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1

I doubt they will.

1

Anything gors in order to expectorate the orange turd, definitelly the worst optionbfor America.

2

How about leaving churches and religion out of things completely?

2

Religion has always stolen from the poor, enslaved them, treated women as nothing but breeding fodder for their coffers!

5

Corey Booker was not going to get my vote in the primary anyway; but if I had been on the fence about him, the following quote alone would disqualify him. He will only get my vote if he should be on the ticket in the general election.

“I get very frustrated when people want to try to separate this idea of the role of the church and the role of the civic space,” Booker said. “That is just not true. You could no more divide your own body. The church is not four walls. The church is the body of Christ.”

I am a citizen of the United States of America and a member of the human race. I am not in any way a part of any “body of Christ.” My values concerning the poor, that are much higher than many Christians, are not faith based—they are based in basic human decency and compassion.

Our founders wanted a separation of Church and State. This does not mean that people cannot vote according to their religious beliefs, but DO NOT make it out that we are all part of this Jesus person/church. I can agree with some of the teachings attributed to this person but there are others that I find abhorrent.

As for Buttigieg, I don’t really like the religious talk; but, I think it is important for him to call out those who think they own Christianity.

As long as we have religions and churches, and they will be around for a while to come, I want to see better versions of them.

I can agree with these statements:

“Church leaders, like politicians, have a responsibility to shift the dominant narrative people hold on poverty…”
“The church has a responsibility to educate and help change the narrative of individuals who are struggling with this issue…”
“The church must be clear to assign worth and value to members of society who are economically disadvantaged and share the good news about those who are impoverished. As we get closer to the general election, persons of the Christian faith and the church must hold political figures accountable, helping to rewrite the false narratives concerning the poor and marginalized in our country so we can love those on the margins as Jesus would.”

This said, one does not need Jesus, or a god, to have love and compassion for others. And, I want to see an absolute SEPARATION of Church and State. I want to see the day when I do not know a candidate’s religious beliefs--I want us to reach the point when the name of Jesus, or any version of a god, is never invoked in public discourse. We are a nation "of, by and for the people.” We are not a nation under the laws of any god.

3

"God must love the poor... he made so many of them"

~ Anon

3

The Poor will cease being poor, when the last Capitalist is hung with the guts of the last Priest!

2

When the poor fully realize that they have been used and abused by Republicans for the last half a century, the Republican pary will crumble. Johnson's "war on poverty" had a good intent, but the wrong approaches. We will never eliminate all poverty in the USA, but we can and should act to reduce it greatly.

2

I see that often the 'liberal' churches follow 'liberal ideology. I disagree with both sides “We’ve got to be honest about the fact that (poverty) is a moral issue.” It is a narrow ethical issue which is based on the primary moral issue which is the survivability of species including our own and future generations. Poverty comes from a lack of resources and the planet has a fixed resource base. As we continue to add more demands on that limited resource base we will experience more poverty. Another, duh, idea is that when we import millions of desperate and poor people our poverty levels will rise. There is not some god who will reward us for our anthropocentric virtues and deeds but that force which is really in control, nature, will act according to her rules. Understanding and acting to those rules is the ultimate morality.

4

I read about half of this before getting tourougly pissed. This whole article seeks to undermine the separation of church and state by invoking similarities between religious leaders and politicians.

It ignores the reality that poverty has been steadily decreasing globally, and that decrease can be attributed to technological development.

An article in the National Geographic on slavery once reported that globally slavery was decreasing. However, that statement was based on percentages. Given our huge population the actual number of people living in slavery was increasing. i suspect this is also the case for the so called reduction in poverty.
A second comment about the reduction in poverty makes me wonder, how does the increase in ones carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions, which one needs to increase their standard of living, affect the overall environment and climate change?

@JackPedigo resource scarcity is something of a myth. We farm enough food in a year to feed 10 billion people, but because a lot of it is thrown away for sanitary and wasteful reasons, we have anyone who doesn't get enough. Through technologies such as genetic engineering and sustainable farming we can increase the amount of food prouced to a match population growth.

We currently relly on fossil fuels for power, and the burning of these fuels is what drives climate change. As fossil fuels become more scarce we will be forced to transition to other methods such as solar, nuclear, and biomass. The real problem is that developing nations especially in Africa may have to utilize fossil fuels to develop, lacking the technology for nuclear, the crops for biomass, and the investment for solar.

The only true limits for our civilization are energy and heat dissipation. All other problems are surmountable.

@Happy_Killbot 25+ years of studying environmentalism and I continue to hear this. My question is how many people can this planet support? 100 billion or 50 billion or even 20 billion? Climate change is not created by one source but a myriad of sources all related to human activities. This is not a simple problem with simple solutions. Thomas Malthus was right when he said we will constantly be trying to keep up with our expanding populations. My question is simply, why? Is our species some sort of holy entity that we need to keep expanding from now on? There's a term for that, hubris.

@JackPedigo Reproduction is kind of our only purpose. Our ability to think and reason evolved to be auxiliary to this.

Based on heat dissipation I would put the number between 4 - 5 quintillion people, although I don't think they would be human as we understand it.

It may be true that poverty when looked at world wide is decreasing on average, but in recent years in the U.S. it has been on the increase.

@snytiger6 According to the US census, poverty rates are down since 2014
[census.gov]

The real concern is that the US isn't doing nearly as well as many other developed countries.
[confrontingpoverty.org]

@Happy_Killbot That is only because the government has not adjusted the poverty rate for inflation, and they only count the very bottom anymore. A true count, with the poverty rate adjusted for inflation, would really make America look bad.

@snytiger6 The more I look into this the more I find conflicting and inconsistent data. It seems every source has it's own definition and analytical methodology for quantifying poverty.

A lot of sources define poverty as something like: "the ratio of the number of people (in a given age group) whose income falls below the poverty line; taken as half the median household income of the total population"

I think that's a stupid definition because it fails to articulate what is supposed to be measured, which is inability to afford the necessities for survival. It also means that two countries with identical poverty rates could have wildly differing levels of material wealth. Statistics that use this data are meaningless unless you know the wealth distribution.

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