about national health care

I am removing this post because I think the explanation here is better, BTW, my cousin susan pointed out that my hyperbole was incorrect because the 15,400 charge was for a family, not per person. What it basically means is that if you take the figures I used(very reserved assumptions) that healthcare would add at least 1.2tn to the federal operating budget.

Anyway, go here for more info. http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

BTW, I am not against national healthcare, but I think that people are not conscious of how much it will cost and the fact that the money will come from us(the middle class) even though many politicians want to make you believe it is being paid for by some anonymous group called the super-rich.

Another blast from the past, Gen. 6.6

Here is another thought from a 19 year old Brent.

8/31 Genesis 6.6

I don't understand how it says that he Lord was sorry that He had made mankind.  Why did He make us if it would grieve Him.  He must have known that the world would go down this path.

Blast from the past, notes on Genesis 3.1-14

I was sorting through old papers and I ran across this old journal entry and thought I would post it, I am not going to edit it though I could think of a few modifications I would make if I wrote on the same subject today, for now you get to see the way I was thinking when I was 19:

From 8/12/1996

In this chapter we have the fall of mankind.  The serpent knew what he was saying as he told Eve that she would know "good and evil".  As she ate the fruit, she obtained a whole new view of the world, the moral view.  However, this view compromised the most important part of her existence, her innocence.  The rush/high of the experience overcame her and she shared that sin with her husband.  Adam could have refused the fruit and saved his future, but he took of the fruit, and he too was changed.  (This situation is much like a child that is told not to touch fire.  The child sees the flames dance and is drawn by the light and the warmth, and he touches it.  He is then burned.)    The first indication of sin's burn was the realization of their nakedness.  Then there is the fear of God as He approaches the couple.

Both Adam and Eve knew God was great, and they feared Him after they shared the knowledge of Good and Evil.  They lost their innocence, and they found themselves separated from God... They also lost their trust in God, and God cannot talk to those who don't trust Him.

My son is one

A year ago today, my little Asher was brought into the world.  It was a tough day, or rather week.  My wife tried to have a natural birth, but my little boy was too big and she had to have a C-section after 72 hours of labor.  He was having trouble breathing when he came out and my wife was exhausted and in serious pain after an emergency surgery.  At that moment I became a father.  I realized that day that I no longer belong to myself.  I stayed with my son and talked to him as he laid under an oxygen hood with and IV in one arm and an oxygen sensor on his toe.  He didn't have the strength to move and I just told him to breathe.  I would go to my wife and report on the status of our new little man.  I was a bridge between my wife who was constrained to her bed and my son who could not leave the nursery.  He overcame those tense few hours and now he is a strong little man.  I got past those first days of sleeplessness and I cannot imagine a world without my little boy.

Not really a comment about God

My gov't is buying banks.

WHAT!!!

I am disgusted with the bailout plan. There was a cabal of financial executives that developed a complex plan to create value when there was none and that plan collapsed. Now, rather than closing those companies and imprisoning those people that understood how bad this would be and still signed off on it, we are propping up their business with tax dollars. But, not even tax dollars. We are doing it by issuing treasury bonds which means that we are mortgaging the future of our children to bailout people that defrauded us because they ran organizations that were "too big to fail". McCain and Obama have coddled this bailout as a measure to stop the downslide of our economy. I have news for them. The economy will rid itself of non-value regardless of how much money we pump into fraudulent companies. It will just take longer and we will suffer for a longer amount of time. Someone needs to read some Machiavelli and realize that if you have to do distasteful things, get them all done at once and then work on rebuilding. People can forget a single disastrous blow but long drawn out suffering breeds contempt and resentment. Just ask Bush. There is a reason that he is the least favored president in US history.

Back to the bank thing. Paulson rounded up execs from the top banks and extorted them to sign the agreement to allow the treasury to purchase their stock. The CEO of Wells Fargo objected to the plan(probably because his bank managed to steer clear of the tempting ponzi scheme which was being peddled on Wall St.) and the response given was something like "if you don't sign now, the Gov't may not be so generous later". Why didn't Paulson just tell Rocco to take them out for a walk by the pier? Hopefully, I will be proven wrong, but I am not happy about the way this bailout plan is shaking out. It seems more like a shakedown to me.

Happy Pascha

This year I observed Lent, as much as I could, and I attended the Paschal Liturgy at my church. Pascha is the Orthodox name for Easter and their calculation of the date for Easter is different than the Western tradition largely because of a continued use of the Julian calendar (and they rely on a real full moon, rather than a calculated one). The result of the calculation difference means that Pascha is always after the Western Easter, and it usually falls on the close of Passover(since the calculation for the two is essentially the same).

I arrived at Holy Resurrection at about midnight just as the paschal flame was being passed to the congregation. The church was dark except for a small light in the Holy Sanctuary where the Priests performed the rites of the service. I then saw those lights multiply as the priests lit candles and emerged from the sanctuary to light the candles of the parishioners. The paschal light was spread backwards through the church until it found me, in the very back, just outside of the door to the nave(where the parishioners are during the service). There was no artificial light and the room was filled with little candle lights. It was a beautiful sight. Chanting begun and the Paschal Hymn was sung. I like the Paschal Hymn a lot, and have since I first heard it. The English of the hymn is as follows: "Christ is risen, from the dead. Trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life" – then repeat. This short verse is full of theological depth and captures the crux of Christian belief, I like it very much and I tend to say it in my head often.

As I was in the back of the church, I watched my candle, protecting its light. We processed around the church, all of us holding our candles. I thought about how the candle must be protected from the wind and how sometimes it is blown out and you have to ask someone if you can use their candle to light yours. It seems like this is a perfect analogy for Christian life, or life in general. We cultivate what we believe, but there are sometimes doubts and having a community to fall back on allows our "flames" to be relit. Pascha is the annual resurrection of our(Orthodox Christians) faith and reminds us that life is a process that requires nurturing and care for growth to occur.

The rest of the service was good as well, after the procession, the lights are turned on in the church and liturgy continues with interjected bouts of "Christ is risen" and "Indeed, He is risen" in many languages. There are a number of different hymns sung which make the service longer than usual. Many of the children in the congregation were asleep by 2ish. I saw some kids on the pews sleeping and two others in sleeping bags under the pews. My friend Aaron's baby seemed determined to stay awake though looking at her little face; I could tell she was tired. She didn't cry during the service even though at one point I looked over and she seemed to be making grumpy-mouth – it was pretty cute.

When the service concluded with communion and blessed bread we gathered downstairs for the Paschal Feast. There was a ton of food, mostly the stuff that one could not eat if they had been fasting. Many of the kids, and adults, were walking around with hard boiled eggs and playing a game where they crack eggs with another to see whose egg will break. One thing I noticed that was different from the other time I had attended Pascha at Holy Resurrection is that the food tables were in a straight line. When I had attended in college, the tables were laid out in the shape of a cross. I suppose the linear shape facilitates getting food easier, but I enjoy the little symbolic details sometimes.

I talked with a few people and met some people that I didn't know before. I spoke with Fr. Patrick briefly and then came home. I managed to sneak in the door around 4am. I was tired, but I am really glad that I went to service.

thinking about the beginning of time

In the beginning there was a ball of massive incomprehensible stuff that got bored and became the universe. Okay, I will take that, I mean it is the closest thing to an acknowledgement of a beginning of the universe one can expect from a scientific establishment that is bent on eliminating metaphysical references when talking about the universe. The problem is that scientists have run into a physical wall, a no man's land of sorts with regards to physical laws. All of the explanations for the Big Bang must abandon physics. I should acknowledge that I am reading a book by David Berlinski right now talking about the scientific consensus that God does not exist, or at least God should not exist. That being said I have been pondering the Big Bang and its paradoxes for quite a while. Hawking purports to be able to tunnel through the Big Bang to a prior state using a mathematical tool know as imaginary or complex numbers(remember the square root of -1 from high school math?). But that is still a technique and not a description of measurable science. Even with his little imaginary tunnel, he is brought to a place which just exists, until it decided to come out, there is nothing significant that can be said about that space and nothing can be said about the cause for its existence. If you think about the cosmological situation we see a return to a fundamental problem in scientific inquiry. Science uses conjecture then experiment to form statements about the physical world. Scientists, however, feel that they should be able to say things about non-physical events, and claim that to be a physical observation. Talking about events prior to the Big Bang is metaphysical, the laws of physics admittedly break down at the Big Bang, it is a singularity where no meaningful data can be assessed. To say that the universe had a state prior to the Big Bang is not within the realm of science. Maybe it is in the realm of advanced mathematics, but at that point the system described is not our universe but a logical entity, essentially a metaphysical system.

What astounds me is that many will fight vehemently to say that science has proved there is no God. It seems to me that it is not within the realm of scientific inquiry to prove such a claim. Perhaps science can assert that a physical reality which was purportedly caused by God has a physical cause, but it cannot prove God to not exist.

So what is it that pushes God-deniers forward? If their methods are not really scientific, why do they push the point? Because they believe it. The same reason that Christians believe Jesus was the Son of God, or Jews believe Abraham talked to God, or the Greeks believed the gods to have lived on Olympus. Believing in the assertion that God does not exist is just as much(if not more of) a matter of faith as believing God does exist. When one asks what caused the universe, one can say nothing, or one can say God (one can say other things, but logically they amount to nothing). It is the expedient answer to say God caused the universe, for there is no perceivable physical cause and our experience is that things do not come from nothing.