Jesus Loves Me ...
With the move and all, I have just now been able to catch up on my newspaper reading. I just read this opinion column in this week's Nuvo (our local free weekly) and felt that I should share this with you. I love not only what he has to say but how he says it. I'm also rather amused by his name.
Victimizing Christianity
Time to stop playing the martyr
Jesús Roberto Rivera
As a Christian, I am dead tired of seeing my brothers and sisters boohooing to make everybody believe that we are the victims around here. This whole drama can be boiled down to one word: intolerance. We are intolerant of other people’s lives and of other people’s beliefs. We are intolerant of anything that does not resemble our self-righteous piety or we might be intolerant because others are not pious enough. Need some examples?
Not all Christians are Republican. Just because you are a liberal does not mean that you are Godless and that you have turned your back on God. Read my lips: Jesus was a radical liberal. He died because he pissed off the conservatives of His day by speaking against their hypocrisy.
• Why are Christians all in a hoopla over gay marriage? Marriage has been a changing institution since the beginning of time and with every change we renew our screams that the end is near. Let’s get a couple of things straight. There is no church that can say it has been told that it will have to perform a ceremony if does not want to. From the very beginning of this battle, activists have been lobbying the government to grant marriage rights to all. The government! The Church does not recognize a civil marriage because it is not a sacrament. Why is the Church fighting to save something it declares invalid from the pulpit?
• Harry Potter did not make our children witches, it made them readers. READERS! Instead of getting our hair on fire because our kids are reading Harry Potter, we should be on our knees thanking God that they are reading and not spending time doing drugs, binge drinking, watching inappropriate TV shows or getting pregnant.
How about some Gabriel García Marquez, Isabel Allende, Anne Rice, Edgar Allen Poe, Jane Austen, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens after you are done with that?
• The Ten Commandments have no business in government buildings. The day we decided to create separation of church and state we gave up the right to mingle our religion with the government. The Ten Commandments are important to us, but every time a non-believer sees them in a government building it is a slap in the face. The day we declared freedom of religion we had to accept the fact that some people were not going to be Christians, or that they could choose not to be believers at all. It is their right and we have no business imposing our beliefs on anybody. We declared freedom of religion 200 years ago; when are we going to declare freedom FROM religion?
• We understand that we take God seriously, but is it necessary that we pass out and foam at the mouth every time anybody mentions his name in any non-religious context? Good Lord! We have already made toilet paper out of his message, do you think that He really cares that the Boondocks strip said “for Christ sake”? Instead of being outraged because of what a comic strip says, maybe we need to be outraged over the fact that there are preachers running around preaching a God that hates people because they are different.
• We are constantly complaining about teen pregnancy, yet when a school starts a sex education program we take our kids out. The joke is that we do not talk to them about sex at home either. We won’t let the schools educate them, but we won’t do it ourselves. And then we wonder why our teens are getting STDs like they are candy.
• Do you really think that by overturning Roe v. Wade abortion will come to a screeching halt? Did prohibition stop alcohol consumption? If you say yes you truly are from another planet. Abortion is here to stay, like it or not. Instead of working towards making abortion illegal how about working together to eliminate some of the root causes that bring many women to abortion clinics every day: rape, domestic abuse, sex miseducation. If we showed respect for women as fellow human beings I believe many of the unwanted pregnancies that end up terminated would not even start.
• Newsflash: Jesus did not walk the USA, was not crucified here and he did not speak English. Stop treating this country like it is God’s gift to the Earth and start spreading the love that he spoke of to all. Our neighbor also includes our enemy.
• Creationism has no business in the classroom. That’s what Sunday school is for. Intelligent Design is religion clothed in science, end of the story. The Bible might be a wonderful book, but it is a poor choice for a science or a history textbook.
• Not all Christians are Republican. Just because you are a liberal does not mean that you are Godless and that you have turned your back on God. Read my lips: Jesus was a radical liberal. He died because he pissed off the conservatives of His day by speaking against their hypocrisy.
It is time that we Christians stop thinking that we have a copyright on the truth and that we are the Earth’s morality police. We will be better disciples if we realize that our actions do not preach the Gospel we were told to preach.
enjoy!
TTFN!