The Saddam/Osama connection... through the eyes of Bush

Another great article at Salon: "How Satan is propping up Bush's war on terror" (Andrew O'Hehir). To wit:

[W]hen our born-again president refers to Osama bin Laden as "the Evil One," he is not dealing in metaphor or analogy, even assuming he is capable of such things. Rather he is addressing his co-religionists in a not-so-secret code. "That makes perfect sense to a born-again believer," Ellis says. "Evil, like God, is One. So you can say, and believe in, an 'Axis of Evil,' because you know that the person who is giving the orders to bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and the leader of Iran and the leader of North Korea is, of course, Satan."

This article also has a neat description of how an Onion article, "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism Among Children.", was passed around as truth through circles of fundamentalist Christians. Weird.

I spent eight years of my life in Midland, Texas... birthplace and boyhood home of George W. Bush. Talk about desolation. I distinctly remember thinking when I arrived at age six, "Humans live here?"

I was also caught off-guard by Christian fundamentalism in West Texas; my family had just moved from San Diego, CA. I remember remarking to a classmate when I was about twelve that I thought the story of Adam and Eve was a bunch of crap... two people couldn't possibly spawn an entire race... genes would inevitably get mixed up in the process and the resultant race would be totally retarded. I said further, maybe we're just retarded versions of the beings that Adam and Eve were... but that I found it much more probable that the Bible was a crock of shit.

You don't tell Christian Fundamentalists that the holiest of holy books, the Bible, is a crock of shit. I got my ass kicked. Anyway, you can say that I've had my share of interaction with fundamentalist Christianity... and I think it is evil. Let me qualify that: I think that the "you're one of us or you're going to hell" attitude along with a blind devotion to irrationality breeds hateful speech and action that the receiving end often interprets as evil. The penchant for fundamentalist Christians to close themselves off to any and all ideas questioning their beliefs and what their flavor of "Church" teaches, is sickening. In fact, another tendency I noted during my sentence served in Midland, Texas was conformism. Fundamentalist Christianity not only needs evil to operate, it creates evil, real or imagined. If GWB is a hint of a beginning, we are in for dark days.

UPDATE [2004-01-19 10:06:45]:
Here's a relevant excerpt from Al Franken's new book (page 281):

During Bush's first campaign for governor of Texas, he told an Austin reporter that only people who accepted Jesus Christ as their savior could go to heaven. While most of the press felt it was a gaffe, Rove know it was the best thing his candidate had said so far. It let the people who like to exclude others from heaven know that he was one of them. That's why, in 2000, they kicked off South Carolina at Bob Jones University.

Posted by joebeone at Enero 18, 2004 11:53 AM