gdp's Comments

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Building benches instead of frisbees.

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:32:45 +0000

In my experience, Jesus' yoke is light not because he accommodates our personal desires, but because he changes us to have joy in whatever we do. When I was a child I used to complain internally about having to do work for which I was not compensated. But now, I enjoy few things more than getting together with a few of my brethren and getting something done, no matter how dirty, tedious, or difficult. The nature of the work didn't change - but through Christ, my attitude did.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:20:08 +0000

"the state has no problem with competition from private charity" Of course the state suppresses competition with private charity. If I refuse to pay them because I would rather donate to my church's food bank and invalid support program (or rather, if they catch me, because I do that in fact), they will put me in jail. Competition means people get to choose which organization they support. It does not mean they are forced to support one regardless of whether they choose to support another; that is the opposite of competition. "In the last 2 years alone, the number of millionaires in the US has gone up by a shocking 16%. Where is the huge outpouring of money to charity that should be occurring? " Charitable donations have increased in the past 10 years (I don't know about the last 2). But in those cases where millionaires don't act charitably, most likely said millionaires believe that the money taken from them by the state in the name of charity covers their responsibility to give. And frankly, I would agree with them, if government welfare was worth a damn. But the fact that the welfare state does a much better job of keeping middle-class bureaucrats in high-paying jobs than it does of feeding needy people, means that we still have a responsibility to the poor. Also, most new millionaires rode a wave of inflation to the top of the pay scale. Now that inflationary malinvestment is being cleared, people are finding out that they were not nearly as wealthy as they thought they were.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:11:32 +0000

It's a fantasy that violence can better regulate an economy than voluntary mutual accountability. And no, it's not odd. Parasites don't last long on starving hosts. They feed longest and deepest on those hosts which have the most to give. Likewise states do not tend to grow large in scope and power in nations with poor economies; and they also tend to collapse when they end up weakening the economies they feed upon, just as other parasites die when their host becomes too ill to support the parasitic relationship.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:07:25 +0000

Obviously. Well, you can go on supporting the violence of the state and calling yourself a follower of Christ at the same time. Do it for as long as you can. Maybe you'll die at a ripe, old age trying to reconcile the two views. And then afterward, you can try explaining to Jesus why you fell back on legalized violence every time you encountered a problem with your fellow man. Have fun with that.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:03:27 +0000

Money is a medium of exchange. It existed long before the state as we know it existed, and will exist after the state fails. Without it, there can be no indirect exchange, no division of labor, no technology, and billions of people would starve. It represents a person's labor and the fruits of their labor. It's how we get things done in this world. It's how people get fed, clothed, housed, and everything else that is necessary for them to survive. Of course God cares about it. He cares about how it is made (literally), how it is gained, and how it is spent - because each of those things have moral implications. Do you really think God doesn't pay any attention to the billions of dollars that governments create through fraudulent means (i.e., counterfeiture), confiscate from their citizens, and then use to feed the greed and avarice of the political class, suppress the free will of their peoples, and build armies that commit mass murder around the world? I assure you, he does.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:02:14 +0000

Non-political solutions only work when they are permitted to exist. But a state will suffer no competition. For Christians to attempt to employ those solutions we create, we will have to disobey, or at least circumvent, the state.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:59:26 +0000

The "free market" is precisely and nothing other than the sum of all voluntary human cooperation. Productivity and morality are both possible only in such a paradigm. The fantasy world is the one imagined by the state-worshipers who believe that people can be made prosperous by the taking of wealth, and that people can be made moral, through violence.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:52:06 +0000

"I don't understand why the 'moral failure' of having people pay taxes is seen as worse than continuing to allow people who need help be denied it." It's not worse. There are no varying degrees of immorality; either something is right, or it is sin. A person who refuses to be kind to the needy sins, and anyone who attempts to correct his sin with violence sins. Violence simply is not one of the options we have in dealing with sin. Unless you're without sin, then have at it. But last time I checked the only person who qualified to throw stones at sinners by HIs sinlessness, refused to do so and rebuked those who would have. Also I dispute the idea that you need taxes to be charitable. It seems that way when the government has a near-monopoly on welfare, but it is not true. People are still charitable even after having been expropriated by the state, and would probably be more charitable if their property were not being confiscated in the name of charity (and then mostly fed to middle-class bureaucrats).

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 06:11:31 +0000

I understand it well. Like most Christian statists, you left out the next part: "and unto God, what is God's". To the Jews present during that conversation, God was regarded to be the lawful owner of EVERYTHING. Tiberius Caesar, meanwhile, claimed to be a god himself (as the inscription on the denarius being examined revealed), and likewise regarded himself as the owner of everything. The two claims (God's and Caesar's) were utterly irreconcilable and mutually exclusive. The people confronting Jesus were trying to force him to either denounce Caesar, thus giving the Roman government an excuse to arrest him before his time had come; or to endorse Caesar, which would have implied that Tiberius' claim of godhood was justified. Jesus instead replied in a way that told them to choose their allegiance - to God or to Caesar - but without implicating himself as either a blasphemer or an anti-Roman zealot. But clearly, his loyalty was to God. The same could not be said of the Pharisees and Sadducees. My loyalty is to God. All I have belongs to him, and I will cause as much as possible to go to his works rather than the works of the state. I will not pay for their social experiments, their dependency programs, nor their wars. If they put me in jail for it, so be it. In the meantime I will go on donating to churches and charities that I feel best do God's work in my community, rather than placing it in the fattened, bloody hands of the political class.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 06:03:52 +0000

The issue is that any time you talk about the moral legitimacy of a political idea, you end up facing the question of the morality of force. I have come to believe that initiatory force is always immoral, because I can reconcile nothing else with the words and works of Christ. Anyone who says otherwise is going to have to prove to me that Christ endorsed violence. This does not mean that there can be no law nor enforcement of law, but it means that the law must act only in response to violence or the threat thereof, and must not itself surpass the amount of force required to repel violence, end threats, and address harm committed through violence and coercion. Call that organization "government" if you will, but as the concepts of government and the state (the definition of which long having been accepted to be a territorial monopoly on violence) have for so long been intertwined, I don't call it "government". It is definitively a form of governance, but cannot properly be called a state. I have no problem calling myself an anarchist so long as people understand that this does not make me opposed to law. Rather, it means that I believe in equality under the law - God's law as revealed to us by Christ, under which no initiation of force can be justified. To attempt to do so would violate all of his commandments. And if everyone is equal under the law, then nobody has the moral superiority required to break the law - to initiate force, in other words - and be justified in doing so. This means that we will have to be creative and consider other ways of resolving our problems than calling for the guys with uniforms and badges and law degrees and guns to FORCE other people to behave as we wish. There is a proper place for defensive force in meeting and canceling aggressive force, but force cannot justly be used to effect morality, nor prosperity. The second is merely an extension of the idea that morality can be created through violent means, as it implies the distribution of wealth to be a morally prescribed action. But a moral end cannot be achieved through immoral means. And again, anyone who wants me to believe that initiating force can be morally justified is going to have to show me where Jesus said it is just, in contradiction to all his other teachings.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:01:44 +0000

The fact that governments monopolize charity is no proof that that is how it ought to be. Ideas and practices that are imposed on society by force cannot be used as proof of their own righteousness.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:59:31 +0000

Right, right. Just disregard the ideas without examination, because "mainstream economic thought" doesn't take them seriously. That's an awful lot like the way Marx admonished his followers to reject criticisms of his theory because they were, after all, based in "bourgeois logic" and hence not to be taken seriously by the enlightened proletariat. Dismissal of a position without refutation is tantamount to conceding the point.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:56:53 +0000

Will you argue that violence is not morally condemnable? Have you never read the words of Jesus Christ? What part of "love thy neighbor as thyself" don't you understand? Perhaps the part from Corinthians that tells us that "love does not demand its own way".

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:05:59 +0000

"Have you ever considered that by supporting the taxation that provides welfare, healthcare, etc, you would be cheerfully giving, and "not of compulsion"? Just a thought. No taxation without representation in this country, you know." No, I would not. I would be supporting the violent expropriation of everybody who is unwilling to give (which is a matter between them and God) and who is unable to afford the costs imposed upon them (which is without a doubt the very opposite of charity). "When it comes to individual versus government responsibility, or, as some would have it, individual versus Church responsibility, I don't think it's a matter of either/or but of both/and. It should be a priority of our society, regardless of religious beliefs, to take care of each other. And as the elected representation of our society, it is entirely appropriate that our government be part of ensuring that happens." Society and government are not the same thing. Society is the result of people coming together for a common goal. Government is a territorial monopoly on violence. The two rarely have anything to do with one another. "The poor and the sick shouldn't have to rely entirely on the whims of charity." Sorry, but yes they should. They do. People are supposed to care for the poor and the sick, yes. But if and when they fail, that does not excuse the further moral failure of initiating violence against them. God did not say "force one another to care for the poor." He said "love one another". Love does not demand its own way, and there is no purer form of demanding one's own way than to force another person to act as you would have them act. "Likewise, it should be a priority of the Church and, frankly, of pretty much any other religion I know of, to care for the stranger, the poor, the sick, and the otherwise down-and-out. Again, this should happen on both an individual and systemic level. Bottom-up and top-down. Supporting one shouldn't be trying to cop out of the other. " Here, at least, we agree. Except that top-down organization rarely works, Doesn't matter whether we're talking about governments or corporations or churches; top-down organization is inefficient, slow, and prone to corruption. The Church, and consequently its works, should be based upon mutual accountability, not hierarchy.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:59:24 +0000

1: To start with, this book and its sources: http://mises.org/rothbard/agd/contents.asp Start at Part II for the historically relevant parts. Before that it's mostly the history of business cycle theory. 2. That is not the point I was making. What I said was that violence is not excusable simply because voluntary action fails to achieve an optimum condition (and the question of who decides what is "optimum" is also worth asking).

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:09:03 +0000

The great depression was a period of liquidation caused by the Federal Reserve tripling the money supply during the 1920's. If it had been allowed to run its course, it would have lasted a few months instead of years. You know, like the depression of 1921. But then they don't teach about that one, because it is an example of how quickly the market corrects itself in the absence of government meddling. So the state caused the depression, then acted in exactly the opposite manner they should have acted to correct it, instead prolonging it by years. THEN the government started confiscating private wealth that was previously being given to charity, and created a welfare state. And now their schools and court-following intellectuals like to tell people that it was a failure of voluntaryism? Spare me. There is no condition in which violence ever works better than voluntary action, nor can violence ever be excused because voluntary action fails to achieve some arbitrary "optimum" result. As for the second point, when you voted for the state to take away your neighbor's money, you were not voting for charity. If you want to give, then give. If you want your neighbor to give, then encourage him to give. Ask him, persuade him, pray for him. And if he will not, that is between him and God. Nowhere along the way does a right to force others to be moral appear.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:57:36 +0000

Yeh, and I'm not here to convert people to libertarianism. I do care very deeply, however, about convincing the church to stop embracing secular political power. There are other ways to think in an apolitical manner without being a libertarian economics/philosophy nerd like me.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:10:03 +0000

The spirit of Christ and the political spirit can have no fellowship with each other. Christians should seek non-political solutions to supposed political problems. We, the Church, should be the instrument that forms society - not the violent, parasitic false god that is the state.

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:07:32 +0000

Hey, you don't have to be a progressive to enjoy craft brews. :P

Stuff Christians Like - Jon Acuff : Secretly being liberal.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:05:31 +0000

I've been writing in "Jesus" for years. Mainly because I believe that if Jesus were elected to political office, he'd abdicate.