But where did Christ give that duty to the State? John 21 seems to give that clearly to Peter and the Church.
And thus taxing for this is Ceasar taking what is God’s for himself.
And why is it ‘Nations’ that have to help others? Is not Matthew 25 and individual command.
This has to be the most funniest and biggest misrepresentation of scripture i have ever seen. You are completely ignoring the context. Some of what Jesus said was contextual; that is to say his command was limited and fulfilled only within a particular context. And thus to take it out of context would be to distort the original intent of what was said.
Luckily we have Catholic moral tradition, and thus reading scripture by yourself has a limited impact on how we interpret scripture and apply it to todays context.
Private Property***
Human beings do not have an absolute right to private property.
All property belongs to God. You are born with a
conditional right. Therefore if you use property in an abusive way, there is no guarantee that you will still have a moral right to that property. If i have a knife; i can say its mine, but if i go around stabbing people to death with it, i will find out that the police will confiscate that knife; and they will have to if they don’t want to find themselves guilty of aiding you in this crime by allowing you to keep the knife and continue murdering people with it. I cannot say that its “
my property” and that therefore i should be allowed to walk around with that knife in prison. That is no defense. The dignity of peoples lives are more important than my right to property, or the knife in this particular scenario.
The same principle applies to the market place in respect of human need. If by owning a substantial amount of money or property leads to others not having enough, or if the market place is as such that a group of people have no positive chance of fulfilling their dignity as living human beings at any given time; then the market place and the people that profit from that market are accountable, and are committing murder and theft if they do not contribute to the needs of society. The government is also guilty of murder and theft if they do not take tax or take property from you in order to help restore the moral dignity of human beings. You don’t have a right to the money thats being taxed.
The question of what an individual should do in a society, and what the government should do in-order to protect the vulnerable in society (
which includes the economically vulnerable), is dealing with two a different contexts, which do not necessarily result in the same conclusions. What a citizen should do and what the police should do when witnessing a crime is again different. What God should do if he sees a person being raped and what a human being should do when he sees somebody being raped is dealing with two different contexts which do not necessarily have the same conclusion and certainly do not and cannot if we expect to believe in a loving God. Jesus did not teach us the particulars of how to run a state. But I think he expected us to use our moral common sense in that regard, since he did teach us to love thy neighbor.
Surely you didn’t think that simply meant your American neighbor alone did you?
Since you are among the rich (relative to the Tanzanians), how much do YOU give personally.
Just because i live among the rich does not mean that i am rich; and just because i am not a Tanzanian does not mean that i can practically afford to give much to anyone when you place my needs in the context of
minimum wage and the
high cost of living in London. You give according to what you have. But the government takes tax, and perhaps some of that goes to aid in other countries; plus what ever you can give to the Church. The last time i looked there was 2.49 million unemployed in the UK, and those people are therefore unable to give charity to any reasonable degree in the sense money. Yes; even in rich countries there are people hovering barely above the poverty line and some, while they are certainly better off than people in other countries, they are still living in poverty insofar as they cannot provide for themselves and are reliant on handouts which represents a very small amount of money when looked at in the proper context of the high cost of living in London. The government has to tax
so that 2.49 million unemployed people do not become homeless and starve to death.
.I can’t believe you guys didn’t see that coming. I am black; and i love the idea of a black president; but that was just a stunt to make the establishment look good.
Throw the people a life changing tear jerker experience, and everybody forgets that they are being ripped off.