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And I have yet to hear a credible reason why you can cherry-pick the Bible to believe only what suits you. Seems to me that kind of negates the validity of the whole thing?

We don't cherry pick - we see the whole counsel of Scripture.. We see poor and we give to the poor. You see poor and you think raise taxes.

"You see poor and you think raise taxes."

you presume to know a lot, but you have no idea what we think. let me fill you in (with what i think, anyway).

personally, i was poor at one time, teetering on the brink of homelessness. it's not something that i take lightly. when i see poor, i feel deep empathy. and yes, i give. i give anonymously (leaving grocery shopping cards and calling cards in their mailboxes, passing on clothes and shoes that my kids outgrew months and years ago to families we know, giving to canned food drives, monetary donations to charitable organizations among other things). but that's not enough. if it were, we wouldn't have such growth of poverty today. i don't see taxes as a way to help the poor, with the obvious exceptions of safety nets like medicare, food assistance, unemployment insurance compensation, and social security.

maybe others might chime in on what they think when they see poor.

"We see poor and we give to the poor."

When you see something that is working to keep that person impoverished, do you resist, or do you simply accept that the "poor will always be with you?"

For example, when you see a corporation bringing in illegal workers from another country in an effort to keep from paying an honest day's wages to their workers, do you believe that the corporation should be stopped from doing that? Or do you believe that we should simply take the illegal workers back home and do nothing to the corporation that brought them here?

I'm thinking specifically of a raid a few months ago in Postville, Iowa, not all that far from where I live and work. So far we have seen a lot of concerned raised about removing the illegal workers, but little call for any action against the company that knowingly hired them.

I know you may not be familiar with the incident, but in general who should bear more punishment in the matter; an employer who recruits illegal workers to keep local wages depressed, or a worker who responds to such recruitment and moves his family here in hopes of improving their lot?