Church of England Leader Speaks Out In Defense of Karl Marx !!!

[Better Believe It]

Leaders of the Church of England launched fierce attacks on the world’s stock market traders last night, condemning them as bank robbers and asset strippers and calling for a judicial review into Britain’s financial services.
by Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
New York Times
September 25, 2008

Dr Rowan Williams (The Archbishop of Canterbury) spoke out in defence of Karl Marx, defending key aspects of his critique of capitalism and gave a warning that society was running the risk of idolatry in its relationship with wealth. And in a hard-hitting speech to bankers in London, Dr John Sentamu condemned traders who had profited from the crisis as “bank robbers” and said that the market had taken its rules from Alice in Wonderland.

Dr Sentamu said no one was guiltless in the present crisis and that everyone had joined in worshipping the false god of money. In an interview with The Times he added that the time had come for a formal inquiry into the banking and finance industry. He said that this should take the form of a judicial review which could investigate every aspect of recent events and find out exactly who in the industry had abandoned ethics, leading to crises such as the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB.

Dr Williams, in an article in Friday’s Spectator, compares today’s debtors and financiers to the feckless young clerics and landowners described in the novels of Trollope. He writes: “Individuals find that their own personal financial decisions and calculations have nothing to do with what is happening to their resources, in a process for which a debt is simply someone else’s wholly disposable asset.”

Criticising the practices which involve financial institutions selling debts on to each other, Dr Williams says: “It is no use pretending that the financial world can maintain indefinitely the degree of exemption from scrutiny and regulation that it has got used to.”

“Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of the problem,” the Archbishop says “Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry.”

Please read the entire article at:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4821507.ece

Dr. Rowan Williams
The Archbishop of Canterbury



Read the Archbishops article at this link:

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1982

[eShirl]

1. "society was running the risk of idolatry in its relationship with wealth."

gee, ya think?

[LeftinOH]

2. Quoting Marx does not make one a Marxist; besides, Marx was right -mostly.

[Better Believe It]

3. He Just Agreed With Marx On Unbridled Capitalism

He's hardly a Marxist but lot's of people are now raising serious questions and doubts about Wall Street and capitalism on a scale when haven't seen since World War II.

If this crisis deepens I think socialism will no longer be a "dirty word".