Doug Giles’s Brother-in-Law Wants Men to Fight Demons

World O’Crap explores Rev Doug Giles’ latest sermon for Townhall, a bizarre exegesis on Adam and the Garden of Eden. Apparently the Garden was a wild place where Adam was hunter, killing antelopes with rocks and living among “giant lizards”; the Fall was his failure to live up to God’s masculine ideals by not mastering the serpent (and he means that literally, lest you are thinking Freudian). As we saw previously, Giles makes a living from a message of Christian masculinity and dominion. But where did he get it from?

Neo-Pentecostal pastor Dutch Sheets recounts the following story of Giles’s early years:

Some dear friends of mine, Mell and Paula Winger, have seen many family members come to Christ as they have faithfully interceded for them through the years. The testimony regarding Paula’s younger brother is especially powerful:

Doug Giles had an extremely ungodly lifestyle and was living in total rebellion. He hated the gospel message and was so repelled by our faith in Christ that he would leave the house when we came for dinner. We began devoting one night each week to pray and fast for Doug’s salvation. We did this weekly for a year and a half, praying that he would be able to see the truth of the gospel, binding the spirit of rebellion that was controlling him and asking God to soften his heart so that he might be drawn to Him. Then, although we were no longer setting aside every Monday night to intercede for him, we continued to pray these and other principles for Doug during the next six years. Finally, one night while attending a Christian concert, he received Christ as his Savior. That was 17 years ago, and today Doug has a powerful evangelistic ministry based out of Miami, Florida.

Giles’s brother-in-law Mell Winger (or “Mel Winger”) has a doctorate from Fuller Theological seminary, where it looks like (based on his theology) he studied under C. Peter Wagner, who promotes an interesting worldview based on constant “Spiritual Warfare” against demons. He is currently district pastor at New Life Church near the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, working under Ted Haggard (see below). Previously, however, he was a pastor at Trinity Church in Lubbock (now run by a follower of Kenneth Hagin) and the director of the Bible Institute of El Shaddai Church in Guatemala City (1).

Winger has an interesting take on Guatemala’s socio-economic problems, clearly based on Wagner’s demonology. Discussing the town of Almolonga:

About 25 years ago, the Church was small and weak, the fields were undeveloped and the city was characterized by an alcohol-induced lethargy – the fruit of serving an idol named Maxirnon.  This perverse idol is associated with the vices of smoking, drinking liquor, and immorality.  Maximon is a 3-foot idol consisting of a clay mask and a wood and cloth body.  He receives the kisses of the faithful who kneel before him.  Placing at his feet bottles of liquor purchased with their meagre earnings, they hope against hope that their offering will bring blessing and healing.  The priest   offers lit cigars to the idol, and taking a mouthful of the liquor offering, spews it over the devotees.  The followers leave expecting a blessing, perhaps receiving a demonic display of power, but nonetheless slipping deeper and deeper into an abyss of oppression.

But following mass conversions, exorcisms and a resurrection from the dead, all is now well, with Godliness and (nod to Max Weber and David Martin) a new work ethic:

This work ethic has produced an economic renewal, an incredible dimension of community transformation throughout Airnolonga.  There is no evidence of the unemployment, the beggars, the drunkards asleep in alleyways, or the loiterers that so often characterize similar places.

Winger, like Giles, sees spiritual warfare in masculine terms: he has a book entitled Fight on Your Knees: Calling Men to Action Through Transforming Prayer. According to the blurb:

For the Christian man the battle rages in unseen realms, and he’s got to wield God’s mighty weapon for warfare. He’s got to pray. Instead of “Stand up and fight,” his war cry must be “Kneel down and pray!” He understands that spiritual battles require godly tactics. He wrestles until he wins the war.

Fight on Your Knees inspires and equips men like you to pray for families, churches, cities, and nations—and to guard and strengthen yourself against the enemy’s onslaughts. This book compiles writings by fourteen men of various ethnic and professional backgrounds, Christian leaders such as Bill McCartney, Steve Shanklin, Ted Haggard, Dutch Sheets, and Dale Schlafer. Their words will challenge and encourage you to enlist in the growing army of intercessors. God is calling men to war through prayer, and you can join them. You can fight on your knees and win.

Winger also promotes the idea of the “prayer shield“, and headlines Exodus 15:3: “The Lord is a man of War: The Lord is his name”.

Winger’s boss Ted Haggard is head of the National Association of Evangelicals, where his promotion of Wagner and other Charismatic and neo-Pentecostal figures has annoyed the “sola scriptura” fundamentalists. It seems that C. Peter Wagner is as popular as ever, with a huge influence on the new generation of conservative Christian leaders. Winger has developed these ideas to emphasise the importance of masculinity, and this masculine posturing appears to provide the only idea that his brother-in-law Giles has any use for.

******

(1) El Shaddai was set up by a pastor close to TL Osborn, and has had links with members of the global neo-Pentecostal “A-List”, such as the Korean Pastor Formerly Known as Paul Yonggi Cho (now David) and (the late) Nigerian Benson Idahosa. Serrano Elías, Guatemalan president from 1991-93, was a member.

Gulliksen: Vineyard a “Clanging Cymbal”

ASSIST carries an interview with Kenn Gulliksen, the founder of the Vineyard neo-Pentecostal churches who is now best known (and so described in the headline) as “Bob Dylan’s former pastor”. Gulliksen provides an interesting perspective not just on Dylan, but also on John Wimber and the whole religious scene of which he has been a part.

Gulliksen started out in the 60s under Chuck Smith, a former Foursquare Gospel Pentecostal pastor who decided to use a more casual style to attract the hippies of Costa Mesa into his Calvary Chapel. Here Christian pop music and Biblical conservatism (Smith writes sub-Hal Lindsey works with titles like The Last Days) was a successful formula, and in 1974 Gulliksen started his own branch in Los Angeles. As this developed more emphasis on “signs of the spirit” it changed its name to “Vineyard” and a number of other Calvary offshoots elected to join this new grouping.

However, rather than becoming the leader, Gulliksen handed control over to another pastor, John Wimber. Wimber’s “power evangelism”, along with his friend C. Peter Wagner’s teachings on demons (which I think quite likely inspired General Boykin), was particularly popular in the 1980s, especially among Charismatic Anglican churches in the UK. The popular Alpha course that began in the UK promoted several Wimber books and followed his advice that exposure to Charismatic phenomena would bring about conversions; the “Toronto Blessing” began in a Vineyard Church (although it was eventually asked to leave the group).

But as Gulliksen now reveals to ASSIST:

I personally regretted giving John [Wimber] the Vineyard – lock, stock and barrel…I think I abdicated my role which was to be more of a balancing to John. I didn’t seek co-leadership, but I should have remained more involved with an emphasis on the Word and love because the emphasis was then on ‘Power’ and, of course, power without love is a clanging cymbal and I think that the Vineyard became a clanging cymbal for a while.

That will please critics of Wimber; his sincerity and probity were never in doubt, but his extravagant claims for supernatural encounters evoked scepticism and some (in particular Martyn Percy, although disputed by Mark Stibbe) detected authoritarianism lurking behind the avuncular visage and self-deprecating style. Wimber’s stock has also fallen since his death from a fall and a brain haemorrhage in 1997 following battles with “cancer, a stroke, and heart disease”, after vigorously promoting the idea that disease is caused by demons that Christians could cast out; references to Wimber have largely disappeared from Alpha materials.

Gulliksen also discusses his own problems, including a separation from his wife, albeit somewhat cryptically. On the Dylan issue, Gulliksen previously told ASSIST that

Dylan has never renounced his faith in Jesus Christ and that “God is not through with him yet.”

Further, Dylan’s Christian concerts were prophetic, “which was why Satan trashed him.”

Meanwhile, Dylan’s religious history is currently under investigation by Jewsweek, which has so far published three parts (1, 2, 3) of a four part series on the subject.

Soldiers Convert to Islam Before Iraq Tour of Duty

The Tehran Times provides a nice “not a lot of people know that” piece with news that there are apparently 35,000 South Korean Muslims (plus 70,000 Muslims of foreign nationality in South Korea). Apparently Turkish soldiers introduced the religion during the Korean War (although there were previously mosques in the Koryo period of 918-1392, according to a Korea Times report posted here). The Tehran Times further reports that 37 South Korean soldiers have decided to convert to Islam as a prelude to being stationed in Iraq – a somewhat greater commitment to fitting in than the Japanese strategy of growing moustaches.

South Korean Muslim soldiers will be interesting contrast to the South Korean Christian missionaries currently descending on the region. A rather anonymous Korean website gives more information (in English) on Islam in South Korea – although its anti-occupation stance seems rather at odds with the idea of South Korean soldiers in Iraq. Much of the general information on (and apologetics for) Islam on this site is pulled from various other sites, and includes at least one essay by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahab, the eighteenth-century Islamic “Puritan” whose ideology is the official understanding of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Overall, however, the site seems fairly moderate. Other material has been lifted (uncredited) from Muslim Answers, a Florida-based organisation that promotes essays by an American convert, Abu Iman Robert Squires (who has left various religions over the years, including Islam, but has now apparently returned to the faith), and others. Squires’ material pops up on various English-language Islamic websites – he seems to be a conservative Sunni, but not an Islamist.

More on Pinckney’s Inspirations

Education Week carries a piece on TC Pinkney, with photos and a bit more biographical information. Pinckney is a former Southern Baptist vice-President, and, as has been widely reported, he has put forward a resolution for the next Southern Baptist convention that members remove their children from public schools. The main reason given is the “acceptance” of homosexuality in public schools, although the teaching of science that contradicts the Bible is another of Pinckney’s worries.

Over the past few days this blog has chased up several references to find out where Pinckney is coming from, and has unearthed several interesting characters: Dan Smithwick, who runs an organisation which allows you find out if your children have been educated into socialism by means of a test; Marshall Fritz, a Catholic libertarian who sees all public education as socialistic and Soviet; and Ray E. Moore of Exodus Mandate. Today I note another of Pinckney’s fellow travellers, whose book Is Public Education Necessary? Pinckney is photographed reading in the Education Week report: Samuel L Blumenfled.

Blumenfled is quite a polymath. Although an ex-publisher (with an honorary PhD from Bob Jones), his main area is child education, where he (quite sensibly, I’ll concede) promotes phonic reading and rails against the use of Ritalin. However, as his essays on WorldNetDaily and elsewhere show, he has other area of expertise, including understanding the Middle East (Palestinians are Nazis and the parents of suicide bombers should be executed), and psychoanalysis (On Al Gore: “His body language reflected excessive anxiety about his ability to win the debate. His sychopathic behavior indicates that he does suffer from a mental disorder.”). Plus, he has a deep knowledge of the history of higher education, uncovering the conspiracies against Christianity emanating from there – ranging from the influence of Unitarians and humanists through to two (at least) secret societies. First, the Skull and Bones:

Most interesting of all is how The Order has managed to gain control of American education. Three members of The Order were responsible for this development: Timothy Dwight (1849), professor at Yale Divinity School and later 12th president of Yale; Daniel Coit Gilman (1852), first president of the University of California, first president of Johns Hopkins University, and first president of the Carnegie Institution; and Andrew Dickson White (1853), first president of Cornell and first president of the American Historical Association. All three also studied philosophy at the University of Berlin.

Second, the Rhodes Scholarships:

[Rhodes’s] network was the outgrowth of the secret society created by British diamond king Cecil Rhodes to carry out his fantasy of an Anglo-American federation that would form the core of a future world government, strong enough to impose peace on the rest of the world. Do we have proof that Cecil Rhodes created such a secret society and set up the Rhodes Scholarships as a means of recruiting future world leaders to his cause? Yes, we have proof. We have nothing less than the New York Times of April 9, 1902, which carried a front page story about a “Wealthy Secret Society” that would “Work to Secure the World’s Peace and a British-American Federation.”

Like Marshall Fritz, Blumenfeld also had links with the late theocrat Rousas Rushdoony (Gary North’s father-in-law, by the way). In a memorial piece, Blumenfeld recalls that:

For years [Rushdoony] had strongly urged Christian parents to take their children out of the public schools and home school them or place them in good Christian schools. He was a champion of educational freedom because he knew that religious freedom could not exist without it. In his book, “The Messianic Character of American Education,” first published in 1963, he recognized that the war between humanism and Christianity was a struggle unto death, and that the humanist control of the public schools gave the enemies of Christianity a decided advantage over believers.

My book, “NEA: Trojan Horse in Education,” covered much of the same territory as did Rushdoony’s book, but from a different angle. Therefore, we were in concert on all matters pertaining to education, home schooling, the need to get government out of education.

Rushdoony as a champion of “religious freedom” is a bit hard to take, but there are some interesting questions here: just to what extent is Christian Reconstructionism making inroads into the Southern Baptists and other conservative Christian denomiations? With the Left Behind books as bestsellers, one would have thought that “Rapture Ready” premillennialism was flavour of the month. Yet it would seem that the ideas of postmillennialists, who see Christ returning after Christians take dominion of society, are also gaining currency. Is there a blending of the two positions? Have recent events made some Christians more optimistic that they can take control, so making premillennialism less popular?

The South Will Rise Again

Several bloggers (World O’Crap, The Dark Window) are making scoffing sounds at a report in WorldNetDaily that a plan is afoot to get South Carolina to secede from the Union and establish itself as an independent, Christian nation. The idea is the brainchild of Cory Burnell, who, on his ChristianExodus.org website explains the problem:

It is evident that our Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system. The efforts of Christian activism have proven futile over the past five decades and, whereas desperate times require desperate measures, we are now in the most desperate of times. The federal government is considering whether marriage, the foundation of civilization since Creation, should be reserved solely to a man and a woman. Christians must now draw a line in the sand and unite in a sovereign state to dissolve our bond with the current union comprised as the United States of America.

His organisation is (he claims) assisting the move of 50,000 Christians out of other states to facilitate a vote for succession. However, what the report doesn’t note is that this is just a revamp (relaunch?) of Burnell’s Confederate States of America Project. Burrnell explained the reason for the CSAP on Dixie Internet.com earlier this year (emphases in original):

First, our enemy is NOT a tyrannical federal government, but rather the socialist populace that demands its existence…the citizenry of these United States shackle our chains to us by demanding pork-barrel legislation and continuously sending socialists to Congress who’ll ignore the Constitutional limits on their power…We should gather thousands of like-minded Constitutionalists, Christians and Southerners – our people dispersed among the enemy in all 50 states – and relocate to our target state.

For further information, Burnell points us to Ron Holland’s Dixie Daily News. Holland is most enthusiastic of Burrell’s plan, as he is also, unsurprisingly, of Christian Reconstructionist and theocrat Gary North. Holland and North run a website called SwissGnomes.com: “A Daily updated, pro-freedom news portal for high net worth individuals around the world providing unique comment and expertise on financial and economic topics plus reports on international lifestyles, travel and offshore opportunities.” (North was a major figure in the late 1990s Y2K hysteria, so he’s really someone with a good record on financial advice) Holland also writes paleo-con type isolationist and anti-war essays, where he makes odd statements about how Winston Churchill was helped out of post-1929 poverty by a famous broker called Bernard Baruch (what can he be suggesting, I wonder?).

Burnell is a member of the Texas Constitution Party, which sees as its second most important duty, after ending abortion, as dealing with AIDS as a criminal issue, and he holds a position in the Texas League of the South, which lists among the hate groups it will have nothing to do with the Aryan Nations, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP.

Libertarian Theocrats?

TC Pinckney and Bruce Shortt’s proposal that Southern Baptists remove their children from public schools is, I’ve just discovered, only part of the plan: if Pinckney has his way, there won’t be any public schools to send children to anyway. As noted by Joe Rodgers in a long essay from a while back (undated, maybe 2002?):

approximately 15,000 [latest figure 25508] have gone so far as to sign a Public Proclamation for the Separation of School and State that calls for the end of government involvement in education. Scores of religious leaders, including [James] Kennedy, Pinckney, and [Tim] LaHaye, have endorsed this concept.

Rodgers’ link to the Alliance for the Separation of School and State, run by Christian libertarian Marshall Fritz from California, is broken, but it’s easy enough to get to. VIP Signers to the Proclamation also include Joseph Farah, (the late) Rousas Rushdoony, Gary North, and a number of other religious figures (including Mormons and a couple of Muslims).

The Alliance argues that

for over a century, American school leaders have more and more focused on “career skills” and for over a half-century, on “life adjustment” or “social skills” as the ultimate goal for their students.

This is dishonest. Schools implicitly tell students a lie: Mere professional and social success can bring satisfaction.

Well, I went to a state school in UK so I can’t judge – although if the above is really the whole picture, one wonders why the Christian conservatives are so worried about American schools teaching liberal values and non-theologically approved science, both of which would surely be squeezed out by a purely utilitarian education. So, should schools perhaps backtrack to what they were like in the good old days of a broad education? No:

By definition, public schools are in the “public” sphere, and are thus subject to political winds — just like your City Hall, your state’s legislature, and Congress.

Besides, the very idea is socialistic, like Soviet farms. The problem that results is that:

A teacher who has children of different beliefs in her classroom can’t honestly share her own beliefs on the Big Questions because that would seriously undermine some of the parents.

The Alliance argues that everyone will benefit:

From Baptist to Buddhist, from Catholic to Calvinist, from Montessori to Muslim, from Progressive to Classical, from Child-centered to Direct Instruction, from Phonics to Whole Language, from sports to arts, and more, parents will choose schools where teachers support their values.

These new private schools will have to be good to stay in business, and “by blending campus-, cooperative-, home-, and self-schooling, education in urban centers will be cheaper to run.” Private accreditation services will ensure “stated objectives” (i.e. stated by the school) are met. A huge tax cut and scholarships will provide the money for tuition fees. In interview, Fritz adds that some on the religious right have complained, but:

I would not have government intervene if a private school was teaching that homosexuality is morally equivalent to heterosexuality, just as I would not approve intervention if that school was teaching that God does not exist and that man is morally autonomous. That would make government the arbiter of Truth, a role it has already wrongly claimed in our present government schools. We cannot count on the government having a proper understanding of Truth. I would allow intervention if a school were advocating direct violence against others. In my mind, this would give government the impetus to exercise its proper role of “punishing the evil doer.”

So why are theocrats like Gary North, who would have homosexuals and non-believers executed, supporting Fritz’s movement? Are they confident that in a free market secular schools will go bust, leaving them in charge by default? Or that a period of separationism would be a stepping stone to their “dominion” over society? In fact, it seems that the likes of Pinckney and North will support any movement that seeks to undermine public education. Katherine Yurica notes that North advocates conservative Christians getting on school boards in order to strangle funding for public schools.

She also points out that the end of public education is already part of the Republican Party of Texas’s platform. The party has also called for “the abolition of the state’s regulatory authority by eliminating the Texas Education Agency and demanded that all power should reside with the local board of education.”

UPDATE (24 May): More libertarian theocracy today.

UPDATE 2 (27 May): More on Pinckney’s associates today.

Memo of Christian Zionist White House Meeting Surfaces

The Village Voice carries a piece on Pastor Robert G Upton and the Christian Zionist Apostolic Congress, who were the subject of this blog a couple of weeks ago. According to the report, the Voice has picked up a confidential memo signed by Upton in which he describes a meeting between a delegation from the Congress and White House staff, including National Security Council Middle East director Elliot Abrams. Three weeks before Bush’s recent endorsement of Ariel Sharon’s latest plan, Abrams told the group that (quoting the memo itself):

the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph’s tomb or Rachel’s tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace.

The Voice spoke to National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones to confirm:

When asked whose job it is in the administration to study the Bible to discern what parts of Israel were or weren’t acceptable sacrifices for peace, Jones said that his [i.e. Abrams’s] previous statements had been off-the-record.

White House political director Matt Schlapp, who was also at the meeting, is reported as having stated (again from the memo directly) “that the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level” in relation to gay marriage, and Tim Goeglein, White House deputy director of public liaison, asked the group to “Pray, pray, pray, pray.”

The Voice also obtained a report that showed that Apostolic Congress representative Kim Johnson was undertaking illegal missionary work in Israel, and that Johnson believed herself to be under spiritual attack after coming near to a Harry Potter book.

Abrams (best remembered as an Iran-Contra conspirator and perjurer) is a religious Jew, so we can be confident that his Biblical reference point is his genuine perspective rather than just a sop to some Christians. The Voice treads familiar ground with the “Christian Zionist/Israeli alliance” angle, but declines to mention another interesting aspect to the story: Upton and friends are anti-Trinitarian Oneness Pentecostals, while most Christians see the Trinity as non-negotiable. Yet Upton is able to work alongside the likes of Ed McEteer without any controversy.

The Voice also fails to note that a previous Congress delegation met with Karl Rove last year, after which it was reported that:

Pastor Upton…posed questions about the war with Iraq. Due to the nature of Mr. Rove’s answers, we cannot write his answers to all these questions.

Is Your Child A Socialist?

Yesterday I noted that the proposal “encouraging” Southern Baptists to take their children out of public school had cited studies by the Nehemiah Institute, run by Dan Smithwick. Today I’ve been able to look at the Institute’s website; and sure enough, there’s Smithwick with E. Ray Moore, the retired military man whose Exodus Mandate promotes TC Pinckney and Bruce Shortt’s proposal.

The main work of the Institute is the PEERS test. PEERS stands for “Politics (civil government), Economics, Education, Religion, and Social Issues”, and by asking test takers (e.g. the children of worried Christian parents) various questions the Institute can determine whether the taker subscribes to one of four possible “worldviews”:

Biblical Theism
Moderate Christian
Secular Humanism

or – dread horror of horror:

Socialism!

To these four worldviews is applied a score:

Biblical Theism worldview- 70 – 100
Moderate Christian worldview- 30-69
Secular Humanist worldview- 0-29
Socialist worldview- less than 0

Smithwick has alarming news: “Results from seniors in high school have ranged from -59.43 to +100.00. The average was 33.34”. So perhaps Walt Brown won’t be in White House just this autumn, but if the sinister forces behind public education have their way Socialism will soon prevail, with all the Columbine-style school shootings that malignant system of philosophy involves (see my previous post if that sounds weird).

The site offers you a chance to do a mini PEERS test over the internet, and consists of twenty statements you are invited to agree with or not, along these lines:

Individuals should be allowed to conduct life as they choose as long as it does not interfere with the lives of others.

and:

Just as a minimum wage law helps poor people earn a fair income, a maximum wage law would benefit all citizens by using the abundance of money exceeding the maximum wage amount to finance programs beneficial to all (e.g., education, health care, etc.)

PEERS can “help individuals and organizations identify key areas where their views of life are contrary to Biblical reasoning.” Just think – you may be an agent of Goldstein and not even know it! Now you can find out and repent.

(NB: I’ve had trouble getting on to the Nehemiah site, but much of it is mirrored here, including the mini test. And the Nehemiah Institute School in San Antonio is a public school that appears to be unrelated to our organisation – I had a bit of a wild goose chase there)

We Don’t Need No Anti-Theistic Education

As is widely reported, the Southern Baptists are currently pondering this resolution, put forward by T.C. Pinckney (Brig General USAF retired) and Houston Attorney Bruce Shortt:

that the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention encourages all officers and members of the Southern Baptist Convention and the churches associated with it to remove their children from the government schools and see to it that they receive a thoroughly Christian education, for the glory of God, the good of Christ’s church, and the strength of their own commitment to Jesus

The problem as they see it is that too many teenagers are dropping out of church, and they cite a study by the Nehemiah Institute which shows that “student attitudes and beliefs that acceptance of a secular humanist worldview by Christian children attending government schools has increased dramatically over the last fifteen years”.

The Nehemiah Institute’s website is currently down, but one of its studies is available from this Creationist website. Here Institute President Dan Smithwick (who has links to Christian Reconstructionism) tackles the subject of violence in schools. Could school shootings have something to do with gun laws and unhealthy weapon fetishism? Naah…

We find violent actions as a result of God bringing judgment upon disobedient people who failed to heed His warnings…”I sent a plague among you after the manner of Egypt; I slew your young men by the sword along with your captured horses, And I made the stench of your camp rise up in your nostrils; Yet you have not returned to Me,”(Amos 4:9)…Is God using violence in our public schools to get our attention? Have we so disobeyed God and spurned His warnings of idolatry such that all there is left for Him to do is bring violence upon our children’s lives to see where we have missed the mark? I believe so…The schools in America were once Bible-based, openly Christian, and under local control…For most schools the biggest discipline problem was chewing gum in class. All of this began to change 150 years ago through the efforts of two key men- Horace Mann and John Dewey.

With Dewey and Mann running education, it was only a matter of time before children would begin to think it was OK to blow away their classmates with guns, but with, err…a wrathful God egging them on.

In a 2001 article on Exodus Mandate (run by another military man), Pinckney delves further into the anti-theistic conspiracy, involving “wealthy Unitarians in Boston”, Auguste Comte and humanists:

And the American Humanist Association understands the importance of capturing the children for they have written: “In order to capture this nation, one has to totally remove moral and spiritual values and absolutes from the thinking of the child. The child has to think that there is no standard of right and wrong, that truth is relative, and that diversity is the only absolute to be gained.”

(Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us where this was written or in what context, and the only references to it that come up on the web are from sites much like his.)

But will his Christian schools be biased? No:

Note that they should also teach about evolution, about humanism, about post-modernism…but in a balanced way, giving the evolutionists’ arguments fully and fairly, but also demonstrating their weaknesses, the mythological presuppositions upon which these lies are based, and the disastrous consequences for those who choose to live without God. Our children must be prepared to live among, confront when necessary, and triumph in debate with secularists. This is one area where ignorance is NOT bliss.

UPDATE (19 May): See today’s post.

UPDATE 2 (23 May): More again!

Snot Funny

Folllowing the furore over Buddha bikinis (see Ryan’s Lair) come complaints about a sweet (“candy” for US readers) sold in Nara near the huge bronze Daibutsu (Great Buddha statue) in the Todai-ji Temple:

Priests at one of Japan’s most famous temples have taken steps to block the sale of a sweet marketed as the “Snot from the nose of the Great Buddha”.

They have prevented the name being registered as a trademark at the patent office, but have been unable to stop vendors selling the sweets to hordes of tourists…Local media have suggested that the sweet is popular because the people of western Japan have an earthy sense of humour, which other Japanese often find coarse. Another famous Nara sweet is called “Deer Droppings”.

As it happens, I currently live in Japan and I was there just recently, and I must say that the temple’s case is slightly undermined by its brisk trade in Buddha keyrings and such. The shops nearby also sell these furry glove puppet Buddhas:

furry-buddha-from-nara