If Democrats are Pharisees, does that make Republicans Sadducees?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/20/AR2005072000555_pf.html
Democrats Say Nominee Will Be Hard to Defeat

By Peter Baker and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 21, 2005; A01


<snip>Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) put it more colorfully. "It's a little bit like biblical Pharisees, you know, who basically are always trying to undermine Jesus Christ," he said on Fox News. "You know, it goes on the same way. If they can catch him in something, they can then criticize and the outside groups will go berserk."<snip>

If Democrats are Pharisees, does that make Republicans Sadducees?
Above Taken From "Sojourners" http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm



Definition from the web:
http://www.sullivan-county.com/nf0/y2k/rel_def.htm

<snip>Because Palestine was in the sphere of influence (and the sphere of political control until the Maccabean revolt, ca. 167 BCE), a number of Zarathustrian ideas also entered Judaism indirectly through Hellenistic culture.

Due to the influx of Persian ideas, three major religious traditions developed in Judaism, depending upon how they coped with the new ideas. The Sadducee tradition was composed primarily of aristocratic Jews, who took a conservative approach to religion. They rejected many of the Zarathustrian encrustations upon Judaism and sought to return to Judaism as it had been before the Captivity. The Sadducees were centered at the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem, and because of their aristocratic background, were quite powerful in Jewish politics and official religion. The Pharisee tradition incorporated many Zarathustrian elements, including belief in punishment for the wicked and reward for the righteous in the afterlife.

Pharisaic religion was primarily centered in local synagogues, and had a strong power base throughout Israel. These two mainstream traditions were both given seats in the Sanhedrin, the supreme priestly council in Israel. However, after the Roman army under Vespasian destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem during the First Jewish Revolt (70 CE), the Sadducene tradition collapsed, and the following Rabbinic tradition--and thus, all of modern Judaism--was based primarily on Pharisaic Judaism.<snip>

C'mon, you gotta keep up! Republicans represent the divine will of the Son of God. Didn't you know that?! :eyes:

From Sojo site
Joe Loconte is on a mission to make sure all religion in America (or at least the political expressions thereof) will be dependably right-wing, like his Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation. Any moderate or, worse, "progressive" religious deviation from the Republican Party line is anathema to Joe, who feels called to stamp out such heresies.



:-(

Heritage Foundation Must all religion be Right?
Must all religion be Right?



In his recent Wall Street Journal commentary, "From Gospel to Government," published July 1, 2005, Loconte, a Heritage Foundation fellow, derides all such progressive religious groups as having "no obvious grassroots constituency," as being "composed mostly of mainline clergy and church elites who are often culturally out of step with the rank and file," and as people who "treat traditional religion with either suspicion or outright contempt." Wow. That certainly is true for the "secular fundamentalists" who exercise the same undue influence over the Democratic Party as the "religious fundamentalists" do over the Republican Party, but certainly not for orthodox Catholic and evangelical Christians (like me) who simply don't share Loconte's right-wing politics. It's hard to find ourselves in Loconte's diatribes.


He charges that such non-Religious Right heretics "leap directly from the Bible to contemporary politics" without the proper theological and political nuances. Interesting. Wasn't it Religious Right leaders who in a Nashville "Justice Sunday" event said that Christians who don't support all of President Bush's judicial nominees are not really "people of faith?" "Imagine my surprise," said an evangelical seminary professor from Asbury, Kentucky, at an alternative religious service when he realized that despite his biblically orthodox upbringing, he was not really a Christian unless he backed the Republican president's choices for the federal court. In his op-ed, Loconte attacked "religious progressives" for being "allied" with George Soros and MoveOn.Org when I know of no connections to those liberal funders and groups that are as direct as the Religious Right's ties to right-wing funders and think tanks such as Loconte's Heritage Foundation. Perhaps a good test of religious independence would be to examine how critical faith leaders and groups are of their natural political allies. I'd love to compare the religious left and right on that score.


Loconte referenced the "best-selling book God's Politics" that I wrote and accused me of deriving from Isaiah a "blueprint for government welfare spending." On that book tour (in which we spoke to the constituency Loconte claims none of us have), we reached nearly 70,000 people face to face over 21 weeks in 53 cities and reached millions more through the media. What I found was a silent majority of moderate and progressive religious people who don't feel represented by the shrill tones and ideological agenda of the Religious Right, nor the disdainful attitudes toward religion from the secular left. But they do feel that poverty is a moral value and religious issue (there are 3,000 verses on the poor in the Bible), that protecting the environment (otherwise known as God's creation) is also matter of good faith and stewardship, and that the ethics of war - whether we go to war, when we go to war, and whether we tell the truth about going to war - are profoundly religious matters. The people I met don't see federal spending as the only answer to poverty (and neither do I), but they do believe that budgets are moral documents and that all of society is responsible (public, private, and civil society sectors - including faith-based organizations) for working together to overcome poverty.


In a recent National Public Radio commentary, Loconte accused all churches and religious groups who had questions about the war in Iraq of being hopelessly utopian pacifists, and invoked the example of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's opposition to Hitler as the more realistic path. The problem is that Pope John Paul II, who opposed the war in Iraq, and the current Pope Benedict are not pacifists. Nor are the majority of church bodies around the world who studied the rationales for the war in Iraq (including the majority of evangelical churches worldwide) and concluded it did not fit the traditional just war categories. And Niebuhr, suggest many of his students (including his theologian daughter), would have been quite alarmed at the Bush theology in the war on terrorism, which too easily sees our adversaries as evil and us as good, denying the evil that runs through all human hearts and nation states.

<snip>

Evangelical Repukicans are Pharisees, Log cabin Repugs are Sadducees and NeoCon Resmugs are the scribes. Democrats are John the Baptist and his followers. Jesus is Jesus - ain't no way GWB is even like Him.

Meaning, they are collaborators in making sure the Empire runs smoothly.

The Pharisees were of the same religion as Jesus. Jesus liked them, too. Except when he called them "Hypocrites". He did this because they had very strict laws based on the Mosaic code that they applied to their co-religionists of other sects, but had no problem with breaking themselves all the time. Most Republicans would fit this description, I think.

that Hatch does not know his Bible!

:-)