Christian Radio: What Fundamentalists Really Believe

Fundamentalists want you to think they believe the gospel of the love of Jesus. But this is not so. To find this out, all you have to do is listen to Christian radio. Whenever I am near Oklahoma City, I do so, since there are at least five Christian stations in that area.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to one of the Christian stations. I will not identify the network, since if I get even one little comma wrong in what I report that they said (or, as in the Bible, a jot or a tittle) they would sue me. But I solemnly affirm that what I am about to report is what they really said, except maybe a comma or two.

The talk show host invited the president of the organization to have a free-wheeling discussion on a Friday afternoon. Here are some of the things they said:

• Democrats talk about impeaching Trump. But the reason they want to impeach him is because of his hairdo.
• Hispanic immigrants are “sporting a permanent suntan.” (Is racial humor really necessary here?)
• The host and guest both agreed that they were glad John McCain was dead. (He was too liberal for them.)
• The host, a woman, said that every woman should have five kids.
• The Me Too movement is spreading the idea that a man should never touch a woman, even with so much as a handshake.
• The Kavanaugh hearings showed that Democrats were vile. (How dare a woman accuse a Republican man of sexual misconduct? Only a vile woman would do so.)
• Republicans should not refer to Democrats as their friends. They are enemies.
• The Russia investigation should be terminated right now. (Trump and his associates could not possibly have had any inappropriate contact with Russia.)

All of this was said within about a half of an hour.

I am hard pressed to find any Biblical basis for any of these claims.

My interpretation of their statements, taken as a whole, is that God made Trump president and anyone who criticizes Trump for anything is a servant of Satan. They claim to believe in the forgiveness of sins by the blood of Christ, and they will mouth these words, but they quickly forget them as they proceed to overtly worship Donald Trump. Since Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has the power to negate any part of the Constitution that he does not like, it appears inevitable that fundamentalist Christian leaders will urge their gullible listeners to support the resulting dictatorship.

John Muir's Spirituality

This is a short entry to bring back to our remembrance the kind of spirituality that John Muir had. His spirituality would not be well-defined enough to satisfy modern creationists. Yet these same creationists seem to care nothing at all about what they consider to be God’s creation. It is the people that these creationists hate that truly love the Creation.

I quote from Wikipedia: In a letter to his fond friend Emily Pelton, dated 23 May 1865, he wrote, “I never tried to abandon creeds or code of civilization; they went away of their own accord... without leaving any consciousness of loss.” Elsewhere in his writings, he described the conventional image of a Creator, “as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater.”

Muir remained, though, a deeply religious man, writing, “We all flow from one fountain—Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.”