- Faster than light.
- Oh swell!: Another American Century!
- Insatiable.
- Few are guilty …
- From the Department of Wretched Excess:
- The 99 and the 1.
The apparent discovery that something can move faster than the speed of light has prompted a new round of commentary written at a level I can understand. Or maybe it’s free association rather than commentary.
“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar …[W]e can’t have neutrinos getting kicked out of taverns they have not yet entered.
That’s Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post. Rod Dreher reacts to the larger discussion between those bookends:
Belief in the efficacy of prophecy depends on faith in an understanding of cause and effect that doesn’t jibe with materialism. How can the future already exist? Yet it must, in some sense, if we can have intimations of it in the present. I have had more than a few dreams that came true. Nothing earth-shattering (alas!), but they were real enough in their details to have been beyond coincidental. Many people have had this experience. Perhaps science is making progress toward explaining how this might be so. Krauthammer is right: it’s revolutionary stuff, but less so for religious believers than he may think. It’s a hugely complex and difficult issue, one that raises brain-breaking questions (e.g., What does it mean for free will if the future is in some sense set? To what extent can our decisions alter the future? What does God permit?), but theologians have been grappling with these for centuries. Science really can learn something from religious thought, despite what you may have heard from Dr. Dawkins.
Rod then has commenters telling us that he and Krauthammer are talking nonsense, that this isn’t that big, and so forth.
Sorry, but these scientists would not have checked their results every which way from Sunday, and wouldn’t be begging for independent attempts at verification, were this not really big. I suppose it might even have something to do with prophesy and dreams coming true.
I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: This century must be an American Century. In an American Century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world.
God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will.
(Mitt Romney Friday at the Citadel in Charleston, SC) Well, at least he’s not pretending that he’ll have a “humble” foreign policy.
Zac Alstin at Mercator.net thinks the “illusion that moral diversity is a viable social strategy is at its last gasp.”
What we are finding, at last, is that the ideal of unbounded individual freedom to make morally neutral choices just cannot satisfy human nature. We need to believe that we are doing what is right, even if we shy away from words like “good” and “right”. It is entirely reasonable that in a culture demanding tolerance for same-sex relationships under the auspices of individual freedom that some would take the next logical step and declare their same-sex relationship to be, in fact, “good”. Not just a private good to be enjoyed under the rubric of tolerance and individual freedom, but a good which ought to be recognised and affirmed as such by the whole community.
Same-sex marriage advocates are seeking not merely the legal and financial rights that go with the institution of marriage, but the social affirmation that marriage promises. To put it another way, some same-sex marriage advocates have argued that the existing marriage laws are inherently discriminatory and promote homophobia within the broader community.
Either way, we are well beyond the point of “tolerance”….
Maybe it’s time to update Proverbs 30:15-16.
There are
threefour things that are never satisfied,fourfive that never say, “Enough!”: the grave, the barren womb, land, which is never satisfied with water,andfire, and the GLBTetcetera movement, which never says, “Enough!”
The dismal truth is that tens of millions of children around the world today have lives more like Oliver Twist than Little Lord Fauntleroy; it’s something the rest of us should not forget.
(Walter Russell Mead) Believe me, I didn’t forget as I stood in line to pre-order an iPhone 4S. Few are guilty, but all are responsible.
Just $899!
I think I take more seriously than the Facebook friend who posted this the great disparities of wealth in the U.S., but I still had to smile:
* * * * *
Bon appetit!
(To save time on preparing this blog, which some days consumes way too much time, I’ve asked some guy named @RogerWmBennett to Tweet a lot of links about which I have little or nothing to add. Check the “Latest Tweets” in the upper right pane or follow him on Twitter.)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 