Mind Yourself Online

So, class, what has this week taught us when it comes to politics and the Internet?

If you improperly frame and incorrectly relate a key part of early American history (Paul Revere’s famous “the British are coming” ride, for example), a good rule of thumb, when appearing on TV shortly thereafter following all the ridicule, would be to say, “I was on the spot, and I flubbed things up a bit and got a couple different elements of Paul Revere’s life mixed together and a little off the mark on a couple points.” The response is not to say, “I know my history” and then to remain silent as your supporters try to alter the Wikipedia entry on Paul Revere to match your fictitious view of things.

Why?

Because the message is everywhere, and no matter how many supporters you have, the truth is going to come out and more people are likely to shake their heads in disgust at you than to nod their heads in support.

Also, if you have been flirting on Twitter with some young lady, and sent her a picture of your penis and possibly other parts of your manly body, and that gets out, claiming to have been hacked, expressing uncertainty about whether that’s your junk on display, and dodging questions is not the way to go.

It’s the Internet Age. The truth will come out. If it’s your dick online, it’s going to be revealed as such. You cannot hide, and every day you duck and dodge makes it worse. Just come out and say, “I flirted online, as many people do, and it got a little out of hand. I apologize, and I’m embarrassed at myself. On the other hand, I’m far from alone in having done this, and I was not nearly as creepy as many folks who do.”

Own your mistake. Take the power of shaming you away from the media and the public and your political enemies, many of whom have worse sexual skeletons in the closet. Don’t undermine yourself with lies that you must have known couldn’t hold up, assuming you have even half the brains Jon Stewart gives you credit for having.

That’s our lesson on Internet reality for today.

Thank you.

Now go about the regular tweeting of your gonads and messing up of history that you should have paid more attention to in high school and college.

I know I will.

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Truths From John Kyl

You know, I’ve sort of gotten used to U.S. politicians, primarily the Republicans but especially the Tea Party folks, spouting out random, made-up, pulled-out-of-their-ass-with-no-regard-for-reality statements to support their arguments.

Need to discredit President Barack Obama’s citizenship and U.S. birth status? No problem. Do what Sarah Palin and Donald Trump have done and say that he’s paid more than $2 million in legal fees to fight calls to see his birth certificate (which he long ago produced by the way) so he must have something to hide. No reason to point out that he’s actually paid more than $2 million to a legal firm for all of his legal work related to his presidential campaign and just being president, of which spurious claims that he’s not a citizen are one small part of the pile (John McCain had to pay well over a million dollars in legal fees just to tidy up post-campaiging matters, and his campaign wasn’t as big as Obama’s).

Want to make sure you can squeeze out every last penny for military spending and making sure that the ultra rich and big corporations continue to get ever richer while the middle class is shredded to bits? Just say things like, “Planned Parenthood shouldn’t get any federal funding because more than 90% of what they do is abortions.”

Wait? What? No, really? You said that, Arizona Senator John Kyl?

No matter that only 3% of what they do is abortions and the rest are health issues like breast exams, pap smears, and STD testing, plus contraceptive-related services. What’s an 87-percentage-point difference among rabid, lying idealogues who will stop at nothing to get what they want?

So, yeah, while I thought I had seen it all, the GOP manages to decline even farther.

But you know, since we’re going that route anyway, how about I help John Kyl with his next set of talking points:

• The government shouldn’t give any money at all to public radio because 90% of their funds are spent arming extremist Muslims in terrorist attacks on the United States
• All funding of the arts by the federal government should cease because 90% of that art involves two men making out with each other while walking all over an American flag and pissing on a crucifix
• Anyone with tan-colored skin (unless from a tanning booth or sunbathing) should be shipped across the border to Mexico without bothering to check their citizenship status because 90% of all Latinos in the country are guilty of illegal immigration (and it’s all Mexico’s fault)
• All black males should be placed in prison once they reach the age of 16 because 90% of them will rape a white woman after kidnapping some white babies and selling crack to white schoolchildren right before cleaning the weapons they used to kill a bunch of upstanding white guys.

No need to thank me, Senator Kyl. Just helping you with more material you can use to advance your cause and then say afterward, “That wasn’t intended to be a factual statement.”

Oh, and senator, it takes a lot fewer words to say: “I was shamlessly lying.”

Obama’s New Pastor Problem

I didn’t want to comment on the choice of Rick Warren to do the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration. I really didn’t. Several other bloggers had already mentioned it, and I figured I could consider myself safely off the hook.

I was wrong.

Seeing the level of invective surrounding this choice, I need to point out a few things.

But first, my personal feeling.

I don’t think that Rick Warren, pastor of mega-congregation Saddleback Church in Orange County and author of the Purpose Driven Life books, is a great choice. It’s unclear to me whether Obama truly picked him, or whether some Congressional folks in charge of organizing the event picked him (and Obama chose not to overrule them). But I would have preferred to see a pastor or preacher more toward the middle end of the spectrum instead of someone who has, apparently, compared homosexuality to incest and pedophilia, and someone who was an early and vocal supporter of Proposition 8 in California.

That said, I cannot sign on to the sheer outrage I’m seeing from so many people on the left or the left-leaning middle of the political scene. I just can’t.

There is too much at stake in this country for me to worry about who gives a brief prayer at any event, even the inauguration of Obama. This doesn’t give Warren some extra bit of legitimacy. Those who liked him before will still like him; those who don’t, won’t. This isn’t some sign that Obama wants to be in bed with the Christian right-wingers. People are bitching and moaning that Obama isn’t gathering enough people around him, and at his events, who represent “change.”

So, the fuck what?

I mean it.

I would like to see more “outside the box” choices, sure. And I hope I will in the weeks to come. But this man has to drag this nation out of a cesspit, and he can’t do it with a huge load of people who lack connections and pull. He can’t do it by focusing on just one end of the ideological spectrum. We’re in this shit together, and we need people and strategies that will get all of us out of this mess as soon as possible.

John McCain and Sarah Palin ridiculed Obama when he suggested that…*gasp*…we actually talk to world leaders who do nasty things. They talked about how irresponsible it would be to do so “without preconditions” because that would legitimize these leaders. And so many Obama supporters decried that notion as unfair and stupid. Now, we have people who voted Obama in and are complaining about, “How could he have a man so against gay/lesbian/bisexual/transsexual issues and a woman’s right to choose on a national stage like this?”

So, you don’t mind if he talks to murderous despots without demanding that they make changes before talking, but you’re willing to burn Obama at the stake for letting a right-leaning preacher say a quick prayer at his invocation.

Hypocritical much?

Let’s stop worrying about silly shit and start dealing with our problems. Worrying about what pastor Obama has near him for a hot second on stage isn’t productive. What a fucking waste of time. I was hoping we were past this crap about pastors after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fiasco.

What next? Do I have to worry now that the left wing will become as oppressively obnoxious as the right wing has been for years, and that MSNBC will devolve into the left-wing version of FOX News and descend to the lowest common denominator of liberalism?

Devil in the Details

So, I wasn’t really going to go political today…and, in a sense, I’m still not going all-out political, but rather a 30/70 political-religious rant.

It’s all the fault of Chez over at Deus Ex Malcontent, by the way, and one of his his Tuesday posts with a quote by former Saturday Night Live cast member Victoria Jackson. And this is what Jackson said on her blog:

“I don’t want a political label, but Obama bears traits that resemble the anti-Christ and I’m scared to death that un-educated people will ignorantly vote him into office.”

First, I didn’t want to be reminded of what a ditsy whack-job Jackson has become. I had first learned about her blog a few months ago when she was spouting off some religious lunacy related to the election season, and it just twists my gut. For one thing, we don’t need crazy folks making the rest of us Christians look bad by association. People already think those of us who believe that the Book of Revelation will come to pass someday are crazy, but then when folks like Jackson and Sarah Palin start spouting off about the end times certainly-definitely-uh huh yeah coming in their lifetimes, it just reflects poorly. People assume that belief in the Book of Revelation automatically means you’re expecting the Antichrist to pop out of the bushes and that you’re just hoping for the Rapture to come right now.

Frankly, I want the Rapture to come as slowly as possible because there are a lot of people out there who haven’t come to Christ, and the last thing I want is the world coming to a close any time soon. Aside from the fact I do want to see the end of important TV series like Battlestar Galactica and Lost, and the end of the world might fuck with that.

I just want to go on record with my fellow Christians who might be confused on some important points:

• The Book of Revelation does not really give a description of the Antichrist.
• In fact, the name/word antichrist doesn’t even appear in that book but in John’s other writings.
• For the most part, antichrist is a generic term for people who are directly counter to Jesus.
• The guy who screws things up in Revelation is referred to as The Beast. He’s the big kahuna of all antichrists, so I suppose you could give him a capital-A version of the antichrist name if you really want.

There is a nice overview of the who False Prophet/Beast thing here. It’s not the most complete I’ve seen, but at least it is honest enough to note that we just don’t know the specifics of who, what or when with the Antichrist/Beast. We just don’t. Apparently, it will be abundantly clear, though, when he arrives, at least to those who are born again.

Well, I’m born again, and it hardly seems like a slam-dunk that Barack Obama is going to be the Antichrist, even though in addition to Victoria Jackson, I’ve seen other bloggers claim this and viral e-mails that claim this. For one thing, Obama professes to be a Christian. That means he professes Jesus as the risen Lord. That already make things muddy and confusing. Because the Antichrist/Beast will preach against any kind of worship but worship of himself and a rejection of Jesus and other faiths.

Obama doesn’t reject Jesus.

I don’t care how much you might think the Antichrist will be the ultimate liar, that guy simply won’t be able to get those kinds of words out of his mouth. To lift up Jesus at all or profess that Christianity is a course to salvation would be entirely anathema to any agenda of a servant of Satan ushering in the end times.

End of story.

Please, if you are a religious wacko who insists on painting Barack Obama as the Antichrist, don’t spout your bullshit in my presence. Because I will slap you until some sense returns to your brain.

(There a nice piece dissecting the ridiculousnness of Obama-as-Antichrist here, by the way, too.)

Digging for Manure

Just some random venting for the moment; maybe something else later today that is more spiritual or more entertaining.

There are a couple Christian blogs I frequent that are, let’s say, a bit more conservative than mine. I like them fine, because often on doctrinal matters we agree on most points. But in this political season, I’ve had to limit my visits to those sites because I’m tired of the repeated claims that Sarah Palin (and somehow John McCain, too) are getting savaged by a “liberal media” and “left-wing bloggers” and that Barack Obama is some golden boy who’s getting nothing but love and who “hasn’t been vetted as much as Palin.” I don’t want to let my anger color my attitude toward these bloggers.

Sometimes, people’s ability to go into deep denial and manufacture fantasy scenarios amazes me.

Obama has been campaigning for a couple years now. He’s had Rezko thrown in his face repeatedly (and that’s coming up again) even though he answered that issue quite thoroughly. He had to endure having out-of-context soundbites of sermons by his then-pastor played over and over and used to support idiotic arguments by people who either never bothered to watch the sermons in their entirety or ignored the real message because informing the public about the real message would have messed up their lies.

Obama has had people digging into records to try to prove he wasn’t really born in America (though his mother was a U.S. citizen so that wouldn’t matter anyway) and to try to prove he went to radical Islamic schools and to even question whether he’s really Christian.

He’s had to deal with people trying to make like he’s good buddies with former domestic terrorist (who long ago served his time and is an upstanding citizen these days) Bill Ayers, while completely ignoring that plenty of conservative Republicans have served with this very same man on the same board Obama did.

People have tried to claim Obama has no experience, even though he is a constitutional law scholar, former community organizer in the third-largest city in the country, a former state legislator and a current U.S. senator.

People have dug around trying to find a mythological video of Michelle Obama using the word “whitey.”

And the list goes on, I’m sure, but I’m exhausted to think about it anymore.

And yet, poke around about whether Sarah Palin had any real major duties as mayor of little Wasilla, point to her own pregnant teen girl as possibly evidence that her abstinence-only stance is flawed or that her family values maybe aren’t so tight, or mention that she’s only been a governor for two years and in a state with less than a million people, and she’s being treated unfairly. Catch her flip-flopping on issues like the “Bridge to Nowhere” and people are being mean. Discover that her husband once had a DUI, and that’s getting personal. Mention that she has associations with scary pastors and churches, and that’s out of bounds. Point out that her husband and she have recent direct ties to an Alaskan secessionist group, and that doesn’t matter.

I know of at least one Christian blogger who believes that all the negative stuff about Obama is something that has to be “dug up” with lots of research because the media won’t cover it, while Palin is being gleefully destroyed.

Forgetting that actually, all the crap and lies about Obama have been circulated quite widely, and often by mainstream media. A lot of the stuff being dug up on Palin isn’t lies but truth…and the stuff that might be questionable (like whether she should be held accountable for what her pastors say) is either equal to what Obama has had to deal with, or gets dropped from media coverage far more quickly than any of the Obama stories did.

Forget also that Obama actually knows the issues and Palin can only spit out soundbites. Ignore the fact that while people try to smear Obama’s wife, Cindy McCain has never really been hounded about how she avoided jail for stealing drugs though her position with a non-profit to feed her habit, or the fact she keeps passing off other people’s copyrighted recipes as her own family fare.

No, let’s continue with the myth that Obama has been getting an easy ride and ignore the fact that it is actually McCain, through most of his campaign up until recently, who has been handled with hero worship and kid gloves my a mainstream media that has loved him for years.

Because why deal with reality when we can wrap ourselves in comfortable lies?

I know that Obama isn’t a saint. I think he’s a pretty upstanding guy and I respect that he has a pretty together-looking family life. I like that he succeeded on hard work and talent and not handouts and legacies. I like most of what he stands for. But I know he’s a politician and someone with his own ego and agendas, like any politician. But it’s amazing to me that everyone has to dig so hard to find even rumors and innuendo about this man, and often come up with flat-out made-up stories instead, while it is so easy to find ugly truths with the members of the Republican ticket, and yet somehow Obama is the one who hasn’t been vetted enough.

It’s madness. Look, if you don’t want to vote for him because he’s black, or pro-choice or whatever, just admit it already, damn it. Stop trying to make a fictional case for some vast media conspiracy to tar and feather McCain-Palin and give Obama-Biden a ride.

This is the Internet age. This is the era of blogging. Shit is dug up and disseminated in an instant. There is no privacy.

And the fact is, most of what’s getting dug up on Obama for two years now is easily proven false or misleading. Yet what is coming out now, only in the past few months or weeks, on McCain and Palin that is scary is actually, in most cases, true. Obama may have skeletons in his closet, but if so, he hides them better than any other politician running for president ever has. And if he’s that good, maybe we really do need him in charge. But chances are that he just ain’t that dirty.

Sorry, conservative conspiracy theorists. In this case, at least, you’re the ones with the loony notions. Get back to reality please.

Spendaholic

Lord knows I’d like to stop ripping Sarah Palin around these parts because I’d rather she just go away, but it’s so damned easy. And too often, so damned appropriate for me when pointing out the rampant values-hypocrisy she shows.

Now, we find out the Republican National Committee has been giving Palin the equivalent of $2,500 a day for clothing, to the tune of some $150,000 so far.

And this woman wants to talk about how much she connects with the “real America,” which she defines as rural America. Where, I’m pretty sure, there are an awful lot of people who don’t have $2,500 worth of clothing in their entire home.

So, the economy is going into the dumper and she (and the Republican machine) want to clothe her in fancy digs. Even if she needs a whole new freaking outfit every day, you’re telling me she can’t find good ones for under a few hundred dollars?

For one thing, I hardly find this kind of thing to be very humble or responsible, two things that being such a supposedly devout Christian are things she should aspire to.

More hyporcrisy. More waste. More ego. More recklessness.

And, dare I say it: Elitism. That very same word that she keeps tossing around to describe Barack Obama.

But I got a feeling that Barack Obama isn’t spending this kind of money, and probably his wife ain’t either.

(Yeah, I heard she’s going to donate them to charity. I’ll believe that they all go that route when I see it. And it doesn’t change the fact that she’s spending too much money on the wrong thing. And the charity idea probably only came up after people realized publicly how much she was spending.)

Guilty Pleasures

I’m going to let you in on some dirty little secrets of mine. A handful of women that I am, for varying reasons, kind of ashamed (and in at least one case, mortified) to say I would like to have known in bed already or, if my wife should pass away suddenly, have a crack at in bed in the future.

This is to be distinguished from the “Women I’d Break the 7th Commandment With” post, as I simply cannot see any of the women I’m about to list here actually wooing me away from my wife for even a quickie. It’s just that, well, were I on the market again, I probably wouldn’t be able to resist a damn one of them.

Helen Mirren

Sure, this woman is 23 years my senior (and a senior citizen), but damn. She somehow manages to both look her age and look good. Really good. I mean, most college-aged women probably couldn’t maintain a body this nice. Bonus points for having a British accent. Additional bonus points for being a tremendous actor.

Here are a few notable quotes that make me like her even more:

“Flesh sells. People don’t want to see pictures of churches. They want to see naked bodies.” (she has often appeared nude in roles)

“I’m a would-be rebel. The good girl who’d like to be a bad one.”

“It’s the creme-de-la-creme of bullshit.” (speaking about the Academy Awards)

“When you do Shakespeare they think you must be intelligent because they think you understand what you’re saying.”

Madonna

To be honest, Madonna was in her peak in the 1980s and early 1990s. I’m not saying she hasn’t done some good tunes since then; but she needs to sit her ass down. I’m not against women being sexual into their mature years (I mean, she’s only 10 years older than me and I don’t consider myself old, really). I don’t think that women (or men) have to exit the pop music business at a certain age.

It’s just that she’s ceased to be relevant. Long ago. She strikes me as someone who is desperately clinging to her place in the spotlight and trying to force her career on us far above any normal kind of promotion or marketing. She’s reinvented herself so often that I don’t think she knows who she is. I mean, the woman got into the Kaballah, which is something you really should be a really intellectual and/or mystically oriented Jew to be tackling. She’s been around the block so much that even if she has used a condom with ever one of her lovers I have to wonder what disease might be lurking.

But still. I can’t shake the notion that she could teach me and show me things that would make me forget my own name. This woman lured 33-year-old baseball star Alex Rodriguez from his soon-to-be ex-wife, who’s a pretty damn sexy woman.

Sarah Palin

I know, I know. The woman is evil. She panders to the worst in people, particularly in rural America, playing on the basest fears and fanning the flames. But I’ve just got to know if there’s a steaming vixen underneath her conservative exterior. Could she really be a “naughty librarian” type? Maybe it’s just the fact that Tina Fey gets sexier the more she riffs on Palin in “Saturday Night Live” skits and I’m just projected a growing Tina Fey lust onto Sarah Palin.

Maybe it’s just the “bad boy” thing with a gender twist. I know she’s wrong for me, I know she’d hurt me, I know we have nothing in common, I know I’d hate myself for waking up next to her. I’m mortified even now to admit all this, and I’ve never even shared the same airspace with her, much less knocked boots.

But I’m curious. Like every ignorant guy out there who thinks Barack Obama is a terrorist and lusts after Palin, I just want to know if those winks she keeps throwing out in her speeches are just for me.

(C’mon, gentlemen. And ladies. Don’t let me hang out here alone, now. Let me know who your guilty pleasures are. Confession is good for the soul.)

An Open Letter from the McCain Campaign

Fellow Americans,

We the members of the John McCain/Sarah Palin campaign would like to apologize personally, and on behalf of the Republican candidates for president and vice president of this great land.

Much has been made of Barack Obama’s name, particularly that middle name “Hussein,” and we have made some unfortunate implications that he might be a terrorist sympathizer, or might even actually “pall around with” certain terrorists, domestic or foreign.

And at various campaign rallies, some members of the audience have shouted things about Obama that sounded a lot like “Terrorist,” “Traitor” and “Kill Him.” We continue to believe that those may have not been the actual words…perhaps “Rarest bits” and “Inflater” were what people were really saying in the first two cases, to reference his rareness (as in not being cooked enough by the fires of experience) and his propensity to make grandiose and airy statements.

And the “kill him” reference probably just meant “kill him in the polls” and not literal murder. Really.

Look, we admit we were wrong to paint Senator Obama as a possible terrorist element or secret Muslim or anything like that. We had what we thought was reliable intelligence on those matters and, frankly, we just got carried away. And if vile things perhaps really were said at McCain/Palin rallies, the candidates themselves certainly were not at fault. They probably just didn’t hear the comments or assumed that Secret Service agents would quietly locate and remove (or shoot) the offenders.

No, we are forced to admit that Senator Obama is indeed a God-fearing, Christian, experienced candidate. He is fully qualified to run for president and possibly hold the highest office in the land.

Still…

…Well, we hate to say this. But you see, because there has been some tension these past several weeks, and perhaps tempers have been inflamed, we have to urge each and every one of you, particularly Obama supporters, to vote for McCain/Palin.

You see, it really is the only choice. If Senator Obama becomes president, we will be living in constant fear, as a nation, that he might be assassinated by one of the few dozen white racists left in the country. And that might incite a race war, or at least some very nasty riots in our largest cities. None of us want that, do we?

Also, because of the concern that some deranged individual or two or three or however many are left in this nation might be overstimulated in their anger, we fear that death threats and risks to Obama will require the Secret Service to expend enormous resources, in terms of money and staff and time, to protect him. In this time of financial upheaval, the United States certainly cannot afford to front that kind of money to protect a black president. We estimate that it will cost upwards of $17 trillion to ensure the safety of a Barack Obama presidency.

Please, as patriotic Americans, make the proper choice in November. Vote the white…we mean, the “right”…choice: McCain/Palin.

Cordially,

The Campaign Staff for McCain/Palin in 2008

Rushing God

We don’t like to wait on God. Not one little bit.

We bitch and moan that if God were truly loving (or if He really existed at all), He wouldn’t make us wait for things like prosperity, peace, justice, love or anything else.

I’ve always put it down to a “me first” attitude of hypocrisy. That is, what I want is so clearly more important than what you want (or God wants), so God should be meeting my needs and wants first. It’s all selfishness because, let’s face it, if everyone got what they wanted, you’d have people with competing and frankly incompatible desires both getting what they want. That could be impossible in some cases, and damaging in many others.

But it never worried me much, this attitude of trying to rush God. To browbeat and beg and push for Him to give us what we want faster.

At least not until I started getting a better sense of churches, like one that Sarah Palin either still does, or recently did, attend. No, I’m not out to bash the great moosehunting savior of humanity with the naughty librarian look (Ooops, guess I did bash a little there); it’s just that her associations with such folks have brought up a whole End Times Christian subculture to which I had previously pretty ignorant of.

These are people who seem to consider it their duty to push along events so that the End Times (the Rapture, Apocalypse, Armageddon, the Millennial Kingdom, and all that) will come sooner. They seem to think that whatever they do is OK as long as it makes the End Times come quicker.

This stuns me.

The sheer arrogance that they won’t wait on God’s timetable but instead see themselves as soldiers to move events along, is staggering.

Why would Christians want to have a hand in all the vileness that comes about with the End Times? Why would we want to have any culpability in that? Why would be want to have our hands in affairs that are supposed to be perpetuated by the enemies of God and Christ?

And furthermore, why the hell can’t we just wait?

God clearly has things well in hand. He doesn’t need our help. We have a duty already, and that is to spread the Gospel. Not to accelerate the timetable toward the end of the world. Frankly, to be working to speed up the path toward the End Times is actually counter to the Great Commission. We are supposed to reach as many people as we can with the good news of the Gospel so that more people can come to Jesus.

To make the End Times come faster means you would purposefully be working toward reducing the chances of people to be saved.

This is so against the Word of God that it’s one of the few things I can truly say I think is outright heresy. These people are heretics. In fact, they may even be committing the one unforgivable sin, which is sinning against the Holy Spirit. Because what they are doing is seeking damnation for millions (really, billions)  and they are telling God: “You aren’t moving fast enough.”

This is a kind of hubris I cannot even wrap my brain around.

God help these people. God help us, too, and preserve us from these people.

UPDATE 10/13/2008:

Kellybelle made note of this blog post in one of her own; wanted to provide a link to hers since it expands on my thoughts nicely, as well as giving a nice quick overview of Religulous, which I’ve mentioned a few times recently around here. Click here to get to Kellybelle’s post.

Christians Are Scaring Me – By Mrs. Blue

I’m almost scared to be around Christians anymore.

And I’m a Christian. Born again, believing in Jesus as the virgin-born and resurrected son of God. Daughter of a preacher. Reader of the Bible pretty much every morning and every night (which is actually more than I can say for my husband…so why is he doing this blog and not me? 😉 OK, he knows stuff, too, I kid him mercilessly about more than his Bible reading habits)

But seriously, I am kind of frightened of Christians these days because I’m never entirely sure what I am facing. Am I looking at someone like me, who keeps faith and critical thinking both very handy? Am I looking at a “sheeple” kind of person who needs to be (and allows him/herself to be) led by a pastor instead of “studying the word to be approved”? Am I possibly looking at someone who would do me harm for not agreeing with their outlook on Christ and the world at large?

I did a guest post here some time back called Faith Gone Bad where I mentioned my friend Mrs. Eager and her desire to move to the Bible Belt, for no other reason than to find a church she likes and greater numbers of really churchy people. Of course, maybe I shouldn’t call her my friend anymore because we don’t talk hardly at all now. No falling out or anything like that; it’s just that we don’t see eye to eye on things. Hell, we don’t even see eye-to-navel. I think we’re looking off in two different directions.

So why am I scared?

Well, let’s look at VP candidate Sarah Palin. She has a pastor praying over her for finances and political success (pretty self-serving, particulary since this pastor fired up a mob…and police…to run a woman out of a town in Africa because HE thought she was a witch). She has said she believes dinosaurs and people were around at the same time. She has said she expects the End Times and the Rapture to occur during her lifetime. She keeps painting the campaign as a battle of “us” vs. “them” at a time when we’re all up the creek without a paddle. She’s trying to make the working class think that somehow their plight is difference from those “elitist” middle class folks and she’s winking and flirting with conservatives and good ole boys like a madonna-whore tease.

And people are eating her up. And a lot of men, including so-called fundamentalist Christian men, want to eat her out, it seems. They are lusting after her even as they claim that our country’s moral fabric is unraveling.

Too many people seem to think we’re waging a holy war on God’s behalf over in Iraq.

Too many people are voting on issues like abortion, stem cell research, church-state issues, teaching “intelligent design” in school and other stuff related to religion, and all of this at a time when our foreign relations are in the dumper and our economy shudders on the brink of the abyss.

I don’t even want to call myself a Christian anymore because too many Christians are showing their hypocritical and ignorant asses. Sometimes I just call myself a follower of Christ.

I don’t want to call myself an evangelist because a lot of the scariest and most conservative Christians label themselves as such, and so everyone else assumes that evangelism means berating people and judging people, when it just means that we share the good news of of the gospel with people. I don’t know what to call myself here, since I do consider myself evangelistic. My dear hubby has suggested we try “ambassadors for Christ.”

This is bad. I don’t like to get into discussions with many Christians I know about current events or world events or politics because it seems like too many of them want to spout off about what their pastor told them they should think or what Sarah Palin thinks.

Why aren’t they using the brains God gave them?

People are being fired up, both under the banner of patriotism and faith, to get nasty. People are shouting “kill Obama” at campaign rallies now. What the hell is up with that? When did Jesus call upon us to kill anyone? Or judge anyone? Or use him as an excuse to do nasty things?

I see my faith being co-opted by a bunch of freaks, and it sickens me. Because while I don’t believe Christianity is simply the bastion for the weak-willed or ignorant, the fact is that savvy people are using it to lure in and herd people who are both of those things. Christianity has been turned on its head for real now, to the point I can’t hardly go to most churches in my area because it’s clear that they are taking sides and would rather have leaders who institute a church-based set of laws than to have leaders who can interact in a healthy way with the world and promote issues like healthcare, economic stability for everyone and tolerance.

It’s scary, I tell you. Scary as hell. It’s like I’m in a zombie movie except that all the zombies are wearing crosses around their neck and I’m afraid of two things:

That those zombie will get me because I’m not one of them.

People who are sick of those zombies will get me because they fear I’m a zombie too.

(Photo by Edd Sterchi, from eBibleTeacher.com)

(If you want to read any of Mrs. Blue’s other infrequent posts around these parts, go here)