Mar. 10th, 2005

sophiaserpentia: (Default)
As a follow up to my post yesterday about usury, bankruptcy laws being tightened, and credit cards, I thought I would post this poll to get a cross-section of people's experiences and thoughts.

[Poll #451973]
sophiaserpentia: (Default)
Debt has become the engine driving the American economy -- from skyrocketing national debt, the strong dollar and record trade deficits, and social security -- to household "survival debt" (using funds from credit cards, student loans, payday loans, home equity loans, etc., on household needs like groceries, gasoline, or rent payments).

The most powerful and prosperous nation in the world has become a huge pyramid scheme.

The ones who pay are those who are unable to maintain "good credit," or in other words those who are economically disadvantaged (due to race, religion, gender, or especially illness or disability) or who are just less savvy. Lose a job, have a major injury or illness, or live in a redlined zip code, and you will pay higher interest rates. A portion of people with bad credit are just less responsible, but not as many as you might want to believe, and to a large degree their irresponsibility is encouraged by a lack of consumer education, lender hype, and advertiser-driven conspicuous consumption memes ("Retailers worry whether this holiday season will match up to previous years. You, yes you there with the remote control. Help the economy! It's your DutyTM. Buy lots of stuff for Christmas, and be sure to pay on credit at 19.99 APR!").

So far I've been unable to find hard statistics about "survival debt" in American households. Of course Congress did not seriously examine this when the "two parties" worked together to fast-track a bill to make it harder for the economically disadvantaged to escape the burdens of their credit card or medical bills. But it is clearly on the rise:

The picture of debt in this country mirrors the trend toward greater economic inequality. During the boom of the 1990s, upper-income families accumulated massive new wealth through capital gains in the stock market. Meanwhile, most low- and middle- income families experienced the opposite: Pinched by stagnant real wages and rising living costs, they were able to save less and began borrowing to make ends meet.

The new decade brought recession, rising unemployment, and state funding cuts - a triple whammy for the already struggling middle-class. Average income families are routinely using credit cards as a safety net. They use credit when a breadwinner loses a job - which has happened more than three million times in the last 30 months - or when illness strikes and there are high deductibles, or for the 41 million Americans without medical insurance, full medical bills to pay.

from Credit Cards fuel American Prosperity by Tamara Draut
sophiaserpentia: (Default)
Everything. If I achieve nothing else worthwhile in this life, I want to try to instill in people a sense of understanding about the ways in which politics, economics, and religion are historically intertwined.

In the modern world, our notion of religion is that it is primarily about what we each believe. If you subscribe to set B of metaphysical concepts alpha, beta, and gamma, you belong to religion X. In the past, though, religion was as much about the way we acted and ordered our lives and structured our society as it was about belief. Many religious movements are rooted in social discord and radicalism, and if we overlook this, we miss what is in my opinion the real purpose and function of religion in human history.

Just in the present day, for example, you would miss the reason Muslims are angry at the west, or the reason the Chinese government suppressed the Falun Gong movement. Don't forget Martin Luther King, Jr.; turning his birthdaty into a holiday demonstrates one way our society has undermined the radical nature of his message by drawing attention to him as a figure (and conveniently obscuring others like Malcolm X).

If religion sends a radical message, a message of social change, then it is in the interest of those who stand to lose the most to find a way to co-opt the message of religion. They do this by isolating and persecuting those who are at the heart of the religious movement. If this doesn't kill the movement, they are then free to promote a "santized" or "safe" version of the religious message to those outside of the center of it. A religion which is only about belief and not about action is effectively a tool of pacification, by which the people in power short-circuit the use of religion as an agent of social change.

A number of scholars have set out to demonstrate that the Christian movement got its start as a movement of the poor and disenfranchized, bearing a message of egalitarianism and solidarity, banding together to heal and support one another in times of crisis. See for example Burton Mack on the miracle stories in the gospels, John Dominic Crossan on the social importance of healing, Elaine Pagels on Christian sexual abstenance as a reaction to Roman and Jewish laws requiring marriage and reproduction and therefore a means of personal freedom, or Robert Funk and Walter Wink on the Sermon of the Mount as a radical manifesto. Crossan, specifically, has put together an interesting argument about Christianity as originating in a peasant revolt protesting Roman economic oppression in Galilee. It was one of several radical Jewish movements protesting Roman oppression and opposing the High Priest as Rome's puppet; the residents of Qumran appear to have been another such group.

The Gnostics were also another such group, in the estimation of Kurt Rudolph the most radical of all:

Gnosis originally represented an ideology related to the dependent classes of the Hellenistic cities which was meant to contribute to the establishing of a new identity after their own intellectual world had largely broken down. Gnosis took account fully of this situation in various ways: it offered a support to the individual, even a certain nearness to God through the idea of a divine kernel in man. A close relationship to God became possible even for the "man in the street" without priestly mediation, without temple, and without cultic practices... The dependent classes... were left to develop their own concepts, and... thus Jewish apocalyptic and esotericism and the Oriental faith of salvation in the form of the mystery religions also became means of expression of social protest. Gnosis was without doubt the most radical voice in this circle. Its rejection of the moral tradition and the visible world of government (including the supernatural) is an attempt to solve the social problems of the time under an unambiguously religious banner. ... Thus Gnosis can be largely understood as an ideology of the dependent petty bourgoisie which however feels itself called to freedom on the ideological-religous plane. (Gnosis, pp. 291-292)


McArchons
Resistence is NOT futile!
The Serpent's Wisdom
Genesis 6 and the Archons

Profile

sophiaserpentia: (Default)
sophiaserpentia

December 2021

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930 31 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 8th, 2025 09:33 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios