I grew up going to my grandmother’s evangelical Southern Baptist church.

Those people are fucking insane, and I genuinely believe that the US needs to be occupied and de-christianized. Their beliefs are unhinged and incredibly dangerous and those who believe and spread them should be persecuted.

I’m glad she’s dead because she’d be cheering this on and I’m glad I mostly get to remember her as the nice lady who had chickens in the back yard

Yeah, it’s really dangerous when the religion lines up with the imperialism.

In the case of Israel, you have the base materialism that’s pushes the US to escalate there, but you also have the superstructure of holy war to cement it in the hearts of the population.

It’s not that we’re wrong about there being a base under the superstructure, we just sometimes forget that the superstructure is still involved.

Quick where’s my burning church emote?

It really challenges the idea that nations ultimately are purely rational actors driven by resource competition. I have to remind myself sometimes that there are in fact some religious whackos tugging on the steering wheels. I don’t have a very good understanding of Iran, but I assume they have their share of that too (how could they not?)

I posted a video that goes into it. Evangelical Christians are the largest pro-Israel lobby in the US. https://hexbear.net/post/2302220

If tele-evangelism existed in the 1930s and 40s they’d be saying that Hitler was the second coming of Christ or something.

That more or less happened with radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin

also wrote something like that in one of his books Western media doesn’t want to acknowledge.

She gog on ma gog was right there

Magog a-gogo

Yim yum

She gog on magog till I corn cog

Check in with me, and nuke Iran

It’s just another form of belrog.

yeah, i remember an article about that. funny in a dark way.

the foreign policy/natsec apparatus spun itself up to discredit the story as unfounded, because psychotic religious excitation was not the flavor of empire people had been sold. the neocon brand in those days was about being the wise adults in the room, taking care of business. of course, 20 years later, the apocalyptic death cult is a big constituency in the US and they have many people in high office praying for JFK Jr. to descend from the clouds and put Jim Caviezel on a white horse at the head of an purifying army. that was not the vibe 20 years ago among the rank-and-file war supporters, lol. it was about democracy and weapons of mass destruction and the burden of being the world’s police.

In the winter of 2003, when George Bush and Tony Blair were frantically gathering support for their planned invasion, Professor Thomas Römer, an Old Testament expert at the university of Lausanne, was rung up by the Protestant Federation of France. They asked him to supply them with a summary of the legends surrounding Gog and Magog and as the conversation progressed, he realised that this had originally come, from the highest reaches of the French government.

President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. Bush had then said that when he looked at the Middle East, he saw “Gog and Magog at work” and the biblical prophecies unfolding. But who the hell were Gog and Magog? Neither Chirac nor his office had any idea. But they knew Bush was an evangelical Christian, so they asked the French Federation of Protestants, who in turn asked Professor Römer.

He explained that Gog and Magog were, to use theological jargon, crazy talk.

that would require americans to stop thinking war is cool though and we have a lot of movies made specifically to stop that from happening.

Gork and Mork are the gods of the Orks in 40K lol

One’s brutally cunning, the other’s cunningly brutal