Do you worship the Bible? Of course not. But is it possible that some people put the love of the Bible over the love of God? If so, how? Or is the love of the Bible inseparable with the love of God?
Yes, I think it is possible and does happen. I think some people may simply enjoy the intellectual stimulation that the Bible gives them and enjoy thinking about what is presented there rather than accepting what is there.
"Before there was a book, there were persons who handed on Christ’s sayings and told of the marvelous things God had worked in him. First came Christ, then the witnesses, then the books. This ordering of things is at the heart of the early interpretation of the New Testament. The goal was to delve more deeply into the mystery of God revealed in Christ, to whom the writings bear witness. We are inclined to begin with the book, with historical context and social setting, words and idiom, grammar and literary forms, religious and theological vocabulary, and many other topics that command our attention. But the early Christians began with the risen Christ, and long before there was a book the faith was handed on orally." Wilken, Robert Louis – Interpreting the New Testament quoted from 1 Corinthians – The Church’s Bible [Eerdmans 2005, Kovacs, Judith L. ed. p. x-xi]
A man named Rick Rood wrote this interesting article about "The Problem of Evil". It starts by saying, "John Stott has said that "the fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith." It is unquestionably true that there is no greater obstacle to faith than that of the reality of evil and suffering in the world. Indeed, even for the believing Christian, there is no greater test of faith than this--that the God who loves him permits him to suffer, at times in excruciating ways. And the disillusionment is intensified in our day when unrealistic expectations of health and prosperity are fed by the teachings of a multitude of Christian teachers. Why does a good God allow his creatures, and even his children to suffer?"
"Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their fathers' idols. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD." It hardly seems God is allowing freedom, but instead demanding obedience. This passage does not suggest that the evil is the natural or inevitable result of disobedience, but the specific act of God in response to it. Good observation. However, there are many other passages that intimate that God is a god of grace, and that mercy proceeds justice.
I also have a problem with Hume's formulation:
"David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, stated the logical problem of evil when he inquired about God, "Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"
Consider a father with a five year old playing next to a busy street. That father would indeed be evil if he did not prevent an immanent evil of that child running into the traffic. But that same father would not be evil if that child was a mature ten year old. The question is no longer a matter of the father's impotence or inability to to prevent evil, but the father now recognizing that the child is developing personhood and commonsense to prevent the evil himself from happening.
I also have a problem with the notion that pain is punishment or that pain is meant to teach us some kind of a lesson. Here is an essay I wrote on this point.
“Tell me about your God of love,” an atheist wrote to me, “for all that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14.” Never let it be said that atheists haven’t read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit that I too I have trouble squaring God’s command to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” with the One who said “Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job. Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. “When I was eight years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died,” she writes. “The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.” A 16 year old has more questions for an advice columnists: “When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I’m a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people—even myself—so I can’t blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn’t know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don’t believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?”
The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He is not God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish to make his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to do what He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn’t exist or He is impotent or He is evil.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It’s a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust—that Hitler was God’s punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.
“Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear, kind God'! “
The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man’s spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, there would be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. The classic Christian reply to suffering makes sense only if we assume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible. If those actions are bad, then God must be evil and the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated to humanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life—dealing with war, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God’s self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.
This accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the “rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14, the boy looked like an old man. “An aching sense of unfairness” led Kushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner argues that bad things didn’t happen because God wants to punish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky—not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn’t question ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect and unfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundred of people “acts of God”, but they use God’s name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.
But I think this is a sterile argument that doesn’t address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of the two million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw of the Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it’s a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: “As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words “If the dead rise not, let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge.”
I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child, my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives had been at no purpose. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the orthodox Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain. You may remember the movie “Shadowlands”, played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had a crisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end of the day, there are no satisfactory answers—only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in “Shadowlands,” we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears. Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job—without an explanation but with the existential experience of God—turns for questioning to wondering silence: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” In this fragment of time on this island in space, we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and suffering is inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.” It did not say, “My tragedy comes from the Lord.” The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.
It's really due to Epicurus, not Hume. Many explanations for evil have been invented. Some, such as the free will defense you cite, do an acceptable prima facie job with moral evils such as war and crime, but do not even touch on contingent evils such as natural disasters and epidemic diseases.
Why reject the free will defense of evil as a method of teaching the ways of God to man? My answer would be that it is obviously random and often misapplied. God allows a child to die a cruel death to teach the parents to serve him better? Not truly credible. God's methods of insruction in this defense seem crude and unfocused —the innocent are often taken with the guilty.
It is true that natural disasters appear random and that is because they are random. Insurance companies call them Acts of God, only because they are outside of the domain of man's control, such as a hurricane. I agree that there is no credibility to the idea that they such disasters are meant to impart a moral lesson (a view that many fundamentalists ascribe to the 9/11 attacks-- Wall Street was attacked because of what the gays were doing in San Francisco.) The rebuttal is a ditty that circulated after the 1907 earthquake in San Francisco, that goes like this:
If, as some say, God spanked the town For being over frisky, Why did He burn the churches down And save Hotaling's whiskey?
The only answer that makes sense to me is to presuppose a God who is not immanent and who is not omnipotent, at least in the way we perhaps would like to believe. Thus, natural disasters that wipe out the good and the bad, the wise and the dumb, the rich and the poor, are all inseperable from the human condition. And, as such, God gives humans the gift of evil so that we can transcend ourselves through medicine, inventions, discovery, and charity. A world that is free from evil would also be free from morality and love as well as science and reason. Perhaps we cannot do good without experiencing evil anymore than we can have light without also having darkness. In Shadowlands, Lewis proclaims that "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But in the rueful acceptance and grief of the death of his wife, he finds that "We can't have the happiness of yesterday without the pain of today. That's the deal."
"In the South Carolina Democratic Party Presidential Debate on January 21, 2008 Senator Hillary Clinton said that Obama had represented Rezko, who she referred to as a slumlord.
"On Friday, January 25, 2008, a picture emerged of an official photo of Hillary and William Clinton posing with Tony Rezko. Hillary Clinton commented on the Today Show that she doesn't remember having the picture taken. She further stated that she has had many pictures taken and can't remember them all."
The voice of the markets is the voice of God. Here is what contract buyers and sellers saying who will be the eventual presidential nominees. They theory is that like the stock market futures these numbers reflect the sum total of all information from the most whimsical guesses to to the most informed number-crunching by real people using real money.
Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential Nominee in 2008 60 percent Barack Obama to be Democratic Prsidential Nominee in 2008 38 percent John McCain to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2008 56 percent Rudy Guiliani to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2008 8 percent
You can cross check by comparing the bets of political gamblers who do much of the same thing. However, as in a horse race, the favorite doesn't always win.
Says Bill Clinton on why Obama won: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here."
Winnicott, my favorite pediatrician, said that there is no such thing as a baby but rather an infant in a symbiotic relationship with its caretaker, whether it is mother or father. So the baby is capable of experiencing positive input and opening up to the world or protecting itself from mistreatment by withdrawal.
Sometimes growing up super good is a form of warped development. You see some of the children of very religous parents who are totally compliant outside but devastated inside. Dobson's methods have been critiqued as giving rise to such people.
Years ago, I read something from the behavorial psychologist BF SKinner that influenced the way I raised my kids. He said something to the effect that if you give me a normal infant, it is in my power to turn him into a vagrant or a criminal or a doctor or really anything at all. I like to think we have more individual choice than that, but I think there is much truth in Skinner's observation. The power we have over the destiny of our kids is awesome and humbling. When we were married a decade and a half ago, someone gave us Dobson's book "Dare to Discipline." At the time, I thought Dobson has some good insights. But his partisanship as a neocon apologist for radical Republicanism has eroded whatever credability he has once had, in my view. So last year, we donated his book to Goodwill and I no longer pay much attention to what he has to say about child rearing.
Yesterday, our family had lunch at a local Chinese restaurant. Our waiter was a student from the local high school, and with kids in middle school, we were curious about it. He mentioned they are knee deep in drugs, including serious drugs like heroin and ecstasy. So, I wanted to know, why is that so? He said that the district is awash in family money and boredom. Kids don't go to parties to do drugs. Rather, they are at parties where drugs at introduced to them through their friends. It is done out of impulse and simply because they can.
This was a conversation that gave me pause. How do you fight peer pressure? The answer isn't to ban your kids from friends and parties, and nor is it to fall to your knees to pray for God's protection. Rather, it is to build into them the conviction that they can make good or bad choices, something that is self-evident to me but not so much it would seem to me to a predestinationist. It means connecting with them, working with them to discover a transcending vision for their life, making it clear that they have a life beyond grade school, that choices effect behavior which effects destiny, that by not choosing they allow other to choose for them, and that they can take an active role in shaping their destiny. All of this of course is easier said than done. But at the end of the day I believe it means that parents need to stay engaged with them, supportive and curious about their lives and their peers, and provide a safe, respectful, and truthful environment where they can freely articulate their concerns and feelings.
As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.
And Calvin in the Institutes, Book II, Chapter I, §8 says:
"Hence, even infants bringing their condemnation with them from their mother's womb, suffer not for another's, but for their own defect. For although they have not yet produced the fruits of their own unrighteousness, they have the seed implanted in them. Nay, their whole nature is, as it were, a seed-bed of sin, and therefore cannot but be odious and abominable to God. Hence it follows, that it is properly deemed sinful in the sight of God; for there could be no condemnation without guilt.Next comes the other point, viz., that this perversity in us never ceases, but constantly produces new fruits, in other words, those works of the flesh which we formerly described; just as a lighted furnace sends forth sparks and flames, or a fountain without ceasing pours out water. Hence, those who have defined original sin as the want of the original righteousness which we ought to have had, though they substantially comprehend the whole case, do not significantly enough express its power and energy. For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle."
There can be no doubt that in Christianity man is evil through and through and is totally depraved, without hope to save himself.
The baseline teaching of Christianity, at least most of it, is that mankind is simul peccator et iustus, both sinner and justified at the same time and capable of both. While Christianity seems to hold with some hereditary taint, it also holds people responsible for their actions.
Monastic theology was an interesting wrinkle. While thoroughly Christian, it focuses on the humanity of Jesus with the optimistic view that humans can become more godlike. The Orthodox call it theosis, of course, but Western monasticism holds much the same. This may be a result of its roots in John Cassian, who was a monk from Egypt who formed a religious order that gave rise eventually to the Benedictines. Cassian's own conferences had a really optimistic view of mankind (and womankind), saying that God's desire to save everyone is enormously powerful. His conference on the subject is considered a refutation of Augustine's predestinarian views -- views that Calvin swallowed whole. Even Augustine reconsidered them late in life but Calvin didn't.
Judaism holds that we are capable of doing evil and good, that both tendencies exist within us, and that we need to listen to our "better angels." I mention this not to make Judaism look good but as a way of getting into the part the monastic rule plays in that theosis/reformation of manners. The monastic rule governs every part of the monk's day, how he prays, when he prays, what he eats, how he relates to his brother monks (translate this into female for convents and nuns). The monastic rule makes the 613 mitzvot look like whoopie but it serves the same purpose. It is not a way to keep the monk/nun from sinning but rather a way of helping him/her be good the way the order feels God intends.
Much of Christian theology stresses our sinful nature, that we were conceived in iniquity, born in sin, and all we like sheep have gone astray and will continue to do so. But I wonder if this is a case of taking something that is explicitly taught in the Bible-- that all have sinned-- and making into something that isn't taught-- that there is nothing good about us-- that we are utterly evil and corrupt. Consider, for example, some of the images in the Bible, such as the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 and that we are children of a King and ambassadors of His Kingdom. So many Christians in particular lack a sense of self-worth to the point of joylessness and depression. It is as if they have over internalized to their harm the hymn that God saves "a wretch like me." My thoughts when I hear "Amazing Grace" is that while I've done bad things in my life, I'm far from wretched.
I recently read a book by Roy Robertson, who headed the Navigators, a missionary organization in Asia. His book Legacy of Discipleship describes some of the implications and my own reservations about this theory of man's total depravity.
"Even in the traditions of the Christian religion we find someone else to blame-- at least temporarily. We can place the blame squarely on Adam and Eve, our first parents. Doesn't Romans 5:12 say because of their sin death passed upon all men, for all have sinned?
"Augustine and other Catholic fathers carried this even further. The Catholic Church dogmatically taught that because of Adam's sin, man not only received the condemnation of death but he was fundamentaly changed do that he became utterly depraved, physically and morally. The implications are devastating.
"If man is toitally depraved morally, he has no capacity to choose to do good. So man has inherited both a body and a will that is corrupt. He has no choice but to do evil. If man has no choice, then he is not responsible. Who then is responsible? We blame God for making us like we are, and we conclude we have an unjust God! He punishes us for that we cannot help. We have reached a position that contradicts many clear passages of the World of God.
"Coupled with Augustine's teaching of inherited total depravity, which locked man in a terrible state of helplessness, was his view on predestination which reinforced the helpless feeling that there was no way of escape. He taught that "God had a fixed number of those eho would be saved, and those utterly without any chance for salvation. Nothing could be done to alter that number." How terribly depressing, not even a ray of hope! We are damned and nothing can be done to change it. We must cast ourselves on the mercy of the clergy of the church who hold they keys to heaven.
"But wait, the words of Jesus Christ ring like heavenly music in the dark dungeon of despair. "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10) "God so loved the world that He gave his only begotton Son , that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life" (John 3:16)
I have to agree that Robertson's position is more aligned to how I read the Bible, that we are not totally depraved, that no matter what you are or who you are, we matter to God, and that the choice is in our hands whether or not we choose redemption. I see no evidence from the Bible to support the claim that the fall impaired man's will. To the contrary, according to Genesis 3:22, Adam and Eve's act of disobedience enhanced our will by allowing us to recognize moral differences, "to know good and evil".
That was a very interesting and thoughtful post. As an atheist I am not entitled to comment credibly on Christian theology, but that usually doesn't stop me.
You probably agree with me that as a one sentence summary of Christian theology, you can't do better than the oft-quoted Romans 5: 19 For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.
However, taking that as the baseline there are several directions in which you can proceed. If you need to justify a doctrine like predestination, as Calvin did, you want to emphasize the total depravity of man so that it does not seem unjust. If you want to justify universal salvation, you would prefer to emphasize the atonement as giving hope to all. Some might see an equal balance between them as the only way to keep people awake.
I have always thought that Buddhism is more encouraging than Christianity in the sense of leading the individual to do good. It recognizes that people start in different places with different minds and make progress at different rates, but in the end, over the very long haul all reach enlightenment. Human life is considered a precious gift that puts you closer and is therefore to be taken advantage of.
I'm not Jewish, but that has never stopped me before from talking about something I know nothing about. :) There is much we can learn from our Jewish brothers and sisters on this point.
Christians, it seems to me, start from a baseline that we are all sinners, that we all start in the classroom of life with a "F", whereas the Jewish religion presupposes God's love for us, that we start with an "A". Simplistically, Christians are born again into redemption whereas Jews maintain their covenant with God by keeping the law. It is as if Christians transcend that "F" through conversion while devout Jews maintain that "A" by following the Talmud.
My view is that one's journey of faith starts out neutrally, at a "C" as it were, and it is both a conscious choice (say, of being born again or of adhearing to your Jewish heritage) and a life's journey having to do with personal ethics and other-awareness.
This website is really fun. You put in the name of the state, then the county, then the town where you grew up and it will show you old postcards of how it looked in the past.
My nurse friend sent this and encouraged me to post it and spread the word. I agree.
If everyone can remember something this simple, we could save some folks. Seriously.
Please read:
STROKE IDENTIFICATION:
During a BBQ, a friend stumbled and took a little fall - she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) ...she said she had just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes. They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food. While she appeared a bit shaken up, Ingrid went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening. Ingrid's husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital - (at 6:00 pm Ingrid passed away.) She had suffered a stroke at the BBQ.
Had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke, perhaps Ingrid would be with us today. Some don't die.... they end up in a helpless, hopeless condition instead. It only takes a minute to read this... A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke... totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized; diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.
RECOGNIZING A STROKE
Remember the "3" steps, STR. Read and Learn! Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.
Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:
S * Ask the individual to SMILE. T * Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently) (i.e. It is sunny out today) R * Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 999/911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher. New Sign of a Stroke ---- Stick out Your Tongue NOTE:
Another 'sign' of a stroke is this: Ask the person to 'stick' out his tongue. If the tongue is 'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other, that is also an indication of a stroke.
A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this e-mail sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved.
On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"
This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues. Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.
And this needs saying, because if you don't know what broke the elephant you can't put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can't trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.
Did anyone see that fascinating documentary on the History Channel "Life After People"? The premise was that all humans suddenly vanished, and then they looked at what would happen to life as the years rolled by. They had great special effects, as you can see.
So, according to the show, 250 years after people disappear, the skycrapers are decaying warrens filled with vegitation, mice, and birds, making an ideal haibitat for cats. They even think that cats may develop gliding abilities, like the flying squirrel.
This isn't just speculation. Scientists looked at what happens now and then extrapolated, for example, in the case of cats, from the prolific cat colonies at Rome's colossium. It's humbling to see that nature will do just fine and argubaly better than without us. But I know Kitty would miss his kibble.
Life may end with a whimper rather than a bang. But it looks like that cats will inherit the earth.
(This persuasive paragraph was written by my sixth grader Ben for Language Arts.)
Disgusting! Hazardous! Costly! Why do it?!
Until we can stop the making of cigarettes, more and more smokers will die. First off, there are many surprising toxins found in cigarettes that many people don’t know about. There’s chemicals found in toilet bowl cleaner, arsenic, pen ink, and over 3,000 other toxic products. In addition, horrible things can happen to your health.
My grandpa smoked in his 20’s, and died of intestinal cancer in his 60’s. Smoking can also cause many other types of diseases like tooth decay, strokes, lung cancer, liver cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, osteoporosis, and many others. Lastly, cigarettes are extremely expensive. An average smoker uses about 2 packs a day, which costs about $7.50. For one week, it’s $55. One year is a whopping $2,800! Would you rather have a new laptop or cigarettes?
As you can see, smoking is just a horrible thing to do, so spread the word! Help make this world smoke-free!
Interesting things you discover when you have sons.
1.) A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2000 sq. ft. house 4 inches deep.
2.) If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.
3.) A 3-year old Boy's voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.
4.) If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42 pound Boy wearing Batman underwear and a Superman cape. It is strong enough, however, if tied to a paint can, to spread paint on all four walls of a 20x20 ft. room.
5.) You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on. When using a ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up a few times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.
6.) The glass in windows (even double-pane) doesn't stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan.
7.) When you hear the toilet flush and the words "uh oh", it's already too late.
8.) Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.
9.) A six-year old Boy can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36-year old Man says they can only do it in the movies.
10.) Certain Lego's will pass through the digestive tract of a 4- year old Boy.
11.) Play dough and microwave should not be used in the same sentence.
12.) Super glue is forever.
13.) No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool you still can't walk on water.
14.) Pool filters do not like Jell-O.
15.) VCR's do not eject "PB & J" sandwiches even though TV commercials show they do.
16.) Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.
17.) Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving.
18.) You probably DO NOT want to know what that odor is.
19.) Always look in the oven before you turn it on; plastic toys do not like ovens.
20.) The fire department has a 5-minute response time.
21.) The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy.
22.) It will, however, make cats dizzy.
23.) Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.
24.) 80% of Women will pass this on to almost all of their friends, with or without kids.
25.) 80% of Men who read this will try mixing the Clorox and brake fluid.
This has been the core of the conservative critique of the Clintons for years. So it is illuminating to hear the same critique coming from Mr. Obama and his supporters now that his candidacy poses a threat to the return of the Clinton dynasty. Even Democrats are now admitting the Clintons don't tell the truth -- at least until Mrs. Clinton wins the nomination.
I have two boys, one in sixth grade and the other in eight grade. For the entire life, they have gone to public schools in a school district where education is tantamount to a religion, with affluent, involved parents and children who graduate into the Ivy League and then launch professional careers as doctors, lawyers, and executives.
I asked my boys if any teachers had ever talked to them about evolution in school. Both said no. (One is is studying electricity and the other chemistry.) At the band concerts in December, none of the two bands had any Christmas music, not even "Jingle Bells." What seems to have happened is that teachers have put evolution along with Christmas music in the taboo reservation, in deference to other people's feelings. They don't want to upset litigious, vocal parents, so they just don't mention it. Perhaps the administration thinks this is an aggravation they can do without.
The paradox is that organizations that have encouraged secularism in the schools and separation between church and education have pursued a dual track of eradicating pedogogy that could even potentially could ruffle the feathers of those holding minority or ideosyncratic viewpoints. Thus, in our school district, we have orthodox Jews, Mormons, Hindus, and Americans Indians, all having their own sacred myths and deep-seated feelings that those myths should prevail. Congnizant of that, I think the district has thrown in the towel. The teaching of evolution may be implied in other classes (I'm not even sure that's true), but it appears that evolution is no longer explicitly taught at all. Ironically, kids could probably learn more on this subject at a private school, where teachers fixate on so-called conflicts between science and faith. So, it looks like the creationists have won-- evolution is out of at least in our school district.
Personally, I welcome this development. Both creationists and evolutionists exaggerate the importance of this knowledge, with evolutionists intimating that all of biology and indeed science collapses without it, while the evolutionists go in the opposite direction by intimating that their faith collapses without creationism as an article of faith. Both views are wrong. The foundation to science is not evolution but curiosity and mathematics. And a belief or a disbelief in creation has no relevancy to whether or not you embrace a faith, especially since it may be that "creation" and "evolution" are synonyms.
I don't want to make too much out of the experience of my kids in one school district, but it may be that the "creationist vs. evolution" argument no longer matters much.
It does appear however that they start to ramp up on this in high school. There is some discussion in middle school, but not to the extent I would have thought.
There is a lot of stuff to teach kids about science. Evolution is just another topic along with electromagnetism and freezing point depression. Those who deny the fact of evolution have artificially inflated the importance of evolution in a general science curriculum.
My observation about "the collapse of science" gambit in the evolution debate is that scientists will assert that evolution is based on the same principles of inquiry that all of science is based on. If you feel that the evidence for the various theories of evolution is called into question for some reason, because similar techniques are used in other areas of science, those other areas of science must be questioned as well; the usual debating technique is to call into question the theory of gravity.
Yes, and if you look at the Arizona curricula, it's clear that evolution is a brick rather than the foundation of science.
You use the word evolutionist. I think I can understand the term creationist, who are usually identified as interested only in a single issue, thus earning the "ist" suffix. I do not think I know any "evolutionists", who irrationally advance the theory of evolution to the exclusion of all else. I am a scientist. I accept the observations of fossil record of speciation and many aspects of our DNA can be explained using the various concepts embodied under the general term "evolution". Am I thus an evolutionist?"
I prefer to let people describe themselves. I think these are sometimes labels for their theism or atheism, which is unfortunate and incorrect. What kids need is instruction in critical thinking, which gets into the philoosphy and epistomology of science. Kids also need to be taught comparative world views and religons. The trick is not to commingle religion with science.
Interesting topic. As the parent of three teenagers, the only advice I can give you is that it is YOUR responsibility to teach your children the reality of the world - not the school district's. Teach them to question authority and seek the truth on their own, and they will be successful adults.
I tell them to question authority but raise their hand.
I'm not aware that evolutionists exaggerate in the way you suggest. Of course, most would endorse strongly worded statements like Dobzhansky's famous remark, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", but that falls short of your paraphrase in precisely the way you appear to suggest it should, by restricting the claim to subject matter rather than process.
In the hands of the right teacher, perhaps as an AP interdisciplinary course, I think that the evolution/creation issue can provide understanding into the foundations of science, since it does raise all kinds of interesting questions on the scientific method, the nature of fact and theory, the relationship between science and public policy and science and faith, and so on. ( Perhaps the same kinds of questions can be examined by other example, on whether space aliens exist. There can only be one emperical answer, and that is no.) Perhaps the staying power of this debate, out of proportioin to what the kids really need to learn, has something to do with the ambiguity of both the questions and the answers. But, at the end of the day, I regard the question only important in so far as it warps the education or ethics of our kids, and I just don't see this happening from my point of view.
I don't understand how biology can be taught effectively without acknowledging the fact of evolution.
It's like saying that American history cannot be taught without studying the Civil War. The Civil War is integral to American history as is evolution to life sciences, but it is possible to teach biology without acknowleding evolution just as it is possible to teach American history without acknowledging the Civil War. But I would agree that wouldn't be much of an education. In Arizona, for example, there are six strands, and in the Life Science strand, biological evolution is but one of five concepts. You won't find a word on the creationist's main bugaboo, the ascent of man. In the context of the kid's overall education, evolution as a subject at least in this state appears to be a minor effort. And, from the perspective of most bored kids, it's just one more subject to test out on before moving to something else.
Are you saying that evolution does not undermine xianity? I am saying just that. Evolution-- modern science-- does not undermine xianity. If we agree that Christianity has to do with the supposed teachings of Jesus Christ, then what does it mean to be a Christian?. No where did He say in the gospels that we must believe in creation. What He did say is something much more onerous-- to "follow me". What that means-- what is culturally bound versus what are transcending ethical principles-- is a challenging matter of personal conscience and ethics. But I find no implication that to be a Christian you must be a creationist. I appreciate that "sensible" elites in every age have prided themselves on being above the superstitiousness of literal readings of various passages and you and many modern liberal Christians are very much in that elite tradition, but unfortunately I don't see you've ever actually established that sensible elites wrote most of the texts.
Of course that cannot be done. My principles of exegesis as to whether something should be taken literally or figuratively relates to how critical that dogma is to the faith. Since the Christian religion is a faith which depends by definition to a certain suspension of rationality (much like we do when we see a movie or read a novel), I am more forgiving of the miracles of Jesus' resurrection than I am of the miracle of the creation of the sun of the fourth solar day (!), something that has no bearing on a core doctrine of the faith, at least in my view. In the case of the talking snake (which, BTW, is a bit like the snake in the Epic of Gilgamesh), that can be put into the allegorical column as the Christian faith relies only on the fact that all have sinned, not the fact that there was once a talking snake. Another principles is that the more ambiguous a text is or an idea is, the less important it is, both in practicall terms or as an article of faith. Thus, you can ponder the doctrine of the trinity or the end times if you want to give your head a workout, but it strikes me as fairly peripheral in terms of the foundations of the faith. Of course, multitudes of other Christians would disagree with me, but naturally they're wrong. :)
You're just pulling a Nelson - putting a blind eye to the telescope to avoid seeing inconvenient things.
I assume you are referring to Horratio the Admiral and not Thomas the Bible publisher. In any case, it's an odd reference.
That is, figurativeness (never mind for what) is an intellectual trash can for anything that's inconvenient. I'm just taken aback because to my knowledge, no one since Augustine and before you has been up front about it, for obvious reasons - it's completely and utterly dishonest.
I don't think so. I view Revelation in the same way, in which even the literalists of Genesis generally regard as figurative, i.e. Gog and Magog are a figure for the USSR and the PRC, say. I put it in the figurative column because it is tangential to the doctrine of the atonement, which doesn't rise or fall or whether or not you view the Gensis story as literal history or allegorical myth. I don't put it in the figurative column because it is false or inconvenient. To the contrary, I view Gensis as profoundly true albeit not in the scientific sense.
The difference between Mark and Genesis is I view the latter as more or less straight reportage while I view the former as efforts to describe ancient ideas with ancient words-- day instead of eon and creation instead of evolution.
It may not be familiar to US audiences (in which case my bad) but in other circles it's the canonical comparison for what you're doing. (At the naval battle of Copenhagen Nelson pretended not to see an order to break off the attack, judging correctly that he was well-placed to win.)
What little I know about the First Viscount is that he was a shrewd leader of men and ultimately triumphant in the Battle of Trafalger. That you attribute in some way his thought processes to me makes me blush at what I take as a complement. Humor aside, reflect on what you are doing with that metaphor. Even though in sort of fell flat, you are doing what the writers of Genesis did, using images and contemporary words to capture a reality that they are struggling to comprehend. I fail to see why this is dishonest or those who view Genesis is in this way are dishonest.
Yes, Revelation is allegorical. No, it's not allegorical for anything like the reason you give, which is utterly invalid and utterly dishonest.
You like the word dishonest, but I fail to see why that is so. Generally, I ignore arguments that are larded in prejoratives, but my curiosity gets the better of me sometimes. You claim that Revelation is allegorical but Genesis is not. Prove it.
Modern liberal...
Stop right there. The only catagories I recognize is true or false. Liberal or conservative are false and meaningless political categories designed once again to marginalize and demonize as prejoratives. If my claims are false, then make the case. But don't ad hom the debate by using phony terms such as "liberal".
... but the author primarily intended it to be a talking snake. We know this...
Admit that you are wildly speculating (or that you are parroting authors or professors who are wildly speculating) and your sins will be forgiven you.
I'm just not in a polite enough mood to smile and pretend it's either defensible or honest. Again you must have actively avoided reading either text for evidence for or against, because ...
What I think is that you have a priori asssumed that the faith claims of Christianity are bogus and thus genesis the gospels are bogus. That doesn't impress me as either defensible or honest. Do you think that makes me smile?
And the P narrative creation in Gen 1 is about as explicit as it could possibly be that "day" means day, a fixed period of time and a cycle of light and dark.
Ah yes, the J author of the P narrative as defined by the K poster. Do you make this stuff up? I see nothing "fixed" in Gensis 1. You are no different than the creationists into reading something into the text that isn't there.
Creationism prospered in the early days in the US in no small part as a reaction against Social Darwinism, and the main anti-evolution argument used internally to fundamentalist churches has always been moral: evolution (supposedly) encourages treating people as of no value, like animals, which leads in turn to all manner of other social ills. (Christians have always treated God's creation as a moral textbook except when it doesn't support the point they wanted to be making, in which case it's the textbook of everything that's, well, bestial. And SD was somewhat of a misapplication of actual Darwinism, but not the less pernicious for all that.) I don't think the moral argument makes a bit of sense logically, but it's what convinces people, and it reinforces the determination to draw a line in the sand in defence of scripture. It's sad how with a bit of refocussing onto gays and abortion as the main evils supposedly fostered, it's now been coopted in the fight _for_ Social Darwinism.
I agree that SD was a misapplication of actual Darwinism, but Darwinism was invoked by the apologists of eugenics and capitalists in particular. Under the big tent of Republicanism, the creationists and the capitalists happily broke bread together, although their doctrinal views were in opposition. It was used by the fascists of Nazi Germany as well, not just as a rationale, but as a prophetic cautionary-- that their relentless final solution would inevitablly select out the strongest Jews and others that would eventually destroy Germany.
I'm sure you could make a very interesting course. However I don't know that you could do it in the post-Enlightment style that I imagine you have in mind without impaling yourself on the central paradox which is that one of the major faiths represented among the students doesn't accept as valid exactly that post-Enlightenment approach with its assumption of orthogonality between faith and fact claims.
The kids would have to sign a waiver first. Let's take free speech to its extreme, and no ruffled feathers allowed!
We get it that it's not a big issue to you. The trouble is it's a big issue to the creationists and you can't sensibly address that without trampling on the polite fictions that all faiths are worth of respect and that all faiths respect each other.
"The difference is that Calvinism recognizes a dimension of the saving love of God which Arminianism misses, namely God's sovereignty in bringing to faith and keeping in faith all who are actually saved. Arminianism gives Christians much to thank God for, and Calvinism gives them more."
I disagree. Arminianism gives Christians a reason to make moral choices, a reason to fight evil, a reason to have a conscience, and a reason for Christ's atonement. Calvinism presupposes something that the Bible never states-- that God's sovereignty voids man's ability to recognize and choose good from evil, salvation from damnation, and thusly gives Christians much less.
My chief objection to Calvanism is that it is morally evasive. If the Devil made me do it or God made me do it, why should I be blamed or rewarded accordingly? If God is sovereign over all, what is the point of the tree in the Garden of Eden—or indeed the tree from which Our Lord was crucified? If He is the potter and we are the clay, if He is the chess master and we are the pawns, then where is our responsibility for anything including even our existence? If God predetermines everyone for either hell or heaven, why waste time, money, and effort on churches and missions? How does God’s creation of a single human being who will inevitably go to Hell glorify God? From the Garden or Eden on, man has been presented with choices, and it is entirely up to us as to whether we make the right or the wrong choice. If those choices are removed, sin cannot exist, and there is no need for a redeemer as God has made the choice already. Calvinism also insists that nothing passes on this earth, indeed in all of creation, without His ‘permission’. It must make God minimally a co-conspirator in every evil that befalls man, from last week’s jay-walk to the holocaust, a premise that can only be acceptable if we posit that God is evil. I think we can affirm that God is King of kings and Lord of all-- and absolutely sovereign-- so long as we insist that God's sovereignty must never curtail human responsibility in any way, including repentance in sin and faith in Jesus. As I see it, all references to election and predestination are indications of divine intentionality. When my boys were six months old, I started to read to them. The purpose was to predestine a love of reading in them when they got older. But there is no assurance that they would love to read. That is entirely up to them. That’s the way I see it here. God predestrines us to life through His creation and salvation through Christ. But it is entirely up to us to make the key moral choices that follow in consequence: “Choose you this day whom you will serve.”
So Bush wants to give US$145 billion back to the taxpayers, but a) doesn't want to reduce spending or increase taxes on other taxpayers to compensate and b) wants Americans to spend it rather than save it.Is this reasonable, or absurd? If I get money back from the gummint, it's going straight into my savings account, economic stimulus be damned. I haven't reduced my spending in the last several years, so I see no reason I should increase it just because I get some back from the government. Actually, I should probably give it back to help pay down the national debt, huh? Or would that be economically silly?
Bush proposes to have the Leviathan cut every taxpaper a check for $800--$1,600 big ones for our family. If someone give me moolay, I gracious accept it. But in terms of public policy I do think it's economically silly. Unlike my rich uncle, the government has this one advantage. It can print the money it wants to give away. So, what you will get in further inflation, a further erosion of the dollar, and as the dollar delines relative to the goods that dollar it can buy, there will be every incentive to not save but spend. This in turn will impact capital formation and eventually unemployment. Policy makers should be careful what they wish for. A policy of promoting spending for the sake of spending has as much value as a Ponzi scheme-- shifting money from one person to another to no ultimate economic end. But I wonder why both parties are clamoring to embrace this ill-advised policy? Could it be that there is an election this year?
Pound for pound the Scottish wildcat is one of the most impressive predators in the world; intelligent, fearless, resourceful, patient, agile and powerful they are genuine superpredators and until as recently as the 1950's were believed to be man killers.
But the last three decades of his life were spent in seclusion, broken periodically by erratic and often anti-Semitic comments and by an absurd legal battle with his homeland, the United States.
His so-called “purple fits” and “earthquakes” have been a constant to those who have worked with him. Some have dealt with it by avoiding him, others by simply responding with silence. One senior White House aide, George Stephanopoulos, who was often a target of Mr. Clinton’s fury, has written of taking an antidepressant because the vicissitudes of the job were so intense. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/us/politics/18bill.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
And the shape of the locusts were like horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were, as it were, crowns like gold, and their faces were like the faces of men. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was like the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like scorpions, and their were stings in their tails; and their power was to hurt men five months.
The flight overseas includes professional as well as low-wage jobs, with engineering jobs offshored to India and China. Thousands of bright Asian engineers are willing to work for a fraction of American wages, which is why Boeing just signed a 10-year, $1-billion-a-year deal with an Indian government-run company.
But it doesn't make sense for parents to mortgage their homes, or for students to saddle themselves with long-term debt, in order to pay overpriced college tuition to prepare for jobs that no longer exist. Tuition at public universities has risen an unprecedented 51 percent over the past five years.
When the classics are assigned, they are victims of the academic fad called deconstructionism. That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called "Shakespearean Sexuality," or "Chaucer: Gender and Genre" at Hamilton College.
ACTA says "a degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud." College students: don't waste your scarce college dollars on a major in English.
"The dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students approaches 50 percent. . . . Every year nearly a million kids fail to graduate high school. . . . The United States has the most severe income gap between high school graduates and dropouts in the world."
In her speech, Secretary Spellings coined an apt phrase and also borrowed a pertinent phrase from the immigration debate to describe urban public schools. She called them "dropout factories" and decried the fact that they have been "in the shadows for so long."
Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried. Why do I tell you this? Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1950s: 1. Teaching Math In 1950s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit ? 2. Teaching Math In 1960s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit? 3. Teaching Math In 1970s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit? 4. Teaching Math In 1980s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20. 5. Teaching Math In 1990s A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers, and if you feel like crying, it's ok. ) 6. Teaching Math In 2007 Un hachero vende una carretada de maderapara $100. El costo de la producciones es $80. Cuanto dinero ha hecho?
"The longest baby ever born at the Albany, N.Y., hospital, at least as of May 5, 1926, who grew up to be my strapping father, passed away last Friday morning. As Mother and I stood at Daddy's casket Monday morning, Mother repeated his joke to him, which he said on every wedding anniversary until a few years ago when Lewy bodies dementia prevented him from saying much at all: "54 years, married to the wrong woman." And we laughed."
There is nothing much that I especially like about Ann Coulter's world view except for her courage and the occasional flashes of wit. But the death of a parent is not the place for partisanship. And so, despite her desire to have God smite me, I extend my heartfelt sympathy to the Coulter family.
"Now Daddy is with Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. I hope they stop laughing about the Reds long enough to talk to God about smiting some liberals for me. "
(Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of “The Language Instinct” and “The Stuff ofThought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.”)
Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?
Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care. . . . Moral realism, as this idea (that we are born with a rudimentary moral sense) is called, is too rich for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens — is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. . . . The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. . . . Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings. . . . Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” Read more:
The more I learn about historiography, the more skeptical I get about it.
You've got that one right. I'm a geneologist hobbyist, and the more I dig into my past, the less certain I am about anything factual. All that you can really do is approximate with as much integrity and humility that you can muster what may have been true, and even then you are left with doubt. Consider the principle that if you can reasonably establish that a date is a fact if it is on three primary documents. From Our Story:
"My approach to writing history is to establish the facts. I then try to tie those facts into broad themes or trends, seeking correlations and implications. Finally, I try to bring history alive by using quotes and stories from people who enjoyed or endured those times that discloses the texture of everyday life. The writing of history is a search for truth, an epistemological challenge of the highest order. A fact—an objective snapshot of a chunk of space and time—is often impossible to establish, for we see life through our own glasses darkly. “Memory,” Aunt Viola Bossman notes, “is a slippery thing.” All it takes are two eyewitness accounts of the same traffic accident to make you wonder about history. Artists use this distorting process to create works of enduring creativity. Monet, my favorite painter, looked with fading eyesight at a puddle and saw a shimmer of green and red and purple. (I call the Monets at the Chicago Art Institute “my” Monets.) Beethoven, my favorite musician, with near-deaf ears heard distant cannonades and wrote his transcendent Ninth. I block my ears to hear, I shut my eyes to see.
When we try to discern historical fact, we walk in a wilderness of mirrors. Even primary documents are suspect. In analyzing these early documents, many contradictions have come to light. Some of these are more apparent than real. For example, N.P.’s first son who died at the age of one has a death record that calls him Paulus, and yet the family knew him as Nicholas. A letter from Esther Christiansen, a cousin to Aunt Elvera Anderson, finally reconciled the two names: “Aunt Bertha told me the first Nicholas was called Paul Nicholas,” she wrote in 1988. N.P.’s birth date is listed in numerous HFLs and other primary documents as April 6, 1850. Can we certify this as a fact, since we have found at least three separate documents, each stating that N.P.’s birth date was April 6, 1850? No, for N.P.’s birth document puts his birth date as April 16, 1850. I’m assuming that the birth document is correct and that the other documents are wrong, but I may be mistaken. Even if N.P. was alive today, his recollection may be incorrect. We cannot know for sure. (In the outline of his writing, it’s April 16). Some of these contradictions have their roots in the motivations and skills of those early scribes. It could be that a Lutheran clerk wasn’t inclined to be so scrupulous in recording the vital statistics of a backwoods Baptist. Other contradictions must remain for now shrouded in the mists of time."
If, tomorrow, you should establish that the New Testament writings are frauds, how would that change the minds of a single Christian?
I believe a lot of Christians would say "my faith is founded on lies", and cease to be Christians.
This is an interesting psychological point, but I believe that you generally are wrong. And example is the "salamander letter" purporting to show that the original account of the Mormon leader Joseph Smith's discovery of the gold tablets wasn't true. The church's reaction?
"The so-called 'Martin Harris letter' [the Salamander letter] is no repudiation of Joseph Smith, but rather probably is a further witness of the Prophet's own account of the discovery of the gold plates. (Deseret News, Church Section, Sept. 9, 1984)"
Whenever indisuptable facts arrive on the scene, the church is quick to absorb those facts so long as they don't harm core dogmas. In this case, the facts turned out to be a fraud, and since the Smith writings where in themselves frauds, it was a fraud of a fraud. The key word is indisputable. Thus, despite the plethora of writings in the Bible that attest to a geocentric Ptolemaic cosmology, few Christians today believe that the earth is flat. Not so, in the case of evolution vs. special creationism, where the only indisputable fact is doubt.
I was one of the the only guys watching this schmaltzy, improbable chick flick. But we liked it, and a lot of people left the theatre dabbing their eyes. The reviews have been rough. However, I recommend it if you want to show your more tender side to your date.
It seems that you have found sufficient justification that defies the consensus of most scholars.
On the particular issue of Jesus' historicity, yes, I have come to believe that the scholarly consensus is mistaken.
"What justifies doubt is the fact that his existence as a human being is not unambiguously attested in places where I am convinced it would have been if he had been real."
Can you be more specific?
I have put a summary of my arguments on my Web site here: http://dougshaver.com/christ/ahistor/ahistor1.htm. If you're pressed for time, go to the bottom of the page and click on "What wrong with this picture?"
I finally got a chance to read your thesis. I apologize in advance if I have misatated your argument, which I understand is somewhat as follows.
What we read in the gospels are essentially camp fire tales-- an accumulation of incidents and wisdom from the Jewish community and the surrounding mystery religions.
That's possible. It isn't quite what I have in mind, but it could work, too. I have not done enough research myself to form a clear hypothesis about their origin, but I think they began as something akin to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. The stories originally were not about Jesus as such. They were collections of teachings, and Jesus, like Gibran's Almustafa, was just a mouthpiece for those teachings. From these stories, a Christian cult began to develop.
No, that's not my theory. I think several savior cults, one of which was Paul's, existed prior to the gospel stories. The gospels, or at least an early version of Mark's gospel, was produced independently of any of those cults. Paul of Tarsus, a hellenized Jew, saw the light and began his missionary efforts and epistles. Paul's Jesus was essentially a Platonic Form, which in the second century merged with the camp fire tales of the earlier mystery cult . And from that came the Jesus of history.
Yes, that says it pretty well.
In your discussion, on several occasions, you invoke the principle of parsimony. It seems to me that there ise too little parsimony to make this credible. For example, what I didn't get from your essay was the motivation of the merger between the mystery cults and Paul's Platonism, an explanation of how the gospels came to be especially relative to its size-- the sheer length of the account-- and the agreement between the gospels, and also the motivation behind Paul's missionary efforts and the growth of the early Christian church.
Aside from simply giving appropriate credit, one reason I referred to Doherty's work was that I was trying to keep the essay to a manageable length and so was focusing on the basic argument against historicity, not the details of an alternative account of Christianity's origins. I was hoping that anyone interested in those details would go to Doherty's Web site for them. It's not that I think he has all the details right. I think it very unlikely that any ahistoricist has all the details of Christianity's true origins right, because most of the evidence we would need to get them all right is irretrievably lost.
Why the merger? Doherty addresses that, but very briefly and so it's easy to miss. Paul's Christ doesn't grab the average person's gut very well. It's too esoteric. Your average Joe wants something a little more (literally) down to earth. As Doherty notes, savior-gods who died and came back to life were not a new idea in those days. The notion that one of them had done it as a man of this world, and had done it very recently, was new, and would have appealed to many more people than the previous versions did.
I fail to see what it is about length of the gospel story that makes it more improbable as a work of fiction than of purported history.
Insofar as the gospels agree on anything, it is easily accounted for on the supposition that they have a common origin. The disagreements among them suggest that the common origin was something other than factual history.
You and Earl Doherty place a great deal of emphasis on what he calls the silences in Paul's writings regarding the historical Jesus. It seems to me that there is a lot of straining to make a point that doesn't appear to be especially valid to me. Take the following statement by Doherty, in which questions why the message they preached wasn't the gospel of Jesus.
1 Thessalonians 2:2 . . . we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the face of great opposition. [RSV]
Early Christian writers like Paul are constantly referring to the message they carry as the "gospel of God." They also talk of the work of God, the saving actions of God, the call of God (cf. Romans 1:16, 3:24, 1 Cor. 1:9, Phil. 1:6, Gal. 4:7, etc.). If these apostles were preaching a message about an historical Jesus who had himself taught about God and his own relationship to him, surely they would style it the "gospel of Jesus." Why is there no mention in the epistles of an earthly ministry of Jesus? On the other hand, if Jesus is a spiritual figure, a "mystery" known only through scripture and God’s revelation of him, then Paul’s message is indeed the gospel of God (see especially Romans 1:1-4), and God is the primary "Savior" (see also Titus 1:3).
In every letter that Paul wrote, I believe without exception, Paul begins the letter invoking Jesus and God. For example:
Romans 1:1, 7-9: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all…”
Thus, from Paul's perspective, Jesus is God, the Logos of John 1:1. The apostles were not preaching about a historical Jesus but about Jesus preincarnated as God. Since Jesus, in Paul's view, was the resurrected Christ, there was no need to dwell on Jesus' earthly ministry.
Among the evidence that you purport is the silence in the letters written to Paul on Jesus as man and a distinction between secular (such as Tacitus) and non-secular writings (such as the Gospels). At least to me, neither point is especially convincing.
Paul was writing to work through theological issues informed by his Hellinistic background (like John) and the only fact that was important to him was that "Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures(I Cor. 15:3)." For example, in the writings of Plato, even where he references Socrates as in the Apology, there is little biographical information except for the premise that Socrates lived; the emphasis is on the development of ideas. If Paul died between 64-67 AD, he would have certainly lived within the lifetimes of people that would have known Jesus, and perhaps he simply felt there was no need to expand on the obvious-- that Jesus lived. Akin to a stone dropped in a pond, Paul never saw the stone but he did feel the waves as they were just beining to radiate outward, effecting not just him but clearly many others. This begs the question as to what caused those waves-- the emergent belief in many more people than Paul. It could have been hysteria or delusion. But it seems just as likely if not more likely that it was the effect of a real person, namely Jesus, who died about thirty years before Paul was killed.
I don't buy the distinction you make between secular and non-secular writings. The book of Matthew, for example, was written between 50-100 AD, somewhat equivalent to us and the events of the Reagan to the Roosevelt presidencies. It was not written as history but as a testimony to key snapshots of Jesus' life, about no more than a month or so of his life. It was written with a point of view, as generally is all history ancient and modern. Even assuming that fables are weaved into the narrative by design or default, it is just as likely that cores of fact remain. The logical question before we dismiss the gospels is to ask not how are the gospels different but why are the gospels in general agreement. That the thrust of the narrative parallel each other suggests to me that the core factuality within the gospels are in at least some measure historically true.
Here are my summary conclusions on the question of the historical Jesus.
Did Jesus exist in the same way that we know that Abraham Lincoln existed? Or was Jesus a myth like Thor or Apollo? I raise this question to reassess for my own satisfaction what I have long assumed to be self-evident. The evidence convinces me that Jesus lived as a flesh-and-blood person. It is significant that few professional peer-reviewed historians challenge the factuality of the existence of Jesus, although I’m sure that there are some.
First, we have the record of the gospels and a small but significant part in Acts. These were written with a point of view, and in fact they only account in totality for about two months of Jesus’ life. But I believe that they are credible. They were written from about 50 to 100 AD, a relatively short time in a culture that had a strong oral tradition. By contrast, Caesar’s Gallic Wars date from 100-44 BC, but our earliest copy is from 900 AD. It would be the equivalent of writing about the events of the First World War—well within the memory of living people or their children. There are credible parallels between the gospels as well as confirmation of names of rulers and places that historians have unearthed.
Secondly, we have the testimony of perhaps a half dozen writers that were roughly the contemporary to Jesus and His apostles. External sources include Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and others. Some extra-canonical writings also provide us with insights. While some of these writings may be fictional, in totality there is enough to support the claim that Jesus lived. It is remarkable that a man of Jesus’ rank—a common carpenter—would have so much documentation.
Thirdly, we have the fact of the mass movement of Christianity that resulted in the replacement of the old gods of by Constantine the Great by the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. chose Christianity because of a vision of the Christian cross, but as a politician, I suspect he was counting noses as well. By this time, the emperor was aware of his Christian military officers and state officials as well of the popular appeal and moral force of Christianity in the face of persecution. Christianity, I believe, was a bottom-up movement. The political elite responded to the people rather than vice versa. Myths have sometimes created mass movements. But the most parsimonious and most likely explanation for this mass movement is that it started with one man who stands at the hinge of history—Jesus Christ.
My thinking on the gospels has done a lot of evolving over the years, but I've never believed that any of the writers was lying.
For most of my adult life, I thought they were just mistaken, that although much of what they wrote wasn't true, they thought it was. If you believe what you say, then you're not lying.
But are you prepared to apply the same standard to yourself? My sense is that you personally are honest. Or, to put it alternatively, I see no reason to think that you will consciously lie. Having said that, and without impugning your personal integrity, I do think that you are embracing a dishonest methodology in your search for historical truth, just as religionists of impeccable integrity nevertheless embrace a methodology to assert that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. There are people who wish to raise the bar into the clouds in testing whether or not Jesus is a myth because they hate Christianity, but their bias is cancelled out by Christian scientists who have lowered the bar so that it hits the ground because they want to prove that Genesis is fact. They are both intellectually bankrupt, although they may no know it.
What the creationists, those who assert that Jesus is myth, the revisionists who claimed that Auchwitcz was a spa, and the tobacco lobbists all have in common is a similar cast of mind that puts their conclusion before the data and cherry picks data to support their conclusion. That Jesus was a historical figure is not Xtian propaganda formented by the magisterium any more than the notion that all animals ascended frm a common ancestor is atheistic propaganda formented by the geology department of Columbia University. While it is true that the mass of the scholars can be wrong, it still behooves you to account for why this consensus exists in the face of two millennia of powerful anti-religionist voices who wish it did not exist. A good test for intellectual honesty is to develop as strong a case as you can possibly develop contra to your hypnothesis, examine all the facts including in this case analogous documents from analogous figures during that time period, and then see if your theory is more compelling than orthodox scholarship. I doubt that the creation of a strawman and then its systematical dismantlement can prevail at any peer review no matter how much in sympathy those peers may be with your hypnothesis.
If you think my method fails to sort fact from fiction, then you can tell me what is wrong with my method.
By making, as do the creationists and the holocaust revisionists, doubt a fact. Here, for example, are arguments that go the other way:
"There are excellent reasons for maintaining the traditional ascriptions of Gospel authorship, when standard tests for such determinations are applied; There is no reason to date ANY of the Gospels later than 70 AD, although such dating may be permissible in the case of John; There is no reason to suppose that the Gospel authors took creative liberties with the events they recorded, to the point of fabrication."
Consider the question of attribution. If we assume that the Gospel of Matthew was written by someone or some people other than Matthew, then lets use the same standard to attribute Tacitus' Annals. Seems fair to me.
Maybe you can clear something up for me. I was at a party some time ago and the guests were evangelical Christians in the most positive sense of the term. I have a problem with evangelicals. I made some small talk with a guest and she said I was a neo-Platonist. It was a thinly disguised insult to a Christian as I learned later.
Use as a prejorative, I think it means that you are a mystic to the exclusion of anything real or rational that might inform that mysticism. Neoplatonism also rejected the afterlife as well as the existence of evil and posited "the Source" or "the Absolute", from whence all things spring and all things return. It might be contrasted to materialism, empericism, and pragmatism. (William James: "Damn the Absolute!") It was popular in the middle to late 1800s, and was influential in the thought of Hegal, Goethe, Emerson, and others.
We should make a distinction between Christian Neoplatonism, which is essentially Christian Theosophy and Christian Platonism, which runs through much of orthodox Christian theology . An example is CS Lewis in which he suggests that the afterlife is more real than this life, and this life is the a mere image-- a copy of a copy-- of what is real, somewhat equivalent to Plato's cave metaphor. We see this rather poignantly in his Narnia Chronicles, the kids in the last chapter are transported to Narnia as they die in a train wreck:
Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."
"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose withi them.
"There was a real railroad accident" said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are-- as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands-- dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."
her anger's a mystery she stomped on a cheescake and went down in history xanthus Xingu - river in Brazil xenon - heavy, colorless gas, i,e most politicians xenogamy Xit - royal dwarf to Edward VI
the best of the bochWurst from hotdogs to frankurters, no one should knockwurst
weeping brides Walcheren Expedition woman -- OE "wifeman" Wundersucht - mystical sense of the reality of magic weeping and waiting wahine waggle wadi wimple wassail
In the final years of the Cold War, the Russians and the Americans sometimes engage in games of chicken, and that is what you may be seeing here. But it may even be less than that-- a complete fabrication engineered as a prelude to the president's trip to the Middle East.
"All ships at sea use a common UHF frequency, Channel 16, also known as “bridge-to bridge” radio. Over here, near the U.S., and throughout the Mediterranean, Ch. 16 is used pretty professionally, i.e., chatter is limited to shiphandling issues, identifying yourself, telling other ships what your intentions are to avoid mishaps, etc. "But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)"
I wonder who would have the most to gain by publishing this.
"As the U.S. government continues to demonstrate its inability to learn from history, an alarming report from the Strait of Hormuz was broadcast to the world on January 7. The Associated Press reported the following: "In what U.S. officials called a serious provocation, Iranian boats harassed and provoked three U.S. Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, threatening to explode the American vessels." These Iranian ships are believed to part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's navy, the organization that the U.S. Congress officially decreed a 'terrorist' organization."
Abortion is far more complex than merely making a simplistic dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice positions. Few doctors endorse abortion as a means of birth control and such a grave step should never be taken lightly. Doctors, perhaps for insurance reasons, sometimes scare the daylights out of mother-to-be about the health of their child. But doctors are sometimes wrong, and it's important to trust ourselves in such matters. I've also met few absolutists on abortion, especially when they have to deal with the issue personally, as in a hypothetical in which a baby is an encephalic-- without a brain-- and the mother's life in danger. Someone wrote to me saying that this "did happen to my closest friends a couple of years ago, and even more ironically, at the time, I was teaching an eight week course on Biblical ethics when the severity of her condition came to light. In a nutshell, she had four small kids at home, pregnant with her fifth, when she started having problems. Doctors said that: a) The baby essentially had no brain, his limbs were severely deformed, and other internal organs where malformed beyond hope. b) Because of some uterine problems, there was a very high chance that sometime in the ninth month she would suffer some major hemorrhage that could prove fatal to her. They of course, wanted to abort right away. She refused, and moreover, wanted to carry the baby full term and have a natural childbirth. (Initially, she actually wanted to give birth at home). For me, I saw the ethical question in a whole new light, now that it had a face on it. The baby had a zero percentage chance of surviving. For a staunch pro-lifer, it was a dilemma acknowledging that the right-to-life can't always be seen as an absolute. It didn't seem right that the mother should possibly lose her life, and four small children lose their mother, when the baby wasn't going to live no matter what. Fortunately, the mother decided to have a C-section at the earliest possible time. (32 weeks or something like that...don't exactly remember) She got through it okay. The baby lived for three days or so."
God gives us minds and God gives doctors their skill. The point is not to look for rationalizations to support our actions but rather be prepared to acknowledge the complexity of life and that we must adapt moral principles to achieve the most ethical ends A one-size-fit-all principle that all life from conception on must be preserved at all costs can be immoral and even deadly, a principle, by the way, that anti-abortionists rarely extend to embracing military pacifism and mercy to criminals on death row.
How strange it is that some conservatives condemn those who abort in the second semester while allowing the state to abort their child in the sixty-second semester in armed combat in foolish wars. Finally, it seems to me that the issue isn't abortion as such, but the predicating choices made by those who conceived that unwanted child in the first place. It seems hypocritical to pat yourself on the back for protesting the taking of innocent life while at the same time acting irresponsibly to bring into existence innocent life.
No, this isn't another post on Marmite. Perhaps I have too much time on my hands, but I have to ask this pressing question. Why do small, domestic cats bury their poop and large, wild cats do not?
Cats bury they poop because they don't want to be found by predators. The dominant cat in a household will sometimes not bury, to asserts his/her dominance. Large wild cats don't really have to worry about any predators (except humans :( ), so I imagine marking their territory is simply more important to them than worrying about hiding it. Burying your poop is only important if something might use it to find you and eat you. That's part of the reason parent birds will remove the fecal sacs from the nest and carry them far away when they have nestlings, or why momma cats will lick their babies urine up - less scent to attract predators to the babies. An adult large cat doesn't have to worry about hiding from predators, so they can use that to mark territory instead of having to use more subtle cues that proclaim their territory claim to others of the same species while not attracting predators.
The curious thing in my case is how a particular smell-- crushed tomato leaves-- or taste-- Marmite-- can transport me back almost five decades. (I've yet to meet a native born American who likes Marmite, something I was weaned on.)
Then there is that recollection from the aging lawyer Bernstein in the movie Citizen Kane, remembering a girl in a white dress getting off a ferry in 1896: "I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all-but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." -- a fragment in time that re-loops for the rest of his life.
Perhaps due to the pre-election polls, I was seduced into believing that Obama would blow away Clinton. I was wrong. However, the race has just begun. And as always, the voters got it right. Both candidates need to be vetted much more. It is looking however to be an Obama-Clinton race, and I suspect that will be the eventual Democratic ticket.
On the Republican side, McCain has prevailed. However, I think his age and objections by many social conservatives especially from the south may make future victories less likely. I suspect Thompson will drop out immediately after the South Carolina primary. Guiliani is expecting to come alive in Florida, but he may have missed the train by that time. I think Huckabee will be on the Republican ticket, but only assuming that Romney is not as well. I don't think that combinaiton will work because of the bad blood between them.
These are exciting times. America is in a time of transition, and anything could happen between now and November.
On Madison Avenue, it is a truism that you cannot sell at any price what people don't want. Milk past its due-date cannot be sold at any price, for example. Clever advertisers can promote a product in such a way such that even the most questionable product can have an allure. An example is the Army Strong campaign to attract military recruits into an unpopular and deadly war.
This principle is true also in politics. Despite spending more than $200 per voter, Romney lost the Iowa campaign. Today, New Hampshire is flooded with more political commercials and mailers. I doubt that many people will switch their votes on the basis of this kind of marketing. Political viewpoints emerge generally from a blending of two sources-- raw fact and images, such as most people get from debates and news stories-- and also from word of mouth of friends and family.
Once these view points take hold, they are difficult to reverse, either by a new set of facts and persuasion or by attack propaganda. What is even more difficult to reverse is when these views aggregate into a trend becoming a force of nature that can only keep going in the same direction. This may be happening to the deteriment of Romney and Clinton at present. I predict a further erosion of support for their candidacies and it may be only a matter of time before they both throw in the towel.
who died for a dish He ran onto his bacon knife when he ran out of fish. venal and venial vee - nuckline visible Negro votive vert veniremen vi e armis volnerary vagary valetudinarian vidience vocative vagina vandel - rapist verity viand virgule verve vitalism voluntarianism virgule
a marriage between the lip-puckering pofnelo and sweeter tangerine. ultra vires undistributed profits tax umble pie uxorious untoward ungula unguent underground kite unfunded liabiltiies usufruct ursa minor umbraging
“Internships are no longer optional, they’re required,” says Peter Vogt, author of “Career Wisdom for College Students” and an adviser to MonsterTrak.com, the student arm of the job-search Web site, which reports that 78 percent of students in college this year plan to complete one or more internships before entering the post-collegiate world.
"Recruitment for the most coveted 10 percent of internships starts 10 months in advance. And many of those, at places like Microsoft, Google, Disney and XM Radio, have filled their summer slots by New Year’s Day.
"Competition is further heightened because applicants are increasingly qualified. At Ketchum, a New York public relations company, more than 600 students applied for 16 positions last summer, with predictable results.
"There is almost always a side door — a makeshift slot created for a particularly qualified, determined or connected applicant. That’s where parents, acquaintances, alumni networks and local business owners and politicians can come in handy.
"A good number of internships serve as two-month-long job interviews, and just as the students hope to turn the experience into something good for the résumé, the companies hope to turn the students into future employees."
"You won’t be missed if you skip class and download the professor’s notes online, but you will miss out. Being there and being alert lets you figure out which stuff the professor finds most important (hint: that’s what will be on the exam).
"Notice the lecturer’s gestures and volume of voice. “If he’s loud and he’s waving his arms, you’d better write that down.”
"While careful not to draw conclusions, he notes that students taking linked courses have done “a notch” better on his exams — a C+ instead of a C, the class mean.
"Mr. Miller believes that success is less about native intelligence than good study habits. He suggests spending time every day processing what you’ve learned, as if prepping for a pop quiz. One way is to copy lecture notes. "
Hillary is 60 now. 35 years ago, she would have been 26, in 1973. The fact is that she wasn't a public figure until 1979 as First Lady in Arkansas. Clinton's first elected office was in 2001 as a senator to New York.
Once again, you see the Clintonian mutability of truth.
The question of why Hillary Clinton lost in Iowa can be answered by asking when did Hillary lose.
The date: November 1st, 2007. The place: Wellesley College, Massachusetts.
It was not the substance of her remarks. Clinton gave a ho-hum speach to her adoring sisters that women have always had to fight discrimination in career advancement.
It was the fact that Clinton decided to take a premature victory lap on this all-woman's campus. For the first time, I saw that that her authentic soul is one of confrontational radicalism. This surely is surely at odds with the unifying and transcending message that Obama proclaims.
It may well be true her her undergraduate years at this prepared her to "compete in the all boys' club of presidential politics." But Clinton's campaign strategy of assuming that the Democrats will crown her before competing against the Republican nominee has made her to triangulate public policies that most Republicans and Democrats reject. Republicans distrust her war policy and Democrats despise her votes in support of the president's war policy.
Hillary Clinton's drive for power today echos the rhetoric of Hillary Rodham, who addressed Wellesley College in her commencement address in 1969.
"We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction," Hillary said then. "Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue."
The questions surely continue. But what are Hillary's answers? Issues come and go, but during her undergraduate years, Hillary defined the principles that would animate her politics a generation later. To fulfull her Bachelor of Arts degree, Hillary's thesis was “There is Only the Fight.” It praises the work of radical activist Saul Alinsky, a radical who epitomized the politics of personal destruction that she has condemned. The spirit of the times may have shifted so that divisive politics canniot work. Neverthless, I predict Hillary will use these tactics to try to prevail against Obama and others-- mass mobilization, framing the issues and labeling adversaries, working through proxies, and publishing opposition research.
Unlike Obama, who resists defining himself as Jessie Jackson did in terms of race, Clinton continue to define herself in terms of gender. I see that from this blog entry from Ona Keller, a president of the Wellesley College Democrats.
"Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s campaign manager, described Clinton as "one strong woman" and observed that “on that stage in Philadelphia, we saw six against one” as Clinton’s “opponents tried a whole host of attacks on Hillary.”
"Clinton’s great pride in Wellesley women was not reflected in the students who stood on the stage behind her. Male students from surrounding schools were imported, while Wellesley students active in the Clinton campaign and the College Democrats were denied seats on stage.
"If Clinton believes that Wellesley prepared her for the tough battles against sexism, why were Y chromosomes featured so prominently behind her at Thursday’s event?"
Ona Keller
XX Chromosome
Let's reflect on these silly and sexist words and consider how emblematic it is of Hillary's desire to be president. That people are merely chromosomes and that Jack, Bill, and Mike are a bunch of Y chromosomes strikes me as a level of reductionism that is dehumanizing to the extreme. Futhermore, that the tough battles against sexism can only be fought by people with a certain kind of anatomy is ignorant and false. It is this kind of divisiveness that is indicative of Hillary Clinton and her campaign to be our next president. And it is why she will not be our next president.
"At one point in the Middle Ages, Farley says, there were as many as 18 putative Holy Foreskins in various monasteries and towns in Europe, most of them in France. By the 20th century, all but one had quietly disappeared.
"The specimen in Calcata finally vanished in 1983, an event the church's pastor blamed on "sacrilegious thieves.''
Senator Barack Obama : 37.55% Senator John Edwards : 29.86% Senator Hillary Clinton : 29.40% Governor Bill Richardson : 2.09% Senator Joe Biden : 0.94% Uncommitted : 0.13% Senator Chris Dodd : 0.02%
Precincts Reporting: 1722 of 1781 (Percentages are State Delegate Equivalents.)
Miss Arizona contestant Kumari Fulbright, 25, has been charged with multiple offences over the kidnap and torture of an ex-boyfriend. Miss Fulbright, who was released on $50,000 bail, served as a law clerk for US District Court judge while she attended the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law in Tucson. She is a second year writer for The Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, is on the ASUA Appropriations Board, and is on the University's Senate Task Force for Campus Child Care.
Once Promising
Now Pathetic
As Miss Pima County, Fulbright's platform was "Students Helping and Reaching People" (SHARP) and her talent was theatric interpretation-- something to keep in mind when you gaze at her mug shot.
I'm sure her grief is genuine but I suspect that her remorse is in getting caught, and not for her victim whom she tortured. According to prosecutors, she "bit him several times while he was bound, stuck a butcher knife in his ear ... said she was going to kill him, [and] pointed a pistol at him." The victim, according to the documents, was able to grab Fulbright's gun after more than eight hours. After the weapon accidentally discharged, he ran out of the house screaming for help.
I am again astonished at yet another moment of bad judgment that immolates a promising career. This kind of post is the stuff of tabloids, but it is also the stuff of life. And shadenfreude is as much a deterrant against this crime as the penalty the school or courts will exact against the likes of this violent harridan.
Even after I had excluded the following terms from Google's search engine--indicted, threaten, criminal, hostage, felony, torture, kidnapper,crime, tortures, tortured, crime, mugshot, kidnapped,kidnapping, accused-- there were still more than 12,000 entries for her name. Let this be a cautionary tale. In today's internet world, there is no privacy. If you do something dumb or cruel, the world will hear your anguished cry: "Don't taz me, bro!".
A curious angle in this case is her G. Gordon Liddy-like infatuation for cheesecake and high caliber weaponry-- strange for a future barrister, although perhaps not so strange for someone yearning to work in a Republican Justice Department or perhaps for Fox News.
An Ominous Love For Guns
But that doesn't make much sense for someone who clerked for U.S. District Judge Raner Collins. Collins, a Clinton appointee, is by Arizona standards a liberal jurist, with his decisions on school funding, conservation, and abortion rights,
It could be that Fulbright was a bit like Los Angeles-- there is no "there" there-- devoid of a core. So, in pushing the envelope in exploiting her assets-- her intelligence, personality, and sexuality-- she finally pushed the envelope a bit too much by forgetting her conscience. And for this, all that Miss Fulbright has dreamed and hoped for is now in ashes.
I'm going out on a limb here by making the following predictions on how the candidates will do in Iowa tomorrow.
The wild card is weather. Bad weather will favor candidates with the deepest pockets and the best organization, such as Romney and Clinton. On the flip side, another wild card is the stock market. Another bad day on the exchange could send voters away from the status quo candidates, such as Romney and Clinton, to the populists, such as Huckabee and Edwards.
Republican
1st Place: Mike Huckabee 2nd Place: Mitt Romney 3rd Place: Fred Thompson 4th Place: John McCain
Democrat
1st Place: Barack Obama 2nd Place: John Edwards 3rd Place: Hillary Clinton 4th Place: Bill Richardson
My heart is breaking, but I know it was time, and Murph did too. I called my friend Sonia, who is Murph's second Mom, so were both there with him. We stayed as he went to sleep, gave him hugs and kisses, and told him how much he was loved. It was as hard as I imagined it would be, and worse. But, I know it was the right decision.
Murphy told Sonia and I he was okay, and it was time. There was a window in the room, and it was open, and the sun was out and there grass to see. He jumped up there a couple times, and the last time he did, I could see he was okay, and that he looked more like the old Murph. Sonia and I both noticed it, and knew he was okay and was ready.
Murphy has this toy, kind of like a stuffed sock, that's he had since he was a kitten. I amazed it's still here after all the moves, but it is. It's 17 years old, very ragged, stuffing coming out, but it's here, and is a part of him. I have it on my lap as I type, and have put it to my cheek.
I'm having a hard time comprehending that he's not "physically" here, that I'm alone in my house. This will be the greiving process I guess.
Murphy, I MISS YOU SO MUCH, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I wish you didn't have to leave me, but understand it's how the universe works...and that I will see you again one day.
I had no idea that I would shed a tear over the love of your beloved friend. I'm so sorry. I lost of cat of 17 years a number of years ago, and it isn't easy to do so. Here is a poem to Murphy, a paraphrase from Alfred Lord Tennyson.
MURPHY: 1991-2008
God gives us love. Some cat to love He give us. But when love is grown to ripeness, that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone.
Sleep sweetly, tender heart in peace! Sleep, dear Murphy, blessed soul While the stars burn, the moons increase And the great ages onward roll. Sleep 'till the end, true soul and sure! Nothing comes to thee new or strange Sleep full of rest from head to paw Lie still, 'till ere we meet again!
What if Pontius Pilate had pardoned Jesus? Would Christianity exist?
I was in Costco's book section today waiting for some film to develop when I had came across a compilation of essays of alternative histories, sometimes based on the most subtle of cirumstances, that would have changed the course of world history. Often, these circumstances had to do with trivial circumstances-- a moment of indecision that saved George Washington's life early in the Revolutionary War from a soldier's bullet, for example.
I forget the historian who wrote the essay, but he made the case that Christianity may well have developed the way it did regardless of what most Christians think is the central fact of their faith-- Christ's death and resurrection. The counterfacts were that Pilate in defiance of the Jewish mob pardoned Jesus and Jesus went on to live until the age of 95 preaching, doing his miracles, and returning on occasion to Jerusalem to try to sacrifice himself in obedience to his Father's will. Jesus' pacifistic teachings and obedience to civil authority were condoned by the Roman Imperium and they became his protector. The missionary activities of Paul and his disciples spread the faith that was officially recognized by Constantine the Great around 300 AD.
Interesting,but possibly misleading. Like all religions ,Christianity was a response to the needs of its society. It was and is a reflection of the societies in which it is found. That is one reason it has never been an homogenous belief system,regardless of claims by apologists. Had Jesus lived on,it is most likely he would have faded into obscurity. He was an very ordinary Jewish Rabbi. His actual teachings as far as I can tell, were Jewish,and meant for Jews. Initially,gentiles were not accepted by the followers of Jesus. The religion which developed into Christianity was invented almost entirely by Saul. It has very little do with Jesus. Christianity contains no new moral code. The same code was taught by some Greek philosophers,in Hinduism by and by Siddhartha Gautama in the C7th BCE..In China The Dao and Confucian moral codes have many similarities with Christian moral values..Christianity contains no new theology or cosmology.Every single idea was taken from elswhere. Until Constantine adopted Chrstianity,it seemed for that Mithraism might become the dominant religion insead of Christianity..The two religions have a lot of similarities. Had Jesus lived,Mithraism may well have dominated the Roman Empire.That Christianity spread was more because it became the State Religion of the Roman Empire than any other single reason.Mithraism was an accepted mainstream religion until the C4th CE. It could easily have become the State religions instead of Chrsitianity--whether or not Jesus had survived. Of course,that's the wonderful thing about alternate history.No one knows enough about affecting varaibles to be able to give more than a possibly entertaining guess.
Perhaps Christianity took root while competing cults such as Mithraism did not was because it was universalistic-- largely detaching ethics from tradition and legalism-- syncranistic-- absorbing ideas from other religions, especially Judiaism but probably other religions as well as you mention, and democratic-- appealing most especially to the marginal in society, which is necessary for creating any mass movement. The persecution the Christians suffered under Nero and other emperors also helped catalize the faith from a cult into a multinational religion by creating a future-based end-of-days narrative. The writings of Paul that effectively married Greek and Jewish thought and the very fact that the gospels and the epistles were made and preserved contributed to Christianity's early acceptance and growth, IMO.
I doubt that Constantine the Great simply by executive fiat made Christianity the official religion, for by that time the faith had penetrated all stratas of society, most particulary the officer corps, and like any good politician, he was responding to his constituency through identity politics.
This is one of those topics that can keep historians busy for years, since ther is no cut and dried answer. It seems to me to have been a combination of factors. Here are a few.
Once Paul had produced a version that did not require one to be or becoem a Jew, it was certainly open to all. Plenty of other cults were, though.
It developed a story that sounded very similar to many of the other religious stories going around, so it wasn't unaccepably bizarre.
Unlike the others, though, it had a one-way valve. Once you were a Xian, you were supposed to leave all the other cults alone.
I really have doubts about the Neronian persecution. Domitian seems to have been more interested in persecuting Jews. (Not surprising, since his father and elder brother were famous for winning the Jewish wars, while Domitian had to stay at home.)
That seems to have been a part of Christianity from the beginning. Ehrman and others see Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, and Paul expects the end in his own lifetime.
“I think God will have prepared everything for our perfect happiness in heaven,” Evangelist Billy Graham writes In Remembrance of A Special Dog. “If it takes my dog being there, I believe he’ll be there.” The same must be said for my cats as well.
The possibility of non-human morality raises all kinds of questions. It’s hard to deny that some higher animals, such as elephants, dolphins, cats, and dogs, lack altruistic impulses and moral sensibilities. And it’s clear to me that the least ethical man is far inferior in his morals than the most ethical ape. I recently read a news account of a child who had fallen into an ape pit at a zoo. A larger ape gently pulled the unconscious child to safety while fending off the more rowdy juvenile apes. While it’s possible that the ape’s mothering instincts might have kicked in, it seems to me that it was just as possible for her more brutal instincts to kick in as well that would have resulted in the death of the child. In other words, it seems to me that the ape made a moral choice. If it’s true that animals have a moral sense, should we follow in St. Francis’ footsteps and preach to the birds? Do snails have souls? Can animals be redeemed and have a redeemer? (My interlocutor sarcastically asked me, “What are you saying? Is there a Jesus rabbit and a Jesus fox and rabbit crucifixion and a fox crucifixion?”) If there is the spark of the divine within beasts, what then should our relationship be to them? Does human contact with some animals—such as my affection for my cat Rex—imprint on that creature in some way a moral sensitivity? Can we teach animals morality? Should we avoid all foods that once had faces? Ban vivisection? Liberate the barn and zoo animals and pray over the burial of our leather shoes and fur coats? What about intelligent non-human life elsewhere, perhaps in other solar systems? Did they too undergo the passion pageant and if not, how should we regard them? As our moral superiors? (I suspect that if we have the means, we’ll probably try to kill them. But this is an academic question as we have no basis whatever to believe that such life exists. Although I’m an avid science fiction fan, I find no convincing evidence from 7,000 years of recorded history to support the belief that UFOs are real or that space aliens exist, and I consider the search for extra terrestrial life to be a waste of effort and money.) What about artificial life? It may be merely a matter of time before we can code robots to have cognition, consciousness, feelings, superstitions, and theistic longings. Can we manufacture a soul? Can we program an android to have free will? Should we still treat them the same we treat a toaster? I don’t think I have many answers for these questions. But, in general, I think we should treat animals, aliens, and even androids and appliances ethically, as our actions reflect for better or for worse our ethics or our lack of ethics.
In the Turing Game, proposed by Alan Turning in the 1950s, two players are behind a curtain communicating with you by a console. If a robot can be substituted for one the players and it is impossible for you to determine that, presumably that robot will have reached the level of conceptual thought. But I think that this test doesn’t scratch the surface in emulating genuine human consciousness. It would also be more impressive if the android interactions reached the level of self-initiated perfidy, as in the case of HAL, the computer in the movie 2001, or self-directed superstition in the movie AI. Human self-consciousness would have to include all the virtues and vices that we manifest, as well as our inner world of thought, doubt, confusion, dread, greed, dishonesty, intentionality, dreams, speculation, and mysticism. I see no basis for assuming that we are anywhere near that point, even at a rudimentary conceptual level.
If man is merely a more complicated machine that the lower orders going down the smallest bacterium, is man therefore truly unique? What is it exactly that makes man a little lower than the angels and a little higher than the orangutans? And why does this matter so long as we are ethically grounded? If we view man as merely an advanced machine or animal, will it necessarily follow that we must treat men as machines or animals? I think the answer can only be: no. The way we treat anything reflects on our respect for life and on our attitude to man himself. “They are only rats” becomes “They are only Jews.”
Hope has been at war with my reason for my entire life, and this may be a case where hope has won. Ezekiel 18:4 says that God regards that “all souls are mine”, and I’m more certain that Rex had a soul than some folks that have made the headlines. I’m reminded of the Prayer of Saint Basil of Caesarea: “O God, grant us a deeper sense of fellowship with all living things, our little brothers and sisters to whom in common with s you have given this earth as home. May we realize that all these creatures also live for themselves and for you—not for us alone. They too love the goodness of life, as we do, and serve you better in their way than we do in ours.” Lions and lambs are in Heaven, according to Revelation. Romans 8:21 says that all of creation will someday be delivered from corruption, which I take to mean all of nature. James 3:7 talks of man taming all creatures. I was recently saw a sparrow trying to move or comfort a dead or dying bird, an expression of empathy that both startled and impressed me. In two places, Jesus makes references to pets, dogs (Matthew 15:21-28) in one case and birds (Matthew 10:29) in another. My belief in animal souls is in part a retort to my Uncle Ray’s rhetorical verse:
It little matters sparrows That the Father notes their fall They die like all the other beats Both big and great and small
And they might justly wonder If they could cogitate Why the Father would simply note their fall When death is still fate?
Shortly after my cat Rex died, I had a dream in which he was sitting at the end of my bed in a puddle of light, but he looked as healthy as he did ten years earlier. He looked at me with his Cheshire gaze and rumbled a purr. And then the vision melted, but I was left with the feeling that he was letting me know that he was happy and waiting. “My Mom has had several Near Death Experiences over the past twenty-five years,” someone wrote me. “And she saw for herself that animals, too, are as important to God as we are. During Mom’s first NDE while she was reuniting with her own deceased mother, she felt something touching her hand. She looked down and saw a dog nuzzling it. She was simultaneously amazed and thrilled to learn that animals pass over to Heaven to same as us and are held in equally high regard in God’s eyes. Mom almost didn’t recognize the dog because the last time she saw him on Earth, he was quite old and crippled from arthritis. He was healthy and youthful looking in his heavenly body. And he remembered Mom! It felt as though they had never been separated even though so many Earth decades had gone by. Your sweet Rex is very much alive and well in Heaven and will be pushing his way through the welcoming committee to greet you when it is your time. He’s watching over you now!”
