Prayer Warriors, Zionism and Dissent

http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=MgdZgBwMjIc

So, my mom is a prayer warrior. Granted, I don't believe she's part of the movement being described in this video, at least, not wittingly or comprehensively. However, her beliefs definitely match up with it. She thinks Gog and Magog are Russia. She watches Jack Van Impe and his computer-animated wife, Rexella. (Crazy or no, Jack at least gets small nod from me for discouraging the idiocy of Pat Robertson.)

She prays demons out of territories, or strongholds. These, curiously, can be either in someone's behavior, or in a geographical location. My mom prints out lists of Indian burial mounds, because demons can take over these spots. (Those awful savages and their evil spirits, ruining this great country even in death!)

My mom drives around, praying for specific streets. Sometimes she feels strange things, and God calls her to pray them out. She watches the news like a hawk (and watches hawks like they're news, incidentally - she loves spotting birds of prey while driving) to see places she's prayed for, to see if crimes are stopped, or if there are places that she needs to start praying for.

In her mind, she's had too much successes, uncovered too many things, seen too many things resolved with such timing, that she is convinced her powers are real, and that there is no room for coincidence here. She keeps a book of answered prayers. She's got some five thousand of these. Of course, Jesus is known well for his ability to turn 2 and 5 into 5000. A look through the book will reveal things like "meeting went well," "[person x] getting better" and the like.

A few importants points of contention:

1. OBVIOUSLY, things have a way of resolving themselves. Praying for something to go well implies the average life is full of frequent misfortune, disaster and inability to come to terms. While bad things do happen, it's hardly requiring of a miracle for people to hold a business meeting where they discuss business successfully.

2. Human beings have immune systems and the ability to repair damaged organs or tissues, which resolves many of their health problems during a short or medium-term timespan. In other cases, humans require medical help from doctors, specialists, medicine, treatments and regimens. To credit God for one's medical successes is an unfounded notion. Maybe you can attribute that one in a million cancer situation to him, but good luck arguing with the overall statistics.

Seriously, if you give people the choice of the doctor or the witch doctor, you know what they're going to pick, and if you don't, God help you when you get sick. To think that the boom of life expectancy and quality of living in the first world in the past hundred years is simply God's mercy, and not the power of modern medicine, you need to do some serious thinking on the topic.

Even if God were responsible, you can hardly demonstrate this, because people who claim answered prayers are often in the middle of medical treatments. Who can say what cures them? At least the scientific angle can be tested and repeated.

It pains me to even have to say all this. It's so obvious. But, it bears repeating.

Denominations (cults) who refuse their children medical care for religious reasons are murderers. Anyone who prays first and dials 911 second is a fool. Yes, I will stand by that.

3. Perhaps the simplest, and most important point is that, when I asked my mother whether she'd be willing to compare her answered prayers vs her unanswered prayers, she didn't need to give it any thought. "No." I think she said that she's prayed for too many things to keep track of. Of course, she KEEPS TRACK OF the successes.

The level of delusion here is blatant. You cannot simply provide a delicious and hearty loaf of whole grain bread as your proof. The process of separating the wheat from the chaff IS your proof, not the result! That is flat-out doctoring, obscuring, selecting.



...All that being said, I'll reiterate that while people believe some crazy stuff, I'm not under the impression that these evangelicals are directly dangerous in the way that some militias or radicals may be - but, their movement could play a part, even if small, in influencing people to such ends, inadvertently or in the shadows.

Fear is the oldest tool in the book for social and political engineering. Religion knows it intimately: execution, torture, fire and brimstone, all under the veneer of infallible leadership, divine mandates, and benevolent intentions. If some people start pushing for the end times, religious leaders, who may very well believe what they're saying, will see it as a suitable means to cow people into belief.

Religion doesn't simply make people evil. That would be a gross generalization and misuse of words. Dogma, moreover, religious or secular, doesn't simply make people evil. What happens is that dogma dillutes and tints reasoning. People will become more likely to be led down a path that won't make sense; they may attack science in the name of truth, attack freedom in the name of their rights, or attack innocents in the name of righteousness.

And what about these end times? I'm definitely going to need to study the Scoffield Bible at some point. Its influence has become far too large. Its footnotes have become doctrine, their implications dogma. (And what it's interpreting is the zaniest pile of babbling mess this side of North Korea.)

If the human world ends, it's because earth can no longer sustain us, which may or may not, but probably will be our fault. Swearing by an old book that reads like an acid trip is so meaningless. Groups can't even agree on what it means, because it is either symbolic or inane. So, a creature with seven eyes and four wings crawls out of the sea and eats a little book (I'm calling this stuff off the top of my head, so please forgive me if I miscount the number of eyes on a fantasy creature.)

Ugh. Alright. I've said enough about the text, but let's address the consequences of the beliefs. Why do people want to bring Armageddon?

1. It's supposed to happen. Yes, chaos and death are inevitable, so might as well get them over with, because I want to see Jesus.

2. We deserve it. We are filthy and detestable creatures who have gone too far, and it has to happen to us based on our own behavior.

3. It's humane to get it over with now. Every generation that passes will be more and more people, proportionately, going to Hell (by any reasonable evaluation of global religious trends, anyhow.) Let's end the suffering.

I'm not saying all Zionists believe all three of these. Any single one of the three is plenty hurtful on its own. Name anything besides religion, or I suppose some spiteful incarnation of nihilism, which would see such good in the end of the world on an unproven assumption that there's a greater meaning behind it. This is a hurtful view.

This harkens to my Love, II post wherein I talk about the notion that love, as far as I can tell by the Bible, is power, and authoritarianism, and punishment and death. The world must end because of love. What a backwards, stupid claim. (And yes, I'm the one making it, but if my interpretations are wrong, I'd love to know.)

Now that you're all asleep, I'll close by talking about dissenting in regards to Christianity. Is America founded in the godly tradition of dissent?

Well, Hebrews 13:17 tells us: Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.

Hmm...

So, when those revolutionaries threw all the tea into the harbor and refused to pay their taxes, they were following Christ, right?

Well, Mark 22:18-21 says: But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, "You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax."

They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?"

"Caesar's," they replied.

Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

Wow, how confusing. It's almost as though all the American, Judeo-Christian, capitalistic, free speech, free religion, patriotic rhetoric is a bunch of hypocritical bullshit. But that can't be right, can it?

Oh, friends. It pains us.

But, anyone who claims to be joining a militia to take back their country in the name of The Lord God of Israel, come to earth in flesh as Jesus Christ, is a complete tool who doesn't know how to read, or, if they do, cherry picks what they want to read. God puts leaders in place, including bad ones. Jesus advocated peaceful resistance at times, otherwise no resistance at all.

Look at his Apostles, for crying out loud. They were killed, but they did not kill. They served and they suffered for their service. When Peter cut off the ear of a guard who was trying to take Jesus away, Jesus healed the ear. If Jesus was fine with being carted off to be killed, Jesus is fine with "freedom" being carted off to be killed. He would not have you turn a blade on another man.

Of course, I can't blame people completely, because the Bible is contradictory as well. Matthew 10:34-36 tells us:

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn
" 'a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law -
a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'

Some might be quick to say that this isn't literal, and that Jesus spoke metaphorically. Well, it'd be nice if he would've been more clear. (The reasons why he wasn't are obvious from my perspective, but at any rate.) Look at how Israel used the sword to glorify God and tell me modern day radicals who are itching for religious conflict have zero basis for their views Biblically. The proof is in the pudding, of course, so we'll just have to judge history and current events as they go.

(Interestingly, the word "sword" appears in 406 verses in the NIV Bible. "Love" appears in 697. Nice save. Curiously, here's the final use of each: sword and love, both from the aforementioned, lovely Book of Revelation.)

I'm running out of things to say on the topic, and that's always a good time to think about quitting. At some point I'll get back to Love. It'll be good.