Sure. MAGA people don’t wear red hats or walk in lock-step with their creator.  That’s a media creation of the left.  Congress is not in a deadlock on immigration and foreign aid because MAGA’s leader issued a command.  My mistake.  I guess I ought to stop reading stuff printed by my echo chamber.  LOL. 

Values? I refer to the Enlightenment values of reason and discourse.  I refer to republicanism and democracy.  I refer to acceptance of the plurality of differences.  I refer to what Martin Luther King referred to as the arc of justice. 

What is going on now is a tragedy — because it is destroying those values.   The values we hold in common. 

 I ‘ve read plenty of SCOTUS opinions written by conservatives and appreciated them because of they made good law even though their conclusions clashed with my sense of how things out to be.  I and those justices who wrote those   decisions shared common values.  

It is different now.  Now reminds me of pre-Civil War America.  

The church?  The world can’t understand it? It is a political behemoth wearing a coat of many colors. it is not A church, but the name of  political power in the name of god.  The church used such political power for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.  May I suggest the 30 Years War? The Counter Reformation?  May I suggest the battle between the church and the princes in the late Middle Ages?  And the conquest of Christian Europe by Islam?  These examples are just off the top of my head. 

What’s to understand?   :)

Dan



> On Feb 11, 2024, at 2:38 PM, Philip Brownell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> In reference to what you said below, “the twisting of ‘our’ values,” whose values? Values are entwined in politics. Also in spirituality. Also in morality. But there is no one size fits all supporter of Trump. There is no MAGA monolith; that is a creation of the left and a straw man talking point. There are people who share some values and differ on others who may also support Trump. Personally, I lament church leaders as it were making a Dorian Gray type bargain in the hope of getting some political goal, because the church will never get what it wants from the world. The world cannot understand the church. And when I say “church,” I’m not talking about the Constantinan hybrid that many people think is the church. 
> 
> The current electoral season is a cluster fuck that would have made for a comedic farce only ten years ago. Now it is a tragedy. 
> 
> Phil
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Feb 11, 2024, at 7:10 AM, Dan Bloom <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> To the extent the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples stand by and watch the twisting of our values by MAGA, they are complicit. Since religions are supposed to be the source of morality, they have a greater duty to take moral stands than other institutions.   The only consistent moral stand I see then taking in all this is against the right to choose.  Fortunately, some religions push back against the right to life people.
> 
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Gstalt-L is an independent eCommunity of people interested in gestalt therapy theory and its various applications. Its public archives can be found at http://listserv.icors.org/scripts/wa-ICORS.exe?A0=GSTALT-L, and subscriptions can be managed by clicking on "Subscriber's Corner," which is found at the archives.