Yeah well I hope we’re not finding hypocrasy in organised religion/politics. That would be simply too much to bear in these dire times. There is one thing though that has always puzzled me about Judeo Christian doctrine.
That is that fundies in both creeds find various obscure pieces of text to justify all sorts of weird stuff from not having blood transfusions to not allowing blokes to play around with other blokes bottoms but there is one very stern ruling in the first and second testaments that everyone appears to forget.
I refer of course to the strictures against usury or charging a borrower for lending money.
In the past the anti-usury movement has been portrayed as anti-semitism and there are those in the jewish philosophy that maintain that the strictures are only against one’s own kind. The jews who follow this line believe that it is OK to charge interest if the borrower is a ‘foreigner’ which some believe to mean not a fellow jew. Now I don’t want to buy into that racist propaganda from either side but it is weird that fundies not known for their; for want of a better phrase, ‘political correctness’, should be so staunch on this issue.
One could argue for example that the whole growth at any cost tenet is a direct result of interest charges.
In other words everyone has to make more this year than they did last year because the use of assets has a basic cost before any ‘profit’ can be taken out.
If a financial entity has $500,000 worth of assets then that entity must profit by $500,000 divided by the prevailing interest rate MORE than it did last year or the entity has gone backwards.
Blind freddy can see that eventually this juggernaut will have ‘sold’ everything it can, that everybody within the ‘market’ has consumed everything available, yet next year somehow ‘more’ must be done.
I don’t want to go all green here but is this really the best utilisation of finite resources?
So the fundies don’t say a word about usury because if they understand they can only perceive ending it as the death of the economy. Perhaps people need to put their heads together and develop an economy that is self sustaining and where it’s absolutely fine to do the same this year as you did last year.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 15 2005 23:06 utc | 3

religions of gammon? does that mean, when I play backgammon, I’m involved in some sort of religious ceremony (esp. when no one is betting or using the cube?)
Good to see Milton in there. He knew how to slap down the royal a-holes.
btw, did you ever hear about the pre WWI era…when there was still a progressive voice, and many of them did not want to join that war of, for and of course never by the rich.
A Chicago, I think it was, a paper published Milton’s Areopagitica (for freedom of the press) in response to the alien and sedition acts that put Debs in jail. People wrote to the paper telling them that however wrote that stuff should be in jail.
In 1644 the English poet and man of letters, John Milton, published the Areopagitica as an appeal to Parliament to rescind their Licensing Order of June 16th, 1643. This order was designed to bring publishing under government control by creating a number of official censors to whom authors would submit their work for approval prior to having it published. Milton’s argument, in brief, was that precensorship of authors was little more than an excuse for state control of thought.
the more things change…

Posted by: fauxreal | Jun 16 2005 1:12 utc | 5

O/T maybe but while we are talking about money, capitalism, governmants…
New idea in Brazil seems like
interesting one
Ricardo Semler – Brazil’s Caring Capitalist

Posted by: vbo | Jun 16 2005 4:48 utc | 7