Coming Clean

“Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. … The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” Luke 1:31-35

Virgin Mary, Theotokos, God-Bearer, Mother of God. Could she rightly and nobly hold these revered titles from time out of mind if the child that resided within her womb was not actually God as she bore Him?

It may seem an odd question to ask, but if we take the questions being asked today regarding embryonic stem cell research, particularly as it relates to Christian morality and ethics, it begs the question – at what point did Jesus become a person with all human (and divine) dignity?

Most Christians would sputter that the question is non-sense – clearly Jesus was fully divine at the moment of His conception within His virgin mother’s womb. And if we are to assert Christ’s divine personhood within His mother’s womb, then we must also assert his humanity. And thus we’re left to turn the question back around upon ourselves – if Christ was divine (and thus human) at the moment of His conception within His mother’s womb, then why should we not accord the same dignity to others who move through the same human embryonic state of being just as He did?

The Christian ethic is clear – embryos must be accorded the same dignity as any other person if for no other reason than that of Christ, who shared in our humanity from conception to death.

The Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam

Clips from the intro to the intro

“The truth shall make you free” (John viii, 32).

What is Catholicism? By that question we do not merely ask what is that characteristic quality which distinguishes Catholicism from other forms of Christianity; we go deeper than that, and seek to discover what is its governing idea and what are the forces set in motion by this idea. We ask what is the single basic thought, what is the essential form that gives life to the great structure which we call Catholicism? Regarded from the outside Catholicism has the appearance of a confused mass of conflicting forces, of an unnatural synthesis, of a mixture of foreign, nay contradictory, elements. And for that reason there have been those who have called it a complex of opposites.

…

We Catholics do not quarrel with the methods of the religious historian, so long as he keeps within his proper limits, within the limits of historical data and proved historical fact, and so long as he does not claim in his classification of religious types to pass decisive judgment upon the essential nature of the religious structure which he has under examination. We Catholics acknowledge readily, without any shame, nay with pride, that Catholicism cannot be identified simply and wholly with primitive Christianity, nor even with the Gospel of Christ, in the same way that the great oak cannot be identified with the tiny acorn. There is no mechanical identity, but an organic identity. And we go further and say that thousands of years hence Catholicism will probably be even richer, more luxuriant, more manifold in dogma, morals, law and worship than the Catholicism of the present day. … It is quite true, Catholicism is a union of contraries. But contraries are not contradictories. Wherever there is life, there you must have conflict and contrary. Even in purely biblical Christianity, and especially in Old Testament religion, these conflicts and contraries may be observed. For only so is there growth and the continual emergence of new forms. The Gospel of Christ would have been no living gospel, and the seed which He scattered no living seed, if it had remained ever the tiny seed of A.D. 33, and had not struck root, and had not assimilated foreign matter, and had not by the help of this foreign matter grown up into a tree, so that the birds of the air dwell in its branches. … But we refuse to see in these elements thus enumerated the essence of Catholicism, or even to grant that they are “structural elements of Catholicism” in the sense that Catholicism did not achieve historical importance save through them. For the Catholic is intimately conscious that Catholicism is ever the same, yesterday and to-day, that its essential nature was already present and manifest when it began its journey through the world, that Christ Himself breathed into it the breath of life, and that He Himself at the same time gave the young organism those germinal aptitudes which have unfolded themselves in the course of the centuries in regular adaptation to the needs and requirements of its environment. Catholicism recognizes in itself no element that is inwardly foreign to it, that is not itself, that does not derive from its original nature.

… is yet another scripting language.

Why?!

Mostly because that’s what my boss says.

So, what’s going to be cool about this new language? Honestly, I’m not sure – but this is what we’re shooting for:
- extensible syntax
- extensible graphical editor (so people won’t have to be mindful of syntax)
- extensible run-time (to support extensible syntax)

This is most definitely going to be a niche thing. It’s geared to get non-programmers programming the basic flow control and information design that they are already responsible for on a daily basis. I work for a call service after all – this is what they do.

One nice carrot on this thing is that after deployment and 6 months to a year of solid running, I can release it open source.


interface Foo
{
}
interface Bar : Foo /* Bar is a Foo */
{
}
interface A
{
Foo getFoo();
}
interface B : A /* B is an A */
{
Bar getFoo(); /* C# thinks this is a bad thing */
}


This is a layman’s understanding and frustration of what’s going on in the world. Maybe I’m off in my perception of things – feel free to correct me.

So, lately, all we’ve been hearing about is stimulus and bailouts and huge sums of cash. What no one seems to be taking seriously in these discussions is where the huge sums of cash are coming from. Technically, all these big organizations, and our government on top of that, are broke. So where’s the money coming from? We know there aren’t stockpiles of cash lying around that is being drawn from. So where?

In one sense, it’s coming from nowhere. In a more real sense, it is being stolen from our pockets. The Treasury department is being ordered to print new cash. Printing new cash can be a good thing, but in this case, it’s bad and immoral. All those hard earned dollars that you have saved away? Yeah, it’s becoming worth less and less. More on why that’s immoral later.

The pieces of paper we call cash symbolize a backing physical precious commodity held in trust by the government – for example, there’s a bit of gold lying around that is equitable to your dollar.

So why is printing more cash bad? Well, first, when can printing cash be good? Printing cash can be good in two instances that I can think of: (1) the government has an increase in its backing stores of precious commodity or (2) the government is trying to keep the value of its cash equitable with other places in the world that are experiencing a decline in the backing value of their cash. In this latter instance, you are devaluing your cash but for the benefit of maintaining equitable currency exchange between foreign markets. To be honest, I don’t know how useful (2) really would be and if it ever has come into play. There’s also a 3rd option – you print cash to replace cash. So you print cash, hold it in reserve, wait to reclaim cash to destroy (’cause it worn out, damaged, whatever), and release an equitable amount of cash that was held in reserve.

So those are the three instances where I think printing cash can be good. There may be others.

When is printing cash bad? In the second good instance mentioned above, I noted that the printing of cash will decrease the value of cash if there’s not an increase in the backing stores of commodity. So for example, you have a dollar bill, and its backing is a chunk of gold. The government comes along and prints some cash, and now that chunk of gold is backing two dollars. So now your original dollar is worth half of its original chunk. If the government gives you your second dollar – great! You’re breaking even. But what happens when the government gives that dollar to someone else? Well, the short version is, you’ve been robbed. And that’s exactly what’s going on today.

And thus here we are in our present situation. Our banks are failing. Economic backbones such as the auto industry are failing. And the government is printing cash (thus devaluing all of our present currency) to bail everyone and their dead great great grandfather out of debt. Does anyone else see the problem there? Debtors owe creditors money. The government is printing new money, giving it the debtors, and letting them pay off their creditors. In some sense, what debt there is should be increasing by the printing of money (i.e. devaluation caused by printing should make the value of debts owed increase), but either way, the value of your money is being decreased so that the difference can be given to someone else that has squandered the money they had away.

It’s kinda like the prodigal son, upon realizing that he’s broke and all manner of screwed up, sending a letter to his father asking for more money (“Dad, need more money”), and the father sending the prodigal son money obtained from the wealth of the responsible son. Note in this version, the prodigal son did not change his ways or return home. If you don’t think that’s occurring right now in our economy between wayward banks, institutions, and irresponsible private citizens (the prodigal son) and our government (the father) and the rest of us (the responsible son), wake up.

Let the banks fail. Let people go bankrupt. You can’t spend your way out of debt. You have to save your way out of debt. And while that may seem like a lot of inaction, it’s actually a very different form of action than what has been exercised for the past 17 years. The current form of action being proposed by Obama and his administration is just a continuation of what got us here in the first place. Obama’s not turning the country away from the cliff, he’s hitting the accelerator. The short term will make people feel good, but the long term just cannot sustain itself.