Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 10th mo. 31, 2012 at 11:26pm

We agree that government is not necessarily "of the People, by the people and for the people".  I wonder if it ever was?
 
Forrest Curo said:

James C Schultz said:

I find Christianity implies living from the heart of God but in submission to man's free will.  Accordingly I cannot use it as a reason to violate another's free will even if that free will is controlled by greed.  I can only use it as my own personal guide.  So while I can love my neighbor as myself, I cannot make my neighbor love anyone.

I think that what God actually does is something like wise parental practice, except for having more wisdom available than human parents:

God is considerate of our 'free will' because continually overwhelming people from outside, imposing the "right" choices against our wills, would do violence to the identities God seeks to foster in us. But where we would intervene if we saw a small child playing on the freeway -- preventing consequences that would be 'fatal' as human beings see matters -- One who can truly see "death" as a change of address will have a different perspective as to what consequences warrant interference, and of what sort.

And where God hesitates, we would be fools to go heedlessly. Sometimes I can be grateful for outside interference; but that's a real stretch; it's not often the way to treat anyone I like. So yes, certainly respecting human free will.

Equally, it's not good to let your friends drink themselves to death; you may have to do it but you'd rather find an alternative. Likewise for them being "controlled by greed."

Governments, however... The present maldistribution of concrete goods and services results from human political activities, from policies that facilitate large scale institutional fraud and robbery. We haven't been granted any real control over the organizations that set those policies, but whatever we try to do to help each other, it takes place in their shadows. We can help set up co-op alternatives, but their incomes will be limited by the economic desertification currently affecting the 'real economy'. Poor wretches can dream of becoming rich wretches, but we don't get to promise them that.

What to conclude from any of this; I dunno either. Don't rouse false hope; try to rouse faith in that Power we truly live by... If you've got two shirts and your friend doesn't have one, see if one of yours will fit... as John the Baptist was saying. "Spare no deceit" as Fox said: or as I say in this context, "Friends shouldn't let Friends buy into excuses for blaming victims -- or for abusing them in the guise of 'Tough Love'." [Tough love wears high-heeled leather boots and wants its toes sucked; love is something else!]

Prayers for Illumination and Guidance, because I think we're going to need these a lot!

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 11th mo. 1, 2012 at 1:15am

James C Schultz said:

I don't want to make this a political topic as I don't believe I have any special wisdom in knowing which government program is truly needed.  Since I am not a legislator I haven't prayed for such wisdom.  If I was I would and I pray that the people I vote for will.

We weren't given power over political decisions; and so far as we disagree with any that are made, "our" legislators' main concern will be to keep our inputs ineffectual. So, why try to understand what's going on and what could be done better, but won't be?

Well, I myself don't care to get all riled up about any of it; it's as natural as a bunch of lemmings going over a cliff... just because the ones behind keep pushing.

We aren't responsible for outcomes that aren't in our hands.

We do have minds, eyes, ears; we know there are people willing to spend a remarkable amount of money to keep the general public befuddled [Do I mean, "to keep the agenda phrased the way they want it"? Yes, that's it exactly: "befuddled."]; and they wouldn't do this if they didn't believe it works, if they didn't find it effective.

So maybe, since it's the best we can hope for -- We can cultivate a sense of what's true (even if everyone's denying it) vs what's illusion and swindles. Not because it'll affect outcomes, but because truth matters. [It doesn't matter that we will, some of the time, be mistaken. Or that we won't be able to devote our lives to researching everything, and shouldn't! Just that we want to know what's true, that we don't stop looking or asking God what it means.]

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 11th mo. 2, 2012 at 12:10pm

Thinking more about "not making this a political topic."

While finding politics to be "a dry hole", I see a lot of truth in John Crossan's description of Jesus as '100% political and 100% religious.' That is, Jesus took stands on behalf of the poor people of his day that definitely put him at odds with the religious/secular human rulers of Judea.

The stories of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness may be key... Jesus neither affirms nor denies the claim that Satan is ruling the kingdoms of the Earth; he simply refuses to worship anyone but God.

I think that "worship" implies devotion, certainly, but also recognition that God is the one whose power needs to be considered. Satan gets to run the show in so far as human beings let him (deferring to dubious official 'expertise' being simply one example of how we do this!)

But God's purposes are being served throughout, even by our mistakes. Those purposes will be served better, with fewer impediments, when more people are insisting on justice and mercy (even when these aren't on the menu!)

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 11th mo. 5, 2012 at 12:18pm

Hmmmm, the link should take you to 

http://michael-hudson.com/1992/03/the-lost-tradition-of-biblical-de...

[but if not, you can simply paste that into your browser]

whereupon you click on the word 'here' and should then commence downloading a pdf.

I took another look at the previous link, trying to find what's the difficulty, and -- not a hint...

Hudson's commentaries (among the wide range of articles at michael-hudson.com)  on several 'write down' plans suggest that what's been going on is less about "debt forgiveness" than you're hoping -- is more about maintaining debt, keeping the payments flowing, and above all persuading the world that there's still enough juice in the victims to keep the vampiric institutions viable...

The 'Invisible Hand' is picking your pocket... Smith wasn't saying that modern stock-speculation capitalism is stable, equitable, or efficient at anything useful; he was talking about a significantly different system, with many independent proprietor-run real-economy industries in genuine competition over price, quality, efficiency of production & distribution.

He also said that the owners would conspire together to stabilize prices at a high level at every opportunity.

His comment on joint stock corporations was that he'd expect them to perform badly on all measures except for enriching their managers...

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 11th mo. 5, 2012 at 3:35pm

 Tried to not make the address a link here, because it gets truncated... Anyway, last part of address is

1992/03/the-lost-tradition-of-biblical-debt-cancellations/

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Permalink Reply by Mackenzie on 11th mo. 9, 2012 at 2:11pm

Those people with second homes worrying about money might be realizing it was foolish to seek status by having a second home while choosing debt.

I think you are absolutely correct about the necessity of "losers" in the system to maintain middle and upper class lifestyles. The thing I come back to repeatedly is clothing (I can go sheep to shawl). If we all had to either spend the time on, or pay someone a living wage to spend the time on, making clothing, how big would our wardrobes be? Well in the 1930s, the average American woman had 9 dresses for her entire wardrobe. And while that's post-Triangle, it's still not a time with favorable worker conditions. So how many dresses do you think the average 17th century Quaker had? I imagine not more than 3, the third being the oldest one, to be worn at home when washing the other two.

Joanna Hoyt said:

Thanks a lot for posting the full piece here--I still can't get the blog page to load so that I can comment where I should and see others' comments. 

There's more going on in this post than i feel adequately able to respond to. But these bits especially jumped out at me:

"But if, by some wild stretch, we should make a significant difference in poor people's lives, do we want them to seek to achieve what our own culture calls success?"

--this one is live for me, since I've been living at the Catholic Worker for the last eleven years and have attended some events where earnest professionals talk about helping poor folks to acquire middle-class virtues and therefore to Succeed.  That goal looks unrealistic to me--the filthy rotten system requires a certain number of 'losers' to do the grunt work which the professionals now consider beneath themselves; anyway if all the world lived like us we'd need four more planted to mine from and dump into. It also looks unhealthy--many of the 'successful' people I know seem exhausted and alienated.  So I keep trying to figure out how we make a system that allows people to have enough  without having too much--enough work, enough leisure, enough food, clothing, shelter, transport, medical care...  Some people seem to have a clear vision of how to accomplish this through legislation. m I;m glad for them, but right now I don't see it.  i do see, though, how households and local communities can start toward it.  And it looks to me as though starting is apt to require some form of voluntary poverty from those who are coming from a more middle/upper-class place...

I do know, though, that this isn't all; that what you write about the false security money provides, and about the need to rely rather on Something unshakeable, is essential. 

The odd thing is that some of the fairly well-to-do folks I know don't seem to have a sense of false security about money, rather the opposite; it is odd from where I now stand to hear people who have second homes worrying aloud about money, but it;s happened repeatedly... At first this sounds to me like self-absorbed and imaginary misery. Perhaps it's more a recognition that you can never have enough money to provide security, because security just doesn't work that way...sort of the way that you can't have a large enough military to provide security.  Maybe we'd all be a little saner and more faithful if we acknowledged that we are not and never will be safe, and that that's all right.

Of course, that's easy for me to say about money and weaponry.  Other people's approval is the idol I get stuck worshiping, even though I know there's no real security there either...

This question from your post also is sticking in my mind:

 "That is, a church can and should serve whichever needs people find most pressing – but its specific mission is to promote the distribution of spiritual goods. Why is that so much harder than handing out bread?"

I will need to keep thinking about that.  Maybe because spiritual goods require time and quietness in which to be nurtured, and our culture tends to crowd quiet time with a host of distractions? Maybe because bread can be obviously given once and for all and spiritual good has to be evoked not just given?

I think, too, that  the two need not always be separate--that it is possible to move toward a way of life that makes work, worship and bread more available for everyone.

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Permalink Reply by Mackenzie on 11th mo. 9, 2012 at 2:17pm

But was that "you" singular (Judas, in your lifetime, you will always...) or plural (all of us forever)?

This is the interpretation I am more familiar with:

http://georgedowdell.org/2012/03/28/you-will-always-have-the-poor-a...

James C Schultz said:

it is not the church's job to bring people up to a society's standards.  It is the Church's responsibility to take care of widows and orphans.  That is true religion.  Jesus said we would always have the poor with us.  We are supposed to not consume everything we can which you could interpret to make sure we give a tithe to the poor but it's not our responsibility to do more than that.  With that we also have to love our neighbor.  But again that doesn't mean we make him into a western consumer.  We have lost site of the simple life.  We are a "stuff" culture, not a need culture.  We should certainly teach people how to and when to  fish as Jesus did but we have no obligation to buy them a bassboat with a 150 hp motor.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 11th mo. 9, 2012 at 2:49pm

Mackenzie said:

But was that "you" singular (Judas, in your lifetime, you will always...) or plural (all of us forever)?

 

There's also the Torah, which Jesus knew well enough: "If you do all these things, you will have no poor among you." So the statement could be read as commentary on how well people were observing the spirit of those laws.

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Permalink Reply by Mac Lemann on 11th mo. 14, 2012 at 2:23pm

Your basic question is a great one and I was hoping for more of a practical response. I agree with you that looking back to Jubilee economics is absolutely critical when addressing the issue of poverty as followers of God. And I agree that saving people from poverty should not mean making them into better consumers. But I think your conclusion is a bit muddled while I believe God's will is clear.

First, to put our faith in money as a means of salvation from the suffering we experience is obviously idolatry. I like Paul Tillich's talk of absolute faith in the "ground of being." Whatever we make the ground of our being is our God and in our culture that is wealth and power. I have absolute faith that life is about something different, that loving kindness is the solution to suffering. Therefore the christian, especially Quaker, response to suffering is never to raise people up with money but to ground ourselves in God's love.

Your examples from ancient Mesopotamia speak directly to the problems in our culture. We hear the problem most often described in terms of people's poverty and the solution seems to be helping people up out of poverty. But according to the writings you cite the solution is actually for those who hold people in debt to forgive those debts. Our entire economy is based on debt and the capitalists who drive it along are continually struggling to find new ways to collect interest on debt. Take, for example, the recent real-estate based near-collapse of our banking system. The banks wealth was measured by the value of the mortgages they hold and future interest to be paid. These mortgages were traded around and sold for more than their worth, banks did not do due diligence when issuing the mortgages and in the end it turned out the basis of their wealth was not worth what they thought. Indeed IT IS WORTH NOTHING all of the debt that grounds their wealth is IMAGINARY. The capital's solution to this problem was to take out loans from the tax-payers (the debtors themselves) to shore up the value of their portfolio's. Of course the government could have given all of that money directly to the debtors allowing them to repay their loans and be free of debt based insecurity for ever. The banks would have been repaid as well, but this would not serve capital's purpose of keeping the working classes enslaved to them, trapped in an unending cycle of debt.

If you want to see an approach to debt-based poverty, jubilee in action, see this project of Occupy Wall Street: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ows-abolish-distressed-loans-ar...

And, within our Quaker society, I believe we need to find practical ways to eliminate poverty, debt, and even wealth. Indeed, every one of us with cash in our pockets is holding debt. That money entitles us to collect something in exchange for it. When I let my imagination soar I believe that if we truly seek God's way, Friends could be the vanguard in showing the world another way. We would certainly be peculiar, but if we collectivized the worldly wealth of all who choose to follow the Quaker way, incorporating it into cooperatives of every sort from farmers to lawyers and doctors. We could, perhaps, take care of the material needs of all of our Friends, manage (and limit) our connection to the world of Capital and Politics.  We could be free from all idols to follow God without fear and with love.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 11th mo. 14, 2012 at 5:16pm

Mac Lemann said:

...I was hoping for more of a practical response....

Your 'practical' solutions sound better than what we've got

though maybe not as truly practical as a "Don't bail, prosecute!" policy. Nobody can be entirely to blame for what they do in an ethically-toxic social environment, given the basic employment criterion: "You must be a crook or you wouldn't be here." But none of the perps were literally forced to dive in. They could have sought training in some useful skill -- and though the big money was clearly in the financial fraud professions, they could have conceivably achieved a modest honest income from that. They didn't go that route.

Buying people free of debt seems praiseworthy -- but the whole transaction would be analogous to ransoming them from kidnappers, then letting the kidnappers go free with the proceeds of their crimes.
-----

Anyway, back on that muddled theological ground: God is not whatever serves to uphold somebody's personal value system -- but what you might better think of as the underlying background of existence itself. If life were described as a movie, God would be the screen, the director, the actors, the audience.

God's will, then, is not limited to having Quakers adopt more humane economic customs. Conceivably we could do this, apply an idolatrous regard towards those improved practices -- and still not recognizing our Maker, drift into some subtler and more destructive evil.

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Permalink Reply by Mac Lemann on 11th mo. 15, 2012 at 3:36pm

Am I right in understanding that your reaction to the sinful behaviors of our banking/investment managers is to sue them? So you put your faith in our legal system. I call this idolatry. I believe that God's approach to sinners is in fact to love them and invite them into the communion that we have experienced. What would Jesus tell us to do with our kidnappers?

I understand what Tillich was saying when he used the term "ground of being;" that God is the foundation of all things. But certainly you understand that when idolaters make anything worldly the ground of their being then that becomes there god. In this case, when we believe that money, politicians, or lawyers will save us from the ills of the world and not the eternal Truth of God's all encompassing love, then we are idolaters.

Your final sentence took a couple of re-readings to understand but I think you mean that you believe debt forgiveness, or any other practical behavior, could become an idol if it is not grounded in God's leading. Well, you articulated for us in your initial post how debt forgiveness was a valuable part of Mesopotamian culture. Indeed, Jubilee is explained directly as God's Will in the Bible and through worship my sense of God's will has arisen in my conscience: that we must approach the world with Love in order to overcome fear and the sins that arise from it. Debt forgiveness is absolutely essential to bringing about God's Paradise on Earth, which I believe is the ultimate project of Quakerism.

I agree with you that loving people and inviting them into loving communion is more difficult than giving them bread, but I believe in a theology and spirituality that is absolutely grounded in material being, as I believe Jesus did. These two must go hand in hand. What do you believe?

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 11th mo. 16, 2012 at 11:27am

Mac Lemann said:

Am I right in understanding that your reaction to the sinful behaviors of our banking/investment managers is to sue them

I agree that the legal system is an inadequate mechanism for regulating human activity, but we were in the context of proposing remedies within that system.

Suing might frighten the perps & inmates of the financial gangs more than threats of prosecution -- but prosecution is more appropriate because we're talking about crimes against the entire society, diversion of resources intended for constructive social purpose, towards personal enrichment and illegitimate power over the government that makes their depredations (and economic activity itself) possible.

I agree that criminal penalties are an unchristian and futile approach to crime; but I insist they would be preferable to the present policy of rewarding and honoring the perps of a continuing theft and assault upon the minds, bodies, lives of millions.

Debt forgiveness (in some form) is essential to a workable and decent economic system.

The reign of God is not an economic system. It would insist on breaking or bending any system that harms human beings (as the present one does), which I'm sure was Jesus' position.

I know a Reality in which "material being" is grounded. It is not material per se. Jesus did not imagine a line between the two, but gave precedence to the spiritual foundation of the whole unity.

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