Just gonna throw this out there

[imported_elp6n]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18679412/?GT1=9155

LYNCHBURG, Va. - The Rev. Jerry Falwell "? founder of the Moral Majority and the face of the religious right in the 1980s "? was in "gravely serious"? condition Tuesday after being found unconscious in his office, a Liberty University executive said.

Ron Godwin, Liberty's executive vice president, said Falwell was found unresponsive around 10:45 a.m. and taken to Lynchburg General Hospital. Godwin said he was not sure what caused the collapse, but "he has a history of heart challenges."?

"I had breakfast with him, and he was fine at breakfast,"? Godwin said. "He went to his office, I went to mine and they found him unresponsive."?

A hospital spokeswoman said she had "no information to release at this time"? on Falwell.

Falwell, a television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority in 1979, became the face of the religious right in the 1980s. He later founded the conservative Liberty University and serves as its chancellor.

In the 1980s, Falwell saw his political lobbying organization grow to 6.5 million members, raising millions for conservative politicians.

Falwell survived two serious health scares in early 2005. He was hospitalized for two weeks with what was described as a viral infection, then hospitalized again a few weeks later with congestive heart failure after being found unconscious. At that time he had to be resuscitated by EMTs at the hospital emergency room.

[CoeburnCane]

Falwell's death is truly a tragedy.

Today, we are all religious zealots. [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/grin.gif[/img]

[imported_elp6n]

Not to speak ill of the dead, but I really couldn't have followed him as a leader.
That's the nicest way I could put it [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif[/img]

[imported_ut1]

Neither could I, but I repected his conviction.

[sup-rbeast]

Agreed.

[R0cketer]

That sums it up well.

I respected his conviction, but many times thought he was a bit out there or mislead.

[imported_juggernaut28]

I didn't know he died until I read it on here. I never really watched him much on tv, so I don't know what his teachings were really or how he lived his life outside of the church fame.
The one thing that bothers me about these big churches and leaders of the churches is how millions of dollars go into these churches and just down the street from them are homeless people, families in some kind of need with food,clothing and etc.
I believe any church who loves the Lord should be out in the streets and areas where the poor are helping and giving their time,love,and finances to show what the Love of Christ really is.

But also I'm not in these churches and they could be giving alot more than I think and helping all around. I just look at what these churches have and the leaders and I wonder sometimes how much are they tithing and giving, like they preach to do.

[NotSoSilentBob]

Frightened by Falwell?!
Chill out and consider his legacy.

By Joseph Loconte

For over 25 years Jerry Falwell has helped to define the public face of Christian fundamentalism "? both for Americans and Europeans "? and his death yesterday has critics and admirers scrambling to define his legacy. Lost amid the cacophony, though, is a larger sense of the significance of Christianity to America's democratic government.

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, admiringly described a man "awakened to a sense of political and social responsibility."? Columnist Susan Jacoby, by contrast, saw nothing but "bigotry, xenophobia, anti-modernism, and utter stupidity."? The headlines in the Guardian and The Independent noted Falwell's infamous remarks blaming the 9/11 attacks on feminists and gays. Much of the reader response to his death is too offensive to reprint here.

To be sure, Falwell could be a man of seemingly glaring contradictions. During the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, he sermonized against mixing religion and politics. "Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else "? including the fighting of communism, or participating in the civil rights reform,"? he said. "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners."?

Yet in 1979 Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a political-action group that helped elect Ronald Reagan. As a fundamentalist, he regarded believers in other Christian traditions "? including evangelicals such as Billy Graham "? with deep suspicion. Nevertheless, his Moral Majority united fundamentalists, Mormons, Catholics, and Jews on a pro-life, pro-family agenda. At its peak, the organization grew to 6.5 million members with a budget of more than $100 million.

Claiming he was weary of being a "lightning rod"? for criticism, Falwell quit the Moral Majority in 1987 to focus on preaching at his Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., and building Liberty University. Yet he maintained a significant presence in American politics. During the Clinton years, he claimed to have a video implicating the president in illegal activity. He actively backed George Bush in the 2000 presidential race. In 2004, he organized the Faith and Values Coalition as a "21st century resurrection of the Moral Majority,"? in order to support anti-abortion judges and a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Falwell was a partisan "? a staunch Republican "? who nevertheless lambasted the party for its failure to push aggressively for his conservative agenda. He was a patriot "? he believed that America was "founded as a Christian nation"? "? yet suspected that the nation's cultural decline (brought on, in his view, by abortionists, pagans, gays, and feminists) had caused the 9/11 attacks. "Living by God's principles promotes a nation to greatness,"? he said, "violating those principles brings a nation to shame."?

Falwell's contradictions continue to define too much of conservative Christianity in America. The assumption that America lays claim to a "covenant"? relationship with God, the confusion of the gospel of Christ with a party platform, the narrow definition of a "moral agenda"? in American politics "? all were among the unseemly aspects of Falwell's activism that survive his death.

Yet there are other elements of Falwell's legacy that are worth recalling on both sides of the Atlantic. For one thing, he helped religious believers of all stripes take their civic and political responsibilities more seriously. Today Christian conservatives are perhaps the most politically active and important voting bloc in America. Though many find aspects of their agenda objectionable "? their pro-life position or support for Israel, for example "? their impressive advocacy on behalf of international human rights is widely respected. No constituency has fought harder for peace in Sudan, for laws against the sexual trafficking of women, or for America's global AIDS policy. No group has done more to bring attention to the human rights atrocities of the North Korean regime. Sadly, these issues were never taken up by the Moral Majority, but it helped to lay the groundwork for this kind of engagement.

Equally important, Falwell's political efforts united believers of wildly diverse religious views in common cause. America is defined by its pluralism, and yet it sustains a level of civic peace and democratic stability that is the envy of the world. It could be argued that Falwell's political activism is one of the reasons. Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Mormons, Jews, Hindus "? and, increasingly, Muslims "? work together peacefully on a range of social and moral issues. They've been doing so for the better part of a quarter century. That makes it less likely that they'll demonize one another in the future.

Falwell's critics "? such as Polly Toynbee of The Guardian or Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary "? like to compare his Christian fundamentalism to Islamic radicalism. They see the same brooding hatreds at work. "The world can no longer afford the kind of absolutist religion and politics Rev. Falwell helped to popularize,"? Thistlethwaite snapped. "It will literally be fatal."?

Yet any calm reflection on Falwell's record exposes that characterization as pure sophistry. Falwell was strenuously opposed to abortion, for example, but he was quick to denounce any violence committed against abortion doctors and he supported programs for unwed mothers. He sometimes used inflammatory biblical language to describe the culture wars in America. But he utterly rejected any notion of a theocratic state or Christian jihad. What many of Falwell's critics find so offensive is the idea that religious ideals "? particularly those in the Judeo-Christian tradition "? should help shape our politics. That secularizing approach, so popular in so much of Europe, does not appear to be producing more humane or just societies. It cannot, in the end, sustain a democratic society.

Jerry Falwell had his faults, excesses, and ego. His style of politics has no doubt contributed to the public rancor over religion. But think about it: The most frightening outcome of his activism was not a cadre of suicide bombers, or a culture of nihilistic rage, or a network of terrorists plotting to destroy the foundations of Western civilization. The most frightening outcome of Falwell's activism was the mobilization of middle-class citizens to join school boards and city councils, to launch lobbying campaigns and voter-registration drives, to participate in local and national elections.

We call that democracy.

"? Joseph Loconte, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator for National Public Radio, writes a weekly column for the London-based BritainAndAmerica.com

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...YxMGJmNTBjMjQ=

[CoeburnCane]

Falwell is typical religious hypocrisy at it's best.

Say one thing when convenient to your cause, say another that's the exact opposite when it's convenient to your cause later.

In other words, it's okay to contradict yourself as long as you claim that "God told me to change my mind".

Ridiculous.

[imported_elp6n]

Don't Believe the Hype
Jerry Falwell built a megachurch, and created a university-both laudable feats. But his influence on American politics has been vastly overstated.

May 15, 2007 - I mean no disrespect to the dead, but I take the British view of obituaries, which is to try to capture the true public significance of the person who died, not just his good qualities. The truth about the Rev. Jerry Falwell is that he was a character assassin and hype artist who left little positive impact on the United States"?and little negative impact either, for that matter. Besides founding Liberty University, he won't be remembered as nearly as influential as he's made out to be.

First, his real legacy: Falwell built the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia from scratch into a mega-church with a 6,000-seat auditorium. And he built Liberty University into a formidable institution that attracts over 20,000 students from around the world and a qualified faculty. Last year, Liberty's debate team won the national championship. It's not easy to create a university and Falwell deserves credit as an institution-builder. He will also be remembered through a famous Supreme Court case he lost, Hustler vs. Falwell, which established that public figures cannot recover damages when depicted in parodies. (The story of the lawsuit is told in the film, "The People vs. Larry Flynt"?). In that sense, he inadvertently helped bolster the First Amendment.

But Falwell's political legacy is much less impressive. He started out as a segregationist who harshly attacked Martin Luther King through the 1960s and later called Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa a phony. He was a strong supporter of Israel but openly anti-Semitic, announcing on many occasions that the anti-Christ would return as a Jew.

On September 13, 2001, Falwell said this on Pat Robertson's show, "The 700 Club"?: "The enemies of America give us probably what we deserve."? When asked to elaborate, Falwell added, "When we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way"?all of them who have tried to secularize America"?I point the finger in their face and say, "?you helped this happen.'"? Robertson replied, "Well, I totally concur."? Falwell later apologized, unconvincingly, for offending anyone.

It was fitting that this was said on Robertson's program, not Falwell's. That's because Falwell never had great success as a broadcaster or televangelist. His "Old Time Gospel Hour"? was never the most popular religious program. While he claimed 20 million viewers, the real number was a tiny fraction of that, usually below one ratings point. In the November, 1980 Nielsen ratings, for instance, "Old Time Gospel Hour"? was watched by 1.21 million people"?well behind not just Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggert but Rex Humbard and James Robison.

According to lore (and much of the coverage of his death), November, 1980 found Falwell at the peak of his powers. That was the month Ronald Reagan was elected president, after having met with Falwell and other members of his brilliantly-named organization, "The Moral Majority."? While Falwell might have contributed slightly to Reagan's margin of victory, he was not even close to being instrumental in his election. With incumbent Jimmy Carter bogged down with the Iranian hostage crisis and double-digit inflation and interest rates, Reagan won with 57 percent of the vote"?a huge landslide. At best, the Moral Majority added a point or two to Reagan's totals. More likely, it contributed nothing. Exit polls showed that Carter bested Reagan among Southern Baptists, 50-46 percent. And abortion ranked well behind foreign policy and economics among issues that mattered most to voters that year.

The Moral Majority claimed to have registered eight million new voters but could never provide any hard figures, and many smaller evangelical organizations said they operated independently of Falwell. (In fact, there was considerable tension within the religious right). The real political muscle was provided by Robertson and his protégé, Ralph Reed. Their Christian Coalition was far more powerful than the Moral Majority, whose voter guides were never credited with winning any particular election.

From the 1980s on, Falwell existed mostly as a media creation, not a real player in national politics. He missed the cable TV revolution, which deprived him of a platform. He took over Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker's PTL after it collapsed in scandal, but by then its revenues were a modest $13 million. The related theme park, Heritage USA, went into Chapter 11. His monthly magazine, National Liberty Journal, became a modest success, with an unaudited circulation of 250,000.

Falwell's power was hyped not just by him but by a media establishment that needed a consistently conservative voice"?not to mention a "guest"? who could usually be counted on to show up at the studio on time and say something provocative. On shows like "Nightline"? and "Larry King Live,"? Falwell became a spokesman for the religious right and "good TV."? Who can forget when he claimed that the Teletubbies character Tinky Winky was actually a hidden symbol of the homosexual agenda? Ironically, he may have loomed larger among secular audiences than religious ones.

In 1994, Falwell paid for a documentary called "The Clinton Chronicles"? that supposedly implicated Bill Clinton, Vincent Foster, Ron Brown and Jim McDougal in a cocaine-smuggling operation. A man shown in the film in silhouette claimed that President Clinton ordered several of his critics killed. Falwell never repudiated the film, though he later admitted "I do not know the accuracy"? of it. Some of the characters featured in the film became involved in the Paula Jones lawsuit that led to Clinton's impeachment, though Falwell was not central to that story either.

The rise of the religious right was an important development in late-20th Century American history. Falwell's name is among those associated with the movement. But just because someone is famous doesn't make him significant. Jerry Falwell wasn't.