FTFY*

Seen this recently? I think I've seen it a good six times over the last 24 hours.

I'm actually getting used to this nonsense.  It's typical Leftist stuff; they've decided that Jesus was a Socialist, apparently deciding to blend their lack of knowledge about Socialism with never actually reading the Bible.

Anyway, I finally got sick of this, so I decided to edit the pic as follows & re-post it (which you know if you're on my FB):

With very few exceptions, I assume of my more liberal friends that we have the same goals, & our disagreement is over how to get there.  I would not ever dream of calling them bad Christians because they believe the problem of poverty is too entrenched to be solvable without government help, much as I disagree.  That they are not extending me the same courtesy is galling, although at this point completely unsurprising.

Self-righteous leftists are no better than self-righteous right wingers. 

Let's be real here: most of the major charities out there, if they are not faith-based now, they at least started out that way.  This is why the Red Cross is the Red Crescent in Muslim countries.  This is why the names of charity hospitals often start with the word Saint.

Thomas Jefferson published (or at least prepared; I'm uncertain if it was published during his lifetime) a version of the Gospels from which he had removed all mention of Christ's divinity.  He was, at most, Deist rather than Christian.  Even so, he acknowledged the usefulness of the church as an agent of social order.  I am fairly certain Unitarian Universalism persists to this day because of similar beliefs--some sort of congregation is the easiest way to gather like-minded folks together to give hands-on help within a community.  Charity of course isn't a Christian virtue per se, but faith groups have been around the longest and are usually the ones to have well-established means of helping the least among us.  Even lacking faith, most people can acknowledge their utility.

I welcome this, but it has brought some rather untoward developments.  There are people with only a partial understanding of Jesus who presume to speak for Him.  Did He command us to help the poor?  Unquestionably.  But he also commanded us to spread God's word, and our belief that salvation is to be found only by following Christ.  More and more I am seeing people insisting that we're missing Jesus's point if we proselytize in conjunction with our charity.

Now, personally I am of the "spread the word by living the word" school of thought, but some sects feel the need to explicitly spread the Gospel as well as living it (I know there are some who do the former and not the latter; they're not the point of this).  Here locally, Alamo City Christian Fellowship provides food and clothing and other aid to the poor, but they insist that petitioners sit through a short service first.  And, well, I don't have a problem with this, even though my church separates the two things rather thoroughly.  An honest reading of Scripture will make it evident that this "Jewish carpenter" was in actuality an itinerant preacher who spread a radical interpretation of God's word, told us to take care of each other (not to force people to join in, mind--this was about personal salvation, & you cannot force that on anyone else), and, yes, sometimes tried hiding from people whom He knew would demand personal favors.

If it fits your purposes better to consider Jesus an historical figure who spread a message of fellowship, more power to you.  But we have knowledge of Him only through Scripture, so you're going to have to acknowledge that some of us will be unwilling to divorce the two.




*FTFY= fixed that for you

Oh, in other news, I no longer allow anonymous comments.  I'm fully sick of people not willing to own their words.  I have, however, removed the captcha.  I figure since I manually approve comments anyway, it's an unnecessary extra step.  If it really does result in more SpamBots, I'll stick it back up, but right now I doubt that'll happen.