I’ve just started reading this essay entitled Greed by Julian Edney. It’s quite long and I have barely started it yet I know this might be right up the alley of people who visit this site. Let me know what you think, I’ll be posting any thoughts in the comments as I go.
(p.s. I just got a Gmail address.. can you guess what it is?)
**mini-update**
After going through my daily comic routine, I found Bob the Angry Flower’s comic entitled Bob vs. Money part 2 particularily funny. You may want to read part 1 first.
The problem: “…on the way to wealth, there are no principles competitors won’t compromise.”
Ethical Capitalism has become an Oxymoron.
ive just started it, as well…looks like a great resource, though…thanks for sharing it…ill try to get back with a more comprehensive response asap
WHAT ME READ? Past, reading blogs and my on line newspapers, I don’t read……
Anyway, I agree…a variety of pictures would enhance but the story genre
is cool to do!
You have to read my retort on the Moonbats comments—damn, should have been
a politician!
They have a tendency to “look at history” only when it fits their opinions!
My thoughts/opinions etc of TODAY, have a foundation based on my “realm of experience” (history) coupled with what is actually going on TODAY.
Allan & Vilmar have become friends…but we know the twain will never meet on the LEFT/RIGHT business!
yes, “greed” is great and long; i have to stop messing around and actually read it!
Yeah, i read the article and it kind of hit home. I don’t really understand. Jesus said we’d always have the poor with us, which makes me wonder whether we really need worry ’bout the issue. To think it needs no thought, however, sounds saddistic as if the suffering of others has no value. I suppose other’s needs need to be thought of and Jesus knew that, but perhaps he understood that human nature is greedy and would live with inequality, even in communist countries the political powers have more than everyone else.
Julian Edney makes some interesting observations (the “nuts” game results), but his thinking is muddled.
The Founding Fathers would not have thought all men are created *financially* equal. They are equal in their fundamental rights, as opposed to the difference in rights accorded to lords and commoners in Merry Olde England. Or nowadays, between untouchables and Brahmins in India.
The poor, starving people of North Korea are in poverty because of the corrupt regime. The poor in America are due mainly to poor choices, most being single mothers with children.
His statement that if every church in America would take in just six people, there would be no more homelessness is wrong. He should have said “six MORE homeless people”.
People are created in the image and likeness of God, and so have a built-in sense of fairness, justice, and truth. But they also have a free will that is capable of over-riding those inate qualities in order to get what they want.
And that is what’s happening. As the school’s and media incessantly promote evolution and obliterate references to God, children begin to realize that if they’re just little cosmic accidents, and this is all there is, then NOTHING really matters, except what THEY want.
But, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” is still the best explanation of how we got here. As a software engineer, I can guarantee you that the information content of the SIMPLEST lifeform is far too complex to have arisen by chance in a billion, billion universes.
I just finished reading Edney’s paper entitled Greed. It is very poetic but not logical! Don’t believe everything you read. Under definitions he talks about greet expanding like fire. What??? Fire takes oxygen, does greed. It sounds good (poetic) but makes no sense. And where is the proof? Psychologists don’t require proof. You just quote a hundred bad books and it looks like you are saying something important. Greed is a human attribute. What do we do? Become non-human? Let’s get real here.
Julian Edney’s is an extremely professional and well written essay containing extensive, various and valid references for support. It is logical, rational and contains evidence and also compassionate. Thank you Dr. Edney for an excellent piece of work. I plan on disseminating it to my numerous university organizations, my political clubs and associates, my friends and colleagues of all opinions, and others for their beneficial reading and feedback. Greed indeed needs to be checked which could also be termed as accountability.
Regardless of form, all societies suffer the same inequities, and the pendulum will swing less violently when the excess wealth is not in the same hands as the armies.
Having recently been part of a vocal group doing background for an adaptation of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”, I am pretty sure Dickens, though surely less a researcher than Edney, will go down in history as far more effective. No social program will ever make things better; the programs become industries in themselves. In fact, when the “war on poverty” concentrated the poor into subsidized housing projects, their resulting invisibility to the rest of us enabled our self-centered habits.
The battle can never be won. It is forever. And it can only be effectively fought at street level one heart at a time. That’s how Jesus taught, and he’s a whole lot smarter than I.
———B. Carlisle
[The only evolution swift enough to really matter is the evolution of the soul.]
I am not clear as to where, in the Nuts Game, the
money and the nuts are supposed to originate from.
The money is in the bowl; where does it come from?
The nuts are alongside for replenishment , but where do they come from? Where are these supplies originating?
I read Greed III in one sitting tonight and I found it very timely and inline with my current thoughts on the subject of peace and justice.
In particular, I found the discussion of rent to be a clarifying explanation of way wealth is not more easily accumulated by the poor.
While I am not poor, I realized recently I am paying 10000+ a year in interest. Something is wrong with that also…