Almost every religion asks a version of the question what would Jesus do?
Buddhists look to the Buddha Muslims to the Prophet Muhammad seeks to guru nanaka
Observant Jews to Moses and the list goes on
Emulating holy men and women from the distant past is hard
What would the Buddha do with Facebook?
But the effort has helped faiths keep their founders missions alive even as they amble across centuries and continents
Still there is a shadow side to this devotion the use or misuse of sacred stories to condone bad behavior
The latest and perhaps oddest example came this week when an Alabama official invoked
Christianity is holy family to defend Senate GOP candidate Roy Moore from accusations that he sexually
Assaulted a 14 year old girl decades ago in some ways
It makes sense for Moore's allies to draw on religious examples when defending him the longtime
Alabama Supreme Court judge has made Christianity and the Bible central to his political identity
He has insisted on displaying a monument to the Ten
Commandments in the court house even after he was told to remove it and earned a suspension for refusing to follow the Supreme Court's
legalization of gay marriage
But you don't need to be a bible thumping southerner to earn biblical comparisons these days
during the
2016 presidential campaign
Many of donald trump's evangelical backers compared the brash and unorthodox businessman to the morally flawed kings in ancient
israel
God called King David a man after God's own heart even though
He was an adulterer and a murderer said Jerry Falwell Jr
the president of evangelical liberty college and a staunch Trump supporter other
Evangelicals compared Trump to Saul the first ruler of the unified kingdoms to Nehemiah who built the walls around
Jerusalem and even Esther who rose from obscurity to become a Persian queen there grew to be so many biblical
Analogies that the Washington Post made a game of it meanwhile a growing number of white
Evangelists to be more accepting of politicians who commit immoral acts in their personal life
What does Christian scriptures say about comparing ourselves to faiths founding families?
one indication comes in a letter written by st. Paul
Each one should test their own actions Paul writes in Galatians then they can take pride in
Themselves alone without comparing themselves to someone else for each one should carry their own load
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