Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
I suppose that because there wasn’t organized healthcare in Christ or the Founders time that doesn’t matter.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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So if government mandated universal healthcare had existed in Christ's time, that might have made it a bit harder for him to convince people to believe his divinity. Of course, he still would have had the proprietary rights of bringing the dead back to life. And his other miraculous healings of the blind and the sick and the demon infested psychologically disturbed would have been more appealing than whatever backward medical treatments were available back then--especially so since his and his disciple's service was free. Except that there was an implicit expectation that the healings would convince the ill and impoverished (as well and especially those healthy others who witnessed or heard about the miracles) to follow him and believe in the coming kingdom of God. That is, they would pay for their cures by surrendering their souls to Christ, to God. If they didn't, there might well not be another cure the next time around--not an explicit threat, but a rational, even religious, conclusion.
It was that payment by soul that was ultimately the true concern of Christ. He did not have a mission to provide some universal health care, nor even campaign for the government to provide it. Rather his goal was the singular salvation of souls. He didn't intend to physically cure every ill and dying person, nor even a minor fraction of them. Even if he would have, they would just get sick again, and he would then be burdened with the never ending task of providing universal health care.
The poor in health and the poor in spirit were the most vulnerable and the most likely to want what Christ offered. And therefor the most likely to provide occasions for miraculous cures for some of the more "privileged" to witness and be motivated thereby to eschew their wealth and privilege and follow the Christian way.
But the price for entering the kingdom of God was always the individual soul, not the lip service of organized bureaucracies and governments.
If anything, that organized capture of and lip service to Christianity (even though it has made possible the expansion of the religion) has diluted the true faith. And in our semi-miraculous technologically advanced time, that dilution has exposed much of the organized, bureaucratic "Christianity" to be a soulless fraud. This current Pope is the ultimate sellout of the Christian faith to the earthly powers and their centralized bureaucratic machinations intended to make us all little useful cogs in support of those self-indulgent but ultimately meaningless coteries of ruling elites.
With your "more Christian than Jimmy Carter or I" you've implied that you're a Christian. If so, are you a true believer or a soulless lip servant who can from time to time invoke the name of Jesus or refer to "Christian values" when it somehow supports some pet agenda?