I have little to no doubt that The Law of Moses is the origin of the often most dependable form of traditional American style liberalism among Jews, those who kept with observance of that law and those who assimilated, though not universally among the latter or even the former. Why wouldn't that phenomenon take among those who read the commentary in the Geneva Bible? It pointed out what it really said in those passages of the Books of Moses, outlining the most radical egalitarian and re distributive economics in the history of economics.
The radical advice of Jesus, that if you want to be perfect you have to sell everything you own and give the money to the poor before adopting your own position in destitution adopts it pretty much in its most radical form. That great figure in the later history of Christianity, St. Francis understood it in those terms, correctly, as did others in as radical or a somewhat less radical form. I've encountered people, even among those infamous "white evangelicals" who are led to economic radicalism through that same source.
Bernie Sanders once pointed out that the Pope's economics was more radical than his were, I don't remember but I seem to recall he wasn't talking about Good Pope Francis but Benedict XVI. And it's true, even that conservative Pope advocated an economics that was way beyond any Marxist or even most of those who get called anarchists. The great saint of our times, Dorothy Day was considered that kind of an anarchist, which is certainly different from the secular, atheist, anti-religious formulations of anarchism. She didn't write much theory about it, she did it. Which is the most radical of radical actions of all, one that almost none of those who are famous for their radicalism ever much get around to doing as they babble and scribble and gull the suckers in college towns and beyond, who man podcasts that demand the impossible as they advocate the conditions that will make delivering what they demand impossible.
No. ol' Moses had that figured out a long, long time ago, so did Jesus.
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ALL INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY ALL CONCLUSIONS REACHED BY HUMAN BEINGS DEPEND ON THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THOSE ARE MADE. It is one of the most telling features of the materialist-secular-atheist model of reality that no moral position can find any absolute footing in its own chosen framing. I have read one after another after another attempt to do that, online one of the most pathetic was a well educated philosophy major who advocated his own branch of the phony substitute for morality which he called "desire utilitarianism" in which to come to any assertion of morality required the most baroque and tortured and arbitrary verbal gymnastics which at any point were entirely vulnerable to that universal acid of materialist-secular-atheism, the refusal to agree, based in their mutually agreed to framing.
If you believe in God, the Jewish-Christian-Islamic understanding of God, when your authority for that understanding, such as the Books of Moses, the Gospel the Epistles assert something, that is the rock on which you can assert the rightness of that moral position. Jesus said, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned, pointing to dire consequences if you didn't do that. No doubt some, perhaps many, if they were so encouraged, would do those things without the dire consequences out of their good will or a desire to feel good about themselves. But it is a fact of history that those will not be the most numerous nor the ones who power in this world flows to. I would guarantee you that in the absence of that framing of morality it is inevitable that power will flow that way, it is only in those rare instances when the moral character of people is fed and directed that that cataract of sewage has been dammed.
That it has not been a complete success doesn't do anything to lessen the urgency of that observation, if it's not successful when a majority profess to believe but then fail to practice it, it's lunacy to think that convincing people that the basis of that morality is nonexistent and they are free to do whatever they can get away with doing, it's going to lead to paradise.
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