Charlie Rangel: We all know Jesus said you're going to Hell if you don't support big gov't

Let’s call him the Left’s Pat Robertson, though the comparison might not be entirely fair to Robertson because he’s probably paid more of his taxes than Rangel. If a Republican uttered anything near this level of nasty, particularly with a religious bent, it’d be news for days, becoming part of the national narrative on heartless, religious rubes of the Right. But Bible thumping’s a-okay, as long as you’re using the Good Book to thump conservatives.

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And, thus Rep. Charlie Rangel’s assessment that roughly half the country is headed for a smitin’ for its embrace of barbarically low spending levels of the sort we had in 2008 or so, is just good, intellectual argument at the “Place for Politics.”

I had no idea the Scriptures were so specific about Social Security, but hey, if Rangel says he knows the Bible, he knows the Bible. He said he knew the tax code, and…well, nevermind.

This is one of my pet peeves. Society and government are not the same thing. Government is not the only way to help those less fortunate than oneself. Did Jesus ask us to help the least among us or did he ask us to empower our lawmakers to forcibly take our money as a symbol of our compassion, so that it can be spent with dubious results for those it’s meant to serve and little accountability for those allegedly serving them? Call me crazy but when I try to fulfill my obligation to God and my fellow man, I like to do it voluntarily and with some notion as to where my money goes, what it does, and whether it actually helps anyone. Simply demanding liberal policies as societal shorthand for how much I care just doesn’t do it for me. It’s an indirect, clumsy way to help people, at best ineffective and at worst corrupt. No one who cares where their charitable contributions go would give to an organization with a track record and 990 that looked anything like the federal government’s, and yet we’re supposed to accept that the only way to avoid Hell is to give a third of our income over to it?

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Anyone who says so can go to straight to…my prayer list.

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