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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (20363)	6/14/2005 11:33:13 AM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

"Jesus seems like a total radical to me. I imagine he'd be a radical today- he'd probably turn up on the streets of Berkeley." John Locke was a radical, too. So was Adam Smith. So was Thomas Jefferson. Imagine the gaul it took to declare the natural rights of man to political and economic freedom - and perhaps most radical of all their thoughts, property rights - at a time when all rights belonged solely to kings, by "divine right", at the head of powerful nation-states. But that doesn't mean they would be attracted by what passes for "radical" today "on the streets of Berkeley." As I said, conditions change, societies evolve. Religions evolve, too. Or they should lest their followers become stuck in the middle ages like much of the Muslim world today, hiding behind a fundamentalist [mis?]interpretation of the teachings of a wholly different time and lashing out at the proponents of progress. BTW, that WAS an interesting read, particularly toward the end where he seemed to be saying "While I'm not a communist, I wish everyone was. Wouldn't that be great? After all, Jesus was." That appears to be his point in romantically reminiscing about the early Unitarians in Poland and communes and kibbutzes (what is the plural of kibbutz?) since then. Interestingly, he acknowledges, but doesn't seem to understand, their failures. He'd like to pin it on evil capitalism, but the reality is that communism is a fatally flawed system from the get go. It is in direct conflict with human nature and is not a sustainable system for ordering society. And he's wrong in his supposition that communism was born of Christianity. In fact it predates it by at least a few centuries, if not eons. The idea of private property, as opposed to communal (or royal), is a modern notion. Plato's ideal political economy, in fact, closely resembles modern communism with a ruling class of "guardians" administering all resources, controlling and dictating the distribution to society of output. He distrusted markets, trade, money and all acquisitive behavior as potentially destructive to the status quo (based on the misconception of trade, or all economics, as a zero-sum game - a misconception that would last until Adam Smith) and would depend, instead, on rationalized decision-making imposed by authority. Interestingly, as did Orwell's fictional order in 1984, he recognized the simple truth that exchange (trade) is necessary for the economy to function and that money facilitates exchange, but he would tolerate such activity only in the lower, working classes (the Proles of Orwell), not among the ruling elite (the Inner and Outer Party) who he argued should not be allowed personal property lest they be tempted into corruption. As we know, such command economies over history have universally failed and such communist authoritarian ruling classes have generally been corrupted and become despotic (not just the fictional ones, mind you). My opinion is that even though Jesus would likely eschew worldly possession were he alive today, he would also approve of the doctrines of political and economic freedom as espoused by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence AND by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations - i.e. capitalism. You see, as the sermon you linked made clear (to me, anyway), Jesus resisted all trappings of wealth and authority for himself and his disciples because he felt they would hinder the spreading of his message, not because having or wanting worldly things was itself wrong.