If the gospel is good news to the rich, why doesn't it say so?

The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

-- Matthew 11:5

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

-- Luke 1:53

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

-- Luke 4:18

But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.

-- Luke 6:24f.

Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.

-- Luke 7:22

Are Americans really generous in their charitable giving when they give just 2.68%?

Are Americans really generous in their charitable giving when they give just 2.68%? And 2.68% is really stretching it, since that includes all the money given by the heavy hitters among the rich, the corporations and the foundations.

Charitable giving came to about $335 billion in 2013, according to the story here citing Giving USA statistics. That's still more than 4% lower than the amount given in 2007, adjusted for inflation, but rising since the end of the intervening depression.

Consider that total disposable personal income in 2013 was $12.505 trillion, according to the latest GDP report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the US Department of Congress here. That means everyone, from individuals to corporations and foundations etc., gave just 2.68%.

So what's with all the Christians, many of whom preach tithing, which is giving 10%?

75% of the country claims to be Christian of some sort after all. If 75% of just the $6.7 trillion in net compensation in 2013 were tithed on by the Christians they would be contributing over $500 billion to charity. And tithing on 75% of the total disposable income would come to a whopping $938 billion.

Of course we can't really say that 75% of either sum is what the Christians actually make.

A closer approximation of that would start with the sometimes heard claim that 9 out of 10 people sitting in the pews make less than the senior pastor. The high end of the scale for senior pastors is currently almost $88,000 per year, which puts them in the 90th percentile of income in 2013. In other words, many of them are rich. Net compensation for everyone making below $90,000 a year in 2013 totaled $4.06 trillion. Taking 10% of 75% of that yields $305 billion in theoretical tithes expected from the Christians in 2013. Typically, however, only about a third of total charitable contributions go to specifically religious institutions and organizations, so we're talking about roughly $110 billion in specifically religious contributions in 2013, a giving rate of about 3.6%, not 10%. Of course the rate could be much higher than that if the Christians are also supporting non-religious charities at higher rates than they support their own, but how likely is that?

Overall it must be said the Christians are more generous than the overall rate, but fall rather short of their oft-stated goal.

Well, don't we all.

Paul transformed Jesus' teaching of repentance as self-amputation into an object of derision

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched...And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched. -- Mark 9:43, 45

I would they were even cut off which trouble you. -- Galatians 5:12

Merry Apocalyptic Christmas: The chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable

"there is a fire asbestos . . ."

"His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

-- Matthew 3:12

"His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

-- Luke 3:17

Reza Aslan still misunderstands Jesus, and multiculturalism means you end up not praying to anyone

Just like Reza Aslan's family, here.

"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."

-- Matthew 10:35f.

"I am a poor boy, too"

From the best story you can read this Christmas, or any Christmas, or any day, here, because in its own misguided way, it makes for a beginning at recovering the call to poverty which lies at the heart of the lost message of the historical Jesus:

So, on hearing "Little Drummer Boy" each Christmas, we should be reminded that the very birth we are celebrating is a call to poverty of the spirit. To be poor in spirit, as Christ asked of us on the Mount of Beatitudes, is to admit of our weaknesses, our insecurities, our shortcomings. In recognizing these in ourselves, we are able to feel compassion when we find them in others, and we are moved to act on their (rather than our own) behalf.

This is the best of Christmas and the Christian message: to say, in the manner of a scared young boy before the most unlikely of Kings, in the cold of an often harsh world, "I am a poor boy too."

Rob Bell defender John Pavlovitz imagines the confines of the Sermon on the Mount are "cozy"

Here:

"This [Rob Bell] wasn’t someone who preached from the cozy confines of the Creation story, or the Psalms, or the Sermon on the Mount."

Apparently Pavlovitz has never read the Sermon on the Mount:

"If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell."

-- Matthew 5:29f.

"Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few."

-- Matthew 7:13f.

Just another reason I'm not a member of the American Academy of Religion

Story here:

This past weekend the New York Times ran a column—”Setting Aside a Scholarly Get-Together, For the Planet’s Sake“—about the American Academy of Religion’s new commitment to battling climate change.

On the assured results of scholarship

"Having learned and taught the subject for more than thirty years, I can honestly say, I have no idea how Christianity began.  Having also read, however, most of the theories put forward by mythtics and Jesus-skeptics, I can also say, in a friendly kind of way: you’re not close to an answer."

-- R. Joseph Hoffmann, 11/5/11, here

The New Rob Bell: In Oprah the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily

full of divinity

Seen here:

Many evangelicals are suspicious of Oprah, leery that she represents what many see as the worst of self-help spirituality. Bell, not surprisingly, disagrees once again.

“She has taught me more about what Jesus has for all of us, and what kind of life Jesus wants us to live, more than almost anybody in my life,” Bell said.

“Is she a Christian? That word has so much baggage, I wouldn’t want to answer for someone. When Jesus talks about the full divine life, you think, this is what he’s talking about.”

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The latest personification of godliness has a net worth of $3 billion.

Giving up one's land was unthinkable to Jesus' agrarian audience

"[T]he explicit condemnation of earthly treasures ... and the negative attitudes toward wealth ... suggest that the [Q] group was intentionally trying to appeal to the peasant class. Typically, it is this set of sayings that have caused many scholars to assume that the message of Jesus was well received by the Galilean peasants.

"But the ideology of this Jesus Movement appears to transcend or breach the bounds of acceptable ideology for the security-seeking agrarian villagers. For instance, there are many sayings that ask the audience to take risks or give up possessions that are rightfully theirs, and abandon their traditional kinship based obligations and lifestyles. These demands were unacceptable to peasants who valued the security measures available in the traditional village setting."

-- Richard A. Horsley, ORAL PERFORMANCE, POPULAR TRADITION, AND HIDDEN TRANSCRIPT IN Q (Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies Issue 60, 2006), p. 174.

"The Jubilee year was mainly instituted in order to prevent violent changes in the tenure of lands (Lev. xxv. 23 et seq.). The land, the law declares, properly belongs to YHWH, who is sole landlord, while all the Israelites are but his tenants. Therefore the land must not be sold in perpetuity. It may be leased, or its crops may be sold; but in the Jubilee year the land returns to its original owner."

-- Jewish Encyclopedia, "Agrarian Laws", 1906 

"In the year of jubilee the field shall return to him from whom it was bought, to whom the land belongs as a possession by inheritance."

-- Leviticus 27:24

John Gray strikes a blow for human evil, which never goes away

Here:

[T]hose who govern us at the present time reject a central insight of Western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians: destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings themselves. In this old-fashioned understanding, evil is a propensity to destructive and self-destructive behaviour that is humanly universal. The restraints of morality exist to curb this innate human frailty; but morality is a fragile artifice that regularly breaks down. Dealing with evil requires an acceptance that it never goes away.

Matthew Avery Sutton grossly overestimates how many American Christians believe in the rapture

Which just proves that you can become infected by apocalyptic while studying it.

Seen here:

"And yet the apocalyptic never leaves. It’s still there, that’s where the polls come back. It’s now assumed by hundreds of millions of Americans that the rapture is a real thing and that Jesus is coming back."

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That is said notwithstanding the fact that the country as a whole doesn't have enough population to support making it in the first place. Don't they teach geography in the schools anymore? It's pretty embarrassing coming from a Ph.D.

Meanwhile Pew polling most recently shows that 78% of the adult population is nominally Christian, with 51% Protestant and just 26% Evangelical, ground zero for the rapture theology. That puts the upper limit on who would likely believe in an apocalyptic interpretation of the Christian faith somewhere in the neighborhood of 63 million, not "hundreds of millions", if that.

This tendency to exaggerate is not limited to the sphere of religion, however, where members of all faiths fudge on polls asking how many times they attend religious services. A famous politician in America known by all, a left-wing ideologue, also frequently opines that the country is far more populous than it really is, which suggests that politics and religion often operate with the same defective spatial reasoning, not to mention the same defective enthusiasms.

Or was it the dope smoking?