And Jesus said, “For verily the poor, the sick and the hungry are not our responsibility. Frankly, they’re just sucking at the public teat and they’ve become so accustomed to handouts that they’ll no longer take the initiative to improve their circumstances. Some folks just enjoy being poor and destitute, I guess. Why would I perform miracles with loaves and fishes when what these tramps really need to do is get off their lazy ass and find a damned job?”
I know you’re going to want to know where to find that little beauty of Scripture, being the devoted Christophiles y’all are. Unless you have a Republican Bible, though, you’re out of luck…which is probably just as well.
Clearly, this parody of Scripture is my (poorly done and borderline blasphemous) attempt to focus attention on one of the biggest problems with modern Christianity: a complete and utter absence of compassion. I may not believe in God, being having been raised in the wild by Lutherans and exposed to more than a few Sunday School lessons, I have a good working knowledge of America’s Religion ©. If memory serves, compassion and service to others (Works trump faith) is a major component of Christ’s teachings. That this has been conveniently forgotten by a good chunk of today’s holier-than-thou hyper-religious hypocrites is all the proof of the problem we need.
One need look no farther than the Republican Party’s war on food stamps to get a sense of the resentment and hatred the Radical Christian Right has for the less fortunate among us. It’s a philosophy that’s as cruel and heartless and it is completely counter to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Yet most Republicans in Congress would happily violate the social contract and leave the poor, the elderly, and the sick to fend for themselves. Because charity is socialism, don’tchaknow? And since Jesus was a Republican, He’d NEVER condone socialism…or so saith St. Ronald of Reagan.
Kinda makes you wonder what Jesus would have to say about it all, doesn’t it?
Most Republican members of Congress claim to believe in Jesus Christ, but their votes against the food stamp program suggest they do not share their lord and savior’s love for the poor….
“In the real world, we measure success by results,” said Rep. Marlin Stutzman, an Indiana Republican, speaking in favor of the cuts. “It’s time for Washington to measure success by how many families are lifted out of poverty and helped back on their feet, not by how much Washington bureaucrats spend year after year.”
That sounds like good old common sense, but, of course, it is actually just more tea party nonsense. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the food stamp program has kept about 4 million above the poverty line and has been a lifeline to millions of others already in poverty. If the Republican cuts were to go into effect, 4 million people would be kicked off the food stamp program next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and another 3 million would be dropped annually in subsequent years.
In other words, instead of achieving Stutzman’s goal of lifting families out of poverty, the reductions would drive millions more into poverty.
I get that no one wants to spend money on those unwilling to do for themselves when they can live on the dole. Honestly, though, I wonder if any so-inclined Republicans have bothered to try and understand what it’s like living on public assistance? How can a self-righteous prick making $174,000 a year hope to have any empathy for those living hand-to-mouth in an economy designed to benefit the “haves?”
Those on public assistance by large are not lazy, shiftless ne’er-do-wells with no desire or plan to do anything better with their lives. Certainly there are people like that on the public assistance rolls, but it’s an imperfect system designed for a decidedly imperfect world. Do we then throw out the baby with the bath water? Do we dismantle the social contract because a surfer in California has discovered a way to game the system? That’s exactly what Congressional Republicans and their cheerleaders at Fox News Channel (and other Conservative media types- see Santelli, Rick) would like to see happen. If they can find one example of corruption or impropriety, they’ll argue that the entire system must be dismantled post-haste.
I could fall back on my usual “If these people are Christians, then I’m the Queen of England” argument, but this goes far beyond mere hypocrisy. This is about a class of people who would happily set seven million fellow Americans adrift on an ice floe. These are people for whom compassion, charity, and tolerance have little, if any, meaning…not exactly what Jesus taught, is it?
Food Stamps cut by $5B today but, on the plus side, still a great time to get a subsidy on a corporate jet, says Paul Ryan #OhSNAPWhatsNext
— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) November 1, 2013
I’m by no means a supporter of the idea that we should blindly hand out money to the lower rungs of the economic spectrum as part of some grand socialist wealth redistribution scheme. Still, I can’t help but wonder what happened to the idea that we’re our brother’s keeper? If we bear no collective responsibility to care for those in need, we cease to be a community and become a collection of self-interested individuals. When we separate ourselves from those among us who for whatever reason were dealt a lousy hand by life, when we resent assisting those in need, we’ve forfeited and claim to humanity.
I’m frankly at a loss to explain the Republican war on food stamps (and health care). I keep returning to the conviction that these people are evil, compassion-deprived, self-absorbed monsters whose philosophy about the needy is that they can go #$@& themselves. I can think of no other explanation for their overriding desire to shred the social contract and create a dog-eat-dog America, a place where only the strong survive. I’m not certain what people like this are, but they have no basis for claiming the imprimatur of the Almighty. They’re no more Christians than I am the long-lost love child of Mahatma Gandhi
It’s about time for these corrupt moneychangers to be chased out of the temple. They wouldn’t recognize the teachings of their Lord and Savior if the Prince of Peace showed up on the House floor with kneepads and a tube of AstroGlide. It’s not about compassion, charity, or tolerance, it’s about creating an America where only the strong survive…which, if memory serves, can be found nowhere among the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Somewhere warm and breezy, Jesus weeps softly into a bottle of Dos Equis….
