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Just caring for each other

Our local public broadcasting station conducted a nonsense poll:
something like, "What do you think we should do about health care?"

It wasn't really a poll.  It was just a way to get some quotes
to fill time on the air, and perhaps to give the radio host an idea
he or she could not come up with alone. 

One caller said she did not think Congress should pass any
health care bill, at all; that our national budget was already
too far out of balance.  She did not suggest what to do about
the thirty or forty or fifty million people who have no health care.
She also did not suggest that she would give up her own
health care to help balance the budget.  "I'm OK.  You're OK,
but I have health care and you don't.  Maybe someday."

Jeff, at coffee, said he did not understand how religious people
can reconcile their religion with the obvious selfishness
they often show; for instance, that millions of people have no
health care, or the ease with which they advocate another war.

I said that I had spent time trying to distill the essence of
Christianity, leaving aside the furniture of ancient worldviews,
and ignoring trivial cultural and ethnic differences, and that
it seemed to me that it boiled down to something like,
"We should care for each other".  You know, "Love your
neighbor, care for the poor", and all that. 

Religions don't build roads and sewer lines.  They don't
pay for police and fire and national protection.  A religion
such as Christianity encourage us to care for each other. 

Maybe even health care for each other.  And food, and
a job and education.  A warm coat.  A warm place to live.

Religion should not be about the Pope's red slippers,
or keeping the clergy pure and unstained from gay people.
It should not be about regulating each other's bedroom habits,
or insisting that we have to think about the universe just as
Moses or Mohammed or Paul of Antioch understood it.

Just caring for each other, as in health care, for example.

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