The following is part of an email exchange I participated in.
Obviously my "source" for the two emails you refer to is the New Testament. Perhaps you're familiar with it.
The first email is replete with references that you can check with your own Bible, if that were even necessary. That email deals with Jesus' admonition to not store up treasures on earth, and other related themes that appear throughout the Gospels.
The second email builds on the first by pondering why Jesus said it's so hard for a rich man to enter God's kingdom. How hard? "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle [a very small tight space] than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." Pretty hard. So hard that the disciples asked who then could be saved.
You don't need to be a Bible scholar to see that Jesus is unequivocal; that he doesn't offer any exceptions. Jesus doesn't say, for example, that a rich man will be fine if he gives X percent of his wealth to charity. In fact, he actually makes the point that there is no virtue in donations one makes from one's surplus. It's the destitute widow who gives from her need who is virtuous, Jesus says.
Something about wealth, then, and seeking it, poses great difficulties. But why would that be? My second email explores that question more deeply, including the seeming implication that wealth is intrinsically problematic. We can infer that there is intrinsic danger both because Jesus does not offer any exceptions, and because his warning resonates with many related themes threaded throughout the Gospels. Jesus is nothing if not consistent.
But why would wealth accumulation be intrinsically dangerous? Again, we go back to the Gospels to see that the "side" Jesus consistently takes is the side of the poor, the dispossessed, migrants, the powerless. These are precisely the ones most harmed (and, to use a word favored by Pope Francis, "excluded") by societal injustices that can and usually do arise from the pursuit of wealth. These with whom Jesus made common cause are the exact opposite of the rich man. And it is they, not him, who Jesus said will enter God's kingdom.
As we keep going deeper the "why" question persists, although one could certainly stop asking and content himself with knowing what Jesus said (and simply following that teaching), even if he doesn't understand why Jesus said it.
Me? I'm a "why" person. I always go deeper. After a lifetime of reading and thinking, it's easy for me, but very hard for you, to grasp that the pursuit of wealth almost inevitably places one in deep, intrinsic opposition to a truly just society. This isn't (necessarily) because the wealth-seeker is inherently bad. It's that wealth-seeking unavoidably operates in a particular paradigm where assumptions are made, and society is structured, in a way that benefits the wealth-seeker and disadvantages the dispossessed and powerless with whom Jesus made common cause. It's as if the wealth-seeker can't help himself, probably can't even see the problem, which is why the danger is intrinsic. And yet the wealth-seeker will inevitably and approvingly intuit that the system as constituted suits him quite well, and so he sees it as the natural order of things. His willing and happy alignment with an unjust system places him at risk.
That previous paragraph will be hard, probably impossible, for you to understand. Your mind isn't wired to understand it, and nothing in your intellectual experience has prepared you to do so. All I can say is that this is not a superficial concept; that the meaning goes very deep, and permeates all human interactions. It does seem that if one is paying attention he ought to be able to at least sense that there is deep meaning and strong connections threaded through the Gospels. The Gospels are clear that societal structure organized around justice would look very different from what we have today, and it has almost nothing to do with who donates what to charity.
Note too that this has nothing to do with my opinion about anybody's prospects for salvation. That's between you and your non-existent God. My interest in this is to ask whether you take Jesus seriously, or not.
And so I wonder how it can be that you've heard the Gospels read in the liturgy all your life, and yet the major themes of Jesus' teaching seem to have not registered in a coherent manner. Somehow you've managed to not connect the dots, even though they're everywhere and easy enough to see. Those dots are all in alignment and reinforce each other, which is why it's so easy for me to argue entirely from the Gospels as I am now doing. Did you ever wonder why Jesus said to not accumulate earthly treasures? Did you think it one of those naive oddities or empty platitudes that could just be ignored? Jesus wasn't always a realist, was he? Is that what you think? Did none of this stuff about eyes of needles and first-shall-be-last never get you pondering what the heck the guy was trying to say?
And, please, enough with sophomoric questions such as: "How does one quote from the Bible when you don't even believe in the God of that Bible?" I quote from the Bible because you claim to believe it, and because it perplexes me that you seem happy to ignore the parts of it that you find uncongenial, even though those parts are at the core of what Jesus was about and what he taught.
And even though I don't "believe in the God of that Bible," I'm happy to endorse how Jesus consistently took the side of the powerless over the powerful. I'll side with the poor and refugees and victims of racism and victims of economic injustice every single time. But you? Not so much. Which, in addition to everything else I've said here, is perhaps a good lesson that morality and religious belief aren't the same thing at all. It's something you'll never understand.
