Reflections on God and Money: Babylon and the Beast (4)

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was made bright with his glory. And he called out with a mighty voice, ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast. For all nations have drunk the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.’

Revelation 18:1-3

The third feature of Revelation’s Babylon to consider this weekend is that it is a haven for terrible evil!

We should not be surprised by this. There is great temptation in handling huge sums of money and it can easily begin to erode a person’s personal morality, their sense of what is right and what is wrong.

For 100 years, the phrase ‘business is business’ has expressed the assumption that society’s usual standards of personal morality do not apply to business and the gap between what we deem to be appropriate behaviour in everyday life and what it takes to do well in business continues to grow. People’s values are regularly tested, then shelved, because in any contest between profit and principle, profit prevails. Everybody expects it, even those who question the wisdom of it. They have become accustomed to the ways that things are done by them and around them.

While there are businesspeople who knowingly act illegally and unethically, there are many more who suppose, in so much as they think about it at all, that they are operating within industry norms by doing what everybody else does. In the 1950s, Dr Solomon Asch demonstrated the willingness of ordinary people to go along with a majority view even when they knew it was wrong. Surprisingly, very little incentive was needed: just four people agreeing with an error could easily sway another. In the 1960s, Dr Stanley Milgram’s controversial social psychology experiments showed how people obeyed authority to act against their own consciences in inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on others. Ten years later, Professor Philip Zimbardo’s controversial prison experiment saw students so absorbed into their role play that the ‘guards’ began to abuse the ‘inmates’. Just a few years ago, a college re-enactment of the Holocaust was abandoned because in the mock concentration camp the ‘guards’ quickly began to abuse and spit at the ‘Jews’. Something similar is demonstrated by the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, where hostages begin to develop positive feeling and even sympathy for their captives.

Revelation’s Babylon symbolises that sort of process taken to extreme: evil being accepted, accommodated and opening the way for still greater evil.

With these three features in mind – that Babylon, is drunk, a prostitute and a haven for all sorts of wickedness – what are we to make of the passage that starts at Revelation 18:4? This is where God calls on his people to leave Babylon.

Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, ‘Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues; for her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities…’

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Handling money and dealing with debt can be complicated and neither the author nor anyone else involved in the production of these Reflections is responsible for any action you take, or fail to take, based on what is written here. You are invited to put a link on your website to these Reflections. You are welcome to copy these Reflections for personal study or for circulation to family and friends on a non-profit basis. For any other purpose, whether or not for profit, you will require written permission in advance from the author before copying, reproducing or transmitting extracts in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or using any information storage and retrieval system.

Saturday, 8 June 2013

Babylon and the Beast (4)