Good morning.

1. The big race, and a look at the course.
2. Moving product.
3. Shooting’s too good for ’em. 
4. One of the gentlemen notes two reasons why porn is bad for you. This as well, is not unrelated.
5. That was my suggestion, back in the day.
6. 47% pay no federal taxes?
7. Animals without oxygen.
8. More on the Obama assassination kerfuffle.
9. Uhm, … in the East, Christian churches are domed and have always been so, Islam borrowed that from the Christians. 
10. Coolness in nature untangled.
11. Video.
12. For the ladies in Pakistan.
13. Post-Pascha let-down.
14. Self reliance and healthcare.

An interesting note from last nights reading. I had started reading American Rifle: A Biography. At the start of the book it notes that before the advent of the flintlock the American natives weren’t interested in firearms. But the flintlock change that, and the musket (later rifle) became a highly sought very expensive commodity item. Prior to that introduction, wars and conflicts between American native groups were based on enmity and for one 7 year conflict between two tribes resulted in 7 deaths. After the flintlock, conflicts were based not on enmity but on (economic) interest and became deadly. After 25 years, the number of combatants from one tribe dropped from 800 effectives to 300.

The point that enmity vs (economic) interest driving lethality is probably can be generalised and considered in the context of the popular opinion about European religious conflicts of the 15th-17th centuries.

Good morning.

1. An example of how Orthodox theology is bound to its liturgy.
2. A billion dollars? I tend to think that’s not credible.
3. Islamic extremism, apparently, doesn’t exist.
4. More Democratic fantasies … see the second paragraph here (and read the rest too).
5. Zipping around the globe.
6. Putin in Poland mentions Katyn. I’m not sure that approach will sit well with the Poles. More here.
7. Hope and change vs reality. Well, it is a change, after all Bush didn’t implement the plan … Mr Obama did.
8. Never is a hard thing justify, i.e., let’s suggest a situation where the wife is in the process of beating her husband is he justified in striking back in defense?
9. Or another advertising plug for SWA.
10. Getting out and marching (for Christ and the Cross).
11. Theodicy.
12. For myself, I think a Amendment prohibiting the Feds (or States for that matter) from entering actuarial enterprises would be best. New Orleans is a prime example of why
13. In the past, I’ve tried to identify the difference between Liberal/Progressives, Conservatives, and Libertarians as a different ordering of the importance of Equality, Happiness, and Liberty, wherein each group puts the corresponding facet as the primary goal of government as primary. Here is a suggestion it is a different perspective on costs for the latter group.

Good morning.

1. Nuclear thoughts.
2. Pascha in Iraq.
3. One atheist and the empty tomb.
4. Praise and vitriol.
5. A prayer.
6. 10 party government!?
7. It seems to me the Blame Bush/Cheney, err, Obama chant is missing here.
8. Will the denizens of the Beltway read this?
9. Consternation? Huh!? Why?
10. The Left calls them chickenhawks, the parallel phenomena on the other side, “fake macho?“
11. More on the politics and daughter count thing.
12. Yer not qualified.
13. Unpaid interns and Mr Obama.
14. Fine tuned qualification lists.

This started as a reply about hermeneutic in the context of the flood on my personal blog. Do we take the flood literally or not. My interlocutor was exasperated exclaiming that to not take the text literally implies words have no meaning. This is exactly backwords. Here is my response to him.

Yes, you are exactly right. Words have meaning. There is this word hermeneutic, which I have used on more than one occasion used in this sentence. Yet, you gaily trounce in with replies like “Why start with the Bible at all? Why not just make up your own stories if that’s what you’re going to do anyway?” or other remarks along the “making it all up” line as if every religious person just takes their preconceptions and hammers the text until it fits. That is not what any honest theologian does (and I think the majority of people atheist or faithful are as honest as they can be). That word, hermeneutic means, “the method by which one extracts meaning from a text.” See that word there. Method. It is there for a reason. Read the rest of this entry

Good Morning.

1. On the Constitutionality question and healthcare, not so cut and dried as the defenders do pretend. And a little help in for your research on the matter.
2. Demographics and housing markets.
3. Iran.
4. On Pragmatism.
5. BSG, btw I’m just about finished with season 2.
6. A in race bike change done, well, just about perfectly.
7. Burning Judas.
8. Shifting standards, from a prior comment, “The threshold inquiry has to be the perspective of the women themselves, in their diverse circumstances, rather than imposing our perspective from up on high (and one size fits all).” So, the threshold inquiry about “maverick” status has to be from the perspective of Mr McCain himself, not imposing our perspective from on high (and one size fits all)?
9. Apparently at home moms are jobless.
10. Memory Eternal, one of best known Christian bloggers has passed. Noted, well everywhere.
11. Ontology and popular culture … or just a joke.
12. 40% of Tea Partiers are Democrats … oops.
13. Riding to work.
14. Drones.
15. Is that why I’m conservative?
16. And … for the Palin fans.

Good morning.

1. Two Saints and Good Friday.
2. Christian redemption, large and small scale.
3. A Serbian song for Pascha.
4. An egg.
5. The Press and the Catholic Church.
6. Canada and the JDL.
7. April fools pranks in Russia.
8. Stage magic and the Administrations energy policies.
9. The intern and the min wage.
10. Legal research.

Good morning.

1. Rape on the decline, tied to the increase in the prevalence of pornography. Kids ethics and a tie in? 
2. How about this?
3. And a really good point on porn.
4. Red Tories … a term I don’t know much of anything about but perhaps should look into.
5. Labels and cans, for the LOST fans.
6. Good Friday in the Ukraine.
7. And the short hymn (troparion) for Good Friday.
8. Faith on the rise.
9. Looking back at the campaign. 
10. Greece.
11. Having an majority interest in that company makes this move suspect.
12. The unicorn, a fiscally conservative Democrat?

The health care mandate is defended as Constitutional because it’s just a tax.

It gives people a choice: they can buy health insurance or they can pay a tax roughly equal to the cost of health insurance, which is used to subsidize the government’s health care program and families who wish to purchase health insurance….

Two questions.

1. Can the government mandate purchasing a GM automobile now that they have a controlling interest in GM with a similar tax, i.e., buy the car or pay a tax used to subsidize the program for those families to buy the same sort of car who cannot afford it? If the first is allowed, why not the second? And don’t pull the “not GM, but any automaker” argument. GM could install a proprietary widget in their car and the law would require that quite easily.
2. How about taxing people who don’t have at least one child of their own and adopt one child? Single -> tax. The tax roughly equal to the cost of supporting two children, which is used to subsidize those families which struggle to support those two children.

So, are the above two measures Constitutional? If they are not, why is the healthcare measure Constitutional while these are not?

Jim Anderson considers my turning the Theodicy question around. He suggests that this, in essence, means this is the “best of all possible worlds.” Now I suppose that could be a charge put to an omnipotent Good God, that is if this is not a Panglossian utopia … why not? But my claim in flipping theodicy was weaker than that. Let me try to isolate more abstractly (or succinctly) the question I had posed.

1. God wishes the love of his creatures. Love cannot be coerced his creatures must be free willed.
2. Following Kass’ arguments in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis from Genesis 1, creation is (and should therefore be) reasonable, that its workings comprehensible to rational creatures.

So, we have a rationally understandable universe in which creatures within it can do evil things if they choose. The ‘trap’ here for your omnipotent God wanting to prevent evil is the brute force approach is unworkable. That is if somehow an evil person, say SW (Snidely Whiplash), is prevented by deus ex machina or Rube Goldbergian coincidence every time he attempts acts of gratuitous violence they fail that this will make it impossible for a rational person to reject God.

Mr Anderson brings 6 points to bear.

1. His first point is one of imagination. He cannot imagine a rational universe with free willed actors without evil. He asks if his failure of imagination “imagine a world you can’t imagine” is a problem.
2. A “rigorously logical attempt will be confounded by the Butterfly Effect” … is an objection I don’t understand.
3. Point three (that there might be too much gratuitous evil in the world) argues that this is likely not the “best of all possible words”, a point I am not defending.
4. Point four reflects on point 3.
5. His fifth point is incomplete, considering that an “inversion of the Ontological Argument” might be necessary when considering the inversion of the Theodicy problem.
6. Is a self-directed ad hominem. That is, the evil in the world reflects really really poorly on us men and if it is indeed necessary it is callous to think that men have been, perhaps, constructed so that we were more naturally nice fellows.

This last point offers perhaps a clue as to where we might find a better universe, that is one populated by men less inclined to do evil?

The comments in his post trend toward mathematical thinking and I’ll offer one mathematical comparison. A school of mathematics is not happy with the method of proof by contradiction. A proof by contradiction demonstrates a fact not by construction but by demonstrating that a thing is impossible without really pointing to exactly why, i.e., by demonstrating that implications of a thing lead to a contradiction.

This “turnaround” of theodicy is perhaps similar, in that it suggests that assuming the opposite that is that a better universe is possible leads to a problem, that is our constructions of better universes have inherent contradictions, i.e., SW is magically ineffective.

Good morning.

1. Judas and a question.
2. On the bombings in Moscow.
3. Skilz.
4. A prediction.
5. Fun with numbers.
6. If you ever wonder how Mr Obama has been tied to sci-fi imagery … look no further.
7. Very light. Stupid light?
8. How? By selling them? No seriously, poor regions lacking any other financial means have nothing but their children for their retirement. Doesn’t that have to be fixed first?
9. The “Sandra Bullock” trade offered for consideration more abstractly.
10. A gay man considers Mr Phelps and a lawsuit.
11. Our congressmen … and this quote from Mr Obama “Mr. Obama with his characteristic empathy acknowledged there are ‘folks who have legitimate concerns … that the federal government may be taking on too much.’” Ya think? To bad he has no answer nor do his supporters.
12. I’m not sure that’s an April 1 post.

Good morning.

1. Arctic mineral rights.
2. Russia and Chechnya.
3. Contra self-esteem with no mention of Evagrius.
4. Progressives against poetry. Oddly enough however, he admits the term AD would be fine … which translates directly as “In the Year of Our Lord” to which he objects. What is it about progressives and their (selective?) dislike of poetry and metaphor?
5. And to pick on Mr Schraub a little more, yet again we find that self-named feminists can’t bring themselves around to criticising pornography qua pornography for its harmful role vis a vis women.
6. Being a young girl in the Afghan region.
7. Whining and kids these days. Back in my college days I remember being assigned to read War and Peace in its entirety over the one week Spring recess.
8. A Palm Sunday memorial you won’t see in the states.
9. Coming out.
10. The history of the student loan government takeover.
11. 3 new confessors.
12. Beam.
13. Washington’s inaccurate view of business. 
14. Economics and a video.
15. The loyal opposition and a call for a benefit of doubt.
16. John Polkinghorn.
17. Taxes and more on taxes. The second link is yet another big economic problem for raising taxes on “the rich” to pay for healthcare.

Saturday night my wife and I went to the symphony. One of the pieces we heard was Symphony no. 4 by Sergei Prokofiev. In the program notes, one of the things we were informed about this symphony was that it borrowed heavily from an earlier work a ballet entitled The Prodigal Son. Furthermore we were informed that the third movement borrowed from a section of the ballet which introduced (for sex appeal) a seductive dance by a female dancer/love interest, added to the story to increase popularity apparently. So when the the third movement came around, I was expecting seductive or melodic patterns that would fit a seductive dance. Yet I got a surprise. The third movement, to my ears, was quirky humorous and, well, goofy. To my minds eye, the exotic dance would feature a grinning minx with strident makeup, mismatched pigtails, a flouncy dress, and a puckish grin and attitude.

Here’s my point. While this is on occasion what I might find captivating and perhaps seductive … I think of myself unusual in this regard. I’ll freely admit, for example, in the Magic Flute, I’m more interested in the Popageno/Popagena love story than Tamino/Pamina story. What do you think of humor and puckish elements as part of seduction?

Theodicy is basically the question of how might a omnipotent good God permit bad things to happen to good or innocent people. This brings me to a question to which I have no good answer. Is there a better way of doing things than the sort of world in which we live? Qualities we consider the Trinitarian God posses include a notion that free loving relationships are of primary importance. God therefore loves us and desires us to love him. Love cannot be coerced but must be freely given. On the apologetics boundary, in discussions between those who believe and those who don’t, theodicy is pointed at as a discussion about whether or not God can exist or not given the existence of evil. But, this question can be turned another way. That is to ask given a God with certain properties does our world fit the expectations of the sort of world that God might create?

So, what properties do we think that a loving God who desires the free-willed love of his creation might possess? One might suggest that the following two qualities be present; that one might rationally choose to love Him and to rationally choose to not do so and that the creatures in that world be free to act against what He might wish. Furthermore observing that those creatures (us) that he has created are (nominally) rational, following Genesis 1 (and the Kass reading of the same) that it is good that the world in which we dwell be rational.

When one considers rape or murder of an innocent and natural disasters, those are typically the problems to which questions of theodicy are more clearly in evidence. These things occur in our world with regrettable regularity. So here’s the flip side theodicy question; that is, if you think theodicy inconsistent with the existence of a omnipotent loving Good God, how would creation differ if that was the case? Does a world in which natural disasters only strike the wicked allow for a person to rationally turn away from God? Does a world in which a rapist is halted by invisible forces allow that?

The claim is that theodicy is an intractable problem for the believer given the evil in the world. I think that this is not necessarily the case, but that those who object to the current state of affairs have failed to provide examples of a reasonable alternative world. Failing to do that means their theodicy objections lack force, that is they object to a state of affairs which may actually be exactly what is prescribed.

Good morning.

1. A discussion of the origin of a word.
2. Metal or paper? And no, in answer to a question a few days ago, (most of) my (retirement) investments are not in gold, but in index funds.
3. Considering federalism.
4. Calvin.
5. Abandon climate change.
6. Indifference and church.
7. How much luggage? How many passengers? Ice? Rain? 
8. Bush and Obama and their passover/holy week messages. What a weird exegesis of Exodus, btw. I wonder how that hermeneutic applies to Judges.
9. Employment. A map.
10. Why does any one read Yglesias? 
11. Mr Obama’s foreign policy.
12. On confession.
13. Tuesday of holy week, in the west. In the East, tonight the third and last bridegroom matins focuses on a comparison of the prostitute anointing Jesus feet and Judas betrayal.