David French is an example:
French: The fact of the matter is that in many circumstances, particularly in this country, poverty is the result of an awful lot of bad choices. A lot of our poverty is the result of behaviors that often require heart-level repentance to change.
Medicare, Medicaid , and food stamps are not going to get you to turn away from behaviors that are destroying your life, but the Gospel will.
Rick Green: Doesn't it make them more dependent on government, which makes them less likely to come to the church that used to be the epicenter of the community where people would come and meet?
French: That's exactly right. It used to be that if you were hungry, if you needed help, you would go to the church and as the church was feeding you, as the church was providing you with the physical sustenance that you needed, it was providing you also with the much more important spiritual sustenance.
And right now what we're doing is we're saying you're going to be able to have the television, all the food you need, the roof over your head, everything that you need without any intervention from the church at all.
At 04:59 PM 2/20/2013, Wojtek S wrote:
>I do not think it is about money. It is about service delivery.
>Churches see themselves as the "proper" venue of delivering human
>services (education, health, social assistance) and resent government
>competition (see for example the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(Catholicism) ) Protestant
>churches adhere to the same principle e.g. in the Netherlands or in
>Switzerland.
>
>Since taxes fund public service delivery, this makes churches
>redundant. Case in point, countries with the most generous public
>welfare system (i.e one delivered by state agencies rather than by
>private providers who are reimbursed by state) tend to have low church
>attendance rates (cf. France or Scandinavia.)
>
>Wojtek
>
>
>On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:22 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>
>wrote:
> > awhile back, we discussed some research analyzing evangelical literature
> > (e.g., xtian mags like Awake! and the like) which showed that there was a
> > concerted effort to stir up antipathy to government and taxes.
> Reasoning was
> > that, by reducing the tax burden, churches could expect to fill their
> > coffers with the monies that might otherwise have been paid to taxes.
> >
> > Ring a bell with anyone? It was, granted, a brief discussion.
> >
> > shag
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
>--
>Wojtek
>
>"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)