Re: Social Darwinism (was Issues for the New year)

[barbara wolf <lupa@biddeford.com>]

At 10:34 AM 1/10/96 EST,.Allan Tilford wrote:
>This is another thread that I have been following with great interest over
>the past several days. Certainly many perplexing questions have been raised
>and there are no easy answers to them.

.*Perplexing* is almost a litotes.  I've yelled, nodded agreement, argued,
and laughed as I've read what people have posted.  But I've also managed to
extract some observations from all the things that have been proposed and
argued.

1.  Discussion of public/political ramifications re
povery/hunger/joblessness/etc. is probably inevitable, and surely
politically necessary.  But while discussions are fun--I love 'em--they can
be toxic, at least as far as I am concerned.  When I am uncomfortable with
and frustrated about the agony behind the statistics, I like to debate, in a
friendly and rational way, the issues.  In fact, I'd a lot rather argue
about cuts in welfare benefits than get my bones down to the soup kitchen.
(It's not the work that I'd rather not do, it's the PEOPLE.  They're so
real.)  I notice that the ongoing discussion here is punctuated with
comments by people who are in fact dealing with people, not issues.

2.  The Gospels (which all too often disturb my thinking on these things)
make it very clear that I am called to be neighbor to unlikely foreigners,
who don't worship *my* God or subscribe to *my* ethics.  I'm sure that the
priest and the Levite--who crossed the road to avoid the hapless traveller
in the ditch--pondered, as they walked away, the social problems inherent in
his situation: the problem of crime in the streets, the lack of responsible
forethought on the part of travellers, and the budget problems created by
social services for hapless victims of circumstance.  Unfortunately, the
Gospel does more than imply that life in the Kingdom of God entails *not*
walking away.  It says that I am neighbor to the one  who is hungry,
jobless, homelss.  I certainly cannot deal with neighbors as a *class* or
*economic stratum* or *population sector*.  But I can minister to one or two
at a time, and I can find ways to help.

3.  Individual efforts to help are probably not going to make a difference
on the large scale, becvause we live in a world that posits and values money
over any other measure of worth. I don't have much money.  Yet this is why
individ. Christians and arishes (yes, a minority) have to find a way through
and beyond the debates if they are not to get drawn into paralytic inertia.

PS  I blame Constantine for all this.  When Christians got to be a
respectable political force, something very important lost its energy, save
in the hearts of individuals of faith--the sense of being called to *love*
our neighbors as ourselves, even if their sin is less responsible and less
respectable than our own greed and fear.





>
.