Opus 2022-303: Plug in Your Memory

I still like Donald Trump and I think the reason is that I don’t pay much attention to him.  I never read his Tweets since I am not on Twitter.  I don’t listen to his speeches.  I don’t fixate on him or who he backs in the political process.

If I lived in a place where his endorsement would help clarify things then it might be different.  In my Texas location the only areas of real choice are in the primary elections and I am capable of making those decisions without any politicians help.  

I still like Donald Trump because underneath the ego is a man who loves America and wants it to be what it was created to be.  MAGA is not just a slogan; it is a testimony.

I still like Donald Trump because I am more interested in the results he produced than in someone getting their feelings hurt because he is not diplomatic unless he is involved in diplomacy.  Even there he did a great job.  How quickly we forget the peace that was breaking out in the Middle East under his leadership.

I like Donald Trump because I have a memory.  I remember the economy, the energy independence, the genuine support of Israel, etc.  Just look at anything that is falling apart and remember that under his mean tweet leadership things were much better.

I might do all of us a bit of good to go back and get our charge card receipts from 2019 and ask ourselves if Orange Man was really bad.

homo unius libri

Opus 2022-302: A Party Whose Time Has Gone

If I had the power I think I would dissolve the two major parties in the United States.  Of course I don’t have that power but maybe if enough of us went with the idea.  What made me think this way was a comment by Nassim Taleb in Antifragile.

“What is plaguing us in the United States is not the two-party system, but being stuck with the same two parties.  Parties don’t have organic built-in expiration dates.”  p. 104, Emphasis in original.

I am sure you have all heard the term “uniparty” that infers there is not real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.  Obviously that is not true in the ideal sense.  All you need to do is read the party platforms and listen to what they say they believe.  The problem is not in the parties but in the people who are locked in because they have not had an original thought since the first time they were asked what kind of cake they wanted for their birthday.

You have met them I am sure.  I recently heard about an elderly lady who was pro-life, anti CRT, believed homosexuality was a sin, opposed sex change operations for minors and so forth.  In addition she claimed she was a Christian.  She was going to vote for her local Democrat congresswoman.  The politician made no attempt to hide that she was opposed to everything this lady believed in but the lady thought she was a nice person.  And a Democrat.  

We all know people like this.  On the other side we have people claiming to be Republicans who don’t believe in anything that the party stands for.  These are the voters, not the politicians.

Maybe we could have a system where you would go on line, enter your position of issues and be told who would be the best candidate.  Of course that would involve computers and the internet so you would have the same problems we are having with voting machines now.

It might be enough to just have the politicians hide which party they were affiliated with.  That would force people to look beyond labels and into issues.  The main problem with that is it would require thinking.  On the up side, if they were required to think then a lot of low information voters would not bother.

Call me a heretic, but I think that might be a good thing.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, Antifragile.  New York:  Random House, 2012.

homo unius libri

Opus 2022-301: Deep Fog

I was watching the fog outside the window.  Tangents appeared and rabbit trails were followed.  I was thinking about God as creator and started down the visible trail.  Was fog created as a specific part of the program or is it just an “accidental” side effect that was left in the script?  I know our ideas of an all-knowing and all-powerful God make that almost a heresy but who are we do define how God wants to make things work?

I am not a big fan of six 24 hour days of creation.  I can accept it.  God had the ability but to me it presents some issues.  Did God create in an instant to get it done or did He develop the wild flowers one at a time as a creative artist enjoying His work.  Set aside your ideas about sovereignty and look at it from God’s side.  Why would He be in a big hurry.  He has an eternity to step back and look at His work.  We are created in the image of God and one of the things that is common in people is creativity.

There are times when the world’s greatest chef spends hours tasting and measuring because he get joy from the process and others when he might just open a package of Twinkies.  Who are you to tell him what he wants at that moment.

If I am painting the house I would want the ability to say, “Let there be...”  and get it done.  If I am painting a portrait of a loved one I want to experience every stroke of the brush.  I picture our living room.  We had the painters come in and do the basics.  All we did was pick the color.  Later we built in a book shelf.  We had the delivery crew move in the sofas but we keep moving the small stuff around.  It took months of sorting and rearranging to get the bookshelves just the way my wife wanted them.  She will probably keep shifting things.

Why could that not explain how both instant and gradual are possibilities?

Ask yourself if the platypus is a dead end that God created, looked at, said “no” and moved on to the peacock, or is it a combination that He was so happy with that he just enjoys looking at it still?  Some say it demonstrates His sense of humor.

It is strange what can come out of the fog.

homo unius libri

Opus 2022-300: Caves Are Good

I am a troglodyte.  I am not sure what a troglodyte is, but I am one.

I have visions of troglodytes living in caves and only coming out when necessary.  In ancient times that would have involved mainly the quest for food and possibly firewood.  There would have been no community meetings or Sunday school socials to worry about.  

That is me.  Of course my version of troglodyte would involve air conditioning and a soft bed.  It would have some kind of stereo and maybe a bathroom in a back cavern.  

My cave now is my room.  At one point it was my office.  In the years I was teaching it was more like going out hunting each day and my car became my cave.  You do what you have to do.  If you are up you might as well enjoy the morning but it doesn’t mean you go out looking for it until your supplies run low.

I wonder if it would help if I would let the grocery store deliver my food?

homo unius libri

Opus 2022-299: Election 2022: Don’t Get Distracted

Never Trumpers have a strange blindness.  Many of them are pocket elitests who look down on the common man as unclean, uninformed and needing wise leadership.  You can often tell them by the sneer in their writing.  Others can actually have some sound thinking as long as there is not a grain of Trump in the mix.  When they get a whiff, all thinking cells shut down and go to the emergency circuit that just yells, “Orange Man Bad!!!!”

John Hinderaker of PowerLine is one of the second kind.  I had just adjusted to reading what he wrote again when he came up with a perfect example of Never Trump Mind Block.

The title was provocative enough for me to read it in spite of the by-line.  I quit reading after I got to the section I am going to quote.  Later, on reflection, I realized that this was a great example of how many people look at Trump and throw all their higher level thinking skills under the emotional bus.

Hinderaker starts off in his traditional style.  The only difference is that the praise for Trump is not backhanded.

“I have often said that Trump was a very good president–our best, rather easily, since Ronald Reagan.”

At this point I was starting to hold my breath but I didn’t even start to be aware I wasn’t breathing, let along going into oxygen deprivation.  The next word fit perfectly into his narrative:

“Unfortunately,...”  There should have been a drum roll.  There might have been but I have my speakers turned off.

“Unfortunately, though, that isn’t the end of the story. He has both said and, less often, done, a lot of stupid things. He now carries this legacy of mistakes behind him like a ball and chain. Of course the Democrats’ attacks on Trump are mostly unfair when they are not fabricated. But there is a reason why half of America’s voters won’t even consider voting for Trump in 2024. I think it is safe to say that no successful candidate has ever begun with that sort of handicap.”

As far as “half of America’s voters”, that refers to the group that also thinks Biden is doing a good job and that printing money has nothing to do with inflation.

Then he throws in what is supposed to be the, excuse me, trump card.

“The Democrats are lying in wait, hoping Republicans are dumb enough to nominate Trump.”

We know this.  The issue is not whether the Democrats hate Trump.  The issue is whether the Republican politicians love their country enough to stand up to the Democrat hate machine.

I have often said that elections matter.  Although I am not sure they matter as much as they use to we need to vote on Tuesday’s issues, not 2024 and we need to speak up while we still can.

homo unius libri

Opus 2022-298: The Truth about Chicken Volleyballs

Back when Bill Cosby was still acceptable he had a routine in which he asked the great philosophical question, “Why is there air?”  I don’t remember the entire monologue but I remember that the answer was, “Any P.E. major can answer that.  There is air to blow up volleyballs.”  Much of philosophy and theology comes in at that level.  Did Cosby give an answer that met the test of reality?  Does air fill up volleyballs?  Of course it does but there are two issues.  First, that was not the heart of the question.  Second, it is a nonsense question of no consequence.  

There are questions that are asked that receive the same kind of answers even though they are not nonsense.  One of those questions was asked by Pilate when he was interrogating Jesus.

(Joh 18:38 KJV)  Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

This was in a grilling in which Jesus brought up the subject of truth.  It is a subject that is still being avoided today.  

The first question today would be, “Is there truth?”  Does it exist?  There are really two main answers to this for anyone not trying to avoid the question:  Yes and no.  Christians would say that because there is a God and that God has a certain character, truth is real.  It does not change.  It is objective.  When I say “Christians” I mean those who are serious about their faith and believe the Bible.  Christians who do not believe the Bible will find themselves in the pagan camp and deny that there is any real truth and if there was we could not know it.  The pagan gods are whimsical and capricious.  They like to play tricks and are not known for their maturity.  Thus you can never count on anything.  

I have come across another way of expressing this difference:  Is it true because God said it or did God say it because it is true?  This became and issue very early in creation.  

(Gen 1:4 KJV)  And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Only four verses in and already we are having value judgements.  Now, did light become a good thing as some mysterious point and God noticed, or did God create a good thing and is pointing it out?

The answer to the question, “Is it true because God said it or did God say it because it is true?” is simply “Yes.” Don’t you hate it when people do that?  The answer is simple and yet it isn’t.  It is a case of both/and not either/or.  When you ask the wrong question it is impossible to get the correct answer.

Some think this is the old chicken or the egg question in a different form.  That paradox is not a paradox if you believe in truth and that there is an answer.  If you are an evolutionist it is a clever question that shows how well you listened to your new age guru.  If you are a Christian who believes in creation the answer is simple.  Two chickens came before the egg or, to be precise, a hen and a rooster.  There are a couple of reason for this.  First, if the egg came first there would be no chicken to sit on it and keep it warm until it hatched.  Somewhere in the soil of the earth would be the one fossil of the one egg that existed.  If somehow the egg was in the sun just right and managed to hatch there would be no bird of the opposite sex to insure that future eggs would be fertile.  Again you are left with one fossil somewhere in the rocks.

God is the source of truth.  God speaks ex nihilo and thus truth is what He declares.  I imagine he could have made the sky green like it was in one of the science fiction series I read but in that case we would probably still call it blue and not know the difference.  Since what He declares has nothing before it and He put the whole thing together, it is true.

Once He declares it then He repeats it because it is true.  And the glorious circle goes on.

What a glorious day for philosophy, theology and logic.

homo unius libri

Opus 2022-297: Godly Nutrition

When I ask myself if something is healthy to eat I often review some of the items mentioned in the Bible.  I trust it more than the notional pop-nutritionists that inhabit our world.  Salt is a good thing.  Bread, although what most people could afford was not made with wheat, is not divided into gluten free and sinful.  Water does not need to be bottled.  Those are physical considerations.

There are also spiritual applications.  When I read them I assume that if they are good as illustrations of spiritual truth they are also good to eat, but they clearly have theological implications.  The OT talks about milk and honey.  Usually they appear with a form of the word “flowing” in front of them and refer to the promised land.

The New Testament talks about milk and meat in spiritual terms.  Sometimes they are contrasted, sometimes both are good.  It makes no case for the lactose intolerant or the vegan.  I could get off on that tangent but that is not where I am going today.

The problem we are having in today’s church is that too many people are drinking the Kool Aid.  I am passing no judgement on the commercial product.  I was raised drinking it and would mix the powder with sugar for cheap candy.  In its place I am a fan of Kool Aid.  As an adult I can enjoy the kids drink, however, I never confuse it for a staple of healthy living.

It always amazes me when people here something in the Bible and say, “I never knew that.”  I wonder why not.  Take the basic truth that Jesus is the only way to eternal life.  It is clearly written and often repeated.  I hear it almost every Sunday coming from the pulpit.  Or take the clear teaching that love is a matter of choice, of being patient and kind, not a gushy feeling like Hallmark wants to portray it.  I should not be surprised.  Take into consideration how many people think the government can keep printing money with no consequence.  

If I were writing the Bible I would put in some mention of pop corn and ice cream and make them important for spiritual development.  You can relax because God has not seen fit to consult me.

homo unius libri