Hagee != Farrakhan. Find another stupid argument

One of my more foolish habits is watching political television…and, again, the latest thing to irritate my sensibilities was the Hannity & Colmes program. As usual, they’re haranging over Barack Obama and his perceived foibles…of particular note to this writing, his relationship with his pastor, who gave an award to Louis Farrakhan, who has endorsed Obama.

Here, Hannity states that Obama should condemn his pastor and leave his church over it. This is wrong on at least two counts.

Firstly, you don’t leave a church or publically put down your pastor unless there are totally irreconcilable differences. I’ve personally learned this lesson the hard way. You can disagree with your pastor, but unless he’s greatly and publically in the wrong, it is unbiblical to supplant his pastoral authority. And, apparently, Obama doesn’t think he’s wrong enough to warrant a break.

However, this is a matter of interpretation: I would say that this would be a reason for me to leave that church. But that assumes I would have joined it to start with, which introduces the second point: the outsider here is imposing his interpretation of truth upon another. Obama obviously agrees with his pastor sufficiently to render this issue irrelevent enough to dismiss, and that’s his business. I would agree that he’s wrong on that, but that’s his business.

For instance, I wouldn’t want Hannity telling me what I can and can’t believe as a Christian given the huge differences in what we believe. For me, though, it’s just another reason not to vote for Obama, as he’s attached to a racist.

But what torqued me was the attempt by Mr. Colmes to equate this with John Hagee’s endorsement of John McCain, reasoning that if Obama were to disavow his pastor’s relationship and esteem for a known racist, terrorist sympathizer, and anti-Christian, McCain should renounce the endorsement of a man who strongly believes that Roman Catholicism is corrupt.

You might ask why it bothered me. Well, for one thing, the two are by no means equivalent. Anyone who tries to draw a line from someone like Hagee to someone like Farrakhan needs to have their head examined…or slapped for the sake of justice. You can disagree with what Hagee teaches, but to equate what he says with that of a racist creep like Farrakhan, whose beliefs concerning Jews and Christians, not to mention white people in general and WASPs in particular, is beyond asinine.

Granted, to disagree with Hagee would involve some rather vigorous calisthenics around the historical and doctrinal evidence supporting such a position…one I happen to share with Hagee. This belief points to the combination of pagan Roman and Christian faiths in the earliest days of the Roman church in the fourth century, its depression of the development in Western civilization for a thousand years, the instigation of the Crusades for fun and profit, and the mass-murder of Jews and non-Catholic Christians throughout its dominance.

And then there’s the scriptural evidence that the Roman church fits the bill for the Woman riding the Beast in Revelation 17. Any search on Google will turn up the particulars (by the way, the best book on the subject is A Woman Rides the Beast by Dave Hunt), as well as rebuttals. Even so, the man never condemns individual Catholics for any of this…the system itself is targetted. But when you believe in a perfect, holy Roman church, such things are like blasphemy. Hence the issue. But it’s not like he called you guys the skunks of the earth.

So, disagree if you like. But equating this to a moonbat like Farrakhan would be a joke…if it were funny.