Reborn-Christian "Promise Keepers" encourage the brainwashed visualization of a naked Jesus!

Having posted on nudism I was at first quite pleased and surprised to find the website: "Promise Keepers: Mind Control Techniques" (by Anton Chaitkin). It mentions some Promise Keepers material that aims to council homosexual men, but includes some baffling homoerotic content. The specific text is "Masculine Journey" by Lt. Col Robert Hicks.
The Promise Keepers were immensely popular and aimed strongly at African American and military men. Here, in South Africa they have largely been replaced by local mass male gatherings called the "Mighty Men" gatherings under "pastor" Angus Buchan. The main market for Buchan seems to be formerly militarized white men.
Some have compared the gatherings to Nazi rallies (although there is no specific right-wing/racist rhetoric).
What do other posters think on these mass male functions: homoerotic brainwashing or self-improvement via religion?
Here is the nude-Jesus quote:

'And if men are going to "bond," PK style, they'll need to visualize Jesus--nude:

"Jesus was also very much zakar, phallic....Jesus was very much masculine, and masculine means being male, and bring male means having a penis. There's no way around it. Some in church history could not tolerate the exposure of the Son of God's genitalia. Therefore, you will never find a portrait of the crucifixion of Jesus with penis exposed even though it was a common Roman custom to crucify criminals naked. Even the Gospel writers tell us that Jesus' outward. garment was torn into four pieces, leaving the inner tunic, which was then gambled for intact ...That left nothing. No underpants. Nothing."
(justifiedtype.wordpress.com...)



[edit on 13-12-2009 by halfoldman]

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Ay Carumba!
This is about as weird as it gets!
Thanks for the mental image of the Holy dipstick!
I'm speechless as to the whole thing, good post!

reply to post by halfoldman


Yes, and the nativity secne should be mid birth as jesus is crowning.......

There is some resonability to not showing a penis dangling from every statue. One possiblity is that the people loved to break the penis's off of statues.

Originally posted by OldDragger

Ay Carumba!
This is about as weird as it gets!
Thanks for the mental image of the Holy dipstick!
I'm speechless as to the whole thing, good post!

Yes, it is a shock! Mainly because it is so blatant, I mean homoeroticism is a well known feature of mass male movements (especially homophobic instances).
All I wanted was an addition to a thread on a nude/naturalist leader/President, when somebody said nudity was the hallmark of Sodom and Gomorrah. I just wanted neutral cases of scriptural nudity (like King David dancing naked befor the Lord) and I stumble on this!
Nevertheless, I had material on fundamentalism before which talks of the paradox. Open gayness must be attacked because religious men are encouraged to meditate on a deity who lived homosocially and ends up as an sado-masochistic gay icon. So the anxiety about comparatively scarce anti-gay verses is that Christian men themselves must police their religious desire from becoming sexualized.
In Hinduism it is OK to desire God (say Krishna) sexually.




[edit on 13-12-2009 by halfoldman]

Originally posted by Wertdagf
reply to post by halfoldman

 

Yes, and the nativity secne should be mid birth as jesus is crowning.......

There is some resonability to not showing a penis dangling from every statue. One possiblity is that the people loved to break the penis's off of statues.

The Promise Keepers are largely from a US based evangelical Protestantism that does not accept statues or icons.
I see your point though, consider the worn down toe of St Peter in the Vatican:

"In St Peter’s basilica, pilgrims come to pay their respects to the bronze statue of St Peter, the first Pope and rock of the early church, over whose tomb the basilica was built.

Pilgrims would bend down to kiss the foot of the statue and over the years the metal wore away so that the toes blend in with the rest of the foot. Nowadays most visitors touch the toe instead of kiss it, but the feet are still worn down with the human contact."
(www.heatheronhertravels.com...)



[edit on 13-12-2009 by halfoldman]

reply to post by halfoldman

Not surprisingly a lot else about Christianity, particularly modern Evangelical "reborn" forms is anti-human.
Consider slavery, is it even a sin?
I found the following fascinating on the origins of America's fundamentalism:

"Long before the American Civil War, an ostensibly Christian religion arose which completely neglected the hundreds of biblical injunctions for social justice. In place of a message of social justice, this new Christian religion demanded only one thing: from the elite, money; from the rest of society, obedience to the established order. To assist the church in supporting the established power, the church demanded two things from the faithful. First, the true believer must have an unquestioning faith in the religious teachihngs of their church, usually expressed as an unquestioning adherence to the Bible as most helpfully interpreted by that Christian church, even if that unquestioning faith required one to suspend his willingness to reason and his ability to accept reality and facts. Second, morality was solely defined as (women's) sexual fidelity, augmented at times with an injunction for men to support their wives and children, in return, of course, for their unconditionaly obedience. As always, the rich and powerful were exempt from both of these rules.

Gone were the strictures against greed. Gone were the obligations of the elites to ameliorate the plight of the least fortunate among them. Gone were God's demands that humanity be wise stewards of God's creation. Gone were the biblical injunctions to bring justice into the world, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to tend to the sick, to assist the widow, to protect the orphan, and to shelter the homeless. Gone were the stories of God's wrath at Pharaoh for his refusal to let God's people go. Gone were the stories of God liberating the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Gone were the stories of God's mercy and God's love for all of her creation.

Using a theology of Social Darwinism in which it was claimed that the rich and powerful are rich and powerful as a sign of God's blessing, the rich and powerful were seen as virtuous and deserving the riches which were showered upon them by a just God. In reality, nineteenth-century slave owners and robber barons became rich because they were corrupt and ruthless. They had the money to silence their critics, as well as, to reward their flatterers."

(For the full text see:www.pinn.net...)

reply to post by halfoldman

I was also interested in the TBN missionary program: "Travel the Road".
Two cheery, ruddy-cheeked US missinararies take off on a global journey to give us a skewed and propagandistic view of the world, which often finds the narrative hilarioulsy at odds with the visuals. The actual moments of translated missionizing are few and unclear.
In one program the all-male gang of missionaries enter a swamp and pray to find a village in east Asia. They end up lost and search each other's orifices for leeches!
More controversially (as was shown on Aljazeera), they were embedded with US soldiers in Afghanistan, and contrary to US policy they handed out versions of the Bible.
I think guys like that must probably visualize Jesus a lot.

reply to post by halfoldman

What is worrying me after a few days of hindsight on this thread is that the original quote in my opening post comes from something called the La Rouche movement.
Despite searches and results I am still uncertain on what this movement is. Is it just exposing military style brainwashing as a feature of religion? The author appears quite homophobic. Does anybody know what the general position of this movement is? It appears anti-gay and anti-religion.