world religions

Once in a while I review my files, re-reading articles I've gleaned from the mass media. By divine coincidence I came upon an article entitled "Greed: The Mother of Sin", authored by Phyllis Pickle, then, in 2002, a Contributing Editor at Publishers Weekly. It relates directly to my recent posting re: Paul's contention that money is the root of all evil.

Subtitled "Many world religions say greed is the stuff other deadly sins are made of.", she references (the 2002) testimony by Alan Greenspan, then the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, as saying he believed "infectious greed" was the culprit in the (then) recent rash of corporate scandals. Some thought that the fact that Greenspan was "spanking businessmen for exhibiting greed" felt like some sort of betrayal. Afterall we'd been told that greed, properly regulated was good, for business and society as a whole, that we'd come to think of greed as being an ambigious quality; sometimes good and other times bad.

Ms. Tickle said that "the major religions had no such illusions about greed. Greed, say many of them, is not only unambiguous, it is the Mother of All Sins".