Quotes Tagged "the-poor"

And the priests looked down into the pit of injustice and they turned their faces away and said, 'Our kingdom is not as the kingdom of this world. Our life on earth is but a pilgrimage. The soul lives on humility and patience,' at the same time screwing the poor from their last centime. They settled down among their treasures and ate and drank with princes and to the starving they said, 'Suffer. Suffer as he suffered on the cross for it is the will of God.' And anyone believes what they hear over and over again, so the poor instead of bread made do with a picture of the bleeding, scourged, and nailed-up Christ and prayed to that image of their helplessness. And the priests said, 'Raise your hands to heaven and bend your knees and bear your suffering without complaint. Pray for those that torture you, for prayer and blessing are the only stairways which you can climb to paradise.' And so they chained down the poor in their ignorance so that they wouldn't stand up and fight their bosses who ruled in the name of the lie of divine right.
— Peter Weiss The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade
Tags: the-rich, the-poor, suffering, religion, power, poverty, manipulation, injustice, ignorance, hypocrisy, heaven, god, divine-right, class, christ
The stunning problem with mindset is sometimes the rich are cheap while the poor are expensive.
Tags: the-rich, the-poor, success-driven-mentality, poverty-mentality, mindset-and-living, mentality, luxury-life-style, inspiration, courage
All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover Him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting His way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology. Within the overarching theme of self-donation the theme of solidarity must be fully affirmed, for it underlines rightly the partiality of divine compassion towards the ‘harassed and helpless’.
— Miroslav Volf Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity
Tags: theology, the-poor, suffering, spirituality, solidarity, social-ethics, religion, ethics, christianity