One of the interesting aspects of studying higher criticism of the Bible is the way you can find multiple stories combined in Genesis to make a larger, completely different story. There’s many interesting examples of how stories are combined and retold in a way that make them more than the sum of their parts.

Take a look at this story and see if you can find anything missing or any logical inconsistencies in it:

Yahweh saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. Yahweh was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So Yahweh said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of Yahweh. Yahweh then said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. Take with you 7 of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and 2 of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also 7 of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. And 7 days from now I will send rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.’ And Noah did all that Yahweh commanded him. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Then Yahweh shut him in. For 40 days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than 15 cubits. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. And the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth. After 40 days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited 7 more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited 7 more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. Then Noah built an altar to Yahweh and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. Yahweh smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. ‘As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.

Now read story #2 and see if there are any problems with it:

Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with Elohim. Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in Elohim’s sight and was full of violence. Elohim saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So Elohim said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within a cubit of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. You are to bring into the ark 2 of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.’ Noah did everything just as Elohim commanded him. Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as Elohim had commanded Noah. And after the 7 days the floodwaters came on the earth. In the 600th year of Noah’s life, on the 17th day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights. On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his 3 sons, entered the ark. They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as Elohim had commanded Noah. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. The waters flooded the earth for 150 days. But Elohim remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed. At the end of the 150 days the water had gone down, and on the 17th day of the 7th month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to recede until the 10th month, and on the 1st day of the 10th month the tops of the mountains became visible. And he sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. By the 1st day of the 1st month of Noah’s 601st year, the water had dried up from the earth. By the 27th day of the 2nd month the earth was completely dry. Then Elohim said to Noah, ‘Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it.’ So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark, one kind after another.

Neither of these stories are in the Bible. Both have been interwoven into one larger story which can now be found in Genesis. The first story was written by an author known as J, who wrote most of Genesis. The second one was written by P, who wrote most of Leviticus and Numbers. Now try this with any other story and see if you can get the same effect.

J: Gen. 6:1-8; Gen. 7:15,7,16b-20,2-23; Gen. 8:2b-3a,6,8,-12,13b,20-22; Gen. 9:18-27
P: Gen. 6:9b22; Gen. 7:8-16a,21,24; Gen. 8:1-2a,3b-5,7,13a,14-19
Redactor: Gen. 6:9a
Other: Gen. 7:6

Notice also how the two stories are actually more consistent now that they have been separated:

* J uses the name Yahweh and P uses the name Elohim. This is because P consistently uses the name Elohim in the story until Elohim tells Moses, “I am Yahweh. And I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai” (Ex. 6:2). This narrative device of switching the name at the time of Moses was also used by an earlier source, E, who did the same thing 3 chapters earlier (Ex. 3:14). After this point, all three sources use the name Yahweh consistently.

* J says says that everything “died” (7:22) while P uses a different Hebrew word meaning “destroy” or “expire” (6:17, 7:21).

* J has Noah send out a dove. P has Noah send out a raven.

* J says the rain lasted 40 days and 40 nights. P envisions the flood lasting a year (370 days).

* J has 7 pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean animals while P has only one pair of each animal. That was because the clean animals were needed for the sacrifice after the flood. But this also matches the theological differences of J and P. J consistently shows Biblical characters making sacrifices at many different places and times before Moses. P has none of the other patriarchs before Moses make sacrifices because it undermines his argument that Jerusalem is the one and only place where sacrifices are legitimate.

* Unlike J, P is concerned with ages, dates, and measurements. This same obsession is found in P’s long descriptions of the temple, the ark of the covenant, the priestly garbs and duties, etc. in his story. P’s penchant for statistics is why the fourth book of the Torah is called “Numbers.”

* J describes Yahweh in very human terms: having regrets, personally closing the ark, and smelling Noah’s sacrifice. P describes Elohim as being more transcendent.

* Throughout the entire Torah, the euphemism “to know” meaning sex, occurs 5 times and only in J. “To lie with” occurs 13 times, and 11 are in J. The term “Sheol” as a place for the dead, as in Hades, occurs 6 times and only in J. The term “to suffer” occurs 7 times and only in J.

* Throughout the entire Torah, the terms “gathered to his people”, “fire came out from before Yahweh”, “he fell on his face”, “be fruitful and multiply”, “property”, “expire”, the root ” ‘dp”, and over 100 references to “congregation” appear only in P.

* Linguistic analysis has confirmed that J and E use an older form of Hebrew than P, and P uses an older form of Hebrew than Deuteronomy. This has been shown in books and papers written by Robert Polzin, Gary Rendsburg, Ziony Zevit, Jacob Milgrom, Avi Hurvitz, and Ronald Hendel.

If you look at Gen. 5, it begins with the sentence “This is the Book of Records of Adam,” indicating it’s the beginning of a different source. The style of repeating exactly how many years were lived before and after the birth of each son is nothing like the way J writes when he gives a geneology from Cain to Lamech in Gen. 4:17-24. If you take out chapter 5, then you have a much smoother, more readable narrative that goes from Cain to Lamech to Noah. Having the Book of Records of Adam inserted into the narrative instead makes this Lamech out to be a different man with the same name from the line of Seth. Lining these two genealogies up shows that they are very similar to one another:

Seth: Cain
Enosh: Enoch
Cainan: Irad
Mahalalel: Mehuya-el
Jared
Enoch
Methuselah: Metusha-el
Lamech: Lamech
Noah

Now let’s look at the story of Joseph:

Story 1:

Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them. And he made a richly ornamented robe [of many colors] for him. Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said.Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, “What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?” His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind. “Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the richly ornamented robe he was wearing. they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt. Judah said to his brothers, “What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed. And they sold him for 20 shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt. Then they got Joseph’s robe, slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in the blood. They took the ornamented robe back to their father and said, “We found this. Examine it to see whether it is your son’s robe.”He recognized it and said, “It is my son’s robe! Some ferocious animal has devoured him. Joseph has surely been torn to pieces.”Then Jacob tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. “No,” he said, “in mourning will I go down to Sheol [Hades] to my son.” So his father wept for him.

Story 2:

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him. Now his brothers had gone to graze their father’s flocks near Shechem, and Israel said to Joseph, “As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them.” “Very well,” he replied. So he said to him, “Go and see if all is well with your brothers and with the flocks, and bring word back to me.” Then he sent him off from the Valley of Hebron.When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, “What are you looking for?” He replied, “I’m looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks?” “They have moved on from here,” the man answered. “I heard them say, ‘Let’s go to Dothan.’ ” So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him. When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. “Let’s not take his life,” he said. “Don’t shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the desert, but don’t lay a hand on him.” Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father. And they took him and threw him into the cistern. Now the cistern was empty; there was no water in it. As they sat down to eat their meal. So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern. When Reuben returned to the cistern and saw that Joseph was not there, he tore his clothes. He went back to his brothers and said, “The boy isn’t there! Where can I turn now?” And the Medanites sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard.

Here’s how these stories were combined:

J: Gen. 37:2b,3b,5-11,19-20,23,25b-27,28b,31-35
E: Gen. 37:3a,4,12-18,2122,24-25,28a,29-30,36
Redactor: Gen. 37:2a

Notice the differences between these stories:

* J uses the name Jacob; E uses the name Israel.

* In J, Joseph is sold to Ishmaelites; In E, he is sold to Midianites (although the last sentence instead refers to them as Medanites). The original person who combined J and E made it appear that the Midianites sold him to the Ishmaelites, but he leaves a contradiction in that Potiphar is said to have bought them from Medanites.

* In J, Judah tries to save Joseph; In E, Reuben tries to save Joseph. This fits with J’s favoritism towards Judah.

* In the Blessing of Jacob in Gen. 49 passes up the older brothers Reuben, Simon, and Levi in order to bless Judah: Reuben for “ascending your father’s bed” and Simon and Levi for their “implements of violence”, which roughly correlate to Reuben sleeping with his father’s concubine and the J story of Simon and Levi massacring prince Shechem (the original capital of Israel) in revenge for the defiling of their sister Dinah. But in Gen. 48, E has Israel bless Joseph and his sons instead, in particular Ephraim, north of Jerusalem, corresponding to E’s location in Shiloh. The prophet Ahijah from Shiloh instigated Jeroboam’s rebellion against Solomon, but then felt betrayed when Jeroboam failed to make them the sole priests of Israel and instead set up the golden calves.

* In order to get the blessing intended for Esau, Jacob deceives his father by using his brother’s cloak and the meat and hide of a goat (Gen. 27). We know this earlier narrative is a J story because it also uses J words like Yahweh and Jacob. Thus, Jacob’s sons using the blood of a goat is ironic retribution for Jacob’s own deception, which is very characteristic of J’s strong reoccuring themes on family deceptions.

* In J, the brothers (not the Midianites) sell Joseph for 20 weights of silver. Later, Joseph will arrange to have 20 portions of silver returned to their grain sacks (9 brothers come back on the first return, and 11 come back on the 2nd return), again hinting at an ironic payback for the brother’s deception.

* J is also the main author of Judges and 2 Samuel. By reading J in it’s original version (which can be found in Richard Friedman’s “The Hidden Book in the Bible”), it’s much easier to see the many correlations that J makes between the patriarachs and the Court of David. The way the Bible is set up now, having to plow through the tedium of Leviticus and Numbers makes most readers completely forget the things they read in Genesis by the time they get there. For example, the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19 directly mirrors the destruction of the Benjamanite city of Gibeah in Judges 19. The story of Levi and Simon avenging their sister while Jacob does nothing is mirrored in the story of Absalom avenging his sister while David does nothing. All of these connections are almost impossible to remember reading the Bible from front to back.

* What’s even more fascinating is the way J effectively brings his story full circle when he ends his story at 1 Kings 2:37-46, with Solomon telling the rebellious Shimei “In the day you go out of Jerusalem, you will die!”, mirroring Yahweh’s words in Eden, “In the day you eat from it: you will die!” Much of the same words like “knowledge”, “good”, “bad”, and “death” are repeated numerously both at the beginning and ending of the story.

“The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against ‘the world.’ This has led to a profound fear of the ‘other.’”

http://www.alternet.org/politics/143232/why_republicans_are_in_the_grip_of_an_apocalyptic_rapture_cult_centered_on_revenge_and_vindication

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6256173/Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-revealed-to-have-Jewish-past.html

http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project

“First Example – Liberal Falsehood

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34: Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.”

“But now, Oh our God, what can we say after this? For we have disregarded the commands you have through your servants the prophets when you said: ‘The land you are entering to possess is a land polluted by the corruption o the its peoples. By their detestable practices they have filled it with their impurity from one end to the other. Therefore, do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons or take their daughters for your sons. Do not a seek a treaty of friendship with them at any time, that you may be strong and eat the good things of the land and leave it to your children as an everlasting inheritance.’” -Ezra 9:10-12

http://www.alternet.org/world/142478/israeli_government_ads_warn_against_marrying_non-jews_

Before this crap started, generally everyone agreed health care had to be reformed. Even a lot of conservatives were congratulating Michael Moore on his movie ‘Sicko’ two years ago to my utter shock. Now it’s riot city. It’s not that I’m disappointed the crazies outnumber the reform protestors; it’s that they seem to even outnumber the war protests. The Baby Boom generation has failed us. It’s like for a brief glimpse in the 60s, the vast majority of the country’s youth understood that we needed to stop feeding the war machine and ferment better racial and gender equality throughout the nation, but now they’ve all retreated to their suburbs, cradling their guns in fear of the African Anti-Christ and his army of Socialist Gun-stealers.

I heard lately that although our material wealth has increased three times over since the 50s, we have steadily become less happy every decade, despite the explosion in mood-altering and sexual enhancement pharmaceuticals. Yet people were happier in the 60s with nothing but ragweed. A large part of it is because people know only half as many friends as they did back then, but I guess a lot of it can be attributed to the American need to outdo your neighbors and buy a bigger house.

I also read a Gallup Poll from 10 years ago that said one in five Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth. I’m having a hard time believing it. I keep thinking that most of them must have misread it or that it was phrased in a way that made them think the question was from their own perspective. Can people really be that stupid? It’s becoming a very transcendental question to me.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx

I noticed the mainstream media was shocked — SHOCKED — to learn that Wright was going on a book tour to try and defend himself after 4 weeks of being completely lambasted by them. Chris Matthews took special offense to Wright saying that the media was attacking not Obama but the “black church.” Of course it’s not really an attack on black churches. It’s the media using the shock value of what goes on in a lot of black churches in order to get ratings and pawn it off as a campaign issue. Obama supporters are interviewed to get the message out that he needs to just shut up and go away, because, as is continuously repeated, the story was suppossedly JUST NOW starting to “die off” (har har har). It almost makes me think the media doesn’t want people to find out that there is more substance to Wright’s message than his crazy conspiracy theory about AIDS. Personally, I don’t care what he says; at least now the lazy media will have to pick off new statements to take out of context instead of re-looping the same two phrases (“God damn America” and “chickens coming home to roost”) over and over again. Of course, this isn’t an attack on the “black church.”

Here’s the FULL quote from Wright about “chickens coming home to roost”:

“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday did anybody else see or hear him? He was on FOX News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the FOX News commentators to no end, he pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, he said Americas chickens, are coming home to roost.”

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

“We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

“We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

“We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.

“We bombed Qaddafi’s home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against the rock.

“We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they’d never get back home.

“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

“Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”

—————–

Compare this to the comments recently made by Rush Limbaugh:

“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country.

Limbaugh cited Al Sharpton, saying the Barack Obama supporter threatened to superdelegates that “there’s going to be trouble” if the presidency is taken from Obama.

Several callers called in to the radio show to denounce Limbaugh’s comments, when he later stated, “I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver.”

Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.

“There won’t be riots at our convention,” Limbaugh said of the Republican National Convention. “We don’t riot. We don’t burn our cars. We don’t burn down our houses. We don’t kill our children. We don’t do half the things the American left does.”

—————–

Limbaugh and Hagee are a lot alike. Both are fat, racist bigots who call for (or “dream of”) violence in order to achieve their political ends (although for Hagee, that end is the Apocalypse). Both believe that God blesses the rich and the poor only have themselves to blame (the opposite of the gospel message). And both make a lot more money off their messages and affect real world politics than their scary, black “hate-filled” counterparts.

I’ve also heard people like Buchanan say there’s no comparison between Wright and Hagee because Obama knew Wright for 20 years and McCain doesn’t know Hagee personally. But why is that better? Obama didn’t *want* Wright to become an issue yet until recently refused to disown him even though it would cost him votes. McCain *sought out* Hagee, despite the fact he had previously condemned people like him, and *asked* for his support in order to get more votes from anti-Catholic, anti-Islamic Evangelicals.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5909

I think this is something like the 3rd week the “liberal media” has been bashing Obama over Rev. Wright’s “God Damn America” sound bytes. This isn’t surprising for those who have noticed how the mainstream media has consistantly jumped to the side of the underdog. First they loved up to Obama because he was the “new guy”, then they jumped over to Hillary when he started to win, and have continued to switch partners as the polls swing back and forth so as to drag the Democratic primary out as long as humanly possible. It’s not like they didn’t have this stuff on Wright from the very beginning.

Yes, Rev. Wright and Louis Farrakhan are both crazy. But they really aren’t as racist and hate-filled as everyone would have you believe. Obviously the part about government infecting the population with AIDS and Syphallis is nothing but a crazy conspiracy theory, but it’s hardly unthinkable. North Carolina secretly sterilized 65,000 people between 1929 and 1974. His statements on “God Damn America” were issued against the violence that America spreads, whch is something Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out as well, saying that America was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and that “America was founded on genocide, and a nation that is founded on genocide is destructive.”

Farrakhan has blamed the Jews of Hollywood for making movies that depict black people as “less than human.” He’s said every American Jew is also a dual citizen of Israel, and in some cases, like that of Liberman, this is true. He’s called Hezbollah “freedom fighters”, which of course is nonsense, but it is true that they are a product of Israel’s injustice towards the Palestinian people. He’s said that rich Jewish bankers helped finance Hitler, which is partially true; many Jewish bankers did help finance both sides during the World Wars. And he’s said that for having such a small number of people, the Jews have a large influence over American and European politics, which is true.

A lot of it is skeevy, but really pretty low on the radar in terms of being “out-and-out” anti-semitic. Both of them deny being anti-white or anti-semitic, but then so did Mel Gibson. Like Apocalypto, there are hateful insinuations cloaked in historical interpretations, but I feel like I’ve heard so much worse, which brings me to Rev. John Hagee.

Hagee said that American and Israel need to ally up to bomb Iran to fulfill “God’s Plan”, which pretty much makes him admittedly anti-arab and anti-islamic. He considers Harry Potter to be contemporary witchcraft. Hurricane Katrina was an act of God meant to punish New Orleans for “a level of sin that’s offensive to God,” namely homosexuality, but also Bush’s pressuring Israel to give up some of its illegal settlements in the “tit for tat” exchange. He even erroneously said that the hurricane hit on the same day as a Gay Pride Parade, which in fact was scheduled a week later (plus the primarily gay neighborhoods such as the French Qurater were spared). He’s blamed Hitler’s anti-semitism on Catholicism without any consideration to the anti-semitic Protestant culture of Martin Luther (something very common; my sister’s history teacher Coach Ourso from Mandeville High teaches the same). He’s also written a book called Beginning of the End about how giving the Golan Heights to the Palestinians is “signing a deal with the Anti-Christ” that will bring about the Apocalypse. On a Praise-A-Thon broadcast in 1993, he said that “poverty is caused by sin and disobeying the Word of God.”

Unlike Farrakhan and Wright, Hagee is one of the highest-paid television evangelists in the world, making over a million dollars in 2001 alone. Hagee has claimed that McCain has sought out his vote, and after his endorsement, McCain said more than once that he was “very proud to have Pastor Hagee’s support.” This, however, is not the story the media is interested in, because it doesn’t fit into the Hillary vs. Obama fight that they have been trying to frame for months now.

Lou Dubose writes in the Huffing Post:

“John McCain needed an evangelical to embrace and send a message to the Christian right that he will do their bidding, even if he’s not quite one of them. He settled on San Antonio End-Timer John Hagee.

Hagee’s bizarre theology would be harmless enough (perhaps) if confined to his multimillion-dollar temple. But John Hagee has a constituency that extends beyond his congregation. He used that constituency to build a foreign-policy advocacy organization–Christians United for Israel (CUFI)–that is now pressing for a pre-emptive war with Iran. CUFI brought 4,500 End Times activists to Washington for its July 2006 inaugural event, followed by a day of lobbying on the Hill.

Hagee was straightforward in announcing his agenda: “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West,” he said.

John McCain has been pressed to renounce Hagee. He cannot. Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, whose unsolicited “endorsement” created a problem for Sen. Barack Obama, can preach religious hate. But he works on the fringe of American religion and politics and is an unlikely guest at anyone’s White House. The influence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright–Obama’s longtime pastor who is cut from a different cloth than Farrakhan–doesn’t extend beyond the African-American community in Chicago.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, is deeply invested in John Hagee and his followers.”

When I noticed that Ben Stein’s new Creationist movie previewed a shot of Richard Dawkins, I already knew that the movie must have used some amount of deception in getting him to participate. Dawkins had vowed years ago that he would not do interviews for any anti-evolution films or documentaries because of an incident in which he gave an interview that was edited to look as if he couldn’t give an answer to some questions that were given to him. Sure enough, Dawkins was told that he was participating in a movie called “Crossroads”, which was suppossed to be about an honest discussion about evolution vs. intelligent design, not about scientists getting expelled for beliving in Creationism. Sure enough, Dawkins’ opinions were once again purposely misconstrued, such as when he goes into a thought experiment about how even if Earth was seeded by some other intelligent life form like aliens, then the aliens themselves would have had to evolved from something themselves. This was turned into: “What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN.” “Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE.” On top of that, when Dawkins and another scientist from the movie, PZ Myers, booked seats together for the screening of the movie, Myers was himself EXPELLED from the movie theatre! Lies about the two being “gate-crashers” were subsequently spun despite the fact that the producer has gone on record saying that “of course” he had seen Dawkins and allowed him to attend because “he had handled himself fairly honorably” (as if Myers was somehow less honorable in the way he stood in line next to Dawkins). According to Dawkins, the movie is terribly boring and attempts to tie Darwinism to the Nazis, which seems about as intelletually dishonest as one can get. All of this is pretty hilarious. The religious right have finally got their Hollywood documentary and they’ve managed to raise the bar of deceitfulness and general douchebagginess far higher than anything Michael Moore could have done to “Donation of Constantine” levels.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2394,Lying-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39jYgsvUOY>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39jYgsvUOY

This is a really good interview with a Catholic theologian.

 http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2766236,00.html