Criticism of Debt - Religion

Religion

The Biblical books of Deuteronomy (23:20) and Leviticus (25:37) explicitly prohibit lending at interest, and are the source of two of the 613 mitzvot (Maimonides #534 & #535), the commands of God to the Jewish people. According to Proverbs 22:7, "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender". NRSV

Christian philosophy has historically also been concerned with these very issues, and the Catholic Church prohibited lending at interest throughout most of the Middle Ages. The words for sin and debt are the same in Aramaic, and the Lord's Prayer can be read as "redeem us from our debts, as we redeem our debitors." The French philosopher Simone Weil has argued that debt is evil, because it leads us to the false belief that the past (a promise to pay later for instance) give us right to a certain future (a given money sum at a given date). God wants us to remain in the present, in His presence, so it is supposed that debt is something which moves us away from the feeling of God's instantaneous presence.

Islamic economics, concerned with the equity of distribution of these things and the potential for unrest if simple luck is permitted to cause some to starve while others prosper, simply for having held a safer debt asset through a catastrophe, has alternative instruments that do not obligate repayment in the sense of debt but instead act as a joint venture type instrument. The justification for this is a hadith which states as a rule of trade: "nothing present for that which is absent". This avoids the problems of the devaluted asset or bad debt becoming a source of unrest later on, should it be devalued or defaulted through no fault of the borrower.