A picture is worth a thousand words–except sometimes. Like, if, it’s full of…words!

(If you have trouble reading this, go here, where you can click on the cartoon (by Darryl Cagle) for a larger image.)

(If you still can’t read it (cartoon text is hard to read, sometimes), go to my teeny personal blog where I have done the work for you.)

* * * * * * *
And if you can’t stand on your head, or if getting on your chair and bending over is dangerous, the answer key reads:

Answer:
Definitely shoot A, H and B.
Sometimes shoot C and D.
Don’t shoot E, J, F and I.
Try not to shoot G, but if you do, we won’t worry too much about it.

What does this say about our “Illegal Occupation and Undeclared War” in Iraq?

What does this say about the mission our soldiers face every day? And what are their chances of being right even half the time?

And what did I say last week? We should not even BE in Iraq!

Can you say “catastrophuck”?

Check out the Conservapedia. Yes, it’s for real.

But be patient; it’s been so ScienceBlogged, it takes forever for it to load. And you’d better turn your irony/satire/parody detector up to “High,” for some very creative editors have been extremely busy indeed.

Happy Weekend!

[For Part One, see When Religion Becomes Treason: Part One–In the beginning…]

1980 — A Watershed Year [and decade!]

Paul Weyrich, speaking in Dallas in 1980, captured the spirit of this new movement. He said,

“We are talking about Christianizing America. We are talking about simply spreading the gospel in a political context.”

Jerry Falwell, who became the leader of the Moral Majority said: “get them saved, get them Baptized, and get them registered.” (These two quotes can be heard on the video produced by People for the American Way called Life And Liberty for All Who Believe.)

Thousands of fundamentalist preachers participated in political training seminars that year, and by June, more than two million voters had been registered Republican. Their goal was to register 5 million by November. In the 1980 elections, the newly politicized Religious Right succeeded in unseating five of the most liberal Democrat incumbents in the U.S. Senate, and provided the margin that helped Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter. The year 1980 was the year that a sleeping giant was awakened, and the political landscape of the United States was dramatically altered.

Many other organizations formed in the eighties. The Reverend Timothy LaHaye founded the American Coalition for Traditional Values — a network of 110,000 churches committed to getting Christian candidates elected to office.

In 1980 LaHaye was present at the birth of the Moral Majority and agreed to serve on the organization’s first board of directors under the tutelage of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, with whom he remains close today.

A year later, LaHaye was co-founder and first president of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive umbrella group of far right leaders who meet regularly to plot strategy designed to advance a theocratic agenda.

“No one individual has played a more central organizing role in the religious right than Tim LaHaye,” says Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, calling him “the most influential American evangelical of the last twenty-five years.” (Rolling Stone, January 28, 2004.)

In 1979 Beverly and Tim LaHaye founded Concerned Women for American (CWA) claiming a membership of 600,000. With prayer and action meetings, the women were, and still are a formidable lobbying force. CWA was successful in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment, and their lawyers won an important textbook case in 1987 to combat Secular Humanism in the schools. That case was later overturned by the higher courts.

James Dobson, host of the radio show Focus on the Family, founded the Family Research Council in 1983 to act as the political lobbying arm of his radio show. Because an estimated four million listeners tune into his radio show daily, the Family Research Council has remained a formidable lobbying organization.

And the highly secretive Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 to conduct three-times-a-year strategy sessions. The CNP was and still is an umbrella organization of right-wing leaders who gather regularly to plot strategy, share ideas and fund causes and candidates to advance the theocratic agenda. more

A Short-Lived Sigh of Relief

In 1988 Pat Robertson ran for President in the Republican Primaries and lost to George Bush Sr. In 1989 the Moral Majority disbanded. A lot of people concerned about the Religious Right breathed a deep sigh of relief. But there was one strange event that should have been a warning sign.

Pat Robertson beat Vice President George Bush Sr. in the Iowa Republican caucuses. How did Pat Robertson beat the Vice President in that state? Members of his campaign worked precinct by precinct to take over the party leadership at the local level until, eventually, they controlled the state party apparatus.

In March, 1986, Joan Bokaer was on a speaking tour in Iowa and received a copy of the following memo Robertson had distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus:

“How to Participate in a Political Party

Rule the world for God.

Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.

Hide your strength.

Don’t flaunt your Christianity.

Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God willing.”

…One of their tactics was to tie up the meetings for hours until people left. Then they appointed themselves leaders and made key decisions. Once they took over the local leadership throughout the State of Iowa, they could control the state party apparatus. After their success in the Iowa ‘88 primary, they used the same tactic in several other states — precinct by precinct.

Republican State Party Platforms began to get pretty interesting in 1992. The Republican Party of Washington State in 1992 outlawed witchcraft and yoga classes.

The game was on, the stealth-tactics were perfected and success was building into momentum. St.Ron-the-Divine, a politician willing to climb into bed with Jerry Falwell, was succeeded by George H.W Bush, another quasi-xian willing to pander to the the Rapturists. Congress was being taken over by more and more fundamentists/evangelicals, and preparing for their big chance.

And all this was happening under the radar, in bible-study groups and meetings of elders and at religious retreats, to say nothing of the outright cabal-scheming between religionists and politicians–all of it away from scrutiny by anyone who felt that our Democracy was just fine the way it is, thank-you-very-much…

(Coming next: When Religion Becomes Treason: Part Three–Thy will be done…)

Lawsuit: School Banned Jesus Costume…

I’ll see what you say, before I weigh in on the issue. But is there anyone that is right? The kid? The fundie mom? The teacher? The principal? The school board?

(BTW, my brother-in-law carved that pumpkin one year, back when they lived in a neighborhood that had children trafficking in “sugar”…)

They’re cropping up like weeds! Some are so close to the interstates, they constitute “eye-pollution”; some you have to really work to get to (those are my favorites!)

We need to invent a “crossicide” (or maybe a “crucifixicide”…)! Something that will cause them to melt in the next rain, rather like Dorothy’s Wicked Witch of the West!

So, here we go—

World’s Largest Cross (Think of this as BigAss Cross v1.2)

Effingham is the home of the world’s largest cross. Built over a five year period at a cost of over one million dollars, the cross stands 198 feet tall and contains 180 tons of steel. It consists of four sections and can withstand 145 mph winds.

Giant Cross (Think of this as BigAss Cross v1.1)

There is a 19 story cross located next to Interstate 40 at Groom. This 190 foot tall free standing Cross can be seen from twenty miles away. Surrounding the base of the Cross are life sized statues of the Stations of the Cross. Inspired by this cross, residents of Effingham, Illinois erected a similar cross that is eight feet taller. The movie Leap of Faith was filmed on location near the cross.

It says on the “Cross Ministries’” website that they were inspired by the Cross in Ballinger TX. (This the inspiration for the BigAss Crosses, v1.0!)

For the best (and most irreverent!) testimony, this is from Route 66 Unraveled:

My brief pilgrimage was a pleasant one, but it was not the spiritual experience for which I had hoped. I was too interested in the cross as a physical object, and my thoughts were, for the most part, secular in scope.

As pious erections go, the Great Cross of Groom is almost Heliogabalic in its aspiration. I do not suppose that it is the largest cross in the western hemisphere by accident, nor does it seem coincidental that it stands tall in Texas, where everything is reputedly larger than life.

Viewed from its base, the Great Cross looks something like the Washington Monument. Both structures are white towers with four corners, and both peak with a point. Both also have ground-level doorways permitting access to their interiors. I imagined a spectacular view of the surrounding plains from the top of a stairwell within the cross, perhaps comparable to that excellent view of the Mall from the observatory of the Washington Monument. A significant difference between the two structures is that the Great Cross is composed of far less costly material than Washington’s great stone obelisk: nuts, bolts and the kind of sheet metal sold in hardware stores for construction of backyard storage sheds.

The cross also made me think of Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

Now we go from the ridiculous to the…even more ridiculous: the rumored Blessed Mary Cafe!

From Where in the world is Reed? blog

Amarillo, TX to Erick, OK 117 miles
Passed by the largest cross in the western hemishere on our way to The Blessed Mary Cafe. Jim and Rebecca were our hosts. No fee for coffee and pie – just a donation that seems fit. No preaching unless you ask but little pearls of wisdom are dispensed…

From Roadside Photos blog

[The person who posted was trying to take pictures of the "cross" when the camera was whipped away, only to fall to the asphalt and, thus, was probably unusable. Alas, no pix of the cross or the cafe. Thank you, Jeebus!]

A sign along the Interstate promises a spiritual experience, but the only things that moved me were the wind and the cold. At least until the wind blew the camera out of my hands and sent it crashing to the asphalt. It landed on its back, so the lens was intact. It focused properly and the shutter and motor drive seemed to work normally…but none of the push-button adjustments worked, and the display which usually showed the shutter speed and exposure was a blank. In sum, I thought the camera was okay, but couldn’t be sure until the pictures were developed. Just what I wanted to hear while an hour from any photo store.

Heading east, I had plenty of time to contemplate my options…as well as such wonders as Blessed Mary’s Cafe half a mile from the Largest Cross (American and Mexican food, just like Jesus ate!)

No one has ever mentioned whether Mary was a good cook!

End Times Titans, RoadsideAmerica.com:

Big Marys: Immaculate giantesses loom, but also forgive. Find the largest the USA has to offer: 50-ft Madonna Queen National Shrine, North Boston, Massachusetts; 30-ft “Queen of Peace,” Sioux City, Iowa; the 33-ft. tall Mary in Windsor, Ohio; and 90-ft “Our Lady of the Rockies,” Butte, MT.

Super-Crucifixes: A super-crucifix is a giant cross with a Jesus statue nailed to it, lovingly crafted as part of a Catholic shrine or church. The two biggest can be found in Bardstown, Kentucky; and the Cross in the Woods, Indian River, Michigan.

Big Crosses: There are many, spread over the widest geography and less denominational than a monolithic Madonna or Super-crucifix. Our favorites are the metal spectacle visible from the interstate in Groom, Texas; and the white colossus atop Bald Knob, Alto Pass, Illinois. A 95-footer went up near Frankfort, Kentucky in 1999. In 2001, a 198-ft. tall Cross went up near I-70 at I-57 in Effingham, Illinois (”Crossroads of America”), inspired by the Groom cross.

Praying Hands of Webb City, MO, or the Healing Hands, Tulsa, OK. Take your pick, though we favor the Healing Hands, within groveling distance of the Oral Roberts Prayer Tower, with its direct prayer-feed to heaven.

World’s Largest Ten Commandments: A popular spot to review epic past indiscretions. Field of the Wood, Murphy, NC.

Heaven-bound: Giant Jesus Statue

Monroe, Ohio: Jesus has risen near the interstate north of Cincinnati. A 62-ft. high sculpture of Christ appears to explode from the dirt behind the amphitheater at Monroe’s Solid Rock Church. From the waist down, he’s underground….

(*I kind wish he’d just drown–is that double-jeopardy? To wish death to a dead man? To a dead man that probably never was?*)

I’ll bet your obession is not nearly as interesting as mine!

(BTW, if you are planning a roadtrip, I urge you to visit RoadsideAmerica blog. They have a wicked sense of humor–and a first-rate set of wonderful, arcane, surreal and/or just plain off-beat attractions! In fact, you don’t even need a reason to visit them!)

Yes, the End Times have officially arrived; behold the Anti-Christ!

In case his name seems familiar, it’s because we first met him in Stardust’s January 25, 2007 post, God Has Retired and Moved to South Florida. Apparently he’s decided that simply being the Second Coming of Christ was just not enough to con – excuse me, convert people – in the highly competitive market of religious cults.

[snippets] Members of Growing in Grace, a controversial religious sect headquartered in Doral, said they were following the example of their leader, José Luis De Jesús Miranda [in English, "Joseph Louis of Jesus Miranda"], who has claimed to be Jesus and recently declared himself the Antichrist…

It’s a sign most Christians would shun, because for centuries the numbers have been associated with Satan. But for the 30 or so church members who branded themselves with 666 and SSS — the initials of De Jesús’ motto, ‘’salvo siempre salvo,” or ‘’saved always saved” — it’s a mark of their absolute faith in De Jesús…

De Jesús — who preaches that sin and the devil were destroyed when Jesus died on the cross and that God’s chosen already have been saved — has built a massive movement around his claim to divinity. Followers call him ”Daddy” and ”God” and lavish him with $5,000 Rolexes and sometimes 40 percent or more of their salaries…

In his sermons, De Jesús emphasizes wealth and success as a sign of God’s favor…

In 1988, De Jesús announced he was the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. In 1999, he dubbed himself ”the Other,” a spiritual superbeing who would pave the way for Christ’s second coming. In 2004, he proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ. That claim caused some prominent members to defect from the movement — including De Jesús’ first wife, Nydia, and his son Jose Luis Jr., who started his own church in Puerto Rico…

De Jesús’ followers have lashed out against organized Christianity because they believe their prophet holds the true gospel, they say. His adherents have disrupted Catholic processions on Good Friday and protested outside an evangelical church gathering in Miami’s Tropical Park. Last July, they tore up literature published by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other Christian movements during a march in downtown Miami…

We really should sit this guy down with all the other megalomaniacs claiming to be incarnations of Christ and Jesus (isn’t the Rev. Sun Myung Moon still around?) and such, and let them work it all out among themselves – or get rid of each other in the process. Of course, I don’t know how seriously to take someone calling himself the Anti-Christ who doesn’t even know that the Number of the Beast is actually “616,” not “666.”

And is it fear of the hurricanes in Florida that keeps driving people into these conmen’s corrals?!

Just for a laugh break, something from Conan, Crooks and Liars.com and YouTube. Enjoy:

I’d like to put this into a personal perspective for you…

Shortly before my husband and I married at the end of 1990, we took a long weekend roadtrip with another couple. Our plan, successfully accomplished, was to drive from Sheridan WY to Livingston MT and spend the night with her newly discovered sister. (They had both been put up for adoption, along with five other siblings, when their biological mother “cleaned house”, so to speak; I’ve tried to think what else I might call it and came up empty…)

From there, we would drive down to Gardiner, the North Gate to Yellowstone National Park and Mammoth Hot Springs and beyond, then go through Tower Roosevelt, exit at the Northeast Gate to Silver City/Cooke City MT and proceed home.

But let’s go back to the Livingston-Gardiner leg for a moment. The highway south travels along the Yellowstone River (which empties into Yellowstone Lake, known for its frigid temperatures even during the hottest summers; this is very odd, as the “caldera” sits atop massive geothermal activity, which is found in only one other place in the world–New Zealand, where the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was filmed. Yellowstone National Park is also subject to frequent earthquakes.)

I noticed that the houses we passed were “unique”, in that most of them had “cupolas” with 360-degree visibility. Dawn explained that the cupolas were “lookouts” and that the houses belonged to CUT members. George went on to explain that CUT stood for Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious cult that had bought up most of the land between Livingston and the North Gate, because they wanted to be able to isolate themselves from the rest of the country. Neither John nor I had heard anything about this. Only later would we read in the papers that they were a “doomsday” survivalist cult, with provisions hid in “bomb shelters”. Also in the bomb shelters, and the trigger that brought this to everyone’s attention, were huge tanks for gasoline storage–which were leaking gasoline into the Yellowstone River! From the Billings (MT) Gazette, A CUT Timeline:

1989:…The mission of the church is to establish a self-sustained community. The church is busy building bomb shelters in preparation for a cataclysm prophesied by spiritual leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet. One shelter is designed to hold 800 people.

Ed Francis [husband of Elizabeth Clare Prophet] pleads guilty to federal conspiracy charges for an illegal scheme to buy .50-caliber sniper rifles; he serves a brief stint in federal prison.

Prophet predicts the end of world, but later says the world is reprieved.

1990: Thousands of church members enter the shelters for an overnight “drill” on March 15. From her post at the Royal Teton Ranch, guru Elizabeth Clare Prophet dictates the message of Armageddon.

The state sues the church over fuel leaks from underground storage tanks built to provide fuel for the bomb shelter. The church faults the company that sold them the storage tanks. Eventually the church wins its court case against the company and cleans up the spill. The state lauds the cleanup as “exemplary.”

And then, for years at a time, I wouldn’t think about the cupolas or Prophet/CUT or doomsday cultists. But last fall, on 10.28.2006, I posted Crap! We missed it… on Martian.Anthropologist:

[Text from the link]…There is going to be an ultraviolet pulse beam from higher dimensions [on October 17-18] than we have previously been able to experience crossing the path of Earth. We will be held in the embrace of this highly charged ultraviolet beam of Light for approximately 17 hours. The energy emanating from this beam resonates with Humanity’s 5th-Dimensional Solar Heart Chakras…

There was so much NewAge-y, ooga-booga that I just had to “suss” it out. Which led me to New Age Study of Humanity’s Purpose, Inc. (WTF?) to Summit Lighthouse to Church Universal and Triumphant (!) to Sean Prophet, son of Liz, and he is an…Atheist! From BlackSunJournal’s “About” page:

Growing up in this environment offered many advantages: I got a first-hand, first-rate education in the publishing and entertainment business. I got to travel the world. Our family had wonderful luxurious vacations. As a young boy, I met heads-of-state in Ghana, Liberia, and India, as well as the Dalai Lama. In my twenties, I met many prominent academics and celebrities. I formed lifelong friendships with my co-workers in the church, which continue to this day. Through it all, I gained a deep understanding of group dynamics, the power of suggestion, and the pitfalls of communal living.

Now for the disadvantages: I led a very sheltered life. I had to learn the hard way about subjectivity. I had painful encounters with peers in public elementary school who, I quickly discovered, didn’t believe any of what I’d been taught. Later, as a young adult, I was elevated nepotistically to positions of power within the group. Since I had little management experience at first, at times I had trouble empathizing with people and their needs. Through it all, I also struggled with coming to terms with objective consensus reality versus our skewed ‘in-group’ perceptions. There were moments of clarity in my teen years, when I left and lived on my own. Then I rejoined the church as an adult. I became a minister at age 23, and later vice-president. It was a heady role for a 25-year-old, near the top of a non-profit organization with thousands of members and huge land holdings, and total assets over $50 million.

All of this early drama has fostered my intense interest in human nature, (how could something like this have happened?) and a desire to define human experience in naturalistic terms. I needed to know what could lead human beings to imagine things that weren’t visible, and about which there was insufficient evidence. I needed to understand how someone could be so sure of these things, they would base their life on them. Finally, how could such invisible beings take positions on matters of earthly politics?

The church community was extremely politically conservative, and though ostensibly “new age,” it reeked of right-wing fundamentalism. Combining Catholic guilt, the sacraments of communion, belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, along with near-Taliban-style restrictions on dress and human interaction, the church stood human nature on its ear. Mirroring society as a whole, the church tended to demonize nonconformity. (Alternative forms of dress, sexuality, consumption of alcohol or drugs, or leftist political persuasion, to name a few.) This was a great paradox, because the church itself was founded on nonconformity to established religion. One would be hard-pressed to find two greater rebels than my parents.

Given their individualism, their expectations of conformity for others were hard to fathom. I have often thought of the church community in retrospect as a laboratory for the working out of their own personal psychology. While all of us do this to a greater or lesser degree in our lives, the difference is that we don’t have thousands of followers at our beck and call. In accordance with the dictum: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it is inconceivable that any individual, no matter how ethical, could have survived unscathed at the center of that maelstrom.

It was this awareness, and the church’s disastrous flirtation with millennialism and bomb shelters, that led to my decision in 1993 to finally and irrevocably break with anyone who still subscribed to that belief system.

Some of the personal accounts of people who become atheists (or antitheists, as Sean) are filled with drama–but it’s difficult to imagine anyone else’s epiphany being more… what? It appears that he walked away–but he still looks back, through his blog.

BTW, Elizabeth Clare Prophet (Wikipedia) was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1999. A google search and a wiki search failed to find an obituary.