Tag Archives: Jesus Christ

Sunday sermon: Mitt Romney criticized by Franciscan Friars for comments on the poor

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“Our Christian tradition teaches that we are to treat the poor with dignity and to prioritize the poor in our policies as a society. At a time when millions are struggling financially, it is degrading to talk about the ‘dependency’ of people hurting in this economy, as Gov. Romney did recently.” — The Franciscan Action Network (FAN), a Catholic faith-based advocacy and civic engagement organization, strongly criticizing Mitt Romney’s recent ads and rhetoric regarding welfare programs and welfare recipients. (via: azspot)

I would imagine, but I couldn’t say for sure, that this Christian tradition is similar between Mormons and Catholics. But the political agendas of Romney and Ryan — both of whom profess to be Mormon and Catholic, respectively — are not inspired by any of the teachings of Jesus Christ, as far as I can see.

It seems like Christianity only matters to far-right conservatives when they can use it as a weapon against a political enemy. Sometimes atheists can also be found wearing sheep’s clothing.

Sunday Bible lessons from Ayn Rand

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image: paxamericana

Up until last week, Paul Ryan was Rand’s biggest fanboi:

  • “I just want to speak to you a little bit about Ayn Rand and what she meant to me in my life and [in] the fight we’re engaged here in Congress. I grew up on Ayn Rand, that’s what I tell people.”
  • “I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.”
  • “It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged. People tell me I need to start with The Fountainhead then go to Atlas Shrugged [laughter]. There’s a big debate about that. We go to Fountainhead, but then we move on, and we require Mises and Hayek as well.”
  • “But the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”
  • “And when you look at the twentieth-century experiment with collectivism—that Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did such a good job of articulating the pitfalls of statism and collectivism—you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand.”
  • “It’s so important that we go back to our roots to look at Ayn Rand’s vision, her writings, to see what our girding, under-grounding [sic] principles are.”
  • “Because there is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through Ayn Rand’s writings and works.”

When Jesus said “Go Galt!” and then changed His mind: Paul Ryan’s impressive flip flop

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Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House budget committee, was scheduled yesterday to speak at Georgetown University, a Catholic institution. 90 faculty members and administrators sent him a letter about his budget:

“I am afraid that Chairman Ryan’s budget reflects the values of his favorite philosopher Ayn Rand rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ,” said Father Thomas Reese, a fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown, in a press release Tuesday. “Survival of the fittest may be okay for Social Darwinists but not for followers of the gospel of compassion and love.”

The complaints seemed to resonate with Ryan. On Thursday, he went on record denouncing Ayn Rand, who believed altruism is evil, brushing off his well-documented obsession with her as a teenage romance.

Continue…

Did Paul Ryan JUST NOW discover Ayn Rand was an atheist – and a hateful, selfish, hypocritical one at that? Or did he just now discover what Jesus actually taught? Apparently so. This week, Paul Ryan’s did a big ol’ flip flop on his well-known, well-documented hero worship of Rand, as Catholic organizations, educators, and leaders started calling bullshit on Ryan for claiming to be a Christian AND a huge fan of Ayn Rand.

As one example, here’s what he said in 2005:

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

Ryan also said

“…that virtually every national struggle our society faces can be boiled down to the Randian binary, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill … is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict–individualism versus collectivism.”

But here’s what he said THIS WEEK:

I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

Say hello to the new and improved Paul Ryan! Ayn Rand isn’t politically expedient this week, so no more conflict of interest.

Note also that many tea partiers and rightwing bloggers, who would call themselves religious people, worship at the feet of Ayn Rand and Objectivism for political purposes.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of the most xenophobic, mindlessly hateful bloggers for the right has named her site after Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged.”

So will Paul Ryan’s sudden philosophical conversion change his perspective with regard to his budget proposal? Not at all. He told a Christian tv show that his budget was practically endorsed by the Pope himself, who is down on debt:

James Salt, the executive director of Catholics United, which organized one of the protests outside the hall where Ryan was speaking, told gathered reporters that his group was there because “the dignity of the poor should be at the forefront of our minds.” Taking a dig at Ryan’s attempts to cast his budget as a boon for poor people, Salt noted, “If Paul Ryan knew what poverty was, he wouldn’t be giving this speech.” 

One of Satan’s greatest victories with American evangelicals

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“One of Satan’s greatest victories in the American evangelical church has been to convince the vast majority of us that the “faith” of salvation is about “beliefs” rather than “trust.” Instead of trusting in Christ for their salvation, many evangelicals think they are saved by having the correct opinions on a set of theological topics, such as believing that hell is eternal conscious torment (which is the most important one), that Mary really was a virgin, that Jesus really did miracles, that Jesus’ death on the cross could only have been penal substitution (even if you don’t know what that means), that the world was created 6000 years ago, etc.” – Stop Abusing the Word “Biblical”! (via azspot)

Maybe evangelicals have been so easily “convinced” because of political expediency. They’ve so intertwined their religion with politics and political issues, that there’s no longer any kind of light to be seen between either. Not only is that belief system terrible for our country (and one of the main concepts on which our nation was founded – separation of Church and State), but it doesn’t serve the tenets of Christianity at all.

A Mormon TV Star Calls a Revival: Spirit of the Antichrist

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Apparently the Southern Baptist leadership isn’t as enamored of Beck’s ‘miracles’ and Divine Destiny as are their flocks of teabaggers. They’re not liking Beck’s religious revival at the Lincoln Monument.

RightWingWatch:

Russell Moore is Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and he does not approve of all those self-proclaimed Christians who are disgracing their faith by aligning themselves with the false and dangerous teachings of a Mormon like Glenn Beck:

A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.

The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.

If you’d told me that ten years ago, I would have assumed it was from the pages of an evangelical apocalyptic novel about the end-times. But it’s not. It’s from this week’s headlines. And it is a scandal.

[...] To Jesus, Satan offered power and glory. To us, all he needs offer is celebrity and attention.

Mormonism and Mammonism are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They offer another Lord Jesus than the One offered in the Scriptures and Christian tradition, and another way to approach him. An embrace of these tragic new vehicles for the old Gnostic heresy is unloving to our Mormon friends and secularist neighbors, and to the rest of the watching world. Any “revival” that is possible without the Lord Jesus Christ is a “revival” of a different kind of spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 Jn. 4:1-3).

For the record, in citing 1 John 4:1-3, Moore is saying that Beck’s effort to unleash revival in America is operating under the spirit of the Antichrist:

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