What Arthur knows...

As we are currently inundated by political ads, one can only hope that thinking people are realizing they can't all be telling the truth.  One of  the elementary principles of logic is antithesis:  A is not Non A.

One of the things someone is not telling the truth about is:  Who cares the most for the economic needs of the nation?  One side says "We show we care by fighting to give you your money back."  The other side says "We show we care by taking more money away...from the evil (implied) people who have "enough" and giving it to you (assuming every listener is more deserving than the person who nows has it)."

Granted that this is my biased interpretation of things, one can nevertheless see the screaming errors in logic in the second statement.

Arhtur Brooks (pictured above)  author of World's "Book of the Year," The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government will Shape America's Future wrote an earlier volume entitled Who Really Cares:  The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism.   Here are some interesting statistics from that book:

• Ninety-one percent of people who identify themselves as religious are likely to give to charity, writes Brooks, as opposed to 66 percent of people who do not.
• The religious giving sector is just as likely to give to secular programs as it is to religious causes.
• Those who think government should do more to redistribute income are less likely to give to charitable causes, and those who believe the government has less of a role to play in income redistribution tend to give more.
• People who couple and raise children are more likely to give philanthropically than those who do not. The more children there are in a family, the more likely that a family will donate to charity.
• One of Brooks's most controversial findings was that political conservatives give more, despite having incomes that are on average 6 percent lower than liberals.

Just thought you would enjoy some data to balance with all the rhetoric flying around...

As you think about voting and the current election...

One of the controversies in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's time was "the Jewish question."  In his biography of Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas summarizes a controversial address Bonheffer made on this subject. Here are some excerpts from that address, dealing withe the relationship of church and state:

" 'The church must continually ask the state whether its [the state's] action can be justified as the legitimate action of the state, i.e., as action which leads to law and order, and not to lawlessness and disorder.'  In other words, it is the church's role to help the state be the state [emphasis in the original].  If the state is not creating an atmosphere of law and order, as Scripture says it must, then it is the job of the church to draw the state's attention to this failing.  And if on the other hand, the state is creating an atmosphere of "excessive law and order," it is the church's job to draw the state's attention to that too.

"If the state is creating 'excessive law and order,' then the 'state develops its power to such an extent that it deprives Christian preaching and Christian faith... of their rights.'  Bonhoeffer calls this a 'grotesque situation.'  'The church,' he said, 'must reject this encroachment of the order of the state precisely because of tis better knowledge of the state and of the limitations of its action.  The state which endangers the Christian proclamation negates itself."

Of course, it is well to point out that Bonhoeffer was executed by the state, eventually.  And that state fell ("negated itself") to the Allies three days later.