Love of Money

the house that did not need watering yesterday

Yesterday we had some pretty powerful storms move through here. That was good for me, I don’t have to waste water on the lawn. I do understand resale value, but I also understand that every time I water the lawn I waste a tremendous number of gallons of purified water. Slab foundations—the stupidest way to build a house in Texas. Pier and beam foundations work much better in Texas than slabs, but they are more expensive to build. So the construction companies, in the service of the almighty dollar, cut costs and pour slab foundations.

As the scorching heat of the summer progresses the clay under the slab dries, shrinks and will crack the foundation. So, only Texas would be stupid enough to build houses which are so poorly designed for their environment that you must water your house, otherwise it breaks.

We lost power for several hours. I missed seeing John Edwards speak at the Democratic National Convention (I saw Rev. Al Sharpton and boy am I glad I did—that was a good speech). The silence was wonderful. Lisa and I read by candlelight.

It was actually something of a letdown when the power returned. I was enjoying the peace of a quiet evening with my wife and family of pets (two cats, Thelma and Smokey, two dogs, Buzz and Zoey and several fish).

A thought occurred to me and that was if you prefaced the ten commandments in the Bible with something like: I am God, you know me as Allah, Jehovah, Yaweh, Isis, Ra, Astarte etc. I have many names. Then you got to the first commandment and it says: I the lord am your god, You shall have no other gods before me, then you have a completely different context for that commandment. No longer is it a commandment mandating the destruction of other religions.

Instead the injunction would have to be against the worship of material things. When Moses came tooling down the mountains with the commandments and saw the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, was he pissed off that they were worshipping another deity or that they were worshipping material wealth?

This is not the idle, pointless speculation it seems. My thought was that over the ages, worship of money and material wealth has done more to harm mankind than any religion. Think about our war in Iraq. If we were really interested in humanitarian issues and promoting freedom, then we should be in Sudan right now, preventing genocide. The Iraq war is about the worship of material wealth, in the form of oil.

I think love of money could destroy America. Worship of material wealth is tearing us apart.