Total liquidation. It’s what Jesus would do.

It is nice that Pope Francis is a nice man. It is nice that he spends time making personal phone calls to sad people. It would be much nicer if he would fully leverage the power of his huge and powerful global institution to maximize the amount of good it could do for the world’s neediest people (all of whom will be waltzing into heaven as the Vatican’s accountants struggle to thread themselves through the eye of that needle). If the Catholic church wants to be the most Jesus-like institution it can be, it needs to first stop advocating hateful, divisive, and backwards political positions. Then, it needs to spend its wealth properly.

Pope Francis doesn’t need to build any more churches. He needs to start selling churches. Let’s imagine that, by liquidating some holdings of the Catholic church, he could cobble together $600 billion. (That seems like a number that is well below the church’s total wealth.) What could be done with that money? Well, about a fifth of that cash could be used to fully eradicate malaria, a disease that kills almost a million people every year. Then, hell, you could take the rest of it and give a thousand bucks each to every single person in the bottom half of the wealth distribution in Africa, the world’s poorest continent. Or, you could fully eradicate world hunger for a dozen years. Take your pick of causes, really You could do a lot of things, for the world’s poorest people.

And if you sold off all of the Catholic church’s holdings, you could do even more for the world’s poorest people. This would also stop all the lobbying and proselytizing against them having access to birth control and abortion. Everyone wins. Poor people would see their lives materially improved. Denizens of the Catholic church, a wealthy institution, would greatly improve their chances of getting into heaven. Pope Francis could smile on his good works. And the faithful could spend their Sundays outside helping people, rather than sitting inside a stuffy old church. Because the church has been sold.

Total liquidation. It’s what Jesus would want.

http://churchandstate.org.uk

Can We Change

To a man who has observed the world, the misery, the wars, the endless sorrow of the human being, to him the scriptures, authority, beliefs, the rituals, the innumerable political speeches, the ideological and political commitments such as the Communist, Socialist, Congress, Democrat, Republican and or any other, have no meaning any more. And it will be absurd, childish, immature, to look to those to bring about a change in the world, to bring about a good society.
Seeing all this, as you must, one demands naturally:
Can human beings change?
Can you and I change?
Can you and I bring about in ourselves a mutation so profound that, as human beings, our relationship is based, not on temporary, convenient, self-centered activity?
Because what is most important is relationship. Unless there is a radical revolution in that relationship between two human beings, talking about God or about the scriptures, or going back to the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, and the rest of it, is sheer nonsense. It has no meaning whatsoever, unless we establish right relationship between human beings, how to bring a fundamental revolution in our relationship so that there will be no war, so that countries are not divided by nationalities, by frontiers, by class differences and so on. Unless we, you and I, establish such a relationship, not theoretically, not ideologically, not hypothetically, but actually, factually, there is bound to be a greater and greater decline and deterioration.
So a radical transformation of the human being is absolutely essential. Because most of us are still animals.If you have observed animals, you will know how closely related we are! You observe the dog, a pet you know! How jealous he is! How he loves to be praised, to be petted and so on, like human beings!
So there is a very close relationship between the animal and the human being. Unless that animal in us is completely transformed do what you will - have the most extravagant ideologies, commit yourself to any political, religious or economic group, you are not going to solve the problem at all...

Revolution of Consciousness

The main crisis of our life, though there are vast changes going on in the world of science, of mathematics and all the rest. Technologically there is tremendous change going on, but in the psyche of the human being there is very little change. The crisis is not in the outward technological advancement, but rather in the way we think, the way we live and the way we feel. That is where a revolution must take place. This revolution cannot be according to any particular pattern, because no revolution, psychologically, is possible if there is merely the imitation of a particular ideology. To me, all ideologies are idiotic, they have no meaning. What has meaning is what is, not what should be.