So says Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, in discussing president Obama’s re-election. He said that the results sent America “down a path of destruction”.
The younger Graham warned that his ticked-off god is in one of his smiting moods: “I want to warn America: God is coming around. He will judge sin, and it won’t be pretty… We have God’s blessing as a nation. Scripture is clear. God blesses countries, but God also brings bedlam when countries turn their back on him. If we don’t obey his laws, he will withdraw his hand of protection.”
How dare voters in Ohio and other swing states so cavalierly ignore god’s will when he made it so clear? His chosen ambassador on Earth placed full-age newspaper ads to vote for Mitt Romney, for Pete’s sake! You expect god to ignore this slap in the face, maybe turn the other cheek like his wimpy son suggests? Not on your life.
God is out for revenge. So don’t go crying to god when the next blizzard or hurricane hits. You asked for it.
Oh my FSM! We’re living in No Name City!!!
(IMO one of the most underrated, not to mention irreverent, movies of all time.)
If there’s a place in the bible that says “The United States of America has my blessing,” I’ll convert right now.
Well, at least Mr. Graham has the grace to acknowledge the irony of what he’s suggesting. Most of the time you hear these folks using ‘slap in the face’ as a call to action, they have no self-awareness of how what they’re suggesting relates to Jesus’ command.
Franklin Graham is a power and money hungry fraud.
What the bible really says is clear. God is in charge and made Obama the president.
I’ve been watching the fundie xians for over a decade.
I don’t believe that they really believe much of anything they say.
All those deeply held core beliefs can and do change in a heartbeat.
Mormons are nonxian cultists except suddenly they turn into good xians and you have to vote for them. God wants them to have what they want and hates who they hate. A sockpuppet in other words.
Graham’s religion is just right wing extremist politics with a few crosses stuck on it. They all know it and could care less.
I wondered why that disembodied hand kept trying to fill in the Romney bubble on my ballot. I finally swatted it away and trapped it under a waste basket.
Were I god, I’d be tired of getting mad all the time.
Pa. Voter: Faulty Voting Machine Picked Wrong Candidate
Is it a tired old trope that Americans tend to be ignorant of anything that happens outside their own borders? Maybe there is some truth in it when we consider the likes of Franklin Graham. How exactly does he explain the fact that countries in Europe routinely give God the middle finger, yet have less severe weather and less dysfunctional societies?
Franklin, natural disasters don’t prove that your god is angry, they prove that he is hopelessly incompetent. Either that or he doesn’t exist.
Years ago, I saw part of a televised Billy Graham revival meeting and remember remarking “That hall has a funny echo. Among all the ‘AMEN’s, I could swear I heard a ghostly ‘Sieg heil!'” The mechanism of a mob is always the same, no matter which hood ornament you put on it.
The point is that god cares only about America and he punishes us to bring us back to godly ways. God does not care at all about the rest of the world so they can do what they like and go to hell.
God’s punishment for y’all voting in Obama will be to send in more Global Warming pundits to annoy the right wingers.
Well, the fundies may think that because Luther used it to keep the peasants in line. Members of the One True Church(TM), however, can follow Aquinas (Summa Th., II-IIae q.42 a.2 ad 3):
So cave Romanos, Obama! Boehner knows it’s you who is guilty of sedition.
When Franklin Graham speaks all I hear is ‘Fear! Fear! Fear! FEEEEAAAAAARRR!’
I don’t believe that they really believe much of anything they say.
That would make them “bad” people (i.e. people who know they are doing evil and rub their hands in glee). Not even psychopaths consider themselves evil.
As Jonathan Haidt says: We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs [The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion].
You cannot hope to establish a connection with people with different beliefs if you cannot accept that they are just as honestly convinced of these beliefs as you are of yours. Their actions stem from the same needs as your actions, only the strategies to meet these needs differ.
To appease God, let us build huge coal burning power plants as a sacrifical offering!
Anyone else hear God speaking with a New Jersey/New York mobster accent?
“That’s a nice country ya got there… shame if something were to happen to it.”
It makes so much sense now: God’s running a cosmic protection racket! Why didn’t I see it before? With all the potential life in the universe I bet God’s just raking it in! We need to start praying right now and try to get in the ground floor of this scheme!
If I were God I would become an atheist, because of fans like Franklin Graham.
The latter choice looks preferable to me. Live my entire life in fear for divine punishments and then eventually go to a boring place like heaven sounds like a very bad bet to me.
OK. No problem.
I would have a better chance at “establishing a connection” with a rock or tree.
I’ve seen virtually no evidence that they really believe their god babble. It’s well known they don’t follow it. Hypocrisy is one of their 3 main sacraments, hate and lying are the other two.
FWIW, I had no trouble “establishing a connection” with the atheists. Up until a few years ago, I was a xian myself.
PS. The fundies don’t have much interest in “establishing a connection” with me either. At least not one that doesn’t involve guns or bombs. Like a lot of scientists, I’ve been getting death threats from them since the last century.
Xians learned a key lesson when they took over the Roman empire. While converting people can be hard, it doesn’t matter. It’s usually just easier to kill them.
Not sure if you are trying to insult psychopaths or fundie xians here.
They are bad people. It’s not hard to see that. They own the dark side of our society by any objective measurements you care to look at.
This isn’t even remotely true. It’s nonsense (I’m being polite here).
The christofascists openly hate the US government and want to destroy it if they can and set up a theocracy. Most of them are xian Dominionists and make no secret of it. They own the GOP right now.
The normal people want them to go crawl back under their rocks and leave us and our society alone.
Your fallacy is one of equivalents. Believing that there are two sides and they are both right. It’s gibberish. Some groups are simply evil and destructive and it’s been this way since the Israelis genocided the Canaanites. The Afghani Taliban, Khmer Rouge, Al Qaeda, and the American Taliban(s) are the correct equivalents and their malevolence comes from the same source, True Believers who think they should rule over others whether those others like it or not.
Ha Ha Mano Ol’ M8!
All must obey God’s Laws, what God’s Laws?
If we look at it philosophically, legally and practically, God’s Bible killed off his laws, especially the one “Thou Shalt Not Kill” by the justice it delivered in the rest of the scriptures.
A law can only be judged on how the law is applied within a society or group. If the justice doesn’t support or defying the law brings no penalties then the law is defeated by the justice dispensed by the system.
In the Bible, numerous cases of murder (Joshua @ Jericho for instance) where the perpetrator(s) is(are) actually rewarded by God for such defiance of the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” law, that the Law has been completely Nullified by the delivered justice,
It has become a Law of “Maybe Thou Shalt Not Kill Sometimes”.
Yes, the continual chest thumping of Theists, growling “Obey God’s Laws” hasn’t a rational case to support it.
Aye M8! 😀 😀
Aha! So this is where omnipotence (coz that mofo can do everything) trumps omniscience (coz that mofo already knew Obama would win) and gives a quick backhand to omnibenevolence (coz apparently that mofo has had it up to here!)
“Like a lot of scientists, I’ve been getting death threats from them since the last century.”
Good grief! Can you identify your line of work without compromising your anonymity? At least one other member of your genus would like to know.
See the “Don Juan in Hell” episode in G.B. Shaw’s Man and Superman for an enjoyable (and Mozartean) treatment of that preference.
Natural disasters kill thousands of people worldwide on a nearly constant basis.
Apparently god is permanently mad.
His father didn’t even have to speak. The (very Catholic) family I was born in would watch him with the sound off, back when all TV was monochrome. The body language and grimaces were 100% pure hatred and intimidation. We found him entertaining, like a 1930s horror movie. Franklin, not so entertaining.
Medical research.
The death threats came from the forced birthers and female slavers at first. They don’t just threaten to kill people either. These are sponsors of xian terrorism, a serious problem in our country and they kill, bomb, and arson occasionally.
The other group are the creationists who hate all science and scientists but especially biologists.
The groups the anti-science cadres target are biologists especially evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and climatologists. They occasionally go after other scientists as well because they are too stupid to figure out which is what.
There is nothing unusual about this. On a good day, PZ Myers has gotten up to 100 death threats. In one day. At least one climatology group has had to be moved to a safe, undisclosed location due to threats.
(Can’t nest deep enough to reply directly.) Holy shit. Math has been comparatively safe since the AMRC bombing (U of Wisconsin) in the late 1960s, in which IIRC they killed a physicist, perhaps by mistake (sorry, Mano!). PZ’s situation is terrible but is perhaps not directly related to his research. Stay safe.