If there's one thing to convince me that the world is drowning in triviality, it's the BBC "most read" stories page, where a news story, no matter how important, is beaten to the #1 slot by the latest celeb tidbit.

Why are we drowning ourselves with triviality and happy to be on the road to general ignorance and destruction as long as we have a copy of HEAT to read on the way? (For further evidence of this, see the new BBC series "Help! My Dog's as Fat as Me", starting at 8.30 tonight).

So do you think something important is happening, and nobody seems to notice? Or care? Post them here and tell us why they're important. Here's mine:



"The earth is the Lord's and everything in it", or why left wing Chinese athestic academics have a greater sense of economic justice than us.
You may not have noticed, but on Friday China enacted a law that underpins much of our life here and is a giant leap for the biggest nation on earth. That's right kids, China has passed it's first law to cover an individual's right to own assets, namely property. So people can now point to their house and say "oi, it's mine", rather than "I'm just occupying something that belongs to the people".

Great, we may say - a fundamental right. Yeah this is progress on the road to a western capitalist vision of 'development', but I'm slightly uneasy with our concept that the only type of development is economic development. Dare I say that this is a step away from a biblical, dare I go further and say Christian, sense of progress? What of the year of Jubilee? Where all property was retaken and distributed among the poeple agian. We would be horrified at that "communist" thought, but aren't we meant to hold on to our posessions lightly as they are not ours, but are gifts, which we are stewards of?

No, we envy and covet that dream house that can be OURS and slave to get the deposit and nobody is taking it from us.



And we know all too well what we reap through this, living in London, where property is the single greatest cause of economic disparity between the haves and the have not's.

On Tuesday the Bank of England admitted that they kept interest rates down artificially low over the last decade to 'increase prosperity' by making it easier to borrow (and thus spend) cheap money. It worked, people borrowed and spent, not merely on credit cards (which spawned another family of reality TV shows - "Help! I suck at managing my debt") , but mostly on mortgages, doubling property costs and increasing the amount of personal debt in this country to £1.25trn.

But think about it. Do rising property prices in economic terms mean increased prosperity? Not really. I think it means only one thing - capital transfer from those who don't have property (and are thus borrowing obsene amounts) to pay to who? - Those who do have property. So have we achieved increased prosperity for the country? No, we've achieved mass capital transfers from the poorer to the richer. Great.



But back to China.
Who is protesting this move from a shared sense of property ownership to private? Professor Gong Xiantian from Peking University Law School. He actually derailed this law from being passed last year through pointing out that not only did this law oppose the basic tenants of socialism (which are remarkably similar to the ideals of the early church, were property is shared among the community) but also the Chinese consitiution. But his main point I think would have gained quite a lot of traction with JC and treasures on earth. This law only protects the assets of a small minority of rich people, while the poor essentially have nothing worth protecting.

So the rich can get richer while the poor, well, stuff the poor. This is 'development', and if the poor are not capable of dragging themselves up the economic ladder then they deserve their lot.


Our economic assumptions rob us of the riches of God's kingdom, and sometimes you only see that through the protests of a Socialist, atheist Chinese Academic.