(2019 note: i'm almost but not quite embarrassed by my incredibly partisan stance in this essay__not quite because it's just a bunch of facts i'm presenting [hehe])
On the Holy War
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
You cannot serve God and money.
Let’s just look at the facts.
Don’t be concerned about man’s doctrine concerning these Bible verses.
Just suppose, in the first, that Jesus was prophesying
His
mission for our times, and revealing one of God’s (hard) truths. You have
to give me at least that the war mentioned here could be prophetic (especially
since it wasn’t true of Jesus' ministry back then) of when He
is revealed in glory( see
“The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” We could have returned two thousand years ago (and of course this is all according to me); again we see the tantalizing proposition before us: the chance for mankind to return to the infinite. It’s still a possibility. But when we view the bell curves of reality, look at dead average person say, money is the clear favorite in the holy war. Yes, money is not only the devil incarnate, it's also the devil's primary armament in its war on God (and ordinary mind is its first line of defense).
The holy war is real, and yes, the light will overcome the darkness, but it
looks like the Battle of the Twenty-First Century is going to the false
conservatives. That means we won’t see the end of time, but rather mankind will
witness cataclysm of the remnant variety. And I still see that remnant
getting back to its roots, as I said, in a relatively brief period of time.
Then will be the end of time. But it looks like it’s gonna be too late for
your average person by then. Too late to catch a ride on the glory train for,
what’s that? Five billion people? (Maybe it's just two billion
people who are slated to die in "the day of the
great slaughter." [Isaiah 30:25; see also e.g.
You know the type: People with closed minds about my exegesis plural. (2019 note: i realize i use the wrong word here but don't feel like correcting myself now) People with delusions of grandeur (thinking "God's grace" will save them) saying I suffer delusions of grandeur. People who don’t really know their heart. Think average. People who think lower taxes for rich people help the economy. (The really wealthy accumulate more than they spend.) People who believed Reagan’s bizzare trickle-down(voodoo) economics theory. A lot of crazy stuff, really crazy stuff. I mean, competing political parties, you have to expect warfare with so much power at stake. The bad news is that the Republican Party is comprised mostly of people suffering strong delusions. And, more bad news, ”During January (2019 note: this might have been 2012), 35.9% of Americans considered themselves Republicans.”
Strong proponents of ordinary mind. Because__let’s be honest__the holy war can be characterized simply as the war between ordinary and extraordinary mind. And as noted elsewhere, all ordinary mind has to do to win this battle, maybe the second big one, is nothing.
But, for purposes of this discussion, the holy war boils down to a war between mankind and money. (see 1 Timothy 6:10a [For the love of money is the root of all evil: (Money is the root of all evil, because if money didn't exist, there would be no love of it.)] and Micah 3:11 [The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? none evil can come upon us (for we are chosen).]) Yeah, money is the number one strong-hold of the devil. And notice that its presence is not merely physical, there's much more "wealth" in the air/on the books than there is in bank vaults. (A digression: Lots of thoughts come from the air: ordinary mind is the evil spirit.) I almost said the war is between God and money, because money has been mankind’s main false god since Cain decided to like the rock he got from Abel for his harvest. Or whatever. Regardless of the opponent(s), money is winning. Let’s look at some more facts.
I know I’ve
written before about the precipitous increase in people who would be satisfied with
bread, how the number has increased in the past decade by some one hundred sixty
million people. (World Ark's February 2012 edition reports "Rising
food prices have pushed 44 million people into extreme poverty and hunger since
June 2010.") (2019 note: just saw Melinda Gates tell a nationwide tv
audience that 200 million women do not have access to birth control. i
guess that's a big give-away, because nobody believes, i don't believe there
could be fewer than 500 million malnourished human beings in the world now.) Yeah, one hundred sixty million people in the last
decade have joined that huge mass of humanity that goes to bed hungry most
nights. (We like to call them, all nearly one billion living breathing
human beings, we like to call them malnourished [more
"politically correct" these days (more what we want to hear) is
undernourished], because that is something we can almost relate to.)
Unbelievably, according to the latest report (in 2001), one half of these
people are children! Maybe five hundred million children are
afflicted with a lack of daily bread!?!? (That works out to some 16,000
children dying each and every day of hunger. That's children dying of slow
starvation.)
From a
December 2011 Washington Post:
For the very richest Americans, low tax rates on capital gains are better than any Christmas gift. As a result of a pair of rate cuts, first under President Bill Clinton and then under Bush, most of the richest Americans pay lower overall tax rates than middle-class Americans do. And this is one reason the gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country is widening dramatically.
The gap is “widening dramatically.” Major earthquake frequency is off the
chart. The ozone is almost gone. Our civilization teeters on the
brink.
And money is
winning. According to the The Economist, worldwide food
prices rose some 50% in 2010. Think about that. In America I don’t
think it was 5%, but that’s what I want you to think about: middle-class
Americans might fret a bit now and then about how prices are going up at the
grocery stores and the restaurants and the fast-food joints, indeed many have
probably cut back on eating out because they are losing their little skirmishes
with money, but think about how that impacts people who go to bed hungry most
nights say, or many nights every month, think about how a rise in the price of
bread or the price of rice or the price of maize by any amount might impact your
would-be life. (More
than two billion people, I recently read, get by on the equivalent of two U.S.
dollars a day. That’s for everything. And that works out to 29% of
the world’s population.)
In
[W]e wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
(a digression: [an un-edited excerpt] from a recent e-mail]:
How is evil like a trap?
[Evil] always looks like something good for us, but it does not ask about God or
other people, and it does not ask about long term effects. In the process the
boundaries and values by which God orders life are distorted.
The spiritual forces of evil in Ephesians are trap setters, seeking to delude us into shifting the boundaries. Some traps we recognize easily, for we see the paths to destruction worn down by previous captives. Other traps we hardly notice, for we have accepted the revaluing. In most cases our choice is not between obvious evil and something good but between two seemingly good and right options. As Walter Wink points out, Satan watches our inclinations and throws us to the side to which we are leaning... Evil traps us with the good, only slightly out of bounds. Each choice slightly out of bounds redraws the boundaries until nothing remains of God's intent. That is why evil is deceptive and why we need to be alert…[emphasis mine]
)
Back to Ephesian's 6: let’s look only at the Greek word exousia, here translated “powers”, in
the light of some of the possible words as supplied by Strong’s:
Privilege. Influence. Authority.
The
privileged few. Those with influence. Those in authority. Note
that all of these groups have one thing in common: money.
Is it
becoming clear? It isn’t people we wrestle against, it’s the
ordinary mind in every sentient being we battle, the ordinary mind that tells us
we need to serve money, at least give the appearance of it (you
know: I serve God, the money is just a necessary evil, my heart
isn’t very deceitful, certainly not wicked, I don’t believe any of this),
and it gets even worse. Because, you see, to borrow from my (scripturally
formulated) heart/mind/soul horse/reins/rider analogy (see Another Sunday
School Lesson), the heart is a great
influence on the mind, the horse knows what the rider is doing with the reins.
And the heart is, yes “The
heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know
it?” [Jeremiah 17:9]).
And don’t forget (or try to imagine) how the rider is influenced by the actions
of the horse, how our souls are influenced by our hearts.
Also don’t
forget that Congress is a national disgrace. (That phrase came from an
Atlantic article years ago, about the influence lobbyists have with
legislators of the national variety.)
That same
Washington Post post had:
The result, (Jacob Hacker, political science professor at Yale University) says,
is that the lobbying (on the capital gains tax rate) winds up being lopsided,
too.
“The amount
of lobbying that takes place on tax policy from the deep-pocketed interests that
have the most at stake is enormous,” Hacker said. “There’s very little
representation on the other side.”
“Don’t
forget,” he added, “that members of Congress themselves, particularly senators,
are well off and they’re more likely to be sympathetic to the argument for low
capital gains.”
That’s right, all our moneyed groups make up the powers that be, the movers and
shakers of today. And no small part of that influence is used to make rich
people richer. Money is (still) winning. “The deep-pocketed
interests that have the most at stake” are quite simply spiritual wickedness in
high places, evil (selfishness) in the seats of power. All over the world.
Lots of ordinary mind around. Lots of people who equate money with power,
and rightly so.
One of Bill
Clinton’s compromises with the Republicans, by the way, was lowering the rate of
the capital gains tax. Here’s what he had to say (in his autobiography
My Life) about politics in late 1994:
Now that they controlled the Congress, the Republicans had gone too far in the
other direction, underestimating economic growth and revenues and overestimating
the rate of medical inflation, even as they promoted HMOs as a surefire way to
slow it down. Their strategy appeared to be the logical extension of
William Kristol’s advice in his memo to Bob Dole, urging that he block all
action on health care. If they could cut funding for Medicare, Medicaid,
education, and the environment, middle-class Americans would see fewer benefits
from their tax dollars, feel more resentful paying taxes, and become even more
receptive to their appeals for tax cuts and their strategy of waging campaigns
on divisive social and cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, and guns.
President
Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, had acknowledged that his
administration had intentionally run huge deficits to create a crisis that would
“starve” the domestic budget. They succeeded partially, underfunding but
not eliminating investments in our common future. (p. 681)
. . .
Leon Panetta
was willing to take on the challenge. He had already built a record at OMB
that would be hard to improve on—our first two budgets were the first in
seventeen years to be adopted by Congress on time; the budgets guaranteed three
years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since Truman was
President; and perhaps most impressive, they brought the first reduction in
discretionary domestic spending in twenty-five years, while still providing
increases for education, Head Start, job training, and new technologies.
(p. 605)
Bill Clinton is way above average. He’s passionate about elevating the lifestyle of all. He’s also way above average (what? just the ninetieth percentile?) in the intelligence department. So you have a good heart and a good mind (not at all determined by the intelligence). George W. Bush is just about average as far as intelligence goes (no big deal), but below average on compassion for the disadvantaged. A good example of how the heart can influence the mind. He’s on the broad way that leads you-know-where. (If you’re interested, I’m judging[yep] George H. W. Bush borderline; he’s double-hearted and double-minded, having some good qualities of both, so he could go either way. [2019 note: One way or another, huh?])
Here’s some more evidence, from Clinton, that the Republicans suffer strong
delusions:
[Soon] I got back to domestic affairs, vetoing the latest Republican tax cut because it was "too big, too bloated," and put too great a burden on America's economy. Under the budget rules, the bill would have forced large cuts in education, health care, and environmental protection. It would have prevented us from extending the life of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and from adding a much-needed prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
We were going to have a surplus this year of about $100 billion, but the proposed GOP tax cut would cost nearly $1 trillion over a decade. Republicans’ justification for it was based on projected surpluses. On this issue I was far more conservative than they were. (p. 870)
. . .
(George W. Bush) couldn’t dispute the fact that we had 19 million new jobs, the economy was still growing, and crime was down for the seventh year in a row. Instead, his compassionate conservative message to the swing voters was this: “I’ll give you the same good conditions you have now, with a smaller government and a bigger tax cut. Wouldn’t you like that?” (p. )
. . .
I had paid close attention to what Bush and Cheney had said in the campaign. I knew they saw the world very differently from the way I did and would want to undo much of what I had done, especially on economic policy and the environment. I thought that they would pass their big tax cut and that before long we would be back to the big deficits of the 1980s, and in spite of Bush’s encouraging comments on education and AmeriCorps, he would feel pressure to cut back on all domestic spending, including education, child care, after-school programs, police on the streets, innovative research, and the environment. But those were not my calls to make anymore. (p. 951)
. . .
I had watched the Washington Republicans for eight years and imagined that President Bush would, from the outset of his term, be under pressure to abandon compassionate conservatism by the more right-wing leaders and interest groups now in control of his party. They believed in their way as deeply as I believed in mine, but I thought the evidence, and the weight of history, favored our side. (p. 951)
Yeah, the news gets worse. Your average Republican is suffering strong delusions, and "the more right-wing leaders and interest groups" are trying to take control again. They just managed to have the USofA's credit rating downgraded! The rich ones are enemies of God for the most part. (See James 4:4b [(K)now ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.] and realize that the main source of friction for rich people, their main problem with the world is poor people [and other rich people] not wanting to give them more.) Expose a Republican to my truths, say, and expect a negative response. Mostly they’re not gonna believe any of this. Pretty hard hearts for the most part. The bell curve again. Some of the bad news: It’s not just money and our ordinary minds that are the enemy, our hearts are so misled that they are perverting our minds. Witness the Republikans. They are brainwashed basically, sold out to the ways of the world. Did anyone read my 2011 letter to an editor, where I ended with “Come on Democrats, get involved! Let’s see if we can’t convince the Republicans they’re not just deluded, they’re immoral.”? Here’s how bad it is: many of our leaders (except President Obama and some trusted Democrats [hehehe]) not only have hard hearts regarding “the least”( see Matthew 25:31-46) so dear to the heart of Jesus, they are deluded into believing things like “lower taxes on the wealthy result in more government revenue” and “a lower capital gains tax rate results in more jobs”.
Here’s one minor
example of where government should regulate more instead of less: stop the
practice of moving jobs around the country to places where subsidies and tax
breaks and such result in higher profits for corporations; these jobs are
incredibly expensive if you watch the big picture. All of the many many
jobs rick perry likes to take responsibility for in Texas came at the expense of
other states. And Texas loses out on taxes for twenty years, at which
point the business shops around to move to a state with a more favorable
business climate (which still [globally anyway] means lower taxes and cheaper
labor).
Advocating
lower taxes and less government involvement is simply saying “I don’t care about
people less fortunate than me.”
I’m not concerned about the very poor.
Mitt Romney Feb 1, 2012
That was Romney speaking his heart and half of his (double-)mind, speaking for a lot of people, Republican and Democrat. (Just remember it’s a whole lot easier to be concerned about the very poor if you can put more on your plate than you can eat say. Maybe I said that in defense of the poor.)
From The
Atlantic (February 2012):
Millions of dollars of Mitt Romney's personal wealth have been
recently tied to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, a Caribbean UK
territory with decent SCUBA diving and spectacular don't-ask-don't-tell banking
regulations. The Romney campaign protests, weakly yet amusingly, that "the
accounts provide no tax advantage to American investors like Romney" but are
there purely for the convenience of foreign investors who might wish to invest
in Bain Capital without the "entanglements" of the United States tax system.
Either way, a portion of Romney's considerable wealth is parked where it isn't
subject to the same taxation that the average citizen experiences.
Romney's
situation is actually quite typical for a man in his societal position. He has
enough money to make himself attractive to a variety of financial odd-duck
"nations" around the world who would be more than pleased to "host" his wealth
in exchange for the occasional transaction fee, without pestering him about
financing their schools, healthcare, roads, war, or any of the annoying
trappings of civilization. The question remains -- is that moral? Isn't Mitt
Romney a citizen of a particularly large nation-state already? Does he not owe
that nation-state taxes, given that he is such prominent citizen that he may
actually be elected president of the place? What is going on here?
It seems that
the concept of the nation-state itself is becoming a very pliant one for certain
actors in society, be they corporations or the very wealthy. The fact is,
nations only function because the majority of its citizens believe that their
responsibilities to that nation are fixed and immutable, on everything from
taxes to dying in war. If we don't make very clear distinctions as to who owes
whom what in this world, the relative stability we've come to enjoy in the
international system may give way to illegitimacy and, ultimately, chaos.
That’s how bad it is. I’m figuring to die the year I’m 72, and that’s why I figure the world as we know it will end that year too. (2019 note: if the world ends when i die, then i was/am the antiChrist) I just don’t see things changing. I don’t even see prospects for future battles between the forces of God and money. And that’s because there is no force of God. There is none righteous but One. And it looks like He’s biding His time. Back probably as a vengeful lion.
No, that’s not right, I suppose lots of the people on the NBC news feature “Making a Difference” will be judged righteous enough anyway, on that great and terrible day of judgment, the end of the world as we know it. Lot’s of people with good enough hearts and minds. Well, maybe the top ten percent of seven billion is seven hundred million, that’s a lot. (see Ezekiel 16:49 [Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.] and 22:12 [In thee (the bloody country) have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion (and other devices of the devil, like profit), and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord GOD. 13Behold, therefore I have smitten mine hand at thy dishonest gain which thou hast made, and at thy blood which hath been in the midst of thee (how many will die today of hunger, of slow starvation?). 14Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee? I the LORD have spoken it, and will do it.])
But look at what everyone pretty much agrees is the seat of power (while recognizing that the real seat of power is money) in this country, Congress (from the Washington Post, December 27, 2011):
Congress’s Wealth Grew During Crisis
Need another
reason to be angry at Washington? The average net worth of members of Congress
has grown 15 percent since 2004, even as the average American’s net worth
has dropped 8 percent. Nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires.
The median net worth for a member of Congress, according to The New York
Times, is $913,000; in the House it’s $725,000 excluding home equity, says
The
Washington Post.
. . .
In 1984, the 90th percentile of
U.S. families had
holdings worth six times the median family’s; by 2009, the 90th percentile was
worth 12 times the median family, according to the University of Michigan study,
a longitudinal panel survey. These figures include home equity.
This growing inequality,
not surprisingly, is seen in Congress. Not only has the median wealth increased,
but the proportion of representatives who have little besides a home has shrunk.
In 1984, one in five House members had zero or negative net worth excluding home
equity, according to the disclosures; by 2009, that number had dropped to one in
12.
Hey, the Stock Bill just (finally) passed the Kongress, spelling out that they shouldn’t be the only people in the country who can legally benefit from manipulating the stock market. Think that influence (think still lobbyists for special [i.e., rich] interests) doesn’t feather its own nest so to speak? Think the rich get richer? Money has had momentum for a long time now, and the momentum is growing. The "growing inequality" tells the tale.
Here’s some more from Clinton, addressing his economic plan upon assuming the presidency:
(An advisor) felt that the entire team should stress three points: that deficit reduction is not an end in itself, but the means to achieve the real objectives—economic growth, more jobs, and higher incomes; that our plan represented a fundamental change in the way government had been working, ending the irresponsibility and unfairness of the past by asking the wealthy big corporations, and other special interests that had benefited disproportionately from the tax cuts and deficits of the 1980s to pay their fair share of cleaning up the mess; and that we should not say we were asking people to “sacrifice” but to “contribute” to America’s renewal, a more patriotic and positive formulation. (p. *)
Rich people aren’t being asked to sacrifice, merely contribute. Lots of them don’t want to do that. Ordinary mind has the edge. Money is winning. (“Keep your change,” sarah palin said the other night. Give us lower taxes, smaller government, guns and the Constitution, she shouted to the raucous applause of the crowd. Give us freedom from responsibilities and let us pursue our selfish ends, lots of people say. "Our haves/have-nots status quo is one of our main Gods, and we bow down before it.")
As noted, the
Democrats are mostly conformed to the world too (this bell curve doesn’t
distinguish), but the progressive Democratic agenda of leaving no one out of the
equation is much more in line with God’s principles than the basic Republican
tenets of lower taxes, smaller government, fewer regulations governing their
rich friends (no real Wall Street reform please, no government help for huge
banks, or for a desperate automobile industry) and perhaps especially less
government sponsorship of social programs. "Social Darwinism is the way."
Send me a rebuttal, please. When Romney said if the safety net for the
very poor is broken, he will fix it, he showed himself for the hypocrite he is,
for no Romney agenda I can imagine would include more benefits for the
under-privileged. And the plain ol’ poor are under-privileged to be
sure. Think grain prices are more of a concern to poor people than rich?
No, say they’re more of a concern to poor people than the middle class.
Romney and
lots of others want to believe that there is a safety net in this country for
the very poor. They don’t realize, don’t really want to admit it could be
the truth, that the very poor in this country are probably malnourished.
That’s right, they go to bed hungry more often than not. (How often do you
have to go to bed hungry to be, or how bad does your diet have to be for you to
be malnourished?) They’ve slipped through the safety net. In
mass. The estimates are that fifty million people exist on an income below
the poverty level in this kountry. Maybe ten million people malnourished
in this kountry right now? Millions of children going to bed hungry
tonight in this kountry? Is this a crying shame? Perhaps not for
many. (To be fair, I'm sure if we could identify the very poor Mitt would
be glad to help feed them something. [The bad news: this is his
heart deceiving him.])
(later:
)
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. (think ordinary mind rejects my message out of hand?) For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them (via me). . . So they are without excuse, for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. (ordinary mind grows stronger) Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being (albeit a human who is, you know, omniscient and all-powerful and Santa Claus . . .). . .
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, . . . because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. . . .
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. (i'm tempted to write of one professing Christian woman whose name i never learned that i encountered at my mom's funeral, but just think “television”) Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (oh the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked!)
No, nothing in that applies to now. No strong delusions today in the Christian community.
From a recent (for a month or two I made a few notes on money in the news) Atlantic article:
Thomas adds that the Occupy movement and concern over income inequality is shedding light on how tax policy often favors corporations. "You have average citizens and taxpayers subsidizing wealthy corporations," he says, "and a lot of people object to that upward redistribution." (2019 note: well, trump and the republicans managed to cut tax rates on corporations and rich rich people with historic deficits looming)
I add that mostly because of the “upward redistribution” phrase, the phrase that
tells the truth about the holy war: money is winning.
Here’s how
bad it is (in the form of a Wikipedia excerpt):
In 2007 the richest 1% of
the American population owned 34.6% of the country's total wealth, and the next
19% owned 50.5%. Thus, the top 20% of Americans owned 85% of the country's
wealth and the bottom 80% of the population owned 15%. Financial inequality was
greater than inequality in total wealth, with the top 1% of the population
owning 42.7%, the next 19% of Americans owning 50.3%, and the bottom 80% owning
7%.[17]
However, after the
Great Recession which started in 2007, the share of total wealth owned by
the top 1% of the population grew from 34.6% to 37.1%, and that owned by the top
20% of Americans grew from 85% to 87.7%. The Great Recession also caused a drop
of 36.1% in median household wealth but a drop of only 11.1% for the top 1%,
further widening the gap between the 1% and the 99%.[17][18][19]
During the economic expansion between 2002 and 2007, the income of the top 1%
grew 10 times faster than the income of the bottom 90%. In this period 66% of
total income gains went to the 1%, who in 2007 had a larger share of total
income than at any time since 1928. (2019 note: maybe last year the
top 1% in the country owned as much as the bottom 90%; need i say more?)
And it’s not just here in (I just gotta say) ameriKa. Governments everywhere are involved in the upward redistribution of wealth, even the oil-rich kountry recently featured on 60 Minutes, which is lavishing wealth on all its (very few) citizens (but not so for the many immigrant workers), yeah, maybe especially wealthy places like Singapore, where 15% of the population is made up of millionaires (think of Singapore's bottom 15%), every kountry is adapting to the ways of the world. Money is winning.
Here's global share of wealth in 2000;
in 2007 it broke down
to over ten percent of the world’s population and some 1.5 percent of the
world’s wealth for Africa, five percent of the world's population and over 25
percent of the world's wealth for North America [and the disparities between
Mexico and the rest of the continent might be noted]):
More from Wikipedia: "A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. The bottom half of the world adult population owned 1% of global wealth." Does anybody really think God loves this? (Update: a 2014 Oxfam report said the top 1% now control 46% of the wealth.)
"The drivers of the financialization of the economy are hard to discern, but the
effects aren't." That's from Noah Millman, blogger for
The American
Conservative. That's half true. The "drivers of the
financialization of the economy" are rich people everywhere; they prefer to be
invisible, but they're easy to see. And yes, the effects are easy to see
too: Wall Street reform which isn't. $600 trillion in derivatives.
Top graduate schools teaching "financial engineering." Money is winning.
The more
things change, the more they stay the same huh? Ordinary mind is the
enemy. It’s all about me. Eve ate it first, I don’t care if I
did dare her. The rich (still) get richer. Money is (still) winning.
Remember Jesus saying He didn’t need any witnesses? (John 2:23 Now when he was in Jerusalem at the passover, in the feast day, many believed in his name, when they saw the miracles which he did. 24But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, 25And needed not that any should testify of [him]: for he knew what was in man.) He knows what is in man. Ordinary mind. Common sense.
All we have to do is agree that everybody is our neighbor. Let’s look at some more facts, rhetorical and otherwise:
For God so loved the world . . . (John 3:16, emphasis mine)
[I]t is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish. (Matthew 18:14)
The way of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give to those who do not have enough. (Tao Te Ching)
God is jealous, and the LORD revengeth; the LORD revengeth, and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies. (Nahum 1:2)
For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still. (Isaiah 5:25b, 9:12b, 9:17b, 9:21b and 10:4b)
Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? (Jonah 3:9)
And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins. (Leviticus 26:18)
There might be time. Let’s change it all. (I was just kidding, Republicans.)
(This is the quotation for February 9, 2012 on a Catholic web-site [ewtn.com].) |
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Friday, February 10, 2012 |
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Don’t try to make anybody feel guilty. That would be a good approach for me to take, huh? Encourage good works. That’s it, brainwash people into believing they are zealous of good works. (Ordinary mind rears its ugly head, huh?) I threw bread away just the other day. I can put more than I can eat on my plate just about any time I want to. I have clothes I don’t use. And I didn’t give to www.heifer.org for three months now. And yes, I feel guilty of committing injustices. No, maybe the guilt doesn’t do any good, maybe my last couple of quotes hoping to produce good works are even counter-productive.
But isn’t guilt a form of humility? Could it be the
(too-)still, (too-)small voice of conscience, almost voicing our denial of God's
will for our neighbors in need of bread? Is there any way we can say we
seek to serve God if we don’t seek to serve mankind? (See Matthew
22:37-40.) And that’s something anybody can do. Make a copy of this
and carry it to Sunday school or send it to two people or your contact list or
part of the neighborhood, as a for-what-it’s-worth gesture. Think about
going to a church and starting a petition to divert half that church's building
fund to www.heifer.org
(that's what I'm doing__lots of those funds around). Can the love of God
dwell in us if we do not actively try to serve those in dire need of food
staples? (See 1 John 3:17
[But whoso hath this
world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of
compassion from him, how dwelleth the love
of God in him?]
and don't forget Strong's defines brother as "literal or
figurative, near or remote.") Actively try to serve. (And
yeah, giving to the right charities [maybe only the ones aimed at eradicating
poverty] is active service.
If the top one percent gave half of its wealth that would still
leave them with what? Twenty percent of the country’s wealth? Their
lifestyle wouldn’t suffer a meal. That might
solve the hunger problem. Well, it would be quite a reallocation of
resources, but communication and transportation we could say "we are proud of
how far they have come.") That’s what I said. I’m seeking to serve.
I would love to tithe of my income, but I don't think God wants me to do that
right now. Really. (Really I'm not even close. [update:
re: income__if you make less than the median for your state you are relieved of
your charitable giving requirement( hehehe).] Yes, there are times I adore
ordinary mind. No, not really.) Maybe I can help in other ways.
Help me help the least of this world. Please.
One more
daily devotion; please check out the readings:
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Thursday, March 08, 2012
Lenten Weekday |
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