Jerry Falwell's dead

[pecunium]

I was going to go for the snarky, something like "I was taught that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead," and leave it at that.

Because I've disliked Falwell's brand of public piety, and Mrs. Grundyish intrusion to the lives of others since I was in my early teens.

However it was percolating in my mind, as I watered the plants (long beans are sprouting, melons are growing, the peppers have set fruit, as have the grapes begun, the tomatoes are in blossom and last years carrots are preparing to set seed, etc., etc. Spring, in other words, is in full bloom), and I realised that there are... gasp, inconsitencies in things he (or at least those who followed him) believed.

Part of what I dilsiked about the man was his apparent reasonableness. This comes as no surprise, really, the fire and brimstone sort of preacher isn't the best for television. That does best when the group dynamic reinforces emotion, and presses thought to the back of the mind.

No, television preaching is usually some brand of folksy. Falwell was good at folksy.

So he would go on the air, to things like Politically Incorrect, and seem a fair, and reasonable opponent, even when he said the most outrageous of things

One of the most egregious of his pronouncements was that God had used the attacks on Sept. 11th, to punish the United States for falling away from it's role as a light to the nations (we are, after all, the New Jerusalem, and if God could see fit to punish them, merely for falling away; before salvation, how much more might we deserve it?).

Throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

And it occured to me, anyone who buys into that, can't support attacks on Al Qaeda. They were acting as a Sampson. A champion of God, who works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.

If God is Just, then His punishments are just as well. If He saw fit to use those people to manifest his displeasure, then what punishment should the Righteous deliver, for they were acting as God's right hand?

Part of why I bring this up is that I've had the Alabama terrorists on my mind. They, after all, were pretty much ignored. Why? My cynical self says it's because they were white, and wanted to shoot brown people.

My slightly less cynical self says it's because they are "good christian types", who went a little overboard.

Like Eric Rudolph, who is managing to send threatening letters to his victims. Like the couple in Texas who were arrested for trying to sell cyanide bombs.

We don't hear about them.

Instead we hear about six guys who wanted to drive onto Fort Dix and shoot people (and if they weren't entrapped, they were still planning retail. This wasn't bombs in crowded parks. Rudolph practiced wholesale [and had lots of people who were overtly sympathetic to him], the couple in Texas was planning wholesale).

What's the difference? The Fort Dix plotters were Muslim. We can't say it's skin color, because they are from the Balkans (Albania).

So the rule seems to be, christians can't be terrorists, muslims must prove they aren't. Men like Falwell, with their fantasies of being persecuted because they can't impose their religious rules (can we say sharia? I knew we could) on the rest of us, have helped to foster that sort of incivility.

So, while what I had to say wasn't pleasant, I can, I think, fairly say, I have not spoken ill, since the truth is an absolute defense against libel, and the truth, it has been said, shall make you free.

Comments

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

Christians can't be terrorists? Afraid we'll have to disagree with that over here, where we've had a lot of good Catholic and Protestant boys who were perfectly splendid terrorists. We've even encountered a few Jewish ones too, who went on to collect Nobel Peace Prizes. Who knows, parhaps Gerry and Iain will be nominated next year.

As for truth making you free, I have a horrible feeling that a goodly number of his followers would agree that its arbeit that machts frei.

[redbird]

Read for tone, Martyn.

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

Tone? Terry's as usual calm and generous tone that reminds us that not all Americans are ranting, ignorant xenophobes and bullies? Perhaps if Terry's still small voice of calm was heard more the rest of the world wouldn't be as terrified of America as it is.

We learn from history or we repeat it. The choice is ours, but a few seem to think they have the right to make the choice for all of us, whether or not we are of their congregation, constituency or even country. And 'they' are not all American or right wing 'Christian' or whatever the nasty flavour of the week is. Sometimes 'they' are us.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I think she meant your tone, esp. the implications that no one here thinks Christians can't be terrorists, and that lots of Americans are of the mind to establish Dachaus, or Bergen-Belsens.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I disagree with it too. That's part of the point.

What seems to be the case is the principle of "It's OK If You Are A Republican" embraces, "Extremism in defense of "the right values" is no vice."

Which is a pernicious, and evil, idea. Passion is a virtue (and misguided passion can be praisworthy) so long as it doesn't lead one to swing one's fist all the way onto my nose.

TK

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

This is not a peculiarly American or contemporary affliction. The words of Cromwell and Voltaire come to mind, but seeing as neither gentleman was American, I don't suppose they have any impact.

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

Nonsense. Some Americans still read Voltaire. Perhaps not many read Cromwell, but English history certainly formed our history.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I wasn't sure what to say to this. But Locke, Burke, Hume, Voltaire, Hobbes, Rouseau, etc. are taught, and even read.

TK

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

The continuing refusal to name people like Rudolph as the terrorists they are not only infuriates me, it frightens me. Because it means, at some level, the powers that be in both government and media just don't *care* about the people that these SOBs terrorize. The sort of mentality shown by the people who sheltered Rudolph (and he had to have had help to have evaded capture for as long as he did) makes me ill.

And, as you mention and as Representative Keith Ellison has found out, Muslims have to prove that they are not terrorists. That Glenn Beck could demand that Ellison prove himself not a terrorist, and still have a television show after doing so, says a damnably lot about the people at CNN who employ him.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, the piece of gormless spam I got yesterday was on this post where I mentioned just those aspects of Beck's performance with the Hon. Mr. Ellison.

TK

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

The Earl and Countess of Yarborough. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_John_Pelham,_8th_Earl_of_Yarborough)

A lot of what's behind Al Qaeda is Arab tribalism.

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

Er, except Afghans aren't Arabs.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

And the offense which spurs bin Laden isn't tribal, but more a sort of combined sense of sacrilege, and lese majèste against the Arab/Middle Eastern world.

So it's not a tribal thing.

Some/a lot, of what's happening in Iraq is tribal, in the same way that the disintegration of the former Jugoslavia, post Tito, was. The strongman had been playing one loyalty against the other to manage the remote areas in his governance (Tito was playing one ethnicity against the other to keep a codified opposition from forming. Had he truly pushed for unity, instead of stability through tension, the present mess might not have happened, but as he might have been pushed out, but I digress).

Without him to play ring-giver/arbiter, there are many trying to carve out their own niche in the new world.

TK

[tharain.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Well said. In by way of tenderberry.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Instead we hear about six guys who wanted to drive onto Fort Dix and shoot people (and if they weren't entrapped, they were still planning retail. This wasn't bombs in crowded parks. Rudolph practiced wholesale [and had lots of people who were overtly sympathetic to him], the couple in Texas was planning wholesale).

What's the difference? The Fort Dox plotters were muslim. We can't say it's skin color, because they are from the Balkans (Albania).

Michelle Malkin is, of course, thrilled that we're moving in this direction.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I know little about the doctrine of the Roman Catholic branch of the Christian Church (ahem), but have the vague impression that it includes something called "The Sin against the Holy Ghost", and that this involves (mis-)using Religion for nefarious purposes. If such perversions aren't sins, maybe they ought to be. Of course I might be wrong, but it seems to me that Mr. Falwell supported and preached some Evil things, abusing the religion he professed.

The question I wish someone had asked Falwell

[redbird]

The question he should have been asked isn't "So how can you justify attacking Al-Qaeda?" He'd have said something about "just because Satan does God's work doesn't mean we don't oppose him."

What he should have been asked, on live national television, is "If those attacks were the work of God, Mr. Falwell, why didn't you bomb the World Trade Center? Why did you sit there in Virginia and leave the Pentagon untouched?"

Re: The question I wish someone had asked Falwell

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

In the first case, the response is, "How can the Devil do God's work?", and Falwell is stumped, because his Devil can't. Anything the Satan the Falwells of the world believes in is Evil, by the mere act of his doing it.

The problem with the second question isn't that Falwell didn't fly a plane into something, but rather that Falwell, and his ilk, have been working to create (albiet some of them, like Falwell, have been fairly passive in it, and might not think they have been) the people who will fly those planes.

Eric Rudolph is not some creature spawned in a vacuum. The people who attack Planned Parenthood with bombs don't just wake up one morning and say, "I want to blow something up." Rather they are unstable sorts, who have been told Planned Parenthood kills babies. Not only that, but that Planned Parenthood is all about killing babies.

People like Falwell told them that. People a little more extreme than Falwell take the principles of Augustine's "just war" and apply it to Planned Parenthood.

So Falwell would have said he was attacking the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center, but he was going about in in a "Christlike" way, and refraining from violence.

Now I'm as big a fan of killing babies as the next person, but...

[heimshal.livejournal.com]

In my opinion, the ripple going through the world now (and the issues people are having with the "old guard" [i.e. Falwell]) is post-modernism finally catching some grip through populous neccessity.

The problem is the cultural over-indoctrination of positivism. We believe that there is such a thing as immutable truth, but even that isn't the most egregious fault. The rotten bit is the synonymy of referencer and referenced in our culture. I finally picked it out of Jung's Man and His Symbols (unfortunately, he was ignorant of the distinction), and post-modernism clicked for me.

Imo, post-modernism says that a referencer is an entity unto-itself.
Modernism says that a referencer is simply synonymous with the referenced.

Ergo, you have Truth (the Bible). Then you have a Reference to truth (Falwell's preaching). I'd wager a tidy sum more people than not, when polled, would equate the two positions (although a less contentious subject would be more representative).