God-talking professionals have a stake in right wing political correctness. It is principally for that reason that they look the other way when the Christian version of Sharia Law rears its ugly head into our politics.
Government based on Religion
Women with less rights than men
Gays persecuted, and physically attacked
Science rejected religious doctrine pushed
No separation between church and state
God-talking professionals who do it for the money owe us their silence. They owe us the respect of our right to choose without their opinion of God’s opinion shoved in our faces.
God-talking professionals would have us believe God is a score-keeping monarch obsessed with piety and holy self-righteous intolerance – no matter what any dissenter says.
God-talking professionals attempt to say that communion with God must involve their own middle-man interference and interpretation.
God-talking professionals insist that the very heart of our Christian way of life includes an understanding that Jesus, from the unseen world of spirit, is a commanding presence whose commands must be interpreted and enforced by clerical authority. In Christian right-wing thinking, Jesus can only be a presence who commands Christians what to think, when to think it and who to support.
God-talking professionals have convinced many U.S. citizens that Jesus is a Republican Conservative, long on cruelty, obsessed with a house of laws and orders, obsessed with human sexuality in general and women’s bodies in particular.
God-talking professionals seek a pattern of blind obedience to pretended ecclesiastical authority. They imply some kind of Christian duty to blindly consent when someone in prominence announces that the Almighty has chosen or inspired him to lead.
God-talking professionals often proclaim that America has an obligation to impose freedom around the world as The Almighty’s Gift. If we conclude that such a crusade is not our national obligation, we run the risk of stepping outside the dominion of mobs who insist that God takes life, causes suffering, refuses to recognized specific marriages and parenthood and approves of separation of families.
Professional God-talkers encourage that we judgmentally condemn one another, show intolerance to different opinions – particularly spiritual opinions – and ignore political and economic collateral damage. Many professional God-talkers would have us believe we have to choose between a party of Righteousness and a Party of Evil.
Professional God-talkers go to great lengths to reconcile our government’s catering to the wealthiest in this country at the expense of the poorest; expect us to believe that policies which favor corporate interests that negatively impact employment, poverty and the environment are biblical and/or the will of God. The commandment to replenish the earth does not mean a commandment to exploit it to death by a permanent draining and destruction of natural resources.
A contrast exists here and we need to address it. Philosophic and economic theories conflict with Jesus’ own words and actions and we ought to be aware of when that happens and when professional God-talkers avoid telling us.
Believing Christians must exercise their own internal wisdom in this regard. Lazy Christians must stop voting according to some prominent personality who, for example, declares that it is God’s will is that the poor will always be with us so we can take their plight with a large grain of political salt.
The dumber professional believers will – in their broadcast God-talk – even push the idea that economic prosperity is the direct result of personal conservative, Republican, free-market capitalist piety. They call it Prosperity Theology and take as their model every religious bigot who ever avoided the wounded traveler on the highway.
Active Christians ought to honestly ask themselves,
“If Jesus went out of his way to heal the poor, how is it we continue to stumble along in this country distracted by who marries who, creationism versus evolution, and why a military crusade to force peace on the world are all more important than our own sick and poor.”
Is not such behavior a selfish and self-centered hypocrisy?
National security is one of our most critical concerns but it is not the only concern. I would prefer a president inspired by God who is unafraid to acknowledge his spiritual beliefs or lack of belief and then apply what he sincerely believes to be right (even if Franklin Graham disagrees) with a healthy dose of ethics as opposed to a self-serving claim of personal morality.
We do not want or need any politicians who espouse and effectively act on their own personal interpretations of what God wants for us as citizens of our country.
Today it is time for our passions to speak. In the absence of our own passions, we are passively allowing our society to slide toward being told by others the correct answer to “What does it mean to be Christian in America.”
Bigoted Christians preach discrimination as part of being “fearful” of God in a way that recognizes God’s capacity for wrath and punishment to those who stray, backslide and slip into immorality. The Deity of the God-talking professionals is perfectly capable of destroying the innocent with the guilty as evidenced during the 9/11 attacks and the “godly” fist of Katrina expressing His displeasure with an entire city that had supposedly mocked God for too long.
This is the stuff of which an American Christian society deteriorates into the shallow and murderous morality of the Taliban.
If I were a God-talking professional I sure as hell would not want to wind up on the list God is going to read when He decides which unrighteous Christian bigots are headed for the Dante woodshed.
