I have nothing really exciting to say, but Scott Coats is posting once a day these days, and a lot of the rest of my LiveJournal friends are seriously slacking off, so I gotta keep it going I suppose.

We're studying a Christian financial book in Sunday school right now in between my lessons from the amazingly insightful Ray Vander Laan Faith Lessons Series. It's by Larry Burkett of Crown Financial Ministries. I was really concerned when I saw that it was published by Moody, and in some respects that concern was well-founded. There is some good information in it so far. It's just that the whole book is written with a worldview that is completely colored by a premillenial dispensational bent on eschatology. I think that it suffers from the belief that we are the pinnacle of what God intended for there to be on earth. We're friends of Israel, so when we go under, that's a sure sign that the end is near. The decline of American civilization has to mean it's the end of the world because we're so important.

When I put together my study on eschatology a few years ago, one of the best ideas I came across was this: has the church been poisoned by the lie that it will be defeated? The end point I make with my study is that you don't have to have the Left Behind worldview in order to be a Christian. It's not the only interpretation about the end times. In fact, it's only really become fashionable in the last several decades. And yes, we should be prepared for the bridgegroom to return, but that doesn't mean that we give up trying to be the body of Christ in the world (which means more than just being concerned about the state of someone's soul—it's about being concerned about their entire situation, economic, political, etc.).

So the book gets into the idea of a Mark of the Beast UPC code kind of thing after making some sound points about our economic system.

Ever since I got into Ron Paul, I began learning more and more about our economic system, and what I've learned is not all that comforting. There's probably a reason that our schools don't teach how the system works. People would lose all confidence in the system, and it would fall apart if they realized what a magic trick the whole thing is.

"The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled." - John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist

Jamie grew up working in a bank, she works for a major mutual funds manager and most of what I've learned is news to her too. On an intellectual level, I guess I just always assumed that banks lend money from deposits of other customers, but that's not really what happens. The reality is that if someone deposits $1111, then the bank can then load out $10,000. Where does that money come from? It's just conjured into existence. Money does not represent value, money represents debt, and it has no real value aside from the fact that the government says it does. This video series is highly educational. I don't agree with the proposed solutions, but it does a good job of explaining how the system evolved into what it is today.

Hmm.. guess I did have something to say today after all.