Stinking Of Desperation

The McCain campaign is handing out flyers in Las Vegas:

Oops!  Sorry, people in Las Vegas hand out a lot of flyers.  You can take a look at the guide here if you really want.

The "Voter's Guide for Serious Christians," after some boilerplate about not being an endorsement of any specific candidate, teaches Serious Christians - a subset of Real True Christians - that there are five non-negotiable issues, each of which is "intrinsically evil" and which "can never be performed under any circumstances."  The issues are abortion, same-sex marriage, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia and human cloning.

Amanda does her usual great job pointing out that Jesus never said one word about any of them. Actually, there is not one word in the Bible about abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia or human cloning.  And what little the Bible does say about homosexuality doesn't have anything to do with marriage.  It is true that marriage in the Bible is presented as being between one man and one woman - along with that woman's female servants, of course. And between a man and a couple of women and their servants.  Or a man and as many women as he can get his hands on.  Solomon's 700 wives and 300 concubines weren't the problem, not making them give up their foreign gods was the problem.  Oh, if your brother dies without having any children, marriage to you means taking your brother's widow into your bed, getting her pregnant and raising the heir for your brother's sake.  The not-very-effective birth control method known as onanism got its name from Onan, a guy in the Old Testament who happily took his brother's widow into his bed, but wasn't too keen on providing his dead brother with an heir.  God took a dim view of that.

But enough of how their five non-negotiable issues don't have anything to do with the Bible.  Let's talk about things that do have to do with the Bible, specifically with Jesus.  These are things that Jesus said without any qualification whatsoever:

• Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.  That's the only way to be perfect.  And it's easier to thread a needle with a member of Camelus dromedarius than for rich people to get into heaven.  It's non-negotiable!

• You can't follow Jesus if you don't hate your family.  As every Evangelical knows, "Jesus said it, I believe it, and that settles it!"  It's non-negotiable!

• The only criteria for entrance into heaven at the end of time is whether one showed tangible compassion to the poor, hungry, sick, and felonious.  It doesn't get any plainer or clearer than Matthew 25.  Jesus doesn't talk about abortions, taxes, church attendance stem cells or sexual partners.  It comes down to whether or not you help out the lowest, the least, the outcast in society.  It's non-negotiable!

• This last one is fun because Evangelical Christians have the highest divorce rate of any religious group in America (including "atheist/agnostic"):  If you get a divorce and remarry, you're committing adultery.  That's it.  No exceptions.  It's non-negotiable!

• Luke 12:10, "And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven."  No one has any idea what Jesus meant by this.  You may run across someone who explains what Jesus was talking about.  If you do, just remember:  No one has any idea what Jesus meant by this.  But whatever it was, he really, really meant it.  It's non-negotiable!

Playing "find five non-negotiables" is fun, isn't it?  There's more, especially if you include the Old Testament.  Feel free to chime in with your own list of irrelevant non-negotiables.  Maybe we can forward them on to Catholic Answers Action for use in upcoming elections!

Comments

[Crissa]

Genocide isn't in play, huh?

[low-tech cyclist]

While this doesn't undermine your overall point, the business about evangelicals, born-agains, etc. having higher divorce rates than everyone else is false - or at least was, when I last looked at the Census numbers a few years ago.

It's a denominator problem. In figuring the divorce rate for a particular group, your numerator is the number of people who've been divorced. That's easy. The problem is when people take the denominator to be the whole group. But the 'divorce rate' obviously has nothing to do with never-married people: if you don't get married, you don't have the opportunity, statistically speaking, to get divorced. So your denominator ought to consist of the number of people in the group who've been married at least once.

And here's where the skew comes in, because the marriage rate is higher among conservative Christians of the various sorts than it is among mainstream Christians or nominal Christians or agnostics or atheists.

And once you divide (# divorced people)/(# people ever married), it turns out that the differences among faith groups, and between faith groups and non-faith groups, are pretty small.

So evangelical Christians aren't any worse than everyone else with respect to divorce, but they aren't any better, either. That's about what you'd expect for a very syncretistic faith.

[Karl Weber]

Actually in Leviticus 18:22 it does say that it's an "abomination" for a man to lie with a man.

On the other hand, chapter 11 of the same book (verses 7 and 25) make it clear that it's also an abomination to touch the skin of a pig.

So much for football.

[Dave Trowbridge]

Somewhere I read a definition of the "sin against the Holy Spirit" as using the Gospel to sanctify political and economic oppression. Seems right to me.

Add to the abomination list shrimp, wearing clothing made of two different fibers, and houses with leprosy. And "abomination" is not on the same level as the moral commandments, such as not killing, not stealing, etc.