Multifaith Mishegaas
- He plays a fake priest on Lost and now he’s leading the state senate in prayer.
- Rabbi Gellman on Bono and billionaires.
- Roman Catholic group starts blogging to help its image ruined by The Da Vinci Code.
- Meet God’s green soldiers.
- Slate: Which religions allow you to draw their Gods?
- Not surprisingly, HBO’s new Utah-base polygamy drama is upsetting the Mormons.
The Catholic Churches image was hurt because it wouldn’t deal intelligently with Pedophile priests. It has little to do with the DaVinci code, which is a bad book most people haven’t read. People who incline toward the da vinci code’s views are mostly feminists and gay and they wouldn’t like the Catholic Church anyway, since the Catholic Church doesn’t like them.
The Gellman article was interesting. It was one of the rare occasions where a critic of capitalism actually seemed to have some understanding of it. In the end, though, he overemphasizes the differences between the religious and the economic worldviews. Also, he seems to realize that the economic view is indispensable to human well-being, yet offers no approach as to how to reconcile the two views. As a person who is steeped in the Jewish ethos of charity and compassion and is also convinced that free-market capitalism is the only effective way to reduce poverty and misery, I think that sullenly declaring the two views to be incompatible is counterproductive. Better to explore how the two can be combined.
There is something called social democracy that works quite well, at allowing people consumer products, and reducing poverty, but that isn’t a dogmatic like capitalism, or communism, so it won’t be disgussed here in America.
“Allowing people consumer products”. Please, sir, may I have another?
Damn straight that won’t fly in America.
I am uninsured and I have health problems, and I don’t think unregulated capitalism will ever solve that, so I am not interested in the pure form.
I don’t know what Bono thinks he is accomplishing begging rich people for help. It is better to empower the non rich than do that. It ain’t my scene and I tend to ignore those stories. I don’t think anything that happens at Davos is about me or any other poor person, or that it ever will be.
Gellman article was good, and it’s true capitalism does not take into consideration humanity. They are mutually exclusive. Since, in this system of capitalism we are commodified, this process transforms your value into an economic product. There is no soul to an economic product, it can be traded, used, worked, transformed, and left out in the sun to rot. As products, we don’t capture all of our value, so for every 5 dollars of profit i produce the capitalist takes 4, and gives me 1 (probably would give me less if he/she had the chance). This is what infuriated marx to no end. All though I don’t agree with his utopia of communism I do believe that the only way to capture all of your value is to become the runner of the machine, not the fuel for it. In all honestly, the capitalism is like a wildfire. Sure it will burn down barriers, but it does so at such a esclated cost one has to wonder if it’s worth it.