Why God's worth it and why I'd be rubbish at making signs for the M11

You know me, yeah? Well remember there was that monumental phase of blog posts rambling on about `authentic faith`... It occured to me that I have a nice image of God in my head and in my heart, but I've always struggled to convey this to other people in the werld. I think that's because I communicate God by challenging what common conceptions are: the likes of which I disagree. Almost contextualising God by the pitfalls of other followers of today and through history. It would be like writing those signs for the M11 saying:

``This motorway does not stop at: Arminghall, Birmingham, Brighton, Chester, Colchester.......... Yeovil or Zimbabwe``

I think if I ever want to relate my perception of God to someone, I probably need to start thinking along the lines of what He is, rather than contextualising though eliminating the well meaning but superphelous interpositions (like hymns, flag waving, raising hands etc...) between God and man that seem so epicly disasterous to me, but probably not to anyone else.

So here are:

Captain Sir Benjamin F. McFosterson III Esq.'s Axiomatic Truths of Authentic God ™

• God is love. I once heared `the opposite of love isn't hate, but indiffernce`. If there's one thing that God does to show His love, it's everything. The Bible is an homage to God interfering in our mess ups, digressions, indiscressions and general human-ups in life. In fact the only time off the top of my immense brain when God slopes His shoulders with people is when Jesus is on the cross and says `you int 'arf forsaken me, innit` and in hindsight, that certainly comes across as quite well in our favour in the grand scheme of things. God is love, and everything that love is, everything love stands for, everything love aspires to be. He's not permiated with the charactor of love, He's actually made of the stuff. In fact, I think I might even be worshipping a divine bowl of love soup. If you can get your head around that - and I mean REALLY grasp it - then the next step is to understand that God's love is not one side of a dichotomy. God's love is not a love by the contrast of hate/indifference/people trafficking, it's more than a concept, more than an attribute, unquanitifiable, uncomprimisable, unextinguishable. God IS ... love!

• The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.
... which I suppose carries on from the Benjamatic's First Axiomatic Truth of God. My favourite parts of the Bible are where God tells people that he wants kindnesses more than burnt donkies. I don't think there's ought more Godly we can do in this world than love others as God loves us. Nor is any more required. Unfortunately I think as humans our love is based on a dichotomy - the decision to do good instead of evil. I'm not sure God has the capacity to do evil but humans do, so becoming like God is a self-brainwashing process of consciously doing what's right and learning to make that intuative and sincere. That's not to say God's judgement doesn't take into consideration each person's compulsions and volitions to love, but to paraphrase my first blog on Authentic Faith:

Authentic faith isn't the pursuit of love, it is love. Authentic Faith doesn't aspire to love, because it's only attainable by loving, and being love in the first place. Love may well be the lynch-pin to Christianity, but for Authentic Faith to occur, love must be the encompasing, defining, saturating feature of the follower. More than an attitude - as much a feature of the person as their own blood and ears. A life surrendered without comprimise.

• All we need to worship and commune with God is that which He gave us when we were born. We have everything we need right here right now.
• A heart, 
• a passion, 
• a gratitude, 
• a humility, 
• a servitude, 
• a vague and potted knowlege of who God is and what He's done, 
• a brotherhood of like minded children of God, 

And that's it. That's all it is. That's all He wants. That's all He cares about. I think God's reaction to Church bands is like my reaction to the BBC iDents... yeah - you've put a lot of work into it, but it doesn't make me love you any more than I just did a moment ago, Mr BBC, it's just padding out time to be doing more useful things. But that, is of course, just my opinion.


So there you have it: Ben's Wee List regressing a very long Bible into three neat post-modern-esque bullet points. Just what God would have wanted... Authentic Faith as defined by what it is instead of what it isn't. I still feel like it's more powerful to describe based on the contranyms between church and Authentic Faith but that's because I'm coming from a reactionary/contrary point of view, I suppose. But at the end of the day, so long as I'm better at following God than getting to J27 westbound on the M25, everyone's a winner.

Capitolism vs Globalisation

Reading about AIG got me thinking: if a company is big enough to lose $28m a day for so long without anyone batting an eyelid and then enticing the self preservation statement``too large to fail``, what sort of a world do we live in when corporations become indispensible?

We live now, in a situation where (to the chagrin of the FSA) protectionism, tighter investment fund regulations, banker accountabilities etc all seem more like a responsible necessity. As someone who's not too badly hit by the recession - but still pissed off enough to look down on the banks from the moral high ground of irritated hindsight - I don't want to see a banking or economic system that's mollycoddled by the FSA or worse still, one that's under the thumb of the treasury as that would be contrary to the goals of capitolism.

Which raises the question, what relationship should the state have with capitolism?

That moral highground is leaning heavily to the left right now but that's because those affected by the economic downturn have been financially violated by everything from endowment mortgages to hedge fund performance. And then some more with looming redundancy and the tabloid's `WE'RE ALL GUNNA DIE!` stance on the situation! All this collaborates to ostracize the banks as brands to whom people entrust their money, and undermines the system through which the country grows its wealth.

But despite the sense that thinking offers, it's ultimately a knee-jerk response. A petulent attitude that's most often seen in the insecure opinion: the wrongly placed frustration against those whom you trusted but were let down by. The deferal of responsibility that doesn't acknowledge the need of the individual to so much as monitor, let alone police, those in whom they have quite literally, put their trust.

I'm not trying to defend the banks in saying that. Indeed if anything I think that thought vilfies them more by highlighting their indifference to their customer's collective blind eye.

But if the en masse consumer body are demonstrably incapable of protecting their own assets by scrutinising the funds their banks invest in, and the bonus system that governs the fund managers leads to unstable investments, then it stands to reason the government or FSA should patrol the corporate investments for danger spots.

But let us not forget that this financial year is the polar opposite of the 1980s where yuppies playing the market intellegently swelled the FTSE 100 growth to 13-14% over the year (or something like that) and if the endowment policy holders or savers of the time actually received anything near that amount would probably say that controlled market economies and protectionism are rediculous concepts. So it's reasonable to say that the `common sense` view on the relationship between state and capitolism is as whimsical as the markets themselves.

What the policyholders and bloggers are calling out for now is therefore a sustainable and effective banking system, where the state is simultaneously both and neither guarentor and naive to the practises of investment banking. I think it's tempting to argue that such an initiative has never been practised, and there is no precedent for such an industrious relationship to build from. I think that's an over complication of the reality of capitolism.

The very foundation of capitolism is that through pro-actove industry and the wherewithal for people to forge their own fortunes (and poses rights over the money they earn) is what the West is all about. This system works. It's always worked. It works because it calls on the basic human compulsion to work for the self, and in doing so society is mutually benefitted. Relatively small societies, such as the parochial village or market town all flourish on this concept of trade. The problem we face in this current recession is, however, nothing to do with capitolism, rather the globalisation of capitolism.

I think globalisation is the worst-case-scenario self-fulfilling prophecy of the nature of capitolism. There is of course, a moot debate over the simple pro's and cons of globalisation, but ultimately, it wipes out or engulfs competition to the point where the biggest business occupies a ~100pc market share. This then means the whole industry sub-sector relies on this one (or more) business and is at it's managemental whims and mercies.

This was the case in early broadcasting with the BBC, the Royal Mint, even the DVLA and for this instance governmental legislation is required to stop the compaies who monopolise the sector to abuse their position. So when the banks get into this position where five banks essentially run the country and the rest of the finance sector scatters market share between a handful of companies (like AIG) the mutual jostling and pro-active passion to make money through capitolist principles of sucess and entrepeneurism are overwhelmed by the closed circle investments that go on. As one bank swells in wealth, so too does the bank that has a stake in it. Put simply, when one fund area fails badly (like the American mortgage sector) the industry collapses like a pack of cards.

The globalised banks who are complicit in their own demise are certainly to blame for the economic crisis, as are the government agencies who allowed this all to go on, but the blame doesn't lie in the habit of investing in poor funds. Nor does blame lie in the bonus system that caused near sighted investment choices like that to happen. The blame doesn't even lie at the door of the FSA who's job it is to police the practise of commercially sensible banking. Instead the blame lies in the over globalisation of the banking sector.

The more banks that merge means the previously abundant pockets of fiscal capitol agglomorate more and more towards a singularity. The gamle is higher with bigger capitols, and the ante is raised too much for smaller competition to be taken seriously in terms of the wider trade markets.

So regarding the policyholder's cry for sustainable banking, the equalibrium between state intervention and autonymous banking doesn't lie in a legislative balance, but in a re-assertion of basic capitolist free-market principles but with the added flavour of wider competition and discrete investment funds.

Of course the industry needs policing in some way, but the legislation needs to be hands off: guidelines that shape the picture of the sector rather than dictate the cans and cannots of its practises. Free markets flourish, so to avoid this all happening again, we need to see the government keep the wealth scattered and the practise of mutually beneficial trade built on the backs of real world industries. We need to avoid putting financial eggs in the basket of imaginary money from American mortgages. Intead, keep investment in the working sector: in contruction, in property, in retail, in the fruits blue collar labour that won't go away.

In short: we need a typicly conservative free-market economy built on the backs of left wing values, and at the end of the day, that's all capitolism is, baby. That's all capitolism is.

Nigella -> Llawrence Llewen Bowwen