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Response to a Critic of 'Capitalism's False Ethic of Giving' (3)

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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