What Jesus Actually Taught - An Update

The following text is not attributed directly to Jesus of Nazareth, but is patched together faithfully from the extant parables and teachings attributed to him.  Were he to appear today, he no doubt would say something similar.  Fundamentalists, take note.

And Jesus said unto his followers, whom have you hated today in your heart?  Into whose face have you splashed acid?  Whose house of worship have you picketed with angry signs impugning an entire religious tradition?  Have you tortured your enemies, or asked your kings and high priests to do so, have you invaded their land and drenched those who opposed you in blood?  Have you worked hard to insure that the rich must not pay much to the poor, and that the poor, disabled, and outcast are ignored lest the least among us be enabled by a government handout?  Have you worked harder for the wealthy few than the impoverished many?  Have you attacked those who interpret my teachings differently than you do, claiming to have a unique, exclusive, god-like understanding of my parables and teachings?  Have you attacked and shamed those among you whose sexual preference is different than yours and against whom I never spoke a word?
If so, then surely, I say unto you, those of you who have done these things have violated my teachings and will not be recognized by me on the day of judgment.  Have I not told you that when you show contempt for the least among us you show contempt for me and for god?  What profit a man if he wins an election and a tax cut but loses his soul?  Have I not warned you that there will be many false prophets who speak with silver tongues and claim to represent me?  Some will have studios in their basement to broadcast their lies to all the nations, but anyone who preaches hatred of the poor or of anyone presumed to be an enemy cannot claim to be a follower of my teachings.  Woe unto those who bear false witness, who do great injustices in my name!   When I said that one should yield unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, perhaps I was not clear:  pay your taxes.  Pay them gladly, so that your left hand does not know what your right hand is giving, as I have commanded you.  When I said to love your enemy as yourself, I most certainly did not want you to torture them or hold them indefinitely without trial.   When I said that he who lives by the sword, dies by it too, I did not mean that plowshares should be melted into swords and tanks and missiles.  Do this in my name.  

Why does the Tea Party say such easily disprovable things?

8/26/11:  As Ron Hillman recently pointed out, the Tea Party and its shills on the far right are in need of some basic reality checks:

JUST A REMINDER:Evolution is real.The Earth is 4.54 billion years old, not 6,000.The Founding Fathers did not free the slaves.The Revolution was NOT fought over slavery.Paul Revere warned the Americans, NOT the British. Federal law trumps state law. The Civil War was about slavery, NOT state’s rights.

I still believe that the Middle 80% politically (and most of the Bottom 99% economically) are decent, hard-working, honest and innovative people who are badly served by a tiny elite who have managed to dupe a minority who will be victims of their economic and political carnage into shilling for policies that will harm them deeply. This tiny elite, the top 1% who own a disproportionate amount of the wealth of this country but want even more, have their own news station and their own faux-populist party. They say stupid things because if they said out loud what they really advocate no one would support them. Closing down public schools and firing teachers to prevent a fraction of a percentage of Americans the inconvenience of having to visit a financial planner to avoid the estate tax just doesn't have the same ring as calling it a "death tax" and making distracting pseudo-philosophical statements such as, "Death should not be a taxable event." Allowing children, the disabled, and the poor to die of treatable conditions so that free-riders should not be bothered to do something they know they should do doesn't have much traction, but blathering on about whether healthcare is a privilege or a right and death panels that would be scary if they only existed seems to distract enough people to make support for healthcare reform, once wildly popular, now evenly split. Pulling stimulus spending and badly needed federal aid to states away at the worst possible time - an economic slow-down - would be viewed as economic suicide if it weren't for the misinformation campaign of the far right that tells the unemployed the reason they don't have a job is because of the "burden" of big government that must be slashed right now (while taxes should never be raised to Clinton- or Reagan-era levels because that would make the "job-creators" not in the mood to hire (not that they seem in all that much of a rush to hire now after 10 years of tax cuts)). I think the moronic statements on the age of the earth, the role of slavery in the first century of our country or the Civil War, or the non-role of Christianity in the founding of our secular government are all meant as a warm-up, loosening up the audience for the big whoppers about how tax cuts that have neither paid for themselves nor stimulated the economy for the past decade might start working if they were only deeper and longer.