Arachne646

People who don't have health care want to be able to see a doctor when they get sick, or take their children when their children are sick. No one wants to go bankrupt if they have a serious medical illness or severe injury.

People who are unemployed are not having a holiday on unemployment insurance. They are looking for work. Very few are finding it. Look at the numbers. Do not drop people off the rolls at a certain time limit.

Families who are working and cannot afford food, heat, and rent are called the working poor. When we allow the government to cut housing assistance, food stamps, and other programs, something has to break.

Families with children who do their homework in homeless shelters want somewhere to live.

If you are a Christian, you will not have a hard time figuring out what poor people want. There are groups forming on the web, you can go to a Church in an urban area, or perhaps your congregation can help poor people get together where you live. People with mental illness or addictions are waiting for treatment opportunities that are not available, too.

To say that poor people have gifts, talents, and value to our gracious Father is true. Often these are unable to be used, though, because pain, worries for our children, and fear drown them out.  Our Christian duty is to stop powers that are making the few rich at the expense of the many.

Hit and kick a dog long enough, and any of them will stop fighting back. People are the same way. If they see no way out, the education system set them up to fail, and even the political action they took got them burned out and hopeless too, why try? Without a committed Christian community, hope to fuel work for change, even to speak out about what's really going on, is hard to find and keep.

Don't criticize anyone until you've walked a mile in her shoes.

Jesus prohibited violence. It's not just that he omitted to talk about it, like slavery, premarital sex, or homosexuality. It's not just that he taught about it by example, like eating and drinking with sinners, prostitutes, and all kinds of people society forbade contact with; he specifically told his followers not to fight back if attacked. The Koran permits certain kinds of war--defensive, and to protect the oppressed. It also has rules, like the Geneva conventions, to protect non-combatants, etc. The Christian New Testament has no writings on war because Jesus said to love your enemies, which does not include killing them. Who would Jesus bomb?

When Christianity became the State Religion of Rome, and then every Kingdom after that, it couldn't be christianity. A Kingdom cannot run without an army, to make sure the King is secure from his people and other Kings. Jesus only preached, travelled, ate and stayed with poor people. He said rich people couldn't inherit eternal life. Jesus was domesticated in the Church, eventually the theory of "Just War" was developed.

The One who had been executed by the greatest and strongest military dictatorship in the world proved that it had no power over him. He rose again to inspire a depressed group of followers to found a Church that would fight for its life for Centuries before it was adopted by the same Roman Empire that executed Jesus Christ. Lots of pacifists want to take the Church back.

That's kind of irrelevant, since in the South, the parties have pretty much exchanged names and the conservative Democratic Party switched nationally (and pretty much locally) to the Republican Party thanks to Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" (continued by Reagan) of appealing to "tough on crime", and  "cut welfare" policies worded in ways like "welfare queens" to appeal to racist fears of voters in both the North and South. It worked, and Republicans are still intimating that food stamps are a program for African-Americans today. Like the country as a whole, food stamp users are mostly white. They are mostly the working poor, too.

I agree with your point that neither party represents a moral alternative--they're both political parties. JFK only supported Civil Rights laws with National Guardsmen because of the bad publicity, foreign and domestic, that non-violent Civil Rights demonstrators being violently attacked by police and civilians provided on TV and film. Recent politics has not shown either Party to be morally superior. God is a non-affiliated authority.

Creation: It's the real thing.

Barak Obama's election as President of the United States does signal a dramatic shift in the black/white reality in the US. The fact that an African American could be elected President is very significant, and God's grace moved people to see that it was reasonable. That does not mean society is not racist in how it works, though, thankfully, being racist is seen as unreasoning and distasteful to almost everyone. Systems in and of themselves can be racist, without malice or conscious racism from any individual, and some easy places to see it are in education, the drastically different effects of the economic collapse, and most of all, in the criminal justice system.

To say that racism is alive and well in society today is not to attack white people, or to say that white people where I live are less racist than somewhere else. Racist systems exist particularly well when they are maintained by people who aren't particularly malicious or racist, "colourblind", and who would like to see a "post-racial" world. We've made lots of progress, but we're far from equality. I don't think letjusticerolldown is suggesting we just concentrate on all the good that God has inspired toward equality and harmony, and anything that's not fair will just work itself out in time. Without forgetting all the progress that's been made, let's continue to see injustice for what it is, and tell the truth in love, no matter what the cost.

I believe President Obama followed that proverb--he's said the conversation and finger pointing was no big deal. He's never made a big deal about any of the racist conspiracy theories, "jokes" and hate speech poured out on him since his campaign started, other than to defend family members.

The couple reviewing the Driscoll's book was not hating him, they were honestly reviewing a didactic handbook a pastor uses to teach Christians what "real marriage" is. I don't think your clip about Jeff Bethke is relevant to the TED video either--did you watch it? The world is becoming less and less Christian all the time, as corporations, rather than governments of formally or practically Christian countries have disappeared. Without the Church's former political power, the end of Christendom is close, or has already happened, and the Church is going to have to change radically to bring the Gospel to the rest of the 21st Century and beyond.

Jesus taught almost nothing about sex and marriage.  He spoke about money more often than about anything else except the Kingdom of God. Justice for the poor and the stranger are consistent priorities of God throughout the Bible. Sojournors' work to unite Christians to work for the benefit of the poor, disabled and immigrants is consistent with Biblical principles. In the Kingdom of God, peace with justice will be the rule, not the exception, and as we pray "Your will be done on earth", we must make sure we do our part to make sure it happens.

Mr. and Mrs. Vanderveen are not telling you to do anything against what your Pastor tells you not to do in bed. I agree with them that putting specifics down in their book is unhelpful, inflexible, and just part of a controlling, top-down leadership style as opposed to servant-leadership of the Church. Marriages must have flexibility, just as Jesus was flexible, within the Great Commandments to love God, and one another. We need to wish each other the best.

First, the cartoon was only about Jesus and the Tea Party. It was not meant as a journalistic piece, so no balancing message needed to be said about godless atheists who favour rescinding tax cuts made to the rich. 

Tea Partiers may not have read Ayn Rand or have based their political stance on her ethos, but her super-individualism and belief in "every man for himself" personal responsibility for the way one's life turns out, no matter where your starting line is, makes her a candidate for the Patron Saint of the Church of the Tea Party, or at least one that would appeal to lots of people, as long as Tea Party Jesus was there!  How much of Jesus' words do you and I really remember every day, anyway?

The combination of stepped-up immigration enforcement by state, county, and local legislation to target undocumented immigrants, and the Federal Government's intensive program of incarceration of huge numbers of people for immigration violations have caused huge losses of crops in the US because not enough farmworkers could be found to pick them. Immigration and temporary work permits to the US are way down because of the economy, and agriculture is just the first area of the economy to feel it.

If you thought Keystone XL was a controversial project, you should look a little more closely at the northern pipeline to a Pacific port that the Tar Sands want to build. There is the same risk of spills along the length of the pipeline, but this time in the middle of the wilderness. Much of the path is through land in dispute with First Nations peoples, but the worst part would be having a new port for oil tankers on the extremely rough and rocky Pacific coast at that point, and the eventual spill. Opposition had started last spring to this project in British Columbia, and will be extreme against any pipeline for Tar Sands petroleum exports to Asia.