Washing the Christianity Out of Money
Somewhere, in the unholy gumbo that passes for religious discourse and thinking here in the US, there’s a couple of real dumb ideas that get linked together.
The first is the idea that we’re all equally effective at prayer or any attempt to get the divine to help us. A priest of any religion, any random person off the street and your grandma, god is just as likely to act—or to put it another way, as unlikely to act. If all you think of prayer is someone ranting into the air in an empty room, then yes, all prayers are equally effective.
If you want results from your prayer, people are not equally effective at getting those results.
The second is the idea that we should all have equal ‘rights’ with respect to god: that we all have equal ability to speak to god, equal effectiveness with respect to the divine, equal ability to get the divine’s attention, and that god looks at us all the same. This is closely related to the first idea, in that if you don’t think the divine is effective, then sure, we all hypothetically are the same.
Also hypothetically, this means god is fair, which requires you to very carefully not use your eyes and misses the point that fairness is just something we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better.
There is no fair.
People from a Christian background will often use those ideas to be suspicious of vodou priests and spiritual workers. I’m going to ignore the idea that god is not effective and that prayers aren’t supposed to evoke a response, and bring up tithes here: if you’re giving 10% of your income to a church and hoping they “do good things” with your money, paying for a service that’s specific to some situation in your life is ridiculously cheaper.
It’s also, because we’re not handicapped by the ideas above, a lot more effective. If you’re called to this work, it’s because the divine is actually listening to you, and has marked you to be doing this work. You are, in essence, a specialist. The divine is not in the slightest democratic, does not traffic in fairness, does not care for your ideas about good (or evil), and is quite effective.
Washing the Christianity out of your ideas about money requires recognizing all these things, and will make the difference between being free and allowed to rest, or being pressed into constant service by people whose beliefs will let them drain you dry, refusing to recognize anything but that they want more results while they resent your results for proving that their beliefs are bullshit.
