Sulfuric acid
A funny few days, punctuated by rather childish name calling. You will probably have picked up that Hugo Chavez called Dubya the devil at the UN. This has been a major story over here with Faux News having a major hissy fit over this puerile posturing. Clearly Chavez is a chancer, a populist and a bit of a clown, but the reaction over here is interesting. Generally the left are deeply annoyed. Clearly this is a gift for the Republicans with the mid-term elections about six weeks away. Jon Stewart - who is probably the premier satirist over here has summed up this view most robustly . http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/index.jhtml
More interesting is to consider how the almost universal condemnation of Chavez here - even from people who clearly hate all Bush stands for - stems from the head of government and head of state being the same person. Therefore an attack on the president is somehow conflated with an attack on country. Hence the Post-Intelligencer - which is, to my reading, probably the more liberal of the two local newspapers (and newspapers know their readership - Seattle breaks 80-20 to the Democrats) - headlined this as "Chavez attacks America". Hard to imagine an attack on Tony Blair being seen as an attack on Britain... This may of course explain the advantage that incumbents appear to have in presidential elections - I think I'm right in saying that only three have lost since the 1920s.
Much less commented upon, but in my view much nastier, because it reflects a genuine belief rather than adolescent rhetorical flourishing, has been the reliably lovely Jerry Falwell comparing Hilary Clinton unfavourably to Lucifer. Given his earlier assessment that 9/11 was God's punishment on feminists and Katrina was all the fault of gays this is, I suppose, par for the course, but still deeply depressing as he claims to be an evangelical.
It was curious to read this after attending an excellent church service in the morning. A fine sermon on Colossians 1:1-8 made the point that when Christians stop focusing on the essence of the gospel (Christ) and become more concerned with their own agendas - whatever that may be - they are in danger of behaving exactly like the rest of the world, which has the effect of making Christians entirely unattractive and nullifies the gospel. (Salt losing its saltiness as Christ said). The two juxtaposed made me think how bad it is when Christians behave even worse than the rest of the world.
The encouraging fact is that the vast majority of evangelical christians in the US, indeed even republican supporting evangelical christians, are nothing like Falwell and his pernicious ilk. Further encouragement on these lines came from an article in Real Change (the local equivalent of Big Issue) featuring a prominent liberal churchman. The journalist - looking to line up a bit of christian bashing - suggested to the churchman that all evangelicals were troglodytic, mouth-breathing, quasi-fascistic morons. The liberal's response was interesting enough to repeat verbatim
"I think there are many evangelicals we don't hear much about who ... believe that Jesus was a friend of the poor, women, and people left out of our culture, the persecuted, the maligned. I think Evangelicals are beginning to realize that their [sic] Gospel's been stolen...and saying I think we've all been used".
Well I'm one of them. It's good to know there are many others.
More interesting is to consider how the almost universal condemnation of Chavez here - even from people who clearly hate all Bush stands for - stems from the head of government and head of state being the same person. Therefore an attack on the president is somehow conflated with an attack on country. Hence the Post-Intelligencer - which is, to my reading, probably the more liberal of the two local newspapers (and newspapers know their readership - Seattle breaks 80-20 to the Democrats) - headlined this as "Chavez attacks America". Hard to imagine an attack on Tony Blair being seen as an attack on Britain... This may of course explain the advantage that incumbents appear to have in presidential elections - I think I'm right in saying that only three have lost since the 1920s.
Much less commented upon, but in my view much nastier, because it reflects a genuine belief rather than adolescent rhetorical flourishing, has been the reliably lovely Jerry Falwell comparing Hilary Clinton unfavourably to Lucifer. Given his earlier assessment that 9/11 was God's punishment on feminists and Katrina was all the fault of gays this is, I suppose, par for the course, but still deeply depressing as he claims to be an evangelical.
It was curious to read this after attending an excellent church service in the morning. A fine sermon on Colossians 1:1-8 made the point that when Christians stop focusing on the essence of the gospel (Christ) and become more concerned with their own agendas - whatever that may be - they are in danger of behaving exactly like the rest of the world, which has the effect of making Christians entirely unattractive and nullifies the gospel. (Salt losing its saltiness as Christ said). The two juxtaposed made me think how bad it is when Christians behave even worse than the rest of the world.
The encouraging fact is that the vast majority of evangelical christians in the US, indeed even republican supporting evangelical christians, are nothing like Falwell and his pernicious ilk. Further encouragement on these lines came from an article in Real Change (the local equivalent of Big Issue) featuring a prominent liberal churchman. The journalist - looking to line up a bit of christian bashing - suggested to the churchman that all evangelicals were troglodytic, mouth-breathing, quasi-fascistic morons. The liberal's response was interesting enough to repeat verbatim
"I think there are many evangelicals we don't hear much about who ... believe that Jesus was a friend of the poor, women, and people left out of our culture, the persecuted, the maligned. I think Evangelicals are beginning to realize that their [sic] Gospel's been stolen...and saying I think we've all been used".
Well I'm one of them. It's good to know there are many others.
posted by Exiled in mainstream at
6:40 PM
2 Comments:
Let me recommend a couple of evangelical blogs that are the opposite of Falwell and his ilk. Try Ben Witherington at http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/ and Wade Burleson at http://kerussocharis.blogspot.com/
By
Terry Hamblin, at 6:13 AM
Thanks for sight of that. Reading some of the machinations and lack of grace relayed on kerussocharis, I feel vindicated in my commnent about behaving worse than the world.
By
Exiled in mainstream, at 2:18 PM
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