Weblog

In my lifetime, I've observed a common postulate that's assumed among Christians.

Christianity = Republican Party

Reading my RSS feeds once again, I came across an article¹ that once again made me want to say what almost got me suspended at my American/Christian high school: “Oh my gosh!”.

If you're too lazy to read the article, I'll summarise it for you: Kerry goes up against Bush. People in the church support Kerry. Pastor kicks them out for supporting Kerry.

It does seem harsh that people would be kicked out of the church. I once saw a television advertisement for a church that several television networks refused to play.² It featured bouncers outside of a church letting in the heterosexual, white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant family but turning away the fags, blacks and cripples under the thought that Jesus never turned away people, so we don't either. I can't imagine how degrading it must be for blacks and cripples to be put in the same category as fags. In fact, this is contrary to church teaching! (Not about the racial issue, the fag issue. Besides, I don't see things in terms of race anyway.) The Bible explicitly says to kick out those who are sexually immoral.³ If you didn't already know this, guys boinking other guys is immoral.

So, clearly, the Bible provides a mechanism for expelling people out of the church, and it got used on some Kerry supporters. Apparently, some pastor didn't like the idea that Kerry supported abortion rights. It makes sense. Abortion is murder, and, after all, no one hates abortion more than I do. However, isn't this hypocritical? Some people say that Christians were responsible for putting Bush into office.⁴ Plus, this pastor responsible for kicking out the congregation members is quoted as saying that people who didn't support Bush were sinners. Well, let's take a look at Bush:

• 2000 February 15 — Bush says that abortion is okay in a case of rape or incest. Apparently, an unborn child is a person unless that person was conceived in rape or incest.^{5 6} (If you're a Bush supporter, think about that one.)
• 2001 August 9 — Bush sets aside federal money for stem-cell research. That's research that kills children.⁷ (Although these children were already killed, you have to ask yourself if funding research to continue the medical experiments after the Nazi Holocaust would have been right.)
• 2002 October 11 — Bush calls Islam a “great religion”.⁸
• 2005 May 10 4:58:37 AM GMT — The United States public debt reaches $7,753,707,426,887.48 — the highest that it's ever been.⁹ (Whatever happened to the Republican ideology of a balanced budget? It's not good œconomics. Plus, it's not Biblical.¹⁰)

Kerry is bad, but so is Bush. I know that several people from the separation-of-church-and-state crew are against churches becoming politically involved. Still, it seems that the government telling churches not to become involved in politics violates that separation. So, politically, that sounds to be to be okay. After all, if a mosque or synagogue did this, I wouldn't care, but a church doing this? Yeah, I do care about that. That's just plain hypocritical. I have this love-hate relationship with dumb people. Without them, I have nothing to write about here.

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1. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Politics/story?id=742265
2. http://real21mt.audiovideoweb.com/ramgen/avwebnb1006/com1-a.rm
3. 1^st Corinthians 5
4. http://www.christianvotes.com/templates/cuschristianvotes/details.asp?id=27567&PID=165562
5. http://www.issues2000.org/George_W__Bush_Abortion.htm
6. http://www.rnclife.org/faxnotes/2004/apr04/04-04-21.html
7. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/08/20010809-2.html
8. http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/ramadan/islam.html
9. http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
10. Proverbs 22:26-27