James Lileks has another inspired Fisking of an article by Bill Moyers on why Christians are destroying the planet so they can create the Rapture.
Which makes me wonder, if someone said the same thing about Jews, the ADL would be all over them with cries of anti-Semitism (and rightly so). If they said it about Muslims, James Zogby and CAIR would be demanding public apologies. But paint Christians with a broad and completely idiotic brush, and you’re treated like a wise man. Instead, we get Moyers and the French nutjob Georges Monbiot making up their own straw-man version of Christianity and treating the Left Behind series as some kind of whacko Gospel. While there are plenty of nutjob Christian fundamentalists out there, the argument that everyone with any semblence of public religiosity is part of their number is bigotry pure and simple.
Moyers and his ilk have absolutely no understanding of mainstream or evangelical Christianity, neither of which resembles his crude straw man. Moyer’s snake oil only cements the idea that there is an ideology in this country that is filled with an anti-Christian bigotry, and that ideology has found a home in the political left in this country.
UPDATE: Dave Kopel finds that Moyers can’t even get his basic facts straight.
Moyers is an ordained minister from Oklahoma. I think he knows more than you do about “mainstream or evangelical Christianity.” But then that wouldn’t be too difficult. Even in relatively secular Southern Minnesota, I’ve interviewed several people who randomly ask me if “I’ve been reading the ‘Left Behind’ series,” as a way of instantly determining my post-Rapture fate. It is you that has no clue about how radical the Republican party’s fundamentalist majority is. And why should you? These savages are enabling your wing of the GOP to get exactly what it wants, so why concern yourself with the details of their actual agenda when they provide such nice piggybacks. Ignorance is clearly bliss at your end.
Part of the beauty of being a Christian is that whackjobs like Moyers cannot touch you.
The comment by Mark is just more proof that there remains a vast need for more Christian love in this world…
Mark says “Moyers is an ordained minister from Oklahoma. I think he knows more than you do about “mainstream or evangelical Christianity”” and then he asserts “It is you that has no clue about how radical the Republican party’s fundamentalist majority is.”
Well, that’s just steller debating society argument now isn’t it. The comeback, the logic he can understand, “Jay Reding is a Republican. I think he knows more than you do about “how radical the Republican party” is.
What a dimwitted troll. Can’t they dispatch their smarter liberals for these trolling sorties?
Winston, my argument was pretty a basic example of logical consistency, but allow me to rephrase it to see if I can put it in terms even you may be able to understand. Moyers is an ordained minister. Jay Reding is not. This negates Reding’s ignorant claim that Moyers has “absolutely no understanding of mainstream or evangelical Christianity” and it’s implication that Reding is in a better position to educate us about Christianity than is Moyers. Are you following so far Winston….or should I enunciate my words?
Now, we’ve already established that Reding is a less credible source on explaining Christianity to us than the man whose Op/Ed piece he is disparaging as ignorant. With that in mind, let’s take our crayons and connect dot A with dot B of my argument. Reding distances himself from religious conservatives and has proclaimed himself an irreverent “South Park Republican” who primarily embraces the party because it’s joined at the hip with the old-school Chamber of Commerce robber barons and supply-side ideologues….the traditional GOP base. The evangelical Christians who represented 52% of Bush voters in 2004 are clearly not a part of Jay Reding’s circle of GOP contacts otherwise he wouldn’t be attempting to marginalize the influence of radical Christianity on American culture and politics…nor would he have made an absolute ass of himself by saying that an ordained minister like Bill Moyers has “absolutely no understanding of mainstream or evangelical Christianity.”
Now, was that so hard to follow? Perhaps if you consumed more actual political debate rather than exclusively reading and writing the one-sided views of small-minded conservative propagandists, my retorts wouldn’t prove so agonizingly complex for you to decipher.
Thanks for the explanation Mark. I should have attempted a different approach to point out the sillines of your “you don’t know anything” so you can’t criticize Moyers argument. I trust that you would take any ordained ministers view of Christianity as superior to your own or to Jay’s. Pat Robertson, for example. Reggie White – if he were still alive. Jerry Falwell. As ordained ministers they must know much more about evangelical Christianity than any of us, eh?
Or is your problem with Jay semantic? Don’t like his broad hyperbolic dismissal of Moyers’ idiocy? If that’s the case, then you don’t care much about the issue either, just silly debating points.
So, here’s where your little logic falls apart. I’m a Republican. I know evangelical Christians in the party, and those who aren’t. Neither you nor Moyers are Republicans. Therefore, you cannot assert that I am incorrect or “don’t know what I’m talking about”. Fine debating point. You probably argue that I can’t support military action if I haven’t been in the military too.
winston, only now are reduced to framing this argument in narrow semantic confines. Even though I reserve the right to disagree with Pat Robertson, Reggie White and Jerry Falwell, I would never claim my knowledge of Christianity to be superior than theirs….or say that they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about when referring to Christian doctrine. My guess is that Jay Reding wouldn’t have made a fool of himself by saying that about Moyers had Reding actually known Moyers was an ordained Baptist minister. If Jay wants to disagree with Moyers’ statement, that’s his business. But when he attempts to discredit a messenger far more knowledgable about the matter than he is, as opposed to merely discrediting the message, I’m gonna call him on it.
The same is true with the military. I may disagree with the military’s current foreign policy initiatives, but I would never claim that I’m more in the know about military matters than those wearing the uniforms.
I read Mona Charen’s article about Moyers today in my Sunday paper and decided to see what else I could find on Moyers and this subject. Mr. Moyers is 5 years older than I, and we lived for a time in the same town where I was born, Marshall, Texas. We may have even attended First Baptist Church in Marshall at the same time. I don’t personally know him, but some of my family did. Two of my family members worked for the News Messenger, one as editor. I moved from there when I was 7 but visited in the summers.
To realize that Mr. Moyers is an ordained minister and a graduate of Southwestern Bapist Seminary is surprising to me. He must not have paid close attention to his Biblical studies, because the rapture is mentioned there as is the 7 years of tribulation after it. But what really is galling to me is to say that we born again Christians, Evangelicals, etc. WANT TO RUIN the environment to hasten the rapture. Utter nonsense. I do believe in the rapture of believers. But in no way do I believer or know of ANY Christian who would deliberately want war with Iraq or the ruination of our environment thinking that it would bring on the rapture. We are supposed to be stewards of everything. And the rapture and armageddon will occur in God’s own time, not by anything that we as Christians can bring about.
CAIR, you know what will happen to muslims that work for organizations like CAIR after the next big attack
against America by muslims, you will be rounded-up and put in concentrations camps the way the Germans and
Japanese were in America during WWII (and the way Jews were in Germany) There is talk of it now, wait and see.
You will be sent out west, you will eat internal organs from cows, pigs,and chickens, they will be mixed together
to make hotdogs and lunchmeat. You will eat it or starve to death. You will wish you never heard of islamm.
Bring it ON!! 🙂
Islamism and the old defeated and failed ideology of pan-Arabism is what many Islamic groups in America are advocating. They are silent in the face of Muslim poverty, corruption, neglect of human rights, oppression of women, honor killings and the brutal and unusual punishments such as cutting off limbs, flogging and stoning. They are not using American freedoms as an opportunity to change their countries of origin, but as an opportunity to influence and change America to be like the countries they came from.”