We’re all familiar with Phred Phelps and his troupe of nutters, along with their breed of hate visited on the families of those armed forces members who have been killed while serving the US in Iraq, and other locations.
Now this gets really crazy. A Parkville, MD (suburb of Baltimore) family was returning home from a visit with family in Michigan, when their minivan was struck head-on by a drunk driver, killing 5.
The spin on this, according to Westboro Baptist folks, is that God is putting a smackdown on the Baltimore community to retaliate for the $11M award. An all mighty, and all powerful, and all loving God, wouldn’t burn the judge and jury to a crisp, if He was adequately incensed, but would instead use some stray shlub with a propensity for booze to strike down, with furious anger, a family of ordinary folks minding their business on an Ohio interstate.
I can’t get my mind around how an “all mighty, and all powerful, and all loving God” still lets Phelps’ crew hang around on this spinning rock. Good thing I’m not Christian, 'else I’d really worry a lot about that.
It works on the same principle as the idea that God chose to punish America for tolerating homosexuality by permitting the World Trade Center to be destroyed, and not, say, Greenwich Village.
I guess it’s my job to run my particular PSA in all these Phelps threads.
Why do you guys think the Phelps church/family makes these sorts of announcements? They do it BECAUSE they know it makes their church an outcast. The cult leaders don’t want their members associating with anyone else, not even other standard-issue fundamentalist nutjobs, because theyn those members wouldn’t be under the total control of the church.
There are only two paths if you’re born into this family. Either obey completely, or leave the family. And since you’ve known nothing but hatred and contempt from the outside world since the day you were born, leaving the church is impossibly difficult. Fred Phelps WANTS you to hate his children and grandchildren, because if everyone hates them then they can’t form relationships with people outside the church.
The Phelps clan isn’t just another ultra-right-wing fundamentalist whackjob sect, only more so. Phelps deliberately chose anti-Americanism as a tenet of his church because almost all other ultra-right-wing fundamentalist whackjobs are rabidly nationalistic.
The Phelps do not claim that their God is all loving. In fact, they’re quite specific in their belief that God passionatly hates everyone on Earth who is not a member of their church.
I don’t disagree with most of your post, but I think it is unfair to characterize Fred Phelps as right wing.
His beliefs aren’t representative of anything except his own church, as you rightly note, and his personal history doesn’t show any association with the right wing or conservative movement. As a matter of fact, Phelps defiantly maintains his Democratic party registration.
This doesn’t prove that he’s representative of Democrats, surely, but he isn’t one of us be a long shot, and I think you ought to acknowledge this.
I was just thinking: Phelps may actually be the first person to never die based on the “Heaven doesn’t want him, and Hell’s afraid he’ll take over” theory.*
As a Universalist, I am supposed to believe that God is too good to damn anyone. As a Unitarian Universalist, I am supposed to respect the Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Human Being. Pater Phelps tries both of these beliefs.
As an Anglican, I believe in both. And smile and smile to myself at the thought of Phelps dying and going up to Heaven… only to meet God looking fabulous in a floor-length backless red Chanel and pumps.
What bothers me, and this is a bit OT, is that people continue to regard Phelps et al. as a mainline church. (Not people in this thread, but generally.) I think it’s a matter of terminology. I wish people would stop referring to them as a “Baptist Church” just because they claim to be. They have no affiliation to any legitimate Baptist Church, all of whom vehemently disavow them. They are a cult, no more no less, and I think they would not be taken so seriously, or taken seriously at all, if they were referred to as a cult instead of a church.