False God

As a devout Christian and a United Methodist, I conclude this essay with a
paraphrase of The Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines: I am ashamed that George
W. Bush is a member of my denomination. The current leaders of the GOP are
little more than modern-day money changers in the temple of our Republic.
The Christian Right, blind to the hypocrisies of these leaders, will no
doubt continue to support the GOP and its false God. Will the rest of
us—the majority of those of all faiths—be able to join together and drive
the Republicans from power in November?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.democraticunderground.com/
False God
January 10, 2004
By Andrew Sarchus

Since the early years of the Reagan Administration, members of the
"religious Right" have performed as the shock troops of the Republican
party’s conservative base. They turn out the vote from hundreds of church
congregations, particularly in the South and West. So-called
"evangelicals" constitute the fastest-growing segment of the Christian
faith, and people identifying themselves as evangelicals vote
overwhelmingly for Republican candidates and GOP-backed voter initiatives.
While most American mainline churches opposed the Bush Administration’s
rush to war in Iraq, the religious Right lined up solidly behind the
hardliners. Christian conservative rank-and-file members clog talk radio
and letters to the editor with denunciations of "Godless" liberal plans
concerning the environment, education, taxes, and the Middle East.

While religious Conservatives enjoy thinking it is they who control the
destiny of the Republican Party, the truth is that GOP leaders are using
the religious Right as electoral cannon-fodder. The GOP power structure
will pander endlessly for votes of middle-class Conservative Christians
even as its policies rob them of their economic and social future. In
truth, the religious Right worships a false God, a God created by
Republican leaders to extract votes in return for…a mess of pottage.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the term "cheap grace" to describe a condition
where personal sacrifice is not required in order for one to follow
Christ’s teachings. The Republican leaders have spun this idea for the
religious Right so that the personal sacrifice shall always be from
someone else. Republican "cheap grace" manifests itself in the
Congressional vote against "Partial Birth" Abortion, ardently supported by
Conservative Christians. In effect, criminalizing this procedure poses no
financial or moral burden on the religious Right—the burden falls on the
poor women who lose their right to privacy and the sanctity of their own
bodies. Likewise, the Florida Legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush invoked "cheap
grace" in their recent unseemly rush to "protect" the life of a woman with
no cognitive functions. The woman’s family, not the politicians or their
voter base, must bear the continuing burden of keeping her alive in a
persistent vegetative state.

After three years of ruinous deficits, the damage done to the economy by
GW Bush and his ideological team is obvious to everyone. Most members of
the religious Right have failed to benefit (along with the majority of
middle and lower-class Americans) from any tax cuts or "economic
recovery". Many religious conservatives are numbered among the nearly
three million unemployed Americans. Yet Conservative Christians cling to
false beliefs such as Bush being "appointed by God" to lead the USA in a
time of great crises. Pat Robertson declaimed on his 700 Club that God has
told him George Bush will win re-election in a "blowout", and the shock
troops lapped it up. Why is this so? Perhaps the acceptance of such
ludicrous eschatology has its roots in the religious Right’s long- running
battle against scientific facts that conflict with the "literal" Bible
account of Creation. As countless debates about Evolution vs. Creationism
have demonstrated, when historical evidence refutes the creationist
argument, Creationists declare that the evidence itself is suspect, that
God deliberately deceives us about nature. The recent flap over
creationist books sold in the Grand Canyon National Park Bookstore is
indicative of the deep antiscientific bias of Christian fundamentalists.
Debates of this sort hark back to the Inquisition, if not the Dark Ages.

The political ambitions of the Christian Right have been obvious since
Ronald Reagan began courting its constituents in the early 1970’s. One key
objective of the movement seems to be to define Christianity’s central
figure in terms that can be satisfied only by GOP stalwarts. Cal Thomas, a
loyal pundit and armor-bearer for the Christian Right, recently penned a
column dealing with the Democratic Presidential Candidates (chiefly Howard
Dean) and their attempts to cope with the perceived "God gap" vis-à-vis
the GOP. Gov. Dean was interviewed by The Boston Globe concerning his
religious beliefs and said he was "a committed believer" in Jesus Christ.
Dean then explained that Jesus sought out those people who were "left
behind" and "fought against the self-righteousness of people who had
everything." Gov. Dean’s comments about Christ are well-supported by each
of the four Gospels. In summing up his beliefs, Dean said that Jesus "set
an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years…"

Cal Thomas pounces on this last statement like Torquemada on a suspected
heretic. Sooo, Thomas poses to his readers, the good Governor apparently
regards Christ as a mere "example" of a great teacher, but not (perhaps)
as the Savior and the Son of God! Having previously noted that Dean’s wife
is Jewish and her faith takes "a distinctly different view of Jesus",
Thomas steps away and leaves his reader to infer that Gov. Dean is, at
best, a "political opportunist" out to "bamboozle" the religious who may
have the temerity to consider voting Democratic.

I believe we may expect many more attacks of this sort by the Christian
Right on the religious sincerity of Democratic candidates. When confronted
with the solid Biblical example of Christ’s ministry, the arrogant, rich,
and self-righteous persons who now control the Republican Party must
inwardly cringe. Thus the litmus test suggested by Cal Thomas: what counts
is whether the politician publicly says Jesus is Divine—not whether the
politician believes in following what Jesus said, did, or taught. GOPers
from Bush to Sen. Frist to John Ashcroft are quick to proclaim their
belief in Christ’s Divinity. However, today’s Republican leaders ignore
the words of the Apostle Paul and Thomas a Kempis, who wrote at great
length about Christians living their lives in imitation of Christ—in
humility, honesty, truthfulness, and compassion--all traits conspicuously
missing from GOP leaders. In the canon of Republican Leadership, publicly
stating that one believes in God and Christ trumps any efforts by "others"
to follow Christ’s teachings. This ploy works with the shock troops of
Christian fundamentalists, even when GOP policies work against their
social, environmental, and economic interests.

As a devout Christian and a United Methodist, I conclude this essay with a
paraphrase of The Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines: I am ashamed that George
W. Bush is a member of my denomination. The current leaders of the GOP are
little more than modern-day money changers in the temple of our Republic.
The Christian Right, blind to the hypocrisies of these leaders, will no
doubt continue to support the GOP and its false God. Will the rest of
us—the majority of those of all faiths—be able to join together and drive
the Republicans from power in November?

On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 1820 +0100 (CET), George Orwell
wrote this crap:

>As a devout Christian and a United Methodist, I conclude this essay with a
>paraphrase of The Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines: I am ashamed that George
>W. Bush is a member of my denomination.

I'm ashamed of the Dixie Chicks.


Horvath@Horvath.net

This signature is now the ultimate power in the universe

If you ever wondered exactly how Bush stole Florida, this explains in simple
terms. What is left out is why the Democrats didn't stop it from happening
or
protest it appropriately, and why Gore didn't second the motion to stop the
seating of the Florida electors and become President of the United States.

Robert T.

> Winning the Election - The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in
> Florida - The Weekly Dig, Boston, MA, April 22, 2003 - by Liam Scheff
>
> When future historians want to know what happened to America in 2000,
> they'll read Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The book
> follows the paper trail of perjury, deception and incompetence left by
> the Bush family, and the billionaires who fund them, as they trample
> through the world - from mining disaster cover-ups to the California
> energy scandal to the pre-9/11 intelligence black-out that let a handful
> of Saudi terrorists slip past the NSA, FBI and CIA.
>
> The book also uncovers inside documents on the IMF and World Bank, Pat
> Robertson's unholy money-schemes, and the co-opted US media that won't
> report what the rest of the world gets on the front page.
>
> The book opens with the crime that keeps on stealing - the 2000
> presidential election. George Bush lost the popular election by 500,000
> votes, but won the electoral vote by winning hotly contested Florida,
> the state that tipped the scales, and the state where his brother Jeb is
> governor.
>
> His tiny 500-vote win there was accompanied by a torrent of hanging
> chads and unhappy voters, who claimed their votes were stolen. Last week
> Palast came to Boston to promote the new edition of The Best Democracy.
> I asked him exactly what he uncovered.
>
> What really happened in Florida?
>
> Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine
> Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida's voter rolls on
> grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all
> eligible, registered voters. If you're not on the list, you don't get to
> vote.
>
> If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there,
> and you're "scrubbed" from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in
> the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it's an
> uncivilized vestige of the Deep South.
>
> My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at
> minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any
> crime - except for being African American. We didn't have to guess about
> that, because next to each voter's name was their race.
>
> When I questioned Harris' office about the high percentage of African
> Americans on the scrub list, they responded, "Well, you know how many
> black people commit crimes."
>
> But these people weren't felons, so why were they scrubbed?
>
> The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely
> vote as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were
> paying $5,700 to compile their felony "scrub" lists and replaced them
> with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the
> same job. [DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive
> database company that does extensive work for the FBI.]
>
> There are a lot of Joe Smiths in the Florida phonebook. DBT was hired to
> verify which Joe Smith was a felon and which was not. They were supposed
> to use their extensive databases to check credit cards, bank
> information, addresses and phone numbers, in addition to names, ages,
> and social security numbers. But they didn't. They didn't use one of
> their 1,200 databases to verify personal information, nor did they make
> a single phone call to verify the identity of scrubbed names.
>
> So where did DBT get their data?
>
> From the Internet. They went to 11 other states' Internet sites and took
> names off dirt-cheap. They scrubbed Florida voters whose names were
> similar to out-of-state felons. An Illinois felon named John Michaels
> could knock off Florida voter John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels,
> or even J.R. Michaelson. DBT matched for race and gender, but names only
> had to be similar to a certain degree. Names could be reversed, and
> suffixes (Jr., Sr.) were ignored, but aliases were included. So the
> felon John "Buddy" Michaels could knock non-felon Michael Johns or Bud
> Johnson Jr. off the voter rolls. This happened again and again.
>
> Although DBT didn't get names, birthdays or social security numbers
> right, they were very careful to match for race. A black felon named Mr.
> Green would only knock off a black Mr. Green, but not a single white Mr.
> Green. That's how DBT earned its $2.3 million.
>
> Why didn't DBT use their own databases?
>
> They didn't, because the state told them not to. Choicepoint
> vice-president James Lee was grilled by a Congressional committee,
> headed by Cynthia McKinney, and he admitted everything, but said DBT was
> following state directives. Florida state officials told DBT to knock
> off voters by incorrectly matching them with felons.
>
> Congresswoman McKinney led this commission to her own peril. Choicepoint
> is in her Atlanta district. She was destroyed in the last election by
> fabricated quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign.
>
> Is this the only way votes were stolen?
>
> No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were
> counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. Katherine Harris' office
> illegally scrubbed people who'd served time in other states, then moved
> to Florida, and Jeb Bush's office illegally barred these people from
> registering to vote at all.
>
> The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black
> rural counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state,
> thousands of votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots
> which are read by an optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark
> were considered "spoiled" and not counted. The buttons used to fill out
> the ballots were set up - with approval from Bush and Harris - to make
> votes appear unclear to the machine. One in eight ballots in Gadsden was
> voided by the state.
>
> The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white.
> There only one in 100 votes was "spoiled." What made the difference? In
> Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked
> incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the
> black counties, the votes were trucked off immediately. There were no
> machines on site. Voters weren't told that their votes were spoiled, and
> they certainly weren't permitted to re-vote.
>
> When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that
> blacks lost votes because they weren't well educated, and made mistakes
> that whites hadn't. He didn't even bother to ask how the machines were
> set up. This is the kind of reporting we get in America. In Britain,
> this story ran 3 weeks after the election, when Gore was still in race.
> It was in the papers and on TV. In the US, it was seven months before
> the Washington Post ran it, and then it was only a partial version.
> After the election, Gadsden County replaced its voting commissioner. In
> 2002 they only lost one in 500 votes. So you can say blacks in Gadsden
> got smarter in one way - they elected a black elections chief.
>
> What happened to Choicepoint?
>
> Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration
> reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are
> being rolled out across the country.
>
> It wasn't reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and
> the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands
> immediately and said, 'You got us! We'll put these people back as soon
> as we can.' We're still waiting.
>
> http://weeklydig.com/dig/content/2846.aspx


"George Orwell" wrote in message
news:db5331861320313a671a3625cecbaed9@mixmaster.it ...
> As a devout Christian and a United Methodist, I conclude this essay with a
> paraphrase of The Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines: I am ashamed that George
> W. Bush is a member of my denomination. The current leaders of the GOP are
> little more than modern-day money changers in the temple of our Republic.
> The Christian Right, blind to the hypocrisies of these leaders, will no
> doubt continue to support the GOP and its false God. Will the rest of
> us—the majority of those of all faiths—be able to join together and drive
> the Republicans from power in November?
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> http://www.democraticunderground.com/
> False God
> January 10, 2004
> By Andrew Sarchus
>
> Since the early years of the Reagan Administration, members of the
> "religious Right" have performed as the shock troops of the Republican
> party’s conservative base. They turn out the vote from hundreds of church
> congregations, particularly in the South and West. So-called
> "evangelicals" constitute the fastest-growing segment of the Christian
> faith, and people identifying themselves as evangelicals vote
> overwhelmingly for Republican candidates and GOP-backed voter initiatives.
> While most American mainline churches opposed the Bush Administration’s
> rush to war in Iraq, the religious Right lined up solidly behind the
> hardliners. Christian conservative rank-and-file members clog talk radio
> and letters to the editor with denunciations of "Godless" liberal plans
> concerning the environment, education, taxes, and the Middle East.
>
> While religious Conservatives enjoy thinking it is they who control the
> destiny of the Republican Party, the truth is that GOP leaders are using
> the religious Right as electoral cannon-fodder. The GOP power structure
> will pander endlessly for votes of middle-class Conservative Christians
> even as its policies rob them of their economic and social future. In
> truth, the religious Right worships a false God, a God created by
> Republican leaders to extract votes in return for…a mess of pottage.
>
> Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the term "cheap grace" to describe a condition
> where personal sacrifice is not required in order for one to follow
> Christ’s teachings. The Republican leaders have spun this idea for the
> religious Right so that the personal sacrifice shall always be from
> someone else. Republican "cheap grace" manifests itself in the
> Congressional vote against "Partial Birth" Abortion, ardently supported by
> Conservative Christians. In effect, criminalizing this procedure poses no
> financial or moral burden on the religious Right—the burden falls on the
> poor women who lose their right to privacy and the sanctity of their own
> bodies. Likewise, the Florida Legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush invoked "cheap
> grace" in their recent unseemly rush to "protect" the life of a woman with
> no cognitive functions. The woman’s family, not the politicians or their
> voter base, must bear the continuing burden of keeping her alive in a
> persistent vegetative state.
>
> After three years of ruinous deficits, the damage done to the economy by
> GW Bush and his ideological team is obvious to everyone. Most members of
> the religious Right have failed to benefit (along with the majority of
> middle and lower-class Americans) from any tax cuts or "economic
> recovery". Many religious conservatives are numbered among the nearly
> three million unemployed Americans. Yet Conservative Christians cling to
> false beliefs such as Bush being "appointed by God" to lead the USA in a
> time of great crises. Pat Robertson declaimed on his 700 Club that God has
> told him George Bush will win re-election in a "blowout", and the shock
> troops lapped it up. Why is this so? Perhaps the acceptance of such
> ludicrous eschatology has its roots in the religious Right’s long- running
> battle against scientific facts that conflict with the "literal" Bible
> account of Creation. As countless debates about Evolution vs. Creationism
> have demonstrated, when historical evidence refutes the creationist
> argument, Creationists declare that the evidence itself is suspect, that
> God deliberately deceives us about nature. The recent flap over
> creationist books sold in the Grand Canyon National Park Bookstore is
> indicative of the deep antiscientific bias of Christian fundamentalists.
> Debates of this sort hark back to the Inquisition, if not the Dark Ages.
>
> The political ambitions of the Christian Right have been obvious since
> Ronald Reagan began courting its constituents in the early 1970’s. One key
> objective of the movement seems to be to define Christianity’s central
> figure in terms that can be satisfied only by GOP stalwarts. Cal Thomas, a
> loyal pundit and armor-bearer for the Christian Right, recently penned a
> column dealing with the Democratic Presidential Candidates (chiefly Howard
> Dean) and their attempts to cope with the perceived "God gap" vis-à-vis
> the GOP. Gov. Dean was interviewed by The Boston Globe concerning his
> religious beliefs and said he was "a committed believer" in Jesus Christ.
> Dean then explained that Jesus sought out those people who were "left
> behind" and "fought against the self-righteousness of people who had
> everything." Gov. Dean’s comments about Christ are well-supported by each
> of the four Gospels. In summing up his beliefs, Dean said that Jesus "set
> an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years…"
>
> Cal Thomas pounces on this last statement like Torquemada on a suspected
> heretic. Sooo, Thomas poses to his readers, the good Governor apparently
> regards Christ as a mere "example" of a great teacher, but not (perhaps)
> as the Savior and the Son of God! Having previously noted that Dean’s wife
> is Jewish and her faith takes "a distinctly different view of Jesus",
> Thomas steps away and leaves his reader to infer that Gov. Dean is, at
> best, a "political opportunist" out to "bamboozle" the religious who may
> have the temerity to consider voting Democratic.
>
> I believe we may expect many more attacks of this sort by the Christian
> Right on the religious sincerity of Democratic candidates. When confronted
> with the solid Biblical example of Christ’s ministry, the arrogant, rich,
> and self-righteous persons who now control the Republican Party must
> inwardly cringe. Thus the litmus test suggested by Cal Thomas: what counts
> is whether the politician publicly says Jesus is Divine—not whether the
> politician believes in following what Jesus said, did, or taught. GOPers
> from Bush to Sen. Frist to John Ashcroft are quick to proclaim their
> belief in Christ’s Divinity. However, today’s Republican leaders ignore
> the words of the Apostle Paul and Thomas a Kempis, who wrote at great
> length about Christians living their lives in imitation of Christ—in
> humility, honesty, truthfulness, and compassion--all traits conspicuously
> missing from GOP leaders. In the canon of Republican Leadership, publicly
> stating that one believes in God and Christ trumps any efforts by "others"
> to follow Christ’s teachings. This ploy works with the shock troops of
> Christian fundamentalists, even when GOP policies work against their
> social, environmental, and economic interests.
>
> As a devout Christian and a United Methodist, I conclude this essay with a
> paraphrase of The Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines: I am ashamed that George
> W. Bush is a member of my denomination. The current leaders of the GOP are
> little more than modern-day money changers in the temple of our Republic.
> The Christian Right, blind to the hypocrisies of these leaders, will no
> doubt continue to support the GOP and its false God. Will the rest of
> us—the majority of those of all faiths—be able to join together and drive
> the Republicans from power in November?
>