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Commentary: What would Jesus really do?
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miketheidiot
Lifer
I'd like to see the church provide roads, defense, fire protection, defense or any of the other responsibilities assumed by the governemnt. The help provided by religious groups is marginal at best.
miketheidiot
Lifer
are you denying that governemnt policy can have economic effects? I think any responable economic would laugh in your face at that statement, regardless the side of the policitical spectrum they lie on.
miketheidiot
Lifer
Is it the one where god says abortion is evil? 😛 /cheapshot
please, inform us.
Fern
Elite Member
Having an economic effect =! manufacturering poor people.
Nor did I say that government policy has no economic effect, thanks for putting words in my mouth. I think any responible economic person would laugh at the statement above about polititions manufacturing poor people.
Government has very limited ability to directly affect the number of poor people, short a massive increase in subsidies which would be unlikely to have a lasting effect, or a massive immediate welth re-distribution system unlike any we have ever seen. An excpetion would be the Great Depression, which was primarily caused by greed and poorly developed financial understanding, tools and compliance.
But we're veering from the topic. The article's statement & premise is falacious. Churches/Christians do much work in poverty, homeless etc. Their work is done, for most part, directly with those need, so you don't hear about it unless you are either in a church, a recipient, or go look for it (their efforts). OTOH, if their efforts for the se issues were expended in the political arena (i.e., lobbying) you would hear about just as much as abortion or gay marriage. Those two later issues are the subject of legislation, thus the lobby about them.
--------------------------------
The basic services you describe above are neither the subject at hand (reference the above article, those aren't mentioned), nor argued by anyone yet that Churches do a better job at providing them government. You are refuting a point no one's attempted to make, nor is directly it relevant to poverty & homelessness.
---------------------------------
It's the purpose for his "being" here. In a nutshell, he replaced the Old Testiment requirement/need for (animal) sacrifices.
Fern
That's a good take on it. While in practice you hear about abortion and homosexuality as far as politics go, most churches are actively involved in dealing with other issues. Like churches in my area will do outreaches, clean bathrooms, hand out light bulbs in poor neighborhoods, etc.
That is very true, which is why its dangerous for people OUTSIDE and UNINVOLVED in churches to criticize Christians.... because while they may hear something on TV, or from a friend, their impression will ultimately be lacking unless they actually are involved in churches and understand what they are doing, how money is spent, where donations go, what activities are organized, etc.
EDIT: The fact is, there are MANY reasons to criticize Christians and churches... but don't use these criticisms as a mere excuse and say, "Well since Christians aren't perfect, their claims are without merit."
I wouldn't. That's why we have secular government.
That is an extremely biased opinion, and besides, Christians aren't forced to pay taxes like the government -- giving is rightly encouraged and taught, but never forced.
So while you may marginalize the generosity of those who give out of charity and concern for other people, I can assure you they do make an impact.
For example, after the Asia tsunami strikes a few years ago, the missions organization I'm involved with collected over $100,000 and used 100% of the funds to build new homes, buy bicycles and fishing nets for dozens and dozens of families.
Another organization collects $25/month from people in the U.S., and uses the money to buy meals daily for poor kids in Albania and Guatemala. There is no substitute for their service, and the fact is, if they were not present in those countries, most of those kids would not have food in the morning.
Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
3chordcharlie
Diamond Member
Yes, because Jesus was a minarchist Libertarian. If I recall, most of what he taught was one iteration or another of 'But it's MY Money!!'.:disgust:
3chordcharlie
Diamond Member
While I agree that there is more than one paragraph in the New Testament that matters to Christians, if you had to pick one, it is you who picked the wrong one.
1prophet
Diamond Member
The answer to the question. Religious Right Has Distorted the Faith
In the 1980s, in order to solidify their shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and "secular humanists," who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court's misguided Roe decision.
It's a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn't true.
Although various Roman Catholic groups denounced the ruling, and Christianity Today complained that the Roe decision "runs counter to the moral teachings of Christianity through the ages but also to the moral sense of the American people," the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about it; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision. W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote, "Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision." Indeed, even before the Roe decision, the messengers (delegates) to the 1971 Southern Baptist Convention gathering in St. Louis, Missouri, adopted a resolution that stated, "we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." W.A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, expressed his satisfaction with the Roe v. Wade ruling. "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," the redoubtable fundamentalist declared, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed."
The Religious Right's self-portrayal as mobilizing in response to the Roe decision was so pervasive among evangelicals that few questioned it. But my attendance at an unusual gathering in Washington, D.C., finally alerted me to the abortion myth. In November
1990, for reasons that I still don't entirely understand, I was invited to attend a conference in Washington sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Religious Right organization (though I didn't realize it at the time). I soon found myself in a conference room with a couple of dozen people, including Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition; Carl F. H. Henry, an evangelical theologian; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Edward G. Dobson, pastor of an evangelical church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and formerly one of Jerry Falwell's acolytes at Moral Majority. Paul M. Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist, head of what is now called the Free Congress Foundation, and one of the architects of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, was also there.
In the course of one of the sessions, Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let's remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.
Bob Jones University was one target of a broader attempt by the federal government to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Several agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sought to penalize schools for failure to abide by antisegregation provisions. A court case in 1972, Green v. Connally, produced a ruling that any institution that practiced segregation was not, by definition, a charitable institution and, therefore, no longer qualified for tax-exempt standing.
The IRS sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school's regulations forbade interracial dating; African Americans, in fact, had been denied admission altogether until 1971, and it took another four years before unmarried African Americans were allowed to enroll. The university filed suit to retain its tax-exempt status, although that suit would not reach the Supreme Court until 1983 (at which time, the Reagan administration argued in favor of Bob Jones University).
Initially, I found Weyrich's admission jarring. He declared, in effect, that the origins of the Religious Right lay in Green v. Connally rather than Roe v. Wade. I quickly concluded, however, that his story made a great deal of sense. When I was growing up within the evangelical subculture, there was an unmistakably defensive cast to evangelicalism. I recall many presidents of colleges or Bible institutes coming through our churches to recruit students and to raise money. One of their recurrent themes was,We don't accept federal money, so the government can't tell us how to run our shop?whom to hire or fire or what kind of rules to live by. The IRS attempt to deny tax-exempt status to segregated private schools, then, represented an assault on the evangelical subculture, something that raised an alarm among many evangelical leaders, who mobilized against it.
For his part, Weyrich saw the evangelical discontent over the Bob Jones case as the opening he was looking for to start a new conservative movement using evangelicals as foot soldiers. Although both the Green decision of 1972 and the IRS action against Bob Jones University in 1975 predated Jimmy Carter's presidency, Weyrich succeeded in blaming Carter for efforts to revoke the taxexempt status of segregated Christian schools. He recruited James Dobson and Jerry Falwell to the cause, the latter of whom complained, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
Weyrich, whose conservative activism dates at least as far back as the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, had been trying for years to energize evangelical voters over school prayer, abortion, or the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution. "I was
trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," he recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
During the meeting in Washington, D.C., Weyrich went on to characterize the leaders of the Religious Right as reluctant to take up the abortion cause even close to a decade after the Roe ruling. "I had discussions with all the leading lights of the movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, post?Roe v. Wade," he said, "and they were all arguing that that decision was one more reason why Christians had to isolate themselves from the rest of the world."
"What caused the movement to surface," Weyrich reiterated,"was the federal government's moves against Christian schools." The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, "enraged the Christian community." That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. "It was not the other things," he said.
Ed Dobson, Falwell's erstwhile associate, corroborated Weyrich's account during the ensuing discussion. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," Dobson said. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."
During the following break in the conference proceedings, I cornered Weyrich to make sure I had heard him correctly. He was adamant that, yes, the 1975 action by the IRS against Bob Jones University was responsible for the genesis of the Religious Right in
the late 1970s. What about abortion? After mobilizing to defend Bob Jones University and its racially discriminatory policies, Weyrich said, these evangelical leaders held a conference call to discuss strategy. He recalled that someone suggested that they had
the makings of a broader political movement?something that Weyrich had been pushing for all along?and asked what other issues they might address. Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, "How about abortion?" And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.
The abortion myth serves as a convenient fiction because it suggests noble and altruistic motives behind the formation of the Religious Right. But it is highly disingenuous and renders absurd the argument of the leaders of Religious Right that, in defending the rights of the unborn, they are the "new abolitionists." The Religious Right arose as a political movement for the purpose, effectively, of defending racial discrimination at Bob Jones University and at other segregated schools. Whereas evangelical abolitionists of the nineteenth century sought freedom for African Americans, the Religious Right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination. Sadly, the Religious Right has no legitimate claim to the mantle of the abolitionist crusaders of the nineteenth century. White evangelicals were conspicuous by their absence in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Where were Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington or on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. and religious leaders from other traditions linked arms on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to stare down the ugly face of racism?
Falwell and others who eventually became leaders of the Religious Right, in fact, explicitly condemned the civil rights movement. "Believing the Bible as I do," Falwell proclaimed in 1965, "I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel
of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else?including fighting Communism, or participating in civil-rights reforms." This makes all the more outrageous the occasional attempts by leaders of the Religious Right to portray themselves as the "new abolitionists" in an effort to link their campaign against abortion to the nineteenth century crusade against slavery.
EXman
Lifer
ROOOOAAAR!!!!!!!!
what? oh gimmie a break. do you actually believe that poo you're shoveling?
Who helped the KAtrina Victoms? Governments? Wasn't that Racist Mayor or the idiot GOvernor. FEMA? Federal Government? No it was a web of churches 100's of churches letting people stay in gyms, houses, giving them relief, caring for them and about them. We gave them jobs and they are not going back to New Orleans.
That is just one of many things. But it is more than that it is a giving heart. It is how you give. Anyone ever heard of a caring federal entity?
I really think your arguement is swayed by your bias.
actually you chopped half of it off🙂
Mark12 28-31
Background
One of the scribes in this verse (28) in reference to the Mosaic law asks Jesus "Which is the first( or greatest commandment?)
v29-31..and Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear O Isreal; the Lord our God is one Lord;
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
And the second is like, namely this, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandments greater than these.
miketheidiot
Lifer
you would be very surprised at how easy it is for the government to make more poor people, its much more difficult and takes more time to repair poverty. Someone who knows what they are doing can easily double the number of poor in american in a very short time, if they had the political leverage to do so.
ok
so i guess police and fire protection, military defense, and providing infrastructure have nothing to do with helping people? Oh yeah, and it was brought up, as you can see.
The part of the new testament the is of primary importance can be summarized by the sermon on the mount. The rest is just stuff about how great it would be if everyone did as he said, and some miscellaneous story telling and proverbial wisdom.
Siddhartha
Lifer
I recommend that you read Mark and Luke's gospels in the bible.
Jesus was more concerned about helping the needy than mantaining wealth.
The ideal is when you have a nation full of good Christians who work hard and take care of others and don't become wards of the state and pay Caesar who is pretty much following Christian ideals to get elected and then the government with all those taxes goes out to improve on what the local Christians are doing, no?
3chordcharlie
Diamond Member
The new American legend is that Jesus was a free-market capitalist, possibly, in fact, a free-market imperialist (neo-con).
Or haven't you heard the 'good news'?
Talk about bias. Christians work for federal entities as well as other good people. Have you ever seen a church entity care?......is essentially what you are saying. It is the natural inclination of everyone to care and you, because you secretly feel inferior, have made it competitive to care. You care because it makes you feel superior to think you care more than others, so you have this need to run the caring of others down. You have built your worth of the valuelessness of others and thus have a stake is seeing them that way.
Read what was said again. We're not debating CHURCHES, we're debating CONSERVATIVE churches. You know, the kind that spend way more money lobbying the federal government than in helping the needy. There is a HUGE difference. But it's still not as much about churches as individuals. Most churches I've been too speak of peace and brotherhood and helping the needy and all that, yet the message a huge number of conservative Christians take away is "gay people are evil". Clearly there is a breakdown somewhere, but clearly the message is being lost on the flock, no matter how much good individual churches might do.
Jaskalas
Lifer
:thumbsup:
Man is made in the image of god. Our being, our existence, is the testament of god.
I?m firmly of the belief, having seen depressed people, that if one does not love thyself, does not love life, then one will struggle if not outright fail at truly loving others. Therefore, when I read that ?thou shalt love the Lord thy God?, is it not intended that you should love life, and perhaps your existence?
Having fulfilled that, you would then have the capacity to love others as you love thyself.
So then the message comes down to a single thing: Love thyself and thy neighbors.
This isn?t really about following the letter by letter man-made wording, crossing every T or dotting every I. It?s about the idea behind it, and what other legitimate purpose should there be in religious teachings if not for the message I write above?
angminas
Diamond Member
Well said, and an important point- God's commandments are often surgically altered. Instead of converting themselves to Christianity, they convert Christianity to themselves...and, of course, once you change it to suit your views, it's not Christianity anymore- it's humanism. Although I will say Fern was more right than most, and obviously has read the Bible more than most. That gets some points.
To the thread in general, it's true in a way that these two commandments are all you need to do...but here's the big thing that very few admit or realize...you can't just do what you feel like and call it obeying the commandments...
You have to learn how and why to obey them!
That's what the rest of the Bible is for, to put it very briefly. Anybody who says you can fit Jesus' entire message into one paragraph is calling him a liar. Why did he say and do all those other things if they were not important? What purpose was served by His disciples continuing to follow Him around and observe His actions and speaking if He'd already said all He had to say? Why did he quote the Old Testament dozens of times if it was just useless fluff compared to the "real message"? What did he mean when he gave them additional commandments after the main two? Why didn't he just say that part and then go die immediately so that his followers could begin to receive the Holy Spirit in Acts 2? See, here's the trap. You can't say his entire message fits into a thimble and then say his other messages had merit, too. You're making him out to be a fool.
Just for one single example- what good would his message have been if, in addition to saying to love people, he hadn't lived a perfect life and died for our sins?
None at all.
You can't just talk the talk- you've got to walk the walk too (Matthew 7, James 2, many other scriptures). Loving God, your neighbor, and yourself in the way God commands does not come with the flick of a switch- it's a lifelong journey. How can you sustain yourself on that journey with one paragraph? Is that what Jesus came here to do?
Well, see what HE had to say about it. Otherwise you're just doing your own thing and not His thing...which means you're not a Christian. That's in the Bible too. Know where?
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