We saw Rick Perry misuse scripture the other day to justify Republican mistreatment of the poor. But a passing mention by Jesus in Mark 14:7 that “For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you will you may do them good: but me you have not always” does not make Jesus’ exaltation of the poor and condemnation of the rich magically go away.
We can debate whether or not Perry actually read the Bible or not, and if he did, whether he understood Jesus’ words, or whether he just flat out lied about what Jesus said. What matters is that whatever the reason, Perry has exposed himself as the fake Christian he is. You can’t follow Jesus if you don’t do what Jesus told you to do.
Then there is Michele Bachmann (R-MN), going out with the same display of ignorance she showed when she come into the House by saying that the Speaker of the House is under the authority of Moses, something that comes up neither in the Bible nor in the Constitution. Moses of all people!
Check it out. Seeing is believing:
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How does THAT work exactly, you ask? Who knows? I know it’s not in the United States Constitution. What I DO know is that American democracy is founded upon the principle that political power derives from the authority of the people, which means that the guy the speaker actually works for is us – the American people. Not some guy thousands of years dead if he ever even existed.
Moses has already become a Founding Father, somehow, and now he has authority over the U.S. House of Representatives. Is he alive suddenly too, after thousands of years? Or is he somehow indistinguishable from YHWH?
She told her fellow shills, “we would hold the power of the purse, we would hold the nation’s credit card, and it would be up to us to decide what we spent money on, and what we didn’t.”
That’s scary as hell. But what does it have to do with Moses?
“We are the lawgivers, because the people of this country have given us the privilege of the election certificate to make the laws. We must never forget that it is by the consent of the governed that we rule and we decide our laws.”
From the sounds of it, Moses was some kind of banker, and that’s maybe why an angry Pharaoh chased him into the Red Sea. If Moses did to Egypt what our bankers did to us in 2008, I can’t say I blame Ramesses. (Not that Ramesses was actually Pharaoh at the time all this was going down – humorous explanation here .)
And as I look about this chamber, we are ringed with the silhouettes of lawgivers throughout history. And yet only one lawgiver has the distinction of not having a silhouette, but having the full face be revealed by the artist. That lawgiver is Moses. Moses is directly above the double doors that lead into the centermost part of this chamber, and in the face of Moses, his eyes look straight upon not only our nation’s motto, ‘In God We Trust,’ but Moses’ face looks full on into the face of the Speaker of the House. Daily, the Speaker of the House as he stands up in his authority and in his podium recognizes that he is a man under authority, just as Moses was a man under authority.
Because you see, Mr. Speaker, Moses is given for the full honor of the greatest lawgiver in this chamber, because he was chosen by the God that we trust to be entrusted with the basis of all law. The ‘basis of all law’ as was written by Blackstone, the famous English jurist, was the Ten Commandments, that were given by none other than the God we trust on Mount Sinai.
How is it that the Ten Commandments are the basis for all law when they are not the oldest law code in human history? How can they be the basis for all law when the Egyptians, who supposedly held the Jews captive, had their own laws while they did so?
Bachmann doesn’t know, she doesn’t care. She probably hasn’t read the Bible in the first place, and if she did, like Perry, did not understand it in the second:
We know those laws, those laws are the fundamental laws of mankind, and here in the United States, the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses is the very foundation of the law that has given happiness and the rise of the greatest prosperity that any nation has known before.
Mr. Speaker, it could be no coincidence that this nation, knowing and enjoying the heights of such great happiness and such great prosperity, that it could be built upon that foundation of the Ten Commandments and of the law given by the God in whom we trust.
So God gave humanity Moses so the US could be rich. How that works when biblical law is not the foundation of U.S. law is, again, anyone’s guess.
The Republican base and the Religious Right’s base eat this stuff up, and I can only assume that is because they too, have failed to read their Bibles. I mean, I get why they dig Moses: he invented the true/false distinction in religion and without that you don’t have a Religious Right. But Founding Father? Really? And now some über-guardian of the House?
I’m sorry, I just have to throw this out here again:
Restore the Bible as America's "principle" Textbook
http://t.co/K86ywp8Frc
— David Lane (@GDavidLane) October 10, 2014
WHY? Oh yeah, because NOBODY reads textbooks. Which explains a lot.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
