Posted on 07/24/2017 8:05:00 AM PDT by Pontiac
We’ve all heard of the idea of a general worker’s strike. In her tome Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand posed a provocative question. What if, in response to an increasingly overbearing regulatory state, the entrepreneurs of America decided to go on strike?
The resulting 1000 pages, if you can get through them, constitute one of the most creative, if overwrought, dystopias ever envisioned. Society’s producers quietly disappear, enclosed in their own hidden capitalist utopia, while innovation grinds to a halt, intellectual property languishes, and overconfident, arrogant bureaucrats run world-class factories into the ground. When all’s said and done, all that was required to liberate America’s unappreciated geniuses and creators was for them to walk away and leave society to pick up the pieces.
American Christians may find themselves in a position closer to John Galt than to Saint Benedict, with apologies to Rod Dreher. Many of the services Americans take for granted are provided by churches and Christian organizations. It is not hyperbolic to say that core areas of American life would languish or collapse without the contributions of Christian people and organizations. These enormous social contributions are frequently underappreciated, but would certainly be missed.
Perhaps the most important is health care. John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, wrote in an article titled “No Christianity, No Hospitals: Don’t Take Christian Contributions for Granted”:
One in six hospital beds in our country is located in a Catholic hospital. In at least thirty communities, the Catholic hospital is the only hospital in a 35-mile radius. This doesn’t even take into account hospitals run by other Christian bodies such as Baptists, Methodists, and especially Seventh-Day Adventists.
Catholic hospitals are the largest single category within non-profit hospitals, which themselves account for about half of all hospitals.
Christians also run thousands of private schools that often meet or exceed the quality of public schools; a full 70 percent of all private schools are either Catholic or affiliated with another religion, generally some form of Protestantism (a much smaller percentage of these are Jewish or run by a non-Abrahamic religion).
In addition to health care and education, it is churches which minister to the neediest and most marginalized members of society. Matthew Robare reported in these pages:
According to the nonprofit Partners for Sacred Places, churches and religious buildings of all faiths continue to have an economic impact on their neighborhoods. Their research found that almost all have some sort of community-service programs, and most have at least four running concurrently. The same study estimated that in Philadelphia alone religious congregations contribute over $100 million to their community annually—about $144,000 per congregation. Most of that comes from measuring volunteer time as though it were paid labor, but they also provide space, staff, and direct financial support to neighborhood services. Sixty percent of churches surveyed had food pantries, and nearly as many hosted music performances and clothing donations. Over 40 percent had soup kitchens.
Churches also offer meals for the homebound, place children with foster parents, offer marriage counseling, run crisis pregnancy centers, and perform countless other ministries and social and cultural activities. And yet bureaucrats heap nothing but contempt or suspicion on orthodox Christians, and policymakers increasingly do nothing but circumscribe their rights in the public square. The reward for managing more healthcare than could ever be provided by the state? Catholic nuns compelled to provide artificial birth control. The reward for taking some weight off the broken foster care system? Being compelled to place children in same-sex households.
The utility and morality of orthodox Christian social beliefs can be debated. But according to Christian teaching, it is licit, perhaps even mandatory, to withdraw and walk away—“shake the dust off your feet”—rather than violate one’s conscience or become corrupted by the world.
At a lecture once in my college Catholic center, our priest said that if laws required Catholic agencies to place children in same-sex households, the church should suspend its adoption placements entirely. What about the children who won’t get placed in homes, I asked? Can the church sacrifice real people for its own survival? Of course it can, he explained; it is more important to preserve the integrity of the church for the future, because it is the church’s moral and spiritual integrity which inspires it to do social good in the first place. That argument may not be watertight, but it is one Christians must grapple with.
Orthodox Christians in America have gotten into the habit of bemoaning their inexorably shrinking political power and the rising hostility to religious freedom. But they actually possess enormous political power: the ability to grind to a halt the health care, educational, and social services infrastructure of the United States. Will they use it?
Catholic Ping
Indeed!
This is a point I have been making for years. Just looking at the names of Boston’s most prominent hosptals gives you a clue to their origin.
Arbour Hospital (Psychiatric)
Boston Medical Center
Carney Hospital(Catholic)
Faulkner Hospital (Now Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital)
Floating Hospital for children
Franciscan Hospital for Children(Catholic)
Kindred Hospital (Boston)—Formerly Hahnemann General Hospital, then Vencor Long Term Care Hospital
Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged(Jewish)
Jewish Memorial Hospital and Rehabilitation Center(Jewish)—Long-term, no ER closed in 2005 Radius Specialty Hospital (Closed)
Lemuel Shattuck Hospital (Public Health/DMH/Prison Hospital)
Lindemann Mental Health Center
Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary
Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts Mental Health Center (closed)
Mattapan Community Health Center
New England Baptist Hospital—Mostly orthopedic (The Hospital for Orthopedics)(Protestant)
Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center (Boston)(Catholic)
St. John of God Hospital (closed in 2000; was a specialty hospital run by Caritas)
St. Margaret’s Center for Women & Infants (Part of St. Elizabeth’s)—in Brighton, MA(Catholic)
Shriner’s Hospital—Burns Institute(Masonic)
Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital
The Boston Center(Children’s partial hospital program)
Tufts Medical Center
VA Hospital Jamaica Plain—Veterans Health Administration
VA Hospital West Roxbury—Veterans Health Administration
In the Longwood Medical and Academic Area:
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center(Jewish AND SDA))
Boston Children’s Hospital
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Joslin Diabetes Center
And that’s not counting Skilled nursing Facilities, Orphanages, and Street Ministries)
If you believe scripture, it does happen, by not by the left's hand. It's referred to as the rapture.
Look at history in some of the atheistic regimes of the 20th century.
THAT's your answer.
I don’t think that would apply in the US.
The Christian charity hospitals are technically privately owned and as such could be closed tomorrow if the owner so desired.
Say some dictator in black robes ruled that a Catholic hospital must perform abortions on demand or be fined $100K per instance.
The governors of the hospital decide that the order can not be complied with on moral grounds and decide to shut down as soon as patients can be relocated.
This could be done in the US. In the atheistic regimes, the hospital would be nationalized and be kept open under government management.
But there would ultimately be societal and economic collapse.
Down the road, it never ends well for the people when atheistic regimes take over.
Did you read what the healthcare in Cuba was like? There was a thread about Cuba. Someone posted that there are three tiers of healthcare. The highest level, state of the art for tourists. The close second for government officials.
The third is your typical third world hell hole conditions for everyone else. Reused medical equipment, blood and fluids ll over the floor, patients need to bring their own everything, sheets, pillows, TP, etc. Dirty, filthy, squalid conditions.
The government taking over anything guarantees its rapid demise.
No question.
People that believe that government can run things better believe that people in government are saints. They believe that people in private business are liars, thieves, and criminals but people in government are saints. Cognitive dissonance.
People inside government are subject to the same character flaws as everyone else. They do lack one attribute that everyone else does not have however. They generally lack the accountability that people in the private sector have.
They are not held accountable for their mistakes. It takes a truly horrendous mistake in government to lose a job.
This makes for a highly inefficient organization. If people are unaccountable they become lazy and careless. If you are going to keep your job and get regularly scheduled raises no matter how useless you may be or how many mistakes you make why work hard or try to improve.
This is why the VA is famously inefficient and deadly. Socialism kills.
The rapture is an invention of the 18-19th centuries.
The Gospels were written in the 18-19th centuries?
The rapture idea got started around that time.
Christians are called to carry their cross until Jesus returns.
Paul speaks of the rapture. I was unaware he wrote in the 18th and 19th centuries.
And yes, we are to carry our cross until Jesus returns for us. The rapture is His return for us
The rapture stuff started to get talked about starting in the 18th century.
Which, if I may continue the logic, is why the communists gave us obamacare! It was to do what the VA has done in some locations and what happens in all socialized med countries. The whole welfare system creates weak people socially, psychologically, physically, and spiritually.
I won’t argue with a fellow believer on something that isn’t essential for salvation, but we both have our convictions.
>>Look at history in some of the atheistic regimes of the 20th century. THAT’s your answer.<<
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Right.
They ALL failed, or are failing—dying actually.
Russia, China, Japan, and most of the countries of the EU (such as France & Germany) are literally dying of old age due to the suicide of one-child or no-child families.
The U.S. is just hanging in there, despite the pressures of liberal/progressive atheism.
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