APRIL FOOL’S MONTH (1)
MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL….
A long time ago when media songs still had some sing-able content, “Money is the root of all evil…..take it away, take it away,” was quite popular. Of course I know that money in itself is not evil: it’s the desire for money- greed – that is the real culprit, but, OK that’s how the lyrics went.
I always have a song spinning in my mind. Perhaps it originates in a habit I have: Every morning, just before breakfast, I read a Psalm or a portion thereof, aloud. I’ve done this all my married life – 67 years. Psalm 119 has 176 verses, and is divided into some 10 verse sections, so it takes me some 17 days to read them all. But most Psalms are short, so it in less than a year I go through the entire Psaltery.
I read them in the GRAIL PSALMS version, a new translation. It’s a singing version, and now that I am alone – my wife being in a care facility – I, at times, sing them. Another reason I like the Grail Psalms is that it comes with short introductions. Take Psalm 14. It deals with THE FOOLS: “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” Here is what the introduction says,
“The “fool” in the Bible is not an ignoramus, not a theoretical atheist or agnostic. He has his values all wrong and is encouraged by past experience to behave as if God would never take action.”
Well, I sincerely believe that this applies to us! We are the fools! We have our values all wrong. For the longest time God has allowed us to muddle, to screw things up, to, by our daily habits, dig ourselves deeper and deeper into a situation from which now there’s no escape. Now Creation is revolting.
I have become more and more convinced that for us God speaks through his creation: creation tells us about God the same way the Bible does. Just as we know Bach, Rembrandt, van Gogh, through their artistic acts, so we know God through his ultimate creation act: THE COSMOS. The Gospel of John opens with these majestic words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” No Bible then: only God’s CREATING WORD. Psalm 33: 9 confirms that: “God spoke and it came to be.”
The Bible is open to all sorts of interpretations – witness the HEAVEN HOAX – while creation speaks with one voice: we either LIVE when we love it as our origin, our mother, or we DIE, when we foolishly exploit it for monetary gain, the root of all evil, including the CORONAVIRUS.
Yes, the desire for money is the root of all evil. Governments everywhere have decided that we can vanish THE VIRUS with trillions of dollars, pounds, euros: FOOLISHNESS, PURE FOLLY: Curing evil with more evil, expanding the money tower beyond its carrying capacity, risks collapse.
Jesus and money.
Jesus had a decidedly disdain for money. When He came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:
“It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay,
And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay”.
No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in the USA is the WEALTH GOSPEL, the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation.
I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money.
We will recall that Jesus’ betrayal, suffering and death was directly associated with money: 30 pieces of silver, the price of a slave. How would we react if we’d start to realize that money would eventually kill us, as is the case now? I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money.
This is what I believe: “money killed Jesus, the WORD become HUMAN; money is killing God, the WORD become CREATION”. Of course God is greater than his creation.
Today all governments act like God: creating money ‘ex nihilo’, out of nothing. The trouble is that money, once in existence, becomes real: it has to be paid back. The same is true of ‘nature’. We take from it, but someday soon we have to pay back what we have borrowed, a very painful process, and there is a way.
Dr. Barry Commoner formulated the FOUR LAWS OF ECOLOGY, outlined in the first chapter of his book, The Closing Circle.
These are:
1) Everything is connected to everything else;
2) Everything must go somewhere;
3) Nature knows best; and
4) There is no such thing as a free lunch.
The first law states what Commoner called “a simple fact about ecosystems” – all healthy ecosystems are interconnected and self-stabilizing: if any part of a natural ecosystem is damaged or overstressed it can trigger far wider problems. For example, the burning of fossil fuels is overloading the global carbon cycle, which in turn is triggering dramatic changes to climate, global ice cover, weather patterns, ocean acidification, farming yields, sea levels, government budgets and worldwide refugee figures. Cutting down forests – for money! – leads to PANDEMICS.
Any society that ignores Commoner’s first law – that everything is connected to everything else – invites ecological and social turmoil, so evident today.
Of the second law – everything must go somewhere – Commoner said: “One of the chief reasons for the present environment crisis is that great amounts of materials have been extracted from the Earth, converted into new forms, and discharged into the environment without taking into account that ‘everything must go somewhere’. The result, too often, is the accumulation of harmful amounts of material in places where, in nature, they do not belong.”
Commoner’s third law of ecology – nature knows best – is not an example of naive, green romanticism, but a rejection of what he called “one of the most pervasive features of modern technology … the notion that it is intended to ‘improve on nature’”. Rather, he said: “Stated baldly, the third law of ecology holds that any major man-made change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.”
Commoner said he borrowed his fourth law – there is no such thing as a free lunch – from economic science: “In ecology, as in economics, the law is intended to warn that every gain is won at some cost. In a way, this ecological law embodies the previous three laws. Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to overall improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis and the CORONAVIRUS are warnings that we have delayed too long.”
MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL….
We all have ignored these laws because we foolishly wanted to make a quick buck. We, fools, now pay the price.
At the root of this PANDEMIC is MONEY, monetizing God and his creation, greed in other words. It is making fools of all of us.
More about this later this month.