Max,

I’ve been following your work… um… religiously… ever since the Hagee scandal. You’re doing outstanding work.

One question which has been in my mind ever since the Muthee videos were made available…

Why has Wasilla Assembly of God decided to make the Muthee videos available? Do you suspect, as I suspect, that the McCain campaign advised WAoG to make the Muthee videos available for fear that their inavailability might draw more attention to them than the actual videos themselves?

TE

Dear Max,

The prospect of Palin getting anywhere near the White House frightens me deeply. That said, I found the editing of this video troubling. In particular, there were many instances in which the sound quality, particularly as reflected in the timbre of Muthee’s voice, seemed changed and/or out of context. Can you guarantee that everything we heard and saw was simply a real-time recording of events as they occurred during the service? How many edits were made in the production of this almost 10-minute clip, and for what reason.

Again, I’m fully inclined to believe that Palin’s Church is a thoroughly nutty place, with or without seeing this video. My concern is that we saw the Right-Wing crazies editing Rev. Wright’s sermons so he would look as scary and insane as possible, and I would hope that’s not a precedent we’re following. Thanks.

Great job Max–you’re amazing!!! I don’t think I’d ever have had the nerve to do what you keep doing. Can’t wait for the next installment.

Kargo X at the big orange points out a rather startling passage at about 1:20:

The second area whereby God wants us, wants to penetrate in our society is in the economic area. The Bible says that the wealth of the wicked is stored up for the righteous. It’s high time that we have top Christian businessmen, businesswomen, bankers, you know, who are men and women of integrity running the economics of our nations. That’s what we are waiting for. That’s part and parcel of transformation. If you look at the — you know — if you look at the Israelites, that’s how they work. And that’s how they are, even today.

.

Sooo… would Sarah Palin care to explain what her minister meant about the “Israelites” and “how they are” to say… a certain demographic that just might have an impact on Florida?

Neal Campbell, September 24th, 2008 @11:24 pm

You people are like racists.

Is this part of that massage of Gawd’s love we’ve been hearing so much about from religious types?

I’m a pentecostal. I get this because I grew up in this environment. It’s nothing to fear, it’s just not something outsiders can easily understand.

The Muslims ‘get’ honor killings, gang rape, killing the infidels, and facing Mecca six times a day in the same way. Do you, as an outsider to the Muslim faith, feel the same way towards their rituals that are somewhat incomprehensible to you?

I speak in tongues. I love science. I have a master’s degree. I’m pro gay marriage and pro choice. I love Jesus which really means I try to love everyone. It isn’t easy and I fail a lot.

I’m afraid that this appears to be one of the times that you failed.

My ultimate point is that this is nothing to fear. It’s just one of the ways that some of us connect to God.

Some of us fear those who feel that they have a ‘need’ to connect to the Invisible Sky Fairy. They especially fear those who feel that everyone must be forced to find a way to connect to whatever they conceive of as a higher being, and take steps to legislate those beliefs into law. Which would be why we fear a religiously insane individual being close to being able to bring about Armageddon by their own hands.

I can’t identify with high church forms of religious expressions. You guys can’t identify with this. That doesn’t make it bad or scary. It’s just a different way to connect to God.

Some of us can’t identify with any pagan occult superstitionists, be they high church forms of religious expression of any denomination, snake handlers speaking in tongues, concerned parishoners exorcising demons from their neighbors, or pastors preaching that the age of consent is puberty.

You all could stand to be a little more tolerant of things you don’t understand. Our differences make us richer in spirit. Tolerance of differences make us wise.

Yes, everyone could stand to be a little more tolerant of things they don’t understand. If Sarah Palin hadn’t forced r@pe v!ctims to pay for their own r@pe k!ts because she didn’t want her fiefdom to pay for contraceptives and, in effect, legislated her beliefs into law, she wouldn’t be nearly as much of a concern to those of us who resent having to deal with the current level of faith-based intrusions into our lives, much less the anticipated level that a lying, hypocritical, back-stabbing ‘christian’ such as her would bring into the nation’s capital.

Neal,

Thomas Muthee’s crusade against Mama Jane nearly got her killed by an angry mob and forced her to leave her home and her town… all for the “crime” of being a fortune teller in Mr. Muthee’s spiritual warzone.

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, right? How would you like it if some crackpot were to do to you what Muthee did to Mama Jane? Of course, what happened to Mama Jane won’t happen to you because you are lucky enough to have the protection of law and order.

Anyone who thinks that Mr. Muthee’s practices are innocuous should read Tracy McVeigh’s article on modern “witch hunts” in Africa and watch the video that accompanies it…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/09/tracymcveigh.theobserver

Do you still think that Mr. Muthee is harmless?

Of course, no one knows whether or not Sarah Palin shares Muthee’s concerns about witchcraft but the fact that she seems to think his incantations led to her being elected Governor raises questions. And, although no one knows whether or not Palin shares Muthee’s desire for theocracy, the fact that she allowed him to pray over her after he called for exactly that raises questions.

Palin was a member of Wasilla Assembly of God for most of her life. Questions about the extent of Palin’s indoctrination into the WAoG way of thinking are warranted.

Regarding tolerance… just because someone criticizes something or makes fun of it doesn’t mean that person isn’t tolerant of it. An example of intolerance would be Muthee’s crusade against Mama Jane.

TE

“We come against the spirit of witchcraft! We come against the python spirits!”

Might Pastor Muthee perhaps be referring to the ‘Monty Python spirits’?

Max,

In your upcoming video piece on Bishop Muthee, you should provide the following audio to show that whatever craziness he recently exhibited at Wasilla AoG was not an isolated event…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsnrIVj9IbM

The audio in the YouTube clip of Muthee advocating violence is from sermons available here…

http://www.kingsgateuk.com/Articles/3516/Kingsgate_Community_Church/Resources/Teaching/Download_Sunday_Messages.aspx

TE

Not to derail this thread, but I have to respond to Tom, who says:
The Muslims ‘get’ honor killings, gang rape, killing the infidels, and facing Mecca six times a day in the same way.

Actually, we don’t get the killing and rape part, and while some Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca 5 times a day, others don’t. Killings and rape not part of the religion, despite the what you are fed by the media…and since you know that the media is slanted on many important issues, why would you take their word on what 1.3 billion people believe? Please educate yourself. You could read Karen Armstrong’s work–she’s a religious scholar and pretty impartial–and look at the work done by Muslim leaders such as the Aga Khan and the Queen Rania of Jordan.

Nishma is right and Tom is wrong. Tom’s anti-Islam is part and parcel of right-wing anti-Muslim fear mongering even though Tom appears to do it from secularist bigotry rather than Christian bigotry. (I am not religious btw).

The phrase “spiritual warfare” deserves some attention because it is the original and most common meaning of “jihad” within Islam. In both cases in its best sense it involves internal spiritual struggle to be a better person according to the lights of one’s belief. In my particular outlook the corresponding ideas might relate to ideas like “the unexamined life is not worth living” and other injunctions to critical self-reflection. From another tradition, “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” to be lived, within human limitations, requires struggles, of spirit if you like, or of mind and emotion if you prefer.

Both “jihad” and Christianist “spiritual warfare” can be perverted in translation to external social struggles which can become physically violent. Yet even this is complicated. Shall we repudiate Julia Ward Howe and the abolitionists when they sang of the “glory” of God “trampling out the vineyards where the Grapes of Wrath are stored” and “loos[ing] the lightning of his terrible swift sword”? Spiritual warfare if ever there was. The historical roots of Muslim Brotherhoods lie in great external social jihads in early 19th century West Africa, that were anti-slavery and opposed to corrupt rulers who collaborated in selling slave-produced goods to incipient Western imperial powers — which at the very same time were moving to justify their imperialism with criticism of “Muslim slavery.” Yet those social revolutionary jihads demanded purity and conformity of belief.

But IMO these contradictions are problems to be struggled *with*, not *against*, at least not always, in the sense of Jacob struggling with God, or the struggles of Job, stories that may illuminate the human moral condition even for the non-religious. The Quran probably has similar stories.

On the “Israelites” passage, if you read it carefully, Muthee is saying that the Israelites handle wealth in a righteous manner and is calling on his Pentecostal manner to do so as well. “Israelite” may or may not refer to contemporary Jews; it can be figurative (see e.g. uses in Rastafarianism, as in the Desmond Dekker song). Some of those figurative uses can be used to deny that modern Jews are “true Israelites” and assert that someone else is (cf. “British Israelism” going back to the 19th century or modern extreme racist “Christian Identity” theology). I do no see anti-Semitism in Muthee’s remark.

The witch-hunting/ finding part is the most difficult to deal with. It would take too long to go into deeply, but as an academically trained scholar of African history I can tell you that a) many African societies believed that much of what we would call ill fortune and illness was not chance (as “fortune” suggests) but directed, secret malevolent action; b) that the separation of the material and spiritual worlds in Western cultural idioms (including Christianity) was so obviously nonsensical within local cultures as to be almost incomprehensible; c) that colonial and missionary efforts to “stamp out witchcraft” including witch-finding, which was treated as the same, all being superstition, was seen as the colonizers and missionaries siding with the witches, and a major source of resistance to missionaries; d) that as Africans began forming independent churches, this was often an issue over which they broke with missionary churches, citing biblical anti-witchcraft texts in justification (the same ones used rather less profoundly to condemn e.g. the Harry Potter books in the U.S. today); e) and that one of the reasons why Pentecostalism has popular appeal in parts of Africa is its connection of Satan as an active force in the world to its openness to various spiritual experiences, including witchcraft on the negative side.

It also is the case that historically and in the present there were individuals who practiced witchcraft, with belief in its effectiveness — in Swaziland in the late 1980s there were a number of “medicine murders” in which young people were killed and body parts taken for use in making substances believed to strengthen the politically powerful supernaturally.

Of course, witch finding was also often used cynically to get at enemies, and to some extent though not nearly as much as in early modern Europe did tend to focus on women, particularly if they practiced healing or other arts in ways that claimed spiritual power of some sort. The case of “Mama Jane” sounds something like that. On the other hand, in some cases a “fortune teller” might also be in part a witch-finder himself or herself — discerning persons who might be trying to harm you in secret from a distance, by means that could be either spiritual or material in Western terms.

Now the question of how this relates to Sarah Palin’s possible actions as vice-president or (heaven forefend) inheritor of the presidency in the 21st century U.S. operates at a different level. It includes anti-constitutional authoritarian dispositions to impose particular beliefs, and the paradoxes and ironies of condemning Islamic spiritual struggle, as opposed to its material perversion, by falsely reducing the former to the latter, derived in part from a priori definition of Islam as a false religion and a vehicle of Satan, as part of supposed Christian spiritual struggles.

But the mere fact that Palin’s former church leaves itself open to Pastor Muthee’s belief in witchcraft tells us no more than Catholic belief in the literal truth of transubstantiation in communion, and rejection of it without seeking more complex understanding can be tantamount to accusing Catholics of cannibalism. How beliefs relating to presence of active personified evil in the world help many people cope with their travails is worthy of a lot of thought, as such beliefs are widespread among people whom progressives regard as on the wrong end of society’s inequalities for whose benefit progressives at least nominally argue such inequalities should be redressed.

I think there’s nothing wrong with her views… save that they’re completely insane and it worries me that American’s can even consider voting for the woman when she may very possibly become president given McCain’s age.

The problem here people have taken religious freedom to mean that not only should people be allowed to believe what they want (which is true) but that they have right to have those views taken seriously and respected (which is false).

This woman’s views do not deserve to be taken seriously or respected for they are insane theories about the world that even rudimentary inspection of the facts (rather than religious brainwashing) would quickly prove false. To vote for her is to vote for ignorance and stupidity… and given the last 8 years America needs no more of that.

Allen,

I’ve been researching Thomas Muthee pretty intensively for the past week or so and I haven’t come across anything which suggests that he either advocates or practices polygamy.

As far as I know, adherents of Apostolic-Prophetic doctrine strongly oppose polygamy.

TE

I am a christian, but not of the same variety of the Wasilla AOG. I have many friends and family in the prophetic movement and have studied it closely. This is not something scary that will hurt anyone. In fact, most people in this movement stay out of politics and government. They believe more in the power of prayer than the power of government.

There must have been a reason why Palin left WAOG and now attends Wasilla Bible Church which is not part of the same “prophetic movement”. It may have been WAOG’s involvement in the “prophetic movement”. It was not involved in it until fairly recently. She still has lots of friends there and obviously attends special meetings there.

The left has made this tempest in a teapot into a scary strawman. If you are afraid of scarecrows, fine. I’m not.

do you know your blog is listed on this blackhat site? blackhatbootcamp.net/listofwordpressblogs/

A comment about the one video in the Daily Beast with Sarah’s own minister(Ed Kalnin)praying over her:listen very closely at the very end, the last sentence where someone shouts out “Jezebel we curse you!” Check out what ‘they’ mean by Jezebel.

If you really dig deeply into their church & beliefs, Jezebel from my research on it is considered to be the Holy Virgin Mary, and is called the whore of Babylon… It’s SICK SICK SICK…

Also check out ‘The Masters Commission’ which Sarah mentioned & praised to the members in another video when she was speaking at her church. See what they do with what almost seems like a cult brainwashing with young teenagers for this War for God, (where Alaska will be the last refuge on earth) as well as check out what Joels Army is.

There’s a lot more that needs to be exposed (Max?) in my opinion than just the witch doctor & his mumbo jumbo, that doesn’t bother me at all. I totally believe in and respect religious freedom for anyone but not where some of those kinds of beliefs from someone in position in extreme power could affect me with that sick kind of thinking or set the world and women back 500 years.

I also thought her church was considered heretical and thrown out from the reg. AOG because of some of their strange beliefs?? Not sure but thought I read that somewhere.