Last Week's Bill Moyer's Journal

This weeks Bill Moyer's Journal was really thought provoking. The show focused on Rev. Hagee and the evangelical support for a preemptive strike on Iran and the political pressure that these groups are exerting on Washington. This is really scary stuff.

I've made no secret of my evangelical past and I can tell you this stuff makes my hair stand on end. The very fact that evangelical Christians are pushing for a war on Iran in the search for "peace" should be suspect on its very face. They believe in the end times theology to their very core. This DOES NOT jive with a search for peace. They want Armageddon to happen. They think that they can make Jesus come back by forcing the cataclysmic events they believe predicted in the Bible to happen. It is a contradiction to use preemptive war to secure peace. The bottom line is that the Christian church should not be involved in politics and no good can come from a church that chooses to do so.

With all due respect, they are crazy. Jews who are making their bed with them are making a very, big mistake. I know these people. They will turn on you. And when they do, it will be ugly. Extremely ugly. Maybe even deadly. I say this to scare you; I need to scare you with the truth.

The basis of the evangelical movement is the need for something more out of life. It begins with a search for a truth greater than oneself. The people that fill the pews in those churches are often lost, empty souls searching for meaning and order in their lives. Unfortunately, that also makes them easy prey for unscrupulous preachers would have them to do evil things in the name of God. (Can you smell the sulphor?) There is a lot of this in today's churches. Preachers who preach more about material wealth than about feeding the hungry and caring for the poor. It saddens me. No wonder Jesus wept.

The most profound words that I've heard in a long while was said by Rabbi Michael Lerner on last night's Bill Moyer's Journal:

The alternative is to create a different world view. And this is the problem that the United States and those of us who are liberals or progressives in the United States and in the Western world have not been able to articulate an alternative world view, in part because we're so largely secular and because we don't understand that there is some spiritual foundation to the yearnings of people all over the world for something other than global capitalism, for something other than the globalization of selfishness. And that is seen as what America has to offer the world, each one for herself or himself. We need an alternative. We need an alternative that can speak to the hunger that people have for a framework of meaning and purpose to their lives and the hunger that they have for loving relationships that are not based solely on looking out for number one.