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What he said, to the rich young man, is that "in order to be perfect" you should sell all your possessions and "come, follow me." (The rich young man had spoken of his piety, his adherence to religious law, his tithing, his generosity toward the poor, etc., etc., and wanted to know what ELSE he could do, to be holy.)
It's true that the only anger Jesus ever displayed was toward the money-changers in the Temple. He routed them, because they were defiling the Temple, a holy place, but he did not condemn them to eternal damnation. His "eye of the needle" remark had to do with the DIFFICULTY of being rich and being holy. It wasn't a condemnation.
It's clear, though, that if Jesus had been asked about economic systems, the one he mostly likely would have endorsed is socialism. He lived communally, welcomed all, and treated all equally--rich, poor and sinner, men, women and children--with particular love for the oppressed and the downtrodden of any kind. (And communalism and equality were strong characteristics of the earliest Christian groups.)
That is the bitter irony of the predatory capitalism of today: Its very worst profiteers are trying to use Christianity to endorse greed and mass murder. They are very reminiscent of the more predatory animals within the Medieval nobility and within the Medieval Church, who also somehow managed to reverse Jesus' gentle message into a justification for crusades, pogroms, witch-burnings, and the acquisition of great wealth.
Christianity as a whole has come a long way from those days, and has learned many lessons. (Even the Catholic Church has learned some lessons about war and economic exploitation, if not about oppressing women.) (And however snotty they are about women becoming priests, they don't burn "witches" any more--that's progress!).
The rise of rightwingism within Christianity is very overblown. The news monopolies give the far right a big trumpet, to broadcast distinctly minority views, and make them seem more important than they really are. This serves the purposes of predatory capitalism and the Bush Cartel. But it is an untruth. Most Christians are peaceful and tolerant in their beliefs, hate war, hate predatory capitalism, and support measures to "level the playing field," such as unions and worker protections, a safety net for the poor, civil rights enforcement and so on. Christians, including many Catholics, were big supporters of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. These people have not gone away--they are just being out-trumpeted, due to the overweening influence of war profiteering news corporations upon public debate.
(I am speaking, of course, of North American Christians, as a whole. There are also some quite radical leftist trends, especially in south/central America, of liberation theology and socialism, and some evidence of it in the north, for instance, among the Catholic Workers.)
I myself love business and trade. I think these are very human characteristics, based on our inherent creativity and love of novelty. Trade has almost always propelled us forward in our understanding of other peoples and cultures, and the success of middle-class tradespeople has often been the fundamental condition for progress, education and enlightenment. I think I must have been a caravanist in other life, back along the spice route. I just relish the color and variety of a true marketplace (of which our current corporate-controlled "malls" are a very distorted representation, and compare to a true marketplace much like Jerry Falwell or George Bush compare to true Christians).
It is PREDATORY capitalism that I hate. It actually kills creativity and invention. It tends to a mono-culture (very damaging biologically, as well as socially). And in the U.S. today, it is totally out of control. It is destroying our democracy, and all the sweetness of life, and has become a threat to life itself through the mayhem it is inflicting on our planetary environment. Our governmental "balance of powers" has utterly collapsed as a means of controlling these predators. And they now control our election system--which, over the last four years, has gotten into private hands--those of Bushite companies Diebold and ES&S--whose vote tabulation software is "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY information!
The answer is BALANCE. The needs of society (socialism!) vs. the need to leave people alone and let them invent their lives and their livings. It is a difficult and delicate balance, and has not often succeeded. There are numerous efforts toward balance in various stages of progress, on a score of different issues (with medical care often as the lynchpin, in capitalistic economies)--in France, Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, Great Britain, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, South Africa, South Korea, India, even in China, the great communist bugaboo which has been forced to liberalize its economy (to balance it the other way), and in Hawaii, which has socialized medicine, and Alaska, which, like Venezuela and Norway, has socialized (or partially socialized) oil money.
The trend toward BALANCE is very distinct. One of the few places it is NOT happening is in most of the U.S.A., which is extremely unbalanced and distorted toward the predators. California is a good example. It had built up a big budget surplus which was being distributed to education, to environmental programs, in higher salaries and pensions for teachers, nurses and all public employees, and in various "common good" programs--until it was outright stolen ($9 billion!) by the Bushite Enron Corporation, with the Bush regime refusing to protect the state, though it had the power to do so.
But the U.S. is an anomaly. Most other countries are trending the other way--toward balance, toward progressive values (if not outright leftism), toward democracy and toward peace. (There is even a liberalization and democracy movement in Iran, which the Bush Cartel is trying very hard to undermine.) (The political/economic trends in Islamic counties are a different topic, which I won't address here, except to say that the west has been a real bad actor in supporting dictatorships in these countries, and Islamic fundamentalism, which has a strong communal component, is in large part a reaction to the west's very wrongful deeds).
Chavez's "socialism" in Venezuela is part of this BALANCING trend. The vast poor of Venezuela have long been seriously oppressed, unrepresented in government, and robbed of most of the benefit of their own labor or the country's great oil wealth, and also robbed of land, so that even their ability of live hand to mouth, from their own plantings, was greatly reduced. Chavez is trending the other way. He is NOT a revolutionary in any traditional sense. He did not overthrow the government of the rich elite. He got elected! Twice! With great majorities! (The most recent, the Bush-backed recall election, was monitored by dozens of international groups, including the Carter Center, all of whom judged the election to be fair and aboveboard.)
To call him a dictator--or "increasingly totalitarian," or whatever they are saying this week--is absolute rubbish! The man helped write and pass the first Venezuelan Constitution. He helped write and pass the recall provision by which they tried to take him down. (The Bush Cartel infused millions of our taxpayer dollars into that campaign by the Venezuelan oil elite!) He is the exact opposite of a dictator. He is a former military man who CHOSE democracy, and has worked tirelessly for its success. He is the first and only leader of Venezuela who has ever represented the majority of its people. (He is also the first brown-skinned leader of Venezuela, whose population is mostly brown and poor.)
And bear this in mind. All Venezuelan media are owned by the rich oil elite, and have relentlessly propagandized against him, and still he won! Big! Twice! Like the US news monopolies, Venezuelan media basically detest democracy and are shills for corporate oil interests. They hate Chavez and his socialist notion that the poor should benefit from the country's resources--as well they might. It means a bit of a curb on the profits of the rich, a bit of sharing, a bit of Christianity! He hasn't taken their Jaguars away, or nationalized their corrupt "news media." He is just trying to be FAIR; to achieve BALANCE.
But, as we have learned here in the U.S., the goals of predatory capitalists and their corporate organizations are not fairness or balance. They don't even like competition and "free trade." They seek monopolistic control over us, our taxes, our votes, our labor and our resources, and those of all other countries. They have become a bloody menace throughout the world, and should be curtailed and de-chartered HERE, in the land that gave birth to them. We have the power to do that--to de-charter and dismantle them. That's why they took our away our right to vote.
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