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Hildegarda

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This sent chills down my spine. Hitler Youth reincarnated.

You can brainwash adults into believing all kinds of things, but if you want them to put on brown shirts, march for a cause and kill for it, you have to start while they are still kids.

First come the Good News Camps, the Bible Study camps ran by teachers during afterschool hours on public school premises. Perfectly legal apparently, as court rulings finally decreed. Those target elementary school-age children. Wall Street Journal ran an article on this issue a couple of weeks ago.

Then, as those kids get older, it's BattleCry (quotes from three TruthDig artiles by Sunsara Taylor follow):



http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060511_battle_cry_theocracy/


If you've been waiting to get alarmed until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in "God's army," wait no longer.

In recent weeks, BattleCry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 people to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit, and this weekend it plans to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.

attleCry is a part of the evangelical organization Teen Mania, and you can learn a lot about the kind of society that Teen Mania is fighting for by reading up on its Honor Academy, a non-accredited educational institution that offers directed internships to 700 undergraduate and graduate youth each year. Among the academy's tenets: Homosexuality and masturbation are sins. Interns are forbidden to listen to secular music, watch R-rated movies or date; men can't use the Internet unsupervised; the length of women's skirts is regulated. The logic behind this-that men must be protected from the sin of sexual temptation-is what drives Islamic fundamentalists to shroud women in burkhas! [..]


Teen Mania and BattleCry are multimillion-dollar operations that send more than 5,000 missionaries to more than 34 countries each year. Their supporters and members are some of the most powerful and extreme religious lunatics in the country. BattleCry's "partners" include Pat Robertson (who got a call from Karl Rove to discuss Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito before the nomination was made public), Charles Colson (who as President Richard Nixon's lawyer was knee-deep in the Watergate scandal and who went to jail for obstruction of justice in the Pentagon Papers case), and Jerry Falwell (who blamed Sept. 11 on homosexuals, feminists, pagans and abortionists). BattleCry's events have been addressed by former First Lady Barbara Bush (via video) as well as former President Gerald Ford. This weekend's event will include Franklin Graham, who has ministered to George W. Bush and publicly proclaimed that Islam is an "evil religion." [..]





http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060513_battlecry_philadelphia/

It began with fireworks so loud and startling I screamed. Lights and smoke followed, and a few kids were pulled up on stage from the crowd. One was asked to read a letter.

This was the letter that opened the event. Its author was George W. Bush. Yes, the president of the United States sent a letter of support, greeting, prayer and encouragement to the BattleCry event held at Wachovia Spectrum Stadium in Philadelphia on May 12. Immediately afterward, a preacher took the microphone and led the crowd in prayer. Among other things, he asked the attendees to "Thank God for giving us George Bush."

On his cue, about 17,000 youths from upward of 2,000 churches across America and Canada directed their thanks heavenward in unison.

Throughout the three and a half hours of BattleCry's first session, I thought of only one analogy that fit the experience: This must have been what it felt like to watch the Hitler Youth, filled with self-righteous pride, proclaim the supremacy of their beliefs and their willingness to shed blood for them.


A man of imposing size sat down next to me and my friends and asked us if we were planning any disturbances.

And lest you think this is idle paranoia, BattleCry founder Ron Luce told the crowds the next morning (May 13) that he plans to launch a "blitzkrieg" in the communities, schools, malls, etc. against those who don't share his theocratic vision of society.

Blitzkrieg.

Nothing like a little Nazi imagery to whip up the masses. [..]

(While in the bathroom, I saw something equally unsettling--a preteen girl wearing a shirt being sported by many attendees that night: Jesus on the cross, robes waving, and emblazoned across the front the words "Dressed to Kill.") [..]

It was a mantra Luce repeated all through the night: the need to submit one's self fully to Jesus, to belong completely to Him.

"He doesn't just want to be in your heart, He wants to own your heart.... There's only one good reason to come to Christ: because He's the rightful owner of your life.... You don't have to know much about Jesus, just enough to surrender your whole life."

Throughout this section, a loud crowd from the back of the stadium would periodically erupt, "We are warriors!" [..]





http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060523_battlecry_ron_luce/

[..] After what amounted to a celebration of genocide against Native Americans and a pep rally for death by STDs, things got really gory: Evangelist Franklin Graham took the stage.

Graham began by tossing out the despicable canard that HIV/AIDS is a punishment from God. "We get outside of marriage and there are consequences," he told the crowd.

He went on to assert that God sees marriage as a "relation between a man and a woman. Not a man and a man or a woman and a woman." This drew him his loudest applause of the day, never mind that the Bible celebrates many instances of marriage between one man and many women. Maybe the next time I go to one of Luce's gatherings I'll take a bunch of bumper stickers that read: "Man + 1,000 Women = Marriage." People can put them on their cars to promote a model of marriage in the Bible-a model in which King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (and for some reason God never gave him AIDS as a punishment).


How long must we put up with a world where religion plays a role in whipping up people to kill others?

The heart of Graham's speech was a call for holy war. He preached about the "battle for souls of men and women from north to south, east to west, over the entire Earth." There is, he declared, "No way to God but through Jesus Christ." [..]

While calling on the youths present to engage in this "battle for the souls of men," he declared: "No souls can be saved without the shedding of blood. Blood must be shed!"

Shortly thereafter the large screen above the stadium lit up with images of Navy SEALs making their way from backstage. Dressed in camouflage, carrying automatic weapons, kicking down doors and firing blanks into empty rooms along their way, they seemed like the embodiments of the house-to-house raids and indiscriminate killings that have been seen in rare footage that made its way out of Iraq.

Fireworks exploded and flames billowed as Ron Luce greeted the warriors, bragging that all of them had been involved in real battles. They are part of FORCE Ministries, a Christian organization composed of current and retired Navy SEALs, law enforcement members and other military personnel who evangelize at events like these and conduct Bible study sessions at military bases around the world. Among those on stage was a SEAL just back from Afghanistan and a member of a police SWAT team. All of them are trained to kill, and they apparently do so or have done so in the belief that God sanctions their actions. [..]
 
CLASSIC: Suppress youthful sexuality in the most strict way possible and channel all that energy to violence and mania. Consider how many are involved in networks such as this forum, and how many "slave warriors" are being culled out there. Personally, I think one knowledgable person is worth thousands of mindless slaves, quality over quantity. Otherwise, the knowledgable are pretty much outnumbered. At the same time these "warriors" are pretty much a small part of the total population, with a lot of back up and hype to try to magnify their significance in the scheme of things.
 
EsoQuest said:
At the same time these "warriors" are pretty much a small part of the total population, with a lot of back up and hype to try to magnify their significance in the scheme of things.
I would have liked to think so, but as a part of a trend I find it a lot more alarming than that. If only because such 'trained' people at opportune times create a certain environment, into which the majority of average Joes fall by default. This had happened before (Russia, Germany).


EsoQuest said:
Personally, I think one knowledgable person is worth thousands of mindless slaves, quality over quantity. Otherwise, the knowledgable are pretty much outnumbered.
the only problem is that the slave warriors are trained to kill, and in the face of brute force 'quality' never helps anyone.

It's all about the Terror of the Situation :(
 
The other day at work a local rancher bought some bales of pine shavings for his horses' bedding. While I helped him load them, out of the blue he asks if I think the Da Vinci Code is factual. I replied that, based on what I've read of history it was complete bs. He then asked me if I know who wrote the Bible. My reply was that it certainly wasn't God because it was so full of errors and contradictions, and why would God entrust to such fallible creatures the writing of his word when s/he could have easily done it him/herself in an instant, especially when s/he created the universe. What would be so difficult about writing a book? He replied that God inspired them to write the Bible, and I replied that I wouldn't want anything to do with God that made so many mistakes. I also brought up the fact that "God " also said "Thou shalt have no other gods before thee." So that means there must be other supernatural entities out there, and that a "God" who had to resort to threats wasn't much of a "God".
Well, this guy started to lose it, and he asked me who decided what was right and what was wrong if not God? I replied that, in most cases, we as individuals did. He then asked if I believed in an afterlife. I replied yes, but that based on published accounts and research, I also thought that reincarnation was a very real possibility.
He replied that it was a Hindu teaching and I replied, so what, it's not just Hindus alone who believe in reincarnation.
He then asks me if I believed Jesus Christ is the son of God and that he died on the cross that I might have eternal life. I replied that although JC was probably a real person, he didn't come to be a sacrificial atonement, but to teach us how to live. In other words, he came to teach, not to be a scapegoat.
At this point I thought I had better cut this discussion off because he was starting to get all flustered and upset and, who knows, maybe violent, so I told him I'd better get back to work because this was really going nowhere. He insisted on giving me a tract to read, which I accepted, and that ended that.
I guess Castenada explains it best when he compares the technical genius of human beings to their stupidity in spiritual matters. After all, this guy seemed to be quite capable of running a ranching business. But then again, we have the free gift from the Predator of his mind , so is it really so surprising that it's so easy to suck these kids into believing all this crap that's being thrown at them?
 
redrock12 said:
I guess Castenada explains it best when he compares the technical genius of human beings to their stupidity in spiritual matters. After all, this guy seemed to be quite capable of running a ranching business. But then again, we have the free gift from the Predator of his mind , so is it really so surprising that it's so easy to suck these kids into believing all this crap that's being thrown at them?
Yep, it seems that pretty well sums it up.
 
Reminds me of my cousins. Both "born again", they don't go off the deep end with this type of christian battlecry stuff but they do accept the bible as their source for all things spiritual.

They enjoy arguing with me with all things spiritual and im constantly linking them to material, the ironic part is they read the first two or three paragraphs and snub it off as propoganda or "obvious BS", which is ironic because when they link me to material i come to the same conclusion.

christians... they have no idea just how deep the rabbit hole goes, thats assuming they SEE the rabbit hole at all...
 
Cyre2067 said:
christians... they have no idea just how deep the rabbit hole goes, thats assuming they SEE the rabbit hole at all...
You gotta remember: If they're wrong they'll just end up at the beginning of a cycle going through karma all over again. But if you're wrong, your soul will go through endless tortures that cannot even be imagined with no hope of escape ever, and not even the luxury of death.

I guess they consider faith in Christianity the safer bet...
 
If they're really unwilling to consider that their beliefs could be wrong, which is not usually the case in the UK, then I say "if you're right then I don't want anything to do with it, I don't want to go to heaven if even ONE person goes to hell for eternity"
 
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