Thursday, March 12, 2009

Who's Pro-Life?

By Lynne Gillooly
March 12, 2009

Wake up America, The Democratic Party is the pro-life party.

Read on.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This issue is another way the religious right sees "life" in terms of a global, unitary concept - - where there is conception there is "life." The libraries of the world are filled with billions of books that tried to define life. Yet, the religious right sees a one-celled zygote as "life." They do not even have to write a book - - one sentence will do. Is there any hope for these folks? Since 1983 I have written many articles and a book about the rise of the religious right. We can thank the entrance of satellite TV, reaching tens of millions, and the publishing and fund raising techniques used by television-evangelist fundamentalists to make big bucks. Suddenly awash with billions of dollars and no way to spend all that money, the religious right bought its way into political power. In the process, they adopted mean-spirited and corrupt political techniques, bastardized two-thousand years of theological orthodoxy and turned Christianity into a radical conservative, Republican domain to which no one else need apply. The concept of "whosoever will may come," became "whosoever believes as we do politically may come." The gospel became a political instrument for a radical conservative takeover of America.
To make things worse, they turned their super churches into closed societies, where critics were shown the door, children were brainwashed within church and home schools and thousands of preachers were ordained without any formal training in theology. So, as much as I respected all your insights, let me say that a closed network with no feedback loop cannot change. It is a fundamental principal of all organisms and organizations. Without the feedback loop both entities die a long, painful death. In addition, there is another guilty party to the errors of the religious right. That is, mainstream Christianity, which did not say one word, as millions left mainstream churches for the "greener" fields of apostate Christianity that consistently promised more than the Bible or faith could ever deliver, and which painted the entire world and its people as the personifications as evil. Faith became a psychological reaction formation to life's disappointments and growing powerlessness of the middle-class. I have little hope for the religious right and its leaders, who are more cult-like than Christlike. Until mainstream Christian leaders grow a backbone and lovingly chastise these apostates and their followers, the religious right will continue to be neither truly religious in the New Testament sense nor right on many other issues. Mainstream Christian leaders must take to the airwaves and educate fundamentalism's followers about the errors in their teachings, methods and lifestyles.
The theology of the religious right represents merely 14 percent of Christian theology around the world, but speaks as if it has the corner on the market of truth. Many of their teachings are not four-decades old and some are the products of newcomers to the movement with lots of money to buy influence, such as the authors of the "Left Behind" series, which sold more than 35 million copies and made the authors multi-millionaires. The problem of untrained (no theological education, unaccredited training at fundamentalist diploma mills or self taught) pastors cannot be overstated. Nearly three-fifths of fundamentalist pastors fit into this category and preach uninformed and inaccurate theological, political, social, scientific, medical, and ethical concepts that are readily accepted as if God himself were speaking.
This nonsense will only stop when public pressure and education force fundamentalists to reexamine their toxic beliefs about too many issues specific to living as good Christians in America. When people stop looking for easy answers to difficult questions about life among leaders, most of whom could not make it in the real world and opted for a self-realized calling from God, then fundamentalism will sink under its own weight of ignorance. These people, who can only see black and white, are visually impaired to view the real world with millions of shades of gray.

Anonymous said...

What an inane, myopic piece of polarizing propaganda.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for an interesting article.
I appreciate also the comments written about the religious right by the first "Anonymous," which were a nice follow-up to your news piece - - also very informative. As for the second "Anonymous," I surmise that this person travels all over the Internet looking for a fight. My advice? Get a life! Peace comes to those who know how to communicate rather than destroy.