Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

A Juxtaposition

Christianity, Culture | Posted by George
Sep 16 2011

Obsidian shards of despair piercing black emptiness, puncturing the hollow nothing of existing without existence.  Instead of the significance of being, reality is only the torture of inky agonies and furious furies against a backdrop of starless void.  Can meaning exist in the black hole of futility?

Effervescent ebullience by surprise, by design… drifting aloft into the pastel sky, the perpetual sunrising of joy.  Amazed by the lightness of reality in the face of approval.  Electrified by the infusion of purpose in the position of ecstasy.  Can existence be meaningless in the supernova of God’s eternal pleasure?

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Yeah, but did Jesus predict Harold Camping?

Christianity, Culture, God, News, Religion | Posted by George
May 23 2011

So now we all know that Harold Camping did not accurately predict Jesus’ return… but perhaps more importantly, did Jesus predict Harold Camping? But then, why should anyone care?

“Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.”  (Matt 24:11) That was easy! We can surely agree that Jesus predicted false prophets, and Mr. Camping wasn’t the first.  Interestingly, Jesus’ prophecy regarding false prophets is in the context of the lead-up to the day of His own coming.  It is fascinating, then, that Harold Camping’s false prophecy leans toward confirming Jesus’ true prophecy!

But then again, many atheists of our day prophesied the embarrassment of Harold Camping as well… planning parties, creating whimsical mockeries using “left-behind” clothes in photos, making the most of entrepreneurial opportunities created by false prophesy, etc.

So why should we care? Well that depends on your standpoint.  So choose a world-view and read on…

Believers in Jesus

If you believe that Jesus meant what He said, then the remainder of Matthew 24 would be useful to you.  In reading it, you will find that Jesus’ commands are to beware of deception, to not be afraid, (by implication) to maintain carefully your love of God and endurance, to be ready, and to be doing the work of the Master when He returns.  Did you skip over this list?  If you are a believer in Jesus, Harold Camping’s false prophecy is a real indication that perhaps you should make sure you re-read this list and be actively doing what He says!  Let’s not worry so much about when and how and whether we are pre-mid-post-mil-trib-wrath-istic or otherwise, and let’s just do what Jesus said to be doing when we begin to see the signs of His coming!

Atheists

Why should an atheist care?  Well, interestingly, the whole of the secular atheism establishment is strengthening the faith of the faithful atheists, bolstered by the foolishness of those who believed foolishly in that which was not true.

This also is very consistent with what Jesus predicted in Matthew 24: “The love of many will grow cold.”

Perhaps even more incredible is how these events (which Jesus said “MUST happen”) are setting you, my dear atheist, for your own failed prophecies.  But I should explain.

In Revelation 19:19, there is an amazingly crazy statement.  It says that the rulers of the earth all get together with their armies to fight against Jesus and his heavenly army.  At first glance, it would seem preposterous that anybody would be so stupid as to intentionally go out to fight against God, and indeed it is preposterous.  But this strongly suggests to us that there needs to be some very powerful strengthening of the faith of these anti-God-ites who decide to fight against the All-Powerful One.

In the light of this, we see that the whole Harold Camping prophecy, huge monies spent advertising his failed predictions, and even the media craze and popular hype of this predictable failure… all these are truly necessary for a faith-building exercise for those who desire to believe in not-God.  This has truly been spectacularly effective, although I suspect we will need even more faith-building before we can get everybody so convinced that we all head out with our AK-47s, tanks, and nuclear warheads to fight against God.

So expect some additional hype in the months to come… the Mayan Calendar of 2012 thing should help a bunch too.  Mockery helps a ton.  Figure out a good angle so you can make some money on the next one.

And one other thing, start to feel justified in your hatred for believers.  Jesus predicted this as well, so we can be expecting increasing militancy in your circle of friends and fellow not-God believers.

So, I guess if you want to get to my point, it is simply this, that if you want to continue in your faith, you will have ample opportunity to bolster your faith through mockery, leading to hatred.  But in the end, your faith-inspired (check previous blogs that demonstrate this) prophecy of not-God will meet up with unfortunate evidence to the contrary.  So my counsel is to beware, although such counsel is probably pretty hard to hear, right?

Harold Camping Disciples (or Ex-disciples)

Just because Mr. Camping blew it does not mean God did.  Your issue is the same as his: if you know the Book but don’t hear the voice of the Author, you will be deceived.  Shove the shame off.  Kill off the condemnation.  So you were duped… like most everybody else in one way or another!  You proved faithful, but unfortunately you were faithful to foolishness – find God and be faithful to the Father Himself instead of what somebody says Father meant when He said something some time. Press in and find out what Father is saying to you today.  He’s not mad at you, and He did not disappear as May 21st ticked away.  Just be happy that the deception has been dealt with and move forward toward God – not some religious futility promoted by someone who claims to know the Bible.

The Bible or religion never was going to save you anyway.  That’s God’s job.

Everybody Else

Well, if you are in between or just aren’t sure whether you believe anything or not, then let me say this: don’t get swept up in the mockery.  I know that it is very tempting.  Fooled people are easy to laugh at!  But in the middle of the mockery is the powerful deception that nothing is true… that lie that says that God Himself was wrong because a bunch of people supposedly speaking for Him were very, publicly, outrageously wrong.  And it would be very tempting to gloat a little bit about how you were less wrong because you weren’t even nervous on May 21st.  Tempting, but dangerous.  A better approach?  Do the God experiment, and ask Him if He would show Himself to you… then listen with an open heart.  Because if Jesus predicted Harold Camping, then we may be at the beginning of the end :-) .

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Truth beyond the Provable

Christianity, Culture, God, Religion | Posted by George
Apr 26 2011

Huios: Well, hello, friend Sci-atheist.  I understand you wanted to talk to me?

Sci-atheist: Yes.  I knew you to be a reasonable person and wanted to chat about one of your favorite topics: God.

Huios:  Really!? Sure!  Would you like to get to know Him?

Sci-atheist:  Well, no, but I have been thinking, and I am pretty sure that I can refute any argument you choose to prove that God exists…

Huios:  OK.

Sci-atheist:  What?  You give up?  That was easier than I expected!  You agree there is no God?

Huios:  Well, yes and no.  I agree that I cannot prove that God exists, although you really have to do some philosophical cartwheels to explain away things like meaning and minds… and you really have to accept some pretty unscientific improbabilities to believe in things like evolution and the existence of an ordered universe.  But given all that, along with some serious quantum-mechanical hand-waving, I agree that I cannot prove God’s existence to you.

Sci-atheist:  So have you given up being a fool?

Huios:  If I get your meaning, I suspect we differ in our definitions of the term “fool” but actually, I am most definitely still a believer in God.  I just don’t think I can prove Him to you – especially with “scientific” evidence.  You see, the God I know existed before the stuff of this world – the stuff of science.  In fact, He created both the space into which the stuff was to go, and the time of its existence.  He exists… or existed… or will exist… or all of the above, since I don’t really know how to talk without reference to time… but His existence is without reference to time or space since these are merely elements of His creation.  There was a first day and will be a last day.  Along here somewhere, there will no longer be any place for the earth or the sky and it will all just not be anywhere.  I guess they (space, time, stuff) could all be considered “temporary” relative to the eternity dimensions in which He exists.  All of space-time, all of the rules inherent within space-time, and all the stuff inside space-time are elements of His creation.  Sure, He can and does interact within this bubble of His creation, tweaking this, inserting that, or canceling the other thing as He determines, but that is at His discretion.  So no set of natural experiments will require you to believe in God – He is anchored outside of this natural world that we can experiment on!

Sci-atheist:  But you say that He sometimes intervenes in the natural world – and I know you believe in miracles?!?  So why not have Him do a miracle right now for me?

Huios:  Well, first of all, He is God and not me… I don’t generally “have Him do” things.  Usually I just talk to Him and then He tells me what to be doing and how to do it…  when I do what He says, sometimes there are miracles, but He is no genie in a bottle!

Sci-atheist:  But if He really wants us to believe that He exists, why wouldn’t He just prove Himself?

Huios:  That is a fair question, so let’s look at it.  First, let’s note that God desires to give mankind free will within the boundaries of this life within space-time.  He decided to allow mankind an amazing degree of freedom to choose – all sorts of choices, including whether to believe or not to believe in Him!  Second, my Daddy God does not fit naturally (in His fullness) inside His creation… the more one becomes aware of Him, the weaker is ones hold on the bubble of space-time.  In particular, if Daddy were totally exposed to everyone, nobody would have any free will at all – we’d all be believers!  So God’s desire for a man with free-will precludes your desired demonstration of God.

Sci-atheist:  So in a sense, God conveniently refuses to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt?

Huios: Well, yes, for now.  As I understand it, after time is done (and I understand that this seems like an oxymoron, so let’s just say “outside the bubble of space-time”) there will be a moment (there we go again with time-words) in which all see Him, and then free-will will evaporate like every other thing that used to exist (time, again! J) inside the space-time bubble, and then, every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus…

Sci-atheist: Hold on!  Let’s not go there.  But what you are saying is you can’t prove God’s existence.  So you basically give up!

Huios:  Well, you see why, right?  Since Daddy’s existence is rooted outside the bubble, we can’t force experiments on Him.  Since God wants us to have free will, He enforces your right to think like an atheist… at least for now.  So you see what I mean?  There is no way to prove…

Sci-atheist:  That’s right – you cannot prove such a God, so I guess I win!

Huios:  Wait, a second!  He is not provable, but by the same token, He is not falsifiable.  And incidentally, if you consider yourself a scientist, yours is the burden of proof!  Remember the most basic approach to science?  It is a process of creating a null hypothesis and performing an experiment that falsifies your hypothesis.  Unfortunately for your quest for proof, I think you may have a real difficulty in coming up with any falsifiable hypotheses.

Sci-atheist:  No proof either way… hmmm….  Well if you can’t prove God and can’t disprove Him, He must be pretty irrelevant, right?

Huios:  That does not quite follow.  You see, the God I know is the most central part of my life… and yours too (believe Him or not :-) .  It’s just you don’t know it.  But there will be a day when knowing Him will be the only relevant thing, and you and I will both know it then.

Sci-atheist:  Yeah?  Your fearful day of judgment?  Well, how could a good God…?

Huios:  Stop!  Just how are you defining “good”?  Usually, someone who asks a question like the one you were posing defines a “good” that does not depend on God.  But a God Who is ignored in the definition of “good” is a God who has been defined away by the poser of the question!  Can you say “straw man”?  Define good as what God is, and then try to ask the question without imposing your own inconsistency.

Sci-atheist:  Ouch!!  Well, I guess that this whole discussion still leaves us without much of an answer… what a waste of time!

Huios:  Hold on, though… There is one thing that has been discovered!

Sci-atheist:  Really?  Proven?  What is that?

Huios:  We have discovered that we each believe what we choose.  You choose your perspective and hold to it with the same sort of faith of which you have always been aggravated by seeing in others.  I have faith in God; you have faith that there is no God.

Sci-atheist:  Well, you may have a point, but your faith is so blind!

Huios:  Blind is an apt descriptor for one who intentionally chooses to believe that something cannot exist outside of a certain comfortable bubble.  I have heard your own sneering laughter at those who believed the earth was the center of the universe, but there are many who even more foolishly wish to believe the universe is the center of all existence.  It is the same sort of mistake, taking that which seems central and assuming it is the ultimate center without recognizing that which is less comfortable and less accessible – that which is beyond.  But in this case, the costs of universe-centrism are even more significant than earth-centrism:  missing out on the purpose and person of our Creator and Savior.  But the consequences of choosing to know God are too difficult for many people – they know they would have to bend the knee now (in time) as well as later (after time), and we all like to do whatever we want.  “There is none so blind as the one who refuses to see.”

So there are some who are blind, but my faith is not truly blind.  Look, you act like you believe in me – Huios, a person – a sentient entity beyond my amassed set of molecules and biological processes.  You relate to me like a friend.  Yet you cannot prove that there is anything beyond my atomic carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, electrical impulses, genetic codes… but you believe in me as a person because you relate to me, talk with me, find out about me, KNOW me.  I call you a friend because I do the same with you.  I believe in my Daddy God because I do the same with Him – I KNOW Him.

Sci-atheist:  But I don’t know Him… if He exists at all…

Huios:  Then be an extra-bubble scientist and do an extra-bubble experiment!   Send a message out from this bubble into the realm beyond: ask Daddy God to invade your personal space and somehow set up a person-to-person connection… not so much a proof as a relationship.  Then tell Him you’d like to get to know Him… and that you are willing to get to know Him if He will show you something of Himself….  But only do it if you really want to, because He won’t force the issue… you can always choose to not believe in Him!  Still, I recommend that you do the experiment and find out that He is there.

Sci-atheist:  That hardly seems safe, if it were true…

Huios:  You are correct.  It is not remotely safe in the conventional sense of the word.  But it is hardly safe not to know Him since He IS, provable or not.

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Fixing Education

Culture, Education Reform, Free Market, Politics, Socialism, USA | Posted by George
Apr 11 2011

Fixing Education

Yeah, it is no real surprise: the US educational system needs fixing.  So how do you fix it?

Well, how do you fix anything that is so steeped in socialism, it hardly knows what to do any more except require more money?

That is a simpler question.  You create competition at every level.  You weed out corruption in the government complex that runs the show – and if government is a necessary component, you create a watchdog that is strongly incented to find and reduce favoritism.  You reduce the regulatory overload that bureaucracy naturally creates. You get information out to the market so that the competition can do it’s job most effectively – with an informed consumer.  And then you let the free market system do what it does best – create a better product at lower cost.

So let’s apply those principles, and make it obvious what the US needs to do.

Create competition at every level. That means that every teacher, every school, every district competes against every other one for the students that will keep their school in business.  That means that every student and every parent will need to compete to get into the schools that best promote the student’s objectives.  And that means that every community and every business will have a vested interest in financially investing in their own future – the students going through their schools.

So let’s get to hard decisions.  What should education look like?

First, you pin a check for $10,000 (to pick a random number in the right ballpark) to the shirt of every child in the US on September 1.  That means that the ingenuity of American educators everywhere would be leveraged to create the best opportunities for their potential clients – kids from age 5 to 18.  Schools would be required to publish information on their students’ standardized test scores, acceptance to various colleges, placement into jobs of various incomes, and other relevant information, allowing students and parents to choose among schools that are succeeding and those that are not, weeding out the poorer schools and increasing the profitability of those models that are helping more children.

Next, you let a school make its own enrollment decisions to promote its approach and image, creating a second layer of competition.  A school can cater to students with certain strengths, particular desires, or certain needs.  Schools could focus on vocation, science, business, or liberal arts. Students or parents who are motivated to attend a certain school will compete on the basis of parent volunteerism or student effort or ability.  Schools would not be required to retain students who create disciplinary problems unless the student or a parent is willing to take immediate remedial action.  Businesses could invest in vocational schools, even guaranteeing employment for successful graduates.  Universities could make agreements with the academically most competent students for rapid advancement similar to current 3+2 expedited masters degree programs.

As a side note, urban centers can have numerous specialized schools, but even students in rural areas could attend schools of their choice via Internet “satellite schools” in which (perhaps volunteer, or other low-cost) room monitors and computers connect the students to a variety of schools taught by central educators online (or via video).  Note also that any student in any location could in principle be part of such a distributed educational classroom – suddenly we do not have to move inner-city kids out or suburbanites in to mix things up; let the Internet do the bussing.  This approach can level the playing field and make opportunity proportional to effort or aptitude instead of location or caprice.  Given the $10K check, only the human imagination is the limit to the educational approach, and many would be willing to provide powerful novel approaches to education.

By catering to older students with special scheduling or family needs, special schools providing alternative schedules – say, weekends and/or evenings – could provide a route to increase graduation percentages.

Schools could be privately held or publicly traded corporations.  In either case, the profit motive would be sufficient to both increase the effectiveness and decrease the cost of American education.

What is the role of the government? The government does not do a good job of most domestic services, but it has two excellent roles here, as well as a few other smaller functions.  First, it can assemble and distribute the funding.  (I would like to discuss the way that the government should fund things, but that’s a bigger question than I want to address here.)  Even in this role, government cannot be trusted and it would be to the taxpayers’ benefit to have a watchdog that is financially incented to find and eradicate corruption.  Second, the government should maintain a minimum level of acceptable output.  Given the dismal state of education in our current system, it might seem that the government could not do even this job well, but it is important that there be care against abuse of children or gross negligence regarding their education, and it is a role of justice that the government can fill.  We need to beware, however, lest the government place so many requirements on the education of student that the businesses become unprofitable – government bureaucracy has a real tendency in this direction – so the real requirement is basic justice and an advocate for parents as the parents and students exercise their choice to maintain real educational accountability of the schools.

For the time being, it is important that the decentralization of the school bureaucracy be unhampered; thus, it is essential that educational businesses be empowered to combat dominant centralized unions.  Businesses naturally resist the inefficiency of unions, so unless the government interferes by requiring them or unduly enabling their continued existence, competition will drive them to the fringes unless and until they become necessary.

Finally, an independent informational service should be created to enforce truth in educational advertising and to provide an information infrastructure for legitimate decision-making for the customers (students and their parents), businesses (the schools), and their collaborators (communities, businesses, and institutions of higher education).

Our educational system has become increasingly socialistic – liberal government bureaucracy and unions opposing any real reform.  And because of its socialistic bent, the system’s costs continue to rise while its effectiveness continues to plummet — that is how socialism works!  It is time to return to our American roots –giving our people opportunity to succeed or fail, leveraging market forces to create a better product at lower cost, and saving our country’s future from the dwindling returns of mediocrity.

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Your Life in My Driveway, etc.

Culture, Freedom, Justice | Posted by George
Mar 04 2011

Your Life in My Driveway

If, for some reason, somebody bound and gagged you and then laid you across my driveway, would ownership of my own property give me the right to run you over?

A foolish question indeed. Your right to be unbattered supersedes the normal exercise of my rights of ownership. But I could just untie you and then I can be on my way…

What if with some amazing feat of technology, someone made it so you would explode if you were removed from my driveway before a year had expired… how long would I have to put up with the infringement of my rights of ownership? Would I have to allow for further intrusion based on your need for food and care?

More foolish questions! Your right to live would definitely supersede the normal exercise of my rights of ownership. So just make a second driveway to access the garage.

What if instead of being vitally connected to my driveway, you were vitally connected to my body – in 9 months you can be separated, but until then, you will die if you move away or disconnect from my body…. Should my right to move freely and freely associate be more important than your right to live?

This is all silly. The answers are all obvious. It is not your fault you are connected to my driveway or to me. And I should not turn my back on your life because of my various less important rights. Sure, I should let you live, but must I let you be vitally connected to my body?

Then suppose instead that I personally took the steps to make you utterly dependent for your survival upon me and my body. I chose to get you into that position… then am I morally obligated to see it through to the end… and let you survive? What if I made you dependent on me with the help of someone else? Is my right to my body enough to let you die in that circumstance?

The implications to the question of abortion are obvious and immediate.

Fetal Humanity vs. Fetal Personhood

A fetus is every bit as human as you are. In fact, as soon as fertilization is complete, the genetic signature of that embryonic creature declares its humanity. The DNA also clearly demonstrates that the fetus is a different human individual than either of his or her parents – an embryo is a unique human being. (Neither a zygote nor a sloughed off human cell can be said to be a unique human, although each has the potential of becoming – through fertilization or through cloning.)

A fetus is every bit as alive as you are, and killing a fetus is killing a unique human being.

A fetus is every bit as much a person as you are, unless someone decides that it is more convenient to define this particular set of humans as less than a person. Certainly there are numerous examples of this in history, although most who define a fetus as less than a person would prefer not to be associated with Nazis (like Hitler) who dehumanized Jews or other racists (like Margaret Sanger) who selectively targeted humans with darker colored skin as less desirable members of the human race. People are killed for many different reasons, and some of them may even be just and appropriate reasons, but if we dehumanize the target human so that the reason for destruction can be as significant or as insignificant as an individual chooses, and so that a single individual renders verdict on a human’s life or death without hope of appeal, we surely cannot conclude that we are just.

Does a fetus need to have thoughts or emotions to be worthy of human protection? Ask someone who’s been in a coma for 9 months and lived to tell about it. Is someone in a coma a “potential human”?

Does a fetus need to be independently able to survive to deserve human protection? Ask anyone with a medical condition that made him dependent on someone else for 9 months. Is a paraplegic a “potential human”?

If I were temporarily implanted into an obese man’s excess, would I cease being human and become a “potential human”? An obnoxious mental picture, but one that makes the question of location a silly one.

Does the existence of the necessity of triage under certain circumstances dehumanize every person in every situation? Of course not, so neither should the rare necessity of triage requiring the life of the fetus instead of his mother.

The strong, the influential, the rich, and the powerful all have ways to protect themselves. True justice should defend the weakest humans against the strong. The truest injustice is for the powerful judge to protect the right of the influential and strong human to kill the defenseless one.

But What About Choice?

But what about the choice of a woman? Certainly, the scenarios above have their clear judgment. But a woman does have a choice! She can decide whether or not to engage in sex.

By the time a woman is pregnant, she has made her choice.

You see, choices do have consequences. Do we have the right to choose both a choice and the negation of the consequences of that choice?

I know that this concept is lost on many of our day, but choices do and even justly should have consequences.

One of the consequences of engaging in sex is that you might get pregnant. If you don’t want that consequence, then don’t engage in sex. This is simple, but apparently too complicated for the liberals among us. Certainly, many of us make choices that have undesirable consequences, but we all need to begin to take responsibility for our choices and their consequences, intended or otherwise. This includes justly taking responsibility for the decision to be sexually active and its consequences.

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Is Welfare Just?

Culture, Freedom, Justice, Politics | Posted by George
Feb 23 2011

Taking care of the needy:  it is a command of God to every compassionate man’s heart.  God requires His people to give to the needy widow, orphan, and foreigner.  Anyone with a modicum of humanity recognizes the mandate to take care of the needy people in his own sphere.  Do you?  I do.

But now let us look to the role of the welfare system.

It does not take a genius to recognize that there is an American caste of welfare dependency.  If it were simply that people chose dehumanizing beggarhood over self-sufficiency and preferred unceasing adolescence over adult personal responsibility, one might simply sadly allow this to proceed – it is a free country.  But this cultural prison of ignorance and depression is encouraged (dare I say imposed?) by those who benefit politically by the codependency of this welfare system.  Liberal government is driven by politicians who want the government to be the big daddy provider for the needy, and big daddy liberal government pimps the needy for their votes, abusing their humanity, enticing and/or forcing them to remain unfulfilled and beholden by their difficult-to-escape welfare policies, pretending to care while providing the solution of an abortion center in every neighborhood.

Did you know that minimum wage laws reduce the numbers of low-end jobs?  (Take microeconomics 101 and you can easily prove it.)  Minimum-wage laws say unequivocally that we would rather dehumanize you by taking away your job than allow you to work your way up, that we would rather give you free money (which would be less than minimum wage) than let you work for less than minimum wage.  “We want to dehumanize you.”  This is not justice, but it does promote a welfare codependency culture between the government and the poor.

Did you know that our laws make it difficult for people who want to better their condition to do so legally?  Make too much money and your benefits are cut off.  Better not try a job you might be able to do, because if you do, you will lose your disability status forever.  Wouldn’t it be better to structure things that would motivate someone to try to move ahead?  How could it possibly make good sense for a government to cut off benefits for someone trying to work his way out of dependency?  Only if that is where your political power comes from.  This is not justice.

Did you know that putting together a nuclear family – a stable, ordered home in which to raise the children – puts the needy at risk of losing benefits?  So our government financially encourages people to live together without commitment, to lie about their situation, and to teach their children to do the same.  This, in spite of the clear and mounting evidence that demonstrates that children have less success emotionally, educationally, socially, and economically when raised in single-parent homes.  I see: let’s invest in generations of downtrodden to maintain our liberal power through the decades!  This is not justice.

Did you know that the government fights against the entrepreneurs among the needy?  Yes, I am referring to the pimps and drug dealers.  What other opportunities can the downtrodden access?  First, the opportunity has to be under the table so that benefits are not at risk.  Second, the males that cannot get additional free money by having additional dependents need to be able to profit.  Third, the opportunity must be associated with a product that the “haves” would be willing to purchase from the “have nots” which can’t be stocks or high-end products or food or any other good thing.  So we provide them with lucrative illegal business opportunity and then put them in jail for it whenever we get a chance.  By providing the monetary incentives, we can surely destroy the moral fiber of the needy and perpetuate our liberal codependency through the generations.  This is not justice.

Please don’t give me your snide liberal “you conservatives look down at them” crap.  I serve these people.  I care for these people.  I could help these people more than they will let me right now.  But you liberals want to keep them on the dole and therefore down-and-out.

I believe that individuals have a responsibility to reach out to the less fortunate.  So I do that.  Conservatives generally do much more of this than liberals.  Liberals want to reach out to the less fortunate with other peoples’ money and leverage that money to maintain liberal influence.  The government is not the ideal entity to provide for the needs of the needy; according to the Mosaic law, it should be the people and the church.  Currently, neither the church nor the people are in a position to do it, and the governmental codependence is in the way.

Realistically, the government should not just cut off these programs.  But neither should we simply perpetuate this evil system – there are obvious better ways and ways we could make dramatic positive impact within months.  I will write on that later.  But the big daddy liberals don’t want to lose the votes when someone moves out of dependency into the satisfaction of personal responsibility and self-sustenance.  The system serves to perpetuate the system at the expense of the downtrodden.  This welfare system is not justice – social welfare as it currently operates in the US is oppression and injustice.

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God and Reality

Christianity, Culture, God, Religion | Posted by George
Feb 20 2011

First, a few obvious statements:

  • There is information and reality accessible via scientific research. These are very useful to humankind and I personally truly enjoy the scientific process.  Rational process is a wonderful approach to many realms, and we as people have benefited greatly by it.
  • There are realities beyond those reachable by scientific means. This is well understood by most physicists.  Even in the space-time in which we exist, there are portions of space-time inaccessible to those of us currently living on planet Earth.  But beyond that, most cosmological models (e.g. Big Bang-ish stuff) have time and space and stuff all being spewed out in parallel.  (In other words, the first moment of time and the first infinitesimal of space were things created – and populated with stuff – in the context of this cosmic bang.)  There is something beyond space-time (a higher-order dimension?  a super-reality?) into which space and time are created.  “Before space-time” and “after space-time” seem like funny phrases, but are not unreasonable things to consider, but words like “before” and “after” require something of a different reference point, a different unit of measurement, and even perhaps different rules than our typical space-time-like understanding.
  • It is unscientific to posit without proof that there is nothing super-natural. And further the very notion of the supernatural clearly indicates that science may very well not be the tool to access the supernatural.  Certainly, one can state that God is not necessary for a harmonious perspective on life (see below), but many other well-accepted truths are also not necessary for a harmonious perspective on life.

Next, let me confess that I know God, so I that God is real, and that His reality is central to mine.

  • God the Creator exists/existed/will exist beyond the extent of His creation in both space and time, i.e. eternally. That He pre-existed His creation is a presupposition of the present active tense of the verb.  Biblical perspective on creation clearly has a pre-existent God and also One Who will continue after time.  Given that space also is a creation, one could hardly expect that it housed the pre-creation Creator.  (It is fascinating that the Scriptures declare that it would happen that “no place was found for” the earth and the heavens – I wonder if space-time no longer exists.) The above notion of a “reality beyond” is a notion well-suited to a real understanding of the spiritual realm, one that can legitimately be referred to as “eternity.”
  • God does not require people to acknowledge His existence. In fact, He seems to be pretty determined that anyone that desires to ignore His existence be allowed to do so (although at some cost).  This is not very surprising, given His purpose with man, but that is substance for a future post.  Let it suffice for now to note that there will never be a time (sic) in which man is required to acknowledge God, so in time, there will always be a place for realists, theists, and atheists.  After time, however, it will be otherwise, since anyone or anything that continues to exist after space-time is discontinued will be forced to live in that outer matrix of the eternal.
  • It is to the benefit of the created to know the Creator and His purpose in creation. In a Creator-centered existence, this again seems obvious.

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Welcome

Christianity, Culture, Freedom, God, Justice, News, Politics, Religion, USA | Posted by George
Feb 18 2011

Welcome to Just Reality, a blog on both simple reality with God and pursuit of justice in a free society.  Thanks for coming by!

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