Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

How do I say this...

I couldn't object to a single paragraph more than if the devil himself boomed it from hell with flaming nostrils. Williams is wrong, wrong, wrong. He couldn't be more wrong than if he claimed Clay Aiken isn't gay after all. He couldn't utter a more contemptuous statement than if he was telling us that the church planned to raise Harold Shipman from the dead and ordain him as a bishop zombie. The statement is as wrong from right as George Michael is from Albert Einstein. It's as objectionable as a pedophile in Disneyland. It's as idiotic as Hitchens being waterboarded. If my own precious five year old child said something like that, I'd spank his face with a Louisville Slugger. It's enough to make a drunk sober. It's enough to make Mother Theresa flip a middle finger from the grave. This Rowan Williams. He's sipping from the Fallacious Cup. He's eating from the Bonkers Bowl. He's a maniac. He's wrong.

Thank you.

Why?

What bit?

I'm generally not much of a Rowan fan, but I think that sounds fair enough, probably. I haven't really thought about it yet...but no, that seems fair enough, if a bit flowery. But I can see what he's getting at.

And who's Clay Aiken?

Clay Aiken is a past Idol winner who's been known to be gay for a very long time despite his insistence to the contrary. This week he finally came out.

What bit? The whole 'Marx was right' thing. The whole 'we should be wary about capitalism' thing. The 'money is the root of all evil' implication, and the 'financial markets are idolatrous' idea. Bullshit. Williams needs to read some Ayn Rand.

This is possibly the most painful thing I have ever written for Rowan Williams arouses in me the same visceral loathing that loyalist flute bands (multiplied to the power of Hugo Duncan) do in Brian but, I have just read the complete article and the only thing I could find to disagree with in it was his assertion that Marx was right about little else other than capitalism engendering its own mythology. (An unworthy dismissal of a great mind and a seminal thinker).

It was a penetrating and eloquent critique of a philosophy that is sick and rotten to its very core.

Well done Rowan - even though I think you are a bad and faithless servant.

The love of money may be the root of all evil but in the land of the free and the home of the brave, for many it is the pursuit of happiness and it can be carried out legally with the full blessing, faith, and credit of the United States Government. Archbishop Williams has directly contradicted President Bush's statement last night. He seems more in line with Fidel Castro or Kim Il Sung. They took a vow of poverty for their nations too and as a result they are starving to death. I've never seen a church refuse money when they passed the plate around. The very notion of a tithe makes it seem they felt they had it coming to them by right.

Well, Mark, as Ayn Rand said, run for your life from anyone who says money is the root of all evil. It's the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

Does'nt the Cof E run a very successful investment portfolio of its own and don't churches have favoured tax status. Can you milk all the benefits of a financial system and criticise it without being a hypocrite?

John, if Williams, needs to read some Ayn Rand, I would suggest to you that you need to read some Robert Tressell.

Hi will

How do you get hold of a Lego Marx are there other ones? The kids are geting intelectual these days

NobleD - not only do the Church Commissioners run a very substantial and varied investment portfolio they do so using all sorts of morally dubious practices and get-outs including the use of funds which practice the 'short-selling' the Archbishops have recently directly criticised. This does make Rowan look a sanctimonious old humbug - what's new pussy-cat? It does not, however, make him wrong.

There is no such thing as an unregulated economy outside the fairyland imagination of libertarians and, given human nature, there never can be. The only question has to be what is the legitimate scope of regulation. The progressive deregulation of the last two decades has been essentially one-sided - permissive in terms of supervision and accountability but without any concomitant weakening of the protection from corporate and personal responsibility for recklessness or incompetence.

Even in the land of the free and home of the brave where you can blow out an intruder's brains if he raids your home you cannot as much as recover a bean from the fund manager (with his ring-fenced bonuses) who has left you without a pension after years of saving. That is the reality of a supposedly free market.

The motivator of capitalism is greed - man's chief end is to maximise utility and enjoy it for ever - such a human, but inhumane, driver can only lead to the self-devouring chaos we are about to witness unless there is successful intervention. Man's social needs balance his selfish objectives, negotiated compromise between them is the basis of morality and regulation in terms of law is the practical outworking of that compromise.

I myself believe that usury is the enemy of community and that the great Semitic religions were right to forbid it. It is shameful that, to this day, their adherents, even when they accept the principle, expend all their ingenuity in circumventing it.

The Christian churches have traduced shamelessly throughout history the message of their founder and shown a commitment to Mammon which beggars their devotion to the one they call 'Lord'. It cannot and should not be excused.