True Religion Is The Top Requirement.
Lois: “The world doesn’t need a savior.”
Superman: “Everyday I hear people crying for one.”
Savior Obama?
A SAVIOR IS A PERSON who saves someone or something— especially a country or a cause— from danger. Such a person may come to be regarded with the veneration of a religious figure, like the Savior in Christianity, God or Jesus Christ.
So just how bad must things be before we officially recognize the services of a qualified savior are not just desirable, but required to solve our enormous list of problems?
Three Christians are vying to assure us— or not— that they are the Christian leader we are looking for; each of them publicly committed to the core values and principles taught by Christ himself.
These three Christian candidates however, each reflect different traditions of American Christianity, each adhering to a slightly different doctrine held to be relatively true over all others. We might safely assume all three presumably agree that Jesus is their “Savior,” the source of not only their personal salvation, but also of their Christian values. This might indicate at least, some understanding of the necessity of the role in human social dynamics, but may also do nothing to help them actually fill such er, sandals.
Let’s be clear: NO sane person wants a religious savior as POTUS. The ongoing catastrophe hatched by the comparatively modest breach of the wall between church and state by the religious right with the Bushite collaborators, should shiver the cockles of the most rabid liberal or flaming conservative.
What we’re looking for is a leader who can perform as a savior while not actually thinking they are a savior. But how could the nation not benefit from a Christian president who actually lived the values of the true Savior they each claim to emulate? Especially one who recognizes the absurdity of saying men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates; who understands our laws are a codification of morality; and that one’s core religious values must be translated into universal— not religion-specific— values.
Despite one or two pretenders, no one in our political history has inspired more feelings of savior-tude than Barack Obama, who is being both praised and ridiculed for appealing to our innate spiritual hunger for a savior, and not, we must presume, simply because the republicans have fucked things up with unprecedented alacrity and malfeasance. Maybe it’s simply time we had one.
McSavior?
John McCain is the sometimes Episcopalian, sometimes Baptist Christian, who got religion the old fashion way— by praying in a situation where his ass was on the line, and frankly, among the most exciting come-to-Jesus moment one may have, I think, but oddly, not one that always necessarily rises above an intellectual emotional conversion to the lofty plateau of a spiritual one.
Jesus is certainly aware of McCain’s suffering in Vietnam, extending from the moment he was hauled out of Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi, by a dozen or so angry young men to become the captive of the very men, women, and children he had been dropping napalm on a few minutes earlier, and yet, he still draws breath.
And before that, the Lord heard McCain when he said, “Now that I’ve seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.”
Jesus is aware that, despite McCain’s awakening to the fact the jellied gasoline he’d been dropping on human beings was not unlike “that stuff” that burned 138 of his crewmen to death and nearly him too, when a rocket errantly fired on the deck of the Forrestal, that he continued to do it anyway.
And the Creator of us all heard McCain when he sang “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”
And his professed Master and Savior took note of him when he shew his guidance for the Christian nation he would lead by opining: “There will be more wars.”
And Jesus said, “Love your enemies.”
Not exactly top drawer savior material. Next.
Saviorette Clinton?
Hillary Clinton, a Methodist early on, tends to talk about God in the abstract, ever careful to not sound so committed to religion as to jar secular America fully awake to her supposed faith in a being higher in stature than herself. But Jesus was most assuredly awake when she said, “I will fight against the division politics of revenge and retribution. If you put me to work for you, I will work to lift people up, not put them down.”
And Jesus was next to the podium when she said, “Shame on you Barack Obama, shame on you!”
And when she said, “We have a lot of kids who don’t know what work means. They think work is a four-letter word.”
And some years ago, “I’m not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president.”
And, “If I didn’t kick his [Bill’s] ass every day, he wouldn’t be worth anything.”
And Jesus knows she speaks the truth when she revealed, “I have to confess that it’s crossed my mind that you could not be a Republican and a Christian.”
And Jesus said, “Love one another.”
Add to that her uncanny ability to drag her nails across the blackboard of unethical polemics for weeks on end (she’s a dirty fighter alright) without breaking one, and you’ve got a candidate who’s learned nothing about the true values her professed Savior proclaims.
Yeah. That’s right.
This is a no-brainer.
