LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Winner 2013 Webby Awards for Best Political Website
May 23, 2013

 Choose a size
Text Size

Trending:     chris hedges     economy     elizabeth warren     politics     robert scheer
Most Read

A Call to Action

Bizarre, Apparently Jihadist Slaying in London (Video)

Oklahoma Needs Help, Not Ideology

Hell on Earth for Greeks

Terracide and the Terrarists: Destroying the Planet for Record Profits

Most Comments
Most Emailed

Reports
 * NEW! * Fish Migration Reveals Ocean Warming

Ear to the Ground

A/V Booth

Arts & Culture
 * NEW! * A Call to Action
Act of Congress
Daily Rituals

Digs

Truthdig Bazaar
ENTER_ALT_TEXT

Liberating the Schoolhouse

By Wellford Wilms
$19.00 Buy direct from the publisher - Use Truthdig discount code TD35

more items

 
Cartoons

This Much

Email this item Email    Print this item Print    Share this item... Share

Posted on Sep 23, 2010

By Mr. Fish


   


Click to see more Truthdig Cartoons

Make Love

The Heartland

Apple Taxes

Tornado










More Below the Ad

Advertisement


New and Improved Comments

If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy.

By call me roy, September 26, 2010 at 10:50 am Link to this comment

Obama, who once dismissed the Bible’s relevance to politics, saying, “People haven’t been reading their Bibles lately,” may need to go reread his Engels. Co-author with Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels knew better than Obama about collectivism’s clash with Christianity, stating, “… if some few passages of the Bible may be favourable to Communism, the general spirit of its doctrines is, nevertheless, totally opposed to it ….”
Despite Engels and Marx (who dismissed religion as the “opium of the people”) Obama and many others still manage to see socialism in the Bible. They point to the early church which, at first glance, seems like a model socialist community. The New Testament reports that these first believers “had all things in common” (Acts 4:32) and “all who were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet; and they distributed to each as anyone had need” (Acts 4:34-35).
But unlike socialism, the sharing was voluntary, not coerced, and the money was given not to the state, but the church. As Southern Baptist leader Richard Land puts it on the new Coral Ridge Ministries documentary, Socialism: A Clear and Present Danger, “It’s one thing for you to give out of compassion to someone who’s less fortunate. It’s an entirely different thing for the government to confiscate your property and give it to someone else.”
While the Bible asserts property rights and the rights of inheritance, socialism assaults them. Marx and Engels put the “abolition of property” first in a 10-step program for implementing communism. That’s not exactly a Christian thing to do. The eighth commandment, “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15) applies every bit as much to the men and women who hold the reins of political power as it does to everyone else.
So does the 10th commandment, “You shall not covet” (Exodus 20:17). Coveting, or envy, is a powerful driver of socialism, which is in a perpetual snit that some people have more than others. So when President Obama castigates “Fats Cats” on Wall Street, decries “economic inequality,” and warns, as he did in his 2009 budget statement that a “disproportionate share of the Nation’s wealth has been accumulated by the very wealthy,” he stokes a destructive impulse that is condemned by Scripture.
Socialism also runs afoul of the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3). Socialist governments seek to play God — to take His place as the ultimate sovereign. Consider the veneration that Russians once gave to the embalmed remains of Lenin and Stalin, the Nazi prescribed prayer to Hitler (“Thy Reich [kingdom] comes, thy will alone is law upon the earth”), and the personality cult surrounding North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il.
The sixth commandment, “You shall not murder,” is also widely ignored by Marxist regimes. Marx and Engels proclaimed that their aims could be “attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Their disciples, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other communist henchmen, killed 100 million people, a “tragedy of planetary dimensions,” as the French publisher of The Black Book of Communism put it.
Barack Obama may say that the Bible tells him to be his brother’s keeper (his youngest half-brother reportedly lived in a shack in Kenya on $1 a day at the time he said this) but he ought to go back and reread what God’s Word actually says. Engels was right. Socialism has nothing in common with Scripture.

Report this

By call me roy, September 26, 2010 at 10:42 am Link to this comment

What?
Looks like the rest of the posts to your comment don’t really care about Jesus or respect anything except hate, Huh?

Report this

By glider, September 25, 2010 at 6:25 pm Link to this comment

I don’t know.  It sure looks like the shadow he casts is that of a Dick-Head.

Report this

By Aaron Ortiz, September 24, 2010 at 8:30 am Link to this comment

Wow Mr. Fish, this is much better than your previous religious cartoons!

Report this
Newsletter

sign up to get updates


 
 
 
 
Join the Liberal Blog Advertising Network
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
© 2013 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.