Thursday, December 29, 2011

What About "Education?"

The mother of all ideas used by our entrenched far-left government to convince people to support a glut of programs for our schools is "education."  If you really love your children, as the argument goes, you will support our noble efforts to "educate" them.  If you oppose all of the noble ideas, then you do not "love" your children and you should probably be executed.
    Yet if you ask most people what they really want for their children, you get an answer that is fairly simple and very do-able:
    By the time my children are 25 yars old, I want them to be:
    1. Doing a job that is meaningful, pays well, and makes a legitamate contribution to society;
    2. In a stable marriage;
    3. Thin;
    3. Willing to help others;
    4. Free of any addictive activities (including smoking);
    5. Responsible with their money;
    6. Increasing their learning by advancing their job proficiencies;
    7. Happy.
    Yet. if these goals are so widely held by a majority of people, why do so many of our children arrive at 25 years of age with almost none of these?
   The answer is both simple and very frightening.
    For the last 50 years our children have been subjected to a whole host of  social and "educational" ideas that fly in the face of our children's success:
    1.  The whole scheme of taking federal tax money from individuals and then sending a portion of it back to our local schools has given the federal government a strangle hold over what the local schools can teach their children.  This reaches into every aspect of learning including the role of parents, the denial of teaching about our cultural roots, the virtual elimination of teaching about our constitution, our founding principles, our personal responsibility to take care of ourselves.
    2. There is an ongoing attack on the institution of marriage.  Many federal and state programs that have breen created to address poverty have, in fact, promoted the abandonment by fathers of their own children by limiting benefits to mothers who are married.
    3. The focus on "social" success essentially robs children of the core goal of financial success and independence.  Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was asked when he sold his internet business for $4 billion, "How did it make you feel to be a multi-billionaire?"  His answer: "taller and better looking."
    What are the answers to all of this?
     Jacques Barzun, a Chicago University professor, wrote a book entitled Teacher in America.  In this book he differentiates between education and training.  Education primarily takes place in the home;
the schools can only offer training.  Education embodies our children's attitudes toward learning and their attitudes toward a whole host of things like work, food, sexual roles, self esteem, etc.
    We have succumbed to the temptation of delegating to the government our responsibilities to educate our children, and they have done a terrible job of it.
    What about it, seekers?  Can we take over the education of our kids and kick the government out of the process?

Thursday, December 1, 2011

What About "Poverty?"

    Ronald Reagan said, in a speech before Congress, "people are not poor because they have no money; they have no money because they are poor, and if their poverty cannot be removed, giving them money only adds to their misery."  This brought coals of fire from many of the poverty brokers in Congress and was blazoned across the headlines for weeks.  The sad thing about all of this was that he was exactly right.
    We are assaulted with a carefully crafted attempt to sell us all on the idea that wealth should be "redistrubuted" to achieve a more equitable society and remove the grinding poverty of millions of our citizens.  One cannot help but wonder why, after throwing trillions of dollars at so-called "poverty" programs, we have as many or more poor people today than when the "war on poverty" was launched 60 years ago.
   The answer lies in a very dark conclusion:  totalitarian governments need poor people.  When people have their own money, they are powerful and do not need government.  These people will not support the redefinition of our government as master in place of its constitutional role as caretaker of our "unalienable" rights.
   It should surprise no one that our educational system has been drastically altrered so that it produces poor people.  Consider the way our public schools "teach" our children:
   1. They are given "rights" to privacy, sexual orientation, freedom of speech, freedom from mention of our Christian roots, freedom from learning about our constitution, freedom from learning academic material such as math, english, reading, economics, ethics, objective history, freedom from learning usable skills. 
   2.  Our students are focused upon elements of "social" success such as appearance (including a whole host of curricula associated with race, obesity, sexual orientation, national origin, language, conflict management) and a very determined effort to guard students against any intrusion of  ideas that would tend to discredit any portion of these "educational" efforts.
   By contrast, a civil society based upon the principles contained in our constitution, not only does not produce poor people via education, but does not need poor people. 
   By focusing our children from kindergarten through high school in such a way that discourages independence, a large percentage of them will join the ranks of the poor and can be counted on to vote for politicians who promise to take money from working people and give it to them.  This is such a universally held educational philosophy in our public schools that one must conclude that it is done by design.
   I look at the institutionalized poor rioting on Wall Street and other places against the "rich," and I feel an overpowering sadness for them, because they are powerless to help themselves.  It is not surprising that the people who have created this tragedy are now embracing their futile efforts.
   The very first order of business in any new order in Washington should be to shut down the whole scheme of funding local schools through federal taxes.  This has given a corrupt and perverse federal government a strangle hold over what is taught in our schools.
   What about it, seekers?  Can anything be done to save our kids from poverty?

Sunday, November 6, 2011

What are the odds?

   One of the most amazing and provocative much overlooked feature of the Judeo-Christian scriptures is the Genesis creation account.  To summarize, there are six "days" of creation that are listed:
  1. Day one - the earth is created from a nebulous material.  It is described as "without form, and void."
  2. Day two - the earth is covered with water and thick clouds.  The earth's crust emerges from the water.
  3. Day three - First life forms emerge.
  4. Day four - Cloud cover dissipates revealing sun, moon, stars.  Mammals and diverse land and sea animals appear.
  5. Day five - Man appears
   There are three very important observations about this:
  1. The oldest original manuscripts of the book of Genesis, ascribed to Moses, are very ancient, certainly predeeding any knowledge about cosmology, geology, biology, etc
  2. Moses was raised by Egyptians, later was a sheep herder, later led the israelites out of Egypt.  Nothing in his resume seems to reveal any scientific knowledge about astronomy, geology, archeology, etc.
  3. The account of creation found here follows the general scenario of how we think the earth was formed .
   But the most amazing feature of this account is that the events are in the correct order.  What are the odds that a wilderness-wandering sheep herder could have gotten this right?  Where did he get this information?  The Egyptians were already building pyramids and doing other impossible things when Moses was there.  Did they know about it?

   Fellow seekers, I would like to see your ideas about this.

   Did the Great Engineer in the Sky tell Moses about this when He gave the ten commandments to Moses on mount Horeb?  Did ancient aliens visit the earth and tell him?  What happened here?

Friday, October 28, 2011

We are a Christian Nation

There is a large amount of confusion about what the phrase "Christian Nation" means.  We hear all kinds of rhetoric about America as "melting pot," a "nation of immigrants," a land of "equal opportunity," and many others.
   The fact is, all of the features of America that have made it the "shining beacon on a hill" for the rest of the world, derive directly from the underlying premises of Christianity.  Whether you believe in God or Christianity or not, these premises are contained in Christianity and the America that we have created based upon these premises cannot exist without them:

   The Christian view of man is that man is a special creation of God.  God loves all men, not only the ones who profess to be Chrsitians.  God wants all men to come to him and worship Him.  But God will not coerce anyone;  He wants men to come to him willingly.  God bestows upon man the dignity of trusting him with decisions about his own eternal destiny.  This dignity is succinctly described in our Declaration of Independence..."We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights..."  Christianity, among all of the religions of the world, holds that man is free.

   If man is then free, then it follows that he has the rights of free speech, ownership of property, equal justice before the law, etc. as stated in our Federal Constitution.  Capitalism is a natural consequence of man's God-given freedom. 

   We must think twice about throwing out the divine origin of man's rights.  Those who advocate this will sadly find out that they have laid the axe at the roots of their own prosperity and the great social adventure that started in 1776 will be destroyed in favor of the old worn-out ideas that have plagued man since the beginning of history.

 

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Parasitic Christians

   There is a phenomenon in physics called "parasitic vibrations."  If you pluck the string of a guitar, for example, the string next to it vibrates too. 
    There is no doubt that the founding fathers believed that the foundation for a civil society was firmly established upon the premise that "...all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights..."   Upon this base, they defined the role of government to be the caretaker of those rights.  What has resulted from this over the past two hundred plus years is the most remarkable economic and social phenomenon in world history.  It was stunningly revoltionary at the time and still is today.   The idea that common people collectively making personal choices about their own perceived benefit could be trusted to direct the affairs of the government is still unique in human history.
    At the heart of today's debate about the role of government is a powerful challenge to the premise that God even exists and , therefore, certainly did not endow anybody with anything.  The people challenging this, however, are living inside of a society created by this premise.  All of the natural corollaries that grow out of this premise  such as the validity of contracts (including marriage), equal justice before the law, the rule of law, ownership of property (sometimes called capitalism), religious freedom, are claimed by those denying the premise.  They believe these things can all be secured for society without the troublesome insertion of God in the formula.
    These people are "parasitic Christians" because the dominant culture in the country is still Christian, and the driving force behind the enforcement of these rights still comes from a large majority of the population that thinks their rights are "unalienable."  In other words, the proponents of doing away with this limited role of government have an easy time because they are surrounded by people who support the premise, and they are forced to "vibrate" like these people simply because the are close to them.
    The proof of this is in their proclamations like "We must always support the rule of law."  "Private sector jobs are our first priority."  "Everyone has a right to live a life free from poverty."  All the while, the laws and directives created by these same people are intended to ignore the role of government as caretaker and redefine it as master.
     The truth is that God endowed rights, whether you believe in God or not, are absolutely essential to the continued prosperity and freedoms that has produced this great country,
    The role of government as master is an old worn-out idea that has been tried since the dawn of history with the same predictable results - destruction of wealth, elimination of personal freedoms, institutionalized  poverty, social violence, crime, destruction of the home, and the emergence of a ruling class.
    This great social experimant called America can only survive if the majority of our citizens have the moral fiber to stand together and defeat this redefinition of what our government is supposed to do.
   
   

Saturday, September 17, 2011

What about evolution?

     Probably the most provocative idea to come along in the past couple of centuries is the idea that some sort of natural (that is, random) process is at work in the world which accounts for the living things that we are surrounded with. 
     The frustrating aspect of this is the elusive nature of the process.  In spite of many years of study, no clear definition of this process exists.  Like religions everywhere, there are a large number of proponents of various views about this, but none seems to have any real credibility.
     Some of the troublesome facts that persist to confound proponents of the various theories are:

     No matter how far back one goes in the geologic record, no one has discovered any "primitive" or simpler forms of genetic material.  DNA  seems to have popped up intact at the dawn of life on earth, and, except for the codes on the DNA which produce the diversity of life we see now and historically, it is still the double helix with its staggeringly complex structure and absolutely astounding data storage capacity.

     Chlorophyl, another compound necessary for the processing of of sunlight and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen in green plants,  has also not "evolved" as far as we can tell.

     No one denies the complexity and diversity of life forms that are here now.  Also, no one can deny that this diversity did not always exist.  The farther back one goes in the geologic record, the fewer and simpler are the organisms.  The true "smoking gun" of the evolutionary theorist who intends to show that life arose through some sort of random, that is not outside-directed process, would be the mechanism by which the DNA code morphed over the past millions of years to produce all of the species that we have now.  The "mutation" theory put forward falls short of explaining this phenomenon because the number of mutated instruction sets required to produce a new species is not one or two but billions.  Much is made of the observation that man shares 95% of his genes with the higher primates.  The instruction set contained in the genetic material of man differs by billions of characters, not just a few as is claimed.  It is too much of a stretch to think that a single mutation (or even many of them) could have taken place that got all of these data correct at one time.

   The true missing link in the evolutionary theory that intends to show that some random process produced all of the creatures we now see is the primary driving force of purpose behind natural selection.  Creatures which are "struggling to survive" must first know that they are supposed to survive.  By definition, this purpose would have had  to precede  the process.  Since purpose seems to be ethereal, it does not seem to be accounted for in this version of evolutionary theory.

     We have all seen the highly touted pictures in biology textbooks showing life proceeding from the primordial slime millions of years ago culminating in the Wall Street trader.  The problem with this vastly simplified religious statement about man is that modern man did not go through any such process;  man seems to have popped up around 10,000 years ago with his vast intellectual powers intact.  In fact, a case could be made that man has lost some of his intellectual prowess since ancient man accomplished many things that we cannot duplicate today (like moving 40 ton rocks around with relative ease.)

     My question is:  What happened here?

    

Monday, September 12, 2011

What about global warming?

     I have  watched the dialogue about global warming with a great deal of skepticism.  My skepticism arises from the solutions that people have put forward to correct it.
     The "science" of global warming (and the assignment of human activity as its cause) seems to rely upon a vote by a number of atmospheric "scientists" who also have strong connections to one of the "solutions" to the problem, to wit: institute a punishing tax upon Americans.
     This short-circuiting of the investigative process to determine if there even is any global warming and that it is connected to human activity is just too easy.
      Just suppose that it is eventually proven that the world is heating up and it is definitely our fault.  It seems that the correct approach would be a concerted  effort to define the mechanism of the process and then find ways to change our methods of power generation, transportation, home heating, etc. to reduce the offending chemicals. 
      Carbon is said to be the culprit in global warming.  Taxing Americans is too provincial to be effective.  The most flagrant offenders of carbon emmissions from electric power generation are China, India, and Russia.  Any comprehensive solution to this problem should include every country and should not be via taxation but through technology.  American coal-fired power plants are squeaky clean when compared to comparable plants in these other countries. 
      It seems that we could offer to sell our heat capturing and chemical scrubber technology to these other countries so that they could clean up their emissions. 
      Much still needs to be done to develop the underlying scientific knowledge about this.  So far, what passes for "knowledge" is filtered through a suffocating ideology and has very little or no credibility.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Clear-Eyed Seeker of Wisdom and Truth

Those of us who earnestly desire to find out the truth of things are assaulted with all sorts of "facts" about everything from religion, to politics, to science and a host of other things that many times do not pass the muster of thoughtful inquiry.
   There are many questions that arise in all of these areas that beg for answers.
   I would like to see thoughtful answers that  anyone might have to some of these questions:
   The faith question:
           It seems apparent that the human problem with knowledge requires that first we must make a number of faith-based statements about our own existence.  For example, the statement that  "there is a god" and the statement that "there is no god" are exactly the same from a rational standpoint.  That is to say, no evidence can be brought to bear that proves either position.  Yet both of these camps zealously guard thir own positions to whatever extent they can.  If either group has political power, it could actually cost you you life to hold the other position.
          As a clear-eyed seeker of widom and truth, the circumstantial evidence seems to be heavily on the side of life being a very sophisticated technology which we cannot understand.  Where did it come from? 
          Consider the case of the spider which was hatched inside a box.  This spider never saw another spider and never attended seminars on web spinning.  He is further disadvantaged in having a brain the size of the point of a pin.  Furthermore, as far as we can tell, he doesn't even "know" that he is supposed to survive.  Yet he sets about to spin a web to catch a fly he has never seen.  In addition, he has two orfices in his small body, one secretes a thick non-sticky web and the other secretes a very fine very sticky web.  He spins the non sticky web and attaches it to the floor of the box with the sticky web.  He then climbs up the side of the box, hauling the non-sticky web with him, and attaches the other end to side of the box with some of the sticky web.  After repeating this process a number of times, he then proceeds to loop the sticky web across the non-sticky strands in close intervals to create the trap for fly he has never seen.
          The level of highly critical technical choices this little fellow must make to achieve this is staggering.  Humans, with all of our brain power, couldn't even replicate the web, let alone create the body that made it.
          So I ask:   What happened here?   It seems that this knowledge must exist somewhere outside the spider and is somehow downloaded when he needs it - including the "knowledge" that he must survive.