?

[133724]

[WindRavenX]

1. ...

:thumbsup:

Great image.

[kid a]

17. links to posters to post in your pews...

...i love the sound of alliteration on a sunday morning...

http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/jesusposter/index.html

[BeHereNow]

30. GREAT POSTER!!! I downloaded it and plan to USE it!

Thanks for the link- that site is great.
BHN

[babylonsister]

2. Whoa. Recommend. nt

[Mnemosyne]

3. Exactly. n/t

[emilyg]

4. R

[stevedeshazer]

5. KNR

[WillyT]

6. His Mother Was Homeless Too

And she was a pregnant teen, hanging around an older man who was not the father of her child.

:shrug:

[babylonsister]

7. Thank you for broadening the

discussion, but if I think about that too long, my head might explode. ;-)

[lonestarnot]

14. Who was also homeless!

:shrug:

[Posteritatis]

8. ! (nt)

[Nostradammit]

9. !!

[cui bono]

10. k & r

[IndyOp]

11. What is the source of the image? What group? (n/t)

[kid a]

16. here

http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/archives/homeless1.html

[133724]

24. The Wattenberg Door

Where Luther Nailed his 95 theses....

[roguevalley]

27. ah, jan crouch. a favorite. :)

[helderheid]

12. Summed up perfectly.

[Richard Steele]

13. K&R

[GeorgeGist]

15. I don't

[mistertrickster]

18. Did Jesus shoot heroin and rob people?

Conservatives feel that rich people are inherently better than the poor. We all agree that is wrong.

Liberals however seem to take the converse as true: that the poor are somehow more noble than everybody else.

Even Saul Alinsky has pointed out that they aren't.

Some homeless people have endured hardship because of unimaginable events--abuse, mental illness, bad luck. Others are where they are because they're parasites on society.

Same as everybody else. Romanticizing the poor is in itself a way of keeping them at arm's length and justifying inaction.

*****

http://www.kansas.com/news/updates/story/144897.html

Amanda Wallace and Chris Webster were at the park at 3228 N. Oliver with their children on that Saturday afternoon when they heard a woman scream for help.

She had been assaulted by a stranger who demanded money. While Wallace offered comfort to the 21-year-old woman and her 1-year-old child, Webster chased the suspect, who was fleeing the park on a bicycle.

Webster pursued the suspect for more than a mile, out of the park and into an adjoining neighborhood, before he lost sight of him. But police recognized the description of the bicycle provided by Webster as one he had seen at the nearby Union Rescue Mission.

When officers went to the mission, they learned that a 48-year-old man had told others he had just tried to rob someone. He was arrested and awaits trial in connection with the case.

http://www.kansas.com/213/story/143598.html

Homeless man at library arrested on many charges
BY STAN FINGER
The Wichita Eagle
A homeless man was subdued and arrested for a series of offenses at the Central Library on Tuesday afternoon, Wichita police said.

The incident began at about 3:20 p.m. when a library patron reported that a man had been touching himself inappropriately in the back aisles of the building's ground floor, Lt. Jeff Weible said.

A librarian and security officer confronted the 58-year-old man, who became irate. When the librarian took him by the elbow to escort him from the building at 233 S. Main, Weible said, the man reached behind his back.

"The librarian thought he was going to get punched," Weible said.

*****

On edit-- you may think it mean-spirited to point out the dead obvious, that sometime homeless people commit crimes and hurt people. But I think it's important that we don't allow our beliefs to become a DOGMA. Nothing should be taken on faith. Nothing should be believed without evidence and weighing consequences.

Otherwise, we just become the flip side to the reich-wing's "free enterprise is always good" and "rich people are rich because they're more productive" quasi-religon . . .

[kid a]

19. no, but homeless represtent a fraction of street crime and many have mental disorders

I'm a liberal and i don't hold homeless people to be noble, just in need of help.

"To summarize the MMSE data, in most studies of homeless adults those sampled exhibit high rates of generalized cognitive impairment."

Full article: http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/full/97/8/375

Also, those crimes the homeless commit are generally less serious and petty:



http://psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/39/1/46

****
Criminal Activity Among the Homeless: A Study of Arrests in Baltimore
Pamela J. Fischer Ph.D.1

1 Johns Hopkins University, 624 North Broadway, Baltimore, Maryland 21205

To illuminate the role of criminal activity among the homeless, particularly the homeless mentally ill, the author compared 634 arrests of homeless persons with 50,524 arrests in the general population that were made in Baltimore in 1983. Significant differences were found in the demographic characteristics of the two groups of arrested persons and in the types of offenses prompting the arrests. Among the homeless, those arrested were more likely to be male, white, and over age 45 and to have committed trivial, victimless crimes. Evidence suggests that ostensibly serious offenses such as assault, larceny, and burglary charged to homeless persons tended to involve petty thievery, entry into vacant buildings, and other acts aimed at maintaining subsistence in the absence of housing.

Note:

The assistance of the Baltimore Police Department is acknowledged with gratitude. Particular appreciation is owed to former commissioner Bishop L. Robinson, Colonel Michael Zotos, Major Peter Shaulis, Gail Hall, Sergeant Emory Starry, Captain John Reintzell, and Lieutenant Jeffrey Wright.

[Morereason]

21. Sure, there are now gangs amongst the homeless, and they stalk the most vulnerable

But we need to place them in jail, not as an excuse to allow ourselves to lose our compassion. I have conservative aquaintences who are "Christian" but I watched them one day purposely avoid a sleeping homeless man with loathing in their faces. The fear thing is just an excuse for lack of concern for others.
The crime amongst the homeless is mostly a result of allowing the problem to fester. Stereotyping them as criminals does not help the issue.

[mistertrickster]

26. Stereotyping them as anything is exactly what my post was all about.

The original post seems to be stereotyping them as Jesus among us.

And, yes, I am familiar with the Biblical injunction that 'what ye do for the least these, you do for me.'

Face it, a lot of homeless guys take every penny they get, buy cheap wine, and drink it as fast as they can. If they have enough money, they drink for as long as possible. Not all but many. WWJD? I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure helping drunks stay drunk is not part of the plan for helping somebody.

[Morereason]

35. You are the one stereotyping friend. You have bought the RW meme that they are lazy drunkards

Sure, social ills will be overrepresented in the homeless... after all, if you have serious issues and can't maintain you can easily end up in the streets. There are a lot of ill people, depressed people, emotionally ill people, in the homeless population. I mean that is a given. Are you old enough to remember what started the overall trend? It was when Reagan closed down the sanitariums and sent the mentally ill out into the streets.

[Wednesdays]

25. Do you have any statistics?

Do you have statistics on what percentage of crimes, particularly violent crimes, are committed by homeless people? Next, can anyone cite statistics on what percentage of the U.S. is homeless? I heard that the majority of the homeless is children. If that's true, then egads! we have an epidemic of children running around shooting heroin and robbing people!

[Fleshdancer]

33. the recent articles I've read regarding the homeless and crime....

were about bored asshole teenagers taking baseball bats to people living on the streets. :(

[fightthegoodfightnow]

32. Talk about Dogma..........You're Putting All that on the Homeless

............because you think what...........we should ignore them?

Nice.

[mistertrickster]

40. Yup, I'm a right winger who thinks we should ignore them and let them die.

That's just what I said . . . oops, except I didn't say that at all.

I just said that there are a range of different types of people who become homeless. The fact is that some people are homeless because of bad, self-destructive choices. We should still try to help them. Our government should do more to help them.

But making them into Jesus is not a rational start to helping them.

[fightthegoodfightnow]

41. Make Me Barf

Make them into Jesus?

My guess is you would not recognize Jesus if he looked you straight in your eye and asked you for a dime.

You'd no doubt just smirk at him and say he made 'bad, self-destructive choices" and he should move on.

[Gonnuts]

20. How can you ...

worship an imaginary spirit/man/god in the sky and than have anyone take anything you take seriously?

Maybe if you used your Sundays more productively we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today.

[OwnedByFerrets]

22. .....

:thumbsup:

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

28. How would you suggest we use our Sundays?

I just finished cleaning a clinic for a non-profit health group. They help folks stay healthy first and ask for payments later. The doc in charge donates her services, and barely gets by financially. But then she's motivated by something that is hardly imaginary and which is not "in the sky" but which dwells within the heart.

[UrbScotty]

37. There are a lot of people who worship Jesus whom I’m sure you take seriously.

It’s bad enough those on the ‘right’ have a desire to malign Christianity by telling us that somehow, those who don’t believe in what they say will go to hell. They don’t show respect for those who don’t adhere to their strict beliefs.

I've had enough of people bashing others based on what they believe. If you don't believe Jesus ever existed, fine; just don't stoop to the fundies' level.

[LanternWaste]

39. You don't expect anyone to take the words of...

You don't expect anyone to take the words of John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter or Martin Luther King seriously?

:shrug:

[valerief]

23. The Hindis made a religion out of different classes of people. When

you're born dirt (the Outcast caste that does all the manual labor), you stay dirt and will never be worth more than dirt. When you're born rich, you stay rich and will never be worth less. Makes me wonder why BushCo isn't Hindi.

[DRoseDARs]

31. lol "Hindi" is the language, not the people or the religion; "Hindu" is the word you want.

You goober. ;) :P

[C_U_L8R]

29. How can you worship the prince of peace on sunday

and support a war on monday?

[ladym55]

34. Wow

Powerful image.

Today's Christians need to study their New Testament and get past that verse in Leviticus that seems to hang them up.

[HannibalBarca]

36. Isnt it interesting

how Jesus is always portrayed as a bearded caucasian. I'm not sure I would classify it as racism but for me it adds to the abundance of doubt that religion engenders in me, that it functions more as a security blanket than as anything remotely accurate or true.

[Maestro]

38. True

He looked more like a modern Palestinian than anything else, but probably about 5'6" or so as people were generally shorter back then.