Tag Archives: Spiritual Warfare

More on the Spiritual Warfare brigade

Just in case you though I was exaggerating when I talked about “spiritual warfare” advocates taking credit for the death of Mother Theresa, read this:

“Our assignment from God was to take down the foundations of The Great Babylon, the harlot over many waters, who supported the false systems of the world. God clearly showed us where we should go for our main prophetic act by revealing a large, brown stone formation, completely surrounded by walls of ice resembling a castle and shaped exactly like an idol of the Queen of Heaven! This seat of the Mother of the Universe was 20,000 feet high, and to get there we had to cross the ice fall, the most dangerous par of the Everest ascent, with no guide but Him and no help from anyone else other than the angels.”

OK, so far it reads like a particularly weird scenario for some RPG, perhaps a twisted version of Mage: The Ascension, or perhaps Call of Cthulhu run from a weirdly fundamentalist perspective. But apparently this was an account of a real “spiritual warfare” mission into the Himalayas.

It then gets a lot darker and more disturbing.

Within two weeks of the expedition, other things happened which I believe are also connected: the huge fire in Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation; an earthquake destroyed the basilica of Assisi, where the Pope had called a meeting of all world religions; a hurricane destroyed the infamous temple ‘Baal-Christ’ in Acapulco, Mexico; Princess Diana died, a representative of the British throne, to which Sir Edmund Hillary dedicated Mount Everest; and Mother Theresa died in India, one of the most famous advocates of Mary as Co-Redeemer.”

This isn’t Christianity. It’s a cross between Voodoo and the Manichean Heresy. And it’s not a fringe cult; they have their tentacles deeply embedded in American politics, and claim huge numbers of followers. Sarah Palin is one of them.

(Thanks to Making Light for the link)

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Absolutely Pigs Bay

You may have heard the phrase “Dagenham East” as in “He’s completely Dagenham East”. Dagenham East is four stops past Barking on the London Underground’s District Line.

But if you stay on the train to Upminster, then change to the parallel London Tilbury and Southend line, you can travel all the way to the seaside resort of Shoeburyness.

But even that’s not quite the end of the line. The tracks continue past the station into the military depot at Pigs Bay. If you go any further you’ll end up in the North Sea.

Pigs Bay is therefore as mad as you can possibly get.

It’s an apt description of the lunatic fringe of America’s religious right. These are sort the people who preach that you will go to Hell if you vote for Barack Obama. They’re also claiming Kenyan witches are casting spells on John McCain to make him look stupid, and ensure the election of Obama, who although he claims to be a Christian, is really a Muslim and therefore a Satanist. You couldn’t make this stuff up. The stuff about so-called ‘spiritual warfare’ has always rather scared me.

As Teresa Niesen-Hayden says in the first linked article

“Spiritual warfare” is a sort of folk thaumaturgy with ambitions to theurgy. If it worked, it would be a branch of black magic. There are “spiritual warfare” adherents out there who publicly take credit for the death of Mother Teresa.

So we have a what amounts to a syncretism of fundamentalism and folk magic which reminds me of a Protestant version of Voodoun, plus a big dollop of conspiracy theory and an unthinking adherence to authoritarian right-wing politics. It makes me think of Baby Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes.

I’d love to think they’re a tiny lunatic fringe, but Sarah Palin seems to be deeply immersed in this subculture. While there’s little chance of McPalin being elected unless the poll is rigged massively, the fact that politicians think they’re a significant enough voting block to have to pander to them is rather frightening.

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