A person’s sense of right and wrong is unknown, even to him- or herself, until the moment that person can gain something by being a low-life, lying creep.
You have this month’s slime-ball, Republican South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who admits to indiscretion after indiscretion, while comparing himself to a biblical hero. You have last month’s slime-balls, who shamed gay men from their pulpits before running off to their musclebound 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, who are given a mission to bring the light (Republican politics) to the world.
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. It 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.
Phillip Tofts
Salt Lake City