Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Buffman · 10-06-2002, 08:17 PM

I read a disconcerting article today titled "Mystique of Fellowship carries weight in foreign affairs."

It was provided by the Washington Bureau of the "Orlando Sentinel." The article was written by Lisa Getter, a Washington investigative correspondent for the "Los Angeles Times," a Tribune Publishing newspaper. I can not locate a hyperlink to it. However, as I began to look for more information about "Fellowship," a very distressing C-SS picture began to emerge that seems to have quietly spread throughout, not only, our federal and state governments but even into the highest levels of our military services.

Here are just a few quick insights from what I consider to be an alarmingly long list of questionable, though unfortunately not illegal, activities that can be traced back to the people involved with this organization. (Today's article goes into better detail.)

http://www.faithandaction.org/Presid...rBreakfast.htm

http://www.esperanzaonline.org

http://www.praynj.org/state-prayer-breakfast2002.htm

http://www.wood.army.mil/ch/htm-pages/

If anyone locates a link to this Oct 6, 2002 article, I hope they will post it. I think others will find it very informative...and perhaps even a little frightening based on the other information which has been provided in the forum since the Bush Administration has decided to advance the relationship between religion and government.

[ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: Buffman ]

Toto · 10-06-2002, 10:36 PM

I think I read that in the LA Times a few weeks ago. It was a little disturbing. If it is the one I am thinking of, it is here, but probably not for much longer for free (requires free registration):

Showing Faith in Discretion

Quote:

The Fellowship, which sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast, quietly effects
political change. It acts with the blessing of many in power.
By LISA GETTER

. . .

A Los Angeles Times review of the Fellowship's archives, which are kept at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., and an examination of documents obtained from several presidential libraries reveals an organization that has had extraordinary access and significant influence on foreign affairs for the last 50 years.

. . .

The Rev. Rob Schenck, founder of Faith and Action in the Nation's Capital, a Christian outreach center, said that "the mystique of the Fellowship" has helped it "gain entree into almost impossible places in the capital."

The Fellowship also has brought controversial figures to Washington, where they have met with U.S. officials either at the prayer breakfast or other venues. Among them are former Salvadoran Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who in July was found liable by a civil jury in Florida for the torture of thousands of civilians in the 1980s. He was invited to the 1984 prayer breakfast, along with Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, then the head of the Honduran armed forces. Alvarez, later linked to the CIA and a secret death squad, became an evangelical missionary before he was assassinated in 1989.

"The people that are involved in this association of people around the world are the worst and the best," Coe said. "Some are total despots. Some are totally religious. You can find what you want to find."

RufusAtticus · 10-06-2002, 11:39 PM

Quote:

Coe said the group's mission is to create a worldwide "family of friends" by spreading the words of Jesus to those in power. He believes that people of every religion�including Muslims, Jews and Hindus�are swayed by Jesus. If he can change leaders' hearts, he said, then the benefits will flow naturally to the oppressed and underprivileged.

Is it me, or does the "Fellowship" sound like the Christian Illuminati?

Quote:

Douglas Johnston, who heads the International Center for Religion & Diplomacy in Washington and is a former Fellowship board member, said faith-based diplomacy is the hallmark of the Fellowship. He said the Fellowship has kept its actions low-key because people might wrongly assume it is crossing the line of church-state separation.

"People forget what separation of church and state is supposed to be all about," he said. "Freedom of religion is not freedom from religion."

Quote:

But he dismisses concerns about the Fellowship's heralding of Jesus. "Religion is divisive. The ideas of Jesus are cohesive," Coe said. "That is the single most important thing I've learned in the last 50 years."

Is that why Jesus is worshipped by so many sects, denominations, and cults?

[ October 07, 2002: Message edited by: RufusAtticus ]

Buffman · 10-07-2002, 03:41 PM

He said the Fellowship has kept its actions low-key because people might wrongly assume it is crossing the line of church-state separation.

I wonder if "low-key" means Secret and out of public view until the Supreme Court reconstructionists had an opportunity to appoint GWB II as Protestant Pope and he was able to appoint John Ashcroft as National Inquisitor?

Yup! The public might have accurately identified that there was a fundamentalist Christian stealth coup underway for the last 20 years that didn't just cross the C-SS constitutional line, it obliterated it...and primarily because there are so many passive Christians who can't accept that their fellow believers could violate every ethical principle of Christian morality in the name of an artificially created, fundamentalist, Jesus.

American democracy and leadership has been set adrift in a sea of governmental superstition and myth, and all in the name of a supernatural, jealous, God of death, destruction and emotional intolerance.

I will listen to the fundamentalist, conservative, Protestant Puppet speak tonight, and then to the fundamentalist, phoney liberal, Orthodox Jew who is supposed to represent the loyal opposition. Unfortunately, I expect to hear the identical mantra from both. "Pre-empt! Attack! Kill! Destroy! The Lord is with us! God bless America!" (Blind faith obedience is the only way. Thus spake the American Taliban. Who cares what was/was not once constitutional. The War on Terrorism trumps that old document and any oath sworn to uphold it.)

Meanwhile, down here in Florida, our enlightened(?) citizenry is currently giving Republican Tom Feeney, the former head of the Florida, Christian Coalition controlled, Conservative, House of Representatives that took extraordinary steps to help Bush win Florida in the last election, a 19 percentage point lead over his Democratic challenger in the race for a federal government House seat. (I bet that Feeney never misses a Prayer Breakfast.)

End mini-rant.

Toto · 04-11-2003, 12:53 AM

A very disturbing article. "The Family" is the shadowy group behind the National Prayer Breakfast.

Jesus Plus Nothing: undercover among America's Secret Theocrats

Quote:

In a document entitled "Our Common Agreement as a Core Group," members of the Family are instructed to form a "core group," or a "cell," which is defined as "a publicly invisible but privately identifiable group of companions." A document called "Thoughts on a Core Group" explains that "Communists use cells as their basic structure. The mafia operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four man squad. Hitler, Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people."

Another document, "Thoughts and Principles of the Family," sets forth political guidelines, such as

21. We recognize the place and responsibility of national secular leaders in the work of advancing His kingdom.

23. To the world in general we will say that we are "in Christ" rather than "Christian"�"Christian" having become a political term in most of the world and in the United States a meaningless term.

24. We desire to see a leadership led by God�leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit.

Quote:

The Family was founded in April 1935 by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant who made his living as a traveling preacher. One night, while lying in bed fretting about socialists, Wobblies, and a Swedish Communist who, he was sure, planned to bring Seattle under the control of Moscow, Vereide received a visitation: a voice, and a light in the dark, bright and blinding. The next day he met a friend, a wealthy businessman and former major, and the two men agreed upon a spiritual plan. They enlisted nineteen business executives in a weekly breakfast meeting and together they prayed, convinced that Jesus alone could redeem Seattle and crush the radical unions. They wanted to give Jesus a vessel, and so they asked God to raise up a leader. One of their number, a city councilman named Arthur Langlie, stood and said, "I am ready to let God use me." Langlie was made first mayor and later governor, backed in both campaigns by money and muscle from his prayer-breakfast friends, whose number had rapidly multiplied.* Vereide and his new brothers spread out across the Northwest in chauffeured vehicles (a $20,000 Dusenburg carried brothers on one mission, he boasted). "Men," wrote Vereide, "thus quickened." Prayer breakfast groups were formed in dozens of cities, from San Francisco to Philadelphia. There were already enough men ministering to the down-and-out, Vereide had decided; his mission field would be men with the means to seize the world for God. Vereide called his potential flock of the rich and powerful, those in need only of the "real" Jesus, the "up-and-out."

dangin · 04-11-2003, 07:00 AM

I'm not freaking out about this stuff for several reasons.

One, they claim they are being led by god, but we all know that is bullshit. When you think god gives you strength, it is really just something already inside you.

When you claim god healed you, it was really just the processes of your body and medicine.

When you claim that the spirit is guiding you, it is really still just you making decisions.

Because of this reality, these people, like all groups, will dissagree among themselves. Also if they overreach and don't achieve their goals, their will be a backlash against them. Even if they do achieve their goals, their may be a backlash.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't be watched, and worked against. But when something is mysterious, what we imagine we don't know is often more frightening than reality.

Richard1366 · 04-11-2003, 09:39 AM

What worries me is when they say, "Let's not do anything, God will protect us..."

dangin · 04-11-2003, 10:47 AM

That line of thought didn't work to well for the european jews in the 1940s.

10-06-2002, 08:17 PM	#1
Buffman Beloved Deceased Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: central Florida Posts: 3,546	"Fellowship"---Christian Powerhouse I read a disconcerting article today titled "Mystique of Fellowship carries weight in foreign affairs." It was provided by the Washington Bureau of the "Orlando Sentinel." The article was written by Lisa Getter, a Washington investigative correspondent for the "Los Angeles Times," a Tribune Publishing newspaper. I can not locate a hyperlink to it. However, as I began to look for more information about "Fellowship," a very distressing C-SS picture began to emerge that seems to have quietly spread throughout, not only, our federal and state governments but even into the highest levels of our military services. Here are just a few quick insights from what I consider to be an alarmingly long list of questionable, though unfortunately not illegal, activities that can be traced back to the people involved with this organization. (Today's article goes into better detail.) http://www.faithandaction.org/Presid...rBreakfast.htm http://www.esperanzaonline.org http://www.praynj.org/state-prayer-breakfast2002.htm http://www.wood.army.mil/ch/htm-pages/ If anyone locates a link to this Oct 6, 2002 article, I hope they will post it. I think others will find it very informative...and perhaps even a little frightening based on the other information which has been provided in the forum since the Bush Administration has decided to advance the relationship between religion and government. [ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: Buffman ]

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10-07-2002, 03:41 PM	#4
Buffman Beloved Deceased Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: central Florida Posts: 3,546	He said the Fellowship has kept its actions low-key because people might wrongly assume it is crossing the line of church-state separation. I wonder if "low-key" means Secret and out of public view until the Supreme Court reconstructionists had an opportunity to appoint GWB II as Protestant Pope and he was able to appoint John Ashcroft as National Inquisitor? Yup! The public might have accurately identified that there was a fundamentalist Christian stealth coup underway for the last 20 years that didn't just cross the C-SS constitutional line, it obliterated it...and primarily because there are so many passive Christians who can't accept that their fellow believers could violate every ethical principle of Christian morality in the name of an artificially created, fundamentalist, Jesus. American democracy and leadership has been set adrift in a sea of governmental superstition and myth, and all in the name of a supernatural, jealous, God of death, destruction and emotional intolerance. I will listen to the fundamentalist, conservative, Protestant Puppet speak tonight, and then to the fundamentalist, phoney liberal, Orthodox Jew who is supposed to represent the loyal opposition. Unfortunately, I expect to hear the identical mantra from both. "Pre-empt! Attack! Kill! Destroy! The Lord is with us! God bless America!" (Blind faith obedience is the only way. Thus spake the American Taliban. Who cares what was/was not once constitutional. The War on Terrorism trumps that old document and any oath sworn to uphold it.) Meanwhile, down here in Florida, our enlightened(?) citizenry is currently giving Republican Tom Feeney, the former head of the Florida, Christian Coalition controlled, Conservative, House of Representatives that took extraordinary steps to help Bush win Florida in the last election, a 19 percentage point lead over his Democratic challenger in the race for a federal government House seat. (I bet that Feeney never misses a Prayer Breakfast.) End mini-rant.

04-11-2003, 07:00 AM	#6
dangin Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: The Middle, Kansas Posts: 2,637	I'm not freaking out about this stuff for several reasons. One, they claim they are being led by god, but we all know that is bullshit. When you think god gives you strength, it is really just something already inside you. When you claim god healed you, it was really just the processes of your body and medicine. When you claim that the spirit is guiding you, it is really still just you making decisions. Because of this reality, these people, like all groups, will dissagree among themselves. Also if they overreach and don't achieve their goals, their will be a backlash against them. Even if they do achieve their goals, their may be a backlash. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be watched, and worked against. But when something is mysterious, what we imagine we don't know is often more frightening than reality.

04-11-2003, 09:39 AM	#7
Richard1366 Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2000 Location: Northern Virginia Posts: 1,260	What worries me is when they say, "Let's not do anything, God will protect us..."

04-11-2003, 10:47 AM	#8
dangin Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: The Middle, Kansas Posts: 2,637	That line of thought didn't work to well for the european jews in the 1940s.

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