“Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty.” — Bertrand Russell
By that reasoning, crazy men believe in a crazy God and use that belief to excuse their insanity. The ramp up to the election in 2016 was bizarre in many ways but arguably the most bizarre aspect of it all was when the so-called Christians decided who they were going to support.
The Cliff’s Notes version of what happened to make twice-divorced, sexual harasser and accused rapist Donald Trump a faux Xian icon is this: When it became obvious Ted Cruz wasn’t going to get the nomination, the religious wingnuts had to go with the flow. David Barton, who is a Texas religious leader and “educator” (think Jerry Falwell) told James Dobson to get cracking. Dobson was a right-wing religious radio personality and Mike Pence’s idol. Dobson created the myth of Donald Trump being “born again” and in June of 2016, Trump was solidified as the right’s religious icon. Insane, but true. Dobson had a press conference at Trump Tower and talked about “baby Christian” Trump, GOP candidate and man of God. We will take a brief pause to throw up.,,,
…Are you back? Good. Now take a look at where this madness has gone. The war in Ukraine is being bastardized into End Times prophecy and of course Mighty Trump emerges as a religious hero. And as always I say, nobody laughs at this harder than I do — until that awful figure 74 million comes back into my mind and then all this stops being funny.
Religious-right activists Shane Vaughn and Delora O'Brien demonstrate that even though Trump is no longer in the White House, the Cult of Trump remains strong. pic.twitter.com/Gn5Fsos4fP
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) April 1, 2022
This guy is a hard core lunatic. He claims that belief in climate change is Satanically inspired, that level of idiocy. This woman is a bit quieter but same crazy message.
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) April 1, 2022
When I listen to people like this woman, I begin to wonder if this planet is classified as a mental institution. Do you remember George Bernard Shaw’s comment? “The longer I live the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.” In the age of Trump I have stopped regarding that comment as wit and begun wondering about the literal truth of it.
HOW can these crazy people believe that a trust fund baby TV show host can “take this country and the world and wipe out evil, free everyone and bring us into a whole new world, that was the world that was supposed to be…” How can they project messianic status to this cotton candy haired, pathological liar in litigation up to his eyeballs?
I used to try to figure it out but now I don’t because I fear my head will explode.
Maybe they know it’s all bull pucky and they’re doing this to own the libs. I can tell you that enough of them do in fact believe this. I remember, back in 2016, an evangelical wingnut of my acquaintance told me that “Trump will be in office for eight years and then the other guy (Pence) for another eight.” I guess if my head was going to explode it would have done so right that minute. I asked her to explain her comment and she said, “It was the word of God on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) this morning.” Oh well, if they say it…
That’s my take on it as well. Trump is laughing his ass off and counting the donation money.
While he’s laughing all the way to the bank, the rest of these idiots just make it easier. Time for a nap. My brain is on overload.
Holy crap! And I mean that very literally. A friend of mine has a Maga religious sister who told him in 2016 that it was all about abortion. Another republican christian stance that is anti-christian. Force every woman, regardless of circumstances to bear every pregnancy, then ignore the needs of the child and mother from the moment of birth.
Yeah. These idiots sort of forget that God didn’t have any problem killing the first-born of Egypt (royal, peasant and even animals) and, more to the point, was the direct actor in it (Pharaoh had agreed to let the Israelites go time after time only for God to step in and “harden Pharaoh’s heart”). And, then, of course, there was the whole “Slaughter of the Innocents” that God let happen in order to save the baby Jesus (Herod ordered the wholesale slaughter of every male child under the age of 2 in the hopes of killing the “newborn King of the Jews”). Oh, and there was that whole period when the Israelites were fighting to reclaim Canaan under Joshua’s leadership and God frequently told Joshua to slaughter whole cities, leaving no man, woman or child alive, for the “audacity” of defying the invaders.
Yet, for some insane reason, they choose to believe that God wants every fetus to be brought to term (despite the fact that Nature frequently intervenes through miscarriages and stillbirths and despite the fact that the Bible itself only considered there to be some other life inside a woman after the “quickening*”–basically, when the baby kicks/moves for the first time).
*Quickening is related to the phrase “the quick and the dead” in the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed where “quick” means “living” or “alive.” It’s also related to the “quick” of the fingernail–the living part underneath the fingernail itself that, occasionally, has a tendency to stick to a fingernail that you cut wrong and hurts like the Devil if it’s not cut right.
The argument regarding the first born is that all life belongs to God to do with as he wills. “God let happen” introduces a whole new problem–If God is all powerful, why is there evil in the world? Theologians have struggled with this question for millennia. In purely human terms, many concepts are understood only in conjunction with their opposite. Weak is not strong, strong is not weak, and so on. What is good if there is no bad to put good in relief?
There is no direct biblical indication of God’s will regarding abortion. There are two tangential instances. 1) the Law of Moses says if two men are fighting near a pregnant women and one kills the baby by accident, the one must pay property restitution to the woman’s husband. 2) When Judah discovered Tamar was pregnant he ordered her to be burned, rescinding his order when he found out the baby was his, in order to preserve his property. Biblically, unborn babies are property. It makes sense in a time when infant mortality was so high. The “quickening” argument is also relevant to the question of when life begins. Of course it can also be argued that those Bronze Age people really had no other method besides movement of knowing whether the fetus was alive or not. Do we, with all our medical technology, know any better?
The Bible also does not question the institution of slavery, another property issue. It is accepted as a social given. There are rules for treatment of slaves, but no notion of the morality or immorality of slavery. During Abolition, abolitionists had near as much direct indication of God’s will regarding slavery as we do of abortion. They extended the New Testament principle of all people having the same status before God, rich-poor, Jew-Gentile, free-slave, and the principle that Christians are children of God by adoption to argue that it made no sense for one child of God to own another child of God. There is an argument that this extension of biblical principles could only occur to people because of the effect of the Industrial Revolution on labor.
It really only became feasible to extend some Biblical principles about the sanctity of life to fetuses when infant mortality became less prevalent. In some cultures, children did not get a real name until age 5 because the probability of death before the fifth birthday was so high. If we appeal to logic only, there is no logical reason to reject one Biblical extension and accept another. The US went to war over slavery not because of logic but emotion. Agricultural labor did not benefit much from the Industrial Revolution, and plantation owners viewed abolition more like economic sanctions.
I do not have a public policy answer, however I think that recognizing the validity of arguments on both sides is the place to begin. I think people need to recognize you do not have to be a Christian to personally believe abortion is wrong, but also recognize that a personal belief dependent on religion cannot drive public policy.
You forget that in the Bible women are chattel. They go.from.the ownership of their father to.the owe of their husband. Daughters could be sold into.slavery if Daddy felt like it. This attitude was written into British common law and thus into ours for centuries. And Common Law is the direct predecessor of American law, Wife and husband were one person: the husband. Women literally had no rights. If she inherited or ran a business, the money was his until.the 19th century. He could best her with impunity. She had no.recourse and could not file for divorce. but he could.
The Bible is not the ource ofnourvlegal.system, despite what the Religious Reich believes. If It’were , women would still.be property. This country would be run by the likes of the Duggars and t;heir sexual predator son.
I did not not forget it. And your point is well taken. Biblically, wives, children, and if you were wealthy enough, other people were property, so of course unborn children are property, perhaps thought of as potential property. However, as you yourself point out, the history of our legal system has the Bible and English common law as its backbone. Provisions of the law slowly change one at a time, and there are still many aspects of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and English common law within our legal system. The founding documents incorporated some of that New Testament reasoning.
The Bible, especially the New Testament, has been used for the reasoning behind a number of improvements in the law. One of my points is that if the Religious Reich applies the same Old Testament Biblical reasoning they use for other issues to abortion, consistency demands they judge abortion as a nonissue. Their application is inconsistent depending on the pre-desired outcome.
Normally, when there is a perceived discrepancy between Old Testament and New Testament principles, the New Testament wins because the Old Testament is the attributed word of God, but the New Testament contains the actual word of God, as spoken by the second person of the Godhead, Jesus.
Your sentence is probably an exaggeration, but on the other hand, considering some of the actual GOP candidates these days…I do not dispute there is a disconcerting amount of overlap in the Venn diagram of Republicans, Religious Reich and Christians.
You can’t apply that overview to the whole Biblical Narrative. Some women in the Bible were women of property such as Mary the Magdalene, not at all the prostitute some scholars have in the past portrayed her to be. Also as far as that goes should a woman fall upon hardship such as widowhood, she would be permitted to earn a living for herself and her children unimpeded, as a prostitute and own her money.
Harold: None of that has been established. However it is true that some women were indeed women of property. It does not change the basic fact the the condition of the vast majority of women is they either belonged to their father, or they belonged to their husband.
Poor widows who could not be given a brother of the deceased to the were expected to do things like glean the fields after the reapers were finished. Their plight was truly terrible. That is the reason the early church started a committee dedicated to the care of widows. Prostitution was never socially acceptable. They might be unimpeded for a while but it was also risk that eventually they could be stoned or burned.
False prophets. False idols. Moses became so angry when he brought the commandments,written by the hand of God, down from the mountain & found the people worshiping a golden calf, he smashed them. Jesus became so angry at the money changers doing business on the holy ground of the temple, he fashioned a whip & drove them out. WATCH OUT AHOLES.
If they really had read their bibles, they’d have understood that when Jesus said that “no man knows the hour”, he was talking about death – we don’t know when it’s going to happen, and it’s frequently sudden and unexpected. And when you die, *your* world ends.
Actually, no He was talking about his second appearance on earth In context, his disciples had just asked, Tell us,” they said, “when will these things happen, and what will be the sign of Your coming and of the end of the age?” The entire answer deals with the the Second Coming, not death. Near the end of the lecture, Jesus says, “For this reason, you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour you do not expect. ” Matthew 24.
Even Paul recognized the problem 2000 years ago. However, until relatively recently these people did not have big microphones. 2 Timothy 4:3-4 (updated). For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own conformation biases and desires shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; 4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto right-wing propaganda.
Good insights all around but nothing is more clear about Trump, the evangelicals & the Maga crowd than when Jesus rebukes the Jewish religious leaders in John 8:42-47 for being hypocrites & threatening him because he tells them the truth. They hide behind being “the descendants of Abraham”, & he points out their forefathers killed the prophets. He then calls them “the children of the devil”, who was “a murderer & a liar from the beginning” & the “father of all lies”. When you worship a serial rapist, pathological liar, & murderer of over 1 million citizens, you fit Jesus’ description to perfection. As Jesus pointed out, it doesn’t matter what you believe about yourself. OK Maga crowd let’s see your cowardly, evil asses argue with the Gospel. Cue up the lies & rationalizations. You wanna talk scripture? I don’t think so. I studied under scholars at UNC Chapel Hill. You listen to preachers scamming you for cash. As Dr. Barber, leader of The Poor People’s Campaign points out; the Maga crowd talks alot about what God says so little about, & says so little about what God says so much about in the scriptures. Judgement is coming. Oh, & as John Prine sang, ” your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore. It’s already overcrowded with your dirty little wars. And Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason for, and your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore.” Put that into your collective pipes & smoke it.
Not to knock Protestants, but I fear this started with the Repormation. At least, the Catholic Church has not forgotten that the Day og Judgment ain’t gonna be pretty. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_irae#Text
Their literal “rush to judgment” is just another FFO. Has anyone asked them, if they do succeed in bringing about the end of the world, what about all the pregnant women whose fetuses will never be born? And what about all the babies who will never even get conceived because there is no world left for them to be born into? If they succeed in bringing it about, all that blood is on THEIR hands.
Granted arrogance is one of their defining characteristics anyway … but it seems supremely arrogant to me to assume that THEY are going to get raptured when any sane person can see that God wants nothing to do with them.
I have read all the comments right to the end and find that everyone wants to argue finer points in scripture and ignore the whole point of this article which is what to do about the 70,000,000 followers of this new Demigod? Now that we have established that we the lib left, have the final word on the word of God May I offer this passage from Jesus’s own mouth. When asked by the Scribes and Pharisees who they should obey God or Caesar Jesus replied by the use of a coin. Saying “render on to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and render unto God what belongs to God”. Yet the Christian Right is so quick to wrap themselves in the Flag and march behind the Cross of Christ? Rendering?………..
The Scribes and the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them or not?” The exact context of the question is the reason Jesus used a coin in his answer.
A significant portion of the Christian Right anyway have indeed gotten all mixed up..