The GOP and the not so religious right have spent decades demonizing politicians and health providers who are pro-choice. Right to life zealots have murdered doctors who provided abortion care. Planned Parenthood amf others who run clinics have had to deal with threats from extremists as well as sidewalk "counselors "( BTW Screaming "Don't Kill your Baby" at womyn isn't counseling. It might be harassment).
Is anyone surprised that we have yet another zealot decide that his god demands or condones killing because he has decided to rid the world of "evil"?
Well he has done it. I am guessing Putin's public admonishment for trump not to attack Iran was a ploy, his private words to trump was he doesn't care. I repeat this is mere speculation. More speculation, this will not end well.
Today a "right wing media influencer" named Mila Joy posted on X that Kamala Harris's secret service protection as the former VP runs out on July 20 (unless the sitting president extends it, which Trump certainly will not). Mila ended the tweet with "tick tock, Kamala." How is one supposed to interpret that?
Mona Charen’s post sums up an idea or impression that I’ve had since my early teenage years. I attended private evangelical schools until college (but I was not from money amongst my classmates). The education (aside from the young earth creationism) was outstanding - in US Government we didn’t learn about Locke, we needed to read him and discuss. We read significant portions of the Federalist Papers in class, taking turns. Great stuff, including the philosophy, comparative religion, and Biblical studies.
In the midst of this was the theology. This was the late 1980s and in high school, they still hadn’t gotten over the satanic panic from like five or six years before. Abortion was murder, and people who help with that were evil. These folks were all-in on Martin Luther, but I’d kind of rejected most of that by age 13. Also to them, they did not clearly see the separation of church and state. The end of the world was coming soon, and we needed to get ready. I understood by the time I graduated that they were talking about theocracy. Christian Dominion stuff, and I would add condoning the violence that comes with it. I was not taught that the Crusades were negative events.
Some of these folks are dangerous. Armed religious extremists to be precise, and I know this for the reason that I was totally down with it - as a child. But I grew out it of shortly after puberty. I came to understand these people as highly immature. Which is dangerous when you’re an adult.
Their problem was providing a “classical Western education” without thinking some of the students would absorb material besides the Bible. I recall covering Plato’s Republic and the teacher not understanding that it preceded the New Testament. We covered Aristotle, and that was my introduction to scientific thinking, rather than facts. My teachers’ repeated misunderstandings about the Constitution, particularly regarding the First Amendment, were extraordinary. They were teaching me the opposite of what they were preaching to me, but they didn’t understand that.
Public officials should have much better security including "hardening their homes" and security guards in public. People who make threats to public should be punished severely.
The cost is significant. And how far down the political food chain would that protection go? I held elected office for 20+ years in a tiny water control district and we had a surprising share of angry nuts to deal with. One who wasn’t even in our district spent hundreds of dollars of his own money to send packets documenting our supposed misdeeds to 75 different state and federal government agencies including the DOJ, FBI, and CIA. We were required to hold our meetings in a public place within the boundaries of our district, which put us in potential danger, as our options were very limited.
I am just grateful this morning that JustDumb went to Los Angeles to acquire cash from donors, insult a sitting senator, and lie about the Mayor of Los Angeles and the Governor of CA. Thursday night I was seized by the dread he was going to become acting military governor when trump declared martial law. As long as federal troops remain in CA this is an ongoing threat.
Religion. Back in the early 1980’s, evangelicals were riding high. Held in thrall by a coterie of coiffed, tanned, pompous prophets like Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and the divine duo Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, evangelicals were convinced that God had chosen them to lead our country out of its sinful malaise. And it certainly seemed that way. Blessed by the almighty, their farming and energy-based communities were thriving (remember “let a Yankee freeze in the dark?”), while the debauched cities on both coasts were miasmas of crime, drugs, corruption and godlessness. The Moral Majority had been a driving force behind the election of Ronald Reagan, who, if not religious himself, at least had a wife with faith in astrology. Best of all, a cruel and mysterious plague was decimating the ranks of homosexuals.
But things did not turn out as prophesied for evangelicals. Over the past four decades the carnal coastal cities have prospered to a degree that can only be described as miraculous while the oil and ag economies are struggling. A black man was elected president TWICE. The opioid plague is mostly ravaging non-urban communities. And gays can now get married! We all know that the hand of God works in mysterious ways, but this is ridiculous.
So should it really be so surprising that evangelicals swooned when a coiffed, tanned (well, oranged) blowhard emerged from the hell of New York City like the beast from Revelations, promising to Make America Great Again? Oh, Rapture! Finally, a true prophet! Sure Falwell, Swaggart, and Baker were frauds, but this guy’s the real deal! He says what’s on his mind! He’ll drain the swamp! He’ll build a wall! Jesus may have abandoned us, but Trump will put us back on top!
When Trump fizzles out, evangelicals will probably just find a new prophet. Or, here’s a thought; they might consider doing something completely different and become Christians..
You forgot Pat Robertson, he of praying away hurricanes and for the death of supreme court justices. I will quote a republican here for he knew who the so called moral majority was and he spoke plainly about them. From the late Senator Barry Goldwater:
"The moral majority is neither." and my favorite "Jerry Falwell needs his ass kicked."
Props to Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer for clearly calling a spade a spade in his piece about right-wing American politicians' rhetoric on political violence, naming it exactly what it is: stochastic terrorism.
Few have used this word in the past; I myself have used it, but probably not nearly often enough. And words matter, and things should be called what they in fact are. And these two words should be hung around the necks of any and all who dehumanize and demonize their fellow Americans with this kind of rhetoric for political gain, and in doing so promote domestic terrorism and create the permission structure within our society for the politically and socially radicalized and the twisted and demented malign actors among us to engage in it.
The perpetrators of stochastic terrorism should face consequences just as surely as those who act upon the encouragement it provides for politically motivated bloodshed. A good start would be a Senate censure at the very least in the case of Mike Lee and his egregious and unconscionable social media posts about the Minnesota political killings. But of course that won't happen, since the Senate is in the hands of a political party for which stochastic terrorism has become simply part of its brand and standard operating procedure.
So, it's up to all the rest of us to continuously call these people out for what they really are... loudly, clearly, without mincing words and with no quarter given under the guise of "free speech". If a politician can say migrants are befouling the blood of this country and play the race / eugenics card by saying, "We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now", then I can say that politician is a stochastic terrorist and a bane upon the safety and welfare of every American and every other person who sets foot on American soil...
And when it comes to calling a spade a spade, maybe one day soon we'll wise up and drop this whole generic "authoritarian" thing, take a second look at the squads of masked feds tacked up like S.W.A.T. teams snatching unarmed people off the street with no probable cause for detainment or arrest beyond the color of their skin, or the fact that Marines were deployed into an American city as a show of presidential force and as an intimidation tactic against a local government composed of the opposing party, and the physical assaults against politicians of that party exercising their lawful rights to ask questions or inspect federal facilities... maybe we'll start calling this all what it really is, and the people behind it what they really are. And the word for that would be *fascists*.
We already have one F word that people seem less and less afraid to hurl around these days at the drop of a hat. We'd all be a lot better off and a lot more truthful if that count now rose to two.
Yes, I have been using the washed-out word "authoritarianism," but each time it seems too insufficient to cover the events that we are seeing occur daily.
The one bright spot I saw last week was the refusal of our military to act like fascists marching in the "Dear Leader Parade" to celebrate TheRump's birthday... oh, I mean the 250th birthday of the US Army.
The ICE patrols are all, as far as I have seen, down to the last masked thug of them, fascists.
Our Dear Leader is fond of saying that he always uses “the best words”. There clearly is some truth to this: He uses words that successfully convey to his followers his malign instincts and intentions. Therefore, he *never* uses the word “stochastic”. On this, he is correct.
Ask 100 random (pun intended) people what the word means, and 99 will have no idea.
I’ve been searching for a more accessible way to describe the phenomenon of random people taking violent action in response to violent rhetoric, but been unable to find it. I pray someone will. Because “stochastic terrorism” lands on most ears as nothing more than meaningless academic jargon.
On this whole issue of stochastic terrorism ... in yesterday's episode, the host of Knowledge Fight (the pod that covers Alex Jones) brought up some plausible links from a recent violent rant by Alex Jones to the killing of Minnesota politicians by an Infowars fan.
Dan, the main host, would never draw conclusions in a haphazard way and he's in no way a conspiracy theorist. He's a very methodical and careful analyzer of Alex Jones and I've never heard him connect Alex so directly to political violence before. Alex Jones calls for the death of Democrats all the time (while pretending that he is only being hyperbolic) so maybe in this instance he inspired a very impressionable lunatic. It's worth a listen if anyone is interested.
I agree about the word "stochastic" as it relates to those who don't know its definition nor understand its use in the term 'stochastic terrorism'. And I agree that using that word with a certain type of person would be a complete waste, even if a definition were offered.
But I expect the number of people (who vote) who don't at least know the meaning of *terrorism* is for all intents and purposes insignificant. So, it's not unreasonable to be mindful of whom is being spoken to and to modify what's said accordingly.
For instance, I can easily hear myself saying to certain people under the right circumstances, "This is the kind of irresponsible and intentionally hateful talk that can and will get people killed, as it already has on numerous occasions. And the majority of people who talk like this are on the same moral level with the terrorists whom they encourage do the killing."
Or something to that effect. Not as compact and handy as a snappy term like stochastic terrorism, but it puts the idea across, which is the main thing.
And if that's too complicated for those with less-than-optimal vocabulary skills to understand the meaning regardless of whether they agreed with what I said, I'd be wasting my breath speaking to them regardless of the words I used anyway.
“Stochastic terrorism” is far from the only confusing term to arise from far left academia. My personal disfavored: LGBTQIA+. This gay man finds it a construction trying to do too much, too clumsily, and therefore accomplishing nothing.
Yeah, an unpronounceable acronym consisting of 25% of the alphabet doesn't really seem useful to me. Easy enough to use it in "print" and to read, but it seems kind of ridiculous as far as actual spoken language goes.
But I'm a straight guy and don't think I have any business telling people in this broad non-heterosexual demographic how to refer to themselves. However, I do sometimes use "non-heterosexual" in actual conversation as opposed to using LGBTQIA+ because although it's an imperfect descriptor in a number of ways, it's not actually inaccurate and can at least be pronounced, and I don't see that as some kind of "slight" to any of the people included in the acronym. At least it's not intended to be.
So, Rodney, I'd be interested in knowing what someone covered by "all those letters" thinks about that, if you wouldn't mind letting me know.
Agreed. A friend of mine joked that if any more letters are added, we might as well just list them all from A to Z, and we can dispense with the plus sign.
I had to look up what the IA stands for. At first, I thought it was supporting AI algorithms with dyslexia.
I fully endorse DEI policies, but even the DEI acronym is getting tired and turned into another insult like "woke" by the right-wing propagandists. We have to stay one step ahead of the fascist misinformation-mills, and use plain, clear language whenever possible.
I am, however, in favor of "stochastic terrorism." It does the job clearly and concisely. Let those who don't know the meaning look it up on their phones. They use their phones already as stooges of stochastic terrorism, so they might as well learn what it means.
Of course. But that's another confirmation for us that the opposition is full of uneducated morons. Sometimes I need to be reminded, or my empathy for them re-emerges.
"Sure, centuries ago, Christians had committed atrocities in the Crusades and during the Inquisition”
Actually the far greater atrocities were committed by Christians in the New World. Columbus got his final financial boost from Isabella of Spain upon the promise that he would convert all he found to Christianity. When he landed (most likely on San Salvador) in October of 1492 he brought about the largest and most consequential family reunion in human history, The result was utterly catastrophic for the Native American populations in South, Central, and North America, and much of that devastation was done in the name of converting the heathen in the process of taking their land and the natural resources therein.
Indeed, ever since ’the kingship descended from Heaven' in ancient Sumer, power hungry men and some women have used religion as a controlling mechanism. After all, one can oppose a king, but not a god. There have always been very good political reasons for the Divine Right of Kings.
When I was a ElHi student at a predominantly protestant independent school outside Philadelphia, one of the hymn we regularly sung during morning chapel was “Onward Christian Soldiers’ One of the following lines was ‘marching as to war”. I didn’t think much about it then, but much of the history of organized Christianity has been a form of conquest, even against each other as during the wars of the Reformation.
So I would be cautious about supposing that homegrown religion fanaticism is something new here. It has just been a bit underground.
Great comment. I would also suggest to anyone who is in California who has the time and opportunity to tour the Missions up and down the California coastal areas that they have a look into the massive burial sites around those missions - those sites contain the remains of many who were enslaved, killed and disregarded as they hadn’t converted, were viewed as having no souls, no humanity.
The Ku Klux Klan is an American Protestant-led Christian extremist, white supremacist, far-right hate group, sometimes called America’s first domestic terrorist group.
Also see Father Coughlin, ‘the radio priest”, who broadcast out of the Detroit area in the 1930’s, who supported fascism and anti-Semitism, among other things.
This isn’t new. It’s been underground and re-emerging, empowered - again.
The GOP and the not so religious right have spent decades demonizing politicians and health providers who are pro-choice. Right to life zealots have murdered doctors who provided abortion care. Planned Parenthood amf others who run clinics have had to deal with threats from extremists as well as sidewalk "counselors "( BTW Screaming "Don't Kill your Baby" at womyn isn't counseling. It might be harassment).
Is anyone surprised that we have yet another zealot decide that his god demands or condones killing because he has decided to rid the world of "evil"?
Well he has done it. I am guessing Putin's public admonishment for trump not to attack Iran was a ploy, his private words to trump was he doesn't care. I repeat this is mere speculation. More speculation, this will not end well.
Today a "right wing media influencer" named Mila Joy posted on X that Kamala Harris's secret service protection as the former VP runs out on July 20 (unless the sitting president extends it, which Trump certainly will not). Mila ended the tweet with "tick tock, Kamala." How is one supposed to interpret that?
Mona Charen’s post sums up an idea or impression that I’ve had since my early teenage years. I attended private evangelical schools until college (but I was not from money amongst my classmates). The education (aside from the young earth creationism) was outstanding - in US Government we didn’t learn about Locke, we needed to read him and discuss. We read significant portions of the Federalist Papers in class, taking turns. Great stuff, including the philosophy, comparative religion, and Biblical studies.
In the midst of this was the theology. This was the late 1980s and in high school, they still hadn’t gotten over the satanic panic from like five or six years before. Abortion was murder, and people who help with that were evil. These folks were all-in on Martin Luther, but I’d kind of rejected most of that by age 13. Also to them, they did not clearly see the separation of church and state. The end of the world was coming soon, and we needed to get ready. I understood by the time I graduated that they were talking about theocracy. Christian Dominion stuff, and I would add condoning the violence that comes with it. I was not taught that the Crusades were negative events.
Some of these folks are dangerous. Armed religious extremists to be precise, and I know this for the reason that I was totally down with it - as a child. But I grew out it of shortly after puberty. I came to understand these people as highly immature. Which is dangerous when you’re an adult.
Their problem was providing a “classical Western education” without thinking some of the students would absorb material besides the Bible. I recall covering Plato’s Republic and the teacher not understanding that it preceded the New Testament. We covered Aristotle, and that was my introduction to scientific thinking, rather than facts. My teachers’ repeated misunderstandings about the Constitution, particularly regarding the First Amendment, were extraordinary. They were teaching me the opposite of what they were preaching to me, but they didn’t understand that.
Public officials should have much better security including "hardening their homes" and security guards in public. People who make threats to public should be punished severely.
How would law enforcement determine which threats to public officials were serious and merited closer surveillance and or arrest?
The cost is significant. And how far down the political food chain would that protection go? I held elected office for 20+ years in a tiny water control district and we had a surprising share of angry nuts to deal with. One who wasn’t even in our district spent hundreds of dollars of his own money to send packets documenting our supposed misdeeds to 75 different state and federal government agencies including the DOJ, FBI, and CIA. We were required to hold our meetings in a public place within the boundaries of our district, which put us in potential danger, as our options were very limited.
I am just grateful this morning that JustDumb went to Los Angeles to acquire cash from donors, insult a sitting senator, and lie about the Mayor of Los Angeles and the Governor of CA. Thursday night I was seized by the dread he was going to become acting military governor when trump declared martial law. As long as federal troops remain in CA this is an ongoing threat.
I thought I would share a selection concerning Trump and religion from a 2017 Substack post. I would love to get feedback on this and all my posts.
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/the-tribe-has-spoken
Religion. Back in the early 1980’s, evangelicals were riding high. Held in thrall by a coterie of coiffed, tanned, pompous prophets like Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and the divine duo Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, evangelicals were convinced that God had chosen them to lead our country out of its sinful malaise. And it certainly seemed that way. Blessed by the almighty, their farming and energy-based communities were thriving (remember “let a Yankee freeze in the dark?”), while the debauched cities on both coasts were miasmas of crime, drugs, corruption and godlessness. The Moral Majority had been a driving force behind the election of Ronald Reagan, who, if not religious himself, at least had a wife with faith in astrology. Best of all, a cruel and mysterious plague was decimating the ranks of homosexuals.
But things did not turn out as prophesied for evangelicals. Over the past four decades the carnal coastal cities have prospered to a degree that can only be described as miraculous while the oil and ag economies are struggling. A black man was elected president TWICE. The opioid plague is mostly ravaging non-urban communities. And gays can now get married! We all know that the hand of God works in mysterious ways, but this is ridiculous.
So should it really be so surprising that evangelicals swooned when a coiffed, tanned (well, oranged) blowhard emerged from the hell of New York City like the beast from Revelations, promising to Make America Great Again? Oh, Rapture! Finally, a true prophet! Sure Falwell, Swaggart, and Baker were frauds, but this guy’s the real deal! He says what’s on his mind! He’ll drain the swamp! He’ll build a wall! Jesus may have abandoned us, but Trump will put us back on top!
When Trump fizzles out, evangelicals will probably just find a new prophet. Or, here’s a thought; they might consider doing something completely different and become Christians..
They will simply find a new prophet.
You forgot Pat Robertson, he of praying away hurricanes and for the death of supreme court justices. I will quote a republican here for he knew who the so called moral majority was and he spoke plainly about them. From the late Senator Barry Goldwater:
"The moral majority is neither." and my favorite "Jerry Falwell needs his ass kicked."
Props to Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer for clearly calling a spade a spade in his piece about right-wing American politicians' rhetoric on political violence, naming it exactly what it is: stochastic terrorism.
Few have used this word in the past; I myself have used it, but probably not nearly often enough. And words matter, and things should be called what they in fact are. And these two words should be hung around the necks of any and all who dehumanize and demonize their fellow Americans with this kind of rhetoric for political gain, and in doing so promote domestic terrorism and create the permission structure within our society for the politically and socially radicalized and the twisted and demented malign actors among us to engage in it.
The perpetrators of stochastic terrorism should face consequences just as surely as those who act upon the encouragement it provides for politically motivated bloodshed. A good start would be a Senate censure at the very least in the case of Mike Lee and his egregious and unconscionable social media posts about the Minnesota political killings. But of course that won't happen, since the Senate is in the hands of a political party for which stochastic terrorism has become simply part of its brand and standard operating procedure.
So, it's up to all the rest of us to continuously call these people out for what they really are... loudly, clearly, without mincing words and with no quarter given under the guise of "free speech". If a politician can say migrants are befouling the blood of this country and play the race / eugenics card by saying, "We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now", then I can say that politician is a stochastic terrorist and a bane upon the safety and welfare of every American and every other person who sets foot on American soil...
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/07/trump-immigrants-crime-00182702
And when it comes to calling a spade a spade, maybe one day soon we'll wise up and drop this whole generic "authoritarian" thing, take a second look at the squads of masked feds tacked up like S.W.A.T. teams snatching unarmed people off the street with no probable cause for detainment or arrest beyond the color of their skin, or the fact that Marines were deployed into an American city as a show of presidential force and as an intimidation tactic against a local government composed of the opposing party, and the physical assaults against politicians of that party exercising their lawful rights to ask questions or inspect federal facilities... maybe we'll start calling this all what it really is, and the people behind it what they really are. And the word for that would be *fascists*.
We already have one F word that people seem less and less afraid to hurl around these days at the drop of a hat. We'd all be a lot better off and a lot more truthful if that count now rose to two.
Yes, I have been using the washed-out word "authoritarianism," but each time it seems too insufficient to cover the events that we are seeing occur daily.
The one bright spot I saw last week was the refusal of our military to act like fascists marching in the "Dear Leader Parade" to celebrate TheRump's birthday... oh, I mean the 250th birthday of the US Army.
The ICE patrols are all, as far as I have seen, down to the last masked thug of them, fascists.
Our Dear Leader is fond of saying that he always uses “the best words”. There clearly is some truth to this: He uses words that successfully convey to his followers his malign instincts and intentions. Therefore, he *never* uses the word “stochastic”. On this, he is correct.
Ask 100 random (pun intended) people what the word means, and 99 will have no idea.
I’ve been searching for a more accessible way to describe the phenomenon of random people taking violent action in response to violent rhetoric, but been unable to find it. I pray someone will. Because “stochastic terrorism” lands on most ears as nothing more than meaningless academic jargon.
On this whole issue of stochastic terrorism ... in yesterday's episode, the host of Knowledge Fight (the pod that covers Alex Jones) brought up some plausible links from a recent violent rant by Alex Jones to the killing of Minnesota politicians by an Infowars fan.
Dan, the main host, would never draw conclusions in a haphazard way and he's in no way a conspiracy theorist. He's a very methodical and careful analyzer of Alex Jones and I've never heard him connect Alex so directly to political violence before. Alex Jones calls for the death of Democrats all the time (while pretending that he is only being hyperbolic) so maybe in this instance he inspired a very impressionable lunatic. It's worth a listen if anyone is interested.
I agree about the word "stochastic" as it relates to those who don't know its definition nor understand its use in the term 'stochastic terrorism'. And I agree that using that word with a certain type of person would be a complete waste, even if a definition were offered.
But I expect the number of people (who vote) who don't at least know the meaning of *terrorism* is for all intents and purposes insignificant. So, it's not unreasonable to be mindful of whom is being spoken to and to modify what's said accordingly.
For instance, I can easily hear myself saying to certain people under the right circumstances, "This is the kind of irresponsible and intentionally hateful talk that can and will get people killed, as it already has on numerous occasions. And the majority of people who talk like this are on the same moral level with the terrorists whom they encourage do the killing."
Or something to that effect. Not as compact and handy as a snappy term like stochastic terrorism, but it puts the idea across, which is the main thing.
And if that's too complicated for those with less-than-optimal vocabulary skills to understand the meaning regardless of whether they agreed with what I said, I'd be wasting my breath speaking to them regardless of the words I used anyway.
“Stochastic terrorism” is far from the only confusing term to arise from far left academia. My personal disfavored: LGBTQIA+. This gay man finds it a construction trying to do too much, too clumsily, and therefore accomplishing nothing.
Yeah, an unpronounceable acronym consisting of 25% of the alphabet doesn't really seem useful to me. Easy enough to use it in "print" and to read, but it seems kind of ridiculous as far as actual spoken language goes.
But I'm a straight guy and don't think I have any business telling people in this broad non-heterosexual demographic how to refer to themselves. However, I do sometimes use "non-heterosexual" in actual conversation as opposed to using LGBTQIA+ because although it's an imperfect descriptor in a number of ways, it's not actually inaccurate and can at least be pronounced, and I don't see that as some kind of "slight" to any of the people included in the acronym. At least it's not intended to be.
So, Rodney, I'd be interested in knowing what someone covered by "all those letters" thinks about that, if you wouldn't mind letting me know.
Agreed. A friend of mine joked that if any more letters are added, we might as well just list them all from A to Z, and we can dispense with the plus sign.
I had to look up what the IA stands for. At first, I thought it was supporting AI algorithms with dyslexia.
I fully endorse DEI policies, but even the DEI acronym is getting tired and turned into another insult like "woke" by the right-wing propagandists. We have to stay one step ahead of the fascist misinformation-mills, and use plain, clear language whenever possible.
I am, however, in favor of "stochastic terrorism." It does the job clearly and concisely. Let those who don't know the meaning look it up on their phones. They use their phones already as stooges of stochastic terrorism, so they might as well learn what it means.
Problem being, most people won’t bother to look it up. They’ll simply tune it out.
Of course. But that's another confirmation for us that the opposition is full of uneducated morons. Sometimes I need to be reminded, or my empathy for them re-emerges.
And some pretty well-educated morons as well. Some guy named JD comes to mind for some reason.
Cannot wait when Linda Chavez is back on Mona’s show.
"Sure, centuries ago, Christians had committed atrocities in the Crusades and during the Inquisition”
Actually the far greater atrocities were committed by Christians in the New World. Columbus got his final financial boost from Isabella of Spain upon the promise that he would convert all he found to Christianity. When he landed (most likely on San Salvador) in October of 1492 he brought about the largest and most consequential family reunion in human history, The result was utterly catastrophic for the Native American populations in South, Central, and North America, and much of that devastation was done in the name of converting the heathen in the process of taking their land and the natural resources therein.
Indeed, ever since ’the kingship descended from Heaven' in ancient Sumer, power hungry men and some women have used religion as a controlling mechanism. After all, one can oppose a king, but not a god. There have always been very good political reasons for the Divine Right of Kings.
When I was a ElHi student at a predominantly protestant independent school outside Philadelphia, one of the hymn we regularly sung during morning chapel was “Onward Christian Soldiers’ One of the following lines was ‘marching as to war”. I didn’t think much about it then, but much of the history of organized Christianity has been a form of conquest, even against each other as during the wars of the Reformation.
So I would be cautious about supposing that homegrown religion fanaticism is something new here. It has just been a bit underground.
Great comment. I would also suggest to anyone who is in California who has the time and opportunity to tour the Missions up and down the California coastal areas that they have a look into the massive burial sites around those missions - those sites contain the remains of many who were enslaved, killed and disregarded as they hadn’t converted, were viewed as having no souls, no humanity.
The Ku Klux Klan is an American Protestant-led Christian extremist, white supremacist, far-right hate group, sometimes called America’s first domestic terrorist group.
Also see Father Coughlin, ‘the radio priest”, who broadcast out of the Detroit area in the 1930’s, who supported fascism and anti-Semitism, among other things.
This isn’t new. It’s been underground and re-emerging, empowered - again.