Early christians shared the wealth evenly among themselves and lived in communes. But in our capitlistic America we would be calling this communism.
"communalism" might be a little closer, eh? (& "communism" (& especially "Communism") is tinged with karl marx's mid-19th century rantings, & the 20th century's variations on the theme, & doings in russia, china, cuba, & elsewhere...) (historical note - some few of the various communities in north america (1600s - 1800s) tried "the common" method... it seldom lasted for long...)
A teacher at school once explained me the difference: communists says 'all that's yours is mine'; christians say 'all that's mine is yours'.
and there's the basic fact that you can't force someone to do something they don't wanna do. is it christian if they have no choice? is it really charity if you're forcing your brother to ante up the same thing? no one stops anyone from throwing their money at whatever cause they see fit, the christian community just doesn't force everyone into doing something they don't want to do.
Well, let's hope they don't. There are subtle ways of force that can also be called guilt and manipulation. I would agree though that the "True Believers" would not be among that crowd.
yeah, well, it's a battle. i try not to get angry at the well-intentioned, though i truly believe the over-zealous do way more harm than good. i just don't think religion and government should mix AT ALL, except in the voter, which is unavoidable. there should be NO sunday laws, which colorado has on liqour, which is silly, and still annoys me. laws that force behavior in the name of religion should not be allowed, nor should laws prohibit the expression of faith, except as how it protects the body of the non-believer.
though i will add that if you feel guilty or manipulated, you need to get over it. just ignore it. you're a big girl.
I know that some of Marx's early writtings were on the communist priciples present in the primative church. I read an interesting take in "The Theory and Practice of Communism" by RN Carew Hunt. He says that Western Civilization suffered from a glaring paradox (or Dialectic, in Hegelian/Marxist terms), which gave rise to Marxism, in that Christian countries professed a faith that made all "men" equal, but professed a system that set owner over slave, landlord over peasants, etc. Did you know that Medieval Christendom was also quasi-communist? People who sold for profit were considered outlaws, lending money on interest was illegal between Christians (which gave rise to money lending as a Jewish profession), and so on.
It appears I gave the wrong impression. I was agreeing with your comment that you "can't force someone to do something they don't wanna do. is it christian if they have no choice? is it really charity if you're forcing your brother to ante up the same thing?" I was just taking that thought a step further.
Yes, that is my favorite book of all time! The whole book is me in a nutshell. It revealed things to me about myself that neither psycologist, nor psycedelics, were able to tell.
No, not completely, I never finished it, don't know why because I liked it. I promiss to read it soon, okay?
damn it! no i'll have to hold you to it. lol. For some reason, I did the same thing: bought the book, read 50 pages or so, love it but put it down, and didn't pick it up again for about a year. Like I said, it was much better than I expected. Some hail it as Hesse's masterpiece. I don't really think it was the best book I ever read, but it does the best job of showing ego and id, the relation with shadow self, etc. It is definately a hippy book! If you have Christian beliefs and/or tendencies, all the better.
