From Christianity to Capitalism and Back:
The Story of a Homeless Man
An Essay
Within the past couple of centuries, the man of the developed western society has found himself within the doorsteps of a new world that would not include the old promise of an everlasting shelter, which would protect him against the harshness of the real world. He has found himself in the house of the nonbeliever. Religion has lost all credibility with the development and expansion of reason and science, which have acted as catalysts in the rate of secularization (William Barrett, 1990: 24-29), or the process of separation of Religion from state. All that once gave human beings hope, has slowly eroded with the introduction of the more efficient and more productive system of capitalism. Movies such as The Passion of the Christ are now looked more as science fiction than as a part of our Christian heritage and books like The Da Vinci Code further dissolve any doubts left that there might be some true in the Bible. During this process of intense secularization, man has lost his shelter, his truth and his sense of meaning; he is now homeless. A term that Martin Buber uses to describe not a lack of physical shelter, but psychological (1938; 148-166). Insecurity, anxiety, despair and the feeling of being alienated and isolated from that, which made one feel secure are the substantial characteristics of the state of homelessness. Another term for this concept of chaos is Peter Berger's anomy, which describes the nature of a system dominated by no system; where one has escaped or fallen out of the perimeters of the sacred nomos and has found the truth within the anomy (1967; 23). The truth being that his nomos, his shelter is merely a man made machine created with the single objective of be ...