A lot of posts lately about 50% of Americans paying no taxes; and livid responses from those that I assume call themselves Christians. I dont see how any decent human being can be pissed that a family of 4 trying to live off 30K a year doesn't pay taxes ... But to call yourself a follower of Christ at the same time has to be the ultimate hypocrisy. I won't even get into your opinions on war, the death penalty, revenge, or all the other social issues that you people spew on here daily -- 180 degrees from the teachings of Christ. So I ask you T-Shirt Christians --you know who you are -- how do you live your life as a Christian that disagrees with almost everything Christ ever said? I know you read your bible -- do you just skip over these parts?? Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. [Matthew 5:9] Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. [Matthew 5:39] I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despite-fully use you, and persecute you; [Matthew 5:44] If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to cast a stone at her. [John 8:7] Do not judge, lest you too be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. [Matthew 7:1 & 2.]
I answered this before and you refused to respond. You're distorting the scriptures to fit your own goal, which is pretty typical.
Satchel as usual chimes in without a shred of substantiation for his one-liner. Well played. What's hilarious is that he supports the OP, which supposedly is about mercy and love, and then he claims that justice is actually more excellent than mercy - which is found nowhere in scripture. I'd be more than happy to reconsider that when it's shown to me in scripture. But he said it because he heard his preacher say it one day, and it sounded good and fit his world view, so it must be true.
You wouldn't understand it because you don't understand that Scripture is what it says and what it means. The the OP, your points are good ones. South American Catholic Bishops tell stories of how they were lauded for their charitable works among the poor by the rich and powerful. It was only when they began to question systems, governments and structural inequities that perpetuated poverty did they lose the support of their former allies. One speaks to charity which is time bound. The other speaks to the permanency of Justice and as the Message Translation puts it: "God wants justice and oceans of it'
No you didn't. You didn't site one scripture, you didn't explain how a single point I made was wrong. You said this:
Prodigal, I quoted the Message translation of the Amos passage in sacred Scripture. Whether you like it or not, justice and the Christians obligation to pursue it, is a recurring theme throughout the Bible. You should check it out.
A Christian is someone who has accepted Jesus as their Lord and savior. You can be a believer and still think 49.5% of the population living off the government tit is BS.
As with most things, it may depend upon the social location from which one "interprets" Scripture. Yours is the more common top- down view and so you rely conveniently on literalism to ignore the primacy of the recurring Biblical theme of justice.
I don't know anything about scripture, but I do remember hearing a fable about people with long spoons needing to feed each other in order to survive. Not sure if that is in the bible, but it should be.
Chango, if you want to string together some excerpts from the Bible to suit your own context, let's try these: Matthew 27:5 - "Judas...went away and hanged himself." Luke 10:37 - "Go thou and do likewise." John 13:27 - "What thou doest, do quickly." HHD
As Chango reads the scriptures, they cause me to stop and ponder. I'm frankly amazed that American's can read the scriptures and not have questions and issues with government and their own behavior. I don't think Jesus would be a very good Republican, he cares too much for the poor and too little for the capabilities to kill with military force or the weapon in your glove compartment. Not that he'd be comfortable and welcome in the Democratic Party. As PH points out, Jesus cares about rightousness and the law. There are moral absolutes. God bless you if you can study the scriptures and not have vexing conflicts with your political and personal positions. I honestly feel torn between materialism, my own rigteousness or lack thereof and what I'm called to be in the scriptures.. I do think one can care about the afflicted and not necessarily get excited about seeing folks take their tax returns that exceeded their tax withholdings to buy flatscreen TVs and fancy stereos.
Prodigal Horn I'll cite a scripture that you obviously have no understanding of: "Do not throw your pearls to pigs." People who are as bigoted and hateful as this atheist crowd are not going to listen with intellectual honesty or argue with fairness. Save your apologetics for someone who actually suspects that there is something in this world greater and holier than themselves. The structure is always the same. "You 'claim' to be a Christian, so I am holding you to XXX opinion (which is always a distorted or just wrong point), and--even though I don't acknowledge or admit that there is any truth in the Bible or that Jesus is who he claimed to be--I am going to try to judo trick you into agreeing with my hateful anti-Christian point of view by making it sound like a Biblical point of view." So here, let's try this: If you don't accept the Bible as the truth, you have no right to quote it, and don't come here quoting some Bible fragment you know nothing about. {The "message"--give me a break} If you don't accept Jesus as a truth teller in all he said, don't make him out to be some straw man authority to you to use for one political post on Hornfans.
VYFan I knew there was a reason I liked you other than your very fine choice of name/ I am not particulary an organized religion kind of person but I respect everyone's right to be so and when I read haters try to use the bible against Christians I don't know enough to "refudiate" them but i can see the haters think they in a great snapshot. thank you
Solomon Zeitlin states, "It is quite clear that Jesus was arrested and brought before Pilate as a political offender against the Roman state". My guess is that Jesus wouldn't be too thrilled with an overbearing government.
Okay, Dionysus, I think your questions are genuine (if not, any sarcasm is fairly well disguised), so I'll try a calmer approach. Wasn't the ENTIRE POINT of the post by Chango--cheered on by the mocking Satchel--that if Christians disagree with his political views about how we apportion the obligations (taxing people) and "entitlements" (freebies) that the federal government oversees, that we are hypocritical? That if we disagree with his political views, we are not just mistaken, or have different values, or have different self interest or different intelligence or whatever, but rather that we are "T-shirt Christians" meaning that we are not true believers in Christ. Wasn't the whole point of this thread to call Christians hypocrites? And notice that Mr. Chango didn't go after President Obama--who claims to be a Christian yet supports partial birth abortion murder, but yet goes after economic conservatives who don't like big government. And, the structure of the argument is a phony one, pretending to argue from the Bible, as if he believed it to be a valid true authority, but only for the purpose of silencing Christians from complaining when the government takes (for me, for example), well over half my income to support (mainly) people who make bad decisions in their own lives. Suppose I argued to an atheist: You don't believe in any basis for morality, so why do you come to me with some phony argument about what is "right" when your own philosophy is that there is no God-given right and wrong? The most central point of the Bible, that can't be missed, is that we are all sinners, separated from God by our sin, and that we need a savior. Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, the long-prophesied Christ, the Son of God. He came to forever change the spiritual landscape of this world. He made audacious and outrageous claims as to who he was, and I believe those claims. If you or anyone else believes those claims, too, and you want to challenge me in my Christian walk to be more giving, more sensitive, more empathetic, etc., then I will accept that support from a fellow Christian, because I want to be more of those things. But I already do quite a lot, and to have a non-believer mock my beliefs and hold me to a Biblical standard he does not even hold himself up to is, well, disingenuous.
As far as apologetics goes, there are two main theories. Some Christians believe that unless the Holy Spirit opens a person's spiritual eyes first, the gospel will seem pure foolishness to them, and no amount of logical argument will make a difference. In other words some people are either temporarily or permanently closed off to this truth. Those people don't go in for apologetics much. I guess today, in listening to Prodigal Horn try to reason with someone only mocking him put me into this category...."shake the dust off your feet and leave the town." Because of my background and how I came to believe, I think that apologetics can be useful. Basically, it is the logical explanation for why it is reasonable to believe Christ's claims. The most apologetics can do is show you that his claims are plausible, that they should be closely considered. There is a certain leap of faith to the ultimate saving belief, but to me it's not as large a leap of faith as to believe that we are random. Anyway, I think apologetics serves a useful function, especially in our current culture where Christianity is referred to as fantasy by the human secularists who run our public schools. Are you seriously asking where to turn for truth in apologetics? I wonder instead whether you mean that because some people may disagree, you are disregarding the whole topic? You know Pilate had Christ right in front of him, and mused almost the same thing...a casual "what is truth?" is all he chose to ask Jesus Christ in his only chance to interview the savior, but he didn't mean for Jesus to answer; he meant it only to say that in his opinion, there was no such thing as truth, so there was no use discussing truth. Missed opportunity, that one.
My guess is poor people would much prefer to see a sermon than hear one from the really preachy types.
