re: My leftist pastor "friend of a friend" has gone full retard

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Anti-abortion Christians

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A wolf in sheep clothing.

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Anti-abortion Christians are exploding with self-righteous indignation, and they need to be knocked down a couple of pegs There are more issues involved in being a Christian than abortion. It is, as Stanley Hauerwas has noted, a complex subject. And the arguments on both sides have devolved into people living in glass houses throwing huge rocks at one another. Abortion has not always been the defining issue for evangelical Christians. The movement is more rooted in racism than anti-abortionism. But they discovered anti-abortion wins votes and racism not so much. The anti-abortion preachers attempt to claim they sit at the right hand of God or at least “on Moses” seat, but that is a mighty big presumption on their part. They are not the definers of what constitutes a Christian. No wonder Jesus told his disciples that such groups “do not practice what they teach.” These one-issue Christians pretend they are righteous and holy because they oppose abortion. But how many of them support capital punishment? They pass laws to “tie up heavy burdens” for women, “hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others.” They act as if they are not participants in our culture of violence. They forget they are citizens of a nation which has used its powerful bombs to kill children around the world. They turn a blind eye to the 38,000,000 people living in poverty in America. You would think they never heard Jesus say, “Blessed are the poor.” They have no interest in alleviating the number of children who die every year in America from malnutrition and inadequate health care. These are all Christian issues. Anti-abortion preachers don’t have a leg to stand on by insisting a person isn’t a Christian if they are opposed to a ban on abortion. For example, the most dangerous ecological problem facing our planet is global warming. The anti-abortion crowd consists primarily of climate deniers. The scientists have demonstrated the increasing danger of global warming, a danger so great the entire human species is now on the endangered species list. If you tell me that being anti-abortion makes you Christian and taking action on global warming makes me not a Christian, then I dissent with every fiber in my being. I would say you are doing your anti-abortion protests in public “to be seen by others.” Your insidious attempt to reduce all political decisions to the single issue of abortion means “you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven.” “Woe to you, hypocrites! For you pass laws to prohibit women from crossing state lines to receive an abortion and you criminalize friends who help women cross state lines. You “cross land and seas to prevent every possible abortion, and you convince a secular culture Christians are heartless and cold. You swear you are the only true Christians. Woe to you hypocrites. “For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” All across our nation, there are millions of progressive Christians working for, organizing for, voting for justice and mercy. You scream “anti-abortion” while you “have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, and mercy and faith.” I have found no more apt description of the anti-abortion insistence that everyone else is not a true Christian than these words of Jesus: “You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!” And no one is fooled by your anti-abortion crusade. Even if somehow you managed to make all abortions illegal in the entire nation, you would not be satisfied. Look at you. You are a big mess of confusion. You back a candidate for president and vice-president who are turning rhetorical cartwheels to be pro-choice but not as pro-choice as Kamala Harris. You are losing elections about abortion in state after state. And your response is to be even more shrill in your insistence that your opponents are not Christian. I think your claims of righteousness and holiness are too exaggerated and inside you “are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.” You forget we have seen your kind before. You have a history of invading nations and imposing your iron-clad will and your disgusting politics on everyone. You are the tribe that killed the Anabaptists and the Baptists in England and Europe. You are the tribe that threw Roger Williams into a winter wilderness and left him as good as dead. You are the tribe of the Crusades and the Inquisition. In your current pompous state, you vigorously oppose the social gospel - the politics of Jesus. You quote Matthew 25 with pride, but you are not willing to lift a finger or cast a vote to enable our government to provide a social safety net that invests more in saving the poor than it does in bombing other nations. We knew you the first day you set foot on our shores. And we dare you have the audacity to claim you have the only true faith. Aside from abortion, look at all the theological, ethical, and social issues dividing Christians. Denominations can’t manage to stay together over issues of sexuality. What a mess! And you make it worse by pretending you have ascended to the hill of God and taken your rightful place at the right hand of God. Well, you are now expelled from your self-exalted chair. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” I have seen the judgement throne of God and there’ only one occupant in the chair at the right hand of God – Jesus Christ our Lord. He is the one who has the keys to death and hell. Not you anti-abortionists claiming to rule the nation. Your self-righteousness stinks to the high heavens. It’s as if you have become high church performers and are swinging the vials of incense back and forth across the nation as toxic fumes of arrogance and indignation. “You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”

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