1. Pete Buttigieg Exposes The Christian Right’s Moral Contortions

   Just in time for Easter comes Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg. Married and gay. Catholic turned Episcopalian. A social justice progressive who speaks easily about his faith and God. Just in time for uncomfortable family get-together this Sunday, Buttigieg is driving home the hypocrisy of church-going conservative white Christians, evangelical and Catholic, who still support a president whose policies go against Christianity at almost every turn

   “We have this totally warped idea of what Christianity should be like when it comes to the public sphere, and it’s mostly about exclusion,” said Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, stating “I do think it’s strange knowing that no matter where you are politically, the gospel is so much about inclusion and decency and humility and care for the least among us, that a wealthy, powerful, chest-thumping, self-oriented, philandering figure like Trump can have any credibility at all among religious people”

   As for Vice President Mike Pence (the anti-gay zealot and former governor of Buttigieg’s home state) Buttigieg opined “Either he abandoned his religious principles in order to be part of this campaign and administration. Or he has some very strange sense of destiny, that God somehow wants this in order to get somewhere better, which I think does very little credit to God”

   Buttigieg’s pre-Easter God talk has startled and rattled white conservative Christians, who’ve long claimed to be the nation’s sole exemplars of “family values” like Trump defenders Erick Erickson and Franklin Graham, among others, who have attacked the fresh-faced mayor

   But progressive evangelicals like Sojourners magazine’s Jim Wallis, who’s long argued that Trump supporters can’t be Christ supporters too, sees this Buttigieg moment as a delicious and “wonderful irony”

   “For years the religious right, the media, and parts of the secular left have agreed on one thing: All religion is right-wing, judgmental, and exclusionary. But it never has been Now all of a sudden, there’s a progressive Democrat talking unabashedly about Jesus, something the Trump right can’t now do, since Jesus is all about loving one another, especially the poor and outcast, and Trump is all about money, power, building walls, and putting people in cages”

   Trump’s most notable public reference to a Bible verse from “Two Corinthians” was laughable

   Some younger evangelicals have had enough of rejiggering their religion to fit Trump’s policies. Students and alumni at Indiana’s conservative Taylor University want school administrators to dis-invite Pence, Trump apologist extraordinaire, as their commencement speaker next month saying “Giving him a coveted platform for his political views makes our alumni, faculty, staff, and current students complicit in the Trump-Pence Administration’s policies, which we believe are not consistent with the Christian ethic of love we hold dear”

   When your pro-Trump relatives fresh from church insist they must support him because of abortion, you might ask: How much of that is really about the unborn, and how much is just a righteous excuse for a far less noble agenda? You might refer them to revered Catholic nun Joan Chittister, who’s anti-abortion, but has famously said “Your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth”

   When they tell you they must support Trump because the Bible calls homosexual sex an abomination, you might remind them that the Bible (Leviticus) calls eating shellfish an abomination. Deuteronomy says it’s OK to stone to death disobedient children. And The New Testament condones slavery. So why pick just on gays?

   You’ll likely get nowhere. Still, it’s been satisfying watching Buttigieg expose the Christian right’s moral contortions. It will be satisfying, on Easter of all days, to watch your sanctimonious cousin or brother-in-law try to defend the moral squalor of the cruelest man ever to occupy the White House

   http://bit.ly/2vgw0pO

2. The Terribly Tiny God of MAGA Christians

   I feel sorry for professed Christians who support this President. They have a profound and fundamental spiritual problem: their God is too small

   They passionately worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male and perpetually terrified of Muslims, immigrants, gay children, Special Counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbucks holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines, Science, everything. Their God is so laughably minuscule, so fully neutered of power, so completely devoid of functioning vertebrae that “He” cannot protect them from the encroaching monsters they are certain lurk around every corner to overwhelm them

   MAGA Christians sure put up a brave face. They shower this God with effusive praise on Sunday mornings, they sing with reckless abandon in church services about Him, they brazenly pump out their chests on social media regarding His infinite wisdom, they defiantly declare this God’s staggering might at every opportunity, but their lives tell the truth: They believe He is impotent and scared and ineffectual. You can tell this because they insist on doing all the things that a God-sized God would simply do as part of the gig

   They need to be armed to the teeth at all times because they don’t really believe God will come through to defend them in a pinch—and will always be out-gunned

   They want to change gay couples and transgender teenagers themselves, because they don’t trust God to work within people as He desires. Apparently God keeps making LGBTQ people, which really pisses them off

   They want to stockpile and horde wealth, health insurance, and opportunity, because this is a zero sum game, because the God they claim turned water into wine, and fed thousands with a few fish and some leftover bread, but the MAGA God can’t make enough for everyone

   They are obsessed with building a wall and defending a border and turning away refugees because their God isn’t generous or smart or creative enough to help them figure out how to welcome and care for everyone who requires it

   They want no other religious traditions to have a voice, because their insecure and terribly tiny God is mortally threatened by such things

   MAGA Christians daily existence testifies that their God is a microscopic, myopic coward, who has appointed them to morally police a world He cannot handle or is not equipped to direct and renovate. That’s pretty sad

   In short, their God isn’t a God worth believing in or worshiping, which is why they have to play God while they’re alive. It’s why they are furrowed-browed and white-knuckling their journey here, not content to let Jesus take the wheel for fear he’d drive them outside their gated community and into the hood and ask them to get out and care for the people they’re so used to condemning

   If you’re going to have a God, it may as well be right-sized. The world deserves this

   People deserve a God who is bigger than Franklin Graham’s and Mike Pence’s and Sarah Sander’s and Jerry Falwell’s and the GOP’s God. Their God is small and terrified,and it suspiciously resembles them

   People deserve a God who so loves the world, not a God who thinks America First, whose creation begin without divides and borders and walls, because there is only a single, interdependent community

   People deserve a God who touched the leper and healed the sick and fed the starving and parted the seas and raised the dead, not a quivering idol who builds walls and drafts bathroom bills and social media crusades against migrant families

   People deserve a God who is neither white nor male nor cisgender-heterosexual nor Republican, because any other God isn’t big enough to bear the title or merit any reverence

   MAGA Christians believe in God earnestly, pray to God passionately, serve God with unflinching fervor. The problem is their God is too small, and as long as they are oriented toward such a tiny, useless deity they will continue to be compelled to do for God what they believe God should be doing, but can’t or won’t

   I feel sorry for them and for the world that has to be subjected to their pocket-sized theology when there is an expansive space waiting. I hope and pray that these people soon find a God who is big enough so that they stop living so small

   For their sake and for ours

   http://bit.ly/FakeMAGAtGod

   • You Sir, really do need help for you manic Trump Derangement Syndrome.

3. Pray for the dead and wounded in the Easter Sunday suicide bombings in Sri Lanka. So sad.
   …………………………………………………

   April 21, 2019
   Why the Easter Sunday terrorist attack on Sri Lanka was so evil

   All terrorist attacks are vile, despicable, cowardly and evil, the work of human garbage, but the Easter attack in Sri Lanka that greeted us this Sunday morning, with 207 dead, and nearly 500 injured, had some intensifiers. Perhaps the biggest is a simple one – it’s because Sri Lanka’s churches are so good….

   But what stands out is that it was a attack on the good. Evil rarely attacks other evil, it has a partiality for attacking the good.

   Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/why_the_easter_sunday_terrorist_attack_on_sri_lanka_was_so_evil.html#ixzz5lkPa9VHl
   Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

   • JethroBodine – What a pathetic cut-n-paste that manages to obfuscate the crap at this right-wing blog that seethes with hatred towards Muslims while IGNORING that many of the events of the first paragraph below are describing attacks by RIGHT-WING WHITES

     How about sharing the ENTIRE load of BS from this blog, and noting that NOBODY has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and no officials in Sri Lanka have identified who did the attack

     “Sri Lankan authorities, who imposed a 12-hour curfew on the Indian Ocean island, have not said who staged the attacks and no group has claimed responsibility”

     This is just another way of exploiting tragedy for the right-wing movement
     …………………………………………………
     We have already seen horrific such attacks by Muslim militants on Christians in Pakistan and Egypt, and on Jews in the United States and well beyond the U.S. Muslim terrorists aren’t the only ones going after houses of worship, a stray crazy committed mass murder in mosques in New Zealand, another godless lowlife burned several black churches in the Deep South, and a maniac was caught with a gas can in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on a day after the Notre Dame de Paris inferno, whose origins are still being investigated. There was also the monster who opened fire on the Sutherland Springs church in Texas in 2017, and the murderous attacker who targeted the Pittsburgh synogogue who was a Nazi. There’s something awful about the growing attacks on peoples of faith, as if faith can’t coexist in the modern world full of Internet-obsessed lunatics

     The attacks on the Christians and Jews are notable because they are organized efforts, the work of Muslim militants, and they seem to be intensifying. Sadly, Islam itself is a petri dish for this, because it is a decentralized religion and with a lot of ancient thinking throughout its writings, which enables a lot of discontented miserable people of the modern world who feel like failures otherwise to read it the way they want to read it sometimes murderously

     According to the background reports, the terrorists who attacked this place of worship were likely Islamists

     But what stands out is that it was a attack on the good. Evil rarely attacks other evil, it has a partiality for attacking the good
     …………………………………………………

     Yeah, that last sentence describes right-wing white hatred

     • A top police official in Sri Lanka issued in an advisory 10 days ago about a threat to churches from a radical Islamist group, National Thowheeth Jama’ath.

       • BZZZZZ! Wrong! You, sir, really do need help for your manic LackOfFactsSyndrome. The warning was NOT about a “radical Islamic group”
         …………………………………………………
         The French news agency AFP reported that Sri Lankan Police Chief Pujuth Jayasundara issued an intelligence alert to top officers 10 days earlier warning that suicide bombers may hit “prominent churches”

         According to the report the alert said “A foreign intelligence agency has reported that the NTJ [National Thowheeth Jama’ath] is planning to carry out suicide attacks targeting prominent churches as well as the Indian high commission in Colombo”

         The NTJ was accused of vandalizing Buddhist statues last year but has never carried out any terrorist acts remotely as murderous and sophisticated as the coordinated bombings on Sunday

         NTJ DOES NOT FIGURE ON THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S LIST OF MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS

         Sri Lanka also has a long history of violence by the former separatist organization Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), WHICH WAS NOT A MUSLIM ORGANIZATION AT ALL, but whose “Black Tigers” were some of the first suicide bombers on the world scene

         http://bit.ly/2vgTGdG

4. Been busy hiding Easter Eggs and watching shar pie find them today CCO and just noticed yesterdays “LEFT JAB RIGHT JAB” is missing.

   No biggie, but was curious if shar pie responded to my last post.

   I asked him that today but he had so many Easter Eggs in his mouth he looked like a chipmunk with 47 acorns in his mouth having to walk backwards.

   ?….

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