Another thought occurred to me as I was considering the passage in the Bible from my last post. It's been so well-documented around the web that it feels pointless to post links, so I won't, but the parallels between today's Christian Right and the Bible's Pharisees are unending.
For just one more example... in the passage I quoted in my last post, the apostles ask Jesus if the man was born blind because of his sin or because the sin of his parents. Jesus responds that it is not sin at all that has caused the blindness. Biblical scholars note that one of the dominant arguments of the day among Pharisees was exactly whose fault it was that people were born into poverty or with disabilities. Was it their sin or their parents' sin that caused this suffering. They were foreign to the idea that random chance might have made some more fortunate than others. This philsophy is comforting to those in power, because it gives them license to ignore the downtrodden, disabled, and poverty-stricken. It absolves them of the responsibility to take care of those less fortunate. They can just tell themselves that the blind, sick, and poor are that way because either they or their parents sinned in some way and thus deserved their fate.
Aren't these the same arguments Republicans make today as they erode the social safety net and relentlessly pursue an "everyone for himself" social contract? The poor are poor because they're lazy and don't want to better themselves. The disabled are weak and are probably making it up and if they're not, they probably did something stupid and thus deserve it. There's no room in their calculus for bad luck (or worse, structural problems within society their policies have created) and thus they feel absolved from taking care of those in need. But like true Pharisees, nothing riles these hypocrites more than questioning their devotion to their professed philosophies. Of course they're good Christians, they just have no idea what Christ was actually talking about and don't appear to have any desire to find out.
Of course Republicans are one step worse than the actual Pharisees. The Pharisees didn't have as their model a person who died to oppose their policies.
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