When being stupid is smart
You don’t suppose giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize will polarize America, do you?
I thought it was supposed to be a Peace prize.
I guess you can’t blame controversy. It’s going to happen among contentious people, whatever the spark. Still, irony like this is too good to waste 
It’s sad. They didn’t take their daughter to the doctor, let her die… because they thought it would be unfaithful to God.
The judge told the Neumanns this would give them time to “think about Kara and what God wants you to learn from this”.
He added that they were “very good people, raising their family, who made a bad decision, a reckless decision”.
He added: “God probably works through other people, some of them doctors.”
I’m really impressed with the words of the judge in this case. I’m certain that many people won’t like his decision, but for a judge that shouldn’t be made to mean much.
I respect how he chose to spoke to the family in words that they had a chance of understanding. I respect that he addressed the flaws in theology that caused the death of a little girl.
How do you fix a theological flaw? How do you fix a theological flaw as a secular judge?
You can’t.
But you can’t simply allot punishment according to actions – that’s why we have a person on the bench, and not simply a computer. If a computer were the judge, then once guilt/innocence was ascertained, the sentence would be automatic.
When I wrote about this before, I thought that whatever ruling was made on this would necessarily be a religious ruling. I still think so; I think that this is why the story is on BBC News, because this is a very challenging incident which highlights how the neat and tidy church and state divide is really messy and interwoven.
But I respect that the judge made a religious ruling and that he made a wise one. I think it was wise because he can’t punish the couple in a way that compares to the loss of their daughter.
The Neumanns will have to stand before a greater judge one day, but before they do, they’ll have to wrestle with the question of “Why?”.
Bad theology kills. It kills others through our sin against them, and it kills us. It brings deadness and pain and suffering into our own lives, because it’s bad, and it’s not the truth, but it’s in us, and because we ourselves can’t see it and we don’t know it’s what’s causing our grief, we can’t get rid of it.
Living in a world that is not the one which really exists brings its own pain. Believing in a God who isn’t the one who exists brings its own pain.
This is why there is the law; this is why there is justice and punishment. To show us where we are living in a false world, to show us where we have strayed from what is whole and sound. To lead us to something better.
This is why the court of a wise judge, a judge who reveals this… is a beautiful thing.
I have a friend.
Unfortunately, my friend is a boor. I don’t like saying it, and I wish there was a nicer word that conveyed the same meaning.
However, the truth is, the meaning is not very nice, and so the word that conveys it is not very nice. My friend actually *is* a boor. He has cultures growing in various nooks and crannies (behind his ears, between his toes) but that’s about it.
So I said, “Let’s help my friend out a little bit.”
I bought my friend the seed to start a library – two beautiful carved wooden book-ends and a lovely book on art. I knew that every time he looked at the shelf beauty and culture would just spring up in him. You couldn’t look at those book-ends and *not* become cultured.
Those were some book-ends.
When I visited him the other day, it was clear he liked the book-ends.
He was in the kitchen, and he had the book laid out on the counter. On top of it was a slab of meat. That he was tenderizing. With a book-end.
He waved his bloody implement at me - “Give me a hand and mash the potatoes, will you?” – gesturing at the pot, and the table, and at the other book-end.
I kind of wish my other friend hadn’t come in just then and that the story hadn’t gotten out.
That’s not really why I gave him the book-ends.
This works in Firefox and in IE8 but I’m still debugging IE7. Sorry, folks.
I’d like to unpack a game that we often play.
It’s called the “Bad Person” game.
Fundamentalist Christians are particularly fond of it, I’m sorry to say.
It’s very simple. You have to make it through life without being bad.
There’s even an electronic version of the game.
Do you have what it takes to make it to glory?
Arrow keys navigate, enter will shrive you, granting divine forgiveness. If the annoying scroll with the arrow keys bothers you, you can use the alternate navigation keys ‘w’,'a’,'s’,'d’. Or you can launch the standalone version
How can they responsibly say this?
No, wait. Shoot the copywriter, because I’m sure the researcher said something responsible, but then the copywriter threw it all away for a catchy title.
But saying,
“Half of babies ‘will live to 100′”
just doesn’t help anyone.
I’m pretty sure there are significant social pressures building and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the next 100 years had a few things to say about our expectations.
Today I put the lining back in my coat.
Yesterday wasn’t fun, but today was the first day this fall that I could see my breath. That still doesn’t feel right to me.
I remember what winter is like, but summer and winter make the world two different places. A bus stop at thirty below with ice underfoot is not the same stop in the summer. The bus comes at a different time and gets a different reception from the people waiting. It’s not the same.
I saw a flatbed truck go by, loaded with a k-car. It was towing a second behind it; they were twins except for colour. Is it cost effective anymore to have a k-car towed?
Students are back, filling the buses to standing room only. A girl got off; her hair was shipped directly from the seventies catalogue.
I guess if you’re that pretty you can get away with anything.
On the ride, I passed the McDonalds sign, the kind with the re-arrangeable lettering. I guess they couldn’t afford a decimal point; they were advertising $139 coffee. Maybe sales were down.
Underneath it was the slogan, “works for me”. I’d like to meet the fellow who would say that about McD’s coffee, priced reasonably or not.
But that’s a boom-time slogan. I remember when they brought that in. It’s when companies couldn’t find a new hire, couldn’t keep one. People traded up their jobs until all the minimum wage positions were stripped bare.
I remember looking at cashiers and wondering, “When did they start hiring 12 year olds?”
Well, you don’t hear much too talk about that anymore 
. But it wasn’t really all that long ago, so it will probably come round again.
Change is written into our lives at the lowest, most basic level. Try as we might to stop it, it just keeps going. Eating the same cereal every morning doesn’t stop the sun from burning down.