[This is the best advice anyone has offered since the Rev. Jim Jones suggested sampling the grape-flavored Kool-Aid.]
^^^^^ CB: During the election battles, Mildred Gaddis, Detroit talkradio host likened to Jim Jones those few Black ministers who urged congregations to support Bush.
There is also some possibility that Black Democratic Christians will be developing Left Christian propaganda, in the tradition of ML King, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Frederick Douglass. We'll see. Rev. Carlyle Stewart gave a fiery sermon pre-election which emphasized many of the left positions of Jesus; for example, Jesus was the "Prince of Peace" , and Bush's war has slaughtered 100,000 Iraqis. In general, Democratic Christians here are insulted and angry at the right wing Christian claim to superior morality , and may mount a sustained Christian moral counterattack. We'll see.
See _ The Urgency of Marxist/Christian Dialogue_ by Herbert Aptheker circa 1970. He references the history of radical practice of the "prophetic" tradition in Chrisitanity.
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jul1972/v29-2-bookreview15.htm
By and large, the redletters of the New Testament are more left than right
: help the poor, peace, forgiveness of sins, love thy neighbor. I don't
think Jesus "says" anything directly or even indirectly about abortion or
homosexuality.
Also, Engels , of course, claimed that the Book of Revelation was actually a coded plan of Palestinian (:>0)revolutionaries for overthrowing the Roman Empire. So, the Rapture has already come and gone.
Frederick Engels 1883
The Book of Revelation
Source: Marx and Engels On Religion, Progress Publishers, 1957; Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
A science almost unknown in this country, except to a few liberalizing theologians who contrive to keep it as secret as they can, is the historical and linguistic criticism of the Bible, the inquiry into the age, origin, and historical value of the various writings comprising the Old and New Testament.
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One good thing, however, Ernest Renan has said:
"When you want to get a distinct idea of what the first Christian communities were, do not compare them to the parish congregations of our day; they were rather like local sections of the International Working Men's Association."
And this is correct. Christianity got hold of the masses, exactly as modern socialism does, under the shape of a variety of sects, and still more of conflicting individual views clearer, some more confused, these latter the great majority - but all opposed to the ruling system, to "the powers that be."
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Christianity, like every great revolutionary movement, was made by the masses. It arose in Palestine, in a manner utterly unknown to us, at a time when new sects, new religions, new prophets arose by the hundred. It is, in fact, a mere average, formed spontaneously out of the mutual friction of the more progressive of such sects, and afterwards formed into a doctrine by the addition of theorems of the Alexiandrian Jew, Philo, and later on of strong stoic infiltrations. In fact, if we may call Philo the doctrinal father of Christianity, Seneca was her uncle. Whole passages in the New Testament seem almost literally copied from his works; and you will find, on the other hand, passages in Persius' satires which seem copied from the then unwritten New Testament. Of all these doctrinal elements there is not a trace to be found in our Book of Revelation. Here we have Christianity in the crudest form in which it has been preserved to us. There is only one dominant dogmatic point: that the faithful have been saved by the sacrifice of Christ. But how, and why is completely indefinable. There is nothing but the old Jewish and heathen notion, that God, or the gods, must be propitiated by sacrifices, transformed into the specific Christian notion (which, indeed, made Christianity the universal religion) that the death of Christ is the great sacrifice which suffices once for all.
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Here, then, we have two clear statements: (1) The scarlet lady is Rome, the great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth; (2) at the time the book is written the sixth Roman emperor reigns; after him another will come to reign for a short time; and then comes the return of one who :"is of the seven," who was wounded but healed, and whose name is contained in that mysterious number, and whom Irenaeus still knew to be Nero
Rest at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/religion/book-revelations .htm
^^^^^^
Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple
Jacopo Bassano Italian, Bassano del Grappa, about 1570 Black and colored chalks on blue paper 17 3/16 x 21 3/8 in. 89.GB.63
Embracing the celebrated Venetian love of color, Jacopo Bassano made only six large compositional studies in colored chalk. Here he combined blue paper, widely used by Venetian draftsmen, with natural black chalk and colored fabricated chalks, including blue, mauve, red, yellow, and peach. Thinking coloristically was integral to his preparation for painting. Bassano used color, not line, to articulate space. The flesh and peach tones in the reclining males at left project outward, Christ's mauve robe draws the eye into space, and the central figure's red costume provides a focal point in the middle ground.
Bassano illustrated an important episode from the New Testament, in which Jesus showed his authority in the Temple of Jerusalem, saying, "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers" (Mark 11:17). After Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, the chief priests and scribes "kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching."
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November 17, 2004
Some Democrats Believe the Party Should Get Religion
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK