The good samaritan treated a single symptom. He should have (and did) assist the traveller, but then should have gone to Rome to petition to increase patrols on the road to prevent such things from happening again.
How many people died on the side of the road on the days that the good samaritan did not pass by?
One of the fascinating things about being able to keep more than one thought in your head at a time, is being able to help both a single individual, and society, at the same time.
In the context of the OP, the samaritan would help the traveler due to his Christian values, then petition due to his politics, which might be but are not completely influenced by his faith.
The subject of refugees is a complicated problem. It takes a lot more than “love thy neighbor” to come to a conclusion on, as the OP implies.
And right now, European countries, our allies, are bearing those costs, due to the Syrian civil war. Why shouldn’t the USA take some of the load, for the sake of Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Sweden, & all the others?
OK, name five ways that we can help refugees and help Europeans flooded with them.
I’m pretty “lots” is at least five, and that’s if you’re a rabbit and can only count to four.
This, like many other such issues, is a theological debate over whether Jesus’ or Scripture’s commands about helping the poor mean ***personally ***helping the poor, or saying that one’s ***government ***should do it.
It is an individual mandate. At no point did Jesus say that Christians should push the government to help the widow and the orphan. Christians are called to give of their own personal resources.
People make similar arguments about welfare - usually non-Christians, trying to use Scripture to score political debate points.
All of which seem to show them advocating for fighting the governments actions to harm refugees.
This actually seems to be the norm in churches with a structured way to educate their clergy, but more rare in sects with less formalized models. But that claim is purely anecdotal of course.
But I do not think it is a rare or uncommon case to take Matthew 25 and other passages to it’s word, where it is damnation without action or when ignoring those in need. Although Matthew 25 isn’t probably the best example.
He didn’t say that we weren’t allowed to call upon the government, though. In that time and place, the idea of signed petitions would have been met with bafflement; nowadays, there’s countries whose legal frame includes the procedure for presenting those to the legislative bodies. They didn’t have telephones, email or a reliable mail system available to civilians, either.
Our personal resources include our own time and money, but also the mechanisms available within our legal systems to get our collective representative, the Government, to move in a direction or in another.
My own Income Tax Form has two little squares that you can mark to tell the Government “calculate 0.7% of my income tax and give it to non-religious nonprofits” and/or “calculate 0.7% of my income tax and give it to religious nonprofits”. The pen in my hand when I’m filling the income tax form is a resource.
OK, so your question isn’t about whether some churches don’t believe in “helping others” or “humanitarian causes.” You’re asking specifically why some churches’ interpretation of scripture doesn’t lead them to the same public-policy position on US refugee intake as you and the churches you cite above.
I’m not sure where I said anything about what US immigration policy should be?
I’m quite certain that the optimal European policy towards Muslim immigration is “none is too many” (they need to shut down further immigration, and figure out how to get rid of the ones they have), but I don’t have especially strong feelings about what America should do: I care much more about Europe than America in that regard.
Um, seriously?
There are lots more than five solutions here, insofar as there are a lot more than five countries to which they can go. The obvious solutions are to pay Muslim countries (or non-Muslim developing countries in Africa or Asia) to take them. Pretty much any poor country is better suited to take in refugees than a rich country, because the cost of living is much lower. Here’s a more fleshed out version of the same point:
“•One dollar of spending money goes about five times further in poor countries than it does in First World countries due to purchasing power differences. (And that’s without considering the “extras” in the form of extra policing, language courses, welfare spending, etc. that First World nations would have to provide in order to pay for all the new vibrant diversity). If conditions in Syria are so utterly unacceptable that young males have no choice but to emigrate, surely it would be more effectively altruistic to encourage them to settle elsewhere in the Third World – say, why not a relatively stable and Islamic but poor country, like Tanzania, Senegal, or Bangladesh? The $10,000 they pay the Italian or Greek mafias to smuggle them into Europe would probably be enough to buy a nice house there!
•European EA’ers could even subsidize them with a few $1,000s for the first few years to help them settle in their new homelands and encourage them to stay put. A Syrian doctor or engineer would be a great boon to a typical $1,000-$2,000 GDP per capita African country, where there are very few such specialists in the first place. In a European country, there are no substantive shortages of high IQ specialists, and your Syrian doctor or engineer would be just as likely to end up as a taxi driver (or would it be Uber now?) as to make relevant use of whatever professional qualifications he might have. There are 4 physicians per 1,000 people in Germany, compared to 1.5 in Syria and just 0.4 in Bangladesh, 0.1 in Senegal, and 0.0 in Tanzania. Having a Syrian doctor be a taxi driver in Germany is a bad skills misallocation on the global level, one that easily incurs an opportunity cost in the $10,000s, and it should elicit howls of outrage from any truly rationalist EA’er.”
Yes, if you could actually put forth a plan where we pay others to accept refugees, that might be an acceptable alternative*. But that is not the alternative being proposed. Nor is cost the reason people don’t want to accept refugees.
I’ve gotten into this argument quite a few times with other Christians, and the argument is one of safety. They specifically try to come up with examples like me not accepting just any homeless man into my home, and try to argue these are the same thing–ignoring the massive vetting.
Fundamentalists especially are afraid of outsiders, coming in and polluting the purity of their beliefs. It’s basically what they are all about. They rejected modernism, despite it not in any way contradicting Scripture, because it is different.
You have to realize that these types of churches like this are conservative at a fundamental level, above any actual religion. If we still had the young, active Christianity of the early Church, these people would not be a part of it.
*I say might, because, while it’s quite scriptural (the Good Samaritan paid others to take care of the man, after all), it’s also a pretty good tactic of trying to shut down the idea of taking refugees, while knowing that the better plan can’t really happen. (Giving money to those scary terrorist countries? Never!) It’s really hard to know whether people are sincere about this.
I mean, the Religious Right did vote for Trump, and this is definitely not his plan. He is definitely in the “safety” camp.
Yeah, the OP sort of begs the question insofar as the premise that Christian Values *must *mean supporting a society-wide more open public policy regarding charity and acceptance of the outsider (later, **Flyer **refines the debate more along the lines of whether they require this charity be universal rather than only internal to the Christian community – in which case I happen to agree that they do, but it’s evidently not a settled debate for some parties)
I tend to agree: Fundamentalism (of any faith) starts off by saying the Old Ways were best and latter developments have corrupted them. If modernists and liberals support a welfare state or multiculturalism or disco then it must be wrong, because in the Good Old Days there was none of that.
I’m not. The person replying to me is, thinking that modernism means the same thing as modernity. I used the word I used for a reason.
Fundamentalists (which I have friends among) have no reason to reject theological modernism, if you go by Scripture itself. They do so out of their own tradition, just like the Catholics they condemn for having their capital-T Tradition.
Fundamentalists pretend to be Biblical literalists. But their literalism is not really all that literal.
If they were, they couldn’t condemn abortion or transgenderism, or assert all they do about Heaven and Hell. Or condemn those who don’t believe in the Trinity.
I doubt if Evangelicals were opposed to all refugees, only to Muslims in a philosophical way, not exactly opposing particular refugees from violence or discrimination, rather, worried about being challenged by more radically religious groups.
I rather think that Evangelicals were influenced to vote for Thrump moreso by their inherent belief that women should not be given, or elected to, domination over men. And, I don’t mean just the men feeling that way, but also a significant portion of women, as well. Sad to say, I think Evangelical women are more prone to being happy with being told how to behave, think and vote than are men.
Almost nobody’s is, if you come right down to it. Everyone cherrypicks and interprets, and it’s all in translation anyway, just that some traditions (Catholic, Jewish) are up front that yes, we had someone who studies this for a living do the translating and interpreting.
(Some American Evangelicals take the extra step of claiming a specific translation of scripture (KJV) is itself divinely inspired and inerrant to the letter. )