by OLD1953 » Sun Apr 08, 2012 12:40 am
I'm not surprised at the growth of anti war sentiment in Syria, people just don't see a reason why Assad has to remain in power at such a price.
Happy Easter!
Easter makes me think of the devil's bargain the churches of the US made back in the 50's and 60's. If you do any google on churches and communism, you will very quickly find a lot of items from that era claiming the churches were hotbeds of communism. This was not true of course, communism has never gained any real hold in the USA and there's not a bit of actual evidence that it ever did. (I will most absolutely point out here that there are 10 million pages of SPECULATION about commies under every bed and peeping through every keyhole, some of which speculation is straight out of FBI headquarters. Moreover, meeting with a communist leader does not make one a communist. If this were so, then every modern president is a communist, every Pope is a communist and all European leaders are communists. The notion is absurd on the face of it, if communism was a communicable disease, then we all would be communists through indirect transmission. It is not and we are not. Moreover, the USA is not Vietnam or Malaysia, I'm speaking of the US and US only here, not somewhere else. I've HAD these diverted discussions with fervent anti communists, and frankly I'm sick of them. Anti communism is the most fervent religion in the world, and the least rational. Speculation is not evidence of anything, and the bulk of the speculation is supported solely by claims made by actual communists who had no reason to claim diminished numbers. Yes, I'm well aware of the number of KGB informants and plants in influential or important posts - that's called spying, and we are talking about numbers here, not how influential or important a single person was. In NUMBERS the group was not large. And if that doesn't draw the lines carefully enough that you can understand what I'm saying, I give up.) The most communist US group in history as far as I know was the IWW, and it never was that popular - at its absolute height, they could claim 300,000 supporters and they certainly weren't all in the USA - of course, the press of the time claimed millions, but there was no evidence.
Honestly, if the numbers of communists in the US were anything like the inflated numbers claimed during the commie scare, we'd BE a communist country. They'd simply vote.
However, Commie under the bed scares were very politically useful tools against labor unions and other organizations. And it was easy to point to "godless" Russia and China as examples of countries subverted by commies, so the popular meme against communism was quite powerful - except in one area, and of course that was the churches. An organization dedicated to charity and good works finds it difficult to preach against leveling incomes via whatever means, especially where there are growing divides between the wealthy and the poor - and if you've never seen any actual poverty in the US, then you've been lucky. I have, and real poverty is not pretty. It isn't very common in the USA now, and there is a sharp line between poverty and simply being poor or homeless, but it is much worse than anything they show you on TV.
So, what I've been told, and there is a good bit of circumstantial supporting evidence, is that some of the most powerful business leaders began to make quiet visits to the various church council meetings for the purpose of speaking to the leaders about the threat of communism. This was portrayed as communism rampant and ready to take over the USA at any point, and the moment they took over, the very word "God" would be forbidden to the masses.
They were convincing and the church leaders choose to change the US churches to be anti communist. And they didn't feel that was possible without changing their message. They had always been allied (since the 1920's) with the Democratic Party, as they were the ones promoting charity and equality. So charity and equality and brotherhood of man had to go. In other words, they had to take Christ out of the church, so they could ally the church with the anti communist Republicans. And, by carefully choosing who sat in which influential pulpit and what messages were "approved" they did just that. If you had a time machine that could move people from 1950 to the present, and they saw the change in the US church all at once and not gradually, they'd be utterly astonished. I have no doubt of this.
The result of this was the modern US church, which is generally a hollow shell of what it used to be. And the typical American now is not an actual church member, churches inflate their memberships drastically to make themselves sound more important, I'm not a member of any church at this time, and I'm claimed by at least two or three that I know of. The US has moved rapidly towards an atheist or agnostic society over the last four decades, and that's just a fact. You can't take Christ out of a nominally Christian church and have anything left but a social club. Squabbles over whether or not the bible should be used as a science text are amusing and make great headlines, but are of actual interest to a very small number.
Turnings always involve a new church movement as part of the turning, that was actually the original inspiration for Generational Dynamics, the regular changes and movements in the churches. Given the near death status of the church in the US, it's certainly time.
I'm not surprised at the growth of anti war sentiment in Syria, people just don't see a reason why Assad has to remain in power at such a price.
Happy Easter!
Easter makes me think of the devil's bargain the churches of the US made back in the 50's and 60's. If you do any google on churches and communism, you will very quickly find a lot of items from that era claiming the churches were hotbeds of communism. This was not true of course, communism has never gained any real hold in the USA and there's not a bit of [b][i]actual[/i][/b] evidence that it ever did. (I will most absolutely point out here that there are 10 million pages of SPECULATION about commies under every bed and peeping through every keyhole, some of which speculation is straight out of FBI headquarters. Moreover, meeting with a communist leader does not make one a communist. If this were so, then every modern president is a communist, every Pope is a communist and all European leaders are communists. The notion is absurd on the face of it, if communism was a communicable disease, then we all would be communists through indirect transmission. It is not and we are not. Moreover, the USA is not Vietnam or Malaysia, I'm speaking of the US and US only here, not somewhere else. I've HAD these diverted discussions with fervent anti communists, and frankly I'm sick of them. Anti communism is the most fervent religion in the world, and the least rational. Speculation is not evidence of anything, and the bulk of the speculation is supported solely by claims made by actual communists who had no reason to claim diminished numbers. Yes, I'm well aware of the number of KGB informants and plants in influential or important posts - that's called spying, and we are talking about numbers here, not how influential or important a single person was. In [b]NUMBERS[/b] the group was not large. And if that doesn't draw the lines carefully enough that you can understand what I'm saying, I give up.) The most communist US group in history as far as I know was the IWW, and it never was that popular - at its absolute height, they could claim 300,000 supporters and they certainly weren't all in the USA - of course, the press of the time claimed millions, but there was no evidence.
Honestly, if the numbers of communists in the US were anything like the inflated numbers claimed during the commie scare, we'd BE a communist country. They'd simply vote.
However, Commie under the bed scares were very politically useful tools against labor unions and other organizations. And it was easy to point to "godless" Russia and China as examples of countries subverted by commies, so the popular meme against communism was quite powerful - except in one area, and of course that was the churches. An organization dedicated to charity and good works finds it difficult to preach against leveling incomes via whatever means, especially where there are growing divides between the wealthy and the poor - and if you've never seen any actual poverty in the US, then you've been lucky. I have, and real poverty is not pretty. It isn't very common in the USA now, and there is a sharp line between poverty and simply being poor or homeless, but it is much worse than anything they show you on TV.
So, what I've been told, and there is a good bit of circumstantial supporting evidence, is that some of the most powerful business leaders began to make quiet visits to the various church council meetings for the purpose of speaking to the leaders about the threat of communism. This was portrayed as communism rampant and ready to take over the USA at any point, and the moment they took over, the very word "God" would be forbidden to the masses.
They were convincing and the church leaders choose to change the US churches to be anti communist. And they didn't feel that was possible without changing their message. They had always been allied (since the 1920's) with the Democratic Party, as they were the ones promoting charity and equality. So charity and equality and brotherhood of man had to go. In other words, they had to take Christ out of the church, so they could ally the church with the anti communist Republicans. And, by carefully choosing who sat in which influential pulpit and what messages were "approved" they did just that. If you had a time machine that could move people from 1950 to the present, and they saw the change in the US church all at once and not gradually, they'd be utterly astonished. I have no doubt of this.
The result of this was the modern US church, which is generally a hollow shell of what it used to be. And the typical American now is not an actual church member, churches inflate their memberships drastically to make themselves sound more important, I'm not a member of any church at this time, and I'm claimed by at least two or three that I know of. The US has moved rapidly towards an atheist or agnostic society over the last four decades, and that's just a fact. You can't take Christ out of a nominally Christian church and have anything left but a social club. Squabbles over whether or not the bible should be used as a science text are amusing and make great headlines, but are of actual interest to a very small number.
Turnings always involve a new church movement as part of the turning, that was actually the original inspiration for Generational Dynamics, the regular changes and movements in the churches. Given the near death status of the church in the US, it's certainly time.