left biblioblography: Allegories Gone Wild: Palin And The Third Wavers – Warning! Don’t ‘Transform’! Muthee’s A Crazy Mother…

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Allegories Gone Wild: Palin And The Third Wavers – Warning! Don’t ‘Transform’! Muthee’s A Crazy Mother…

Cross posted @ God Is 4 Suckers!

I stumbled across this shudder-inducing tidbit, and it is recent enough to be of serious concern:

Spiritual Mapping and Spiritual Warfare - Muthee and the "Transformations" Franchise / 1

A video starring Thomas Muthee as a prayer warrior and witch hunter was released in 1999. "Transformations" was the first in a series of videos that would soon become the heart of the Transformations franchise, a network of prayer warriors, ministries, organizations, and businesses, brought together for the purpose of promoting Christian theocracies. They share the goal of bringing their own communities and nations into the "Kingdom." These videos would play a major role in the teaching and promotion of spiritual mapping and spiritual warfare. Following is the story of those videos and how the Transformations brand has propelled the development of an emerging international belief system, the New Apostolic Reformation, and how it is bringing that movement into your community and your government.

Overview

The Transformations videos are advertised as having been viewed by 200 million people in 70 languages. A star of the videos is none other than Thomas Muthee - the same man whose anointing of Sarah Palin has become an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. But the videos are important for far more reasons than Palin and Muthee. Muthee's words, just prior to anointing Palin, on invading and infiltrating society and government are not aberrations. They reveal the disturbing ideology of a growing and powerful religio-political movement in the U.S. and around the world.

An international explosion in "taking communities" through spiritual warfare and expulsion of demons, from individuals and from entire geographic areas, has impacted denominations around the globe. The popularizing of these methods is sourced in the massive effort to evangelize the world in the decades prior to the year 2000. Much of the dissemination of these ideas was through parachurch organizations (religious organizations not associated with a particular denomination), that emerged from Pentecostalism and developed networks around the globe. In the 1990s, a missions and church growth expert named C. Peter Wagner found a way to coalesce these activities into an organized structure now called the New Apostolic Reformation. His colleague, George Otis, Jr. simultaneously developed the Sentinel Group which has produced the series of Transformation videos and resulting Transformations organizations promoting these spiritual warfare ideas. The videos have been a major factor in the global promotion of "prayer warrior" networks specifically linked to these efforts.

Are you getting pissed? Not to mention a little nervous? I know I am.

The franchise has been so successful that the "Transformations brand" has a distinct meaning to many worldwide. The videos, which have been used as the central teaching tool of the movement for nearly a decade, reveal not just another grandiose program of global evangelizing -- but an explicitly theocratic political movement of consequence in a number of countries - including the United States. There are Transformation-related groups in almost every state and every major city.

I say you’ll pry my freedoms from my cold dead fingers first.

The New Apostolic Reformation and the associated Transformations "franchises" aim to unify the church around the globe and take control of the world for the "Kingdom of God." This movement has evolved into its own distinct structure with networks of Apostles and Prophets around the globe who believe that that Christendom should be restructured under their authority to accomplish the task of bringing together a unified end time church that will help to usher in the Kingdom of God.

Insane is the word that springs to mind. And the video highlights just how gratuitously horrible the end result will be.

These believers are not waiting for the Rapture but believe they must combat evil themselves through aggressively taking control of society and government. The Transformations videos have been used as a major promotional tool for the advancement of the methods for taking control - spiritual mapping and spiritual warfare. The videos demonstrate the taking control of communities and nations through large networks of "prayer warriors." whose spiritual warfare is used to expel and destroy the demons that cause societal ills. Once the territorial demons, witches, and generational curses are removed, the "born again" Christians in the videos take control of society. The videos then claim that these communities experience an "alignment with God" which allows for miraculous curing of poverty, disease, environmental degradations, and other societal ills.

Demons and Witches and Curses? Oh my! Seriously, we’re going to have to take some sort of action on this – because we’re  talking the Inquisition times ten.

And of course, the spin:

The video series glorifies the movement towards theocratic governance, real or imagined, in Uganda, Fiji, Colombia, and Guatemala, as well as the U.S. They are used as a tool for building "Transformations" brand organizations that in turn glorify the concept of authoritarian religious social engineering. The "stars" of these videos have already played a role in promoting witch hunts in Africa, endorsing death squads in Guatemala, the de-Catholicizing of Brazil, and the mythology of miraculous curing of AIDS in Uganda. The Transformations promote a complete merger of church and state and offer a glimpse of the "Kingdom" to come, when the world is purged of all other religion, and "Spirit-filled, born again" Christians take control of the leadership of all societal and government institutions.

Oh yes, and we know that these things tend to end badly.

In case this sounds esoteric and far away, it is important to underscore that this movement is influential and powerful enough to have encompassed not only the Governor of Alaska, but also Ted Haggard, the now disgraced but once nationally renowned head of the National Association of Evangelicals. These leaders are not the exceptions, but the rule, as the movement comprises hundreds of organizations and thousands of churches across the country. Their activities fly under the radar of popular media by operating through hundreds of stealth evangelizing programs, with the goal of fulfilling this dream. However, the movement is currently receiving more scrutiny due to the revelation of the anointing ceremony of Sarah Palin by Thomas Muthee and other ties between Palin and the New Apostolic Reformation.

There is no better term for this than terrorism. Monotheistic religions rely heavily on argumentum ad baculum, and there is no need to read between the lines of the rhetoric here: it is clear that these people have no other agenda than to force their religion upon any of us who don’t believe. And as there is no spelled out dispensation of punishment for those who resist, we can only assume the worst. Exile is the pleasantest we can expect at the hands of these zealots, and the mind shudders at the worst imaginations. Visions of strappado are dancing through my head right now, because this is no less than belief at gunpoint, and beatific love at the end of a branding iron.

And while I hope against hope that this post is misdirected, that this will never come to pass, that reason will have sway over the savage heartbeats of our fellow men, I would also suggest that it may be prudent to keep some firearms on hand, and get some combat training under our respective belts.

Again, it may come to nothing, but the adage of the ounce versus the pound springs to mind.

This is the Apostate, signing off.

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