WWJD?

I'm firmly convinced that if Jesus were alive today and preaching his gospels in the American midwest, he would be pilloried by the pundits at FoxNews for being an anti-gun, anti-war, bleeding-heart, quasi-communist, weak-kneed liberal milquetoast.

Exhibit A: Pat Robertson. Execute the leader of a sovereign nation for speaking against the US? That's the kind of rhetoric one has come to expect from Pat Buchanan or Anne Coulter. But one would think that as a man of God who has presumably "let Jesus into his life," Robertson might have absorbed some of the lessons of the Gospels ... or perhaps I skipped that class in high school when they taught us that section in the Book of Mark when Jesus goes on at length about black ops and wet-work.

Robertson's words are yet another spectacular demonstration that the religious right -- or at least those members who are politically inclined these days -- simply miss the point of Christianity. I might have stopped being a believer a long time ago, but that has a lot more to do with philisophical issues and with idiots like Robertson than with any quarrel with the basic teachings of any major religion. The basic premise of the Gospels is still startlingly relevant, but healing the sick, clothing the poor, feeding the hungry -- these things are all out of step with the conservative American go-it-alone philosophy. Robertson et al should look away from the Book of Revelations for a few minutes and take a refresher course on the basic tenets of what Jesus would do.