Washblog

Religious Americans can be addicted to the Bible in an extremely unhealthy way. A case can be made that someone addicted to living entirely by specific verses literally accepted and adopted into life choices places limitations on God and on their own personal ability to perceive God in a healthy way.

The monstrous assumption for me is the notion that God has already said all the important stuff once and for always and that everything God would ever say to us He has said in the Bible.

I consider that assumption monstrous because if one  bought into that, one would have to voluntarily reduce and limit the experience of God that currently informs a believer's life.

Biblically hobbled in terms of civic responsibility, all of us would have to set aside our own understanding of why America has been the greatest democratic republic in history. We would have to fall back on worn out false assurances of Biblical literalists, particularly the politically powerful ones like Judge Scalia who think the Hebrew tribal Old Testament system of judgemental and punitive governing was the will and wisdom of a wise and all-knowing God.

Put in another way, we would be putting God inside a box from which He could not escape because of our foolish religious assumption that all we need to know is in the book. If it's not stated in the book in a clear and simplistic way in which we justify whatever we're to justify - a choice, a reaction, a conclusion - God must not want us to know it or do it.

I realize that there are those who will say, "It's there in the book and God has told you, Arthur. But you - possibly through some sin or unworthiness - are not hearing what the holy spirit is saying to you through the book."

I've never viewed nor used the Bible that way. I do however perceive that George Bush, the reigning Christian Presidential tyrant along with those Christian Right extremists who support him DO use the Bible in that way.

Would Mitt Romney do something that stupid and shallow?

Photo:www.kare11.com

You're asking me if someone of obvious and proven intellectual, entrepreneurial and leadership stature like Mitt Romney would - if he became President of the United States - suddently revert to a mindless religious robot in thrall of Joseph Smith's and Brigham Young's limited 19th-Century literalism? ... something non-Mormon Presidents and religious political activists have already done to the detriment of the country?

With God stuck inside the Bible and with American conservative religious voters stuck in a life that is full of black/white and either/or constructs, an American religious civic-minded voter is in a rut.

These folks need to fall back on an assumption that the Bible is all there is with the lifestyle habit of living life obsessed on justification with the Bible as the only justifier.

Personally, I believe that addiction to the Bible and to Religion is real and more prevalent than we realize.

Such behavior is not unique to any specific religion but literally fundamental to most narrow evangelical congregations.

In the face of big-mouthed Christian celebrity voices like Falwell, Dobson, Robertson and most currently and loudest the bigoted Donohue, our immediate reaction is automatic resistance to the idea that a majority of American Christians would believe and vote as if Donohue's religious bigotry were the norm.

People and cultures continue to use God to justify questionable horrific behavior and attitudes. The Bible is the vehicle by which God can be portrayed that way.

Take, for example, the following quote from Fred Phelps, pastor of Westboro Baptist Church:

"If you got to castrate your miserable self with a piece of rusty barb wire, do it.

Hear the word of the LORD, America, fag-enablers are worse than the fags themselves, and will be punished in the everlasting lake of fire!

You telling these miserable, Hell-bound, bath house-wallowing, anal-copulating fags that God loves them!? You have bats in the belfry!

American Veterans are to blame for the fag takeover of this nation. They have the power in their political lobby to influence the zeitgeist, get the fags out of the military, and back in the closet where they belong!

Not only is homosexuality a sin, but anyone who supports fags is just as guilty as they are. You are both worthy of death."

Granted, Phelps is a joke. However, labeling Mitt Romney a Christian heretic because of his religion while dingbats like Rev. Fred Phelps and his Topeka, Kansas, fundamentalist congregation are considered "Christian" is equally a joke; but not funny at all.

Not voting for Mitt Romney cause he's Mormon but buying the bull crap coming from the Religious Right, for example, Gary North - Institute for Christian Economics is hardly wise CHrist-based  civics:

"The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant-baptism and holy communion-must be denied citizenship.

This is God's world, not Satan's. Christians are the lawful heirs, not non-Christians."

Or get this one from Jay Grimstead - Coalition on Revival:

"We are to make Bible-obeying disciples of anybody that gets in our way."

Jerry Falwell:

"We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism...we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today...our battle is with Satan himself.

AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's chariotters.

The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.

AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.

If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."

A Mormon president would be dangerous in that regard?

What historical heritage to we have from past Christian presidents?

Teddy Roosevelt
part of an American deception to launch a war with Spain for land greed?
Episcopal

Ulysses S. Grant,
next to G.W. Bush the presider and decider in the worst corrupt admin?
Presbyterian

Rutherford B. Hayes,
thought by some to have stolen an election? Presbyterian

James Buchannan
who launched a dumbass invasion of Utah based on lies and disinformation?
Presbyterian

Ronald Reagan
tough-talk bluffer, presider and decider during the genocidal Iran-Contra years?
Presbyterian

James Knox Polk
lied and misled the country into a war with Mexico primarily for land greed?
Methodist

Lyndon B. Johnson
of our troops dying to preserve the lies-fame in Viet Nam?
Disciples of Christ

Richard Nixon,
the most impeachable and now a mild forerunner to the most corrupt President in American history?
A Quaker?

and the current incumbent born-again liberty-spreading American evangelical?

George W. Bush,
the worst and most corrupt President America has ever had (responsible for loss of life of 3100 American troops and the killing of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians - FAR MORE than Saddam Hussein killed in his own country)
and
Dick Cheney the worst V.P. ?
both Methodists

One might then conclude that if God overrode the voice of the people and with divine power forced George Bush on the American Citizens then God surely by now has changed his mind.

If I remember, in the BIble when the people wanted to throw out the judges and install a king, God counseled against it, explaining in detail why judges were better than a king (or president who behaves like the one God warned about.)

"Listen Samuel, you tell the people that such a leader will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to plough his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be perfumers, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

    And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

    And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

    And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

    He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

    And when that day comes you will cry aloud because of the king (president) you have chosen for yourselves, but on that day Yaweh will not hear you."

When you think about it, that description as a sign of the times is far more explicitly clear and evident than any of the concocted portrayals of contemporary events as proof of imminent apocalypic end-times prophecies.

so ...

American Christians and Bill Maher are afraid of what a Mormon President might do?

Why?