thinking about all these smug athiest dipshits out here who shit on religious folks and espouse materialism, utterly failing to grasp that we live in what is essentially a faith-based economy at this point in history

money is, tangibly, supposed to be a representative currency

i stroll into market wanting to sell a plot of land, i can't very well bring the land with me, so instead i have some sort of authenticated representation of that land being mine to sell

and then you get into currency proper- this particular thing is shiny or rare or we just like it, so let's use that as an intermediary currency, an unused resource token, basically a community "get one (1) resource" coupon

representative and intermediary currency is supposed to exist solely for convenience- because resources are finicky. some of them are hard to transport, some of them are not immediately accessible (i trade my labour for the first male calf born in springtime on your farm), etc

but they're supposed to be equivalent to and representative of resources, actual extant things

an economy that has divorced representative currency from actual resources so absolutely that it has developed a widespread culture of what is essentially coupon hoarding is... surreal

because those coupons aren't actually anything anymore

once you divorce the currency from the base of resources it's meant to represent, it's nothing. a currency must be tied to and directly indicative of the volume of resources available to a community

and here's the thing: billionaires, in hoarding their glut of coupons, are essentially telling everyone "i don't physically have those resources, but they're mine and you can't have them" and we all just fucking TREAT THAT AS TRUE

there's no tangible reason people should not be able to go to the store and barter for bread- those resources do not actually belong to anyone

but the withholding of currency means they are being held, in theory, by the withholder

the entire concept of billionaireship is literally supported by a communal faith in the existence and immutable power of representative currency

which is supposed to be representative and is fucking nothing on its own

failing to recognize that you live in a culture that demands you pay fealty and labour in to the pursuit of something that itself offers you no tangible benefit, and in fact upholding that system, is fucking EXACTLY the same as devotion to the pursuit the love of a distant god

and, in fact, there is an argument to be made that the cultural shifts towards atheism and hustle culture are irrevocably linked: faith offers purpose and structure, no matter what the subject of that faith

which is to say that religious faith is actually probably substantially healthier for a community because moral rather than material devotion does not inherently require you to fuck other people over to demonstrate and live within your devotion

extreme zealous religiosity towards a faith without harmful doctrine is, honestly, probably a much more community-positive way of life than even low-level economic piety

i am saying this as a person who has been an atheist for more than half of my life

you cannot deride people for living within their faiths- i mean, you shouldn't anyway, you asshole- while yourself subscribing to the faith of modern economy

if you think about it, this is probably why small religious communities have such a reputation for being aggressively generous, regardless of whether or not they're necessarily kind

expressions of faith via resource redistribution is a major part of a lot of religious doctrines

and why even intolerant religious folks tend to respond to facing the subject of their intolerance with "i'll pray for you" rather than threats

because in moral faiths, the removal of the moral threat is also an ephemeral process- a divine absolution

attacking the moral threat directly only contaminates you with its corrupting influence

whereas in economic faith, you have folks actively espousing "let 'em die" rhetoric, re: covid because the pursuit of that faith is very tangible in its competitiveness

and you have people out here actively attacking immigrant workers because they're perceived as a threat to the pious' pursuit of their economic faith- a material threat to devotion that must be removed, whether by violence, displacement, neglect, or disease

anti-immigrant sentiment is just anti-heretic sentiment with a fresh paint job

the state pointing to mexican workers as why your family is starving is the modern version of the church claiming witches are why your crops failed

if it wasn't witches or foreign heathens, it was those "godless irish bastards" or some shit

hey, why do you think we have such negative moral associations with large, poor families? that's right from the beginning of the cult of economy, babyyy

as soon as technological advances mean you need less workers and medical advances mean less kids die, having a bunch of kids goes from "grist for the mill" to "a waste of resources, too many mouths to feed"

and it's not a coincidence that an individual's reproductive control has pretty much always been a question of access to resources

because no, abstinence has literally never fucking worked. humans gonna fuck

so your big families were the ones who can't afford condoms, etc

and that means you get sweeping moral judgements applied to specific social groups

which is why you saw that applied to irish people alongside a variety of non-white immigrants and why that doesn't mean historical anti-irish sentiment somehow means we're post-racial bias

because the crime of the irish was being poor

the crime of everyone else was just BEING

and historically a lot of anti-indigenous sentiment was rooted in religious justifications, and now it's rooted in economic justifications based entirely in problems CAUSED by colonialism

indigenous folks are poor because we made them fucking poor

we forced our stupid janky system of value on peoples to whom it did not and could not apply without irrevocably damaging their ways of life, and now we have the gall to sit here like "well, they do it to themselves"

poorness and richness are imposed, not inherent- taking a loaf of bread from a supermarket that will simply dispose of it if it isn't sold and calling that a theft and a moral transgression is symptomatic of the depth of our cultural delusion

it's NOT the same as taking food from another person's house, because it's not the staff of the supermarket who owns the resource, but the supermarket itself, and the supermarket doesn't fucking eat

that's the fundamental difference between corporate and small business

if i'm a baker and nobody buys my bread today, i'm just gonna go ahead and eat that shit myself

if i'm a carpenter, i'm gonna make shit on request, not fill a warehouse with unsold chairs no one asked for