Greed consumes lust
June 19, 2017 § 14 Comments
Discussing usury in a previous post, Wood asks:
Why are we so susceptible to this particular sin, or at least why did the Enemy choose to attack here? Why do we “want” to be so blind here?
The idea that wealth can be conjured out of nothing, that we can create wealth ex nihilo, is very alluring. Look at the appeal of lotteries, “who wants to be a millionaire” game shows, and other kinds of gambling. Wealth is even more appealing than sex: in fact most people assume that wealth is fungible with sex, and other things besides. So wealth is better than sex. Wealth is a superset of sex: greed consumes lust.
Usury creates the illusion that wealth can be conjured ex nihilo by making an incantation, by speaking a magic spell: the personal IOU. Usury empowers us to speak into the void and say “let there be money!”; and there was money, and also sex, because those with money get sex as a concomitant.
Zippy Catholic 
They count the entire amount of the mutuum as property? They will for example loan out $10,000 and record the $10,000 plus the interest as an asset?
Patrick:
More or less. GAAP always requires some liquidity discount, etc.
(That is why “fractional reserve lending” appears to create “money” out of nothing, as I explain in the linked “student loans and treehouse homes” post).
“Accordingly, we must say that covetousness, as denoting a special sin, is called the root of all sins, in likeness to the root of a tree, in furnishing sustenance to the whole tree. For we see that by riches man acquires the means of committing any sin whatever, and of sating his desire for any sin whatever, since money helps man to obtain all manner of temporal goods, according to Ecclesiastes 10:19: “All things obey money”: so that in this desire for riches is the root of all sins.” -STA
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2084.htm#article1
Then what do they do with that, since there still is only the actual amount of money, use it to get others to loan them money?
Do people actually use that to buy things? Like if one had 10 million in loan debt’s owed with interest, could he buy a factory or something with that?
Patrick:
Yes, the loans are recorded as capital on the bank’s balance sheet, which increases its capacity to make other loans, etc.
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“Usury creates the illusion that wealth can be conjured ex nihilo by making an incantation, by speaking a magic spell”
Interesting. I often speak of the very seductive nature of pharmakeia, where we get our word pharmaceuticals from, and also propaganda and brainwashing. Witchcraft, in more evangelical circles. Unfortunately, while we’re all looking for the disneyesque version of witches, we’ve got all these really obvious cultural examples playing out right in front of us. Huge drug problems, huge fake news and propaganda issues, and a whole lot of us whose thinking has been seduced away from us, hijacked, much like being under a spell.
The original sin in the garden uses the same method of operation, Eve is beguiled, deceived by a challenge to objective reality, “did God really say?”
That ain’t working, that’s the way you do it;
Money for nothing and chicks for free.
One of my “conservative” friends sent me an item a couple months back, which I can’t find now, but here is the money quote (pun intended) as I remember it:
My friend’s initial message included the tag “This woman nails it!”. I wrote him back: “Brother, me and you got to have a LOOOONG talk.”
“For we see that by riches man acquires the means of committing any sin whatever, and of sating his desire for any sin whatever, since money helps man to obtain all manner of temporal goods, according to Eccles. 10:19: ‘All things obey money’: so that in this desire for riches is the root of all sins.” —St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (“Whether covetousness is the root of all sins?“)
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