Martin Durkin, a writer I have long admired takes well deserved aim at a couple of wolves?(weasels perhaps) in sheep's clothing ( the theatrical 'humility' etc):
A NEW LUTHER NEEDED
We need a new Luther. We need another revolutionary protest to reclaim Christianity. The Roman Catholic and Anglican churches are now firmly in the hands of people who are opposed to freedom and progress. Clifford Longley admiringly writes that, ‘Both (Francis and Welby) are outspoken critics of global capitalism and the concessions that governments tend to make to keep it happy, usually at the expense of the poor.’
Read that again, because, in Longley’s weasel phrases, there’s dirty work at the crossroads. Longley, like all his anti-capitalist kind, is guilty of what the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs called reification. He has turned a relationship between people into a ‘thing’. He says governments are nice to capitalism to keep ‘it’ happy.
Capitalism is the free exchange of services voluntarily rendered and received. It is a relationship between people, characterized by freedom. Adding ‘global’ merely indicates that governments have been less than successful at hindering the free exchange of people's services across national boundaries.
A ‘concession’ to capitalism, is a ‘concession’ to freedom. The authoritarian instinct of Longley and Welby and Francis is dressed up as generosity and big-heartedness … in particular a concern for the poor. But when we ask the question, ‘has capitalism (freedom) benefited the poor?’ no-one, with any knowledge of history, no-one except a lunatic or a scoundrel, could answer, without blushing, anything but, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
This attack on freedom does not help 'the poor' either materially (Socialism makes poor people poorer), or morally. The corrosive, dehumanizing effects of a sprawling ‘welfare’ state is now clear for everyone to see. It strikes at the very thing that makes us moral human beings, namely, responsibility for ourselves and invidual responsibility for others. As Bastiat observed, ‘To man responsibility is all-important. It is his mover and teacher, his rewarder and his avenger. Without it man is no longer a free agent, he is no longer perfectible, no longer a moral being, he learns nothing, he is nothing. He abandons himself to inaction, and becomes a mere unit of the herd.’
Welby and Francis may be ‘outspoken critics of global capitalism’, but Jesus was not. They are not following in his footsteps. I am told (by people who would defend them) that no matter what, they MEAN well. This counts for nothing. The most dreadful acts have been perpetrated, excused and overlooked, by people who mean well.
These ‘outspoken critics’ are enemies of freedom, and should be feared all the more because they are so humble (to an almost theatrical degree), because they are so ‘well meaning’ and because they claim to speak in God’s name.
Get out your hammers and nails and head for the church doors.
Read Luthers thesis @
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/95theses.htm
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