Letter to President George W. Bush

from Dr. Bob Jones III

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

The media tells us that you have received the largest number of popular votes of any president in America's history. Congratulations!

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.

Had your opponent won, I would have still given thanks, because the Bible says I must (I Thessalonians 5:18). It would have been hard, but because the Lord lifts up whom He will and pulls down whom He will, I would have done it. It is easy to rejoice today, because Christ has allowed you to be His servant in this nation for another presidential term. Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government. You have four years—a brief time only—to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God.

Christ said, “If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my father honour” (John 12:26).

The student body, faculty, and staff at Bob Jones University commit ourselves to pray for you—that you would do right and honor the Savior. Pull out all the stops and make a difference. If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them. Conservative Americans would love to see one president who doesn't care whether he is liked, but cares infinitely that he does right.

Best wishes.

Sincerely your friend,

Bob Jones III
President

BJIII:lw

PS: A few moments ago I read this letter to the students in Chapel. They applauded loudly their approval.

When I told them that Tom Daschle was no longer the minority leader of the Senate, they cheered again.

On occasion, Christians have not agreed with things you said during your first term. Nonetheless, we could not be more thankful that God has given you four more years to serve Him in the White House, never taking off your Christian faith and laying it aside as a man takes off a jacket, but living, speaking, and making decisions as one who knows the Bible to be eternally true.


Are we living with a Theocracy in the US now - you decide?

Is this for real?

???

You bet - Letter.

Mike

PS - would you expect me to post stuff that I knew wasn’t true?

What’s your point. It’s not like this is a letter from Bush or from someone in his cabinet. Everyone already knows Bush is a Christian. There are probably thousands of letters just like this one. It wouldn’t suprise me that since Kerry is a Christian there might be similar letters from his Christian supporters.

Conversly, it wouldn’t suprise me if Kerry received letters from athiests, agnostics or possibly anti-christian groups. That doesn’t mean that is how he would have acted as President.

WTF, Mike. It’s a freakin’ letter, and it isn’t written by Bush or the Supreme court. What IS your point?

The reality of the Christophobia is really beginning to set in with me. That should be no surprise… it isn’t like we haven’t seen it before or been warned.

Why don’t you post some of the many public letters out there ripping Christianity? Several have been circulating in academic circles decrying the lack of lions. That’d be good.

Time to dig out my old avatar, huh?

No one has anything against Christians - you guys perpetuate that myth.

Since I have to spell it out - my point is:

1) The content of this letter is typical of the “Jihad” that the Evangelical right in the US is waging. Do you deny that?

2) Bush spoke at this University in 2000 & IMO, this University upholds racism, prejudice and backwardness.

3) I will fight against this country becoming a Theocracy.

Mike

PS - I’m feeling pissed & ornery today (I’m been too “nice” lately) :laugh:

Quote (MidnightToker @ Nov. 12 2004,15:11)
3) I will fight against this country becoming a Theocracy.

Yeah, on the n-Track forum, no less...

That’s a misuse of “jihad,” of course…

I dunno, Pete, there is a real concern that Bush will do just what Jones is asking (not because he is asking for it, but because Bush believes in it) - so we will get more laws and policies like the one governing stem cell research, or we might have the decalogue posted in the public schools, or we might get some justices that turn the constitutional clock back to 1900 or so (an avowed goal of many of those in Bush’s base). I don’t think that’s Christophobia - goodness knows I’m not anti-Christian, I married the preacher’s daughter! and I’ve spent a huge amount of time studying the Bible - but rather a healthy concern for meaningful separation of church and state.


:) :)

By the way, I’m an academic, and I haven’t seen any of those “lion” letters - have you? Post one - that’d be interesting. But don’t infer that academics are all anti-Christian or something…

Tom - you’ve got that right. I was using the word Jihad is a way I’ve heard these groups you use it.

The other things that really bothers me about this letter & the general sentiment of the Evangelical right is their characterization of liberals, Kerry, etc., e.g.,

<!–QuoteBegin>

Quote
Don’t equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.


This paints us as non-Christian & evil. Talk about judging people & hatred.

I hope Bush does follow Bob Jones III. I hope we take this right to the front-lines where the battle will be fought.

Interestingly, not all evangelicals agree with Bush or Jones. Pete and Mike, you might enjoy this:

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/150/story_15052_1.html

Yes - I’ve heard this argument but this author is in the minority as far as I see.

I thought this article was pretty interesting, I think it’s worth a read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/15/opinion/15KRIS.html?th

Believe It, or Not
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Today marks the Roman Catholics’ Feast of the Assumption, honoring the moment that they believe God brought the Virgin Mary into Heaven. So here’s a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).

So this day is an opportunity to look at perhaps the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world: faith. Religion remains central to American life, and is getting more so, in a way that is true of no other industrialized country, with the possible exception of South Korea.

Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary. In France, only 13 percent agree with the U.S. view. (For details on the polls cited in this column, go to www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds.)

The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time. The percentage of Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth actually rose five points in the latest poll.

My grandfather was fairly typical of his generation: A devout and active Presbyterian elder, he nonetheless believed firmly in evolution and regarded the Virgin Birth as a pious legend. Those kinds of mainline Christians are vanishing, replaced by evangelicals. Since 1960, the number of Pentecostalists has increased fourfold, while the number of Episcopalians has dropped almost in half.

The result is a gulf not only between America and the rest of the industrialized world, but a growing split at home as well. One of the most poisonous divides is the one between intellectual and religious America.

Some liberals wear T-shirts declaring, “So Many Right-Wing Christians . . . So Few Lions.” On the other side, there are attitudes like those on a Web site, dutyisours.com/gwbush.htm, explaining the 2000 election this way:

“God defeated armies of Philistines and others with confusion. Dimpled and hanging chads may also be because of God’s intervention on those who were voting incorrectly. Why is GW Bush our president? It was God’s choice.”

The Virgin Mary is an interesting prism through which to examine America’s emphasis on faith because most Biblical scholars regard the evidence for the Virgin Birth, and for Mary’s assumption into Heaven (which was proclaimed as Catholic dogma only in 1950), as so shaky that it pretty much has to be a leap of faith. As the Catholic theologian Hans Küng puts it in “On Being a Christian,” the Virgin Birth is a “collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary” narratives, an echo of virgin birth myths that were widespread in many parts of the ancient world.

Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Yale historian and theologian, says in his book “Mary Through the Centuries” that the earliest references to Mary (like Mark’s gospel, the first to be written, or Paul’s letter to the Galatians) don’t mention anything unusual about the conception of Jesus. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke do say Mary was a virgin, but internal evidence suggests that that part of Luke, in particular, may have been added later by someone else (it is written, for example, in a different kind of Greek than the rest of that gospel).

Yet despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence, and despite the doubts of Biblical scholars, America is so pious that not only do 91 percent of Christians say they believe in the Virgin Birth, but so do an astonishing 47 percent of U.S. non-Christians.

I’m not denigrating anyone’s beliefs. And I don’t pretend to know why America is so much more infused with religious faith than the rest of the world. But I do think that we’re in the middle of another religious Great Awakening, and that while this may bring spiritual comfort to many, it will also mean a growing polarization within our society.

But mostly, I’m troubled by the way the great intellectual traditions of Catholic and Protestant churches alike are withering, leaving the scholarly and religious worlds increasingly antagonistic. I worry partly because of the time I’ve spent with self-satisfied and unquestioning mullahs and imams, for the Islamic world is in crisis today in large part because of a similar drift away from a rich intellectual tradition and toward the mystical. The heart is a wonderful organ, but so is the brain

Kristoff may be a bit behind on Biblical scholarship, or perhaps he is soft-pedaling the divide between scholarship and what is being said in the pulpit. The vast majority of ministers and scholars have known that nearly all of the narrative structure in the gospels is a later addition. That this is news to the average believer is a very curious fact, and one that causes stress even for very even-headed people. Also, I think it’s a mistake to call the present shift one towards “mysticism.” Very few people today have the kind of belief one finds in St. Teresa, or Hildegard, or St. John of the Cross. :)

There’s more to the story than he suggests. I think he is pulling punches, so to speak.

Quote (MidnightToker @ Nov. 12 2004,15:11)
No one has anything against Christians - you guys perpetuate that myth.

Since I have to spell it out - my point is:

1) The content of this letter is typical of the "Jihad" that the Evangelical right in the US is waging. Do you deny that?

2) Bush spoke at this University in 2000 & IMO, this University upholds racism, prejudice and backwardness.

3) I will fight against this country becoming a Theocracy.

Mike

PS - I'm feeling pissed & ornery today (I'm been too "nice" lately) :laugh:



Sad Mike, really sad ....

bin Gali



Kerry supporters seek therapy in South Florida
Boca Raton trauma specialist has treated 15 patients

Published Tuesday, November 9, 2004 at 1:00 am
by Sean Salai

More than a dozen traumatized John Kerry supporters have sought and received therapy from a licensed Florida psychologist since their candidate lost to President Bush, the Boca Raton News learned Monday.
Boca Raton trauma specialist Douglas Schooler said he has treated 15 clients and friends with intense hypnotherapy since the Democratic nominee conceded last Wednesday.
I had one friend tell me he's never been so depressed and angry in his life, Schooler said. I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated.
Schoolers disclosure comes after the weekend discovery of a Kerry volunteers corpse at Ground Zero in New York City. Georgia resident Andrew Veal, 25, reportedly killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head due to Kerry's loss and a girlfriend problem.
Some mental health professionals in South Florida said Monday they have already developed a new category for the Kerry-related stress reactions. Because Palm Beach County voted heavily for Kerry, the therapists said, many residents hurt themselves by so anxiously expecting the Massachusetts senator to win especially those who maintained unrealistic recount hopes after their candidate's concession.
We're calling it post-election selection trauma and we're working to develop a counseling program for it, said Rob Gordon, the Boca-based executive director of the American Health Association. It's like post-traumatic stress syndrome, but it's a short-term shock rather than a childhood trauma.

Kerry Won Ohio
By Greg Palast
In These Times

Friday 12 November 2004
Just count the ballots at the back of the bus

Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here’s how the votes vanished.

This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, “The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state?s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.” Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn’t warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won’t count because their votes won’t be counted.

The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio – and in New Mexico – are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: “spoiled” ballots and “provisional” ballots.

OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN

American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked “spoiled” and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes “disappeared” into the spoiled pile is approximately one million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.

Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state’s vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White House.

Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are “overvotes” – too many punches in the cards, and “undervotes.” Here we find the hanging, dimpled and “pregnant” chads created by old, dysfunctional punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole doesn’t fall out, but hangs on. Machines can’t read these, but we humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading these cards ? if allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a “recount.”

Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators determined that Black voters’ ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil rights group’s expert testimony concluded that Ohio’s cussed insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an “overwhelming” racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts. Blackwell doesn’t disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery ? sometime after George Bush’s next inauguration. In the meantime, the state’s Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election.

Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card.

Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush’s lead of 136,000 votes.

JIM CROW’S PROVISIONAL BALLOT

Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the ‘provisional’ ballots, and – voila! – the White House would have turned Democrat blue.

But that won’t happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.

Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and rules of a state’s top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot veto to Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, Blackwell.

Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of provisional ballots won’t be counted. For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the “wrong” precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President.

Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.

This is the first time in four decades that a political party has systematically barred – in this case successfully – hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party’s confidential “caging” lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext.

We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.

Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year, Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act.

But that didn’t stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were copied directly to the Republican National Committee’s chief of research and to the director of a state campaign.

Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas, African-American soldiers shipped Over There.

You don’t have to guess the preferences registered on the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote.

Blackwell has said he will count all the “valid” provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush’s skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican officials – late and improbably large purges of voter rolls, rejection of registrations – maximized the use of provisional ballots which will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible “felon” voter (and there’s plenty in that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even though they are wrongly identified.

KERRY BLACKS OUT

It was heartening that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color of votes not counted in America. “Don’t tell us that in the strongest democracy on earth a million disenfranchised African Americans is the best we can do.” The Senator promised the NAACP convention, “This November, we’re going to make sure that every single vote is counted.”

But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate in history to break a campaign promise after losing an election. The Senator waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.

While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry’s lawyers would, first, have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a “Kate Harris” by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry’s team would also, as one state attorney general pointed out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook.

Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the will to power of the Ohio Republican machine.

We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing absentee ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal voters from registries and other games played in swing states. But why dwell on these things? Our betters in the political and media elite have told us to get over it, move on.

To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio’s politically ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own website, “Last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn’t in a soup line, she’s in Congress.”

NEW MEXICO GOES KERRY - BUT WHO’S COUNTING?

Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional ballots in the Enchanted State – handed out “like candy” to Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic Church’s get-out-the-vote drive – and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the votes ? but that won’t happen.

I like the article & agree w/ much of it. I & many other Methodists don’t believe in the Virgin birth either :p

Quote (CosmicCharlie @ Nov. 13 2004,22:35)
I like the article & agree w/ much of it. I & many other Methodists don't believe in the Virgin birth either :p

Yes, those later accretions miss the profound message - "anyone with two good ears..."

Hey Pete - does changing your Avatar back to your old one mean that you agree with the Bob Jones letter, or is it just a reaction to my comments? One could interpret it either way.

If this is true, why did Kerry concede?