how a bias like that works in government as far as legality goes? It almost sounds like a religious vendetta and it is unjustifiable.

Does instigating violence or war for one's religious convictions have any precedence in our system and is there any remedy? I can't even imagine that this is okay formally when it is a personal issue like that.

on our side or some other such nonsense while committing hideous acts seems like it's probably a pretty high number.

Well, that's certainly another set of sledgehammers on the wall between church and state.

Though I am not surprised, considering all the theocratic elements afoot, I certainly shudder at the thought of cristofacism under Mosaic Law.

We have two sworn enemies to our fragile and progressing democracy and they are oligarchs and theocratic fundamentalism. That's the only kind of religion that cannot function well under a sectarian umbrella and I single them out because there are religions and religious people who can do that properly and who respect the value of democracy in its pluralistic sense.

they still provide an umbrella to the fundamentalist. Generally.

The fundamentalists are in charge now. They have Revelations to carry out.

I share your fears.

Keep your powder dry. Or submit. Decisions, decisions.

Cheers.

Using religion to gain power, by any means necessary, is an old habit among humans. Makes me so disgusted.

being taken on this holy joyride.

and .... they call Trump their God, but Trump allows Pompeo and Pence to make decisions of war and Rapture? Serious voodoo going down there.

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Ship_B

This is just so warped. They should all be sectioned.

I mean, what does the bye-bull say?

But I'm glad his lunacy wa revealed.

They are praying this goes wrong, they actually think they will be lifted up into the sky and the rest of us will be left here to burn in hell.🙄 If the rapture is real, I wish he'd just take them now.

The scary thing is there is absolutely no reasoning with them.

Prayer Breakfast/the Family/Opus Dei folks, etc. The average American, has no clue about what is actually happening within our government. It's scary as hell, they have tasted power and will not relinquish it easily.

It is NOT enough to be "saved"...they MUST see others suffer.
The "rapture" is all about being in the elect, the ones who get to watch everyone else burn and suffer under the reign of the Antichrist.

The whole pathology is disgusting and SHOULD be disqualifying for public service once openly stated and uncovered...we do NOT need any more crazy, we're quite literally all stocked up already...

This could blow the lid off these nutjobs and expose them to the American public

Despite its presence on the political scene for nearly 40 years, the media have never bothered to educate themselves about dominionism, apocalypticism, or end times belief systems. Sure, it's fun to ask some end timer if you can have his stuff after he gets raptured, but if a reporter is going to ask useful questions of these people, they need a grounding in some of this. It's tedious and boring and wasteful of brain cells, but it has a powerful allure for some people.

Living on the edge of eternity, as they think they are, is intoxicating. All of human history is culminating in a colossal ending where they fly away free from this mess, and then get to watch as the heathens and apostates get what's coming to them. Their foolishness vindicated with one wave of Jesus' magic god wand.

But it can get boring waiting for Jesus to come back, so people like Mike Pompeo feel like they have to hurry the old boy along any way they can. So they fancy themselves a latter day Queen Esther, placed in a strategic position for such a time as this. Or one of the tower guards, warning the people about the coming doom. Or any of a dozen other roles they assign to themselves. Without an understanding of at least some of the underpinnings, reporters can't ask pertinent questions or get intelligible answers.

The media seems to have no clue--the connection between the radical extremist views of these people, and government policy that they enact, seems to never get made.

Our government has been systematically and incrementally taken over by far-right religious wackos, under the radar of almost everyone. There have been a few books written on the subject but they get minimal traction except on progressive shows, other than "The Family," but there is no widespread coverage that would penetrate the consciousness of most 'Muricans.

And because these nutjobs in gov't wear expensive suits, have neatly cut hair, and speak in complete sentences, they don't set off people's alarms.

in the name of religious nutbaggery without sounding like you're saying the religion itself is nuts. Even if you're only talking about the wacko heretics off in the corner, the minute Christians think you're calling any of them crazy because of their beliefs, things get ugly fast.

Joining you in

I strongly recommend American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, by Chris Hedges:

https://www.amazon.com/American-Fascists-Christian-Right-America/dp/0743284461/ref=sr_1_1?

Deserves wider recognition. Ever since Ronnie Raygun days, these whack jobs have been pushing for government policies that serve religious fantasies more than the actual world and its living, breathing inhabitants.

My own in-laws and their extended families are rapture-ready and believe Trump was sent by gawd.

Any of them believe in the rapture or anything else.

They are corrupted by power and are using this to feed the rubes.

Jim Jones would e proud.

This sounds like BS to me. I don't doubt that Pompeo is a religious nut and a war monger, but I find it hard to believe that at this exact moment, he finds Queen Esther's passion to protect Israel has become paramount and that his persuasive powers ratcheted up to such a degree that POS POTUS is moved to take this action. That's not the nature of the relationship between POS POTUS and his Secretary of State. Pompeo is his top thug running interference, not his whisperer.

Dominionist Christians have infiltrated top levels of government and are a threat to mankind and the world.

Show me the word IRAN anywhere in the bible.

Yes, details matter you asshole!

It was invented by John Nelson Darby in the 19th century.

I like Bill Murray. Stripes!

But that's it, right? It's all up to the reader. Which means that the bible is not a guide at all since the reader can twist it into all kinds of different meanings to suit personal goals.

Such as causing the deaths of thousands of people to jiggle dog's elbow to hasten dog's second coming. Wouldn't that be a sin? Not if you think you are in for a wonderful rapture regardless of what you do because you have the get-out-of-jail card by being "born-again".

Unless we kick it to the curb it's going to be the death of all of us.

Really.

Sounds like a Jihad to me. Sounds like exactly what everybody wanted to fight against in 2001.

They have become what they hate

what it is exactly. A Christian Taliban.

in the US are our domestic terrorists. Iran had it right tRump is a terrorist in a suit.

Well aren't I the smart one.

Nope-- millions of people probably figured it out..

Pompeo is a full on rapture moron

It's "human sacrifice to get the end times ball rolling" now. Iraq, Iran. It never stops.

Found this synopsis on Wikipedia of the Iranian reaction to the attacks on the twin towers:

"Iran: Iranian president Mohamed Khatami[56][57][58] and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei condemned and denounced the attacks and the terrorists who carried them out. Iranians who gathered for a soccer match in Tehran two days after the 9/11 attacks observed a moment of silence. There was also a candlelight vigil. Huge crowds attended candlelit vigils in Iran, and 60,000 spectators observed a minute's silence at Tehran's soccer stadium.[59][60] On Tuesday, September 25, in 2001, Iran's fifth president, Mohammad Khatami meeting British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, said: "Iran fully understands the feelings of the Americans about the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11." He said although the American administrations had been at best indifferent about terrorist operations in Iran (since 1979), the Iranians instead felt differently and had expressed their sympathetic feelings with bereaved Americans in the tragic incidents in the two cities." He also stated that "Nations should not be punished in place of terrorists." [61] According to Radio Farda's website, in 2011, on the anniversary of the attacks, United States Department of State, published a post at its blog, in which the Department thanked Iranian people for their sympathy and stated that they would never forget Iranian people's kindness on those harsh days. This piece of news at Radio Farda's website also states that after the attacks' news was released, some Iranian citizens gathered in front of the Embassy of Switzerland in Tehran, which serves as the protecting power of the United States in Iran, to express their sympathy and some of them lit candles as a symbol of mourning.[62]"

So Pence lies about Iranian complicity. Pence more than likely feels a kinship to the other Mike -- Pompeo -- Bible inspired ignorance about Iran.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/politics/pompeo-christian-policy.html

Early enough in the month to read it before the paywall.

Typical of a fundie he very much ballparks the timeline of Jesus Christ.

If you push God's hand you are not following the will of God.

Thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God.

But then, these folks don't seem to care much about the actual message of Christ at all.

What is it Jesus shouted in the Temple in a well-known rock opera?

My temple should be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves! Get out! Get out!

It's not unlike all the people who called MLK a "radical" or a "terrorist" when he was alive suddenly started saying "Be like MLK" years after he was assassinated.

That he uses to formulate policy. They are extreme non-secularists in a nation that was founded as a secular nation that inserted the First Amendment to help assure that it remain secular. Today we have a Supreme Court that is packed with extreme religious beliefs justices that to me use the Bible rather than the Constitution when they make decisions - think Hobby Lobby, pharmacists that can deny legal birth control. America is badly broken right now and it can be traced in large measure to extreme religious beliefs.

the rest of the world.

**Still missing Molly.

Barr is a member of this secretive organization.

https://buzzflash.com/articles/william-barr-and-opus-dei-the-secretive-ultra-conservative-catholic-organization-that-poses-an-existential-threat-to-democracy-and-pluralism

These bible thumpers will do everything they can to hasten the apocalypse no matter how many of the rest of us get hurt.

I just heard on Cable News (CNN or MSNBC...I am going back and forth) said both Pompeo AND Pence pushed this. Gee, go figure that both are also up to their necks in impeachment crimes themselves. I wonder why they urged this move?

...one might think this would be an occasional topic of conversation in our national dialogue, wouldn't you? But apparently, it's impolite to mention this...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/politics/pompeo-christian-policy.html

The Rapture and the Real World: Mike Pompeo Blends Beliefs and Policy
By Edward Wong
March 30, 2019

JERUSALEM — When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sat down for an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network in a hotel in Jerusalem earlier this month, he made a remark that was perhaps the most revelatory of any in his nearly one year in office.

An evangelical Christian, Mr. Pompeo had just returned from tours of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the ground where Jesus is said to have been crucified and buried, and of tunnels beneath the Western Wall, by the holiest site in Judaism. The interviewer posed a question around a biblical tale about a queen who saved Jews from slaughter by a Persian official: Did Mr. Pompeo think President Trump had been “raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?”

“As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” Mr. Pompeo said. “It was remarkable — so we were down in the tunnels where we could see 3,000 years ago, and 2,000 years ago, if I have the history just right — to see the remarkable history of the faith in this place, and the work that our administration’s done, to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains. I am confident that the Lord is at work here.” ...

But no secretary of state in recent decades has been as open and fervent as Mr. Pompeo about discussing Christianity and foreign policy in the same breath. That has increasingly raised questions about the extent to which evangelical beliefs are influencing American diplomacy.

Studies show that white evangelicals are much more likely than other Americans to believe that Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy. Known as Christian Zionists, they believe God promised the land to the Jews, and that the gathering of Jews in Israel is foretold in the prophecy of the rapture — the ascent of Christians into the kingdom of God.

Mr. Pompeo talks about the rapture. “We will continue to fight these battles,” he said at a “God and Country Rally” in 2015, because there is a “never-ending struggle” until “the rapture.”

“Be part of it,” he said at the meeting, at the Summit church in Wichita, Kan. “Be in the fight.”

job. I don't know if I am watching an episode of Watchmen or if this is our govt. Yikes! Brilliant series by the way. Please binge watch it if you have not done so yet. !!!

Last edited Tue Jan 7, 2020, 08:14 AM - Edit history (1)

...gee whiz now I'm confused. Which is it fellas???

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/mike-pompeo-the-secretary-of-trump
Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of Trump
How he became a heartland evangelical—and the President’s most loyal soldier.
By Susan B. Glasser
August 19, 2019

In the winter of 2016, Donald Trump was roaring through the primaries, and Mike Pompeo was determined to stop him. Pompeo, a little-known congressman from Wichita, helped persuade Marco Rubio to make a late stand in Kansas. Like many Republicans in Congress, Pompeo believed that Rubio had the national-security knowledge and the judgment to be President, and Trump did not. Urged on by Pompeo, Rubio’s team pulled money out of other states to gamble on winning the Kansas caucus. It was one of the few remaining contests in which Rubio still hoped to beat Trump, who, he said, was a “con artist” about to “take over the Republican Party.”

On March 5th, Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, arrived in Wichita for the caucus. Rubio left his closing argument to Pompeo, who told the crowd at the Century II arena, “I’m going to speak to you from the heart about what I believe is the best path forward for America.” An Army veteran who finished first in his class at West Point, Pompeo cited Trump’s boast that if he ordered a soldier to commit a war crime the soldier would “go do it.” As the audience booed, Pompeo warned that Trump—like Barack Obama—would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.” American soldiers “don’t swear an allegiance to President Trump or any other President,” Pompeo declared. “They take an oath to defend our Constitution, as Kansans, as conservatives, as Republicans, as Americans. Marco Rubio will never demean our soldiers by saying that he will order them to do things that are inconsistent with our Constitution.” Listening backstage, Trump demanded to know the identity of the congressman trashing him. A few minutes later, Pompeo concluded, “It’s time to turn down the lights on the circus.”

Pompeo’s stinging rebuke of Trump got barely a mention in the local press, and Rubio finished third in Kansas. “We got smoked,” a former top Rubio campaign aide told me. Days later, Rubio’s campaign was over. In May, Trump secured the delegates needed for the nomination, and Pompeo reluctantly joined the rest of Kansas’s congressional delegation in endorsing him. Still, Pompeo had told the Topeka Capital-Journal, in April, that Trump was “not a conservative believer,” and, a few weeks later, he said, on CNN, “A lot of his policies don’t comport with my vision for how I represent Kansas.”

Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who keeps an open Bible on his desk, now says it’s possible that God raised up Trump as a modern Queen Esther, the Biblical figure who convinced the King of Persia to spare the Jewish people. He defines his own job as serving the President, whatever the President asks of him. “A Secretary of State has to know what the President wants,” he said, at a recent appearance in Washington. “To the extent you get out of synch with that leader, then you’re just out shooting the breeze.” No matter what Trump has said or done, Pompeo has stood by him. As a former senior White House official told me, “There will never be any daylight publicly between him and Trump.” The former official said that, in private, too, Pompeo is “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.” Even more bluntly, a former American ambassador told me, “He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”

I would definitely not care to die for anyone else's.

What are you, some kind of civil liberties extremist?

I just wanna go... naturally.

that some old white man on a cloud is going to make them fly into the sky so they can watch people being tortured for 1000 years, because they believed in the "wrong" sky spirit?

Also:

Are they not aware that Jews, Muslims, and Christians all believe in the same god?

And, if indeed, their god is real and all-powerful, starting Armageddon on their own negates the entire thing being "god's judgement" because they are substituting their own judgement for their god's.

The thought of these people running a carnival ride, much less the government terrifies me.

It's Trump's fault.

For putting the various actors along the timeline leading up to the hit on suleimani, and set against the backdrop of Pompeo’s kooky rapture zealotry.

Am fortunate that I lucked into getting a liberal education. I chose a long time ago to be secular, as I saw/learned of the abuses and cruelties that some Christians, etc. have perpetrated over the course of history. I will never understand how so many people could think that breaking the Ten Commandments will somehow give them a shortcut to heaven.

Artists everywhere are sure to be hard at work. Ripe for clay statues, posters, online graphics. This is as good as "The Thinker".

there are people in government who wish for the end of the world. They are a suicide cult making decisions for the welfare of the country. Obviously they wish the country to be demolished.
These people are insane and should be treated that way.
Force them to explain how their beliefs translate into their decisions - then let the people decide with their votes.

Wait a minute, TOLD YA.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212851830

What does that tell us?

I think it tells us that Jeebus really means nothing to them.