I am doing research again, here is the smallest summary of all the content I found. It is a lot, but not compared to everything I found!
Greed is called a selfish desire to obtain money, wealth, food, material possessions or any other entity more than one legitimately needs.... A basic desire to increase one's wealth is generally considered acceptable in Western culture, and simple want is not considered greed. Instead, most believe that there are varying degrees to the pursuit of material wealth, with greed being the most extreme form, with one desiring things simply for the purpose of having them. Greed may entail acquiring material possessions at the expense of another person's welfare (for example, a father buying himself a new car rather than fix the roof of his family's home) or otherwise reflect flawed priorities.... When greed is applied to the subject of the excessive consumption of food or drink the term gluttony is often used, another of the Catholic seven deadly sins.... Proponents of ultra-capitalism, including Objectivists, argue that greed should not be considered a negative trait and should instead be embraced, as they claim it is the emotion on which the capitalist economic system is based.... Thomas Aquinas metaphorically described the sin of Avarice as "Mammon being carried up from Hell by a wolf, coming to inflame the human heart with Greed".
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Paradoxes and omissions in Adam Smith's original theory permit - encourage - greed without restraint so that in a very large society over two centuries it has become an undemocratic force creating precipitous inequalities; divisions in this society now approach a kind of wealth apartheid, and our values are quite unlike Smith's: this is an immensely wealthy society but it is not a humane society. Wealth and poverty are connected, in fact recent sociological theory shows our institutions routinely design inequality in, but this connection is largely avoided in texts and in the media, as is the notion that greed is a moral wrong.
...Frequently I survey acquaintances with this touchstone question, attributed to Rawls (15): Suppose there are people living on one side of a big city who throw weekly parties so lavish that afterwards they are throwing out meat, while on the other side of the same town are people so poor they cannot afford to buy meat at all.
...Defenders, of course, argue that the rich getting richer benefits all, and that in an economy that is an unlimited, growing, open system, all can rise, that (once we get through temporary difficulties) we will find a full and abundant world.
...And the worst signs of unhappiness cluster in the lowest cuts: we have among the highest national rates of imprisonment, and the Administration concedes there are 5 million hard-core drug users in America (23) and millions of alcoholics, all disproportionately among the poor.
...But a few years ago the Harvard Business Review carried an article daring to look down: Richard Freeman (29) warns that under the surface America is becoming dangerously segregated, forming an apartheid economy, and the lowest are not free to move up.
...The modern fashion not to sound judgmental, situation ethics, and the habit of social scientists to use past deprivation, social pressure, low self esteem, background, entitlement and myriad extenuating circumstances to explain the behavior, make the moral question so complex, all has crumbled into uncertainty.
...You had to be bold bringing out new ideas in the European 1700s but they were revolutionary times and philosophers risked their necks pushing some new arguments that people were created equal and each had the liberty to create his own destiny.
...Its ethics: units of pleasure and pain can be summed and compared, and we should choose the act that results in the greatest good for the greatest number, calculations that any person can do.... But these are soundly rational moves from an economic point of view, and when everybody does this, it sums and spreads through the community, which is improved as if lifted by an invisible hand because no individual intended that end.
...If we should judge an act by what brings the greatest good to the greatest number (the ‘hedonic calculus’) then, for instance, in setting up a factory to make cheap clothes, the pain caused to employees doing tedious work for low wages is offset by the greater benefit to the greater number of customers who benefit from cheap clothes, and the factory is a good idea.
...The notion is that when many units compete under the same rules of market exchange, the ever-circulating of goods and money keeps the whole system fluid; units are free to enter and exit this system at will.... Historically, the contradiction between the Constitution's talk of happiness and justice, and what was visible to the naked eye, that most workers’ lives were still nasty, brutish and short, was rationalized by saying actually pain and suffering are good because they goaded the poor into greater efforts, thus the economy is energized.... Upward mobility is a sacrosanct notion in Smithian economics, very widely held because the freedom to move up represents hope - in some people’s minds, this freedom rebuts all criticism of the system.... While there is freedom to move up adjacent classes (a stock hand may rise to supermarket manager in a lifetime), the same freedom allows many people also to fall, which is called downward mobility, and which occurs in similar numbers.... But the end result is that today all we have is a long, groping slavery to principles which don’t work; can’t work; because some of Adam Smith’s axioms don’t even rise to the level of common sense.
...As each of his friends comes walking by, Tom plays the work up to be a magically rare opportunity, and his friends, persuaded, compete for a chance to try it, actually paying Tom their toys to let them paint the fence. More friends come by and Tom gets rich from all their prize possessions while getting them to do the work for him until the task is done.
...But since the 1970s we have been captured in the orbit of a certain kind of argument, that we have poverty and scarcity because our planet Earth has limits and we are running out of food and raw materials.
...A high synergy society is socially cohesive, cooperative and unaggressive - one person’s acts at the same time serve his own advantage and that of the group, his gain results in a gain for all.
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And even though, if you stop to think about it, greed makes many people's lives a misery, modern psychology generally does not take greed to be a problem worth treating.
...It is “a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim 6:10), one of the twelve things which come out of individuals and defile them (Mark 7:20-22), evidence of a darkened understanding or a depraved mind (Eph 4:18-19; Rom 1:28-29).
...Indeed, there is a wealth of evidence from the Old Testament and early Jewish moral teaching which supports a link between greed and injustice.... The first ethical concern to be mentioned in Proverbs is the band of outlaws whose goal it is to “get all sorts of valuable things” and to “fill [their] houses with plunder” (1:13); wisdom warns that such people “rush into sin” and are “swift to shed blood” (1:16).
...If you were to ask the Apostle Paul or someone else in the early church to construct a profile of your average pagan—someone who does not know the true and living God—you would probably have got a three-point sermon in response. Early Jews and Christians alike condemned the Gentiles first of all for their idolatry, then for their sexual immorality and finally for their greed.
...To put the matter the other way around, greed not only suits a pagan's lifestyle, it is also not a fitting behaviour for someone who knows God.
...In the fourth century, Zeno of Verona declared simply: “God is right to hate greed”.8 The greedy are as insatiable as hell, according to Basil the Great: “Hell never says enough is enough; neither does greed ever say enough”.9 Ambrose thought greed so central that he spoke of the primal sin, that of Adam in the garden, not as original sin, but as “original greed”.
...In our day, whatever we make of the words of Jesus and Paul, it is worth noting that people with no religious commitment have observed the almost religious function money performs for many people.
...There has never been a time in the history of the world when Jesus' and Paul's condemnations of greed as idolatry seem more apt and make more sense than now.
...Visitors spend hours in such places (not to mention loads of money), drinking in the experience of being overwhelmed by the variety and beauty of the goods on offer before returning to their local shopping centres and their everyday lives the better for it.
...Boli explains: “Religion may help us save our souls or understand the agony of life and death, but it cannot help us to obtain the vast array of goodnesses, meanings and purposes that are preferred in the economic realm”.13 Alan Storkey sounds a similar note of despair: “Christianity, despite all the warnings in the Gospels, has not even seen the challenge, the temptation, the lies, the enemy.
...“If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.” When such preachers proclaim that it is God's will for you to be healthy and wealthy, and that not to be so is evidence of your lack of faith, they fail to reveal only one thing: which god they are talking about.
...2 Miroslav Wolf, ‘In the Cage of Vanities: Christian Faith and the Dynamics of Economic Progress’, in Robert Wuthnow (ed.), Rethinking Materialism: Perspectives on the Spiritual Dimension of Economic Behaviour (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p.
...12 John Boli, ‘The Economic Absorption of the Sacred’, in Robert Wuthnow (ed.), Rethinking Materialism: Perspectives on the Spiritual Dimension of Economic Behaviour (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p.
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God did not create us for the sole purpose of obtaining material goods (Luke 12:15, "And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth").... BIBLE SCRIPTURE: Luke 12:15, "And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth."
...In the end we still would never be satisfied (Isaiah 56:11, "Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter"). BIBLE SCRIPTURE: Isaiah 56:11, "Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter."
...All day long a slothful person will greedily crave for the things that they desire, but they will not work for it. Their desires may only be for the basics of life, but they will not work for it (Proverbs 21:25, "The desire of the slothful killeth him; for his hands refuse to labour.... BIBLE SCRIPTURE: Proverbs 21:25, "The desire of the slothful killeth him; for his hands refuse to labour.
...They will deceive others so that they can take from people what is not theirs (Matthews 7:15, "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."). Many people that are greedy deceive themselves and others of their wickedness in order to continue in their life of greed (Luke 11:39, "And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness"). BIBLE SCRIPTURE: Luke 11:39, "And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness."
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Proud people are apt to seek wealth as a means to secure their sense of "independence" from others and even from God; instead of relying on God to provide for their needs, they feel it’s entirely up to them to provide for themselves.
...If you take Greed in its most generic sense, as just "wanting / desiring too much" of something, several of the other items on the list of the Big Seven can even be understood as forms of greed.
...From the age of the church Fathers all the way down to our own, Catholic teaching has insisted that while the ownership of goods may rightfully be private, the use made of these goods must be regulated by just norms pertaining to social well-being. This goes directly against an idea that has, sadly, become a common assumption in our society today, the extreme individualistic idea that I’m entitled to amass as much wealth as possible (by lawful means) and to do simply whatever I want with what is "mine," unhindered by any social obligations.
...In the very nature of the case, prodigality will eventually exhaust itself; if you keep on dissipating your resources over a long enough time, sooner or later all your resources will be spent and you won’t have anything left to continue being prodigal with.
...Though he himself did not expressly say this, we might at least ask whether our level of giving, notwithstanding its magnitude in terms of absolute quantity, amounts to anything more than "crumbs from the table" in relation to our over-all economy.
...The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, planted at the base of Manhattan island with the Statue of Liberty as their sentry, and the Pentagon, a squat, concrete fort on the banks of the Potomac, are the sanctuaries of money and power that our enemies may imagine define us. But that assumes our faith rests on what we can buy and build, and that has never been America’s true God."
...Greed can even come to be seen as a virtue; as mentioned before, many in our society now consider it a right – and I’ll add here, even an imperative – to amass as much wealth as possible and to keep and use it all for oneself with no sense of obligation toward other people who are needy.
...The first mammon-illness symptom listed by Haughey is what he calls "running," exemplified in many instances of workaholism and, more generally, in so much anxiety over material security as well as in the over-all driven quality of our lives.
...Traditional Christian writers did not explicate this particular type of dishonesty as an offspring of greed; but they did see greed as generating dishonesty in other forms, especially in the proneness to deal with others in ways that are underhanded, deceitful, fraudulent – i.e., to take unfair advantage of others for one’s own gain.
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Another key aspect of the definition of greed is that it is deceptive.... They will deceive others so that they can take from people what is not theirs (Matthews 7:15, "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."). Many people that are greedy deceive themselves and others of their wickedness in order to continue in their life of greed (Luke 11:39, "And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness"). BIBLE SCRIPTURE: Luke 11:39, "And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness."
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Another key component of the definition of greed is that you are never satisfied with what you accumulate. The sin nature in all of us craves for more and more.... If we own a house, we want to own another one.... If we were not constraint by our economic situation, most of us would continue to accumulate goods and would never stop. In the end we still would never be satisfied (Isaiah 56:11, "Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter"). BIBLE SCRIPTURE: Isaiah 56:11, "Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter."
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Many people that are greedy deceive themselves and others of their wickedness in order to continue in their life of greed (Luke 11:39, "And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness").
