Republican Jesus

Blackflag: You're not wrong. I just want the methods to be sustainable.

And we do have a culture like that. Americans give more to charity, both in gross numbers and percentage of their income of any other nation on Earth.

TowerOfBabel: Yet our society is still full of greed. We are far from living up to my very reasonable expectations. Anyways, I haven't had a good discussion like this in a while. I hope we can have more in the future.

Blackflag: I plan on it!

Blackflag: Jesus never said to not bring your ideals to a bigger stage. In fact, that was what he did.
Is it? Did he ask the authorities to follow his ideals? Because if my bible lessons are accurate that's not how I remember it. At most he stayed quiet around authorities, and occasionally he rebuked them in a negative way. I instead remember he preached to PEOPLE, rather than participating in any politics. He sought to alter moral and religious values, as opposed to dictating definite policy which results from that. Values, of course, can be interpreted differently by a variety of states.

admin: Jesus set examples. He never demanded a single person follow any custom.
Jesus's examples show with clarity how an ideal government would be operated.

We are not arguing that Jesus was a politician. He wasn't. His ideology and examples do set the stage for the ideal modern day government. If you read the forum, you would of saw I already addressed this.

Christians are taught specific ideals from the bible. It isn't about Christianity mixing with politics, as much as it is the ideals we garner from Christianity being made integral into politics.

We cannot trade in our believes whenever we reach a new threshold.

Jesus never said not to bring your ideals to a bigger stage. Jesus's examples did pave the way for people to bring ideals to a bigger stage.
The statement is completely accurate.

Blackflag: I don't know about all this. I think a lot of government already had similar ideology and ideals prior to Jesus' time. And people did bring ideals to a bigger stage.

I also disagree Jesus paved the way for any sort of political revolution. I mean, if anything, his church was politically persecuted for God-knows-how long, and when it was finally turned into a state religion it was standardized to something that suspiciously had a bunch of pagan rituals in it all of a sudden.

Maybe that's the whole American thing though, since you're so used to Jesus being invoked in your culture as being something like the basic foundation of government.

Blackflag: Because Jesus totally would've loved for a huge federal entity to take over for us the job of providing for the poor by arbitrarily providing a check to anyone who files for one. Hallelujah food stamps.

By the way, slightly over 700 billion dollars every year are spent on the Department of Defense. That may seem like a lot, but welfare is way more expensive. For instance, Social Security actually spends a trillion greenbacks every year (I think).

Blackflag: lol