My problem isn't with God, or Jesus, or spirituality. My problem is with the bad apples who abuse their trust as people of faith for their own short-term, anything but Christian, personal economic and political gain.
I view these people of organized religion with distrust because I am a scholar of history. I know of the Salem Witch Trials and Jonathan Edwards' 1741 classic "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." I remember the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. I remember the complete annihilation of the Native American population by our own "Christian" American hands.
Religion and spirituality have always been abused by the powerful and those who that wish to seek power. It has always been this way.
I now remember how this elite-pastor class willfully and affectively tilted this past election for Bush, coercing their followers against their own self-interest for a red phone line into the Oval Office for their own personal gain.
Nothing has changed.
Let me set the record straight. I, as Democrat (progressive, liberal, neo-populist libertarian), don't care who you worships, as long as you don't tell me or my government what to worship. Period.
But to understand what I perceive as the Left's anger at the "Red-staters" falls along this line of religion being abused for the personal gain of both the preacher and the politician. Just for an exmaple of how broad the reach of this Republican movement, read some Sidney Blumenthal from today:
"The American church is in crisis as Catholic opinion on abortion and stem cell research leans closer to that of the general public. And the exposure of rampant pedophilia among priests has undermined traditional belief in the church's sanctity. Electing a liberal Catholic as president would have been a severe blow. So conservative bishops denounced Kerry, spoke of denying him Communion and even talked of excommunication. Sunday after Sunday, from thousands of pulpits, epistles were read and sermons delivered telling parishioners it was sinful to vote for candidates who supported gay marriage and abortion."
Blumenthal continues:
From the White House, Rove operated a weekly conference call with selected religious leaders. Evangelical churches handed over their membership directories to the Bush campaign for voter registration drives. According to the Washington Post, "clergy members attended legal sessions explaining how they could talk about the election from the pulpit." A group associated with the Rev. Pat Robertson advised 45,000 churches on how to work for Bush. One popular preacher alone sent letters to 136,000 pastors advising them on "non-negotiable" issues -- gay marriage, stem cell research, abortion -- to mobilize the faithful. Perhaps the most influential figure of all was the Rev. James Dobson, whose radio programs are broadcast daily on more than 3,000 stations and 80 TV stations, and whose organization has affiliates in 36 states, and this year created a political action committee to advance "Christian citizenship."
True to historical form, Dobson, Robertson, and all the Catholic bishops who complied, betrayed their good, honest, hard-working parishioners by envoking the flames of hell to gain their own politcal clout.
Anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty will tell you Bush rewards wealth, and taxes work. He has a radical agenda of pushing the tax burden onto wages, while rewarding the likes of Paris Hilton with billions of dollars of hand-outs. All this while sending our poor kids to die without a plan, charging corporate welfare to the kids, and putting the solvency of our country, riddled with debt, in the hands of the China. These are hardly the works of a good man.
But the corporatist neo-con Republican regime I see today is not intellectually honest. With Robertson and Dobson at their side, they smiled and laughed, and won this election by abusing the most sacred, human quest of spirituality, for connection to this crazy thing we call consciousness, with dishonest rhetoric and misleading propaganda.
The truth is they allow the rich to get more rich and the poor to get more poor. These Republicans divide the wage and salary earners in this country along whatever lines they can manufacture to keep capitalists engorged. While the claim the grace of God, they line their pockets with the tax dollars of their parishioners who needlessly struggle to enjoy their God-given right to the American dream.
The Republicans wage this war, the most age-old never ending war, in the dark. It's time we bring it into the light with all the passion and hope you have for a more fair, equal, and just world.
Always remember, we are the good guys. All we need are some frames.
Read more here