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PumpkinAle

(1,210 posts)
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 03:16 PM Jun 2014

Brat - a Christian Reconstructionist and Ayn Rand follower

While I am happy about Cantor's defeat, I can't help but be worried about Brat.

It was only last week that people were sounding the death knell for the tea party and yet Brat has an over whelming win.

Brat basically ran this race on his own, without support from the major tea party backers. That is going to change and there is going to be a lot of money (and vitriole) thrown against Tremmell.

And looking at Brat's background he is going to garner a lot of votes from the crazies out there......

This is a good quick and scary read.............

Brat is a strict Christian Reconstructionist, which means that he supports a theocratic government and holds extraordinarily radical beliefs when it comes to the role that God should play in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. As far as Reconstructionists are concerned, the Bible is the standard for morality that all must adhere to and those in violation of its tenets as they interpret them — gays, blasphemers, the irredeemably sinful — should be subject to punishment by the state. In fact, Rousas John Rushdoony, who founded the Calvinist-based sect, declared that Christianity and democracy were “inevitably enemies.”
Lovely. Another asshole clinging to ancient superstition and ready to disregard thousands of years of scientific advancement and human enlightenment is likely going to become one of the 435 “superlatives” we’ve chosen to sit in our House of Representatives. There are plenty of reasons why this country is completely fucked and has been allowed to degenerate into utter madness, but the fact that we not only sanction a belief in bronze-age fairy-tales but actually elevate it to government office has got to be somewhere near the core of the problem. Both parties do it but only the GOP and its Tea Party insurgents have explicit intellectual violence actually written into their charter. They don’t trust nor care one bit about provable science, but they sure as hell will drop the name of the Lord every few minutes like there’s a Skinner Box treat in it for them.
And what’s worse is that Brat isn’t even some cynical prick pandering to his constituency — he’s a True Believer. In the year 2014 he holds tightly to the idea that everyone should be mandated to follow the commands of a 2,000-year-old book written by people who by modern standards knew almost nothing about anything.

http://thedailybanter.com/2014/06/dave-brat-jesus-not-another-one-of-these-aholes/




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jehop61

(1,735 posts)
4. Wrong.
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 03:27 PM
Jun 2014

He's a calvinist and received degrees at Hope College in Holland, M and Princeton Divinity School, both Protestant organizations.

 

yeoman6987

(14,449 posts)
5. http://davebratforcongress.com/about-dave/
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 03:34 PM
Jun 2014

Towards the bottom on "about him" it says that he and his wife follow their beliefs at St. Mary's Catholic Church. No big deal but this morning when everyone was talking about him. I wanted to see what this guy was about. I was being sarcastic when I compared him to Nancy and Kennedy. Of course boehner is Catholic too so not all are great.

Nonhlanhla

(2,074 posts)
14. Princeton Theological Seminary
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 11:56 PM
Jun 2014

A bit of background from my own engagement with the theological world: Princeton Theological Seminary is mostly centrist with some slightly right-of-center (and even the more right-of-center ones that I knew from there were still Dems, by the way), as well as some pretty far-left-leaning folks and it is definitely NOT fundamentalist. Compared to some theological schools like Union Seminary in New York it is relatively conservative, but compared to the overall picture in the US it is decidedly liberal - although obviously there were a small number of students there like this dude who were certainly very conservative. The Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) of which Princeton Seminary is part is a generally liberal-leaning denomination that has ordained women for decades and also recently started ordaining gays. I don't know if he was PCUSA, but a guy with such uber-conservative ideas would have found the open exchange of ideas that is common at Princeton Seminary difficult to handle, and he would certainly be too conservative for the PCUSA. I suppose he converted to Catholicism due to their more conservative stances on some social issues.

The Velveteen Ocelot

(115,280 posts)
3. There's some hot, steaming cognitive dissonance for ya.
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 03:26 PM
Jun 2014

Ayn Rand was an atheist who despised Christianity.

Rand is perhaps the only virulently anti-Christian writer that Republicans nonetheless routinely feel comfortable heaping praise upon. In a charming 1964 interview with Playboy, Rand described the crucifixion of Jesus in terms of “mythology,” and submitted that she would feel “indignant” over such a “sacrifice of virtue to vice.” That Christians are called to care for the most vulnerable of God’s people was, to Rand, manifest proof that the religion has nothing constructive to add to human life: After all, in her philosophy, “superiors” have no moral obligations to those weaker or more vulnerable than they. According to Rand, the Christian moral imperative to serve the needy is a “monstrous idea.”


And:

Rand’s entire notion of morality is predicated upon the idea that a sacrifice such as Christ’s would be morally wrong, which means all ethics that flow out of her work will contain in them that seed of conflict with the central message of Christianity. Whether conservatives like it or not, to advance a Randian political ethic is to further an ethic that fundamentally denies the goodness of the sacrifice of Christ, and thereby can never be brought to union with any serious Christian ethics.


http://www.alternet.org/why-christian-conservatives-love-jesus-hater-ayn-rand

Apparently the likes of David Brat and his fellow teabaggers have chosen Mammon over God. It's just that they can't explain why.

Arneoker

(375 posts)
10. As a Christian I think that a Marxist is more likely to be a good Christian...
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 05:35 PM
Jun 2014

than a follower of Ayn Rand.

But of course the Tea Partiers are better described as Mammonists than Christians. Mammonism is the greatest religious threat to Christianity, that is, the real sort, involving, you know, adhering to the sayings of Christ.

eppur_se_muova

(36,227 posts)
8. Someone should ask him about William Edward Hickman ...
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 04:25 PM
Jun 2014
Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation — Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street — on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”


http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1118602


Maybe he could work that into his campaign literature.

Sunlei

(22,651 posts)
15. will be interesting to see where Cantor is placed next. This guy will do what the big Rs suggest if
Thu Jun 12, 2014, 01:47 AM
Jun 2014

they mix it with some prayers.

 

AverageJoe90

(10,745 posts)
17. Isn't it theoretically possible that he could be a Cynical Prick AND a True Believer?
Fri Jun 13, 2014, 11:20 PM
Jun 2014

It's happened before, after all; just look at certain of the old Dixiecrats for example......eom.

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