{"id":5478,"date":"2011-03-07T14:46:51","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T14:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5478"},"modified":"2011-03-07T14:46:51","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T14:46:51","slug":"god-and-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/god-and-taxes\/","title":{"rendered":"God and Taxes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It’s always worth remembering that there is a religious left<\/em> too. Amongst its prominenti are the ‘social justice’ Christians of Jim Wallis’ Sojourners group, a public nuisance for years. Contemplating the nation’s budgetary woes, the Sojourners are now asking “What Would Jesus Cut?” <\/p>\n

In a splendid piece for the Boston Globe <\/em>Jeff Jacoby responds<\/a>. Here’s a key extract:<\/p>\n

Wallis fumed in an interview that Congress should be cutting defense spending instead of health or nutrition programs. \u201cHouse Republicans want to beat our ploughshares into more swords,\u2019\u2019 he said. \u201cThese priorities that they\u2019re offering are not just wrong or unfair, they\u2019re unbiblical.\u2019\u2019 Unbiblical! Does Wallis really believe that no one advocating budget cuts he opposes can have serious ethical grounds for doing so? It must be wonderful to be so certain that what Wallis wants is precisely what God wants. Not all of us are as confident that our religious faith translates as readily into a detailed partisan agenda.<\/p>\n

A more fundamental problem with the \u201cWhat Would Jesus Cut?\u2019\u2019 campaign is its planted axiom that Jesus would want Congress to do anything at all. Yes, we are emphatically commanded by Scripture to help the poor, to comfort the afflicted, and to love the stranger. But those obligations are personal, not political. It requires a considerable leap of both faith and logic to read the Bible as mandating elaborate government assistance programs, to be funded by a vast apparatus of compulsory taxation. I admit that I am no New Testament scholar, but I cannot recall Jesus ever saying that the way to enter Heaven is to dole out money extracted from your neighbors\u2019 pockets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the other hand, He did <\/em>hang out with tax collectors….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s always worth remembering that there is a religious left too. Amongst its prominenti are the ‘social justice’ Christians of Jim Wallis’ Sojourners group, a public nuisance for years. Contemplating the nation’s budgetary woes, the Sojourners are now asking “What … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[403,723,82],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5478"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5478"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5514,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5478\/revisions\/5514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}