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Friday, November 12, 2004 |
Where is the Christian Concern for Social Justice?
A quote from David Virtue's letter found in Ron Sider's ePistle: And is not justice for the poor and downtrodden a central tenet of biblical concern, and should it not be so for evangelicals? Dr. Christopher Hall, NT theologian and evangelical Episcopalian noted, "The main words for sexual sin occur about 90 times in the Bible. By a conservative count, the four words for justice (two in Hebrew and two in Greek) appear 1,060 times in the Bible."
(Via Jesus Politics.)
12:23:57 PM Permalink
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The Destruction of Christianity
The Destruction of Christianity: "
Michael Feingold writes:
this is the election in which American Christianity destroyed itself. Today the church is no longer a religion but a tacky political lobby, with an obsessive concentration on a minuscule number of social topics so irrelevant to questions of governance that they barely constitute political issues at all. These are the points of contention tied into what are blurrily referred to as "moral values," though they have almost nothing to do with the larger moral question of how one lives one's life, and everything to do with the fundamentally un-Christian and un-American idea of forcing others to live the way you believe they should. The displacement of faith involved is eerie, almost psychotic: Here are people willing to vote against their own well-being and their own children's future, just so they can compel someone else's daughter to bear an unwanted child and deprive someone else's son of the right to file a joint income tax return with his male partner.
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And Christianity as currently preached and practiced in Middle America is virtually Satan, by the standards of anyone who strives to follow the teachings of Jesus. Having degraded themselves to the level of political lobbies, most Christian churches should certainly be compelled to register as lobbyists and pay taxes.
(Via Jesus Politics.)
12:21:57 PM Permalink
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On a Pale Afternoon
Students in Boulder CO get a call from the Secret Service who fears they may read the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song!
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
...
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
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And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead
To be sure, it's not the Secret Service here that overreacted but some politically correct parents who seem to think that a protest against war -- or, actually, against those who profit from war -- is a threat to the President. Maybe, though, they're right.
And of course, this reminds me of the time during the first Gulf War when Bob was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammies, and during the height of one of our periodic orgies of warmongering and jingoism, sang this song. It was a blistering version, but Bob sang it in such a way that probably only a small segment of the television audience realized what he was singing.
10:06:59 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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