US Christian Fundamentalism - Frozen Relic? Useful Idiocy?

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US Christian Fundamentalism - Frozen Relic? Useful Idiocy?

Postby rerevisionist » 27 Feb 2012 04:26

This is an attempt to discuss the existence, and maybe menace, of Christian fundamentalism in the USA.

It seems a bit bizarre that a country generally regarded worldwide as advanced, and powerful, and at the leading edge of science, should harbour many such people. I'm assuming this isn't just an artefact caused by media advertising and promotion; no doubt Billy Graham was funded, and no doubt now Jewish money goes to many organisations, but there do seem to be large numbers of Protestant fundamentalists, who seem to have genuine beliefs.

The puzzle is posts like the following one, from https://www.theBritishResistance.co.uk website, where most posters are aware of the risks of anti-white propaganda, wars, immigration into white countries, present-day Jewish and political corruption, plus the more nebulous fears instilled by the junk media --
My brilliant Minister preaches for hours every week. His topic? How to penetrate the fog of deception that has penetrated every mind in the world. As Christians we ALL have the duty to spread the gospel. That is our calling. That is why our nations exist. My pastor teaches that as Christians we must start our study NOT in Matthew Luke or John BUT IN REVELATION! The book of revelation is a MESSAGE from God the Father TO THE CHURCHES!
Revelation teaches us how to deal with these end times. Here is a truth we must ALL accept: THE ENTIRE WORLD IS DECEIVED! EVERYONE INCLUDING CHRISTIANS IS DECEIVED! The only way OUT of the cloud of deception is by God's grace which he freely gives. Satan has deceived us all. Etc etc

This poster believes that the (supposed) atom bombs were predicted in the Bible. What's going on here?

Maybe there's some clue from history. Assuming the traditional dates are more-or-less right, we find
1620 - first settlement in the USA that proved viable. Let's try to summon up the mental atmosphere of the time. I'll consider the offical dates of publications of printed books, taken more or less at random from my notes. Given the cost and rarity of these things, it's reasonable to expect their ideas would take decades to percolate down. So in the previous century or so we see the whole Reformation movement, plus the spread of European ideas, and the feeling of practical things being passed down by books rather than oral sources--

1489 Malleus Maleficarum Hefty tome on witchcraft in the European sense
1517 Disputatio Contra Scholasticam Theologiam - Martin Luther - German Disputes Against Scholastic Theologians
1525 ish- 1611ish: outpouring of translations of the Bible, including 1525-1539 Tyndale's Old and New Testaments; Matthews Bible; Taverners Bible; Great Bible.
1556-1559ish Something of a fightback: Index Librorum Prohibitorum because the Catholic view was that the Bible (in Latin) was exclusive property of the priestly hierarchy, as opposed to 'Bible Christianity'. Foxe's Book of Martyrs - deaths of Protestants - belongs here.
1560-1611 Geneva Bible. Completion of Authorized King James Bible in England 50 years later. Calvin died early in this period; he reputedly revived the idea of individualist action, of backing one's own judgment.

There must have been some Renaissance influence. To take a few examples, we have 1485 Caxton's printed edition of the Morte d'Arthur; 1500 Erasmus's Adagia; 1513 Machiavelli's The Prince; 1516 Orlando Furioso; 1517 Plutarch's Parallel Lives; 1528 Castiglione's Il Cortegiano; 1543 Vesalius's The Structure of the Human Body; 1550ish Vasari's Lives of the Artists; 1556 Agricola's de re Metallica; 1557 Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Good Pointes of Husbandrie. There was a slow surge of books: poetry, essays for pleasure, philosophy, art, science, travel, technology, and just handbooks of everyday techniques. But I'd guess ordinary English people were relatively uninfluenced by most of these somewhat remote activities.

After this time, the Reformation took the arguably unChristian form of the Thirty Years' War, starting in 1618. It seems plausible that the mental world of English colonists was bookish Christianity, rather free from the multiple new interests, arguments and sources of violence in Europe. And they had to make a living in what they'd see as wilderness, cut off by the Atlantic from easy access to apparently simple things like horseshoes and saws and glass and leather. People with a liking for abstract thought must have had little option but speculate on Biblical lines. The English Civil War, after the Thirty Years' War, must have encouraged English emigration, despite the hazards of crossing the Atlantic in small ships. Cromwell and others used Biblical analogies as a matter of course. There was a lot of emigration from Germany, too; these people may well have had a similar outlook.

The question I have is what happened from, say, 1700-1920. What kept ideas so static amongst so many people? Or am I being unfair? Large areas of Russia and China had many peasants; I've heard the USA compared to India by a rationalist - she told me she was on a bus in the deep south, and the driver called out "Say, this lady doesn't believe in God!" and the entire busload of people laughed. Is the country too huge to allow ideas to interact? Did it need so much work against army worms and wild animals and Indians that there was no time for wide thought? Did there come to be so much in the way of raw materials that their version of consumerism dominated everything?

Looking back from the Civil War through the 20th century, the USA's population has been exploited and plundered and used; they've been unable to fight back against alien forces. This has become so serious that the USA's population seem to be amongst the most gullible and naive of any in the world - in proportion to their power.
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Re: US Christian Fundamentalism - Frozen Relic? Useful Idiocy?

Postby Cowan Bellarmino » 27 Feb 2012 16:26

I don't think it was always so.

Unfortunately, John Nelson Darby's theology spread like wildfire once Cyrus I. Scofield was bankrolled to sell it.

Darby is the founding father of Fundamentalism (a.k.a. Dispensationalism). Scofield is the one that took Darby's concepts and wrote his own study bible that remains a big seller in this time. Dispensational theology is responsible by-in-large for US government and church support of zionism. Pastors like John Hagee and Chuck Colson are the heavyweights in the arena now as Billy Graham's age has caught up to him, although his son Franklin is currently carrying that ministry's banner.

Thankfully, there is some pushback as this theology is built on sand.

Protestant sites like: https://againstdispensationalism.com/

are doing some good, although underfunded, work to rehabilitate sensibilities these days. However, even they and most of the reform movement remain Calvinist and are completely ignorant of Walsingham's British intelligence operation that removed the Apocrypha from Protestant Bibles. Small steps I guess. Getting people to realize that there is no such thing as "The Rapture" is a rather large hurdle. The brainwashing, as your quote shows, goes very deep.
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Re: US Christian Fundamentalism - Frozen Relic? Useful Idiocy?

Postby rerevisionist » 27 Feb 2012 20:41

CB - I was rather incomplete, sorry; I missed out the 19th century US rationalists, many of them very good -
Draper's History of the Intellectual Develoment of Europe written in 1859 (Bertrand Russell said of this, to a new friend at Cambridge, that he was the only person he knew who'd heard of it); Ingersoll; and later Joseph Wheless e.g. Forgery in Christianity (1930ish). Wikipedia talks of the 'Golden Age of [American] Freethought'.

Just as Jews successfully almost erased people like Darwin and Herbert Spencer and indeed much British and American thought, they largely erased the freethought movement.

I'm afraid I haven't heard of any of your modern propagandist types. In Europe, people don't like these extravert things in religion - although there was a movement called 'moral rearmament' or the 'Oxford Movement' mainly in the 1920s. Billy Graham came to Wembley Stadium once but I don't think he was very successful. I don't think many people here have heard of 'the Rapture'. All this in England may be something do do with the Church of England, which is legally established (tax exemptions on its property holdings - I think) and has at its head a political appointee. Below is a picture of the current head, appointed by war criminal and liar Tony Blair, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I don't know which is worse: the frantic loud-mouthed US preacher types who at least have to make an effort, or the smug amoral well-funded Rowan Williams hugging the church's money and spending nothing on any intelligent research.

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Re: US Christian Fundamentalism - Frozen Relic? Useful Idiocy?

Postby Cowan Bellarmino » 27 Feb 2012 23:36

You may not have heard of them, but don't worry - you're not missing anything. You can always search them online at Youtube. Hagee is quite entertaining, but it's a bit of dark comedy as there are folks that fervently believe what he's saying. Con men are quite persuasive.

Anyway, the doctrine of Dispensationalism is totalitarian. Once it gains hold of an individual's mind it is very tough to break. The totalitarian mind does not allow for any dissent. I think that's why it seems so static. Your point about gullability in relation to power for the American is quite right. We are gullible because we are entranced, and will buy whatever the carnival barker is selling.
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Re: US Christian Fundamentalism - Frozen Relic? Useful Idiocy?

Postby NUKELIES » 29 Feb 2012 15:46

Rerev most of those bible thumpers live in the Bible Belt - far from California and New York. I have had very little exposure to them - though I have seen them. Americans have a natural disposition to puritanism inherited from their 17th century English ancestors (familial or cultural). There was a significant divergence between England and America in this respect probably beginning after the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. We retained our puritanism and it festered into often putrid fundamentalism. "I'll pray for you" is used as a weapon in middle American culture - a threat that you are inferior and debauched and you better watch out. England turned into a slave colony prison island with its satanic mills after 1694 - retaining the beauty and grandeur accumulated up until Charles 1, and the natural environment will always be eerily beautiful on the British Isles. But it has been essentially communist for three centuries now, under the yoke of Finance.

You have to keep in mind that he US has five times the population of the UK, and a thousand times (?) the land mass, as well as now having 40-50% non-white population. It's bound to have more diversity - for better or worse.

The first A.C. Doyle Sherlock Holmes story - I think "The Scarlet Letter" - was a scathing attack on Mormonism.

Middle Americans can be disgustingly backward. But let me tell you: the most sinister backwards place I've ever been in the first world was Cheadle - the one in Staffordshire. The people there were like that pig woman shopkeeper on the League of Gentlemen "Are you local?" and Lymm near Warrington is a cursed town.

I've noticed many Brits have a disdainful fascination with America - but the truth is personal cultivation is voluntary - even race-independent to a great extent. Most power is hype anyways - just look at peacocks. The more you huff the more women (and slaves) believe you.
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