RE: Christian "purpose" and "meaning" in life.
June 1, 2014 at 4:36 pm
(This post was last modified: June 1, 2014 at 4:37 pm by Lek.)
(June 1, 2014 at 2:54 pm)Geoguy Wrote: Somewhere back there, I believe Lek (forgive me if I'm wrong) said that Jesus said that government taxation to support programs for the poor is theft. That's one bible quote I'd like to see.
The trouble is that Christians don't take Jesus's command to help the poor as a command. For them, it appears to be more of a public relations ploy, a chance to claim superiority because of their charity efforts (which atheists are assumed never to do).
I do support, strongly, public taxation for charitable purposes, because unlike many Christians, I think it is something that, as a society, we ought to be doing. before Social Security, under the church model, the poverty rate for the elderly was 50%. Afterwards, with the government program, it became 10%. The Great Society cut the poverty rate in half. This alone makes the effort worth it.
And for the record, I would be, in Romney's terms, a maker. I pay a considerable amount of my income in Federal taxes, and while I don't agree with all the spending our Congress does, I don't whine when I pay it.
The bible says "do not steal". I agree that that paying taxes for services for the common good is a good thing and Jesus did say we should pay our taxes. What is wrong is taking money from one group of people to redistribute it to another group. Social security did help lower the poverty rate for seniors. Of course, I don't know what is going to happen when the system goes broke. The problem now is the group with the highest poverty rate is the younger working age group. Before social security families took care of their aging parents and relatives. Seniors were poor because they had little income, but most were taken care of by family. I believe our welfare system has led to the destruction of families and created a permanent welfare class. Show me how Johnson's "war on poverty" has done anything but increase the national debt. Compare our poverty rate now to the rate in 1964 and see if it's worth the trillions upon trillions of dollars poured into black holes. I still have to listen to the statistics about how many children go to bed hungry every night. Extreme amounts of the money contributed by taxpayers to these programs have been wasted, misappropriated, taken by fraud or just plain stolen and, yes, spent on stupid wars. Seeing how the US government has handled these programs, I'll voluntarily give my money to most anybody but the US government to help the needy.
