Bankers have become as unpopular as tax-collectors. Barack Obama doesn’t like them:

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” Mr. Obama said in an interview to be broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program Sunday evening, according to excerpts made available ahead of the program.

Relations between the banking industry and the White House began frosty and have deteriorated in recent weeks, with large banks lobbying against legislation that would toughen financial-market regulations and administration officials frustrated by some banks’ continued payment of high bonuses and their reluctance to lend.

Mr. Obama reiterated that frustration in the interview, noting that some banks have continued to award bonuses and restrict lending while many Americans struggle with unemployment. “Some people on Wall Street still don’t get it,” he said.

Rowan Williams really doesn’t like them:

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams: bankers have failed to repent.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has attacked the bonus culture of the City, condemning the failure of bankers to repent for their excesses.

Dr Rowan Williams, who has consistently taken a left-of-centre line on economic issues, said that the Government should have acted to cap bonuses. He warned that the gap between rich and poor would lead to an increasingly “dysfunctional” society.

Dr Williams said: “There hasn’t been a feeling of closure about what happened last year. There hasn’t been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven’t heard people saying ‘well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty’.”

And now the British public has a chance to whack a banker:

An arcade game that allows people to vent their anger at bankers has proved so popular the owner keeps having to replace worn out mallets.

Inventor Tim Hunkin introduced “Whack a Banker”, which is based on the older “Whack a Mole” game, at his arcade on Southwold pier in Suffolk.

Instead of players hitting pop-up moles with a mallet, within a set time, the target is pop-up bald figures.

Mr Hunkin said the game was “proving very popular”.

I wonder what Jesus thinks about bankers? Perhaps the same as he thought about the famous tax-collecor, Zacchaeus:

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small of stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” Luke 19:1ff

As liberal Christians love to point out: Jesus sides with the marginalised and downtrodden.

William Blake posed the question and a new film claims to have the answer:

Jesus may have visited Glastonbury with his uncle, according to new film.

A new film suggests that Jesus may have come to Britain, as described in the hymn Jerusalem, its director said today.

The documentary, And Did Those Feet, explores the story behind the legend which survives in the hymn, for which William Blake wrote the words.

The legend claims Jesus visited several places in the West Country, such as the Roseland peninsula and Glastonbury, with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathaea.

It should be self-evident that if Jesus had come to the British Isles, the last place he would have visited would have been Glastonbury: he would have gone to Wales.

From Bloomberg:

Nov. 4 (Bloomberg) — Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer John Varley stood at the wooden lectern in St. Martin-in-the- Fields on London’s Trafalgar Square last night and told the packed pews of the church that “profit is not satanic.”

The 53-year-old head of Britain’s second-biggest bank said banks are the “backbone” of the economy. Rewarding high- performing bankers with more pay doesn’t conflict with Christian values, he said. Varley was paid 1.08 million pounds ($1.77 million) and no bonus in 2008.

“Talent is highly mobile,” Varley, a Catholic, said. “If we fail to pay or are constrained from paying competitive rates then that talent will move to another employer.”

“Is Christianity and banking compatible? Yes,” he said in an interview after the speech in the 283-year-old church. “And is Christianity and fair reward compatible? Yes.”

Varley joins Goldman Sachs International adviser Brian Griffiths and Lazard International Chairman Ken Costa as London bankers who’ve gone into London churches in recent weeks and invoked Christianity to defend a banking system that critics say has created wealth and inequality in the U.K.

“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” Goldman’s Griffiths said Oct. 20, his voice echoing around the gold-mosaic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose 365-feet-high dome towers over the City, London’s financial district. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”

While I agree with this maybe-I-have-an-axe-to-grind banker that making a profit is not Satanic, it isn’t particularly virtuous either. I have nothing against capitalism, but once it loses its ethical footing – and just like most other things in the West, I think it has – its power is just like any other power: subject to corruption.

This piece of pop-psychology enlightenment alone is an ample demonstration of why bankers should stick to banking and leave the pulpit to priests (who, admittedly, tend to use the pulpit to decry the evils of banking):

“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,”

When Jesus told us to love others as we love our selves, it was hardly an endorsement of self-interest or loving ourselves; it was simply recognition of the fact that we do love ourselves. Even people who are miserable and consumed with apparent self-loathing are only in that state because they feel hard-done-by and wish for better things – because they love themselves. A person does not become suicidal through a lack of self-love, but by an over-indulgence in it; he loves himself enough to do anything to escape from his misery.

Let’s hope that John Varley takes some other sayings of Jesus to heart, too. Like:

“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”

and

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?

Yet another demonstration that Mr. Bumble was right: The law is an ass:

Child rapist strikes again days after being let off because victim’s Christian family forgave him.

A top judge is at the centre of an investigation after he freed a child rapist who then kidnapped and raped another youngster just eight days later.

Judge Adrian Smith had spared the 16-year old sex attacker a jail term after his first victim’s family, who are devout Christians, forgave the teenager.

Judge Smith is thought to have allowed the boy to go free after hearing statements from the victim’s father who said his ‘religious faith’ had allowed to him to forgive the attacker.

As part of the three-year community rehabilitation order, the youth was ordered to receive counselling sessions to address his behaviour and supervision from probation officers.

The Christian family who forgave the rapist did something extremely difficult that their faith, nevertheless, requires – both for their own benefit and because God forgives them. The state, though, is there to restrain evil by punishing the wrongdoer, not to indulge in vicarious Christian forgiveness. As St. Paul says, “for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” Rom 13:4b

Instead, a mealy-mouthed judge has permitted more evil because he did not do what his job requires.