Deborah Meier commented that Trump doesn’t like losers. Winners don’t get caught. So, she suggested, he cannot like Jesus Christ, who got caught and gave up his life for others.
Our blog poet writes:
Jesus Christ was a loser
Jesus Christ was a loser
Winners don’t get caught
Should have been an abuser
That’s what Pontius taught
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I suggest a new name, not “our blog poet” but “our poet laureate.” This one is brilliant. I’ve also heard that Jesus was a Capricorn and ate organic food. Crazy lefty.
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I’ve heard that He led a mob through the streets of Jerusalem
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And handed out free food to those loafing masses!
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Are you saying that Jesus was a socialist? Free food for the masses? Feeding the hungry?
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Yes! Commie socialist illegal long haired freak he was. And people like Seanus Hannitus and Rogerius Ailus tried to aid Pontius Pilate to quell the fake news he was trying to spread. 😂
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Charles Fourier was one of the first European socialists. His ideas also included his view that Christianity was essentially what we would call socialistic in nature. The reputation for socialism as atheistic comes from the battle between Catholic support for monarchy and traditionalism during the nineteenth century as battle lines were drawn in the push to,spread the spoils of the new industrialism throughout society.
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Add Pope Francis to the list:
https://crooksandliars.com/2018/11/foxs-wingnut-pastor-robert-jeffress
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I really think Dems should market themselves as the party of Jesus — the real Jesus, not the sick ministers’ travesty of Jesus. I’ve actually used this line in canvassing and it works.
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That’s a great idea.
As a Jew, I don’t often quote the New Testsment, but this is what the Methodist minister said to Jeff Sessions.
Matthew:
42 For I was hungry, and you didn’t feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn’t give me a drink. 43 I was a stranger, and you didn’t invite me into your home. I was naked, and you didn’t give me clothing. I was sick and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’
44 “Then they will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?’
45 “And he will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.’
46 “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.”
Sessions, I think, was shamed. Maybe not.
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Jeez, someone should let Trump know he’s risking eternal punishment. Maybe that’ll get him to be nicer.
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Don’t kid yourself. Sessions is well aware of scripture.
He’s like most so-called “Christians”, he uses the Bible as a cover to achieve his goals–none of which have anything to do with Christianity.
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Slight correction, karla, if I may. Sessions is well aware of HIS interpretation of scripture, which as any believer or atheist who has read the Bible knows, has nothing to do with its intent.
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I try to lead my life as an atheist guided by a code of ethics, the most important of which is embodied by Matthew 7:12, “Do to others what you want them to do to you.” Everything else is superfluous. If we can’t live by this, there is no reason for humanity to exist and we get what we deserve.
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And add Harold Poelchau to the list. In my view, one of the most important ethical persons of the 20th century. Poelchau was a prison pastor in Berlin from 1933-45.
Peter Steinbach, a pastor who was a contemporary of Poelchau, observes why his intellectual and moral consistency is timeless. Poelchau, like his friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer, believed that “the way people on the edges of society are treated legitimizes the state and its agents” which is important “because the modern state always has a tendency to lose its ‘humane orientation.’” Also, “justice that didn’t protect the weak, but instead uses its mechanisms to subject them to exile, to justify murder” had to be resisted. The life of every person was sacrosanct.
Poelchau wanted to work in the prisons because it was the only religious position left in Germany that was not subject to Gleichschaltung, the Nazi totalitarian control over economic, social and political life. He had been strongly influenced by Bible verses in Matthew 25:36 (…I was in prison, and ye came unto me), 25:39, and 25:44, which all referred to visiting those in prison. An important part of his ministry was to spend the final hours with those condemned to die. He accompanied more than 1,000 people to their executions, many who were close friends from the resistance.
Poelchau was a member of the Kreisauer Kreis, led by Helmuth James von Molke and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and had connections to many other individuals and groups involved in resistance to Hitler. He visited Bonhoeffer in prison daily for nine months and was also a close friend of Jochen Klepper. He often spent the entire last evenings with condemned prisoners, helping them to write their final letters and then personally delivering them to their loved ones. Poelchau believed strongly that his obligations included seeing to the needs of dependents of those executed. These experiences almost always led to life-long friendships.
Together with his wife Dorothee (Dor-O-tay), Poelchau protected countless people outside of the prisons; harboring individuals and families, securing illegal employment, providing access to false papers to hide identities, finding other people to provide shelter and cover alibis. He helped Jews, evangelicals, atheists, soldiers, children—in other words, anyone who needed help as he maintained his anonymity. Often he even had people visit his office at the prison, correctly reasoning that no authority would suspect such brazen acts. Even the prison cook, Willi Kranz, worked with Poelchau to hide a young Jewish girl for a year. Captured freedom fighters from other nations who were jailed resistance activities were also befriended by Poelchau. At memorial services in the Netherlands, Norway, and England, he was often the only German invited to attend and speak.
Until 1933, only murder was punished by execution. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, another 13 “crimes” were included, after the beginning of WWII, 18 more were added. Executions were part of Hitler’s plan. In 1933 he ordered 20 guillotines that were made by convicts in prisons. The number of legally-sanctioned executions in 1934 was 53, by 1939 it reached 215, and in 1943 and 1944, there were more than 6,000 per year.
Although there will never be full accounting, the Nazis did keep records. About 30 volumes were found in the bombed rubble by an attorney who was able to document 1,100 executions of women and 5,088 non-Germans. Military tribunals also imposed death sentences. From the beginning of the war on September 1, 1939 through November 30, 1944 at least 9,413 officers and soldiers were executed, 4,000 of which occurred between September 1, 1943 and August 31, 1944. Executions became so frequent that rules requiring twelve witnesses and a final meal were eliminated.
Poelchau documents with chilling detail what it was like inside the execution infrastructure. Executioners, who were mostly drawn from the butcher profession, had intervals of three minutes to conduct an execution, but with practice, they actually took seven to nine seconds. The victims were strapped onto a board while standing, the board was flipped ninety degrees and the blade came down quickly. Among the “skills” of an executioner was the ability to correctly estimate the height of the person to be executed so that the neck could be put in the proper position without wasting time. Women had their hair cut short, above the neck.
Soldiers sentenced to death were executed by firing squads, their final journeys on a horse drawn cart through the city where they could see everyday life as they neared their deaths, a particularly cruel process. Sometimes the carts were so full that it would take as long as three hours until the last was executed, forcing that person to watch every person taken away, listen to the shots, and often hear an additional shot if the firing squads did not do their jobs efficiently. Many of the members of the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt were hung from piano wire attached to meat hooks and their executions were filmed because Hitler intended to use them for propaganda purposes. Poelchau often conveyed the last words of the executed to their families.
After the war he worked in a religious social welfare agency, briefly went back to work at a Berlin prison under Soviet command, and eventually became a social pastor. He had no church but focused on pastoring to workers and union members in small groups. They often met at his kitchen table or at their workplaces. His idea of a ministry was not formal, it was meant to be among factory workers, laborers, and other members of the working class.
Just a few months before his death in 1972, he and his wife were honored at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial and historic research center. The only “weakness” of this account is that he wrote so little about his personal life. That was left to three essayists in the conclusion. One was the widow of Adam von Trott du Solz, a Foreign Ministry official who advised the Kreisauer Kreis on external affairs. She described how Poelchau’s visits helped her survive in jail after Adam’s arrest and execution. Poelchau helped her to keep tabs on her children, who were taken by the Nazis, and helped them reunite. Poelchau was far too focused on his duty to others than he was of himself. This was the consistent thread of his entire life.
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A true Christian. Though, as he says himself, Trump is the “best Christian”.
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Trump worships Mammon.
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I wonder if Trump knows who Jesus Christ really was and what He stood for?
In Trump’s mind, he is also a stable genius and the greatest businessman in world history and president in U.S. history. Has Trump claimed he is the world’s best leader yet going back to the stone age?
Has Trump claimed he is the greatest molester and groper of women yet?
Has Trump claimed he is the greatest tax cheat in history yet?
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Greg,
That is a beautiful and moving account.
Thank you for writing it.
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I just googled him. The Wikipedia entry is in German. There is a book about his life on Amazon. A used copy sells for $699!
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I’ll translate it for you for $698 😜. But seriously, there are so few contemporary accounts about what life was like under Naziism that survived and even fewer that have ever been translated into English. Victor Klemperer’s diaries are arguably the most important. And it is a miracle that they survived. Another great novel that reflects the reality of the times, in my view the very best, is Hans Fallada’s (pseudonym for Rudolf Ditzen) novel Alone in Berlin. I recommend it to everyone, especially if the Reps defy odds and maintain their majorities after the midterms. We are closer to Germany in 1933 that we are to the colonies in 1776.
To learn more about Poelchau and the people he ministered to, go to http://www.gedenkstaette-ploetzensee.de/index_e.html. If you should ever visit Berlin, put Plötzensee on your itinerary. You will never be the same after visiting.
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Robert and Rebekah Mercer who pay for the hatred of Breitbart and Steve Bannon are invested in two private prisons that profit from Trump’s hardline against immigrants. What a shock.
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Jesus was on the side of the poor when he drove out the price-manipulators and rent-seekers in the temple courts and he was on their side when it cost him his life.
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I guess that makes you Christ-like, eh Lloyd?
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No one is Christ-like except Jesus Christ.
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