Wednesday, December 09, 2009
evil
you are most likely familiar with the phrase "money is the root of all evil". it's from the Christian bible. specifically the First Epistle to Timothy, chapter six, verse ten:
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
that's the King James Version of the Christian bible, in case you're curious.
![7-4Time[1].jpg](/ptblog/uploads/7-4Time%5B1%5D.jpg "Le Corbusier. Jefferson. Montessori. Pizarro. Elizabeth. Tinkerbell. all of them high order Masons.")
whoever it was writing to Timothy (Paul? Polycarp? the pneuma?) seems to have gotten it backwards. the truncated malapropism most of us are familiar with is likewise mixed up: money, or the love of it, isn't the root of evil. rather, it seems to this church, evil is the root of money and greed. or maybe neither caused the other; they just happen to make a really good team.
how about some multimedia? this video is a decent primer on some major issues with the modern monetary system. it's a bit cutesy and of course a gross simplification, but a decent primer. pay special attention to the importance of exponential growth. if you've got the slightly longer attention span for it, there's also sort of a sequel (learn some Finnish while you watch!). if you're up for some, uh, light reading on the topic, The Lost Science of Money isn't a bad place to start. if your local library doesn't have it, they can almost certainly track a copy down and get it to you through an interlibrary loan.
those animations and book only address them briefly, but the negative social, health, and environmental consequences resulting inevitably from the modern money system are relatively well documented, if not well known or acknowledged. this church is concerned, first and foremost, with the impact of the prevailing money system on dirt. that impact is too vast to adequately elaborate here, so a very brief summary will have to do: in order to function, the money system requires an always increasing rate of consumption of finite resources. that consumption necessarily harms dirt and at an always increasing rate. for such a system to continue indefinitely is an impossibility. to believe otherwise is folly. to accept the truth but do nothing to change things is a selfishness that future generations will not and should not forgive.
but do not despair; there are alternatives. for today, we'll limit ourselves to discussion of the evil status quo, but take comfort in the knowledge that there are ways out. there are people who can help. whether you notice them or not, they are all around you.
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