Would Jesus raise taxes on the rich?

Yes, He would, suggested Obama at Thursday's National Prayer Breakfast. Is the president playing politics with scripture?

President Obama used his speech at Thursday's annual National Prayer Breakfast to explain how his faith influences his policies. "When I talk about shared responsibility," he said, it's because I really believe asking people like myself who have "been extraordinarily blessed" to give up some tax breaks is good economic policy. "But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus' teaching that, 'To whom much is given, much shall be required.'" Is Obama saying, as Politico puts it, that "Jesus would tax the rich"? And, well, would He?
 
Jesus wasn't a socialist: Maybe Obama would understand scripture if he "visited church more often," instead of "only during campaign seasons," says Breeanne Howe in RedState. "Jesus very much emphasized the importance of giving to the poor," but out of joy over what we've been given, not out of an obligation to pay taxes. In fact, the Bible "teaches that everything we have, including money, belongs to God." Ultimately, a few "Bible quotes... fail to give credibility to Obama's socialist leanings."
"Give me your money in the name of Jesus"
 
Obama wasn't speaking for Jesus: "I personally have little doubt that if Jesus of Nazareth had been in charge of determining how much various people were rendering unto Caesar," he'd redistribute the wealth, says Ed Kilgore in Washington Monthly. But that wasn't Obama's point. Far from claiming "Jesus as co-author of his policies," he went out of his way to say the opposite: "Our goal," the president declared, "should not be to declare our policies as Biblical." I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the Christian Right is "projecting their own usurpation of religion onto the president."
"Obama's prayer"
 
It's good to hear a Democrat reference religion so well: I think Obama's speech "deserves study as an instance of turning religious themes and imagery to the service of his larger policy message," says James Fallows in The Atlantic. Republicans are so good at this "we take it for granted." The reason Obama's prayer is getting such notice is that "it is interesting to see it done, and deftly, by a Democrat."

Source:  http://news.yahoo.com/jesus-raise-taxes-rich-115700946.html

Note: As a member of The Christian Left on faebook and the internet I agree
with Obama on this issue. -Rob

How Newt Gingrich Shamelessly Feeds the Fears and Egos of White Conservatives -- and Why That May Win Him the GOP Nomination

From http://www.alternet.org/news/153876/how_newt_gingrich_shamelessly_feeds_the_fears_and_egos_of_white_conservatives_--_and_why_that_may_win_him_the_gop_nomination

If Gingrich does manage to pull off an unlikely victory, it will be the result of running a picture-perfect right-populist campaign.

January 24, 2012  |  

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

"More American families went on food-stamps during George W. Bush's term in office than under any other president in history – almost a half-million more than under Barack Obama. Facts don't matter much in a GOP primary contest, however; and Newt Gingrich catapulted himself to victory in South Carolina in large part by calling Obama “the foodstamp president” and then picking a fight about it with Fox News pundit Juan Williams during a January 16 debate.

Gingrich had set a brilliant trap for a Republican primary contest. Most people understood the foodstamp president line to be a classic example of the racist “dog-whistle” – the kind of rhetoric that has long been at the heart of the GOP's “Southern Strategy” -- and Newt was confident that he'd be called on it.

Williams obliged. “My e-mail account, my Twitter account, has been inundated with people of all races who are asking if your comments are not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities,” he said.

Gingrich's response was practiced, and perfectly tuned for the Republican base. “Well, first of all, Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. I know, among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable... and if that makes liberals unhappy...I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn, some day, to own the job.”

Newt earned a standing ovation from the audience, and immediately after the debate Team Gingrich turned the exchange into an online ad titled, “The Moment.” Five polls taken in South Carolina in the days leading up to the debate had Mitt Romney up by an average of 11 points. Six polls in the following three days found Gingrich up by an average of just under three points, and a week later – after another testy exchange with CNN's John King – Gingrich beat the former Massachusetts governor by 12 percentage points in the Palmetto State's primary.

Newt Gingrich is a deeply flawed candidate. But fresh off his South Carolina trouncing of Romney, who has long been anointed the GOP front-runner, the political establishment is beginning to wonder – with horror or enthusiasm, as the case may be – if the veteran pol actually has a shot at becoming the Republicans' standard-bearer in 2012.

He does, although Romney still has formidable advantages in fundraising and organization on the ground. If Gingrich does manage to pull off an unlikely victory in the nominating contest, it will be the result of running a picture-perfect, almost archetypical right-populist campaign that is perfectly suited to this moment, with the ascendancy of the hard-right Tea Party among Republican primary voters.

The right-populist storyline is simple, and compelling for many at a time when Americans have seen an unprecedented loss of economic security. According to the right-populist narrative, the working class – especially the white working class -- is caught in a vice between two pernicious forces: an elite festering with corruption at the top and a legion of undeserving freeloaders at the bottom.

Sandwiched between these two forces is the “real America,” as Sarah Palin put it during the last election cycle. Gingrich defines the “middle-class” broadly enough to include white-collar professionals and all but the most affluent “entrepreneurs.”

Whereas traditional populism pits working people against corrupt bankers and the titans of big business, Gingrich's brand of right-populism is directed at cultural elites – intellectuals, the media and “latté liberals.”
During his exchange with CNN's John King, Gingrich was again happy to have the media serve as his foil. “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country,” he said to King, who'd had the temerity to ask about Gingrich's past marital infidelities, before adding: “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.” Again, the crowd went wild.

Later, during his victory speech, Gingrich drove the point home: “The American people,” he said, “feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and become some other kind of system.” At the same time, Gingrich said that the “African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps."

It's an updated version of Ronald Reagan's mythical “welfare queens” – suggesting that those receiving nutritional assistance are “undeserving” blacks content to live off the public teat. Never mind the fact that almost 60 percent of food-stamp recipients are children and the elderly – people who can't be expected to “demand paychecks” – or that only 8 percent of beneficiaries receive welfare. Never mind that whites make up the largest share of food-stamp households. In the right-populist view, lazy people of color are living high
on the hog on an average benefit of $287 per month.

While he heaps scorn on those families that require some nutritional assistance during the worst economy America has seen for 70 years, warning that we are fast becoming an “entitlement society,” Newt's other big selling-point is his promise to bring Obama down to size in a series of unmoderated “Lincoln-Douglas-style” debates. It's a pitch that taps directly into the Right's sense of being talked down to by liberals – specifically, by a smartypants president with a degree from Harvard Law School. The GOP base wants nothing more than to see the elitist food-stamp president humbled intellectually – it lies at the heart of their bizarre obsession with the fact that he uses a teleprompter like every other pol -- and Gingrich is offering them an opportunity to do it vicariously through his bulldog campaign.

Conservatives have come to believe that their grievances are universally held by the American people. One of the most interesting tidbits from the South Carolina exit polls is that among those voters who said that the ability to defeat Obama in November was the most important characteristic in a candidate, Gingrich won by 14 points. That, despite the fact that Obama is leading Romney by less than two points in head-to-head polling but crushing Gingrich by 11 percentage points.

Ultimately, if Newt Gingrich does manage to claw his way to the nomination on the back of grievance politics, it could swing the election decisively to Obama. A poll released January 17 (PDF) found that Gingrich had a net positive favorability rating of 5 points among Republicans, but Americans as a whole view him unfavorably by a whopping 60-26 point margin."

Note: Great article btw -Rob

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

"There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody."

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

"The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this," Nosek said, referring to the new study. "It's not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists."

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority." Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as "I wouldn't mind working with people from other races." (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson's work can't speak to this "underground" racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

"This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice," said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A study of averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren't implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

"There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals," Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

"We can say definitively men are taller than women on average," he said. "But you can't say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There's plenty of overlap."

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice."

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]

Simple viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri's explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn't conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you'd have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren't possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like "every kid is a genius in his or her own way," might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

"My speculation is that it's not as simple as their model presents it," Nosek said. "I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where 'People I don't know are threats' and 'The world is a dangerous place'. ... Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful."

Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group's point of view. That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

"There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners," Hodson said. "Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups," rather than thoughts."

Note: This was a very interesting study. I believe it is accurate and correct on a number
of things. -Rob

An open letter to Libertarians, Republicans and Conservatives regarding the poor from a Liberal Christian

A response to a friend's message to me on facebook
who is a Libertarian. This message also apply's to
Republicans and Conservatives regarding why
the government should help people out and
not just individuals and religious institutions
such as Church's.

"In regards to your statements and my own
opinions on the matter regarding government:

1. Government in the U.S. was founded on religious freedom
but that does not mean we should abandon religious teachings
and morals.

First let's define government:

"government
 
Definition

A body of people that sets and administers public policy, and exercises executive, political, and sovereign power through customs, institutions, and laws within a state."

Source: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/government.html

So as you can see the government consists
of actual people and not mindless robots!

Most of the people in the U.S. Government
consider themselves Christian btw.

It is an extension of us in a way.

2. Often times I hear people saying or making
claims that taxing is a form of stealing esp.
when it is done to rich people. I fail to
see how this is considered stealing.

People pay taxes to the government on
their own accord and have free will to
choose not to pay taxes to them as well.

See here:

Taxing the Rich More Is Stealing?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110425185318AA5nMWI

3. Since this nation is mainly Christian we should
follow what Jesus taught us to do in regards to helping
people. While Churches and religious people do help
a lot of people out there are some restrictions that
apply even to organizations such as Catholic Charities
and the Salvation Army.

I have volunteered for these organizations as well as Church food pantry's and
here is what help poor people tend to get in my area which is near Chicago which is the Southwest Suburbs:

1. A few bags of food every 4 months enough
to do 2 people a week at the most. Some
people with big families tend to get a little
more. Most of the food is canned food
that is outdated although some fresh
food, meat and even $5 food gift
cards to grocery stores are sometimes
given out but not always.

Larger charities such as Catholic Charities
may help people out on a monthly basis
but only to residents that live in a certain
area and again only one or two bags of food
and a $5-$10 gift card.

A Church in my area has 2,000 members in it
The Lighthouse Church and only one member
out of all of them helps out with her family
anyone that needs help. The Pastor won't
even help out.

This places a need for then not just Church's and
individuals helping out. I've come across many
people who depend on link or snap cards aka
food stamps to feed their family's from the
public aid government office.

These people are hard workers who make
between $35,000-$25,000  year and work
full time and even though some of them have
family members that help them out is it not
enough for them to get by or live on.

I also know middle class people whom have
had to depend on the government for help
in regards to food and medical care.

Without county hospitals many people
who are uninsured would not have
the proper medication to live such as
insulin, blood pressure pills, heart meds,
pain medication, etc. or the proper
healthcare.

Taxes are to thank for this.

Simply put there are many individuals
who help people out but they can only
do so much as the need to help people
out is constant almost and never ending.

This is where the government comes in handy. 

They can do a more effective job then individuals can and religious institutions by enacting  programs to help people  out by educating them, giving jobs to those who are able to work, and providing housing, food, medical care and other programs to help people live and get by.

They can also put a large amount of money into these
programs as well to fund them and put less of a burden
on Church's and individuals except in regards to paying
higher taxes (hey if we can spend billions a month on
going to war and space programs like NASA we can
spend a little to help out our fellow man, right?)

In regards to forcing people I don't see how
anyone can be forced to do anything that
was mentioned in your quote and at
gunpoint? I don't see how anyone
is using guns to force anyone into
giving money.

Also see the facebook page The Christian Left their
info section. Thanks.

Whew! That was a long message.

Regards

Robert

p.s. See this link here:

Government exists to help the poor

"Government (at least in the United States) has a number of jobs

1. Defense of the country
2. Welfare programs and programs for those who cant afford health care
3. Enforcing minimum wage
4. Homeless shelters
5. School Systems
6. Other Public services
7. Carrying out justice.

So really when you do consider it, government (at least the US government) exists to help the poor, whether it be those who are poor in money, poor in education, poor in defense, poor in health, poor in justice."

Also on a side note Happy Halloween everybody!

23 Achievments Of The Democratic Party by Addictinginfo.org

Here is an excellent article from the great pro liberal and Democratic website 23 Achievments Of The Democratic Party by Robert Sobel from August 24, 2011 listing over two dozen achievments of the
Democratic party. Enjoy ;)

"After constant battling back and forth, conservatives and liberals will go to their graves defending their ideology. No matter what side of the aisle you stand on, you have probably had a debate about many issues. At democrats.org they sell a great t-shirt that I have worn myself many times. On the back is a list of 23 great programs brought to you by the Democratic Party. Not surprisingly, many of these programs are today being targeted by the Republican Party who remain as unconcerned as ever that the loss of such programs would lead the United States in a downward spiral…unless people really start standing up for what is right.Here is the list from the back of the shirt. Again, the list could go on forever but these are just a few of the great programs.

1. Women’s Suffrage Movement

2. Securities Exchange Act of 1934

3. Social Security Act

4. Unemployment Compensation

5. Rural Electrification Act

6. Federal Home Loan Program

7. 40 hour work week

8. Minimum Wage

9. Over Time

10. GI Bill

11. School Lunch

12. Marshal Plan

13. NATO

14. Peace Corps

15. First manned moon mission

16. Civil Rights Act

17. Medicare

18. Medicaid

19. Voting Rights Act

20. Head Start

21. Guaranteed Student Loan Program

22. Family & Medical Leave Act

23. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

Edited By: Sherri Yarbrough"

An excellent list.

9/11 Tribute (10 Year Anniversary)

Tribute for the 10th Anniversery of the 9/11 attacks "My Sacrifice"