Thank you Sandra and Francis... (Y-not question the Sunday Readings)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Tuesday, July 17, 2012, 22:28 (308 days ago) @ Francis

I value both of those replies.

I don't pretend to know where all this is going. If you look at the long sweep of human history it can be considered as some long, long climb out of the sort of dog-eat-dog/dog-eat-child sort of morality that we have seen in the Four Corners documentary on Afghanistan in the last 24 hours. A long, slow climb out of the jungle of survival of the fittest and those with the most vicious grunts.

I don't think human civilisation has yet found "the perfect economic formula" that helps create a "just and equal society". The best we have at the moment is this democratic or Westminster system of government and economic organisation where we hold in "creative tension" what might be termed "the bovver boys" and "main chancers" from the collectivists and altruists in society. The reality is that the collectivists and altruists often could not find their way out of a wet paper bag. They need the bovver boys and main chancers often to make anything happen productively in an economy or community. The best we (society) have come up with so far is to organise some "balance of power" so that the capitalists don't have it all their own way but where there are enough constraints placed on them by the collectivists and altruists so that "the public good" gets a look in. Equally though we don't want a society controlled exclusively by the bureaucrats and socialists or you end up with the sort of diabolical mess that the Soviet Empire became before its collapse.

I don't sense democracy is the perfect system or some "end of the line" in the political and economic organisation of human society. We (humankind) are still in evolution.

The emerging super powers, China and India, are trying to manage this tension between the individualist and collectivist interests in society in new ways to those that emerged in the Western world. What will eventually emerge in another hundred or two hundred years from that: who yet knows?

I have some nascent sense that even after 2000 years we still don't yet understand the full insights of these sort of readings we've been discussing from last Sunday — and there are other similar insights elsewhere in Scripture. I certainly don't think they point to the sort of "economic system" we saw on Compass recently of the Millionnaire Prosperity Preachers in Nigeria — and they only learned all that from watching the evangelical "abundance" tele-preachers in the United States that are such an embarrassment to Christianity and the name of Jesus Christ. Neither do I sense this is some Da Vinci like endeavour of seeking "secret codes" in Scripture. I don't know if God the Father literally handed this "wisdom" to a bloke named Jesus 2000 years ago, or whether Jesus is some manifestation or accumulation of the human "wisdom of the ages". In the end, does it matter? We (humankind) are on this enormous journey of exploration trying to find better ways of organising our human affairs and become more civilised than we are.

Eugene Stockton urges us to stop for a moment and look at what we might have missed when we, the "great white sahibs" from the West invaded the lands of these "primitive peoples" with all our "cleverness" and "economic and technological power".

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]