you haven't got a clue do you?Viveka wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2017 9:57 pmWhat 'Western Culture like the US"? We have a culture of Consumerism, Money is God, Jesus is healthcare with the gambling of insurance and a pop icon with little to no understanding of what he originally meant by his parables or his ministry or how Christianity's 'Word' developed through the Roman Catholic Church, and the Apostles are electronics and short-lived thrills like video-games.DPMartin wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2017 8:28 pmsorry to jump in here, but this is an excellent posting.Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2017 10:04 am The following quote from Cicero applicable to a populist politician and those important persons who rob the poor to pay the rich:
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."
(My underline)
been giving some thought to this, and this may not be an accurate articulation but it seems today in western culture maybe more like the US that there is this underlining sinister way of thinking where nothing is, namely, nobody is to be excluded from anything for any reason. hence a social demand to corrupt everything in the name of "fairness for all" insisting on "inclusion for all".
hence no distinction between race, religion, gender so on and so forth. and what I mean by corrupting is; if you insist that neo-Nazis are entitled to not only join the NAACP but to be promoted and administer, would corrupt the purpose of the organization hence a traitor within. one who is not for but against what the organization is for.
There's a reason why the Alchemists used the same symbol for Gold as the same symbol for 'Goodness'. Supposedly Gold is the manifestation of Goodness, and this ultimately lead to Capitalism and Nation-building as it was a prime source for currency and exchange. If we are to revolt against money being God, we also cannot lapse into Communism nor Capitalism but rather an in-between. Without Capitalism there is no profit made, and thus no true progress in advancing society. Communism is a failed societal experiment, as has been tried over and over again without any true utopia, and Capitalism as we know it can only work when we can print money out of thin air with no chance of deflation at the behest of big banks that rule the civilized world. Jesus in the scourging of the temple was specifically doing it because of the profit that money changers made by exchanging money at a price; one of the world's first banking activities. Unearned labor such as usury was what Jesus was against, and that would be the beginning of a true utopia.
money usury or debit has been around since one person had the need for what the other had and didn't have the kind of conscious it take to take it, or didn't have the power to take it. so he was stuck with indebtedness. and biblically the Lord God of Israel instructed the Israelites (via Moses) on usury and who should and shouldn't borrow or owe and how it should be restored if payment wasn't met. so you are way incorrect on those points.
but everything has its place and time of which Jesus knew, they knew they were incorrect. and made a point to show how corrupt they were.
and no system of gov or economy is good or evil, its the souls that have charge of such systems, and or governments.
just like guns, guns don't kill, people do, and many use guns to do it. gov's don't oppress the people that have the power to use gov to oppress, oppress.