Did you read it? Because it doesn’t seem to show what you appear to think it does. People who attend religious services self report higher rates of charitable giving. I don’t equate dropping a sawbuck or two in the collection plate once a week as charity, but I’ll bet they do.
Puddleglum.
Shouldn’t the precise opposite occur? I seem to recall a radical inveighing against giving alms in public like the hypocrites do… Their beliefs never really caught on though.
Bringing the water to the horse:
The Bible says much more about concern for the poor than it criticizes homosexuals. Jesus does not mention homosexuals at all. St. Paul says that homosexual behavior is as bad as heterosexual fornication, but he does not seem to think that it is worse.
Those who use the Bible to justify capitalism are restricted to a few proof texts from Proverbs like Proverbs 10:4 He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.
Proverbs also has verses like, Proverbs 22:16 He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches, and he that giveth to the rich, shall surely come to want.
The Old Testament prophets blame the decline and fall of David’s empire in part to oppression of the poor by the rich.
Jesus has nothing good to say about the rich, and much that is good about the poor.
I wonder how many of those verses will make it into Andy Schlafly’s Bible translation?
That’s something straight out of 1984.
From that Bible Translation:
(I’m curious: what does “rich” mean in the original text?)
I don’t know, but I’ve looked up several different translations of Mark 10:24-25 and Luke 18:24-25 on Bible Gateway, and none translates it as anything but “rich.”
Also, the story is about a man who asks Jesus what he must do to be perfect, beyond obeying the words of Moses and the Prophets, and Jesus says, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor,” and the man goes away discouraged, “for he had a great many possessions,” and then Jesus, as a capper, tells his followers the bit about the camel and the eye of the needle, etc. Nothing about the man being “miserly” – a man who won’t give away all he has is not necessarily a miser. And I do wonder how Schlafly is going to reword that part.
I read in Asimov’s Guide to the Bible that the medieval Church used to tell rich potential donors that “The Needle” was actually the name of a gate in the walls of Jerusalem too low for a fully-laden camel to pass through, but you could get it through if you lightened the camel’s load a bit; i.e., no need to beggar yourself to get into Heaven (that wouldn’t have played very well), just give some of your wealth to the po- that is, to the Church.
This version of the truth was taught to me in sunday school as a child. It’s ok to be wealthy overall, as long as you lighten your load a little bit by donating to charity.
I recall Robert Anton Wilson recounting his Catholic childhood – in church, unlike in Protestant services I’ve been to, they used to pass the collection basket on the end of a stick, and the altar-boy or whatever holding it would pause it in front of every parishioner in the pews and hold it there until you dropped in something. They preached the story of the Widow’s Mite. “I think the point of the story is that God doesn’t draw class distinctions; but the way the priests told it, it meant you have to give something no matter how poor you were.”
This seems kind of simplistic but it is the essence of the problem. The more fundamentalist a believer the more the bible is taken literally.
In the end it simply becomes a matter of arguing with god. Not something easily done no matter how abhorrent the godly wishes are.
The theory of biological evolution says all humans have common ancestors and we’re all cousins. So does the Bible. Shouldn’t he be able to read that as against racism?!
I think there might be.
You don’t have to make gay sex and abortion appealing, you just have to remind Evangelicals that they’re not responsible for the actions of other people in God’s eyes, and it’s fine if the believe that those things are against God’s will but they should not be imposing their views on people with other beliefs.
Evangelicals in my experience (and contrary to the stereotype) are pretty compassionate when the issue is framed on a personal and not political scale. They can be pretty hateful to “gay rights” as an issue but have a friendly relationship with the actual gay couple next door. If we can frame the issues in terms of relationships instead of movements, more Evangelicals would probably adopt a let-God-be-the-judge policy instead of feeling that their beliefs were under attack and needing to assert those beliefs in the political arena.
Abortion may be murder and a sin, but it’s hard not to have compassion for a scared seventeen year-old or single mom who already has four kids or a rape victim if you actually know them. It won’t convince an Evangelical that abortion is wrong but those kinds of experiences make them less likely to judge others harshly.
