what if evil men used your religion to control you?

[mopaul]

what if hollow men, who hold no religious views of their own, used your religion against you? used it to control you, or make you vote a certain way? or react a certain way?

any cursory reading of history will show that evil men all through human history have done this very thing. and are still doing it.

never has there been a more glaring recent example of this than the bushkkko cabal.

[REP]

1. More Importantly

Why did I read "buchkkko" as "bukkake"?

[prodigal_green]

2. I would ask

what do you mean by "if?"

[dbt]

3. Yeah, mo. Where you been for the last thousand years or so?

:evilgrin:
dbt

[mopaul]

4. right over there......

in the back of the cave

[no_hypocrisy]

5. Classic example: Rasputin, a Russian monk, told Tsar Nicholas how

to prosecute the Russian Army (literally and figuratively) in World War I. Rasputin totally controlled the mind of Tsarina Alexandra, who in turn, told her weak, spineless husband how to be the Tsar of Russia.

Result: The Russian Imperial Family assassinated after being overthrown and the Romanov Dynasty forever extinguished, and Rasputin finally dies after 6-7 consecutive methods of assassination.

[ArkDem]

7. >prosecute the Russian Army<

That must have been one hell of a trial.

[sweetheart]

6. What if your religion has no "men" between you and god?

Then its all a bit hard. All they can do is screw with your
economics, and force you to work for their war machine in order
to eat and feed your family. The subversion is economic, IMO,
not direct.

[truthspeaker]

8. Many religions try for that ideal, but then backslide to authoritarianism

One of the basic tenets of Islam is supposed to be that there is no intermediary between each man and Allah. Yet there are all these mullahs, muftis, and sheiks claiming religious authority.

The main thrust of the Protestant Reformation was to take religious authority away from men and return it to God. The corrupt Catholic hierarchy exemplified what happens when fallible men are given authority on matters of faith. Yet, many of today's Protestants take the words of their pastors or even televangelists and authors without question. I've met many so-called Protestants who have barely read the Bible, let alone tried to interpret it for themselves.

Some people want to be told what to think.

[sweetheart]

12. men teach how to think

I think god (within us) just knows, and does not "think". This love
is not thinking, but more silent and subtle, as if the human spirit
were a magnificent flower that, when blossomed fully, is nothing
but totally beautiful to know.

And knowing so totally absorbing, and appearantly so simple, without
the need for complex explanations. In this regard, i see fratboy's
defense of what knowledge is. "the actors approach" Knowledge as
fluid dance.

And all the dance, deeply loved by the listening heart. Until they
can teach "listening heart" as a thought, there will be a need for
religion. . . and indeed by example, as our world is so so distorted
from that balance point, deadened to its own nature.

The entire clergy of the USA should be speaking on DU right
now, if they really know something... geez, the worlds a vacuum for
some truth and some wisdom, goodwill and light.

Dearest truth,
heart calls you,
always waiting,
always in love.

[Lerkfish]

9. because religious fervor can be a quick vector into

...the masses to cause-fervor. Not all religious people are like this, but the ones that are will believe ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING told them by those they trust as leaders, NO MATTER HOW WRONG OR ILLOGICAL. Essentially, they have become conditioned to be open to manipulation.

Therefore, the evil man knows this, and uses this hook into their psyche and gradually points the direction of their mindless fervor from their religion to the evil man's cause.

Often, the duped can no longer tell the difference between the religious things they are supposed to take on faith and not question, and the political things they are supposed to treat the same way.

That's why the religious right think God has chosen Bush, or that criticism of Bush is evil or heretical. They have, through constant manipulation of coopted religious leaders (falwell, Robertson, etc.), been told that it is their holy duty to influence and control govt.

It's like this: if you are a heroin addict, you can take a hypo with rat poison someone gives you and inject it quickly without thinking, because you're used to needles and giving yourself injections. You become inured to the process of receiving the poison, and may not even realize you've poisoned yourself.
However, if you handed a hypo with rat poison to someone who is not a drug user or familiar with needles and tell them to inject themselves, they'll start asking a lot of questions like "why" "what's it do"? etc.

The religious right is trained to inject ANYTHING their charismatic leaders tell them to inject into their psyche, as long as their leaders tell them to support other leaders, its merely a simple feint of hand, and it isn't until the poison has already done the damage will they start to realize they have sacrificed their religion for some other person's political agenda.

[Nordic]

10. Nice, Mopaul!

I wish the so-called Christian leaders would ask this of their minions. But they're too fucking stoopid to figure out that this is exactly what's happened to them.

They are, indeed, the "sheeple". (the fundies is what I'm talking about here)

[JohnOneillsMemory]

11. Watch 'Metropolis' again. 1927 warning to workers against evil churches.

An amazing movie showing how power co-opts the saintly and loving 'Maria' and makes an evil duplicate that leads the workers to their own destruction when they aren't needed anymore. Allegory rocks!

The Christian Church has been the Fox News of the peasants for 1500 years.

It has been used to sanctify the Divine Right of Kings...who jail, torture, and kill any resistance.

Religion ain't gonna save us from the bastards because there aren't enough Christians like the Berrigan Brothers. Most are like Graham, Falwell, and Ralph Reed or worse.

[sweetheart]

13. What if religion were the economic ladder

And truth was that a matrix of universities and economists have
designed an attaboy system, like a spinning wheel to keep the ferret
making war and mass murdering its own children, generation after
generation by giving them no peace.

If truth is to be ruled by no man but god, i can easily see how some
muslim people ("slave" it means if i heard right), are against western spiritual "work-slave" poverty, a "prodenstant" ethic endemic
to the economic system, that one has to be "someone", and have an
economic identity. Though this may be the "truth" for all professional
people in america, to presume this is a religion,
imposing an economic vice, by its demand to take oil,
and with it, imposing militarism, mass murder, low low humanity
and truly foul and evil ethics.

I am deeply worried for the american people, given the modern will
of angry people, and what hate is being stirred up. And all of this,
if a society had not forced all its people to work-slave, and perhaps
the luxury of idle, to sit still, to meditate for a day, a week
a month or a year, is no crime, but only in a society that values
something beyond war. Our very culture is exporting a mechanism
that is against peace and god.

To be a true christian, a person of god in this dark time on earth,
is to be a totally intense radical. To stop, cease, desist,
withdraw, awaken, surrender, have peace, now. That is the most
radical. To refuse to run with the pack, to go with god and not
follow the law of the pack. To oppose the using of your good blood
and tax to murder people for a cultural basis and to occupy other
peoples in a economic-religious crusade, a civil war, not beetween
george bush and arabia,


but between the hearts of all people, and being still and knowing god.