USA - A "Pharisee" nation.

[JohnyCanuck]

Some DUers might find this useful material to forward to your wingnut, fundamentalist relatives or acquaintances next time they bug you with another Republican talking point filled email blast, or they assert that Gee Dubya was made President with heaven's blessing because he's a true believer and carrying out God's will.

Pharisee Nation
by John Dear


Last September, I spoke to some 2,000 students during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. “Now let me get this straight,” I said. “Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ which means he does not say, ‘Blessed are the warmakers,’ which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means warmakers are cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent Jesus you have to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this horrific, evil war on the people of Iraq.”

With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. The rest of them then started chanting, “Bush! Bush! Bush!”

<SNIP>

A Culture of Pharisees


We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing an authentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, we as a collective people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful, murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill others in the name of God. The Pharisees supported the brutal Roman rulers and soldiers, and lived off the comforts of the empire by running an elaborate banking system which charged an exorbitant fee for ordinary people just to worship God in the Temple. Since they taught that God was present only in the Temple, they were able to control the entire population. If anyone opposed their power or violated their law, the Pharisees could kill them on the spot, even in the holy sanctuary.

Most North American Christians are now becoming more and more like these hypocritical Pharisees. We side with the rulers, the bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run the Pentagon, bless the bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear weapons and seek global domination for America as if that was what the nonviolent Jesus wants. And we dismiss anyone who disagrees with us.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0215-21.htm

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. True words.

These assholes would have spat on Jesus and the disciples and locked 'em up downtown.

Or . . . just jump out of their pickups and beat the livin' shit out of 'em with Louisville Sluggers.

[yurbud]

2. that is a scary fucking reaction

[yurbud]

3. vote this one up

[CrazyOrangeCat]

4. kick

:kick:

[CoffeeCat]

5. Jesus would have been...

...against the Iraq war. He would have protested and spoken out--which would have put
him in the no-fly list. His phones would be tapped, his email monitored and he would have
been declared an "enemy combatant" according to wording in the Patriot Act.

[doublethink]

6. Hypocritical RW Fundamentalist Christians ......

should look up the words 'truth' and 'hypocrites' in the Bible to begin with and go from there. In fact here's a good search engine for them to start with if any happen to be lurking and want to do just that ..... http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/kjv2www?specfile=/texts/english/religion/kjv/kjv-pub.o2w just type in those two words separately and read a bit. Peace, and great post. K&R. :)

[bloom]

7. I think the war supporters worship the GOD of WAR

And while I agree about the Pharisee description - I also know of those supposedly righteous people who seriously study Revelation and use it as the basis for violence against others.

Also related to the "Left Behind" series - which I've never read - but which sounds like some serious propaganda.

[gratuitous]

8. One minor quibble

I don't think the Jewish authorities had the power to order an execution, but otherwise, there is quite a bit here to chew on.

It's astonishing to me that the fundies, in their zeal to shut the church doors in the faces of those they disagree with, will focus obsessively on a couple of verses and tease a meaning out of them that may or may not be there, and which is contradicted or overruled by so many other biblical verses. I speak, naturally, of homosexuals and their allies. But when the plain meaning of so many other verses and passages, incredibly numerous, is pointed out from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Hosea, the gospels, and so many of Paul's writings, we see a walkout of hundreds with others remaining behind to chant "Bush, Bush, Bush." The GOP elephant flies above the flag, flies above the constitution, even flies above the Bible for these folks.

Sometimes I wish they would just quit the Church.

[Ladyhawk]

9. K&R. The fundies won't listen to this atheist and they won't listen

to Christians with ideas different from their own self-serving ones.

Any fundy Christian I sent this to would have the same reaction: "Bush! Bush! Bush!" Bush is their god, not Jesus.

[sundancekid]

10. at the very least, we are oppressed by the Pharisees Political Power

[bvar22]

11. Well Said!!! K&R

I'm sending this out!

"The first thing we Christians have to do in this time is not to become good Pharisees. Instead, we have to try all over again to follow the dangerous, nonviolent, troublemaking Jesus. I believe war, weapons, corporate greed and systemic injustice are an abomination in the sight of God. They are the definition of mortal sin. They mock God and threaten to destroy God’s gift of creation. If you want to seek the living God, you have to pit your entire life against war, weapons, greed and injustice--and their perpetrators. It is as simple as that."

The Democratic Party is a BIG TENT, but there is NO ROOM for those
who advance the agenda of THE RICH (Corporate Owners) at the EXPENSE of LABOR and the POOR.

[Joe Chi Minh]

16. Well said, bvar22 - your tag line. Also the paraphrase of the

Beatitudes you quote.

[lovuian]

12. Hey is John Dear the great peace activist who prayed

with the soldiers in New Mexico when they came out and were yelling and throwing things at his house... I love this man...

[JohnyCanuck]

14. Yup sounds like it would be the same guy

The Soldiers At My Front Door
by John Dear


I live in a tiny, remote, impoverished, three block long town in the desert of northeastern New Mexico. Everyone in town--and the whole state--knows that I am against the occupation of Iraq, that I have called for the closing of Los Alamos, and that as a priest, I have been preaching, like the Pope, against the bombing of Baghdad.

Last week, it was announced that the local National Guard unit for northeastern New Mexico, based in the nearby Armory, was being deployed to Iraq early next year. I was not surprised when yellow ribbons immediately sprang up after the press conference.

But I was surprised the following morning to hear 75 soldiers singing, shouting and screaming as they jogged down Main Street, passed our St. Joseph’s church, back and forth around town for an hour. It was 6 a.m., and they woke me up with their war slogans, chants like “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and “Swing your guns from left to right; we can kill those guys all night.”

Their chants were disturbing, but this is war. They have to psyche themselves up for the kill. They have to believe that flying off to some tiny, remote desert town in Iraq where they will march in front of someone’s house and kill poor young Iraqis has some greater meaning besides cold-blooded murder. Most of these young reservists have never left our town, and they need our support for the “unpleasant” task before them. I have been to Iraq, and led a delegation of Nobel Peace Prize winners to Baghdad in 1999, and I know that the people there are no different than the people here.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1129-07.htm

More about his anti-war, anti-violence philosophy available on his web site at www.johndear.org

[StellaBlue]

13. This became crystal clear to me when I was afforded the opportunity

to view our nation from Europe for four years.

Pathetic but true.

[Joe Chi Minh]

15. They won't get off as easy as the Pharisees. That's for sure.

If we thought the deepest pits of Hell were reserved for the Pharisees, it would be to overlook the fact that these Simoniac devils have had Christ's vehement denunciations of the spiritually superficial indeed blasphemous culture that the Pharisees had built up over many years, at their disposal, and yet are too wilfully spiritually blind to have heeded his words. "If your righteousness does not exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the "eternal sin for which there is no forgiveness", was considered by the Fathers of the Church to refer to "invincible ignorance" - the deliberate conscious refusal to acknowledge the truth, specifically Jesus' teachings as they relate to the purpose of our existence on this earth, and his authority to pronounce on it. Obedience to his law of Love is what God wants, not religiosity; particularly religiosity used as a cover for wickedness.

We cannot serve God and money. We either serve one or the other. We cannot do both; if we serve one, we must despise the other. The accumulation of wealth was one topic above all others, upon which Christ spoke most plainly and forcefully, because it is clear from his teachings that even as he spoke about compassion, he was implicitly denouncing the love of money and worldly power. So true is this, indeed, that even in the Old Testament, the wicked man is referred to in apposition to the rich man; the virtuous man, the true Israel, to the poor man. What fiercer, more insulting (to their eyes) denunciation of the rich man could Christ have uttered than that the very street-dogs licked Lazarus' sores; the dumb beasts in their stumbling compassion putting them to shame.

When Mary sang God's praises in her Magnificat, she spoke of "God" scattering "the proud in the imagination of their hearts" and putting down "the mighty from their thrones and exalting the lowly", filling "the hungry" with good things", and sending "the rich away empty", she was prophesying; speaking of an insight she was given of the eventual triumph of Christ and his lowly, suffering people in the future. Sure not every poor man is a saint, and not every rich man a sinner, but, like the race not always going to the swift nor the battle to the strong.... that's the way to bet - particularly when your eternal destiny is in the balance. And I've got news for Mr Getty: the poor will not only inherit the earth, but also the mineral rights.

"Do not set your heart on riches, even when they increase, for God has only said one thing; only two do I know: that you Lord belongs love, and that you repay each man according to his deeds."

[progressoid]

17. An oldie, but a goodie.

[malmapus]

18. In the words of my mom when I sent this to her...

"There's a lot about Jesus that the Conservative Right don't know or just
don't understand!"