KEY POINTS:
The Archbishop of Canterbury certainly hit the nail on the head in his sermon on Easter Sunday.
Rowan Williams told his Canterbury Cathedral congregation that greed was consuming the world's civilised nations. The "comforts and luxuries" people took for granted could not be sustained forever and as a
result civilisation would one day collapse.
"Individuals live in anxious and acquisitive ways, seizing what they can to provide a security that is bound to dissolve, because they are going to die. Societies or nations do the same ...
"Whether it is the individual grabbing the things of this world [which is] the mark of an inner deadness, or the greed of societies that assume there will always be enough to meet their desires - enough oil, enough power, enough territory - the same fantasy is at work.
"We as individuals cannot contemplate an end to our acquiring, and we as a culture can't imagine that this civilisation, like all others, will collapse and that what we take for granted about our comforts and luxuries simply can't be sustained indefinitely," Dr Williams said.
I have said it before and I say it again: greed is the most dangerous of the seven deadly sins at work in the world today. And it will, in the end, destroy us.
Greed destroyed the Roman Empire; and hundreds of years later reduced the British Empire from a worldwide conglomerate to nothing more than a couple of islands in the North Sea.
The grasping exploitation of the people, the minerals and other resources of the lands under British dominion eventually led to rebellion and from rebellion to independence.
Thus will it be for all the "empires" of today, particularly those nations that make up the countries of the OECD, in which materialism and greed abound on a scale probably greater than any seen before. Already we are seeing cracks appearing in the economies of many of the world's richest (and greediest) nations - including our own, for all that it is one of the world's smaller backwaters.
Greed caused the crash in 1987 when it became rampant in the wake of economic deregulation and the emperors of the business empires built on other people's money were found to have no clothes.
Greed is the cause of the collapse lately of a whole heap of usurious moneylenders and property developers, all of whom also profited hugely from the misuse of other people's money.
Greed brought us the dreadful leaky homes tragedy; greed lifted the housing market to obscene heights, and now that the bubble has burst a lot more people are going to get seriously hurt.
And, most sinister of all, it is greed that has enticed this country to seek a free trade agreement with China, a move that will eventually have dreadful consequences for each and every one of us.
The United States economy is perilously close to imploding on the back of an unwinnable war, pandering to the rich and the fantasy activities of fringe players in the mortgage market who sucked in some seemingly solid financial institutions whose greed overcame their stewardship scruples.
The countries of the European Union are all facing economic troubles - not the least of which is their unsupportable subsidy system - and you can guarantee that as their economies falter, nationalism will once again take over. In 50 years or less the EU will no longer exist.
Meanwhile it is acknowledged that the two fastest-growing economies in the world are China and India which between them contain a large percentage of the world's population.
These are the empires of the future, and as they begin to dominate the global economy, if you think they won't take revenge on the nations which for centuries have treated them as poor relations, then think again.
As they rise they will exhibit a manifestation of greed unknown and incomprehensible to the Western mind, for they have no background of Judaeo-Christian moral and ethical belief to temper their self-interest.
In an Easter Sunday newspaper article, the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, wrote that the turmoil in the world's financial markets resulted from amoral forces and warned that one of the "great disparities" of our age was the gap between rich and poor.
"Those with power need to ensure that the poor are not disproportionately affected," he wrote. "What is required is a change of heart, of disposition, of attitude.
"From possessiveness we need to move to gratitude for what we have, from cutting corners to make a quick buck to that integrity for which business in this country was celebrated, and from mere accumulation of wealth to a generosity of spirit."
Well, that would be a start. But don't hold your breath.
