The Common Era purports to date from the birth of Jesus who personified teachings of the New Testament: the vindictive Old Testament God yielding to a compassionate one, tribalism yielding to the idea of human brotherhood, the Golden Rule. Greediness was condemned. The New Testament’s teachings were socialistic!

Common Era church fathers allowed the moneychangers back into the temple. A business model took over. The sale of indulgences and internment in sacred ground (perhaps the first enclosure movement?) and other mischief resulted. The Papacy became the plaything of princes. Ceding secular arrangements to commercial interests the churches focused on human behavior, rites and rituals. Sectarian quarrelling over the details led to tribal turf wars. Attaining personal salvation took priority over building civilization. Token reforms invited new visions such as those from Mohammed and Joseph Smith. Each innovation seems to emphasize submission to authority and de-emphasize human agency moving toward dictatorship or theocracy stultifying the moral impulse.

I conclude that man’s moral impulse is too important to be left to the churches. Representative governments must intervene to protect themselves before corporatism supplants them.

Moneylenders needn’t be dumbstruck by a socialist president. His ability to throw the moneylender out of the temples of finance will be frustrated by corporate lackeys of both major parties. The best outcome voters can hope for is moderation of the upward redistribution of income and acceptance of the discussion of socialism in polite company.

The thing the powerful need to fear is the unlikely mass conversion of Christians to Christianity. One Baptist preacher who urged conversion lost half of his megachurches parishioners. Will Pope Francis have better luck?

Bernie’s revolution can only take place in you.

Please note: I reserve the capital S in the word socialist for an ideology or an ideologue. Sanders is a pragmatist with a socialist orientation.

 

John Gibson

Owatonna