A moral obligation to oppose Obama healthcare plan

Syndicated columnist Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University, said it best when he opined, 'For me to voluntarily open my pockets to help the poor and needy is a worthy and honorable act of human compassion.  But for you to reach inside my pockets and take my money to do so is stealing for which somebody should go to jail.'

Yesterday we were treated to the news that some of the nation's religious leaders had been recruited by Obama to promote his plan for a government takeover of healthcare. 

And they gladly jumped on board like giddy sailors ready for another voyage into the exciting seas of political activism.

Although many are quick to condemn rightwing, evangelical groups for 'taking their faith into the political marketplace,' Leftwing religious groups are given a pass in the mainstream media when they engage in overt political activity.

After all, when they do it, it is 'a moral obligation,' or so they would have us believe.

Sojourners Magazine, of course, was one of the first to jump aboard the Obama voyage, stating that Americans have 'a moral obligation' to support the current plan for 'healthcare reform.'  Soon others from the Leftwing were chiming in with their usual drivel, claiming that followers of Christ have a Christian duty to support this immoral and anti-Christian program for government-controlled healthcare.

Yes, you heard it here first.  ObamaCare is immoral and anti-Christian.

It is immoral to rob citizens of the their hard-earned money in order to give to other citizens something that they did not earn.  That is government-sanctioned stealing, pure and simple.  And it is anti-Christian to take something out of the hands of individual believers something that they should voluntarily do out of their compassion for the poor, and place it in the hands of government to do through a mandated program.

Nowhere in the Gospels, or the New Testament for the matter, are we commanded to create government programs for anything.  We are commanded, individually and voluntarily, to 'minister to the sick, help the poor, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and visit the lonely and imprisoned.

When government does these things for us, it has the net effect of absolving us of our individual responsibility for these things.  We can then rest with the self-deceived notion that 'somebody else is doing it' and then sit back and relax without lifting a finger.

I'm sure Jesus would be proud of his disciples basking in their laziness after creating a government program to do everything he told individual Christians to do.

And this is precisely why Leftwing, mainline Christian denominations are dead wrong when it comes to social programs.  They are, in effect, promoting government-sanctioned stealing, robbing from individual Christians the obligation and resultant joy inherent in actively engaging in giving of their own time, talents, energies, and resources to help the needy.

When one takes into account Barack Obama's religious affiliation, one readily recognizes the problem.  Obama is a member of the most liberal Christian denomination in America--the United Church of Christ--which has supported every single Leftwing cause on the planet for decades.

And within the United Church of Christ, Obama's former church in Chicago is among the most liberal of the liberal.  The Reverend Jeremiah Wright regularly treated congregants to a smorgasbord of anti-American propaganda, Marxist-based 'Liberation Theology,' and 'whitey-hatred.'

Within this relatively small circle of extremist Leftists within Christianity one can find the most obnoxious ideology on the planet.  It is an ideology based more upon Marxist philosophy than anything Christian.  This includes a disdain for capitalism and the profit motive, the belief that there is no such thing as 'private property,' environmentalist extremism, changing the tax system to 'equalize' the rich with the poor, and supporting the cradle-to-the-grave nanny-state that removes any natural motivation to produce.

This is all done, of course, in the name of Christ--which in itself is laughable given that the UCC and other liberal mainline Protestant denominations participated in 'the Jesus Seminar'--a consortium of liberal scholars and ministers--which concluded that Jesus did not say roughly 90% of what is attributed to him in the New Testament.

It is highly telling, however, that those few times the Seminar claimed Jesus did speak were all about the social obligation to the poor.

Obama and company hopes that by putting these extremist faith-leaders out front on his healthcare plan, he can rally Christians to the cause.

But Obama is forgetting that most Christians in this nation today are NOT a part of liberal, mainline denominations anymore.  The UCC, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, and a few others have lost multi-millions of members over the past 40 years.  Most Christians are now part of conservative, evangelical groups, such as Southern Baptists, the Presbyterian Church in America (a conservative group), the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, and thousands of independent, conservative, evangelical, and charismatic churches. 

For the most part, in today's America most Christians no longer buy into the failed notion that the church must support government initiatives when it comes to social programs.  They have seen time and again that these programs fail, and they know that the real obligation as Christians lies in their individual involvement in helping the needy, and joining in faith-based initiatives that provide relief to those who need it.

Thus, it is clear that people of faith have a moral obligation to OPPOSE Obama's healthcare plan.

For more information:      The Star-Telegram news story    The 40-Day Campaign     The Jesus Seminar     Sojourners     The Religious Left 

For more commentary on other issues, visit my blog at The Liberty Sphere.