Posted on 06/05/2010 6:04:48 AM PDT by Christian_Capitalist
The Tea Party Movement is not Libertarian..It is simply the majority standing up and saying enough is enough..Don’t stick us in boxes that you don’t understand..And Wallis, go back and pray to your uncle, Beelzebub...
This is his “area of expertise”. Wallis is nothing more than a Commie political officer cloaked in the mantle of faux religion.
As a conservative Christian, libertarian-leaning, registered Republican (and former GOP Precinct Chairman at that -- get involved in your local GOP, it's easy!), this article was right up my alley. Glad so many others are appreciating it as well.
You’re welcome; thanks for pinging your list! I really liked this article, thought it was spot-on.
These leftist are materialsts. To them it’s all about money. Some people’s lives don’t work and the materialist think that they just don’t have enough money. If they are just given more money then their lives will work. These “Christians” are always evaluating and categorizing people in terms of money.
EXCELLENT argument! And an argument which almost begs the question: Do they serve God, or Mammon?
He's wrong in the first sentence. I'm a tea partier and I'm not a Libertarian and don't see much Libertarian expression. It's a "back to the Founding Fathers" movement.
EXCELLENT argument! And an argument which almost begs the question: Do they serve God, or Mammon?
Thanks. Conservatives and libertarians get the bad rap of being materialist whereas it is the leftist, “liberals” and progressives who are such. Good is evil and evil is good. We set let people be free and they say let’s control and distribute money, it’s all about money. Who has what. It is the gross dishonesty that riles me. If you want to be a materialist, then go for it. Just don’t assume the mantle of moral superiority and lie about your opponents.
Seems like conservatism is aligned with Christian values to me...
The only answers he's interested in are: Yes, and No.
That's the hallmark of the Loaded Question. IMHO, the only appropriate response when someone hands you one is to unload it, dissassemble it, and hand it back in pieces without pulling the trigger. I believe the author does a pretty good job of that.
“I really liked this article, thought it was spot-on.”
The article is TRASH communist agit-prop from Obama’s spiritual advisor.....
It’s Pure bullshit.
You are not your brothers keeper!...he has the free will god gave him.
Charity at the point of a gun is not charity.
Um, no. The article I posted is a CRITIQUE of Wallis. Read the article I posted, it's quite good! (I think).
Blessings, CC
Sorry...I meant to say WALISS’S article was trash agit prop...not the critique of it...
My bad..
No problem, simple misunderstanding.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – Barack Obama, Super Tuesday 2008 http://tiny.cc/j18p0
Of course, B.O. had lifted that quote from the final pages of Jim Wallis’ book, “God’s Politics”:
IT TAKES A CERTAIN AMOUNT of chutzpah to write a book called God’s Politics. But you have only to read a few pages of Jim Wallis’s new bestseller by that name to discover that it isn’t actually about the politics of an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful deity at all. Instead, it’s 384 pages of Jim’s politics, and Jim (with a couple of notable exceptions) is a pretty average, down-the-line leftist …
[.....]
MAINLY, THOUGH, what Wallis is up to these days is building his “movement for spiritual and social change” and arguing for optimism over cynicism. Previous theological agonies dispelled, Wallis fills his book with chatty anecdotes from his speaking tours, his time teaching at Harvard, his appearances on TV and talk radio, his travels at home and abroad.
He closes the book with the self-congratulatory (and possibility heretical) declaration:
“we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Excerpted from:
Excerpted from 2005 article:
God’s Democrat
From the April 11, 2005 issue: The church of Jim Wallis.
by Katherine Mangu-Ward
04/11/2005, Volume 010, Issue 28
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/441oqlsg.asp?pg=1
Also posted here:
Posted on 04/05/2005 12:20:31 AM EDT by RWR8189
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1377520/posts
The biblical perspective is not a socialist one. Redistribution of whealth would clearly fall under the heading of stealing and covetting your neighbors whealth and property is more a concern in the bible than greed. (There are these things called 10 commandments) Social libertarians though are fools if they think the loss of liberty is limited money and property because with those social issues which they consider matters of private choice are no longer such when they become prescribed by law to supercede the will of the people to choose to disagree and not support other peopes choices with tax payers money, service, or patronage without threat of government oppression or retaliation. Freedom of association and the right for all to be treated equally under the law regardless of individual pecularities of race, gender, ethicity, etc means that law which offers greater protections for identity politic subgroups is inherently a violation of the the constitution.
I guess I am a little more libertarian-leaning, though I’ve always been a registered Republican. One of my major concerns is that sometimes the hard-core Christian wing of the party (GWB [note: I voted for him twice] Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, etc...) prove to be a real turn-off to people like me. Guess I should explain “people like me.” I’m a gen-Xer (age 38), married, college-educated (but not indoctrinated...was even called a nazi by a professor once), raised in a relatively religious family (Catholic) but never got into the whole religion thing (refer to myself as an atheist-leaning type). I hate over-encroaching gov’t, high taxes, violations of freedom of association, oppressive gun laws (former member of the NRA: I support what they do, just can’t afford the dues and their constant appeals for money), strong national defense, and a lot of the issues that are dear to the Republican Party.
Having said all this, there are other things I take great issue to: Religious zealots who want to legislate morality (ie: The war on drugs (which is criminalizing a lot of people who, with the exception of the fact that they like to get high, are otherwise law-abiding citizens), anti-gay agenda (seriously, they aren’t forcing you to do it, so my attitude is to leave them alone: there are a lot of straight people who give marriage a bad name). I am for legalization of things like gambling, prostitution, drugs (at the very least, pot), and other “crimes” that are essentially victimless. Abortion is a tricky issue for folks like me. For most of my life, I have been pro-life. But people, let’s face it, kids have sex. We need to have a more comprehensive sex-education curriculum in our schools. Having been an inner-city middle school teacher for the last 4 years, this is what I have observed (I overhear a LOT of conversations): These kids are having sex. They definitely know the mechanics of it. What they need to know is contraception and prevention of std’s. Babies are having babies...that is the reality of the situation. And with this comes drop-outs, a cycle of poverty, and crime (kids raising kids are usually not the best role-models). If we want to do something about abortion, we need to do something about the rate of unplanned pregnancies. It’s a realistic approach (works better than just saying “Don’t do it”...because they are going to).
Ok....I digress. Where is our place at the table? It’s hard to vote for someone who matches our criteria 90%; someone who wants government out of our wallets, but wants to act like a mommy at the same time (in our bedroom, in our doctor’s office, in our classrooms)- someone who talks to an invisible man in the sky and claims that He talks back to him/her (in some circles we call that a schizophrenic or paranoid delusional). What do we do? Some people hold their social issues over their fiscal issues. Some people support the fiscal issues over the social issues, but get turned off by the excessive Bible-thumping (kinda like having an embarrassing uncle...he’s not a bad guy, but you still don’t want your friends to meet him). I think there are a LOT of people like me out there, and I think this is a huge issue for the Republican Party to look at. I didn’t want to vote for McCain (Republican “lite”) and his embarrasingly Jesus-freakish running-mate (sorry, I am not anti-Christian. Since I was raised Catholic, I was always taught that your religion wasn’t something you wore on your sleeve. It was more between you and God. He knows what you are, it’s not up to you to constantly have to remind other people what you are). I mean, Jesus himself said that we shouldn’t make a big show of our religion (see? He though it was tacky, even back then). I think fundamentalists on any part of the religious spectrum are dangerous.
Any thoughts on this? This is open to anyone who wants to reply.
If you thought this was a “tl;dr” kind of post, here it is in a nutshell: What do we do about folks who are pro-republican but are turned off by the legislating morality/ “Jesus Freak” wing of the party? BTW, my wife’s step-dad is a fundamentalist minister. He’s a great guy and I love talking with him and hanging out with him. I have no problem with people’s practice of religion whatever one they may ascribe to, as long as it doesn’t encroach on what I perceive as my “rights.”
Sorry if this was a bit rambling, but I’m a bit of an ADD case, so there’s a lot of stream-of-consciousness writing.
“Jim Wallis is the activist preacher and editor of the leftwing Christian magazine Sojourners.” ~ Christian_Capitalist
Exactly. bttt
“..As one of its first acts, Sojourners leaders formed a commune in the inner-city Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Southern Columbia Heights. Living in communal households, Sojourners’ members also shared their finances. They participated in various activist campaigns, organizing events at both the neighborhood and national levels. Grounded in the prevalent antiwar convictions of the community, the themes of these campaigns, echoed monthly in the pages of Sojourners, centered on attacking U.S. foreign policy (particularly regarding the Vietnam War), denouncing American “imperialism,” and extolling Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World.
Fueling these campaigns was the widespread anti-Americanism espoused by the Sojourners community. Jim Wallis, one of Sojourners’ founders and its longtime leader...
Sojourners devoted much of the 1980s to living out this vision. The Sojourners community actively embraced “liberation theology,” rallying to the cause of communist regimes that had seized power with the promise of brining about revolutionary restructuring of society. Particularly attractive for the ministry’s religious activists was the Communist Sandinista regime that took power in Nicaragua in a 1979 revolution. The Sojourners community uniformly welcomed the Communists’ victory in the revolution. Clark Pinnock, a disaffected former member of Sojourners, revealed in 1985 that the community’s members were “100 percent in favor of the Nicaraguan revolution.” Having supported its rise to power, Sojourners turned its efforts to opposing the policies of the Reagan administration that aimed to undercut it. Singing the praises of the Sandinistas each month in Sojourners, the community also initiated a program called ...”
Continue reading here: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Sojournershistory.html
Crap...missed my own point. I think it’s “people like me” who find ourselves in this position which is pushing us towards movements like the tea party (haven’t really looked into it myself). The Republican Party has a lot going for it, but I think the constant moralizing coming from the “religious wing” of the party has become a turn-off to some of us who don’t fit into the cookie cutter outline and pushing us into partially-fringe movements outside the party.
I just think the legalization of a lot of these “vices” will produce a lot of tax revenue, reduce crime (remember, it was alcohol prohibition that built the mafia, and now it’s drug prohibition that is building inner-city gangs into violent multi-million dollar operations, and international criminal cartels), and reduce our prison populations.
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