The Internal Inconsistency of the Righteous Religious Right
With the increased intrusion of the religious right into civic government, now is the time to ask who these people are. I suggest that they are authoritatively controlled conservatives who are basically hypocrites.
Hypocrisy: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially: the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion
Is a Christian someone who tries to model their life after Jesus and who asks when making their choices in life, “What choice do I believe Jesus would make”? Should a Christian use their belief in the example of Jesus as a guide to how to live their life?
I ask the readers and posters visiting this blog to respond to the following hypothetical situations and answer as to how they believe Jesus would have them respond.
1) Would you, just after marriage, but before choosing to procreate, choose instead to adopt one of the millions of children in the world who otherwise would not have a chance at a healthy and happy life, with loving supportive Christian parents?
2) You are at a Starbucks and buying a five-dollar café latte, when you see a starving five year old lying on the sidewalk outside the window, who could be saved from starving by just one dollar of the money you spend each day on a latte? Is the fact that this child isn’t on the sidewalk but is out of sight of you and your gated community materialistic life, sufficient for you to not consider all the children who have starved to death that you, by making simple and easy spending choices, could have saved?
3) You support your government and its practice of dropping massive bombs from 30,000 feet in Iraq, where collateral civilian damage is probable and expected. Such that tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children are horribly killed.
4) What if the final choice of executing someone in your state were your personal decision. The prisoner is someone who is caged and is reasonably prevented from ever harming anyone for the rest of their life, and who may find redemption and come to Christ and save his soul should he not be executed
6) Children are born with a blank slate – they learn as they grow and are educated and experience life. Public education is a way our society insures that all children are exposed to and taught, such that they will be good and prepared citizens, and equipped to reasonably handle the life they will be confronted with as an adult. At what point should this growing child discover the facts and realities of human sexuality and reproduction? And where should this information come from?
7) A carefully screened gay Christian couple wants to adopt an orphan from Darfur who otherwise would not be adopted and would probably die horribly. Would you prevent this adoption and the opportunity to have the love and support of Christian parents?
I would hope that these narrow-minded and judgmental and arrogant hypocrites back off from crossing the bright line between religion and government, that earlier wiser Virginians were so instrumental in creating in our state and federal constitutions, and instead, start questioning their own leadership -- and begin to instead take responsibility for their own spiritual path. After all, I don’t think St. Peter will accept your argument that James Dobson, or Jerry Falwell told you to do it.
Or, that’s what I believe Jesus would have you do.
posted by Bill Garnett @ 4:04 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
i am more of a democrat than a republican (which is really your intended audience for this post), but i will give you my commentary anyway:
1.) this is going to sound selfish of me, but my answer is "no." i want to try and have my own kids. if i cannot, adoption is the way to go. if everyone had to adopt children before being able to have them, then we would just be a society cleaning up other people's messes.
2.) jesus wouldn't want us to buy coffee. we drink it purely for selfish reasons, and it really doesnt nourish the body. but i would give a kid money. if it was an adult, i would tell them to go inside starbucks and fill out an application, because they obviously need more people working there if it takes 15 minutes to make a friggin white chocolate mocha. i believe in giving to the poor, but at some point, people must be accountable for themselves. where that fine line starts though, is the 10 million dollar question.
3.) i dont agree with collateral damage. killing 10 innocent people with a bomb that was marked for 1 terrorist makes no sense.
4.) i am for capital punishment. people know the consequences of their actions. any U.S. citizen knows what the punishment for murder is, and therefore knows what the consequences of his/her actions will be when he/she murders someone. true, it is not up to us to "play God" and decide who lives and dies, but when someone murders someone else, i think they have evened the playing field by "playing God" themself.
5.) you skipped number 5. i dont know if you realize this.
6.) i dont see anything wrong with sexual education. i think that a good solution to this problem is to offer a sex education course in jr high/middle school as an elective, and then parents can decide if they want their kid in that class.
7.) theres nothing wrong with gay people adopting, and i think Jesus would say the same thing. why is it ok for a single mother to raise kids, but not 2 loving gay women?
you are right. if Christians want to outlaw gay marriage based upon the word of the Bible, i think it is only fair that we outlaw eating pork for the jews, women must hide their faces for muslims, and we must all pay thousands of dollars a year to scientology.
it is complete and utter bullshit for a Christian to want to enforce LAW based upon the Bible and not be willing to go along with laws that are based upon the koran. the excuse that this country was built upon Christianity is the worst excuse every. It was also built upon slavery, slaughtering and lying to native americans, destroying the environment, and much more. not to mention, this little thing called the first amendment.
crazy.
Actually, I was out of town for a day and a half. Excuse me if I didn't immediately moderate and/or respond to your comments. You know, I do have a life outside of blogging...
Since you're so anxious to get a response from me, we can either transfer this debate to email or I can set up a message board and link it on my blog for everyone to participate. Your decision. I just don't want to have these lengthly debates on here because this note format wasn't designed for that.
Anyway, I await your decision.
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I admit, I don’t know if a man named Jesus lived and I can accept some probability that he may have. I think there were, at his time and place in history, many similar religious men, many of whom were attributed with special spiritual powers and access. History is also replete with characters that did not exist but whose contrived lives were passed on in oral and written tradition – e.g. Hercules, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Ulysses.
I am from a very devout Southern Baptist family – my mother was one of thirteen siblings on a Virginia farm that produced several Baptist pastors, a past president of the World Baptist Alliance, and many life long church attending and tithing Baptists. I grew up in this environment and was baptized as a young child. Now at 64, I have made a life journey that has taken me to what I consider a more mature and responsible and enlightened spirituality. I have concluded that the Christianity practiced by my relatives is pseudo Christianity. I have concluded that religions and Christianity have been root cause of much of the suffering and conflict that humanity has experienced. I have concluded that the Christian Bible is interpreted out of context of the time and culture in which it originated and that inerrant reading of the Bible is simply ignorant.
I do not know the answer to the great questions that face all mankind and have faced all mankind throughout history. However, I do see and accept the science that suggests that we are the pinnacles of the evolution of nature and that this evolution seems purposeful. I accept that I have free choice, self-awareness, common sense, and an innate sense of good that is independent of my religious or social conditioning. And I believe that it is qualities of courage, honesty, humility, charity, mercy, forgiveness, stewardship that defines the quality of a life and best suggests our purpose that is most intended by the mystery we commonly name as God.
It is the pinnacle of hypocrisy to say one believes the example of Jesus to be the guide and rule of one’s life, and then completely excuse one’s actions for not following that example.
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I know you not for you do not disclose yourself on your blog. Jesus was not afraid to disclose himself. And far too many evil voices and false prophets have come before you. Perhaps it is time for a modern Martin Luther to nail to the door of your blog the God evident truth. And that truth is that neither you nor I know. We may believe but we do not know. And your dogged insistence that you hold the truth and I do not no longer works its spell on me.
God gave me the ability to discern and I think with that gift comes the responsibility to make the best choices my mind and experience can evolve.
I attempt to not judge you but to understand you, and what I understand is that you will rigidly and stoically and determinedly maintain your faith out of fear. Whilst I maintain mine out of not knowing; out of honesty and courage.
My life is unknown to you as yours is to me but my life has been that of a seeker, and truth informs me, reason informs me, and my God given intuition informs me. And my conclusion is that to follow the precepts of a man, any man, over my own best judgment is to betray my own God given best judgment.
Men like you seem so steeped in your own mythology that you cannot see the lessons of history nor the facts of science nor the conclusions of common senses. There are many of you, have been and may always be – but it is in that stubborn clinging to a ritualized and dead religion that you fail to live even the life that that religion prescribes, being so comforted only in the ecclesiastical ritual and dogma.
Yes Jesus was real and so was Shakespeare and so was Mozart and so was Jefferson and so was Einstein – all inspired by some great and mysterious power that has brought mankind forward, struggling for centuries against the inane cowardice of those who would foist their ignorant beliefs on others.
I was a student at the University of Richmond where as a young man I would visit the Baptist Historical Society situated on the campus and read the sermons of pastors long gone who found evidence in scripture to justify slavery, oppose women’s suffrage, oppose integration, and oppose mixed marriage. And I’m sure today repose sermons that attempt to exclude those of minority sexual orientation from the fellowship of their congregations. You and those like you considered it God’s will to wage crusades, to engage Inquisitions and to burn witches. All of this in the name of an adamant insistence on your own righteousness.
How dare you question my connection with God? How dare you assume you are blessed and I am not? How dare you in your hypocrisy, when half the world goes to bed hungry, give payer before you feast at your supper? You don’t know me – but I am not hiding under a rock. I am in the light of God’s bright day and will engage you forthright and face-to-face. I dare you to come out and face me. Or as Jesus would do, enlighten me out of compassion and not out of arrogance.
I like what you have to say. Have you read my blog?
http://amberdawnsbestfriend.blogspot.com/
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