Socialism teaches that wealth should be held in common ownership, controlled by the state. Hence, the Democrats’ constant push to have government confiscate ever more income and power.
By contrast, the Bible teaches that God owns all things and that we’re merely stewards of His creation. When we look at each of the Ten Commandments, we see that they’re directly at odds with socialism.
You shall have no other gods before Me.
Socialism and its offshoots – communism, fascism, democratic socialism and National Socialism (Nazism) – enshrine the state above all other powers. There is no room for God, which is why socialists are in a permanent war with the church and are bent on creating a faith-free society.
You shall make no idols.
Idols are anything that takes the place of God in the hierarchy of values. Under socialism, sheer power over one’s fellow man is an idol. Another is building utopias – the unicorns of government because such perfect societies do not exist.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
When socialists take over a culture, it becomes depraved and perverse. To enforce their new immoral order, socialists openly blaspheme God and particularly Jesus Christ.
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Keep the Sabbath day holy.
Sundays are no different from any other day in socialist societies. In fact, people going to church on a Sunday are identified and often persecuted in places like communist China, where atheism is the official state religion. Even in our market-based society, materialism – a necessary precept of socialism – has pushed respect for the Sabbath to the margins.
Honor your father and your mother.
Socialism has been at war with marriage and family since the French Revolution in 1789.
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You shall not murder.
Many people misread this commandment as a broader order not to kill for any reason, which denies the moral difference between taking innocent human life and executing murderers. Socialists have long promoted abortion – the direct taking of an innocent human life – as a way to “liberate” women and men from parental responsibilities.
You shall not commit adultery.
In the 1960s, Americans became familiar with the term “free love,” but socialists have been promoting it heavily since the early 1800s. Sex outside marriage, prostitution, pornography and abortion all militate against marriage fidelity. Socialists deploy euphemisms like “choice” and “sex work” to cover the retreat from Biblical morality.
You shall not steal.
Socialism is grand theft. It uses the state to take earnings from productive people and redistribute it to create dependency and thus political power for those handing it out. Slavery is 100 percent taxation – when someone else controls the fruits of one’s labor. Socialist countries first control and then seize private property.
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You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
This is not just about telling lies in a witness situation but also about using lies to advance one’s wellbeing. Socialism is built on a mountain of lies about human nature, which is why it eventually must resort to violence.
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You shall not covet.
Socialism’s main engine is envy, stoking resentment against others who have more, even to the point of using violence to get it.
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Coveting divinity got Satan kicked out of Heaven, and it’s what he and his minions continue to peddle in a variety of forms – including pride, envy and socialism.
— Robert Knight, Townhall, Socialism Violates All Ten Commandments, July 2, 2019
What absolute nonsense. Socialism does not require common ownership (that’s communism, but I doubt the writer of the article or his devotees were in school long enough to learn the distinction), it is simply the concept that government should act for the good of the people. As most governments make some attempt at this, including the US so, to a greater or lesser extent, they are at social democracies.
I take offence at the nastiness that purports to connect socialism, albeit the writer has no idea what he is talking about, with sexual behaviours or capital crimes. Abortion is NOT murder, no matter how many times you repeat it, (I’d call out the writer’s own ideology which, I would suggest, promotes gun violence, a horrifically broken system of capital punishment, and the immoral treatment of illegal immigrants), and to say that socialism promotes adultery is insane, plain and simple. I’d argue, with much better evidence at my disposal, that it’s actually religion that produces sexual deviants, or rather provides the environment within which they can thrive.
In my experience, most of the right wing religious folks don’t understand the differences between communism and socialism. They bought into the 1950s push by the American government to vilify communism so it could garner support of the American citizens for its wars.
If I recall correctly, in several places in the New Testament Christians were exhorted to give up their possessions and follow jesus. Presumably they would have been relying on the kindness of others for food, shelter, etc., and wouldn’t have been employed. Modern evangelical Christians would consider Jesus and the apostles to be a shiftless lot of hippies wandering around for 3 years relying on others to feed them.
So here is a fellow who has written for mainstream news and long held very rigid ideas about life. He has a working brain but it is skewed by petrified beliefs that allow him to routinely ‘hate’ others with his love and glorious offer of salvation, harm to each and all, as I read it. The man demonstrates how evangelical belief systems can ruin us so that we are unable to have any balanced view on matters of human politics and insist that our extremism is God’s own ultimate balance for our world. Don’t even question it: It’s God’s Law.
It is so tiring to hear grown bipeds attack democratic socialism as if it is evil. If taxes had been instituted for health and education instead of war, then perhaps greedy extremists would be able to see beyond unbridleded profit and the rape of the earth for the shareholders, beyond their completely innane military spending.
The United States is a warmongering nation living in fear and hatred of others even as it doublespeaks about how it loves and cares. It roves over the world dispensing ‘peace’ for Halliburton and Co. It lies to its citizens about terrorism and has created the world’s most disgusting enterprise for profit, the fight against international terrorism. And my country, America’s dumb brother, Canada, tip-toes around trying to maintain some status-quo while USA degrades, dragging big dumb brother to the north along. And right at the bow of this drunken boat are evangelical extremists, waving flags and crosses. Robert Knight is a blight on decency, an assault against Reason.
Bruce, maybe you can do a blog post about the topic of how someone can be a complete idiot, and still make a respectable or sometimes ostentatious living when they are hawking evangelicalism.
The interesting thing about Robert Knight’s essay is that it doesn’t say much about either socialism or the ten commandments, rather it shows his priorities (for example: abortion isn’t even mentioned in the ten commandments nor is it a tenet of the various hues of socialism past and present.)
The whole thing could be picked apart, but what about flag and Bible worship among the right wing? Oh and that pledge of allegiance that has to be recited like a civic mantra because of “the troops” was written by a socialist. As for “God owns all things”…doesn’t that sound like collective ownership? I could go on and on.
Methinks the idiot is confusing communism with socialism.
Credit where credit is due: that’s an impressive pack of distortions and outright lies that Robert Knight has put together, there to fight that straw man.
Love the cartoon!
The anti-socialists want to put up Venezuela as the poster child on why socialism is bad. Of course, when most people here talk about socialism, it’s European style, not one country in South America. Of course, we already have upward socialism: the rich get richer.
Most of the instability Venezuela is experiencing is coming from US pressure to unseat it’s government and place a puppet there that will do what we want it to do.
We want to take all their oil, and let our corporations relieve them of all their money.
Venezuela is a tragic example of a Banana Republic, not an example of democratic socialism. Of course the United States is already socialist, the question is how much more (or less)? And what things to socialize.
I cannot stop laughing at this.
Wouldn’t the Judeo/Christian God be the most socialist being/entity/ideal that ever existed?
Was Jesus not the Ultimate Socialist?
Not especially socialist.
Jesus had some humanitarian ideas which were somewhat like socialism, but these were moral advice and philosophies.
Real, modern socialism involves laws and policies that are enforced by the government.
It would be many centuries before technology, economics and politics would make socialism something that could actually be achieved.
Knight the wingnut’s problem is not about discerning the difference between Socialism and Communism but, NOT being able to see that his religion actually PROMOTES Socialism. His real nemesis is Charles Darwin’s theory of “Natural Selection by Free Enterprise Competition.” This guy badly needs to read more than one book in his life.
He sure does. Just look at those Scandinavian countries with their low crime rates and higher standard of living — who could call THEM Communists and have a working brain ? Sounds like Knight doesn’t have much going on upstairs,lol.