How to Break the Republican Lock on God (NYT- behind paywall)

[meow2u3]

We know that slaveholders in the American South used Scripture to justify keeping their fellow humans in bondage. They could find no words from Christ on this, for there are no words from him. Just a line in the New Testament from mere mortals presuming to speak for him.

But perhaps it made those who tore apart families, who whipped insubordinates until they passed out, who sold children and cotton bales as similar commodities feel better to know that the monstrous crime of their daily enterprise could be a blessed act.

These days, no less an authority than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said recently that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.”

She offered no sourcing for this assertion, as is the case for vaporous claims that rise from the rot of the Trump presidency on a daily basis. But in blaming God for Trump, Sanders echoed a widespread Republican belief that the most outwardly amoral man ever to occupy the White House is an instrument of divine power. He’s part of the master plan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/opinion/stacy-abrams-pete-buttigieg.html

Exposing fundies as the hypocrites they are -- from a gay man, no less -- is justice in action.

[NightWatcher]

1. If someone believes that a 600 year old dude built a magic boat and two kangaroos from Australia...

hopped to the Middle East, got a 40 day boat ride, and hopped back to Australia, leaving no bones or proof between Aussie and the ME...


We cannot argue with them. We cannot hope to get them on our side. We cannot get them to acknowledge reality.

And don't get me going on the trip that penguins took.

[real Cannabis calm]

3. Are you attempting to claim that NO Christians support Democrat candidates?

With only a few exceptions, Democrats elected to Federal, State and Local offices profess Christianity. Check the records and discover what is obvious to most people.

[NightWatcher]

5. I'm not going to expect anything from evangelicals. I don't want to try to appeal to them.

[PJMcK]

2. From the end of the column

This is the key strategy:

The best Christian argument against Trump comes from Christ. The essence of Christianity is his exhortation that people treat the sick, the hungry, the poor, the imprisoned as they would treat him. “Whatever you did to the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me.”

No one can know what’s in Trump’s heart. But his policies are inhumane in the extreme. Cursed are the meek, for under Trump’s command, children have been put in cages, and the poor in red states are denied the health care that should be available to them under Obamacare.

Pope Francis, an authority I would trust more than Sarah Sanders in this realm, said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not a Christian.”

Trump is all about self. His bigotry, his boasting, his lies, his pride, his scams of the vulnerable, his worship of materialism, his insults of the dead, his turning a blind eye to refugees, his bragging of adulterous behavior, his treatment of “the least” among us — all of this is antithetical to Christian philosophy.

Buttigieg is right to call him on this. He’s right to attack Pence’s hypocrisy. But the moral high ground is a fragile perch, best visited on rare occasions. He’s thrown down a needed challenge. Now let Trump and Pence try to prove him wrong.

That could be the way to expose the utter religious hypocrisy of the Republicans.

[Act_of_Reparation]

4. And here comes Christianity to save us from the problems Christianity itself created.

I've seen how this movie ends.

[bobbieinok]

6. They say T is 'new Cyrus'. God used a bad man Cyrus to bring Jews back to Him. T bringing US--

--likewise God is using T to bring US back to him. He's doing this by right wing judges, moving US embassy to Jerusalem, attacks on abortion and homosexuality. The modern American Evangelicals' redefinition of the basic tenets of Christianity. [Plus anti-evolution.]