The Idolatry of Money

Anyone looking at the title of this post might think sarcastically, "No kidding; what a deep thought." And I agree that this has been observed and discussed by moralists and religious thinkers (go all the way back to Jesus and before) for some time. So why do I decide to put this into my blog today (Jan. 26, 2013)? Often on Saturday morning I will listen to all or part of the MSNBC program Up W/ Chris. Two of the topics this morning were the Keystone XL Pipeline and the tramatic brain injuries suffered by NFL football players. Also, during a commercial break I looked at my E-mails that had come in overnight. One of the E-mails was a plea by an organization to encourage people to sign a petition. The goal of the petition was to encourage the Olympic Organizing Committee to pressure Japan to stop an annual dolphin hunt as a condition for receiving the 2020 Olympics in their country. These may all sound like quite different subjects or if you prefer causes. I think that causes is the appropriate term because the people that advocate for them are trying to accomplish what they see as a greater good. So what ties them together? The similarity in each case is money and the difficulty of reaching a positive outcome because of the power of money.

Take first the case of the pipeline. The negative aspect of this project is that the crude extracted from the oil sands in Canada that would flow down the pipeline through the United States is the dirtiest form of oil and burning it would release copious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere thereby hastening Global Warming. If one accepts that Global Warming is destructive to the planet (and the vast majority of scientists do) this is therefor a project that obviously should not be completed. So what keeps the project going? Money. The money that can be made selling this destructive product to other countries.

Now look at the question of traumatic brain injuries to football players. Relatively recently there has been an increasing amount of attention paid to this subject as a result of studies of the brains of NFL players who have died and had suffered from a variety of neurologically debilitating conditions prior to their deaths. The evidence, as a result of these studies, is that the concussions suffered by the players during their careers is the cause of the neurological conditions. Although, there have been some improvements in helmets and rules the game goes on almost completely as before with few changes. Why so few changes? Again, money is the answer. The vast sums of money made by the owners, the league and the players and a whole orbit of businesses that revolve around the NFL.

The last topic that caught my attention via E-mail was the slaughter of the dolphins. Why does the hunt for these intelligent, endangered creatures continue? As in the examples sited above the answer is money. The money to be made by the fishermen, wholesalers of the meat, and the restauranteurs in Japan.

Money, or perhaps the desire for money, trumps what many would consider the greater good. In the case of the NFL players money trumps the health and welfare of the individual. In the cases of the tar sands and the dolphins money trumps the greater good of the planet and the creatures God created that inhabit it. This unreasonable desire for money that overrides every other consideration can be seen as the worship of wealth of money. The worship of anything other than the God that created this universe has to be labeled for what it is idolotry. Idolatry is a subject that has irritated me for many years. If one goes back to the beginning of this blog you will see that I started it because of the idolatrous worship of the national flag in a small local church. I will not bother now with the detales of that other than to say that many people there wanted to make it the fourth member of the trinity.

Perhaps we need a definition of idolatry at this point:

In part, according to Wickepedia; "Idolatry is a pejorative term for the worship of an idol, a physical object such as a cult image, as a god,^[1]or practices believed to verge on worship, such as giving undue honour and regard to created forms other than God....Behaviour considered idolatrous or potentially idolatrous may include the creation of any type of image of the deity, ...and the use of religious symbols, or secular ones. In addition, theologians have extended the concept to include giving undue importance to aspects of religion other than God, or to non-religious aspects of life in general, with no involvement of images specifically. For example, theCatechism of the Catholic Church states: "Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. Man commits idolatry whenever he honours and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods, or demons (for example satanism),power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money etc."^{[2]" (Emphasis mine.)} 

When money is given the status of a god (viewed idolatrously) the predictable outcome is negative. It is contrary to the common good and therefor evil. We are told in 1 Timothy 6: 9 - 10a, "Those who long to be rich, however, stumble into temptation and a trap and many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evil..."