Paul Krugman is late to the party but welcome
While a theocracy has long been a dream of the most extreme religious kooks, actually putting a long term plan into action has been gathering force since the 1970's. Like any real conspiracy, it has inner strife, braggarts, turncoats etc, and while subverting traditional conservative groups is being itself subverted by Moonies, but has still succeeded alarmingly, and is and is much more of a threat than Krugman lets on (or knows?).
Sara Posner has an excellent article on another of the real farm teams that provide the reserves for the Gang Of Pirates to draw from as well as doing great damage in their own right, as does another by her here
Others have spent the effort to see not just how these people are pursuing power, but what they would like to do with it. John Sugg has written in Mother Jones
Gary North, a top Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. “Those who refuse to submit publicly…must be denied citizenship.”
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The Old Testament—with its 600 or so Mosaic laws—is the inflexible guide for the society DeMar and other Reconstructionists envision. Government posts would be reserved for the righteous, as long as they are male. There would be thousands of executions a year, with stoning a preferred method because it would turn the deaths into “community projects,” as movement theologian North has noted. Sinners in line for the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their parents, and gay men (lesbians, however, would be spared because no specific reference to them can be found in the Books of Moses). DeMar told me that among Reconstructionists he is considered something of a liberal, because he’d execute gays only if they were caught indulging in sodomy. “I’m happy to just drive them back into the closet,” he said.
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Besides facilitating evangelism, Reconstructionists believe, government should largely be limited to building and maintaining roads, enforcing land-use contracts, and ensuring just weights and measures. Unions would not exist, and neither would unemployment benefits, Social Security, and environmental protection laws. Public schools would disappear; one of the movement’s great successes has been promoting homeschooling programs and publishing texts used by tens of thousands of homeschooling families.
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The old left—the Communist Party and its many splinters—used organizing tactics called popular fronts, in which people were recruited through specific causes into a movement tacitly guided by the Party. Reconstruction has married those Leninist tactics to the causes of the right—abortion, evolution, gay marriage, school prayer. Gary North wrote in 1982, in an effort to reach Baptists,“We must use the doctrine of religious liberty…until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” Nowhere at the Restore America rally did anyone hoist a banner for Reconstruction; those attending came to develop a united front supporting such things as displaying the Ten Commandments in public buildings. But they were also introduced—and recruited—to the broader program.
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“All governments are theocracies,” he (ex-judge Roy Moore) said. “We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head.”
(as if things like roads, or hospitals, even sports, are atheist inspired if not specifically Christian)
Katherine Yurica also weighs in with a detailed report that includes this list:
- God’s People Are to be Regents Over the Earth: “Almighty God wants us to recapture the dominion man held in the beginning… Remember, at the time of creation man exercised authority, under God’s sovereignty, over everything. He was God’s surrogate, His steward or regent.
- Dominion over Others Originates in the Bible: “The genesis account uses two colorful words to describe this. One… we translate ‘dominion. The word means to ‘rule over’ or ‘tread down,’ as with grapes…
- Man Was Told to Subdue or ‘Trample the Earth’: “The other word…is translated ‘subdue.’ Man was told to subdue the earth. The root means ‘to trample under foot,’ as one would do when washing dirty clothes. Therefore… we have in part the concept of separating good from evil by force.
- God Gave Man the Power to Govern and the Right to Subdue: “With the first word …God gives man the authority to govern all that is willing to be governed. With the second…He grants man authority over the untamed and the rebellious. In both instances, God gave man a sweeping and total mandate of dominion over this planet and everything in it.
- God Intended the World to be Governed and Subdued by the Godly: “….God’s intention was that His world be governed and subdued by those who themselves were governed by God.
- God Demands His People to Invest Their Capital: “Despite our preconceived attitudes toward social justice, God’s Law of Use controls the ultimate distribution of wealth. We must be willing to take the world as He made it and live in it to the fullest…
Very Scary folk
a couple of more quotes this is from Randall Terry, the head of Operation Rescue, recently made this statement at a dominionist evangelical convention to a rousing, standing ovation:
ReplyDelete"I want you to just have a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want a wave of hatred wash over you because, yes, hate is good. Our goal as a fundamentalist Christian nation — we have a biblical duty. We are called by Jesus, our Lord, to conquer this country America. We do not want equal time and we do not want pluralism."
also