Houses of the Holy

Ari, Covenant Zone's Israel member, sent in this video a few days ago:


All he wrote was "Who we are dealing with in EU". That kind of sounded to me like a challenge to watch the (unnarrated) video and "get" the vibe of this woman. After watching her - diplomatic smile, festooned in green, except when she dressed up like the Grim Reaper to visit a mosque (which gets me wondering if Western depictions of the angel of death are not in some degree a product of "orientalism"...) - I wrote back:

I thought this woman I had never seen before has a rather self-righteous bearing, the kind of "evil" that can't be good for understanding the bases of conflicts, and something that is easily manipulated by Palestinian victim theatre. Today I see Barry Rubin has this to say about her.

Check it out. Rubin provides a good analysis of the Western pathology that rebels against existentially discomfiting realities while dreaming of the Gnostic key - the necessary "solution" - that will open all doors to Peace, Love, and Holy Sibship. His opening statement strikes a mood:

The fact that she holds such a position—in effect, she's the European Union's first foreign minister—shows Europe is in serious trouble. For Ashton’s main previous claim to fame was as a leader in the Soviet-oriented movement for nuclear disarmament of the West.

If Ms. Ashton's only claim to fame is her involvement in that quintessential movement of the 1970s British left, the campaign to outlaw another difficult reality - the bomb - while sympathizing with a tyrannical empire - my mind wanders and wonders, could Robert Plant be singing to the the EUtopian empire's latest smile?

Spengler - David Goldman - on American religion

The critic Harold Bloom once argued that the characteristic American religion is a species of gnosticism, and I have good reason to believe it to be true, having spent some years—from 1976 to 1986—in a gnostic cult under the leadership of a man named Lyndon LaRouche.
[...]
We were all about thirty, and most of us were Jewish. The question, of course, is what were a group of young Jews doing in the company of a cult leader with a paranoid view of the world and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic streak.

Here is one answer: We were all long-in-the-tooth student radicals. LaRouche’s organization was the flotsam washed up by the wave of the collective madness that had swept through the youth of the world in 1968 and left many of its participants maladapted to ordinary life for years afterward.

During the 1960s, LaRouche was a one-man Trotskyite splinter group, teaching free-lance courses on Marxist economics at whatever venue would have him. He culled student radicals with an intellectual bent who were repelled by the mindlessness endemic on the left in the late 1960s. LaRouche’s pitch was insidious: How can you justify yourself morally unless you know that what you are doing is right? There existed a science of mind, LaRouche claimed, that would enable the adept to reach the right conclusion.
[...]
His intellectual method resembled the old tale about stone soup: Having announced that he had the inside track on the hidden knowledge that underlay Western civilization (one of his essay was titled “The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites”), he attracted a small parade of intellectual orphans, whom he then put to elaborating the details. By the late 1970s he had collected some highly credentialed acolytes, including a group of physicists and mathematicians at his front organization, the Fusion Energy Foundation.

LaRouche claimed to trace a tradition of secret knowledge across the ages, from Plato and Plotinus, through the Renaissance, and down to the German scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century. Of course, that raises a question: If there exists this kind of knowledge, then why isn’t it universally shared? The reverse side of the gnostic page is paranoia: There must be a cabal of evil people who prevent the dissemination of the truth.
[...]
The Venetian Inquisition, the British Empire, the Hapsburg family, the Rockefellers, and the Trilateral Commission all figured variously in this grand conspiracy against LaRouche’s supposed intellectual antecedents. Jewish banking families kept popping up in LaRouche’s accounts of the evil forces.

You might think—you should think—that this would have sent us running for the exits. But, Godless and faithless, we were all possessed by a fear of being Jewish, and LaRouche offered us a rock to hide under. LaRouche feigned a sort of philo-Semitism, praising marginal figures who could be fit into his mold: the Platonist Philo of Alexandria, for example, and the German rationalist Moses Mendelssohn—Jews, that is, who sounded more like Greek philosophers than like Jews. He also portrayed himself as the opponent of Nazi tendencies that lurked everywhere. In a caricature of the reductio ad Hitlerum, everything he didn’t like pointed to the Nazis. The economist Milton Friedman, whose students had advised the Pinochet regime in Chile, must be a fascist because LaRouche didn’t like his economics, and I coauthored a book with LaRouche in 1978 with that silly allegation.
[...]
In 1978, I did a study for LaRouche of the economics of the narcotics traffic. The numbers I crunched showed that narcotics was a hundred-billion-dollar-a-year business—not a controversial conclusion today, but at the time it seemed startling. LaRouche took my quantitative study and combined it with the paranoid musings of other researchers into a book, Dope, Inc., that had unmistakable anti-Semitic overtones. I knew about this, too, and again I looked the other way.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, LaRouche was doing well, with a pocket publishing empire, a more-or-less accepted scientific front in the Fusion Energy Foundation, and a remarkable capacity to raise money (a good deal of which, it later turned out, was obtained by fraud). Nonetheless, within a few years nearly all his key people had quit. Once they began to engage the real world at a serious level, they broke free of LaRouche’s spell.
[...]
Like so many leftist Jews, I came to believe that only a universal solution to humanity’s problems would solve the problems of the Jews, and the more universal the solution, the less Jewish. In plain English I was afraid to be Jewish: The less Jewish I was, and the more universal, the less likely I would be to be killed for being Jewish.

But are the many who are afraid to be Americans much different?
FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Confessions of a Coward

Everyman/Person: I will go the extra mile with thee like.

HERE BEGINETH A TREATISE HOW THE HIGH FATHER OF HEAVEN SENDETH DEATH TO SUMMON EVERY CREATURE TO COME AND GIVE ACCOUNT OF THEIR LIVES IN THIS WORLD AND IS IN MANNER OF A MORAL PLAY.

Messenger: I pray you all give your audience,

And hear this matter with reverence,

By figure a moral play-

The Summoning of Everyman called it is,

That of our lives and ending shows

How transitory we be all day.

This matter is wonderous precious,

But the intent of it is more gracious,

And sweet to bear away.

The story saith,-Man, in the beginning,

Look well, and take good heed to the ending,

Be you never so gay!

Ye think sin in the beginning full sweet,

Which in the end causeth thy soul to weep,

When the body lieth in clay.

Here shall you see how Fellowship and Jollity,

Both Strength, Pleasure, and Beauty,

Will fade from thee as flower in May.

For ye shall here, how our heavenly king

Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning:

Give audience, and here what he doth say.

Everyman is late-15th-century English morality play. Called by Death, Everyman can persuade none of his friends - Beauty, Kindred, Worldly Goods - to go with him, except Good Deeds.

Characters:


Everyman-------------------------Strength
God: Adonai---------------------Discretion
Death-------------------------------Five-Wits
Messenger-----------------------Beauty
Fellowship------------------------Knowledge
Cousin-----------------------------Confession
Kindred----------------------------Angel
Goods------------------------------Doctor
Good-Deeds---------------------Barak Obama
Fool---------------------------------Bill Moyers
Virgin Weeping----------------- Marian Wright Edelman
Hypocritical Friar--------------- John Thomas
Morality Play Mummer-------Lynne Redgrave
Knight Errant-------------------- John Thomas
Goliard Abbott------------------- Kevin Phillips
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/everyman.html
****


[The Players assemble upon the stage. Let slip the tongues of Scorn:]

Barak Obama: "Our Morality Play begins with a dramatic monologue [truncated] by Dag:

"There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright and one that feared God and eschewed evil...."

Moyers: "The Democratic Party has found out about him, and there is now an investigation underway to determine the role Bush and the oil companies are playing in his unimaginable SUFFERING. There is clear evidence that not only is Job himself suffering but that his family might well have been MURDERED. There seems to be no horror to terrible for the Republican Party to stoop to in their lust for profit, and that matters not who suffers. Barak Obama and Bill Moyers, among others, are looking into this tragedy, and we must insist they continue, regardless of the cost to the nation. It is UNFAIR what has happened to Mr. Job, an undocumented immigrant, and it is beyond evil to see such things happening to Mr. Job without trying to DO SOMETHING about it and to bring the conspirators to JUSTICE in the here and now. What, one must ask, are Christians doing about this OUTRAGE?!

Below we see an attempt by the fascist Rightwing Crusader Zionist conspiracy to smear the GOOD WORKS of Gnostic Christians. Read it and WEEP.

****

By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 27, 2007

Two hundred fifty years ago, Congregationalist pastor Jonathan Edwards, America's premier theological mind of the 18^th century, helped ignite the Great Awakening. That revival, winning thousands of converts, profoundly transformed America in the wake of the American Revolution.

Rev. Edwards' spiritual descendants founded the 1 million member United Church of Christ (UCC), though few share his faith. Today, UCC leftists are trying to kick off a new American revival, with help from Senator Barak Obama, PBS commentator Bill Moyers, Congressman Barney Frank, the Children's Defense Fund's Marian Wright Edelman, and recovering former Republican analyst Kevin Phillips.

"They say your church is dying, and lame, and limp," Moyers told the UCC's General Synod over the weekend. "But it is a small, committed community of people of conscience who can turn this country around."

Forty years ago, the UCC was nearly twice its current size. But its preference for left-wing political action over spiritual renewal has helped make it one of America's fastest imploding denominations. ...

What the UCC lacks in spiritual energy it hopes to compensate for in leftist political zest.

[....]

Obama, who belongs to a UCC congregation in Chicago, commended his denomination for its long history of political "troublemaking" across two centuries, from the Boston Tea Party to the Civil Rights Movement.

"My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I won't be fulfilling God's will unless I go out and do the Lord's work," Obama told the enthusiastic crowd of up to 10,000 at the Hartford Civic Center. The "Lord's work," of course, is the agenda of the secular, political Left.

"We should close Guantanamo Bay and stop tolerating the torture of our enemies. Because it's not who we are. It's not consistent with our traditions of justice and fairness. And it offends our conscience," Obama told applauding UCC'ers. He denounced the Iraq War as "not just a security problem [but] a moral problem." He called for an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an increased minimum wage, and for a universal health care bill.

Obama implored: "God's work must truly be our own." He lamented that faith had been "hijacked" by religious conservatives who had "determined that [their] number one priority was tax cuts for the rich." He could not imagine what Bible they were reading, but he was insistent: "Our problems are moral problems…there's a spiritual dimension to everything we do. Our conscience cannot rest."

At least Obama was politically upbeat, at least compared to the doomsday prophet Bill Moyers, who left his native Southern Baptist church for the more politically conducive UCC. According to the UCC news service, Moyers' speech was "inflamed with passion [and] anger," with at least 36 interruptions of applause, followed by a two-minute standing ovation.

"I have come to say that America's revolutionary heritage – and America's revolutionary spirit – 'life, liberty and the pursuit of justice, through government of, by, and for the people' – is under siege," he warned. "And if churches of conscience don't take the lead in their rescue and revival, we can lose our democracy!"

Moyers regretted that the original author of "life, liberty and the pursuit of justice" was a hypocrite who had had also "stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a slave woman named Sally Hennings. It is no secret." Forget that Thomas Jefferson wrote of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; Moyers believes that where Jefferson failed in moral leadership, the UCC succeeded.

"You have raised a prophetic voice against the militarism, materialism, and racism that chokes America's arteries," Moyers enthused. "It's a mystery to me. Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me'...You have to wonder how this so-called Christian nation leaves so many children to suffer."

"For 30 years," Moyers fumed, "We have witnessed a class war fought from the top down against the idea and ideal of equality. It has been a drive by a radical elite to gain ascendancy over politics and to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that checked the excesses of private power."

For the political and economic nightmare that is America, Moyers faulted "corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a political religion of fundamentalism deeply opposed to any civil and human right that threatens its paternalism, and a series of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us."

Barney Frank was almost tame compared to Moyers' searing critique of America's moral squalor. He admitted that the U.S. economy is growing. "But the average individual has gotten no benefit from it," he insisted. As usual, he pointed to a larger welfare state as the solution. "When we step in together, that's what we call government," he told the UCC'ers.

Former Republican analyst Kevin Phillips, now one of the GOP's "harshest critics," gladdened many UCC hearts with his dark theories from American Theocracy, his 2006 expose of an imaginary, sinister alliance among conservative Christians, oil interests, and neoconservative imperialists. The American empire's overreaching in the Middle East will likely doom the United States as a great power, Phillips reassured his pleased audience.

No less pleasing to the UCC'ers, Children's Defense Fund chief Marian Wright Edelman warbled mournfully about "the children," who she insisted must not become "partisan political fodder." Interrupted by applause 24 times, according to the UCC news service, she then made her usual political demands for a larger welfare state, always to benefit "the children." Edelman inveighed against America's "rampant individual greed," even as she insisted on new multibillion dollar programs.

Trying to sound prophetic, but lacking Edelman's pulpit cadence, UCC president John Thomas spoke of the "disgrace of a broken social contract," of global warming, of "foolish greed," and of the war, with "its deceit, its torture, its demoralizing death and dismemberment, its relentless march toward chaos."

In contrast to the political tirades from Thomas and others, actress Lynn Redgrave, instead of speaking about environmentalism as scheduled, told of seeking out a local UCC congregation near her Connecticut home when recovering from cancer surgery in 2003. The worship service made her "peaceful and optimistic," she recalled. Redgrave concluded her testimony with a reading from the 23^rd Psalm.

Perhaps the UCC might reverse its 40-year decline by giving more of such hope and appealing to the Scriptures. Redgrave's message was received with applause and even tears. But for the UCC leadership, more focused on power than on the Spirit, the sparks and political fulminations against American greed and militarism are far more exciting than quiet appeals to a forgotten Savior who believed in rendering unto Caesar.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28925

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Good greens, you have to wonder what possesses these folks. These people are not Christians in any sense I can recognize as Christian. They are a vile version of Gnostics. If you're a Christian of some real kind rather than a Good Works Gnostic, think about sitting with us at the atrium of Vancouver Canada's Public Library on Thursday this and always from 7-9:00 p.m. for coffee and discussion. We wear blue scarves, some of us donning Israeli flags on our baseball caps. We're hard to miss. Join us.