Conversations with God

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And slavery was an attitude, too. Slaves should have just stopped letting that slavery vibe run in their head.And if poverty and slavery are just attitudes, why not diseases like diabetes? It's all in your head, Phat.How about we dump you (or any of us) on a street in New York City with no money and see where you are in a year. Or even ten years. You certainly won't be living in a nice apartment and working at Trader Joe's. It's amazing that someone intelligent enough to compose mostly grammatical sentences could be so confused about almost everything else. Ringo is just reminding you of what Jesus said. If you find it in conflict with your behavior then it is you with the contradiction, not ringo (you labeled it incorrectly - it's not a double standard).For you Christianity is a buffet where you only select the items you like.--Percy

well it shouldn't be, but check out the multiple municipalities who have criminalized things like sleeping in public spaces. Memphis for example wants to make it a felony.https://tennesseelookout.com/...blems-for-homelessness-worse

Well, it's caused by YOUR attitude. You just want to grab all you can and look down on people who can't grab as much as you. You're EXACTLY what Jesus preached against. Stop being so stupid. YOU GUYS, who claim to believe in Jesus but refuse to do what He said, have failed to take care of the poor. That was YOUR job, not society's as a whole. You were supposed to be an example to society as a whole - but instead, you try to make the problem worse. Stop being so stupid. THINK, for once. Why would anybody who doesn't believe in Jesus do what He said? THINK before you post that stupid lie again. It's not a double standard. It's a single standard set by Jesus for those who want to follow Him. You not only fail to meet the standard but you denigrate Jesus for setting it. If there was a Hell, you would certainly be at the front of the line.

It is pretty obvious from everything you say that you absolutely no faith in Jesus whatsoever. If we can see your lack of faith so clearly, Jesus can see it too, except he doesn't exist, so you are off the hook.None of you christians are willing to test your faith because you know deep inside that there is no god or Jesus. You all pretend that you believe and that you are getting signs from a deity that is so weak and puny that it cannot even communicate clearly and unambiguously.Grow up you selfish little prick!

No, I want the right to grab "as much as I can" rather than having an authoritarian government try and legislate what's best for me. I want them to keep their hands off of the projects that make oil and gas cheaper for all of us and I want them to quit forcing me to pay the bills they create which they can't even afford....nor can any of us. Creating money out of thin air only causes its value....for all of us...to drop. And as our old friend jar used to remind us...the bill will get paid. Sez you. The same guy who recommended that ALL of us follow the message rather than the messenger. It's your job too, Pal.The Double Standard, however, is that you want all of us to adapt to your government model. I can simply tell you that your model may not be MY model. And that's freedom. Not authoritarianism disguised as altruism. Why would (or should) anyone who questions the integrity of AOC, Kamela, and doddering old Uncle Joe be forced to do what they try and say? That's not selfish. (well it might be) BUT that's freedom. The Lord loves a cheerful giver, not a mandate that all must follow.And by the way, I dont want Trump back either.

Why do you say, "No," and then repeat exactly what I said? Stop. Nobody here is talking about any government.But yes, you do seem to need somebody to do what's best for you, since you're so bad at doing it yourself. Gas should be more expensive, not less, so people use less of it. Sez Jesus. When did I ever recommend that? I just pointed out that Jesus REQUIRES it of YOU (Christians), not all of us. Of course it is. And yet you mock me for giving away spare change. How many times do I have to tell you that it isn't about government at all? If society FAILS to take care of it's own, then it's the government's responsibility to take care of them. You right-wingnuts think the government's only responsibility is to protect you from black people, Mexicans and Grenada. I have pointed out many times what's wrong with your model. And you have demonstrated many times that you have no clue what my model is. You sound like Putin "freeing" Ukraine from the Nazis. Duh. They're the government. You get to try to vote them out but you don't get to pick and choose what laws to obey. Render unto Caesar. And yet He gave a mandate. (See Ananias and Sapphira.)

You're just sloganeering off your YouTube videos. You don't actually understand any of this. For example, you say you don't want an authoritarian government, but guys you like just ruled that people have no constitutional right to an abortion, and other guys you like who are in charge of state government rushed to enact laws that make abortion illegal. That's pretty authoritarian. You're all fine with it now as long as they're telling woman what to do and not you, but in all likelihood they'll eventually get to making up rules about something that affects you.And if we increase our use of petroleum based products, who's going to pay for the resulting havoc wreaked by increasing climate change, like the fires caused by the heat waves in the US and Europe, or the increased electricity consumed by increasing use of air conditioners.About the deficits created during the pandemic, they helped keep the country going economically.And one more thing. You've been in discussions about deficit spending before where a great deal of information was provided to you. Why are saying this as if those discussions had never happened? Does everything ever said to you truly just bounce off? Does every discussion with you about any subject always have to start at square one as if it had never been discussed before? Sure seems that way. Taking care of those less well off than us is a responsibility that the rest of us already accept. The actual point is that you reject the way that Jesus said you should do that, which is to give up all your worldly possessions. You're the one who believes in him, not us, so don't admonish us for not following him. It's the responsibility of those who believe in him to follow what he says, and they shouldn't selectively choose which of his commands to follow the way you do.You just don't like the thought of anyone telling you what to do, whether it's the government or Jesus, and you just make up justifications for doing whatever the hell you please, no matter how much it contradicts what you say you believe. That is not a double standard (which isn't a formal name and isn't capitalized). Look up double standard. You're talking nonsense when you say we "want all of us to adapt to your government model," but if this was something someone wanted, it is not a double standard. Asking everyone to follow the same model is the opposite of a double standard.But concerning "government models", ours is democracy. What's yours? Freedom is not a government model. All forms of government constrain what you can do. We've been over this. And in a democracy the people elected by the voters decide on public policy. Your democratically elected officers might decide that it is the best use of public funds to assist the homeless. When those democratically elected officers are not the ones you voted for and they do things you are not in favor of, that's called democracy, not authoritarianism. If you're not going to remotely address what you quote, why quote it? You're the one who believes in Jesus, not us. Why should we do what some mythical person you believe in says. You're the one who believes in him, so why aren't you doing what he says?It's also worth mentioning that in terms of compassion for your fellow man you are by far the least Christian person here in this conversation. Jesus is just a convenient excuse for people like you so that you can tell yourself, "I'm not the horrible prick my attitudes and behaviors make me out to be because I believe in Jesus." Why not? You have far more in common with him than anyone else who might run.--Percy

No, poverty is an economic reality.To respond those who say it's political, society's decision of how to handle the issue of poverty would be political. Especially decisions to make it worse and to trap people in poverty in order to benefit those who are not poor.Poverty can indeed create attitudes among the impoverished, especially when their every effort to work their way out of poverty is thwarted so that they finally end up giving up.Examples would be a welfare system in which a single parent can survive without working, but as soon as she tries to break out of poverty and gets a job, then all benefits are cut and she finds it impossible to pay for child care along with all the other costs of living, so she has to go back on the dole.Another example is the old "company town" where you work for the company who provides you with housing (at a cost) and stores (with high prices, but you have no other option), etc. That locks the company's workers into a cycle of poverty that is impossible to break free of. Refer to the line in Tennessee Ernie Ford's best known song, "16 Tons": "Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store."A more extreme example of that "company town" are the generations of brick makers in India. They have to pay for the materials and other needs, but they don't get paid enough to pay that off. Every single member of the family, young children to the elderly, must work all day never being able to pay off the family's debt which goes back hundreds of year. A political decision to use poverty to enslave your workforce.When repeated efforts to break free of the poverty being forced onto you, then eventually you get worn out and you give up.Similarly with the homeless. Yes, some don't want to change -- they're like you in that they want personal freedom to the point that they refuse to move back with their families because they don't want to follow house rules. But many do want to get out and find themselves trapped. If they got there by having lost their job, then they find it near impossible to get a new job -- every job application wants a residential address and phone number and if you don't have either then you're a good prospect. Finding a new home to rent is prohibitively expense as you must come up with first and last months' rent plus cleaning/security deposit. Child care expenses again rear their ugly head. Along with the job's grooming requirements such as how you're supposed to clean up to report to work (I met a homeless woman who was able to work that out for a waitressing job by using a business' rest rooms, but she was exceptional in her determination). Ah yes, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." But what that leaves out is that you must to both, feed him as you are teaching him to feed himself. Sure, you could teach a homeless person how to get rich by simply telling him to "buy low and sell high" or by describing how he could play the real estate game with multiple properties, but you still haven't provided him any way to even begin to get started.Plus there's the attitude the long-term poverty engenders. About a decade ago on NPR they reported on a "donate a goat" charity that operated in the Third World where poverty was so bad that it was a struggle for people just to find enough food to stay alive; they had no concept of planning for the future because they were pinned down in the present just trying to survive. Give one of those families a goat and you know what they'll do with it: immediately slaughter and eat it. So that charity's program was to set a family up with a goat and a place to keep it and then to teach them how to take care of it. In the short term you get nourishment from its milk, so you learn the value of keeping that goat alive. Then you learn to work with other families with goats to get them (the goats) to breed and produce more goats, which means more milk plus excess goats (and dry does who no longer give milk) can become dinner. And you can start to make money by selling the excess milk that you cannot consume yourself.The issue that that charity was addressing was the problem of ingrained attitudes of long-term poverty which prevent people from ever escaping poverty. It did so by providing them with the means (a goat and a place to keep it) and with training to teach them how to make the best use of that goat and in the process changing their attitudes so that they could finally start to plan for the future.You don't just throw money at a problem, but rather you use that money to address and to solve that problem. IOW, their attitude of extreme selfishness (which you freely confess to and which is completely antithetical to Christian teachings, hence your hypocrisy of claiming to be a follower of the Christ who had commanded against such extreme selfishness (but sadly you are not alone in your fake-Christian hypocrisy) ). They want it all just for themselves and are unwilling to share it with anyone else, especially those in great need.Even in a non-Christian society, everybody recognizes and responds to the most basic societal directive of helping others in your society, AKA altruism. That is the very reason for being in a society. Otherwise, we naked apes are out there all alone in the wilderness depending on our own individual ability to fend for our own individual self without a snowflake's chance in Hell of succeeding. It's like that symbol of collective power, the fasces (an axe encased on a bundle of rods, such as we see on the wall of our House of Representatives and which unfortunately lends its name to fascism. I'm sure that you've been told the same story as I had of the Roman father giving his sons a life lesson. He gave each one a single stick and told them to break it, which they easily did. Then he gave each one a bundle of sticks and told them to break it, which they could not do. "Alone we are weak and easy to break, but together we are strong and remain unbroken."Of course, fascism then seeks to eliminate the weak sticks and the "undesirable" ones in order to make the whole state stronger, but that is a perversion of societal unity. Rather, the whole society becomes stronger by doing the opposite, by supporting and caring for even the weakest among us. The moral strength of a fascist state is greatly diminished when every single member must live in fear of being "culled" or of having their loved ones being "culled", whereas a society which cares for and takes care of all its members increases in moral strength.But then what would a Christian know of morality? Especially a fake Christian. You mean organized charities? Such as Christian charities?I know a fellow atheist and fellow Air Force veteran who had spent time being homeless. Those Christian charities working to help homeless veterans were only interested in one thing: using their "good works" to proselytize. He got no help from them despite all the money they had received including, I'm sure, government money (a carry-over from the Dubya administration, I'm sure).The thing is that "voluntary charities" will fail both because they will lack sufficient funds but also because of sectarian prejudices they will lack the willingness to help all those who need it. That is where the entire society itself must step in, which is done through government action. And the funding for that is through government funding, which comes from government revenues which includes your taxes.Since you have proven to be not very aware of Christian teachings, it would not surprise me to find that you are also not very aware of Jewish teachings.The Pirke Avot ("Sayings of the Fathers") "is a compilation of the ethical teachings and maxims from Rabbinic Jewish tradition. It is part of didactic Jewish ethical literature." We read it and did a report on it in my Rabbinic Literature class.Some of entries would construct a gaming matrix (these are from the first centuries of the Common Era, mind you) which used two states of two properties in order to construct a 2×2 matrix of four outcomes that could then be analyzed, somewhat like Pascal did with his infamous wager. Hence the four kinds of students and the four kinds of charity (working from memory here, since I had lent my copy to a friend in 1973 and he has since disappeared on me).Regarding charity and how altruistic it could be, the two aspects are:

1. Does the donor know who the recipient is?
2. Does the recipient know who the donor is?

The results matrix then reads something like this (again, I'm remembering back half a century, as well as trying to work a dBCodes table for the first time): I'm sure that we all can see how Christian charities rate in this matrix.Basically, government assistance through tax dollars qualify as being the most charitable in that through our taxes we all contribute to the same pot and those who need draw from that pot. Just a bit of sectarian irony that, I guess, only an atheist could appreciate."True Christians" insist through their drive for Christian Nationalism, basically their cry for instituting Christian Sharia Law in the USA, that everybody be subject to Old Testament Law ... except for themselves. Because Jesus had made them all exempt from Old Testament Law. But all non-Christians are still bound by that Law.And that's the irony. Jews, especially Orthodox Jews, are "under contract" (ie, part of the Covenent, the "Old Testament") to follow OT law. Christians believe that Jesus had fulfilled those laws and freed them from those laws (ie, so bacon and cheeseburgers and polyester-cotton blend clothing are suddenly OK).But what about atheists and others who are neither orthodox Jews nor Christians? Well, what I've heard certain "true Christians" claim is that the full extent of Old Testament Law applies to everybody, including Hindus (so cheeseburgers are still verboten, though for Hindus it's the mere inclusion of cow meat and not the mixing of dairy and meat that's the problem). 
OK, here's the basic rules that everybody should follow.If you belong to a religion that has certain teachings and beliefs, then it is your duty to adhere to those teachings and beliefs.If you do not belong to that religion, then the teachings and beliefs of that religion do not apply to you!If you observe an individual of a particular religion violate the teachings and beliefs of their particular religion, then you are within your rights to point that out to them.If you observe an individual who is not of a particular religion that that individual does not belong to violate the teachings and beliefs of that particular religion that they do not belong to nor adhere to in any manner whatsoever, then you have nothing whatsoever to say about their actions. So kindly just sod off.

It's been a few days and you haven't replied, so I'm going to add a couple thoughts.First, please don't pretend my reply never happened so that sometime in the future you just repeat your original arguments from scratch all over again as if they hadn't already been responded to numerous times.Second, the reason almost no one follows Jesus's admonition to give up their worldly possessions is because it's unworkable. It assumes a large community of people who are unconverted to the cause but are otherwise sympathetic and will give to Christian beggars. And since one's worldly possessions include whatever means one had to make a living, one is now destitute. If one owned a business, the employees are now out of a job.Acts 4:32 describes a perfect reverse pyramid scheme guaranteed to bring widespread poverty to any region:

quote

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³²All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. ³³With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all ³⁴that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales ³⁵and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.
  —Acts 4:32

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Of course no one follows this because except at the very beginning it is devastating to economies, but this was the behavior that was evidently demanded, because when Ananias and Sapphira held back some of the money from the sale of a property they were struck dead. Any rule for which the penalty for disobedience is death is an extremely serious rule. And what was the result of this rule? Was it peace and love? No. Here's what the Bible tells us this rule did:

quote

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Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.
  —Acts 5:11

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Evidently the God of the Old Testament pokes through into the New Testament now and then.--Percy

Why do you reopen topics just so you can get your racist, entitled white ass thumped again? Some sort of persecution complex?

KOMO? Sinclair broadcasting? You don't even know propaganda when it smacks you in your face.

As of July 1, it is potentially a felony statewide.
Tennessee made homeless camps a felony. Colorado is trying something else.

Your response indicates that you are as racist as I am charged to be. FYI I usually like to push liberal buttons around here but my behavior in no way mirrors my actual life---not that any of you would know (or care).I am aware of the whole theory of White Privilege but am appalled that you feel allowed to vilify the white race for such an event in History. Woulda Coulda Shoulda...yeah we (all of us) could have gotten along better and yet racism and social inequality (including gender) still exist. If God exists, He is most assuredly aware of our conversations....and yes, I will be judged for every idle word that spews from my mouth. He likely is annoyed that I am lukewarm---neither cold nor hot. That being said, Percy finally framed my argument with ringo in practical terms.ringo, ignoring his belief that the Bible is merely a product of man and that God and Jesus never existed, still tries to pin me down with my own supposed belief.Basically, we all are arguing in circles. Ringo will state that it matters not whether the character in any book is actually real. He will say that if I believe in said character (Jesus) as being beyond the book, there is no reason for me NOT to give everything up. It would be insulting, by the way, to be a "Christian beggar" and be forced to rely on unbelievers to get fed. Not that the Bible doesn't suggest this as a good scenario.

Trust me I am well aware of Denver's explosive growth in homeless populations. My workplace, a grocery store, is directly one block off of the Colfax corridor.The homeless by and large were booted out of the center of town (Civic Center) which is a park between the City and County Building and the State Capital. While trying not to lump (or stereotype ALL of these homeless as being the same, I will say that the facts indicate a majority of them are hooked on Fentanyl or Meth...among the percentage that commits crimes against property (and person).For local businesses such as my employer, it is a nightmare. Previously, the upper management solved the financial loss part of the equation through pricey insurance that covered most of their losses.Now they are trying something new. They are about to employ off-duty cops to let the shoplifters know that this isn't just a free and open source of survival...it is, after all, a business. In my arguments here at EvC, I realize that my duties as a Christian include helping these people...and many of us at my store do buy them a meal when we can....though we are not about to give it all up and work just for them. We too have families in need and bills to pay---just as Percy suggests. Ringos argument that *some* of the early church were obedient to give all that they had was in a different time and context....it would literally wreck the economy if all who claimed to be Christian did it now (assuming they had strong enough faith.) We also now have cameras on all of our self-checkouts so that if someone makes a wrong move it is caught on videotape.This newfangled camera system is very accurate and Orwellian. This leaves it up to us to trust people in general despite the overwhelming presence of lots of shoplifters. And which I do. People like me by and large.

Perhaps you should explain, because I don't see anything racist in Theodoric's post. Again, an explanation is missing. I'm white, and I suspect that Theodoric is probably white. I don't feel at all villified by anything he wrote. Then you are seriously misunderstanding what ringo writes.