Alms to the Poor

I don't know why they call it "alms", but I think that all the major religions teach that we should give alms to the poor. There is a difference, however, between giving a voluntary charitable donation and having the government confiscate your money and redistributing it to anybody they see fit. I don't remember reading anything about that in the Bible. Jesus did say that it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar because that's whose face was on the coinage of the day. That is usually interpreted to mean that being a Christian does not get you out of paying your taxes. I don't think that it means Caesar can turn around and redistribute the money to others, but I suppose it doesn't mean that he can't either. Since no Caesar before Constantine was a Christian, it wouldn't have applied to them anyway.

I remember reading that the original Twelve Apostles held all their wealth in common, not that they had a lot of wealth, they were supposed to mostly live off the charity of others. I don't know how long that practice continued in the early churches. At some point it became customary for Christians to donate a tenth of their income to their church. I'm pretty sure that meant their local church because there was no Church with a capital "C" in those days. That came later when the Romans combined church and state. Even before that, the Romans had some kind of income redistribution, they called it "bread and circuses". In modern times, this became a term of derision that was used by my former Bircher associates to apply to all sorts of government programs.

I did indeed allege that the Democrats seem bent on reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator and maintaining them in poverty, but that hardly makes it my plan.

Old Dog, when you refer to the "Blogger page", do you mean the one that comes up when we log in, or do you mean the page we access by clicking on "View Blog"? That one has a mind of its own and frequently displays text differently than we write it. The default text color is gray, not black, and I believe that Uncle Ken has tried to change it without success. I hardly ever go there but, unfortunately, I think that's the one our visitors see.

Uncle Ken, your draft of 4/27/18 is listed right under your "Asshole" post of the same day. At least that's the way my browser shows it.