A public record of some of my thoughts. Feel free to comment, but don't expect me to respond.
There’s a lot of political bickering about how the Trump case is different than the Biden or Hillary case (or vice versa), but I seem to recall that Congress has been leaking classified information for decades. IOW, as much as I love the fact that Biden is being dragged through the mud right now, there is a larger problem. We’re simply not protecting our secrets well enough.
Mike Pence: Classified documents found at former vice-president’s home
John Wayne Jew phoned in from sunny California to join Pigweed and Crowhill on this one. It was a lot of fun.
There’s a saying that every time an old person dies, it’s like a library burning down. All that knowledge is lost.
It’s easy to imagine a 70-year-old thinking, “What’s the point of learning something new? I’ll be gone before too long, and it will all be for nothing.”
In one sense, this is like Woody Allen’s concern that the sun will eventually destroy the Earth. “What’s the point of it all?” he wonders. But he could just as well ask what is the relevance to him, right now, of what happens millions of years in the future.
So one answer to the question “why learn things now, if I’m just going to die and it will all evaporate,” is that you’ll enjoy it now.
In that sense, “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die” takes a narrow view of what’s fun to do right now.
Here’s another way to look at the question.
Some people say that the history of the universe is “God getting to know himself.” The idea is that all consciousness is somehow connected to a bigger scheme. I used to find the idea rather silly, but there’s something to it.
You could ask, for example, how God knows what it’s like to be this or that, and one answer (which I am not advocating) is that the very definition of God is that He’s the sum total of all experience. IOW, every conscious experience of every conscious thing is somehow part of the mind of God.
Stated that way, it sounds New Age-ish and a little ridiculous, but it’s actually embedded in the debates over God’s foreknowledge.
One question that Reformed theologians used to ask was “When did God know that man would fall?” — i.e., before or after he decided to create the world. IOW, did he decide to create the world, and then foresaw that man would fall, or did he consider creating the world, saw that man would fall, and then decided to create it anyway?
I think the question is a little silly because we’re imposing an “in time” perspective on a being who exists outside of time. Still, it reminds me of the “God getting to know himself” perspective.
Imagine the state of things before creation. All of existence is simply the Trinity living in a state of perfect love. In that reality, does it make any sense at all to ask “what does it feel like to be a 9-year-old girl, starving to death in Ethiopia?”
There are no girls, there is no time, there is no starvation, and there is no Ethiopia. The question makes no sense until the concept of creation is broached.
Once again, the question imposes a time-bound perspective on a being that is not bound by time, but I hope you’re starting to see the point. God’s perfect knowledge of every detail of creation only makes sense once He decides to create, or at least considers the idea of creating. In that way, every detail of creation is, in a sense, “God getting to know himself.” Or at least “God becoming omniscient with reference to the creation.”
Perhaps you could reduce it all down to this infra-lapsarian perspective. “God only knows what I’m experiencing right now because I’m experiencing it.” Which is not that far removed from the New Agey “the universe is God getting to know himself.”
Did they take public transportation?
Sending busloads of illegal immigrants to New York was bold and brilliant. It was too easy for liberals to sit in their safe enclaves, far from the border, and accuse anybody who wanted to control the border of racism. Now that the cost of caring for all these people is getting unmanageable up north, they’re changing their tune. NYC mayor Eric Adams is calling for action to address the migrant crisis.
It was fine when the border states had to handle all the costs, but when it gets close to his walled community, something has to be done.
Personally, I find Joe Biden’s border policy traitorous, and it steams me just to think about it.
Maryland leads the way. In the wrong direction.
Several Maryland cities have already lowered, or are considering lowering, the voting age (for local elections) to 16. This isn’t “insane,” as I saw one commentator claim. The difference between 18 and 16 is not a line between sanity and insanity. It’s just a marginal push to make the electorate more liberal — just as raising the voting age to 21 would be a marginal push to make the electorate more conservative. (“Show me a young man who’s not a liberal ….”)
Liberals want their still-indoctrinated drones to get involved politically to push things further to the left. I.e., before they’re old enough to wise up, like Paul Simon, and realize most of what they learned in high school was crap.
18-year-olds are too young to vote, in my opinion. They haven’t done anything yet. They haven’t had a real job. They haven’t lived on their own, paid taxes, or raised a family, or done any of the things associated with responsible adulthood.
But there’s nothing magic about 16, 18, or 21. It’s a question of when a person has become a responsible adult. And by that standard, we probably shouldn’t let people vote until they’re 30.
The Shroud is more complicated than you think. Nobody has time to investigate all the things there are to investigate in this world. You have to take shortcuts. So, for example, when I see people pointing to anomalies about 9/11, I take the shortcut that if the conspiracy theories were right, some responsible journalist would have pointed it out.
I take that shortcut knowing full well that journalists are generally lazy, intellectually incurious, and have demonstrated their willingness to go along with “the narrative” against the facts.
Consequently, I can’t blame someone who quickly concludes the Shroud is a medieval forgery since the carbon 14 tests came back with a date in the 14th century, plus or minus. It seems like a reasonable shortcut to check that one off and move on to other things.
The trouble is, it’s way, way more complicated than that. (As are many things.) If you’re curious, check out the recent episode on the “Pints with Aquinas” podcast.