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For when your liberal friend says, "Well they're all crooks:":

If you don’t trust ‘em, then don’t trust ‘em with so much of your money.

I've recently been helping to lead a "seekers' class" at church based on the Starting Point materials from Northpoint Church in Atlanta. During a discussion about doubt, it became evident that several in the group were concerned about whether belief and doubt were mutually exclusive.

One person even mentioned where Jesus said (Luke 18:15-17) we have to come to God "like a child." This didn't seem right to me in this context. It quickly occurred to me that neither ignorance nor lack of doubt were implied here, but something else.

I think the childlikeness referred to is that of dependence and trust, not ignorance or total lack of doubt. Doubt is not a sign of disbelief, nor does it show lack of faith. I remember reading in Os Guiness' great book In Two Minds (now rereleased as God in the Dark) about how the famous atheist Bertrand Russell lost his faith. It made a such a great impression on me that I still remember it after 25 years or so. He quoted a well-known autobiographical passage about Russell's youth:

I became exceedingly religious and consequently anxious to know whether there was any good grounding for supposing religion to be true. For the next four years a great part of my time was spent in secret meditation upon this subject. I could not speak to anybody about it for fear of giving pain. I suffered acutely, both from the gradual loss of faith and the necessity of silence

Guiness explained (I'm going on memory now, I can't go look it up because after 2 years most of our books are still in boxes) that Russell's problems were threefold:

1. He believed in the wrong things (Unitarianism)
2. He believed for the wrong reasons (the classical theistic proofs)
3. He was afraid to discuss his doubts with anyone

Guiness discussed all three, but I want to focus on the last one. What does it mean when we are afraid to face doubt? It means that we are afraid that if we pursue it, we will confirm the doubt rather than our faith. In other words, to be afraid to pursue the truth about a doubt that we have about — say theodicy or origins to name a couple of things we had been discussing in the class — is to admit that we really don't trust God and want to hold on to faith for other reasons.

So, back to this "childlikeness" stuff: Suppose you're four years old and your standing at the edge of the pool. Your Dad is encouraging you to jump in. "Go ahead! I'll catch you!" he calls. You have doubts. What if he's playing a trick on me? What if he drops me? You're scared, you don't know what's going to happen, you have doubts, but you jump because ultimately you trust your Dad.

So, go ahead and doubt, but use your doubts to prod you to pursue the truth.

Go ahead and jump.

Cringely:

My Davis is an all-aluminum two-seater with an 85-horsepower engine. The engine was built in 1946, the plane in 1982, and the whole thing cost under $4,000 at the time, though today I have more than that invested in the instrument panel alone. The plane weighs 625 lbs. empty, 1125 lbs. loaded, has a top speed of 140 miles per hour and can travel about 600 miles on its 24-gallon fuel tank.

Why can't I buy a car like that?

Imagine if we took the basic design parameters of my DA-2A and applied them to a modern automobile. The new design would have to carry two people and luggage, have an empty weight of no more than 625 lbs. and use an 85-horsepower engine. With a loaded weight of 1125 lbs., the car would have a power-to-weight ratio comparable to a Chevy Corvette and be just as quick -- probably even faster than the airplane's 140 mph. Driven only 20 percent over posted speed limits as God intended, the car would easily get 50+ miles per gallon.

Who wouldn't want to buy one?

Let's start a list, shall we?

1. People that don't want to die in a minor accident.
2. People that carry more than themselves and a wallet in their car.

The only annual event more exciting than when the new phonebooks come out! The Dave Barry Holiday Gift Guide.

No way, now how. Anyone that thinks the Gold Glove awards are just about fielding hasn't been paying attention.

(Via Baseball Crank)

Top Fifty Players Of 2008:

Pick two of [players ranked 16-28]. Together, they were as valuable as one Albert Pujols.

Albert Pujols wins Most Valuable Player award:

St. Louis Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols won his second NL MVP award, powering past Philadelphia Phillies star Ryan Howard by a comfortable margin Monday.

Vaporizing Tehran or Pyongyang wouldn't bring back New York or Seattle. We have to be able to defend ourselves.

by the helpful Planet Moron:

There are two types of renewable energy to consider:

1. The kind that is really expensive.
2. The kind that doesn’t exist.

The expensive kind is helpful in that the additional resources devoted to it will help slow down the economy, while the kind that doesn't exist is helpful in that the additional resources devoted to it will help slow down the economy.

So, there's really no downside.

You really should RTWT.

No one can rant like P J O'Rourke:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

Don't miss any of it.