"Attention, This is Your Federal Reserve Chairman Speaking..."

I look over the Los Angeles Times frequently just to see what the World is talking about. You may have seen quite a few references to it in this blog, but that is only because I live in the Los Angeles area and it is the top paper of the area, a prominent System mouthpiece along with the New York Times and Washington Post to keep us abreast of all the things we're supposed to do to be good World inhabitants.

Today I noted a couple of things from that mouthpiece that add more profound evidence for the nature of the World in distinct contrast to the Kingdom, the place where God calls us to love one another authentically.

I want to start with Tom Petruno's column titled "Fed needs you to take risks despite chaos." He goes into all the yabba-yabba about how lower interest rates may be good for borrowers but is lousy for investors, he puts out some numbers-- yeah yeah, anyone who pays a rats nard of attention to the market knows all this.

His main point is that for the economy to get that little spark everyone says we're supposed to want, people need to fear not getting more money more than they'd fear losing it. Ahh, I see, so we must rev up our covetousness and hook up with a bunch of liars exploiting our value, or be very afraid of them and hoard, which is, as FDR said during another precarious economic time, "exceedlingly unfashionable."

Whatever the case we should listen to the Lord Fed, who it seems must rely quite a bit on us, as revealed by the first four words of the piece:

"Fed needs you to..."

It needs us to do something. Hmm. Annnd if weee don't, then what?

If you're a devout World inhabitant, living life completely outside the Kingdom where Truth and Grace reign, then it's best you do as Lord Fed says, or we'll have very very bad economic times ahead. Very very bad. After all, liars and murderers need someone to calm their fears of all the other liars and murderers, and Lord Fed is there to help.

If you are a Christian you may not be inoculated against the whirlwind of codependent exploitation here. This leads to the second LA Times piece, this one in the "Column One" section of the front page. "What Chores Would Jesus Do?" is about a small group of young Christians who wants to live as communally and selflessly as they think Jesus tells them to live.

I can't deny that reading this piece made me weep. The reason I wept is because as heartfelt as these people are, as committed as they are to Christ,

They are still World inhabitants bumbling around in the darkness of World torment.

The article told of how virtually everything they did was done with great timidity, that they had to drop all their boundaries in order to please everyone else in the commune, that they had to whack themselves all the time to remind themselves how they're supposed to endure such pain in reaching out to others because this is how Jesus wants it.

It was painful for me to read it.

The worst thing about this story was that they could live out the life Jesus wants them to live not by smashing into each other emotionally and spiritually but merely by-- oh my, this is too simple-- by merely

Getting themselves ungrafted from the World.

They stumbled around so much trying to prove themselves to Jesus that they were impotent when it came to just loving another with His love. Please don't get me wrong. I don't want to demean for two seconds any of the good wholesome things they do or want to do for Christ. Awesome, really, that's awesome.

But still, I can't help but write about things for what they are.

And this commune thing is so Catholicist it makes me want to puke.

I shouldn't be so hyperbolic, huh. Nah, I'm just feeling it. As I usually do.

One of those guys, in the commune-- the newspaper story said he worked for a Christian non-profit but said nothing more about it.

A Christian non-profit. Meaning that the gifts that God gave us, and clearly asked us to invest so we can see as much as a hundred-fold increase, those gifts should be locked up and buried so we can be sure we won't profit from them for that would be reeeally bad? Is that it?

But then, hmm, I thought Lord Fed told us to invest even when it hurts.

Oh wait. I think I get it now.

If you say you believe in God, you must prove it by living monastically in poverty so you don't have any real impact on those around you. 'Nkay. And for everyone else, they should pretend like they want more stuff even when the powerful people around them will still yank their chain, and they should do that to prove their belief in Lord Fed.

No, yeah, that can't be it. That's just way too stupid-- It's okay to believe in God as long as that God is the Federal Reserve. Yeah, way too stupid.

Except that,

That's kinda the way it is.

For the World.

What is the community Jesus wants us to live in really like? Look here for some ideas.

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