Monday.....Miscellaneous.....Bad Moon Rising

You are on the beach and someone comes up to you and offers you $100 if you will come and listen to a 40 minute presentation on a condo; there is 0% chance that you would ever buy a condo. You accept the offer. Is this ethical? There are numerous excuses that can be given to justify this; They know what they are doing, they wouldn't make offers like this if it wasn't profitable to them is one. You see a coupon in the newspaper from your favorite restaurant. You know that the purpose of the coupon is to bring new people into the establishment. You take advantage of the coupon. Have you treated the owners that have given you good service and good food, properly? A corporation has instituted policies that are meant to save money in every possible area. Unfortunately, concerns for the employees and of their service are found no where in the equation. Assuming that this whole effort is based on maximizing already healthy profits for the sole purpose of making this company more attractive to investors, is this ethical corporate management? If a union uses leverage that it may have, to go beyond a fair contract and demand a lucrative one, and ignore everyone else in the employer, employee, consumer relationship, is this something to be proud of? If a politician saturates his newsletters with his stand on a particular issue, makes waves for a while as it is being discussed in Congress but changes his vote after being given a tit for tat offer behind closed doors, is this transparent, honest governance? If a tree limb has fallen on your car, breaking the windshield, you then collect homeowners insurance on the windshield and the dent in the fender that you put on the car while backing into the garage, is this not stealing? There was a time when a man's word was good enough to seal a deal. I don't mean to pontificate. Ethics is just one area that we as a society have lost our moorings and I have made my own contributions to this mess. By its very nature, a Jeremiad is laughed off and scorned, as was Jeremiah's. To put it as simply as I can, we, as a nation, are in trouble. God's mercy and His mercy alone can pull us out, yet the television preacher tells us God wants us to succeed while the preacher in the pulpit displays his powers of elocution. There is one weapon of the poeple that no totalitarian government has ever been able to eliminate and that is prayer. I would like to end here with the first few lines of an anonymous Puritan prayer that can be found in the book Valley of Vision edited by Arthur Bennett.
O my forgetful soul
Awake from thy wandering dream;
turn from chasing vanities,
look inward, forward, upward,
view thyself,
reflect upon thyself,
who and what thou art, why here,
what thou must soon be,
Thou are a creature of God,
formed and furnished by him,
lodged in a body like a Shepherd in his tent,
Dost thou not desire to know God's ways?