Open letter from Jesus about Christmas

Open letter from Jesus about Christmas 

posted in  Christians Tired of Being Misrepresented

[Submitted by member Gracey Smith - author unknown]

It has come to my attention that many of you are upset that folks are taking My name out of the season. Maybe you've forgotten that I wasn't actually born during this time of the year and that it was some of your predecessors who decided to celebrate My birthday on what was actually a time of pagan festival. Although I do appreciate being remembered anytime.

How I personally feel about this celebration can probably be most easily understood by those of you who have been blessed with children of your own. I don't care what you call the day. If you want to celebrate My birth, just GET ALONG AND LOVE ONE ANOTHER.

Now, having said that let Me go on. If it bothers you that the town in which you live doesn't allow a scene depicting My birth, then just get rid of a couple of Santas and snowmen and put in a small Nativity scene on your own front lawn If all My followers did that there wouldn't be any need for such a scene on the town square because there would be many of them all around town.

Stop worrying about the fact that people are calling the tree a holiday tree, instead of a Christmas tree. It was I who made all trees. You can remember Me anytime you see any tree. Decorate a grape vine if you wish: I actually spoke of that one in a teaching, explaining who I am in relation to you and what each of our tasks were. If you have forgotten that one, look up John 15: 1 - 8.

If you want to give Me a present in remembrance of My birth here is my wish list. Choose something from it:

1. Instead of writing protest letters objecting to the way My birthday is being celebrated, write letters of love and hope to soldiers away from home. They are terribly afraid and lonely this time of year. I know, they tell Me all the time.

2. Visit someone in a nursing home. You don't have to know them personally. They just need to know that someone cares about them.

3. Instead of writing the President complaining about the wording on the cards his staff sent out this year, why don't you write and tell him that you'll be praying for him and his family this year. Then follow up. It will be nice hearing from you again.

4. Instead of giving your children a lot of gifts you can't afford and they don't need, spend time with them. Tell them the story of My birth, and why I came to live with you down here. Hold them in your arms and remind them that I love them.

5 Pick someone that has hurt you in the past and forgive him or her.

6. Did you know that someone in your town will attempt to take their own life this season because they feel so alone and hopeless? Since you don't know who that person is, try giving everyone you meet a warm smile; it could make the difference.

7. Instead of nit picking about what the retailer in your town calls the holiday, be patient with the people who work there. Give them a warm smile and a kind word. Even if they aren't allowed to wish you a "Merry Christmas" that doesn't keep you from wishing them one. Then stop shopping there on Sunday. If the store didn't make so much money on that day they'd close and let their employees spend the day at home with their families

8. If you really want to make a difference, support a missionary-- especially one who takes My love and Good News to those who have never heard My name.

9. Here's a good one. There are individuals and whole families in your town who not only will have no "Christmas" tree, but neither will they have any presents to give or receive. If you don't know them, buy some food and a few gifts and give them to the Salvation Army or some other charity which believes in Me and they will make the delivery for you.

10. Finally, if you want to make a statement about your belief in and loyalty to Me, then behave like a Christian. Don't do things in secret that you wouldn't do in My presence. Let people know by your actions that you are one of mine.

Don't forget; I am God and can take care of Myself. Just love Me and do what I have told you to do. I'll take care of all the rest. Check out the list above and get to work; time is short. I'll help you, but the ball is now in your court. And do have a most blessed Christmas with all those whom you love and remember :
I LOVE YOU,
JESUS

Republicans are anti-religion, according to their own logic

Republicans are anti-religion, according to their own logic

by kosFollow for Daily Kos

Why do Republicans hate the Pope and Catholics?

Latest GOP stupidity:

The campaign committee for Senate Republicans on Wednesday denounced President Obama's policies as “anti-religion” following a decision to relocate the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican [...] Conservative critics, however, see it as another attack on religion following the healthcare reform law's mandate that insurers cover birth control.
“This is just the latest anti-religion pursuit of this administration, a slap in the face to Catholic-Americans around the country that weakens America’s position as a global leader,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee said in an ad. The ad, which features a demonic-looking Obama ominously glaring at a Vatican shrouded in darkness, links to a petition calling on the administration to reverse its decision.

The embassy is being moved for budgetary and security reasons, inside the protected compound housing the U.S. embassy to Italy. But saving money and diplomatic security don't really mean shit to Republicans, despite all the bleatings about Benghazi. And in any case, the Vatican is cool with the move. But since Republicans now decree that any disagreement with the Vatican is "anti-religion," then I look forward to them embracing liberal economic policy:

"In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world," he said. "This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting."

What, Republicans aren't about to surrender their grip on their discredited "trickle down economics" theories? BLASPHEMERS! What, Republicans refuse to follow along with the Pope's plea to focus less on hard-line social issues like opposition to abortion and gay marriage? SATANIC! And there's even more shocking religion-hate below the fold!

The Pope declares in his Evangelii Gaudium:

Just as the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say "thou shalt not" to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?

Or:

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.

Or:

The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.

Republicans must now agree with those proclamations or they hate Baby Jesus and are slapping the face of Catholics everywhere. Right?

Three of the Biggest Lies Republicans Tell About Themselves

Three of the Biggest Lies Republicans Tell About Themselves

November 25, 2013 By Allen Clifton  

 

When I talk with Republicans, I often feel like I’m speaking with someone who lives inside of a bubble where the outside world and all of its realities are simply unable to penetrate.  It’s the school teacher who votes Republican despite Republicans stripping teachers unions of collective bargaining power.  It’s the individual who’s soon to rely on Medicare and Social Security, claiming they don’t need the federal government.  The person on welfare who voted for the politician who just voted to cut their benefits.
But one area where Republicans excel at is propaganda.  They’re really good at it.  They’ve successfully convinced millions of people to be absolute hypocrites, vote against their own interests and believe that giving rich people more money benefits the rest of us.
Basically, they’ve convinced people to lie to themselves.
So I decided I would give a quick rundown of three of the bigger lies Republicans perpetuate about themselves (though there are far more than three).
1) They’re fiscally conservative 
This is probably the biggest joke of them all.  It’s amazing to me that this is real platform they actually run on, yet haven’t had a Republican president who’s actually balanced the budget since President Eisenhower in the 1950′s.  Hell, their “conservative hero” Ronald Reagan came close to quadrupling the national debt during his eight years.  How exactly is someone a “beacon for fiscal responsibility” when they almost quadrupled the national debt?
And I know some conservatives will do what they always do and blame Democrats for Reagan running up our national debt.  I love reading the asinine conclusion that the near quadrupling of our debt was the fault of Tip O’Neill, not Reagan.  I hate to break it to these people, but Reagan signed off on every single piece of legislation during his eight years in office that led to the massive growth of our national debt.  Congressional Democrats couldn’t simply enact legislation without Reagan’s approval.
Then again, conservatives who make this argument clearly don’t understand how government works.  They’re also the ones who give all of the credit for our balanced  budget in the 90′s to congressional Republicans.
Then look at George W. Bush.  He took a balanced budget and completely wrecked it.  It took him one year to send us back into deficits after President Clinton gave us a surplus.  And don’t even tell me that our budget surplus should be credited to the Republicans in Congress.  If they were the primary reason why we had a balanced budget, it would have continued after Clinton left the White House, when they were still in charge of Congress — but guess what?  It didn’t.
What Bush did was cut taxes, then started two wars.  That’s like buying an $80,000 sports car just after taking a massive pay cut at work.  He reduced our revenue then increased our spending.  How again is that being “fiscally conservative”?
The only area Republicans point to for this claim of “fiscal responsibility” is their opposition to tax hikes.  But guess what?  Cutting taxes has nothing to do with being smart with money.
Oh, but they’ll cut programs that help the poor and the needy, that’ll balance our budget, right?  But you damn sure better not mention cutting oil subsidies or closing tax loopholes for the rich — Republicans will have no part in eliminating either of those.
The only place Republicans are fiscally conservative is in their minds.
2) Small government 
This is another joke.  I love how the party which actively campaigns for president on the pretense of passing Constitutional Amendments that would define traditional marriage is somehow the party of “small government.”
Or the party that continues to pass laws in Republican-controlled states attacking the right for a woman to have an abortion, requiring ultrasounds or transvaginal probes before an abortion can be performed.  That’s small government? 
Hell, if they had their way there would still be a ban on homosexuals in the military.
The fact is, Republicans love government.  Well, as long as that government is supporting something they want.  The only time they’re advocates for “small government” is when the government forces them to do things like — give people civil rights.
I live in Texas, a highly Republican state, where you can’t even buy liquor on Sunday due to outdated laws passed decades ago.  Hell, there are some counties in Texas where you still can’t buy alcohol at all.  How “small government” of them.  Isn’t Texas supposed to be a beacon for “small government values”?  Right.
The truth is, Republicans love government when they can use it to try to enforce their bigotry and ignorance, but hate government when it prevents them from enforcing their bigotry and ignorance.
3) Pro-life 
Being anti-abortion doesn’t make you “pro-life.”  Just like supporting the right for a woman to have an abortion doesn’t make you “pro-abortion.”
Republicans constantly prove that they don’t give a crap about life the moment it’s out of the womb.  Sure, they’ll use a fetus to stir up anger within people to get votes, but the fact of the matter is once that baby is born — they couldn’t care less.
The GOP has consistently cut funding for programs that help the poor and the needy.  They’ve strongly stood against access to health care for all Americans.  There’s even a push now by many to privatize Medicare and Social Security so that these programs are handed over to greedy corporations that can gamble with the future of millions of Americans.
There are tens of millions of children who will have less to eat this holiday because of the Republican cuts to our nation’s SNAP program.  And if Republicans get their way, tens of billions more will be cut from the program.
In a state like Texas — where millions of its citizens go without health care — Rick Perry refused to expand Medicaid coverage so that millions of Texans could receive health care, some for the very first time.  This is a practice we’ve seen all over the country in many Republican-controlled states.
How “pro-life” of these Republicans to deny access to health care for millions of Americans who desperately need it.
And the sad fact is, Republicans only really “care” about a fetus because it helps them get votes.  Otherwise they wouldn’t oppose — and cut — funding to programs that would help millions of poor children all across the United States.
When Republicans say they’re “pro-life” all they really mean is they’re anti-abortion — that’s it.  To call Republicans “pro-life” is an absolute joke.  Because once that baby is born, they couldn’t care less what happens to it, as long as it votes Republican in 18 years.
Now of course these aren’t the only ways Republicans lie to themselves.  These are just three of the bigger “labels” they give themselves that I find completely absurd.
But I’m sure to any Republican reading this, I’m absolutely wrong.  Sure I am.  Of course, they’ve most likely never voted for a Republican president who’s balanced the budget, they probably support a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage, and you can bet they support massive cuts to welfare programs that feed millions of poor children.
Like I said, it’s like they live in a delusional bubble that reality is simply unable to penetrate.

Focus on the Family serves up a rancid turkey in time for Thanksgiving

Focus on the Family serves up a rancid turkey in time for Thanksgiving

by Steveningen

 

Ugh. Where to even begin with this one. The odious Focus on the Family has released a video designed to teach you how to explain the truth behind Thanksgiving to the kiddies. It is so rife with distortions, fabrications, omissions, persecution complex, and anti-government bias that it is a hideous thing of beauty.

Hi. I'm Stuart Shepard, This is Stoplight. About now, children are bringing home Pilgrim hats and turkeys made out of construction paper. And maybe making lists of things they are thankful for. But, it's up to us to make sure they understand the full context of what happened back around 1620.
We are the Pilgrims.
They were not called "the Pilgrims" back when this whole thing started. England would not allow these Christians to live out their faith they wanted to. They were told to fall in line with the government's view of religion. If not, they could be taken to court, fined or even imprisoned.
We are the Pilgrims.
So, some of them packed up and moved to Holland. Now thing were generally better there. But then they watched as the culture began to draw their children away from the Christian faith they were learning at home.
We are the Pilgrims.
So, then they booked that trip on the Mayflower. A cargo ship. Not really designed for passengers. Think of it as a floating tractor-trailer being tossed about by a stormy ocean. It was spartan, it was rough, but it eventually got them here to the New World.
We are the Pilgrims.
They signed the Mayflower Compact saying they were united in this undertaking for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith. Its simple framing of democracy would inform the U.S. Constitution more than 150 years later.
We are the Pilgrims.
They learned about human behavior: That if the colony took what each one produced and shared it with everyone else, well it brought out the very worst in human beings. The colony only succeeded once it allowed each family to have their own property and enjoy the benefits of their own labor.
We are the Pilgrims.
So--after having government trample on their God given rights--after seeing their children wooed away by a decadent culture, after a treacherous ocean voyage, a harsh winter, after learning how imperfect human beings function as a group--after all that--they held a feast to celebrate. And they thanked God for His Providence.
We are the Pilgrims.
It was only after Christian faith was turned into action, and after it was applied to real life troubles, and after they endured hardship while giving thanks--that they became known as "The Pilgrims."
We--are--the Pilgrims.

Even those with a rudimentary historical understanding of Thanksgiving would somehow remember to include the Indians at the first Thanksgiving table. But I suppose that is just too much for today's xenophobic, immigration-hatin' modern Pilgrim. Best just not to mention them and give over that time to further drive home all that persecuting, government intrusion and fear into your children's soft little heads. Among all the tripe to be found in this video is this doozy that sits at the very heart of the religious right.

They signed the Mayflower Compact saying they were united in this undertaking for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith. Its simple framing of democracy would inform the U.S. Constitution more than 150 years later.

Here they have taken the notion that it was our Founding Fathers who intended our Constitution to be divinely inspired and are now crediting the wacked-out Pilgrims for our Constitution that clearly states there shall be no separation of Church and State. Or something. The stupid, it burns.
So, when you find yourself at your own Thanksgiving table on Thursday, please remember to give a little moment of thanks that Stuart Shepard isn't sitting over there at your kid's table giving your little ones a history lesson.
Update: Thanks to Dave in Northridge for sharing this link: The Puritans and the Puritans who settled Massachusetts, 1620-1630.

Just How Stupid, Mean and Spiteful is the Evangelical-Controlled GOP/Tea Party South? Here’s How Stupid

November 22, 2013 By Frank Schaeffer

“What we could see, 10 years from now, is a Mason-Dixon line of health care… And [the GOP South] is doing it out of spite. Elsewhere, the expansion of Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, has been one of the few success stories of Obamacare… One side (with exceptions for conservative Midwest and mountain states) would be the insured North, a place where health care coverage was affordable and available to most people…
“On the other side would be the uninsured South, where health care for the poor would amount to treating charity cases in hospital emergency rooms. The South, already the poorest region in the country, with all the attendant problems, would acquire another distinction — a place where, if you were sick and earned just enough money that you didn’t qualify for traditional Medicare, you might face the current system’s version of a death panel.”  By TIMOTHY EGAN ( The South’s New Lost Cause, NY Times)

10 Weirdest Fundamentalist Christian Conspiracy Theories

The world of fundamentalist Christians is crawling with conspiracy theories, urban legends, and just plain bizarre beliefs.

AlterNet / By Amanda Marcotte

 

For the Christian right, having a “faith-based” worldview extends far beyond claims about demons and angels. Unsurprisingly, the world of fundamentalist Christians is absolutely crawling with conspiracy theories, urban legends, and just plain bizarre beliefs about how the world works. Here’s a list of 10 of the weirder ones are currently in circulation.
1) Same-sex marriage is an elaborate scheme concocted by lesbians to entrap men. David Usher of the Center for Marriage Policy managed to cough up a theory that is an outstanding blend of homophobia, misogynist myths about the mendacity of women, and paranoia about the supposed gravy train that is child support. He argues that women will marry each other and conscript men into supporting them by “pretending they are using birth control when they are not.” The men will then “become economically conscripted third parties to these marriages, but get nothing in return,” presumably because the only reason a man would want to care for his own children would be in exchange for sex and housework. He also assumes that the only sources of income women have access to are child support and welfare; the possibility that women hold jobs doesn’t seem to occur to him.
Usher is trying to find a way to justify the increasingly ridiculous right-wing claim that same-sex marriage is somehow undermining “traditional” heterosexual marriage. He has zero-evidence for his claim outside of his belief that women are generally sleazy liars, and will “cheat” men out of the straight marriages they’re entitled to by sneaking off with women.
2) Planned Parenthood is trying to get kids “hooked” on sex. The anti-choice organization American Life League has been peddling the idea for a long time now that Planned Parenthood works like a mythical drug dealer, but with sex. The theory, summarized in this amazing video, goes like this: Planned Parenthood lures otherwise asexual young people into thinking sex is fun (something they are dead certain that you would never, ever think if not for Planned Parenthood). They then trick them into having sex by telling them contraception works, but (evil laugh), the contraception doesn’t work and the young people get pregnant and have to have abortions. Which means profit for Planned Parenthood! This neat little theory requires ignoring both the fact that Planned Parenthood is a non-profit and that the overwhelming scientific evidence shows that contraception does work, but ignoring facts and evidence is what the Christian right does best.
3) Gay men wear special rings for the sole purpose of giving innocent straights HIV. This one was trotted out recently by everyone’s favorite disseminator of Christian right urban legends, Pat Robertson. “You know what they do in San Francisco, some in the gay community there they want to get people so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger,” he explained, suggesting there’s a serial killing ring of gay men who kill with HIV for reasons undetermined. Robertson backpedaled, but as Anderson Cooper suggested, only because he got caught.
4) The abortion-mad Chinese eat human fetuses. This one is popular in anti-choice circles, because it hits both the abortion-obsessed and racist sweet spots. The claim is sometimes that the Chinese eat “fetus soup” as an aphrodisiac, because concern that other people are enjoying sex too much is always part and parcel of any anti-choice urban legend. This obviously false bit of racist propaganda is spread mostly through email, though prominent anti-choice activists like Jill Stanek have also perpetuated it.
5) Crazed liberals in Illinois want to teach 5-year-olds how to have sex.A Chicago school district has implemented a mandatory sex education program for each grade level, leading Christian right publications to accuse the district of practicing “pedophilia” by trying to get kindergartners to think about “sex and sexual acts.” While it’s no surprise that fundamentalists love the opportunity to titillate and outrage themselves by imagining kids getting blow job lessons, the reality is much more mundane….and pedophilia-preventive. Lessons for kindergarten and first grade will simply be about anatomy, with an emphasis on learning the difference between “good touch vs. bad touch,” specifically so children who are targeted by pedophiles know to report what’s happened. But perpetuating the belief that evil pervert liberals are targeting innocent children clearly matters more to the Christian right than stopping real-life perverts who are actually targeting children.
6) Obama is the Antichrist and plans to rule America by sharia law. Even though you’d think Obama would be getting on with this plan already instead of wasting time talking about bombing Syria, the belief that any day now a combination of sharia law and the apocalypse will be brought on by Obama still rules in Christian right circles. Public Policy Polling found that an alarming 13 percent of Americans are sure Obama is the Antichrist and another 13 percent entertained the possibility. Christian right-wingers are always on the lookout for “evidence” that Obama’s secret sharia plan is about to take off, leading to headlines likes this one from Breitbart.com: “Obama administration paves the way for sharia law.”
7) Charles Darwin took it all back the day he died. This one has been around since the 19th century, but still has a significant amount of play on the Christian right, as part of the ur-conspiracy theory which holds that scientists are just making up evolutionary theory as part of a grand atheist conspiracy conducted for reasons unknown. Interestingly, this is one legend leaders in the Christian right have been trying to put to bed recently, with even the group Answers In Genesis—which believes that dinosaurs and humans lived in harmony together—denying that Darwin recanted his atheistic views on his deathbed.
8) JK Rowling is trying to lure your children into Satanism with her Harry Potter books. Hardline Christian conservatives have always been afraid pop culture is a conspiracy of Satan’s to attract impressionable young people, so it’s unsurprising that Rowling’s Harry Potter series, with its portrayal of fantasy magic, made the top of the list of products to be feared. The hysteria hit a peak in 2001, with fundamentalist activists accusing the books of trying to “desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult” and “trafficking in evil spirits.” Things were made worse when the Onion published a satirical article Christian conservatives didn’t realize was satire, causing them to literally believe young kids told the Onion things like, “But the Harry Potter books showed me that magic is real, something I can learn and use right now, and that the Bible is nothing but boring lies.” The furor has died down somewhat, but plenty of evangelical leaders still routinely claim demons can possess your body if you read Harry Potter.
9) Pro-choicers in Texas were planning to pelt the state senate with jars of feces. This one rose up and was debunked within the space of six weeks over this summer of 2013. The claim, which unfortunately was given credence by the Texas Department of Public Safety back in July, was that evil pro-choicers were planning to sneak jars of poop into the debate and were only stopped by brave, poop-confiscating lawmakers. Eventually, the TX DPS reluctantly handed its actual documents regarding the protests over and sure enough, there is no evidence outside of urban legend-mongering from conservatives that there were any jars of any human waste whatsoever. Unfortunately, the legend was already out and circulating.
Humorless fundies are also perpetuating the claim that there was Satan-worshipping from pro-choicers at the protests, even though a cursory perusal of the evidence shows that the shouts of “hail Satan” were not a prayer so much as a joke aimed squarely at the Christian right protesters.
10) Birth control pill turns your uterus into a grave littered with teeny-weeny corpses of fully formed babies.Kevin Swanson, Christian right talk show host, expelled this one recently, claiming that “certain doctors and certain scientists” are finding that women on the pill have, “these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb.” An evocative image, albeit one that requires not only falsely believing the pill “kills” embryos (it works by suppressing ovulation), but also simply refusing to believe that menstruation actually exists.
These are just a sampling of the stories you’ll hear in hushed, can-you-believe-it tones in Christian right circles, where the urban legend is a primary form of communication.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

Who’s Destroying Christianity? It Sure as Hell Isn’t the Liberals

November 24, 2013 By Allen Clifton

It’s my belief, as was the belief of our Founding Fathers, that religion and politics should never mix. Honestly, what good can come from it?  Even among the seemingly endless denominations within the Christian faith there’s not a consensus of what is right and what is wrong.
I’ve been to the households of Baptists where drinking is strongly forbidden and against their religious beliefs, and let’s just say I’ve been far less than sober at a Catholic wedding.
But there’s undoubtedly a war being waged within this country by the far-right “Christian fundamentalists” (the ones I call followers of Republicanity) and real Christians who actually follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Since I founded Right Off A Cliff and co-founded Forward Progressives, I’ve made it part of my mission to reclaim Christianity from those who I personally feel don’t follow the Christian faith at all.  Another group I would highly encourage all of you to check out as well is The Christian Left.  It’s another great page that fights the ignorance of Republicanity.
It’s amazing though how so many conservatives really believe liberals are a bunch of godless heathens out to destroy Christianity.  It’s a claim that’s absolutely absurd.  There are tens of millions of liberals who are Christians in this country.  The difference is, we practice our faith in private like it should be.  We don’t stand on some alter, preaching down to others about how they should live their lives.

Still, I can’t count the times I’ve heard conservatives claim that liberals are out to destroy Christianity.
And while their ignorance concerning the idea that liberals are trying to destroy Christianity is apparent, they are correct about one thing — millions of people are destroying Christianity.   They are.

Republicans are the biggest enemy to Christian values I’ve ever witnessed.
You know what I’ve literally never heard, not even once?  ”I’m no longer a Christian because of the beliefs of liberals.”
But you know what I have heard numerous times?  ”I’m no longer a Christian because of the ignorance of so many conservatives who claim to be Christians, yet act like ignorant, hateful pricks.”
Story after story from people who no longer considering themselves Christians, though they were raised one, because of the ignorance of those who take Christianity and destroy it with their own selfish, hateful desires.
Liberals aren’t driving people from Christianity, conservatives are.  It’s the Republican party who acts like they’re some representatives of “Christian values” while being supported by hateful, paranoid, delusional, angry, fearful bigots who hate anything and everything that isn’t just like them.
“Oh, but I go to church and tithe 10%.  I’m also in the choir and I volunteer at all the church functions.”
Neat.
When someone says something like that to me this is what I hear:

“I was raised to go to church because it’s what God orders me to do.  I’ve also been told that I’m supposed to give 10% to the church otherwise I might end up in hell.  Oh, and if I’m not involved in church my friends and family will judge me, but it’s okay, I don’t really mind that because I’m surrounded by people in church who are just like me and we can gossip and judge everyone who isn’t just like us.”

Anyone who’s ever worked with the public will tell you the absolute worst day of the week to work is Sunday.  When I was a server at a restaurant right across the highway from one of the largest churches in the city I was living in at the time, Sunday morning was the shift where we had the rudest people, worst tips and our lives were miserable until the day was over.

You know, once the “good church people” arrived.
But like I said, people aren’t flocking from Christianity because of liberals.  They’re flocking from the religion because of the absolute ignorance of conservatives.  Who, as I’ve said many times now, don’t follow Christianity — they follow Republicanity.
And as a Christian who accepts people of all faiths, no faiths and all things in between, I’m going to continue to stand up for Christianity.  I will continue the fight to reclaim Christianity from the ignorant clutches of these right-wing fanatics.
I just hope more people join me in this fight.

The Gospel of Selfishness in American Christianity

The Gospel of Selfishness in American Christianity

How the philosophers of selfishness came to use Christianity as their cover story.

AlterNet / By Amanda Marcotte

November 14, 2013  |  

  Anyone who has worked in the restaurant business will be happy to tell you that waiters always fight each other to avoid working Sunday lunch shift. Not because they want to sleep in, but because it’s a widespread belief that the post-church crowd is loud, demanding and unwilling to tip appropriately. In the food service industry, “Christian” is synonymous with “selfish.”
Unfair stereotype? Probably. Big groups, regardless of affiliation, tend to tip poorly. More to the point, waiters probably remember the bad Christian tippers more because the hypocrisy is so stunning. The image of a man piously preening about what a good Christian he is in church only to turn around and refuse the basic act of decency that is paying someone what you owe them perfectly symbolizes a lurking suspicion in American culture that the harder someone thumps the Bible, the more selfish and downright sadistic a person he is. And that perception—that showy piety generally goes hand in hand with very un-Christ-like behavior—is not an urban myth at all. On the contrary, it’s the daily reality of American culture and politics.
Bill Maher recently had a rant on his show that went viral addressing this very issue, bad tippers who leave sermons or notes scolding waiters instead of paying them what they’re owed. His larger point is a much more important one: It’s absolutely disgusting how the politicians who make the biggest show of how much they love Jesus would be the first in line to bash him if he returned with a message of clothing the naked and feeding the poor. The Jesus of the Bible multiplied the loaves and fishes. His loudest followers these day gripe about feeding people, claiming it creates a “culture of dependency.” They may even comb through the Bible to take quotes out of context to justify their selfishness toward the poor, as Rep. Steven Fincher did when he claimed the Bible says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” The fact that those jobs are unavailable didn’t give him a moment’s pause when suggesting this very un-Christ-like plan to his fellow Americans.
There are plenty of progressive Christians who genuinely try to live out Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself, described in the Bible as the root of Jesus’ entire philosophy. That said, statistics bear out the sense that people who are more invested in being perceived as pious also embrace the most selfish policies. Self-identified conservatives and Republicans claim go to church regularly at twice the rate of self-identified liberals. People who go to church more than once a week are far more conservative than the rest of the population. Indeed, the research suggests how often you report being in the pews is the most reliable indicator of how you’re going to vote. (Though it may not be a reliable indicator of how often you actually go to church. In the grand tradition of showy piety, people who claim to be avid church-goers often lie about it to pollsters.)
The attempts to reconcile the correlation between displays of piety and support for selfish policies get complex on the right, with conservatives often arguing that hating your neighbor at the voting booth doesn’t count because church charities supposedly make up for it. (They don’t.) In reality, the relationship between Christian piety and support for selfish policies is fairly straightforward. It’s not that being Christian makes you conservative. It’s that being conservative makes being a loud and pious Christian extremely attractive.

Without Christianity, the underlying mean-spiritedness of conservative policies is simply easier to spot. Without religion, you’re stuck making libertarian-style arguments that sound like things cackling movie villains would say, like Ayn Rand saying civilization should reject “the morality of altruism.” Since Christianity teaches altruism and generosity, it provides excellent cover for people who want to be selfish, a sheep’s clothing made of Jesus to cover up the child-starving wolf beneath. Since Christians are “supposed” to be good people, people who really aren’t good are lining up to borrow that reputation to advance their agenda.

The fact that conservatism causes obnoxious Christian piety in American culture is most obvious when looking at some of the theological developments that have accrued since the philosophers of selfishness decided to use Christianity as their cover story. The “prosperity gospel” that has developed in recent years is a classic example.
The prosperity gospel teaches, to be blunt, that you can tell how much God favors you by how rich you are. While some on the Christian right reject this idea as a tad crude, it’s still wildly popular and its adherents, like Oral Roberts, are some of the major architects and organizers for the Christian right. It’s a perfect example of how conservative ideology leads to pious Christianity. People want to believe that the rich are better than everyone else and the poor don’t deserve squat, so they find a way to blame God for it rather than own their own greed and selfishness.
Pope Francis may be entirely sincere when he says he wants Catholic clergy to deemphasize the right-wing political pandering in favor of highlighting values that are more in line with liberalism, such as compassion and generosity to the poor, but the odds are slim of this message making inroads with church leaders in the United States. The church needs conservatives who need to believe they’re good and holy people despite their selfish beliefs. Without them, who will show up and tithe? Liberals? Most of them are sleeping in on Sundays, secure that their commitment to social justice makes them good people regardless of how visibly pious they are.
The fact of the matter is that the purposes religion serves in America are shrinking in number. Our cultural identity is increasingly shaped by pop culture, not faith or ethnic identity. Our holidays are more about shopping and having a chance to catch up with far-flung family these days, not showing devotion to a deity. Spiritual needs are often addressed through modern means like psychotherapy and self-help. People build communities through hobbies and interests more than through faith communities bound by geography, ethnicity and family.
Increasingly, the only thing religion has left to justify itself is that it provides cover for people who want to have bigoted, selfish beliefs but want to believe they are good people anyway. As these social trends continue, we can expect the alignment between public piety and grotesquely selfish political beliefs to get worse, not better.

10 Reasons Why Reading The Bible Makes Us More Progressive

November 13, 2013 By Benjamin Corey 

 

In a piece I published yesterday, (Study Shows: Reading Your Bible Often Makes You More Liberal), we took a look at a study I read the other day which showed the more often people read their Bible, the more liberal/progressive they become. (In yesterday’s article I used the term “liberal” but in today’s I’m using the term “progressive” since that’s what I identify as). Looking back on my own journey out of fundamentalist thinking and into a Christianity that is life-giving instead of life-sucking for me, this trajectory of moving away from the hard right the more I read my Bible, has been a daily reality.

From getting to know so many of your stories, it sounds like many of you have experienced similar paradigm shifts of predictable right-to-left movement the more you embraced the Bible as well.

(Quick point of order: I’m not saying that reading your Bible will make you all the way left, because certainly I am not on many issues. The argument is simply that for those of us on the hard right, when we read our Bibles more often, it tends to move us in a leftward motion on certain issues.)

The question becomes, why?

For those family and friends still stuck in a paradigm we have already left, when we move ever so slightly out of the far-right corner of the field we are assumed to be not taking the Bible seriously, accused of being “relativists”, and other assumptions are made as to why we are changing. The ironic truth however, is that so many of us have arrived at being Christian progressives not because we decided to set half the Bible aside, and not because we decided to stop taking the Bible seriously, but as a gradual process that resulted from taking the Bible more seriously and deciding to try to follow those often neglected parts.

We became Christian progressives because we read our Bibles, not because we put them away. It’s okay if you’re not here yet or if you ever will be, but it’s important to understand the truth about how and why we arrived here.

While this isn’t all comprehensive, based upon my own experience, here’s my list:

10 reasons why I think reading your Bible more frequently will make you a more Progressive Christian:

1. The more I read my Bible, the more I realize that I don’t have it all together.

Growing up I was frequently reminded that the Bible, through the Holy Spirit will convict us of sin… and you know what, it’s true. The more I get to know my Bible the more I realize how deeply flawed I am… which makes me see others more compassionately, because I am reminded that they are just like me. The more I see others as being just like me, the more progressive I become because I move in a trajectory of love, tolerance, and am way less likely to pronounce judgment on someone else than I was before. (Obviously, I still struggle with Mark Driscoll, but I am working on it.)

2. The more I read my Bible, the more I develop humility.

The Apostle Paul says that we should view our sins as being worse than anyone else, and that we should view ourselves as walking examples of how patient God is with people who can’t get it together. When I am honest about my life, that is absolutely true. I am a walking example of someone who knows how to test God’s patience, and my sins are just as bad as whatever yours might be. This realization made it too difficult to stay in my old paradigm; yes, I want to spend my life inviting people to experience Jesus (in that regard, I am completely still an “evangelical”), but I want to do it in a new way– a more humble way. I’m not always there (see #1) but I desperately want to get there.

3. The more I read my Bible, the more I discover that justice for the poor and oppressed is at the heart of it.

I wasn’t all that concerned about the poor and oppressed until I opened my Bible… and discovered that commands to care for them are all over the place from the Old Testament, all the way through the New Testament. I tried to escape it and explain it away, but I can’t– God wants us to care for, serve, and love these people.

4. The more I read my Bible, the more I realize “redistribution of wealth” wasn’t Obama’s idea– it was God’s.

That redistribution of wealth stuff? Yeah, it’s in the Bible and was actually God’s idea. In the Old Testament we have years of Jubilee, restrictions on gleaning your garden more than once, a command from God that there should be “no poor among you”, and prophets who came to denounce the nation when the rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer. Let’s not give Obama the credit– God thought of it first.

5. The more I read my Bible, the more I realize that the early Christians actually practiced this re-distribution of wealth.

Those early Christians? Well, for a time they actually practiced some radical economic principles. And, guess what? The book of Acts tells us that there weren’t any poor people among them. They rejected individual ownership, gave their wealth to leadership who in turn, redistributed it according to need. There weren’t any mandatory drug testing programs, just assistance according to need. While this still seems too radical for me, it moves me in a right to left trajectory as I read it.

6. The more I read my Bible the more I realize Jesus taught we need to pay our taxes.

After reading 4 and 5, some are probably saying “yeah, but that was never supposed to be the government’s job”. Well, in the life of Jesus we see him tell someone that he should “sell everything and give it to the poor”, and to yet another we see that Jesus commands us to pay our taxes. So, it looks like we’re not getting off the hook either way– we need to pay our taxes AND give private charity. It’s not an either or proposition. I’m not a fan of that either, but it’s in the Bible.

7. The more I read my Bible, the more I realize that God wants us to be people who are quick to show mercy.

The prophet Micah says that “loving mercy” is actually something God “requires” of us. Jesus tells us that justice and mercy are the “more important” parts of God’s law. This means that when it comes to issues of justice, economics, poverty, the death penalty, etc., I have become more quick to take the default position that sides with radical mercy.

8. The more I read my Bible, the more I realize that God cares how we treat immigrants.

Whenever God lists out a group of people that he wants his people to take care of, immigrants make the cut. The more I read about God’s heart for the immigrant, the more I realize that I might be held accountable for how I treat them, and how I talk about them.

9. The more I read my Bible, the more I realize that God will hold us accountable for how we care for the environment.

The more I read my Bible, the more I see that God’s original mandate for humanity, was to care for creation– we were designed for and given the task of being environmental conservationists. In the end? Well, we see that God is going to judge quite harshly those who refused:

“The nations raged, but your wrath came, and the time for the dead to be judged, and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints, and those who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying the destroyers of the earth” (Rev 11:18)

Not sure how to escape it– God wants me to care for and protect the environment, so I will.

10. The more I read my Bible, the more I realize that God isn’t judging us by whether or not we get all of our doctrine right– he’s judging us by whether or not we get the “love one another” part right.

This aspect wasn’t a major player in my faith before, but the more I read the Bible the more I realize that God is less concerned with us all sharing the same doctrine but is heavily concerned with whether or not we love each other. In fact, Jesus said this would be the calling card of his followers, and how others would realize we’re actually following Jesus– that we love one another. The more I read my Bible, the more I want to defer my position or preference and instead side with what is in the best interest of others– because that’s the loving thing to do.

These are the 10 reasons why reading my Bible more made a more Progressive Christian. How has reading your Bible more often changed your worldview? Has your experience been similar or different?

Mystery Atheist Hijacks Anti-Evolutionary Theorist’s Twitter Account and Issues an Ultimatum

Nov. 11, 2013 8:22am Billy Hallowell

 

Evangelist Ray Comfort is known for regularly riling secularists and now an atheist who is less than enthralled with his message has hijacked Comfort’s official Twitter account in an effort to get back at the “Evolution vs. God” filmmaker.

Comfort told TheBlaze on Friday that his official Twitter account, which has more than 31,000 followers, ”was seized upon by an atheist.”

The non-believer was able to secure Comfort’s Twitter handle (@RayComfort) after one of his staff members accidentally changed his username. Just moments after the error occurred, someone else registered the @RayComfort, making it impossible for Comfort’s team to get it back.

As a result, the Christian leader has been forced to change his Twitter handle to @RayComfortLW. But that’s not the most intriguing part of the story. The individual who ended up with Comfort’s Twitter handle is now using it to push back against the evangelist’s beliefs and contentions — and the person has even given Comfort some demands.

“The atheist who took my Twitter name, then gave me an ultimatum. He said that he would return it if I made a public statement,” Comfort told TheBlaze. “He tweeted that I must say that I would ‘no longer denigrate, blame and demonize skeptics and nonbelievers, including agnostics and atheists.’”

Real Ray wants his handle back. I've promised to do so, on condition he stops badmouthing skeptics and nonbelievers. I'm waiting for reply.

November 7, 2013 4:36pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@RayComfort

Ray Comfort

Comfort said that he told the unnamed individual that he loves non-believers and has never demonized them and that he will be passing on the offer. The evangelist also said he doesn’t know who the person is, but that it could be any number of activists.

This year, alone, Comfort said he has banned over 3,000 people on Facebook for “blasphemy and cussing.”

TheBlaze also reached out to the atheist behind the account. While we asked for the person to share his or her identity, this request was declined, however answers to some of our questions were provided.

“I took over the handle to build up a parody account of Ray,” the person said in an e-mail interview. “If you’ve read my recent tweets, I’m using it to promote humanistic values and science now.”

Here are just some of the more recent tweets the mystery individual is sending from Comfort’s old username:

Demonizing people who are LBGTQ and using the Slippery Slope fallacy to equate them with pedophiles is an epitome of divisive dishonesty.

November 10, 2013 10:14am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@RayComfort

Ray Comfort

READ Heb 13:16 Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have... Verses like these are too often ignored by selfish Christians.

November 9, 2013 9:11am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@RayComfort

Ray Comfort

Do something effective for Philippines instead of praying. Find an aid org like Médecins Sans Frontières or Red Cross working there & donate

November 9, 2013 7:35am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@RayComfort

Ray Comfort

The atheist corroborated Comfort’s story and explained that he acquired the name after the evangelist’s personal assistant inadvertently changed the Twitter handle.

“Someone took it before me, and released it. When I tested if it’s available, it was and I simply opened a new account with it,” he said. “So I did not ‘get it away from Comfort.’ It was abandoned by his PA.”

As for the ultimatum, the account snatcher said that the goal was to force the evangelist to “stop publicly blaming and denigrating skeptics, agnostics and atheists.”

Comfort said his team has contacted Twitter about the situation, but it’s unclear what the company might do, if anything, to resolve it. In the meantime, the unnamed user said that offers have been received from others who are interested in taking the account over, but that returning it to Comfort has not been completely ruled out.

It’s certainly no surprise why non-believers would dislike Comfort. The Christian leader opposes Darwinian theory and has worked diligently to try and disprove it.

“It’s a love-hate relationship. I love them and they hate me, and they will do anything to frustrate the gospel,” he continued.

Comfort also noted that his anti-Darwinian film “Evolution vs. God” is at the center of much of the contention surrounding him — and that this situation may be a direct consequence of that.

“After the release of ‘Evolution vs God’ it energized the hatred that many atheists have for me. In four months there have been over 104,000 comments on YouTube and thousands of the comments are livid,” he told TheBlaze. “This is because Darwinian evolution is a hill upon which atheists and evolution believers are prepared to die. It says that we are primates, that there are no moral absolutes, and there’s no God to whom we must answer.”

Sorry, Tea Partyers: Religious right rooted in radical progressivism

How quickly Christian evangelicals forget their movement has a long history of demanding government intervention

Ira Chernus, AlterNet

Tea Party supporter William Temple holds up a tea pot as he shouts against President Barack Obama's 2010 health care overhaul outside the Supreme Court in Washington, June 28, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Jason Reed)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

The media spotlight has focused on the growing split in the Republican Party between its corporate-business wing and the libertarian-leaning Tea Partiers. But what about the third leg of the GOP tripod, the one that used to get all the attention: the evangelical Christian religious right? That’s where the spotlight ought to be.

We know the corporate-business types want an active federal government, because it can be counted on to serve their interests, especially if Republicans regain control of it. We know that the libertarians, who are the driving force in the Tea Party, want to shrink government; that’s their whole reason for being.

What we don’t know yet, and what will determine the fate of the GOP, is which way the religious right will break in this intramural fight over the role of government. Even the conservative evangelicals themselves don’t know, because the split in the GOP runs smack down the middle of the religious right.

Many politically active evangelicals are happy to be Tea Partiers and align with the libertarian call for smaller government. They see government as a force imposing its secular ways upon them. And Tea Party politicians have been equally happy to talk the religious right talk because it wins them votes.

Many other evangelicals will join the corporate-business Republicans in rejecting the Tea Party’s extremist anti-government agenda. They’ll see why Tea Partying is a trap for them. Only a powerful government can do the things evangelicals want most, like banning abortion and gay marriage, and more generally, imposing strict rules of personal behavior on every American. The more the Tea Party weakens the government, the more it deprives the religious right of its most potent tool. That should be easy enough for most conservative evangelicals to see.

What most won’t see, though, is the hidden place where evangelicals and libertarians do meet: way back in U.S. history, where both movements were inspired by a radical worldview. Just as the libertarian call for less government has its roots in radical, not conservative, assumptions about human nature, so the religious right’s call for government intervention has deep roots in evangelical demands for policies that were radically progressive at the time. Some of them are still radical, even by today’s standards.

As early as the 1820s, the evangelical style of Christianity was beginning to dominate American political life. It didn’t stop dominating until the 19th century was over.

Looking back across the history of that century you’ll find evangelicals, demanding strong government intervention in everyone’s life, popping up in all sorts of places. And most of those places are well to the left of where you might expect them, if your view of evangelical politics is shaped only by the era of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell.

Most famously, evangelical Christians led and filled the ranks of the movement to abolish slavery. Some (though far too few) even took the lead in treating African Americans as genuine equals. The best recent writing on the causes of the Civil War shows that evangelicalism was a crucial factor creating widespread popular resistance to the “peculiar institution.”

Without the spur of evangelical fervor there probably would have been no Republican Party, no President Lincoln, and no secession of the South. Slavery would not only have continued in the United States; it probably would have spread throughout the territories that became the new states of the Southwest, making it that much harder ever to abolish.

Antebellum evangelical reformers also took the lead in demanding that government provide free public education for all, more humane treatment of prisoners and the disabled, and more equality for women. Of course, most of their specific policy prescriptions seem too conservative by today’s progressive standards. But in their own day they were out on the cutting left edge of political life. And one of their demands—that government renounce war as an instrument of national policy—still sounds as radical as ever.

You’ll find all of these examples, and more, if you pick up any good book on 19th-century U.S. history.

I picked up one such book at random, just as I was beginning to write this column: Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America, one of the most insightful histories of the Gilded Age, from the 1870s to the 1890s. When historians go looking for evangelicals supporting left-leaning government policies, they almost always look at the era of reform before the Civil War, not the Gilded Age that followed it. Yet just thumbing through Trachtenberg’s book I easily found evidence that the pattern lasted right through the 19th century.

Trachtenberg points out the powerful evangelical impulse in two of the era’s greatest political bestsellers, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. George wrote glowingly of “the noble dreams of socialism.” Bellamy advocated “the religion of solidarity… a system of public ownership… to realize the idea of the nation … as a family, a vital union, a common life.”

Both denounced the injustices of the emerging corporate system with “evangelical fervor,” says Trachtenberg, sustained by “religious emotions of ‘solidarity.’”

But there was more going on than just utopian words. There were workers organizing in the factories and the streets, dominated in the 1870s and 1880s by the Knights of Labor. The Knights intended to use government to achieve their goals—goals that today’s progressives still struggle for, like a fair and just income tax structure, guaranteed equal pay for women, and government ownership of utilities and transportation systems.

And they built their movement upon “an unmistakable fusion of republicanism and evangelical Protestantism,” in Trachtenberg’s words. “Workers found in Protestantism a profound ‘notion of right’ for their struggles.” They made “’the religion of solidarity’ proclaimed by Edward Bellamy and other Protestant reformers … a living experience within labor.” Obviously they saw no conflict between evangelical Christianity and a strong central government enforcing laws to create economic justice.

By the 1890s the Knights’ leading role in labor movement had been eclipsed by the American Federation of Labor. But as the Knights declined, the spirit that moved them was being picked up by an eclectic mix of movements that came to be grouped under the umbrella term, Populists. Their program was laid out most famously in the 1892 declaration of the People’s Party, which demanded that government support the interest of “the people,” not “capitalists, corporations, banks, trusts.”

That declaration was “composed in evangelical accents” and “rang with echoes of revivalism” as well as “backwoods democracy and grassroots outrage,” as Trachtenberg writes. “Populist spokesmen clothed themselves in the garb of righteous evangels.”

Like the Knights, the Populists were on a crusade to eliminate sin. But their political ideas also “drew from the movement’s roots in native radicalism, in a secular rhetoric of ‘equal rights’ and ‘anti-monopoly.’” And the main weapon Populists aimed to use was political power—enough power to make sure that their policies were enacted through government legislation, regulation, and strict enforcement.

Like most historians, Trachtenberg traces the decline of the Populists to their fateful decision, in1896, to join with the Democrats in making William Jennings Bryan their joint candidate for president. Bryan ran three times for the top job and lost all three times. Today, on the left, he’s most remembered as the evangelical Christian zealot who decried the teaching of evolution in the 1924 Scopes trial. But the infamous trial came near the end of his long life.

For most of that life he, more than any other American, carried the banner of radical reform in the name of God. It’s worth reading the details in Michael Kazin’s recent biography of Bryan. Kazin, a leading authority on Populism and an important progressive intellectual in his own right, makes it clear that in the late 19th century, and on into the early 20th, millions of evangelical Protestants saw it as a religious duty to demand that a strong government right the economic wrongs of the corporate capitalist system. The left in that era could not have emerged as a significant force without the tremendous boost it got from evangelical faith.

All this history should be more than mere curiosity to us. The Knights of Labor, the Populists, and the Bryanites were in many ways the forerunner of today’s progressive left. Their fusion of evangelical Christianity and strong progressive government holds lessons for, and poses questions to, progressives today.

The Republican Party may or may not be cracking up. Cracks in the GOP alliance don’t necessarily mean any advantage for progressives, of course. But they are windows of opportunity, if the left knows how to take advantage of them. It’s all a question of strategy.

A smart first step for progressives is to do whatever we can to widen those cracks. It’s the religious right, long the progressive left’s favorite target, that is now the richest target of opportunity. Because politically progressive evangelical Christianity is not merely a relic of the 19th century. It’s making a comeback.

That presents left progressives with a challenge. In your struggle for justice, would you ally with people who share your commitment to greater economic equality but would like to see government ban abortion and gay marriage? Today the question may seem abstract and hypothetical. Soon enough it may become a very real issue of debate for progressive strategists, and there are bound to be good arguments on both sides.

However, everyone should be able to agree that at least progressives outside the evangelical community should begin talking to folks inside that circle who are open to hearing the progressive message. Evangelicals will have to filter the message through their own beliefs, which means phrasing it in a somewhat different language.

Smart progressives will start learning that language, figuring out how to communicate with evangelicals and discover common ground. Smart progressives will also learn how to remind evangelicals, gently but persuasively, of their own radical political history, which many may not know.

The main goal here should be to make the progressive tent wide enough to make room for evangelicals. Though we are far from the 19th century, evangelicals can now, as then, bring a unique kind of energy into progressive movements that can pay off. As a side benefit, moving evangelicals to the left will also widen the cracks in the shaky conservative alliance and hasten the day when it can no longer hold itself together.

Ira Chernus is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing about Israel, Palestine and the U.S. on his blog.

5 Child Damaging Doctrines ~ Jim Palmer

(1) "Telling children that they are born into this world intrinsically bad, absent of inherent worth, and repulsive to God.

(2) Telling children that their sinfulness is so bad that it left God no choice but to brutalize, torture and kill his son.

(3) Telling children that there is nothing good inside of them and that they should not trust their thoughts and feelings.

(4) Using fear or shame as a means of binding children to certain beliefs or practices related to God.

(5) Teaching children that the rejection, hatred or diminishment of other human beings is an expression of devotion to God."

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing." Matt 23:37 

CSNY said it well 

Jim Palmer is the Author of Divine Nobodies: Shedding Religion to Find God (and the unlikely people who help you); Wide Open Spaces: Beyond Paint-by-Number Christianity; Being Jesus in Nashville: Finding the Courage to Live Your Life (whoever or wherever you are) & our valued FBBro.

Posted 21st August by Bob Ingle