"Do you believe President Bush is doing The Lord's Work?"

http://www.bushfish.org/resources.html

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yes! EXTREEEEEEME CATHOLIC!

Jeez. There's still plenty of room in Australia, if anyone wants to move ;)

Um... er... shh dont tell Nick ;)

oh pretty canadian indie rock chicks, won't you please offer solace & shelter?

Yes I know this is neither the time nor the place.

Australia has stricter immigration laws than the US!

Erm, I don't think it is.

damn secularists. life starts at birth, not a month (or more) after!

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2005/05/persecution_con.html

The glamorization of "persecution" is a component -- and a vital one--of the culture "wars". It allows a participant to view himself (or herself) as a "soldier" carrying out God's work -- and losing.

This is the important part.

If you're losing your struggle, you get to break the rules, cheat, lie, do anything to win. Winners have to play fair, but if you can somehow twist things so you become oppressed, you are granted moral license to do, well, anything.

It's the glow of martyrship without the ickiness of actually being martyred.

And that feeling, that shock of indignation, that swell of righteous anger: it's addictive. It's a sure-fire hit on the crackpipe of certainty. It's why all fanatics sound the same -- their leaders all use the same tools.

On the whole, I think it is fair to say that much of the Religious Right's earlier agenda (if you can really speak of one unified agenda - which I doubt) could be described as defensive - many people of faith felt (a) that the state had gone too far in telling them how to live their lives; and (b) that they were being shut out of the national debate ("national debate", yeuch: apologies for the NPRspeak). Those were fair points. Now, things are different, and as full participants in that national debate, the Religious Right, like most other political groupings, are pursuing a more active agenda. Emboldened by electoral success, they too are trying to set rules for everyone else. They are fully entitled to try to do so, just as those who disagree are fully entitled to shove back - that's democracy. Derb's point (if I have this right, John) is that we should no longer assume that this agenda is automatically opposed to big government. It's not. Derb is right - and he is right to be depressed.

Derb referring to ye olde John Derbyshire, specifically this essay. As you can see, both essay and this comment above (from Stuttaford) aren't exactly left in tone or intent, but they are starting to voice an increasing unease in the right ranks (others not so sanguine include Instapundit and, unsurprisingly, Sullivan) which will almost certainly grow (and the resulting intra-right contempt will be interesting to see play out). I don't foresee breakdown per se but I do foresee an increasingly inability to claim a united front over time -- what exactly happens is actually going to be anyone's guess.

No, it's Terrorist Schiavo.

We don't have immigration laws, we have a building in the desert where we hide them all in the hope that they'll magically disappear.

Americans, your nearest parts of the EU are Gaudeloupe, Martinique, St Martin and Guyana. They make better Rum too.

...The popularity of the fish symbol is also related to the persecution complex we've been discussing here. The early Christians adapted the pagan fish symbol during the Roman persecution as a surreptitious way of identifying one another. It was, for them, not a flag on a marble arch, but a symbol furtively scratched in the dust, then hastily wiped away. That such a symbol is adopted and reinvented into a triumphalist emblem is further evidence of the weirdly contradictory, "persecuted hegemons" self-concept of many American evangelicals.

There's a good summary of the history of the fish symbol at religioustolerance.org, in which they trace the symbol's pre-Christian meaning.

The symbol, originally, was not a fish but rather, ahem, an image representing fertility. (The fact that it also resembled a fish was a very ancient and very, very dirty joke.) That history is strangely echoed in the "BushFish" from "BushFish.org: Supporting God and Country" (thanks, Scott, for the link).

This isn't quite "the abomination that causes desolation, standing in the holy place" -- but it's close.

Like the folks over at DailyKos, I desperately hope this is a well-crafted parody, but it doesn't seem to be.

This symbol is a staggeringly confused piece of Caesar-worship masquerading as Christianity. Where does Jesus end and George W. Bush begin? It's impossible for these people to say, the two have literally been merged into a single entity: the BushFish...

http://oplnk.net/~ajackson/clipart/ichthyus.gif

...Some Christians believe that a second link between their religion and the fish symbol is seen in the Greek word for fish (ichthus, spelled: Iota Chi Theta Upsilon Sigma). That is an acrostic for "Jesus Christ, of God, the Son, the Savior" [Iesous (Jesus) CHristos (Christ) THeou (of God) Uiou (the Son) Soter (the Savior)]. An acrostic is an "arrangement of words in which the first letter of each line ordinarily combines with others to form a word or words or the alphabet." 1

The Apostles were often referred to as "fishers of men". Followers of Christianity were called Pisciculi; the root of this Latin word is "fish". The symbols of "sacremental fish, with wine and a basket of bread represents the Eucharist and the Last Supper in Christian art." 2 The symbol was simple to draw and was often used among Christians as a type of password during times of persecution by the Roman government. If two strangers met and were unsure whether each other was a Christian, one would draw an arc in the earth like:). If the other were a Christian, they would complete the symbol with a reverse arc: (), forming the outline of a fish...

contains other neat bits like:

http://www.parrishgallery.com/images/silk/jerusalem%20cross%20copy.JPG

...The use of the cross as a symbol was condemned by at least one church father of the 3rd century CE because of its Pagan origins. The first appearance of a cross in Christian art is on a Vatican sarcophagus from the mid-5th Century. 11 It was a Greek cross with equal-length arms. Jesus' body was not shown.

The first crucifixion scenes didn't appear in Christian art until the 7th century CE. The original cross symbol was in the form of a Tau Cross. It was so named because it looked like the letter "tau", or our letter "T". One author speculates that the Church may have copied the symbol from the Pagan Druids who made crosses in this form to represent the Thau (god). 7

They joined two limbs from oak trees. The Tau cross became associated with St. Philip who was allegedly crucified on such a cross in Phrygia. May Day, a major Druidic seasonal day of celebration, became St. Philip's Day. Later in Christian history, the Tau Cross became the Roman Cross that we are familiar with today...

it's great to learn, cuz Knowledge is Power!

also st. paul was crucified upside down so as not to be killed the same way as jesus.

also, the last supper/eucharist is a central concept to much of christianity for its first thousand years or so(give or take an extra 500).