Fundamentalist Christians are a wacky bunch. Not wacky in a funny Lucille Ball way but wacky in a disturbing way. I know them all too well having escaped their clutches years ago. These are people prone to believe the most ridiculous things. Let me give one example. I went to the largest fundamentalist church in the United States. I mean they would have 20,000 people on a Sunday in their services. You couldn't get bigger back then. I attended their high school and went on to their Bible college. So I knew these people and I've outlined some of the scary beliefs rampant in that movement in previous articles here. Certainly they were racists. They were clearly a people inspired more by hatred than by any sort of "Christian love." I suspect it will always be that way with those kind of people. Their inspiration does not come from what they believe so much as from what they despise and who they hate. They were big on the "end times" prophecies, Anti-Christ, rapture and the Mark of the Beast theories rampant among the dispensationalists. Now not every fundamentalist is an advocate of such doctrines. The Calvinists, for instance, do not think this way but they are fundamentalists and Calvinists were prominent leaders in the fundamentalist movement when it started in the United States in the early 1900s. "THE ANTI-CHRIST IS HERE ALREADY!!!" One trait of these fundamentalists is a tendency to grab the flimsiest of evidence to support a theory. In addition they will ignore reams of material which contradicts them. They are always absolutely convinced of what they believe since their beliefs are not rooted in evidence at all but in theology. In other words they believe because they believe, facts be damned. One day one of these fervent fundamentalists was trying to convince me that the anti-Christ was already on earth and ready to take over. That was over 30 years ago so I guess the anti-Christ didn't have the same schedule. He also said that the anti-Christ was ready to impose his new money system on the world. In fact, he noted, the money was already being coined in Utah as we spoke and he had proof. I was a bit amused and curious. I found it odd that the anti-Christ would pick Utah for his mint and wanted to know more. The man pulled out a brochure which had pictures of the currency of the "anti-Christ." Of course it didn't say "Satan's money" anywhere on it. In fact what baffled me was the currency in question was silver. Apparently the Anti-Christ was a hard money advocate. I asked the gentleman what had convinced him that this was a coin for the New World Order of the Anti-Christ. He said it had the mark of the beast (666) right on the coin. I couldn't see it myself but he assured me it was there. I looked closer. Still nothing. Finally he pointed to a small number which, if you held the coin correctly, did appear to say 666. But that was only if you held it upside down. Otherwise it actually said .999 and referred to the silver purity of the coin. Recently I wrote about stealth fundamentalist Sandra Paterson who was using her column in the New Zealand Herald to promote Judith Reisman, a real loony and extremists on the Right. Reisman is obsessed about pornography, gay people and Alfred Kinsey. In fact Reisman thinks gay people created Nazism and ran the concentration camps of Nazi Germany... Nazism was a gay plot and gays are just itching to impose that odious system of tyranny on the world again. Her proof, of course, was on the level of the lunatic with the brochure. And I cover more of that in my article at http://www.liberalvalues.org.nz/index.php?action=view_journal 6 soldiers, none Nazis; 2 lumberjacks; 3 men in general leather outfits; 2 cowboys; 1 soccer player; 2 punks with mohawks; 1 Santa figure. It was a rather diverse lot but none of them were Nazis. In fact most of them were not blonds either. I was only able to see 37 blonds out of 257 images. That's just under 15% and considering that Tom came from a nation of blonds this is rather remarkable because of it's low numbers. Thirteen of the men in this collection were Black and a good number of them appeared Latino but that's a much harder distinction to make. As for those whips Reisman claims are routinely swishing by the man's side I didn't find any. But three of them were holding leather belts so perhaps all this porn had strained Judith's eyes a bit and she got confused. I even did some research on Luftwaffe caps. I was surprised to see how many different varieties of caps the Luftwaffe wore and many of them look very similar to other caps. Some of them look like regular army caps which I wore in ROTC years ago in the US. Others look like motorcycle caps or helmets. What makes them Luftwaffe caps would be the insignias and none of the caps in Tom's drawings in this collection had Luftwaffe insignias. Of course the caps used by the Nazis look like caps worn all around the world under very different circumstances. That is the nature of a cap. Judith Reisman sees what she wants to see. Sandra Paterson calls her an expert because Reisman tells Paterson what Paterson wants to hear. This is typical of the selective perception of the fundamentalist mind set. Reisman reminds me of a fundamentalist crusade who I debated on South African televism. Horace von Rensburg was obsessed with porn as well and on a crusade to ban it entirely. He was convinced that the typical erotic image depicted a 2 year old being raped. While I have little doubt that some such horrific images exist I also have no doubt that they are a tiny minority of all such erotica. In fact I'd bet it is less than one one-thousandths of one percent. That is probably too high an estimate as well. But the fundamentalist looks for what they want to see and then projects the exception onto the whole. They do it with erotic. They do it with gay people. They do it with anything or anyone they don't like. [Sadly for Jim, no-one paid him a cent to do his content analysis. Jim is the Executive Director of the Institute for Liberal Values. - Ed.] Jim Peron - 10th February 2005