Beef with Christian Investment Counselors?

[Josh]

Marcus,
You incidentally brought up yesterday that you have some 'beef' (for lack of a better term) with Christian investment counselling. Care to elaborate for clarities sake?

Didn't think I'd let that one slide, did you?

[marcus]

Oy.

[Josh]

I found a passage in Mere Christianity that I had forgotten about which brings up issues related to this:

"There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest-- what we call investment-- is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Artistotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or 'usury' as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private money lender, and that therefore, we need not bother about what they said. That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilisations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life"

C.S. Lewis

Now, that's some food for thought, surely.

PS: What's really funny is the kind of 'Christian' ads that are coming up as a result of this post.