21 May 2016. The Faith of a Secularist… More “Christian” Than That of the Loud Religionists… Fancy That

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I care if a politician espouses the social vision and compassion that the Church enjoins on all of us. In this present election, only one of the three major candidates fits that description. Yes… Bernie Sanders… interestingly, the most “Christian” candidate is a secularist Jew. Note well that loud religionists such as “Evangelicals” and “Pro-Lifers” oppose him. That speaks volumes of them and of Mr Sanders. I’d say that the loud religionists are the sort that Our Lord Christ had in mind when He spoke of those who shouted, “Lord, Lord!” but were not of His flock, after all.

God WILL judge… vote accordingly… vote for Bernie, the only “Christian” candidate!

BMD

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21 May 2016. “Conservatism” Isn’t Only Wrong… It’s ANTICHRISTIAN (As In “The Mark of the Beast”)

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I saw this comment on FB:

Yes… “How WE care for others”… not, “How our government care for others”. We can have great social programs as a nation, but still be a nation of jerks.

My response was:

You can’t wriggle out of it that way… the Church has always blessed State social action… beginning in the Roman Empire and continuing to the present. His Holiness calls the Free Market a fraud. I agree with Patriarch Kirill… do you (the above comment puts that in doubt)?

I also saw this on FB:

It’s interesting… the people who loudly caterwaul for “Christian Values” also favour policies that hurt the poor, sick, elderly, and orphaned. Such people aren’t Christians… they’re demonic impostors.

“Conservative” fanatics are trying to take over the Church. I believe that they’ll fail in the long haul, but in the near term, they’re going to cause a great deal of trouble. They’re not overly numerous, but they’re well organised and vocal… indeed, they make up most of the voices heard on the internet, even though they’re a minority amongst diaspora Orthodox. Interestingly enough, even though they claim to be “anti-communist”, they’re Marxist to the bone… that is, they believe in historical inevitability, the supremacy of economics over everything, and the concept of a “vanguard class”. They’re not Conservative in the least.

REAL Conservatives were men like Bismarck and Diefenbaker… men who placed generous social programmes in place for all the people. Indeed, Bismarck was a leader in single-payer healthcare, unemployment insurance, and old age pensions… as he saw them as the surest bulwark AGAINST socialism! Tsar Aleksandr III Aleksandrovich gave his approval to the sending of “Zemsky Doctors” out to the countryside at government expense to provide healthcare for the people (as one contemporary Russian doctor put it, “The Zemsky Doctors did it all!”… their legacy lives on). American “conservatives” such as Rod Dreher and Rush Limbaugh are nothing but slobbering apologists for wealth, not conservative at all (any group that idolises Edmund Burke isn’t conservative in the least).

Have a care… there be dangers on the road ahead. Take my hand, it’s going to be darker before the dawn arrives…

BMD

Pope Francisco Rips “Bloodsucking” Bosses and Prosperity Theology

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On Thursday, 19 May, Pope Francisco blasted employers who don’t provide health care as bloodsucking leeches, and he took aim at the popular “theology of prosperity” in a pointed sermon on the dangers of wealth. Referring to businesses that hire employees on part-time contracts so they don’t have to provide health and pension benefits, the pontiff said at morning Mass in the chapel of the Vatican guesthouse where he lives:

This is akin to sucking the blood from their workers’ veins, leaving them to eat air. Those who do that are true leeches; they live by spilling the blood of the people who they make slaves of labour.

Cutting staff during the summer months to avoid providing benefits is a phenomenon in Italy, but the pope said this type of mistreatment and enslavement of workers is happening all over the world:

We thought that slaves don’t exist anymore… they exist. True, people don’t go and get them from Africa to sell them in America anymore, no. However, they exist in our cities. There are traffickers, those who use people through work without justice.

From trafficking sex workers to failing to grant vacation to employees, Francisco criticised those who seek profit at any price:

(They’re) living on the blood of the people. This is a mortal sin. This is a mortal sin. This demands a great deal of penance, a great deal of restitution, to convert oneself from this sin.

Francis also focused attention on the “prosperity theology”, which, as the pope explained, says, “God shows that you’re good by giving you great wealth”. The so-called prosperity gospel is popular in the USA, where its preachers are often on cable television, and it’s a common phenomenon in Latin America, where the Argentine pope is from, and in Africa and Asia. Francisco said in his homily on Thursday:

The problem is that you can’t serve both God and riches because the love of money becomes a chain that makes it impossible to follow Jesus.

Francis took his cue from one of the day’s readings for Mass, a fiery passage from the Epistle General of St James about the punishments the rich will suffer for having exploited the poor. The pontiff summarised the broad meaning of homily with a simple image:

A glass of water in the name of Christ is more important than all the riches accumulated through exploiting people.

The Argentine pope’s comments continue a theme of his papacy, during which he has tried to create a “poor church” that rejects the idolatry of money. Francisco isn’t only critical of the global financial system; he’s also critical of the greed and the power-hunger of Catholic leaders themselves.

19 May 2016

RNS Religious News Service

http://religionnews.com/2016/05/19/pope-francis-rips-bloodsucking-bosses-and-prosperity-theology/

Editor:

I should note that His Holiness mostly agrees with the Pope of Rome on social issues. That is, all the loudmouthed rightwing caterwauling by the konvertsy isn’t only ignorant, it’s Antichristian and Anti-Churchly (I’m thinking about the Russian concept of protivotserkovnost and of theomachy). In short, instead of glorifying Our Lord Christ, they pervert His teachings into an unseemly Black Mass honouring the Evil One. One either internalises “lived Orthodoxy” or one has nothing at all, no matter how often one attends services. I think that Our Lord Christ called such “whited sepulchres”. We should attend to the social teaching of the Church, or we have no faith at all, we’re not real believers. That sounds harsh, but it’s true…

BMD

14 August 2015. Bernie on Wealth Inequality

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