Jan: In reference to your posting at the end...
The homeless are an interesting lot. I "work" with them in two ways.
First, I help run a food pantry that feeds many of these people in our
town. I can assure you that feeding them does **NOT** get them to work
or get them into family homes. Nor have I seen any evidence whatsoever
that feeding them in any way increases their likelihood of becoming more
responsible. Second, my husband and I both run a private practice in
clinical psychology. Often throughout the year the police will bring
"street people" to us for evaluation. As unpopular as it is to say in
America today, it is very definitely my opinion, based upon discussions
**with the homeless people** that they prefer to NOT be in shelters or
family homes. You may not like that, you may even dispute that, but my
suggestion is if you really have a problem with homelessness, you might
want to dedicate your next two-week vacation to actually living on the
streets with these people. Ask them...don't ask me. Ask them while you
are getting to know them if they want shelters and family homes. You
may be surprised by the answer.
Lucy
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Darwinism/Compassion]
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 11:13:04 -0500
From: Jan de Koning <jan@dekoning.ca>
To: asa@calvin.edu
At 09:18 AM 21/02/02 -0600, Lucy Masters wrote:
>Lucy responds:
>
>I agree that we are to "take care of the poor." Where I disagree is in
>the action. We are **NOT** taking care of the poor when we increase their
>ranks. To me, "taking care of the poor" would involve liberating them
>from their dependence, teaching them (as the Chinese say) to fish - not
>giving them fish. Yes - Jesus did give them fish rather than teaching
>them to fish, but he didn't exactly become a welfare agency either. These
>were more like sporadic episodes.
>
>So again, I must say that working toward a world in which humans are
>healthy and living within the boundaries of their raw materials is a good
>thing. It is certainly the way "nature" would have it, and I believe God
>created all the systems in nature.
I don't think that you know what to do about the people living on the
streets of big cities. I see them regularly. When I was living in an
inner city in Europe I saw a lot of things that were very wrong, but I did
not see so many people living on the streets in far below zero (Celsius)
level. Our governments are concerned about The Economy but don't seem to
care about these people. Also, we in N.America are using far more than our
share of the available raw materials, by our power to buy things. I do
not know how to change these things, as long as we elect governments who
only care about The Economy.
In other words we don't live within the boundaries of OUR raw materials,
but use a good bit of the materials of other countries.
Jan de Koning
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