Per Hunter, it’s like Jesus said:
[T]he poor are poor because they lack virtue. If they were virtuous, after all, they would not be poor: QED.
[A]ny help to the poor will only coddle them. They should attend church, and feed their souls; if they are virtuous, God will feed them himself. Poor people get divorced, but rich people do not. Poor people are ignorant: if God truly loved them, he would pay for their education (because of course the rest of us should not.) Poor people are not hard workers, unlike the better off: any layabout can pick crops for ten hours a day. Poor people tend to be born out of wedlock, which makes them bastards, which makes them impure.
Above all, poor people are depraved, and should certainly not have their lives made more comfortable and sustainable at our expense. If they cannot feed themselves, they should die. If their children need medical care but the poor have not saved enough money for it, those children should die. If they cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, if they cannot stay in school instead of giving it up in order to earn enough money to eat, if they cannot go to Harvard like the rest of us and educate themselves, damn them, then they are not worth saving. We should tell them to work harder, we should tell them to go to church, and we should tell them to stop getting divorces: after that, our hands are tied.
Clearly, poverty is righteous punishment for immoral behavior, and it would be presumptuous of humans to interfere.
In seriousness, a lot of times, moral behavior is economically advantageous behavior. We should encourage people to be diligent and industrious. But, that’s not the whole story and that’s not the end of the story. Sometimes, people are in financial trouble for reasons that are not immoral. And, just because you can plausibly fix the blame on the person for their own condition, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are justified or even sensible in washing your hands of them.
This whole line of thinking by some Christians just pisses me off. Karma isn’t taught in the Bible. In fact, the very lack of karma in the bible is often quoted by non-Christians as a reason they can’t accept the religion. See Job.
As the article you linked to pointed out, Christ helped the poor, he didn’t preach to them about how they get themselves into that situation. The main subject he preached to people about in terms of their sins was being greedy & not giving enough to the poor.
Lastly, the whole “Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he will eat for his lifetime” is NOT in the Bible. That’s from Lau Tzu, founder of taoism. Sadly, I’ve heard many Christians quote that as if Christ had said it.
Libertarians just cut out all that religious claptrap against the poor and replace it with an open fervor for unadulterated greed and pseudo-intellectual callousness…
Those who espouse Social Darwinism are usually the first to denounce Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection in biology as atheistic claptrap designed to replace the eternal verities of the inerrant Holy Bible (KJV)
Wow, are you ever a “Nutcake”!
What a partisan joke.
When Hunter quotes French to support the position that conservatives believe that:”Above all, poor people are depraved, and should certainly not have their lives made more comfortable and sustainable at our expense,” he is ignoring all of the actual known facts in this area.
In reality, Hunter’s quote above has been shown to be absolutely false. If we take the reasonable assumption that Republicans are “conservatives” and Democrats are not, Republicans actually give 30% more to charity than Democrats do, despite the fact that Republicans make 6% less. Doesn’t sound like inhospitality to the poor to me.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/conservatives_more_liberal_giv.html
I also note that if we track President and Vice-Presidential nominations of the two political parties, Democrats have nominated a “non-charitable” person for a national position in 5 of the last 6 elections (assuming Biden is on the 2012 ticket). I am unaware of any allegations of the sort to a single Republican nomination in the period. Talk about leading by example….
Reminds me of Tipsy’s comment on another topic this week:
The religious roots of economic policy were a focus of the book that emerged from my sabbatical research (God and Country: America in Red and Blue. Couldn’t resist the shameless plug.) Not all conservative Christians believe this, but adherents of more Calvinist denominations certainly do.
As to the assertions that conservatives contribute more, that’s true–but the lion’s share of their philanthropy goes to churches and may or may not be used to ameliorate poverty.
Was that a shameless “capitalist” plug, Sheila? Whether or not, I’ve bought and read your book, and it’s a treasure. And our two comments together may make Doug have to announce some policy against such shameless hi-jacking of his site for uttlerly base purposes. (:
Doug: I might be daft this particular afternoon, but I have no idea what you are trying to state. (BTW, I do want to state that my refereence to “partisan joke” was stronger language than I meant to use).
Sheila: I’d be interested in reading your book. As a Catholic, my understanding is limited to my particular religion, and I can’t speak for the Protestant religions with any authority. Still, the Catholic churches have always seemed to have programs focused on helping the poor, yes?
Upon reading the post, I had something thoughtful to say, but that just vanished upon reading Wilson’s first post. I don’t wade in with bigots of any stripe, whose method of ‘thought’ is to paint whole groups with the broad brush.
“The poor” are simply folks with poor future time orientation. This manifests itself in a number of pathologies, not just poverty: getting involved in the criminal justice system, not getting an education, not getting married, having large numbers of children, having them out of wedlock, drug use… need I go on.
Oh, one other thing: NOT going to church. Church attendance required future time orientation, and there’s some new research out there showing that church attendance itself is correlated with income.
Which is too bad, because religion’s proscription of how to live your life (if followed!) would help with many of the pathologies that the poor exhibit.
While the welfare state has been successful in ameliorating the financial consequences of being poor (poor people don’t starve anymore, for example), it has been completely unsuccessful in addressing the other pathologies the poor suffer from, and in fact perhaps has made those worse.
So… should we be blaming the poor for their predicament? There is no question that very few people who do not exhibit the other pathologies are also poor. So what came first, the pathologies or the poverty? Is correlation causation?
These are hard questions, made harder by the fact that we live in a society that has only one Commandment (capital C): thou shalt not judge.
By the way, Doug, you should really be reading NRO in the original, not through Daily Kos.
You are just reinforcing my prejudice against you: steeped in the New York Times/ NPR conventional wisdom, not really understanding who conservatives really are.
Do you guys ever watch the shows about the Baptist families with the 25 or 50 kids? I don’t, but my wife was watching Dateline or something similar which had one of those families on.
I am not a big fan of Baptists (another of my prejudices), but you can’t help but notice that their goofy beliefs address a lot of the pathologies that the poor suffer from.
I mean, they wouldn’t even wear bathing suits when they went swimming (something that I’ve seen before myself, strange to see a girl swimming in a full length dress). They keep a tight lid on their teenagers, where “courting” is taken very seriously (and “dating”, or more likely “hanging out leading to messing around leading to…” is completely banned).
Does it work? It’s not something that I am interested in personally. But it seems like a recipe for curing what ails a significant portion of our society who are poor.
The other day I heard something on NPR (getting some of that “New York Times/NPR conventional wisdom that Buzzcut paints Doug’s upper body with) about the “Neuvo-poor”, meaning I think those in the middle class who have been adversely affected by the economy and therefore closer to the poverty line than in normal times, breaking the stereotypes about bringing on the condition themselves.
( I know I’ve likely misspelled “neuvo”, or whatever it is, but too lazy this afternoon to spell-check>)
Don, nouveau is French. Your spelling must be for all the Mexican illegal aliens who have fallen below the poverty line since the construction industry has collapsed.
Yes, yes, Buzzcut took French in high school. The irony.
Don, those middle class folks who are now poor, can they pass a drug test? Just asking. Any inappropriate tatoos? What degrees do they have? From what schools?
Things that are tolerated in boom times are… not tolerated… when times are tough.
Dear Buzzcut,
Just because someone is lacking a college degree, does not mean that he/she is uneducated. There are many in skilled trades who have completed extensive training and are licensed in their vocations but out of work due to the recession. And there are MANY college educated individuals who are also unable to find jobs right now. Your snobbery and elitism is very unattractive.
Jesus said the way to help the poor was to help the poor. Pretty simple; look it up. While not citing Jesus in his last sentence, I read Doug’s comments to say, “sometimes it is good to be kind to people in need.” Not that complicated.
Barry, no one is saying to not be kind to people in need. Jesus wasn’t saying that we should support welfare.
Dear Buzzcut:
1) Yes
2) No tattoos at all
3) BA, MA, MA, all from very respected institutions
I also speak French.
Please let me know when I should expect to hear back from any of the hundreds of positions, from grocery bagging on up, with a job offer.
Lemming, Send me your e-mail. Seriously. The oil company that rhymes with ET is hiring like crazy. I forward job openings to my friends all the time. We had three last week for trainers of various kinds.
Our biggest problem is finding people who can pass a drug test. Seriously.
In your case… you can’t be stupid with your major, and there is such a thing as too much education. What are the MAs in, and what schools are they from?