Whatever the long term effect of this bailout, it should at the very least make us, as a society and as Christians in society, take a far more critical view of the culture in which we are inevitably embedded.
Most of us have very little influence on the great affairs of state; we do not run major financial institutions or multinational corporations. But we are entitled to opinions about how far the pursuit of wealth by the few should be allowed to trump their responsibilities to the many. We are entitled to take a stand on the glorification of greed in popular culture.
And we are obliged, by our discipleship, to live differently ourselves. To walk around one of our great city centres is to be exposed to a full-scale onslaught on the senses from advertisers who want us to buy things not because they are useful, but because they are desirable in themselves; a quality they acquire simply because we are persuaded that other people desire them too.
Let’s throw in to the mix the mania for the exclusive education necessary to make that pursuit a reality, [url=http://www.vulcanhammer.org/?p=1331]as I do recalling my Episcopal prep school class reunion recently[/url].
you can take the “When” out of the title and I believe that makes it more accurate….
Chris, Amen.
The pursuit of wealth ultimately leads to death and is a sad thing to watch for of us who want everyone to have a living relationship with the Living Christ so that they will live forever. The latter is the only kind of wealth worth pursuing.
The author gave it all away in the last paragraph
[blockquote]”there is a yawning gulf between the poverty of a First World economy or City trader and that of a Zimbabwean child suffering from every disease of malnourishment. Nothing should deflect our political leaders from their commitment to end global poverty.”[/blockquote]
The yawning gulf described by the author is filled with greedy, dishonest U.N. bureaucrats and their counterparts in First World economies who use poverty elimination as a means to grab and maintain power. And lets not forget people like Robert Mugabe. Nothing makes you feel better than giving your tax dollars to line the pockets of dictators like him. If we could clear out the Swiss bank accounts of all the people like Fidel Castro, we could end global poverty and have enough left over for a big party.
So, what’s a thoughful Christian to do with the money he or she hopefully has left over after the tax man focibly extracts it from his or her pocket (up to three times on the same dollar earned in the U.S. – when you earn it, when you receive it as Social Security payments, and what’s left over after you die)? Poverty won’t be solved by Ivy League bureaucrats who think they know better than you how your money should be spent. It will be solved like the Kingdom of God will come, one soul at a time. For me personally, I really like to give to microenterprise loan/grant organizations like Five Talents and directly to aid organizations whose financial statements I can scrutinize to ascertain just how much of my money gets to where it’s supposed to go.
Point well taken, but why is the private pursuit of wealth singled out? I never hear anyone (other than that kook Ron Paul) condemn government for confiscatory taxation, devaluing the currency, and running up deficits to unthinkable levels even though it is the poor who suffer the most from the government’s diversion of capital. The government gobbles up trillions of dollars a year and presses its citizens for more, more, [i]more[/i], but I never see any poverty activists calling for government to consume less.
Has the economic disaster so shaken the American Dream of getting rich quickly and painlessly? Earlier, I would have said no. the bottomless hunger of the Perfect Consumer trumps all realities. Now, I am not so sure. As the price of gas drops, the gas guzzlers will be bought once again, but it may be that there has indeed been a fundamental shift in the American attitude toward self-restraint, consistent with the kind of cultural change one sees when a new century shakes off the fin de siecle malaise that characterized the old. The new century may be getting ready to speak, and the liberal tsunami we see upcoming in November is a wave that was started in the old century and whose effects will only galvanize the change in the new. Larry