When an oil worker told investigators on July 23 that an alarm to warn of explosive gas on the Transocean rig in the Gulf of Mexico had been intentionally disabled months before, it struck many people as reckless. Reckless, maybe, but not unusual. On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said that a crash last year on the Washington subway system that killed nine people had happened partly because train dispatchers had been ignoring 9,000 alarms per week. Air traffic controllers, nuclear plant operators, nurses in intensive-care units and others do the same. Mark R. Rosekind, a psychologist who [...]
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The Christian life is just a bunch of rules. It’s not about joy, or being happy, it’s just all about not doing things that keep God from being happy with you. Who wants to give up things that will make you happy? Isn’t my happiness important? Who wants to get caught up in all of God’s red tape? I’ve heard this sort of thing expressed a number of times; the Christian life is a life without joy, or without happiness. Who wants the life of a Christian? When you start to feel pulled into it, the instant reaction is [...] We hear, almost daily, about how the Palestinians “just want their own state.” They’ve been oppressed and misused, and just either a “one state solution,” with a secular democratic state where Israel now stands, or they want an Islamic state alongside Israel, and for all the “refugees” to “return home.” I have a challenge for those who think these are reasonable demands: Show me. Show me the Islamic state, right now, that is democratic in the fullest sense of the word. Pakistan, you say? You mean this Pakistan? Oh, Turkey? You mean the Turkey that recently sponsored a “peace [...] Some of the assumptions of the present science-religion debates simply do not hold up under the weight of research data. Dispelling myths about religious and scientific communities could lay the groundwork for a new kind of dialogue — one based more on serious thinking and scholarship than caricature. For example, many in the religious community hold scientists at arm’s length, believing that they are all atheists who are interested in attacking religion and the religious community. While 30% of the scientists I studied consider themselves atheists, a much larger percentage than in the general population, fewer than 6% of [...] The more we see of him, the more we hear him, the more we are all perplexed by Barack Obama. The American people voted for him and wished fervently for his success, but increasingly they feel, as Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post, that “he casts no shadow.” … This should not be too surprising. When you vote for a fictional character, you will likely get a fictional character. If you thought that Obama was going to redeem America’s original sin of racism, and that this would heal the nation’s financial plight, you were obviously deluded. -Had Enough [...] Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. [...] Now dead faith, as we will see, is a form of non-saving belief. It is a belief that does not save. It is a belief that brings a person up short of regeneration, redemption and the new birth. It is religion without reality. And the distinguishing mark of dead faith is the absence of something, and that is the absence of righteous works. -Dead Faith If you say “I know it!” Then show it! How do you know you’re a believer? You’ll see some changes in your life. Real faith always produces change. -Real Faith that Really Works [...] … I still don’t quite get Reformed theology. God desires all to repent, but He doesn’t desire all to repent. How does one believe something one is incapable of understanding? It’s like saying I “believe” that the round plate before me is also a square, as if my saying it makes it so. The Calvinist’s response is: What the commenter has hit on is a formal contradiction, at least if no fallacious equivocation is going on. If the word “desire” is being used in the same sense, then the statement that God desires all to repent and the [...] To be against Israel in the name of peace is something new. For this hostility has cast off any practical or political motives… This new anti-Semitism does not arise from base instincts, nor is it the product of honorable political intentions. It is the morality of morons. Anti-Jewish… hostility arises from the purest human needs; it comes from the yearning for peace. It is therefore entirely innocent; it is as universal as it is moral. This moral anti-Semitism completes Germany’s restoration to goodness, in that it heralds the perfection of inhumanity: the banality of good. -Gay City News Think [...] I have a lot of friends who send their kids to the government run public schools; their reasoning for keeping their children in public schools generally fall into one of these: 1. I can’t teach my children a specific subject. 2. My school/class is fine; my children’s teachers are Christians. 3. I teach at home to make up for and counter the academic and worldview shortfalls of public school. 4. My children provide a witness to those around them in their public school. For the first objection, I would just say this: it’s better to do a second rate [...] Recently I’ve seen a number of posts on Christian blogs about how Christians need to get out of the “political business,” and into the “soul winning business.” That we need to stop being consumed, or obsessed, with politics, and start caring about those around us who are not saved; that we are not to control politics, which is a form of dominism, but rather we are to be concerned only with saving people. I’ve heard this from pulpits, as well. Since I obviously write on a wide variety of subjects here, from shooting to Scripture to politics to culture, [...] Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of Eden, trained on the tree of knowledge. Think how this might have changed things for the better. The serpent sidles up to Eve and urges her to try the forbidden fruit. Eve reaches her hand out – in paradise the fruit is always conveniently within reach – but at the last second she notices the CCTV and thinks better of it. Result: no sin, no Fall, no expulsion from paradise. We don’t [...] When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine. -NYT In a paper titled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments, published in 1999, professor David Dunning argues that people who are poor at making decisions often suffer from a double burden [...] |
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