Money = Power, control, self determination. Chinese are obsessed with money, they want to become rich and powerful. Will the west sit crosslegged in caves, dressed in rags after giving their money away in the name of spirituality while China gets rich and wants to overrun the west? Becoming poor, giving up wealth to become spiritual, I'm not sure this is a good idea.
%% Good points; but God does seem to like[favor] some animals more than others. He created many more kinds of birds than rabbits......................................
Nature gives us the brain chemistry that encourages the pursuit of money and power for reproduction but humans can take things to the extreme and want more and more money and power. The solution seems to be to channel this excess energy into making the world a better place not just your own lot.
The gospels are works of fiction. The Jesus in the gospels is not a historical character, at least as portrayed, and any sayings attributed to that Jesus is made up from other wisdom teachings or philosophies. There is ample evidence that the origins of the Jesus character in Mark is a Roman invention to propagandize the Jewish population after the destruction of their temple. Whatever the Jesus character in the gospels said about the kingdom of god or the kingdom of heaven has as much meaning as the main character speaking memorable lines in a movie. The person (or persons) who wrote the script is the one saying it, and he’s saying it through the character to persuade the audience. The message could be as direct and simple as pay your taxes: Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s; give to God what is God’s. Or as general and seemingly deep as the camel and the eye of the needle: Don’t be so fucking greedy!
The bible very much reminds me of a character on ET who once was, his name Jack. He would spout endless long winded posts about trading, price & time & volume. The posts were gobbledegook. Many times I would read and reread his posts attempting to make sense out of it, but it always alluded me. The crux, trading and spirituality is not that fuckin complicated for god's sake! All pompous speech writing, surely a sign of bs artists at work. But people flock to witness bs, they love it.
If you mean Jack Hershey, I have to disagree with you there. Unlike Jesus, Jack was a real person. I knew him and exchanged many messages with him in chat and on this message board. I consider the years he was active the golden years of EliteTrader. His writings were not difficult to decipher for me. I encountered him in the Usenet days and maybe that had something to do with it. A lot of what he wrote were variations on the same basic themes. Only the details got more dense with the iterations in his trading method he shared online. I went along a different path than he advocated but I always found his posts worth reading. The stock trading method I pass along to others is based on Jack’s method. Don Cameron (dufferdon) had a site on MSN dedicated to it.
Maybe that's like the kingdom of god, 1% get it and 99% don't, I'm in the 99% camp. I'm waiting for the god train to arrive.