The Height of Hypocrisy | The Source Weekly - Bend, Oregon

The Height of Hypocrisy

A person's sense of right and wrong is unknown, even to themselves, until the moment that person can gain something by being a low-life lying

 A person's sense of right and wrong is unknown, even to themselves, until the moment that person can gain something by being a low-life lying creep. At such moments, the only thing you have going for you-the only stake in your corner-is your simple and unvarnished sense that certain things are just wrong. Who knows how you get that sense-from mom and dad, from your first teachers, or from church. No, not from church, as we can tell from the ever-growing list of loudmouth moralizers who are the first to point out everyone else's failings, while ignoring the most basic lack of decency in their own lives.

You have this week's slime ball (South Carolina) Governor Mark Sanford, who admits to indiscretion after indiscretion, while comparing himself with a Biblical hero. You have last month's slime balls, who shamed gay men from their pulpits before running off to their muscle-bound boyfriends waiting in the wings. How do these religious men get so hypocritical? The louder and more self-righteous, the more likely the double standard?

It's because they've grown up believing they are special men, God's chosen, God's elect, God's messengers who are given a mission. These men believe that they are God's anointed, sent to bring the light (Republican politics) to the world. Because they consider themselves so special and set apart, they honestly don't believe that indulging in the sins that they are condemning is particularly wrong. Because they are the special emissaries of God, normal morals don't apply. That sense that you either have, or don't have-that sense that certain things are just plain wrong, well, these Republican leaders have obliterated that. Instead, they have the visionary notion that God forgives whatever they do, because they are on a mission to tell the rest of us that we are going to Hell if we do not become more like them.

How's that for twisted? Such convoluted craziness is probably why one religious leader initiated a relentless course of confrontation with the religious hypocrites of his day, a confrontation filled with rancor and vitriol, a brawl that took no prisoners, and ended in his being violently executed. That man was Jesus Christ, and my guess that if such a man appeared in today's mega-churches and asked "Who do you think you're fooling?" the leaders would find a way to put him away as well.
 


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