You can see the reverse effect too not only at an individual but collective level. Once the religious ethos disappears from a sect, widespread adoption of debt becomes the norm.
Ancient societies of all stripes had periodic debt forgiveness. Ancient (pre-Christian) Rome, for example.
... Unless you're making a joke that it happened but was not "celebrated" because most people didn't like it.
The way Islamic finance avoids interest [1] - the bank buys a property and sells/leases it back to the borrower at a slightly higher price, paid in installments - sounds more like semantics than actually avoiding interest altogether.
It seems to rely on a belief that there is a fundamental difference between rent paid on borrowed money (AKA interest), and rent paid borrow the use of real property.
The virtue in Islamic banking seems to be that it has a healthy skepticism of financial derivative products, preferring to invest directly in physical assets and businesses. This probably avoids a great deal of risk (trading off the upside too).
1. https://www.guidanceresidential.com/resources/faith-based-fi...
Even debt like student loans, which gets almost universally panned, is still good debt. The ROI on a collage education is ~1000% (amount borrowed/paid off vs. increased lifetime earnings). On paper your are still dumb to not take out student loans to get a degree.
Like I said, debt is overwhelmingly useful to the vast majority of people who use it.
We're not gonna ban cars because a handful of highly emotional road tragedies. We're not gonna abolish debt because of a handful of deranged debt collector stories.
"We're not going to" presupposed the outcome. I don't agree and won't contend it, since you're not willing to say anything that can be refuted. I'm not the author of the future I can't say what we're gonna. But then neither are you.
"The overwhelming majority bear tangible benefit from it" is the actual argument.
Debt is a core instrument of modern first world society. Just think about how many people would own a car, much less a home, if you had to pay for it all up front.
Home mortgages are only a few hundred years old, and it's not like they started out as prevalent as they are today.
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Just because we find ourselves in a particular place today doesn't mean other options aren't feasible. Assuming no better options could have ever existed sounds depressing.