C Street Fellowship Of Christians Supports Rape Of Children December 11, 2012

Jeff Sharlet writes in his new book, “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power”, about the secretive group that helped cover up Senator John Ensign’s extramarital affair.

A stunning excerpt:

Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ’s avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. In the Family’s early days, they debated registering as “a lobby for God’s Kingdom.” Instead, founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. “The more invisible you can make your organization,” Vereide’s successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, “the more influence you can have.” That’s true — which is why we have laws requiring lobbyists to identify themselves as such.

But David Coe, Doug Coe’s son and heir apparent, calls himself simply a friend to men such as John Ensign, whom he guided through the coverup of his affair. I met the younger Coe when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family. He’s a surprising source of counsel, spiritual or otherwise. Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was — or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate — he asked a young man who’d put himself, body and soul, under the Family’s authority, “Let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?” The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. “No,” answered Coe, “I wouldn’t.” Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he’s among what Family leaders refer to as the “new chosen.” If you’re chosen, the normal rules don’t apply.

These are the men that Republican families trust to lead the country out of the moral wilderness those families believe we are in.

Now we have a good idea why the country has been going to hell, with Republicans leading the way. What the hell, if it’s okay by the Republicans to rape children, then it’s okay to invade countries illegally and slaughter foreigners; it’s okay to act like whores for corporations; it’s okay to deny health care to Americans; it’s okay to lie and cheat and deceive to get the government to follow your personal agenda of immoral war and torture and unending imprisonment without charges.

Where will these people take us? Once again, The Lion suggests the answer lies in the words of Jacob Bronowski, particularly when he speaks of arrogance.

Jacob Bronowski,in The Ascent of Man, at the pond in Auschwitz prison camp, squeezing the mud between his fingers…

“It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

“Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken’.

“I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”

Technorati Tags: Jeff Sharlet, The Family, C Street, John Ensign, Pedophilia, Child Rape, David Coe, Doug Coe, Abraham Vereide, Politics, Jacob Bronowski, Mark Sanford, Religion, Christianity

America the Stupid: The Great American Religion of Ooga Booga December 10, 2012

Here are named some of the leading lights of American governance, all in crucial positions.

James Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin: Complained about scientific ‘fascism’. Called climate change science an ‘international conspiracy’.

Todd Akin, of Missouri: Speaking of women who have been raped, said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Paul Broun, of Georgia: At a church banquet not long ago he said, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.”

Dana Rohrbacher, of California: Speaking of an ancient period of climate change, said, “We don’t know what those other cycles were caused by in the past. Could be dinosaur flatulence, you know, or who knows?”

Randy Neugebauer, of Texas: Sought to pass a resolution that Americans pray ‘to humbly seek fair weather conditions’. That was his response to violent tornadoes and extensive drought.

These men are all members of the American House of Representatives, duly elected by the people of their home districts, and they are all members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

The House Republicans, the people in charge now of the House of Representatives, have appointed to a critical committee dealing with significant issues of the Twenty-First century, in a time of critical need for intelligent, informed, and wide-ranging discussion and action on a number of issues involving science, the Republicans have appointed men from the Stone Age whose greatest ability, aside from getting the ignorant rubes back home to elect them, is to hide in the back of caves mumbling ‘Ooga booga’ while a thunderstorm rages outside.

And just to ice the cake, just to put the cherry on top of the American ice cream sundae, the chairman of the committee, one Ralph Hall, of Texas, has said about climate change, “I’m really more fearful of freezing. And I don’t have any science to prove that. But we have a lot of science that tells us they’re not basing it on real scientific facts.”

This is America, the leader of the free world as the whole world falls down the rabbit hole of massive, global climate heating, on the way to mass extinction, all documented, all researched, all full of facts and intelligence. America, still living in the Stone Age, led by shamans and priests of Ooga Booga.

Remember the names you read here. These are the men your children will curse as they struggle to breathe in a dying world.

Reprise: Afghanistan Again December 10, 2012

Just to return for a wee moment to the United States government’s claim that it is murdering people in Afghanistan so that the country will never again be used as a base to attack the United States…

The claim is ridiculous on its face, as I’ve often said. The attacks could have been planned anywhere in the world. The attackers trained in the United States. Their weapons, airplanes, were American airplanes flown from American airports and hijacked in American airspace.

The Americans would have been better off ignoring Afghanistan as a player and hunting Bin Laden and his co-workers with small teams using intelligence gathered from multiple international sources. Instead they did the equivalent of dropping a bomb on a biological weapons warehouse, spreading the deadly bugs all over the place. Now the Americans are killing people all over the world, including their own citizens, all in the name of fighting a disease which they in large part are responsible for creating and disseminating.

And now the Americans use the ultimate coward’s weapon and coward’s rationale: airborne drones using missiles to murder ‘suspected militants’. Suspected. Militants. Not known terrorists actually guilty of criminal acts. Suspected. Militants. Speak too loudly in support of your country and your beliefs and the Americans will strike like an invisible god from the sky, hurling lightning bolts at you. And your womenfolk. And your children. Because they ‘suspect’ you and your women and your children just plain don’t like the United States of America.

What a pathetic, shambling, mindless thing America has become.