"Paralyzed or Free"

Most of the people on earth today are paralyzed by what are said to be the consequences of their sins. The destitute of the world have it hammered into their consciousness--by those who, like the scribes, have the power in our day to define sins--that they are poor because they are lazy; or that they are poor because they have mismanaged their resources; or because they have squandered opportunities; or because, in the most blatantly evil definitions of guilt, they are black or female or homosexual or members of whatever part of humanity the powerful choose to define as subhuman and sinful. Paralysis, hunger, homelessness and early death are, according to the rich and powerful, the direct consequences of the poor and powerless having sinned in one way or another.... [But] the paralytic walks away because he has become a new human being. Transformed within and without, he is freed from paralysis. ~James Douglass