Tuesday, May 06, 2025
4 comments:
READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!
All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.
AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That Vance meme gave me a chuckle. :)
ReplyDeleteMe, too. I keep coming back to it, and it never gets old.
DeleteHannah Cox needs to brush up on her understanding of Christianity. Jesus "just did it" because He was basically Harry Potter and could create food out of thin air. The disciples couldn't, so in the early church everyone contributed to the common good.
ReplyDelete"All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need." (Acts 4:32-35, NIV)
And when Ananias and Sapphira sold a piece of property, kept part of the proceeds for themselves, and then lied about it, they were both struck dead.
I'm not going to argue the pros or cons of any given economic or political system. I'm just saying it's not as simple as a cocky tweet. Of course, it never is.
I can't really speak for ol' Hannah, but I don't think she was suggesting Jesus was somehow a capitalist, just that the miracle of sharing (and other examples of feeding the poor/the masses) wasn't an example of socialism—which I'd heard when I was out west in 2008 and staying at that communal home in Portland, OR: that Jesus was an out-and-out socialist.
DeleteAt the other extreme, our church in northern Virginia one time invited a minister to speak to us during a pledge drive re: pledging, tithing, and monetary contributions to the church in general, and his spiel started off with the claim that the topic that comes up most frequently in Jesus' discourses is money (rebuttal here as well as in many other places, so this claim could well be false). Again, this claim isn't really a contention that Jesus was a capitalist (although the parable of the talents would seem to rely, for analogical purposes—it's not an economics lesson—on the idea that investing one's wealth, and getting a return, was better than simply squirreling the money away as savings), and I found the minister's claim to be a somewhat crass introduction to the topic of coughing up for the sake of the church. But I guess the minister's basic point was that, even if we're uncomfortable talking about money after all of that "God and mammon" rhetoric, Jesus himself was okay with talking about it.
Anyway, those're just reminiscences. As to whether Jesus was a socialist or a capitalist or a something-else-ist, I have no clue, but I suspect Cox is trying to say that if people think "enforced redistributivism" was Jesus' modus operandi and his suggested economic model, they're wrong.
But you're right in the sense that, in tweet form, whatever she's saying ends up being more of a quip than an argument—an attempt at a witty rejoinder and nothing deeper. I wouldn't condemn her for that, though. I interpret her "he just did it" to mean Jesus voluntarily gave without coercing or being coerced. She took her cue from the guy's mention of socialism which, as a system on a national scale, does indeed involve coercion, as we've seen throughout history over and over again. For myself, I'd argue that socialism as a voluntary thing might work at the level of groups and communities as long as everyone involved were fine with contributing, but at scale, socialism becomes something much less positive. I think that's what lies at the heart of her response. If Cox sees socialism as "robbing other people," which is how people like Margaret Thatcher saw it, then I don't think she's wrong to contrast voluntarism and coercion.
Of course, Safa and Cox might be totally talking past each other: maybe Safa is talking about benign redistributionism on a local scale while Cox is responding by pointing out the ills of enforced redistributionism on the national scale—and doing so via dodgy "theology." I don't know.