all you need is love & money

Been a heady coupla days, but I promised some good cop for Chris Bell and I wanna deliver on that promise. Bell, as Demophoenix and others have noted, delivers a signature line in which he says that "budgets are a moral document." If the saying about putting one's money where one's mouth is holds true, than this simple statement by Bell backs up the religious affiliatin', church-volunteerin' resume-builders he offers on his web site.

This is a complicated issue. It's as easy and tempting for Republicans to claim that they are God's party, as it is for Democrats to accuse them of hypocrisy. Viewed through this lens, the religion issue is an either/or fallacy on both sides. Either you're with us . . . or you're a hypocrite. Even Sojourners, to which I subscribe in many senses of that word, seems disingenuous when they say "God is not a Republican . . . or a Democrat." We all know what that formulation means: that God is more not a Republican.

It's an either/or fallacy partially because of the multitude of other options both parties are largely ignoring: Buddhists, Moslems, Unitarians, Atheists, Agnostics, worshippers of the Great Green Arkleseizure and the Masses of the Confused.

But we all come from where we are, and the Religious Operating System I use to access the Almighty is Methodist Christianity. Methodists like to study and we like to hash things out, and we usually agree to disagree amongst ourselves. But one thing Christ made pretty clear was that money can become a big problem in a well-lived life, can become a false god that gets in the way of the Truly Important- if you have all of it, if you have none of it.

More specifically, the Love of Money, the Root of all Evil.

The little green pieces of paper are for sure a necessary evil. But I think Bell's on the right track when he says that the way that we distribute those green pieces of paper, and how much we focus on them as an end in themselves, speaks multitudes. A budget that funnels more money to those that have it already is an immoral document. A budget that tries to provide for the general health, education, and welfare is Bell's "moral document."

You know I hate to speak for others, but I think most religions, and most moral/values systems, applied honestly, would agree.

SPACEDARK