America Is...

During a period of sleeplessness, when many things that have been floating around in my head come up, links sometimes click into place and I get an aha! moment.

I have been staying away from the political fray lately, earlier last year, I got enough of it to understand how little my voice means to Washington or even Austin politicians. But these movements still fascinate me, like the Tea Party folks. I heard one spokesperson that was articulate enough that I could follow her train of thought, and that led to a couple of conclusions.

All the pushback and fear around concepts like Socialism, Welfare, Universal Health Care, Taxes, suddenly made a bit of sense to me... When I understood her view of the world:

America is a place where there are winners and losers; the winners deserve to win, the losers deserve to lose. This, in a nut shell is their definition of our country.

It caused me to remember Bishop Carlton Pearson, a preacher who built a huge following and religious institution around the traditional theology of "God loves me, but you're going to hell".
Bishop Pearson had an awakening one day when God informed him nothing of the sort was going on, all his children were on his 'saved' list, and that was that.

Thrilled and excited, the preacher brought this news to his congregation who (like the tea party folks) were less than happy to hear about universal salvation. As in ages past, I suppose many people have a mental list of who's going to hell, and they don't want that list disturbed. Something like 95% of his congregation denounced him and moved on (to someplace where "we're saved, and THEY are not").

I don't know how they square that with an image of the Almighty being identical to the program at a German death camp in the 1930's.