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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Jesus telling you to love your neighbor and saying rich men won’t enter heaven isn’t at all similar to Marxism?

Not really no.

Marxism is all about class distinctions, is explicitly materialist, and rather famously "requires hate". Whereas a core tenet of Christianity is the rejection materialism and class distinctions.

If a citation is needed:

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

vs

First you must ask him to what class he belongs, what his social origin is, his education and profession. These are the questions that must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.

and saying rich men won’t enter heaven

I'm not that well read on the Bible but isn't the point of that verse to say that even the rich (seen as the most blessed) can't get into heaven without the grace of God? If the point is to say that material well-being wins you no points with God, placing so much weight on a materialist philosophy like Marxism seems to be making the same mistake in reverse.

Read Matthew 19:16 till the end of the chapter: Jesus sends some rich guy who wants to follow him away, and tells him to sell all his belongings and give it to the poor. Then he can follow him.

Material well-being doesn't only win you no points, it's an obstacle that needs to be discarded.

It was an obstacle for that rich man. It explicitly was not the same for at least one other rich man, in Luke 19:1-10.

Further, the entire idea that salvation comes down to some discrete act done or not done is antithetical to the entire message of the new testament. When Jesus talks about cutting off your hand or plucking out your eye if they cause you to sin, the point is that they don't cause you to sin. It's not your hand or eye, it's you. In the same way, it's not the money either. You can give every dime away and live the rest of your life penniless and still not find salvation.

It's about what you want. That's what Marxism gets wrong. It assumes that what people want is a product of a political system, rather than individual human will. Christianity does not assume that, and that is one of the many, many fundamental incompatibilities between the two.

By the standards of Jesus's audience, Marxism aims at making everyone rich men. Obscenely rich. It really didn't take much, by modern standards, to be "rich" in Jesus's day.

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