Why is it that people say they don’t care about material things, yet they live in ways that blatantly contradict this everyday? When was the last time you met someone who admitted to being materialistic. My observation is that people buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t even like, or that don’t even like them. Why do we live in a culture that strives so hard to define people based on their accumulation of material goods? Cars, Homes, Clothes, Clubs we belong to, people that make us feel good because we know them. I have also observed that people who make the decision to live a life that revolves around acruuing material things also spend the majority of their time taking care of those material things. These same people like to talk about being a good steward. After all if you take care of the things your "God" gives you, then your "God" will give you more things. Really? So we try to do the right thing in life in order to get rewarded by "God" with more stuff? Hmmmm. Would'nt it be more noble to decide not to have so much stuff, maybe give some stuff away to people who actually need it, or even better decide to live at a level way below our actual incomes and give away some of our resources to help others. Why is it that so many people use their religion to try and justify the life they have personally chosen to live that has nothing to do with their "religion" at all. That to me is the shallowest form of religion. When we use it to justify the lives we have already made up our minds about. Isn’t the function of religion to get us to change our philosophical assumptions about a variety of subjects?
