But the good news is that at least some Christians recognize that there is more to the moral agenda than gay bashing.
Christian Coalition pres.-elect leaves - Yahoo! News: "ORLANDO, Fla. - The president-elect of the Christian Coalition of America has declined the job, saying the organization wouldn't let him expand its agenda beyond opposing abortion and gay marriage.
The Rev. Joel Hunter, who was scheduled to take over the socially conservative group in January from Roberta Combs, said he had hoped to focus on issues such as poverty and the environment.
'These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about,' said Hunter, a senior pastor at Northland Church in Longwood, Fla."
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And if we needed more proof, the same Religious right is already starting its attack on Obama:
Obama's Wooing Of Evangelicals Runs Into Fierce Resistance | TPMCafe: "Obama's efforts are running into fierce resistance. For instance, an open letter from a group of Christian-Right figures — including Phylis Schlafly, Tim Wildmon and others — criticizes the invitiation by citing Obama's pro-choice stance and his support for condom distribution in answer to the AIDS epidemic, "not chaste behavior as directed by the Bible." The letter ends, "No, Mr. Warren, Mr. Obama, we will never work with those can support the murder of babies in the womb.""
See. The religious right can speak up when they care about something. But evidently, they have NO PROBLEM whatsoever working with people who can take an alleged terrorist, fake drown, bury, or freeze them. Those same people could have at least written a letter on torture, right? Or the suspension of habeas corpus? Right?
Yeah, as it turns out, they don't care at all about either of those. Just as they don't care if global warming will impact the poor more than the rich. Those are other people's concerns. Now where are those gay people?
17 comments:
streak,
do you realize that aids would end if sexual purity were the norm? that aids continues to spread primarily thru sexual sins?
also, why dont you quit putting words into my mouth. you are a typical liberal. you dont rely on the facts...you just say whatever comes to your mind....whether there are any facts behind it or not.
btw, you have a good lookin dog.
volfan007
Volfan, you refuse to answer my questions, just as you did over at Les's blog where you regaled me with fiction regarding slavery and told me it was "scholarship."
Here I ask you for evidence that evangelicals stood up to torture, and hear nothing back from you. You just claim that evangelicals don't support torture. But it is I who says whatever comes to my mind?
You said in the other comment thread that the only things you really cared about were abortion, the "gay agenda," low taxes and gun rights. didn't you say that you would vote for a pro-life candidate no matter what he stood for elsewhere? Not even, evidently if he cheered torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Not even if he cut funding for the disabled poor.
You want to come in here and spout what you do, you should keep in mind that my blog is not as genteel as Les'. We will call you on shit like this--as my friends did in the other comment thread. I look forward to you responding to their points, though I doubt very much you will.
thanks for the compliment to my dog. He is a great dog.
i would vote for a man who was against abortion and for torture any day over a liberal who was for abortion and against torture. that being said.....i am against torture. every evangelical that i know would be against torture...well, not all that i know. there would be some that i could see saying give them what they have coming to them.
also, i have answered your questions. what questions have i not answered. ask me again...not rant and rave like a frantic woman who has lost her child in a store...ask me and i will try to answer them.
volfan007
I had an angrier retort, but decided to delete it. But volfan, this: "not rant and rave like a frantic woman who has lost her child in a store..." is stupid and annoying. Knock it off.
I will repeat my questions. Show me an evangelical who stood up to Bush's torture policy (and he has a torture policy, you realize?) and maybe we can talk.
This is an observation, but voting for a pro-life person who endorses torture may make sense in a political bedfellows kind of way, but has no place coming from someone who claims to live by the Bible. We can work to reduce abortions, but torture is something that the state has in its complete power. Bush, as president could stop it immediately. He won't because he doesn't care about what happens to non-white Muslims, and apparently neither does most of conservative evangelical Christianity.
sreak,
i am not for torture. i wish that bush was not for torture. but, to me, the murder of innocent little babies in the womb of the mother is far more serious than the torture of some terrorists to try to get info out of them.
and, let me just say that as a christian, who should i vote for....a person who believes in baby killing? or, a person who believes in torturing terrorists?
i dont have a whole lot of other options...now, do i?
to me, abortions are the bigger issue. terrorists are guilty of crime. babies are innocent of crime....they are supposed to be protected.
in a perfect world, babies and terrorists alike would not be murdered nor tortured.
and, let me give you something else to consider. sinners who die lost in their sins will be tortured forever in hell.....God will send them there. thus, the torture of rebellious people forever is ok with God.
volfan007
Ok, honestly, this is unbelievable. God is pro-torture now?
Let me explain this to you, Volfie, the big problem with torture is that we don't even know they are terrorists--in fact, innocent people have been tortured by us, or sent to countries that torture, again by us. Of course, the idea of torturing even guilty people should be a problem for you, but it isn't. and that is scary.
Your binary world is also troubling. Do you not realize that many people who are pro-choice are not pro-abortion? Do you even know that? Do you realize that none of these people celebrate abortion or think it is a great idea. some of them respond with the same principle you claim--about the role of the state to make decisions for an individual. After all, if it is murder, then the mother and doctor should all be executed for murder, right? Are you ready to follow that "logic?"
Let me also repeat, we will never eliminate abortion. We can certainly work together--pro-life and pro-choice to reduce abortions--to make them unthinkable and to ensure that pregnant women have care and options for health. But you don't want to do that. You want to call all pro-choice people murderers.
God tortures people? Unbelievable. Your theology is so bad it makes me a little ill.
streak,
hell is real. God is the one who created it. God is the one who will send lost people there. thats what the bible teaches. so, what conclusion should i draw from this?
also, i do believe....from my study of the bible....that God does not delight in sending people to hell. i believe it breaks His heart. i dont like the thought of people going to hell forever to suffer for all eternity. but, its the truth.
read the bible.
i guess you missed my comments that i am against torture.
also, those who murder the innocent should be punished. and, i dont care if its thier momma and daddy, or a stranger...if they murder an innocent little baby, then they should be punished.
volfan007
Oh, there are numerous conclusions, but yours is the only one you will even consider. Serious scholars have grappled with these issues over the centuries, but I am sure that means little to you. Nor does it mean anything to you that they might see it differently. Just as you were sure that slavery was on the way out because of Christians in the ante-bellum south. No evidence to support it, but hey, why bother with that?
I know you are against torture, though that seems soft. But I keep asking for evangelicals who stood up to the president and told him to stop. They could have, you know. They could have done that and maintained their anti-abortion homophobic platform. Not a conflict there. But they didn't. Because they don't care as long as it is non-white muslims being tortured.
Just so we are clear, you affirm what I said--better to oppose abortion absolutely than to work together to reduce it. And you are on board for the death penatly for the teenage girl who gets an abortion, right? God probably will be sad, but since he will be torturing her in hell anyway, he will probably get over it.
Pull up, pull up! Copy, Gold Leader?
"This is Red Five. I'm going in."
But I have him in my sights....
volfan007,
Since you didn't answer my questions about abortion, I will ask them again:
How do you reconcile your Republican "pro-life" vote with the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians who have died for a war President Bush lied us into? How do you reconcile it with the notion that abortion rates declined more under Bill Clinton than they have under George Bush? How do you reconcile the fact that women below the federal poverty level are nearly 4 1/2 times more likely to have abortions as those with higher income? Are you aware that even if Republicans were able to get Roe v. Wade overturned (still very unlikely), abortion would revert to the state level, at which point at least 20 states (and probably more given what happened in South Dakota a few weeks ago) would still keep abortion legal?
wasp,
in war there are casualities...and some innocent get hurt. i guess its all a matter of you thinking the war is unjust and me thinking that it was good to get rid of saddam and protect our oil rights. i too hope that we will pull out soon....when we get the job done. but, innocent little babies who are supposed to be safe in thier mothers wombs are another story all together. they are innocent. thier killing is premeditated murder. its not self defense. its not war. its not killing a criminal. abortion is the killing, or really the murder, of an innocent little child. quite a difference.
with bill clinton and abortion rates going down...did he not have to deal with a republican congress all those years who did much to bring the rate down. he was forced...well, felt forced...to go along at times. that being said, i am disappointed at bush and the congress for not getting more done in this area while in power. thier defeat not too long ago showed that some other evangelicals were disappointed as well.
my family was very poor back before 1960's.....they never felt the need to abort a baby. what's poor got to do with it?
and, if states choose to keep the murder of babies legal....then, thats up to them. they will answer to God for it.
my friend, God's not in heaven wringing His hands about all this. He is God. people and nations answer to Him. and, i am afraid that our nation will have much to answer for....we have murdered more people than hitler ever did.
from the hills of tn,
volfan007
Volf, again, there are serious problems with your approach. What I think you miss, however, is that there are ways to talk about this from your point of view that do not involve this kind of logical fallacy approach.
Let's take the war in Iraq. WJ is asking a very legitimate question--are the people in Iraq better off now if the death toll is far higher than it was under Saddam? No one here doubts that he was a homicidal dictator, but as WJ also reminds us, it was conservatives who coddled him and helped him gas the Iranians in that bloody war. It seems rather disingenuous to THEN decide he is the new Hitler.
But at the end of the day, the numbers are shocking. If the latest estimate of nearly half a million deaths--not all directly related to our invasion and occupation, but most of them--are even close to true, then simply asserting that we are better off without Saddam is a harder case to make. The continual death toll there now also makes that argument less and less tenable. If, at the end of this, Iraq is subsumed in an Afghanistan-like tribal warfare where women are killed for showing their faces or attending school, then we will have lost ground, no?
WJ is also asking you to think (at least consider) that your blanket claim that abortion is murder (in all cases) will lead to unintended consequences. I was overly strident yesterday, but teh death penalty for a teenage girl who obtains an abortion does not seem to be unthinkable if we follow your logic. Are we prepared to go that route? Is it clearly murder to abort a fertilized egg in the same way it is to abort a fetus at the end of the term?
Why do you constantly ignore my suggestions that we all work together to make abortion unthinkable? I actually think that Dobson and the Christian Coalition refuse to broaden their appeal because by focusing on gays and abortion, they are assured of a steady stream of fund raising. Don't get me wrong, people on the far left do the same thing, but by keeping the issue on unsolvable issues--always be gay people and people will always seek abortions--makes it an unending war. Kind of like Bush using the war on terror to justify civil rights encroachment.
And finally, I really do respect the issue of abortion. It is the one issue that evangelicals focus on that is even close to social justice. But it is not the same thing as Hitler's ovens, and to suggest that is simply false. And, I would respect evangelicals more if they focused as earnestly on reducing abortion, reducing infant mortality, and reducing poverty. Volfie, there is a clear correlation between hopelessness and things like abortion. Not all who are poor lack hope, to be sure, but many do. We can address the breeding grounds of hopelessness and help reduce many ills that plague us--divorce, abuse, abortion, crime, etc.
streak,
so, you are saying that it would help us end crime and poverty and abuse, etc. if we abort the babies of the poor? is that what you are saying? because it sure looks like it.
hitler also said that germany could do away with poverty and crime and such if they got rid of the jews.
this climate of death that is all over our society today is frightening. where the life of certain animals is more protected than a baby in the womb. where the life of an animal is more valued than a human in the womb. scary.
you are a student of history. dont you think hitler and stalin and nero the cambodian leader who killed so many...what was his name? dont you think that they would have loved the abortion idea and the abortion industry of america?
as far as the death toll in iraq, where do you get your figures? do you discount that thousands and thousands of kurds were put to death by saddam? i bet the kurds were happy to see us coming. i also heard testimony after testimony of iraqi's who were thrilled when we came into iraq and put down saddam. they were absolutely tickled to death that we had come to help them escape this raping, murdering madman. i guess people have short memories when it requires sacrifice to earn freedom.
again, i too wish that we could get out of iraq. i beginning to wonder if you can help the countries in the middle east that are full of muslims who are ready to kill anyone that doesnt agree with them. its just constant fighting over there...unless your muslim group has power....then, you are abused.
well, enough for now,
volfan007
Volfie, I am losing patience with you. Just as before, you don't actually dialogue. You have monologues. You misstate my arguments time and again. If you really think that I am arguing for aborting poor babies, then you really need to work on your reading comprehension. I said that there is a correlation between hopelessness and things like abortion. You twisted that horribly.
Actually, I am thinking, again, that discussing with you is nearly impossible. You ignore our role in Saddam's government, and in the gassing of the Kurds. You missuse history just to make points. I am not a scholar of Nazi Germany, but I don't believe that he was pro-abortion. He did agree with you about homosexuality, though, does that mean that you agree with Hitler? No, I doubt that very much. See how that works?
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