Revolution#120, February 17, 2008
To download a printable PDFversion of the leaflet from the Harlem Revolution Club (below), go to revcom.us
T.D. Jakes and BattleCry
A dangerous alliance—A dangerous trap
We received the following leaflet from the Harlem Revolution Club:
On Friday, February 8th at 3:00 pm BattleCry, the nation’s largest Christian fascist youth movement, will be in Times Square with its high tech, paramilitary, religious pep rally and “holy war” recruitment extravaganza.
BattleCry has reached hundreds of thousands of mainly white suburban youth with its message of holy war for God and America. Now it is attempting to attract Black and Latino youth into its crusade. Well-known Black preacher, Bishop T.D. Jakes is the featured speaker at BattleCry’s main event. He is helping to deliver these youth into the hands of these lunatics, while he serves up his own brand of slavish submission to a non-existent God and an all too real empire. Youth—don’t be played! Break out of the mental chains of believing in things that don’t exist and join the struggle to make revolution.
The Bible taken literally is a horror! The Bible is “God’s Instruction Manual” according to BattleCry and T.D. Jakes is down with that. What kind of instructions does the Bible offer?
The Bible upholds slavery—(Ephesians 6:5 and Deuteronomy 3:21), and calls for mass murder—(Samuel 15:2-3).
It commands: death for children who hit, curse, or disobey parents, death for those who commit blasphemy, death for gathering wood on the Sabbath, death for women who commit adultery, death for homosexuality, witchcraft, idolatry. ( Exod . 21:15, 17, Lev. 21:18-21, Num. 15:32-36, Lev . 20:13).
This is but a small sample of the horrors condoned by the Bible. God commits more murder and mayhem than Freddy Kruger ever thought about. The Bible teaches a murderously oppressive morality. We dare T.D. Jakes, BattleCry or anybody else to defend what the non-existent God of the Bible calls for! It doesn’t stop here.
The Bible fiercely supports and promotes patriarchy, the domination of man over women. (Deuteronomy 22:13‑21, 1 Corinthians 11:3, 14:33‑35 and many, many more places). BattleCry upholds this and wants to more forcefully impose it on all of society: women should not have the right to divorce, or to abortions, or to contraceptives, or to any life at all outside of being some man’s property and the bearer of his children. T.D. Jakes upholds this same bullshit. In “Woman Thou Art Loosed,” a book written by Jakes (there is also a movie based on the book), Jakes tells an angry woman who has been nearly destroyed by abuse that she has to get right with God: “Until your attitude is corrected, you can’t be corrected…. You cannot expect the whole human race to move over because you had a bad childhood.” In his sermons Jakes has said there are as many abused men as women. WHAT?! Seventy-eight women are raped each hour in this country. A woman is assaulted every 10 seconds. A woman is most likely to be beaten or murdered in her home by her husband or boyfriend. So—Fuck T.D. Jakes!
BattleCry and Jakes, and religion generally, say we must live with this madness and misery because God is punishing “sin” or carrying out some secret plan. Bullshit! God is a human invention! Satan is too! And there is no damn secret playbook!
30,000 children die needlessly around the world every day due to hunger and preventable diseases—not from the “wages of sin” but from the workings of this capitalist system. Savage poverty and wars stalk billions of human being cross this planet—not because “God is working in mysterious ways,” but because this system can work no other way. Slavery, racist police brutality and murder, the wretched desperation during Katrina and afterwards, and the nooses in Jena are not “part of God’s plan” but are part of a society that has white supremacy and the oppression of whole peoples built into its very foundation.
“Thank you Jesus.” “It’s a blessing.” Hell no! We want to make revolution and fight for a whole different kind of world—a world where human beings can live and work, and learn and love and struggle together—a world free of all this slave master and slave bullshit. We want a communist world where the youth, women and men, gay and straight, people of all nationalities from all around the world can rise up together and change everything. It’s time to lift our heads, get up off our knees, reject enslaving superstition, and take up the most radical and truly scientific way of understanding and changing reality, communism.
God Does Not Exist! But We Do And We Can Emancipate Humanity!
No to BattleCry and Jakes! Join us Friday at Times Square
The Harlem Revolution Club
(347) 813-8265
email: revolutionclubsnyc@yahoo.com
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