A very apt article on a Sunday (in some places) : "The Land Belongs to God"
I am of no particular religious persuasion, but i think the discussion on historical treatment of Debt and Jubilee is compelling. This was aan address by Prof. Michael Hudson to Union Theological Seminary, Columbia, with some very cogent comments.
" An even greater argument occurs over the Lord’s Prayer. What does it mean: Is he saying forgive us our sins, or forgive us the debts? Well, most of religion’s leaders, certainly the vested interests, say: “He’s talking about sins,” that religion and Christianity is all about sin, it’s not about debt.
Actually, the word for sin and debt is the same in almost every language."
" At first Jesus said: “Good to be back in Nazareth, let me read to you about Isaiah.” In Luke 4 says it that this was all very good, and they liked him. But then he began talking about debt cancellation, and they tried to push him off a cliff.
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"We no longer know about aphesis, the core New Testament term for forgiveness, but that is indeed the term you have brought up: the term for deror, for shmita, for yobul, for all the kind of debt release, for release of people from captivity, for release of land from being given away. And that is very much present in the New Testament. We just have kind of suppressed it. It’s suppressed in the theology that most of us have learned somewhere, and not accidentally.
We pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our debts.” But we think, “It’s not really debts, it’s sin.” If you listen to the stories from the New Testament you can see that debt and sin forgiveness are not apart. This separation only happens when Christianity was integrated into the whole system of Constantinian state theology: of an empire that lived on debt mechanisms.
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"So sin is an economic term and it’s a pietistic term."
http://michael-hudson.com/2017/01/the-land-belongs-to-god/Read the whole thing. I mean it.
sidd