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romanian!
Obviously I’m sorry if you can’t participate in this vision of peace and prosperity – for example if you’re old, sick, poor, unemployed, or if you are a Chinese factory worker who has to work for the whole day for next to nothing to make those designer trainers.
Nothing’s new. There have always been those who have, and those who don’t have. Throughout history there have been trade routes, along which you could find all sorts of new and interesting things from far-away places. Trade can be good – it often leads to peace and prosperity. And it’s not only new types of pottery and jewellery which travel along the trade routes, but also ideas, beliefs, lifestyles. All the time when cultures are meeting and mixing, you can create a rainbow or you can create beige. Usually most societies evolve their own compromise on this one. Or if you prefer, you can have war instead of compromise.
Of these three possibilities, I would prefer the rainbow; but it’s obvious that even beige is better than war. So what’s the problem? There are two.
In the first place, beige is insipid. The fact is that we are all individuals, and it is very clear that God rejoices in diversity, in fact in the rainbow. Read Ephesians, or Romans 12. Mammon is a god with two faces. One is kind and smiling, turned towards the consumer, enticing him to become yet another product in the great scheme of things. The other is severe and unsmiling, and turned towards the worker plodding through pre-set protocols. In the world of beige, those who are truly different are excluded – the heretic, the poor, the foreigner, the thinker. Is there space for everyone in the love of God?
And in the second place, Mammon is a very dangerous god. The more you worship him, the more money you offer him, the more powerful he becomes. We already have high-priests of Mammon who are very powerful in the glass cathedrals – do you think this matters or not? In the past, the priest of another god – Communism – patrolled your access to information and news. That’s not the case now, but there is a very topical discussion in England nowadays as to what happens when every source of news is controlled by a single high-priest? Do you think that such sources would be objective or “true”?
