found online by Raymond
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
I’ve been in their homes and they’ve been in mine.
I know what these people have seen, the work they’ve been a part of, the kindness they’ve shown others, the faith they’ve professed, the God they’ve read and sang about.
Which makes it all the more heartbreaking now, to admit that I no longer recognize them; the venomous words they share on social media, the hateful theology they now ratify, the blatant corruption they turn their heads from, the human rights atrocities they are stunningly silent on.
The only conclusion I can come to, is that we were never following the same Jesus—or at the very least we aren’t any longer.
They are following a Jesus who is foreign to me, a Jesus who builds walls.
Most principles seem to be a matter of convenience, often of the most trivial sort. They sound nice, but they only work as long as they aren’t challenged. Shown their own hypocrisy, people tend to come up with all sorts of outrageous justifications rather than admit that they only cared about their principles to the extent that they allowed them to feel righteous and superior to others. And those who insist that they derive their principles from their god’s laws have all the more reason to rationalize.
Strange that the people most insistent that their god’s laws are absolutely clear and unwavering are often the most in need of twisted reasoning to reconcile their practices with those laws. They somehow always find the hatred clause in the commandment to love.
Authoritarianism and Right wing ideology always have a home in religious fundamentalism . True believers will be true believers.
The same holds true in all dictatorships, whether Communist, Arab, African, or white nationalist, or fascist. It is a cult of political fundamentalism that exploits, subsumes or replaces religious fundamentalism.
Messianic demagogues and tyrants have never been liberal progressives with their pseudo-religious, self-serving, manufactured mythology. They are all very conservative, and see any social change or desire for democratic representation as a threat.
This is con-servatism, and it requires the subjugation of reason to core dogma. Reason is a dangerous threat to con-servatism, fundamentalism, and tyranny because it entails the risk of finding the humanity in the “others”.