Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Moral Myopia

I still find it remarkable that no one on the "Christian right" has said anything about torture.
It seems obvious to me that if you fail to condemn torture, you've proven that you have no moral standing whatsoever. To my knowledge, there have been no statements condemning the military's and CIA's use of torture from Mr. Fallwell, Mr. Robertson, or Mr. Dobson. If they can approve of that, I don't see how they can claim to represent anything approaching morality, or even religion. Unless we're back in the Middle Ages when they burned people at the stake.
These people have trivialized Christianity, turned it into some kind of a political action group. If you were to listen just to them, you'd get the impression that the Christian religion was just about making sure fetuses are not aborted, teenagers don't have sex, and gays are kept in the closet. Then at the same time--silence on torture, silence on killing of children in the Middle East and elsewhere by their own government, silence on Republican corruption and racism.
There comes a time when someone loses any credibility as a spokesman for religious views. Being silent about torture invalidates anything else these people may say. To continue to allow them TV time, to act as if they're legitimate like the press does, to break bread with them at all, is to participate in a monstrous sham. They are the pharisees of our day. Actually, that's an insult to the pharisees, who were learned men, but it's the best Christian analogy we have.

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