The FundamentaList: This week in the religious right:

[Joanne98]

This week in the religious right: A conservative compares Obama to Hilter, there's nothing scary about speaking in tongues, and a look at the people behind Palin's Wasilla book-banning.

Sarah Posner | September 24, 2008 |

1. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Comparing Obama to Hitler.
The meaning of the Declaration of Independence was supposed to take center stage at a forum for religious outreach representatives from both presidential campaigns yesterday, but the lunchtime crowd of conservative activists and congressional staff at the Capitol Hill Club was instead treated to a lineup of speakers tossing out apocalyptic rhetoric about Barack Obama.

The event was sponsored by the Capitol Hill-based Faith and Action's Reese Roundtable, an annual luncheon about the moral meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Faith and Action's motto is "bringing the word of God to bear on the hearts and minds of those who make public policy in America." One of its goals is to "restore the moral foundations of our American culture" through placing Ten Commandments displays in public buildings.

Faith and Action's Rob Schenck, a perennial religious-right adviser and gadfly, moderated and wasted no time in lambasting the Rev. E. Terri LaVelle, the Obama campaign's senior religious adviser, who had committed to attend but cancelled at the last minute. "A snub!" protested Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America.

With McCain's conservative-coalitions director Robert Heckman looking on, and at one point chiming in that Obama's recent faith and values outreach was a "colossal flop," Obama was portrayed by speakers as a figure of evil and doom. No one came right out and called him the Antichrist, but the apocalyptic message was clear.

Bernie Reese, the octogenarian founder of the Reese Roundtable, said, "I grew up during days of Hitler; we've almost got a blueprint to what brought Hitler to power. He rode in on an economic crisis and promised the moon to the middle class. He was a man who had glittering rhetoric; he could sit in the room and have his audience in his hand." Alveda King, niece of the civil-rights icon and an adviser to Priests for Life, the militant anti-abortion group, said abortion in the African American community had been done "deliberately, by genocide." We're "beyond chastisement," she went on. "We're in judgment."

"Lord," prayed Johnny Hunter, an African American pastor who gave the benediction, don't let us elect someone who might "bring this nation down."

2. There's Nothing Scary About Speaking in Tongues.

After syndicated political cartoonist Pat Oliphant penned a cartoon about Sarah Palin that mocked the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues, condemnation came quickly from within and without evangelical circles.

The cartoon shows Palin speaking gibberish, McCain talking about how that gives his campaign a direct line to God, and God complaining to Peter that he can't understand a word.

Sarah Palin may or may not speak in tongues. That's neither here nor there. Speaking or praying in tongues is a common -- some would say required -- practice in Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, the fastest-growing form of Christianity in the world. According to Pentecostals, the practice dates back to the first followers of Jesus who, as documented in the Book of Acts, were filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke in other tongues as evidence of it. Palin's religious practices shouldn't be ridiculed -- but it is essential to explore how she would inject her religious beliefs into governing and policy-making.

Continued>>
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fundamentalist_092408

[sam sarrha]

1. but she's a Dimionist... i'd rather live under Hitler..chances of survival are better

[Sentath]

2. There's Nothing Scary About Speaking in Tongues.

Thats true I guess. Its a fairly well understood phenomenon of glossolalia via self induced trance state.

It also has nothing to do with xenoglossia, the miracle that it is aping.