Playlist for Show: Long Waves

We are fascinated with the ends of things but not as much with the beginnings. We expect time to be ordered to our dramas: sports, adventure novels, apocalyptic fantasies. They all follow the same pattern: an introduction, exposition, conflict followed by threatened resolution, then resolution and denouement.
It seems as if our world script is dictated by this formula.
The ways in which we expect events in the world to play out.
We don’t seem to have a lot of fantasies and stories with sanguine outcomes. Why not?
Certainly we have made a pretty mess of things.
Global climate change, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption , Wars, the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Zombie apocalypse, etc. Say what? A new version of the apocalypse story, Mad Max, is about to be released. (Talk about the original trio).
And everyday we see enactments of the beginning of familiar story lines.
A war breaks out, things escalate, the world ends.
For some, though, this fits with an eschaton of a religious sense.
Human time and experience are always bound with cultural time and narratives of explanation, fantasy, or instruction. Writing our stories into the world gives us linkages between our lives, our experiences and the larger word around us. We belong.
These stories and narratives can be used as well for specific manipulations of people by the ambitious politician or unscrupulous clergy. Nothing plays to the fears of someone feeling the loss of privilege or the loss of a future so much as a drama with clearly defined moral parameters: good and evil, us and them.
People who don’t think much see the world only through binarisms that describe things in terms of what they are not. Female is that which is not male. Enemy are those who are not us. The markers are clear and unambiguous. Ambiguity, a lack of clarity and certainty, drive the search for simple, easily grasped, held, and recalled concepts, definitions, meanings, histories.
Thus mere differences of appearance are often enough to generate hostile or suspicious thoughts and feelings about others or about events in the world.
William James (Introduce) observed that :
our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,–for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.
So we are by and large not very rationally conscious of the world. How to regard them is the question, indeed. Some of these experiences and vaguely felt intimations might lead one to see in them a religious connection.
James notes that : “The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation” the contradictoriness and conflict, the opposites in the world, are united, resolved made mystically unified.
When the cultural stories can be turned to fit the contemporary world and all problems reduced to simple formulae, there is a resolution.
Now, I am not bashing people of sincere faith, but I am trying to explain how seemingly rational persons can reduce the entire world into narrow religiously based stories.
So, if there is a heightened threat of nuclear war and there is scriptural story about the end of days, one can resolve part of the fear and helplessness by compressing the two events.
This is why so many persons in the world see events as unfolding into a story familiar to them, as signs and portents of a vaguely promised future. Omens. Prophecy. This melds together two elements in the mind and reconciles them. Fear of events, a cultural narrative, and a totalizing belief in or consciousness of something ineffable, unexplainable, passive, and transient.

Let’s consider some examples:
William Tapley: youtube show. Calls himself the 3rd eagle of the apocalypse and the co-prophet of the end times. Roman Catholic:
Play segment.
Signs and symbols tortured to lead to a foregone conclusion as though it were inevitable.
Somber reflection, on a recurring basis, of evidence contrived and twisted to validate and make more certain the pre-existing beliefs. Then comes the reconciliation and the resolution of the world.
Certainly, there are groups like the Westboro Baptist Church, who to most of the world seem caricatures of the religious fundamentalists. They have resolved the world down to one simple issue: God hates fags and god is punishing America for allowing GLBTQ people to exist.
Driven by some unconscious reason, such people cherry pick what they wish to find, and raise it to a mania, a calling, an imperative to transform the world. It is thus that their lives become, perhaps for the first time, meaningful.

Then there are those who take things further:
SPLC:
Frederick Clarkson
Eric Robert Rudolph, the government says, bombed an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., earlier this year, killing a police officer and partially blinding a nurse. Agents also want to question him about the bombings of an Atlanta area clinic and a lesbian bar, attacks which injured seven bystanders. And many suspect Rudolph of involvement in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing which killed one person and injured 100 others.
To many, these targets seem unrelated. But they are not.
More and more, anti-abortion extremists, white supremacist groups and the conspiracy-minded “Patriot” movement have come to share the same enemies list. Many in these previously separate movements agree that everything smacking of “one-worldism” — the Olympics, the United Nations and any other global agency — is part of a massive plot to subject Americans to tyranny.
Activists in all three movements describe LGBT people as “sodomites,” people who deserve capital punishment. And in the latest development, many of those involved in these groups are bitterly attacking abortion.
Since the early 1990s, Patriot and white supremacist groups have used mainstream issues like gun control and land and environmental regulation to draw people into their organizations. Now, they are taking up the banner of fighting abortion.
The militant anti-abortion movement is driven by three different but overlapping theologies that motivate violence: Christian Reconstructionism, Christian Identity and apocalyptic Catholicism. To understand this movement’s increased militancy and its goal of instituting a theocracy — a goal that by definition means ending democracy — it is necessary to examine these three ideological strands.
Reconstructionism and ‘Total Confrontation’
Reconstructionism, which arose out of conservative splinters of mainstream Presbyterianism (Orthodox and Reformed), proposes contemporary use of the laws of Old Testament Israel, or “biblical Law,” as the basis for “reconstructing” society under an explicitly theocratic government.
High on the list of capital crimes, Reconstructionists say, is abortion, along with homosexuality and the “propagation of false doctrines.”
The defining text of Reconstructionism is Institutes of Biblical Law, published in 1973 by Rousas John Rushdoony. In the 800-page explanation of the Ten Commandments and the biblical “case law” deriving from them, Rushdoony declares: “All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion. Every law-order is a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare.”
Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, a charismatic evangelical, was originally inspired by Schaeffer, although within a few years he went beyond him. In 1988, Terry was personally tutored by a leading Reconstructionist thinker, Gary North, according to the recent book Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War, by James Risen and Judy L. Thomas.
‘A Time To Kill’
Also in 1988, North wrote a book urging anti-abortion organizations to move beyond Schaefferism and forge a theocratic movement that might eventually force “a political and military” confrontation.
Operation Rescue’s “physical interposition” at clinics, he believed, was but the first step “in the philosophical war against political pluralism. … Christian leaders can see where these protests may be headed, even if their followers cannot: to a total confrontation with the civilization of secular humanism.”
The influence on Terry was obvious. By 1995, he was telling an Operation Rescue gathering that America must be governed by biblical law and that Christians may need to “take up the sword” and “overthrow the tyrannical regime that oppresses them.
Another Reconstructionist theorist is Rev. Michael Bray, the convicted mastermind behind a series of 1984 bombings in Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia. Bray’s targets included clinics, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Abortion Federation, a trade association of abortion providers.
**
One of them, Merrell, has close ties to America’s Promise Ministries, an Identity church in Sandpoint, Idaho, headed by the Rev. Dave Barley. Merrell preached at Barley’s Bible camps, and Barley sold Merrell’s tapes.
The Spokane gang, now all serving long prison sentences, were self-described “Phineas Priests.” The biblical story of Phineas, a priest who killed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman with one spear, has been used to justify the murder of interracial couples. It was also used by Paul Hill to justify his actions, although Hill told journalist Judy Thomas that he rejects the racism of the Phineas Priesthood.
Thus we see the conflation of religion and law, no longer spiritualism, in these formations the religious experience has collapsed into literalism, rigid unwavering and determined by one person or one small controlling group.

This is similar to those who have pushed for legislation against sharia law, so-called in OK, NC, Alabama, etc. These are the same people who would institute mandatory Christianity, requiring church attendance, enforcing laws based on the old testament. Though, as always, not including the parts they don’t like.
These places and people refer to themselves as conservative. What is the connection between their religious beliefs and their politics?
Visit their websites. These are people who see infiltrations everywhere of Muslims, Mexicans, Miscengenists. That’s the other, that’s their world. Based around a set of feelings poorly understood, such persons react to the loss of the mythic world wrapped in nostalgia and needing an explanation. Not just any explanation, but one which specifically can contain the emotional power of this loss, justify the emotion, and provide specific actions, so alleviating their anxiety. The lost self-esteem is regained by seeing their actions as courageous.
Then there are
Klingenschmitt
A disgraced former Navy chaplain warned members of a group dedicated to monitoring fringe conservatives that he had would be willing to shoot their readers and then “pray for your soul” if necessary.
Earlier this year, Dr. “Chaps” Gordon Klingenschmitt accused Right Wing Watch encouraging “the assassination of pro-life Christian leaders” because of anonymous comments posted on YouTube. He later forced the group’s YouTube account to be taken down by filing bogus claims under the Digital Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Those claims were overruled and Klingenschmitt was warned this week to “cease and desist.”
On Tuesday, Klingenschmitt gave up on legal threats and turned to Second Amendment remedies.
“Even though I’m a chaplain, even though I’m a noncombatant, that I’m a 20-year military veteran and I was a nuclear missile officer and I was the captain of my high school rifle team,” Klingenschmitt told the viewers of his Pray in Jesus Name Internet broadcast. “So, I did recently go down and I got my concealed carry permit.”
“So for those of you watching on Right Wing Watch and issuing death threats against me, just know that if you come to my home and you threaten my wife that I will defend myself and my wife,” he added. “And I’ll pray for your soul. I pray that you go to heaven. Right?”
Klingenschmitt then repeated one of his favorite Bible verses, which he has interpreted to mean that Jesus wants people to “sell your clothes and buy a gun.”
“America, you can follow Jesus’ advice and Jesus’ teaching and arm yourself,” he explained. “He advocating what became the basis for the Second Amendment, that God has given us a right to self defense.”
Klingenschmitt concluded by asking God to block “pro-abortion judges, the anti-gun judges, the anti-freedom judges, the centralized government judges” and the “power-grabbing Obama administration.”
“Father, stop the bad judges and restore our freedoms. We pray in Jesus’ name.”
Latest is Blaming abortion for the brutal attack on Michelle Wilkins, 7 mo pregnant, answered a craig’s list ad for baby clothes but was attacked with a knife and her fetus was cut out of her and died.
Demons of rape…like Pat Robertson.
May be sincere or may be a charlatan fleecing the flock. Does it matter?
Certainly, some people have mystic experiences, the have states of consciousness that are undeniable as experiences.
James wrote: “yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance.”
But there are many things to which one might surrender consciousness. The mystic experience may be guided to mean all manner of things, to fit all manner of ideology, to accept all manner of introjection, such as the charismatic leader for the idea that suddenly seems right and perfect.
For many, the attraction of a more primitive version of religion has huge attraction. It promises to return an agency and a meaning to a world that consistently denies people either.
“To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bull stories were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date such distinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted, most things were taken into the mind from the point of view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself exclusively to the aesthetic and dramatic aspects of events.” *
But truth has been contradicted now, and the religion of conservatism, of reaction, of power, is what no longer fits. The abuse of spirituality, though inevitable in this world, is what we must reject as unfitting for human beings in this world.
We should encourage people to explore their varieties of religious…or spiritual experience. But we have no need to respect or to condone or to protect the inverted and confused beliefs of those who cannot find another, more fitting way of reconciling their world with their inner-experiences. This was always a problem, even for Paul. These are times of new beginnings and people are threatened. Our challenges lie in facing the threats and dealing with them squarely. We should not retreat into a perversion of spirituality, a selective reading of ancient truths that reject the present, a psychological blackhole of hate.

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