PAUL KRUGMAN: For God’s Sake

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement — the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right — suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure,” he wrote, “and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university’s law school. She’s the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to “dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.” And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge.......

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/04/paul-krugman-for-gods-sake.html

:kick:

and the best example since the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre took place !

Who is it for?

When did they lose their souls

and were misled.

Who led the innocent astray?

Who's easier to take advantage of than the passionate, in their twenties, thinking that now that they are adults they know everything with the moral certitude of college graduates, ready to accept their assignment from destiny?

Shame on you, Republican Party, for thinking that by recruiting from the ranks of impressionable young adults, you could make them unwitting agents in your plan to supplant the Constitution with a one-party interpretation that rendered the Constitution your own servant and instrument.


ed: number of f's in fulfill.

they are subverting the Bible too....



Even on this issue Jesus said "Give Caesar What Belongs to Caesar…
…And God what belongs to God."

All in a day's work for pseudo-Christians who crave power and position.

It's time for the followers of Jesus' true message to say, "Enough!" and take their religion back from these pretenders.

What objective signs should I look for when I'm trying to figure out if someone who self-identifies as a Christian really is one?

A bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

Does this mean that Mahatma Gandhi is a Christian (even though he explicitly rejected Christianity) and James Dobson isn't?

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as snarky - that is not my intent. But I am increasingly baffled when liberal Christians think they can easily dismiss their more embarassing co-religionists by as not actually being "real" Christians. Apparently a lot of people think that there is a way to determine whether someone is a Christian or not other than by that person's self-identification. Help me understand what actually defines a "real" Christian in opposition to the "pseudo-Chrisitans." Are the "pseudo-Christians" people who have no sincere belief in Christianity at all and are cynically and consciously striking a fraudulent pose as a Christian? This is genuinely confusing for me.

or at least for most of them.

As for Christians, Jesus said that, if one could not believe in Him to believe in His works, and that the greatest commandment was to, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength and with all your soul and with all your mind," and the second greatest was "like unto it: To love your neighbor as yourself." He said that on these hung all the law and the prophets.

The Kingdom of God is within, and it doesn't need a label, Christian or otherwise. If you really want to find out, simply read the New Testament - at least the Gospels (first four books, and they are short!), and decide for yourself what makes a Christian. Jesus advised his disciples to think for themselves!

Asked if he were a Hindu he said, "Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew."

Gandhi's core belief seems to have been that one's religious creed is irrelevant; as long as one pursued the truth the religion doesn't matter. It all ends up being the same thing.

the Bible at all (abortion: the closest the Bible comes to mentioning abortion is saying that you have to pay reparations to a family if you injure a pregnant woman and cause her to miscarry--it says nothing about ending an unwanted pregnancy) or are mentioned only tangentially (homosexuality, which is mentioned in the context of ritual purity in Leviticus and in the context of a lot of other human characteristics in the letters of Paul) or are definitely contrary to the teachings of the Bible (the so-called "prosperity gospel" of praying to become rich). Their idolatry of the Bushboy is also disturbing to mainstream Christians.

My simple take on what makes a Christian a "Christian" is how that person takes the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and applies them to the whole world.

I would encourage you to read the New Testament and compare it to the actions, behaviors and values exhibited by Robertson, Falwell, Dobson and their minions. You may note that they more closely resemble the Scribes and Pharisees that Jesus railed against rather than those who followed his teachings.

As for Gandhi:

Oh, I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ.

In which everything is topsy turvy, and up is down and left is right, and good is bad and bad is good.

Bush is something I had never considered before - a man who is dangerous soley on account of being an idealistic simpleton.

Fascism -- authoritarianism -- monarchism -- theocracy -- http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Senator/8">it's all the same thing.

Only Impeachment can confront it head-on, publicly with a lasting message.

==

:kick:

Hekate

My guess is, no, they'll never hear a word about it. Our corporate media would never report something like this, it's too confrontational to America's christians. So, I'm guessing they'll never get a whiff of this and the infiltration of our government by radical Reich-Wing christians will continue unabated. America will never know, until it's too late.

at the Pentagon and at institutions such as the Air Force academy. They're going to need guns to makeover the U.S.

Here in Indiana they have there own license plate. It says "In God We Trust" and it's one of those "special" plates. The thing is, they don't have to pay the "special" fee required of other plates. We essentially have two classes of plates: one for fundies and one for the rest of us.

Beatitudes...not the 10 Commandments. You never hear the "so-called Christians" quoting the Beatitudes. That said it does not follow that because true Christians can follow the teachings of Christ and lead a good life that the followers of other great men and that those who follow their own conscience cannot be good people.

"Christians" start in on how God wants us to fear, hate and fight the Muslims because God has decreed they are evil.

The Beatitudes rather than the Commandments. That is truly beautiful. Thanks.