Yes, 99...... 2

Ack wrote:Thank you Dan.

Rightly so.

And God's Kingdom is all about the best possible timing of the Personal Merging of the BPWH and the SWH.

How do you like them Apples?

Do I go the the head of the class?

How small is the Small World?

No one would believe me even if I told them I think.

However, let it be said that the Small world is necesarily a personal world.

Let's just say that if God were not a people person I probably wouldn't be here.

smelly wrote:
Muppetz say God...and act like they know IT...LIKE U!!

99 wrote:There are intelligences that work through the "unconscious" and technology smelly and someday you will encounter them if you haven't already.

U wrote:

smelly wrote:
Muppetz say God...and act like they know IT...LIKE U!!

I am IT puck boi, whatchu think this is?

(youtube]rHhf9ai3Tyw[/youtube)
(a Batman video, link edited by dan - I usually only allow Eric to use video displays on this thread, sorry, in fact, side conversations really s/b elsewhere)

dan wrote:We can discuss the best possible God.........

It might be no God, but I doubt it.  

For too many of us, the only purpose of God is to vanquish our enemies.  

The purpose of God is rather to manifest our higher selves........ principally by working with the forces for social justice.  

.

Fascist forces in the West are not the only ones that find a kindred spirit in Bannon. Bannon's mortal enemy, Islamist extremists, share Bannon's eschatological, clash-of-civilizations worldview. In fact, al-Qaeda identifies so much with Bannon's ideas, it put him on the front page of an affiliated newspaper, al-Masra.

Studies show that white evangelicals are much more likely than other Americans to believe that Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy. Known as Christian Zionists, they believe God promised the land to the Jews, and that the gathering of Jews in Israel is foretold in the prophecy of the rapture — the ascent of Christians into the kingdom of God.

Armageddon? Bring It On: The Evangelical Force Behind Trump's Jerusalem Speech
The U.S. evangelical community is in raptures over Trump's decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, believing it moves the world closer to Armageddon

Trump's Jerusalem Syndrome: Whose End of Days Messiah Does He Think He Is?
The president just gave Jerusalem to the Evangelicals for Christmas, as a capital of their very own. After all, who else but Trump could make the Apocalypse great again

(Spoiler alert: It involves stuff like “saecula,” “Heroes,” “Nomads,” “Grey Champions” and other such “Game of Thrones”-ish esoterica. Exciting!) So you’d think that Bannon might actually relish the notion that he and Baghdadi are on some sort of eschatological collision course. ....

Hmmm. You know, I might quibble a little with this. It’s true that Bannon has not “declared a caliphate,” but he has called for something of a crusade ― for example, telling a 2014 Vatican City conference that the West is “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism” and urging his audience to take up that fight. “It’s war. It’s war,” he said in 2015. “Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.” ....

So there’s a certain willful obtuseness in Carlson’s approach. The USA Today editorial, obviously, does not attempt to demonstrate that Bannon and Baghdadi are literally alike. It merely observes that they are two sides of the same coin ― opposed to one another in certain ideological particulars, but gripped by the same accelerationist, apocalyptic instincts. (See also: “[Vladimir Lenin] wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”) ....

Carlson contended that Bannon’s comments about global war were metaphoric in nature ― which, for the time being, is true: Steve Bannon has not literally committed the atrocities that Baghdadi has authored in the Islamic State’s despotic slice of the world.

But hey, the presidential term is young! 

But much has changed in the past decade. In fact, Moss and Sharlet’s documentary, which devotes the bulk of its coverage to developments in “The Family” after 2010, is quite timely. The Christian right has found renewed energy since President Trump’s election. Christian nationalism, the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and needs to return to its religious roots, is on the rise. Many pundits and scholars wonder whether the evangelical movement can be separated from the agenda of the Republican Party.

It’s time to examine Sharlet’s work (and now Moss’ work) with fresh eyes, and for this reason alone, “The Family” is must viewing.

Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian-born evangelical, founded the Family (its original name was the International Christian Leadership Group) in 1935 to provide a space for men with power in his adopted hometown of Seattle to meet regularly for prayer and Bible study

As Sharlet notes in “The Family,” and Princeton historian Kevin Kruse has argued in his book, “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,” Vereide’s organization had more than just a spiritual agenda. He merged evangelical Christianity with corporate capitalism to defeat what he believed to be the socialist leanings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Family emerged at a time of labor unrest in Seattle, and Vereide used his fellowship of Christian businessmen to crush the city’s growing workers movement.

Sharlet first learned about the Family when he was invited to live at Ivanwald, a house in Arlington, Va. Young men, preparing for future leadership in the movement, resided there in spiritual community and spent time serving the needs of the Family’s leadership and international dignitaries who met at a nearby mansion known as the Cedars. Episode 1 of “The Family” dramatizes Sharlet’s experience at Ivanwald. ....

Moss and Sharlet seem to be interested only in this darker side of Coe. They concentrate on the Family’s numerous efforts to blur, or in some cases, cross the line between church and state. This is especially the case in the episodes dealing with the Family’s influence outside the United States. “The Family” documents several incidents in which Coe’s organization funded the travel of sitting members of Congress to meet with autocratic world leaders for the purpose of sharing the message of Jesus. While such meetings are not problematic in and of themselves, the documentary points out that these ambassadors for Christ rarely condemn, or in some cases simply ignore, the human rights violations of these leaders.

Moreover, world leaders often perceive these delegations as U.S. envoys. Sharlet puts it well when he says that Coe and the congressional members of the Family meet with world leaders “as representatives of the most powerful government in the world,” but when they arrive, they claim that they “are just talking about my Jesus.” Some of these congressmen have even advanced the religious agenda of the Family while serving on official government trips funding by taxpayers, and at least one spent time in prison for laundering money through the Family.

Indeed, “The Family” makes a convincing case that many of Coe’s followers are crusading Christian nationalists who use fearmongering tactics and political influence to spread a false gospel that equates Christianity with worldly power.

Many viewers will inevitably equate the Family with American evangelicalism. And who would blame them if they did? Some of the Family’s most troublesome practices reflect an approach to religion and politics that led 80 percent of American evangelicals to vote for Trump in 2016. Many of the politicians who gravitate toward the Family have run campaigns designed to convince evangelicals that gays, Muslims, Barack Obama and immigrants are eroding white Christian America.

It’s the kind of story we’re hungry for now, because The Family, like any good conspiracy theory, makes sense of what would otherwise be absurd, nonsensical. We begin with Jeff Sharlet himself. As a young writer in New York City in the early 2000s, Sharlet recalls, he was asked by family friends to check on their son, who they worried had joined a cult. The two men met, and the son invited Sharlet to take a look at the community he had joined near Washington, D.C. There, Sharlet found a group of young men all living together, fraternity-style, spending their days playing sports or reading from a slim volume simply titled Jesus. Also: The young men were told they were being trained to rule to world. ....

In the 1930s, a Norwegian named Abraham Vereide visited America, where he organized a “breakfast prayer meeting” between 19 unnamed business leaders who wanted to keep Western money in private pockets as the world’s markets heaved. When Vereide died in 1969, leadership of the secretive club passed to the legendary evangelical figurehead Douglas Coe (who died in 2017—the group now has no official leader, but many cells). Vereide’s little meeting grew into the National Prayer Breakfast, the annual D.C. event attended by hundreds of politicians—including, since 1953, each sitting president of the United States. Many congresspeople believe the event is thrown by Congress itself, Sharlet discovered, but in truth it has always been a Family affair. “The more invisible you can make your organization,” Coe once said, “the more influence it will have.” The Family is modeled on Coe’s own profile: he was deeply pious, extremely secretive, and influential beyond belief.

For example, President Jimmy Carter himself appears in The Family to recall how helpful Coe was in during the 1978 Camp David Accords, helping negotiate the peace deal between Egypt and Israel behind closed doors. President George H.W. Bush spoke directly to Coe during the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast speech to praise him for his “quiet diplomacy—I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy.” The show’s fourth episode, “Dictators, Murderers, and Thieves,” explains how Coe and his congressmen emissaries travelled around the world to pray privately with leaders, including men like Muammar Gaddafi, to build diplomatic back-channels.

How did Coe gain the trust of so many politicians, Democrat and Republican and Libyan dictator alike? He met with people one on one, looked into their eyes, and told them to believe in Jesus and nothing else. He called the doctrine “Jesus Plus Nothing,” and the strategy seems to have relied on Coe’s enormous charisma. Coe was never elected to any public office in his lifetime, instead building a network of religious allegiance that he always intended to function as a closed-room alternative to the democratic process.

In The Family’s eccentric theology, the world is run by “key men” who have been chosen by God to rule over the rest of us, in imitation of Jesus, who they believe to have been a muscular leader interested only in power. This equation of divine and political power runs counter to the American principle of the separation of church and state, and propounds an elitist, even totalitarian view of politics.

The Family shows several clips from a lecture given by Coe in 1989, in which he invites his audience to think about “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler.” The three men were so powerful because “they bound themselves together in an agreement.” Coe means this, however, as a compliment. “Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself,” Coe says. The same was the case, he adds, with Hitler: “that was the demand to be in the Nazi party.” He goes on to marvel at China’s Red Guard, and its members’ willingness to execute their own mothers in the name of their cause. “That was a covenant. A pledge. That was what Jesus said.” ....

The Family’s most valuable payoff is, in the end, the story of fascist rhetoric’s entry in fundamentalist conservative politics. Trump doesn’t sound like a dictator by accident, and The Family finally explains why, in detail: The president speaks that way because men like Douglas Coe idolized fascist rulers of the mid-twentieth century and spread their appeal. The “covenant” offered by Christian fundamentalism is popular because of, not in spite of, its similarity to Nazi brotherhood, and it was engineered on purpose to be its equivalent.

Though it’s doubtful that The Family will sway many conservative religious viewers—how can you prove that the show about a conspiracy isn’t a counter-conspiracy?—Coe’s admiration for Hitler cannot be forgotten once learned. Though the documentary’s larger argument is muddier and harder to verify, that speech from 1989 will haunt Coe’s spiritual descendants with a viciousness that will only grow as more of the public learns about his views. Meetings can be secret, and diplomacy can be covert, but videotape is forever.

In an interview in 2012, Major General Chen Zhou, the main author of four Chinese defence white papers, stated that Marshall was one of the most important figures in changing Chinese defence thinking in the 1990s and 2000s.[14]

Andrew Marshall funded and published three best selling books by Michael Pillsbury: Chinese Views of Future Warfare in 1998[15], China Debates the Future Security Environment[16], and in 2015 an international bestseller, The Hundred-Year Marathon - China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America.[17]

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is an annual event that takes place in Washington, D.C. It was created in response to Pope John Paul II's call for a new evangelization.