Visiting Minister @ Palin's church prayed for 'witchcraft' protection

Takvah said:

Hey it could be worse... she could be a Scientologist.

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ooh... just imagine the White House tours then!

South Park episodes would abound...

Celia Cyanide said:

I don't think they worship Satan at all.

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Depends on the church. There are many various forms of Satanism. Theistic Satanists do worship Satan, but he's a much different guy than Christianity's version.

Sheryl Nantus said:

and if (fill in name here) isn't/is (fill in your religious beliefs here, if any) then they must be Evil And Not Allowed to Rule.

the amount of ignorance you Americans have about how laws are passed in your own country really scares me. Seriously. You really have NO idea about how your own government works.

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I am aware about how the government works, however, it should be notable that there are public officials who do, in fact, inject their religious beliefs into their public policy positions (issues such as reproductive rights, LGBT issues, creationism in public schools, separation of church and state, etc). I have no issue with people believing whatever religion they want, but so long as they don't try to impose their beliefs into public institutions and on the country as a whole.

I am watching the video right now on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkViRp6W5oE

I intend to watch at least three different versions of the same video on YouTube before I pass judgement. And then I will get back to all you fine folks with my own opinion (for what it's worth).

Meanwhile I am going to make a very stern and (yes) angry statement:

None of you have any f--king business passing judgement on a religious ceremony if you neither understand the ceremony, nor even witnessed/taken part in such a ceremony yourselves. A lot of you here are outsiders looking in and don't have a damned clue as to which parts of such a ceremony are literal, which parts are merely poetic, and how it all ultimately impacts the outlook of the people who do take part in them. As for me, I have indeed taken part in exactly these kinds of ceremonies of prayer for protection from evil, so I will be viewing these videos from my own insider's perspective of what these kinds of ceremonies mean --and also from the perspective of what I know from over 20 years of experience what it is that they most certainly do NOT mean.




.

*hands Plot Device a valium*

It'll be okay. Really.

mscelina said:

Aware enough, I think, to recognize that there's no way in hell that a Vice President could chunk the separation of church and state from the Constitution.

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Really. A vice president is basically a figurehead position, and there's no way a VP could, oh, i don't know, set up an entire domestic spying program despite constitutional problems or set policy on torture or push the nation into war or anything like that.

Seriously, I think Palin's influence on policy if elected will be negligible at best.

This is a misprint. He actually prayed for World of Warcraft protection. He didn't want her to become overly absorbed with the game.

*grin*

Cheney wasn't just a vice president, though, was he? As I said in another thread, I think McCain is signalling quite heavily that HIS vice president won't be some kind of power broker behind the throne. Allowing for the constitutional position of the VP and McCain's traditionalist view on the second in command, I'd have to say that any such claims (Church and State, overturning Roe v Wade, blah blah blah) would pretty much have to be dismissed as hyperbolic. Hell--the president couldn't accomplish any of those things on his own without a whole lot of help from the other two branches of the government. Check and balances are real working cogs in our government machine as Sheryl pointed out earlier.

Palin isn't hunting... she's engaging in animal sacrifice. What a sick, bitch!

dmytryp said:

Yes, ceremonial prayer to 'protection from witchcraft' is the same as 'God Damn America' and 'US government spread AIDS to blacks'. Same thing.

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When the hell did I ever say it was the same? I said calling people out for the actions of their pastor was wrong no matter what. I thought I made that quite clear. In fact, my opinion is that they are nowhere near comparable, but that's wasn't my point.

Don said:

Yes, there are all kinds of wacky people in the world, but we expect our Presidents to exercise judgement, and be at least a little smarter than the average victim of con artists. Personally, I believe both Obama and Palin should be kept far away from positions of power until they learn to distinguish the difference between fact and fiction.

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This is my opinion as well (is ok for me to claim that since someone else already stated my opinion for me?) Although i disagree about keeping them away from power. I don't feel either one of them believed in what these pastors said. Until they make the same statements from their own mouth, I don't have an issue. I don't believe in guilt by association unless there is proof that such a person follows such beliefs. Simply listening to a pastor doesn't equate believing in everything they do. If that were the case, few pastors would have very large congregations.

I thought you did too, cethklein. *sigh* There's a lot of tit for tat going on with this issue on both sides of the aisle. Fact of the matter is, personal religious affiliation shouldn't be part of the modern electoral process. When the Clinton camp beat the Obama's church issue to death, it was annoying and distracted from the major issues of the campaign. Same thing is happening here. If you argued against the backlash on Obama for the "God damn America" BS then you'd have to be far more than a hypocrite to try to make something out of this which is, after all, a stretch no matter how you look at it.

You can't hold candidates responsible for what other people say unless those other people happen to be close advisors or some such...

at which point, they still may not be representing the views of the candidate they work for. Who agrees with anyone 100%? It's not even fair to say, "you hired this person, now you must defend or refute everything they say, every single day, no matter how unrelated to their job or your position."

And yet the news jumps all over the words of pastors or donors or even just supporters. Geesh.

There's plenty to bash the candidates about...can't we leave this sort of stuff out of it?

I'm more saddened by the fact that the media is giving such weight to the words of ministers, and trying to make them matters of state.

When the color blind guy shouts "Red ties are Satanic!" should we attack the wearers with scissors?

Here's what I watched:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkViRp6W5oE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAWM7E_WMfo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0utkTp7DTw&feature=related



He prayed a prayer of "petition" for Sarah Palin. Please note that the "petition" portion of his blessing over her makes up the bulk of most of the entire blessing. And then at the end he briefly takes an excursion out of "peition" and into "declaration."

First the "petition" part. He prayed for her to receive the following from God as she enters the political arena:

Now here's the part where he shifted his prayer from one of "petition" to one of "declararion." Here are the only two declarations he made:
And then he swicthed back to "petition-mode" again.
And then he concluded the paryer.

A prayer of declaration is NOT a prayer in which a person tells God how things are going to be, nor where a puny human dictates any sort of demands to God. Instead it is a type of a public declaration of allegiance to God. The intended audience for the declaration is LITERALLY a human audience, but on a poetic level it is also simultaneously supposed to include a "spiritual audience" which means it's deliberately inclusive of any supposed angels or demons who might happen to be listening in as well. But this intent is only a symbolic one, not a literal one, and THIS is where a lot of outsiders just don't get it. This entire gesture is meant to be an injection of stage drama akin to Hamlet talking to a skull. The skull can't REALLY hear Hamlet's soliloquy, nor can the previous owner of that skull. But it's STILL regarded around the world as one of the most powerful and most brilliantly written scenes in the history of human theatre --no one laughs at or mocks Hamlet's conversation with the skull. So I take issue with anyone laughing at or mocking this kind of a prayer. If you don't "get" Hamlet, go sign up for a few courses in English Literature. And if you don't "get" these kinds of prayer sessions, take a cue from Margaret Mead and go immerse yourself in some real life exposure to real life people who actually partake of these kinds of religions. And renting Borat doesn't count.




I want to conclude this post with one explanation about his use of the phrase "the enemy."

There has been a very long-standing philosophical outlook in Christian thought dating back to the days of Martin Luther and John Bunyan regarding Satan, and this particular stance on Satan has precedent in the Bible. Specifically, the prescribed philosophy is to embrace the full notion that Satan really does exist, and yet simultaneoulsy to go through life utterly avoiding talking about him or even thinking about him. The justification of the philosophy is to deny giving Satan undeserved air time since God is the one who should more rightfully be talked about. Thomas Moore said:
And then there's good old CS Lewis:
These philosophies have ultimately percolated into modern Christian culture in the past several centuries such a way that yes, we believe Satan is real, but why bother to celebrate him? The old folk saying of "Speak of the Devil and he shall appear" is an admonition against giving him too much praise, implying that he will go where he is heralded, so if no one heralds him, then he has no place to go at all.

The outcropping of this decision to avoid talking about Satan is that when he DOES get spoken about, Christians try to avoid actually saying his name. So rather than say "the Devil" or "Satan," Christian will say "the enemy." So it's a euphemism.

Tolkien employed this exact concept in LotR when all of his many characters refused to say the name of Sauron and instead said "the enemy." And please note that their usage of the phrase "the enemy" all throughout the story included anyone who was in league with Sauron, not just Sauron himself.

And when CS Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, he deliberately inverted this well-established practice amongst Christians by having his demon Screwtape make frequent reference to "the Enemy" or "our Enemy" whenever Screwtape was in fact referring to God.

And in the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling does the same: the characters all refuse to say Voldemort's name, so they instead say things like "you know who" and "him" (with much dramatic inflection) and even "the enemy."


In the end, when Christians talk amongst themselves about any assortment of spiritual matters, they will employ many very peculiar words and phrases that an outsider probably won't understand, or (worse) will only half-way understand, and usually wind up taking the wrong way. So I just wnt to clarify that whenever you hear Christians mention "the enemy" they are referring to either one of the following three concepts, and you have the get a grip on the correct context each and every time to figure out which of these three that they really mean in any given instance:

1) Satan himself
2) an agent of Satan (such as a demon, even a low-ranking one)
2) any sort of manifestation of life circumstances that could potentially hail from the Kingdom of Darkness such as an unexplainable and laws-of-averages-defying bout of very bad luck

The use of "the enemy" is meant as a catch-all phrase employed with a cautious eye toward the need for Christians to super-streamline otherwise unsavory conversations that are capable of getting way out of hand into total weirdness. "The enemy" is thus a sanitized euphemism that prevents people from delving too deeply into the whole sordid concept of Satan and allows them to just skim the surface and get the point across in a more minimalist way. The dual-goal is 1) weirdness-avoidance and 2) keeping things positive and edifying.

Williebee said:

When the color blind guy shouts "Red ties are Satanic!" should we attack the wearers with scissors?

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There's an almost zen-like quality to this statement of yours.

When a tree falls in the forest .....

But does the one hand really clap?

cethklein said:

When the hell did I ever say it was the same? I said calling people out for the actions of their pastor was wrong no matter what. I thought I made that quite clear. In fact, my opinion is that they are nowhere near comparable, but that's wasn't my point.

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You know, Ceth, I was going let this slide, but you had to leave me a rep point together with this, so I'll answer.
You specifically said:

you said:

I didn't think Obama's pastor should be held against him and the same goes for Palin. although I'd like to hear the opinions of those who DID think Wright should be held against Obama on tis issue.

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The second part of your statement implies that people that thought Wright was important and this incident wasn't are hypocrites. Which would be true if the situations were comparable. Which I said in my post. In fact, you never said that "the two situations were incomparable". If you did, it would have undermined your whole arguement. So, I suggest you back off a bit.
As to the matter at hand -- the situation with Wright has nothing to do with Obama's personal religious beliefs. What the hell "God Damn America" and the rest of the crap he espoused has to do with his religious beliefs? The criticism of Obama was based on the fact that he held this man as his personal friend, part of his campaign and his mentor for twenty years. The expression "tell me who you friends are and I'll tell you who you are" is certainly somewhat simplistic, but it does have some validity, especially if this is part of the pattern (what would happen if one of the candidates chose a known extremist as part of his cmapign?).
The situation here, with Palin, is purely religious ceremony, which has zero impact on the outside world, unless you try to gouge some insight about her personality from this incident. Which you are more than free to do, but imo is really stretching it (for reasons pointed out in this thread already).

With posts like mine, I simply am bewildered why I haven't graduated from Camp yet.

I haven't been holding anybody's pastors against them in this election before, and I won't start now. Lots of people go to church because they agree with 85% of what's being said and roll their eyes at another 15%. So I won't judge Palin.

I will judge that the visiting pastor is a nutjob, though. Witchcraft? WTF?

So stabbing your 'mentor' in the back and leaving him to bleed out on the floor when his opinions are brought into focus is a good thing to do?

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You really believe that? What, no one can have a difference of opinion with their spiritual leader? You gotta do better than that. It happens every day - I personally know three people right off the top of my head that don't agree with their spirtual leader on certain issues.

Obama recognizes that his pastor is just a man, not a god, and therefore fallible. He's also a man who can think for himself, and knows when his beliefs differ from the hellfire and brimstone sermons of his pastor. And I don't want a blind follower for a leader, anyway. I want someone who is thoughtful about their religion, not a sheep.

So...uh-uh. Try again.

I'm not saying I actually hold this against Palin or not, only that I haven't seen any evidence that she feels this kind of behavior is inappropriate or not in her personal pantheon of beliefs.

Christine N. said:

You really believe that? What, no one can have a difference of opinion with their spiritual leader? You gotta do better than that. It happens every day - I personally know three people right off the top of my head that don't agree with their spirtual leader on certain issues.

Obama recognizes that his pastor is just a man, not a god, and therefore fallible. He's also a man who can think for himself, and knows when his beliefs differ from the hellfire and brimstone sermons of his pastor. And I don't want a blind follower for a leader, anyway. I want someone who is thoughtful about their religion, not a sheep.

So...uh-uh. Try again.

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Oh, baloney! Obama didn't have 'a difference of opinion' with his spiritual leader. He worshipped in that church for 20 years, even had the guy perform his marriage ceremony. Then, when people realized what a black supremacist Wright is, Obama stabbed him in the back, denied basic tenants of the church that had been posted on the web for years, and left the guy bleeding in a back alley, pretending he'd never heard such things in his life.

My comparison to Judas stands.

Whatever dude. You want to vote for a sheep, be my guest. This IS still America.

Don said:

Oh, baloney! Obama didn't have 'a difference of opinion' with his spiritual leader. He worshipped in that church for 20 years, even had the guy perform his marriage ceremony. Then, when people realized what a black supremacist Wright is, Obama stabbed him in the back, denied basic tenants of the church that had been posted on the web for years, and left the guy bleeding in a back alley, pretending he'd never heard such things in his life.

My comparison to Judas stands.

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What should he have done? It seems that no matter what his reponse he's a horrible person.

Celia Cyanide said:

What should he have done? It seems that no matter what his reponse he's a horrible person.

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I'd say his first mistake was making a black supremacist his mentor. Sometime in that 20 years, you think he would have realized that.

Had this been the reverse situation with McCain, he never would have been the nominee.