May we drop the appellations like Catholic, Protestant, Fundamentalist, Evangelical, Christian Right, etc., and simply talk to and about Christians and Christianity.

True or False? George Bush speaks for America.

Demonstrably false! Check all the polls. God knows who or what he "thinks" he is speaking for, but it's certainly not us.

True of False? Millionaire television Evangelists are speaking for the whole of Christianity.

Also totally false! Outside their twitching television audiences, their impact and influence on the Christian religion is profoundly limited. The 2,000 year old "super taker" of Christianity has never been turned by fanatical cults.

Which brings to why this is an SOS to Christianity.

The carefully orchestrated illusion of the last six year (a la Karl Rove) is that Bush/Republicans are all of a piece with Christianity. Hence, many good hearted Christians voted for Bush, assuming they were voting for Christian values.

This was a triumph of Judas/Nazi propaganda, because EVERYTHING the Bush/Republican administration is doing and has done would be anathema to the loving founder of Christianity.

REPUBLICAN FACT: The United States of America is now a Dictatorship of the Rich. Don't look to South America to find oligarchies; just look at the White House.

CHRISTIAN FACT: The main thing Jesus Christ preached was compassion for the poor in spirit (and pocket). We must never forget that the ONLY time in the gospels when Jesus "lost his cool" was when he whipped the money changers out of the temple. Alas, he didn't finish the job (our responsibility?) since the Earth is still crawling with money changing "temples", such as the Bush/Saudi Royal Family, Texas energy corporations whose profits increased SEVERAL HUNDRED PERCENT during these last six Bush/Saudi years, and Cheney/Halliburton's monstrous gouging in Iraq, and on and on and on. Bottom line, the vampire rich have changed from millionaires to multimillionaires and multimillionaires to billionaires, all thanks to this puppet president of America's Greek God like elites.

Granted, it's taken awhile, but we finally see things like they are (in spite of the Judas press), and what we see is profoundly different from the Republican propaganda picture continuously painted since the year 2000.

Naturally, on one side we have Bush/Republicans and on the other side we have Democratic progressives.

So on WHICH SIDE do the values and vision of Christianity and Jesus Christ fall?

Nothing could be simpler. Pug spinning notwithstanding, Jesus' compassion for the middle and lower classes (to use contemporary words) harmonizes perfectly with the left of center values and policies of the Democratic Party.

And please, please ignore the hypocritical dem centrists (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Joe Liebermann, and the DLC); since they are the court jesters, merely, of the vampire rich -- the "luke warm" ones Jesus said he would spit out of his mouth. No, "liberalism" and "progressivism" are the political words which are virtual synonyms of the primary teachings of Jesus Christ, i.e., compassion for the poor and contempt for the astronomically rich.

Of course, for the Republican Party it's exactly the opposite: contempt for the poor and compassion for the astronomically rich. Hence munificent tax breaks for the 1% elites and back breaks for the 99% of the rest of us.

A related and terribly important question is why weren't there any outspoken Christians in Bush's original coterie of advisors who buried American foreign policy in quicksand Middle Eastern wars in the first place? A fact that is exceedingly odd for an administration that claimed it had Jesus by the throat? Maybe we should go back and take a long hard look at exactly who made up that power structure of infinitely influential "advisors" for whom America was the tail and they were the dog. And to what extent (if at all) did these people take seriously the teachings of Jesus Christ?

Hopefully, 2007 will mark the year when Christians and Liberals begin to unite around such shared values as compassion for the lower and middle classes, and contempt for the Bush/Republican "money changers".
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W. Christopher Epler (Bill)