What kind of government or society would Jesus support? A kind, compassionate, generous, loving one that cared for its sick, elderly, and poor. Kinda sounds like he’d support Social Security, Medicare, Universal Healthcare?
Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys…
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of my father. Sound familiar? Or when Jesus attacked the money changers on the temple steps? If you are against welfare programs you are against the teachings of Jesus. The Jesus that’s presented in the modern bible didn’t care about how well your stock portfolio does or how many mills you have to pay on your property tax. And I’d love for you to cite examples of a capitalist/free market social programs that help people in need? Like say unemployment programs for those who’ve lost jobs? Wait that’s socialist. What about Medicare for the elderly folks who need access to healthcare and have reduced insurance benefits? Wait that’s socialist too. What about tax exemptions for religious organizations that aid and assist the poor. Damn that socialism. Socialism is the boogeyman of corporations today, much like the antislavery movement was in the prewar South. Slavery kept a few wealthy, and to enforce the ideal that it was right, they encouraged the belief, widely supported at the time in most of America, that blacks were inferior and incapable of acting like human beings. I am not anti capitalist or pro socialist. Neither am I pro capitalist and anti socialist. There is a middle ground between the 2 that most of the modern world accepts as socially beneficial. I went way off base and my writing is inelegant and perhaps inarticulate but the point still remains that the core philosophy of Christianity is wholly incompatible with capitalism, which at it’s core promotes private ownership for the benefit of those who all ready have, and through the process of market competition alienates the have nots.
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The early Christians, we are told, lived together and held all their goods in common. From each according to his means, to each according to his need. Now a man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira sold a piece of land, and gave some, but not all, of the money to the apostles. Jesus, it seems, does not like people holding out on him: thus when Peter confronted Ananias and Sapphira about their counter-revolutionary petty bourgeois ways, both of them were miraculously struck dead on the spot.
It seems Jesus does indeed support Socialism, complete with a classic Socialist method of enforcing cooperation.
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