Written by Carmine Gorga, The Somist Institute
Reply to The Morality of Harvesting Jewish Souls.
Will you enter in conversation with me, a-Catholic-in-pain?
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Can we recognize the mistakes that we have made in the past and look forward to a future in which we, together, move closer to God?
It seems to me that we will never enter a world of peace, if we do not agree on our journey in the future.
I am a-Catholic-in-pain, not only for the past misdeeds that people of my religion have committed against your Jewish people, and many other people as well, or for the recent degradation of so many of my priests. I am a-Catholic-in-pain, especially because I see my religion walking away from God, rather than walking toward God.
Why do I need your help? Because you and your people truly understand who God is. So much so that you do not dare to spell the word G-d.
When you say, with the Psalmist, Lord “…your love is better than life“, I know you understand the greatness of God. I want to know more how, how you reach this depth of understanding. I want to feel more closely the effect that such an understanding has on your life.
How can I imitate you?
For our conversation to be beneficial to both, I am going to try to tell you who God is for me.
This is NOT because I hope we will reach agreement on delicate questions of theology, but because we might agree that we can – and we need – to work together on concrete issues, if we truly want to win our battles.
My Story
Why do I believe in Jesus, not only as a man, but as God? For innumerable reasons. Let me emphasize three of them.
First, Jesus, being Spirit, transformed the matter of his body into energy; he left an imprint of his body on the Shroud of Turin, and – all by himself – returned to being pure Spirit.
If you want to know a little more of how I reached this understanding, you may read it here.
Second, only God could say everything that he said while being on this earth with such astonishing completeness. The more I study Jesus’ words, the more I understand what he said. And there is nothing I may add to complete what He said. It is so astonishingly clear. In the Parable of the Talents, he synthesized what Moses recommended: do not hoard. Moses had specified: Do not hoard time (thus the Sabbath); do not hoard money (thus the Seven-Year Debt Jubilee); do not hoard the fertility of the land (thus leave a portion of the land untilled on a rotation basis); do not hoard land (thus the Fifty-Year Land Jubilee).
As an evident ecologist, Sig (if I may), I do not need to emphasize that tillage rotation restores the inherent power of fertility to the land, without fertilizers – and without poisoning our aquifers.
Jesus repeated this plea in Our Father. He asked His Father to grant us the release of our “debts” (towards time, money, and land). And he did something more. He asked His Father to give us our daily bread.
In his multiplication of Loaves of Bread and Fishes, Jesus made it clear that our “daily bread” is indeed our daily bread, Without sustenance, we do not live; we do not have time and energy to praise God for our bountiful, beautiful, precious life. He even lets us inhabit His wondrous earth without charging rent.
But, please, Sig, let me tell you the third reason why I believe Jesus is God. This is what I have recently discovered about making our daily bread. To make it, we need to exercise four economic rights and responsibilities, which support the entire structure of Concordian economics:
1.The right of access to land and natural resources (with the responsibility to pay taxes on land and natural resources which we keep under our exclusive control);
2. Access to national credit, an entity whose value we all create and on the basis of which we create money (with the responsibility to repay the loans obtained on the basis of national credit);
3. Right to the enjoyment of the fruits of our labor (with the responsibility to perform tasks required in the performance of our tasks);
4. Right to the enjoyment of the fruits of our property, especially as specified in the tools of production or physical capital (with the responsibility to respect the property of others). Each and every product of our agricultural, industrial, or commercial activity is a result of the amalgamation of these four economic rights and responsibilities.
A Proposal
So, Sig, as a Jew you are fully entitled to claim this inheritance. As a Catholic I feel a little bit like an interloper. I will feel that much more at ease, if you grant me an explicit consent to make good use of your inheritance.
Well, there is more. There is always more in life.
Remember that the Romans had a simple technique to control the world: Divide and Conquer.
The “masters of mankind” of today, as Adam Smith called them, know the technique full well. Are we going to let them use it against us? If we do, we cannot blame them for their malfeasance; we only have to blame us for allowing them to hurt us.
An important specification. If we exercise those rights and responsibilities fully, we will not need one cent of the wealth they have accumulated.
You seem to be a deeply religious person. I must confess, I am a deeply religious person. If we want our religion to win, we must unite. What unites us is much more important than what divides us. Our love for God unites us. It matters not how we express that love.
We cannot lose. We must not lose. We will win, not today or tomorrow or a thousand years from now. But we will win. God is with us.
Three of my last books go a little deeper into these issues:
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