Every archeological find in history proves the bible is true

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

9. Oh. Michelle Bachmann. Mad as a box of frogs, that one.

And she doesn't even understand a basic doctrine of her own religion (she belongs to the Wisconsin Synod of the Lutheran Church, which is the lunatic fringe of that denomination). When she says "salvation is free" and you don't have to do anything to get into heaven, she is talking about Luther's concept of "justification by faith" (sola fide). Luther came up with the idea as an objection to the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences, which over time had become simply the payment of money to the Church, in exchange for which you'd get time off in Purgatory. Luther felt this led to corruption (which it did), so he got himself excommunicated by claiming the only way to heaven was through faith, and you couldn't "buy" your way there even by doing good works. Jesus' death was supposed to have been the "sacrifice" that got believers into heaven. But the rest of Luther's argument was that a person's good works were evidence of and made possible by their faith. Matthew 25, where Jesus says you don't get to go to heaven unless you feed the hungry, etc., makes no sense in Bachmann's version of the sola fide doctrine. She is saying, in effect, that you can be a nasty, sinful asshole (e.g., Donald Trump) and still go to heaven if you believe in Jesus - leaving out the rest of it, which is that if your faith is genuine you won't be a nasty, sinful asshole in the first place.

I'm an agnostic. I don't care much about how many angels Martin Luther had dancing on the head of a pin. But Bachmann shows us the hypocrisy of a whole lot of "Christians" who brag about their faith while happily kicking the least among us in the head.