Religion

Money deserves our reverence. Formal religion among the People is ontologically obliged to deal with money along with weights and measures as a “mode of worship”, because money and measures influence the interaction of humans with one another and [as we are now learning] with the environment … both in the present and across generations … for good or for ill. The Jewish Old Testament and the Christian New Testament both have strict admonitions about the individual and social practices associated with money and measures ... and warnings of the inevitable punishments for departure therefrom.

In his final book in 1995, “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” [TROTE], Christopher Lasch notes:

• “[T]he old dispute between left and right has exhausted its capacity to clarify issues and to provide a reliable map of reality. … [I]n some quarters the very idea of reality has come into question, perhaps because the talking classes inhabit an artificial world in which simulations of reality replace the thing itself. ... But now that we are beginning to grasp the limits of our control over the natural world, [the elites' mastery] is an illusion - the future of which is very much in doubt, an illusion more problematical, certainly, than the future of religion.”

Were we to replace Lasch's “simulations” with the Federal Reserve's ”stimulations” it would be immediately obvious and irrefutable that the elites "in whom we trust" have [their real intentions notwithstanding] led us away from the reality which all religion proclaims as good and worthy of our worship into a virtual reality they manage for partisan profit and not for social or environmental justice. That a dire state of civil and environmental rights should arise [albeit difficult to diagnose] from such deviance is to be expected. Consider these thoughts by the prophet Micah and the philosopher John Ruskin:

• "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Micah 6

• "The Creator himself pre-ordained that the criterion of all human behaviour was not profit but justice, and on the strength of this all efforts to define levels of profit are always useless. Not one person has ever known, or can know, what the final results of a certain action, or series of actions, will be, either for himself or for others. But each one of us can know which action is just and which is not. And likewise, we can all know that the consequences of justice will, at the end of the day, be as good for ourselves as for others, although it is beyond our power to say beforehand what this good will be and of what it will consist." John Ruskin

Would a just God require something of man which man was not already equipped [sociologically and ecologically] to achieve? Religion, if it is to remain relevant in the future, must join the battle to reform and restore the role and management of the money in our midst.

Additional resources and thoughts

• Religion and Money

• Family: from nature to nomos to money