A Major Milestone?
The Stimulus bill passed and it is being called “a major milestone” for President Obama. But I do not see this as any significant effort. The simple fact was that a stimulus bill was going to pass as Republicans could not have stopped it. The best they could have done was influence it, but the Democrat’s response to any Republican input was “we won the election.” Sure they wanted Republican support, but not if it meant Republicans had any real input on the end result.
Nor did they need Republican support. The Democrats have a lock on the Congress, something Republicans have not had in a 100 years. Neither did Clinton have this. In fact you have to go back to Carter to find the last President who had the luxury of being able to effectively ignore the other party.
Yet with such a majority, and the opportunity it gives to a president to enact their programs and policies, Obama seems to have voluntarily stepped to the sidelines and let Pelosi and Reid handle the stimulus bill. He didn’t seem to care what was in the bill, as long as it was called a stimulus bill, and it was about $800 billion. Obama’s leadership was essentially little more than asking politicians to spend a huge amount of money. Getting politicians to spend money is not a significant accomplishment.
This is a far cry from the leadership of previous presidents of both parties as very few had been in the position of Obama. To get their policies enacted into law took a lot of skill and work to craft a bill that met their goals and yet still had enough support to pass both the house and the senate. Obama’s leadership on the stimulus bill was akin to taking some children to a candy store, handing them a lot of money, and they taking credit when they were able to spend it. I am afraid that the end result will be not be that much different than for kids who have gorged themselves on candy.
Hitchens – God Is Not Great XXXI
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In my extended review of Christopher Hitchens book “God Is Not Great,” I have come to chapter 18, A Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational. The chapter struck me as a very strange chapter, for it left me with the feeling that Hitchens lives in somewhat of a fantasy world, where atheists are a small but noble underground valiantly fighting in the face of great odds against some dark and evil empire.
Hitchens view of history is a very black and white one, where everything bad is in some way connected to religion and anything good must be the result of something other than religion. Thus Hitchens writes, “When we read of the glories of ‘Christian” devotional painting and architecture, or ‘Islamic’ astronomy and medicine, we are talking about advances of civilization and culture.” (p. 254)
As much as he likes, Hitchens cannot have it both ways. He cannot have religion “at all times and in all places” subjecting non-believers to “ruthless suppression” (p. 254) on the one hand, but a completely absent force when it comes to the “advances of civilization and culture” on the other. People are much too complex to allow for such a nice, neat compartmentalization of their various and diverse aspects of their lives.
A good example of this is Galileo, whom Hitchens mentions as one who “might have been unmolested in his telescopic work if he had not been so unwise as to admit that it had cosmological implications.” (p. 255) Hitchens contrasts this with those did kept “their innermost thoughts from the scrutiny of the godly.” (p. 255) Yet the story of Galileo is not so straight forward and simple as atheists like Hitchens seem to believe.
As Dava Sobel has written in her excellent book “Galileo’s Daughter,” Galileo “remained a good Catholic who believed in the power of prayer and endeavored always to conform his duty as a scientist with the destiny of his soul.” (p. 11-12) As I point out in Evidence for the Bible “Rather than a conflict between science and religion, or even between science and Christianity, the conflict was at best a conflict with the Catholic Church” as his works “were published and studied by protestants without conflict.” (p. 85)
Rather than the titanic struggle between faith and reason that atheists like to claim, this was more an issue of a bureaucracy attempting to maintain its hold on power, as this occurred during the Protestant Reformation. Even within the Catholic church Galileo had many supporters. His primary opponents were the Aristotelian professors who were driven more by conflicts between Galileo’s discoveries and the teachings of Aristotle than any conflict with the Bible.
Similar problems plague many of Hitchens’ other examples. Hitchens sees “the original collision between our reasoning faculties and any form of organized faith” in the trial and death of Socrates. For Hitchens the matter is simple he was “indicted for godlessness and knew is life forfeit.” (p. 255) But like Galileo, things are not quite so simple.
In the decade leading up to his trial, the democracy of Athens was twice over thrown for short periods by pupils of Socrates. When the democracy was restored for the second time in order to resort peace a general amnesty was issued; an amnesty that many must have been unhappy with given the numbers that had been killed.
Rather than religion as the driving force, the trial of Socrates was driven more by a mixture of an attempt to prosecute Socrates despite the amnesty that had been granted and fear that his continuing to gather young students around him without any change in his teachings would spawn yet more attempts to overthrow the democracy of Athens.
Much of Hitchens’ accounts are so vague as to be hard to judge. For example, writing about Gibbons, and his monumental work “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” he simply says that Hume “warned him that there would be trouble , which there was.” (p. 267) Exactly what he means by “trouble” and what kind of trouble Gibbons faced is not stated.
One source of the problems was the fact that Gibbons argued that Christianity was a cause of the downfall of Rome, a view that other historians have since questioned. Frankly it is much more likely that the growth of Christianity was a result, rather than a cause of the downfall of Rome. Yet it would seem that in Hitchens’ world, while atheists are completely free to attack, criticize, and ridicule the views of theists, theists must not respond less they be seen as part of some “ruthless suppression.”
Again this is not to argue the opposite, that the history of Christianity is all good. But Hitchens’ black and white approach to these questions hardly supports his claim to be on the side of the rational.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
Does a Tree That Fall In the Forest…
There is the old question that asks does a tree that falls in the forest make a sound if no one is there. However fascinating that question may be, there is a similar, and much more relevant version: Is a problem that goes unreported really a problem?
President Obama’s inexperience is already showing as he has pretty much lost control of his first major effort in less than two weeks. As a result there currently seems to be two, perhaps three leaders of the country. In addition to President Obama, Speaker Pelosi is exercising total control over the House, completely locking Republicans out of any say the process. As a result the bi-partisan position on the stimulus bill was the opposition, as all Republicans and 11 Democrats voted against it. As details of the stimulus package became known, public support dropped. And it is left to the Senate and Harry Reid to try and regain some control over Obama’s first signature issue.
What is clear from this episode is that the country can expect a large lurch to the left. The so-called stimulus bill crafted by Pelosi was really little more that a mixture of old-fashioned political payoffs, standard issue political pork, and an attempt to expand government into even more areas. Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said about this crisis, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” It seems Speaker Pelosi took those words to heart, as she seems to see the crisis not as a problem to be solved, but as an opportunity to reward political allies and massively redefine government.
I would not be as concerned about the move to the left if those pushing it had some concept of what they were doing. Instead they seem to be blindly following their ideology. It is not as if their policies have never been tried. They have been tried repeatedly and have failed every time. But this brings me back to the question I asked at the start: Is a problem that goes unreported really a problem? It would seem that for Pelosi and others pushing the country to the left, the answer is clearly that problems that are not reported are problems that can be ignored.
For example, while California was once the land of Reagan, it is now solidly in control of the left, whose policies drove the state into a fiscal crisis that resulted in the recall of their governor. They replaced the liberal Democrat with a liberal Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they left the liberals in control of the state legislature. The result: California is facing a $41 billion budget deficit, what Time magazine called : The Great California Fiscal Earthquake.
Nor is this just an exception. Michigan is another example of a state solidly in liberal hands for years, and has the financial problems to prove it. Likewise, one could look at the cities, dominated by liberal policies. Or just consider the following two facts: 1) The Northeast is solidly liberal. 2) People have been fleeing the Northeast. The correlation between liberal policies and these problems is clear. But it is a correlation that liberals, including those who dominate the major news media, refuse to see, and thus it goes unreported.
Instead they focus on Republicans as the cause. A perfect example of this being the current financial crisis. It is clear that at the root of current problems was bad housing loans and the housing bubble that resulted. At the center of the bad housing loans were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which were pushing them. It is also clear that the reason that Fannie and Freddie were pushing these loans is because of government policies passed initially under Carter and then expanded under Clinton. In fact Fannie and Freddie were lead by former Clinton administration officials. Finally, the Bush administration, while they may not have seen the size of the problem, did see that there was a problem with these loans and attempted to regulate Fannie and Freddie many times, but each time they were blocked by the Democrats. So it was liberal policies that forced the banks to make the loans that were at the core of the problem, while the Bush administration tried to avoid it.
But liberals do not see this, Bush was president, Bush gets the blame, end of story. And normally there is always some Republican somewhere who can be blamed. The last time the Democrats were in complete control of the Government such that there was no Republican to blame, was following the 1992 election. They messed things up so badly in two years that Republicans won control of the Congress for the first time since the early fifties. The time previous to that was in the late 1970s under Carter, which gave us the combination of high unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates, and gas lines. The time before that was under Johnson, who did not even attempt reelection.
It would seem that since the problems of liberalism are not reported, they are forgotten, and so every 10-15 years we must suffer through at least two years of democratic rule. The massive spending that is now almost certain to come will have an economic impact whether it is clearly reported or not. With the help of a willing press, Democrats will be able to effectively blame the current problems on Bush, but as time goes on and things get worse, this will become less effective as people will understandably be more focused on fixing the problem than affixing blame.
Hitchens – God Is Not Great XXX
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I am continuing in my extended review of Christopher Hitchens book “God Is Not Great,” and his defense of atheism in chapter 17. Last time, I looked at how Hitchens deftly attempted to shift the blame for the secular evils of the twentieth century onto religion effectively arguing that Christians are to blame because they did not do enough to prevent the evils committed by atheists. But there is a deeper issue here, one that is a problem for all groups, theists and atheists alike.
As I wrote earlier pointing to the evils committed by atheists, is not so much an attack against atheism per se, but rather atheist’s reasoning. As I wrote in Christianity and Secularism, it is “to point out that any system that involves people can be directed toward evil. I am sure neither Charles Darwin nor Karl Marx intended evil to come from their works. Still, they planted the seeds for the greatest evils in history.” (pg 118)
The key issue here is that good and bad people can be found in and out of religion. While history has show that secular regimes have been by far the worst, that could change. Not all religions are the same. The 20th century evils could be eclipse by radical Islam if its adherents can acquire the weapons of mass destruction they are seeking.
Nor is it impossible that in the future a radical form of Christianity could appear that could be a similar threat. One of the surest ways to run into problems is to focus too much on the evil in other groups, while assuming your own group is somehow immune. The danger from evil is ever present and history has clearly shown that being religious or an atheist is not an automatic safeguard.
This is nothing new. As Jesus pointed out in Matthew 7:3, we can see the speck in the eyes of others, while missing the beam that is in our own. Instead of pointing to the past evils committed by others as an example of how bad the current group is, we should instead focus more on current evils and how to stop them and how to prevent evil in the future. This is not to say that we should ignore past evils, we shouldn’t. We should learn from them, not in an us-versus-them way, but seeking the common traits, traits that can appear in any group, so that we can avoid them.
We should also focus more on the beam in our own eye. One of the easiest ways to fall into evil, is to think you are immune. For Christians, this means acknowledging the great evil that has been done at times in the name of Christ. But for atheists, it also means acknowledging the great evil done by atheists. Neither can just blame it on the other.
It is a simple fact that criticism from within a group will be far more effective at limiting evil than criticism from those outside, as criticism from others is often confused as an attack. While I could be wrong, I believe that if Muslims in general were to be as outraged over those who target and kill the innocent in the name of Allah, as they have been over cartoons of Mohammad and stories about alleged mishandling of the Koran, there would be a lot less terrorism. Likewise, if it were not for the clear and consistent condemnation of the few who have bombed abortion clinics or murdered abortionists, not only by the majority of Christians, but by all anti-abortion groups , I believe there would have been more bombings and murders.
One of the reasons I believe that the teachings of Christ are so important is not because it automatically makes me a better person, but because it teaches that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23). In addition it teaches that we have hope. While we are saved by grace, that only begins a process of discipleship in which we should continually strive to be more like Jesus.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
Stimulus Plan?
As Obama puts his mark onto the presidency he continues to enjoy high approval ratings, but cracks are beginning to appear. That the stakes are very high as can been seen in an article in the Christian Science Monitor. The headline warned of “risks to opponents” of the stimulus plan, and most of the article was written in terms of the 2010 elections.
For example, the article claims “Obama’s plan is popular in the 13 states that are expected to have competitive races for US Senate in 2010.” Furthermore Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who conducted the poll, said, “I think the message of having zero Republicans voting for the plan was an immense error,” and “I think it will be seared in peoples’ consciousness.”
It is always gives me the warm fuzzies to have Democrats so worried about the welfare of Republicans. But the simple fact is that looking at polls on how people view the stimulus plan now, so as to divine how they might vote in 2010, is not only meaningless, it is down right silly. This is because how people vote in 2010 will be based on conditions in 2010.
Now I oppose the so-called stimulus bill for one very simple reason, I do not think it will work and will in fact make things worse, probably a lot worse. One of the things that bothers me the most is how the major media just lets Democrats make things up, such and the claim that this is the worst economic situation since the Depression. Things are certainly bad, but it is just a matter of record that things can be and have been a lot worse, even since the depression.
The Misery Index is measurement of how bad things are, and is a combination of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. It is currently at 7.29%, and likely to go higher. But for example, it is still lower than most of the post war period. In January 1968 it was 7.35% and rose to 21.98% in June of 1980. It did not drop down below our current level again until July 1997.
Now the current rate is so low because the inflation rate had dropped to virtually nothing. If we look at simply the unemployment rate by itself, it is currently 7.2 percent. While high, it was higher in early 1990s, and through most of the 1970s and early 1980s, peaking out at 10.8 percent. So when they say this is the worst economy in 50 years, or the worst economy since the great depression, Democrats are simply making things up.
Unfortunately the Democrats have created somewhat of a trap for themselves and more importantly for us. While certainly not the entire picture, a key aspect of any economy is confidence. This is particular true in the current downturn as a large part of the current problem is a loss of confidence in the financial markets. Thus Bush and McCain were correct, at least economically, to try to reassure people about the underlying health of the economy. But the Democrats seeing an issue, pounced and portrayed them as out of touch and not understanding people’s pain. It was to the Democrats’ advantage politically to paint the economy as worse than what it really was, and it worked.
The problem is when people have a negative outlook about the economy, they hold back on spending. As more and more people and companies hold back, the economy slows down even further, causing even additional problems, which then cause people to hold back even more. The economy enters into a downward spiral.
Unfortunately Obama is still talking down the economy. Perhaps it is because he sees it as being in his own interest to scare people about how bad things are, as it will help him pass his programs; or perhaps he believes the current problems will be blamed on Bush rather than on him; or perhaps because of his inexperience, he simply does not know any better. Whatever the reason, His doom and gloom rhetoric is certainly not helping things.
His alleged stimulus package may be popular at the moment, and people are understandably willing to give the new President the benefit of the doubt, but this will not last forever. When 2010 comes people will not be focused on how Republicans did or did not support support the Stimulus package unless it fails. If it succeeds, the the economy will be doing very well and people will be focused on other issues and Obama and the democrats will get the credit regardless of any Republican support or lack thereof. The only way the people will really focus on the stimulus package, is if it fails, especially if it is seen as making things much worse.
Given that the CBO says that only about 20% of stimulus plan dollars will even be spent this year, it is not likely to have much of a stimulus, at least any time soon. Spending dollars years from now is hardly likely to help the current problem. Perhaps the reason Democrats are so worried about the Republicans’ lack of support, is that they will be held completely responsible for the stimulus plan they wrote and passed.
