couldn't think up a clever name

a brilliant tax policy...

2008-05-14T09:21:00.003-05:00

"they won't miss it."

click through to read the story. would we hold any other thievery to the same standard?

passover... but not

2008-03-26T10:08:00.000-05:00

Okay, bear with me.

I grew up celebrating Passover every year. At the passover seder, we all broke and ate the matzoh and drank the four cups of wine. Everyone at the table. When I was twelve, my immediate family went to a messianic seder hosted by my second cousin, who is a messianic jewish rabbi. We were unofficially banned from my extended family's jewish seders from then on. Everyone in my family, youngest to oldest, was banned – even though my father was the one who made the decision to attend the messianic seder. (I guess my relatives understood the concept of covenant headship.) So we went to a different table, a messianic table. We all went and ate and drank at that passover table, now commemorating the death of Christ.

This past Thursday was my first Maundy Thursday church service. Growing up (since I was twelve) we commemorated Maundy Thursday with an actual seder. Of course, we didn't call it Maundy Thursday. We called it Passover.

So at our church's Maundy Thursday, as opposed to every other Sunday ("Why is this night different from all others?"), it seemed we were really (and appropriately) hammering on the connection to passover and the seder. And it kept bringing me back to the seders I'd attended growing up. And I remembered feeding wine and bread to my cousin when he was no older than one, and could only just chew and swallow. This was the level of participation he offered at the seder despite that he had no concept of what was going on, he could not read and he could not speak the confessions or prayers recited during the meal. And yet we wouldn't have even thought of withholding the bread and wine from him (and the karpas, and the maror, and the korech). In fact, wherever the baby's faculties keep him from participating, we act for him. (For example, during the urchatz – the washing – we wash their hands for them.) Even more, the youngest child who can speak is given a special role at the seder; nevertheless, speaking and the ability to ask the Four Questions is not a requisite for admission to the table.

Again, on Maundy Thursday we as a congregation affirmed that what we celebrate is actually the last supper, the passover seder, freely offered to all members of the covenant community. And then I was made to withhold the bread and wine from my son, who was baptized into the covenant, just as my cousins and I were circumcized into the old and failed covenant. So what is it? Are we celebrating the seder or not? If so, how could it be so different than the seder I celebrated growing up? How could we do something in the Church of Christ that would be unthinkable to my un-believing relatives, who always celebrated with great relish the day that the youngest child at the table first took their matzoh and wine, i.e., the day a weaned baby celebrated his first seder.

So what am I to think? Are we celebrating the last supper, or are we celebrating the communion as distinct from the last supper? Did my Jewish relatives, who follow the same seder liturgy (though the true meaning is obscured by unbelief) every year in the same basic way as Christ did, have it all wrong? Or is there biblical reason to alter the fundamentals of the seder?

what would it mean?

2008-03-18T11:22:00.001-05:00

what if this is true? would it mean that obama is out-of-touch? or lying?

so sad it's funny

2008-03-10T12:26:00.002-05:00

hilarious. also, schumer's comment (half-way in) that the money could be better spent elsewhere; classic.

why not give it back to the taxpayers? because it belongs to the government, silly! like you and everything else you own! yeah, we could better use it to collect more taxes!

Rebate letters to cost $42 million

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 7, 1:47 PM ET

WASHINGTON - At a cost of nearly $42 million, the IRS wants you to know: Your check is almost in the mail.

The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.

The notices are going out this month to an estimated 130 million households who filed returns for the 2006 tax year, at a cost $41.8 million, IRS spokesman John Lipold confirmed.

That works out to about 32 cents to print, process and mail each letter. It doesn't include the tab for another round of mailings planned for those who didn't file tax returns last year but may still qualify for a rebate.

Democrats accused the Bush administration of wasting time and postage.

"There are countless better uses for $42 million than a self-congratulatory mailer that gives the president a pat on the back for an idea that wasn't even his," Sen. Charles Schumer said Friday, arguing the IRS could more effectively spend the money to catch tax cheats.

Keith Hennessey, director of the president's National Economic Council, said the letters are being sent to explain how the tax rebates will work.

"Any time you do something as a government tens of millions of times, there is ample room for people to get confused. And so if you're going to have tens of millions of taxpayers getting checks, you want to get the information out so that you have as few people as possible confused about what's happening, they understand what's coming, and it reduces the number of incoming requests that IRS and Treasury have to figure out how to deal with it," said Hennessey.

"Dear Taxpayer," the letters will begin, going on to say the IRS is pleased to inform the recipient that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law a plan that will provide payments of up to $600 for individuals who qualify or $1,200 for married couples filing jointly. The rebates are the centerpiece of a $168 billion economic stimulus package.

The actual rebate checks are scheduled to go out starting in May, after the IRS has finished separately mailing out routine refunds for the 2007 tax year.

The letters will be a reminder that people need to file a 2007 tax return so they will receive the rebate if they are eligible for it.

Similar notices will go out later to some Social Security recipients and those who receive veterans benefits — groups that often do not file tax returns.

For those people to get a rebate check, they will need to file a tax return if they received at least $3,000 from a combination of certain Social Security benefits, veterans benefits and earned income. The minimum payment for this group will be $300 for an individual and $600 for a couple filing jointly.

Not everyone will be eligible. Singles with income of more than $75,000 and couples with more than $150,000 get only partial rebates, if any.

People who earn less than $3,000, illegal immigrants and anyone who does not file a tax return will miss out. Singles with incomes exceeding $87,000 and couples with incomes exceeding $174,000 also won't qualify, although those caps rise by $6,000 per child.

___

Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report.

why isn't there more outrage...

2008-03-10T11:08:00.003-05:00

that we're paying an international cartel for our gas, a monopoly that actively restricts supply to keep prices artificially high?

"If we had increased our production given all these factors, you wouldn't have been able to miss the impact on prices," [Algerian Energy minister and OPEC president Chakib Khelil] said, suggesting prices would have slid.

oh, that's right, it's because our own government keeps pumping the economy full of worthless dollars to boost demand and keep prices on everything else artificially high.

still think it's a fundamental right?

2008-02-28T15:27:00.004-06:00

the founder of planned parenthood, margaret sanger, was a well-known proponent of eugenics and minority abortions. she said, in 1921, that eugenics through abortion is "the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems." at another point, she lamented "the ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all." (Emphasis added.)

planned parenthood has located 79% of its clinics nationwide in minority neighborhoods. about 35% of all abortions are performed on blacks, even though they comprise less than 13% of the population. almost half of all black pregnancies are aborted. black women are 4.8 times as likely as non-hispanic white women to have an abortion, and hispanic women are 2.7 times as likely. Jones RK et al., Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2008, (forthcoming). under the legal theory of disparate impact, planned parenthood is engaged in a form of racial genocide.

further note that abortion disproportionately targets the poor: the abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level ($9,570 for a single woman with no children) is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level (44 vs. 10 abortions per 1,000 women). Jones RK, Darroch JE and Henshaw SK, Patterns in the socioeconomic characteristics of women obtaining abortions in 2000–2001, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2002, 34(5):226–235.

here's the real and frightening shame on the church: forty-three percent of women getting abortions identify themselves as protestant, and 27% as catholic. (Jones, 2002).

read it and weep

2008-02-28T10:52:00.001-06:00

THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING

by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers
1893-1957

A student of medieval literature, she was one of the first women to receive a degree from the University of Oxford, graduating with first class honors in modern languages. After working in a London advertising agency, the setting for her later novel Murder Must Advertise (1933), she began to write detective stories, beginning with Whose Body? (1923). It featured the dashing, witty aristocrat-detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who solved the crimes in her ten subsequent books. Works such as The Nine Tailors (1934), which involves disquisitions on the art of ringing church bells, and Gaudy Night (1935), set in a woman's college at Oxford, are examples of Sayer's erudite, complexly plotted approach. Her other works include theological studies and works on Dante and translations of his Divine Comedy (1949 and 1955).

Her essay :The Lost Tools of Learning has become the clarion call for the restoration of classical education in the United States, particularly in the homeschooling movement.

Her theology was traditionally Anglican with emphasis on doctrine. Every available moment of her time was spent writing, to the small hours of the morning. Letters, articles and essays streamed from her pen. She explored by-ways of knowledge, delighted in puzzles and enjoyed many a fight which she conducted with wit and good humour. Her formidable presence, magnificent brain and logical presentation put her in great demand as a lecturer. She worked with the Rev. Patrick McLaughlin at the St Anne's centre for Christian discourse and became in 1952 churchwarden of her London parish, St Thomas-cum-St Annes.

That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant people are appointed to highly technical ministries; and plain, blunt men write to the papers to say that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw. Up to a certain point, and provided that the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, theses activities are commendable. Too much specialization is not a good thing. There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or another, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing our contribution to the discussion may have potential value.

However, it is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I propose will ever be carried into effect. Neither the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the board of

Beauty in Castles of the Middle Ages

governors, nor the ministries of education would countenance them for a moment. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.

Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase reactionary, romantic, mediaevalist, laudator temporis acti, or whatever tag comes first to hand, I will ask you to consider one or two miscellaneous questions that hang about at the back, perhaps, of all our minds, and occasionally pop out to worry us.

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to the university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society. The stock argument in favor of postponing the school-leaving age and prolonging the period of education generally is that there is now so much more to learn than there was in the Middle Ages. This is partially true, but not wholly. The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects but does that always mean that they actually know more?

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher that it has ever been, people should have become susceptable to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he has already defined them? Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going about? And if so, are you troubled because it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous misunderstanding?

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly, and properly documented, and one that is, to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a subject remains a subject, divided by watertight bulkheads from all other subjects, so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the piece of salmonor, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economic, or chemistry and art?

Are you occasionally perturbed by the things written by adult men and women for adult men and women to read? We find a well-known biologist writing in a weekly paper to the effect that: It is an

Beethoven
1750-1781

argument against the existence of a Creator (I think he put it more strongly; but since I have, most unfortunately, mislaid the reference, I will put his claim at its lowest) 'an argument against the existence of a Creator that the same kind of variations which are produced by natural selection can be produced at will by stock-breeders. One might feel tempted to say that it is rather an argument for the existence of a Creator. Actually, of course, it is neither: all it proves is that the same material causes (recombination of the chromosomes by cross-breeding and so Fourth) are sufficient to account for all observed variation just as the various combinations of the same dozen tones are materially sufficient to account for Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and the noise the cat makes by walking on the keys. But the cat's performance neither proves nor disproves the existence of Beethoven: and all that is proved by the biologist's argument is that he was unable to distinguish between a material and a final cause.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
School teacher and author
of the world-famous
Little House on the Prairie books

"I believe it would be much better for everyone if children were given their start in education at home. No one understands a child as well as his mother, and children are so different, they need individual training and study. A teacher with a roomful of pupils cannot do this. At home, too, they are in their mother's care. She can keep them from learning immoral things from other children. At home the expense is much less, for in school there are a great many expenses that are difficult for poor people to meet."

from
Little House in the Ozarks
by Laura Ingalls Wilder
p.54-55

Thomas Belson Publishers
Nashville

Here is a sentence from no less academic a source than a front-page article in the Times Literary Supplement:

The Frenchman, Alfred Epinas, pointed out that certain species (e.g., ants and wasps) can only face the horrors of life and death in association.

I do not know what the Frenchman actually did say: what the Englishman says he said is patently meaningless, We cannot know whether life holds any horror for the ant, nor in what sense the isolated wasp which you kill upon the window-pane can be said to 'face' or not to 'face' the horrors of death. The subject of the article is mass behavior in man; and the human motives have been unobtrusively transferred from the main proposition to the supporting instance. Thus the argument, in effect, assumes what is set out to prove a fact which would become immediately apparent if it were presented in a formal syllogism. This is only a small and haphazard example of a vice which pervades whole books particularly books written by men of science on metaphysical subjects.

Another quotation from the same issue of the TLS comes in fittingly here to wind up this random collection of disquieting thoughts this time from a review of Sir Richard Livingstone's Some Tasks for Education:

More than once the reader is reminded of the value of an intensive study of at least one subject, so as to learn the meaning of knowledge and what precision and persistence is needed to attain it. Yet there is elsewhere full recognition of the distressing fact that a man may be master in one field and show no better judgement than his neighbor anywhere else: he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it.

I would draw your attention particularly to that last sentence, which offers an explanation of what the writer rightly calls the distressing fact that the intellectual skills bestowed upon us by our education are not readily transferable to subjects other than those in which we acquired then: he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it.

Is not the great defect of our education today a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils subjects, we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play the Harmonious Blacksmith upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized the Harmonious Blacksmith, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle the Last Rose of Summer:. Why do I say, as though? In certain of the arts and crafts we sometimes do precisely this requiring a child to express himself in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economize labor and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an old piece of material, in order to give himself the feel of the tool.

Let us now look at the mediaeval scheme of education the syllabus of the Schools. It does not matter, for the moment, whether it was devised for small children or for older students, or how long people were supposed to take over it. What matters if the light it throws upon what the men of the Middle Ages supposed to be the object and the right order of the educative process.

The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium. The second part the Quadrivium consisted of subjects and need not for the moment concern us. The interesting thing for us is the

Medieval Construction

composition of the Trivium, which preceeded the Quadrivium was the preliminary discipline for it. It consisted of three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order.

Now the first thing that we notice is that two at any rate of these subjects are not what we should call subjects at all they are only methods of dealing with subjects. Grammar, indeed, is a subject in the sense that it does mean definitely learning a language at that period it meant learning Latin. But language itself is simply the medium in which thought is expressed. The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to subjects at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to order a meal in a foreign language, but the structure of a language, and hence of language itself what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language: how to define his terms and make accurate statements: how to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument. Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and Disputation. Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language how to say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively.

At the end of his course, he was required to compose a thesis upon some theme set by his masters or chosen by himself, and afterwards, to defend his thesis against the criticism of the faculty. By this time he would have learned or woe betide him not merely to write an essay on paper, but to speak audibly and intelligibly from a platform, and to use his wits quickly when heckled. There would also be questions, cogent and shrewd, from those who had already run the gauntlet of debate.

It is of course, quite true that bits and pieces of the mediaeval tradition still linger, or have been revived, in the ordinary school syllabus of today. Some knowledge of grammar is still required when learning a foreign language perhaps I should say, is again required; for during my own lifetime we passed through a phrase when the teaching of declensions and conjugations was considered rather reprehensible, and it was considered better to pick these things up as we went along. School debating societies flourish; essays are written; the necessity for self-expression is stressed, and perhaps even over-stressed. But these activities are cultivated more or less in detachment, as belonging to the special subjects in which they are pigeon-holed rather than as forming one coherent scheme of mental training to which all subjects stand in a subordinate relation. Grammar belongs especially to the subject of foreign languages, and essay-writing to the subject called English, while Dialectic has become almost entirely divorced from the rest of the curriculum, and is frequently practiced unsystematically and out of school hours as a separate exercise, only very loosely related to the main business of learning. Taken by and large, the great difference of emphasis between the two conceptions holds good: modern education concentrates on teaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressing one's conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along; mediaeval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.

Subjects of some kind there must be, of course. One cannot learn the theory of grammar without learning an actual language, or learn to argue and orate without speaking about something in

Allegory of the
Liberal Arts

particular. The debating subjects of the Middle Ages were drawn largely from theology, or from the ethics and history of antiquity. Often, indeed, they became stereotyped, especially towards the end of the period, and the far-fetched and wire-drawn absurdities of Scholastic argument fretted Milton and provide food for merriment even to this day. Whether they were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivial than the usual subjects set nowadays for essay-writing I should not like to say: we may ourselves grow a little weary of A Day in My Holidays and all the rest of it. But most of the merriment is misplaced, because the aim and object of the debating thesis has by now been lost sight of.

A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless rage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I hope, that it never was a matter of faith; it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing say, the point of a needle it is located there in there in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is there, it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of different people's thoughts being concentrated upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper subject of the argument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and tension in space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be the nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been something else); the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not to use words like there in a loose and unscientific way, without specifying whether you mean located there or occupying space there.

Scorn in plenty has been poured out upon the mediaeval passion for hair-splitting: but when we look at the shame-less abuse made, in print and on the platform, of controversial expressions with shifting and ambiguous connotations, we may feel it in our hearts to wish that every reader and hearer had been so defensively armored by his education as to be able to cry: Distinguo.

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education lip service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave concientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

What, then, are we to do? We cannot go back to the Middle Ages. That is a cry which we have become accustomed. We cannot go back or can we? Distinguo. I should like every term in that proposition defined. Does "go back" mean a retrogression in time, or the revision of an error? The first is clearly impossible per se; the second is a thing which wise men do every day. "Cannot" does this mean that our behavior is determined irreversibly, or merely that such an action would be very difficult in view of the opposition it would provoke? Obviously the twentieth century is not and cannot be the fourteenth; but if the Middle Ages is, in this context, simply a picturesque phrase denoting a particular educational theory, there seems to be no a priori reason why we should not "go back" to it with modifications as we have already "gone back", with modifications, to, let us say, the idea of playing Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, and not in the "modernized" versions of Cibber and Garrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.

Let us amuse ourselves by imagining that such progressive retrogression is possible. Let us make a clean sweep of all educational authorities, and furnish ourselves with a nice little school of boys and girls whom we may experimentally equip for the intellectual conflict along lines chosen by ourselves. We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents; we will staff our school with teachers who are themselves perfectly familiar with the aims and methods of the Trivium; we will have our buildings and staff large enough to allow our classes to be small enough for adequate handling; and we will postulate a Board of Examiners willing and qualified to test the products we turn out. Thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus a modern Trivium with modifications; and we will see where we get to.

But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn; besides, one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will, therefore, catch em' young, re-quiring of our pupils only that they shall be able to read, write, and cipher.

My views about child-psychology are, I admit, neither orthodox nor enlightened. Looking back upon myself (since I am the child I know best and the only child I can pretend to know from inside) I recognize three states of development. These, in a rough-and-ready fashion, I will call the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic the latter coinciding, approximately, with the onset of puberty. The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things. The Pert age, which follows upon this (and, naturally, overlaps it to some extent), is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to catch people out (especially one's elders), and by the propounding of connundrums. Its nuisance-value is extremely high. It usually sets in about the Fourth Form. The Poetic age is popularly known as the "difficult" age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness, a reaching-out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to now and some one thing in preference to all others. Now it seems to me that the layout of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular appropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-Parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic age.

Let us begin, then, with Grammar. This, in practice, means, the grammar of some language in particular, and it must be an inflected language. The grammatical structure of an inflected language is far too analytical to be tackled by any one without previous practice in Dialectic. Moreover, the inflected languages interpret the uninflected, whereas the uninflected are of little use in interpreting the inflected. I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least 50 percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all of the Romance languages and to the structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents.

Those whose pedantric preference for a living language persuades them to deprive their pupils of all these advantages might substitute Russian, whose grammar is still more primitive. Russian is, of course, helpful with the other Slav dialects. There is something also to be said for Classical Greek. But my own choice is Latin. Having thus pleased the Classicists among you, I will proceed to horrify them by adding that I do not think it either wise or necessary to cramp the ordinary pupil upon the Procrustean bed of the Augustan Age, with its highly elaborate and artificial verse forms and oratory. Post-classical and mediaeval Latin, which was a living language down to the end of the Renaissance, is easier and in some ways livelier; and a study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that learning and literature came to a full stop when Christ was born and only woke up again at the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Latin should be begun as early as possible at a time when inflected speech seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenom in an astonishing world; and when the chanting of Amo, Amas, Amat is as ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of eeny, meeny, miney, mo.

During this age we must, of course, exercise the mind on other things besides Latin grammar. Observation and memory are the faculties most lively at this period; and if we are to learn a contemporary foreign language we should begin now, before the facial and mental muscles become rebellious to strange intonations. Spoken French or German can be practiced alongside the grammatical discipline of the Latin.

In English, meanwhile, verse and prose can be learned by heart, and the pupil's memory should be stored with stories of every kind classical myth. European legend, and so Fourth, I do not think that the classical stories and masterpieces of ancient literature should be made the vile bodies on which to practice the technics of Grammar that was a fault of mediaeval education which we need not perpetuate. The stories can be enjoyed and remembered in English, and related to their origin at a subsequent stage. Recitation aloud should be practiced, individually or in chorus; for we must not forget that we are laying the groundwork for Disputation and Rhetoric.

The grammar of History should consist, I think, of dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities. A set of dates to which one can peg all later historical knowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective of history. It does not greatly matter which dates; those of the Kings of England will do very nicely, provided that they are accompanied by pictures of costumes, architecture, and other everyday things so that the mere mention of a date calls up a strong visual presentment of the whole period.

Geography will similarly be presented in its factual aspect, with maps, natural features, and visual presentment of customs, costumes, flora, fauna, and so on; and I believe myself that the discredited and old-fashioned memorizing of a few capital cities, rivers, mountain ranges, etc., does no harm. Stamp-collecting may be encouraged.

Science, in the Poll-Parrot period, arranges itself naturally and easily round collections the identifying and naming of specimens and, in general, the kind of thing that used to be called "natural history, or, still more charmingly, "natural philosophy. To know the names and properties of things is, at this age, a satisfaction in itself; to recognize a devil's coach-horse at sight, and assure one's foolish elders that, in spite of its appearance, it does not sting; to be able to pick out Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, and perhaps even to know who Cassiopeia and Peliades were; to be aware that a whale is not a fish, and a bat not a bird all these things give a pleasant sensation of superiority; while to know a ring-snake from an adder or a poisonous from an edible toadstool is a kind of knowledge that has also a practical value.

The grammar of Mathematics begins, of course, with the multiplication table, which, of not learnt now, will never be learnt with pleasure; and with the recognition of the geometrical shapes and the grouping

Kublai Khan

of numbers. These exercises lead naturally to the doing of simple sums in arithmetic. More complicated mathematical pro-cesses may, and perhaps should be postponed, for reasons which will presently appear.

So far (except, of course, for the Latin), our curriculum contains nothing that departs very far from common practice. The difference will be felt rather in the attitude of the teachers who must look upon all these activities less as "subjects" in themselves than as a gathering-together of material for use in the next part of the Trivium. What that material is, is only of secondary importance; but it is as well that anything and everything which can usefully be committed to memory should be memorized at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not. The modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on a child's mind at too early an age. Intelligent questions, spontaneously asked, should, of course, receive an immediate and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond his power to analyze - particularly if those things have a strong imaginative appeal (as, for example, "Kubla Khan"), an attractive jingle (like some of the memory rhymes for Latin genders), or an abundance of rich, resounding polysyllables (like the Quicumque vult).

This reminds me of the grammar of Theology. I shall add it to the curriculum, because theology is the mistress-science, without which the whole educational structure will necessarily lack its final

Moses
as portrayed by
Charleton Heston

synthesis. Those who disagree about this will remain content to leave their pupils' education still full of loose ends. This will matter rather less than it might, since by the time the tools of learning have been forged the student will be able to tackle theology for himself, and will probably insist upon doing so and making sense of it. Still, it is as well to have this matter also handy and ready for the reason to work upon. AT the grammatical age, therefore, we should become acquainted with the story of God and Man in outline, i.e. the Old and New Testaments presented as parts of a single narrative of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption, and also with the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. At this stage, it does not matter nearly so much that these things should be fully understood as that they should be known and remembered.

It is difficult to say at what age precisely, we should pass from the first to the second part of the Trivium. Generally speaking, the answer is, so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to pertness and interminable argument. For as, in the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so, in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason. In the first, the exercise to which the rest of the material was, as it were, keyed, was the Latin grammar; in the second, the key-exercise will be Formal Logic. It is here that our curriculum shows its first sharp divergence from modern standards. The disrepute into which Formal Logic has fallen is entirely unjustified; and its neglect is the root cause of nearly all those disquieting symptoms which we have noted in the modern intellectual constitution. Logic has been discredited, partly because we have come to suppose that we are conditioned almost entirely by the intuitive and the unconscious. There is no time to argue whether this is true; I will simply observe that to neglect the proper training of the reason is the best possible way to make it true. Another cause for the disfavor into which Logic has fallen is the belief that it is entirely based upon universal assumptions that are either unprovable or tautological. This is not true. Not all universal propositions are of this kind. But even if they were, it would make no difference, since every syllogism whose major premise is in the form "All A is B" can be recast in hypothetical form. Logic is the art of arguing correctly; "If A, then B"; the method is not invalidated by the hypothetical mature of A. Indeed, the practical utility of Formal Logic today lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference.

Let us now quickly review our material and see how it is to be related to Dialectic. On the Language side, we shall now have our vocabulary and morphology at our fingertips; henceforward we can concentrate on syntax and analysis (i.e., the logical construction of speech) and the history of language (i.e., how we came to arrange our speech as we do in order to convey our thoughts).

Our Reading will proceed from narrative and lyric to essays, arguments, and criticism, and the pupil will learn to try his hand at writing this kind of thing. Many lessons - on whatever subject - will take the form of debates; and the place of individual or choral recitation will be taken by dramatic performances, with special attention to plays in which an argument is stated in dramatic form.

Mathematics - algebra, geometry, and the more advanced kinds of arithmetic - will now enter into the syllabus and take its place as what it really is; not a separate "subject", but a sub-department of Logic. It is neither more or less than the rule of the syllogism in its particular application to number and measurement, and should be taught as such, instead of being, for some, a dark mystery, and, for others, a special revelation, neither illuminating nor illuminated by any other part of knowledge.

History, aided by a simple system of ethics derived from the grammar of theology, will provide much suitable material for discussion. Was the behavior of this statesman justified? What was the effect of such an enactment? What are the arguments for and against this or that form of government? We shall thus get an introduction to constitutional history - a subject meaningless to the young child, but of absorbing interest to those who are prepared to argue and debate. Theology itself will furnish material for argument about conduct and morals; and should have its scope extended by a simplified course of dogmatic theology (i.e., the rational structure of Christian thought), clarifying the relations between the dogma and the ethics, and lending itself to that application of ethical principles in particular instances which is properly called casuitry. Geography and the Sciences will likewise provide material for Dialectic.

But, above all, we must not neglect the material which is so abundant in the pupils' own daily life.

There is a delightful passage in Leslie Paul's The Living Hedge which tells how a number of small boys enjoyed themselves for days arguing about an extraordinary shower of rain which had fallen in their town - a shower so localized that it left one half of the main street wet and the other dry. Could one, they argued, properly say that it had rained that day on or over the town or only in the town? How many drops of water were required to constitute rain - and so on. Argument about this led on to a host of similar problems about rest and motion, sleep and waking, est and non est, and the infinitestimal division of time. The whole passage is an admirable example of the spontaneous development of the ratioinactive faculty and the natural and proper thirst of the awakening reason for definition or terms and exactness of statement. All events are food for such an appetite.

An umpire's decision; the degree to which one may transgress the spirit of a regulation without being trapped by the letter; on such questions as these, children are born casuists, and their natural propensity only needs to be developed and trained - and, especially, brought into an intelligible relationship with events in the grown-up world. The newspapers are full of good material for such exercises; legal decisions, on the one hand, in cases where the cause at issue is not to abstruse, on the other, fallacious reasoning and muddleheaded arguments, with which the correspondence columns of certain papers one could name are abundantly stocked.

Wherever the matter for Dialectic is found, it is, of course, highly important that attention should be focused upon the beauty and economy of a fine demonstration or a well-tuned argument, lest veneration should wholly die. Criticism must not be merely destructive; though at the same time both teacher and pupils must be ready to detect fallacy, slipshod reasoning, ambiguity, irrelevance, and redundancy, and to pounce upon them like rats. This is the moment when précis-writing may be usefully undertaken; together with such exercises as the writing of an essay, and the reduction of it, when written, by 25 or 50 percent.

It will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert age to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectly intolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands. It may, indeed, be rather less obtrusive at home if it is disciplined in school; and, anyhow, elders who have abandoned the wholesome principle that children should be seen and not heard have no one to blame but themselves.

Once again: the contents of the syllabus at this stage may be anything you like. The "subjectas" supply material; but they are all to be regarded as mere grist for the mental mill to work upon. The pupils should be encouraged to go and forage for their own information, and so guided towards the proper use of libraries and books of reference, and shown how to tell which sources are authoritative and which are not.

Towards the close of this stage, the pupils will probably be beginning to discover for themselves that their knowledge and experience are insufficient, and that their trained intelligences need a great deal more material to chew upon. The imagination - usually dormant during the Pert age - will reawaken, and prompt them to suspect the limitations of logic and reason. This means that they are passing into the Poetic age and are ready to embark on the study of Rhetoric. The doors of the storehouse of knowledge should now be thrown open for them to browse about as they will. The things once learned by rote will be seen in new contexts; the things once coldly analyzed can now be brought together to form a new synthesis; here and there a sudden insight will bring about that most exciting of all discoveries; the realization that a truism is true.

It is difficult to map out any general syllabus for the study Rhetoric; a certain freedom is demanded. In literature, appreciation should be again allowed to take the lead over destructive criticism; and self-expression in writing can go forward, with its tools now sharpened to cut clean and observe proportion. Any child who already shows a disposition to specialize should be given his head; for, when the use of tools has been well and truly learned, it is available for study whatever. It would be well, I think, that each pupil should learn to do one, or two, subjects really well, while taking a few classes in subsidiary subjects so as to keep his mind open to the inter-relations of all knowledge. Indeed, at this stage, our difficulty will be to keep "subjects" apart; for as Dialectic will have shown all branches of learning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledge is one. To show this, show why it is so, is pre-eminently the task of the mistress-science. But whether theology is studied or not, we should at least insist that children who seem inclined to specialize on the mathematical and scientific side should be obliged to attend some lessons in the humanities and vice versa. At this stage also, the Latin grammar, having done its work, may be dropped for those who prefer to carry on their language studies on the modern side; while those who are likely never to have any great use or aptitude for mathematics might also be allowed to rest, more or less, upon their oars. Generally speaking: whatsoever is mere apparatus may now be allowed to fall into the background, while the trained mind is gradually prepared for specialization in the "subjects" which, when the Trivium is completed, it should be perfectly well equipped to tackle on its own. The final synthesis of the Trivium - the presentation and public defense of the thesis - should be restored in some form; perhaps as a kind of "leaving examination" during the last term at school.

The scope of Rhetoric depends also on whether the pupil is to be turned out into the world at the age of 16 or whether he is to proceed to the university. Since, really, Rhetoric should be taken at about 14, the first category of pupil should study Grammar from about 9 to 11, and Dialectic from 12 to 14, his last two school years would then be devoted to Rhetoric, which, in his case, would be of a fairly specialized and vocational kind, suiting him to enter immediately upon some practical career. A pupil of the second category would finish his Dialectical course in his preparatory school, and take Rhetoric during his first two years at his public school. At 16, he would be ready to start upon those "subjects" which are proposed for his later study at the university: and this part of his education will correspond to the mediaeval Quadrivium. What this amounts to is that the ordinary pupil, whose formal education ends at 16, will take the Trivium only; whereas scholars will take both the Trivium and the Quadrivium.

Is the Trivium, then, a sufficient education for life" Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the age of 14 they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of 16, thus proving himself the equal of his mediaeval counterpart, whose precocity astonished us at the beginning of this discussion. This, to be sure, would make hay of the English public-school system, and disconcert the universities very much. It would, for example, make quite a different thing of the Oxford and Cambridge boatrace.

But I am not here to consider the feelings of academic bodies; I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.

Before concluding these necessarily very sketchy suggestions, I ought to say why I think it necessary, in these days, to go back to a discipline which we had discarded. The truth is that for the

Milton
1608-1674

last three hundred years or so we have been living upon our educational capital. The post-Renais-sance world, bewildered and excited by the profusion of new "subjects" offered to it, broke away from the old discipline (which had, in-deed, become sad-ly dull and stereotyped in its practical application) and imagined that henceforward it could, as it were, disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium without passing through the Trivium. But the Scholastic tradition, though broken and maimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities; Milton, however much he protested against it, was formed by it - the debate of the Fallen Angels and the disputation of Abdiel with Satan have the tool-marks of the Schools upon them, and might, incidentally, profitably figure as set passages for our Dialectical studies. Right down to the nineteenth century, our public affairs were mostly managed, and our books and journals were for the most part written, by people brought up in homes, and trained in places, where that tradition was still alive in the memory and almost in the blood. Just so, many people today who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it.

But one cannot live on capital forever. However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number - perhaps the majority - of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out our research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits - yes, and who educate our young people - have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning - the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane - that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or "looks to the end of the work."

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, is at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers - they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this; to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

have you got a boo-boo, baby?

2008-02-27T08:27:00.010-06:00

i just saw one of the more asinine headlines on cnn while at the gym. (what are headlines called when they run across the bottom of the screen?) here's what it said:

"should swimming with sharks be banned?"

now, apart from being absolutely hilarious (should swallowing knives be banned? should eating chandeliers be banned? should sleeping on beds of nails be banned?), this question is apropos to the political discussion in which this nation is currently engaging. or, i should say, the utopian fantasy this that this nation is eagerly swallowing, hook, line, and sinker. and if we're going to understand where we're headed, we have to crack open this little chestnut.

what would make cnn think this question is even appropriate to ask? well, obviously, some idiot got ate. yes, the world is now one-sixth of the way to meeting its yearly quota of 1/1,000,000,000 of the world population
who die every year in shark attacks.

this guy was swimming in waters chummed with bloody fish parts and, lo and behold, a shark bit his leg off. our genius lawyer friend is fifty miles off the the sunshine state's coast. that's a one-hour hour boat ride, minimum. obviously, he buys his tickets before boarding the boat. let's put the time of purchase at least an hour before kick-off. i'm sure the crew and staff walks herr groh through a safety lecture including the same warning they post on their web page: Please be aware that these are not 'cage' dives, they are open water experiences. let's add a half-hour of pre-boarding time for the safety talk. finally, upon arriving at the diving site, it's likely that the crew chum the water while the divers assemble and safety-check their gear. you've got to let the chum dissipate a little so it doesn't get all over the divers, and so that the really big sharks can smell it and swim in. half-hour for that. finally, this guy watches crew divers jump in the water, the bloody water, without a cage. then he jumps in. no one pushes him. all told, our austrian friend has at least three hours to reconsider swimming unprotected with the meanest, dumbest and biggest carnivores in the ocean. and he decides to take the risk.

he decides to take the risk.

so, what grounds does the government have to ban an activity the risk of which the participant knowingly assumes?

first, protect the sharks. well, maybe. maybe the sharks are unhappy. i don't see how, what with the free meal and all. they're not getting killed. they are getting photographed, but scientists have conclusively proven that getting your picture taken does not rob you of your soul.

second, protect the diver. this is the tack that all such arguments take (e.g. the argument for universal health insurance); it's the most dangerous kind of argument and we don't seem to be getting it.

why do we need to protect the diver? because we feel bad for him, or because it costs the rest of us money? see, since we've decided to pay for everyone's healthcare (whether through private insurance or public, this sort of injury is covered: hospitals cannot turn people away who have sharkbites), we have to be able to say what sorts of risks they should be allowed to take. mark my words: the more control we give the government over healthcare, the more the nanny-statists will be able to tell us what we can and cannot do with our time (free or otherwise). no jaywalking. no trans-fats. no cholesterol. no smoking. wear your seatbelt. eat your vegetables. no swimming with sharks. no riding your bike without a helmet.

granted, many of the the things on that list are good things to do. smart for your body. but think: do we want the government telling us that we have to do them, under penalty of fines or jail time? well, it's going to happen. those of you who think the republicans want to take your liberties away to fight the war on terror (they do and it's bad) should stop to consider how your most-private liberties will be given up as you ask the government to take more and more control of your lives. as you ask the government to spend money on things, it will start to impose restrictions on spending and on behavior, just like a good parent. you will be told what kind of sex you can have. you will be told how many children you can bear. you will be told how many times you have to go to the doctor. you will be told what sort of vitamins you have to take. see, safety-nets affect risk-perception. people will do more risky things if they know they'll be cared for regardless. thus, the nanny draws lines.

in a world without universal healthcare, we currently have universal healthcare through tax-code enforcement and government entitlement programs, smokers might die earlier of lung cancer, people who swim with sharks might slowly bleed to death in the ocean, gastropods who gorge themselves on trans fats might trip their heart out at 30. in short, people would reap what they sow. but they would have the freedom to choose where to sow. (and the market and the world as God designed it would communicate risk so that people would probably engage in less risky behavior overall. water runs uphill. people by and large don't like to stick their hands into open fires.)

is that so bad? or do we want a big nanny to care for all our boo-boos? how many of your cherished freedoms are you willing to give up for socialized medicine?

all authority is God-appointed to bless or discipline God's people. we will need to honor whoever gets elected president. but will we be honoring a man who is appointed to discipline us or to bless us? who among the viable candidates is not an enemy of the church?

how is this fearmongering?

2008-02-25T10:51:00.008-06:00

wait, wait, wait. why would the obama campaign call the release of this 2006 photo "shameful offensive fear-mongering"? didn't obama put the costume on? fear-mongering to whom?

and what's the subtext of his campaign's statement? does obama think dressing up in head-scarves and robes is offensive? well, if he doesn't, why didn't he just put out a statement saying, "chill out, freaks. it's just a robe"? why remind people that they need to keep being afraid of sashes and walking sticks?

interesting. listen: if you're going to run for president, don't make a porno, hire illegals as maids, or dress up in ethnic clothing. otherwise, just come out, say you did it, and move on. that was obama's move on smoking weed.

a friend of mine summed up obama's brilliant, two-point change-the-world plan as follows: 1) i have a plan, 2) my plan will work. change you can believe in, indeed.

i know the answer: MORE spending

2008-02-06T10:07:00.000-06:00

here's an interesting site.

go ahead, run the numbers. the correlation between spending-per-student and graduation rates is 0.21. very weak.

get this: the correlation between public school per-student spending and SAT scores is stronger and...

NEGATIVE!

so i guess people who don't want to pour more money into public schools just don't care about kids, do they?

oh, no i did-int!

it's no secret

2008-02-05T12:22:00.000-06:00

while this post will not focus on the socialist smokescreen of "progressive" taxation (as if stealing more from those with more makes usurious taxation appropriate or justified, anyway) i did just want to point out the idiocy behind one of our more-recent "save the poor" pieces of legislation boosted by the non-thinking emoticrats on the left and the right:

as you may know, bush recently signed into law the SCHIP bill, which extended a certain government health-insurance program supposedly aimed at low-income children. well, the dems got in a fuss because they said the bill was underfunded. they wanted to hike the tobacco tax to pay for the bill (earlier vetoed versions contained that provision).

hmm, that makes sense. we're going to pay for health insurance (not health care, that's a completely separate ball of wax) for the "poor" using a tax on a product used by four times more people living below the poverty level than those who have college educations. these folks, republicans and democrats, want to do away with private "insurance" (which we don't really have any more, more about that later) – in which a person pays for his own insurance – with public insurance, the thought being that poor people can't pay the cost of their own insurance. meanwhile, the SCHIP bill they pushed in '07 would have almost entirely funded the expanded SCHIP spending with taxes on those living below the poverty level. (that assumes, of course, that demand doesn't decrease with the imposition of additional taxes. if this bill were funded by a tobacco tax and then people stopped buying as much tobacco, i suppose we'd need to raise taxes again, maybe on high fructose corn syrup or trans fats. or just some other regulation to pound this pesky market into submission. and make water run uphill.)

make no mistake, america isn't robbing the rich to pay the poor anymore. they're robbing everyone. who they're paying is anyone's guess.

do you want it, or don't you?

2008-01-31T08:18:00.000-06:00

the law of God.

as a church, we are so far from espousing a fully-orbed, working understanding of the law. testifying to this is the unabated slaughter of 50 million children in the last three decades, the church's complete inability to stem the tide and its endless ceding to secular pressures on the issue (including the pressure to just drop it), not to mention that many christians are even now considering voting for candidates who support expanding access to and incidence of this horrible pagan practice. add to that the church's pitiful failure to field a candidate who promises to ban the murder of america's children, and you've got a big matzoh ball. the issue of abortion is apropos to discussion of the law of God; if we behaved like we believe that the law of God is an immutable law, that not a jot or tittle will be put aside until Christ's return, then we would take seriously its commandments, and we wouldn't talk of "rights," but rather of duties, which would drive us to action on behalf of the innocent. (suffice it to say, i do not consider the issue of correcting american-style "poverty" a greater issue than the murder of children. care for the unborn – the truly voiceless – is a paramount issue to wage correction. consider: would it offend you if i said that we shouldn't be murdering the poor wholesale at one-and-a-half million per year?)

and, really do we think that God will grant us success in correcting the "problem" of the "poor" if we continue butchering our children?

before i get too far afield – into questions of whether God rewards obedience and punishes disobedience – allow me this (controversial?) statement:

all you who call on Jesus Christ as your savior most certainly do not believe that you are free from the law of God.

now the law of God is a touchy subject, and some people who read this are going to want to accuse me of legalism and such. let me start by saying this: my justification and my hope come from Christ, in whom i believe through faith, which is a gift of God. there is nothing in me apart from Christ that warrants salvation. all my good works are enabled through the gift of faith by my covenantal union with him. i am obedient to my baptism, which was also pre-ordained by god and marks me as a christian, only by the grace of God. he alone makes me to continue in righteousness through obedience and he alone is sacrifice for my sins when i fail.

back to the conversation at hand: hasn't Christ's death freed us from the law of sin and death? didn't abraham's salvation come by faith, and not by law? didn't i die to the law? aren't we under grace, not law? yes, yes and yes. but all these statements flow from a presupposition that the law of God is still fully operative, in fact necessarily operative. (i might deal with what it means for the law to be fully operative in later posts and what that means for our "modern" culture – remember, to people 200 years hence, our modernism is their antiquity. for now, we'll focus on why you cannot believe the law is not operative.)

ask yourself: what do i mean when i say Jesus is my savior? you mean He died for your sins, right? well what the heck does dying for your sins have to do with his being your savior? and how can He die for your sins? well, He was sacrificed for your sins. okay, what does that have to do with being forgiven for sins? what i mean is, where do we come up with the idea that Christ's death has anything to do with our sins? what connects our sins with Christ's death?

the law! the hopeful message of God's grace (which alone addresses God's law).

the author of Hebrews, in one among many New Testament passages addressing the topic, illuminates the answer. in speaking to hebrew christians planning to return to Jerusalem prior to its destruction, to return to the old form of the law in its atoning sacrifices, encourages them thusly:

For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.

Hebrews 7:26-27.

so he writes that Christ, under the terms of the sacrificial law, offered himself up as a sacrifice according to the pattern of old-covenant sacrifices. this is repeatedly affirmed by other authors and orators who refer to Christ as the "passover lamb." see, Christ is only our savior because of the law. only in the law does God establish how one atones for the sins of a people by the sacrifice of another.

furthermore, the priesthood of Christ is one that directly refers to the law. words like "priest" and "sacrifice" and "atone" and "curse" are meaningless apart from the law. the law is the tutor that taught us about Christ's office and accomplishments. it teaches us that there are priests, and that they make sacrifice for our sins, and that sacrifice atones for sins and lifts the curse of the law – but not the law itself. we only know to interpret Christ's death as sacrifice for the sins of his people because the old testament system taught us that that's how God works salvation. when we look at the law, we see grace, which is why the psalmist can sing of loving God's law.

consider this: if the law has been completely set aside, than how can Christ have died for our sins? yes, he could have died for the sins committed before he hung from the tree. but ours? if the death and resurrection of Christ abolished the law of God, then there is no sin to atone for. indeed, it must be that some law is still operative in some way, and it must apply somehow, despite that it is clear that we, the redeemed, are not under it nor does our righteousness come from obedience to the law (though, according to james, our obedience flows from our righteousness).

what law then? the law as expressed by Christ in the new testament? what's that law? "Obey my commands." and what are His commands? follow me here: Jesus is triune with God and the Holy Spirit. He is the incarnation of the old testament, law-giving God. what God commands, Jesus commands. nothing proceeds from the mouth of God that Jesus disagrees with.

all our claims of Christ flow from the law of God as expressed in the Old Testament. if you claim Christ as your savior, you are making a claim to God under the law, claiming that Christ died under the law now existing for your sins under the law now existing. you are pointing to Christ and telling God, "cursed is him who hangs on a tree." Deut. 21:23. He took the curse. because you are at one with Christ, you can be righteous, and you have the ability to please God by obeying His commands as expressed in the law.

to recap:

we christians claim Christ as our savior.
Christ is our savior because he died for the sins of his people.
the law of God establishes the pattern of substitutionary atonement, that one can die for the sins of another. He established the law of grace.
aaronic priests were unable to perfectly atone for the sins of the people (collectively and individually) because the law of grace requires atonement for the sacrifice-maker's sin as well. the law taught God's people, through pageantry and liturgical repetition of sacrifice and festival (the same liturgy as ours), how God was going to work his redemption of the world.
Christ was able and did fulfill the law and the sacrifice required under the law.
Christ is the perfection for us of every sacrifice required by the law.
we present that sacrifice to God, appealing to the law of grace.
thus, we claim right standing under the law based on Christ's obedience (active and passive).

okay, so if the law has to be at least partially operative for us to be justified, how do we decide which part to obey and which part to not obey? which ethical burdens do we carve out?

more on that later (maybe).

consumer confusion

2008-01-30T11:48:00.001-06:00

anybody else think it's a bit odd that we're told we need to fund social
security because americans can't be trusted to save for their futures,
but every time consumer spending is down we're all supposed to get
freaked out that the economy's taking a down-turn? (remember after 9-11 when bush told us to be patriotic americans and go shopping?) and every time the economy's "down," the politburo in dc pumps new dollars into the economy to increase consumer spending (bear in mind, the increase in dollars actually decreases the value of everybody's savings).

is that a good thing? a couple thoughts:

why is spending down? supply and demand: prices are too high; demand is too low. so either merchants hold on to their inventory until demand increases (which could put them out of business), or you slash prices (which could also put them out of business). since we have a total aversion in america to 1) consequences of our actions and 2) directly regulating prices (that would be socialism, ya pinko!) we just inflate demand by increasing "buying power," i.e., pour new money into the economy. "rebates" for all, including non-tax payers!

this market intervention empties inventories, and we all calm down because consumer spending is UP UP UP! and people are selling stuff! so what's the problem with that? first, because we don't let the market adjust, the prices stay high, and the ants who've had the foresight to save get screwed over by the grasshoppers. that's inflation. second, if you don't save today, you're going to spend less in the future, which means that we'll need another "economic stimulus" package so that merchants can clear their shelves then, which will mean that you'll save less then, and spend less in the future of that future, which means we'll need another stimulus package. it's turtles all the way down. and we're wall-papering our houses with $100 bills.

rrraugh! saving... good! spending... good! grog like peanuts!

the stupidest thing ever?

2008-01-30T11:31:00.001-06:00

why is the scripture all the way up by the toe? unless you're wearing your birkenstocks, you only get the inspirational message at the heel. so if you're really discouraged, just take your shoes off and, oh!, there's a pithy feel-good quote waiting for you... on your stinky shoe insert.

get your retarded shoe inserts here: http://in-souls.com/.

which must be why they eat ticks off each other and throw poop around when they get excited

2008-01-30T09:27:00.000-06:00

Apes evolved from humans? This explains how the good doctor Filler was able to come up with such an asinine theory.

Anything but belief in the triune God! Anything!