Historically, Protestantism has always had a cozy relationship with capitalism - be damned the primitive socialism of the Gospels - but this New York Times article rubbed me the wrong way.
It seems mega-churches are blending together their proseltyzing with their business dealings so thoroughly that it's making it hard for the tax assessor to know where mammon ends and god begins:
Mixed-use projects, like shopping centers that also include church buildings, can make it difficult to determine what constitutes tax-exempt ministry work, which is granted exemptions from property and unemployment taxes, and what is taxable commerce.
And when these ventures succeed - when local amenities like shops, sports centers, theaters and clinics are all provided in church-run settings and employ mostly church members - people of other faiths may feel shut out of a significant part of a town's life, some religion scholars said.
Read on ...
Like many atheists, I'm a textual literalist, because I take the book's assertion that God is omniscent and omnipotent seriously. Thus the good book must be the unassailable word of the big guy: Would he let his scribes mess the translation up?
Naturally though, humans, being the creatures we are, try to modernize their belief systems to account for those grey spots strewn throughout religious texts. So when an artist during the Great Depression imagined Jesus as standing in a breadline, I thought that was a fair representation of Jesus and his mission for modern times.
But I have to ask, after reading the NYT article, where oh where evangelicals can I find Jesus of the bazaar?
I guess Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the Temple because they were squatting on prime territory. Jesus always gets his percentage on top of saving a few good souls.
