Jesus Demands You Impose a Socialist Economy Or Something, Wingnuts

This is their moment to strike. Obama's destroyed the economy of the country, so pretty soon people will start looking for a Plan B. They want it on the record that socialism can be that Plan B.

And so, the stupid.

A truly strange thing has happened to American Christianity. A set of profound contradictions have developed within modern conservative Christianity, big and telling inconsistencies that have long slipped under the radar of public knowledge, and are only now beginning to be explicitly noted by critics of the religious and economic right.

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But to understand just how non-capitalistic Christianity is supposed to be we turn to the first chapter after the gospels, Acts, which describes the events of the early church. Chapters 2 and 4 state that all “the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need… No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had…. There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.”

Now folks, that’s outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx - who likely got the general idea from the gospels.

Um, yeah, or the Paris Insurrectionist Communes of the French Revolution (Reign of Terror period 1793-94 especially, natch) which advanced early communistic ideas. See, that's where the word came from. Since one of the Commune-ist (see?) radicals is credited as being the first Communist, yeah, I think I'm going to go with the French Revolution radical communes which came fifty years before Das Kapital, rather than all the way back to the Gospels.

By the way, the enrages, as they were known (Enraged Ones, or "madmen") tended to be extremely anti-Christian and atheist, carrying out widespread violent dechristianization efforts in Paris. The least of such efforts consisted of destroying all religious art and artifacts; the more strenuous efforts consisted of murdering priests wholesale. They became very fond of drowning dozens of priests at a go, by tying them into boats whose hulls had been bored through with holes. They called this a "Republican baptism." (Republican, from the French Republic which had just a year or two back been declared.)

They also created a fake atheist religion devoted to the goddess "Reason," who they acknowledged didn't actually exist.

They were such violent lunatics (and also, inept) that even the Jacobin leader Robespierre -- he who declared that state-fostered terror would create virtuous citizens -- got sick of them and put them all to the guillotine.

Socialism and terror and anti-christian agitation have been hand in hand in bloody glove since the beginning.

The pro-capitalist Christians who are aware of these passages wave them away even though it is the only explicit description of Christian economics in the Bible.

To get just how central collectivism is to Christian canon, consider that the Bible contains the first description of socialism in history. Anti-socialist Christians also claim that the Biblical version was voluntary. Aside from it being obvious that the biblical version of God was not the anti-socialist Christian capitalists commonly proclaim he was, some dark passages in Acts indicate how deeply pro-socialist the New Testament deity is. Chapter 5 details how when a church member fails to turn over all his property to the church “he fell down and died,” when his wife later did the same “she fell down… and died… Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.”

Dear readers, does this not sound like a form of terror-enforced-communism imposed by a God who thinks that Christians who fail to join the collective are worthy of death? Not only is socialism a Christian invention, so is its extreme communistic variant. The claim by many Christians that Christ hates socialism is untrue, while no explicit description of capitalism is found in the Bible - not surprising because it had not yet evolved.

Oh dear. This is of course written for Sally Quinn's nasty "on faith" section of the Post, which is about as serious about faith as I am.

Two men fire back against this stupidity.

God’s people should “strengthen the hand of the poor,” not create poverty. Yet socialism impoverishes. How can a Christian be socialist?

Jesus also preached charity, not state-enforced extraction of wealth. Charity is ennobling; paying socialist-level taxation levels is merely avoiding jail.

If only there were some study, some empirical evidence, that demonstrated that liberals, believing they had checked that charity box by simply thinking good thoughts and voting for liberals, actually gave far less in actual charity than conservatives...

If only such studies demonstrated that the conventionally-pious were in fact far more virtuously charitable than those who yap about socialism and atheism.

posted by Ace at 04:04 PM

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