Resurrection Day 2012: 'Jesus Was a Commie'?

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Resurrection Day 2012: 'Jesus Was a Commie'?
From The Federalist Patriot
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Resurrection Day 2012: 'Jesus Was a Commie'?
By Mark Alexander · Thursday, April 5, 2012
Confusing Individual Responsibility With Statist Tyranny

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." --Benjamin Franklin, "Management of the Poor" (1766)

In this Holy Week of Easter, one of the socialist communiqués destined for my "Know Thy Enemy" email folder was a promotion for a new "award-winning" film, "Jesus was a Commie." The film was described as "an avant-garde conversation about critical social issues," and it supports the errant pop-thesis that Jesus advocated socialism.

As absurd as that title is, liberal atheists and too many well-meaning but chronically nescient Christians regularly assert that the communist doctrines of Karl Marx equate with the teachings of Jesus Christ -- that the central message of Christianity supports socialism.

Most notable among this week's Easter crop of socialist propagators was Barack Hussein Obama, who was out stumping for income redistribution by invoking a Biblical reference from Genesis 4, "I am my brother's keeper," to promote "redistributive justice" for socialist welfare programs to benefit "the least of these" (Matthew 25). At the same time, Obama condemned free enterprise as "you're-on-your-own economics."

Obama elaborated that "spreading the wealth around," socialism, "coincides with Jesus' teaching that 'for unto whom much is given, much shall be required'" (Luke 12:48). Apparently in Obama's deluded interpretation of the Gospel, "Jesus was a Commie."

This fallacious equation of socialism and the Gospel of Jesus was also promoted by the father of American socialism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who declared, "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle." Of course both the Roosevelt and Obama references are paraphrases of the gospel according to Karl Marx, whose manifesto maxim was, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

In reality, there is no basis for this equation, as there is no instance when Jesus ever suggested, even in the broadest interpretation of the Gospel, that taking care of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the weak, the widowed, the sick, the downtrodden, was the role of the state. There is no instance where any of the apostles or any of the prophets suggests that the state is a suitable surrogate for our individual responsibility to care for each other.

In fact, when the Biblical nation Israel desired a king (government) in the place of God, as outlined in I Samuel 8, our Creator warned that the price of choosing government over God would be death.

Moreover, Jesus always preached individual responsibility for our brothers and sisters, not collective statist mandates, and He made clear that the most impoverished among us are not the materially poor, but the poor in Spirit.

Obama preaches that the so-called socialist government gospel1 is "a reminder not only of what binds us together as a nation but also what binds us together as children of God." In reality, socialism is fatally flawed2, and socialist advocates3 have succeeded only in binding generations of Americans to dependency upon the state4.

Indeed, the failure of socialist doctrine was evident long before the word "socialism" became part of the common lexicon, as Benjamin Franklin noted in "Management of the Poor" written in 1766. Unfortunately, that lesson is lost on the Left today, as they endeavor to undermine the authority of our Constitution by replacing Rule of Law5 with rule of men6 and enact economic policies that are anathema to Liberty and appeal to the worst instincts of human nature.

Ironically, I would note in this Holy Week, which begins with the unjust crucifixion of Jesus by Pontius Pilate's government, in the 20th century, socialist governments crucified tens of millions of innocent men, women and children, both through murderous purges and deadly failures of centralized agricultural and economic planning.

Obama has devoted his entire political career to the resurrection of those same socialist doctrines. He now wants another presidential term to fully implement them in order to achieve his objective of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America," and if collective ignorance prevails, he may get it.

I think it's fair to conclude that Jesus was not a socialist or a capitalist, and for those predisposed to equate the central message of Christianity with Obama's Marxist doctrine, here are a few additional Gospel revelations to ponder.

Jesus emphasized the primacy of the individual as having unique value, each an irreplaceable soul, and each a unique personality bearing an individual imprinted fragment of the image of the eternal, infinite God. He preached that the individual is vastly more than a communal unit or a fractional piece of a socialist aggregate.