He did forget to play the patriotism card, though; I felt let-down by his inattention to the tenets of full-blown demogoguery.

I think it's very telling that Mother Jones' latest issue has brought so many reconstruction apologists out of the woodwork so quickly. A neutral observer might see this as the reconstructionists feeling a tad defensive, and maybe even a wee bit threatened by the uncontrolled publicity they're getting.  

If so, then that's all to the good. Folks looking to undermine the Constitution and replace it with the Bible ought to feel defensive whenever the bright light of public attention gets turned their way.

And Al Mohler? Power issues are first and foremost with him, always. Keep the women too busy with pregnancies and raising kids to stir up trouble for the oh-so-important menfolk. It's a social control mechanism justified by the fact that the only SBC-acknowledged status women have in the Bible are as wives and mothers. Best not to look too closely at some of those uppity females in the New Testament - they didn't really hold any positions of authority over the men.

Unfortunately for Al and his ilk, we don't live in the times covered by the Bible; we live in the world of today. It's a vastly over-populated world, with swiftly dwindling resources. Unlike Al, I don't believe that that's the way Jesus wants it.
- -

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Those who study history are doomed to know it's repeating.

Bottom line, the 'willful childlessness' thing isn't about children at all- it's about power over women. Women who do not have children (or have few children) are free to be and do as they will, and unmarried childless women are the freest of all. Hardline Christians do not want women who are free, who are peers, who are educated, or who are able to think past the threshold of their homes or the needs and demands of their husband and children. They want domestic drudges who will 'train up' the next generation of obedient little crusaders, whose sons will go to war, and whose daughters will also become housebound. They must have their strict, patriarchal hierarchy, where God is in his heaven, the preacher is in his pulpit, and the father rules the roost. Women have no place and no real voice in this cozy pyramid- it's a man's world.

Children are both a blessing and a burden. Today's non-agragarian culture does not require that we have a 'quiverful' like some of the extremely Biblical Christians believe. God gave us free will and a brain to use, and we learned long ago that fewer children mean a higher quality of life for the entire family.

by Lorie Johnson on Wed Nov 30, 2005 at 09:13:51 AM EST

two rival faiths--Christianity, a worldview teaching that God is sovereign over all He has created, and secularism, a worldview teaching that man is sovereign over all that has evolved up to this moment in time.

It's as if all he can conceive of is replacing one patriarch with another. The possibility of a worldview that isn't based on winner-take-all notions of sovereignty never even enters into the equation.

by sabreuse on Wed Nov 30, 2005 at 09:41:42 AM EST

Firstly, I am a survivor of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual abuse at the hands of a family involved in a dominionist church and involved in dominionist groups.  

Secondly, I am not certain that in the present legal climate--or in any future legal climate--I will be able to protect any potential kids of mine from being "recruited" by my dominionist relatives into a spiritually abusive church other than completely isolating them from practically all my relatives.

Thirdly, should I pass on as well as my husband, I am not sure there is in this present legal climate--and it looks even iffier in any future legal climate--that I can prevent any children from being taken by dominionist relatives to indoctrinate into a spiritually abusive church that is highly involved in the dominionist movement.

A good parallel for most of you to explain why I have consciously decided not to breed:

Imagine you are a walkaway from, say, Ted Haggard's New Life Church, but all of your family are still members to greater or lesser degree.  Imagine that you yourself are now a pagan, have realised you are bi, and dare not ever come out about either of those to your family because you know damn well what happens to pagans and gays...you've seen their "prayer gangs" literally run them out of town when you were a kid.

Imagine having to worry about raising a kid in that when your own mother is going to do everything she can to take him to "Sunday school" in the World Prayer Center at New Life Church.

Imagine having to worry about them changing the laws that bisexual people can't have kids--and if you and your husband ever got divorced, your relatives in New Life Church suddenly trying to get custody.

Imagine having to worry that your relatives might file bogus "child abuse" claims against you because you won't let your kids see Granny (because of legit fears she is trying to induct them into a cult with political aspirations).

Imagine having to worry that, if you and your husband die in a car accident, having to worry that your relatives will sue for custody even though you've arranged for a friend to raise your kids...and that they might get them, and your kids would be raised in the very environment you escaped.

The group I walked away from is essentially a mini-New Life Church.

That's why I don't have kids.

by dogemperor on Wed Nov 30, 2005 at 10:04:31 AM EST

Well, Mr. DeMar has good reason to be a bit prickly concerning the relationship of modernity to religion - the idea that modernity and religious belief are in opposition has until very recently held a certain currency among sociologists although the notion could hardly be described in the first place as rigorous in the scientific sense : it was more of an observed effect, perhaps contingent on historical particulars, and a reexamination of the idea is now underway.

To begin with, definitions of what exactly constitutes religious faith are absurdly slippery, and if some Pentacostalist sects handle snakes, well - sociologists endeavor to handle a snake - the project of defining what religious faith might be - which is certainly coated with Teflon and vaseline : slippery. But leaving that aside, if indices of religiousity have been shown to decline in relation to modernity - or at least as societies undergo the transition from pre-industrial to modern industrial economies - can sociologists derive general principles from the historical record ?

Well, maybe not. As William Swatos Jr., Editor of The Encyclopedia of Religion and Society notes :

"The links between definitions of religion and the ongoing debate about secularization are obvious. Those who see religion  primarily in substantive terms are more likely to argue that Western society is becoming increasingly secular, for what they perceive as religion is diminishing in a way that can be convincingly measured. Bruce (1995a) is a formidable exponent of this approach. Those, on the other hand, who see religion in functional terms will be less convinced, for they will want to include within the definition a set of phenomena that at the very least meet the Durkheimian description of the sacred; these show a far greater degree of resilience. One point is immediately clear. Secularization is a debate by Western scholars about Western  society. A second assumption very frequently follows, namely, that the tendencies that characterize Western (and more often than not European) societies today will, necessarily, occur in other parts of the world tomorrow. Such a view is increasingly challenged. A further limitation is historical rather than geographical; secularization almost always has been explored in relation to the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (hence, among other things, the interest of the founding fathers in this question). The debate about advanced industrial society is only just beginning."

"The debate......is just beginning.".....Imagine that sentence read aloud at a convention of professional sociologists ! What tones might Mr. Swados invest the utterance with ? - Sardonic ? Flip ? Foreboding ? Merely laconic ? We may never know ( though one could ask Mr. Swados himself )    but the statement is one of the more pregnant utterances any sociologist of our time might possibly make. The      debate is just beginning, indeed.

Now - in his capacity as editor, Mr. Swados goes on to  gently chide, or to use a loaded term shepherd the milling flocks professional sociology :

"mainline sociologists continue to assume that religion is of marginal interest in contemporary society..... those with appropriate skills need to offer alternative analyses that integrate rather than marginalize the role of religion in the modern world (Beckford 1996)"

Surely, at least in American sociology, such former views of religion, as a some sort of quaint or atavistic pursuit, are now being left in the dust as the field scurries in reactive pursuit of facts ( or to use another loaded term, boots ) on the ground.

As always, humankind strides boldly towards an imagined future  - once of plastics and aircars, now of computers and the Net, genomics, and so on - but in America, at least, the path forward somehow now leads past a diorama which  glosses over the physical impossibilities inherent to the project of stuffing a huge flock of breeding pairs of dinosaurs into an ark of known - in Biblical terms, that is - size* ...... Much of the rest of the World looks on aghast at this spectacle, but though America may indeed be in process of passing off the torch to Asia and Europe, new inheritors of the spirit of the Enlightenment might look past their temptations to smirk, to the implications. And not merely to the obvious ones, the mere menace inherent as the foreign policy of the world's reigning superpower becomes less informed by Kissingerian realpolitik and more guided by imperatives derived from premillinarian eschatologies (  see Rick Perlstein's "Jesus Landing Pad", from the Village Voice  ) or from  postmillenialist impulses towards conquest, crusade, and the urge to Christian dominion :

Does the Enlightenment - science, reason, and the whole grand project - contain its own limit horizon ? The question concerns the ability of technologies of advertising and public relations to align public opinion with pretermined beliefs. What if those beliefs are irrational or a-rational ? Does the Enlightenment then - in essence - consume itself in some sort of Escherian or Ouroboronic  paroxysm ?

Well - to  coin a phrase - the buzzometer is in the red zone, and PhD sociology candidates are, as you read this, no doubt retooling dissertations and dissertation proposals to address the zeitgeist directly or at least airbrush those with fashionable hues of vague numinosity, as the prices, on the American cultural stock market, in faith-based shares zoom  to the sky.  

______

As far as Mr. DeMar's assertion of a similarity in the aims of  secularists and communists [  "They want a completely secularized (atheistic) government, something similar to the Communist regimes of the former Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba, and the former Soviet satellites." ] beyond the obvious point that such rhetoric amounts to re-boiled McCarthyist rhetoric, well.... that is a whole other can of worms - a huge and treacherous one not easily or safely unpacked with few words. There's a lot to it. It pulls in a whole tangled heap of history. Chip Berlet, if he has time, has quite a bit to say on this subject, I believe.

For the moment I'll just say this : though the notion of Communism had not yet been invented at the time, the Anti-Philosophes  -  who emerged to battle against the Enlightenment and its doctrines of universal human rights, reason, and free inquiry, on principle that those would upset that established order of church and crown deemed to necessary as a bulwark against some sort of apocalyptic eruption of sin and depravity - and other opponents of the Enlightenment tended to view the secular impulse with the same hostility as Mr. Demar, and it's fitting that Dostoevsky long ago has written this conflict, as it works out in Christian theological terms, with sublime artistry maybe never to be rivalled :

Let me then pose "The Grand Inquisitor" - as a challenge - to Mr. DeMar and all who share his views. At issue is free will, or not.

So : confronted by a Jesus returned to Earth, walking the land in secret and then captured by a present day inquisition, would Mr. Demar, playing the role of inquisitor, tell Jesus to take his teachings elsewhere, that he was neither needed nor wanted, that theocracy in its wisdom had determined humanity would be happier in ignorance, deprived of free will ?

Jesus, it is said, threw out the moneychangers from the temple. Well, what of the temples of those who presume to know enough to delimit human choice, those who would try to deprive humanity of choice and even perhaps knowledge of choice, to force all but a tiny privileged ruling theocratic elite - claiming some mysterious badge of divine mandate  invisible to all perception and senses but their own, for absolutist autocratic rule even as kings and queens so recently did -  into some theocratic prison, a world without choice and so without sin ?  What can we say about such projects and impulses but this :  in Christian theological terms, don't such impulses amount to a human presumption to the wisdom, omniscience, and powers of God ?  

Outside the realms of theology or blasphemy, in common parlance, that impulse can be rendered quite simply in this warning:

Beware of busybodies.

*Now, that's a staggering feature of prestidigitation - the dinosaur trick -  indeed, done with smoke and mirrors, far more impressive even then squishing a hippo into a walnut shell - and if some of the dinosaurs - or most - won't fit, all is not lost. The real magic trick involves trying to stuff the realm of the sacred - by definition infinite, ephemeral, beyond human comprehension, and so on, into the realm of the profane.

That's the underlying - if not necessarily conscious - project.  In the cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism, there is a type of hell with an avatar or spirit which is depicted as a little cartoonish creature with an enormous belly, with immense appetite, and a tiny mouth that can never pass enough food to fill even a fraction of the belly. There is a curious parallel between this theological metaphor of endless, inatiable desire and the nature of trying to make stuffing immense imagined herds of dinosaur breeding pairs into an ark of known dimensions a rational affair instead of something like a slow motion act of hysteria : why even try ? Why not leave the dinosaurs alone ? The project itself can never be made intellectually defensible, let alone scientific, and for those impossibilities those who try to make it into a rational affair will always be consumed by the task, like building castles of sand on the beach to stem the incoming tide.

"Well", the plaque by the educational exhibit might explain, "those were prepubescent dinosaurs which were in fact bred to miniature stature, like toy dogs, for the very purpose....there were very many of them but they were very, very small - perhaps even like mice - and only later grew so large, after the flood...." Crowds come and pay the admission fee, people walk past and read the plaque. On and on it goes, and where it stops......

by Bruce Wilson on Wed Nov 30, 2005 at 12:27:29 PM EST

secularism, a worldview teaching that man is sovereign over all that has evolved up to this moment in time

It is my opinion that the religious right is intentionally misusing the word secular and its variations in an attempt to mislead their followers.

Secularism is consistently equated with atheism, humanism, materialism and naturalism.

Secularism is consistently equated with hostility towards religion.

Here is my 2 cents...

Secularism is not atheism, is not humanism, is not materialism and is not naturalism.

Secularism is not hostility towards religion, it is neutrality.

Secularism is nothing more than taking no theological position.

Who has the faulty dictionary...me or them?

by BSeab1024 on Wed Nov 30, 2005 at 06:20:56 PM EST

It's all about little WHITE babies and only little WHITE babies.  

The hidden undercurrent of racism and the "master race" thinking needs more effective exposure.

These folks are scared of being innundated by a sea of "inferior" "mud people" if there aren't more WHITE babies produced.  

Ever wonder why the fundies and the large corporations get on so well? It's fascist style thinking with either member of the team.

[my first post here, woohoo!]
[Hi Bruce!]

by nofundy on Thu Dec 01, 2005 at 10:19:31 AM EST