Evangelical Christians don't care about the poor

[Zostrianos]

We already knew this, but here's a great interview where a Republican gets owned with some tough questions on poverty and his party's cuts against the poor - hypocrisy exposed. It's awesome
W1pSJfyuESM

[Azraella]

Conservative christians are annoying as hell. At least liberal and leftist Christians get the point of Jesus' message.

[Lynx]

What would Jesus do?
Would he cut those programs?
Would he insist that charity be voluntary?

[Sea]

Most fundies do "care", but their minds are so infected with screwed up beliefs that they genuinely think you can help people by fucking them over.

Fundies, and I use that term loosely mind you, don't care about what the bible says as much as they claim; they just care about their perverse ideas of right and wrong and how to most efficiently push them on the destitute.

Super-conservative Christians have such a distorted concept of what help means that they are willing to actually hurt people to further it.

...but at least they mean well, no? :rolleyes:

[Prometeo liberado]

What would Jesus do?
Would he cut those programs?
Would he insist that charity be voluntary?

Jesus would probaly bust out with that stealth revolutionary shit he was known for, "Give to Ceaser what is Ceasers..". "Basically fuck the system and build your own shit. But don't quote me on that 'cause Pontius is starting to stare me down again" type shit.

[Astarte]

We already knew this, but here's a great interview where a Republican gets owned with some tough questions on poverty and his party's cuts against the poor - hypocrisy exposed.

Of course not. Evangelicals are protestants. According to the Protestant ethic the poor and needy are lacking in divine substance because they are apparently "lazy" and "don't want to work".

[Book O'Dead]

There's an example of patriarchal ideology: "put a kid in a house with a mom and a dad".
The problem with that reasoning it is that the country is full of houses with desperate "moms and dads" driven crazy by insecurity, fear and poverty.

[Vorchev]

Conservative christians are annoying as hell. At least liberal and leftist Christians get the point of Jesus' message.

You might want to check that.

The progressive social gospel was built on assimilating immigrants into the workforce rather than tolerating local political machines because they were supported by ethnic enclaves. Instead, it wanted to make immigrants compatible with Anglo-Saxon culture while tearing them apart from where they came from and substituting their ethnic awareness with meritocratic, skills-based education.

Basically, it completely served supply-side economics in turning immigrants into wage-slaves with no remaining identity politics aside from how they worked for the man. Even labor unions were used to substitute immigrants' previous relationships.

[Jesus Saves Gretzky Scores]

What's this video called?

[MarxSchmarx]

If Zoroastrianism, and not Christianity, were the dominant religion of settlers and colonizers, these American right wingers would endlessly proclaim their fealty to the sacred fire and Xerxes and all that.

It is not about the religious teachings. Its about the control and the authority of tradition. The right can replace their religious mantras with "chicken poop" and they will repeat it over and over again.

For all the accusations we make about stupid rightwingers, it is idiotic leftists who fail to see that the teachings of Jesus are just a convenient stand in for a will of the powerful to impose their power. Sometimes its fun to see them squirm about it, but honestly, that kind of schaudenfreud is not constructive.

[tradeunionsupporter]

Right Wing Christians think the Poor should only get help from Voluntary Charity and Churches and that we should do away with the Welfare State they sound like the Right Wing Libertarians.

Poverty and Welfare

Highlights of the Libertarian Party's "Ending the Welfare State" Proposal


From across the political and ideological spectrum, there is now almost universal acknowledgement that the American social welfare system has been a failure.
Since the start of the "war on poverty" in 1965, the United States has spent more than $5 trillion trying to ease the plight of the poor. What we have received for this massive investment is -- primarily -- more poverty.
Our welfare system is unfair to everyone: to taxpayers who must pick up the bill for failed programs; to society, whose mediating institutions of community, church and family are increasingly pushed aside; and most of all to the poor themselves, who are trapped in a system that destroys opportunity for themselves and hope for their children.
The Libertarian Party believes it is time for a new approach to fighting poverty. It is a program based on opportunity, work, and individual responsibility.
1. End Welfare

None of the proposals currently being advanced by either conservatives or liberals is likely to fix the fundamental problems with our welfare system. Current proposals for welfare reform, including block grants, job training, and "workfare" represent mere tinkering with a failed system.
It is time to recognize that welfare cannot be reformed: it should be ended.
We should eliminate the entire social welfare system. This includes eliminating food stamps, subsidized housing, and all the rest. Individuals who are unable to fully support themselves and their families through the job market must, once again, learn to rely on supportive family, church, community, or private charity to bridge the gap.

http://www.lp.org/issues/poverty-and-welfare

Cato Policy Report, November/December 1996
Replacing Welfare



By Michael Tanner
Michael Tanner is director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute and author of The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society (http://www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDetails&method=cats&scid=21&pid=144165) (Cato Institute, 1996), from which this article is drawn.
Detailing the failures of the current welfare system and proposed liberal and conservative reforms is easy. However, critics of welfare have an obligation to go beyond attacking the system to provide an effective, compassionate alternative.
The first step is to recognize that the 1996 welfare reform legislation falls far short of what is needed to fix the system. Let’s look at some of its problems.


Eliminating the Welfare State
Welfare may have started with the best of intentions, but it has clearly failed. It has failed to meet its stated goal of reducing poverty. But its real failure is even more disastrous. Welfare has torn apart the social fabric of our society. Everyone is worse off. The poor are dehumanized, seduced into a system from which it is terribly difficult to escape. Teenage girls give birth to children they will never be able to support. The work ethic is eroded. Crime rates soar. Such is the legacy of welfare.
Instead of "reforming" failed programs, we should eliminate the entire social welfare system for individuals able to work. That means eliminating not just AFDC but also food stamps, subsidized housing, and all the rest. Individuals unwilling to support themselves through the job market should have to fall back on the resources of family, church, community, or private charity.
As both a practical matter and a question of fairness, no child currently on welfare should be thrown off. However, a date should be set (for symbolic reasons, I like nine months and one day from now), after which no one new would be allowed into the welfare system. There are two distinct populations of welfare recipients. Those who currently use the system as a temporary safety net will be out of the system relatively soon. Immediately ending their eligibility would have only a minor impact on the system but would risk flooding the job market and private charities without allowing for a transition.
There are serious problems with expecting hard-core, long-term welfare recipients to be able to find sufficient employment to support themselves and their families. When we established the incentives of the current system, we may have made a Faustian bargain with those recipients. Now it may be too late to change the rules of the game. We should do whatever we can to move those people out of the system but recognize that success may be limited. It is far more important to prevent anyone new from becoming trapped in the system. That will be possible only if the trap is no longer there.
What would happen to the poor if welfare were eliminated? First, without the incentives of the welfare state, fewer people would be poor. For one thing, there would probably be far fewer children born into poverty. The availability of welfare leads to an increase in out-of-wedlock births, and giving birth out of wedlock leads to poverty. If welfare were eliminated, the number of out-of-wedlock births would almost certainly decline. How much is a matter of conjecture. Some social scientists suggest as little as 15 to 20 percent; others say as much as 50 percent. Whatever the number, it would be smaller.
In addition, some poor women who did still bear children out of wedlock would put the children up for adoption. The civil society should encourage that by eliminating the present regulatory and bureaucratic barriers to adoption. Other unmarried women who gave birth would not be able to afford to live independently; they would choose to live with their families or with their boyfriends. Some might even choose to marry the fathers of their children.
Poor people would also be more likely to go to work, starting to climb the ladder that will lead out of poverty. A General Accounting Office report on women who lost their welfare benefits after the Reagan administration tightened eligibility requirements in 1981 found that, on average, the women increased the number of hours they worked and their hourly wage and had a significantly higher overall earned income. Two years after losing their eligibility, a significant minority of the women (43 percent in Boston, for example) had incomes as high as or higher than they did while receiving benefits.
Similarly, in 1991 Michigan abolished its General Assistance program, which provided cash assistance for poor adults without children. Two years later, a survey for the University of Michigan found that 36.7 percent of those people were working in the month before the survey. Of those with at least a high school education, 45.6 percent were working. Two-thirds of former General Assistance recipients, regardless of education, had held a job at some point during the two years before the survey.
It is important to recognize that job opportunities do exist for individuals willing to accept them. That can be seen in the experience of unskilled immigrants who enter this country with disadvantages at least as significant as those of welfare recipients. Many have less schooling than the average welfare recipient and many cannot even speak English. Yet the vast majority find jobs, and most eventually prosper.
Of course, it may be necessary for people to move where the jobs are. In some ways, the availability of welfare disrupts normal labor migration patterns by allowing people to remain in areas with low employment. If welfare had been in place at the beginning of the century, the great migration of black sharecroppers and farm workers from southern farms to northern factories would never have taken place.
People forced to rely on themselves will find a variety of ways to get out of poverty. Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University examined the movement of poor individuals out of poverty. They found that 18.3 percent of poor people receiving welfare moved out of poverty within one year. However, 45 percent of poor people who did not receive welfare were able to escape poverty.
Even many liberals understand that without welfare many poor people would find other options. As Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution says, "My guess is that if welfare recipients realize their benefits are going to stop . . . it will cause them to search much, much harder for alternatives."
Of course, many people will still need help. As the Bible says, "The poor always you will have with you." The civil society will not turn its back on those people. Instead, they will be helped through a newly invigorated system of private charity.

Replacing Welfare with Private Charity
Private efforts have been much more successful than the federal government's failed attempt at charity. America is the most generous nation on earth. Americans already contribute more than $125 billion annually to charity. In fact, more than 85 percent of all adult Americans make some charitable contribution each year. In addition, about half of all American adults perform volunteer work; more than 20 billion hours were worked in 1991. The dollar value of that volunteer work was more than $176 billion. Volunteer work and cash donations combined bring American charitable contributions to more than $300 billion per year, not counting the countless dollars and time given informally to family members, neighbors, and others outside the formal charity system.
Private charities have been more successful than government welfare for several reasons. First, private charities are able to individualize their approach to the circumstances of poor people in ways that governments can never do. Government regulations must be designed to treat all similarly situated recipients alike. Glenn C. Loury of Boston University explains the difference between welfare and private charities on that point. "Because citizens have due process rights which cannot be fully abrogated . . . public judgments must be made in a manner that can be defended after the fact, sometimes even in court." The result is that most government programs rely on the simple provision of cash or other goods and services without any attempt to differentiate between the needs of recipients.
Take, for example, the case of a poor person who has a job offer. But she can't get to the job because her car battery is dead. A government welfare program can do nothing but tell her to wait two weeks until her welfare check arrives. Of course, by that time the job will be gone. A private charity can simply go out and buy a car battery (or even jump-start the dead battery).
The sheer size of government programs works against individualization. As one welfare case worker lamented, "With 125 cases it's hard to remember that they're all human beings. Sometimes they're just a number." Bureaucracy is a major factor in government welfare programs. For example, a report on welfare in Illinois found procedures requiring "nine forms to process an address change, at least six forms to add or delete a member of a household, and a minimum of six forms to report a change in earnings or employment." All that for just one program.
In her excellent book Tyranny of Kindness, Theresa Funiciello, a former welfare mother, describes the dehumanizing world of the government welfare system--a system in which regulations and bureaucracy rule all else. It is a system in which illiterate homeless people with mental illnesses are handed 17-page forms to fill out, women nine months pregnant are told to verify their pregnancies, a woman who was raped is told she is ineligible for benefits because she can't list the baby's father on the required form. It is a world totally unable to adjust to the slightest deviation from the bureaucratic norm.
In addition to being better able to target individual needs, private charities are much better able to target assistance to those who really need help. Because eligibility requirements for government welfare programs are arbitrary and cannot be changed to fit individual circumstances, many people in genuine need do not receive assistance, while benefits often go to people who do not really need them. More than 40 percent of all families living below the poverty level receive no government assistance. Yet more than half of the families receiving means-tested benefits are not poor. Thus, a student may receive food stamps, while a homeless man with no mailing address goes without. Private charities are not bound by such bureaucratic restrictions.
Private charity also has a better record of actually delivering aid to recipients. Surprisingly little of the money being spent on federal and state social welfare programs actually reaches recipients. In 1965, 70 cents of every dollar spent by the government to fight poverty went directly to poor people. Today, 70 cents of every dollar goes, not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor. Few private charities have the bureaucratic overhead and inefficiency of government programs.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html

A Libertarian View of Welfare

Uploaded by catoinstitutevideo (http://www.youtube.com/user/catoinstitutevideo) on Apr 9, 2010

John Stossel draws from a panel of experts to discuss a libertarian view of the welfare state. Do government programs lift people out of poverty or do they perpetuate cycles of dependency?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMOts0t-c5w

[Deicide]

I'm against creating generations of whiny entitled faggots like you. That doesn't equate to hating everyone. Like the occupy faggots who are angry that they couldn't get a job with their art history degrees. Don't go into debt to get a useless degree, then whine when you can't get a job or get out of debt. It is not my responsibility to take care of anyone. There's a difference between charity, and institutional learned helplessness. Now go pick up your welfare check faggot.

lol...

[Tim Cornelis]

Very much related to this is this thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/conservatism-explained-t173159/index.html?p=2471967#post2471967).

[Dave B]

Never mind about what right-wing fundamentalist have done to Christianity with all its abuses and distortions etc.

[Irrespective of what your opinion is of the original.]

What about what Leninism and Bolshevism have done to Marxism.

As if Marx would have advocated state capitalism and the murdering prostitutes for getting soldiers drunk like Lenin did.

To say nothing of Lenin’s apostle Stalin.

Oh you hypocrites, why don’t you take the plank out of your own eye first.

At least “JC” had the vision to see that a load of bastards would come along later to hijack it all.

Matthew 7:21.

Unlike Engels who hadn’t fully thought through the possibility that a Blanquist inspired ‘state’ capitalist revolution, with an Iskra like spark, would carried in Russia under his name or ‘flag’.

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1885 Engels to Vera Zasulich (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/z/a.htm#zasulich-vera)In Geneva


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_04_23.htm

Only to see the Trotskyist and Maoists Bolshevik faithful lying about it later for a hundred years



At present, petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called "national accounting and control of production and distribution". Those

page 341

who fail to understand this are committing an unpardonable mistake in economics. Either they do not know the facts of life, do not see what actually exists and are unable to look the truth in the face, or they confine themselves to abstractly comparing "capitalism" with "socialism" and fail to study the concrete forms and stages of the transition that is taking place in our country.


http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/LWC18.html

And from the ‘Marxist’ Mao

THE ONLY ROAD FOR THE TRANSFORMATION
OF CAPITALIST INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE

September 7, 1953



The transformation of capitalism into socialism is to be accomplished through state capitalism.

1. In the last three years or so we have done some work on this, but as we were otherwise occupied, we didn't exert ourselves enough. From now on we should make a bigger effort.

2. With more than three years of experience behind us, we can say with certainty that accomplishing the socialist transformation of private industry and commerce by means of state capitalism is a relatively sound policy and method.


3. The policy laid down in Article 31 of the Common Programme should now be clearly understood and concretely applied step by step. "Clearly understood" means that people in positions of leadership at the central and local levels should first of all have the firm conviction that state capitalism is the only road for the transformation of capitalist industry and commerce and for the gradual completion of the transition to socialism. So far this has not been the case either with members of the Communist Party or with democratic personages. The present meeting is being held to achieve that end.


http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/TC53.html

To say nothing of Lenin and his band of Blanquists adventurers taking state capitalist Kaiser gold coins in order to ‘copy’ the German model; as opposed to Caesar’s gold.

On murdering prostitutes etc


Lenin 160, To: G. F. FYODOROV

August 9, 1918


Comrade Fyodorov,

You must strain every effort, appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/09gff.htm




.

[DasFapital]

Through personal experience I know evangelical aid to the poor usually consists in getting them involved in bullshit financial schemes and giving there children a shitty conservative christian based education. Not surprisingly most of these people end up remaining in poverty. Much of American Christianity is a sick joke.

[Igor]

Of course not. Evangelicals are protestants. According to the Protestant ethic the poor and needy are lacking in divine substance because they are apparently "lazy" and "don't want to work".

Haha what. Most protestants don't think that at all and I have no idea where you got that from. That's not "protestant ethic" at all and even though there might be some fucked up Calvinist denominations that think so it's by no means generalizable to the vast majority of protestants. What shit Luther and his fellas might've written back in the day is not really relevant to most modern day protestants and the protestant movement is a lot more diverse than you seem to think.

[Dumb]

On some level, evangelical Christians do care, but two problems prevent them from caring effectively:

#1). Evangelical Christians think your life depends on the ideas in your head. If you're working $8/hr 15 hrs/wk (or if you're unemployed), trying to pay off $25,000 in student loans without Jesus in your life, you're miserable. If you're working $8/hr 15 hrs/wk (or if you're unemployed), trying to pay off $25,000 in student loans with Jesus in your life, then suddenly your material problems don't matter.

That, and they generally think your life sucks because the ideas in your head lead you to be lazy, indigent, etc., so they need to help you by teaching you a lesson in hard work.

#2). Ultimately, evangelical Christians are more loyal to their leaders and their institutions than to their ideals.

[Dumb]

Haha what. Most protestants don't think that at all and I have no idea where you got that from. That's not "protestant ethic" at all and even though there might be some fucked up Calvinist denominations that think so it's by no means generalizable to the vast majority of protestants. What shit Luther and his fellas might've written back in the day is not really relevant to most modern day protestants and the protestant movement is a lot more diverse than you seem to think.

On the contrary, the Protestant Work Ethic is perhaps the single most important concept underlying US Protestantism today - and that diversity you're talking about only covers maybe 1/4 of the Church in the US today. Protestantism in the US today is dominated by the idea that material success due to hard work is somehow correlated with salvation.