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To: mercuria
As was said just before the program's close: you can't serve both God and Mammon.

About natural resource issues: it's not advocating species suicide to point out that an absolutist advocacy of triumphalist materialism is inadequate as a conservative paradigm. If conservatism is about restraint -- social, moral, political, cultural, and the rest -- it must recognise that unrestricted consumerism is a trap, and that prosperity alone is of no value if it becomes not our servant but our master.

From the strictly Christian point of view, it is the fall of Adam that turns man into a predator who no longer perceives creation as something directed to the praise of God. Instead, it is good only for self-worship. Suicide of the species will not come from insufficient prosperity; if it comes it will be from a disordered and disintegrating quest for posessions and pleasure that make man a servant of his appetites, rather than someone freed in the Resurrection that redeems not only humanity but all created matter.

This is not to suggest that all men are called to poverty, but it does argue for an ethic of economy and decent self-restraint, according to which material posessions are good only so long as they constitute a Eucharist -- a thankgiving -- not as man's due for his own self-earned justification -- and only so long as they tend to human solidarity, and not alienation.

147 posted on 01/03/2002 7:26:45 PM PST by Romulus
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To: Romulus
Bravo.
149 posted on 01/03/2002 7:41:17 PM PST by Askel5
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To: Romulus
Thank you for the well-thought out comments. I think that's the point I was trying to make, but neither as profoundly nor as eloquently.

176 posted on 01/04/2002 8:26:23 AM PST by AnnaZ
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