The reality of higher gas prices...

I was at work the other night and I was just chit-chatting with a customer and I just joked about high ridiculous the gas prices were getting. I know that I live in a liberal neighborhood in a liberal town and state, but the thing he said next was simply hypocritical of everything that liberal ideology preaches. To paraphrase he said that he was happy that gas prices were getting so high because it would cause people to stop using so much gasoline.

Fine, I get it. The higher the price the more people will cut back on their expenditures, specifically gasoline and driving, and reassess the value we place on certain things or simply look at the waste we produce. However, a huge part of the liberal ideology is helping the poor and those in need. So what this guy is saying is that he is HAPPY that every single necessity that people purchase from food, to clothing, to shelter is going up in price. Higher gasoline prices do not hurt people like him who can afford to pay higher gas prices and continue to live a comfortable lifestyle. They hurt people who are already struggling to pay already high prices in electric and heating bills and now rising food prices. The oil prices directly affect these things, not just how much people drive.

I think it is good to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels if it is done in a way that does not destroy lives. However, I do not want to make the insinuation that the recent rise in prices is because of a liberal agenda. I know that the recent rise is because of the continued unrest in places in the Middle East, specifically Libya. But I cannot stand this mentality that higher gas prices is a good thing.

Perspective on Teachers, Unions, and Wisconsin

Are you sick of highly paid teachers?

Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or10 months a year! It's time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do - babysit! We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan-- that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET'S SEE....

That's $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute -- there's something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher's salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student--a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Make a teacher smile; repost this to show appreciation for all educators.

I found the above floating around Facebook today and it seems simple enough and straightforward enough to accept. But there is a huge glaring hole that this piece completely ignores: benefits! It is obvious that this was written in response to the recent activities in Wisconsin and now is being shared throughout social media in a way to emotionally sway the political argument in a particular direction. But I feel incredibly manipulated when the whole thing is completely misleading. In fact, the issue in Wisconsin has nothing to do about the wages of teachers or even if the state continues to give the privilege of collectively bargaining for their salaries. The issue is over the people working actually putting their own money toward their own benefit and pension plans. The author of this little piece above seems to purposefully leave out the fact that the $50,000 dollars does not include the thousands of dollars that teachers get in benefits.

What I am NOT saying is that teachers do not deserve these benefits or that teachers do NOT deserve more money. Teachers perform and incredible service to our society. My brother is in school right now to become a teacher and I applaud him and anyone else in or planning on going into the profession for their work and service.

But another problem that this little piece seems to neglect is Collective Bargaining. As I mentioned Gov. Walker is NOT planning on ending collective bargaining for salaries, merely for benefits. And future wage increases would be subject to a voter referendum. What is wrong with this? How dare the public have a voice in how their tax dollars are spent?

Here's some perspective that this piece above does not give. One of the most liberal Presidents of the 20th century, FDR, said that public unions collectively bargaining is not and should not be part of true democratic government. As he puts it, in the public arena "the employer is the whole people."

To engage in true collective bargaining for public workers is called voting. You vote in a representative that is sympathetic to your political and personal views and ideas. You engage your representative in townhall meetings, send them letters and emails, and call them. Also, in a private collective bargaining situation the two sides have different agendas that they must work to reconcile. In the public sector the very people that are voted to represent are then the negotiators. These elected negotiators are going to give their constituents what they want in return for campaign contributions and votes. Just think about the power of the public union when a huge voting block can be used against a representative to get the desired change. That representative would rather maintain those votes and give in, it is in his best interests. This is completely different in the private sector.

But this also gets into the problem of the unions. The unions have the ability to accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars from their member dues and use those to lobby elected officials to pass particular legislation that they want. So the public union can circumvent the democratic process by lobbying officials and twisting arms via threats or promises for campaign contributions and votes to get their desires met even if the public majority of the public does not want it.

Finally, this comes down to the idea that the public unions have the "right" to collectively bargain. We throw this word around these days as if everything we WANT is a "right." Collective bargaining for public officials was given to them by Wisconsin in 1959. This is not a right. The government does not dictate to us what is a right. Those are inalienable and God-given. Government protects the rights of ALL people. This includes the rest of the public that pays for these public workers. When people are losing their jobs and their incomes are being reduced and their lives are being changed by the economy the public unions do not have the right to collectively bargain to maintain or increase the burden upon the public to continue to finance programs that the people benefiting from them are not even paying out of pocket for themselves.

Why Jesus was NOT a Liberal (or a conservative)!

Saturday Jacinda and I both went to get a haircut at a local mall. After we walked around some of the shops, including a Barnes and Noble. I always tend to gravitate towards two sections: Christian Books and sports. Go figure. The one thing that continues to amaze me whenever I go near the Christian book section is how many useless books there are on Christianity. I remember hearing once that Christian books (outside of the Bible) were fairly rare, or at least the bad ones were filtered out and never really saw the light of day. In the last fifty years or so, though, Christian books is a massive money making industry and people who should not be writing, let alone about Christianity, pump out books it seems either to boost their egos or make money.

What I am trying to get at more specifically was that while browsing through Barnes and Noble I spotted a book called "Jesus Was a Liberal."

I know what is going on right away, but let me explain. Many Christians who find themselves politically liberal feel that their voice has been taken away by the "Silent Majority" or the Christian Right that really took off back during the Reagan years. Now they are trying to distance themselves from the Christian Right and maintain their Christian identity. I do not judge them for this, neither do I think they are wrong in doing this. The problem lies in the way they go about this.

I want to be clear that I am specifically at odds with the author of the book I mentioned above. I have two immediate reasons for this. First, the book makes a theological claim about Jesus right in the title, "Jesus WAS a Liberal." I am assuming that the author did not even realize this or if he did he did not mean it this way, but it still says that Jesus WAS. The Christian understanding of Jesus Christ, however, says that Jesus IS. Jesus IS still alive and he rose from the dead to establish His kingdom forever. I am not trying to overplay this in case it was mere oversight, but this is a fundamental teaching of the Christian church.

The second problem lies in the word "liberal." I do not care if many of Jesus teaching fit into a modern liberal worldview, the real issue is that the term liberal, especially the way we use it today, is loaded with political and social implications of our current period in history. Nowhere in the Bible is the term Liberal used and this must be acknowledged. This is the problem of reading into the text our own culture and worldview, instead of actually reading what it says. In truth, most of what Jesus said in the Bible is far from any political position i have seen held by anyone in public office. Not only does Jesus reach out to the poor and condemn the unjust and prideful, but he speaks of hell and judgment frequently. Not too many liberal churches that I know of preach on hell that often, let alone of it being a real place. Though I only read the front and back cover, the intent of the book seems to argue for a Christian POLITICAL shift back to the left, instead of back to the actual Bible.

If you read the Gospels and try hard not to bring to the text your personal assumptions, which is impossible, but if you try you will see that Jesus has no time for politics. He has no time for government officials and their agendas. Jesus would not be anywhere near the White House dinner, whether with Obama or Bush in the Oval Office. When Jesus is tempted by the Devil while fasting in the wilderness He rejects the Satan's offer of political power for the agenda of His Father. When the religious leaders try to get Him in trouble with the Roman Government by using the issue of taxes, Jesus seems to affirm the political reality of the day. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's." But what is more important is that in comparing the image of Caesar on a coin and the image of God that is imprinted upon humanity, Jesus is saying, "Give Caesar his worthless pieces of metal and give to God your whole life."

If you want to break the Bible free from the confines of the political Right in America, fine by me. Just make sure that what you are preaching is the Gospel and not your politics. I think this is just as big a problem, if not more so, for the Right, since it takes the political reality for granted. This is not easy and anyone who knows me knows that I am politically conservative. Does this make what I have to say loaded? Probably yes. But I think that we on the right should hold ourselves to just as high of a standard when it comes to seeing with a Biblical worldview and not seeing the Bible with a worldly, politicized world view.

Skepticism

Is skepticism good? I think so, to a degree. I think the problem is that it is acceptable and even applauded to be skeptical of faith and spirituality, especially in America today, but if anybody is skeptical about science, "Whoa, c'mon. Science is truth."

I think it is funny how so many skeptics of religion point to the example of how Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for saying the earth revolved around the sun. This is not to me an example of the church trying to bury science. It is an example of the belief of the day driving social and political policies. Is not this exactly what the global warming scientists are trying to do. They condemn anyone with a different scientific opinion and their position is the norm that is driving the social and political movements of our day. The massive amounts of email from the leading scientists in the Global Warming field is one thing, but recently India has been releasing news that the head of their climate research team has been using weak, at best, data from an interview, not an actual experiment, to drive their political agendas.

So what am I trying to get at? Well, basically science is the observations of men, human beings. Humans can be wrong and this needs to be a starting point for all scientific research. It is called humility. Science is observation and observations can be tainted by so many different factors. This does not mean that science is wrong. Far from it. It just means that if you put your faith in science, and it is a faith, then you are putting your beliefs in the hands of men who screw things up. Men who have political agendas. Men who will condemn others who disagree with them.

I think we do ourselves a disservice by quickly putting people into certain analogous relationships and do not put everything in the proper context. I am not defending those in the church who condemned Galileo, but they were speaking for God. They were speaking from the place of political dominance. The Bible does not speak of whether or not the earth is the center of the universe, or if the sun is the center of the universe, or if there are other planets with life in the universe for one simple reason: it is not important to the message. The message is about how much God loves us, not about how God made us the center of the universe and told us that we are the only thing that matters or that the Pope should be the governor of the World.

So who has the social and political dominance now? Well, that can be a hard thing to tie down, but in the area of climate science it is the Global Warming crowd who say they have a consensus. Why wouldn't they want a Galileo to set them free to the realities of science if theirs was wrong. Maybe they just don't have the correct tools like scientists before Galileo, or maybe they want to maintain their dominance like the Heliocentrists in the 17th century.

Either way, if you are going to be skeptical of religion then you should be equally skeptical of science. Not because of science itself, for it is just an idea, but of the men who use, and abuse, it.

Rejoicing over his bride...

I was in chapel the other day and one of the readings was Isaiah 62: 1-5. The passage specifically speaks about the coming salvation of Israel, but what really caught my attention was verse 5. It reads, "For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you." Again, this passage is specifically talking about God saving His bride, but the phrase "and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride" made me pause because in this statement is not a description of what is going to happen, but an assumption of something that already happens.

I think this is important for me as a husband because I lose track many times of the incredible joy that I have in my life because of my wife and I should never forget to rejoice over my bride. It is easy to get distracted by life and frustrated with all the responsibilities that come (though I know I have relatively few), but like Proverb 5 says "Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth... be intoxicated always in her love."

I am still young and our marriage is still young, but I hope that the rejoicing and joy in our marriage only grows greater with time.

By the way I am going to make a shameless plug for my wife. If you have not checked it out Jacinda has a website with her photography on it. She also just opened an Etsy page at http://www.etsy.com/shop/jacindashields. She is a wonderful artist, so please check them out.

Advent

In the church we are still in the season of Advent as we prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus into this world. Last year I found a blog by a member of the band called Jars of Clay that he had set up to post Advent poetry to sit back and reflect on the coming Christ-child in this busy time of shopping and stress. I just checked that blog again and he has not updated it this year, but it still has all the poems that he posted last year so if you are interested it has some really good reflective poems. I thought I would just share one here.

That Holy Thing
by George MacDonald

They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam’st, a little baby thing
That made a woman cry.

O Son of Man, to right my lot
Naught but Thy presence can avail;
Yet on the road Thy wheels are not,
Nor on the sea Thy sail!

My how or when Thou wilt not heed,
But come down Thine own secret stair,
That Thou may’st answer all my need-
Yea, every bygone prayer.


The rest are at
http://adventpoetry.blogspot.com/

God Bless and Merry Christmas,
Matt

Misconceptions about the Bible

I wanted to comment on something that I have been hearing lately, actually with increasing regularity. It is the idea that the Bible as we known it was given to us by a group of white, Roman Catholic men. I am not considering here the authorship of the Bible; that is a completely different and in-depth topic all-together. But as far as what we call the canon of scripture this idea that a group of biased men put in and kept out the books they wanted has become increasingly popular.

The first problem is that many of the books in the Bible were already accepted hundreds of years before Emperor Constantine gathered church leaders from across the Roman Empire to "determine" the canon. Many churches in the first three centuries flat out accepted certain "books" (really letters) to be authoritative and felt little, if any, need to have a list of accepted scripture. The main criteria for the authority came from the author and his relationship to Jesus or to someone close to Jesus. For example Matthew was a disciple of Jesus and Mark was a companion of Peter, so directly connected to an eywitness. In the case of Paul not only did he have direct connection to many of the disciples of Jesus the Christian belief accepts that he had a vision from Jesus directly giving him the Gospel account. This vision might be hard to accept for many modern people, but in Acts we find that the first thing Paul did was ask the disciples if his vision was correct. So many of the letters and writings were already accepted as having divine authority because of the authors' conections with Jesus. But by the end of the 2nd century lists were being developed, though some disagreed on what to include.

This inclusion disagreement was only a minor dispute. All of the current books of the Bible were accepted by the first generations of Christians, but there were minor issues with books like Hebrews, James, and Revelation. The concerns were small and some churches just chose not to use them. In fact, Martin Luther did not like the book of James and wanted to cut it out of the Bible, but not liking what something says does not mean cutting it out. Again, the vast majority of Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD before the canon was developed already accepted the books of the Bible that we have today.

So what of exclusion? If the books we have were accepted from the word "go" then were any left out? Yes. There were letters and writings left out. This is evident in the talk over recent years of books like the Gospel of Thomas. But there is a huge problem with the writings that were left out, especially the Gospel of Thomas. I will use the Gospel of Thomas as an example because many of the books excluded were of the same vein. The Gospel of Thomas was not written by the disciple Thomas, this is a big point. It was written by a group that denied the supremacy of God along with many other major Christian beliefs, so if the Gospel of Thomas is put into the Bible it would not have any coherence along with the fact that is not written by Thomas or by a contemporary of Thomas or another disciple. Another Gnostic writing talks about a giant Jesus coming out of the tomb and a talking cross. Obviously these do not fit into the Biblical accounts.

Now with the misconception about the "Roman Catholic" part. The problem of looking back on history with modern eyes is that we bring to history our own experiences. Many people see the church, whether Roman or not, as the medieval Roman Catholic Church with the big cathedrals and the Pope. The first few centuries did not have these. In fact the first few centuries of Christianity Roman emperors killed and persecuted Christians. Christianity did not become the state religion until 380 AD. This is almost 60 years after the Nicene Creed was put together to codify the core Christian beliefs in response to the heresy of Arianism (that Jesus was created and not eternally God). The main reason for codifying the Bible was because of heresies like this. The leaders, and the lay-people, wanted to finally make a concrete list of what they can recommend to people to read and accept. The things that were left out were left out for very good reasons.

So if you have heard or believe that a bunch of white, Roman Catholic men manipulated the Bible to give us what they wanted to give us then at least this will give you some context and more understanding of the process. It is true that white men dominated the writing of western history, but that does not make it unreliable. As for the canon of the Bible it was accepted well before those old white guys put it into a list.