The comments of the critics are in green, enclosed by the square brackets. My response is in purple, interspersed in between the paragraphs enclosed by square brackets.
[Didn't Jezebel have to
come up with that elaborate murder plot so that a the king of Samaria could get
Naboth's land? Naboth couldn't sell it.]
How is this related to
capitalism, let alone the morality and ethics of capitalism?
[They believed that the
land was an inheritance from God, parceled out to individual tribes and
families according to His will. Therefore land was never really sold, only
leased - and that only under the most dire circumstances. Real Estate offices
in ancient Israel didn't do very
good business.]
Indeed, real estate is a product of individualised, humanistic capitalism. It is opposed to communalism which respects all material things to be God’s, and involves people sharing property, not keeping property for themselves or their own families. Capitalism is the opposite. It cares only for the individual rights. It only cares for those who have more.
[ Indeed, a family not being
able to sell land would actually produce a lot more wealth in the population.
The coal companies around where I live have made huge buyouts of land for
generations... Very little is left for people to live or farm on... and the
mineral rights are long gone. And where does all this wealth go... Not to
people around here, let me tell you.]
The
wealth generated is not that which determines the morality of an economic
system. It is what is the spirit of the economic system that determines the
morality.
["For God hath expressly, and for divers weighty reasons, forbidden the alienation of lands from the tribes and families to which they were allotted, Leviticus 25:15, 25:23, 25:25; Numbers 36:7; Ezekiel 46:18." (Poole)"]
Nowhere did I say that that
people cannot possess and live on land. It is the doctrine of individuals owning
land and thinking they have a right to do with it as they see fit that is
against God.
[Some people sold their land
in Acts, but it'd probably be better to allow poor people to farm it without
gaining profit from it.]
This person seem as though
he is trying to read into the Bible what he wants to justify ownership of land.
I shall give him the benefit of the doubt. I commend him for saying that the poor should be allowed to farm land, from which no one should be able to profit from their labour. :)
[That way the Christian
retains responsible stewardship, etc. keeps it from falling into the hands of
big snuggly corporations. ]
Corporations indeed do gain
much material gain and are comfortable with me, smug with their wealth. So are
many Christians in the modern church. Many of them live almost like the pagans
when it comes to their attempt to serve mammon that it is somewhat hard to tell
who is a true Christian and who is not within the local churches.
I am not sure if Christians
today can be trusted with retaining such responsible stewardship because many
of them fail to understand mammon.
[ So... despite being
somewhat contrary to capitalism... the Lord's laws regarding possession of land
were AWESOME AND THE BEST EVER in my opinion]
God’s
Laws are of course the best. You just admitted that capitalism is contrary to
God’s Laws. Exactly! Capitalism is against God.
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