10 Books
A question came up in a discussion over the weekend and I thought I would post here. Other than standard answers such as the Bible, what books have influenced your thinking the most? What books do you remember, cite or refer back to. Here is my list.
Paul Johnson, Modern Times
A world history from 1920-1980. – Gave me some real insight to this period and some of its figures from a unique point of view. For example that Gandhi, while his goals were praiseworthy, his action actually caused more problems, and led to more deaths.
Paul Holland, Political Pilgrims
A history of the Left’s attraction to Communist regimes such as the USSR, China, and Cuba, and how they could visit and come back with such glowing reports of “worker paradise” when the reality was so different, while at the same time being so critical of the US. (Mona Charen’s recent book “Useful Idiots” is a more popular treatment of this subject, which documents how many of this people changed their views once the USSR fell, and with examples of similar behavior up to the beginning of the war on terror.)
Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel of Solentiname,
A record of a small Bible study group in Solentiname, Nicaragua. Such groups were an important part of the liberation theology movement. Cardenal was prominent in both Liberation theology and a member of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s. – It was a real eye opener on the true nature of liberation theology
Will and Ariel Durrant, The Story of Civilization Vol 1-11
A history of the world. Vol 1 covers pre history to 333 BC in Europe and the rest of the world to modern times (then 1930s) Volume 2-11 take European and later Islamic society up to 1815. Hard to summarize the value of this work as it brought clarity and insight to a whole range of areas and called into question a whole range of common believe such as the so called “Dark Ages.”
David Alan Black, Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek
A study of Linguistics that gives insights into the working of language with application well beyond the title.
Kegley and Kegley, Introduction to Logic.
This was my first textbook on logic and one I have returned to frequently over the years.
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom,
An analysis and historical examination (written during WWII) of why centralized planning and control, as found in totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Communist states such as the USSR not only fail, but are doomed to fail and why market based solutions based on competition are better. This had been important in evaluating current political discussion where Democrats have pushed for more centralized planning and control, while Republicans have pushed for Market based solutions and increased competitions.
The following three books were very important for me in revealing the shallowness of most of the arguments advanced by skeptics and using a scholarly approach to the Bible.
David Alan Black & David S Dockery (editors) New Testament Criticism and & Interpretation.
19 essays by scholars on various aspects described by the title.
Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels
A summarized version of the 6 Volume Gospel Perspectives which was published from 1980 to 1986 and which addressed the issue of reliability from a technical and scholarly level.
Norman Geisler, Inerrancy
14 scholarly articles on Inerrancy. While the main focus was inerrancy, it as a result address much deeper issues such as the adequacy of language, and the nature of inspiration, hermeneutics.
9/11 Commission
While it would be important to really find out what mistakes were made prior to 9/11, and how to fix them, it is very clear to me that the current commission is a joke. Having it so soon was is bad enough, but having it in an election year makes it worst than useless. Like the early commissions on Pearl Harbor, it is doing much more harm than good.
While I have great respect for Lee Hamilton, and do believe he is trying hard to do an honest job and get at the real problems, having more partisans such as Bob Kerry and especially Richard Ben-Veniste on the commission doom it into becoming little more than a election year partisan exercise. This is even more so with the political activists clapping and cheering in the audience when someone makes a point they like.
For example, what was Bob Kerry doing making a political statement on the current war in Iraq, during a hearing about what happened before 9/11. Then later complains that he did not have enough time.
Problems with Success
Imagine a conservative sponsored bill is before Congress. Liberals denounce it as they do most such bills as hurting the poor. Liberal groups claim it will push millions into poverty, it will hurt millions of children, it will make those who are poor even poorer. Liberal think tanks publish “studies” showing 2.6 million people (1.1 million children) will be forced into poverty if the bill is passed. In short the same standard class warfare rhetoric we normally get about how Republican only care about the rich and seek to hurt the poor.
Imagine the bill passes, and after many years the results are clear. Not only were the liberal claims wrong, they were the opposite of reality. Poverty dropped instead of increased. When the law expires and needs to be renewed, do the democrats admit their mistake, and support the bill?
As you might guess this is not a hypothetical. The bill is the Welfare Reform bill. The claims about it are real, as are the results. In fact poverty among Black children, which had climbed from 40 to 45% from 1970s to the mid 1990s fell drastically to 39.8%, a record low as a result of the bill. And these results have continued despite the recession debunking earlier liberal excuses that it was only a result of the strong economy.
Yet despite this success, liberals are putting their agenda ahead of reality and are still trying to block its renewal and/or weaken it key provisions. The bill expired in 2002, and has yet to be renewed.
This is all summed up in the wsj today. “Race to the Top” pg A8. (On the paid site)
https://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108087696840172617,00.html?mod=opinion
Summer Reading List
I though I would share my summer reading list,
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos – Latest scientific views on the make up of reality.
Guillermo Gonzalez, Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet – Argues against the Copernican Principle – the idea that there is nothing special about Earth or its place in the universe.
Tom Holland, Rubicon – discusses the fall of the Roman Republic starting 100 B.C. and going up the beginning of the reign of Augustus Caesar.
I have already started The Fabric of the Cosmos and it is very interesting. I really like the way Greene explains things. For example I knew about the speed of light being the ultimate speed limit and I knew this was tied to time in that as you travel faster, time slows down. But I never realize exactly how these were directly related before. The speed limit is not just on traveling through space, but is on traveling through space-time. And it is not really a limit but rather is a fixed speed of your combined movement through both space and time. When you are not moving through space all of your movement is through time. In order to move faster through space you must trade off some of your ability to move through time, resulting in your moving through time slower. Photons, which travel through space at the speed of light use up all of there motion through space, and do not travel through time at all.
He also points out some of the simple but perplexing experiments that have vexed physicists for centuries. For example, if you tie a bucket filled with water on a string and twist the string; when you release it the bucket will spin around, the water will also begin to spin. But why does this happen and what does this say about whether or not space is a thing that actually exist? (physicists have gone back and forth on the existence of space).
How does it add up?
If you total up all the proposals that Kerry has promised in his campaign it come to 1.7 trillion in new spending over the next 10 year, most of this is in proposals he says he will push through in the first 100 days.(His health care proposal alone is projected to cost $900 billion) He claims he will do this by repealing the Bush tax cuts for those making over $200,000, plus a series of other tax increases for “the rich.” This would raise around $700 billion over ten years. This leaves him $1 trillion dollars in the hole. And this is all assuming that his new projects are limited to their projected costs, whereas the history of such programs is that they almost always end up costing much more than projected.
On top of all this he claims he will cut the budget deficit in half during his first term, although since Bush’s current budget already projects to do this, it is a neutral proposal except that does limit his options as to how he will make up the difference. He has also talk some about “Middle Class” tax cuts but it is not clear exactly what he means or what impact they would have.
So just where should we assume that Kerry is not being truthful
1) On spending
2) On taxes
3) On the deficit,
4) All the above.
