It Just Doesn't Make Good Sense

I honestly believe I learned more as a teacher than my students did from the experience, which is not an admittance of shame or remorse.  To the contrary I think it's as it should be.  Any teacher who doesn't learn more from the experience of teaching than the students do from being taught should find a new job.  Teachers start with a good student's knowledge of their subjects but before they can explain their subjects to their students they must come to an even deeper level of insight.  But that's just the beginning of why teachers learn more.  It's being in charge of people and observing human behavior patterns in a setting where the directions those patterns move directly effect the achievement of goals.

I started out teaching with my feet squarely planted in the behaviorist school of psychology.  I believed that all I needed to do was introduce the right set of rewards and punishments and I would inevitably end up with a well behaved group of students.

By my last teaching day I had been completely converted to what they call the humanist school of psychology.  Human beings, unlike rats and other animals the behaviorists experimented on, cherish their freedom to make decisions so much they are willing to forgo great rewards and actually endure punishment just so they can say to themselves, "I made my own choices and not the ones people pushed me towards".

Another thing I learned as a teacher is that people naturally pick at anomalies.  Big word, "anomaly", I know.  I use it because it's general and it's in the general sense that this is true.  Pass out a bunch of books where one is a little warn for ware and I guarantee you that book will be the most likely to see further abuse.  Slowly walk a thousand students with minimal supervision past two walls.  One wall with no flaws and the other with a tiny hole in its paint and once again I can practically guarantee you the hole in the paint will become a hole in the drywall if not worse, while the wall that started with no flaws will remain that way.  It is human nature to pick at anomalies.  Most of us, I hope, learn to restrain ourselves as we grow up but still far too many of us don't grow up fast enough to keep us from hurting people and things because of it.

This brings me to the subject of issuing marriage licenses to gay couples and what I believe is the key issue behind it.  Why do people wish to redefine a civil institution?  Does the history of marriage and its purpose in civil society lead us to this?  Is marriage no longer tied to natural procreation?  Has artificial means become so common that keeping the definition we've had since the beginning of recorded history no longer seem practical?  I strongly doubt it.  There is something else to it I suspect that has little if anything to do with the family unit and its role in civil society.

The primary argument as I see it for re-defining marriage is that society discriminates against gay people.  Now what does the tendency of human beings to pick at holes in walls have to do with this?  Everything.  Gay people have and still do suffer much in nations all around the world.  It doesn't matter how progressive the nation may be that they live in, they are discriminated against, attacked, beaten up, and sometimes even killed.  This treatment of gay people is reprehensible human behavior, human beings behaving at their basest levels.  People who haven't grown up enough to realize that picking at anomalies only makes things worse.

So does redefining marriage help with this problem?  If every book you pass out to students is badly worn, all of them come back much more badly worn.  If you slightly cut each students' shirt before walking them by the walls, there will be a bunch of completely torn up clothes as well as a hole in the drywall when you're done.  And if you redefine the fundamental civil institutions of marriage and family so as to include a social anomaly, you achieve nothing positive and potentially a great deal negative.  It's the wrong solution to a none the less very real problem.

The "I am Sparticus" approach to injustice can be very moving but only when all involved have volunteered.  And we really should make note of just how well that approach worked in that story.  You can't stop the meanest and lowest examples of human behavior by throwing yourself in its path.  And forcing others to join you there actually makes you almost as bad as the people you're trying to stop.

I personally am a person with many many social and other sorts of anomalies about me.  Thus there are a lot of reasons why a lot of people would want to pick on me, and they have, some times even violently.  Not because they have anything personal against me but because they're human beings who happen not to have matured enough to realize how stupid their reactions are.

So what do I do about it?  Well being a defiant sort I go out of my way at times to advertise some of my anomalies, like not liking sweets or warm climates (so what are you going to do about it?).  But knowing and appreciating human nature as I do, I keep most of them , the most likely to really stand out, between myself and those who may share or appreciate those things about me.  To use the hole in the wall analogy, I keep those things out of sight so as not to tempt the base human natures of others that may thoughtlessly do me harm.

I'm not saying I deny who and what I am.  Anyone who knows me can tell you I'm not normal and have little interest in being so.  Even many people who see me in public would tell you I'm not normal, from the car I drive, to the clothes I wear, I am very much me and not normal.

There is, as the great Greek story teller Homer kept trying to say, a balance that should be reached in most things.  In the case of how to protect ourselves from the natural human tendency to pick on anomalies, we should pick and choose with care what we expose and what we are discrete about.  Walk into your typical college fraternity for example and announce your commitment to not having sex before marriage and you will be attacked, possibly even beaten up and achieve nothing.  Now keep that same passion between yourself and those who you first befriend and you may just work miracles in helping other young men keep themselves out of trouble.

Likewise, as in the cause of celibacy, in the cause of gay rights, an aggressive stance, especially one that redefines an anciently sufficient and fundamental civil institution is a bad tact.  Instead of persuading people to perhaps grow up about the issue, this tact just encourages them to wallow in their own base tendency to pick on anomalies.  And even worse in this case where marriage is becoming less and less common, the next anomaly to be picked on may be marriage itself.

I know this issue seems very complicated to some and overly simple to others, so I'll sum my point up here as succinctly as I can.  Gay marriage doesn't solve the problem it's designed to solve.  In fact it makes it worse.

Checking Back In On The So Called Economic Recovery

I'm not an economist but I've been well educated in the subject.  I even taught an advanced course to high school students.  Ah but I do like to embellish.  Let's be strait with each other.  I'm not an economist but I'm going to offer my best advice on the subject anyway, which will be a lot better than whatever seems to be currently flying around in the White House.

We keep hearing talking heads tell us that either the economy is finally in recovery or that it has a few more rough spots to still get over.  Most of the experts we are told, and expected to blindly believe, are supposedly saying we are in recovery.  Their strongest argument being the recovery of stock values since the crash.

Now it is there that my education in the subject of economics jumps up and starts flashing an alarm at me.  Crashes happen because of an excess of a range of business ventures that are at best weak and at worst foolish.  In the case of our last crash the lion's share of those less than good ventures were primarily in the area of real-estate due to home loans being too easy to obtain and other consequences of attempted government tweaks.  Knowing this, I don't think the current levels of the stock market are a good indicator of a real recovery.

What made this last crash so bad is that the bad business ventures were the product of more than just bad business plans.  They were the product of bad government plans, plans that government on all levels across the United States eagerly participated in.  They were varied only by context but they all shared the same general theme.

"What's good for builders and real-estate values is good for communities in general."  Construction meant jobs and that along with higher real-estate values meant higher government revenues through income and property taxes.  Thus governments on all levels did whatever they could to encourage construction and growth.  Things like forcing insurance companies to charge less then they needed to in order to insure homes built in dangerous places like near beaches or on fragile cliff-sides.  They also took care to tailor taxes to help things along as well.  On the federal level we still have the home mortgage interest deduction and on state levels we have things like Florida legislators trying to weaken homestead exemptions designed to keep people on fixed incomes from being driven out of their homes by rising property taxes.  They want to weaken this protection because it's forcing new home buyers to pay higher property taxes in order to make up for the protected ones, and you guessed it, this makes it more difficult for folks to build new houses and sell them.

The worst government culprit in all of this has been the federal government with the unintended consequences of the Community Reinvestment Act that attempted to assist poor minorities in getting home loans.  This ultimately led to the Federally backed weak mortgages that were the primary weight pulling the world down in the last crash.

Even burdensome government spending owes a great deal to this bad government theme, for much of state and local spending around the country has been driven by the desire to improve real-estate values by improving local amenities like parks, public transportation, public theaters, and local access to colleges.  In deed it could be said that the song "This Land Is Your Land" should be the theme song of what's primarily wrong in the United States today.  Our government at all levels has come to care too much about our land values and not enough about our right to own it.

Now where does that bring me on the question of when it can be safely said we're in recovery?  Well, solid recoveries only happen when money and time start to get heavily invested in solid business ventures.  That means the weak ones whose excess accumulation caused the crash in the first place need to be out of the picture for the most part.  So where is the money in the stock market going?  Is it to solid business ventures like for example, stuff closely related to the oil fields of North America?  That's where a certified economic analyst would come in handy, but just looking at the values of shares in companies like Marathon and Exxon I'm not seeing a clear trend.  I can't say one way or the other there but on the question of whether the bad ventures are mostly out of the picture, that is so clear it doesn't even take my level of training to see it.  Real-estate and new construction are still a major part of the investment picture.  That means that of the newly moving funds, too much of it is chasing weak and possibly even foolish investments.

And governments especially don't seem to have learned their lessons.  They're continuing to try and boost real-estate values and encourage new construction.  Investors need to wise up for a few years and stay as far away from new home construction and real-estate flipping schemes as possible.  They also should develop a general aversion to any potential investment that depends on special favors from governments.  Do New York's tax free business zones come to anyone's mind?  It's not that governments aren't necessarily reliable, it's that whenever a government attempts to manage markets there will always be a piper to pay, and that the piper from the story ultimately ends up taking his payment in children is soberingly appropriate.

So when I stop hearing about "good signs" in real-estate and new home construction and I start hearing about money going to solid business ventures, then I will say we are finally on our way out of the great recession.  Until then, no.

What Messed Up Modern Reasoning

Have you ever wondered why so many of those people with the big academic degrees from the big elite Universities seem to be so out of touch with reality?  I know the first thing I thought of was they spend so much time with books and other intellectuals that they forget what the rest of the world is like, assuming they ever had a clue about it in the first place.  That was my first guess.  Then I went to college.

My guess, though conveniently offered to me by Hollywood, was largely off the mark.  The real reason was something I wouldn't completely discover until I had spent ten years of my own in academia and then a few more in the private sector.  And no, there was no great capitalist guru who took me under his wing to point it all out to me.  I'm not trying to pass off a sub-plot from Atlas Shrugged or an antidote from the writings of Napoleon Hill as part of my life.

I finally found the answer after long years of analyzing studies, papers, and books in various fields. Psychology, historiography, education, geology, and political science just to name a few.  Through my own analysis I gathered a lot of pieces, enough to support my skepticism of modern academia's over-all credibility.  Most striking in my experience was the dominance of Marx's dialectic amongst the world's historians, that in spite of Marx having been a minor scholar at best and his theories badly pocked with logic holes.

Then I found a book that has really seemed to put it all together for me.  Indeed, it has put together more than just what's wrong in modern academic circles, but what's wrong in much of the world's public rationale today.  I cannot recommend this book too much.

It's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker.  In it he discusses not just ten books but fifteen.  It's sub-title is And 5 Others That Didn't Help.  A key base assumption of his book is that ideas matter and make a difference, some bad and some good.  He strongly recommends reading each of the books he discusses for yourself so you can fully appreciate what's wrong with them.  I strongly recommend at least reading his book.  All of the others you may not have time for.

As much as I love writing critiques, I wont critique it for you.  Instead I must insist on asking you to read it for yourself.

But I wont just leave you with that recommendation.  I will actually give you my personal summary of what's wrong with much of modern academia.  Note that reading Wiker's book will give you a much more complete picture, and many of his conclusions are not summed up here.

In as few words as possible and at the risk of over-simplifying, here it goes.  They want power over others and they measure the amount of power they have over others by how much they see the world change to match their own views about how things should be.  Thus they are more motivated by their agendas of "progress" than they are by the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge, or of being accountable to sound logic and reason.

Another way to put it is they have a lust for power.  The way many of them would put it is they want progress.  So beware what others call progress.

Celebrating The Birth Of The Homeless?

And here's another quote used by the acolytes of "social justice".

“Christmas is built upon a beautiful and international paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”

-G.K. Chetsterson

I have great respect for G. K. Chetsterson and find much I can agree with in another statement of his in particular.

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

The fact that he made this statement about British politics around the turn of the 20th century only shows how very little we have moved from the same general nonsense today.

I wont attempt to argue with the late Chetsterson here.  I want to make that clear before some student of his life and writings chooses to come after me and tell me I don't know near as much about him as they do,

Instead I want to address the intuitive implications of his quote on Christmas.  What I do actually know about Chetsterson is enough to be fairly sure that the intuitive conclusions are the wrong ones to draw, not what Chetsterson meant at all, but unfortunately what many of the acolytes of social justice will think it means.

Jesus Christ was not born homeless.  If being born somewhere other than in your parent's house means you were born homeless then anyone born in a hospital was born homeless.  

He was born in humble circumstances and it is there that we see "a beautiful and international paradox".  The king of the universe and then some was born like someone in lowly circumstances.  He doesn't care about the kind of power and social status that most of us do.  Just as much as this may be seem as a "shout out" to the poor it can with equal validity of thought be seen as a  sort of spitting on our human understanding of power and status.

But for the acolytes of social justice it is another opportunity to feed the flames of class warfare.  Almost assuredly not what Chetsterson was getting at.  Though if it was, I draw the same conclusion with still equal strength.

In order for "social justice" to be anything other than a set of nonsense syllables that happen to make out two recognizable words, groups of people, classes of people must be the focus of Christ's ministry through us.  We must persue political power to achieve this brand of justice since whole classes of people cannot be directed without it.  This therefore means we end up pursuing the very thing the implications of His birth reject, the kind of power and social status most humans cared about before His first coming.

Contrary to many popular teachings, Jesus was never a poor man.  His earthly parents were middle class and even during the travels of His ministry He had enough resources that a treasury was maintained to manage them and the garment He wore was so fine that the soldiers cast lots for it instead of just tearing it up and dividing its materials evenly, as was the more common practice of the time.

The point of this fact is not that Jesus was middle class or rich, but rather and with far more powerful implications, He transcended our fallen class system.  He was one of us but not a part of our pursuit of power and wealth.  He benefited from our resources and our economics but He had no use and still has no use for our politics.

Christianity has influenced many great social transformations without ever laying hold of political power.  And in those cases where Christians have attempted to grow "the kingdom" through political power it has failed.

Social justice is a false concept that encourages us, to quote Chetsterson, "to go on making mistakes".  And these mistakes are costly.  Only heaven can give us a full account of just how costly.

I can now only hope that my conservative Christian friends will bring themselves to see just where and why social justice has gone wrong so we don't just end up opposing social justice in the name of some current status quo that social justice helped create and thus, "prevent the mistakes from being corrected".

Our Daily Bread And Our Neighbor's Daily Bread

Art Simon is the author of Bread for the World and co-author of Grace at the Table: Ending Hunger in God’s World.  He's also a retired Lutheran minister and considered a voice for the cause of "social justice".

In researching this series about the Christian message being thrown off course by what I consider to be the false concept of "social justice" I have found a large trend.  It seems that this false concept has come to be identified so heavily with real parts of the Christian mission that it's hard to tell them apart.  Case in point this quote from Art Simon.

“If praying for daily bread means to pray for enough, then surely the implication is that when we have more than enough we will share the ‘more’ so that others may also have enough. Such sharing is an indication that our hope in Christ is deep and true.”  ~ Art Simon

If this is social justice than what Christian can argue against it?  But that's just the thing.  This isn't social justice.  This is powerful loving third person individualism.  At least until that last sentence anyway.

Up to that last sentence it is the greatest commandment, loving your neighbor as you love yourself.  You have more than you need and you see your neighbor doesn't so you see yourself in your neighbor's position and act accordingly.

Perhaps one could say that last sentence is the earlier part of the greatest commandment, that we are to love God with all of our being, but I think it is more like what it says in much of John's Epistle or what Jesus says in his parable about fruits, that our faith will be evident in our actions.

Once again this is not "social justice", so why I am addressing it here?  Because it is listed as a "faith and justice" quote by the Ignatian Solidarity Network.

Here allow me to quote their own description of themselves.

"The Ignatian Solidarity Network (ISN) is a national social justice network inspired by the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. ISN was founded in 2004 and is a lay-led 501(c)3 organization working in partnership with Jesuit universities, high schools, and parishes, along with many other Catholic institutions and social justice partners."

They clearly believe this quote from Art Simon is about "faith and justice".  And the use of the word "justice" in Christian circles has unfortunately become a short-hand for "social justice".  Considering this organization's own self description I have little doubt that is how they're using it when they say this list is about "faith and justice".

Okay so people do good things in the name of "social justice".  One may ask what I think the big deal is.  Jesus did say "he that is for us cannot be against us" right?  Well yes He did, but it was about a supposed non-believer doing good things in Jesus's name, not believers doing good things in something else's name.

Social justice is about groups of people, the rich, the poor, the groups with advantages and the groups with disadvantages.  Everything about it is about groups and group action and the problem with group action is that individuals in the groups involved are either drug along or run over.

What would happen if you could drag someone against their will to the gates of Heaven?  Would they enter?  Would they be willing to?  Would they be allowed to?  It's like pulling someone out of line to buy a movie ticket and attempting to bring them into the theater with you without them having a ticket.  They wont be allowed in and you'll be the reason why.  Is that what we as Christians should want?  Should we use group actions to pull people to places they're not individually ready to go?

And that's just the "drug along" side of the problem.  What about the "run over" side.  Those people who by no fault of their own are in a group deemed as having committed some injustice upon another group.  They were born into it and no reasonable opportunity for choice was involved.  They are innocent.  Social justice would demand that everyone in the "bad" group be held back, taxed extra, or in some way diminished or punished so the "victim" group can get "justice".

What does this have to do with, "when we have more than enough we will share the ‘more’ so that others may also have enough"?  Nothing, that's what.  But that's the big problem here.  Too many Christians call helping those less fortunate than us "justice" or even worse, "social justice".

It would be like inventing a false god that turns groups of people against each other and giving her credit for every act of kindness and mercy, and then trying to justify the idolatry by saying she's a Christian.

As Jesus said, "by their fruits you will know them", and what fruits has this false god produced?  Do the poor love the rich more and resent them less?  Are more and more African-Americans coming to forgive their former oppressors?  Are the political activities of the champions of "social justice" empowering politicians who respect God?

Injustice seems to follow in the wake of this thing called "social justice".  People are forced to surrender both property and well earned opportunity.  Some even suffer imposed poverty and in extreme cases death because it is claimed to be justice that some be forced to give up what is there's to others who have less.

This is not true justice and it certainly isn't Christian.

Now what Art Simon's words say, they are powerful loving third person individualism.  In other words they are part of the greatest commandment.  That's not "social justice".  If the Ignatian Solidarity Network understood this they would remove Simon's words from their page of "faith and justice" quotes.

The tough part of my position is telling so many of my fellow brothers and sister's in Christ how far they have allowed their minds to wander from the course.  How do you tell someone who has founded an entire ministry on a false concept like social justice that that is precisely what they've done?

As Jesus once told his disciples, much prayer is needed.

Love And Self Interest

Pedro Arrupe was an amazingly dedicated and compassionate representative of Jesus Christ in the world.  As a Jesuit in Japan before, during, and after World War II, he offered help and comfort to believers and unbelievers alike.  He was imprisoned at the start of the war but his behavior was so admirable that the Japanese released him after only six months (perhaps there's a miracle to be found in that somewhere).  

He was within the blast radius of  the atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima and he and his fellow Jesuits converted their novitiate into a makeshift hospital.  There they treated many of the survivors through great agony and grief.

I will not question his commitment to Christ, but as with Pope Francis last week I have an example of the false concept that is "social justice" clouding his perception and potentially distorting the message he presented.

Here is the quote from Pedro Arrupe I have chosen to address in my series about how "social justice" can separate us from our mission.

”To be just, is not enough to refrain from injustice. One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self interest as the driving force of society.” – Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

I cannot disagree with the idea that we must "refuse to play" the game of injustice.  Cooperating with a system that mistreats individuals in any way that enables the system to continue doing so is wrong.

Arrupe encountered many dictatorships in Latin America that intentionally persecuted some of the people in their nations without just cause.  He also encountered wealthy classes that as matter of policy prevented upward economic mobility.

He saw how his own Church seemed to encourage the imposition of a permanent underclass.  The abuse of such scriptures out of context such as "blessed are the poor" and "it will be as difficult for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" come to mind.  

Rich and poor alike are thus encouraged to believe that to lift anyone out of poverty is to make them less blessed.  And as for the rich, they have a curse they must endure by being rich as they are, and if they should do anything that may make a poor person no longer poor, then they have only made things worse for themselves.  Their only penance for their wealthy condition is to give generously to the Church which then in turn mainly only comforts the poor rather than doing anything that may improve their economics.

One example of the problem can be seen in Mexico today.  Decades after Arrupe's death things are little if any better.  The North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to improve economic opportunity in Mexico, a democratic nation, but the oppressive attitudes of rich and poor alike have worked to prevent the social change the also late Jack Kemp envisioned when he championed NAFTA.  The poor remain poor and any thought of allowing them an opportunity to become middle class seems to be seen as anathema, by both the rich and the poor.  So Mexico's social problems as regards economic mobility remain intact thanks to an over-use and misuse of "blessed are the poor".  It's a perverse irony.

In light of this it's easy to see why Arrupe might have become involved in liberation theology, but there's a problem with liberation theology and its doctrine of "social justice".  It's right there in the quote.  I'll emphasize the part for you.

”To be just, is not enough to refrain from injustice. One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self interest as the driving force of society.”

Like a good bridge player with the ace, king, queen in trump, I'll start with the high card, "the driving force of society".  What is the driving force of society?  When Jesus walked the Earth did He address any "driving force of society?"  He no doubt saw Himself as a driving force, but of what, society?  Like so many of these "social justice" distortions it all falls apart when considered in the light of the greatest commandment  where it says "love your neighbor as yourself".  Especially in the larger context of the part of loving God with all of our being, our individual beings.

He didn't come to save The United States of America or the United Mexican States or any other political entity or society.  He came to save individuals.  He commanded us to spread the message to all nations, but by that he didn't mean the Roman Empire, he meant the people of Rome, the people of Italy, the people of Greece, etc.  I know for some this may seem like a fine distinction but it isn't.  

Who wants to be loved as a tiny subset of a larger set defined by politics?  Who wants to hear someone say, "I love you because you're a citizen of the United States"?  That wouldn't be very personal, would it?  We want to be loved by people who actually know us as individuals, know our faults, and still love us.

The biggest problem with what Arrupe said in this quote is that we as Christians take our "eyes off the prize" when we start to see our ministry in terms of being a driving force for society, rather than a transforming influence on individuals.  We're simply not here for society beyond the most temporal requirements to participate in it.  We should be a source of conscience and guidance to society but not a driving force of it.  The individuals we encounter, no matter what arbitrary set they are grouped into, they are our calling.

To reinforce my point I will quote a very renowned non-Christian.


“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.” –  Mahatma Gandhi

The distorted ministry of "social justice" makes too much of money and too little of power, when power is the true root temptation.  When Timothy 6:10 says, "the love of money is the root of all evil" it spoke in a historical context where what we call money today didn't exist.  Money in Timothy's time was a store of value that a very few had and it could not be devalued.  To possess it was to possess power in whatever form it could buy for you.  It was power in its purest form.  Today's money is common and little more than a means of exchange, and is devalued almost every single day.  This devaluing is done along with many other things in part to prevent it from becoming power.  A paraphrase of Timothy 6:10 replacing "money" with "power" could very arguably be a translation much closer to the author's intent.

But even if we stick to the literal here, logic still directs us inevitably to the love of power being at least part of the problem.  Why would someone love money, if not to use it to obtain things including favors over others.  Why would they love money and not in turn love what it gets them?  Perhaps the reason it doesn't literally say "the love of power" is because money is potential power and not just actualized power.  So thus the love of potential power and not just power achieved is the root of all evil.

And that lands squarely on one of the major pitfalls of "social justice".  It leads to a pursuit of power over individuals instead of actually reaching individuals as individuals.  This pursuit of power not only tempts us away from the message but directly into the evils of political oppression.  We need to make sure in our hearts that "the power of love overrules the love of power".  To do that we need to abandon the false doctrine called "social justice".

And now I'll end on the part that says, "substituting love for self-interest".  If what Jesus said about loving others as ourselves is true then we shouldn't separate love and self-interest in any way that would make substitution of one for the other possible.  It is only out of an understanding of how we love ourselves that we even know what love for others looks like.

Perhaps he meant to sub out self-interest as in being self-sacrificing, which is noble if done for the right reasons (love would be a right reason, but lack of self-worth would be a wrong one).  If so, then I offer up no argument, but if by that he meant to attack the philosophical underpinnings of pro-free-market policies, then of course I must object.  But I suspect he didn't entirely mean either, or at least many of those fond of this quote don't interpret it so.  I suspect many of them actually believe Jesus Christ died on the cross so that we would work to bridge the economic gap between the "the rich" and "the poor" and do so through the pursuit of political power.

In other words, thanks to this monstrosity called "social justice" many Christians believe they can justify entertaining the love of power and allow the power of love to become an after-thought.  And an after-thought is something love must become within "social justice" because you cannot love others as yourself and treat them as subsets of politically defined groups.

I'd say it seems like I'm beating a dead horse, but unfortunately this evil pony isn't dead yet (There's an ancient Greek pun in there somewhere).

Justice, Fairness, And Respect For Every Human Being

For the next few weeks I'm going to look at examples of "social justice" in what is called the "faith community" with the intent to demonstrate how, while well intended those who preach social justice are being mislead, and thus ultimately distracted from what should be our true calling as Christians.

Week One:  We start with a big one, a quote from Pope Francis.

“A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table, but above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness, and respect for every human being.” – Pope Francis

I truly love the part about "respect for every human being".  He'll get no argument from me to suggest that isn't extremely important and clearly part of our calling as Christians.

But taking his statement in its entirety I see what should be an obvious problem except that this false concept called "social justice" is clouding so many minds and dare I say hearts.

His first six words pretty much strike right to my point.  "A way has to be found."  For the Pope to say about the world's sufferings, "a way has to be found", is like a doctor in the midst of a medical emergency saying, "if only someone here had some medical knowledge."  I'm pretty sure Pope Francis knows quite well that a way has been found and that way is Jesus Christ.  I'm also as confident as I can be in a fellow human being that he intends to reach as many people as possible with that message that Jesus Christ is the way.

To be fair to Pope Francis I will grant him that Christ works through people and we as Christians are not called to just be fans in the stands of God's mercy.  We are called to be the instruments of His mercy in this fallen world.

But here is where "social justice" separates us from Christ.  Christ uses us, His followers and by the fact the church universal is a set defined as all of His followers, He uses the church.  But no government is the church, no geographical community is the church, no group other than the church is the church.  The church is a set that intersects with but never encompasses any other group except for those specifically defined as such like congregations and Bible-study groups.  One can no more expect governments and communities to do something because it is what a good Christian would do than one can expect a car to be a train.  And to demand it through a political process is to make a joke of our calling.

Now to get down to some of the details in this quote.

"... to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table"

There are places in the world where the rich and powerful own everything and consciously work to keep the poor destitute.  This is clearly wrong.  Forbidding or working against economic mobility is something no Christian should participate in.  And in a secular context I believe Christians should favor governmental reforms that allow for greater mobility.  But such reforms should not be made at the expense of, as Pope Francis said, "respect for every human being."  Forced redistribution isn't Christian.  It is just one step away from unjust execution.  It demeans the individual to treat private property as something under the control of some larger community.  Voluntarily giving of one's surplus to assist those in need and potentially better their lives is Christian, but governmental policies of wealth redistribution are anti-Christian.

"...above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness, and respect for every human being.”

As long as that word justice is not perverted to apply to groups instead of individuals I can say amen to this much.  Unfortunately "social justice" does just that.  Once we start to seek justice for groups not defined by having a common individual victimizer but instead another group we make victims of members of the other group who did nothing wrong in this case.

This false concept called "social justice" should rub all Christians the wrong way since it perverts and distorts so much.  Most distastefully it distorts our relationship with Jesus Christ.  I pray more of us will come to this realization.