This video isn’t entirely necessary to watch in full, but irritated me as I watched it last night. Bible thumper comes on and says that homosexuality is against the word of God. Elliot Spitzer is very careful, saying things like “I respect your beliefs” but never addressing the obvious: the Bible says that adulterers should be stoned, as should women who have sex before marriage. If the Bible is the word of God, then you are disobeying God by not following these precepts. The problem with fundamentalists is that they are not fundamentalist enough. Crazy as that sounds – if evangelicals were truly forced to live in the world that the Bible dictates, they’d realize what a dystopia it would be. Does God want a dystopia? But Elliot Spitzer never mentions the ludicrous tenets of the Bible – and if stoning a non-virgin is kind of crazy, maybe homosexuality is evil is kind of crazy as well.

Furthermore, very sick of “I respect your beliefs.” Once religion is used to legislate – following religion as if it’s law – it’s no longer a “belief” but a political ideology. Commentators should not have to be so careful, as if religion is a “personal matter.” It’s hardly personal if they’re trying to bring these ideas into government. Religion is used as a shield – “I do not discuss my faith” – even if that faith guides policy. So someone like Michelle Bachmann can get a pass, and won’t be asked what she truly believes. Does she, for example, want the war of Armageddon? This is a valid question – ludicrous to normal people, but she’s a zealot.

Maybe there will be an article – “Does Michelle Bachmann want the war of Armageddon?” with an outline of Left Behind beliefs, but without asking her about it wherever she goes. If she is truly a Left Behind Christian, this a serious concern – in fact, it’s the most serious concern – and “I don’t discuss matters of my faith” is a disaster in the making. The religious test clause is a good one, a person should not have to be religious to serve – but if someone is deeply religious, the press needs to ask exactly what this means. Questions about the founding fathers are nice, but are only a surface reflection of a fundamentalist core.

“We have to realize that, at the end of the day,” Palin warns in the interview, “a nuclear weapon in that country’s hands is not just Israel’s problem or America’s problem — it is the world’s problem. It could lead to an Armageddon. It could lead to that World War III that could decimate so much of this planet.”

Palin’s reference to Armageddon, described in the Bible’s book of Revelation, refers to a final battle between the forces of good and evil over the existence of the state of Israel.

Palin is saying the exact opposite of what she means – attacking Iran would begin the End Times, not stop it from happening. She clearly knows who she’s speaking to.

Lobbying for Armageddon:

At the center of it all is Pastor John Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. While Hagee has long prophesized about the end times, he ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, “Jerusalem Countdown,” in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.

(via)

Basically speaking, Final Events is a study of a think-tank group comprised of personnel from within the U.S. Government, military and intelligence community that has existed in stealth for a surprisingly long time. The group believes that while the UFO issue is a very real one, they do not believe it has anything to do with literal extraterrestrials.

Rather, the group – which calls itself the Collins Elite – concludes that the “aliens” are, in reality, literal demonic entities that are trying to seduce us with a false lure of supposed alien technology, and to – quite literally – steal and farm our souls. The group claim to have discovered evidence that these demonic entities – that seem to utilize a weird combination of advanced technology and archaic rite and ritual – derive a form of “energy sustenance” from the human soul or life force.

In other words, they don’t want to land on the White House lawn and help us, nor do they want to destroy us. Rather, they want to maintain the herd, and upon our physical deaths, extract the human life-force as sustenance. The Collins Elite believes this has been going on since the dawning of civilization and that the ET motif is the latest in a long line of deceptive images they have used, and that in the past have included gods, angels, Jinns, fairies, goblins, etc etc.

I like Christopher Knowles theory at the blog – that the “demon” is not a literal demon, but a “presence” that could crumble the foundation of Christianity. As such, they dig into their beliefs harder, as is the case with the When Prophecy Fails syndrome.

Another interview at Mike Clelland’s blog.

Watched this past weekend. Recommended. It doesn’t poke fun at a bunch of southern-accented Bible thumpers. So it’s not another “Religulous.” This is journalism – like an episode of “Frontline,” sans the narration, i.e. terrifying. What’s effective is that an End Timer could possibly watch this movie and be emboldened. If they can listen to Hagee sermonize that Islam is a religion of warfare – therefore we need to go to war with them – and not see the incongruity, they’re probably not going to see the subtle condemnation of millennialism.

Note: The American Book of the Dead is in part about an American president trying to bring about a Biblical apocalypse. Or: if a male Sarah Palin became president. Even George Bush wasn’t a male Sarah Palin.

So how close are we to an EMP bomb:

According to some reports, the U.S. Navy used experimental non-nuclear E-bombs during the 1991 Gulf War. These bombs utilized warheads that converted the energy of conventional explosives into a pulse of radio energy.

CBS News reported that the U.S. dropped an E-bomb on Iraqi TV during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but this has not been confirmed.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, others also have speculated that the United States military used a Tomahawk Missile with a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse warhead on other Iraqi targets. The evidence of this occurring is that the power went out over Baghdad yet there was no physical damage to the electrical generator plant.

A widely-read article by engineer and defense analyst Carlo Kopp, first published in 1996, stated that suitable materials and tools to create basic non-nuclear electromagnetic weapons are commonly available. In that article, Kopp said, “The threat of electromagnetic bomb proliferation is very real.” Although Kopp’s article mentions nuclear EMP, the article was mostly about non-nuclear EMP weapons.

Then again, maybe advanced UFO technology (if it exists) could actually stop this from happening.

Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming