Religious Leaders Failing The Poor By Adhering To Discredited Dogma…

As a prac­tic­ing Christian, I have always believed that the words of the Bible, parts of which have been assigned direct­ly to the supreme God, becomes man­i­fest in front of our eyes because of human doings, rather than any­thing mag­i­cal or mys­ti­cal.
Having giv­en this sub­ject much thought, and hav­ing observed the rapid cul­tur­al meta­mor­pho­sis from a sit­u­a­tion in which truth is at the very least an estab­lished base­line, to the pro­lif­er­a­tion and accep­tance of lies, I am moved to put my thoughts into words.

2 Thessalonians 2:1 – 3 New King James Version (NKJV)
Now, brethren, con­cern­ing the com­ing of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gath­er­ing togeth­er to Him, we ask you, ² not to be soon shak­en in mind or trou­bled, either by spir­it or by word or by let­ter, as if from us, as though the day of ^[a]Christ had come. ³ Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of ^[b]sin is revealed, the son of perdi­tion.

I nev­er sub­scribed to the the­o­ry that any sin­gle indi­vid­ual rep­re­sent­ed the fright­en­ing sys­tem of gov­ern­ment the Bible pre­dicts, (the sys­tem of the antichrist), will pre­cede the sec­ond com­ing of our Lord and Savior Yeshua the Christ. However, hav­ing read and assim­i­lat­ed the word of God as best I could, and hav­ing stud­ied keen­ly his­tor­i­cal and cur­rent events, I long con­clud­ed that the fright­en­ing sys­tem to come has lit­tle to do with any sin­gle indi­vid­ual.
So no,.…… I do not believe that Donald Trump is the Antichrist as white Christians believed President Barack Obama to be. Nevertheless, I believe that as a species we have woven our­selves so tight­ly into a cocoon of ungod­li­ness, that we would not know how to dis­en­tan­gle, even if we want­ed to. As a con­se­quence, the ful­fill­ment of the scrip­tures is guar­an­teed because of our own actions.

While Barack Obama was com­pet­ing for the pres­i­den­cy of the United States he under­went all kinds of attacks, many of which were not only unwar­rant­ed, but down­right racist, dirty, and stu­pid­ly con­spir­a­to­r­i­al.
He was accused of being a Muslim, as if being a Muslim was a con­sti­tu­tion­al block against attain­ing the US pres­i­den­cy.
It is not!
He was accused of being a Manchurian can­di­date, and after he won he was accused of being a Manchurian pres­i­dent intent on destroy­ing the Republic.
 A manchuri­an can­di­date is a per­son, espe­cial­ly a politi­cian, being used as a pup­pet by an ene­my pow­er. The term is com­mon­ly used to indi­cate dis­loy­al­ty or cor­rup­tion, whether inten­tion­al or unintentional.

Most of those scur­rilous the­o­ries came from FOX mis­in­for­ma­tion, and the bevy of right-wing nut jobs on talk radio which blared out rabid hatred dai­ly.
Those the­o­ries even­tu­al­ly got picked up by white Evangelical Christians and inevitably bled into the main­stream con­ver­sa­tion and became pseu­do-facts, alter­na­tive facts. The real­i­ty is that those alter­na­tive facts infil­trate the brain of peo­ple, not just those char­ac­ter­ized as the [deplorables], but by peo­ple who have advanced degrees, includ­ing black peo­ple with PhDs who ought to know bet­ter, have bought into the lies, and the deceit which has tak­en over the nation­al consciousness.

I was absolute­ly shocked that a Ph.D., who is also a black man, and a Pastor, told me that he would rather have Donald Trump remain in the pres­i­den­cy than vote for Pete Buttegeig because he is a homo­sex­u­al.
He won’t vote for Joe Biden because he is bor­ing, and he will not vote for either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren because they are Socialists/​Communists.
He based every state­ment he made on his Christian faith, not on his intel­lec­tu­al capabilities.

My Ph.D. lament­ed that his tax­es are being used to take care of peo­ple who ought to be work­ing. [Did I tell you that he is also a Pastor]?
I stood there in utter shock as he berat­ed the Democrats, point­ing to New York City’s Mayor Bill De Blasio who he argues wants to give away every­thing to peo­ple for free, peo­ple he believes ought to be work­ing.
Dumfounded, I stood there, mouth agape at what I was hear­ing, I was almost at a loss for words, some­thing that does­n’t hap­pen often.
I harkened back to Yeshua’s teach­ings, take care of the poor, take care of the orphan and the wid­owed, vis­it the incarcerated.

As small busi­ness and prop­er­ty own­ers, my wife and I pay what we believe are over and above what we should be pay­ing in tax­es.
Am I some­times mad that we get noth­ing back for all that is tak­en from us?
You bet!
But the way funds in the fed­er­al bud­get are allo­cat­ed should leave no one with the wrong idea about wel­fare.
Corporate wel­fare is the prob­lem, not the crumbs which are tossed to the poor­est Americans.
The thing that puz­zles me most is the way the poor­est peo­ple have been conned into mil­i­tat­ing for the inter­est of the rich over their own interests.

Exasperated I pulled up this page, turned my com­put­er screen around and showed him this pie-chart.
His first reac­tion was that it was exag­ger­at­ed, I asked him for proof, he gave up and went onto some­thing else.
I want­ed to be fair so I found PolitiFact’s piechart. Politifact is well respect­ed as a non-par­ti­san arbiter of polit­i­cal claims. 

Politifact argues its chart is more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the true fed­er­al spend­ing allo­ca­tions.
[“To get num­bers that approx­i­mate this, the pie chart(chart num­ber one), cher­ry-picks just dis­cre­tionary spend­ing. But that means the pie chart rep­re­sents only about one-third of fed­er­al spend­ing. Once you include the 60 per­cent of the bud­get that is manda­to­ry spend­ing, the mil­i­tary share plunges from 57 per­cent to 16 per­cent, and the cat­e­gories that include Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid col­lec­tive­ly account for a major­i­ty of fed­er­al spend­ing. Spending on food and agri­cul­ture is still small, but it does quadru­ple from 1 per­cent to 4 per­cent.]

That is PolitiFact’s assess­ment, I dis­agree, because Social Security is mon­ey paid to the gov­ern­ment by work­ing Americans, that mon­ey should be locked away to do what social secu­ri­ty was intend­ed to do and ought not to have been part of the nation­al bud­get year to year.
The fact that social secu­ri­ty com­mit­ments have to be hon­ored from the fed­er­al bud­get is exact­ly because those funds have been raid­ed to finance ille­gal wars over­seas.
So tech­ni­cal­ly, a more accu­rate pic­ture would be to add social secu­ri­ty’s 25.3% to the mil­i­tary’s 16.2% for a grand total of 41.5%. So we are back clos­er to the first pie chart’s num­ber of 57%. 

To be fair, I want­ed you, our read­ers, to have access to both charts so that you may make an informed deci­sion.
Given a sce­nario in which the actu­al truth is that fed­er­al spend­ing actu­al­ly lands some­where in the mid­dle of the two depic­tions, or worse, even falls where [Politifact] places the num­bers, how can we jus­ti­fy spend­ing that share of the pie on weapons of mass destruc­tion, instead of on poor Americans?
If we (a) set aside Donald Trump’s moun­tain of neg­a­tives which ought to have dis­qual­i­fied him from the pres­i­den­cy, (at least accord­ing to nor­mal eth­i­cal stan­dards), and (b) are able to set aside the idea that any­one call­ing them­selves Christians, (much less Africa-American and Christian) would accept Donald Trump, we are still left with the dis­pro­por­tion­ate allo­ca­tion of fed­er­al dol­lars to contemplate. 

How do we, who call our­selves Christians rec­on­cile that amount of resources going toward cor­po­rate inter­est, yet we com­plain about the mea­ger crumbs going toward help­ing the most vul­ner­a­ble?
Are we so social­ized into apa­thy and dis­dain toward the poor that we would rather con­tin­ue the trick­le-down the­o­ry which says if we give more to the rich some will fall from their tables so that the poor can eat the crumbs?
It seems that my Ph.D. friend and the Evangelical move­ment has done just that.

During his pres­i­den­cy, Barack Obama asked the peo­ple earn­ing half a mil­lion dol­lars or more annu­al­ly to pay a lit­tle more in tax­es.
Polls at the time showed that the major­i­ty of peo­ple in that income brack­et were quite fine with pay­ing a lit­tle more in tax­es so that oth­er social oblig­a­tions could be addressed.
Ironically, it was the poor­est peo­ple in the Southern and Midwestern States who came out with tiki-torch­es and pitch­forks, they called Obama all kinds of deroga­to­ry names, social­ist, com­mu­nist, and those were the good names.
The medi­an income in those states was about $35.000, yet they were out fight­ing the fight of mil­lion­aires and billionaires.

In a September 2019 arti­cle for [The Atlantic], Columnist Derek Thompson wrote, ” By the ear­ly 2000s, the share of Americans who said they didn’t asso­ciate with any estab­lished reli­gion (also known as “nones”) had dou­bled. By the 2010s, this grab bag of athe­ists, agnos­tics, and spir­i­tu­al dab­blers had tripled in size.
The stark real­i­ty is that few­er and few­er young peo­ple are sub­scrib­ing to their par­en­t’s reli­gious prac­tices.
Is this part of the falling away from the faith? I do not pre­tend to have those answers.
Daniel 12:4 (KJV) But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowl­edge shall be increased.
The pro­lif­er­a­tion of knowl­edge has nev­er been greater at any time in record­ed his­to­ry. The Internet and social media allow for the mass dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion across con­ti­nents in nano-sec­onds.
While this is hap­pen­ing, Pastors and Parishioners alike, are mak­ing a mock­ery of the word of God, the young peo­ple are watch­ing and many are say­ing “we want none of it”.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
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