{"id":44541,"date":"2014-06-03T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T17:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=44541"},"modified":"2014-06-06T11:28:45","modified_gmt":"2014-06-06T16:28:45","slug":"infallible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=44541","title":{"rendered":"Infallible"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a Protestant.\u00a0 I’m a Protestant for a lot of really good theological reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’ve got nothing against Catholicism; parts of my family are Catholic, as are a strong plurality of my friends.\u00a0 Like a lot of Protestants, I admired John Paul 2,\u00a0not leastly because he seemed to not only recognized that\u00a0all Christians were on the Jesus Team, but \u00a0that Protestant beliefs were also a path to salvation.<\/p>\n

But I’ve wondered sometimes; if the colonies had been majority-Catholic, would there have been an American Revolution?<\/p>\n

I ask it when I read things like this; one of the Pope’s top advisors rips on “liberartarian” beliefs and the free market<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The pope, [Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez] Maradiaga said, grew up in Argentina and \u201chas a profound knowledge of the life of the poor.\u201d That is why, he said, Francis continues to insist that \u201cthe elimination of the structural causes for poverty is a matter of urgency that can no longer be postponed.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe hungry or sick child of the poor cannot wait,\u201d the cardinal said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So far, so good.<\/p>\n

\u201cSolidarity is more than a few sporadic acts of generosity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Instead, he said, solidarity with the poor, as envisioned by Catholic social teaching, calls for \u201cdealing with the structural causes of poverty and injustice.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And when people talk “structure”, they’re talking “political solutions”.<\/p>\n

And when you talk “political solutions” to economic “injustice”, you’re inevitably talking top-down, government solutions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Without exception.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A charismatic churchman who speaks fluent English, Maradiaga was animated in his criticism of the effects of today\u2019s free market capitalism and he peppered his remarks with digs at economic conservatives.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Trickle-down economics, he said, is \u201ca deception,\u201d and he declared that the \u201cinvisible hand\u201d of the free market \u2014 the famous theory advanced by the 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith \u2014 was instead being used as a cruel trick to exploit the poor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The world is full of cruel tricks, when you’re poor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the free market has virtually eliminated widespread starvation (in parts of the world that have <\/em>a free market), government, thetop-down solution to “infrastructure problems” inevitably makes things worse for the poor, while enriching the administrative class with the graft that always, always follows political solutions to social issues.<\/p>\n

Although my Catholic friends my bristle when I say this, I am exceedingly unimpresssed with Pope Francis’ reign,\u00a0at least in secular and political terms,\u00a0so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a Protestant.\u00a0 I’m a Protestant for a lot of really good theological reasons.\u00a0 I’ve got nothing against Catholicism; parts of my family are Catholic, as are a strong plurality of my friends.\u00a0 Like a lot of Protestants, I admired John Paul 2,\u00a0not leastly because he seemed to not only recognized that\u00a0all Christians were on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faiths-and-their-followers","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44541"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44695,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44541\/revisions\/44695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}