The Love of Money & The First Temptation of Christ

Christ did not come to "forgive the sins of the world," which is as much of a lie as the lie that each person is here to basically secure the salvation of their own personal soul, with all those who fail at this task winning an eternity in hell.  In fact, the very "individualism" that the Church often condemns is derived from this very lie that the Catholic Church only everywhere declares to be essentially an "infallible truth." But this grand lie is simply another means of divide and control.

Instead, Jesus came to undo the sins of David, which were summed up in the three temptations offered by the Devil to Jesus while he was fasting in the desert for 40 days. Jesus would form a "new covenant" by resisting the same three temptations that had seduced David, and in so doing, cost the Israelites the "promised land" (which was never predicated upon a physical geographical location) in the same way it had cost Adam & Eve the Garden of Eden.  

The first temptation offered to the starving Jesus was to turn stones into bread. While this temptation has often been understood in a number of ways within the Bible context (including the idea that the "bread" was tantamount to the "fruit" offered to Adam & Eve) the more relevant way of understanding it today - and since the stories in the Bible were always intended to be the "living word," it is necessary to apply it to events relevant to our own time and place, which was traditionally how those stories were always applied by the Twelve Tribes before they were written down - is that this temptation is really about money.

The Island of Yap, for example, is well known today for its stone money. Felix Martin explains how this system of stone money worked, as the basis for one of the earliest monetary systems, in his book Money; An Unauthorized Biography. (A short article about this can be found here)

As such, the Devil is offering to do for Christ what the common "free market" does for people today: that is, to "miraculously" transform money (i.e., pieces of silver, copper, and paper, or on the Island of Yap, stone) into bread (i.e., food). And those without such "money," in accord with a morality based as much on the ethos of Capitalism as a religion predicated upon a "prosperity gospel," are seen as having lost God's (i.e. money's) favor. As such, they are therefore subject to the same "famine" used so often in the Old Testament, where God shared his displeasure with one group or another, through the sanctifying grace of starvation.

What is often left out of the understanding of the temptations, and indeed left out of the whole understanding of Jesus challenging the Pharisees and threatening to destroy the Temple, is that the Temple's built by Solomon in accord with David's directives, were in fact the banks. Even more relevant is that it was in the building of the temple that came to be seen by at least some of the Tribes, and Samuel as well, as the thing that broke the covenant the Israelites had formed with Yahweh on Sinai.

And even more interesting about this fact, is how money was created out of the very same religious practices that Jesus relied upon to create the New Covenant.  Money, in other words, was invented using the same tradition used by the Hebrews at Passover, and Jesus later used at the Last Supper. 

Like Christian concepts of God, money is actually a trinity of social conventions, all of which are in some ways identical to ideas captured in concepts in the Christian religion, and embodied in the concept of the Christian God. That trinity was comprised of equal booty distribution, reciprocal gift-exchange, and most importantly, the equal distribution of an animal sacrifice, like that celebrated at Passover and during the Last Supper. 

Martin explains this in much greater detail in his book, Money, but here is a synopsis relevant to understanding how the Christian religion is based on the same underlying concepts as money, and why therefore, the love of the one is the same as the love of the other.  The only real "Christian God," in other words, is Money. That's why it says "In God We Trust," on our money.

COMMUNION AS THE BASIS OF GOD & MONEY

While the idea of "communion" is common among the 40,000 + different Christian religions today, and is a practice that is often thought to have originated  with the Passover celebration of the Jews (where God became King Herod the Great and murdered the innocent sons of Egypt  to free "his people,"which only leaves us to wonder who's "people" the Egyptians were), such a practice had existed long before the Hebrews used it to escape Egypt. And not only was it used as the basis for religious unity, but also for the invention of money.

Money, Felix Martin points out, "is not really a thing at all but a social technology: a set of ideas and practices which organize what we produce and consume." Money, therefore, is not the tokens that represent it, nor the account books where people record it, nor even the buildings such as banks in which people administer it. Like our ideas about God and tradition, there is nothing physical about money.

Rather than being a "thing," money (like a religion), is a set of ideas, practices, and institutions; and above all, the idea of an abstract economic value, the practice of accounting, and the institution of decentralized transferability." (Note: the "religion" Christ was defending, based on the traditions of the twelve tribes, was likewise a "decentralized" system, that the Catholic Church quickly put the kibosh on.)

As Martin points out, "The Iliad and the Odyssey - the two epic poems that represent the earliest surviving product of Greek culture - are relevant here because these stories capture the fact that there was, during the Dark Age of society after the fall of Greece, no such thing as money."

Like the Passover meal celebrated by the Jews and the Last Supper celebrated by Catholics at every mass, these poems describe a third crucial institution that was altogether just as profound: the sacrifice of oxen to the gods and the distribution of the roast meat in equal part to the congregation of the tribe. Through this solemn ritual perhaps the most basic of all principles of the Greek political organization was expressed in visible - indeed, in edible - form: the fact that every male member of the tribe was of equal social worth, and, by the same token, owed an equal obligation to the community as a whole. 

In the absence of money, there were three simple mechanisms for organizing society in those days, a kind of "trinity" in its own right. One was the interlocking institutions of booty distribution, whereby the spoils of conquest were shared among the soldiers as a reward from their leader. The second was based on reciprocal gift-exchange, the idea that the giving of a gift was reciprocated with a gift of similar value. This was essentially the basis of barter exchange. And the third and most important, was the egalitarian distribution of an animal sacrifice. 

These practices are far from unique to Dark Age Greece. Rather, modern research in anthropology and comparative history has shown them to be typical practices of small-scale tribal societies. 

Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Perry have identified, in comparative studies of society from Madagascar to the Andes, for example,  that there was a primeval institution of the sacrifice and the egalitarian distribution and communal consumption of its roast meat - a ritual expression of tribal solidarity before a deity, probably inherited from the most distant Indo-European past. 

In the famous city of Ur, which was a city that the Bible authors were well acquainted with by the time they began to transfer their traditions from oral to written format, "the social system that developed was radically different from the primitive tribalism of the Dark Age Greek world. Ultimate power in Ur was shared between the palace - the seat of semi-divine king who combined the roles of military leader and chief justice - and temples - home both to the deities who were believed to regulate the universe, and to the extensive clerical bureaucracy whose job it was to do the same for the economy of the city on earth."

(NOTE: Ur housing their own gods in their temples is just one example of why the Ten Tribes in the North opposed David's desire to build a temple, because it was a sacrilege to house Yahweh in anything, especially a place  that owed it's existence to money - a 'god' that had far more effects in peoples lives and the world overall, than another other.) 

The priests in the temples, in this sense, were also the economists, in the same way today, economists are essentially priests for one economic religion or another. 

"The fields, the herds, and the marshes, were all owned mainly by the temples, who used citizens to take care of the daily work. The temple administrators were always, however, the ultimate authority." (Again, this is ultimately how Solomon would organize the temple in Jerusalem as well, which many of the Tribes had feared.)

For thousands of years, this system remained unchanged. And with the rise of urban civilization and the temple economies, came the command economy directed and controlled by the temples more and more, because they operated as the banks. 

INVENTION OF  LITERACY, NUMERACY, & ACCOUNTING

It was in Mesopotamia that we witnessed the invention of the three most important social technologies in the history of human civilization: literacy, numeracy, and accounting. Ur not only invented writing, but with it, the concept of number, opening the way to the development of mathematics. And these two set the stage for the creation of accounting. 

Faceless international bureaucracies have not typically been responsible for revolutionary advances in human civilization. More often, they have been bastions of dogma and recidivism against which lonely pioneers have had to struggle in the daring quest for knowledge and truth. The field of metrology - the science of measurement - provides a noticeable exception to this general rule, however. 

While measuring had been created to measure virtually anything and everything that needed to be measured, there was no single universal measure of all things. Like the internet needing to run on a single IP protocol so that any computer can communicate to any other, so to there was a  need to establish one universal system of value that could be used to measure the new system of abstract economic ideas that mathematicians had devised. And from this need, came the invention of money. 

Martin continues:

"What was needed was a concept that could be used in society for a single, universal, abstract substance in terms of which the objective social reality could be understood. [Greece] had, hidden amidst its barbarous and primitive cultural forms, one glittering prize: a nascent idea of universally applicable value.

Economic value is a property of the social world; where as linear extension, mass, temperature and so on are properties of a physical world. The choice of standard for the measures of physical concepts is a question of technical efficiency. But the uses to which measurement of the social property of economic value are put are qualitatively quite different; and so the choice of its standard is quite different as well. The choice of standard for the monetary unit, in other words, affect not how easy it is to build bridges, but how wealth and income are distributed and who bears the economic risks. It is, therefore, not just a technical, but also an ethical question: and the criteria for choosing it is not only which standard unit is efficient, but which is fair."

 It is no wonder, then, that those who would be left to determine such "fairness" would be the priests in the temple-banks, for the masses had already learned to defer to their special and indeed elevated moral acumen, as men who were seen as emissaries of the gods.

There was a time before money, in the Dark age of Greece and the ancient Mesopotamia. "It is the invention of the concept of universal economic value that was the missing link in the invention of money. It was in the archaic Aegean that this invention occurred.

HOW SHARED ABSTRACT MORAL VALUES PRODUCED A MONETARY SYSTEM

Martin explains how both the communality of the tribes and the ancient religious practice that is today known as "communion," would eventually create money, like a Frankenstein monster of which the entire community had a hand in building, much like ideas of the gods and even God himself.

"The sophisticated Mesopotamian apparatus of accounting and forward planing did not operate without notions of value, of course. Though in the early states of their evolution it had operated with plans expressed only in physical units, the temple bureaucracies later developed units of abstract value with which to allocate resources between different  classes of inputs and outputs. But these unites were designed for deployment only in specific sectors and as part of the planning process: because of the sophistication of the system of bureaucratic control itself, there was no need for a universal value which could be applied more generally and outside the administrative hierarchy. As the medieval peasant had limited purpose units of length, each ideally suited to its particular task - his ells, fathoms, and feet-so the temple bureaucrats had limited purpose concepts of vale and corresponding accounting units: "[d]epending on the economic sector, the means of comparison or the measure of standardized norms and duties could be silver, barley, or fish, or "laborer-days,' that is, the product of the number of workers multiplied by the number of days they worked."

When the ancient Mesopotamian technologies of literacy, numeracy, and accounting came om contact with the primitive, tribal institutions of Greece, they were transplanted into a wholly different environment. And one of those institutions - the ritual of sacrificial distribution - contained the germ of a quite different concept of value. the ritual of the sacrificial feast consisted of the ceremonial killed of the victim, the burning of its entrails as an offering to the gods, and the roasting and distribution of its meat to the congregation. All male members of the tribe participated, and the shares distributed were equal - for this was an ancient ritual, the purpose of which was to express, to rehearse, and to ensure understanding of, the communality of the tribe. Like gift exchange, it was a ritual based on reciprocity - but the reciprocity here was between the individual and the tribe: the individual was reaffirmed as an equal member of the tribe and as having an equal obligation to ensure its survival. the most basic ideas at work are so fundamental, and so familiar to us today, that they are easy to miss. But they were ideas completely alien to the hierarchical cosmology and caste society of Mesopotamian. There were the concept of social value-the property that every male member of the tribe enjoyed by virtue of being part of the community-and the the notion that one this measure, every member counted equally. 

For as long as these ideas remained in their original context of the tribal ritual of sacrificial distribution, they remained nothing more than a relic of barbarism. But when mixed with the new technologies from the East and the new perspective on the world which they provoked, the catalysis was volcanic. For the notion of social value was an atomic concept in terms of which an objective society reality could be constructed. And the idea of the equal worth of every member of the tribe was a social constant: a standard against which social value could be measured. At the heart of Greek society, in other words, was nothing other than a nascent concept of universal value and a standard against which it to measure it, pret-a-porter. Here was an answer to the question begged by the new perspective on society and the economy. Where the new understanding of the physical reality had man, the observer of an objective universe, the new understanding of the social reality had the idea of the self, separate from society - an objective entity consisting of relationships measurable in  a standard unit of the universal scale of economic value. It was a critical conceptual development - the missing link, on the intellect level, in the invention of money. 

Mesopotamia had for millennia possessed of the three component of money-a system of accounting, based upon its discoveries of writing and numeracy. but the immense sophistication of Mesopotamia's bureaucratic, command economy had no need of any universal concept of economic value. It required and had prefect a variety of limited-purpose concepts of value, each with its respective standard. It there did not develop the first component of money: a unit of abstract, universally applicable, economic value. Dark Age Greece, on the other hand, had a primitive concept of universal value and a standard by which to measure it. But the Greek Dark Ages knew neither literacy nor numeracy - let alone a system of accounting. The had, in nascent form, the first component of money, but lacked the second. Neither civilization had all the ingredients for money on its own. But when the ultra-modern technologies of the East - literacy, numeracy, and accounting - were combined with the idea of a universal scale of value incubated in the barbaric West, the conceptual preconditions for money were at last in place. 

The ritual of sacrificial distribution was applied then in other social and religious and even legal contexts. "What had since time immemorial been ritual obligations, the relative worth of which it would not have crossed any one's mind to compare, began to be assessed in terms of the new measure of value - the monetary unit. Already in the early sixth century BC, inscriptions of religious dedication at the temple of Hera on the island of Samos - the greatest Greek religious foundation of its day - had begun to proclaim their monetary value."

Money, like the concept of dept and thus "sin," also allowed for the transferability of social obligations that could not only be valued on a universal scale, but transferred from one person to another. And this miracle of money produced an equal twin - the miracle of the market. And with the invention of coinage, a dream technology from recording and transferring monetary obligations from one person to another was born.

BIBLICAL BASIS OF COMMUNION  IN JUDAISM

We see how this practice of sacrificial distribution took various different forms prior to both Passover and the Last Supper, which used this practice in the same way it had previously been relied upon as the basis for the value and invention of money.  

The twelve tribe confederacy… provided a common basis of worship and social responsibility. Not only did the tribes gather at the common confederate sanctuary of Shiloh for annual religious festivals, as we learn from Judges 21:19 (see also I Sam. 1:3: 2:19), but in times of emergency they were summoned to concerted action in the name of the God of the covenant. 

A vivid example of such action is given in the story of the Gibeah outrage, related in Judges 19-21. There we read that a Levite, incensed at the rape-murder of his concubine by some Benjaminites, cut up her corpse into twelve pieces and sent those parts throughout “all the territory of Israel.” The act of dividing the body into twelve parts (see also I Sam. 11:7) indicates, of course, the twelve-part structure of the Israelite confederacy. 

The tribal response to this symbolic act was quick and decisive, indicating that the tribes were bound together by a common sense of law and decency, without a monarchy, even when one of the tribes was an offender:

“And all who saw it said, “Such a thing has never happened or been seen from this day that the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt until this day; consider it, take counsel, and speak.” Judges 19:30

So, we are told, all the men of Israel gathered together in the “assembly of the people of God” and resolved to take punitive action, "united as one man.”

The Ammonite Ultimatum

Another example exists in the what has come to be called the Ammonite Ultimatum.

 The Ammonites, taking advantage of Israels preoccupation with the Philistines, said they would not make a treaty  unless the right eye of every Israelite were gouged out. The men of Jabesh sent an appeal for help throughout all the territory of Israel. Saul happened to be coming from the field behind some oxen when he heard the report about this. And “the spirit of God” came mightily upon him in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Judges. What the spirit impelled him to do is exceedingly significant”

He took a yoke of oxen, and cut them in pieces and sent them throughout all the territory of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying “whoever does not come out after Saul and Samuel, so shall it be done to his oxen!” Then the dread of Yahweh fell upon the people, and they came out as one man. 1 Sam 11:7 (emphasis added).

Like the severing of a corpse into 12 pieces, this was a symbolic summons to the whole Israelite confederacy to engage in concerted action the name of Yahweh. Inspired by Saul’s charismatic leadership, the Confederacy brought about a decisive defeat of the Ammonites. Christ's Last Supper, then, was intended to similarly create a "one man" whereby the 12 tribes acted together, as one body. The Catholic Church, however, crucified this idea when it followed in the footsteps of David and the Sanhedrin, and appointed itself as God's representative on Earth. And in so doing, became the serpent in the garden of our earthly Eden, which sells the "fruit" from the man made tree of torture that it worships.  

MONEY & THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The "communion" celebrated in the Catholic Church is understood as the actual transformation of the bread and wine used at mass, into both the physical and spiritual body and blood of Christ. This is achieved through what Catholics call "transubstantiation." Money, as we have seen, was formed in a similar way, yoking together a trinity of ideas into a system of universal value that is similar to the "universal natural law" used by Christians to apply "objective" values of right and wrong, good and bad. It is this "objective" system that is always used by the Christians to support and indeed justify every evil they or their God commits, and always for "the love of God."

While money had always been understood, after it's invention, to be simply a quantification of labor, the famous and practically worshiped economist Milton Friedman changed this in the 1950s, when he posited that money itself was the thing of value. No longer was money simply a tool used by people as a substitute for barter, that allowed for the denomination of a person's skill, labor, and time. Instead, like a modern day miracle worker who could change water into wine, Friedman transformed money from a means to an end, and in the process, turned money from a thing that served man, to the thing that all men must serve. 

Paul Tillich was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and Lutheran Protestant theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. He once pointed out that "all institutions are inherently demonic." And this is because all institutions necessarily worship power, and therefore money, or what the Bible refers to as "the love of money." From the Temple directed to be built by King David to the Catholic Church, to every system of government we can devise, all of these "institutions" are systems that necessarily feed first and foremost on power, which in a system that runs on money, is the same thing as "the love of money."

This "love of money," that the Bible calls "the root of all evil," is why the Catholic Church sought to hide it's pedophile priest problem for so long, for example, not so much because it would injure its claim as God's moral authority on earth (which is surely would), but because it would seriously undermine the Churches ability to continue to collect massive amounts of wealth from the billions of "believers" around the world who were only too eager to exchange their savings for the promise of salvation.

Tillich's observation has been fleshed out in several books, including “Merchants in the Temple” by Gianluigi Nuzzi, and “Avarice,” by Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi. Both of these describe "how the Vatican operates a “saint making factory” on the premises presided over by mendacious monsignors and funded by payments of up to $483,000 from parishes pushing their candidates for canonization." In addition to this, "most of the $400 million in St. Peter’s Pence offerings collected at parishes around the world winds up in an account that greases the wheels of the Holy See’s bureaucratic machine — not in the pockets of the poor."

Other books detailing the "inherently demonic" nature of the Catholic Church include "The Vatican Exposed" and "Among the Ruins: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Catholic Church," both by by Paul Williams, and "God's Bankers," by  Gerald Posner. 

CONCLUSION

Every war, every horror, every suffering, every injustice humanity is confronted with today, can be traced back to a "worship" of money. Mind you, those who are doing the most "worshiping" sincerely believe that they are doing nothing of the sort. The Catholic Church, for example, gives away to charities most of the money it collects. But to simply accept that "money" - which is not only made from a tree, but is as dead as the tree that Christ himself was hung on - is the necessary means for organizing the world, we therefore are forced to only ever consider solutions that necessarily depend upon money, and the money changers. 

It is to willingly become, in other words, both slaves and worshipers of the money changers.