Does humanity deserve Corona?

[Belacqua]

Sura 3, The Quran:
https://quran.ksu.edu.sa/index.php?l=en#...rans=en_sh

( 130 )   O you who have believed, do not consume usury, doubled and multiplied, but fear Allah that you may be successful.

These verses are evident to that interest has no place in Islam. Actually; Muslim governments today claim that it is "a mandatory price in today's world"; and people who criticize it are usually doomed to prison.

Islam is anti capitalism and against this economic system. That can make you truly wonder whether the so called "Muslim governments" are truly Muslim. But looking at their history, you'll realize that they are mere imperialistic proxies of the great powers.

Yes, I think there's no question that the political powers can't take their own religions seriously, and still maintain power in the modern world. And finance is another proof of that.

The Christian world also has a long and conflicting history with usury. The strictest people say it means that no interest is allowed, while others say only excessive interest is forbidden. As always, selfish people use religious excuses to justify doing what they wanted to do anyway. 

You probably know that in Europe, conflict over money-lending has sometimes played out along sectarian lines. Christians who were reluctant to borrow from other Christians would borrow from Jews, who were forbidden from doing jobs other than money-lending. Then when they didn't want to pay back the loans they would have a sudden increase in piety and expel the Jews. What I've learned from this forum is that some people will call this a religious or even theological conflict because the sides break down along religious lines. Even though it is purely a fight over money. 

In Europe the proscription of usury has various expressions. The mythical justification is in Genesis, where God says that Adam and Eve have to make their livings from the sweat of their brows. 

But as always there is reason behind what's going on, and the myth is merely a symbolic expression. Ancient thinkers were quite right to see long term problems with people getting rich through moving money around. Our modern world, as so often, has increased the problem so far that no one should be able to ignore it. Wall Street has figured out how to make themselves rich without producing anything at all, and this "financialization" of the economy has left the country in a terrible situation. Whole parts of the US are "sacrifice zones," abandoned because they don't serve Wall Street. Or investors find a way to profit from uneducated and unemployable people not by putting them to work but by putting them in prison, so that the prison owners are paid by the government  and in this way financialize the existence of poor people. Henry Ford knew that if he wanted to sell cars, he had to pay his workers enough to buy cars. But that isn't necessary any more. 

The interesting thing to me is that the proscription of usury, and of the rentier class, by religion, is often reduced to only its mythical expression. People here will say that since Adam and Eve weren't real, then religious proscriptions are based in fakery, and taking them seriously is foolish. But there's no question at all that if such warnings were taken seriously, we would be able to avoid a lot of the mess we're in. 

And here is where we get into the parallels between the so-called "New Atheist" types and the current political status quo. They work together. We know that Hitchens and Harris have [or had] terrible politics. Dawkins seems to espouse a kind of 19th century naive progressivism. I suspect that they aren't so conscious of this, but by mocking straw man versions of ancient thought, they play into the hands of Neoliberals and other powerful people. By removing the only traditional alternative to capitalist values, they make it seem that our own system is the only reasonable thing. Bill Maher is horrible this way. I'm not quite such a conspiracy theorist as to suggest that this is an intentional political move. But that's one of the results it has. And there's lots of evidence that the media world (publishing and TV) buy into the whole Neoliberal worldview.

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Exactly what sort of an economy do you expect with this?

This is an extremely good question! It would be a very different economy. It might value people over profit.