Showing posts with label Santa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Santa. Show all posts
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Williamson: The Government Isn’t Santa
There were three wise men, bearing gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Much has been written about the mystical connotations of those gifts, but it is rarely, if ever, asked: Where did they get them?
Presumably, Balthazar, Melchior, and Caspar were not engaged in gold mining, frankincense farming, or myrrh cultivation. They had other things to do, other stars to follow. For Christians, and for men of goodwill categorically, this is an important question: Feed my sheep, saith the Lord — okay: Feed ’em what? Some of the Apostles were said to have the gift of healing through the laying on of hands; those without such gifts still have an obligation to heal the sick (if the ACLU will allow it), which means building hospitals and clinics, equipping doctors and nurses, etc. With what?
If ye had but faith in the measure of a mustard seed . . . and if the mustard-seed approach does not work, and the mountains we command to be uprooted remain stubbornly in place, then we are back to the old-fashioned problems of human existence: scarcity and production. That is what is so maddening about Pope Francis’s recent apostolic exhortation — which is, as much as my fellow Catholics try to explain it away, a problematic document in many ways. The pope’s argument, fundamentally, is that we can have capitalism on the condition that we feed the poor. This is exactly backward: We can feed the poor if we have capitalism. To give away wealth presumes the existence of that wealth, whether it is an annual tithe or Jesus’ more radical stance of giving away all that one owns. Giving away all that you own does not do the poor an iota of good if you don’t have anything. You can’t spread the wealth without wealth.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
'It's A Great Opportunity For Me Personally, It's Great Opportunity For Our State' ASBURY PARK, N.J. (CBSNewYork) –...
-
And then some. Via: Weasel Zippers
-
Click here to view Video!! As the Obamacare website launch deadline approached, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebeli...
-
In his August 17 monologue , Rush Limbaugh discussed Trump's spot-on immigration plan extensively, a plan that incorporates all three...
-
Donald Trump is leading yet another poll for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, in what is expected to be one of the national surveys...
-
You think ? CNN’s Elise Labott noted yesterday that Bryan Pagliano’s decision to plead the Fifth rather than testify before Congress — a...