the military power in the
world, is to bomb banana republics into submission and to imprison those whose
behavior is open rebellion against the hypocrisy of pseudo morality. On both
counts, we have done exceptionally well.
We pick on defenseless nations for violation of human rights while leaving
alone such monsters as China. We support the apartheid of the Israeli government
against the Palestinian Territories on the fallacious grounds that the boundaries of
the modern nation-state of Israel were set by agreement between God and
Abraham.
As well, with 5% of the world¶s population, America boasts 25% of its
incarcerated prisoners. Tough-on-crime neocons, reeling under the cost of
corrections, now want to let half the prisoners out under something called ³right on
crime.´
The proof of compassion will be unveiled as these released prisoners violate.
Federal and state governments are systematically extending minimum sentencing.
We are not long from life imprisonment or the death penalty as the final solution
for 3-time losers who urinate on the sidewalk.
 
    
Barton is not a believer in theocracy. He is a believer in dominionism, a step
beyond theocracy. War and prison become ready instruments of dominionism.
Evangelical dominionism ± ³occupy µtill I come´ ± expresses itself most
readily in the police state. The false premise of WMD¶s employed to obliterate Iraq
were incidental to dominion over the ³axis of evil,´ just as the false premise of
deficit reduction is incidental to obliterating employee bargaining rights.
The particularism implied in the rise of the American police state suggests a
white, pseudo-Christian, male-dominated, legalistic society, the hidden agenda
behind limited government too enfeebled to advocate for human rights. It is
strangely Darwinian in nature.
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What Darwin posited as ³natural selection,´ evangelical dominionists are
jumpstarting as ÷
 selection. What Darwin labeled ³survival of the fittest,´
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evangelical dominionists have adopted as survival of the righteous ± by definition,
the self-righteous.
One wonders if it is possible that America is on the cusp of a ³Fourth
Reich.´
 
iY O÷
 
O , AlterNet, April 18, 2011.
iY Newt Gingrich and Pat Nolan. _÷ 
, January 7, 2011.


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