KOS expresses, as a self-described “athiest”, something about values that resonates with me, as a Christian. Something as outlandish as the idea that vlaues have something to do with lifestyle and not lip-service.

Daily Kos :: Values

It wasn’t the war or the economy that killed us. It was the notion of “values”.
Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation, yet Kerry was bad because he had “Massachusetts values” or other such nonesense.
We need to retake the language. We need to reframe the notion of “value”.
That’s why Obama’s speech below is so brilliant. He speaks of God in a way that not just fails to offend this atheist, but inspires me. It’s faith used for the purpose of living a good life, rather than faith wielded as a weapon against a whole class of people.

And ther “faith” of the Bush administration is just that: a “weapon wielded”, and that is an affront to the idea of “faith”. There’s the Bush admistration faith, and then there’s FAITH. The latter , for Christians who take the gospel seriously, involves active peacemaking, active justice seeking, and active, overwhelming, sacrificing love for others, even “enemies”. This is the opposite of the Bush administration. This is why I was unable to shake the concept “Anti-Christ”; a figure of Bibilcal apocalyptic literature so distorted and misused by the Fundamentalist Christians over the years (and epitomized in the book series “Left Behind”). But if an individual (or in this case, a “set” or “circle” of individuals like the neoconservatives) epitomizes so many elements that are “opposite” of values Christ emphasized and lived, then it stands to reason that these are “Anti-Christ”. The very fact that this embodiment is taking place right before our eyes, in our “Christian nation” makes it , apparently, easier to “slip by un-noticed and unrecogized”. The other problem is that the very idea of what Jesus stood for has become distorted beyond all recognition. If people see in George W. Bush an embodiment of Christian leadership, we are in deep trouble indeed.

Nowhere is Bush more anti_Christ, in the eyes of Christians and in the eyes of millions of moral people worldwide, than in his ultimately ruionous ploicies of pre-emption, which I now fear we have not seen the end of. I wrote yesterday of the neccessity of a revival of the “Confessing Church”, harkening back to the example of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, who , as a German pastor/theologian, resisted the Nazi regime. There comes a time when silence is betrayal. That time has long since past for the vast majoirty of American Churches. Church leaders speak up in various denominational and ecumenical statements, but local Church leaders, even those who oppose what Bush did in Iraq, and in other areas, but especially there, avoind the subject in Church meetings and studies. The time has come to stop this.