Pastors and Republicans Show Their Hate and Hypocrisy

Many Republicans and more than a few fundamentalist pastors are showing the hate, lies and hypocrisy that under gird their poisonous beliefs.  Additional pastors have applauded the slaughter of gays in Orlando and foul hypocrites like Ted Cruz ignore their own role in creating the toxic, discriminatory atmosphere in which LGBT Americans continue to live.  Indeed, as the Sacramento CBS affiliate reports, a Baptist pastor's sermon on Sunday morning praised the deaths of the Orlando victims:

A Sacramento Baptist preacher’s sermon praising attack on an Orlando nightclub that killed 50 people has the local LGBT community outraged.

Recordings of the sermon by Pastor Roger Jimenez surfaced under the Verity Baptist Church’s YouTube account.

“Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?” he said in the sermon. “Um no, I think that’s great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight.”

The remarks were delivered on Sunday morning, hours after the attack happened.

Jimenez’s sermon went on to call for even more death at the hands of the government.  “If we lived in a righteous government, they should round them all up and put them up against a firing wall, and blow their brains out,” Jimenez said in the sermon.

While Christian apologists will fume and say that Jimenez's remarks do not define Christianity, sadly they do.  Through the centuries Christianity has left a trail of death and destruction in its wake.

On the political front, in addition to Donald Trump, other Republicans have jumped on the "blame the Muslims" bandwagon even as a more bizarre portrait of the Orlando shooter is emerging.  Moreover, some of this self-prostituting Republicans ignore their own roll in fanning the flames of homophobia and encouraging anti-LGBT violence.  Ted Cruz perhaps best personifies this as Joe Jervis lays out:

Last fall Ted Cruz stood smiling on the stage with a Christian pastor who had just called for exterminating homosexuals in the name of White Jesus. But somehow that scandal seems to have slipped his feeble mind. From his Facebook page:

For all the Democrats who are loud champions of the gay and lesbian community whenever there is a culture battle waging, now is the opportunity to speak out against an ideology that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians. ISIS and the theocracy in Iran (supported with American taxpayer dollars) regularly murder homosexuals, throwing them from buildings and burying them under rocks. This is wrong, it is evil, and we must all stand against it. Every human being has a right to live according to his or her faith and conscience, and nobody has a right to murder someone who doesn’t share their faith or sexual orientation. If you’re a Democratic politician and you really want to stand for LGBT, show real courage and stand up against the vicious ideology that has targeted our fellow Americans for murder.

Take it away, Right Wing Watch:

We wonder why Cruz himself didn’t display such heroism when he spoke at a conference late last year where the main speaker, Kevin Swanson, a long-time and notorious advocate of the government instituting the death penalty for gay people, said repeatedly on stage that the Bible calls for gays and lesbians to be put to death and argued that America should introduce capital punishment against unrepentant homosexuals once society is moved in that direction.

That conference was also attended by Cruz’s father and his then-rivals Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal.

The summit, called the National Religious Liberties Conference, even distributed literature calling for the death penalty for gay people and others, mentioning stoning and throwing people off cliffs as possible forms of executions.

And yet now Ted Cruz has the gall to lecture liberals about the importance of showing “real courage” in the face of those who want to put gays to death.

Why Fundamentalist Christians Fear Knowledge and Intellectualism

I've said before that for fundamentalist Christians - and I would extend this to Islamic fundamentalists as well - the most terrifying prospect is having to think for oneself and face the fact that modern scientific knowledge is proving many dearly held beliefs to be false.  A prime example is the human genome project proof that Adam and Eve never existed as historic figures.  From that discovery, the entire Christian story line of the Fall and Christ redemption begins to come crashing to the ground.  For those with what I see as almost a form of mental illness that demands certainty and the ability to "check off the boxes" to confirm one's goodness or assurance of going to "heaven" knowledge and intellectualism threaten the entire artificial  world in which they live.   A piece in Patheos looks at the terror knowledge and intellectualism strikes in fundamentalists.  Here are highlights:

It is much easier to believe you understand who you are and to be stable when your core belief system is stable. For folks like liberals and progressives this is a little more difficult because the walls around our core beliefs are a little less rigid and more willing to flex as new information presents itself. Which means that we, more frequently than fundamentalists, are reshaping our understanding of who we are and how we relate to society, even if in small ways.

This just isn’t true for a fundamentalist Christians. The protective walls around their core beliefs are tall and rigid – and with good reason. We have to keep in mind, these core beliefs are so much more than ideas or ideals, they are identification and identity. Who we understand ourselves to be is formed around them. When you challenge a specific belief you are also, in small part, challenging the person’s understanding of who they are.

For fundamentalist Christians, it is even more complicated than just that. In both direct and subtle ways, they believe their salvation, at least in part, is dependent upon being correct on issues of faith.

Intellectualism invites the constant assessment of the “correctness” of a person’s belief system. That’s dangerous ground for a fundamentalist Christian. When you confront them on a particular belief you are not only confronting them on an idea that they have held to more rigidly for a longer time than most other folks but you are confronting the very core of who they understand themselves to be. For them, it is those core beliefs upon which their salvation hangs in the balance, at least in part. Questioning it doesn’t just question the thought but, for them, it puts into question a lifetime of holding on tightly to that thought.

When you take all of that into consideration, it’s really not surprise that most fundamentalist Christians react negatively to or avoid all together any intellectual questioning of their core belief systems.

It's a sad form of existence in my view, but that's precisely what demagogues in the pulpits and your Muslim imam  - and bitter old Catholic cardinals - seek to maintain.  Religion remains the source of so much misery in the world.  Fundamentalists of all faiths are the true slaves and, in my view, knowingly or unknowingly, the agents of evil.