Man is nobly supplied and mentally equipped with all that is imaginably required to maintain himself and his immediate family so long as he strives to live in concert with the natural tenets of this miraculous Garden of Eden. When some men decide that they want (not need) more than their own God given share of this bountiful earth, they have the obvious necessity to enslave others just in order to satisfy their unfounded greed. Once mankind entered this slippery avarice slope, there was no eminent returning to that original state of equal respect for all life including his neighbors.  Mankind unknowingly engineered his own departures and expulsion from this phenomenal and endlessly discoverable Garden of Eden. I would like to imagine and hope that mankind could get back on an equitable course with nature, but his ever-increasing greed seems only to feed upon itself in some unexplainable frenzied manner. This chronic greed becomes the very object that often substitutes for his relentless search for his understanding and meaning of life itself. Greed's infinitely infectious nature has even sinisterly invaded man's most cherished religious institutions, which should have aptly served as a necessary and loving check and balance to man's potentially menacing nature; herein lies the better and actual explanation for Man's timelessly perceived need of religion.  The beginning of any effective antidote for this infirmity is by necessity linked to a realistic recognition of this anomaly between the practice of religion and the civil behavior of man.
     I'd like to project an image in order to help explain just how man likely arrived to this awful state; a natural setting in which our indigenous native Americans might have once enjoyed the immense bounty of this mother earth. They had no need to possess money or even some legal written document that gave them that inalienable right to occupy their own little corner of the earth. Nature provided almost everything that they had any actual need of: the water in the nearby streams; the endless supply of herbs for medicines; fruits, nuts, vegetables and roots for food; the deer in the forest for meat and clothing; and an intuitively creative mind and the good hands to make the most effective use of these bountiful gifts.  All of this most natural bounty and man's ability to reap these gifts from nature were all part of their natural inheritance. It was a bountifulness that should have remained in perpetuity for those natives and the generations to follow, who would have likely shared this land and its bounty had we sought to live in the same manner and show our respect of nature.
     Picture, if you will, an individual brave that could have easily entered the forest, and with his crafted bow and arrows, bring down a hearty buck. He could then have dressed that buck, slung it over his shoulders and single-handedly brought it back to his modest abode for the full enjoyment of his whole family. This buck would have provided meat, and its tanned skin, moccasins and those needed warm clothes for the winter months. If this man had only been rightfully satisfied with this almost idealized life that was easily sustained by this endless bounty, he could have perhaps remained in that envisioned Garden of Eden indefinitely. So, what happened?
     One day this industrious brave entered the dense forest and traveled a rather longer distance than usual to have found an even larger herd of deer than usual standing peacefully in a clearing of tall grasses. In his unexpected excitement he was un-providentially able and successful at slaughtering more than he had any reasonable need of. He was quite able to dress out these deer one at a time, but he then had the insurmountable problem of getting all of those slaughtered and dressed deer back to his camp. This grievous situation became the likely etiology of man's almost inevitable encounter with the enslavement of one's own neighbor. This brave had to necessarily enslave (enlist would be the kinder word!) some of his nearby neighbors to carry the unneeded and covetous bounty back to his own camp. This act of reckless greed did not only severely diminish the chances of his neighbors' being able to find their own deer needed for survival, but it seriously reduced the valuable time required for them to do their own hunting, killing and retrieving. As a terrible consequence, these temporarily enslaved neighbors and their families were forced to rely on this one greedy brave for surviving the ensuing winter. They had never previously been so mischiefly engaged, and in their trusting naiveté of this newly imposed behavior on the part of their once trusted neighbor, they became endlessly and hopelessly indebted. This was probably not the result of a cognitively plotted scheme against one's good neighbors, but the unrehearsed manifestation of just this one man's over-zealous exercise of his freedom of choice and the awful resultant manifested potential for acts of greedy wrongdoing.
     The above scenario was imaginably set in our own country at an earlier time long before the Europeans had arrived. We all know from our study of history that mankind have long been plagued with these desires of excessiveness; the want of more resources, property and power.  It can be difficult to comprehend this commonly displayed trait. Perhaps its least indicative explanation could simply be its presence in our nature as a side effect of some naturally imbued mechanism of survival. It is in the Bible where Joseph had told the Pharos that he needed to store seven years of grain as insurance against a prophesied seven years of drought and famine. Egypt also provides us with the image of the great pyramids that were built by the employment of massive slavery. Amongst the other reasons, the Pharos had these excessive monuments erected as grand tombs and as a perpetual testament to their self-imbued divinity. This apparent and exercised excessiveness in the nature of man almost always requires slavery of some nature even if it is cleverly disguised in some modern form that our own government designates as the minimum wage.
     The awesome traits associated with greed are not limited to only those who tend to enslave others. The human trait of greed has infiltrated every level of society. Everybody wants more and more, bigger and better and most importantly most people want more than their neighbors, and god forbid if any of us should have any less. The preoccupation with outdoing one's neighbor seems to have rob many of us from enjoying the simple things in life and the values that have usually been adopted just to achieve this material superiority often diminishes and even replaces the true value that should be placed on the individual. We end up identifying the person in either the terms of their material value and/or the status of their employment/means that was used in order for them to have acquired their material wealth. At the other end of the spectrum we devalue anyone that doesn't display some degree of financial success or the acquisitions of material goods. As we entered the third millennium it was observed that what had once been referred to as the middle-class, was diminishing. There had been a time when it was possible that a single head of household could earn enough from one job in order to meet the costs of living for an average middle-class family. For any number of economic reasons it became increasingly difficult for a family to have a decent living with just one income.
     Marketing has managed to sell the average man a erroneous bill-of-goods and a life-style that costs him more than his earned wages. The lending institutions then extended that man's good credit in order for him to purchase un-affordably high-ticketed items not only for himself but also for his entire family. All of this often-wasteful spending and unwarranted credit sadly created an economic situation that necessarily required a second income. The spouse had to find a job and someone else to care for the children. This caused the average American family to shift their values to material gains and the real victims too often became their children. There was definitely something to have been said that with the shrinking of the middle-class and its once highly held values, there came into existence a new group/class of people. These modern slaves by sheer necessity, had to switch to and reluctantly adopt that mode of fiscal coping often associated with and parallel to the traits of greed. It was just another incorporated form of modern-day survival. This too sinister form of subsistence had manifested itself in an asphalt jungle that had none of the natural resources that had been naturally available, without any of these modern forms of slavery, to that earlier American native. One could easily postulate that greed begot greed and that every subsequent generation simply surpassed the previous until man had achieved an awfully oppressive mega state of preservation from which their appears to be no reasonable escape.
     This dreadful dilemma has created a hostile social environment that has fostered an attitude amongst most people that makes it almost impossible to love one's neighbor. The competition for survival has become so great that selfishness is now the standard even within many individual family units. So many people of my time have been harping on the subject of family values and they are constantly seeking only to blame everybody else for their own dismal failings; the high divorce rate heading the list. We have been sold out by even our own religions that often incorporate these same tenets of greed in a fashion that rivals the best of the business world. Life, liberty and that pursuit of happiness has been unconscionably trumped by a superficial quest for a material existence that blindly robs most of us of our true measure and nature.
     Greed to mega-greed may have been simply that awful side effect of a naturally manifested mechanism of survival, but our having grossly accepted this terrible phenomenon without any due resistance casts an ominously damning shadow on all of mankind. We have shackled ourselves as perpetual slaves to a system that can only spell doom and only a modern day savior with larger than life gifts of persuasion could possibly turn the tide towards a more favorable direction. Will it happen? "God only knows," but most sadly and realistically, there is no God who knows!  And of even greater grief is the reality that those who have the wealth and power are not about to abdicate their position and that also includes our ominous religions and their most powerful leaders.
     If it was only the larger picture that was so tragically affected by this downward turn of fate, this most dismal situation just might be tolerable. The saddest part is that even the noblest of individuals often find the situation insufferable. We have overtly developed common phrases in our language that clearly addresses our efforts at denying this oppression like, "he has buried himself in his work." We often escape to the very places in our lives where we had been first enslaved rather than seeking safe sanctuary. I would suggest that we have not been appropriately taught how to care for ourselves under these dire circumstances most assuredly because our more trusted instructors just haven't the necessary resources. As long as those to whom we have entrusted our souls are such integral parts of the problem, we will likely remain permanently entrapped. Like I have said, greed begets greed that begets mega greed and this awful cycle continues without any interruptions.
     I am at a total loss to suggest a viable solution. We have all become so terribly entrenched in this viciously revolving system that those of us who possess even the slightest inkling of the situation with the temptation of taking any action risk being ostracized by those others who continue to benefit the most from such human misery. And even more pathetic is that most people have so adapted to the situation, and are equally in such total denial, that they don't wish to "rock the sinking boat" and risk drowning in some hideous form of self-doubt. That very strongest part of our will to live and survive any foreboding obstacle has somehow taken control and provided many of us with this most convenient cooping mechanism that appears to shield us from this oppressing truth. It appears that we have found ourselves in the midst a terrible dilemma.  It is as though we have been presented with another modern-day Pandora's Box of such global magnitude that the awesome fear of opening it has totally paralyzed the potential of any future growth of the human spirit. This idea at least provides me with a better understanding of just why some of us are so quick to condemn ourselves for being so materialistic.  It is all a vicious circle from which we are apparently unable to escape. And in midst of my own rational pessimism I am once again enthusiastically reminded of the great message of one who lived two thousand years ago and proclaimed as an axiom of salvation that, "ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." The question that remains is whether we are up to the challenge of actually dealing with the stark truth, and equally as important is whether we are actually willing and able to let go of this raging daemon commonly identified as greed.
     This intrinsic fear of loss and the even greater fear of being without appears to permeate our very being, and I must confess that I am no exception. I can also add that most of these grievous fears find their greatest rooting in the most fertile soil that is totally impregnated with self-doubt and poor self-identify. It is and will always be the first tenet of any human enslavement by the greedy to thoroughly convince these disempowered souls that they themselves are unworthy of anything better than that lowly status to which they have been unconditionally condemned. It was Jesus of Nazareth that had first begun suggesting that narrow but actually rather easy path to salvation, but before he could fully establish his teachings as absolute truths and a better way of life for hiss own people, the Romans who saw him as a legitimate threat to the their own agenda for the Eastern Empire crucified him with the blessing of the Hebrew leadership.
     Jesus had made several astute references to the evils of greed in the course of his teaching his own approach for acquiring salvation. He threw the moneylenders out of the Temple and further explained the almost hopeless difficulty of the rich to find ultimate salvation. He had also suggested to one who had wanted to follow him to sell his possession first. Most of us have been sort of taught that it is money itself that is somehow less than righteous. I am of the impression that it is the excessive desire of money and that unexplainable accompanying greed that is often manifested in ones very being that has become that insurmountable obstacle/daemon to our salvation. It really comes down to the simple and profound tenets of truth and love.  Most of us just want to be loved and if we can't find that love in another person, then we’ll just aptly turn our attentions of some thing (material as it may be) in which I can invest that need for love. If that thing should happen to betray us, then we are all aptly to become spiritually dead!