Category: Countdown to Christmas

From December 1-25, I’m sharing a quote and its truth from John Fugelsang’s Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, the book Robert and I are currently and fascinatingly reading.

An odd Advent Calendar, of sorts.

Today, Fugelsang writes:

“Jesus was a nonprofit prophet, but was he really a socialist? The short answer’s no, because socialism didn’t exist yet. But let’s point out:

He never owned property.

He said, ‘It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’

He told people to pay their taxes.

He never healed the blind and then billed them.

He never gave anyone a mandatory drug test before dispensing some loaves and fishes.

I’ll never say Jesus was a socialist. But I will say if he were alive now and preaching the exact same message, right-wing Christians would call him one.” p. 190

From December 1-25, I’ll be sharing a quote and its truth from John Fugelsang’s Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, the book Robert and I are currently and fascinatingly reading.

An odd Advent Calendar, of sorts.

I love Fugelsang’s simple truth in today’s post:

“Jesus’s wisdom is in the principles that cut across religious and secular boundaries: calls to love your enemies, to care for the poor and marginalized. Those teachings don’t require belief in supernatural events to be meaningful. Any skeptic can still recognize the wisdom in ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ or the revolutionary ethic behind ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’” p. 22-23

He continues: “By prioritizing Jesus’s teachings, Christianity can emphasize principles that unite, without relying on coerced belief in two-thousand-year-old supernatural accounts to win people over.

• He asked people to freely share everything they had and turn the other cheek, to deliberately break all ancient cycles of hate and suffering.
• He broke social and religious taboos by associating with outcasts and sinners, like tax collectors, prostitutes, and despised foreign Samaritans. He treated them all with compassion, directing his anger instead toward economic injustice and exploitation (Luke 4:18-19, Luke 6:20-21).
• In Mark 12:17, he supports paying taxes for the government to re-distribute.
• In Matthew 26:52, he forbids his disciples from using their weap-ons.
• In John 8, he opposes the legal death penalty.
• And if any politician called for what Jesus commands in Matthew 25 (The Sheep and the Goats aka The Judgment of the Nations) he’d be labeled an open-borders socialist.
• Jesus disdained wealth and earthly power, and challenged traditional laws of his own faith. He rejected earthly materialism, renounced the idea of revenge, and commanded us to welcome the stranger.” p. 23

Wow.

Sometimes the teachings of Jesus are as clear as black and white.