Jesus didn't say, "Love your neighbor as yourself through Senate bill 184."

[bobbieinok]

http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/jwalking/




Political obsession

...

First, as Jesus' followers our first goal isn't to create a better world through politics. Jesus didn't say, "Love your neighbor as yourself through Senate bill 184." He said, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Similarly, Jesus didn't say in his terrifying discussion at the end of Matthew 25, "Come into my kingdom all of those who spent time advocating for tax cuts for pharmaceutical companies so they can produce cheaper drugs." He said, "Care for the sick." Christians get confused when they think politics is the way to serve your neighbor. CS Lewis' admonition for Christians to never use faith as a means to a political end is ignored, and Lewis' prediction that their faith will become corrupt is realized.

Second, my recommendation for a "fast" isn't for Christians to never again be involved in politics. Rather, it is for Christians to get a real perspective on politics. After all, the largest Christian political organization--the Family Research Council--doesn't mention poverty, HIV/AIDS, Africa, or any other hurting class of people in their top 10 list of priorities. Defunding the ACLU is #2, however.

We need a fast to gain perspective. And we need it now.

[lvx35]

1. I'm glad people are talking about that.

the stuff coming out of the Christian right is really spiritually screwed...This whole idea that God NEEDS them to gain legislative dominion to have power. Its just disgusting.

[Erika]

2. I think Tony Perkins, Falwell, etc are learning

that Americans care about the poor and the needy. They have pretty well consumed all the gay hatred and bashing, flag burning, etc. To get more $, they have to move on.

[struggle4progress]

3. Wow. The conservatives lose an election, so Christians should stay ..

.. away from politics completely? Presumably, until the 08 election cycle begins, the talking point is that none of the people in Congress and none of those who talk to them could be Christians?

[NMMNG]

5. That's not what he said at all

What he said was:

Second, my recommendation for a "fast" isn't for Christians to never again be involved in politics. Rather, it is for Christians to get a real perspective on politics.


In other words, Christians (primarily RWers) need to get away from adding discrimination against gays into state (and possibly the federal) Constitutions, trying to dismantle the ACLU, clamoring for bans against abortion, etc. Instead they need to focus on what the Bible/Jesus actually prescribed, such as ending poverty, aiding the sick, loving their neighbors and so on.

[struggle4progress]

7. Kuo is former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives,

an office which, by the traditional doctrine separating church and state, should never have existed. Kuo's history, including his willingness to serve in such an office for three years, says quite a lot about his politics and about his values:

... Kuo, .. in college .. was a liberal who .. got a girlfriend pregnant, and they went together to an abortion clinic ... Haunted, Kuo .. moved to Washington to work for the National Right to Life Committee and, later, for the CIA, he began attending First Baptist Church in Alexandria ... ".. I learned .. being a good Christian means being a conservative Republican."
... Kuo took William J. Bennett as a mentor, wrote speeches for Ralph Reed and Robertson, and was domestic policy adviser to then-Sen. John D. Ashcroft (R-Mo.). In 1998, he joined George W. Bush's campaign for president ...

Losing Faith in the President ...
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 17, 2006; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601101.html

Why should I pay any attention at all to a former protege of Reed and Robertson, former adviser to Ashcroft, and former BushCo campaigner who then served this most corrupt of Administrations for years? The Washington Post story is worth reading: here's Kuo on the review process for grant-making under the so-called Faith-Based Initiatives program:

... "They were supposed to review the application in a religiously neutral fashion. . . . But their biases were transparent." ... Kuo tells .. about meeting a member of the review panel at a party. He says she giggled as she recalled, "when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero." Kuo says he laughed but, at the same time, was aghast ...

His comments on this are revealing, not merely about the context in which he served, but about Kuo himself: in Kuo's description of the world, the grant-making was heavily biased, but the White House and everyone Kuo worked with are all innocent, because the bias was an unavoidable byproduct of the appointment process, and of course Kuo was always aghast -- but of course he nevertheless laughed along with the rest of them and keep his mouth shut to outsiders.

Whatever we hear to the contrary now, Kuo did not leave the Administration because of a sudden change of heart:

... Kuo left the White House in late 2003 after a brain tumor and subsequent seizure caused him to have a serious car accident ...

Ex-Bush Aide: Officials Called Evangelicals 'Ridiculous'
New Book 'Tempting Faith'
By JAKE TAPPER and KENDALL EVANS
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=nation_world&id=4665213

Kuo has a long history of playing the rightwing conservative game and pretending to speak for Christian values to promote the fortunes of insane figures like Ashcroft. Nothing recent really suggests a change of heart.

So what we're seeing here is rightwing damage control.

[YellingTuna]

4. Very good

Something that still makes me wonder is, "are GOP Christians really Christians?" With all this perversion of the bible how can they call themselves that?

[angry_chuck]

6. when you abstain from actually

reading the book which contains the doctrines you profess to believe you are limited to how much you can actually know about those beliefs. Plus, to decipher old philosophical treatises is hard; better let Pat Robertson and the CC take care of it, right? Most evangelicals probably wouldn't 'hate' gays and liberals so much if their masochistic pastors would just stfu. Why waste time hating each other, when we can all hate GWBush together?