- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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Cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/34117495
[OC]
Original still created by @gedogfx (IG). Title source: “Inkl”
Edit: I’m not on any other social media platforms, so feel free to share this elsewhere if you want
Matthew 19:24
“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+5%3A1-6&version=NIV
I like to contextualize this in a modern form. I like to say, “there are no billionaires in Heaven. In the end, every last one of them burns.” When I see Musk, Bezos, or Trump, I see men who are literally and inevitably headed for the very literal fires of Hell. Let them have their vanity here. In the end, they’re all gonna fry.
I don’t know what qualifies as “rich.” But I don’t think a modest 401k to support yourself in retirement is going to damn anyone. I don’t know where the line is, but by the time you get the obscene level of a billionaire, you have been consumed by greed.
I like to imagine wealth and as an anchor. Would you die, your soul tries to ascend upward. But those with great wealth find themselves chained to a great golden weight, a spiritual manifestation of their wealth and greed on Earth. And as they try to fly upward, they instead are pulled down, down, and down. They see the surface of the Earth rise up above them like a diver descending beneath the ocean’s surface. And they do not stop falling until they reach the Pit.
The context for the original quote is Jesus speaking to a “young ruler”. The young ruler asks if he will be judged as a good person. He follows all the religious laws and is very pious. Jesus tells him to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor. Jesus promises the man that his reward will be great in heaven, but the young ruler cannot bring himself to do it.
I don’t see this as Jesus telling everyone to live in poverty. This is Jesus testing the man’s faith. Even though Jesus himself promises the man a reward for giving up his possessions, he doesn’t trust Jesus. He doesn’t have faith that his actions will be rewarded in heaven. The warning isn’t that having possessions is inherently evil, but that one can be so tied to their Earthly possessions they can refuse a direct request by Jesus himself.
I like to view it in the context of the passage about the three people donating money. One wealthy man donates a large sum of money, while a man who makes an average living donates a smaller amount, and the last is an old lady who donates something akin to $1.50. In the end, Jesus declares that the old lady gave the most because she donated all that she feasibly could while the wealthy man gave what was a mere pittance of his money and the other man gave a noticeable portion of his salary, but not enough that he would miss it.
The effort and generosity behind a donation (whether of time or money) is more important than the donation itself, and that’s what the rich can’t understand. By the time you get to that level of wealth, you’ve spent so much energy in accruing wealth that you no longer have the empathy to see those around you who truly need aid, and to lose that empathy is to lose an essential part of what makes us human - a part of the divinity that exists within us.
If you’re on lemmy, you’re probably rich. Like worldwide rich.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040#%3A~%3Atext=Let's+put+the+world's+average%2Cbottom+of+the+earnings+league
Edit: Yall hating on me, just like any mf from Tajikistan hates you. Yeah. That’s a real country and 1% of your income could change their lives but you’ve never thought about it because you’re trying to keep up with the Joneses and thinking about Musk
The discrepancy you’re pointing out across different countries is at most 18x, according to your article.
Let’s ignore, for a second, that “richness” needs to be considered in the context of COL. Yes, 1% of someone salary could make an impact in Tajikistan. But the cost of a meal for that potential donor could also bankrupt someone in Tajikistan. But let’s ignore that for now.
18x an average persons salary is a fart in the wind when it comes to the rich. Take a look.
comfortably rich in [pick whatever capital city you want] is a grain of sand compared to being a billionaire though, that is the level of disparity we are talking about
I understand that. the Bible makes no such exceptions and probably couldn’t imagine what we have now. we should help who we can. we live better than any king in the Bible. I know about the disparity that exists now. my only point is that everyone here on lemmy is likely above the world median but acts like they are paupers because they compare themselves to celebrities. I hear Oxfam does good work if you don’t want to work locally. I’m down with eat the rich, just please don’t mistake yourself for poor if you’re not. if there wasn’t an ocean between the usa and Africa we would probably look at wealth differently. but all that said, of course the wealth graph shouldn’t look exponentially increasing, but for a biblical discussion I think you can ignore the top 5% as a historical anomaly ignoring the usury.
Oh fuck off. This is the same mentality of pushing the climate crisis off onto everybody instead of the few people causing it.
I mean it’s true. Nothing you ever do will matter.
Edit: Outside of luigiing, but that probably can’t work twice. And it probably does matter much either. I think the point is that it’s not what you can accomplish, which being rich in your eyes seems to make you more responsible for (you could feed a starving kid for 53 cents a day, but likely don’t ), but how you conduct yourself.
Anyway I do find it a little hypocritical that people here on lemmy complain about the rich when they have probably never missed a meal. Yeah, there are people that could feed most of the world, but I’m not addressing them.
To give you some context on at least one downvote.
I have been homeless like proper homeless sleeping on a metal chair with a backpack outside my college for weeks using the gym to shower and working 3 jobs to afford the basic idea of the American dream of going to college and nothing else. I spent most of my childhood hungry as my incubator spent all money on her vices.
I ended up fleeing the country via a work program that basically made me an indentured servant for a few years while I tried to get my life together in a way where I didn’t want it to end anymore.
You speak for a lot of people you don’t know when you say sweeping statements about the audience to who you are talking to.
But also with that said I bet most of the down votes are still people who have not lived a life nearly that rough and think that renting is an equal level of poor and don’t want to hear it.
No it’s not. Some dude is quoting the Bible. So no basis in reality. The quote generally talks about giving all your stuff to the poor and being a boon to humanity instead of keeping things for yourself, but I point out that people here have more than most in this world and I’m wrong?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult
I quoted the Bible because the image in the OP is Luigi in the style of a saint. I’m not religious.
If I said “the Sun is hot” and you said “if you live on Earth you experience temperatures hotter than most of the universe” you also wouldn’t be wrong. You’d be Neil deGrasse Tyson. Most of the universe is -270°C. Earth is 15°C. The sun is 1,000,000°C. No matter how you look at it, the Sun is hot. The Earth is only hot if you purposefully compare it to cold things.
1/3 of the world make $2 a day. I made about $137 a day. Thompson made $27,945 a day. I am $135/d away from the poorest and $27,808/d away from Thompson. I’m not sure what the goal is of saying I am rich compared to the poor when I am 205x closer to being the world’s poorest than I am to being a multi-millionare, let alone one of the approx. 2,700 billionaires in the world.
my goal isn’t about ignoring the super rich. it was more about spending one day, Xmas day, thinking more about the poor.
Don’t use them as props in your arguments then and speak about them with compassion and how to raise them up then.