(hat tip to Hieronymous Bosch XIV for the image)Mat 6:24-33 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.This is the Word of God. Amen.
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
For after all these things do the Gentiles seek: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
The right wing Mammon-addicted economic royalists and their co-dependent Religious Right have long had a way of turning economic issues into "moral values." Take welfare, for example: it's immoral, because God talks about labor from the sweat of our brow as our birthright from Adam. Heaven forbid we should assist someone in dire need!
Or, a man lives and struggles (don't get me started!) all his life, and at the end of his days, as his body is lowered to its final rest, the taxman stands graveside, plundering his miserable earnings eked out across his life...assuming he stowed away more than $5 million dollars, minimum.
Most of that money having been untaxed during his lifetime, I should add.
The truly cynical aspect of all this is that, in an attempt to lure suckers for tax cuts like moths to a flame, or more appropriately, addicts to a crack mountain, the Republicans have foisted upon their bases, the numbnuts who don't read the newspapers and the others who read the Bible only, to believe that this makes sense: giving more money to the rich, because one day, "you too may be this wealthy."
I was listening to the radio this week and heard a commercial for a seminar on how, you too can avoid the estate tax! Just a few hundred dollars is all you need to learn the secrets the really rich use to avoid paying any estate tax at all! GRATs! Family LLCs! Generation skipping trusts!
And I wondered how many people who are worth over $5 million dollars don't already have an estate plan--...oh!
Right. This isn't about them. This is about the morons who will never, until their death beds, get that $5 million is a LOT of money, and they never even achieved 20% of it...and they're now being ripped off by the bottom feeders who see the scam the Republicans pulled off and want a piece.
But Paris Hilton gets a pass because of this cynical abuse of the American greed. When she garners her inheritance, the only people who will see any portion of it are a couple of drug lords in Colombia, her boy toys, and now, the LA Sheriff's Department.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The judge who sent Paris Hilton to jail called a hearing for Friday on why the hotel heiress was released early and placed under house arrest in a move swiftly challenged by prosecutors and local politicians.Forget about the fact that she's famous merely for being famous. Forget about the fact that she's fabulously wealthy in mammon. Forget about the fact that her soul is about as deep as the gene pool at a hillbilly family reunion, Uncle Dad.
Hilton, 26, a symbol of privilege and the excess of American celebrity culture, was released by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for unspecified health reasons on Thursday after serving just three full days of her original 45-day sentence.
Hilton, whose term the sheriff already had reduced to 23 days citing state sentencing guidelines, was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet to track her movements and ordered confined to her lavish home in the Hollywood Hills house for the next 40 days.
Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said her "reassignment" from an 8-by-12-foot cell to house arrest was carried out after "extensive consultations" with doctors at the jail and others, including the sentencing judge.
But a court spokesman said the decision was made without the approval of Judge Michael Sauer, who later set a hearing on a request by prosecutors to send Hilton back to jail for the remainder of her sentence.
Let's focus on what she truly represents: idle wealth creating nothing in this country but headlines and tabloids.
Jesus promised us that God would take care of us. Who cares if we have no clothes, no food, no shelter? If we believe, God will provide what we need. Let's face facts though: at some point, man was making enough mammon to be able to help his fellow man.
Maybe He said, "OK, I can slack off making rainment appear out of thin air. They seem to have things under control there."
At some point, He looked down at the bountiful harvests that man was growing and said, "You know what? They seem to have this feeding thing knocked out, as well. *Whew* Because it was getting hard making manna drip from the sky!"
At some point, He saw our builders and engineers making these massive houses and structures like churches, and God said, "OK, now, I guess I can stop strewing branches and reeds on the ground! Well, maybe not. Other animals use them. But these men got it going on!"
Don't you think He might, might, get a little miffed at the creation by our society of a Paris Hilton, who wastes our time, our money, and His resources with her antics, particularly since they are validated and by extension endorsed by our inane fascination with her lunacies, but moreover, our financial support by our tax code?
I'm thinking Jesus' job gets harder and harder the more and more Republicans get elected.
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