In recent decades, some concerned critics say, portions of U.S. conservative Christianity have been overrun by an army of little so-called antichrists.

These “antichrists” are said to be smug and willfully ignorant people who worship a god of warfare and death. When they aren’t justifying wars, obsessing over demons, and rejecting the scientific method, they vote for egocentric autocrats and special interests who favor Armageddon-like living conditions — deteriorating seas, poisoned skies, melted ice caps, runaway ethnic cleansing, no privacy, and large-scale religious conflict. Some of these would-be antichrists — doomsayers Timothy LaHaye and Hal Lindsey come to mind — have earned tens of millions of dollars by writing best-selling books that call other people “antichrists.”

In promoting sales of his own new book, ex-gay activist Anthony Falzarano this week decisively associated himself with this supposed army of believers in a god of death.

Falzarano’s latest message to a sexually-honest former Exodus leader is basically this:

Falzarano’s god is a sadistic tyrant that kills individual people with cancer in order to punish other individual people for petty reasons — and in order to bolster the wobbly egos of Biblically illiterate and impenitent ministers like Falzarano.

I won’t repeat the full text of Falzarano’s latest meme here. It is linked above; it has been repeated by other major bloggers; and we at TWO have already allowed Falzarano to spout his memes here in the past week.

Right-wing religious demagogues spread these memes, sugar-coated with godtalk, for the following reasons:

1. to make money when they are ill-qualified for productive employment

2. to inflate their unstable egos by degrading and bullying other people

3. to intimidate practitioners of traditional, modest, and minority religious creeds, replacing those faiths with egocentric, cynical, and authoritarian cult-like movements that are insulated from any dangerous persons who might express faith in a genuinely loving, graceful, life-affirming, self-sacrificial — or non-existent — higher power

4. to promote conflict, bloodshed, and destruction in a “fallen” world that they admittedly hate

5. to victimize other people, putting them perpetually in a defensive position

It’s a bit difficult for me to imagine anything more anti-life, or antichrist-like, than the culture of death and defamation that Falzarano affirms in his recent messages to TWO and to a former Exodus ministry leader.

But I’ll try: (Read More)

Anthony Falzarano - the founder of Parents and Friends of ‘Ex-Gays’ (PFOX) - was a leading “ex-gay” spokesperson in the late 90’s. His media-friendly story was quite unique, in that he claims he was Roy Cohn’s rent boy and partied each night like it was 1999.

Falzarano’s entry into the ex-gay scene in the early 80’s has always been a little murky. In one version of his tale, God told Falzarano to go straight before the AIDS crises hit. In another version, after many of his friends had passed away, God told him to become ex-gay. In yet a third version, one of his sexual conquests felt guilty after their encounter and introduced him to Christ. Obviously, these colorful versions are contradictions and they can’t all be true.

If there is one thing about Falzarano - he is not opposed to telling a good story, the facts be damned. So, his fictional book, “Such Were Some of You: One Man’s Walk Out of the Gay Lifestyle,” is sure to be entertaining and certainly much better than Exodus’ Alan Chambers depressingly trite tome, “God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door.”

Falzarano holds to the empty and unsupported belief that homosexuality is caused by a young person being molested - and he pulls bogus figures out of thin air to bolster his case. Indeed, he is known to invent new percentages on the number of gay people molested from one interview to the next. The man has no scruples and honesty is just an inconvenience in his bizarre universe.

He is also a proponent of spiritual warfare, once telling CBS News, “AIDS comes from the devil, directly from Satan. He uses homosexuals as pawns and then he kills them.” Another time, he called hate crime victim Matthew Shepard a “predator to heterosexual men.” (Read More)