Heidi Stevenson, Gaia Health, September 21, 2010
Big Pharma has almost reached the finish line of its decades-long battle to wipe out all competition. As of 1 April 2011—less than eight months from now—virtually all medicinal herbs will become illegal in the European Union. The approach in the United States is a bit different, but it’s having the same devastating effect. The people have become nothing more than sinks for whatever swill Big Pharma and Agribusiness choose to send our way, and we have no option but to pay whatever rates they want.
Big Pharma and Agribusiness have almost completed their march to take over every aspect of health, from the food we eat to the way we care for ourselves when we’re ill. Have no doubt about it: this takeover will steal what health remains to us.
It Begins Next April Fools Day
In the nastiest April Fool’s Joke of all time, the European Directive on Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products (THMPD) was enacted back on 31 March 2004.(1) It laid down rules and regulations for the use of herbal products that had previously been freely traded.
This directive requires that all herbal preparations must be put through the same kind of procedure as pharmaceuticals. It makes no difference whether a herb has been in common use for thousands of years. The costs for this are far higher than most manufacturers, other than Big Pharma, can bear, with estimates ranging from £80,000 to £120,000 per herb, and with each herb of a compound having to be treated separately.
It matters not that a herb has been used safely and effectively for thousands of years. It will be treated as if it were a drug. Of course, herbs are far from that. They’re preparations made from biological sources. They aren’t necessarily purified, as that can change their nature and efficacy, just as it can in food. It’s a distortion of their nature and the nature of herbalism to treat them like drugs. That, of course, makes no difference in the Big Pharma-ruled edifice of the EU, which has enshrined corporatism in its constitution.
Dr. Robert Verkerk of the Alliance for Natural Health, International (ANH) describes the problem of requiring drug-like compliance on herbal preparations:
Getting a classical herbal medicine from a non-European traditional medicinal culture through the EU registration scheme is akin to putting a square peg into a round hole. The regulatory regime ignores and thus has not been adapted to the specific traditions. Such adaptation is required urgently if the directive is not to discriminate against non-European cultures and consequently violate human rights.(2)
Trade Law
To best understand how this can be happening, one needs to see that trade laws have been at the center of the moves to place all aspects of food and medicine under the control of Big Pharma and Agribusiness.
If you’ve followed what’s been happening in the United States regarding raw milk and the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) claims that foods magically become drugs when health claims are made, you may have noted that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been part of the process.
Rather than treating food and traditional medicines as human rights issues, they have been treated as trade issues. That makes the desires of large corporations the focus of food and herbal law, rather than the needs and desires of people. It’s this twisting that has resulted in the FDA’s making outrageously absurd statements, such as claiming that Cheerios and walnuts quite literally become drugs simply because of health claims made for them.
The goal of it all is to make the world safe for the megacorporations to trade freely. The needs and health of the people simply are not a factor in their considerations.
How to Fight This Encroachment on Our Health and Welfare
It’s not a done-deal, at least, not quite. If you value your access to herbs, or if you care about access to vitamins and other supplements, please take action. Even if these issues seem meaningless to you, consider the people who do care. Should they be denied the right to the medical treatment and health maintenance of their choice?
The ANH has been active in fighting these encroachments. They are currently going to court in an attempt to stop the implementation of THMPD. We can hope that they’ll succeed, but recent history shows that no legal maneuver is likely to stop this juggernaut. We cannot afford to sit back and wait for the results of their efforts. We need to see their endeavor as part of a whole, one in which each of us plays a role.
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)
It’s up to us—each and every one of us—to take action. If you live in Europe, please, send a letter or message to your Member of European Parliament. Go to this page to find out who is your MEP and the contact information. Then, send a letter that states, in no uncertain terms, that you strongly support the ANH’s actions in trying to suspend the implementation of THMPD and that you hope they will also take a stand in support of the people’s right to choose herbal treatments.
If you find it difficult to write such a letter, click here for a sample (in the universal .rtf format) suggested by ANH. Feel free to use it.
Try to imagine facing your children or grandchildren when they ask why you didn’t. How will you tell them that you really weren’t that interested in their welfare? How will you tell them that it was more important to watch the latest fake reality show on television than to take the time to write a simple letter?
It is only by actively protesting that this travesty against our welfare can be stopped. If we sit back in apathy, then it will happen. Our right to protect our health and that of our children is hanging in the balance. If you care for your child’s or grandchild’s welfare, then you must act. Speak out, for now is the moment of truth. You can sit back and do nothing, or you can speak out.
And then, once you have, talk to everyone you know. Tell them that it’s time to act. There truly is no time to waste.
References:
(1) Directive 2004/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 31 March 2004 (PDF)
(2) http://www.anh-europe.org/news/anh-press-release-anh-set-to-challenge-eu-herb-law
20100927
Big Pharma Scores Big Win: Medicinal Herbs Will Disappear in EU
20100908
Why We Must Always Be Skeptical
Why skepticism matters -- not just in science, history and other academic pursuits, but in everyday life.
When I write about atheism -- especially when I write about how the religion hypothesis has no good evidence supporting it and is almost certainly not true -- there's a response I get surprisingly often: "What difference does it make whether it's true? Religion makes people happy. It gives people comfort in troubling times. It offers a sense of purpose and meaning. It lets people tolerate the idea of death without being paralyzed with terror. Why try to take that away from people? If it's useful, who cares whether it's true?"
My typical response to this... well, my first response is always dumbstruck head-scratching. To me, the idea that the truth matters is self-evident, and it seems bizarre to have to defend it in debate. And I am truly baffled by what people even mean when they say they believe something without necessarily thinking it's true. ("You keep using that word 'believe.' I do not think it means what you think it means.") But when my head-scratching is over, my typical response has been to write high-minded defenses of the philosophical and indeed ethical necessity of prioritizing the truth over our imaginings about it. Coupled with passionate love letters to the universe that would make Carl Sagan blush.
Today, I'm going in a different direction. Today, I want to talk about the uses of skepticism in everyday life. I want to talk about how skepticism -- prioritizing good evidence and critical thinking over ideology and preconception, which includes declining to accept propositions without good evidence, and letting go of conclusions when the evidence doesn't support them -- can make our lives happier, healthier and more richly satisfying. I want to talk about the real challenges that a skeptical approach to everyday life can present... and why the rewards make those challenges so worthwhile.
I want to talk about skepticism as a discipline.
(And since I'm writing here about skeptical rigor, I'll be rigorous myself, and say right off the bat: This piece is very anecdotal. I'm writing largely about my own experiences, and my observations of other people. It's not as if I have double-blinded, peer-reviewed, replicated research showing that a skeptical life is a more satisfying life. In fact, there is research showing that a few very specific kinds of self-delusion, such as having a somewhat higher opinion of yourself than is strictly warranted, are essential to mental health. A topic for another piece.)
See, here's the thing. Lots of people who defend religious faith, who defend believing in God or the supernatural with no good evidence, insist they only ever do this with religion. When it comes to everyday life -- health and money, work and love, what car to buy and what food to eat and what city to live in -- of course they base their decisions on good evidence. Of course they don't believe whatever they're told or whatever appeals to them. Of course they're willing to let go of ideas when a mountain of evidence contradicts them.
But I know -- from my own experience, and from what I've seen -- that this is simply not the case. I know that it's not so easy to believe whatever you find comforting in some cases... and then question, or challenge, or let go of your beliefs in others.
Skepticism does not come naturally to the human mind. The human mind is very deeply wired to believe what it already believes, and what it wants to believe. The habit of questioning whether the things we believe are true? The habit of letting go of beliefs we're attached to when the evidence contradicts them? These are not easy habits to come by. They take practice. And they take discipline.
But it's a discipline that pays off: in specific pragmatic results, and in the broader, deeper, less obviously tangible areas of personal connection and fulfillment.
Here are a few examples of what I mean.
Letting Go of Glucosamine
I have a chronically bad knee. There are some things I do that make it better, but it's always going to be at least somewhat messed up. And one of the things I used to do for my bad knee was to take glucosamine. I kept hearing that glucosamine increased the production of lubricating fluid in the joints, which sounded nifty, and some of the early medical research was promising.
But then further, more thorough research was done... and the results were conclusive. Glucosamine doesn't work.
You'd think I'd have been pleased to hear that. A rational reaction would have been, "Well, good. It would have been better if the stuff actually worked -- but at least I don't have to waste my money on snake oil anymore. Since it doesn't work, of course I'd rather not take it."
But I was extremely disappointed in this outcome. Upset, even. And at first, I was very resistant to accepting it. I liked feeling like I was doing something about my bad knee. Especially something so easy. It was comforting. It gave me a feeling of control. It helped me not feel so helpless. And I had convinced myself that the stuff worked. (The placebo effect can be powerful indeed.)
So my first reaction was to reject the research. My first reaction was to repeat my "Early research is promising" mantra, to drown out the "This stuff doesn't work" mantra the universe was now presenting me with. My first reaction was to stick my fingers in my ears, pretend I hadn't heard anything, and keep doing what I'd been doing.
But because I was beginning to identify as a skeptic, and was getting involved in the atheist/skeptical movement, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't keep trying to persuade people to reject the wishful thinking of their religious faith and take a rigorous look at the lack of good evidence supporting it... and still embrace my own wishful thinking about glucosamine over the evidence staring me in the face. Not if I was going to live with myself. That's the thing about cognitive dissonance: once you become aware of it, rationalizing it becomes a lot harder. And that's the thing about the cognitive errors skeptics are always yammering about, errors like confirmation bias and hindsight bias and the clustering illusion and so on: once you start noticing them in others, they become a lot harder to ignore in yourself. I couldn't do it. I had to take my bottle of glucosamine, accept that it had been a waste of money, accept that it had all been a waste of money for years, and pitch it in the trash.
Why was this a good thing?
Why was it good that I gave up doing something that made me feel happy, something that gave me comfort and a feeling of control?
The most obvious answer is that I didn't have to spend my money on the stuff anymore. That's a very good argument for skepticism generally: of all the arguments against credulity and blind faith, Not Getting Taken By Con Artists is definitely high on the list. But in this case, that was a minor concern. Glucosamine was relatively cheap. I spend more money every day on useless things that make me happy. (Decaf coffee and cable TV both leap to mind.)
A better answer is that I was no longer doing something useless that made me feel like I was making a difference... so I started looking more carefully at things I could do that weren't useless and that might actually make a difference. It wasn't until I stopped taking glucosamine that I started pushing my doctor -- hard -- about getting me a proper diagnosis for my knee, and getting me some freaking physical therapy. I'd asked her about it before and gotten vague, half-assed answers... which I'd accepted, since I was soothing myself with the delusion that glucosamine was making things all better. Once I accepted the harsh reality that my knee was not getting all better, I was motivated to take action that might actually help.
This is a point I make a lot about skepticism and caring about evidence. Good information about reality helps us make better decisions about how to act in that reality. It helps us understand which causes are likely to have which effects. And the reverse is true as well. Decisions based on bad information are no better than guessing. Worse, in some ways, since we're more willing to let go of decisions we know were based on guessing. It's like people in data processing say: Garbage in, garbage out.
Facing harsh reality can be... well, harsh. It's not always fun. And comforting delusions are... well, comforting. But that doesn't mean they'll make us happier in the long run. Does believing in God or the afterlife give some people comfort? Sure. Believing that global warming isn't real gives some people comfort, too. That doesn't make this belief useful or good. For the people who believe it, or for society as a whole. If you get mad at people who stick their fingers in their ears and say, "I can't hear you, I can't hear you," about global warming... why do you think that's an appropriate way to think about God?
And then there's the broader, deeper, "connection with the universe" personal fulfillment stuff. But I'm going to hold off on that for a moment, and talk about one more pragmatic effect skepticism has had in my life.
Weight loss.
No, really.
Lose Weight Now, The Skeptical Way!
A little over a year ago, my bad knee started to get very bad indeed. It went very rapidly from "having to be careful getting in and out of cars" to "having serious trouble climbing hills and stairs." It was a very upsetting experience, one that made me feel intensely helpless: my knee was getting worse, much worse, potentially cripplingly worse, even though I'd been doing everything I could to take care of it.
Well, almost everything.
Everything but lose weight.
I was, at the time, about 60 pounds overweight. And if you accept nothing else about the evidence connecting health problems with weight, at the very least you ought to accept that extra weight is hard on your joints. It's just simple physics.
But I was also, at the time, deeply persuaded by the more extremist wing of the fat-positive movement that (a) being fat had no connection whatsoever with health problems, and (b) weight loss was essentially impossible. It is embarrassing to admit how much I let myself be deceived by denialism. I was stuck in confirmation bias, wishful thinking, all of it. I had pored over the trickle of studies suggesting that the link between weight and health was minimal, and ignored the mountain of research demonstrating that the link was both real and serious. I had pored over the statistics on how roughly 90 percent of all people who try to lose weight fail, and ignored the stubborn reality of the roughly 10 percent of people who do succeed.
Until my bad knee started to get worse. And I faced a choice: Stay stuck in my denialism, and slowly deteriorate into a steady loss of mobility until almost everything that made my life valuable was gone... or face reality, the harsh reality I'd been avoiding for years, and lose the fucking weight.
I had a very dark night of the soul. Or the soul-less, I guess I should say.
And I got up from my dark night of the soul-less, and decided to lose the weight.
I'm not willing to hold myself up as a weight loss success story. Not yet. I haven't yet lost all the weight I want to, and I haven't yet kept it off for more than a year. And I know -- because I care about reality and am following the research -- that keeping weight off is a lot harder and a lot less common than losing it. But I have lost just about all the weight I want to, and I haven't yet gained any back... and I have a workable, practical plan for keeping it off for life.
And the degree of success I've had so far, I owe to the discipline of skepticism, and to prioritizing reality over what I might want to be true.
What does skepticism have to do with my weight loss? Well, for starters, it's given me an evidence-based weight management plan that actually stands a reasonable chance of working. I'm not getting sucked down the garden path of fad diets, crash diets, snake-oil supplements, dangerous drugs, useless home exercise gizmos, and all the other Quick 'n' Easy weight loss tricks that offer false promises and deliver nothing but money into the promoters' pockets. I'm basing my program on hard research into what does and does not work for healthy, sustainable, non-misery-inducing weight loss and maintenance. It's a program that's rather more difficult than popping some pills or eating nothing but grapes and Kool-Aid for six weeks -- reality is a harsh mistress, and she demands both more honesty and more work of us than comforting self-delusion -- but it does have the singular advantage of, you know, working. (Here's more about the details, if you're interested.)
But perhaps more importantly: My skepticism is what helped me see my denial in the first place. Because I was familiar with cognitive errors like confirmation bias and so on, I was in a better position to recognize them in myself. Because of the work I'd been doing to show other people how they were unconsciously fooling themselves into believing whatever they already believed or wanted to believe, I'd been softening the ground for my own paradigm shift: for that essential but elusive flipping-of-the-light-switch that's such a crucial part of behavioral change.
Also, because I'd been reading skeptical blogs and journals, I was familiar with the skeptical criticism of the fat-positive movement's extreme denialist wing: the wing that's moved way past the sane and reasonable manifesto of "Society has an unhealthy fixation on an overly rigid and overly thin physical ideal, and needs to accept a wider range of healthy and beautiful body types" (a manifesto I am entirely in agreement with), and into the crazy realm of "Weight loss is completely impossible, utterly pointless, and seriously harmful, for absolutely everybody." Because I was able to recognize denialism in other areas -- evolution denialism and global warming denialism and AIDS denialism and vaccine denialism and whatnot -- I was able to see it in the fat-positive movement's refusal to accept any link between weight and health.
My weight loss hasn't just improved my knee, by the way. It's improved my overall mental and physical health, in ways I would never have imagined. It's improved my feet, my asthma, my sleep. My libido. My energy. My alertness. My mood.
All of which dovetails into another discipline I've been practicing: the discipline of being present in the world.
And which brings me -- at last -- to the broader, deeper, less obviously pragmatic, "connection with the universe" personal fulfillment stuff I keep teasing you with.
What a Wonderful World
I could gas on for days about the pragmatic ways that skepticism has changed my life and my view of the world. I could tell how my views on strict gender constructionism, strict sexual orientation constructionism, the utility of exercise, the history of witch burnings, whether everyone is basically bisexual, and on and on and on, have all been changed by practicing skepticism as a discipline of everyday life.
But I think you get the idea. And there's an entirely different way that prioritizing reality over wishful thinking has affected my life: a way that's a lot less tangible than losing weight or saving money on glucosamine, but is in some ways far more intense and profound.
It has to do with feeling intimately connected with the universe.
It's easy, as we all know, to walk around with our heads in a bubble. It's easy to spend our lives wrapped up in our dreams and fears, our plans and memories, our fantasies and anxieties. It's easy to tune out when we talk with people, to nod attentively while we think of what we want to say next. It's easy to manage or medicate or distract ourselves from our feelings when they get uncomfortable. It's easy to flip on the TV. It's easy to shut out the world -- the sometimes frightening, sometimes tedious, sometimes hurtful world -- and live our lives in the more pleasant and predictable world inside our heads. It's easy. It's human. It's entirely understandable. And it's something I'm trying to do less of.
I'm trying to practice being more present in the world. I'm trying to pay attention to the street art mural between my job and the place where I get coffee, and to notice a new detail about it every time I walk by. I'm trying to really listen when other people talk, and stay with them, and let their words sink in before I decide what, if anything, to say back. I'm trying to limit how much time I spend watching TV or having music pour into my ears on my headphones; I'm trying to only watch TV or listen to music when there's something I actually want to watch or hear. I'm trying to let myself feel what I feel. I'm trying to let go of expectations, and to let experiences and people be what they are. I'm trying to stop what I'm doing, at least once or twice a day, and remember that I'm alive, and conscious, here in this place and time. I'm trying to stop what I'm doing, at least once or twice a day, and remember that I'm living on a rock whirling around a star whizzing through a galaxy in an unimaginably enormous universe, and marvel and feel humble at the astronomically unlikely good luck I have in being alive at all. I'm trying to literally, physically, with my actual nose, stop and smell the roses. I'm trying to smile at people I pass on the street. I'm trying to notice the world around me, and to connect with it, and to let it in.
And prioritizing hard evidence over wishful thinking -- prioritizing what is true over what I want to be true -- is an essential part of that practice.
I'm not advocating that we all live our lives as purely rational beings. I don't want to live on Vulcan. Impulse and intuition, emotion and creativity, passion and insight... all of these have crucial places in a full human life. The world would be desperately dull without them. When it comes to subjective questions, questions of what is or isn't true for us personally -- am I in love with this person? Should I move to a different city? Should I save my money for a down payment on a house or spend it on a trip to Barcelona? -- it is entirely right and reasonable to be guided, at least partly, by the world inside our heads and our hearts.
But when it comes to objective questions of what is and is not true in the world outside our heads... we need to be skeptical. And we need to be disciplined about it. We need to prioritize good evidence and critical thinking over ideology and preconception. We need to not accept propositions without good evidence. We need to let go of conclusions when the evidence doesn't support them. We need to care about reality more than we care about what we want to be true about it.
Reality is a harsh mistress. She demands our honesty. She demands our work. She demands that we give up comforts, that we let ourselves feel pain, that we accept how small we are and how little control we have over our lives. And she demands that we make her our top priority.
But she is more beautiful, and more powerful, and more surprising, and more fascinating, and more endlessly rewarding, than anything we could ever make up about her.
And we can't let her in unless we're willing to let her be what she is.
And the discipline of skepticism is essential to making that happen.
Soldiers Punished for Refusing to Attend a Christian Rock Concert
The Army said Friday it was investigating a claim that dozens of soldiers who refused to attend a Christian band’s concert at a Virginia military base were banished to their barracks and told to clean them up. [...]Pvt. Anthony Smith said he and other soldiers felt pressured to attend the May concert while stationed at the Newport News base, home of the Army’s Transportation Corps.
“My whole issue was I don’t need to be preached at,” Smith said in a phone interview from Phoenix, where he is stationed with the National Guard. “That’s not what I signed up for.” {…]
Smith, 21, was stationed in Virginia for nearly seven months for helicopter electrician training when the Christian rock group BarlowGirl played as part of the “Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concerts.”
Smith said a staff sergeant told 200 men in their barracks they could either attend or remain in their barracks. Eighty to 100 decided not to attend, he said.
“Instead of being released to our personal time, we were locked down,” Smith said. “It seemed very much like a punishment.”
Smith said he and the other soldiers were told not to use their cell phones or personal computers and ordered to clean up the barracks.About 20 of the men, including several Muslims, refused to attend the concert based on their religious beliefs, he said.
Smith said he went up the chain of command and traced the concert edict to a captain, who said he simply wanted to “show support for those kind of events that bring soldiers together.”
While not accepting blame, the officer apologized to the soldiers who refused to attend the concert and said it was not his intent to proselytize, he said.
“But once you get in there, you realize it’s evangelization,” Smith said.
How many other commanding officers are using their positions of power over the lives of our young men and women in the service to impose their religious views on them? How extensive is this type of “evangelization” within the officer corps? We already know the Air Force Academy is practically a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fundamentalist Christian Right.
Reporting from Denver — The Air Force Academy, stung several years ago by accusations of Christian bias, has built a new outdoor worship area for pagans and other practitioners of Earth-based religions.But its opening, heralded as a sign of a more tolerant religious climate at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., was marred by the discovery two weeks ago of a large wooden cross placed there.
I’m not a Wiccan but they have as much right to worship and practice their faith as Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and Christians of whatever sect. And athesists have just as much right to not practice any faith. Joining the muilitary doesn’t mean you give up your first amendment protections against the government imposing anyone’s religious values upon you. It shouldn’t mean that your Christian superiors can force you to attend events where they proselytize you to accept their faith or elese face punishment. Any officer, no matter how high or how low should be drummed out of the military for such behavior. Court martials should be held and officers who violated these d=soldiers fundamental constitutional rights should be stripped of their commands and given dishonorable discharges.
The people who fought an American revolution did not fight so that any member of the government, much less a military commander could use his position of authority to coerce anyone to accept his or her religious beliefs. Quite the contrary. They came to America to escape religious persecution, not create a new means by which their faiths would rule supreme over everyone who believed differently than them.
This is just one of many dangerous signs over the last few years that our military is being corrupted by these Fundamentalist Christians. We know that their goal is to Christianize the government and the military and use that political and military power to impose their version of “Biblical Law” on the rest of us.
In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it secretly helped the Carter Administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and more recently, in 2001, it brought together the warring leaders of Congo and Rwanda for a clandestine meeting, leading to the two sides’ eventual peace accord last July. Such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa’s postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century’s most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise. “We work with power where we can,” the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, says, “build new power where we can’t.” [...]Two weeks into my stay, David Coe, Doug’s son and the presumptive heir to leadership of the Family, dropped by the house. My brothers and I assembled in the living room, where David had draped his tall frame over a burgundy leather recliner like a frat boy, one leg hanging over a padded arm.
“You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world.”
Obviously one place they have been building up their power to “rule the world” is in the US Military. And that is a very dangerous sign for our future as a free nation.
The most effective wedge for the insertion of evangelicals into every rung of military life was the NAE and its influential chaplain-endorsing agency, the Commission on Chaplains, which worked tirelessly as a liaison for a wide array of fundamentalist denominations, from the Assemblies of God to the Southern Baptist Convention to the full index of offshoot and splinter congregations. Notwithstanding the military’s policy of allotting chaplaincies on a quota system designed to roughly reflect the religious affiliations of society as a whole, by the late ’60s evangelical denominations were regularly exceeding their allotments.The phenomenon mirrored, in part, the explosive growth of fundamentalist Christianity in America and, in part, the assiduous efforts of the NAE and its Commission on Chaplains to fill posts left empty by the Catholics, Jews, Orthodox, and others who were regularly failing to meet their allocations. In what Loveland terms a “quota juggling act,” the NAE and others aggressively lobbied to fill chaplaincies left vacant by other denominations, resulting in a marked shift in the selection process weighted more and more to religious demographics within the military itself, where evangelical numbers continued to swell. This consolidation of power would result, by the late eighties, in the NAE Chaplains Commission’s acting as the endorsing agent not only for established denominations but for hundreds of nonaligned individual churches. [...]
It was inevitable, considering the concerted effort by evangelicals to penetrate every echelon of the service, from the lowliest barracks to the loftiest policy-making aerie, that there would eventually emerge a cadre of Christian officers emboldened to openly profess their faith and use the full influence of their rank to bolster the cause. [...]
It is a convergence that would, in turn, reach its apotheosis in You the Warrior Leader, a gung ho handbook for “applying military strategy in victorious spiritual leadership,” published at the same time Weinstein was beginning to gird himself for a different kind of battle. Written by former Green Beret and current Southern Baptist Convention president Bobby Welch, You the Warrior Leader is as unequivocal a statement of evangelical militarism as could be imagined, an unabashed tactical manual on storming the barricades of unbelief with rousing rhetoric that evokes a kind of holy bloodlust for the trophies of triumphalism. [...]
In the chapter “Attack! Attack! Attack!” Welch asks, “Remember the Warrior Leader’s Mission-Vision?” as he hammers home with steely-eyed determination his grand strategy for winning souls: “To develop victorious spiritual-war fighters who form a force-multiplying army that accomplishes the Great Commission.”
And yes, Sharon Angle and other fundamentalist Christian Republican candidates for National office do approve a Christian takeover of the Country:
When Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a Christian news interviewer this year that “entitlement programs (are) built to make government our God,” she voiced a central tenet of Christian Reconstructionism, according to academics who study the movement. [...]Many of Angle’s religious and political beliefs appear to align with the tenets of Christian Reconstructionism. She’s supported eliminating Social Security and Medicare, is a home schooling champion, sees the separation of church and state as an unconstitutional doctrine that was never meant to protect the state from religious belief, and believes public policy should support the traditional family structure as defined in the Bible.
She also helped resurrect the Nevada affiliate of a national party founded by a prominent Christian Reconstructionist and has raised campaign money from reconstructionists.
But Ingersoll said Angle’s comments on government as a false idol come directly from the movement’s founder, R.J. Rushdoony, an orthodox Presbyterian minister.
Do we really want politicians who will support the continued Fundamentalist Christianization of our government and especially our military? Do we really want people with the most powerful weapons on earth trained to believe that only the Christian faith is truly American? That their duty to a Christian God supersedes their duty to the Constitution? I think you know the answer to that.We need to eradicate this infestation of religious intolerance and infiltration before it leads our country down a dark path in which our armed forces become a pawn of religious zealots determined to make our country as “free” religiously as Iran or Saudi Arabia are today.
Posts
