No one is suggesting that Christians need to be reduced to poverty in order to be good obedient servants of Christ?
Are you blind?
Drew wrote:
"I just think that what this actually means include
giving up all luxuries.
Are you prepared to argue that converting our "non-bare essential" possessions into $$$ for the milllions who are "the least of these" is not what it means to care for the needs of our "brothers and sisters"?"
bibleberean answers.
So it is true that the suggestion that Christians need to be reduced to a state of poverty in order to be "good Christians".
All luxuries includes everything above what it takes to live....
Drew wrote:
Actually, I think one can make a case for "bare-essentials" living without even appealing to the Bible. Consider the following:
1. If they have the means to do so, all human beings have a moral obligation to provide the very basics of life to those whose plight is not of their own making (i.e. those people who have not "created their own problems" through, say, a chronic unwillingness to work). Basics of life = food, clean water, shelter, security, basic health (maybe other stuff?)
2. There are, in point of fact, many people on this planet who are in need of the basics of life and are not responsible for their situation (tens or hundreds of millions, I would guess)
3. The "means to do so" from item 1 needs to be more clearly specified. I would assert that anything that is a "luxury" counts as an asset that could be turned into the "basics of life". A luxury item would be anything that is not itself either a "basic of life" or any thing that arguably could be used to generate "wealth" (even intellectual capital) specifically for the purpose of being used to provide the "basics of life". So spending $100,000 to get a university degree that enables you to contribute to the development of new medical / agricultural technologies is not a luxury item. However, a DVD player, a sports car, a vacation in France, a $300,000 house, a country home, a diamond ring, etc. would be luxury items.
4. One need not give to the point of being in need oneself, or one need not give once everyone on the Earth has the basics of life. In other words, it OK to be Donald Trump if no one is starving.
5. It is almost certain that the magnitude of need for basics of life (say expressed in dollars) exceeds the total dollar value of all the luxuries held by all people in the world.
6. Conclusion: We are all obligated to give up all our luxuries.
bb comments:
I don't know what thread some people are reading but I would say they either can't read or have their heads stuck in the sand or somewhere...
If that isn't telling Christians that they need to redistribute all their wealth beyond the basics of life then I don't know what is... :o
Soma Sight writes answering Quath:
Quote:
How about another type of comparison? Say you buy a DVD player. However, if instead of doing that, you sent the money to Africa to be used on immunizations. You may save 1 to a few hundred lives.
Is your DVD player worth more than the lives of others?
Quath
That is the way to look at it.
A true Christian rejects materialism for the greater good of helping suffering souls as the Master Jesus did in His earthly stay.
BB comments again. I won't say someone is dishonest to say that I made a false statement. I will say that they must need a good eye exam so they won't miss the obvious.
:
From the opening thread...
Drew wrote:
"Now people will try to dance around this by saying we only need to give up our TV / car / vacations if they have a kind of unhealthy hold on us. Or that we are only asked to give 10 %. I think, to be brutally honest with ourselves, this is a little "trick" to rationalize holding on to our stuff-we simply convince ourselves that it does not have a hold on us, so its OK.
But we know that there are those who need the basics of life (if not here, then in countries ravished by poverty),
we know that children are dying of cancers that might otherwise be saved if we all truned our plasma TVs and trips to DisneyWorld into research dollars. In other words, I think we cannot argue that there is no real need.
So are we Christians not engaged in "group hypocricy" by effectively affirming the acceptability of holding on to anything more than the bare essentials of life? Are we playing games with ourselves? I want to be clear, I direct this question to myself as much as to others."
BB concludes:
I have had enough...
I am not even going to quote the socialist garbage the blind man wrote...
