One of my readers took umbrage at yesterday’s blog entry. The claim was that this reader is a Christian and runs a business and is, ergo, a Christian businessperson. “I’m not motivated by money in my business,” I was told. “I’d do this even if there weren’t any money in it. I’d just get a job doing anything and still help the people I’m working with now.” I was sternly admonished not to make such generalizations. We will have to agree to disagree, I’m afraid. Christ answered this himself in the Sermon on the Mount; he said that if you try to serve the interests of both God and money, you’ll either do a good job of one and not the other or you’ll make a hash of both. Yesterday, I didn’t mention that God also said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. I also think it’s significant that Judas Iscariot sold out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver and not for an idea or a belief. My reading of the Gosplels is “extreme”, I was told. I still maintain that it is not my “reading”, it is the radical and revolutionary thinking of Jesus that is extreme. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to believe me or the words of Jesus. I’m ready to be taken to school, though, and if you think I’m reading Jesus as being extreme, please bring up the verses and the evidence that dispute my conclusions and don’t just baldly assert what is not in the text.

“Greed is good,” intoned the character Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglass) in the movie “Wall Street”. “Greed works.”

The very Hand of God moves over the marketplace and the outcome will be just, Adam Smith instructs in “Wealth of Nations”, the seminal book of economics and the progenitor of laizze faire economics.

God must love poor people, else why make so many of them?

We would sure like to believe that we’re reading this blog on our laptops in our historic neighborhoods because we’ve been blessed by God. We drive our SUVs to church believing that we’re so darn good.

We spend our Sundays soaking up God in what has become America’s most segregated hour in church.

The poor will always be with us.

Can we be moral and have wealth while thousands suffer?

The ultra wealthy aristocracy of France and Russia thought that they were in charge of the world as a result of divine intervention and they got their heads chopped off for their troubles. America’s oligarchs think the same. I wonder as to their ultimate fate.

Under this present American administration, a very few of the very wealthy have become even more wealthy. The few have benefitted to an unassailable degree. Wealth has been amassed that cannot really be comprehended by most of us.

Meanwhile, millions have been driven into poverty under this administration.

The gap between rich and poor has grown and grown and grown during the past six years.

Corporate moguls have traditionally earned about 15 times the wages/salary as the common worker in an American corporation. Now, CEOs earn upwards of 23 times the income of a worker.

We’re talking CEOs making hundreds of millions.

How’s that working out for us?

I can tell you from my own observation that America in the past half century has moved from a society in which mothers stayed home with children to a working mother as the common situation. It seems as if every household is now a two income family just to keep the wolf from the door. Children are raised by televisions and find out about morality and language and sex and drugs and cigarets and alcohol from other children because there is no strong parental role model at home. Mom and Dad are both physically as well as emotionally absent — they come home exhausted.

We are working more hours a week now than ever (at least as far back as we have records) and we work far more hours than our Asian and European fellows.

Fewer of us have fewer benefits now than ever. Tens of millions have lost their health insurance and millions more are finding their pensions are broke or no longer offered.

We compete with workers in Asia and elsewhere who live in squalor and we lose our jobs to them routinely.

In my own profession as an attorney, we’ve known for a long time that money matters. Martin Luther King, Jr., accurately described the legal system when he said that it’s Justice for Just Us who can afford it.

Do you really think that greed, one of the seven deadly sins, is good?

Don’t you, like me, know people who have been driven into bankruptcy and poverty through no fault of their own other than to have a child or spouse who became ill?

Have you met our homeless? They are people who lived in nice suburban houses but only a paycheck away from disaster and then, an illness or a factory closing drives them onto the street to live with children in their cars.

They are the last, but they will be the first. You and I will be known in heaven by the way we treat the least of these.

Your bloated bureaucratic entitlement program is their lifeline to dignity and decency, but nevermind.