Of Marx the Bogeyman, and Jesus the Savior

Let us be clear about the profound immorality of those who love to use Marx as the bogeyman in our time while they pay lip service to the life and work of a Nazarene named Jesus. Marx lived twice as long as Jesus and eventually died of pleurisy. While Marx was vilified by many for calling the workers of the world to unite, Jesus was murdered at age 33 for calling out the inequities of his day and those who perpetuated hem. We can theologically sanitize his murder all we want... He was NAILED to a rough wooden cross, which he was forced to carry on his back to the hill where he would be murdered, and allowed to hang on it till he was dead. His was the kind of fate that the theologian Bonhoeffer aptly described in his declaration that when God/Christ calls a man: "He bids him come and die." This for Bonhoeffer was "the cost of discipleship".

Those who have an interest in maintaining the status quo have never welcomed the voices that declare in favor of the poor and the disadvantaged. The silence of the Press in regard to the complicity of the rich in the downpression of the poor is the inevitable function of a system of patronage that is the raison d'être of the Press itself. Christianity as we know it is a reflection of the prevailing moral values in society. This being the case, prophetic voices are invariably isolated and targeted for elimination. The false equivalencies that we witness are nothing more than attempts to muddle the consciousness of those who are patrons of the daily discourse of charlatans "making a living". 

 Walter Rhett makes this observation about the obvious contradictions between the rhetoric of some of our political leaders and their political praxis:

"In South Carolina, 101 children died in the care of the state’s DSS in 2012; yet governor Nikki Haley opposes the Medicaid expansion in a state at the bottom of the national health matrix. Moral intelligence looks at what we do for others, what legacy we leave. It is time to look past budgets, the constitution, the ugly labels, the rising murders and madness, and point to the moral failings of a party that closed the very government the founders fought to establish; that passed laws to allow guns in church or to take the lives of neighbors and to say none of these were the original intent of the founders–and neither were special privileges for the rich."

And so the poor perish while political opportunists and their lackeys spook the people with their visions of the ghost of Marx. And for this "Jesus wept". 

The struggle continues...