Best argument for LIHOP from Kevin Phillips,

Kevin Phillips, political strategist for the Republican Party, "lost" his way during the Bush years and brought us Wealth and Democracy, and American Dynasty which hit the current lot at the GOP hard. He has a new book out American Theocracy about the unholy alliance of conservatives and religion. In it he says three things are going to bring our downfall. The role of oil in defining foreign policy, religion in government and our debt. Before you dismiss him, Phillips wrote 40 years ago that the GOP was the emerging majority and would control the country in years to come. Those of us around 40 years ago thought he was a silly dreamer.

He takes seriously the idea that they want terrorism because it will bring the rapture. I've never been a LIHOP or a MIHOP believer and have dismissed the idea that the GOP really believes this rapture stuff, but Phillips apparently makes the case.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19brink.html

"Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive."

rapture.

Do they think they are going to use the same tactics to take over Heaven???

In their view, is Jesus a super CEO of a super corporate conglomerate?

And God the Chairman of the Board??

Do they believe that Heaven is run like a Democracy where votes can be stolen a la Diebold, Sequoia, et als?

Sounds like the Republican strategists are creating their own "reality" again.

Who wants to be a fly on the wall when the creators of their own reality meet actual reality?

He takes seriously the idea that they want terrorism because it will bring the rapture. I've never been a LIHOP or a MIHOP believer and have dismissed the idea that the GOP really believes this rapture stuff, but Phillips apparently makes the case.