Does Trinity Church, Rev. Wright and the UCC teach hatred and violence?

grantcart

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Mon Mar-17-08 08:44 PM
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Does Trinity Church, Rev. Wright and the UCC teach hatred and violence?

Edited on Mon Mar-17-08 08:57 PM by grantcart

I am sure that at some point they have taught using the text of John 2:15

"Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables."

Can you imagine how Jesus would have been youtubed and trivialized?

Of course one of the great ironies of this whole Rev. Wright escapade is the fact that had all of the country's pastors, priests, rabbis and monks had the courage that Rev. Wright had, it is quite possible that the public consciousness would have been raised five years ago to a point that our nation's lust for war may have been stalled long enough for cooler heads to have prevailed.

What we should do, rather than excoriating one of the pastors to actually have the back bone to question the radical change to pre-emptive war, what we should do then, is to ask all religious teachers to show where they were five years ago and what did they do to call this nation to the religious understanding of war as an instrument to be used in only as absolute last resort.

Is Rev. Wright guilty of hyperbole to the point of absurdity - yes. That is a misdemeanor while other religious leaders commit the felony of acquiescing to state violence.

Those religious teachers who cannot show that they advocated restraint of violence are the ones that should be shamed in public, not a marine who in anger goes too far.

I would imagine Bush's pastor would have been found preaching something like, "God wants you to kill bad people". I am guessing that if Cheney ever went to a church he would go to one where the pastor would title his sermon "You were chosen to for power - use it and scare the heathens".

There is a scandal in America about what its religious teachers have been teaching. It is an infectious cancer that has drained the sting of religious images until they read like the platitudes of a Reader's Digest. It embraces power and wealth.

Can you imagine how the same people who are tearing up Rev. Wright would have taken these excerpts from Dr. Kings' sermon on Vietnam out of context and put them on youtube? You can imagine the carefully sliced cuts "America never was America to me"

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
excerpts from Dr. King's speech
(quoting langston hughes)

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. . . .

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. . . . .

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. . . .

Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. . . .

I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. . . .

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

end excerpts

Fox would have chopped the speech and diced Dr. King a million cuts.

At least no one will ever accuse Rev. Wright of the following

Matthew 5:13 "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.