Michele Bachmann listed Francis Schaeffer as one of her most important influences.. His son, Frank Schaeffer, explains why that should terrify you.

From AlterNet:

As presidential candidate Michele Bachmann chews up scenery in the GOP primaries, the mainstream media is finally digging into her extremist beliefs in a serious way. In a profile published earlier this week, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza talked about Bachmann's radical right-wing influences, which include the most extremist figures in the history of the religious right movement. 

One of these was my evangelical leader father, Francis Schaeffer. Bachmann says in the New Yorker article that she got into politics because she watched a film series I directed called “How Should We Then Live,” written by and featuring my dad. 

What the New Yorker article doesn’t do is explain why people like Bachmann, Sarah Palin, et al. turned to the hard reactionary anti-government right. I explain this in my book Sex, Mom and God. I think it’s important to understand this. So let me add what the New Yorker left out.

Frank Schaeffer then proceeds to take his readers on an out of control carnival ride with frights that include Theocratic beliefs, abject hatred toward homosexuals, and a complete distrust for government. 

I urge you to read it with a hot comforting beverage to sip and all of the lights on to chase away the darkness.

What was the motivation behind the Oslo killings? And are they destined to happen in America next?

This is pretty chilling stuff folks so you may want to have at the very least a cup of coffee before reading this.

Courtesy of the Foreign Policy blog:

I have just finished reading through what appears to be the 1,518-page manifesto and handbook of the alleged perpetrator of the worst terrorist attack in Norwegian history.

The manifesto, bylined by someone calling himself Andrew Berwick, is entitled "2083: A European Declaration of Independence" and was posted on Stormfront.org, a white supremacist website, and discovered by American blogger Kevin I. Slaughter. [UPDATE: Norwegian TV has confirmed that the author is indeed the Oslo shooter, according to the New York Times.]

In it, "Berwick" declares himself a "Justiciar Knight Commander," a leading member of a "re-founded" Knights Templar group formed at an April 2002 meeting in London. He claims the founding group has 9 members, whom he does not name, and that three other sympathizers were not able to attend the original meeting.

"Our purpose," the document reads, is to "seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda."

In grim, apocalyptic language, it advocates attacks on "traitors" across Europe who are supposedly enabling a Muslim takeover of the continent.

"[W]e should… not exceed (per 2010) aprox. 45 000 dead and 1 million wounded cultural Marxists/multiculturalists in Western Europe," the author writes. "The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come."

The manifesto also provides detailed instructions for everything from making a bomb to raising funds to preparing physically and mentally for what the author describes as a coming three-stage "civil war" between patriotic nationalists and "multiculturalists" who are, wittingly or not, destroying European civilization.

Filled with hateful rantings against Muslims -- whom the author claims are on a trajectory to take over Europe and erase its culture patrimony -- the writing bears a great resemblence to online comments attributed to Anders Breivik, 32, the confessed perpetrator of a massacre that has so far claimed nearly 100 lives.

The author also claims to be Norwegian, and says that English is not his native language. And at the bottom of the document are several pictures of Breivick in different outfits, including the frogman costume pictured above.

There is much more which you can read for yourself by clicking the link above.

This is very frightening information indeed, and I am sure I am not the only one amongst us who immediately thought of Jared Lee Loughner, or Timothy McVeigh, after reading of this tragedy and then wondered if, in this time of vicious political bickering, the very same kind of horrific incident wasn't in America's immediate future as well.

I can tell you with certainty that Frank Schaeffer has very little doubt:

There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the killer wrote:

"Today's Protestant church is a joke," he wrote in an online post in 2009. "Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic."

It seems Anders Behring Breivik longed for a "pure" and ultra conservative religion. He was a man of religious conviction, no liberals with their jeans need apply! Liberals beware.

Norway is just a first taste of what will happen here on a larger scale.

I certainly hope that this time Mr. Schaeffer is incorrect, but I cannot pretend not to see the same gathering storm clouds of which he is speaking.

And for those who have recently questioned why I still bother to call out Sarah Palin on her lies, and reveal to the world just how insane she, and her political points of view, are, this is why. Because the people behind this kind of hatred, and plans for Christofascist domination, are looking for an attractive package behind which they can broadcast their message of hate and divisiveness until the country is so splintered that they can then step in to grab hold of the reins of power.

I have long been convinced that Sarah Palin WAS the vessel that they chose to further their agenda.  But we, with no small amount of help from Palin herself, have managed to damage her credibility to the point that I don't believe they find her useful any longer. By no means am I suggesting that she is not still somebody whose activities should be monitored carefully, because she is.

However there are others like Bachmann and Perry with which we still to contend.  And hidden in the shadows there can be no doubt that America has its version of an Anders Behring Breivik, just waiting in the wings for that last straw to snap his emotional camel's back, or perhaps for direction from a Right Wing radio host or Fox News talking head, to provide a clue as to which enemy he needs to place in his crosshairs.

In other words my friends when it comes to unveiling the dangerous agendas of the lunatic fringe, or shining the light of truth on dark plots of nefarious political operatives, we have really only just begun.

In the immortal words of Robert Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Frank Schaeffer reveals how Fundamentalist religions are destroying the world. They're playing my song baby!

Courtesy of Alternet:

The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a "chosen" people is the root of almost all our troubles. So is the lunacy of believing in "Truth" revealed through one special prophet to one special peoples and/or tribe, be they Jews, Muslims or American Evangelical Christians, or conservative Roman Catholics who believe in the special primacy of their popes.

Eliminate willful self-serving tribal religious delusion from the globe and there might be hope for the survival of the human race. Combine tribalism and religious conviction with nukes and the "right" to exploit the earth and disaster looms.

It's no accident that the most dangerous cultures today are also the most religiously observant societies. The ultra-religiously observant USA embraces perpetual war as a way of life. With our notion of "exceptionalism," we fear the "other" who might challenge our notion of having been chosen by God for some special task.

This is a great article and I urge you to spend the time to read all of it.  However I will let you know that this next part is my favorite portion.

Someday these "special" and "chosen" countries will cease to exist as will all nation states. Someday they will not even be remembered because all things pass from time into oblivion, nor will their "holy" books and "holy" places exist forever, simple geology will take care of that. What makes them dangerous today is their shared religious delusion that they are somehow essential and eternal.

I know that for religious people this is a very difficult concept to grasp, that their nation, and even their religion, may someday disappear into the mists of time, but anybody who has studied even junior high school history cannot deny the reality of that statement.

I remember once making a born again Christian hopping mad at me for referring to his religion as a mythology.

"No it is not!" he said.

"You're right." I replied. "It's not a mythology, today. But someday it WILL be, unless of course it is not remembered at all."

I was kind of a jerk in those days, and loved to rattle people's cages concerning their sacred cows.  I am much more mellow, and less combative, these days but the truth of my prediction is no less valid.

What has to be remembered is that thousands of years ago armies of "chosen" warriors marched to war after giving offerings to,and receiving the blessing from, Gods that you and I have never even heard of.  Yet they had complete faith that these long forgotten deities would keep them safe, or provide a place for their spirit to reside if they were felled in battle.

Millions have died under the swords of armies who believed that their gods had given  them license to destroy those who dared to worship at "sacrilegious" altars. And that faith allowed them to do so without even a hint of guilt at the wholesale murder of entire civilizations.

Now be honest, from that time to this, has mankind REALLY evolved that much?  And if not, why not?