"New Religious Threats to Academic Freedom: The Religious Right's Agenda for America's Public Universities." On March 20 those who attended this lecture by Zach Miner, Campus and Community Organizer for the Center For Inquiry in New York, heard about the latest project of Tim LaHaye. LaHaye is the author of the Left Behind series about a post-Rapture world, which has sold thirty million copies. Apparently LaHaye has a hard time distinguishing between reality and his fiction. He is spending some of his millions in book profits on the " Mind Siege" project (see also), a kind of American madrassah movement, carefully designed to brainwash insecure people into believing there's an insidious, atheistic, secular humanist conspiracy to destroy civilization.

The madrassahs in Pakistan and Afghanistan indoctrinated the young into a reactionary religion of hatred for the individualistic values of modern Western civilization (which certainly has its problems, but not likely to be improved by fanaticism). So too the "Mind Siege" project has no positive solutions to offer to our problems beyond joining a crusade to establish a theocracy on the ruins of secular democracy. LaHaye has teamed with David Noebel to produce a set of videos & other "educational" materials for a six-week study course, being held, under the radar, in local churches across the nation. Zach Miner had edited together a string of excerpts from the video materials, which he showed and dissected during his talk at the downtown Omaha Public Library. Paul Kurtz, a leading humanist philosopher, and his Center For Inquiry, for whom Mr. Miner works, are among LaHaye's specific targets. Others are the National Education Association, the ACLU, the National Organization for Women, the United Nations --all of "the usual suspects" of the Radical Right.

Zach Miner has a background in media, and analyzed the propaganda tricks used in the "educational" materials, including their inflammatory "war" language (familiar to anyone who attended the "War of the Worldviews" put on in Omaha by Answers in Genesis a while back). Samples assertions: "Anti-Christians" are "censoring" the evidence against evolution. Advocates of "naturalistic science" disguise their "inflexible hatred of Christian values." To be "fair," the government should let "both sides" into the schools, and even "into the courts," their most ambitious goal yet. Good Christians should work to "de-fund the left" and block "humanist" political candidates (that is, those who put the well-being of human beings ahead of conformity to religious dogma). They state flatly: "No humanist is fit to hold public office."

According to these theocrats, secular humanism's "Five Tenets" are:

-Atheism, which is the work of Satan;
-Evolution, ditto (versus the reality of mainstream religious support for evolution & science);
-Amorality, by which they means disagreement with their particular morality;
-Autonomous Man (their real terror: having to stand on their own two feet);
-Global Socialism (Huh? Apparently this stems from eschatology; they think the End Times must see a World Government established by the Anti-Christ. And in their impoverished vocabulary, "World Government" means "socialism.")

Make no mistake; these people are well-funded and dedicated, and are implacable opponents of all the gains mankind has made since the days when witches were burned at the stake. If you do not "follow God" (their version of God), then you "follow Satan." There is no gray area in their cosmos, and like John Calvin in 16th century Geneva, they see no room for a society and a government that fails to share their vision of theocracy. In this respect they are allies of the militia cults and racist sects that lit up the brains of David Koresh and Timothy McVeigh. The psychology of such people was examined in detail by Theodor Adorno and his associates in The Authoritarian Personality, and their groups and organizations are kept track of by the Intelligence Project (formerly Klanwatch) of the Southern Poverty Law Center. They bear watching.