So do we Treat it as Such?
What is God? What does it mean to “worship” God?
For the sake of this reflection let’s imagine that god is whatever is the most important thing to you.
Perhaps god is whatever gives your life meaning and purpose and direction.
Perhaps god is whatever connects you to other people, the past and the future.
Your god could be soccer. [the World Cup is happening as I write this]
Your god could be music or drugs or sex or gambling or art or Nature….
There are an infinite number of possible Gods to “worship” – that is, the thing around which all your other decisions are made.
In our case it seems that as we have become “enlightened” and “rational” we have made one of new God the ECONOMY.
Oh dear. If there was ever a false god, a god of death, it would be the economy.
Let’s go back a few steps. This idea is not mine – it came via an old Catholic friend of mine in the USA who has ran a private business for many years – I say that to make the case that he is grounded and sensible and lives in the “real world”. He has observed that the way we talk about the economy – the words we use that are abstract and unassailable – is very much like the way folks in the medieval age talked about God. There is an unquestioning nature to statement like “We must grow the economy” or “The Economy needs more skilled immigrants” or “Our productivity is decreasing and without fixing this we are doomed to poverty” [I exaggerated the last one a bit, I can’t help but laugh when I hear this stuff as laughing beats crying any day] Another way of saying it is the expression used by Bill Clinton during his elections [which he won] – “It’s the economy stupid”. That’s all the matters. If folks have more money, or even think they can get more money, then all will be will. A “healthy” economy is the silver bullet that will solve all our problems.
This is not just my friends opinion: here is what AI said when I asked about our worship of the Economy as if it was a god:
While not all leaders literally worship the economy, many speak about it with a reverence that
mirrors religious devotion, emphasizing its ethical, social, and even spiritual dimensions.
Whether through moral critique, theological framing, or political rhetoric, the economy is
often treated as a central, guiding force whose proper management is seen as essential
to human flourishing and societal well-being
Of course there is also good news – some economic growth has improved people’s lives. For example, in the process of globalization in the course, is a process of spreading many of the institutions that foster economic exchange from the West to the rest of the world. And what we’re seeing is, is that as the rest of the world adopts Western style institutions, markets and the behaviors that go along with them… that in fact economic growth does happen there as well. And it lifts a very large number of people out of material poverty. If you look at the percentage of the world that is living below $1.90 per day, which is the global poverty line, that’s plummeted. It’s been reduced by about 50% over the past 30 years. And so quite frankly, it’s one of the most remarkable achievements in all human history to see massive reductions material poverty in just three decades. But at what cost to Nature and the death of other species and entire ecosystems? It seems that our “improvements” are usually have a victim, somebody or something that pays are price for our improvement. That could be an old growth forest or species of frog or a river – they die, so we can live? We seem to have an approach to the economy which created “sacrifice zones” and approaches wealth generation like mining the land rather than having a regenerative agriculture approach and worldview.
In other words, its all about trade offs. In the real messy world when you gain one thing you lose another – there are no silver bullet. Ithe real and very mess world of biological constraints – including the fact that we are in most ways “cave men wearing business suits” – the exponentially growing economy has been the source of many of our problems and not its solution. Once again I want to emphasize that I am not saying that money and wealth are bad: they only become a force for death instead of life when we worship money as the #1 priority in our life and in our socio-economic system.
What I am saying is that the Economy, to be life giving, must be like our Breath. It is not more and more and more – it is a process intimately linked to our surroundings. We breath in what is around us and when we breath out we change what is around us.
Thus our economy, in reality, is part of the bigger environment we live in and right now our economic metrics consider them “externalities” – they don’t really matter. We may pay lip service to them, as in we save the odd river here and there but really we worship the Economy so much that poor people or wild rivers or even the air we breathe being damaged is worth it – because the Economy is happy. God is happy – so it’s Ok that you suffer. Yuk. That logic was nasty in medieval times and its still nasty now.
So what are you and I to do? Breathe. In and out. Slowly. Deeply. Calmly. Feel your connection to all that is around you – both alive and “dead”. [even dead is a loaded idea – because that “dead” water you drink becomes part of you and thus “alive”… so there really is no boundary between alive and dead]. Live your live, and how you earn and spend your money, like “land is family”; like “Racoons are family”. Life goes up. Life goes down. We are born. We die. Life is not more, more, more – only cancer does that. So let’s stop being a cancer cell and rather be a cell that is truly alive – perhaps even stop worshiping the false god called the economy and “worship” some other god that heals instead of destroys. You get to choose. I choose to try to heal in all I do and think and say and feel.
Want to save the world? Read a poem like this one as you breathe in and breathe out and connect yourself to the world around you.
Blessed Mess
Come sit down beside me, darling,
on this old familiar ground
The crickets know your name here
and the wind comes around
You are something worth the waiting
you are soil after rain
all the cracking and the breaking
wasn’t ruin, it was a lane
a lane that’s leading somewhere
somewhere warm and wide and new
You’ve been carrying your worry
like a stone inside your chest
but honey, even rivers
stumble to their rest
they bend around the boulders
they don’t ask them to move
they just find the softer water
and they carry on the groove
Fear no turning of the season
fear no frost upon the vine
what is leaving had its reason
what is coming waits its time
You’re a blessed mess, a glory
you’re a fire half-begun
you’re the middle of a story
not the damage, not the done
Plan your garden, plant your seedlings
but let the rain come as it will
there’s wisdom in the yielding
there’s power in the still
You are finer than you know
you’re the seed beneath the winter
you’re the river’s undertow
just keep going with the flow.
Nicole
Substack permission to weird
June 13 2026
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