For all of our Conservative Christian Friends
www.Liberation.org Presents...
Jesus for President!
(Is it time to repent yet??)
Many people consider themselves to be Christians only because they hope
that by professing themselves to be Christian, they might believe that
they will go to Heaven when they die. We'll call them Heaven-Believers.
The full scope of Jesus' teachings holds little interest for them. They
are happy to say "Love thy neighbor" and leave it at that (not that
there is anything wrong with loving our neighbors; loving God and our
neighbors were Jesus' most fundamental teachings, but Jesus taught much
more than that.)
The real test of whether anyone is actually a Christian rather than a
Heaven-Believer is, would they vote for Jesus to be President or Prime
Minister? This is when the full scope of Jesus' teachings come into
play. Would Christians vote into office and turn control of the
government over to a man whose policy was to forgive and love our
enemies and to be more concerned with the poor and outcast, than with
the rich? This is more liberal than even the most liberal of
politicians. Talk about a Bleeding Heart Liberal!" Jesus WAS the
original bleeding heart liberal for whose bleeding heart on the Cross the term was
coined. One wonders how "Christians" could insultingly call someone a
"bleeding heart liberal" when it should be taken as a compliment and
highest praise.
G. K. Chesterton hit the nail pretty squarely on the head when he said,
"Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found
difficult and left untried."
Many Heaven-Believers will want to say that things were simpler in
Jesus' day and there weren't any weapons of mass destruction nor Al
Queda back then, but if a Roman legion was ordered to destroy your town,
the results would not be any better for your town, nor any less terrifying,
than if a weapon of mass destruction had been employed. If you were a
dissident, you would probably be crucified by an extremely oppressive
and intolerant government. The point to be made here is that when Jesus
said to love your enemies, there were plenty of people in Jesus' day who
were just as difficult to love as any of today's fanatical murderers and
enemies of the state.
If we would not have Jesus as our President or Prime Minister, then that
means that we would not accept him as our leader and we are not really
his followers, but only providers of Sunday morning Heaven-Believing lip
service. Jesus wanted us to trust in something other than The Powers Of
This World. Is it time to repent yet?
John Kenneth Galbraith said, "The modern conservative is engaged in one
of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a
superior moral justification for selfishness" which might be amended to
describe Conservative Christians by saying that Conservative Christians
are engaged in one of man's oldest theological exercises; that is to try
to come up with a biblical justification for greed and the pursuit of mammon.
Jesus said, "They already have their reward."
This is not to suggest
that there is anything wrong with working hard and being successful, but
a successful Christian (a True follower of Christ) is concerned about
the poor and those in need and seeks diligently to take care of others
as opposed to lavishing more and more excessive wealth upon themselves.
A successful Christian would not have a problem with tax hikes that were needed
to support health care for the poor and elderly and education for the young;
a successful Christian would shrug and say "Oh well...Render unto Ceasar.."
A successful Christian understands and believes the saying that we
should "Live simply, so that others may simply live." They know that
they have enough, and are therefore already quite rich and perfectly
content.
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