No, I agree with you. It’s just the taxes that happens with too. All the other laws are on the honor system. I’m not sure why the single out that one thing, but it probably has something to do with Facism, or Communism, or both for that matter. I’m sure Jesus would be pissed. I bet he wouldn’t turn the other cheek for that nonsense. No siree, he’d be packing heat. If Jesus had been at Waco I think it would have turned out different, don’t you think?
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I am not sure that liberals are 100% for UHC and conservatives 100% against it.
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I am betting Jesus is pro-UHC but He probably expects us to provide it to each other with or without government involvement.
Jesus would tell us to stay out of politics altogether, and if the government came to collect taxes, pay them. Jesus was not political in any way, and I doubt he’d become so just because of the universal health care debate.
This. Do I ask for a rebate just because I’m never ill enough to use UHC, or do I deem myself lucky that someone else needs it, and not me? Wow, such a tricky question - let me think on it.
Jesus seemed to promote the have’s using their good fortune to help the have nots, so I think he’d clearly want people in need of health care to be taken care of.
He’d also expect the have nots to work their ass off to provide for themselves rather than sit around waiting for others to do so.
So lets say someone is working hard but their pay isn’t enough to provide adequate health care for their family and little Johny is sick and needs attention, but insurance companies won’t touch him because it’s a preexisting condition. I think Jesus would expect his fellow citizens to make sure Johny got the health care he needed.
I want the government of the country that I choose to reside in to enforce its laws.
Don’t you? Why not?
Well, yeah, but – leaving taxes out of it for a moment – would Jesus be okay with private individuals forcibly taking money from said fellow citizens to provide that health care, via armed robbery on their own initiative?
Let’s deal with that question first, and then promptly move on to the different question of whether he’d authorize taxation to accomplish the same (and then note that once a tax is in place he of course says you should pay it).
You’ll have to show me that question is relevant first.
Let’s say a group of private citizens get together to discuss helping a neighbor who needs some help with medical bills. The majority are willing to pitch in and help but a few say “no thanks I’m keeping what’s mine , I earned it, and their problems are thier problems.”
What do you suppose Jesus would say about those who refused to help?
What’s going to help it the intent of the heart, not the dollar amount given
Money taken by taxing is money taken at gunpoint, it is tainted by threat of fear and force, but freely given from the heart is what is really wanted. If someone wants to hold on to their money:
You are missing the point that none of your extrapolation is relevant to the question of whether Jesus was liberal or conservative.
There may well be an argument to be made about the consequences to society of an influential individual’s personal philosophy. “Liberal” and “conservative” are descriptions of political leanings.
The position of Jesus Christ was closer to abstention from politics, with an effort (where possible) to live within whatever the law of the land happened to be (rendering to Caesar, e.g.).
FWIW, an anarchist is a different thing–it is a position that all government is inherently undesirable and possibly harmful. As for being a Utopian, yes–but not with respect to this world; only the next. Jesus was not a Utopian for the world as we know it. He was very clear that his kingdom was not of this world.
There is no evidence that Jesus would have participated in a social or political movement of any kind, regardless of his followers wishes that he do so. The notion of “practical necessity” follows from a paradigm that this world is the Main World, and needs fixing. This was not the perspective or paradigm of Jesus. We don’t see him decrying slavery, or unfair taxation, or lobbying to improve the position in society of women, or establishing shelters for the poor, or…well, you get the idea.
This is a phony characterization of taxation, which everybody supports and wants to benfit from, incuding you.
Do you drive on public roads? Do you eat USDA inspected foods? Do you want a military? Do you want to be able to call the cops or the fire department? Do you haul your own garbage or do you rely on a sanitation department? If you haul your own garbage, do you own a private dump or do you use a public one? Have you ever mailed a letter? Listened to public airwaves? Benefited from street lights? Taken a shower? Flushed a toilet? Do you want a criminal justice system? Do you want there to be prisons or should all criminal justice be a private enterprise? Did you support the invasion of Iraq? Afghanistan? Should WWII have been fought? The Revolutionary War?
Does a state have a responsibility to help those who can’t take care of thmselves? If a live, newborn baby is found abandoned outside a hospital, should the state take responsibility for it and take care of it, or just leave it lying on the sidewalk? Should the elderly and the disabled just be left to fend for themselves? Does the stae have any responsibility to abandoned or neglected children?
If you support any of this stuff, then you support state collectivism. Whatever money you make, you make because the government makes it possible. Without the government, you wouldn’t have a cent. Not only that, but you’d probably be sickly and illiterate and living in a tin shack.
Ayn Rand is sophomoric, self-centered, fraudulent crap. Mature beyond high school already.
What about righteous living that is coerced by the threat of eternal damnation? Is that also tainted?
Exactly; the “everyone should collectively help everyone else” part is the utopian bit.
How is that utopian? We’re talking about Christ’s “everyone should…” admonishment, not Marx’s “everyone can if we just order society the right way” theory of economics.
Jesus taught within the context of Jewish society under Roman occupation and Roman law. Social justice doesn’t seem to have been part of his rabbinical agenda to address. Like Buddha, he spoke only regarding *individual *enlightenment, and seems to have considered the political and social contexts of his time to be necessary parts of the human condition, to be suffered the same as floods, fires and great winds…
Incidentally, the notion that Jesus wouldn’t have supported the state enforcement of his collectivist ideology is unsupported at best, and arguably belied by the fact that he spoke constantly of these things coming to pass as part of the Messianic age – the “kingdom of Heaven” – which – to Jesus and the Jews at the time – was a literal, monarchic kingdom as well as a theocracy. Yes, Jesus was a theocratic monarchist, who explicitly stated that the 'king" would impose his will on the social and wealth structures, and literally reverse class order.
Amd before anyone says it, Jesus did not think the Messiah was God, but that he was a human king, descended from David and “anointed” by God, but a human all the same. Jesus thought this one human would be, and should be, an absolute dictator of a one-world government. Maybe Jesus though he himself was this king, maybe not (I think probably not), but either way, he thought this figure should be the absolute boss.
Jesus was not a supporter of democracy.
OK. And this is more of a question than a statement, but didn’t he also assume that there would some sort of transformation of humankind, too? I mean, in this Kingdom of Heaven, would there be laws, police and jails, or would humanity be restored to a sort of pre-fall innocence where none of that would be necessary?
The Conservatives would put him in jail. He would be a subversive .
He didn’t exactly give detailed answers to this. He basically said there would be a judgement, that the wicked would be removed (he usually allegorized this by saying they would be cast into Gehenna), and that the good, thepoor, the humble, etc. – basically, the oppressed lower classes (and they really were oppressed in that time and place) would be the “heirs” to the Kingdom.
He did not impart any implication (that I’m aware of), that humanity would be fundamentally transformed, he spoke much more in terms of punishment and reward for what people had already done. He did not say anything about the administrative logistics of the Messiah. He seemed (to my thinking anyway) to be obsessed with the immediate judgement – the “separation of the wheat from the chaff” – the destruction of the class orders, etc. and said little or nothing about the mechanics of the Messianic Age going forward (or if he did say anything about it, we don’t currently have any record of it).
OK. That makes sense. He was kind of like Bush that way-- not a detail guy. Just get rid of the evil-doers. 
Still, with a literal God on the thrown of a theocracy, talking about whether or not there would be UHC and how that relates to what we should do in our Democratic Republic seems rather, uh, odd.
The people who live without knowing God and His Love are already in death and Hell and bound by the Law, forced to live up to a standard they can never achieve. God waits for us to come home and is ready at any moment we are to take us back, extends grace so as to forgive all transgressions now and forever.
What was your question again?