@maxdancona,
maxdancona wrote:
Nice sermon LivingLava. I have read the Bible. The message is pretty clear. If you follow Jesus you will have the fruits of the Spirit. This is personal, the God of love working through you. All your bullshit about politics and countries and borders... Jesus didn't say a word about that.
I never attributed everything I say to Jesus. What I say about politics and countries and borders is from the perspective of someone who was once liberal, but has become disillusioned with the failure of liberty to make liberalism less problematic than it has become.
If true liberty prevailed among all humans (i.e. freedom coupled with voluntarily responsible choice), there should be no reason to maintain separate nations and borders, prohibit various drugs, abortions, rape, sexual harassment, etc. i.e. because people would simply police themselves with an awareness of negative effects that are caused on themselves and others when they abuse substances, sex, economic power, etc.
Jesus doesn't have to say that we should behave correctly, because that is implicit in everything else He taught and died for.
What His crucifixion does teach, however, is that sin will happen and it will be forgiven. Of course we are supposed to resist temptation, but the reality is that we fall to temptation all the time and, as a result, there's not going to be world without borders and police and criminal justice, etc. All those things fall short of what would exist in an ideal utopia, but because the world has sin, it's not utopia and we are stuck dealing with, coping with, and ATTEMPTING TO FORGIVE it.
Quote:Jesus told you to act with righteousness. He told you to welcome the stranger, to have compassion, to act with mercy and to forgive.
Right, and we don't always live up to these ideals because WE ARE SINNERS. What's more, we are sinners dealing with other sinners in a world where sometimes if you turn the other cheek, it gets punched. Now, to all the people who don't fall to temptation and fight back or seek to put a wall between themselves and their persecutors, congratulations; but to everyone else, they are forgiven in Christ for their sins. That's Christianity.
Quote:The rest is just excuses.
Sin.
Quote:Read Matthew 25..... Jesus is talking about how we personally should help people in need (people who are in need of clothing, food, shelter). He says "welcome the stranger". Jesus says "However you treat these people, that is how you are treating me".
Yes, well that is also true for the drug magnates who are sending humans as mules and decoys into 'the rich US,' to exploit people whose well-being they don't care about in the least because they are rich, spoiled sinners. They are trying to trick and lure Jesus into drug addiction to enslave Him for money, but that doesn't seem to bother you in the least.
Quote:I have not seen you, or MaxDog, or the loud Christians, express any compassion, love, care, forgiveness toward the people in need you call "illegal". All you offer is fear, hatred, and judgment.
You lie over and over about this because you project fear, hatred, and judgment onto it. The fact is that the more you liberate migration, the more you make migrants into targets for those nationalists/racists/classists who exploit migrants to their detriment in order to profit off people whom they don't care about because they are foreign to them.
I have said many times that I wish we could end nationalism/racism/classism so that people could migrate freely without being abused and exploited by others in their travels, but the reality is that those abusers aren't going to back off until they no longer have any hope of making money by exploiting migration.
At that point, people will have the liberty to migrate for their own benefit and without exploiting anyone else (or environmental sustainability) by doing so. That will indeed be a utopia, maybe life will be like that after the rapture and second-coming, idk.
