And you know when B.D. gets under HIS skin…he’s striking with a HOT iron.

But, I won’t respond in kind. As you’ve noted Don, BD is a complicated & often misunderstood KenWilsonOnLine BlogPoster. Much as you would expect from someone who refers to himself in the 3rd person.

So rather than be snarky in a kind way, I’ll be kind in a snarky way and remind you that
neither You nor Ken speak for ANYBODY but YOURSELVES.

*You DO NOT speak for evanglicals.
*You don’t even speak for Christians.
*You CERTAINLY don’t speak for Conservative Evanglelical Christians.

Yet they are PRECISELY the targets of some of the most VENOMOUS, hateful attacks emanating from posters on this blog aided & abetted by Ken’s meddlesome, worrisome, can’t-be-too-sure-of-anything, false-spirituality-trumped-only-by-false humility hand wringing!

So, for the most part, you are NOT taking the mote out of your OWN eye. Rather, you’re using scripture to provide a rather transparent figleaf cover.

B.D.
Hey – Someone had to say it…

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

Also, following your lead I’ve taken some choice cuts out of your recent posts to prove that you’re actually one of the kindest and friendliest people posting to this blog:

“Nice eloquence Ken…”

“Now THAT is a GRACIOUS response!”

“With all due respect.”

“I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to share my take.”

“I totally respect Eric’s position…”

“Don’t feel bad, though.”

“Why thank you!”

In my previous post I said: “I suppose greed is not what you have but your feeling towards what you got. Who you serve.”

My understanding of Kingdom economics stems largely from my life experiences over the past 20 years. I wont bore you with the details, but in summary: even though I was unemployed and underemployed for 15 years we never went hungry, never went without. We survived, largely because others were generous with their stuff. I ran a food bank and soup kitchen where we never ran out of food because others were generous with their stuff. Even when we did run out, occasionally at the end of the day, there was enough food for next time people came for food.

One of the food banks just celebrated 1 million pounds of food given away.

Where did we get the impression God is not abundant?

I operated on a self-imposed challenge that I couldn’t out give God, which was proven true over and over. God supplied what we needed.

As soon as I (we) started to “count the cost”, when we focused on what we couldn’t do because of the budget, we ran out.

We must not leave God out of His Kingdom, he delights to give good gifts to his people.

I believe, greed comes from leaving God out of the equation.

I will say again, we only keep what we give away.

Are we ignoring the elephant in the room?

Matt. 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

I feel the way so many others do – systemic factors are way beyond my resources, way over my head, as a mere individual (more below). My gut (my bias) rages to know hard facts and data about poverty, systemic greed, normative beliefs about wealth, greed, and poverty across cultures, whether there are inverse relationships between wealth and giving a rip about the poor (across a population: not for anecdotal individuals), whether and how our consumption constitutes indirect aggression against poor nations (akin in effect to Buddhists in Indonesian islands hailing to Buddhist norms of pacifism, but then, using the only remaining weapon in their arsenal of indirect violence, namely local boycott and protective trading, to freeze Muslims out local island economies) – all these factors, even down to whether impulse buying in our culture is such a strong implied and expressed norm that we’re bias-blind, so that preaching against it amounts to a law of diminishing returns (I’m talking about facts for this question: not anecdotes); or, whether we’re just plain guilty of bystander behaviors and we know it. Or, all the above. And on and on – I personally go nuts raging for facts and data about these kinds of systemic questions. I’d like to see hard facts on whether generalized preaching generates its own curse in diminished emotional reactions. Or, if it helps.

I say we’re called to be people of the truth. And truth at systemic levels means systemic facts. My greed is that I’d rather ramp myself up in some self induced corticosteroid rush in my private devotions, feeling high and holy, than pay the long and hard price of getting, analyzing, and doing the work required at this overwhelming level of systemic facts and systemic truth.

My rant is directed: toward a wish that the church as a corporate body had an identity motivated to pool study resources to tackle systemic questions, at a factual level – this stuff is beyond any individual. Gideon at least had a little corps. And toward generating this kind of corporate identity for the church, I think that your calling attention to this overwhelming – overwhelming – systemic stuff (like Hamilton’s “interconectivity” thread), and like your pool with Ocean Blue, is Spirit motivated. Toward a new church …