As if our hard working, Square Mile and Docklands' financial sector workers didn't have it tough enough right now, it seems they've provoked the wrath of god with their wicked debt trading.
The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have seized plum media opportunities to comment on something only marginally related to their sphere of expertise. Just because that Jesus bloke allegedly went into the temple and "overthrew the tables of the moneychangers" it doesn't mean that the Church of England is entitled to weigh in and call city traders "bank robbers and asset strippers" and imply that their business is unwholesome.
Writing in the Spectator, Dr Rowan Williams takes Marx's comparison of "unbridled capitalism" with mythology and twists it into the religious term, idolatry, urging a new connection between money and the material world rather than revering "paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders" before we all go to hell in a handcart, presumably.
But of course their real point is that world leaders are gathering today to discuss progress against the Millennium Development Goals - one of which is ending poverty and hunger by 2015. In light of which, Williams is right to point out that the money magically being found to bailout the big banks right now could have been similarly conjured to bring us closer to achieving these idealistically humanitarian goals.
Image courtesy of Binary Ape's Flickrstream under the Creative Commons Attribution licence.
