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@princess-foo

@wordsmith (don’t join if you’re busy/don’t want to, but I want a second opinion from somebody who knows what they believe)

Hello, @princess-foo. I would like to address what you said very carefully, but I certainly do feel strongly about this issue.

So, first off, who are the men who started the ideas of socialism, communism and the rest? They were men like Karl Marx (please forgive me if I’m not perfectly citing, I’m a little rusty on this). Karl Marx whose ideas manifested themselves in history with Hitler and The Soviet Union. Karl Marx hated God. I have studied him enough to know this much.

So, in my dad’s words, he said to never confuse the sharing of the saints with socialism. There are some people who do this, like the Hutterites. However, the Bible also says that the worker is worthy of his wages. Socialism, income tax, all of this makes me upset. My dad is a God-honoring man who gets up early in the morning to pray for his family, drive an hour to work, and works there all day to provide for my mom and his seven children. He is often sleep deprived and when he’s home, he works hard doing everything from taking care of children to running a chain saw and cutting down trees. He works endlessly, is honest and I know there are not many men in this world with his character. It makes me upset to think that my dad’s hard earned money would be taken from him in high income taxes and given to people who do not have the will to work.

There is nothing wrong with sharing and giving. If a man could not feed his family or support them, yet is willing to work, that is when compassion is beautiful and the body of Christ can come and help this family. Yet people who would live to live off of the government (AKA my dad’s hard earned money) who are capable of work should not be given what they themselves can earn. It makes me mad when I see a family begging on the side of the road where the wife is holding up a sign asking for help while her husband sits doing nothing in the shade.

Our church has had more than one child born to young families where the babies have had to have extensive care. One child born last year had to have at least one open heart surgery when he was a newborn. Recently, our church decided to help this family financially with a particular expense that would be difficult for his family. This is love, not the government stepping in and giving money to those who can’t work.

Or when my little sister was born. She is three now, but when she was born, my mom had a C-section and afterwards caught a super-bug in the hospital. She struggled for eighteen days in the hospital while she had to be separated from her newborn and her other six children. She came very close to death, but praise God, she pulled through. Without the church coming around us in prayer, bringing us meals, helping run the house (of seven rambunctious kids), taking care of my baby sister, I don’t know what we would have done. I was 14 and my dad had to go to be with my mom every day, there is no way we could have done what all they did.

There is a huge difference between the love of the body of Christ and redistributing the wealth. The Bible clearly says that we should work, and that we should receive the fruit of our labors. A government that hates God (which in the case of the Soviet Union that is very true, read Richard Wurmbrand) and gives the earned money to those who will not work is wrong. Then beyond money, shouldn’t love be not only financial, but manifested in prayer and in encouragement? A paycheck from the government is not love to either party, but the kindness of the church is a sacrifice of love, not just to mankind, but we sacrifice out of love for Christ. A man can give a paycheck, but are the prayers of a child not perhaps even more precious?

Lastly, I will point out that socialism does not work economically from what we have seen in the past. I am not an economist at all, but I will say that socialism and capitalism have been tested, and in my mind, I cannot understand how anyone with a work ethic can stand the thought of socialism. Then if we just think about the many hundreds of thousands of crosses that mark men who died fighting for freedom, and the many people who were tortured for Christ and oppressed under socialism and communism in other countries, I do not think that we should run to the thing that bled their lives from them.

It scares me that in our culture that refuses to fear God that we would run to the agendas that have proven to rise under those who hate him. It fills me with sadness that we, the young of America would take so flippantly the blood of Americans that we stand on.

I’m sorry if this is very heavy, but it is a heavy topic. I say none of this to be hurtful or unkind, but I believe this with all my heart. I want America to go on being free as long as it can, because I fear that one day, my children may face persecution, and when you read the horrors of the Soviet Union, it is unspeakable. Most of all, I wish that the young of America would turn back to God and love him with their whole hearts, fear him, for he is God, and read his word. This is my heart. We will reap what we sow, and I am afraid of what we are sowing.