God and Country
by PHIL JONES

Things don’t have to be this way. What is possible on this earth, and what God wants for us all, is orders of magnitude greater and more wonderful than anything we have ever experienced or even imagined. Jesus of Nazareth called this state of bliss the Kingdom of God, and the scriptures agree that some day it will be an earthly reality.

What God envisions for us is a heaven on earth, a world of safety and security, prosperity and freedom, belonging and purpose. It is a world in which the political system delivers justice, the economic system delivers both prosperity and an equitable distribution of wealth, and the religious institutions help individuals find meaningful relationships with the Eternal. It is a dynamic state of affairs that gradually spirals upward to ever higher levels of peace, justice, prosperity and freedom. This state of total individual and collective well-being is called “shalom.”

God has pointed the way to shalom. The book of Deuteronomy lays out a societal order designed to deliver this heaven on earth. Throughout the scriptures, it is echoed and reinforced. Unfortunately, we have chosen not to go the way God has pointed. We think we have a better idea.

All we have to do is look around us, to see how good our way really is. Our world is wracked with political, economic and religious strife. The greed of the wealthy and the powerlust of the powerful create endless oceans of misery, crime, poverty and depravity for vast millions of our fellow human beings, as the world’s resources are usurped into fewer and fewer hands.

Bankers and financial services professionals are too big to fail, and therefore cannot be held accountable for their crimes. They are free to run as much risk as they like, defraud the public to their heart’s content, and stuff as much money into their pockets as they can. Then when their house of cards comes tumbling down, they can run to the government to bail them out, because the alternative is a financial collapse that would be much worse than the bailout. The result is that they gain fabulous amounts of ill-gotten wealth, while millions are thrown out of work and into despair. And they can and will use their wealth to block reform, so that we can be pretty sure it will happen again, a few years down the road.

Similarly, auto makers are too big to fail, and so to avoid even worse unemployment, we have to bail them out with our tax money. And no changes have been made that would prevent a similar fiasco in the future.

Now that corporations have been declared individuals with free speech, and can wade into the political system with their overwhelming financial resources, you can reasonably expect the pattern we just observed in the financial and automotive industries to spread much wider. Corporate executives are now free to be utterly reckless in pursuit of quarterly profits, as if they weren’t reckless enough already.

God has a solution for all this. It has never been tried in the United States. Next week, that solution.

djones2032@austin.rr.com