Who are they?
0 comment Saturday, August 2, 2014 |
A month or so ago, I had planned a post about the Westboro Church, or the Westboro 'Baptist' Church. I put the idea aside because I could not find very much useful information, answering the questions in my mind. I've long had the sense that they are not what they purport to be -- which I think is an obvious conclusion -- and I had heard speculation that maybe they are a kind of agent provocateur group.
This article from the Christian Post, however, makes some interesting claims, and poses new questions:
''The FBI confirmed Wednesay that members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church were part of a training program for agents and police officials at two separate bureau facilities, a move that has now been abandoned.''
The story is a bit tangled, so it's hard to make much sense of it. But it's apparent to any real Christian that these people are not in any sense Christian or Biblical in their beliefs. I had wondered if they are meant to try to provoke more outrage among the general population toward Christianity. Their 'protests' at military funerals and their outrageous actions there might turn a certain segment of conservatives against what they perceive as 'fundamentalist' Christianity. And the WBC is certainly a favorite villain of the left, providing further pretext for the left to disparage Christians and 'homophobia.'
On the Wikipedia page, we read of Fred Phelps, the founder of the WBC:
Founder Fred Phelps is a veteran of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and the Church has attempted to distance itself from racism.''
We know too that he is connected to Al Gore. Hardly the typical 'fundamentalist Christian'. The WBC's provocative statement about Jews seem studied and calculated to evoke a certain response, and make them stand out as being anomalies in an America wherein most fundamentalist Christians are ardently pro-Zionist.
It is as though somebody decided to invent an anti-Semitic bogeyman to order.
My impression is that they are a fake 'right-wing extremist' group, actually working for the other side, or are they actually agents, as the Christian Post article implies?
In any case they are not what they purport to be. It is almost as if someone jumbled together a number of caricatures and exaggerations of 'right-wing extremism' and came up with this bizarre group of people.
It truly is a crazy world in which so many things are not only not what they seem, but the diametric opposite, attempting to mislead people and to misdirect anger and fuel conflict.
I've said we live in the Age of the Lie, and who knows how much of what we read is deliberate disinformation? It's just more gaslighting, attempting to confuse and confound people, and to make us doubt everything.

Labels: , , ,