Monday, October 6, 2008

The Financial Crisis and The Prosperity Gospel - Unsettling Link

Take a look at this:

While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity's central promise — that God will "make a way" for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house." The results, he says, "were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.
Interesting article here (Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess) - true as it may be, note the "subtle" promotion of the naturalistic worldview by injecting the idea that "magical thinking" is the root cause of the current crisis, thus sweeping all persons of faith under the umbra of cognitive disfunction.

While the Prosperity Gospel (PG) is certainly a foul heresy, it seems disgenious not to point out that it is reasonable to conjecture that a consistant naturalist would also have little or no restraining impulse within their worldview not to cast caution to the wind and grab what gusto they could in their purposeless pursuit of meaninglessness gene passing.

As far as the PG goes, it reminds me of certain Scriptures:

Matthew 6:24
"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.


1 Timothy 6:10
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Amen!

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