Of God and the modern opium of masses… Recently I was reading a book called ‘Sacred Economics’ by Charles Eisenstein, there the author makes a fascinating comparison between how our notion of God and that of money similarly match. While I don’t have the mastery over words like his, I thought of making a checklist of comparison points about what he says: 1. Money, today, is an abstract concept, it exists mostly as mere bits of data in a computer separated from our physical reality. God is also said to said to exist in a separate realm than ours in most religions (don’t believe me? watch Thor). And for those who think that god exists in physical forms as idols, well we do have paper money, the idols of our modern god. 2. In that realm does god exist exempted from nature’s most important laws? Check. Even money does so, it does not decay or return to nature as most things do. In fact it continues to grow thanks to a divine power it has, we mortal people know it as interest. 3. Now this comparison without the preachers of our god would be incomplete, wouldn’t it? Looking down from their Olympian heights these heads of financial institutions has power over millions of people; they can literally move mountains, burn down forests, tame rivers and can cause the rise and fall of nations. Well as far as I know almost all popular preachers, spreading the voice of God, had powers of these sort. 4. Next let’s see what these messengers of god do when God decides to abandon the world (the last time it did so was called recession), these priests demand greater sacrifices from their followers and blame their misfortunes either on sin (greedy bankers, irresponsible consumers) or the whims of God (the financial markets). 5. There is no dearth of construction machinery in this world, food rotting in storage houses; then why is there still world hunger, homeless people? Well it is the lack of guiding spirit, or you can call it money, that uplifts the will of people to take up these projects. 6. And lastly lets come to miracles: You are severely ill: well now a days if you are not in the good books our god, u cannot afford even basic miracles. Want to build something that will stun the world: stop reading this and start counting your blessings. It took a lot of blessings of our God to make Burj Khalifa. And now pilgrims from all over the world come to see it as a modern wonder of the world. In short money is the present opium of masses. I would love to have noted a few more points, but of late I have become so busy serving this God that I rarely get time for anything else.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 05:14:03 +0000