The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
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The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
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Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#2Pace Aristippus (and the lentils), telling rich people what they want to hear is not a bad way to arrange for a stream of invites to fancy dinners.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#3Pace Aristippus (and the lentils), telling rich people what they want to hear is not a bad way to arrange for a stream of invites to fancy dinners.
Telling them what they need to hear tends to get you nailed to stuff, though.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#4Meh. You don't get (or stay) rich by being all that concerned about your fate in the hereafter.
I'd say that the seriously rich (and serious wanna-bes) are far more interested in Matthew 4:8-9. And in doing whatever it takes, to hopefully receive such an offer themselves.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#5I always find the "eye of the needle gate" deflection funny, because why would anyone use metaphor that to make such a general point?
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#6Meh. You don't get (or stay) rich by being all that concerned about your fate in the hereafter. I'd say that the seriously rich (and serious wanna-bes) are far more interested in Matthew 4:8-9. And in doing whatever it takes, to hopefully receive such an offer themselves.
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Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#7Meh. You don't get (or stay) rich by being all that concerned about your fate in the hereafter. I'd say that the seriously rich (and serious wanna-bes) are far more interested in Matthew 4:8-9. And in doing whatever it takes, to hopefully receive such an offer themselves.
Mammon is an easy idolatry.
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#8I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest—if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this— that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.
Chesterton, 1908 ("Orthodoxy")
Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#9I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest—if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this— that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered d…
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Re: The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
#10Meh. You don't get (or stay) rich by being all that concerned about your fate in the hereafter. I'd say that the seriously rich (and serious wanna-bes) are far more interested in Matthew 4:8-9. And in doing whatever it takes, to hopefully receive such an offer themselves.
> You don't get (or stay) rich by being all that concerned about your fate in the hereafter.
The Egyptian pharaohs might disagree. They seemed very interested in taking it with them, so to speak.