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Replying to post 13 by Danmark]
As you say, one of our greatest challenges is to help the truly needy without increasing their dependency, and without giving an incentive to avoid work. I agree. So, then, why do you fault the church? Is it because they are giving too
much to the poor directly? They are throwing too much money at people? According to the ECCU study you presented, the church allocates about 3% to "local and national benevolence". I suppose, in a perfect world, the church would be able to put all it's money towards
root-level solutions to poverty, by serving to teach foundational values (Luke 6:46) , build community infrastructure (Acts 4:32), and encourage its members to love their neighbor (Matt. 22:36-40) and, above all, to love God, since all else hangs on that. But I do think that, practically speaking, the church must take care of the practical needs of people with at least a small portion of its resources, because if you are stuck in poverty, you're not thinking about root causes. The church, however, has a primary responsibility to strike at the core of the problem, not at the surface. The surface-level issues are delegated to non-profits that can specialize therein. For instance, the Salvation Army, a Christian organization, has a great many practical strategies of addressing poverty, and I think it is better suited to implement them than a regular church. Each part has its own role. The Church proper, where the preaching occurs, should keep to its God-given task.
If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?
1 Corinthians 12
If you don't believe that the major work of the church (yes, even paying the pastors) does in fact serve the poor, I would very much like you to go through with this idea you have of starting a church. I hope this thread isn't just a mockery of the existing system - I hope you're serious. It's not enough to criticize somebody else's problem-solving strategy... you have to first show that you have a better solution.
Since your title says "Marx brother", I'm sure you're well aware of the attempts of the Russian atheist intellectuals to solve the problem of poverty in the last half of the 1800's and early 1900's. I don't think their strategy worked very well - and the worldview is to blame. As Nikolai Berdiaev put it,
The falsely directed love of man, it turned out, destroyed love of God, because love for the truth, like love for beauty or for any absolute value, is an expression of love for the Deity. This was a false love because it was not based on true respect for men as equals and kinsmen by their One Father. On the one hand, it was compassion and pity for the man of "the people", and on the other it turned into worship of man, and worship of the people. Genuine love for people is not love against truth and against God, but in truth and in God; it is not pity, which denies a person dignity, but recognition of God's own image in every human being.... But this attitude toward the peasantry and proletariat implied a lack of respect for the absolute significance of man, for this absolute significance is based on the divine and not on the human, on truth and not on interest.
-Berdiaev.
Philosophical Verity and Intelligentsia Truth. from
Vekhi. 1909. Translation originally serialized in
Canadian Slavic Studies (1968-1971).
I hope your version of atheist church doesn't look like theirs.
