A Tale of Two Groups

September 15 2006
Counterbias.com
MEL SEESHOLTZ
 

Evangelicals and other religious fanatics are always claiming they know “God’s” will. More than a few claim to speak for the Divine. Some actually believe their own PR. You just gotta wonder about that group, but not about the group that does what it does for money and power.

The “You Just Gotta Wonder” Group:

Tax fraud is not a laughing matter, but “Dr. Dino’s” explanation as to why he and his Young Earth Creationist amusement park were exempt from taxes (and other laws) was definitely laughable. But Dr. D has been outdone.

Rape is never a laughing matter, but the defense used by sixty-three year-old self-proclaimed prophet Pastor Leonard Ray Owens of Fort Worth, Texas when charged with raping a twenty-two year old woman was beyond ludicrous. According to the Associated Press, Owens told the young woman

that a sex spirit and lesbian demon were inside her and needed to be cast out, police said. The pastor then asked her to lie on the floor and began yelling at her as if she were a demon, saying, “Loose her in the name of Jesus,” according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

 

The woman told police that Owens pulled down her pants as he called for the demons to come out. When she tried to get up, he pushed her down, the affidavit said. The pastor then began to fight with her as if she were a demon before climbing on top of her, pinning her down, and raping her, police said.

 

Then Owens … ordered her to wash her face in the name of Jesus and to read Psalm 105:15, which says to do no harm to prophets, the woman told police. …

Historically, doing violence to others ad majorem gloriam Dei has been the modus operandi of religious fanatics: from the “Holy” Inquisition through the Salem witch hunts to the wholesale slaughter of the native peoples of the New World, using religion to justify violence has been a mainstay.

Rather than doing violence to the young woman, Owens should have consulted a certain rabbi in Bnei Brak, Israel:

Rabbi’s advise: ‘Cure lesbian with sorcery’

 

Rabbi assures cheated husband that his lesbian wife will come running back if he pours sand on her lover’s doorstep

Meir Turgeman, Ronen Tal

 

It sounds like the beginning of a really bad joke: “My wife has become a lesbian,” a terrified husband told his rabbi. The rabbi gave him a sack and assured him: it contains special sand, simply pour it on your her lover’s doorstep and when she steps on it she’ll come running back. …

 

The Rabbi provided a quick magical solution: He gave him a heavy sack of sand and told him to pour it on the doorstep of his wife’s lesbian lover, telling him that the moment his wife will step on it the curse will be lifted. “Your wife will come running back,” he said.

 

Happy at the advice given by the rabbi the man returned home. He immediately rented a car and assigned the mission of pouring the sand on the lover's doorstep to his 18 year-old son. The son obeyed his father and set out on his way.

 

A few days ago, at around 3 am, the boy arrived at the lover’s home in Kiriyat Malachi. He carried the sack of sand on his shoulders, climbed the stairs to the apartment, poured the sand on the doorstep and returned to his car.

 

On his way out, he noticed several of the lover’s dresses hanging on the washing line and couldn’t hold himself back. He took out a match set the dresses alight.

 

The raging fire made him panic, and he tried putting out the flames. When he was unable to, he fled the scene. The frightened woman, who noticed the fire, managed to write down the license plate of the escaping vehicle and immediately called the police.

 

The Kiryat Malachi police discovered who rented the car and summoned the father and son to an investigation. …

I always thought “magic sand” and other forms of sorcery were strictly forbidden in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But neither Owens’ delusional defense or the rabbi’s bag of magic tricks comes close to the winner of the You Just Gotta Wonder award, bestowed posthumously (or is that “posthumorously”?):

An evangelist who tried replicating Jesus’ miracle of walking on water has reportedly drowned off the western coast of Africa.

 

Pastor Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle, and he attempted it from a beach in Gabon’s capital of Libreville.

 

“He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus,” an eyewitness told the Glasgow Daily Record.

 

“He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat. He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back.”

So much for “revelations”… and Pastor Kabele.

The “You Don’t Gotta Wonder” Group:

George Santayana’s admonition in Common Sense is as poignant as ever: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Religious fervor and its delusional, violence-promoting dogma have once again reared their ugly heads. But what’s truly scary is that so many supposedly educated citizens of the twenty-first century are buying into the dog and pony shows put on by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Lou Sheldon, James Dobson, Don Wildmon, and the rest of the politicized “prophets” of the Christian Right. Wasn’t September 11, 2001 warning enough about mixing fundamentalist religion with radical politics?

True, the American Taliban is not killing people (overtly, at least). They’re just waging war against common sense and the American citizens Rev. Falwell blamed for 9/11: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen. … [God allowed] the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.’”

Every day the websites of organizations such as Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition, Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Perkins’ Family Research Council, and Wildmon’s American Family Association hurl vile insults and depraved attacks at gay and lesbian Americans, their children and their families. Why? Why do they hate so much when they profess a religion supposedly based on love and respect for others?

Aside from the pathological need to hate demanded by their perverted religious dogma, the answer seems simple – money and power – as Sylvia A. Smith so astutely noted in her June 11, 2006 article “Marriage brouhaha all about money”:

The Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition and likeminded ilk won’t admit it, but they and their buddies on Capitol Hill were in cahoots last week to make fools out of the social conservatives who are the Republicans’ most reliable voters.

 

That wasn’t their stated agenda, of course. What they said they were doing was saving every American married couple from inevitable divorce and preventing American society from crumbling under a force more powerful than the al-Qaida attacks five years ago: two lesbians who join their lives and their finances.

 

In fact, the three days the Senate devoted to blathering about a constitutional amendment to ban marriages between two men or two women was a cynical sham. …

 

So why are some in Washington defying both their states’-rights roots and the wishes of a majority of the country? Because of political jobs and interest groups’ bank accounts.

 

Interest groups of all stripes are always in need of more cash. There is no better way to get sympathetic Americans to grab the checkbook than to present them with a crisis. A hurricane tears apart an entire region of the country, and generous Americans respond. A “grave moral crisis” threatens the fabric of society, and Americans dig deep to help the crusaders fend off the apocalypse.

 

(If you have any doubts about the manufactured hysteria of these interest groups, consider this overheated warning by the Traditional Values Coalition: “The homosexual activist movement and organized pedophiles are linked together by a common goal: To gain access to children for seduction into homosexuality.” Does anyone really think Dick Cheney’s daughter is out trolling for 12-year-olds? What a crock.) …

 

My disgust is with the interest groups who exaggerate the situation for the purpose of raising money – and with the politicians who are using gay marriage as a way to create a froth among a voting class they can’t afford to lose.

Too bad all the holier-than-thou, send-your-donations-now folks forgot the words of St. Paul in 1 Timothy, 6:10: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” The words of Mark Twain are also apropos: “The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

British historian Lord Acton accurately noted that people’s sense of morality lessens as their secular power increases. That well describes the leaders of the Christian Right as they seek to increase their funding and political clout in order to turn America into their theo-state where they and they alone decide how everyone should be, how everyone should live, who is worthy of civil rights and who must have “demons” cast out, by whatever means necessary.

So if anyone reading this sends money to evangelical “prophets” or brethren groups in the politicized Christian Right, which of the two groups are you supporting? In a sense, it doesn’t matter. They’re both cut from the same desecrated “cloth” you’re helping to further desecrate … and further destroy a once great country dedicated to equality, liberty and justice for all citizens.

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