A helpful hint from Huckabee
I disagree with most of Mike Huckabee's positions. Still, I find a couple of things about him that I do like.
Big money Republicans are bothered by his candidacy's recent surge. They don't like his moderating touch of economic populism. His concern for the poor does make Huckabee much more of a "compassionate conservative" than most of his colleagues. In his campaign, he criticizes corporate policies, Wall Street, and the damage done to workers by US trade policies. He's even won a union endorsement, from the Machinists.
His platform, however, as displayed at his website, doesn't go into these matters. It's much more conventionally and conservatively "faith-based" as defined by right-wing evangelicals, and more reticent on compassion.
Despite this, his economic populism is a plus factor. And he has an enlightened attitude toward the arts: he supports more arts funding in public education and made music and art education mandatory in Arkansas for every K-12 student. The arts are often the first to be cut either as an unaffordable "frill" or as taking time away for "more important" academic work. Huckabee, an amateur musician, knows they are integral to mental development.
What's more interesting to me is the deft way he deflected a question on Biblical inerrancy. It could be a model for the way we deal with the inerrancy issue here. When a young man held up a Bible and asked "Do you believe every word of this book?" this is what Huckabee said when his turn came (http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/28/debate.transcript.part2/index.html):
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Sure. I believe the Bible is exactly what it is. It's the word of revelation to us from God himself.
(Applause)
And the fact is that when people ask do we believe all of it, you either believe it or you don't believe it. But in the greater sense, I think what the question tried to make us feel like was that, well, if you believe the part that says "Go and pluck out your eye," well, none of us believe that we ought to go pluck out our eye. That obviously is allegorical.
But the Bible has some messages that nobody really can confuse and really not left up to interpretation. "Love your neighbor as yourself."
And as much as you've done it to the least of these brethren, you've done it unto me. Until we get those simple, real easy things right, I'm not sure we ought to spend a whole lot of time fighting over the other parts that are a little bit complicated.
And as the only person here on the stage with a theology degree, there are parts of it I don't fully comprehend and understand, because the Bible is a revelation of an infinite god, and no finite person is ever going to fully understand it. If they do, their god is too small.
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The two things that I see as significant here is that first he both asserts inerrancy and recognizes that what he believes to be inerrant meanings are beyond complete understanding. Then he sets out what I think is the important idea that's shared by theologically conservative and theologically progressive Progressive Christians: love your neighbor as yourself and as you do unto others, you do unto Jesus.
What we need to keep saying to ourselves and to each other is "Until we get those simple, real easy things right, I'm not sure we ought to spend a whole lot of time fighting over the other parts that are a little bit complicated."
Programmatically, they're not that easy. But the words themselves don't need interpretation. As progressives of whatever stripe, we'll spend our time better in thinking together about how to be faithful with those words than in fighting over the other parts.
Although I will oppose Huckabee if he's the nominee, I thank him for this helpful hint.
Thanks, Mike.
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Vance on Huckabee Choice
A while back, I posted a notice about a very helpful website, http://glassbooth.org/ that offers a list of the major issues of the day. The visitor to the site can rate the issues as to their importance to them. Then, it gives a short list of questions to answer related to the issues selected. Page three then reveals the top three candidates that match the respondents answers based on the official positions of those candidates. I took the test twice, once honestly and once answering exactly the opposite just to see what happened. Kucinich was my honest match and Huckabee was my dishonest one. Try the test yourself and see who matches your interests.
Glassbooth choices
I took that one a while back. No contest -- Kucinich was a match. Huckabee was the pits.
Huckabee: Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Huckabee: Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
By:
Stan Moody
Orthodox Jews love him. The Christian Right loves him. The LaHayes (Left Behind series) love him. Tele-Zionist John Hagee loves him.
It is not because Gov. Huckabee is not a Mormon that they all love him. It is because his foreign policy as President will be to put the finishing touches on the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East.
In a nutshell, Huckabee is a Rapturist. I’ll explain.
Belief in the Rapture is predominant within Evangelical circles. It has no biblical support except by inference. It finds no place in the early history of the Christian Church and is based primarily on a prophetic interpretation developed in England in the mid 19th Century. Its architect was John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren movement, a fundamentalist Christian sect that came out of Dublin, Ireland in the 1820’s. Darby published some 50 books on his unique interpretations of the New Testament.
Darby’s doctrine, known as Premillennial Dispensationalism, was expanded in 1909 through the publication of the Scofield Desk Reference Bible, a Bible with extensive footnotes all screened through the lens of two future returns of Jesus to earth.
The first return will be in the form of the physical resurrection of all “true” Christians, who will disappear from the earth in a single moment to join Jesus in the skies. That is referred to as the Rapture. For seven years to follow, the earth will be in a period of Satanic upheaval, building to a final Apocalypse in the Valley of Meggido (“Armageddon”), whereupon Christ will descend onto the Mount of Olives with His raptured saints, defeat the armies of Satan (including the Roman Catholic Church) and set up a physical throne in Jerusalem to reign for 1,000 years.
There have been variations on that theme, but the physical return of Jesus to greater Israel has remained intact. In the US, the Dallas Theological Seminary, the flagship Southern Baptist pastoral training center, has been the breeding ground for the American Rapturist movement.
In this scenario, the Jews remain the apple of God’s eye, the land promised to the patriarch Abraham being their inheritance. In the 7-yr. period of Satanic upheaval (referred to as the Great Tribulation), the land at least from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River must be secured for Israel. Solomon’s Temple will be rebuilt, 144,000 Jews will be converted to Christ, there will be a bloodbath of monumental proportions, and peace will be restored.
Support of Israel’s expanded borders, therefore, becomes non-negotiable for American Evangelicals who subscribe to this dogma. There is a long history of Evangelicals funding illegal settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza. Recently, Tele-Zionist, John Hagee, has consolidated these cultists into an organization called “Christians United for Israel” (CUFI), applauded not only by President George W. Bush but by such luminaries as Joe Lieberman, Tom DeLay and Presidential candidate John McCain.
On October 15, 2007, Huckabee gave a stump speech at the home of New Hampshire State Representative Jason Bedrick, the first Orthodox Jew elected to the NH House of Representatives.[1][1] In that speech, he staked out the following:
1. He supports the creation of a Palestinian state…
2. He believes that such a state should be formed outside “Israel.”
3. He suggested Saudi Arabia and Egypt as prospects for such a state, noting that the Arabs have far more land than the Israelis and that it would only be fair for them to give land for a state rather than carving it out of the tiny Israeli state…
4. He stands against the creation of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, thus tacitly supporting the seizing of the Temple Mount by Israel, the third most sacred Moslem site in the world…
5. He has stood against any pullback of illegal settlements on the Golan Heights and the West Bank.[2][2]
By re-defining the boundaries of Israel to be vastly outside those officially recognized by international law, Huckabee unmasks himself to be a Christian Zionist.
By offering a solution not unlike that envisioned by 19th century Americans to the slavery question and carried out against Native Americans, Huckabee essentially dehumanizes the Palestinians and proposes to transport them elsewhere.
We accuse him, therefore, of being an advocate for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Here is his long-range view: “If you are with Jesus Christ, we know how it turns out in the final moment. I’ve read the last chapter in the book, and we do end up winning.[3]
As an evangelical pastor and theologian, I’ll take the Mormon any day!
Stan Moody
www.christianpolicyinstitute.org
207/626-0594
Stan Moody, founder of the Christian Policy Institute, has served in the Maine House of Representatives...He is an Advisory Board member of "Jews-On-First" and the "Institute for the Study of Christian Zionism." Dr. Moody is the author of several provocative books, including, "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry." Pastor of a rural country church in Central Maine, Moody has enjoyed a long and productive career in small business development and management.
Eileen Fleming,
Reporter and Editor of
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
Author "KEEP HOPE ALIVE" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
Producer of "30 Minutes with Vanunu"
Huckabee or Romney? Oy...
Fortunately, we can say neither.
Romney's hardly any better on Israel than Huckabee. Without all the Rapturist stuff as a larger framework for his pro-Zionist stance, Romney is a typical supporter of Israel. For all practical purposes, I don't see anything to make either of them more acceptabel than the other.
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