When Leftists Abuse Notions of Jesus

A favorite rhetorical trick of the left is to say to accuse (the word for Satan in Hebrew) Christians of not following Jesus' teachings regarding some policy issue.  The latest concerns immigration and accepting Muslim refugees.  Here is my tl;dr response if you don't want to read further: Piss off.

Jesus and the New Testament has lots of stuff that the left doesn't accept; so until they do, I don't accept their interpretation of anything Jesus said. Here is a short list of examples.

Divorce (Matthew 19):

3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’[b]? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

The left accepts divorce as acceptable for many reasons, I don't.

Adultery (John 4): Jesus also is clearly condemning adultery in that passage, which the left always excuses.

Homosexual relations (Romans 1:18-27):

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Note that homosexual attraction per se is not condemned, but rather homosexual acts are equated with idolatry.  The greatest sin against God.

Open borders.  (Acts 17:25-27) which is explaining some of the meaning of the Tower of Babel:

26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.

and Deuteronomy 32:

7Remember the days of old;
consider the years of many generations;
ask your father, and he will show you,
your elders, and they will tell you.
8When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
9But the LORD’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.

If you are a Christian being chastised by some lunatic leftist, challenge them on THEIR belief in all the Bible says before you answer.  Don't grant them the moral premise of a response.

Influencing the Culture - Economics of Divorce

Fellow SLOB blogger, KTCat, rightfully points out the overwhelming number of correlations between cultural dysfunction and economic blight both in the U.S. and overseas.  He asks tough questions and gets on my case over drug legalization because I believe he sees it as another step backward in maintaining a culture that caused our country to become a great and wealthy country.  The culture is at least partially the product of the incentives that the populace operates under.  For example, we subsidize single parenthood through AFDC and low and behold we get more of it.  We should ask what incentives could be changed to start to change the culture.  I have also been surveying some blogs that focus on culture for some of the answers.  I offer some ideas for your consideration.

Divorce.  The U.S. Census Bureau reports that children of divorce are more likely to live in poverty.  What causes divorce?  I don't know all of the reasons, but we know that divorce was less likely in times past.  Maybe the question we should be asking is what prevents divorce.  It turns out that the extent to which courts enforce alimony and child support increases the probability that a woman will seek divorce.  H/T Dalrock.  Dalrock points out that the authors of the study think this is a good thing, because it allows mothers to have more leverage over fathers in marriage.  Why this is good is not explicitly stated.  Any discussion of reducing the rate of divorce has to start with reducing the incentives, including alimony which typically goes to the woman, because woman tend to marry up.

Single Parenthood.  The divorce rules will also provide an incentive for men to avoid marriage as well.  The greater the potential financial penalty in a potential divorce, the less willing will men be to enter into marriage.  Given the average woman's desire to have offspring and the uncertainties of birth control and the lack of opprobrium surrounding extramarital sex, there are powerful incentives for men to avoid marriage.  Changing the ground rules in family court might help change these incentives.  Perhaps the old rules requiring a cause of action for divorce would apply if one of the aggrieved parties desired alimony or child support.  Flimsy reasons for divorce provided by supposedly Christian mommy-bloggers might not look so attractive if no child support or alimony were forthcoming.

Penalizing Marriage. The ACA encourages divorce because of the way that subsidies are tied to the poverty level.

Any married couple that earns more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level—that is $62,040—for a family of two earns too much for subsidies under Obamacare. "If you're over 400 percent of poverty, you're never eligible for premium" support, explains Gary Claxton, director of the Health Care Marketplace Project at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
But if that same couple lived together unmarried, they could earn up to $45,960 each—$91,920 total—and still be eligible for subsidies through the exchanges in New York state, where insurance is comparatively expensive and the state exchange was set up in such a way as to not provide lower rates for younger people. 

The tax code overall is mixed regarding penalties and bonuses for getting married.  Continuing to ensure that there is no penalty for marriage is helpful.

These are a few ideas that come to mind.  I am not so naive as to believe that economic incentives by themselves will change the culture, and surely not in the short term.  But I notice that people respond to incentives in the long run.

What You Should Be Reading

• If you want Christian perspective on culture that is not polluted by the screed of feminism, then try KTCat, Dalrock and Sunshine Mary.
• Dean is back, noting the falling U.S. economic freedom index.
• In a small blow for economic freedom, federal judges overturned ridiculous FCC rules on net neurality.
• The City Journal because it has excellent in depth policy discussion that will get you thinking.
• Legal Insurrection documents the administration's march towards Hugo Chavez style thugocracy, with its proposed rules to quash conservative groups' tax exempt status, while leaving leftists' untouched.