This is just scary!

[NOTE AS OF FRIDAY MORNING 9/12/08: The video below is SUPPOSED to be playing from You Tube, but instead there is an error message that comes up stating that it has been removed. I made a search for - and found - another source for this material because I believe it is VERY important that it be seen. In the meantime, please read what I have to say about it, because the perspective remains, and is in fact perhaps even MORE significant in light of this new development.

In addition, for a look at the way Google's censorship policy works in oher countries around the world, go to my story on China and watch the Tank Man movie.]


Sarah Palin's Churches and The Third Wave from Bruce Wilson on Vimeo.

Anyone who knows me personally, or who reads this blog on any semi-regular basis (I only WRITE it on a semi-regular basis), knows that I firmly believe in the importance of the separation of church and state. At the same time, I believe in the rights of believers (all believers of all faiths) to worship as they believe is appropriate (within a certain range of human descency however... murder as a part of worship is not really something that sits well with me for example).

I am "a believer" myself, though what that actually means in my life is not what a lot of people who call themselves "believers" would accept. I have a Masters of Divinity from a Southern Baptist seminary (a degree that also has a social work major - something that no SBC seminary offers any longer), I attended Oral Roberts University my freshman year in college... I have "spoken in tongues" (no smart-ass comments please). I was "licensed to preach" by the Southern Baptists when I was 18. For three years I worked for the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board at a mission in San Francisco. I am an ordained minister, and I co-pastored a small church in San Francisco for a short period of time in 1981. I directed an independent gospel music recording company from 1982 - 1991. I am presently a member of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco.

All I have to say about the above is that we need to BE CAREFUL!!! As you will see in the video (go to the links at the end for more, if you can stomach it), the election of Sarah Palin would be no less than the final ascension of the first of The American Taliban to reach high executive office. It's a plan that began with these people back right about the time I graduated from seminary (1980) and the arch-conservative factions of a number of Protestant denominations swore that they were going to take over first their denominations and then the country as a whole. I stood in an auditorium in LA while Bailey Smith, the newly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, made that declaration and I went home and watched as my church (a church open to and welcoming gay people among others) was harassed and eventually thrown out of the SBC.

These people believe in it... These people want it... These people will make it happen. These people aren't your relatively benign, live and let live neighborhood Presbyterians (or Episcopalians, or even most Baptists), these people are fanatical, war-mongering, psychotics and they absolutely believe that what they do comes by direct order from God. There is no difference between the churches that Sarah Palin comes from and the deep fundamentalist Islamic mosques and schools of Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia; no difference except the fact that one believes in a demented Jesus while the other believes in a demented Mohammed. BOTH are wrong, BOTH are evil, and BOTH are terrifying. They are drunk, free-wheeling maniacs commandeering Arnold Schwrzanegger's Hummer and speeding down the political freeway with God in the back seat smoking crack and yelling out orders.

Jim Jones on steroids and lugging gigantic containers of kool-aid.

John McCain is too ignorant of these folks and their beliefs to realize the deal he's made, or - and I truly believe this - he wouldn't have made it. Giving the Republican Party, and the country, to these people is literally a "Disaster of Biblical Proportions!"

While it's possible that John"... would rather lose an election than a war," he clearly IS willing to sell our country down the river to these takeover fanatics in order to win THIS election.

If you thought we were at war before... get ready for friggin' ARMAGEDDON...

Their ultimate goal is to destroy the world so they can go home to Jesus.