Maggie's Farm

Attended a talk by a preacher on that subject on Friday morning. I don't know the answer to the question, nor do I know the answer to the larger question: "Does God want us to be happy?"  Or to the sillier question: "Does God want us to have fun?"

However, I suspect larger, deeper issues than these preoccupy God, and that "life in abundance" does not mean owning five expensive cars, or a 10,000 square foot house, or having a million sycophant friends, or a gun room full of Purdys and Perazzis - however pleasing and desirable those things may be.

Speaking as just one regular guy, who is wealthy by world standards but well below average by my local neighborhood standards, it has always seemed that God is more interested in humbling me, and teaching me gratitude, and seeking my devotion, than in raising me up by worldly measures.

But what I want to post is a quote from Nelson Mandela, with good comments following from Worstall, which which I agree:

"Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is people who have made poverty and tolerated poverty, and it is people who will overcome it."

If you start out with such a misdiagnosis you'll never be able to offer the right treatment.

Poverty is, how ever much we wish it wasn't, the natural state of mankind. It is the starting point, not something that is created at all, it's something that is there before we start to try and do anything.

The thing that is created is wealth, not poverty. What we need to study is not how poverty is created, for that is what is there already, but how wealth is created, which is the different and interesting thing.