Discussion: Bryan Fischer Dustup Makes RNC's 'Family' Sponsored Israel Trip Pretty Awkward

You know I don’t think he has had time to read all those pesky passages from that Jesus fellow. You know the ones about love your neighbor, judge not lest ye be judged and that sort of thing.

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How can you say that about someone who accurately represents the mainstream of the Republican Party?

True, but that is no different than any other military organization, including our own. Of course he leaves that part out…

Bryan Fischer, Fred Phelps, Jerry Falwell, et al, only scratch the bare surface of what’s wrong with religion.

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More astonishing than any of the inane prattle or self righteous proclamations that seem to be these fools hallmark is that they conflate their views with fictitious reading/interpretation of the Constitution.That the document is intended to assure freedom and justice for all citizens unfailingly escapes them.

Reince has some lousy friends, but, they do express Reince’s true views.

I have three names for this joker to contemplate for a moment:

  • John Adams
  • John Quincy Adams
  • Millard Fillmore

These three duly elected U.S. presidents were practicing Unitarians. Unitarians were not and are not Christians. Today’s Unitarian Universalists usually claim Thomas Jefferson as well on philosophical grounds, but the three presidents named above were indisputably not Christian. I believe two of them are what Rev. Fischer would call “our nation’s Founders,” so you have two choices regarding Fischer: he’s ignorant as sin (ahem), or he’s an unrepentant liar.

Here it is. True mental illness.

The problem is, he’s not some crazy hanging out on a park bench talking to himself. He says this stuff all the time, and people and organizations keep giving him a soapbox and an audience. As extreme and nutty as he sounds to us, he’s close to mainstream for a good-sized segment of our country.

The AFA and RNC aren’t disagreeing with him. They just want him to quiet down for a little while so the organizations can pretend that their support for Israel is a genuine desire to see that nation and its Jewish citizens thrive, rather than a desire to see fulfillment of some biblical prophecy in which all Jews will have to accept Jesus or spend eternity in hell with Hitler, etc.

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Jesus the Jew who hated Jews? Yah, He was a Norther European Christian from the beginning (tee hee). Nah, Eustace… Fisher worships Jeebus. Y’know, the guy who drives a pick-up with Louisiana plates and an “Easy Rider” rifle rack who loves him some pig cracklin’s and spiral ham and is a devoted dittohead of Rush Limbaugh?

Keep on keepin’ on Eustace. Our parody master.!

I have good reality testing skills.

The GOP usually likes to keep its bigotry on the DL using dog whistles. This guy is too open about his hatreds.

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If he was really a Jew, why did he have a Puerto Rican first name?

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I wonder where on those brown shirts they embroidered the pink triangles…

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Next to their death’s head pin?

Actually, most Unitarians do consider themselves Christians, and that is especially true of the early Unitarians – they are just not Christian Trinitarians. Many of the New England Congregational churches began calling themselves Unitarian in the late 18th and early 19th century, and the Adamses were part of that group. It’s only in more recent days that there has developed a group of Unitarians who do not consider themselves to be Christian.

Unitarians follow the teachings of Jesus, and believe that he was in some sense the son of God, but deny that he was divine, and do not accept the Three-in-One notion of God that Trinitarians do.

By the close of the 18th century many of the largest churches, especially but not exclusively in eastern Massachusetts, had become markedly liberal in theology. Their ministers and lay members were openly, though not confrontationally, Arminian and unitarian. To these liberals, freedom of the human will was both a reality of common experience and a necessary corollary to the goodness of God, without which the justice of God would be meaningless. They rejected as unbiblical the traditionally held Calvinist doctrines of original sin, total depravity, predestination and the trinity. They adopted positive doctrines of the nature of humanity and the possibility of continuing moral, spiritual, and intellectual growth.

Because the evolution of a distinctively liberal theology during the 18th century was gradual, it was not perceived by liberals as an innovation, but as a natural development in Biblical understanding. Nevertheless, they did not think it necessary or even helpful to argue about these matters with their more orthodox neighbors. Nor did they covet formal recognition of their doctrines, much less their imposition on any who disagreed with them.

The more orthodox members of the community were less reluctant to be confrontational; they began to stipulate creeds that members had to adhere to, and eventually a distinct rift developed.

Many liberals—among them their greatest pulpit orator, William Ellery Channing—were loath to acknowledge the permanency of the rift. Eventually, however, it was impossible not to accept a fait accompli. To own publicly, to lift up and clarify the distinctive tenets of church-goers who must now also become a distinct community of churches, Channing preached in 1819 his great sermon “Unitarian Christianity” at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore, Maryland. Some twenty or more New England Unitarian ministers accompanied him to make the nature of the occasion clear. The adjective Unitarian would from this time describe certain Christian churches and distinguish them from others. The sermon was reprinted several times; copies sold numbered in the tens of thousands. In 1825 a group of young ministers created the American Unitarian Association, an organization of Unitarian individuals whose aim to promote and plant Unitarian churches was national in scope…

http://uudb.org/articles/unitariancontroversy.html

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Lord, yes. All the crazy right-wing religiosos in Israel who think they’re so clever by teaming up with all the crazy right-wing religiosos here to exploit their “support” for Israel may have a strong enough belief system that they can dismiss that little idiosyncrasy. But I’ve never understood how even a right-wing Israeli who’s basically secular couldn’t grok the significance of the fact that someone whose “support” for Israel is based on his desire to see it survive just long enough to bring on Armageddon and the end of the Jews as Jews may not be the kind of “support” that’s really in Israel’s long-term interests.

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Armageddon is always 5- 20 years away for the believers. I imagine that “always” is a long enough term that the Israelis encouraging the support from Christian Evangelicals don’t have to worry too much about what to do when Armageddon arrives.

The danger is that the believers might get impatient and decide that god is telling them to take more forceful action to get the end times going.

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It’s also worth noting that Röhm was an adherent of the “socialist” part of the National Socialist party, at a time when Hitler needed to coopt the major industrial powers in order to solidify his position. After the SA was purged, the last vestiges of its socialist origin were removed, contrary to the other conservative meme that the Nazis were a “left-wing” party.

He addressed Judaism and the founding of the the U.S. in December 2013, declaring that “there was almost no presence of Judaism on these shores at the time of the founding” of the U.S.

And that is a complete and utter falsehood. There have been Jews in this country since the time of the Pilgrims: Elias Legade, a Sephardic Jew, arrived at James City, Virginia, in 1621 on the Abigail. He was a vintner, hired to teach the Virginia colonists how to grow grapes for wine. There were Jews among the ranks of the 16th-century conquistadors in the western part of the continent as well.

There was an established Jewish community in New York in the days of Peter Stuyvesant, before New York became an English colony. They came in 1654, religious refugees from Brazil, from which they were expelled after the Portuguese took it over from the Dutch.

The charter of the colony of South Carolina granted liberty of conscience to all settlers, expressly mentioning “Jews, heathens, and dissenters.” Until the 1830s, Charleston, SC had the largest Jewish population of any city in the US. Jews were also among the early settlers of Newport, Savannah, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Richmond, Virginia’s, Congregation Beth Shalome was one of any number of Jewish congregations to send greetings to George Washington on the occasion of his inauguration as president.

Members of those Jewish communities were instrumental in establishing principles of religious tolerance and equality under the law.

In 1790, the warden of Newport’'s Touro Synagogue wrote to Washington expressing support for his administration’s policies and good wishes for the president personally. Washington’s response said, in part:

… the Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. … May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy."

Washington was not forgetting that one of the most important financial backers of the American Revolution was a Jewish merchant, Haym (nee Chaim) Salomon, who had immigrated to New York from Poland. He was a member of the New York Sons of Liberty, and was arrested by the British as a spy in 1776. Fortunately, they pardoned him and set him free. He was arrested again in 1778 and sentenced to death; he escaped and made his way to Philadelphia, where he became a member of Congregation Mikveh Israel. There, he was instrumental in having the religious test oath for office under the state constitution (originally inserted to disenfranchise Quakers) removed. He was never repaid the vast amount of money he lent to support the War of Independence, and he was penniless when he died in 1785 at the age of 44.

Granted, the Jewish population in the US at the time of the Revolution was small – only about 2,000 out of a total population of about 2.5 million – but they were hardly inconsequential.

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