Religion and Money

To reflect the whole complexity and versatility of the relationship between money and religion, we need to get back to the nature of these two notions.

You hardly can ever find anything more irrational than religion, and at the same time, it's impossible to find something more rational than money. Money is literally the pick of the materialistic world. Unfortunately, as the time pass, the lines are becoming less clear, and the process of defining the type of this relationship is becoming ridiculously confusing.

With the huge increase in the world population and development of the current civilizations, the religion institutions's attitude towards financial operations changed. It is also problematic to claim that any financial actions can be prohibited by the church, since the religious institutions changed their role in the life of the ordinary people: from being official establishments to the spiritual advisors. Not all religions lost their power, some of them still play a huge role in the decision making processes in their countries. That's when we need to talk about the religious diversity of our world.

Today in the world lots of new religions are created every year. There is almost no control of this issue from the government anymore, and people have a freedom to establish new churches not being afraid of the possible further negative consequences. However, in order to clarify the relationship between money and religion, it would be much effective to look at the world religions with a long going history: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism. Among all the religions mention below, Judaism has the most loyal attitude towards money. Moreover, earning money has become a Jewish national feature. Jewish succeed in banking system so much, that even has created a prejudice that Jewish people control the banks of the whole world.

In the past, Christian church had a negative attitude towards all kinds of the financial operations. According to the Bible, It was shame to make profit. However, in the last two centuries the church was forced to remove any prohibition against usury, since it has become impossible to restrain people's passion to earn, which has already overcome any religious bans. At present, the church ideally tend to separate itself from the commercial establishment. Involvement in materialistic aspect of life may cause discrititation of the church and wave of criticism. But is the church truly separated from the financial operations? In fact, church in the most of the European countries used to own a big amount of lands and could control government not only in terms spiritual power, but through its financial power. Nowadays, still exist a country directly controlled by the church - Vatican. Despite the fact, that Vatican is literally a country based on the power of the church, it is also a bright example of squandering. The economy of Vatican is unceasingly fed by the investment