Two thousand years ago....99.9999-percent of people existing on the Earth....were marginally getting by. Anyone who participated in Christianity in the those days....were poor. So, I don’t get where exactly this essay is going.
“I would make Jesus the God of the poor.”
Jesus as the God of the poor in spirit or the poor in material things?
And remember that ‘the meek’ meant those that were humble, not ‘wimps’ as is often thought today.
I get what the author is saying, but he’s saying it a bit awkwardly. It is not a tenent of Christian teaching that the poor should be able to vote themselves government largess, or that the government should support the poor. It is not charitable or merciful for people to support government transfer payments and welfare. You aren’t a good person because you vote for the guy who wants to expand Obamacare or Food Stamps.
Conversely, over the long span of history, Capitalism, while it can be brutal at times, has lifted the mass of humanity out of poverty. It is a revolutionary good more so than pretty much anything else in human history. And yet it is despised because, in the short term, it results in economic dislocation.
What insanity.
This is pretzel logic
And “I’ve never heard a sermon about how socialists who fail shouldn’t be coveting and stealing what belongs to capitalists...”
The catechism alone which strictly cited the bible is full of tgis. Where to start?
And where’re the Church cooperates with government in taking money from taxpayers, acting as if government knows better than the individual to determine where money is best used, it perverts the idea of virtue, not to mention disregarding separation of church and state. Where is there ‘social justice’ for ex.in my giving my closely budgeted money to planned parenthood or to the ungrateful nasty illegals cutting in front of me at the 15 item checkout pretending they can’t count speaking foreign language using tge EBT card I provide them ?
2401 The seventh commandment forbids unjustly taking or keeping the goods of one’s neighbor and wronging him in any way with respect to his goods. It commands justice and charity in the care of earthly goods and the fruits of men’s labor. For the sake of the common good, it requires respect for the universal destination of goods and respect for the right to private property. Christian life strives to order this world’s goods to God and to fraternal charity.
2403 The right to private property, acquired or received in a just way, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind. The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise.
I hate this rich/poor divide, especially in the church. Read the book of James, and tell me there should be such a divide. Or, how about how Jesus treated his wealthy disciples — oh, yes, he had some! How about Matthew the tax collector?
I have no idea why Western rationalist materialists fawn over (non-white) poor people, who are their cultures' version of the "redneck." Any poor person who cooperates with these alien philosophies should be ashamed of himself.
I get what he’s saying... very shrewd.
Fine article. It condemns the fact that it is “politically correct” to criticize the wealthy and the successful, and to make a virtue of poverty.
If a man refused to work, then he was not to eat.
Jesus chastised free-loaders for wanting free hand outs rather than wanting the things of God (John 6).
The fact that these words come off as downright shocking shows how much whites have been demonized in our society.