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.
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of Debt
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“No, no; Religion is a Spring
That from some secret, golden Mine
Derives her birth, and thence doth bring
Cordials in every drop, and Wine;”
—Henry Vaughan (1622–1695)
“Both Socrates and Jesus were outstanding teachers; both of them urged and practiced great simplicity of life; both were regarded as traitors to the religion of their community; neither of them wrote anything; both of them were executed; and both have become the subject of traditions that are difficult or impossible to harmonize.”
—Jaroslav Pelikan (b. 1932)
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)