What makes Christianity stand apart

In answer to the age-old question "why does God allow evil and suffering?" Christianity is the only world religion or faith system where God took on human form and suffered and died so in answer to the Question we may not have the full answer in this life but you could at least say God took part in our own suffering so to speak. Of course this all collapses if you view Jesus Christ as mere man, nice prophet and nothing more but for me the essence of Christianity is what I just said and you can't say this of the other religions. It helps make the Question bearable if not answerable and for a good read along this line read Taylor Caldwell's The Listener. It's almost as if God were saying to the human race since I gave my creatures free will I will allow evil to exist in the world but I, in the Second Person of the Trinity will also partake in the suffering it causes. Pretty profound if you stop to think about it. Now the dogmatic theologian will object that Christ died solely for our sins and to save us, that mine is an errant theology but that's my personal faith as Patrick M might say. Deep thought for the Day.

Lest we need a reminder

I am afraid to say I am detecting a pattern here, it seems the terrorists are intent on giving each individual country their own 9/11. What kind of a religion is this? Monday morning quarterbacking for a minute during the cycle of the Big Election public opinion surveys and exit polling consistently told us terrorism was very low on the list of voters' concerns, shockingly low imo and the Economy was all the rage. Now we have the atrocity in Mumbai, India and, thinking out loud here if terrorism was more properly important in voters' minds as it should have been conventional wisdom has always held that this helps the Republican side more, in this case McCain. Put another way if the collective voting psyche was different and more attuned to reality would McCain have done better, even pulled it off? 9/11 is like some unhappy island drifting off and disappearing into the fog, seems the further we get away from it the more we forget. I haven't yet yielded to the temptation to conclude the voting public is stupid but in addition to the social issues hardly making a blip on the radar screen, dunno, it's like having a big jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. It is also conventional wisdom to treat everything coming out of Joe Biden's mouth as one big guffaw, the personification of the brain fart but is it that far behind that Obama will be tested, will face some sort of crisis during the first six months of his Administration? In four years will he even want the job? The 3AM phone call, just transfer the call. "Hill on line 1."

Flippin' through some quotes

The ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu (389-286BC) was one of the earliest interpreters of the religion of taoism. Googled some quotes and here's a gem: "Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness." Here's another one for Bill Maher: "Men honor what lies within their sphere of knowledge but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it." But perhaps my favorite is this:

"To say that something is chance is to deny a principle at work."

Every now and then I look back at chapters in my own life, often the odder or more enigmatic events stand out, chance meetings, funny characters, mysterious chains-of-events, the unexplained meanings of things. Worked with a guy once and maybe it's because he's of a spiritual bent but he said to me one day he almost wound up at another job but felt he's at this one for a reason. Beth feels there's a significance in us forming an online friendship and I agree, it's as if it were destined to happen. We're living in a kind of agnostic existential vacuum right now where many place no more meaning on Life's little events than accidentally kicking a pebble while walking but quotes like this fascinate me. It then becomes this - since there are physical laws in place governing matter and the universe might not there be another operative set of laws that a philosopher can discern, a kind of spiritual physics? There is something vaguely optimistic in Tzu's quote even if we can't explain why we got four years of Jimmy Carter or the Dinkins Administration in New York. Hamlet said "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew (prepare for) them how we will." So enjoy this little fortune cookie. Now if someone could just explain David Lynch's Inland Empire.

Bill Maher (I'm sorry to bring him up again)

I agree with Patrick M, for me personal faith is more important than dogma but here's another thing. The vast majority of us can, if we look hard enough, find various items of faith that we disagree with, that we may even find illogical if not wholely irrational. In the Catholic faith we have the doctrine of transubstantiation, that when the priest consecrates the bread and wine at Mass it literally turns into the Body and Blood of Christ. We also have the Sacrament of Confession and many question why we have to confess our sins to a priest if we are sorry in our hearts. BUT here's the larger point, just because we don't accept everything and btw I don't think we should, reason should never take a back seat to faith, they can and should co-exist, so just because we come across a particular religious item or two (or even three or four but who's counting?) that turns logic on its head we don't turn into little snarky Bill Mahers. We still retain our faith, just because of a couple of technical points we don't say the whole edifice of faith is wrong or somehow corrupt or doesn't have any value or useful purpose. Many people like to say they're spiritual but not religious, I don't know what this is supposed to mean. I'll cut this in two and reserve a philosophical point for my next blog.

How much emphasis to give the abortion issue?

Pro-life doesn't seem to be a great theme here, the higher concern, the broader context is the continuing socialist narrative. While this of course is not unimportant it shouldn't have been the only thing on the table. Maybe it's because re abortion we're so settled in our ways on the issue and we see it as a distraction from the Larger Cause but I think we could have made a more effective presentation. Obama and his Socialist Agenda, folks probably don't even know what the word means, it has that amorphous ring to it but let's say Obama is a regular reader of the conservative blogosphere as well, he might be forgiven if he concludes they don't seem to talk about the a-word all that much so why should I be nudged or cajoled towards the Center on the issue? Maybe it is all about money, our money in the end only trouble is Obama the Socialist doesn't have a womb-view, a broader package. It's Ayn Rand and reading nothing else. There was a shade of grandeur when McCain addressed pro-life head on during the third and final debate but it didn't take long for the Boat to steer back on its Animal Farm voyage. Just my post-election post-mortem for what it's worth.

At one part in his victory speech Obama threw an olive branch to us, "and to those who didn't vote for me I hear your voices" but does he really? Well if he's listening we're taking notes, well some of us are anyway, for when he runs for his second term and it's quite obvious that's a given since he said it's probably gonna take more than one term to clean up The Mess. Now it is assumed that Mr. Men's Vogue is pro-choice of course, it is the only rational position after all but most folks really don't know the extent of it. He needs to distance himself from the FRINGE of NOW and Planned Parenthood, it's like the friend you need to dump, who holds you back, who pulls you down and this would finally free him up to formulate his own abortion policy. I never really got why social conservatives hitched their wagon to the Republican Party in the first place, they really don't give a damn about the issue anyway, they became infatuated with a whore. Should have gone their own way but that's a pet peeve of mine. Obama has said to pro-abortion groups that his very first act as president will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act which would codify Roe vs. Wade should that decision ever be overturned but when he attempts to woo The Middle again in 012 it'll come back to haunt him.....

the socialist narrative will continue after these brief commercial messages.

It was a personality-driven election anyway

McCain had a more than respectable showing, there's gonna be the usual grumblings about doing something with the electoral college and apparently Beth's homestate is the most important state in the nation. My channel-surfing was on overdrive last night, there was Bob Schieffer saying Palin was terrible during interviews, the WonderBoy over at ABC, Shepard Smith and the babes on FOX (yum-o), Brian Williams, Gwen Ifill...My id thought up a terrible joke that I haven't seen black people this happy since O.J. Simpson got acquitted but ya wanna know something? they participated in the process, my brothers were happy at work today, all was civil and there ain't anything undemocratic about it. So why should Obama govern from the center? with a Democratic House and Senate he doesn't have that leavening effect that Clinton had with a Republican Congress so expect at least four years of polar liberalism. As for abortion we've had our Republican day in the sun and abortion is still legal but regardless of the legal status of abortion if we want to call ourselves a pro-life country people need to stop having abortions. Yes I was down for a time last night when the election was beginning to take on definite contours, I'm not into getting hardcore drunk but I had an extra helping of the Christian Brothers just the same. The future of the Supreme Court is depressing and I haven't read the rest of the blogs yet but I would imagine they would say the usual in such a dire situation that we need to focus our energy and grassroots on the mid-terms. Sean & RUSH for four more years, I ain't gonna subject myself to this. The turnout was absolutely massive yesterday, a historic one where close to 65% of the country actually voted, biggest turnout in the last hundred years they said so whatever you think of the results this is heartening.

People who work off the clock during their day off even though the company doesn't want them to, the black man would never do this. People who punch for lunch and then work through lunch, the black man would never do this.

Reagan?