I showed that Thornton was using the wrong definition of Mammon. It is not merely money. And the argument, as least as it presented in the article, is self-contradictory. It says that money is a bad master, just like Jesus said. This is not at all off topic. You brought the subject up in the first place. If you did not want to discuss the subject, you should not have done that.
BTW I do not buy into the Bible as being the real thing. I am not religious at all. But I have studied what the Bible really says as opposed to what many on both sides think it says or want it to say. (I have studied many subjects in great depth. I am not just some kind of Bible fanatic.)
Case in point: Jesus never said that everyone should give everything away. The rich guy asked how to get eternal life. Jesus said to follow the commandments, several very specific action-oriented ones. The guy said he had done that all his life and wanted to do more. Jesus invited him to join his band of followers on the road. Someone so devoted to righteousness would be a fine addition. The big rule about that was that you had to give up your old life completely and devote yourself entirely to spreading the word on the road with no distractions. (Luke even has a passage where Jesus tells the crowds to stop following him because they are not willing to make that commitment.) In order to follow Jesus, the rich guy had to sell what he had and give it to the poor. That was too much for him. But if he continued to follow the commandments as he said he did, he would presumably get eternal life since that is what Jesus said was required.
Here is the passage in question.
One of the commandments Jesus included in his list was ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’.
The Sheep and the Goats story in Matthew makes it clear just what ‘love your neighbor’ means, and that is serious commitment to charitable acts. This is why, back in the ‘rich guy’ story, it is hard for rich people to enter the kingdom of heaven. Getting all wrapped up with Mammon can blind one to the needs of others. In fact the thinking at the time was that material wealth was a sign of approval from God and that the unfortunate deserve their fate. In the ‘rich guy’ passage, Jesus debunks that. We might presume the rich guy avoided that trap, since he said he had always followed those commandments. BTW ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ is a commandment from Leviticus.
Despite what people on both sides love to do, taking bits and pieces out of context does not give an accurate picture of what is being said. The Bible is not a box of fortune cookie one-liners and will never be understood if it is treated that way. Read it in context and without preconceptions of what it is
supposed to say or what somebody else claims it says, and you may be quite surprised.
