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Senator Edward Kennedy’s cancer is in remission.

Through the wonders of the American healthcare system — the finest on earth — Senator Kennedy was able to seek life saving treatment and, through that treatment, have his cancer go in remission.

The sad and tragic irony is that when Senator Kennedy returns to work, he will actively work to deny you the access to treatment he himself had.

We are not supposed to be so impolite to say such things, but the truth must be spoken.

We know, from what was publicly reported, that Senator Kennedy’s condition was extremely serious. We also know that Senator Kennedy’s compatriot, Senator Jay Rockefeller, said that under Senator Kennedy’s and the Democrats’ healthcare plan the government is going to weigh the cost/benefit of healthcare choices and deny you access to treatment if the cost outweighed the benefit.

Given media reports of Senator Kennedy’s health, we can postulate that, had Senator Kennedy had access to healthcare under the system he intends to design, he would not have gotten the treatment that put his cancer in remission.

We can also postulate one other thing — when Senator Kennedy does design the Democrats’ healthcare system, they will make sure people like Senator Kennedy are not subjected to it.

Just you and me.

[From Rich Democrat Uses Private Healthcare to Put Cancer in Remission. Doesn’t Want You To Do Same.]

I haven't been really bowled over by the content offered at PJTV so far, but if they never produce another bit of content, the entire enterprise will have been worthwhile for the sake of this.

Perhaps it is a sign of my advanced age, but I am continually stunned that self-important, half-educated twits like Jon Stewart are taken seriously -- for crying out loud, a large number of twenty-somethings use The Daily Show as their primary news source. This is the intellectual equivalent of walking around with their boxers spilling out over their waistbands, I guess.

This was stupendously dumb. Spectacularly dumb. Stupid with 3 o's dumb.

Exurban Jon asks:

After Obama's latest misstep, I've had a rather horrifying thought: What if Biden's the smart one?

One of the cool things about baseball is that, no matter now many times you watch it, you always have the chance to see something new. Consider this play from yesterday:

The Dodgers literally were awarded a gift run in the second inning Sunday when a rarely seen "fourth-out rule" was invoked in their game against the D-backs.

Andre Ethier was at third base, Juan Pierre at second, and with one out, Randy Wolf lined out to pitcher Dan Haren, who threw to second baseman Felipe Lopez, who tagged out Pierre off second base for the apparent third out of the inning.

But by the time Pierre was erased, Ethier had crossed the plate. The D-backs left the field without making a play on Ethier at third base, which would have been the fourth out of the inning.

But as the teams changed sides, plate umpire Larry Vanover walked over to third-base umpire Charlie Reliford, apparently to discuss the play, which Dodgers bench coach Bob Schaefer pointed out to manager Joe Torre, who went out to appeal.

After an umpire huddle, Vanover ruled that the Ethier run counted, even though Ethier had not tagged up, because there was no appeal at third base. Even though a play at third on Ethier would have been the fourth out of the inning, it would have taken precedence over the third out because it would have erased a run.

Weird and sorta cool at the same time.

Stephen Kruiser:

You want to know the real difference between the right and the left? We were all pissed off at Bush for his spending habits too.

Tigers Release Gary Sheffield

Glenn Morton!:

How does one escape this logical conclusion? By denying one of the premises. If the Turing principle or the multiverse is false, then this conclusion doesn’t follow. If our brains are not merely computers, but have souls, one escapes this form of resurrection but then faces a different situation all together. But atheists should be aware that in escaping the Designer by living in the multiverse, logically brings them back to some of the things they were trying to avoid—resurrection, eternal life and unseen beings out there somewhere in the multiverse. If one doesn’t like the implications of all this, don’t gripe at me. I am merely reporting what is out there in the computational and physics literature—and all these guys I have cited, with the exception of Tipler, are atheists. [From Multiverse+Turing = Resurrection+Eternal Life]

Some things to think about for UK fans here.

Those of us that believe that the writers of the Bible were inspired in some way by God such that the Bible is in some way "inerrant" eventually have to consider the extreme distance between what is apparently described in the opening chapters of Genesis and what is known about cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology, etc.

The Young Earth Creationist (YEC) believes that Genesis 1-11 are literally true:

• God created the Earth in 6 days of 24 hours each (Gen 1-2),
• all of humanity descended from one couple named Adam and Eve (Gen 2-4),
• the Genesis patriarchs lived hundreds of years (Gen 5),
  
• there was a global flood that killed all of mankind except for Noah and his family (Gen 6-10),
• the various human languages had their origin at Babel (Gen 11).

The problem with this approach is this: None of the five things listed above has the slightest bit of factual support outside of the Bible. I'm not going to go into any detail about it (I assume you can use Google as well as I can) here. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Earth is merely thousands of years old rather than billions, while there is a great deal of independently corroborated evidence otherwise. The same goes for the other 4 points. These events simply did not occur.

Now, for most people in most walks of life this doesn't matter much. Unless you're a cosomologist, biologist, astronomer, geologist or anthropologist, it makes no practical difference in your life whether Genesis 1-11 is literal history or not. In the same manner, you can even believe in Ptolemaic astronomy if you want to; it won't make any difference in the way you approach any of your daily activities. Geocentrism worked fine, even for astronomers, for centuries.

But if you care about truth this should matter to you: none of these events happened literally as described in the Bible. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old; the notion of a literal Adam & Eve is unsupported except perhaps for a mitochondrial DNA study that placed Eve in Eastern Africa 140,000 years ago; there was no global flood that wiped out mankind except for a single family; there is no sign that human languages divided at a single point a few thousand years ago.

I'm not going to relate the YEC position or its lack of agreement with fact in detail. Again, I'm assuming you can use Google. If you are a YEC and consider yourself intellectually honest, I dare you to read this site. If you do so, you will have to choose between the two (for the record, I don't endorse Glenn's model but his collection of geological data that thoroughly refute the YEC/Flood model is impressive).

The YEC position eventually falls back to asserting one or both of two propositions. Either God created the Earth a short time ago with an appearance of great age, or did enough miracles to plug the gaps in Creation Science (e.g., cram billions of years of geological change into a single year of Noah's Flood without releasing so much heat the oceans boil off).

So, what if God created the Earth a few thousand years ago, but made it appear to be much older? What if God buried fossils in the ground of animals that never lived, instantly created geological structures that should have millenia to form, created light en route to Earth from supernovas millions of light years away that never really ignited, etc.?

We have to agree that an omnipotent God would be completely capable of doing all that. We even have to allow for the vanishingly slim possibility that He did. However, if we are said to be able to learn about God's character from observing nature (Romans 1), what would such sleight-of-hand say about Him?

The YEC wants to believe a "simple reading of God's Word." Let's ignore the time problem and just look at what Genesis 1 describes:

6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

Just where is this water that the sky separates from the surface of the Earth?

14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

Apparently, the sky contains the Sun and Moon and all the stars – and there is water above it.

The YEC wants to take everything about the Genesis 1 account literally when it describes what was made when. If you're going to go there, then you have to take the "waters above the firmament" with you (the "waters below," too).

This just doesn't add up. After years of trying to force these puzzle pieces together, I abandoned the quick and easy pat answer of YEC and moved on to Old-Earth Creationism.

I'm going to do a series of posts that follow the path that I have followed so far on the issue of origins. I heartily recommend the Haarsmas' book as it provides a more complete discussion than I will have the attention span to provide.

The question of origins raises such emotion that it's usually the primary question that comes to mind when someone thinks of the relationship between science and theology. In fact, if you tell someone that you are reading a book or teaching a class about science and theology they will typically assume that it's all about either bashing the Bible or bashing Darwin.

In this series of posts, I'm not going to discuss this entire question. Instead, I'm going to focus on something that I have realized over the decades that I have studied this topic and that the Haarsmas' book makes quite clear: there is no conservative position on origins that is a slam-dunk, tidy little package that obviously falls out of a straightforward interpretation of Scripture and science.

All of the standard approaches have difficulties. If you are going to take both scientific observation and the Bible seriously, you are going to have to do some real thinking and make some tough decisions. I know; I have been working through all this myself since my teens (late in the Jurassic).

So I'm going to look at the difficulties in each approach: the reasons why in each case I continued to travel on what I hope is a "hermeneutical spiral" and not a random walk. The first stop is at Young Earth Creationism, the default position for most evangelicals and fundamentalists.