Jesus Appalled By Americans?
POSTED BY: Mavourneen
UPDATED: Monday, April 9, 2007 23:32
VIEWED: 11915
PAGE 8 of 15
Fog has made every surface gleam with damp. A tuneless whistle and hard footsteps echo in the dark. The place is empty. Deserted ...
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I make a distinction between charity and compassion. More later.
The footsteps pause briefly, then fade away in the distance. The street is quiet once again.
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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Fog has made every surface gleam with damp. A tuneless whistle and hard footsteps echo in the dark. The place is empty. Deserted ...
N
Fog has made every surface gleam with damp. A tuneless whistle and hard footsteps echo in the dark. The place is empty. Deserted ...
E
Fog has made every surface gleam with damp. A tuneless whistle and hard footsteps echo in the dark. The place is empty. Deserted ...
S
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
Aw crap.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
I make a distinction between charity and compassion. More later.
I always considered real charity to be a function of compassion. Government relief, social programs, etc. while possibly containing an element of compassion, are more politically driven.
Looks like we're having fun with semantics again. Darn. How about charity for compassionate aid and "Charity" for government aid?
Speaking of driven, I'm out the door and on the road. later.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Not trying to play with semantics, just trying to get across a concept. "Charity"- like "tolerance" - has negative connotations. It is a word of separation and superiority, most recently derived from benevolence for the poor. Charity is what Gates or Soros or Buffett or the Waltons do after they rob everyone first. Compassion most recently derives from to suffer together, to see oneself in the other. It is a natural outflowing of sympathy i.e. community of feeling. Which reminds me of a story:
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Three women come across a river full of drowning babies floating rapidly downstream. One immediately jumps in the river, and grabs babies as fast as possible, tossing them on the riverbank and calling out for help. The second hesitates, then turns away.
"Where are you going?" screams the first.
"I'm going for help!" answers the second.
The woman in the river turns to the third, who starts to run away as fast as possible.
"WAIT! HELP! Where are YOU going??!?!"
"I'm going to find the sonofabitch who's throwing them IN the river!"
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Pity would be no more if we did not make men poor.
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Fog has made every surface gleam with damp. A tuneless whistle and hard footsteps echo in the dark. The place is empty. Deserted ...
(W) You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
The smell of damp grass rises from the field and a train's call rises and falls away in the distance. Footsteps approach the mailbox and
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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The smell of damp grass rises from the field and a train's call rises and falls away in the distance. Footsteps approach the mailbox and
Uh oh. Is it dark? Is that a grue? And how come my bag is empty right after that shifty guy came through the field? (I guess now I've completely outed myself as a nerdling 
)
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This isn't directly related to what you're talking about, SignyM, but I wanted to add a piece on charitable giving. I do believe that tithing is considered giving to charity. It's tax deductable (or at least it was years ago when I was tithing). I personally don't consider donating a portion of your income to your church to be the same as donating money to the American Red Cross. So, at least from my perspective, stats on charitable giving are artificially inflated by tithing. How widespread is tithing? Who knows. At my church it was suggested that we do everything in our power to tithe the biblically recommended ten percent (and there were arguments back and forth on whether that was calculated pre or post tax - with God and the angels on the side of pre-tax, naturally 
). This money was used to pay the pastor, keep the church running, etc. (* edited to remove the part about property taxes since I'm not sure if churches are required to pay taxes)
Anecdotally, when I was a pre-teen we would sneak out of Sabbath School and explore the church. There was a room underneath the steeple where boxes and boxes of old financial records were kept. We usually used it as an access to the roof (you could remove a vent cover to get outside) but sometimes when it was raining we would go through the contents of the boxes. The short summary is there was a lot of money coming in through tithes, much more than from offerings.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Not trying to play with semantics, just trying to get across a concept. "Charity"- like "tolerance" - has negative connotations. It is a word of separation and superiority, most recently derived from benevolence for the poor. Charity is what Gates or Soros or Buffett or the Waltons do after they rob everyone first. Compassion most recently derives from to suffer together, to see oneself in the other. It is a natural outflowing of sympathy i.e. community of feeling.
OK. I was brought up to consider charity the action of expressing compassion by aiding someone in trouble - recognizing that we're all in the same boat, more or less.
So for purposes of this discussion, charity is something other than compassionate giving, eh?
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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IMHO "charity" smacks of Victorian almshouses.
But let's get past wordsmithing. Let me tell another story:
The Christmas Bonus
Up in the northern wilds, a prospector and his faithful dog found themselves pinned down by a major blizzard without any supplies. The prospector knew it would let up in a week, but that wouldn't be soon enough because they would starve to death by then. Several days passed while he and his faithful dog huddled by a small fire in the forest. Each day as he got hungrier and hungrier, the prospector eyed his dog a little longer. And finally, late on Christmas eve, he couldn't stand it any longer; he jumped the dog and quick as flash cut off its tail. After roasting and eating the tail, and feeling some guilt and pity for his whimpering companion who stood shivering just outside of the firelight, he looked at the bones in his hand and held them out.
"Here dog" he called softly.
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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When we see historical pictures of the wealthy and powerful handing out a few coins- like Louis XVI Displays Charity in 1788 (LeFevre)-it's easier to recognize the irony of the situation: the King, whose palaces and expenses helped to ruin the country, "sharing" a few meager coins with a rare few lucky ones. It's harder to recognize the same irony in modern circumstances. oops- later
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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