Ouch
Shelton had his own little paraphrase of Jane Fonda's comment to Liz Smith:
"I read the gospels that aren't included in the Bible -- like the Bell Jar and the Communist Manifesto."
Actually, Fonda does have a point - not there, but in her subsequent comment:
What we are seeing today are policy-makers who say they're Christians. Budgets are a religious matter. War is. Poverty is. Health care is. Jesus said, "Look after the least of us." But there is a separation between professed faith and the practice and I'm not seeing too many policies coming out of Washington that are... informed by the teachings of Jesus.
I'll grant that abortion is anti-scriptural, homosexuality is anti-scriptural, and all the other baby seal clubber flash points are anti-scriptural. But there are other things that scripture commands (quote from Carolyn Baker):
Christian fundamentalism in "cafeteria style" has chosen which parts of Jesus' teachings it chooses to honor and which not. Preference is always given to the "I am" passages such as those in the Gospel of John in which Jesus says, " I am the door; the bread of life; the way, the truth, and the life; the light of the world; the living water," and so on, supposedly claiming to be God and commanding his listeners to accept him as the only way to live forever with God in heaven and escape eternity in hell. Little attention is given to the Sermon on the Mount and the many passages where Jesus condemns the wealthy and the religious leaders of his time for their callous, hypocritical, mean-spirited absence of compassion. In fact, theologians who pay much attention to Jesus' teachings on compassion are viewed as bleeding hearts, unorthodox, and not really Christian. For this reason, Pat Robertson stated on his 700 Club Program, January 14, 1991: "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don' have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."
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