Logically this makes sense. But there are actually some basic problems with it.

In physics (as a metaphor) I could explain it as the entropy problem: no matter what we do to increase how organized and coherent things are, entropy (useless disorganization) of the universe always increases. So we can know as a general principle that we can never make things universally better everywhere – the chaos will only be displaced to elsewhere.

Now to the psychology. Most of our present problems are caused by errors in group reasoning and coordination. Look at politics – it’s a battle to get people to make a binary decision and it’s usually between the builder (Democrat) and the demolition guy (Republican) – plainly obvious on one level, but we have this whole media apparatus trying to convince people that destruction is the true creation.

Making complex decisions is hard enough for individuals, because understanding consequences often requires multiple steps of reasoning and most people want to stop at one. “If I drink this milkshake, it will be delicious” is pretty easy logic but may not ONLY lead to the good outcome. But who wants to add “unnecessary” logic? If I drink this milkshake, it will be delicious, and then what? Will the dairy disrupt my gut functioning? Will the sugar disrupt my metabolism for hours? Will the surplus energy of the drink be converted to fat and add to my weight, causing other problems later? Will it contribute to a future heart attack?

Nobody wants to think about all of that and none of it is on the billboard saying “The shamrock shake is back!”

It’s even worse for politics where the decision or policy that feels pleasing on the surface level – cut a tax, end a program that benefits someone I don’t care about, go to war, drill more oil – often has far reaching consequences that are very hard to understand. Externalities, unintended consequences, perverse incentives, and often even intentional consequences that people don’t talk about. People don’t WANT to think all this through.

So yes, people could in theory do better through democratic means. But getting them to actually do so is no trivial task.

Wrote another essay… probably too long for where I meant to put it. Haven’t edited much yet either. Thoughts? (On rent seeking)

“Rent seeking“ is essentially the tendency in a capitalist economy for all economic activity to be manipulated to create passive income for investors. This is not an automatic or natural process, but it does seem to be an inevitable consequence of the very idea of capital. Basically the nature of capitalists (as in, owners of capital) is to manipulate their property interest and the processes associated with it in order to maximize their income and minimize the work required of them. Obviously the easy example of this is literal rent, such as in real estate, and we see this in entities who provide no real service other than access to physical space and charge enormous premiums. Most working people understand that landlords can be and usually are parasites on the working class, but I don’t think people realize that they are parasites on businesses as well. When you hear them complain about $15 an hour for flipping burgers, isn’t it odd that they aren’t also complaining about $15,000 a month for rent at every Wendy’s? Yet if you look at the budget of just about any retail business, rent is usually the largest line item, which is why one of the major advantages of the largest businesses is the ability to make massive investments in real estate. The greatest cost saving measure that allowed Walmart to become a dominant player was not low wages, but having the capital to purchase all of their own land and therefore get out of paying a tremendous percentage of their revenues to landlords as rent. That’s why most Walmarts are in suburbs and almost none are in established downtowns. 

But again, rent seeking is inherent to all aspects of the economy, not just real estate. Another easy example is intellectual property licensing. Look at pharmaceuticals. These are products that are inexpensive and relatively simple to physically produce, but the manufacturers who own the patents to those chemicals charge literally whatever they feel they can get away with, often times making life itself unaffordable for the working poor. “Rent“ in this case is the manufacturer continuing to extract additional profit from something that they own without contributing additional labor or innovation. And like real estate rent, they will charge whatever they can get away with without any rational connection whatsoever to the cost involved in developing the property. 

The frustrating aspect of rent seeking is that it doesn’t just affect prices, it affects the tangible quality of products and services as well. The popular idea of planned obsolescence is itself a form of rent seeking; rather than provide the best quality product that they can at a reasonable price, manufacturers and merchants of products instead engineer the absolute minimum quality and durability that they can get away with in order to get away with selling the same product repeatedly. Rent seeking also describes the tendency of companies to intentionally hold back features and improvements in order to force users to buy incremental products year after year, most popular in consumer electronics, but also in things like vehicles. 

The one rent seeking trend that has me personally the most annoyed is cloud computing. The cloud computing paradigm is basically the idea of removing functionality from local devices and software and instead moving it to a remote server. Companies like Apple, Google, etc. offer insincere rationalizations claiming that this paradigm is somehow good for the consumer, but it’s generally not – in the era of pocket supercomputers, there’s no real reason to revisit the 1950s-1970s paradigm of centralized mainframe computing, except that doing so allows the capitalists to retain control and charge rent day after day, as opposed to allowing consumers to use the full power of the devices they’ve paid for. In fact, the “cloud” services are usually worse than what could be done locally – less reliable due to internet connections being inconsistent, slower because of communication lag, less secure, less reliable, and of course, most importantly, more expensive. Moving computing tasks to the cloud allows capital to not only convert what could be a one-time purchase to a continuing revenue stream, it also allows them to pilfer consumer data to sell for additional revenue. Notably, when you look at software companies like Adobe and Microsoft who have altogether removed the option to purchase lifetime licenses in favor of recurring subscriptions, the quality of the software either tangibly declines or visibly slows the pace of improvement – Adobe Acrobat Pro has not added meaningful features in decades, despite going from a one-time purchase sometimes as low as $99, to a subscription model with a minimum price of $180 a year, and Microsoft Office… well, in the nineties it was a lifetime license released every two or three years with new features, but since it became Office 365 coming up on a decade ago, I honestly cannot name a single useful feature that has been added, besides imposing cloud requirements on features that used to work offline and making it harder than before to work with files. All of this is rent seeking – making moves in the structure of products and services to minimize the value delivered and the cost expended while maximizing the profit extracted from consumers. 

Rent seeking is responsible for many of our economic problems today, across many industries. Basically all of the problems in healthcare; drug prices, hospital fees, the whole idea of medical debt, and of course every aspect of the idea of health insurance, is all rent seeking – structural changes to how goods and services are delivered and billed in order to maximize profit extracted without increasing services provided. Rent seeking is also responsible for most government inefficiency, as capitalists obtain contracts to provide government services, such as Medicaid and Medicare administration, food stamp distribution, student loan servicing, even jails and prisons, and apply rent seeking behaviors to maximize the revenue extracted while minimizing the labor expended providing services. In our society, massive swaths of government services are administered by private contractors, and each and every one of those contractors, without exception, is engaged in rent seeking behaviors that increase costs and lower quality of service. 

Rent seeking is a fundamental trait of capitalism. There really isn’t any way to structurally eliminate it while preserving the basic idea of the means of production being owned by people other than the laborers themselves. Any time you see the phrase “passive income” you are hearing about rent seeking behavior portrayed as a virtue. 

I have tried not to move my personal views all the way to full communism. There are structural problems with institutional communism as well, and in basically every large-scale attempt at it, rent seeking behavior has still come in and perverted the system. Rent seeking, it turns out, is embedded in human nature even apart from any given economic system. It caused problems in the Soviet Union and in other nominally socialist countries, with government agents taking the place of capitalists in engaging in the rent seeking behaviors. North Korea and Russia exemplify government agents (dictators) carrying out the most extreme forms of rent seeking, finding ways to exploit literally the entire society for personal profit. 

More research can be done, sure, but as I see it the best way to ameliorate the effects of rent seeking – which likely can never be truly eliminated – is with distributed ownership of resources. This means small businesses owned at least in large part by actual workers, and more importantly profits shared directly among workers, not captured by owners. Unions having a greater say in all company policies, not just aspects traditionally considered labor issues. There will still be rent seeking and various forms of corruption, but by engaging democratic labor principles throughout the economy, it can be better controlled and managed. Government action has never been effective at controlling rent seeking because of the tendency of rent seeking entities to seek and gain control of the government. 

Right now, we are very much within late stage capitalism. Capital has gotten very good at capturing all economic activity. Whenever a new business activity comes along and threatens to disrupt things, capitalists buy it out. Basically the entire software industry is premised on the idea that, regardless of what product you are creating, the plan from day one is for the product to be sold to capital for rent to be maximized as soon as the product is proven. Look at Wordle – a disruptive startup piece of software, just a game, that as soon as it was well known was bought by capital and monetized for data harvesting and subscription sales. Look at dating apps – every app that was ever successful has been modified to be less effective, intentionally, in order to maximize revenue (by keeping users on the platform longer spending more money, as opposed to quickly finding a partner and moving on). All social media platforms. There’s no shortage at all of examples of how rent seeking destroys everything that starts off decent. 

I am not an economist, just as I say a simple country lawyer. But these issues are fairly obvious to anyone who looks at them. Solutions are not obvious and basically every economist since even before Marx has worked on the issue in one way or another – Marx and Hegel striving to overcome or solve the issue, but many others simply working on how to make rent seeking more sustainable in order to prevent the revolutions that Marx and the like have all concluded are the inevitable result of end stage capitalism. And that’s where we are. The millennial  and Z generations have had our economic opportunities stripped away from us. Wealth is more concentrated today than ever before, and working age people today have less wealth, less real estate, fewer small businesses, and less disposable income than any generation since the advent of modern social structures. Our forebears in the labor movement had made great progress on these issues, raising wages for workers and forcing capitalists to allow inroads for social mobility, but all of that is basically gone now through regulatory capture and propaganda-driven politics. Capital isn’t winning, it has fully won. Our parents, who benefited from the labor movement more than any generation, have abandoned the movement in favor of the “I got mine” mentality that Fox and others have marketed to them as virtue. 

So where do we go? Is there a pathway forward away from a dystopian return to feudalism and slavery? I am not sure there is. But I don’t think we are all going to agree to give up without a fight. I am troubled by the fact that so many of us seem to understand the problem and so few have any workable ideas at all for how to fix it. I would really like to see a peaceful solution to this issue, but I cannot yet figure one out. And there never will be a simple solution. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to somehow wrest control of the government from capital and impose taxes on capital to start attacking its concentration. We need various kinds of wealth taxes – Warren’s idea of skimming a percentage off of all large wealth pools is a good start, protecting and increasing inheritance taxes and making it harder to dodge them with creative legal structuring is necessary, and restructuring the tax code to start taxing forms of wealth accumulation that are currently not taxed at all. I think that using the structure of government and taxation to forcibly interrupt the concentration of wealth is really the ONLY way to prevent the inevitability of violent mass uprisings and outright collapse of society. I just worry that people will give up and acquiesce to the role of being cogs in an economic machine that benefits only a few elites. 

If you’ve been following my posts lately, you’ve seen me talk a bit about themes of manipulation and the neuroscience of arousal and anxiety. The neuroscience knowledge underpinning these ideas has come to me from several sources, with a prominent one being the book “Behave” by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky goes through the evidence gathered from FMRI studies and other brain imaging techniques by which the activity of the brain has now been pretty well mapped. We do not have the technology to read the actual content of neuron impulses, but what we can do is we can measure what areas of the brain are active and when, and correlate that to behavioral and cognitive outputs. Some of these studies consist of things like showing someone an image or playing a sound and measuring what part of the brain lights up. Others consist of measuring nerve impulses and response times. Studies along this line of inquiry are what led me a long time ago to reject the idea of strong free will.

Consider this experiment: the subject is stimulated with a hot touch (“hand on a stove”) and the activation of nerves and brain centers is measured. The objective measurements show that their physical response, pulling their hand away from the threatening object, happens physically before the nerve signal has had time to reach the brain. But when interviewed, the subject insists that they made a conscious choice to move their hand. This is a study that you could replicate at home if you wanted to; it’s an objective, irrefutable truth, that in at least some clear cut situations, human beings behave without conscious input and then after the fact insist that they decided consciously. This is essentially my baseline experimental input to reject the idea of strong free will, which is a phrase I used to refer to the idea that human beings act entirely out of voluntary choice and therefore can control their own behavior, and by extension are personally and morally responsible for their life outcomes. Because we often act before we are consciously aware of what we are doing, this worldview cannot be true.

So then we go deeper. Sapolsky’s book primarily focuses on the circumstances that stimulate activation of the amygdala and deactivation of the frontal cortex. What you need to know about these two brain structures is that the frontal cortex is essentially the center of both reason and empathy, and the amygdala is the “lizard brain” that acts impulsively and generally just unconsciously reacts to stimuli. You don’t think with your amygdala, it is where you act without thinking. But also, the amygdala sends signals to the frontal cortex that influence it in turn. Activation of the amygdala is essentially responsible for all of our worst behaviors. Racism, sexism, and other latent biases all come through the amygdala. This is part of why you can’t just decide not to be racist, incidentally, but that’s another chapter. The amygdala leads us to make impulsive decisions, to behave emotionally rather than rationally. And it turns out that to most corporations, all of that makes us better customers. And that idea is where I basically lose touch with society.

I have come to realize that social media is designed around the premise that an activated amygdala makes a person a better consumer of advertising. This can be phrased another way: A person who is in a state of mental anxiety and distress, aka a bad mood, is a better customer for social media platforms. This isn’t a secret; even Google won’t hide from you the actual published news articles revealing that indeed, Facebook was caught in the act of and even openly admitted to running experiments on users to stimulate a state of anxiety. This is at the core of their algorithms that determine what content you see as you scroll, and who sees the content that you post and when. And I have come to realize that this is now in all social media and essentially every social app or platform that we interact with. Ultimately, it’s about competing interests. You and the company do not have aligned interests, which is another way of saying that you don’t both want the same thing. When you go onto a social media platform, you want to get updates on the lives of your friends, be entertained, and share the stories and experiences of your life with others. But that is not ultimately what the owners of the platform want. What they want is to get other businesses to happily give them lots of money for ads, and having been on that side of things as well, I can lend you some surprising insights. First off, most ads are “pay per contact” so Facebook is heavily invested in not just showing you the ad but getting you to click on it. What makes a person more likely to click on an ad? My advertising consultant told me, back around 2019, that the best keywords to use to get clicks on your ads aren’t anything to do with the content of your ads themselves or the attributes of your particular target customer – in my case, people who were out of work and had a disability – but instead terms like “hillary clinton” and “donald trump” that simply correlated with people who tended to interact with ads more. Why is that? It’s because those topics of discussion provoke anxiety. When you go on Facebook or Reddit or TikTok to discuss politics, or labor issues, or the various ways you’ve been mistreated, you are yourself entering a state of heightened anxiety, and you are also stimulating anxiety in the people interacting with your posts. Why does the algorithm promote this content, when so much of it is vocally against their interests? The answer is because regardless of the content of the posts and comments, often stuff decrying the very problems these companies are amplifying, those posts are effective at stimulating a toxic state of mind that makes people more receptive to advertising. And they know, because they have the data that tells them that when people interact with a particular user on a group page, they become statistically more likely to click ads within the next few minutes. So, the algorithm works to promote content from individuals who provoke anxiety in others, and invites trolls and bullies to be the first to comment on posts.

This is of course the exact opposite of what you as a user want. When I go on a Facebook group, it’s often with the goal of finding an answer to an obscure question, in hopes that the large size of the group will help me connect with the obscure expert. But what happens instead is that the algorithm shows my post not to the expert who has a track record of calmly and politely explaining the relevant ideas, but instead to a bombastic bully who has no meaningful advice to offer, because the platform’s data has shown the bully does a good job of pushing other users into a mental state where they are more receptive to ads. So the parts of the experience that we as users and the mental health community feel are the worst, are actually the parts that the companies themselves are most interested in. The algorithm is directly working against your goals, directly trying to thwart you from having a positive experience, and ultimately actively and intentionally set up to harm you.

It turns out, though, that it’s not just Facebook. It’s basically any piece of software where this paradigm could possibly be applied. So games, especially mobile games, have gone from being stress relievers to little devices programmed to actually increase your stress, because that makes you more impulsive and more likely to either click the ad (they are all pay per click) or to engage in some microtransaction. And it really is absolutely everywhere on your phone; damn near every app you can get these days has ads, microtransactions, or both. The whole industry rapidly adopted that, and if you talk to individual workers at these companies, most of them will say we have to because the rest of the industry is already doing it. Where else? Search engines. retailers like Amazon, and now even in-person retailers are getting in on it as well, with a recent major newspaper article acknowledging that retailers have intentionally abandoned the old paradigm of making stores welcoming and inviting to stimulate “lingering” and impulse buys from boredom and comfort, in favor of the online data-driven paradigm of triggering anxiety and utilizing the worst parts of behavioral neuroscience to make us better customers, and worse consumers from the individual standpoint. It is absolutely everywhere.

This leaves me in a pretty uncomfortable position. What can be done about this? Many people, most people really, just accept it. They say there’s nothing to be done and it just is the way of the world, so might as well embrace it and just try to get your piece of it while you can. And I can’t do that. But what do I do instead? There’s no way for me to get the message out. Ironically, the platforms don’t mind me talking about it for one simple reason: because by talking about it, I’m doing what they want and getting people in a heightened state of anxiety. Talking about it doesn’t fix it, not directly, because for most people there is no accessible alternative. We are on these platforms because we don’t know of anywhere else to go. How are you going to stop using Google? There aren’t a lot of good alternatives. DuckDuckGo may not do as much cookie tracking, but it’s still driven by a search algorithm that is easily manipulated by marketers. You aren’t going to get meaningfully better results there than on Google; on both you will still get pages and pages of low quality chaff before you see any real quality content. And quitting any of these things is just like quitting any other addiction, except that also everyone around you is still deeply addicted and will actively try to engage FOMO to lure you back. The toxic establishments are everywhere and easy to find with prominent locations and giant signs along every road, while the less toxic alternatives are fewer and harder to find, and for the most part, reluctantly or not, engaging the same techniques on that same logic of “if we don’t do it our competitors will beat us.” And so it gets harder and harder every day to find mentally safe places to engage in basic commerce and the logistics of daily life, as well as to keep in touch with others and to stay entertained. It’s basically everywhere, pervading every corner of western civilization, in our pockets and hands, on the devices I am using to compose this thought.

I’m just not sure what to do with this information besides Quixotically try my best to share it, and I know ultimately that I won’t ever win.

I made my usual snarky comments, then got this in response:

Here is my reply:

Sorry for the slow response, as is typical in Facebook “argument” I am being tasked to reply to a lazy meme with detailed research.  Oddly, a cursory Google search didn’t give me a lazy solution, because it seems few sincere Christians have previously endeavored to apply scripture to modern politics – only the insincere ones who reject Christ’s true teachings in favor of the Evangelical heresy.  

Anyway, the first thing is that Biden, unlike Trump, actually knows the Bible.  Here’s an article about Biden actually quoting scripture from memory, something Trump can’t do.  https://religionnews.com/2020/08/06/biden-quotes-bible-at-black-church-meeting-while-trump-says-his-rival-is-against-god/  While Trump loves doing photo ops with closed Bibles, willing to engage in violence against American citizens to make that happen, there’s no indication he’s ever actually opened a Bible – he wasn’t able to name a favorite verse, or book for that matter.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERUngQUCsyE 

Trump has also famously proclaimed that he doesn’t need God’s forgiveness, which is clear blasphemy and wholesale rejection of Christianity.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKLVIm7Q0IQ so in light of that, I’m pretty confused how any Christian could vote for Trump over a confirmed Catholic who quotes the Bible at campaign events.  Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”  Trump made it very clear that he is not saved by Jesus – he thinks he’s good enough on his own.  

But anyway, to what you asked for.  Let’s begin with 1 Timothy 2:1-2.  “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”  So, based on that, you should vote for the candidate who lives a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.  That’s Biden, not Trump.  

Proverbs 29:2, “When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan.”  So, don’t vote for a wicked man – an adulterer who blasphemes God (see above) and is cruel to immigrants.  

Speaking of immigration, here are 22 verses on why you should reject Trump’s immigration policy if you are in fact a Christian (a claim I am less and less convinced of) https://sojo.net/22-bible-verses-welcoming-immigrants

Leviticus 19:34 “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

Leviticus 27:19 ‘Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.’

Matthew 25:37-45 

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

On “America First” we have Acts 10:34 – America is not special to God, and it is heresy to put it before other nations.  “Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”

The main issue that swung me from Republican to Democrat as a Christian was compassion, which admittedly is a pretty broad topic.  I gather it really from the whole penumbra of the New Testament, but you’re asking for specific verses, because I guess you don’t really see the Bible as a coherent whole, which I guess is fine if that’s how your faith works, so here’s a few verses.  For starters, perhaps my favorite verse, Matthew 22:39, with context from 34 through 40, “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Colossians 3:12, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”

There is no compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, or patience to be found in Trump or any modern mainstream Republican candidate.  But it’s really not hard to find examples of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience from Biden.  https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbaldoni/2020/08/20/how-empathy-defines-joe-biden/#48a2fcfd75cf

—

No response to that.  But then I went back up thread and realized I’d misread the comment.  He wasn’t asking for a Biblical argument for Biden, he was asking me to argue for Biden using the same cherry-picking of verses.  So, I followed up.

—

… I realize now I misread your comment.  I thought you were asking for a Biblical case for Biden, not for me to take this cherry-picked list hand selected to make an argument counter to the main thrust of the Bible and apply it to Biden.  Naturally, if you’re going to cherry-pick verses to invent your own religion in lieu of following Christ as a whole, it’s going to be hard for me to use that particular list to argue for a Christian over an anti-Christian autocrat.  But sure, I’ll indulge you.  

Pro-life: Trump is not pro-life.  He has endorsed policies forcing women to carry pregnancies to term, yes, but that is not truly pro life.  Here’s the full verse, ignoring the cherry picking that goes narrower even than a single verse:

There are six things the Lord hates,

seven that are detestable to him:

17haughty eyes,

a lying tongue,

hands that shed innocent blood,

18a heart that devises wicked schemes,

feet that are quick to rush into evil,

19a false witness who pours out lies

and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.

So right here, in the FIRST verse you have cited, we have an indictment of Trump – God hates a lying tongue (Trump has told over 20,000 documented lies in his time in office, but even if you accept his backpedaling explanations on many of them, you can’t possibly deny that he’s a frequent liar).  And as to hands that shed innocent blood, Trump has pardoned and praised war heros, including one who was convicted of murdering a prisoner – THAT is “shedding innocent blood.”  God indeed detests shedding innocent blood.  That’s why Christians can’t vote for Trump.  Biden has never shed innocent blood; so on verse one, you need to vote for Biden.  

Verse two: Genesis 12:3.  Here as with the first verse, the meme author isn’t even quoting a verse in context; he’s adding his own interpretation to suit a narrative that is not Biblical.  Here’s the full verse:

3I will bless those who bless you,

and whoever curses you I will curse;

and all peoples on earth

will be blessed through you.”

Okay, so how would a sincere Christian interpret this verse?  I don’t know how a sincere follower of Christ would read into this a Biblical commandment to politically support every action of the modern Jewish state.  There are other verses I could bring in here about God only being with Israel when they behave in a Godly fashion, and from that explain that Israel as it behaves today is not worthy of the support of Christians.  Anyway, what this verse is really saying is that the People of God (NOT the political nation of Israel) will be blessed by God.  So, if we are to apply this verse to politics, we should vote for the candidate who speaks well of Christianity, the one who professes sincere faith in God, the one who humbly seeks forgiveness, and not the one who blasphemes.  That’s Biden.  

Third cited verse: Proverbs 22:7 “The rich rule over the poor,

and the borrower is slave to the lender.”

Okay.  Well as the meme author explains it, this verse should mean God is against debt.  In that case, we have to vote for Biden.  This one really isn’t at all ambiguous.  Trump has grown the National Debt more in three years than any past President did except in time of World War.  Even in his first two years, when America was at peace and prosperity, Trump and his budgets ran up record deficits and increased the national debt faster than his predecessors.  But also, look at the person themself.  Trump won’t release any info on his personal finances, but the one page of his tax history we have seen told us that he was at least a billion dollars in debt in the nineties, and we know from his personal lawyer and his bankers that he remains hundreds of millions if not billions in debt to foreign entities to this day.  Biden has released decades of tax returns, and he has a positive net-worth and has never taken out a billion-dollar loan; and while he was never directly in control of the national debt, he served in Congress during the only years it shrank in my lifetime, and served as VP during six years of shrinking federal deficits.  Biden is without a doubt the candidate to choose if you hate debt.  

Onward.  2 Thess 3:10.  “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.””  I don’t really see how that has much bearing on either candidate.  However, Biden voted for welfare reform in the 1990s, so if you were trying to argue that welfare somehow defies this verse, you would have to take Biden on his record on this issue and give him the vote.  Trump’s record on this verse?  He’s a trust fund baby who never worked a real job in his life, only gambling with inherited money.  There is no way to make a pro-Trump argument with this verse.

Pro-marriage: I won’t even get into the verse.  Both men have had multiple wives, but the details matter.  Trump has been divorced twice and has had documented affairs on all three wives, including his current one, and has admitted on-record to paying off mistresses to stay silent.  You cannot argue that Trump is pro-marriage, unless your definition of someone’s stance on marriage is based on how often they break the vows they take.  

Next point: government’s purpose is to reward good & punish evil – I’ve seen this argument elsewhere in neocon politics.  Again, this is one where we need to look at the whole reference given (Romans 13) and not just the meme author’s interpretation of it.  I think the meme author is trying to make a “law and order” or really, authoritarianism, argument here.  But this is the chapter that says:

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.”  This is an endorsement of “big government” and a contradiction of the Christian Right’s claim that government should be limited.  Point to Biden.  

“This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. 7Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.” Again, this verse favors taxation and government – point to the “tax and spend” liberals; point to Biden.  

“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.” Love one another?  Point to Biden.  Whoever loves others has fulfilled the law?  Point against Trump, who spews hate with every tweet.  

“12The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. 14Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.” Do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh?  Point away from the adulterer.  Point to Biden.  

Finally, “I will vote based as close as I can on God’s word.”  Well, take this whole post for that one, along with my prior comment.  But let’s look at the full verse as well, in the interest of completeness.  “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”  Okay.  In that case, I will reiterate my original point: ALL scripture.  Not just a cherry-picked listed with an anonymous author’s self-interested biased interpretation.  You have to look at the whole of scripture, particularly the words of Christ.  

My favorite passage of the words of Christ is Matthew 5.  I will only quote selected lines from it, not to cherry-pick but because you’ve probably already stopped reading based on the length of my comment anyway.  Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  I would say if we were to take that verse at face value as an instruction on how to vote, we should vote for the less wealthy candidate.  Point to Biden.  

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Did you catch the headline where Trump’s campaign took shots at Biden the other day for visiting his family’s grave while Trump golfed?  Biden has suffered tremendous loss in his life – most of his family in a car accident at the dawn of his senate career, and his decorated veteran son a few years ago.  Trump, when his brother died, posted pictures of himself smiling on the golf course.  

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.  I don’t think this one needs much explanation, but Trump is not known for being merciful.  Rather, he is known for building concentration camps for children whose only crime was being brought to America by parents seeking a better life.  

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.  I’ve said it before, but Trump is not pure in heart; see my other comment for the video; he won’t even ask God for forgiveness.  

So I’ll leave you with that.  That is a short biblical case for why you, if you profess sincere faith in Jesus, should vote for Biden and not Trump.