The Relationship Between People Who Did Well in School and People Who Did Not Do Well in School

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PEOPLE WHO DID WELL IN SCHOOL AND PEOPLE WHO DID NOT DO WELL IN SCHOOL
Sunday Oct. 23rd, 2022

 

I think Jesus changed his mind several times about rich people but He never changed his mind about poor people. I don't count "The poor you will always have with you." I interpret that sentence to mean "There will still be poor people after I am crucified and ascend into Heaven." That's what it means. It does not mean "Give up on helping the poor. You'll never make any progress."

Just as there will always be new children who need to be taught spelling and arithmetic, so likewise there will always be new poor people who need to be helped by more fortunate people who are trying to be like Jesus, at least a little bit.

I think there's a big correlation between children who learn more slowly than average children, and grownups who are poor. I do not know the brain, but broadly speaking, I think it's not a person's fault if they have fewer of those connector nerves in their brain connecting one part of the brain with another. Their processor isn't as fast or as reliable. When they grow up, sometimes they literally miss THE BUS because the bus schedule didn't stick accurately in their brains. They read or were told where the bus schedule said "4:12 p.m." But they misremembered it as "4:37 p.m."

Here's how I look at our species: God is making oodles of human beings using a very unstandardized process that gives highly uneven results. Some people come into the world with a lot more gifts and graces than other people, and those who have more are supposed to share with those who have less.

I don't think of taxes as an evil plot hatched by the government. I think of taxes as a sensible way, in a big country, for me to pool resources with other people who (like me) have more, so that we can help poor people, especially the enormous numbers of poor people that we will never meet in person.

The wickedness of the human heart greatly exceeds the wickedness of the government. We don't have a government problem. We have a problem shared by all the nations in the world: the problem of human beings who have more, and think they deserve to have more. Here's a phrase people used in Victorian England: the deserving poor. We need to start using that phrase again. What "the deserving poor" means is: "You are wrong if you think all poor people are criminals. And you are also wrong if you think none of the poor are criminals."

When a crooked person cheats a good-hearted person, there isn't any shame for the good-hearted person, unless they have consumed all of their substance in their misguided effort to help less fortunate people. When a crooked person cheats a good-hearted person, I think Jesus would say the system is working as intended. Time is a teacher, and we should have time to figure out who the deserving poor are before we die. Being cheated is part of life, but honest people seek each other out, and when honest people work together, they make the distribution of the gifts and graces less lopsided.

I perceive the Sermon on the Mount as an enormous miracle, which could never have been produced by a million monkeys typing on typewriters -- it could only have been produced by an incarnate being with an enormous reservoir of goodness inside of them. -- But I do not perceive the Sermon on the Mount as a complete guide to goodness.  As far as I can recall, the Sermon on the Mount does not say anything about forgiving people who cheat you, and forgiving yourself when you are cheated.

But if you want to help people less fortunate than you, or/and if you want to help the deserving poor, then you have to prepare yourself for being cheated.  You have to prepare your heart in advance to forgive people who will cheat you, and to forgive yourself for being cheated.  And that includes forgiving the government when it is cheated by crooked people.  Individual people, and governments, cannot do good, and cannot do the right thing consistently, without risking being duped by crooks. People who spit in the face of good people who have been duped, or spit in the face of well-intentioned governments who have been duped, are part of the problem.  Good people are duty-bound to remind citizens that crooked behavior is so unpatriotic that it is as unpatriotic as desertion on the battlefield.

People complain about how slowly government acts.  But the government acts slowly because of all the procedures that have been put in place after the government was cheated by one crook after another, to prevent the same cheat from working again.  Trying to dupe the government is not a game.  It is a nauseatingly unpatriotic behavior.

Frank Newton