Usury

Usury is the most foul and destructive act of lending money at interest. It was forbidden by all major religions (until they discovered it could make them rich). Mainly, it was considered heresy, the creation of something from nothing, which rightly only God could do.

Pound referred to it as: "usury, age old and age thick."

"Dante puts the usurers in the lowest sub-circle of the seventh circle of hell, with others whose sins are regarded as doing violence against nature and nature's God; many people have noted that usurers are placed deeper into hell than violent murderers, violent suicides, blasphemers, and sodomites. Dante regards usurers as perverting art, i.e., productive skill, by means of which we are supposed to produce and create and thereby imitate the goodness of God. Usury is the anti-art: it produces nothing substantial, being just a set of multiplication games with money, and therefore does not really contribute anything to 'earning one's way and furthering humankind'. It merely gives the illusion of doing so, and is therefore a sort of mockery of both human reason and divine providence -- indeed, a sort of universal violence against neighbor, God, and one's own reason, an extraordinarily efficient form of violence by which you do the most damage with the least effort.

The Violent in Dante's hell suffer violent punishments; the punishment of the usurers is to sit while futilely and wearily trying to ward off with their hands the violent, whipping winds that sometimes shower them with burning sand and sometimes cover them with flaming fire."

The Koran says:  One who takes interest, his belly shall be filled with an equal quantity of fire by Allah. If he has earned more from the interest money, Allah will not accept any of his deeds. And till even a grain of interest remains with him, Allah and his angels will continue to curse this man.

It wasn't the telemarketers that Jesus attacked in the Temple, it was the money changers (usurers).

Even the Jews, infamous usurers, though not by choice, initially forbade the practice.

And yet there is hardly an Amerikan who is not in the usurers' thrall (aren't you)? Paying interest is another form of slavery which Amerikans have embraced. There will be a reckoning for this greed. Invented money does not last forever. Ask any Weimar German.