Will there be a backlash against the radical religious groups?

[Joebert]

I was just wondering,

When the dust settles, if they lose and there aren't 10 Commandment stones in every courthouse, bibles in every school, and anti-choice judges on the bench, what's next?

The conspiracy nut in me is wondering if we will have Waco II: Revenge of the Davidians.

Will we have a group that is labelled a cult, one that is WAY out there, so we have to all point at them and say "look at those crazy people" and ignore the crazy ones that actually exist.

Note: I am well aware of what happened in Waco, how the ATF monumentally blew that one, and murdered men, women and children to increase their budgets.

So, will a religious cult that we've never heard of come out of the woodwork, conveniently doing stuff that is all the patently unAmerican stuff to make them easy to hate?

Just curious if anybody else thinks that this is the only way the radical religious people are going to escape scrutiny.

[Kerrytravelers]

1. Once upon a time.

There was a time when I would have said you are definetly: :tinfoilhat:

Now, nothing surprizes me. Everytime I think I've seen it all, I wake up and the *bots, led by their clueless leader, *, have done more damage to this country.

It would be nice to wake up one morning and now have the radio blaring news about something stupid * has done. The only way I can see this happening is to move to a time zone that would have me waking up before * gets started for the day.

[NVMojo]

2. GAWD, I HOPE SO!!!!

[NAO]

3. Radical Religious Groups? You mean "Focus on the Family"

I would love to see them labeled as a cult; "Dr." James Dobson referred to as "that creepy cult leader" and Jerry Falwell viewed as equivalent to the Moonies (oh, wait, that's one's TRUE).

[Joebert]

4. They have way too much money to be a cult.

They're staying. When you have the Governor of Colorado stating that he won't sign a bill that allows rape victims to be made aware of contraceptive options due to religious reasons, they've won.

I just wonder if something will actually happen, or will a scapegoat come up?

[NAO]

7. There's always that Fred Phelps (godhatesfags.com) guy.

He makes a pretty convincing extremist whack-job.

Last week he protested "Dr." James Dobson for being too easy on gays.

[Joebert]

8. I know, they were down the street.

Morons.

When you picket a funeral, you're no longer a religious organization, anything that resembles tax-free status is lost, and somebody investigates you for hate-crimes.

(Or that's what I'd like, at least)

[coloradodem2005]

5. I hope so.

[rwenos]

6. More Likely, They'll Lose a Few Big Fights

Then turn on the Republicans too. That squabble would be beautiful to watch, and shouldn't be too hard to set off.

A prediction: If Frist doesn't get the Nuclear Option through the Senate (and it looks like it's going down to defeat at this point, knock on wood), the RRR is going to do something BIG (like, McVeigh-big), and then take their cookies out of the legal system altogether, back to church where they belong.

They're classic overreachers. Just wait.

[Joebert]

9. That would be an extension of what I'd been thinking.

You can see it on the "news" now.

This poor delusional soul. He was so upset over the judiciary's recent moves to continue allowing abortion, not deporting illegal immigrants, and allowing gay marriage to exist.

This made him incapable of understanding his actions.

Which included buying the truck. Buying the AN-FO materials, driving it to (insert "liberal" court here) and detonated it killing hundreds.

He gets the death penalty sentenced and applied before an investigation into where the money came from is able to commence...

[rwenos]

10. The Appellate Process would FLY

Or, as in the case of the murders of Harvey Oswald and Martin Luther King, a killer with cancer could be found to cut short the testimony in open court.

It would all be so easy. Just a few phone calls . . .

[Joebert]

11. Unfortunately, the truly faithful would be willing participants.

The ones who have such faith in their religion that their leaders would never tell them to do wrong without reason, they would be the dangerous ones.

I mean, look at suicide bombers in other countries. There is a level of desperation that causes some people to do these things to make their families' lives better.

In the US, there are so many distractions, it is hard to find many people so devoted. But they're out there.

A little bit of recruiting, some convincing that their family will be cared for, and they they'd be a martyr, and boom.

[leesa]

12. I think there will be a huge backlash. That's why it is so important for

real Christians to speak up and validate their religion or you will get dragged down with your Pharisee bretheran.

[Jacobin]

13. I wish they would start pushing for alcohol prohibition again

That would turn off a lot of supporters.

:-)

[murdoch]

14. In the long-term there will be a backlash against religion in general

Michael Harrington, who worked with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker as a young man before becoming a socialist atheist thought that the right turn of Christianity in the US, in the long-term, would lead to a secularization in the US. A look at Gallup polls tends to lend creedence to this - more and more people are leaving religion.

I think the US corporate media puts ideas out there which are complete BS and give people a false picture of the size of the religious right. The religious right is not THAT large. Why does it get such corporate media recognition, or supposed sway in Washington DC? Because wealthy people want it that way. Non-religious people or atheists are about half the size as the religious right, yet the corporate hegemony wants us treated as pariahs.

I come from a very religious Roman Catholic family, and I am now an atheist. I know so many people who have left Catholicism as well. There are many people like me. I thought Catholicism was BS when I was 8 or 9 actually, I never believed Jesus rose from the dead and so forth. And in terms of my influences, this was something I mostly figured out by myself to some extent. Perhaps the fundamentalist desire to get rid of evolution from the schools is correct - learning about dinosaurs, evolution and so forth made me question why the scientific, rational explanation of history was in conflict with the religious one. Actually I'm hesitant to attribute this all to my rationality - I'd say it was a combination of my rationality with social changes pushing the world.

Nowadays, it's obvious to me in reading the bible that even the Jews of Jesus's time were split between religious and secular. Or Greeks in Socrates time. The upper middle class and wealthy have always had a fairly secular outlook, out of necessity for its own survival really. They have always tried to prevent this from going down to the working class, like the gods protected fire from Prometheus. It's sort of like what Voltaire said - he never discussed atheism in front of his servants as he feared they'd murder him in his bed.

Of course, in many ways the religious wars are about class identity - the religious workers versus the secular professionals.

[realFedUp]

15. backlash against Bush Inc.

We really shouldn't include the good people
who are true believers and have been used
by this administration for votes. Their true
concerns of jobs, healthcare, housing won't
be addressed by the Bushies, but can be
addressed by Democrats who have always lived out
Jesus's words and deeds through civil rights
for all, a call for universal health care,
putting in safety nets for the poorest among
us and social contracts that unite us, not
divide us.

Rove, Robertson, Falwell, Dobson are stepping
on the backs of these good and faithful for
their own greed and power. It's a shameful
shameful thing.