Christians Going the Way of Republicans?
“Liberty” University has made it clear that the era of tolerating other views is long gone. It seems that a lot of religious organizations have made it clear: you’re either with us or you’re against us. No more of this “respecting others’ views” crap.
“Liberty” made it clear by shutting down the Democratic club, where many students in the school admitted to being, well, not Republicans. And that’s just too much. Democrats support killing babies. Partially born ones! I hear they eat them afterwards. Seriously, they shut down the students’ ability to openly be Democrats on school grounds because it “goes against the conservative Christian school’s moral principles.”
This follows a wide variety of Christians becoming apoplectic when a pro-choice president speaks at Notre Dame. Not because he was going to say or do anything incendiary, but simply because he’s pro-choice. A lot of people don’t want people like that even near the school grounds.
Remember back to the 2004 elections, when the church officially denied John Kerry communion because of his pro-choice positions? This is just getting stronger and stronger. I would not be too surprised if you started hearing of churches demanding parishioners sign pro-life oaths, and shunning them if they refused to. Or starting protests like they have outside abortion clinics, except outside the homes and offices of those who publicly state pro-choice views.
Of course, if a Christian woman kills her daughter by shunning newfangled medicine and instead depending on prayer alone to cure her daughter’s diabetes, well, that’s faith, and should be protected.
Apparently, the woman, her business partners, and a prayer group “ignored obvious symptoms such as her inability to walk or talk.” Her lawyer insists that she “didn’t realize her daughter was so ill.” Usually, being so ill that one is not able to walk or talk, that’s kind of hard to miss. Not to mention that they called in the prayer group–obviously they knew full well that she was seriously ill (unless they call in prayer groups for minor illnesses). Apparently, the whole bunch figured it was time to call 911 “when she suddenly stopped breathing.” You gotta give it to them, they were really on the ball there. Her lawyer said she takes “good care” of her children (aside from letting them die from easily-treated illnesses), and that “obviously, there will be an appeal.” Well, obviously.
In the meantime, religious groups are also rallying against atheists. It’s not enough just to shun them and hate them, they must be denied the same rights and freedoms as religious folk. If they wish to form groups who practice the same belief, they are not entitled to protection under the First Amendment. When they want to post ads on buses or billboards like Christian groups, the Christians go nuts and force the ads to be taken down.
And the attacks against them are ones that would never be tolerated if aimed at religious groups. What if someone published this in a national newspaper?
I can’t stand Jews — but it’s not because they don’t believe in the Christian God. It’s because they’re crashing bores. My problem with Jews is their tiresome — and way old — insistence that they are being oppressed. First off, there’s Jewish victimology: Boohoo, everybody hates us ‘cuz Jews killed Christ.
There would be hell to pay. And yet, such articles are freely published about atheists.
I think the question here is, how far can these people go in such open rejection of others’ beliefs before they start digging the same hole for themselves that Republicans are? Or am I misreading this, and most everyone thinks it’s okay that Christians are becoming increasingly intolerant and hostile to anyone who disagrees with them?
They’re front line of the kulturkampf is evolution, the homosexual agenda, women’s equal rights, abortion and some forms of birth control.
IOW, they’re fucked. What they do as a community wasn’t worth the time & energy I put into typing this. As long as their guns are pointed inwards I couldn’t care less.
That last question is an extremely good one Luis. The dust up over Obama at Notre Dame is central to this. Most Catholics couldn’t give tiddly winks over the issue. Just a few extremist politicized Catholics – well, I should say more than a few, but a pretty small minority that knows how to make a lot of noise.
This is a problem that goes back to 1964.
This problem with right-wing-politicization in religion is not just a problem for just a few sects of protestantism, but for most religions today.
It’s a direct result of wealthy conservatives decision to directly invest in the politicization of religion.
Republicans have only one real goal: the ever greater concentration of wealth and power. For the last 30 years they’ve used false culture wars (the real culture wars ended in 1791 with the passing of the bill of rights) to advance those goals.
The big problem has always been, “how do you get people to vote against their economic interest?
The answer was the phoney culture wars.
This began in 1964. Extremely rich Republicans coopted Leo Strausses theory that the masses needed to be controled by elites by excessive religiosity. This is religiosity for utilitarian purposes within the frame work of politics. They don’t care which religion – any old religion will do: Islam, Catholics, Evangelicals, main line protestants and Judaism. Obviously they’ve been more successful in some than others.
Strauss believed that societies should be ruled by philosophers. But philosophy inevitably leads people to atheism, at least according to Nietzsche, and Nietzsche (and Strauss) believed that atheism leads to decadence and debauchery and the decline of civilization. In otherwords, most people can’t handle philosophy and not become decadent. Only supermen (uber mensch) could handle atheism and not become decadent, therefore society should be ruled by these superman, (elites) and the masses controled by religions.
The republicans simply substituted economic elites for philosopher elites. The thing is, a lot of these uber-people are atheist. They just don’t believe you should allowed to be an atheist, else how would they control you and the rest of society.
By the way, where Strauss and Nietzsche were wrong – atheism doesn’t lead to decadence – the reason being is Game Theory. Today Europe and Japan are largely atheist or agnostic and they have vastly lower crime rates than the United States.
Anyway, back in the 1960s the rich conservatives, through family foundations, funded seed money to the founding of right wing religious movements. They’ve got an organization out there in the field for every sect.
There’s one based in Seattle that deals with infiltrating and moving evangelical religious movements to the right – they, obviously have been very successful. There’s the Catholic League – run by Bob Donahue who is trying to coopt the Catholic Church in America for movement conservatives – they’ve been partially successful with the falangist/authoritarian/papal infallibility Catholics – his efforts have been helped along by the long reign of John Paul II who promoted only very conservative men to be bishops and from their to be cardinals. The catholic church is permanently in the dark – socially speaking.
There’s the Democracy and Religion project that has been assigned the job of infiltrating mainline protestantism. There success has been mostly blunted, although they’ve been overwhelmingly successful with Baptist. Their current sights are on the United Chruch of Christ which has proven most difficult. Many people on the board of that group aren’t even mainline prostestanst. There’s even a group that works on Jewish groups – successful mostly with orthodox Jews.
The big problem with this, and here’s where the cynicism lies: it’s against the constitution, against the traditions of our cultures and for christians it violates a commandment of christ’s that says don’t mix religion and politics. He should know. He was murdered by the later. Bob Donohue not withstanding.