Tag: Billy Graham

Billy Graham, Religious Huckster; Amid His Kindred

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Billy Graham, Donald Trump, Faux News, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin

Worth 1,000 words: The awful state of American evangelical Christianity after Billy Graham
By Fred Clark

This is a picture taken this week at the celebration Franklin Graham held for the 95th birthday of his father, Billy Graham. It is also a parable, a metaphor, an astonishingly revealing snapshot of the sorry state of evangelical Christianity in America in 2013.

Seated in the middle there is Billy Graham, the world-famous evangelist who was, for more than 50 years, the face of white evangelical Christianity in America and the second-most influential Baptist pastor of the 20th century.

At 95, Graham is frail and in ill health. His image and his legacy have been usurped as political tools used by his son Franklin Graham, who seems desperate to be a political player and kingmaker. Not content with living off the interest of his father’s legacy, Franklin has been burning through the capital.

Just look at how Franklin has exploited his father here. The famous preacher is silent now, a voiceless prop called upon to lend a sheen of respectability to the likes of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News lackeys.

To his credit, Billy Graham looks uncomfortable being dragged out to offer his apparent blessing to a gaggle of dishonest strangers and charlatans that includes two racist billionaires. The scowl on the old preacher’s face may reveal his recognition that this is what has become of his legacy — that everything he did and worked for has led only to this, to the empowerment of lying hucksters and the politics of resentful privilege. Perhaps he’s even realizing that something like this was bound to happen — that the intensely otherworldly focus of his lifelong ministry meant that it couldn’t plant deep roots in earthly soil.

But just look at that horrifying photograph. Soak it in.

This is evangelical Christianity in America in 2013.

White. Rich. Right-wing. Dishonest. Predatory. Outwardly pious, inwardly corrupt.

It’s all about political tribalism. Jesus simply isn’t in the picture.

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1 Not-So-Simple, Pretty Funny Question for the 73% of White Evangelicals Who Will Apparently Be Voting for Romney

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Religious Lunatics, Religious Racketeers, Religious Reich, Religious Right, Religious Wankers, Religious Zombies, Republican Loons, Right Wing Kooks, Right Wing Nuts

By Frank Schaeffer

1 Not-So-Simple, Pretty Funny Question for the 73% of White Evangelicals Who Will Apparently Be Voting for Romney
A question that deserves an answer before election day.

According to polls 73 percent of WHITE evangelicals will be voting for Mitt Romney.

If the polls are correct here’s the question I’d like to ask evangelicals using their own style of language/concerns/theological thinking as applied to their choice:

What’s the explanation for the fact that white American Evangelicals made the allegedly philandering lying ignorant braggart lapsed Roman Catholic Dinesh D’Souza their anti-Obama hero, embrace a pro-choice Mormon bishop who promoted abortion and Planned Parenthood in MA, are working to elect a job-destroying tax-avoiding lying flip-flopping-tell-anyone-anything-they-want-to-hear Swiss bank account collecting draft dodger running with a disciple of the God-hating, Jesus-mocking hater-of-the-poor Ayn Rand, for their presidential candidate and look the other way as a crazed ultra-Zionist many Israeli Jews fear billionaire casino owner who is being investigated for allegedly making billions off the dirtiest Chinese gambling Communist Party-controlled outfit in the world funds the enterprise, at the very same time as Franklin Graham sold his ailing father Billy’s soul and denied core evangelical theology by taking Mormonism off the Billy Graham organization’s list of cults in order to help the Mormon pagan-ritual-performing, Trinity-denying, casino-money-grubbing billionaire-coddling, earth-destroying global-warming denying Mormon bishop win respectability for his dead-Jews-baptizing-polygamy-rooted-reality-denying-interplanetary Masonic lodge-embracing faith in an election against an exemplary modest faithful husband good father compassionate smart black evangelical Christian President whose major accomplishments include saving the economy, ending a war, killing our greatest enemy, giving health care to children and the poor and the “least of these” and who has tried to reduce the number of abortions by helping women escape poverty in a reenactment of the lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan?

Go figure.

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Mormon Chosenite | The Extremist Religious Views of Mitt Romney

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Mitt Romney Religious Fanatic, Mormon Extremism

Romney’s Extreme Religious Views Should Scare Voters
Mitt Romney’s religion has managed to stay out of the headlines of mainstream media for most of the campaign, but as we get closer and closer to this election, it has become clear that this is an issue worth discussing in detail, and Mike Papantonio recently spoke with author Nancy Cohen about Mitt Romney’s tenure as a Mormon Bishop, and what his extreme religious views actually mean to voters.
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