Their God Sucks

Right-wingers in America have taken over the dialogue in the U.S., taken over the media, moved the entire country to the right, labeled a moderate-right President a “socialist,” blocked health care reform and other good things like taking care of the environment; and now they have completely destroyed what was once a peaceful religion:  Christianity.  Believe it or not, Christianity at one time taught forgiveness and love, not war and hatred.  You would never know that from the new invention passing as the “Christian” religion brandished by the right-wing in the U.S.  This includes Tea Baggers, who feel “God” is on their side. (Even Andrew Sullian feels the core of the Tea Party movement is “christianist“.)

Right-wingers, the worst of them, (the fanatical believers in God being a man surrounded by vaults full of money) destroy everything they touch, including the philosophy and teachings of peaceful men.  Liberals and progressives need to stop them and remove the cancer of their influence from this country.  If you are a liberal or a progressive then you have to act, especially this year, because it’s an election year. We have to fight the growing influence of the Tea Baggers and the right-wing nuts, in part because these are dangerous, violent people.  They are non-compassionate people who love war and claim to be Christians and this world has seen all this before. Don’t you just love the irony?  Don’t just sit back and laugh at them. They do not go away by being laughed out of the room (believe me; I have tried it).   They are a movement of anger and rage and greed, and that makes them dangerous.  A large facet of the Republican party, led by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, has become a blatant hate group. And yes, their god sucks because their God stands for war, greed, poverty, bigotry, and death.  There has been a new study on these people, the right-wing hate groups:

Rage on the Right

The Year in Hate and Extremism

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called “Patriot” groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight. . . . .

The signs of growing radicalization are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the “tree of liberty” needs to be “watered” with “the blood of tyrants.” The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a Patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps. Politicians pandering to the antigovernment right in 37 states have introduced “Tenth Amendment Resolutions,” based on the constitutional provision keeping all powers not explicitly given to the federal government with the states. And, at the “A Well Regulated Militia” website, a recent discussion of how to build “clandestine safe houses” to stay clear of the federal government included a conversation about how mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph were supposedly betrayed at such houses. “

That’s from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Keep in mind most members of these hate groups and tea bagger groups call themselves “Christian”.  It’s now become a term they have completely bastardized.

One magazine full of wisdom and good ideas (way beyond sound bites, that is) is The Progressive.  The bits of news below are from their latest issue and illustrate how American right-wingers have bastardized a religion, the same as any right-wing religious extremist in any country has bastardized any religion of peace.  They now feel they “own” the religion, so they use it as they see fit — for personal gain and power. Apparently, some right-wingers in America worship a God of Hate, one who kills people at any provocation, and this entity has little to do with the teachings of the philosophy of Christianity in its original form. Think what you will of religion, but Christianity started out as a love and peace movement and was completely hijacked by megalomaniacs in various governments who wanted to kill people and take their land and resources. (like George Bush in modern times).

Modern day Republicans, Tea Baggers and right-wingers in the U.S. continue this hijacking tradition.  Their actions have nothing to do with the work of a philosopher (and more to some)  many people refer to as “Jesus”.   People should not think that Christianity itself is a violent religion just because people have bastardized and reinvented it for their own hate-filled uses.  If violence like wars were done in Gandhi’s name, people would not blame Gandhi, they would blame the people who hijacked his messages.  Same with Martin Luther King Jr., etc.

The Progressive just came in the mail today and these two items caught my eye:

And God Said to Sarah
Sarah Palin believed that Senator John McCain chose
her to be his running mate in 2008 because it was
“God’s plan,” reports 60 Minutes.

And even worse, this:

Jesus’s Rifles
“Coded references to New Testament Bible passages
about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle
sights provided to the United States military by a
Michigan company,” reports ABC News. “The sights
are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and
in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The
maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million
multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights
to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide
sights to the U.S. Army.” After public outcry, the
company announced that it will no longer imprint
the verses on the sides of scopes intended for the U.S.
military, and will also provide clients with kits to
remove the Bible verse numbers from existing scopes.

Not very “Christian” to put Bible Verses on weapons of individual destruction  (WID).  And no, God’s plan was not to pick Sarah Palin as candidate for Vice President. That’s the height of not just arrogance but self-delusion, but then, that’s Sarah. She rattles around in her own foggy little world.

Republicans are constantly telling us that God hates terrorists too, which overlooks the fact that the United States Military Industrial Complex (including the CIA)  is the biggest terrorist organization in the world.  Here’s a nice quote from Howard Zinn that illustrates that.

Our War on Terrorism
Howard Zinn, November 2004

Since war is itself the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.

Unless we reexamine our policies— our quartering of soldiers in a hundred countries, our support of the occupation of Palestinian lands, our insistence on controlling the oil in the Middle East—we will always live in fear.

If we were to announce that we will consider those policies, and began to change them, we might start to dry up the huge reservoir of hatred where terrorists are hatched.

 

Remember this quote the next time some Republican hatemonger tells you we have to kill people in the Middle East because they’ve killed Americans. This is the thinking of a terrorist.  And it does not come from any religion, it comes from hate.