Criticism
Criticism of economic materialism comes from many sources including religion, environmentalism and social activism. Many religions oppose materialism because of the belief that it interferes with religion and spirituality or that it leads to an immoral lifestyle. Thomas Aquinas wrote "Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things.". A main concern is that materialism is unable to offer a proper raison d'être for human existence. Environmentalists feel that increasing materialism is unsustainable, especially when coupled with population growth, and most often leads to an increased destruction of nature. Some social activists believe that materialism is often a source of problems such as crime, pollution, environmental degradation, war, economic inequality, poverty, oppression and genocide.
Read more about this topic: Economic Materialism
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)