Tuesday, June 05, 2007

It’s Always Take, Take, Take

Hillary, “Der Rodham,” Clinton continues to espouse what I am fairly certain she would consider to be her benign socialist vision for Amerika, as I found out after reading this.

During a nationally broadcast forum Monday evening on faith and politics Sen. Hillary Clinton (D.-N.Y.) attacked the free market and told listeners in that order to attain energy independence and provide universal health coverage, it would be necessary to “take away from some people.”

And this.

She went on, “The same with energy. You know, we can’t keep talking about our dependence on foreign oil and the need to deal with global warming and the challenge that it poses to our climate and to God’s creation and just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”

Take, take, take, the political mantra which is strangling America.

Via a Townhall.com piece written by Amanda Carpenter titled Clinton: “Something Has to be Taken Away from Some People.”

Posted by John Venlet on 06/05 at 09:18 AM
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A Theoretical Physicist on Science and Religion

Is the distinctive separation of knowledge, the objective, and faith, the subjective, ...all bound to end in tears, as Wolfgang Pauli asserted?

I don’t have the answer to that question, but there is an interesting article, available via The Edge, which delves into the question, but does not answer it either.

“I assume,” I must have replied, “that Planck considers religion and science compatible because, in his view, they refer to quite distinct facets of reality. Science deals with the objective, material world. It invites us to make accurate statements about objective reality and to grasp its interconnections. Religion, on the other hand, deals with the world of values. It considers what ought to be or what we ought to do, not what is. In science we are concerned to discover what is true or false; in religion with what is good or evil, noble or base. Science is the basis of technology, religion the basis of ethics. In short, the conflict between the two, which has been raging since the eighteenth century, seems founded on a misunderstanding, or, more precisely, on a confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific statements. Needless to say, the result makes no sense at all. This view, which I know so well from my parents, associates the two realms with the objective and subjective aspects of the world respectively. Science is, so to speak, the manner in which we confront, in which we argue about, the objective side of reality. Religious faith, on the other hand, is the expression of the subjective decisions that help us choose the standards by which we propose to act and live. Admittedly, we generally make these decisions in accordance with the attitudes of the group to which we belong, be it our family, nation, or culture. Our decisions are strongly influenced by educational and environmental factors, but in the final analysis they are subjective and hence not governed by the ‘true or false’ criterion. Max Planck, if I understand him rightly, has used this freedom and come down squarely on the side of the Christian tradition. His thoughts and actions, particularly as they affect his personal relationships, fit perfectly into the framework of this tradition, and no one will respect him the less for it. As far as he is concerned, therefore, the two realms—the objective and the subjective facets of the world—are quite separate, but I must confess that I myself do not feel altogether happy about this separation. I doubt whether human societies can live with so sharp a distinction between knowledge and faith.”

The piece is titled Science and Religion, was written by Werner Weisenberg, and at 4,288 words will take a bit of time to read.

Linked via J. Orlin Grabbe.

Posted by John Venlet on 06/05 at 08:55 AM
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Real Time Holocaust Chronicle Surfaces

Most individuals are aware of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

Now, a diary written by a young Polish girl, Rutka Laskier, has surfaced.

The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the “Polish Anne Frank” was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto — at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands.

The diary, written by Rutka Laskier in 1943 shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, was released by     Israel’s Holocaust museum more than 60 years after she recorded what is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland and a memoir of the life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances.

Polish girl’s Holocaust diary unveiled

Posted by John Venlet on 06/05 at 05:49 AM
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