Bryan Fischer agrees with ISIL that the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority facing genocide, are devil worshipers…
If you believe our Religio
-wingnuts are any different, philosophically, than Iraq’s
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL (often
called ISIS), then you are wrong. They have more in common than a simple desire to cloak their thuggery in divine sanction.
Bryan Fischer, the un-American anti-Family Asshats' director of issues analysis, in a self-styled “moment of theological accord”
agrees with ISIL that the Yazidis, a religious minority now facing genocide, are Satanists.
And, of course, Fischer is outraged that President
Obama would intervene in Iraq to protect a bunch of devil worshipers,
saying on his hate speech show Focal Point,
They go after devil
worshipers and all of the sudden the entire weight of the United States
government is sent in there to relieve them and to avenge them.
Not true, of course. A few fighter planes do not
represent the full weight of the United States government. Fischer also
says that “while christians were under attack…nothing from this White
House.”
He went on to claim in a column yesterday,
The city of Mosul, long
a haven for christ-followers, has been emptied of christians who were
ordered by the armies of Allah to convert, submit or die. All 45 christian structures in the city have been seized and converted to muslim use. Obama yawns.
Wait a minute! Wasn’t it Bryan Fischer himself who said that muslims are parasites who must convert or die? Why yes it was!
Yes, Bryan Fischer is SO in theological accord with ISIL.
President Obama now has
decided to go back into Iraq, and it’s because ISIS, the Muslim
militants, are slaughtering devil worshipers. So President
Obama…bringing the full weight of the American into Iraq, now, after
months and months and months of begging from the Iraqi government, now
he’s going in there because devil worshipers are under attack.
Ethnically Kurds, the Yazidis’ faith
combines elements of zoroastrianism
from ancient Persia, sufi islam, judaism and christianity along with
beliefs from ancient Mesopotamia. It’s a closed and still secretive
religion – members have to be born into the faith and cannot marry
outside of it.
Yazidis believe that god entrusted the world to
seven angels – the chief angel known in earthly form as the peacock
angel who refused to bow down before Adam. While Yazidis see it as proof
of his devotion to god, the narrative’s parallels with the fallen angel
have led some muslims to accuse them of devil worship.
Fischer, writing in his column yesterday, tells us:
In a rare point of
theological accord, both muslims and christians agree that the archangel
revered by the Yazidis is in fact the Prince of Darkness. The new testament describes him this way, “Satan (who) disguises himself as an
angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14), eager to deceive the gullible into
believing that he is good rather than evil. The Yazidis have fallen for
his lies.
There is certainly an attempt here to deceive the gullible.
This is bad theology. The old testament
does not think Satan is a bad guy. In the old testament, Satan is simply god’s lieutenant. Not an agent of evil. The snake in the Garden of Eden
is just a snake. Even today judaism does not have a devil. That is a christian hang-up all too many wingnut christians throughout
history have been eager to hang on everybody else, this author included.
It’s endlessly fascinating to see how eager these religio-wingnut figures are to cite the old testament, until the old testament is inconvenient, and then suddenly the new testament trumps
the old. In most cases, as when jesus extols the poor and condemns the
rich, you wouldn’t know jesus or the new testament exists.
Keep in mind that the Yazidis, like the ancient
world’s Pagan population, had their beliefs before christianity and
before islam. Then christianity came along and proclaimed these types of
belief to be of the devil and said the gods were not gods at all but
demons. Then islam came along and did the same thing. What these interloping
religions say about religions older than themselves matters not at all,
certainly not in the court of world opinion.
The Yazidis are people. It doesn’t matter what their
beliefs are. If they were devil worshipers there would be nothing wrong
with that from an American perspective, which cherishes a tradition of
religious freedom enshrined in the First Amendment.
Nor more than ISIL’s rancid theology do Fischer’s
screwed up religious beliefs justify genocide, and he ought to be
begging now for the opportunity to apologize for toeing the ISIL line,
rather than condemning Obama for saving innocent lives.
Nor, in fact, are the Yazidis, unlike christians in Iraq, targeted for extermination:
Unlike christians, who
have been told they must either pay a religious tax or convert to islam
to avoid death, the Yazidis are considered by Sunni militants to be
infidels who deserve extermination.
This is exactly what Iilam did to Pagans in the 7th
century when they exploded out of Arabia. People of the book, like christians and jews, historically get some consideration for having
common roots. Pagans, not so much. You don’t get cushy offers to convert
or die when you’re a Pagan. You just get dead.
Unless you’re a woman. Then you get enslaved. But
then, troglodytes like Fischer no doubt think that’s a pretty great fate
for a woman. After all, Fischer has said that women were designed to be ruled over by man, and in modern wingnuttery’s PoV, slaves have got it pretty good. Better than their masters even, so lucky them!
Fischer happily ignores these facts as well, claiming in his column that,
The Yazidis are without
a doubt in a terrible, terrible plight, with 40,000 of them trapped by muslims on a mountain with no food or water. Many of their children have
already died of thirst.
The point here is certainly not to criticize
President Obama for taking action to relieve their suffering. The point
here is that he has shown no empathy or inclination to intervene to stop
the wholesale slaughter of christians by muslims in the same part of
the world. It has taken the suffering of devil-worshipers to get his
attention and rouse him to action.
Since they’ve already labeled Obama as
demon-possessed if not the Antichrist himself, it’s a pretty easy
connection for low-grade thinkers like Fischer to make.
And don’t for a minute think that should the
opportunity arise, the religio-wingnuts – far from limiting themselves to
a shared theology – would behave any differently than ISIL. They’ve
already got divine sanction, after all, to kill the rest of us dead.
