Culture of Wealth and Prosperity
'No wonder, in our world, in our culture, "wealth and profits" literally became "bad words." We hated to see any of our kind amassing wealth, and put deliberate obstacles in the way of any of us projecting any such tendency...'
We did not grow up in a cultural world in which people prayed for money and wealth. In the culture we knew, people prayed for health, strength, knowledge and wisdom. In our cultural world, it was indeed believed that it was easier for a "camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."
'Riches' and 'righteousness' were made to seem by nature contradictory. Profits, by extension of the same logic, seemed vulgar, negative and probably even unworthy of our best endeavours and creative energies. In terms of careers for the young, business involvement, the enterprise of buying, manufacturing and selling were relegated to a kind of "poor brother," second class status.
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