Via The Daily Eudemon
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Regarding the DVC, the historicity of the gospels is something that never came up in my Catholic school education. Which means I was misled by what I felt then were the completely objective news magazines Time and Newsweek, which annually (Holy Week, natch) paraded their Jesus Seminar articles questioning everything about Christ except that He existed. If Dan Brown's book had come out in 1990 I wonder if I'd have been duped.
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One thing I don't understand in the "national discussion" is the concern by some of leaving debt for our children and grandchildren. Huh? Debt can be carried indefinitely and indeed presumably will on a national level. What twould seem to hurt is less debt than interest on the debt, though that can serve a purpose too. Early on I decided to always carry a balance on my credit card in order to discourage future purchases. (I'm certainly not recommending this strategy; it's simply an admission of the frailty of my human nature.) I determined an "acceptable" (very minimal) interest charge and from that figured the corresponding acceptable credit card limit. If I simply paid off the card I would be tempted to simply run up the debt to the interest charge point of "personal pain" again. They say the key about the national debt is the percentage of debt to Gross National Product, not the debt itself. That doesn't mean I don't go crazy when I hear about federal spending projects that are ridiculous since it's never a great idea to waste money.
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The line where "mere superstition" starts can be fuzzy. It's hard not to see something of a message in the heretic Arius's strange death on the eve he was to be re-admitted to the sacraments. And yet some want to read something into Thomas Merton's accidental death given his foray into Eastern philosophy.
Superstition has recently kept me from mentioning my beloved Cincinnati Reds, who, at least for the month of April, strode atop the baseball world. Full of excellence were the boys of spring, full of homerun-filled bats and svelte E.R.A.'s. If it was not meant to last at least I would not be the cause of their premature end.
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As I said yesterday, the thing that fascinates me about the immigration debate is how a fence or wall has long been considered draconian. I don't see walls as draconian any more than I consider locking my front door draconian. It just goes to show, I think, the importance of the symbolic. I'm skeptical whether a border that long even can be secured, a border that is the only one in the world shared by a third world and first world nation. I suppose it would slow the rate of illegal immigration, if that is the goal even though America needs workers and Mexicans need jobs.
The issue is made more complex because the Mexican economy has become dependent on the huge amount of money sent home by illegals in the U.S.. Is that good or bad? It would appear good because it props up a terribly weak economy. It would seem bad because that dependence means that there is less chance of Mexico ever having a real, home-grown economy. In a way it's like the Middle East's dependence on oil. When the oil dries up there is going to be nothing but poverty and chaos for those nations.
Update: Of course, the more words I say with respect to a controversial subject like illegal immigration the more likely I am to insert foot in mouth. A correspondent pointed out that walls have bad connotations because of what is done to enforce its effectiveness, i.e. machine-gunners in Berlin, etc. That would certainly explain some of the negativity concerning it even though that is unthinkable in this country. That would make Abu Ghraib look like a Sunday picnic.
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