Interesting article on the state of Rick Perry’s faith by Kathleen Townsend at the Atlantic. The Money quote:
Maybe he believes, like some socially conservative evangelicals, that these passages refer only to personal charity, not government programs. But I don’t see any place in the Bible that says we shouldn’t use all the tools we have at hand to help the poor, the sick, and the hungry. The same conservative Christians claim that the Bible teaches them that the government should outlaw gay marriage and stem cell research. But why should the government carry out some Biblical injunctions and not others?
No doubt plenty of convoluted apologetics exist which happen to coincidentally line up exactly with the interests of Perry and his zillionaire buddies. Funny how that always seems to be the case. One might almost call it miraculous.
I wonder if the Christians in the US understand that when the religious right champions torture or exploitation of the middle class, or any of dozens of ugly right-wing political positions they embrace, and makes up transparent excuses for why a loving God really wants us to crush a suspect’s testicles in a vice or doesn’t want We the People to intercede if homeless families are starving in the streets, it’s revolting to most of the rest of us on every level.
Every time I see that stuff I feel lucky to not be a Christian. For years I considered every single one of them either a hopeless dope, or a sleazy conman fleecing the dopes, precisely because of the antics of the religious right and the tele-evangelical phenomena. I’ve since met many great progressive people of faith who have helped dissuade me of that, but the stereotype still lingers and, as long as religious opportunists like Rick Perry thrive, it probably always will.
I was reading a book recently (Bart Ehrman’s “God’s Problem”, if I recall correctly) in which the author discusses the Old Testament prophets.
The prophets repeatedly condemn their contemporaries for ignoring the needy and claim that their negligence in this regard is at least partially responsible for god’s ongoing wrath against them.
As with the camel thru the needle’s eye story, these are passages that the cherry-picking fundies chose to ignore. Hypocrite is not a strong enough word to describe these scumbags.
I’m with nostradumbass, hypocrite is not nearly a strong enough word.
It just boggles the mind how a country chock full of people claiming to believe one thing will go an vote for something that should by all rights go against everything they believe.
If you believe Jesus was real then surely you must base this belief on the Bible and surely you must then realise that if anything, the BiBle shows that Jesus was a leftist socialist? It is right there, in the Bible. Right. There.
American Mind Magic Politics, how the does it work?
And one who apparently thought that citizens should pay their taxes (or at least cleverly avoided saying that they shouldn’t: ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’—from, probably bad, memory).