Thread: Archbishop on "immoral" lenders.

Archbishop on 'immoral' lenders
The Archbishop of Wales Dr Barry Morgan has attacked "immoral" money lenders as the worldwide mortgage crisis deepens.
Speaking during the Easter celebrations Dr Morgan said it was immoral "to encourage people to borrow more money than they could afford".

He added there was something wrong with a system that allowed this to happen.

In Dr Morgan's Easter sermon he will say that while there is no absolute proof the resurrection of Jesus happened, faith is more important.

Dr Morgan said those who had been allowed to borrow more money than they could afford were the first people to go to the wall.

His comments come as the United States sub-prime mortgage crisis, where borrowers were granted mortgages inappropriately, has lead to plunging property prices, a slowdown in the US economy and billions in losses by banks.

According to a draft version of the International Monetary Fund's world economic outlook report, the US economy is "close to a possible recession".


We put our trust in all kinds of things except the things that matter
Dr Barry Morgan

Mortgage lenders in the UK have also tightened their lending criteria, making it harder for first time buyers to get on the property ladder because a larger deposit is required.

Dr Morgan said economic uncertainty like this could force people to address eternal questions.

"It's like when people are sometimes faced with the prospect of dying through a fatal disease and you just realise you've been worrying about 1001 things. We put our trust in all kinds of things except the things that matter," he told the Western Mail newspaper.

In his Easter sermon to be delivered at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff on Sunday, Dr Morgan will highlight to his congregation the varying Gospel accounts of the life and death of Jesus, saying it is more essential to look at the truths they convey and not if they happened.

'Different conclusions'

The archbishop will take St John's story of Mary Magdalene's encounter with Jesus outside the tomb in the garden on the first day of the week after his Resurrection to illustrate his point.

He will conclude that the stories need to be seen from the perspective of faith as well as reason.

"Faith is not certainty - it is seeing life in a certain way, and realizing its true significance," says Dr Morgan.

"The Christian and the non Christian live in the same world and see the same things and yet come to different conclusions about their significance.

"There are, of course, no knockdown arguments for the truth of the resurrection, any more than there are for the existence of God.

"Faith is a way of seeing and in seeing understanding and in understanding believing and in believing seeking to live out the divine life of serving God and his world. "


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/u ... 309467.stm

Please stop the flaggelation, Arch. We Westerners are beating ourselves to a pulp through guilt over two centuries of colonial history. I learned the real truth only in recent years. The Muslim culture had ten centuries of slave-trading experinece to our two, and had found willing participants in numerous tribal chiefs in Africa. Beginning in about 1800 the British navy embarked on a military crusade to put an end to slavery wherever they learned of it.

I agree there is a lot of greed in western civilization. But don't take it out on the common Western man and start calling for reparations, repayments and the like. Our lending crisis is inasmuch due to the migratory wave of people coming into civilized countries and wanting to become a part of it as rapidly as possible and by whatever means necessary.