A simple question: how many professed christians will give the monies allocated for ‘xmas’ pleasure and presents to the poor this xmas? Give and not question the giving(no rationalisation about what I have earned is mine). The answer is 0.
2 thoughts on “Christian Failure?”
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It’s a fallacy that Christians must give the poor all they have
Fitzhugh I’ve seen exactly the point you are making refuted by priests using theological arguments but I don’t remember what the arguments were. They come down to Christians being excused from having to literally give all their money and property away to the poor. The same sort of thing justifies the building of magnificent churches and cathedrals and the commissioning of great and expensive religious works of art, all using money that might instead have been given to the poor. Someone else will have to fill in the actual theological details, which escape me. The refutations draw partly on this passage from St. Mark:
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“When he was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, even as he sat at meat, there came a woman with an alabaster box of ointment, called narde, that was pure and costly, and she broke the box and poured it on his head. There were some who disdained in themselves, and said, ‘What needed this waste of ointment? For it might have been sold for more than two hundred pence, and been given unto the poor.’ And they grudged against her. And Jesus said, ‘Let her be in rest; why grieve ye her? She hath done a good work on me. Yea, and ye shall have poor with you always, and whensoever ye will, ye may do them good, but me ye shall not have always. She hath done that she could: she came aforehand to anoint my body to its buryingward. Verily I say unto you: wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be rehearsed in remembrance of her.’ ”
(Tyndale: St. Mark 14, 3-8) (Story also told in St. Matthew 26, 6-12)
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
christian failure
I asked the question in an absolute form so as to obtain a ‘real world’ set of replies from a theological and ‘common sense’
set of perspectives. My own belief based upon a ‘gut feeling’ is that all monies not given to our immediate needs(food, shelter etc.,) should be given to those in need. Given man’s sinful nature and consequently his intellectual pride he will find a million reasons not to do so.