Grow a garden, give food away, resist the temptation to give into hate, change it up and try peacemaking for once, love your neighbor, love your enemy.
First of all, Jesus clearly tells us not to swear oaths.
When you use God as a means to procure public office, which almost all public officials do, to enact the things you want to enact, and tag God along for the ride, then you're breaking the third commandment. You're not just breaking it, you're openly flaunting your complete disregard for it and, yet, somehow, it keeps getting people elected.
The church is the cross that Christ was crucified on.
I hope God does not look like a bunch of wealthy white European dudes who are going to script the justification for the subjugation and legal ownership of other human beings based upon the construction of race as a biological phenomenon.
Many people who live in the USA feel blessed to live in a free country with many opportunities. For this reason, many try to come to the USA, and few ever wish to leave it.
The bureaucratic nature of both capitalism and our government assures us that there are no checks and balances when it comes to justifying any and all behavior that either makes money and secures the supposed peace of the nation-state.
God doesn't want to give Israel a king, because God knows, being the rather observant deity God is, that the Israelites will become like all other nations: they will worship their king and not God.
I don't think anyone is committing idolatry by wanting to live in any part of the world where they can enjoy the basic necessities of life. Granted, many of us here, in the U.S., have well beyond what constitutes basic necessities.
Look for a church that might ask that you become poor. A church that is more concerned with showing love to those in need rather than a terrified little church who thinks they "won" because their favorite politician became president.
I am not going to say that people who enter the military are doing anything wrong. As I often jokingly tell my students, "Many of my best of friends are in the military!" But it's true. Perhaps not in the Aristotelian sense of the word "friendship" but on so many other levels that matter, we are truly friends.
First of all, the majority of us, regardless of what we may say, are capitalists. That is, we practice it, it's what we "do," it's how we live, we are capitalists.
Free your mind from the colonization of thinking within the obtuse parameters of 'right' and 'left', of conservatives and liberals.
Basically, you know, write the book you want to read, be the band you want to hear, grow the food you want to eat, create the world you want to live in, and so on and so on. I think this translates well for how Christians should approach their present-day situation where the current goal of most everyone, Christian or not, seems to be to procure power.
