No More Compassion

Please, Susan, call me anti-abortion and I will bow with a flourish. Death for those who commit the crime of being inconvenient is the vestige of those who think differently than me, and the agenda of those who will benefit the most from Kuo's book. You don't have to honor me with the title "pro-life", because I do not believe that Jessica Lundsford's killer, who buried the beautiful 9 year old alive after raping her for the weekend, should be allowed to live. But there are those who believe that all victims are collateral damage and the true object of our compassion and the object of our societal largess should be the brute I just described. And those are the people whose political agenda will benefit from Kuo's book. And if Christians walk away from the voting booth, as Kuo and his adherents (who are more holy than Jesus) insist, then the innocent will suffer and the guilty will flourish. But Heaven forbid we seek to add yeast or salt or light, for Kuo hath added his genius and wisdom: like most uber-Christians I've met in my life, they believe that Christianity should be more like a sub-culture (like a zoo critter, safely away from anything but their own tiny world) instead of a counter-culture making a difference. Kuo is wiser than God; we should take our shoes off to read his blog.

Pedro ~ you must be kidding! For the first time in over 30 years we draw close to reversing the abomination of unrestricted abortion being the law of the land, and you have the audacity to confuse voting and praying? I suppose instead of stepping out of the boat, Peter should have remained inside and prayed, or instead of confronting the masses in the 2nd chapter of Acts he should have remained in the upper room and prayed, how dare Paul challenge the Roman world to embrace our faith when he should have been praying in a corner somewhere. Far be it from me to belittle the power of prayer, but others more holy than either of us have been praying for a very long time and we have reached a moment where the earth has shook and the chains have fallen and jail-cell doors have flown open and Mr. Kuo insists we remain inside sitting on our hands. Thank you for your encouragement to read the Bible and pray. I am a teachable soul and not unfamiliar with the contents therein, please share with me where in the Gospels our Lord instructed us to withdraw our hand when we have the opportunity to extend it and further His will (even if that includes something so secular as a voting lever?)? Yes, there are bad politicians and bad religious people and even mistaken, self-important authors who have been blessed by God in the face of dire physical stress and who may have reached conclusions so far afield of His will (but who cannot be bothered to question their conclusions, because they are convinced God healed them for the very purpose of throwing his people under a bus). If someone is beaten on the side of the road does that mean we pass on the other side (most of the ones described in the Good Samaritan parable were religious people, no doubt looking for a nice place to pray and stay out of the messy business of binding wounds and so on)? Just because Kuo was lousy at his job doesn't prove his assertion that the President is a phony or that Christians can't play a dynamic impact in making the world a place less heinous in God's sight. Nobody should confuse political power with the power of God, nor should one hand over political power to those who despise Him for no reason.

Pedro, Kurth has it right from what I can tell. As you say, Christianity needs rescued from politics, not the other way around. Kurth says our current problems aren t really about religion but instead stem from liberal individualism, which goes back to the atrophy of original Reform Protestantism. The problem is conservative secularism, or this American Creed that has saturated our culture for years. The fact that Bill O Reily from Fox News can write a book about secular progressives is completely baseless and ignorant. To coin secular progressives is an historical error in itself. Liberal individualism is no more than modern conservative secularism. O Reilly and the Right are trying to promote progressivism as liberalism and then link Democrat s as weak or godless. When in truth everything is actually socially and fiscally conservative, on both sides!