Palin and the religious right

Turns out Sarah Palin is aligned with a church that is affiliated with the “Third Wave,” a religious movement so far to the right it was declared heretical by the religious right:

The pastor [of Wasilla Assembly of God], Ed Kalnins, and Masters Commission students have traveled to South Carolina to participate in a “prophetic conference” at Morningstar Ministries, one of the major ministries of the Third Wave movement. Becky Fischer was a pastor at Morningstar prior to being featured in the movie “Jesus Camp.” The head of prophecy at Morningstar, Steve Thompson, is currently scheduled to do a prophecy seminar at the Wasilla Assembly of God. Other major leaders in the movement have also traveled to Wasilla to visit and speak at the church.

The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form “Joel’s Army” to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.

While segments of this belief system have been a part of Pentecostalism and charismatic beliefs for decades, the excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000.

The beliefs and manifestations of the movement include the use of ‘strategic level spiritual warfare’ to expel territorial demons from American and world cities….

Full article.

Well, at least we can say that Sarah Palin isn’t a Biblical literalist. “Strategic-level spiritual warfare” and “Joel’s army” and “Fivefold Ministry” — none of this is in the Bible. They just made this stuff up. I know that as a religious liberal, I’m supposed to be religiously tolerant and all, but this is utter crap. Dangerous crap, too — this is the woman who could be one heartbeat away from the American presidency. God (or someone) help us.

Via.

Autumn watch

The autumnal equinox is a week away, and I am very aware of the rapidly shortening days. I don’t mean that I say to myself, Gee, we lost another four minutes of daylight today. Rather, my whole being responds to the lessening daylight : I want to sleep longer; my spirits are lower; I grow anxious if I can’t get outdoors for an hour or so while the sun is still high.

A couple of weeks ago, I planted some Swiss chard in our tiny little garden between our building and the building next door. It has been warm, and we have had plenty of rain, and the seeds sprouted and started to grow, but they have gotten spindly with that look that they’re not getting enough light. The sun has gotten so low in the sky that the buildings to the south block direct sunlight for all except half an hour a day. I don’t hold out too much hope for our Swiss chard.

I usually look forward to autumn, but this year I only seem to notice the loss of sunlight.

Third party candidates (mostly right wing, mostly authoritarian)

Even though I hate politics, I thought you might be interested in learning about the third-party candidates running for U.S. president. You’ll find five of them listed below. (Thanks to Melissa for this idea.)

The figures in parentheses are the percentage of the popular vote each party will get according to this August 7-10, 2008, poll. My cynical summary of the political stances of the candidates, which uses the Political Compass scheme, follows the poll numbers. (For comparison, Obama comes out as mildly right wing and mildly authoritarian, while McCain is right wing and authoritarian.)

As you’d expect in American presidential politics, there are no far left candidates, and no extremely libertarian candidates; — rather, the candidates cluster towards right wing and authoritarian. In other words, if you are truly leftist or truly libertarian, you don’t even have a third party candidate you can voter for.

Cynical? Who, me?

How to sell mass market consumer goods in the United States:– Ignore real consumer needs. Create a need that people didn’t know they had. Find a good-looking woman (or a man, but honestly women work better) to pose in videos and photos. Use overheated rhetoric to bring home your half-truths via mass media. Use dishonesty to overcome your competition.

How to sell presidential candidates win elections in the United States: Follow above steps.

The farcical democracy we endure in this country during presidential elections does not strive after goodness, nor does it aim to provide the best life for the populace. It is amoral;– it has no moral content. All that can be said of it is that at its best our democracy has entertainment value; at worst, it is cheap hucksterism trying to sell us a useless commodity.

And no, I don’t think this is a cynical post. I rewrote it several times so as to remove most of the cynicism.

Reasons to vote the Elder God Party in November

The Mainstream Media (MSM) had absolutely no coverage of the Elder God Party’s convention. Of course, it is possible that MSM sent reporters to the convention, but upon seeing C’thulhu in person they simply descended into slavering, gibbering madness. Or it may be a vast MSM conspiracy to prevent the message of the Elder God Party from reaching you, the voter.

Whether it’s due to incompetence or malice, if the MSM aren’t going to cover the Elder God Party, clearly it’s up to feisty independent bloggers like me to bring you the rest of the story about the presidential elections. In this post, I’m going to compare the Elder God Party candidates with their Democratic and Republican counterparts.

First, let’s compare the vice-presidential candidates.

They say that Sarah Palin is attractive, but let’s look at Shoggoth. With myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over its faintly luminous body, what’s not to like? And people say Palin is the perfect vice-presidential candidate because she is amorphous and can take on any shape she chooses from tundra populist to libertarian to right-wing gun nut, but the amoeba-like Shoggoth is far more amorphous than even Sarah Palin.

They say that Joe Biden has lots of experience, but Shoggoth says, “Experience, schmexperience.” Actually, Sarah Palin says that, but Shoggoth doesn’t say anything. When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, but they will extirpate Joe Biden when his presence becomes troublesome. Then Shoggoth will bear down upon Joe Biden, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter….

Next, let’s compare the presidential candidates.

John McCain is making a virtue of his age, referring to himself as a “wrinkly old white-haired guy” in Paris Hilton’s campaign video. But C’thulhu is far, far older than McCain, and after vingtillions of years is loose again and ravening for delight. Bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu will slide greasily towards McCain and pursue him with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency, and McCain will look back and go mad, laughing shrilly as he keeps on laughing at intervals, wandering deliriously until he chooses Sarah Palin as a running mate. Oh wait, he already did that.

Then Barack Obama steps into the ring, pushing his way through the ropes. C’thulhu underestimates him, and goes for an immediate pin, but Obama manages to get his foot under the ropes for a rope break. The referee (it’s a guest referee named Diebold) pulls them apart, and C’thulhu circles warily, realizing that Obama might actually know something about wrestling. Obama feints left, grabs C’thulhu and turns the monster upside down, — yes, he’s doing a piledriver, driving C’thulhu’s head repeatedly into the mat! But C’thulhu enjoys this, then reaches out a tentacle and pulls Obama’s feet out from under him! Obama goes down, C’thulhu has him in a submission hold! It looks like it’s all over, but Obama manages to touch the rope again, and it’s another rope break. Suddenly Obama pins C’thulhu and wins, but no!! Deibold the referee isn’t looking, so it doesn’t count! So the referee arbitrarily decides gives the match to C’thulhu. C’thulhu wins! The world screams with fright and frenzy!

So be a good minion and just vote Elder God Party in November, because no matter who you vote for, they’re going to win.

H. P. Lovecraft quotes from here.

In the middle of the city

An eight year old girl was going through a stack of magazines with her mother, looking for photographs of animals for a school project.

“What kind of animals?” I asked.

“Birds,” said the girl, smiling.

Her mother looked at a sheet of paper that looked like a homework assignment. “Mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects, and, uh….” She looked over the paper to see if she had missed anything.

“Do you like birds?” I asked the girl.

“Yes,” she said smiling.

“I do too,” I said. “I’m a bird watcher.” Then I told her about how I saw American Oystercatchers down on Palmer’s Island in the middle of New Bedford harbor, and how they have long orange bills that they use to eat shellfish. The mother kept looking through the magazines, and she had that glazed look that people usually get when I talk about birds; but the girl seemed vaguely interested.

Five minutes later, I was walking down Market Street, right in the middle of the city, when a flock of pigeons burst up into the sky in front of me and flew madly away, and out of the corner of my eye I saw this big bird, as big as a seagull but dark gray-brown, sweeping along to my right about ten feet in the air with a long tail and I could just catch a glimpse of its sharp hooked bill as it flew into the late afternoon sun behind me and disappeared:– a juvenile Peregrine Falcon, out hunting pigeons. It flew within thirty feet of me. Right in the middle of the city.

Church mission statements: hopeless (with exceptions)

The committee on ministry here at First Unitarian has been slowly working on a covenant, mission statement, and goals for our church. Recently, one member of the committee on ministry and I searched the Web for church mission statements. I must have read more than a hundred mission statements of Unitarian Universalist churches. They are not good. They are bad:– unrealistic, verbose, full of insider jargon, boring, uninspiring, —

Instead of just being nasty and snarky, maybe I should say what I think makes for a good church mission statement. My criteria for good mission church mission statements come from two main sources, Peter Drucker and John Carver. I’ll give an overview of Drucker and Carver first, next give you my own six criteria for good church mission statements, and end by giving the only two good mission statements for Unitarian Universalist churches that I was able to find. Continue reading →

Biographical sketch of a Revolutionary minister

Yesterday I posted one of Rev. Dr. Samuel West’s sermons on this blog. Since long 18th C. colonial sermons aren’t to everyone’s taste, today I figured I’d post a shorter and more entertaining biographical sketch of West. Brilliant but eccentric, West was a classic example of an absent-minded country parson. Enjoy…. Continue reading →

A Revolutionary sermon

This is the 300th anniversary year for First Unitarian in New Bedford, and this fall I’ll be preaching a series of four sermons on four great ministers from our past. Next week I’m going to speak about Samuel West, minister at our church in the second half of the 18th C. As part of my research on West, I found a sermon he preached in 1776 in support of the American Revolution. First, a little background on West:

Rev. Samuel West of New Bedford (not to be confused with his contemporary, Rev. Samuel West of Boston) was born in 1730 (1729 O.S.), and ordained in 1761 by the established church of what was then the town of Dartmouth, where he served for the next 42 years. In those 42 years, West was awarded the Doctor of Divinity degree by Harvard, oversaw the creation of a new parish in the eastern section of Dartmouth, moved his own church to the fast-growing city of New Bedford, and moved his church theologically from strict Calvinism to liberal Arminianism. In large because of his influence, his church later became Unitarian.

But the most remarkable part of West’s life had nothing to do with theological controversy. During the Revolutionary era, he was an ardent patriot, in a town dominated by Quakers who opposed armed resistance to Britain for theological and financial reasons. In a biographical sketch printed in Hrealds of a Liberal Faith, Rev. John Morison, one of West’s successors in the New Bedford church, described West thus:

Dr. West was an ardent patriot. He could keep no terms with those who were hesitating or lukewarm, but blazed out against them. After the battle at Bunker Hill he set out to join the American Army, and do what he might as a minister of God to keep up their courage. It was while in the army, serving as a chaplain, that he gained great notoriety by deciphering for General Washington a treasonable letter from Dr. Church to an officer in the British army, of which a full account may be found in the third volume of Sparks’s Writings of Washington, pp. 502-506. In 1776 he delivered a discourse (afterwards printed) before the Provincial Convention at Watertown….

Every year, the provincial government asked a minister to deliver an Election Day sermon at the end of May, and in 1776 this honor was given to West.

West’s Election Day sermon is a classic example of American Revolutionary prose. If the American War for Independence captures your imagination, West’s sermon stands up well even today. He begins the sermon by deriving the right to rebel against Great Britain from natural laws, using human reason and Lockean philosophy. He then derives the right to rebel from the Christian scriptures, and some of his readings of the Bible are noteworthy because of his strong reliance on reason and his willingness to draw on extra-Biblical sources to help gain perspective into the thoughts of Jesus. However, the sermon does contain at least one opinion that should make us feel somewhat uncomfortable today: he believes the government should provide financial support for churches, although he does say there shouldn’t be one established church.

West’s Election Day Sermon, sometimes erroneously titled “On the Right To Rebel Against Governors,” is worth reading today. I’m including it as a separate post (because it’s so long), in case you want to read theologically liberal, politically radical sermon from the 18th C. Here it is.