The Surprise Of A Lifetime (This Is What We Live With)
"Behind all of this is my utter bewilderment, hardly a new feeling, as to how it is that Christians can so often get poverty wrong. I’m not talking about the socio-economic causes and effects of poverty, or the demographic definition of poverty, or the psychology of poverty, or liberal or conservative approaches to alleviating poverty.
I’m talking about contempt. Unapologetic, deep-seated contempt.
The contempt that says people are poor because they are lazy, or lack virtue, or are unintelligent, or uninformed, nor not using their money 'Biblically.' (Which seems to essentially mean 'White and middle-class and male.' A deep irony.)"
I think it has a lot to do with the Reformation, and the rise of spiritualism -- in fact I believe the Prosperity Gospel came about from a result of a too convenient reading of Proverbs by certain spiritualists who founded the Word of Faith church and the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church (what a mouthful) -- and who picked up a little too much spiritual/gnostic hoodoo from their dabbling in Eastern religions without knowing what the hell they were really reading. Although, to be honest you can see it in Luther especially after the princes saved his bacon and in the Church of England
ReplyDeleteWhat probably brought that all about was the situation between the nobles and the Church vis a vis the poor concerning the estates and taxing ability of the nobles -- the separation of church and state has been an issue in Western Civ for a long, long time.
As for the Ayn Rand thing he mentions: people are dabbling in things which someone has told them "here read this!" without the proper background to do so and really know what they are getting themselves into....again.
PW
What's the surprise. The poor should be chastised and vilified for basically being a perpetual pariahs upon societies through out history. The poor are nothing but a giant drain on any society that chooses to include them within their ranks. You couldn't throw enough money at the poor anymore to see them still remain poor. it doesn't take brains to know why poor people remain poor. There are multitudes of cross-conflicted reasons, but the primary one is, is they are horrible, terrible, abominable decision makers. The poor don't make enough right decisions to find themselves not poor. They continually mire themselves in nothing but bad decision making, day in, day out. Couple this with an inability to manage money properly and you have disaster and calamity to follow. These two primary components are why the poor find themselves perpetually poor. Everything else that cements them into poverty stems from there and its always nearly a downward spiral into oblivion. Not only for the poor, but for the compassion suckers who want to throw tax payer dollars at them to make themselves feel better about it.
ReplyDeleteThis country and many other would heed themselves well, if there were concerted efforts to start to curtail subsidizing poverty from now on.
Methadras,
ReplyDeleteYou are not nearly as smart as you think,...
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ReplyDeleteThe reasons why the poor often make poor decisions has been addressed many times -- it has quite a bit to do with the environment they operate in (and it has a bad habit of being generational for precisely that reason).
ReplyDeleteSometimes it's just a case of hard luck too.
It does not however make them some sort of genetic/born to it subhumans -- and that is exactly what the Prosperity Gospel encourages (which by the way is directly tied to the spiritualist/mystic movement, and is thus a Christian heresy -- so it's wrong on that score too...as well as being complicit in some truly horrible thinking which has elicited some truly detestable actions).
Since this is tied to things religious: God grant that the people who think this way should ever one day find themselves poor and lowly...
PW