Stones Cry Out

All that’s left for the economic stimulus bill is for President Obama to sign it.  A round-up of reaction:

Dan Spencer at RedState notes an Obama quote from the day before the bill passed, “We are not going to be able to perpetually finance the levels of debt that the federal government is currently carrying.”  The accompanying graphic is the ultimate irony.

CBS news reports that the President is going to convene a “fiscal responsibility summit” on February 23rd.  Again with the irony.  The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

And finally, satirist Scott Ott engages in some wishful thinking:

President Barack Obama said today that “after a restless night’s sleep” he will veto the $787 billion economic stimulus package passed by Democrats in Congress on Friday.

“I had a dream,” said a visibly shaken Mr. Obama. “that my daughters, Sasha and Malia, were trapped under the 1,100-page legislation. In the dream I saw my girls as women in their forties and they were still paying for this. I woke up, and did the math, and realized that it wasn’t just a dream. Has anybody read this thing yet?”

Read the whole thing, even if Congress won’t.

1. Two symbols examined, one a very important lady with a torch.
2. A feast day, the presentation.
3. The press and Islam.
4. The tour of California, a graphical view of what have your day job be in a saddle.
5. Lamarckian descent/inheritance revisited.
6. Chant.
7. “Move over to the side of the road” alligator version.
8. Of Apple and Microsoft.
9. So … now Mr Obama has taken up the “religion of peace” slogan. What is it with these Presidents?
10. Also, how about the religion of desecration?
11. Mr Ping and the stimulus.
12. I’m willing to bet that few, especially of his detractors, think of the Pope as cheerful (but I’ll wager he actually is such).
13. UK and “Fairness”.
14. Christ and Christianity without his death.
15. Obama and the birth certificate weirdness.
16. A lecture on an early heresy.
17. Why is that the left cannot argue for the stimulus without resorting to logical fallacies (poisoning the well and ad hominem attacks in this case)?
18. So … dollhouse, whaddya think, here’s an interview.
19. Five films.

A few weeks ago, I took issue with a quote offered on a particularly bad notion of how Christianity and culture have interacted through the ages. The quote is below, but I’m going to concentrate here on that part regarding Greece:

“In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”

But as I noted this, quote was was incorrect in just about every single idea it tries to convey. It may be a popular conception, that the Greek influence transformed Christianity through perhaps neo-Platonism popular in the first through 4th centuries in the Roman Empire, but this is a misconception and has little to do with the actual intellectual, historical, and practical actual evolution of the Christian faith through the ages.

During my plane ride back on Friday from the West Coast, I read through about the first third of The Vision of God by Vladimir Lossky. Mr Lossky in this book traces the development of the idea of how we as humans might see (perceive) God through the ages. Specifically he is also in the process of countering the idea developed by a certain Protestant theologian/historian that the Greek neo-Platonism was a lasting influence on the Christian understanding of theophany. I’m a little short on time tonight, but at some point during this week I plan to trace the development that Mr Lossky traces in this book. But, on the notion of “where it became a philosophy” I’ll offer a quick remark.

In the 2nd century Clement (150-211/216) and Origen where both very influential theologians in the period and they were both very much influenced by new-Platonism. In fact, well Plotinus, author of the Enneads, another Alexadrian is regarded as the founder of neo-Platonism for late antiquity it might be noted shared with Origen a high regard, each for the other. They were colleagues, in not unrelated spheres and their work influenced each other. However, the neo-Platonic influences guiding the nature of the understanding of the mystical experience and Theophany as a super-intellectual meditative activity was very short lived. It even might be argued that Origen himself was of two minds on this. In many of his writings theophany (or the perception of God) was seen as a meditative act, but in other writings on prayer and in some of his exigesis of Scripture he takes a different tack, seeing the act of exegesis and prayer in a non-intellectual experiential emotive manner.

Furthermore, by the 4th century with the Cappadocians (St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Basil the Great) and St. John Chrysostom it became clear that the idea of theophany as a super-intellectual activity carried out by philosophers and those combining apatheia and intellect to find God had disappeared. Another current that served to erode this idea was the culture of the Desert, as exemplified by St. Athanasius Life of St. Antony and John Cassian’s carrying of the desert culture and learning to Gaul.

The point is that if one was to take seriously the idea that Christianity “became a philosophy” that statement would only have held true for a few short centuries and at the same time that idea was only held by a few theologians and this idea was most definitely not a notion held by average or any substantial fraction of the Church membership, be they elite or “ordinary”.

1. The new openness in the Administration, “cannot comment on specific instances” … or not. More on the census as well.
2. Mr Reid notes a problem with the SBC.
3. Which was basically the same as the problem that St. John Chrysostom had 1500 years earlier.
4. Taking the WSJ to task.
5. If I was on the left, observations like this, “During the 2008 election, Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas” would be quite troubling.
6. Ecclesia.
7. Endurance sports and camaraderie … perhaps a Romans 5:3 thing?
8. Banach-alia.
9. One model reviewed … the sort of thing detail and discussion lacking in the beltway to support their policies.
10. Whether or not there is a right to privacy … the government certainly has reserved the right to extreme stupidity.
11. Aha! (from the left).
12. Supply, Afghanistan and the necessity for relations with Pakistan.
13. Coptic resource for the coffee table.
14. Yikes.
15. CBO and stimulus.
16. Big number found.
17. The state, morality and legislation.
18. Pippin and Obama.
19. Considering the Cylons.
20. It was remarked in a comment here that “no debate has been stifled” regarding the stimulus bill … evidence to the contrary is here.
21. A suggestion regarding the housing market problem I’ve mentioned (in conversation if not on the blog) made elsewhere.
22. So … if you think carbon offsets are an issue … how much do you use a bike for daily travel? If not, perhaps you’re just a hypocrite like Mr Gore.

This is an attempt to examine the question:

Vigilantism is justified when the government has failed to enforce the law.

In the following, two aspects of this question will be examined. One is to examine a famous example of the social custom of vigilantism in a very libertarian society in our American historical past. The second will attempt to touch on some of the foundational political aspects of this question, i.e., to look at authority and society and where force fits into that picture. Please find bulk of the essay “below the fold”. Read the rest of this entry

There is no way that we could possibly eliminate single parenthood.  It’s not an ideal environment to raise a child, but sometimes it simply can’t be helped. 

However, single parenthood by choice — mostly single motherhood — is certainly something we ought to discourage.  Dan Quayle got castigated by Hollywood when he pointed to the TV character Murphy Brown, who chose single motherhood, as a bad example.  He was right.  Obviously so to those of us who understand how important it is to be raised by a mother and a father, but not so much for those that think everything’s cool.

It took a long time to see some of the effects, but in Britain, it’s revealing itself.

A deputy head who sat on a Government taskforce aimed at improving behaviour in schools yesterday condemned a generation of modern parents as ‘uber-chavs’.

Ralph Surman said the parents of today’s pupils were themselves the children of the ‘first big generation of single mothers’ from the 1980s.

He claimed they – and in turn their children – have been left with no social skills or work ethic and may be impossible to educate.

Mr Surman spoke out in response to figures unearthed by the Conservative Party, which show that the number of 16 to 24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training – known as NEETs – is rising across Britain.

‘We must talk about a class of uber-chavs,’ he said.

‘They are not doing anything productive and are costing taxpayers a fortune.

When everything is provided to you at other’s cost, you have no appreciation for it.  Government wanted to show it cared by providing care for these children and their mothers.  It took much of the worry out of being a single mother by choice, and it took much of the guilt away from men who abandoned their children ("Hey, they’ll be taken care of by the nanny state."). 

Yes, the Bible tells us to take care of the widows and orphans, but personally.  When we abrogate that function to the impersonal government, don’t be surprise when people start to take it for granted and expect it.  And the results, it seems, are worse for those who give and those who receive.

Another interesting story that came out about California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage, and the effort to make public the names of donors who supported it, was this article from NPR showing how the Teacher’s Union and its own teachers were on different sides of the question.

As California’s legal and cultural conflict over same-sex marriage played out this fall, the state’s teachers union put up $1.25 million to advocate against the gay marriage ban.

But at the same time, individual public school teachers in the state were giving more money to enact the ban than to defeat it, according to an NPR analysis of Proposition 8 contribution data recently released by the California secretary of state.

Teachers, aides and counselors in California public school systems gave about $2 to support the marriage ban for every $1 they gave to oppose it. The educators gave some $450,000 in individual contributions to advocates supporting the ban and about $210,000 to those opposing it, according to the NPR analysis.

So the union went against the very people it purports to represent, and spent the dues money teachers are obligated to pay in a political cause that the majority of dues-payers opposed.  What a scam!  If you want to educate our upcoming generation, you must donate to political causes that you disagree with.  No wonder liberals love unions; it’s a cash cow for their pet causes.

Never mind the fact that an organization who’s purpose is to supposedly look out for the rights of teachers is giving money to a political cause completely unrelated to their charter.  Not only are teachers forced to underwrite this, it has nothing at all to do with their welfare as teachers. 

I say again; what a scam.

From Michael Ramirez (click for a larger version):

Henceforth, should any Congressman tack on anything to any bill ever, he or she can just say, “Hey, it’s economic stimulus for my district!”  Obama and the Democrats have redefined the word “earmark” into oblivion.

1. A book recommended.
2. Transparency or not, perhaps Mr Twain’s little saying might be amended to “lies, damned lies, statistics, and anything said by a politician”.
3. Just a trip to the UK.
4. Some kids living where winter doesn’t come.
5. Well, you’ll have to pay for that … and the other.
6. The Pope on the ladder.
7. A heroic lady noted, Stanislawa Leszczynksa.
8. A hill … and a bike … and another rider noted here.
9. The difference between Mr Obama and the Dems stimulus bill and Tenaha … the size of their theft.
10. They are.
11. Who. Are. You.
12. A question.
13. Another.
14. Mr Obama standing firm against the economy and recover and its effects. Ah. It’s all part of a super duper secret plan.
15. Why Wednesday and Friday (and Monday for the monastics I think) for fasting?
16. Salary caps and a comparison.
17. Religion and nation.
18. Some economic hypothesis tested.
19. Yet another Democratic tax cheat close to the President.

The legal defense of abortion rests on a claim of a right to privacy. Alas, following the argument below, it seems this right is used as a legal proxy and is not consistently applied. By legal proxy, I mean that it is the legal argument/excuse used to justify the legalization of abortion (for other reasons unstated) and is not a right which is given in other comparable or parallel circumstances. Consider the following three somewhat related cases involving immunization. Immunization is fundamentally a private thing involving the manipulation of your immune system, which is clearly a private part of your person. If the state feels it can adjust and order your immune system programming for its purposes, logically it can also do so in the case of pregnancy.

1. Pubic schools demand immunization of children attending. While it might be said that public education is not a right, education is a requirement placed by the state on parents. You cannot legally raise your child and deny him or her an education. However that is not relevant to the question. The point is, immunization being private should not be a question asked or required to be answered by the state regarding education or any other purpose.
2. When you travel abroad certain immunizations and proof of the same are required for exit and re-entry into the country. One cannot claim a right to privacy to waive this requirement. Again, if this is private how can the state justify this in the face of their stated alliance to a right of privacy. Should one not logically be able, akin to “claiming a fourth Amendment right” be able to stake a claim to one’s right to privacy and refuse to provide information regarding your immunization status?
3. Consider the case of a modern carrier, a Typhoid Mary, if you will. That is to say, ,she/he is a person, symptom free, who is an active vector for a disease. I claim that this person if identified, would be given treatment and by court order if she refused. When this was suggested earlier in a comment, Boonton suggested she might be exiled. However this suggestion clearly fails under examination as the public/foreign relations problem of knowingly sending an active disease vector to another state is, well, just a little problematic. Perhaps we might also, in those states where there is no capital punishment, exile serial killers as well. The only realistic solution, once discovered, is that this person would be treated, willingly or not.

How is that from a legal standpoint are immunizations required? The logical reason is of course the health and safety of the people. Yet over a million are killed per year by abortion. That is clearly a health and safety issue for quite a number of human lives, in fact a quite terminal question for those. And, if you argue the non-personhood of a early term fetus, one still faces the 45 late term abortions performed per day … and after that a small number of executions of infants for whom that late term abortion was intended but botched (botched in that the infant was failed to be murdered at the appropriate moment in the delivery process). It is in this latter case that our current President (in)famously argued that those failed executions should be carried out at any rate.

So there is a logical inconsistency here. Abortion is claimed as a privacy right. Yet analogous privacy rights are waived every day in circumstance not related to abortion and the reason that right is waived is exactly the same claim made by the abortion opponents why abortion should be regulated if not prevented. So perhaps dropping the rights talk regarding privacy in the legal and ethical discussions might be helpful, for that’s really just a smoke screen for something else.

The election in Israel, the outcome of which makes parliamentary government very entertaining to watch, gave more votes to right-leaning parties than to left-leaning ones.  Meryl Yourish with the analysis:

The vote in Israel shows that a majority of Israelis voted for right-leaning parties. Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party, loathed by many for issues like wanting Arab Israelis to swear a loyalty oath, won fifteen seats in the Knesset. Labor, the party that gave us the worst Defense Minister ever (but the best Stalin lookalike, Amir Peretz) won only thirteen. The “peace” parties—the parties that the world most expected to bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians—were shoved aside. Why is that? Why is Labor doomed to the opposition, and Meretz even more marginalized than before?

Her answer is basically that the rockets voted. That’s actually a phrase I read in an opinion piece in the Atlantic, though it does convey her meaning. 

But the thing is, the rocket fire hasn’t traumatized the Israelis so much as it has woken them up.

Israelis want peace. But the policies of the last decade have failed. So Israelis are voting for the strong horse, as they say, but only just. The right-leaning parties have a bare majority in a 120-seat Knesset. The majority of Israelis no longer trust the peace process, because they’ve tried it for decades, and every time Israel gives up land, in return, they get terror.

The Gaza Strip was not blockaded when Israel first pulled out. Instead of working on building Gaza up economically, Gazans destroyed every last vestige of Israel, including the greenhouses, and then installed Hamas firmly into the government. The message to Israel was clear: We’re still going to destroy you. The thousands of missiles carried that message to southern Israel on a regular basis. Even now, Hamas refuses to stop the rockets, refuses to put aside “resistance,” and still calls for an Islamic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Israelis aren’t stupid. They were hopeful. They were optimistic. They were willing to believe that the Palestinians wanted peace just as much as they did.

They were wrong.

And that’s why the Israeli vote went to the right. Not because of the drivel that you read in the AP that says Israelis have a “self image as a besieged nation surrounded by enemies.” Not because “many Israelis are still traumatized by the Palestinian uprising.”

Sorry, John Lennon.  They gave peace a chance, for decades, frankly, and through the barrage of thousands of terrorist attacks in just the last 7 years.  Every effort and concession has been made and still their adversaries will simply not abide by their agreements. 

So now, Israel has spoken, and softly at that.  This was not an overwhelming change in political power, but it was significant.  Israel’s attackers have been put on notice.  Once more.

I wasn’t a big fan of Dubya’s faith-based initiatives.  Well, I was at first, but I was later convinced that, since whoever pays the bills makes the rules, that having government pay the bills was a bad  idea for churches.  It opened them up to having to do things their faith told them not to in order to keep the money coming in.

Of course, there’s another more general reason to avoid new government programs; they expand to fill whatever void the government finds; real or perceived.  And President Obama is busy looking for voids.

President Barack Obama on Thursday signed an order establishing a White House office of faith-based initiatives with a broader mission than the one overseen by his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush.

Obama said the office would reach out to organizations that provide help "no matter their religious or political beliefs."

Obama is calling his program the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

(I would have put this in another ChangeWatch entry, more of the same alleged "theocracy" that Bush was supposedly foisting on us, yet continued and expanded under Obama, but thought it could use its own post.)

I wasn’t aware of a doctrinal test for Bush’s faith-based initiative, but Obama is claiming credit for expanding the reach.  Nifty sleight of hand there.

But the most notable expansion of the program is the addition of the word "Neighborhood".  The partnerships are "faith-based and neighborhood", not "faith-based neighborhood", meaning the neighborhood partnerships don’t have to be faith-based.  This turns the program into an untargeted channel for any and all grassroots groups.  As Warner Todd Hudson notes, sounds like yet another vector for funds to ACORN. 

Hudson also wondered (last Saturday, when he wrote his piece) whether the Left, and the Kos krowd in particular, will give Obama a pass on this, unlike the screams of "church and state!" they gave Bush when he created it.  Well, as of today, if you search Daily Kos back two weeks for the phrase "faith-based", you get exactly one hit, and that article still raps the GOP for it.  Yeah, still OK if their guy does it.  It’s still all about politics.  Such blind partisanship.

1. A question of politics, “should the liberal state permit the existence of non-liberal communities?” I think so, but my argument will not fit in the margin of this page.
2. Well, those Keynesians in government voted themselves more power and got their panacea. Some more remarks here.
3. One more thing for schools to waste money on.
4. Time and church.
5. Napoleon, err, the Anglicans in Egypt.
6. Mr Wilders and “freedom” in the UK.
7. Verse.
8. Healthcare rationing and the stimulus bill is a cowardly way to avoid debate.
9. The Hindu Melkite.
10. An odd film noted and reviewed.
11. So Mr tax-fraud Geithner offers bank bailout version 2, or the fix for bad debt for the credit industry is to accumulate as much more bad debt as possible. Hair of the dog as very very expensive policy?
12. What if I am weak?
13. That “economic consensus” for the stimulus, alas exists only amongst politicians.
14. Two recent films compared.
15. In which yet another lefty discovers the bigotry is hers.
16. No, I have not.
17. A discussion of guilt, innocence and punishments and another (from the left) who just bought the argument hook line and sinker.
18. Epistemology and climate “science.”
19. The cross survives.
20. On fasting.
21. A cool video.
22. So, its been what, two weeks? After four years … one wonders how disillusioned the left will be?
23. If I had more money than I knew what do do with.

Many early Christians enjoyed number coincidences and used them in their prayers and writings. In that vein I offer some coincidences between our understanding of nature and Christian theology.

God in the Christian understanding is Three and One in Trinity. As Christ as well is both Man and God expressing two natures in one person.

Matter displaying wave and particle behavior having two natures in one. Furthermore, fundamental particles are deployed in three lepton and quark families respectively. With SU(3) of color (strong forces) and Gell-Mann’s eightfold way also the eight cardinal virtues and sins. Examine the forces in nature and we find there are three massless (gluon/strong, photon/electric, and graviton/gravity) and one with massive (weak/W&Z) … again the three and the one.

St. Augustine in his Confessions wrote that Nature worships God via our deepening understanding of it. Little did he know how well nature recapitulates theological ontology as the Standard Model post-dated St. Augustine by just a few years.

Then again, why does space have 10 dimensions? 😀

Preaching through the Ten Commandments, our pastor came to the 6th.  One of things I found fascinating is that there are quite a number of words for "kill" in Hebrew, and the King James translation doesn’t do much to get across this particular word.

Lo ratzach; don’t murder.

There is a word in Hebrew for killing an animal.  This is not that word.  You can be a vegetarian or vegan if you like, but you can’t use this verse as Biblical backup for your position.  (Actually, the Bible has a number of references showing that God’s OK with meat-eating.)

There is a word in Hebrew for killing in battle.  This is not that word.  You can be a pacifist if you like, but you can’t use this verse as Biblical backup for your position.  (Actually, the Bible has a number of references where God commands his people to make war on those God wishes to punish.)

There is a word in Hebrew for killing in self-defense or defense of another.  This is not that word.  You can be a police officer and kill someone in the line of duty while protecting yourself or others and you will not have broken this commandment.  You can protect an intruder with deadly force, and not be guilty of breaking this commandment. 

There is a word in Hebrew for the purposeful taking of an innocent life.  This is that word. 

Read the rest of this entry