04.26.12

Shunning Jesus of America

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:00 am by George Smith

Civilization and society rests on morals, morals rest on religion, religion rests on the Bible and faith in God and in Jesus Christ. The Bible doesn’t condemn any man because of his wealth! The Bible says any man who don’t provide for his family is worse than an infidel. According to our standard of gold and silver, Abraham was worth a billion and a half dollars, David was worth three billion, Solomon was worth five billion! Solomon could have carried Andrew Carnegie for a butler … and John D. looked to black his boots! America needs to be taken down to God’s bath house and the hose turned on her. The time isn’t far distant when the wheels of God’s judgment are going to go scraping through this old God-hating world! — evangelist Billy Sunday, 1929

1929 was the year of the great market crash and the start of the Great Depression. Billy Sunday had been the country’s first major traveling evangelist. Popular in the midwest — he was a staunch Republican — his influence had waned by then. In another six years he was dead.

Using religiosity to justify rewarding the wealthy — investments equal virtue, and clobbering the poor — lack of money equaling degeneration, is a common theme in the United States.

But for Paul Ryan it earns condemnation, today from scholars just as he’s planning to visit their school.

It never matters to extremists although being hooted by a crowd in the auditorium might make good video. The elites, the scholars, anyone who disagrees, always gunning for them.

From the BBC:

Faculty members and priests at Georgetown said they could not condone a spending plan they warned would hurt society’s most vulnerable.

The House budget chairman is due to deliver a keynote lecture at the Jesuit college on Thursday morning …

“We would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few,” said the letter by 90 faculty members and priests to the Wisconsin representative.

The letter adds: “In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The scholars do not add that it is also decidedly peculiar to pass off the beliefs of Ayn Rand, who was — bluntly — a God-hating atheist, as having something to do with Catholic faith.

Update: ThinkProgress reports that now that Paul Ryan has been blasted for idiotically trying to pass off the philosophies of Ayn Rand as faith-based policy making, he’s repudiated his former inspiration. It’s become too inconvenient for even the most stupid to overlook, apparently.

Almost unbelievable, except it’s from the GOP world of extremist dissembling, where it’s the norm:

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,??? Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged??? and “The Fountainhead.???

Ryan also noted in a 2003 interview with the Weekly Standard, “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.???

But today, Ryan is singing a far different tune.

From an interview with National Review’s Bob Costa this week:

“I reject her philosophy,??? Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,??? who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,??? he says.

It’s understandable why Ryan would back off his former political muse. She described altruism as “evil,??? condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor …

Even the claim that he is guided by St. Thomas Aquinas is disingenuous, Aquinas not being someone who seeming would have advocated for cutting foodstamps (A quick Google search always make it easy to hang people like Ryan on the spot):

… whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: “The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry: the clothing you shut away, to the naked: and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless.”

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It’s also not news that a strong Tea Party/GOP belief is it was the undeserving poor who caused economic calamity. They got those subprime loans they should not have — liar loans — and this is what caused the investment banks to fail. It is another variation on scapegoating one of many enemies within, the parasitic poor dragging everyone down, common through history.

A quick news bit on CNN from a couple years ago shows who twisted up they got over it. What to preach? The flock might stop tithing.

They chose to exhibit moral failure, dodged the obvious, and focused on personal greed and responsibility for the middle class congregation, as if that had anything to do with what was going on at AIG, Bank of America and Lehman Brothers:

Too many pastors opt for offering pulpit platitudes because they are afraid parishioners will stop giving money if they hear teachings against greed, said the Rev. Robin R. Meyers, senior minister of Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City.

“Money is the last taboo in church. It’s much easier to talk about sex than money,??? said Meyers, who wrote about greed and the other seven deadly sins in his book, “The Virtue in the Vice.???

The anxiety from the pews has become so palpable for some pastors, though, that they now feel like they have no choice.

Andy Stanley, a prominent evangelical leader, said some in his congregation cheered when he launched a preaching series called “Recovery Road??? to talk about politically touchy issues such as personal greed, the federal deficit and the sins of subprime loans.

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Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. — Alan Greenspan, on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, 1957

DD band drummer Mark and your host watched Atlas Shrugged, Part 1, the partial adaption of the book, last night.

It was a box office bomb, failure attributed to a vast conspiracy in the liberal media.

It’s a legitimately bad movie though it is not sufficiently horrendous to have campy fun viewing.

All the characters are unlikeable and wooden, their unpleasantness and lack of redeeming qualities varying only by degrees.

The good people, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, are only marginally hard to watch. Their love scene, near the end, made me squirm, even though it doesn’t last long. Scientists, people from the US government, the uncaring wife, are worse. They’re either loathsome in action and words or physically ugly in some odd way, as in Hank Rearden’s wife’s unfortunate red hair. (You have to see it, used to underline her character as harridan.)

The State Science Institute in Shrugged is unintentionally hilarious, but only briefly, showing — as it does, the Republican/libertarian antipathy toward “experts,” a word hurled like a curse.

As a paranoid nervous tic, it permeates the script. Experts are always subverting the businessman, government scientists conspiring to condemn Rearden’s railroad steel, just like they promote the hoax of global warming, one supposes.

America’s business talent is mysteriously disappearing, leaving factories empty. A ridiculous machine the size of a loaf of bread which makes electricity from air is abandoned. If the viewer isn’t familiar with the novel, and my friend Mark wasn’t, they’re adrift.

The movie’s failure, aside from a general lassitude, is in adroitly showing what’s actually transpiring. If you’re not in the Atlas Shrugged fan crowd, the story is not rendered clearly.

John Galt, seen in a hat the shadows his face, is going from town to town, usually on rainy nights, to have a talk with America’s industrialist brains and talent. He convinces them to leave rotten America, away from the parasites, for a better place where they will be appreciated although it’s not at all clear this is what’s going on to the uninitiated.

The movie ends with an industrialist’s voice, a man who has set his shale oil and natural gas field on fire before vanishing, declaring he has gone “on strike.”

Too bad this hasn’t yet occurred to the heads of all the firms in the fracking industry.

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