Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- I would identify them as the gods of scarcity.
Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or your sex or your land. And then he says, "Don't be anxious, because everything you need will be given to you." But you must decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.
As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary, singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the Magnificat--the anthem of Luke's Gospel. She sang about neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah, who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of ancient Israel's greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus enacted his mother's song well. Everywhere he went he broke the vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed, transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus' example gives us the mandate to transform our public life.
Telling parables was one of Jesus' revolutionary activities, for parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures. But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive. These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought we would go.
The reason this narrative lasts is survivorship bias. Those who survive were provided for and did prosper at least to some extent. They are ‘gods chosen’.
The untold millions that starved to death or died of disease or oppression get no vote and propagate no religion, yet in a divine universe they were just as much chosen too, just for a different fate. And of course they’re mostly the poor and disadvantaged, while the wealthy by and large tend to do just fine. I think I’ll throw my lot in with the wealthy, thanks.
Was there a larger message in your comment than "poor people starve, so no thanks, I wanna be rich"? I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but if that was it, I think you missed, literally, the entire point of the comment you are responding to.
It isn't saying you need to be poor to be godly. It's saying pointing your wealth toward your wants before the needs of your neighbors is wrong. Taking care of your own needs before the needs of others is martyrdom, and I don't think anything said above was saying that was required, or even suggested.
One final thought:
>while the wealthy by and large tend to do just fine
Is debatable. In times of peace and prosperity, yes, they certainly do. In times of turmoil however, they are often the first to suffer, because they grow sure that money will carry the same weight in all social orders, which is not true. People, without fail, look around for the reason there isn't enough to go around, and the first thing they see is the castle in the hill.
>God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty
There's nothing anywhere in that quote or analysis that talks about giving to the poor or helping your neighbour. It says god will do that, not that we should do that.
In fact how are we supposed to help our neighbours and uplift them in times of need if we're poor and have no surplus? The bible tells us not to worry about that, god will provide.
I know that other parts of the bible tell us to give our wealth to the poor, but actually supporting the poor is not our problem. God will do it. Giving away our wealth isn't functional, it's not with the goal of solving poverty, it's with the goal of impoverishing ourselves so that we become virtuous because otherwise we will be punished.
> In times of turmoil however, they are often the first to suffer
In times of turmoil the rich buy first-class tickets out of there and head to one of their secondary mansions. Too late for a ticket? Bribes will still get the job done.
And anyway it's turmoil, so food-/shelter-/safety-insecure people always suffer earliest and most.
Societies made of selfish people die out, and before dying out they impoverish themselves, because human interaction is not zero-sum. Narratives promoting altruism last because people can observe the misery selfishness causes. Cooperation, not rationality, is the fundamental advantage the humans have over other animals.
Historically altruism was the most important form of cooperation, and trade was secondary. Now we have additional modes of cooperation like science, law, employment, and free software; and trade has also improved its powers dramatically.
But they cannot substitute for altruism in all situations.
You've probably met people who rendered their own lives miserable and poor through selfishness and distrust. More, probably, than who rendered their own lives miserable and poor through getting ripped off when being too trusting. In my own experience they are abundant.
My closest friend, (I set him up with his wife), lost his job in the financial crisis and then had his life ruined by a severe illness that’s still crippled him. He lost everything. My wife is a nurse, one of her friends at work lost her sister to cancer, her husband was killed in an accident and now she has terminal cancer. She has a young daughter.
How often on the news do we see third world countries devastated by natural disasters like tsunami, volcanoes, storms and floods. I remember the famines in Africa.
I particularly remember the aids epidemic and the way conservative Christian politicians in the US particularly said it was gods justice. Government spokesmen made jokes about it in news conferences. They thought it was funny.
I was otherwise a Thatcher/Reagan conservative, but I’m not forgetting that, ever. It’s what made me realise no political faction has a monopoly on the truth or morality.
I'm not sure if you think I'm saying that selfishness causes cancer or volcanoes? That's obviously nonsense. And all political factions are pretty selfish; that's what makes them factions. (Though some are so selfish they remain insignificant because they can't join coalitions and keep splintering after growing to some small maximum size.) So I don't think any of this is relevant to the question.
The question is whether, as the quote claims, the poor generally experience better life outcomes than the rich due to divine intervention. I would claim that the actual evidence is overwhelmingly that this is utter nonsense.
Furthermore the number of bible believers that actually impoverish themselves in order to avoid divine punishment is extremely tiny, so it seems to me that they don't believe this either.
Or that certain groups of people survive because the ideologies that they adopt help their group compete with people of other ideologies... and people with successful ideologies are able to convert others from less successful ones.
i'm sorry, the reason "altruism is better, actually" lasts is because all the altruists who could have told you about that are poor and dead, so be like them?
FWIW, I don't identify as Christian, but was raised as such by devout parents. The Bruggemann citation reminds me of a book "The Jesus I Never Knew" which, despite the cringe-inducing title, is worthwhile, as a non-religious look at the life of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. If Christianity had developed differently, in an alternate reality where its adherents modelled their behavior on that person's teachings, what a different world it'd be.
A blogger named Andrew Sullivan coined a term "Christianist" to avoid conflating followers of Jesus' teachings with the nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked the GOP. I hope the term catches on.
Bruggemann, Crossan, Stringfellow, and a few others trace a through-line of really very subversive dissent, back to the beginning, and make for really fascinating reading.
> the nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked the GOP
"hijacked" to me would imply that a significant majority of GOP members are not willing and enthusiastic participants in the political shifts that have taken place, which is clearly false.
Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- I would identify them as the gods of scarcity.
Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or your sex or your land. And then he says, "Don't be anxious, because everything you need will be given to you." But you must decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.
As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary, singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the Magnificat--the anthem of Luke's Gospel. She sang about neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah, who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of ancient Israel's greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus enacted his mother's song well. Everywhere he went he broke the vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed, transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus' example gives us the mandate to transform our public life.
Telling parables was one of Jesus' revolutionary activities, for parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures. But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive. These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought we would go.
Walter Bruggemann, 1999