Goddamn Religious Hypocrisy
I am so pissed off right now I could scream. Sometimes I feel like a complete fool for being optimistic enough to think that all people are inherently good and when push comes to shove, they’ll usually do the right thing. I was wrong. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people are usually selfish assholes :
- With voters overwhelmingly rejecting a massive tax hike, it’s up to legislators to figure out how to run schools and government for another year despite a $675 million deficit.
With 100 percent of the precincts reporting Tuesday, 866,623 people, or 68 percent, opposed Gov. Bob Riley’s $1.2 billion tax plan, while 416,310, or 32 percent, voted for it.
. . .
Riley and several leading lawmakers have said they would follow the voters’ wishes and make cuts if need be. The governor has said cuts could include releasing 5,000 inmates, ending nursing home care for hundreds of elderly citizens, and curtailing prescription medicines for the mentally ill.
Alabama’s Christian community got a unique opportunity here to literally put their money where their mouths are, and they completely failed. Just a couple weeks ago Alabama was in a religious fury. People were camping out in front of the courthouse to show their support for Judge Roy Moore and his Ten Commandments monument. The message that was coming out of Alabama was clear : The laws of God are more important than the laws of man.
But now the same people who were quick to cite God in their ridiculous self-comparisons to the civil rights movement have made it clear that their love of Biblical laws only counts when it doesn’t cost them any money. The real message coming out of Alabama is that the poor can go fuck themselves.
So here’s my message to the Christian community in Alabama (and elsewhere) : Spare me the self-righteous bullshit about Christianity and Christians being more moral than those of us that choose other religions (or in my case, no religion at all). The words “love thy neighbor” may be of Christian origin, but the sentiment (I hope) is shared by people all over the world. You shouldn’t need to read a book to find out that people should be nice to each other. Being a good person isn’t about clinging to the best set of moral guidelines, it’s about living up to those guidelines that you pretend to believe in.
What yesterday’s vote in Alabama says to me is that self-professed Christians are as vulnerable to being selfish, uncaring, and greedy as anyone else (if not more). For too long now Christian conservatives (led mainly by the Republican party) have been hiding behind their faith to distract people from the fact that the only God they pray to is the Almighty Dollar. I’m getting goddamn tired of it.
Liberals and progressives need to speak up more and call these people on their hypocrisy. If George Bush wants to talk about Jesus, then hold him to it. If he wants to cut taxes for the rich, ask him “What would Jesus do?”. If he wants to use cluster-bombs and landmines to “shock and awe” Iraqi civilians, make him justify that against “Thou shalt not kill”. If he wants to slash funding for Head Start, ask him if the meek are still “blessed”. Those of us on the left need to take religion back from the GOP and the way to do it is to know how to talk about it without pandering, not name-dropping like Joe Lieberman.
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Which percentages of which voters were Christian? I think maybe another plausible explanation would be poverty. Almost 60 percent of families in Alabama make less than 50,000/year.
Comment by Earnest — September 10, 2003 @ 1:04 pm
A sign outside my local church
“you know that line that says ‘love thy neighbor’ I meant it!”
GOD
Comment by Phil — September 10, 2003 @ 1:13 pm
What does that have to do with it? The Tax law would have raised the minimum income on which you could be taxed, thus saving the incomes of many thousands of poor people, and it owuld have raised significantly the income tax on the wealthiest Alabamns, and also increased propety taxes for huge wealthy landowners. If anything, the biggest beneficiaries of the propsed changes would have been the poor and middle class, who now pay the burden of the tax even though they get the least benefit.
The biggest landowners in the state are Timber and mining interest, who pay almost nothing in property taxes. The current minimu income for income taxes is something like 4500 dollars PER YEAR, per FAMILY OF FOUR. As it stands, the poor in Alabam are already getting royally fucing screwed. The rich actuall pay less as a percentage of their incomes than the poor do in Alabama.
Basically, the “class war” just had another victory. The larger issue was that these tax laws were being argued using biblical traditions – Christians who are so quick to judge others’ morality when it comes to whom they fuck or what they listen to have absolutely no moral fortitude when it comes to actually inconveniencing themselves and helping the least among us. They’re hypocrites and, well, i’m calling it: They are evil, anti democracy traitors who have been suckered into thinking that someone who makes 30,000 dollars year has more in common with a millionaire than with someone making 10,000 doallrs a year. Madness.
Comment by Ross Angeles — September 10, 2003 @ 1:16 pm
As always, please forgive my spelling errors. I know fucking is spelled “Fucking”.
Comment by Ross Angeles — September 10, 2003 @ 1:17 pm
Let them rot in hell!
Yeah, we’ve known they’re hypocrites…We’ve known they talk out of their asses…Now we can prove it.
So what’s going to happen when their is a spate of rapes and robberies and murders committed by released felons. What will they say when the school year is shortened? What will they say when their grandparents die for lack of services, are prematurely kicked out of nursing homes?
Let them rot in the filth they have wrought upon themselves. It serves them right. (Sorry about the vitriol, my wife is forcing me to watch dickhead Shrub and his minions on 60 minutes 2 talk about 9/11) btw…Shrub & Cheney just admitted they ordered the plane in PA to be shot down…
Comment by Josh H — September 10, 2003 @ 5:16 pm
My point was how do you know that 100 percent of the Yea vote didn’t come from Christians? Regardless of who gets a tax cut or tax burden, people who don’t make much money hear the word “tax” and go running. We all know that’s true. After all, I’ve gotten a refund on my taxes every year, which means that I pay basically no income tax and that many other people who have made as little as I have have also get their tax money back (sometimes they get back more than they put in), but if I thought that much more money was going to be taken out of my check, I’d be upset!
It’s easy to simplify this into Christians voting something down, but it’s most likely Christians who vote everything either up or down since the West Coast is the only region in America where Christians don’t form a clear majority of the people (their numbers reach only into the 30′s, percentage wise on the West Coast)
Comment by Earnest — September 11, 2003 @ 8:07 am
E-
Read the rest of the text, and read more sources on this subject. Christian organizations actively campsigned aginst the right thing to do. That’s why greg rightfully calls them Hipocrites.
Besides, you’re from Oklahoma. You know precisely whom greg is talking about – Don’t assume that greg’s comments are out of touch because he happesn to be in CA. I think 22 years spent in Oklahoma qualifies him to have some insight into the voting habits of those who most vocally proclaim their Christianity.
If you can’t see that so called moral majority style christians usually vote counter to the greater good of society, then you’ve ignored everything you should have leanred just being slightly intellectual and from Oklahoma. We all know that there are tons of Christians all over, but we also know that only a certain types tends to excessivly announce their christianty during election cycles, and those people have atendency to vote a certain way.
Comment by Ross Angeles — September 11, 2003 @ 11:11 am
Sorry if I was a little harsh in my post. Like I said before, I was really pissed when I wrote it. I certainly don’t mean that all Christians are guilty of being selfish bastards, but I do think that for all the religious moralizing that happens in Alabama, that Tuesday’s election shows that there are a lot Christian hypocrites.
In July, a poll showed that 77% of Alabamans supported Judge Roy Moore in his battle to keep his Ten Commandments monument in the state judicial building. In another poll from a few years ago, 77% of Alabamans also said that they support prayers in schools being led by teachers. Now I’m not sure exactly where these two 77% overlap with the 68% of the people who voted down Gov. Riley’s tax plan, but those are the people who are greedy assholes who hide behind their religious beliefs to mask their own greed.
As I pointed out this this post, for a state that’s overwhelmingly Christian, the people of Alabama (or at least, 68% of them) are quick to brush aside Jesus’s frequent teachings to care for the poor in order to maintain an unjust tax system. Considering all the moralistic crap that non-Christians have to put up with in this country from the pious masses (especially those in the “Bible belt”), Christians who insist on judging others should at the very least live up to the ideals that they profess to stand behind. As someone who has had my morals questioned numerous times by those prejudging me because I don’t share their superstitions, I reserve the right to call these people on their hypocrisy. Especially when it results in the continual screwing of the poor.
Comment by greg — September 11, 2003 @ 3:20 pm
I’m sorry, but I think you have a ultra-simplist view of Christians. Many people claim to be Christian, that are not.
I know many people whom claim to be athletes (one who trains to compete in sports), but have never trained. In fact the closest they come to physical actived is arguing of their favorite teams.
The title Christian, which was originally an insult meaning that they (the early followers of Christ) were trying to be “little Christs”. The term is now used for anyone who claims to follow Christ.
It is much easier to claim to follow Christ, than to actualy be a “Christian”. American followers of Christ have it easy. The only people that persecute us are faceless names on the net. The early christian church was almost sure death for its followers and still today in the middle east, Christian are put to death.
anyway the point is this, not all those whom claim to be Christians are Christians (I would say that most are not)
Christ said that they (his followers) shall be know for the friut that they bear … meaning you can spot a Christian by how they live their life
Comment by James Legend — September 24, 2003 @ 8:38 pm
Whoops. actived = activity.
Sorry
Comment by James Legend — September 24, 2003 @ 8:41 pm