This is a comment in response to a post on another site (though it also posted here on glennhager.com). It covers several issues, so you would understand it better if you the post and the comment I am responding to. Here is the link to the post, so you can read the article and the comment I am replying to. The comment-er, Beverly seems to be a compassionate Christian liberal who is shocked by the conservative and Christian response to President Obama. I respect her compassion and honesty.
Beverly,
Thank you for your very thoughtful comment. I apologize for taking a while to reply. It was a busy weekend around here. I also apologize that my response is longer than your original comment.
I am struck by how divided the people of our nations are. When I hear their response to the debates, it sounds like they were watching different programs. That’s because their personality, their friends, and their brand of faith has formed a very specific filter through which they view the world. We would be better off to throw out the filters; except for “the Jesus one” that considers his example, but that is not human nature.
He didn’t seem to care about government and the one he lived with was exponentially worse than ours, being a nasty blend of a cruel occupying militaristic empire and a corrupt theocracy. Jesus did encourage people of his day to pay their taxes with his “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” comment, but I can’t imagine him aligning with any political movement.
I understand why you believe he would lean to the left, since the left claims to be more compassion toward the poor and more accepting of people of various ethnicities. I have found that reasonable people agree upon the problems facing our nation, but they disagree upon the best way to address them and the role of government in that process. That’s a worthy discussion since so many government programs have evoked the law of unintended consequences and are no longer sustainable in these hard economic times.
Concerning President Obama, some people thought the Nobel Peace Prize was undeserved for no other reason than the fact that he had been president for less than a year and had no major accomplishments to show for it other than toning down the nationalistic rhetoric.
Probably any president would have taken out Bin Laden given the opportunity he had. Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democratic Party kept “spiking the football,” something he earlier said was inappropriate.
These days Democrats and Republicans vehemently oppose anything coming from the other side. It’s a kind of semi-civilized tribalism that does a great disservice to the people of our nation.
There are no excuses for racism. Period. However, people who have sincerely challenged President Obama’s policies have been branded as “racists” and that is just as wrong.
President Obama’s associates should be called into question as should those of any candidate.
Personally, I believe there was more hatred directed toward the last President Bush than there has been toward President Obama. This is largely because the media was complicit in the critical attitude toward Bush.
Perhaps my biggest concern about the liberal perspective is that it preaches tolerance, but there seems to be very little tolerance and a lot of misrepresentation of people who disagree with them.
Both the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party are responses are by people who are frustrated with the way things are. They each have the right to organize and be heard as long as they are not infringing upon the rights of others by destroying property or something like that.
Beverly, I love your compassion, but I would encourage you to examine your filter through which you see things. I suggest that people get their news from various sources and avoid becoming die-hard adherents of either party. That way we have the flexibility to accept or reject whatever parts that don’t line up with what we know about Jesus and then we can merge the best parts of various perspectives.
The real problem deals with the issue of equivocation, where merely disagreeing with the president’s political stances are somehow to be viewed as “hatred” [which is similar to the liberals constantly denigrating any opposition to their agenda in pejorative terms such as “racist,” “homophobic,” “anti-woman,” etc.
I was told once as a child, when I said I hated my oldest brother [who was a bully to say it politely], that if I really hated him, I would wish to see him dead. Now I didn’t wish to see him dead, I just wished for the bullying to stop.
To apply that to the current situation: I don’t wish to see Obama dead–but at the same time I do wish for his political career to be over and any influence he might have to be neutralized because I don’t think his agenda is godly or in the best interests of the country.
The problem is that too many shallow thinking people think that in order to be a good citizen, one must show unquestioning loyalty to the president–a position which is clearly hypocritical when one considers that those who are demanding such unquestioning loyalty towards Obama are the same people who heaped unjustified vilification on George W. Bush.
As Obi-Wan Kenobi told Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in “The Revenge of the Sith,”: “My loyalty is to the Republic.” [and not to any one person holding office]
David – It is possible to disagree with an elected government official without hating her or him. I do it all the time.