1/20/22: God Forbid

There has always been that old statement that you never talk about politics and religion. I figured that statement was made in order to keep the peace at family get-togethers. Whoever made the statement probably never would have guessed that there would be a time where politics would become the new religion and any other religion would be seen as an obstacle to the oligarchy.

It has been argued that religion today is losing its grip and now with our new found faith is science – God takes a back seat and those who are steadfast in their religious beliefs become suspicious bad actors who according to the government wish to usurp and being down the current administration.

This has been the concern of law makers as far back as 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. We all know what religious group was targeted after the attacks on New York and The Pentagon but now after January 6th—those who want us to remember also are targeting Christian groups. These Christian groups are also declaring religious exemption from the vaccines – this is also sending up red flags as to who the troublemakers are and who are getting in the way of the Marxist Great Reset.

Public opinion polling has long shown the United States to be a very religious country. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say religion is “very important” in their own lives, and another 26% say it is fairly important. But religious commitment and religious affiliation vary considerably across the U.S. states. For example, Gallup data show that Americans living in the West are generally less likely than people in other parts of the country to say religion is important in their lives.

A state-by-state analysis of religious affiliation confirms this tendency in western states, showing that Oregonians, Idahoans, and Washingtonians have especially high proportions of non-religious residents. The data also show Rhode Island has the highest proportion of Catholics of any state in the nation, and Utah has the greatest percentage of Mormons. Alabama, West Virginia, and Mississippi have the highest proportion of Protestants, and New York and New Jersey have the highest proportion of Jews.

The United States is an overwhelmingly Christian nation. According to Gallup’s yearly estimate on national religious preferences, more than 8 in 10 Americans say they are affiliated with a Christian religion. Some individual states exceed that level, and no state falls below 76% in attachment to Christianity. The aggregate data indicate that more than 9 in 10 residents of Mississippi, North Dakota, and Louisiana identify their beliefs as Christian. Only 8 of the 48 continental states have less than 80% of their residents identifying as Christian — Massachusetts (79%), Washington (79%), New York (79%), Nevada (79%), Idaho (79%), Colorado (78%), California (76%), and Oregon (76%).

Gallup data show that roughly half of all Americans identify as Protestants. The states with the greatest number of Protestants are generally found in the southern part of the country. In Alabama, West Virginia, and Mississippi, three in four residents are Protestant. (Note that these data do not include the growing proportion of Americans who say they are Christian but do not give any religious affiliation beyond that; a significant proportion of these Americans are probably Protestant in their beliefs.) Because of the extraordinarily high prevalence of Mormons in Utah, only about one in eight residents of that state are Protestant.

About one in four Americans are Catholic, which makes it the largest single religious denomination in the United States.

Roughly 2% of Americans are Mormon, and they reside overwhelmingly in the West. Two in three Utah residents are Mormon; Mormons settled Utah in the mid-19th century and the headquarters of the church is in Salt Lake City. The data suggest that one of every three Mormons in the United States lives in Utah. Idaho also has a rather large proportion of Mormons, as more than one in five Idahoans affiliate with that religion.

About 2% of the U.S. population is Jewish. Several northeastern states — including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, have Jewish populations above the national average. Though based on a small sample size, the data suggest that the District of Columbia has a higher proportion of Jewish residents than any U.S. state

There are approximately 3.45 million Muslims of all ages living in the U.S. –which makes up about 1.1% of the total U.S. population.

The narrative around religious liberty has, in recent years, been contentious. Scholars and commentators alike have alleged that recent Supreme Court opinions demonstrate a pro-religion bias and, even more controversially, favoritism of Christians over Muslims.

There was a time just after 9/11 that the Mosques were targets for FBI and CIA spying.

These alphabet agencies infiltrated mosques, religious events, community gatherings and even individuals’ homes, and gathered hundreds of video recordings and thousands of hours of audio recordings of conversations.

The FBI also allegedly instructed under cover agents to focus on the more religiously devoted members of the community. In its estimation, the more devout a Muslim appeared, the more suspicious he or she was.

The blanket targeting of religious exercise should be troubling for all Americans. The government invaded private spaces and branded religious devotion threatening. What is more, after the government’s plan unraveled and the undercover agent was discovered for who he was, members of the Southern California Muslim community no longer knew who to trust.

Yet, despite the egregious violations of religious rights, these activities have largely been ignored in the national religious liberty conversation.

This might be due in part to the complicated nature of the legal issues. The FBI asked the district court to dismiss the religious liberty claims because, it says, the information gathered cannot be disclosed without harming national security.

I am also sure that many people will say that the spying was justified because the mosque would be a great place for terrorists to gather and make plans against our government.

Well, the shoe is now on the other foot — with the advent of COVID-19 and the threat of domestic terrorism, church gatherings have been curtailed and many members of the clergy have acquiesced to the request by government officials to not hold church services because of health risks to congregations.

Christian churches are now the target of spying and contact tracing. There is also concerns form health officials that many people are abusing their religious exemption in order to avoid vaccination.

This will not be addressed in the mainstream media because most Americans might not consider the national security state a threat to their or their community’s religious rights.

Jews faced religious persecution in Nazi Germany during World War II — Muslim Mosques were being spied on after 9/11 and now Christian churches are being targeted by a government that suspects that churches are a place were right wing extremists are plotting against a liberal government.

In the two decades since the attacks, Muslim communities have been subject to sweeping violations of their rights, including invasive government surveillance. Members of some other religious minorities — for example, Sikhs have suffered at times, mostly because they were confused as Muslims. But America’s Christian majority has not been significantly affected.

The times are changing — religious meet ups are being discouraged and many people are wondering why in a place where there is freedom of religion they have been told to keep out of the pews.

The reality, though, is that Christians have now have a reason to fear the national security state, ceding power to the government no matter the circumstance,

The government of the new normal has the potential to hurt all religious groups.

According to the Western Journal, the federal government is now launching a System’ to Collect ‘Religious Information’ on Unvaccinated Americans.

One list being created by a small agency is stirring massive fears that information about religion will be misused by the federal government.

A notice posted in the Federal Register by the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia said that it intends to create an “Employee Religious Exception Request Information System.”

The notice reads:

“This system of records maintains personal religious information collected in response to religious accommodation requests for religious exception from the federally mandated vaccination requirement in the context of a public health emergency or similar health and safety incident, such as a pandemic, epidemic, natural disaster or national or regional emergency; and/or any other lawful collection of employee information or data that is necessary to ensure a safe and healthy environment for individuals who are occupying PSA facilities, attending PSA-sponsored events, or otherwise engaged in official business on behalf of the Agency, The system of records will assist the Agency in the collection, storing, dissemination, and disposal of employee religious exemption request information collected and maintained by the Agency, as referenced above.”

Given the vast, and what may seem pointless, amounts of information routinely collected by everyone from Facebook to the feds, the bureaucratic babble focused on a few employees of a small agency might not sound alarming. But alarm is exactly what Americans should be feeling.

Something this small could eventually serve as a model for a whole-of-government push to assemble lists of Americans who object on religious grounds to a COVID-19 vaccine–it can also be used to track down what Biden calls “domestic terrorists.”

The definition of domestic terrorists in the New Normal are clearly of the American far-right and according to the US Government are driven by zeal for heretical distortions of Christian theology.

These include millennialism, which envisions the imminent end of the age and the advent of a new dispensation; post-millennialism, which holds that Christ’s return will not come until after the battle of Armageddon ushers in a 1,000-year global dominion by victorious “true Christians;” and antinomianism, under which believers follow a “higher law” and intentionally violate societal norms.

According to the United States Department of Justice— “Christian zealots view themselves as actors in God’s plan for a cataclysmic overturning of the current order. At the deepest level, these are actors who deploy weapons of mass destruction in a sacrificial ritual of mass murder and suicide, a magical act intended to alter the relationship between God and mankind.”

This means the same program that was aimed at Muslims after 9/11 is now being used against Christians and Right-wing groups after the attack on Washington on January 6th, 2021.

The government will have every opportunity and incentive to employ the same tactic in future cases involving the alleged targeting of religious individuals, be they Muslims, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Sikhs, Buddhists, Born again Christians or otherwise.

Law enforcement officials will know, when turning their sights on adherents of disfavored faiths, that they are functionally immune from suit no matter how clearly established the laws they are going to be violating, so long as they conduct their activities under the banner of national security and a court accepts the government’s claim of secrecy.

President Biden may not be winning points for transparency, but he’s doing his best to win first place in subjecting Americans with sincerely held religious beliefs to differential treatment, Especially when it comes to conservative beliefs and those who wish to seek religious exemption from getting the vaccines.

Even though the President claims to be a devout Catholic his administration’s hostility to religion lies in the fact that the Department of Defense has not granted any religious exemptions to the coronavirus vaccine.

Also when it comes to describing Domestic Terrorism, you can espouse any religion or ideology and still fall under the watchful eye of surveillance.  

The cause of “domestic terrorism” can be racism, religious intolerance, environmental protest, anti-government feeling, animal rights, anti-abortion campaigners, “perceived government overreach”, “incel ideology”, “anti-corporate globalization feeling” or a mixture of any of the above.

Domestic terrorists” may espouse violence or they may not espouse violence. They may work in groups, or be loners, or be loose associations with no organizational structure. They can be left wing or right wing, religious or secular.

But ever since the January 6th event — the focus is on right wing Christian zealots who the government believes are out to overthrow their power hold.

Joe Biden has claimed multiple times to be the author of the original Patriot Act, saying it was based entirely on a bill he proposed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

But remember it was this act that ensured the spying of Muslim citizens in their mosques.. now we see that what is good for the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Muslims post 911 –is good for the Christians post January 6th.

The Department of Homeland Security , the Department of Justice , and the Federal Bureau of Investigation will gain massive additional powers, and funding, in order to monitor (surveil), investigate (spy), and prosecute (terrorize, murder, and jail) so-called cases of generally undefined “domestic terrorists.” which may and will include Christian right wing nationalists.

After the January 6th attack in Washington DC “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” issued a statement about domestic terrorism: stating that the new terrorists will be homegrown and will be ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority [and] perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.

They are believed to be “motivated by a range of issues, including anger over Covid-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, police use of force,” and other dangerous “false narratives” (e.g., the existence of the “deep state,” “herd immunity,” “biological sex,” “God,” and so on).

“Inspired by foreign terrorist groups” and “emboldened by the breach of the US Capitol Building,” this diabolical network of “domestic terrorists” is “plotting attacks against government facilities,” “threatening violence against critical infrastructure” and actively “citing misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19.”

See, the problem with the original “Global War on Terror” was that it wasn’t actually all that global. It was basically just a war on Islamic “terrorism”– and there was denial form our government that Muslims were not targeted for their religious beliefs.

The Global war on terror aims at populist movements and religious fanaticism. Even basic Christianity can be seen as a threat.

This was always inevitable, of course. A globally-hegemonic has no external enemies, as there is no territory “outside” the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as “terrorists” and “extremists.”

The new threat to the state is religion– they won’t come right out and say so, but no one cared when Muslims were targets, just like the maltreatment and targeting of Jews was completely ignored by the Nazis during World war II

In earlier times, these “terrorists” and “extremists” were known as “heretics,” “apostates,” and “blasphemers.” Today, they are also known as “deniers,” ., “science deniers,” “Covid deniers,” and recently, more disturbingly, “reality deniers.”

Those who rely on faith rather than science.

This is an essential part of the pathologizing of the “War on Terror” narrative.

You see in the new normal that the new breed of “terrorists” do not just hate us for our freedom … they hate us because they hate “reality.” They accept religious faith over science and wish to fight for their conservative beliefs.

You see the deniers of the technocracy and the new order are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be “treated,” “reeducated,” and “deprogrammed,” until they accept “Reality.”

This is our future if we do not stay strong in our beliefs –that goes for all faiths.

All faiths worry that one of their own will be attacked. We will see more attacks on synagogues mosques and Christian churches in the future. There will also be more domestic spying on religious groups out of fear of domestic terrorism.