What is the concept of heaven to you? (believe, charity, organizations)
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I find that way of thinking by the supposedly religious completely bizarre, and yet, we have had not one but two posters on this forum who claim to be retired pastors and whom I've seen both post to that effect in other places on City-Data. Not only are poor people lazy and their poverty their own damn fault, benefits for the elderly should not be provided by society because it is their families' obligation to pay for them.
And both have complained about how they don't like this forum because either Christians are picked on or there are too many Christians who don't abide by their standards.
I'm wondering what their expectations of heaven will be. What will they do if they see people standing in line ahead of them?
Yes, this is my conundrum about so-called "Christians". Jesus put great emphasis on taking care of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the sick, the jailed, etc. Yet this is exactly what so many "Christians" object to. I just don't get the dichotomy. (the ne're-do-wells are another subject: doesn't the NT say "if you don't work, you don't eat?)
"Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven"....have I got that right? I think Mordant is correct that the "poor" will finally get theirs in Heaven, and that all the imagery is to depict lack of scarcity. The Bible seems to allude to the rich as already having "gotten theirs" here on Earth.
I'm hoping God made the Universe so unfathomable so that we could spend eternity discovering and enjoying it, not being constrained by earthly gravity-bound bodies, but PERFECT bodies. YAY!
I hope that also means eat (within reason, not gluttony) and not get fat, and no toileting, lol.
There are people out there who get no pity from me in regard to their station in life. My sister was one. What a totally wasted life by almost any human standard. Drugs, booze, and excuses. That was -- essentially -- her life. What does it say about a person when they drop out of high school less than a month before graduation??? What does it say about a person who has never held a single job for more than a month? What does it say about a person who doesn't have a functioning toilet in their house for 3 years?
But most people are not like that. Most of the poor people I have known work and struggle to hold on to their lives and provide for their families. Life is often not easy, and often not fair, but some...many... persevere and I admire them for that and am more than willing to help.
Sometimes I think that life is a little bit like baseball. Some people strike out once and find the courage to move on. Some strike out twice and find the courage and move on. It may not be on the third strike, but some never even seem to try to get up to bat. There comes a time when people and governments need to put their moneys and efforts on those who still have a reasonable chance to work themselves up to some level of success (however modest that may be) in life and not throw money down the proverbial toilet on those who simply never will.
LMAO, I don't know, my brother dropped out THREE months before graduation.
And now he is 52 and living in my house while I am staying out of the country because he lived with my mother until she died two years ago and we had to sell the house, then with friends, and then he needed a place to go, and I was here and my place was empty. As much as my brain screamed NOOOOOO, I could not let my own brother be homeless. The reason I did say yes is that at long last he is seeking psychiatric help and assistance from social services. When the time comes that I have to return home permanently, he IS going to have to go. I cannot live with his crazy ass, and my condo is packed to the gills with his stuff, as well as stuff from our mother's house. But he is doing better on medication, and I'm hoping by then that he will have found other living arrangements, since he has stated that to be one of his goals.
So yes, I get that there are many stories and reason as to why the poor are always with us and why we tend to feel more helpful to some than to others.
Most of the poorer people I know did work hard but simply do not have the mental equipment to get too far beyond where they are. I have a friend I know from the little church I attended. If there's a line on the IQ chart where one crosses into mentally challenged, she is maybe two or three points above it. But, unlike me, she is by nature a good person with a great heart, always seeing the best in everyone else and wanting to do kind things for anyone in trouble just because that is the way she is. She married but never had kids, and her husband died of a heart attack three years ago. She now has cancer, a bad one, but cheerful as all get-out about it and wanting to live for the sake of her dog. She just hit 60, but she can't work right now at her job as a school cafeteria person because of her treatments. A person like that is broke through no fault of her own.
Yes, this is my conundrum about so-called "Christians". Jesus put great emphasis on taking care of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the sick, the jailed, etc. Yet this is exactly what so many "Christians" object to. I just don't get the dichotomy. (the ne're-do-wells are another subject: doesn't the NT say "if you don't work, you don't eat?)
"Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven"....have I got that right? I think Mordant is correct that the "poor" will finally get theirs in Heaven, and that all the imagery is to depict lack of scarcity. The Bible seems to allude to the rich as already having "gotten theirs" here on Earth.
I'm hoping God made the Universe so unfathomable so that we could spend eternity discovering and enjoying it, not being constrained by earthly gravity-bound bodies, but PERFECT bodies. YAY!
I hope that also means eat (within reason, not gluttony) and not get fat, and no toileting, lol.
That's actually a verse from Thessalonians that is taken out of context to use as an excuse for not helping the poor.
Paul is writing to the church at Thessaloniki, which, like most of the early "churches" were communal groups that followed the basic instructions of Christ to share what they had and work together as a community for the common good. The words he wrote to them, "If a man should not work, neither should he eat" was not a reason to not feed the poor, but rather directed toward the members of the Thessalonian church who were refusing to do their share of work because they figured Christ was coming back any day now, so what was the point of working.
In my opinion, one of the stupidest things ever done to the scriptures was to divvy them up into verses so that its so easy to take one sentence or passage completely out of context and make it mean something it was never meant to say.
The books of the Bible were not written in verses, but that's how they are always presented today.
LMAO, I don't know, my brother dropped out THREE months before graduation.
And now he is 52 and living in my house while I am staying out of the country because he lived with my mother until she died two years ago and we had to sell the house, then with friends, and then he needed a place to go, and I was here and my place was empty. As much as my brain screamed NOOOOOO, I could not let my own brother be homeless. The reason I did say yes is that at long last he is seeking psychiatric help and assistance from social services. When the time comes that I have to return home permanently, he IS going to have to go. I cannot live with his crazy ass, and my condo is packed to the gills with his stuff, as well as stuff from our mother's house. But he is doing better on medication, and I'm hoping by then that he will have found other living arrangements, since he has stated that to be one of his goals.
So yes, I get that there are many stories and reason as to why the poor are always with us.
Most of the poorer people I know did work hard but simply do not have the mental equipment to get too far beyond where they are. I have a friend I know from the little church I attended. If there's a line on the IQ chart where one crosses into mentally challenged, she is maybe two or three points above it. But, unlike me, she is by nature a good person with a great heart, always seeing the best in everyone else and wanting to do kind things for anyone in trouble just because that is the way she is. She married but never had kids, and her husband died of a heart attack three years ago. She now has cancer, a bad one, but cheerful as all get-out about it and wanting to live for the sake of her dog. She just hit 60, but she can't work right now at her job as a school cafeteria person because of her treatments. A person like that is broke through no fault of her own.
Yes, quite so.
And, again, at least for me, it gets down to where can what I do (either physically or financially) actually result in some improvement in a person's life.
That's actually a verse from Thessalonians that is taken out of context to use as an excuse for not helping the poor.
Paul is writing to the church at Thessaloniki, which, like most of the early "churches" were communal groups that followed the basic instructions of Christ to share what they had and work together as a community for the common good. The words he wrote to them, "If a man should not work, neither should he eat" was not a reason to not feed the poor, but rather directed toward the members of the Thessalonian church who were refusing to do their share of work because they figured Christ was coming back any day now, so what was the point of working.
In my opinion, one of the stupidest things ever done to the scriptures was to divvy them up into verses so that its so easy to take one sentence or passage completely out of context and make it mean something it was never meant to say.
The books of the Bible were not written in verses, but that's how they are always presented today.
It’s possible to feed the poor without enabling the lazy.
In my opinion, one of the stupidest things ever done to the scriptures was to divvy them up into verses so that its so easy to take one sentence or passage completely out of context and make it mean something it was never meant to say.
The books of the Bible were not written in verses, but that's how they are always presented today.
Well they'd still be divided up in to sentences and phrases and words and cherry-pickers gotta pick ;-)
It’s possible to feed the poor without enabling the lazy.
The problem is who gets to judge who is lazy or worthy of help.
Then we get into means-testing and gate-keeping the heck out of everything which tends to cause aid to not efficiently get where it's needed, and tends to demean people who aid would benefit with a default assumption that they are trying to scam the system.
Another problem is that "lazy" is very much in the eye of the beholder. My stepson for example is high-functioning autistic with some comorbidities. He will turn 30 this summer and has been living with us since he managed with considerable and in fact heroic effort to complete his undergraduate degree. A casual observer might assume he is lazy because he hardly leaves the house and is not what you would call a "go-getter" (which both his mother and I could fairly be termed I think). But he's actually extremely ethical and hard working. It's just that everything you or I would do is 5 to 10 times the effort for him because of OCD and social anxiety.
He keeps copious and methodical notes from his individual and group therapy, is clearly doing his best to apply himself to his therapy assigments and also works out with a personal trainer weekly and exercises on his own daily. I subcontract out some data analysis work to him, maybe 10-15 hours a week is all he can handle, but what he can do he is incredibly thorough and meticulous and catches things even I miss. From his small earnings he pays us a room and board at least.
Lazy? No. Holding down a 40 hour a week job, living independently, married, having kids, being a "self-starter" or other outward signifiers of being "industrious"? Also no.
He will probably need to get on disability and other aid programs in order to survive after his mother and I are no longer here. He may or may not achieve independent living with zero assistance or supervision. I could fully imagine some bureaucrat somewhere saying, he has a degree in mathematics, he is able-bodied, what's his problem? Obviously lazy.
There was a version of this same thinking that plagued my prior / late wife while she was still in the land of the living. She had a chronic illness that was not well understood by medical science, so she had to go through a disability "review" process every couple of years which was very demeaning and anxiety-inducing. One of the things they kept hammering at was whether she was "just depressed" or not. Mercifully the last time she was reviewed, the shrink that did the review said, "of COURSE she's depressed. I'd be worried about her sanity if she wasn't depressed, given her physical challenges. But that's reactive depression, not clinical depression." And of course even if she WERE clinically depressed, that still prevents people from functioning properly, so either give her a Magic Pill [tm] or don't add to her problems with your constant panopticon of scrutiny.
The problem is who gets to judge who is lazy or worthy of help.
Then we get into means-testing and gate-keeping the heck out of everything which tends to cause aid to not efficiently get where it's needed, and tends to demean people who aid would benefit with a default assumption that they are trying to scam the system.
Another problem is that "lazy" is very much in the eye of the beholder. My stepson for example is high-functioning autistic with some comorbidities. He will turn 30 this summer and has been living with us since he managed with considerable and in fact heroic effort to complete his undergraduate degree. A casual observer might assume he is lazy because he hardly leaves the house and is not what you would call a "go-getter" (which both his mother and I could fairly be termed I think). But he's actually extremely ethical and hard working. It's just that everything you or I would do is 5 to 10 times the effort for him because of OCD and social anxiety.
He keeps copious and methodical notes from his individual and group therapy, is clearly doing his best to apply himself to his therapy assigments and also works out with a personal trainer weekly and exercises on his own daily. I subcontract out some data analysis work to him, maybe 10-15 hours a week is all he can handle, but what he can do he is incredibly thorough and meticulous and catches things even I miss. From his small earnings he pays us a room and board at least.
Lazy? No. Holding down a 40 hour a week job, living independently, married, having kids, being a "self-starter" or other outward signifiers of being "industrious"? Also no.
He will probably need to get on disability and other aid programs in order to survive after his mother and I are no longer here. He may or may not achieve independent living with zero assistance or supervision. I could fully imagine some bureaucrat somewhere saying, he has a degree in mathematics, he is able-bodied, what's his problem? Obviously lazy.
There was a version of this same thinking that plagued my prior / late wife while she was still in the land of the living. She had a chronic illness that was not well understood by medical science, so she had to go through a disability "review" process every couple of years which was very demeaning and anxiety-inducing. One of the things they kept hammering at was whether she was "just depressed" or not. Mercifully the last time she was reviewed, the shrink that did the review said, "of COURSE she's depressed. I'd be worried about her sanity if she wasn't depressed, given her physical challenges. But that's reactive depression, not clinical depression." And of course even if she WERE clinically depressed, that still prevents people from functioning properly, so either give her a Magic Pill [tm] or don't add to her problems with your constant panopticon of scrutiny.
If someone doesn’t make that call, then we end up enabling the lazy, and you know there are people take advantage of that.
And, again, at least for me, it gets down to where can what I do (either physically or financially) actually result in some improvement in a person's life.
Same here, which is why I am more comfortable giving locally rather than to large charitable corporations, religious or otherwise.
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What will they do if they see people standing in line ahead of them?
