Sure, it was just a few ignoramai who cheered for a man to die* because he didn’t have insurance coverage; but figure those few in every county of the U.S., and you start to see the problem of harboring large numbers of under-educated buffoons who have been granted the right of suffrage.
…The Tea Baggers!
I can’t blame anyone for not watching the second coming of Lil’ Ricky Perry at the CNN’s Tea Party Game Show, Monday night. It was another display of just why the Tea Party will go down as one of the ugliest, most ignorant chapters in the entire history of the GOP, (Say Gowp!) and the demise of the Grotesque Obstructionist Partisans.
The GOPPERS are pledging allegiance to the flag and supposedly the United States, but the real grotesque irony comes from their freakin’ fringy base.
Phil Zuckerman and Dan Cady:
The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus.
It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message.¹
But they don’t just “reject his teachings” of love and service to our fellow man. These so-called Christians hate anything that smacks of “socialism,” and are vocally apposed to any help for the poor, including the 27% of the poor that are children. Food stamps, subsidies for schools, hospitals, even job training— they hate it all, and they hate the U.S. government— that professes to to do these things on their behalf. They are also the group in America that is the most pro-gun, and anti-gun regulation; pro death penalty; court-mandated punishment over rehabilitation; and advocates for the violent military invasion of other countries around the world.
Most fair-minded Americans realize that you cannot paint all Christians with the hideous brush of the Tea Party loons. But the fact that so many Tea Partiers exhibit such an extreme form of religious hypocrisy bodes ill for all religionists, and for all religions.
It’s difficult enough under the best of circumstances to explain the many paradoxes of the religion of Jesus,a real religion of transcendent love and divine compassion. But when you have millions of ignorant, hypocritical followers of the debased and grotesque ideas that are now passed off as the religion of Jesus, it becomes far easier to dismiss ALL religion as crazy, irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. And such a shallow and wide-spread dismissal of the vital values embodied in real religion will only lead to increased confusion, pain, and suffering for all Americans.
* If you haven’t had the stomach for it until now, I urge you to click this link and listen to the Tea Party cheer for the death of a hypothetical uninsured American.
¹ Although the Pharisees of those days thought the religion of Jesus was a radical attack upon their authority as teachers of religion, the religion of Jesus does, in fact, foster the highest type of human civilization in that it creates the highest type of spiritual personality and proclaims the sacredness of that person; the principle at the very heart of his message, which is totally lost on the vast majority of “Tea Party Christians.”
The Tea Party is a group of people who like to wear Jesus costumes year round, not just at Halloween.