The Golden Bull
You can't make this stuff up. This is what the Christian Right has come to in this country. Via John Cole:
“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church, so I spent a lot of my youth reading and studying the Bible. Although I have abandoned the literal, supernatural interpretation of the Bible, I have retained the core principles of Jesus' philosophy, along with enough grounding in the Bible as literature to see the irony in this situation. Obviously I'm not the only one to see the comparison to this episode from the book of Exodus:
For those who aren't familiar with the story, while Moses was up on the mountain getting the Ten Commandments, the people he had just led out of slavery in Egypt, the Hebrews, were down below melting their gold jewelry to make an idol in the shape of a calf. When Moses came down and saw them praying to it, he was really mad. What followed was 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.
Praying for wealth is the antithesis of Christian philosophy. The self-proclaimed leaders of the right-wing religious movement in America have a lot more in common with another group of people, and I don't mean Jesus' disciples, but the Pharisees.
The next time you see or hear someone claim they are doing God's work by persecuting the "sinners" and praying for success in the stock market, I think it's safe to say that Jesus would be seriously offended. I know I am.And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:
John 2:15 And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables;
John 2:16 And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise.
