Whose responsibility is it to protect unhoused when it’s freezing outside? An Ohio pastor opened his church to the homeless and was charged by city.
Whose responsibility is it to protect unhoused when it’s freezing outside? An Ohio pastor opened his church to the homeless and was charged by city.
It is. It throws me a bit sometimes. So used to seeing religion being nothing more than a tool of the powerful against the weak aligned with the government against us. The government makes our life hell, the shamans teach us that it can’t be otherwise.
And then once in a rate while a religious leader puts themselves in harm’s way for someone else and I don’t know what to make of it. How can you spend 99,999 being awful and 1 day being good? Makes no sense.
Shaman is a good word there - like the ancient Incan and Mayan civilizations, that kept the power of the oligarchy in check by having a… second oligarchy, side-by-side with it. If the king ever didn’t like a priest they could kill them, while if a priest didn’t like the king they could demand a human sacrifice “at random” of their son/daughter - so checks & balances. It is one of those “neat tricks” that evolution uses, to keep the masses in check underneath the authority of a few. And quite frankly it even makes sense - why train every single peasant farmer how to use a sword & read & such, if you can have 1,000 peasants just doing their illiterate thing in the fields, for every one child that you put a TON of effort into being able to do so much more? (or I guess rather, do differently / higher - like learning sword fighting is an enormous investment of training & skill)
That said, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this preacher guy is probably a genuinely good dude? I mean like 24/7 or at least more than half the day, or at least more than 1/100,000 as you mentioned? Okay I still haven’t even read the article tbh, but religion has no monopoly at all on evil - like the Catholic church isn’t the only entity in the news lately for diddling children, Epstein and others do that just as often if not more so; though crucially, less hypocritically so.
I’m even going to say something a bit unpopular here: 100 years or so from now, there will be dumb atheists. Right now most atheists are “first-generation” in the sense that someone chooses their own views, even if their parents also held identical views. e.g. the vast majority of atheists today know what the word “agnosticism” means, and has made a decision which one they are. But eventually, it will become fashionable, and stupid people will not do the questioning part, and instead just go ahead and say it simply to fit in, b/c it’s what they’ve heard others do (that’s another fantastic “good trick” used extremely often by evolution - it takes a lot less effort to accomplish mimicry than to do the whole entire Real Deal, e.g. a butterfly’s wings that look like another set of eyes).
Anyway, whether the guy believes in God or not, it’s awesome that he helped out the homeless.:-) Even if other Christians might not have done the same - although popular stories lately aside, Jesus Himself was quite adamant that this kind of thing MUST be done, by anyone who would call themselves one of his followers. e.g. Matthew 25:34-40, tldr: “whatever you do to the least person, it’s like you did it directly to me”.
Because they’re not the same people. Pastors don’t buy themselves a mansion and also open up their home to people in need… You get one or the other. Some of them do it for the authority, but some just want to serve and keep a community healthy.
Look at this pope compared to the last one. The last one was basically a career priest. This one went around, physically, helping poor people.
The last one was pretty conservative and anti-gay, this one is just pro-human