GOOD VIBRATIONS

     What does it mean to be made in God's image? When the dogs bark loudly or another significantly loud sound is introduced within the walls of our house, it will set the strings of the myriad instruments hanging on my wall to vibrating. An effect akin to an echo if you will. Are we a physically manifested echo of God's image? He spoke the worlds into being. Genesis talks of forming the dust into man by His breath. (Gen. 2:7)  The dust + God's voice brought us into being. This would suggest an intrinsic connection between us and God. We are not God but an echo of His nature. An echo does not generate sound. It is wholly dependent on the voice (or sound), that created it, but offers the same characteristics as the original voice. Our highest goal should be to uncover that part of our life that is an echo of our Creator.

PIANO'S AND CRITICAL THINKING
Now that I'm retired I've considered several activities to engage in. Engage in at my leisure and in a way that suits me. Hmmm. That sounded kinda selfish, but there it is and I can't really change the statement substantially and still say what I wanted to. So, one of the things I would enjoy would be to teach begginner guitar and mandolin to those who have a desire to learn how to play them. When teaching these instruments I try to include some music theory, (as much as I feel the student can stand), because music theory is applicable to any instrument they may care to learn in the future and will help them be a more complete musician. As it happens, the piano is the best way, in my opinion, to teach music theory. It's kind of like a physical representation of music theory and can open up a deep and effective understanding of music in general. What I've leaned in my music theory classes, and piano lessons has been invaluable in my advancement on other instruments I have learned to play.
    Critical thinking is similar in another area of our lives. If we learn to analyze things systematically we can apply that process to situations as they present themselves in our lives. We cannot use this process to make decisions, but we would be silly not to use the process to HELP us make good decisions. If I may offer a quick example. We may not have delt with new car salesmen before but even on our first encounter we can benefit from analyzing the process. When a salesman says your used trade-in car is worth 3 times more than your friend was willing to pay you you may think your friend isn't as good a friend as you first thought. But if you are appropriately skeptical of the amount of money the salesman is offering you you will likely learn that your car's value is actually more in line with your friends offer. A new car price often includes a significant markup to allow the salesman the chance to offer you the excessive amount of money for your car to give the illussion that they are being very generous to make the sale more likely. They may offer you 3,000 for a car that they will wholesale out for 1,000 while still making a nice profit on the deal. These facts are there for the learning but are seldom discovered. If we know the value of our car before the negotiation we become skeptical of the process and can learn how the new car selling game is played. Then we can negotiate from a position of strength. Strength provided by our knowledge of the process we are engaged in.
    This ability to reason is something our schools use to focus on. Unfortunately we have entered a time when colleges are more interested in advancing a particular ideology rather than teaching the ability to form an opinion based on the logical analysis of the available facts. Just like music theory can help us with our endeavor to learn any instrument, so, too, does critical thinking help us in all aspects of decision making.

A STEP FARTHER

    Still working on the health-care issue in my rather limited mental capacity. See if this clicks at all.
Insurance is, (originally anyway), based on risk. The more risk the insurance company takes on, the higher the premium.
    The "risk" that someone with an insurance policy will get the flu, or a cold, or bronchitis, or an inner-ear infection, or etc. etc. is 100%. This means that the insurance company, before any other calculation, must account for the cost of providing services for these common illnesses. To provide services for these common issues that virtually every person will need, the insurance company relies on internal and external bureaucracies. These layers of red tape are required to oversee the system and verify needs, etc. These expenses are much inflated at the insurance company level over what they would be at the individual level.
    A visit to a direct care doctor for an illness and the subsequent treatment is exponentially more efficient and effective than going through the insurance company's bureaucratic environment.
    Since I have retired, I have engaged in a contract with a direct care physician and have a small sample of personal experience to draw from. I make a monthly payment for his services and then pay as I go for additional items. A recent blood work-up and an inquiry into prescriptions I need for eye drops revealed an incredibly low cost on both accounts. The blood test was around 20 bucks and one of the eye drops was about a tenth of what I'd been paying even with prescription coverage on my old plan. Additionally, I can call him 24/7 and know that I will get a doctor on the phone. I can email, text or use the handy on-line app they provide. I then purchased a policy to cover any major medical issues I may encounter and the combined costs of both are significantly less, (about half), of my previous employer-provided coverage. Yes, there are still questions and scenarios that may reveal issues with this set-up, but it's the kind of effort I expect from a free society. A society, a citizenry, that is losing freedoms by the day and will quickly lose much ground in this regard if we let the government seize control of our health-care system. (now, back to our regularly scheduled discussion).
    With a direct care model in place, (or something similar), the insurance company's would be free to return to their more appropriate place in the system and provide, true, risk-based coverage for people. This would see a dramatic drop in costs because the 100% risk factor will be replaced by a much lower factor and the common, predictable illnesses will be covered by the much more effective and direct approach offered by the doctor-patient contract mentioned above. A significant outcome with this arrangement is the person's more direct involvement in his health-care services and costs. The individual replaces the incredibly ineffective bureaucracy the insurance companies had previously relied on.
    I don't have a solution to our complex medical insurance situation here in the US, but doesn't it seem incumbent to consider some viable alternatives? This model has been around for many years and is available in all but 2 states as of this writing. If you were wondering how you can bring back a more free society, exercising some initiative and individual responsibility is one way. Please consider taking your health-care back from the government before it's too late.
    Thanks and have a nice day.

Where has all the common sense gone?

    Does common sense and logical thinking evaporate? Sublimate? Hibernate? If not, why is it so hard to find these days? And while we're out with our flashlights in the night looking for common sense maybe we can locate that elusive critter called dialogue and civil discussion. Heck, I'd settle for any discussion, civil or otherwise. Do we take our positions so personally that we can't risk actually listening to the other side? Or have we prejudged the "other side" so negatively that we can't even stand to hear it?
    Newsflash. There are thoughtful, compassionate individuals who don't think "gun free" schools is the way to go in a country saturated with guns. Not offering an opinion on gun ownership here, just making an observation. We surround celebrities, public servants, politicians of every stripe with people trained in the use of firearms to protect their subjects from harm. Somehow, we have decided a cool-looking international symbol printed on a sign at the entrance of our children's schools is supposed to protect them. How could any gun-inflicted harm come to our children with such a solid line of defense right there at the school's entrance? If I may say, it doesn't seem to be working too well so far.
    Given the reality that gun confiscation would be messy at best and against our Constitution , and would take years to try to enforce, (likely with little success), it does not offer us an effective solution to this rising problem. Left-leaning ideological thinkers pretending to state their more conservative counterpart's positions by these vague and far reaching "silly" statements isn't exactly interpretable as offering a meaningful solution either. It seems like with such an important subject we need to have a discussion, not a verbal bumper sticker convention.
    By the way, if our children are the priority of our society (as they should be), maybe we should consider another shot at prohibition since drunk driving is one of the leading causes of death among young children. And don't forget that swimming pools claim far more innocent children's lives than guns. Guns are very powerful and need to be handled with the respect they deserve but honestly, fatal accidents involving guns are rare and these school shootings are not revealing a gun problem, they are revealing a society and culture problem.
    "There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws; or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality."
                                                          Alexis de Tocqueville

FREEDOM THROUGH THE BARS

I've noticed how discussions about healthcare often move quickly from the subject of healthcare to other less central items. For instance, people who have been diagnosed with a serious illness immediately feel compelled to share the guilt they would have, (and we SHOULD have), if someone would have a similar diagnosis without healthcare. Therefore, we need universal healthcare to assuage such. And if your job includes healthcare then you feel guilt about having your job as well. 
Never mind that handing the government absolute control of another 1/6 to 1/5 of our economy will hand them yet more power over the individuals whose votes they so badly want that they will lie, cheat, steal, take bribes, etc., to get. Never mind that this power would singlehandedly  change, in a negative way, the relationship between the government and the governed. This would be one small step to avoid guilt and one huge step for Progressivism. Put another way, another large chunk of our individual rights would be handed over to the ostensibly compassionate and egalitarian government. For the last hundred years or so this country has been undermining its very nature. We have used law against itself and when necessary ignored our founding principles in order to move to the Progressive agenda. Personally, I believe we are all made in God's image and that we have certain unalienable rights. Rights that our founders felt compelled to try and protect from the new government it was setting up. While our system of government was elegant and effective it was also flawed. No more or less flawed than man himself. The framers knew that this new government was vulnerable to the same weaknesses that haunt us as individuals. Our inability to exercise, or indifference toward, the idea of self-discipline. We have laws to try to contain these preclusions on an individual basis, (though no law can contain an amoral society), but our system of government needed to protect the people from the negative effects of these facts on the governed. So our constitution provides for a remedy to an out of control government. One that is in the hands of the people but that will not be employed by a citizenry that is happy to willingly hand over its freedoms to the government. Yet, our founders worst case scenarios are coming true. We are watching our government grow into Tyranny. A socialist state that no longer offers its citizens said protection of their individual freedoms from an overreaching state. We have, in fact, become the "Soft Tyranny" that Alexis deTocqueville warned us about. On the one hand we talk about diversity and its import in our culture and our society, and on the other hand we are moving at breakneck speed toward a country that not just rewards but demands sameness in the name of the "greater good" or the "general welfare" of its people. The latter of which is a term that is badly mis-understood these days to the advantage of our power-hungry politicians. We are made in God's image as unique people and are most able to pursue the diversity that is intrinsic in our God-likeness as a free people. But we are now, on every hand, encouraged, intimidated and even compelled to conform to a particular ideology in order to earn the status of a member of this society. We are a long way down the road of sameness while carrying the banner's of diversity and individualism with us on our journey. Unfortunately, these banners are only used to identify us so they know which victim line to put us in to receive our voting instructions and protest slogan signs. After all, we wouldn't want to admit that we are, in fact, practicing precisely what we accuse others of. Intolerance. Do we really think that our laws should compel a Muslim auto mechanic to fix a pig farmers truck even if doing so would violate his strongly held religious beliefs. I don't see any way to answer in the affirmative here. He is living in a country that allegedly protects his individualism. His right to pursue, (of course within reasonable bounds), life, liberty and happiness. Why would the government, (or the media,(please note the absence of the word News)), try to force our Muslim friend to fix the pig farmers truck? It; they; shouldn't. And yet these situations are manipulated and remade into hammers to club certain people, or actually, certain ideas or positions, over the head with to mold public opinion into a more suitable companion for our governments march toward Progressivism. At this point in our history I believe we can restore our country to the lofty goals, (at least the pursuit of such), that our framers put in place. We are quickly approaching a point where we will not be able to find our way back, however, because the path we have been on is being bulldozed and re-landscaped so we can't find our way back. Leave healthcare in the hands of the medical community, actuary tables, and the good people of our great country and get the government out of the way so we can fix the mess they have made.

"It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom forced by it to act but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence. It does not tyrannize but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people until every nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd ".
Alexis de Tocqueville

BY HIS STRIPES

    In the 53rd chapter of Isaiah we read a description of the Suffering Servant. The Messiah. The Christ. It's quite a dramatic depiction of not just the suffering of the Lamb of God but also the accomplishment of Salvation through His sacrifice. It is a passage that most Christians are at least vaguely familiar with and includes the statement that "by His stripes, we are healed" This comment refers to the scourging of Jesus before His crusifixion and points to the fact that Jesus suffering was necessary to bring about the forgiveness of sin. My understanding of this relationship took a leap forward a few years back as I sat at one of several stations during a Maundy Thursday service. This table simply had a Bible and paper and pencils for writing down your thoughts as you considered the whole story of Jesus' crucifixion. Following are my writings from this time.
    "By His stripes we are healed. Those stripes have a very personal origin. My sin. My shortcomings. My intentional turning away. I am not a bystander in this crucifixion. I am actively involved. The beauty of this is that God twisted things around to use the very thing that brought His death to bring me life. No wonder it all confounds the intellectuals so.
-----though your sin be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.
-----He doesn't say wait till tomorrow, 
           or you should have been here before.
    He just says come.
     He is nothing like me."

Just Thinking

Ramblings:

So, if God is all powerful, how can He stand by and watch all of the horrors mankind is always, somewhere, actively perpetrating on itself? This is a question which has been asked for ever and ever and it is now my turn to take a stab at it.

    I believe the answer lies somewhere in the idea of "freewill". That is to say, He cannot effectively show His love for us, nor we for Him, by His turning us all into robots. While the evidence of our Creator is, in my experience, everywhere to be found, it is still a matter of an intentional act to "believe" in Him. That is to say, if God were to split the sky and make an announcement for all of humankind to see, hear and experience, then our natural tendency would be to believe, of course, and to stand fearful and cowering in His presence. Is this "love"? I would say no. And I believe a relationship of love with His creation is what God most wants. Our decision to follow Him, through His expression of love in the Christ, the messiah, is what He wants. There is sufficient evidence in the sciences to lay a foundation for a very plausible faith. Not a blind, radical, emotional response, but a thoughtful, reasoned response resulting in placing our faith in God's work on earth. While He is holy and just, attributes that we are to strive for but without the realistic expectation of achieving, He still loves us. As we express our love for Him we enter into an eternal relationship which will some day be made perfect through Christ.

    Getting a bit off track here. Let me offer an analogy if I may. Back to the question of how a loving God can "allow" so many evil things to occur. As I said, I tie it to "freewill". If you are in a courtroom where your brother has been found guilty of manslaughter because he ventured out on the road after having a few too many drinks and the family of the deceased comes up to you and says, "why did you let him continue drinking and driving after his first 2 DUI's?" What is your defense? After all, you could have handcuffed him and kept him in your basement. You could have had him forcibly taken to a State run facility to live out his days. You could have kept closer tabs on him and driven him home after he got himself drunk. So many things you could have done. But each of them would have violated his "freewill".  So you had to stand by and watch him destroy his own life and he has now  also taken someone else's life. Are you a murderer? Your efforts to talk some sense into your brother were unsuccessful but you could have taken a more direct, physical approach. But that approach, while potentially saving someone's life, would have infringed on your brothers basic rights as a person. God is constantly calling us to a point of redemption. He has made a way for humankind that would move us to a less violent existence. But He has not yet directly intervened on a worldwide scale, I believe, hoping more of His creation will choose to place their faith in Him void of the feelings of compulsion which would certainly accompany a decision after His second coming or some other worldwide supernatural event.
    So I believe we are left with a world inexerably tied to both tragedy and joy. A world capable of evil but a world that offers a loving creators invitation to grace and forgiveness and eternal life with Him.