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Your idea that a Clinton administration would have done better is a baseless assertion. The governors and state legislatures have more power and look at the worse hit states. New Jersey Dem Governor and Dem legislature, New York Dem Governor and Dem legislature, Massachusetts Republican Governor and Dem supermajorities in legislature, Connecticut Dem governor and Dem legislature. What magic does the Democrat party have at the federal level that is reversed at the state level?
National mask mandates are not constitutional. States have power to mandate masks. -
I agree, Obama was a lousy president.
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As Americans we are supposed to stand by and watch religious freedom being taken away and say nothing? Anyone who loves their country will not stand idly by while the freedoms that make it great are eroded.
I believe this is the truth of the matter. When this was first imagined, it was with the assumption that he spoke freely whenever he was not in a press conference. Based on how I understand he refers to Pence I made assumptions.
1a. First, many other parts of the world did do better. Why would you say it’s a baseless assertion that we couldn’t? Is America inferior to freakin’ Africa nowadays? Is that what ‘American exceptionalism’ now means? Good grief.
1b. And even if we couldn’t have done better, does that mean we shouldn’t have fucking tried?? Trump sat around all year with his thumb up his ass when he wasn’t golfing, tweeting, or calling in to Fox and Friends. That was our national response.
It’s a weird response to say we shouldn’t have done any more than we did because we don’t know if it could have done any good. Of course we should have pulled out all the stops to try to save hundreds of thousands of lives, at least if you believe in the sanctity of life.
Like I said, the “pro-lifers” showed their true colors. I’d be ROFLOL if the consequences weren’t so awful.
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Thank you for agreeing with me on this point. Not that I see how you couldn’t: the Bible is full of stories of prophets (and ordinary people as well) telling their own rulers where they were going astray. The evangelical failure to do so in the case of Trump is a repudiation of the things they claim to believe.
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As a Christian in America, I’m unaware of any religious freedoms I’ve lost during the half-century since I found the Lord. Please enlighten me.
I mean, I suppose some alleged Christians have lost the ‘right’ to make other people listen to their prayers in school - but why should I want that right? Does my witness need government aid? Perish the thought! Or the ‘right’ to prevent gays from having same-sex marriages, or the ‘right’ to force trans persons to adhere to the gender that’s on their birth certificate? Why on earth would I want these rights? I’m a Christian, not a fucking monster.
Well it would be hard to prove a theoretical compared to the reality we had to endure, but some things are easy to prove.
First he knew how deadly and contagious it was and he lied about it. He did step up production of PPE, but only because he had done nothing since taking office even though he was given the best information available from the previous administration.
The states that were hit hardest is where people traveled from EUROPE (especially Italy) landed in the United States. Even though the first cases of this virus were discovered in China – most cases in the US came from Europe and that is just a fact. So where the greatest number of infected people was bound to be ground zero for us — Trump did nothing but deny it existed or that it was dangerous.
While it might have been constitutionally feasible for Clinton to MANDATE masks, if the president had encouraged mask wearing (and who knows, maybe, just maybe she would not have discarded to warnings of those with the most experience and we might have had a stockpile of masks instead of a shortage) instead of discouraging mask wearing, it might have made a difference (of hundreds of thousands of lives). Of course I have no doubt that you Trump supporters would persecute Hillary Clinton for Thirty-Thousand or Fifty-Thousand deaths far more vigorously than you bother to even mention the Quarter of a Million deaths on Trump’s watch.
(I do admit everyone was discouraging mask hording during the earliest days of the pandemic because people were hording toilet paper and if they horded masks at that rate there would not have been any for healthcare workers. That is one thing Trump got right, but Clinton would have been more likely to have more PPE stocks because she was smart enough to know sometimes shit does happen.)
But mostly, she would not have held super-spreader events. She would not have infected a hundred Secret Service Officers, she would have protected herself and her staff better and never helicoptered to Walter Reed. But if she did, she would not have gone on a joy ride and risked infecting more Secret Service Agents as well as those hospital workers who were tasked with wheeling him down to the vehicle and put his fat ass in the vehicle.
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-trump-secret-service-20201113-2vpn2jjjb5f7hibxgykuto5jhq-story.html?outputType=amp
It is hard to imagine anyone else behaving with so much callousness toward those assigned to help and protect him. I can’t wait for that asshole to be out on his ass ad I pity those of you who support him because it demonstrates your inability to have independent thought, or think critically, or both.
Being a Trump supporter makes this sentiment kind of meaningless. No one can say for sure that any portion of your contempt for Obama might be based in racism or your own prejudicial views, but by the company you keep it also makes it impossible to say racism plays no role whatsoever.
I m not calling you a racist. What I am saying is lots and lots of folks who sound like you are racists. In my circle, oddly, they are the most vocally adamant they are not racist. Of course since I have known them for decades I can make judgments about them. Just something to think about.
I was intending to bow out again for a day or so, but:
So I received the following message in an e-mail with the subject line Religious Freedom, from the same person who sent me the video I linked above:
If I lose my religious freedom as a result of how you voted, I am never speaking to you again in my life.
What is the Trump campaign telling these people? Does anyone believe Joe and Kamala are hell bent on outlawing Christianity as they impose Socialism and/or Communism upon the United States? Is there even the smallest chance any American believes the Democrats (or Biden and Harris specifically) intend to take ANY religious freedoms from citizens?
You have to understand what “religious freedom” means TO THEM. It means being allowed to treat non-Christians like shit. It means being able to treat LGBTQ like shit. It means being allowed to treat women like shit. This is their version of Christianity and they believe God meant the USA to be under their thumbs.
I find this aspect of your world view somewhat disturbing. As Terry Pratchett once had one of his characters say, “Sin is treating people as things.”
True, this is from one of the Books of Terry, rather than from Scripture, but so what? It’s a direct (and IMHO clarifying) corollary of “Love your neighbor as yourself” which most certainly IS in Scripture; it’s one Jesus’ two Great Commandments. It’s a direct corollary because treating your neighbor as a thing is not loving your neighbor.
Yes, our commercial world puts us in many transactional situations where we have little opportunity to do better than treat a person as a thing. But this is a consequence of the fallenness of our world, not something for Christians to affirm as the proper order of things.
I will say this for puddleglum, he is standing completely alone and he is defending his faith fairly and reasonably. I disagree with many of his stands, but they are more level headed than those of many of my circle of friends and family. As I shared above, at least one from my circle believes Biden and Harris are going to outlaw Christianity in some way.
As the only openly Evangelical in the thread puddleglum is perhaps being called upon to answer for the entire population and I know that I have assigned hurt or anger caused by my personal circle toward him. I have been critical and unfair toward him because of disagreements with others not participating in this thread. (I have even typed out full replies, then glanced over them and pulled them back and cancelled them because they were not fair to him.
I am not saying anyone except me has been guilty of this, but I want to remind everyone to treat him with dignity and respect as he deserves, and to discuss political stands and beliefs but never condemn the person (I have been guilty of that myself – I hope I caught myself before I posted any of them but I cannot be sure). I also admire puddleglum for standing true despite opposition, and doing it alone. Don’t we have other believers in this community who could participate? I mean 72 Million people voted for Trump, isn’t there anyone else willing to stand with him?
As far as the thread topic goes, puddleglum has stipulated that Trump is often immoral and does not live a spotless life and that Biden’s faith seems to be sincere. We have managed to find plenty of other stuff to disagree about, but he is far more fair and open minded than my personal circle of believers.
I agree with you, but I can see why the transactional view appeals to believers specifically in the Evangelical sect of things. That is even how they treat Grace itself. I dated this full grown woman who was a pastor’s kid and had graduated from a Bible College (perhaps by the time she matriculated it was called a Christian College) who got saved every Sunday of her adult life. She lived a sinful life of self indulgence but every Sunday she was on her knees giving her life to Jesus (I will politely not mention what she did while on her knees during Saturday nights).
That was one of the reasons I moved back to liturgical circles in more Orthodox faiths, because they were not so transactional. Salvation was (and is) so much more there than saying the sinners prayer or knowing the “four spiritual laws”. By comparison, orthodox salvation was akin to spending your life building an oil refinery to provide gasoline or your car; evangelicals (even concerning their own salvation) treated fueling their spiritual tank like bopping down to any service station for a fill up - - and it didn’t matter how much gas you burned during the week, a quick prayer of repentance could fuel you up enough to get to Sunday for a complete fill-up.
That is not a perfect analogy, but for some it is more accurate than inaccurate. I still enjoy liturgical church services because I like the devotion to morality (by contrast, most Evangelical services seem primarily concerned by the salvation stand of each attending person). I am saying this poorly, but due to transactional considerations often the focus of Evangelical services can be: “Does everyone have their ticket of admittance? Is everyone here going to heaven?” While Orthodox services are more of the: “How do the moral and righteous in the Lord live their lives to best Glorify God our Father, Lord, and Holy Spirit?” (The full trinity must be mentioned each and every time deity mentioned in those circles!)
I once asked an Evangelical Pastor why we did not dive into the meat of scripture and why each and every sermon was about “getting saved”? He told me when EVERYONE in the congregation gets saved, then we will move on to deeper matters. Even those who were more holy and righteous than the woman I mentioned above were primarily concerned with how your score card was filled out. Salvation was and still is the entire focus and often in those churches it is a very transactional experience. I had forgotten how much that was the focus until I had dinner with a very devout couple late last year or early this year (before the pandemic was a serious consideration). There was a long portion of the dinner conversation devoted to if any who had a tattoo could be saved and go to heaven. There was much discussion about if the individual was raised in a church (and had been subjected to Leviticus) or not and what details applied to the transaction of being saved. (Guess whose daughter got a tattoo on Fall Break?)
Even their efforts at evangelism are transactional. It is all about getting “the harvest” to say the sinners prayer. Once you do that you have full rights and privileges and you are brought into the fold and made into a clone of the rest of the congregation (as Steve Taylor mentions in his song of the same name). I cannot tell you the number of times I have been at a funeral where some well meaning Evangelical will stand up and say something to the effect of: “Rudy might have been living a life the good Lord would not approve of, but in 2004 I gave him a ride home after his car had been impounded and he admitted he was a sinner and invited the Lord into his heart – so we may all have hope we will see him again in the afterlife!” Or maybe this: “Two years ago after Clara attended the ladies brunch with me, on the drive home she said the sinners prayer and I expect to see her in heaven when we all get there.”
The transactional foundation of evangelism has been a part of every training I have ever witnessed in a Fundamentalist or Evangelical church. Those “Evangelism Training” sessions sounded just like a seminar on closing a sale. Stuff like- get them to agree with these four statements beforehand and logically they HAVE to agree to say the sinner’s prayer. Or, tell them even if they don’t fully believe to say the prayer ‘just in case’. The transactional nature of even salvation is baked into the thing in these circles. Sometime ago I was involved in this little ministry that build “homes” (barely sheds) for families in Mexico. Some outsiders were kind of surprised when they went along. Are these members of your faith? Do they attend church regularly? They were surprised when I said I didn’t know them personally but basically they went and put their names on a list at the mission. A very common question was: “Why do you build this home for them if they have not converted?” The simple answer: “To show them God’s love” seemed to have been never considered. Their assumed position seemed to be – convert and then we will build you a shack to live in. Ours was more, here is a shack to live in so you can see this might be something you want to be a part of. (Still mildly transactional but not focused on closing the deal exactly.)
I have made zero headway in explaining they are used to immense privilege and when asked to be treated fairly as all other groups are treated they literally can not comprehend this concept.
One woman of my acquaintance from a Fundamentalist, Evangelical background insisted for an entire Saturday that The United States was founded as a Christian Nation and Christianity is the foundation of the nation by any measure. I was immediately buried in websites and history lessons given in Sunday Schools. No amount of facts or documents were ever going to sway her. She insisted that since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock every white man and woman who has come to the Western Hemisphere has come for the religious freedom of praising the Christian God.
The very next day I got two texts and an e-mail saying she had been wrong and America was never a Christian nation (but it for damn sure was built on Christian ideals!!). My response was: “Hummm, let me guess what the sermon was about in your church this morning.”
When someone is so sure they are right – and they are right by the very authority of the Creator of life, well they tend to be stubborn and inflexible. But then they take it a step further by viewing it like --“Just convert and live as I desire so I can love you and accept you.” They just seem completely unable to view things in any other manner, “bless their souls”. (Could not resist the temptation to throw that slight back in their face.)
I am openly evangelical as well, although there are some things I disagree with in that group.
One reason some Christians (including evangelicals) support Trump, IMHO, is that one unfortunate by-product of faith is that some people tend to accept the false with the true, all in the name of faith or being an easily-believing person. So they believe in God’s existence, the Bible, etc…but also swallow things like Qanon. Because the same open, good, appropriate faith that leads them to God can also carry with it a side helping of gullibility. They don’t just eat the fish but spit out the bones, so to speak.
Yeah, really? The only thing missing is the privilege of expecting the Christian way to be everyone’s norm, and that now if you stand up and say “homosexuality is the way of Satan and I don’t want my children to hear it’s OK” you will get social pushback.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be that way. Having faith in Christ doesn’t mean you have to believe every ridiculous idea that has currency on the right side of the political spectrum. (Or the left side, for that matter, but that’s not where these people are at.) There’s no reason why Christians can’t go through life with a healthy skepticism, even with respect to matters of faith itself. “Test the spirits,” fercryinoutloud.
I think evangelical culture has long inculcated a mindset where you don’t question Pastor, which makes life considerably easier for Pastor. And when evangelicalism became political back in the late 1970s, it extended to “don’t question leaders on our side, and don’t believe anyone from the other side” which sets evangelicals up for being fleeced by any scam artist who seems to have bona fides as being one of their tribe.
Hence all the conspiracy theories my wife’s evangelical relatives post on Facebook: the fleecing here is intellectual, but it’s just as real. They duckspeak all the latest claptrap they’ve gotten from somewhere in the right-wing universe, reinforcing each others’ belief in it.
(The worst of it is, these are people that, before this year, I by and large liked and respected. Now I’m just kinda stunned. I know I’ll never look at them the same way again, and being around them again is going to be very strange, once this pandemic is over and we can travel again. It’s much harder on my wife, because these people are her extended family, and it’s tearing her apart to hear all this garbage coming from them.)
I agree. We have the harmless-as-doves thing down but not wise-as-serpents part.
Very well said!
American Evangelicals tend to also be big into Biblical Literalism, often stated in terms of that they must unconditionally accept every single line as literally true and objectively factual …or else, it is implied. So it is not too hard to map that to a rejection of giving a critical reading/listening to what is being presented as “the Godly side”.
Another factor to consider is that Christianity often requires reconciling seemingly contradictory, almost-impossible-to-reconcile things at the same time.
You have to believe that God is a God of love…who also lets horrific atrocities happen without intervening (every day, people are murdered, innocent people are found guilty), or in fact even commanded genocide in Scripture, etc.
You have to believe that Christianity is a religion of freedom and “not about rules,” while also having to obey dozens of different rules and regulations, even in the New Testament; numerous do’s and don’t’s.
You have to accept countless things that feel like the opposite of reality.
(I am not saying these are contradictory, only that they seem contradictory.)
When someone is accustomed to reconciling these things and swallowing the cognitive dissonance, a by-product of that may be that they can swallow the contradiction of Trump - supporting a man who exhibits numerous un-Christian behaviors, says many un-Christian things. Because you have already had to reconcile many contradictions for many years.
Good point, it is not even enough to be inerrant and infallible, it must also be literal! I had a dear aunt who was such a literalist that she would tell people when they got the sniffles that the Bible addressed that: “All through the Bible are verses that say ‘it came to pass’, so just wait it out – it came to pass.” I swear she did know the King James version was not the original language, but she believed the odd phraseology for our era was meant to be a balm for the afflicted.
You both have a very good point. Last night I was reading chapter three of the book I have been recommending here from the beginning, Sarah Posner’s UNHOLY. She mentions two guys who tried to keep the dissonance to a minimum and were basically shouted down by Robert Jerffress and Paula White; Russel Moore who served as the Southern Baptist Convention’s ‘Washington Policy Office’, and Michael Gerson who worked as a speech writer George W. Bush and now is a columnist for The Washington Post.
They both tried to tamp down racism and encouraged embracing immigrants as also created in God’s image. Moore tried to get Southern Baptist’s to abandon the Confederate flag and to focus on the Gospel more than “values”. He described Trump’s version of Christianity as “Elmer Gantry meets Yosemite Sam”, and encouraged Christian voters to pick almost any other Republican to support (two of whom were raised by ministers). Obviously Trump prevailed and the worst parts of Southern Christianity were exported to whole nation according to Moore.
Even as an atheist I can see the good sense of unshakable faith in God. There is nothing in me that understands unshakable faith in Donald Trump.
Last thing, speaking of infallible and inerrant – did either of you watch any of the video I linked above? Just last night I was treated to rousing chorus of Amir Tsarfati is so knowledgeable and tells it like is!! I wanted to ask if they had watched any of it before they sent it to me. But I didn’t.
Thank you for your comments and for helping me understand how some remain in the faith and remain Trump supporters.
Just like me to do all that set-up then forget the main point.
The author mentions that Southern Baptist Pastor and writer Todd Littleton told her Moore was out of step with Evangelicals and that Trump and Ted Cruz were tapping into evangelical fears of immigration and Islam. He then said: “It’s an ironic move for a Christian person to be motivated by fear when the very sacred text they say they believe actually says ‘love casts out fear’”. Later he went on to say evangelical believers tend to have an apocalyptic vision of everything. I do get the apocalyptic view of every single event – I see them doing that every day. Honestly, I think half of them WANT the world to end. (And as far as I can see, Trump is doing his best to end it!)