So, wait. Obama has known for months that Iran had made serious progress with nukes. Hmmm.
Doesn’t that mean someone has to answer for giving Bush the “Iran has no nukes, is no where near developing them” intel that the Dems and left used as yet another hammer to use against the last American president? I’m just asking. And here are a bunch of interesting links, offered without comment, for your Sunday reading between games:
Religion:
A Must Read: Giving Birth and “Yes”
Inside Catholic: Women’s Authority in Church
Jules Crittenden: The Deliberately Impolitic Pope who offers to Prague, Erasmus and some Jiu Jitsu
Interesting: Catholic Priest Donates Kidney to Hindu
Faith and Reason is Great, but In the end it’s not really about reason
Remain United Through the Eucharist
Politics:
Obama’s UN Theater: Sound and fury signifying nothing
A Helpful Glossary: for to understand Obama
Fear No Art: Unless it is taxpayer financed propaganda. Fear that a lot.
Screwing Eastern Europe: we does it
Michael Gerson: Horrified by Obama’s UN Speech
Is Obama: a literary fraud? No one in media will ask.
Interesting Headline: and subsequent pulldown
Too much power with no accountability: does not raise healthy adults
Egregious Harry Reid: Blocks ACORN investigation. Congress still too busy trying to complete all of their investigations of the last president to look at current situations.
Parker: ACORN and the seed
American President: who is Uninterested in Victory
Yes, a failure to buy life insurance: will get you in trouble but remember, if you like your doctor…
Ed Morrissey asks you to vote
Victor Davis Hanson: How does one man hit so many homers
Deathwatch: Ace looks at Britain
Lopez: Rules for Counter-radicals
Campaign Obama I: Jerusalem Must Remain Undivided
Campaign Obama II: Bush…must finish the fight in Afghanistan
I don’t feel like: being the decider
Nimrod’s Tower: Just words?
September 27th, 2009 | 5:47 pm | #1
I don’t think this link is in your list. This is one of the first headlines I read today. Iran does not seem to be impressed by Obama:
9/27/09 – Iran Tests Two Short Range Missiles
Iran said it successfully test fired two short-range missiles during drills Sunday by the elite Revolutionary Guard, a show of force days after the U.S. and its allies condemned Tehran over a newly revealed underground nuclear facility that was being constructed secretly. http://tinyurl.com/ybgdv5j
There was also a headline about Gates not denying that there were other Iran nuclear sites… seems we’re in deep doggy doo-doo with a Wilson/Chamberlain president?
September 27th, 2009 | 5:56 pm | #2
Doesn’t that mean someone has to answer for giving Bush the “Iran has no nukes, is no where near developing them” intel that the Dems and left used as yet another hammer to use against the last American president?
You are misinformed. That never happened.
We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
September 27th, 2009 | 9:29 pm | #3
Yes, somebody should have to answer for that intel.
But I’m afraid no one will.
September 27th, 2009 | 9:41 pm | #4
When it comes to Iran, Obama is about as ineffectual as a professional wrestling referee.
September 28th, 2009 | 12:13 am | #5
I think GK Chesterton said it well, when he wondered:
“Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman made for no man and set above all angels”
from ‘Everlasting Man’
When we hear that from 20 well known Mullahs, then we can agree it is the ‘religion of peace.’
September 28th, 2009 | 7:47 am | #6
Election in Germany results in a right-wing victory- not a very strong showing for conservatives but a definite surge in support for the vaguely-libertarians, so they have entered government as a coalition- here.
Of note is that the moderate left, which has been in government for some time as part of a colaition with conservatives, are the real losers, because they have obviously been blamed for hindering the government’s effectiveness.
But on the other hand, the far left & green parties, untainted by this association, have had a very strong showing indeed.
I could never quite get my head around which party I should support in any European country- the only place I can make a real solid decision is America
Because even at home I find my views aren’t widely held, or some hold a few of my beliefs but reject others.
Further about the environment- when I hear about “green” I don’t think of Al Gore & how much I hate him, I think of things like this- I’ll give you that a lot of big government schemes don’t work, but that’s only because they were designed by politicians rather than people showing genuine concern for the environment.
Oh, & I know you & your readers are mostly time poor but I have been giving up sleep in order to read this baby- just finished.
Edaward Rutherfurd- New York
I have all of his books- they aren’t for the faint hearted but them as can sustain attention for 500-1000 pages (sometimes more) are richly rewarded by a master of his craft & that.
September 28th, 2009 | 7:53 am | #7
Shorter Germany- the centrists & the pro-administration parties have lost ground to the more clearly defined right & left alike. That is the real swing/lurch, not one to the right as some would like to call it.
I wonder whether Larison will have owt to say on this matter, strong on foreign policy analysis as he is.
September 28th, 2009 | 10:19 am | #8
Dry Valleys, I was under the impression you live in England?
September 28th, 2009 | 10:53 am | #9
Doesn’t that mean someone has to answer for giving Bush the “Iran has no nukes, is no where near developing them” intel that the Dems and left used as yet another hammer to use against the last American president? I’m just asking.
If you actually read the top link within your link you find these two key sentences:
“Iran kept its program hidden for 18 years until its disclosure by an Iranian opposition group in 2002.
A December 2007 U.S. intelligence report said Iran halted work on nuclear weapons four years earlier, but could restart it.”
Bush knew of Iran’s nuclear capacity,if not it’s intentions, well before he went off junketing based on a mere guess that Saddam Hussein had “Weapons of Mass Destruction” at a point in time when Hussein was obviously in no position to use them even if he had them, which he didn’t.
Bush simply didn’t care.
By the way, McClatchy Washington Bureau was the only news source to systematically cover all the Bush Administration deceptions and self-delusions about Iraq as they happened. I’m glad you’re finally getting around to reading them, even if only through someone else’s link.
[Joseph, you forget the outrage when Bush called Iran part of the "axis of evil." And apparently you forget that just two years ago the press was jeering him for doing so, because the intel said Iran was "many years away" from having any nuke capabilities. -admin]
September 28th, 2009 | 12:04 pm | #10
Oh yes, the Bush deceptions and self-delusions. He knew that same intel from the CLINTON Administration about Saddam Hussein was a lie, but he pushed it anyway. He knew that the policy of regime change in Iraq – from the mid-90s – wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, but he actually did something about it only because he’s a greedy bastard who wanted oil profits or some such nonsense.
And as for Iran, he simply didn’t care. Had he cared and actually done something about it, something that actually might be effective and of consequence, like a military strike against Iran, the Dems would have supported him fully and enthusiastically.
The fact is — all the Bush Hate over the years effectively tied his hands and prevented him from doing a lot of things that could have been done and should have been done with respect to Iran, North Korea, and other terrorist nations.
September 28th, 2009 | 12:24 pm | #11
That really is beside the point Anchoress. I know your asking for an investigation is ironic, but you do still ask for it, so the Bush Administration is fair game on this one. What ever “the left” may have done, it does not change the facts of Bush’s military blunder.
In 2002 [when it really matters] the opposition to him had been completely cowed into silence. That is when he made the wrong decision. He invaded Iraq on the hope of finding WMD’s when fully 2/3 of Hussein’s warmaking capacity had been devastated by his father. Common sense should have made him think twice about this. It certainly made me do so, and I never believed for an instant that such WMD’s existed, based on that alone.
By doing this, he so weakened our strategic presence in the region by overextending our troops in two separate wars that Iran had absolutely no worries about us from that point forward. He all but solicited them to start making nukes.
For the first 13 months after “Mission Accomplished” there was only one US aircraft carrier on the entire high seas! Probably keeping tabs on North Korea. No US military strike against anybody can take place without sufficient carrier air support.
You can turn a lot of uranium into yellowcake in 13 months, even if you happened to be starting from scratch, which I doubt Iran was.
If you were serious about an investigation, I would also point out that you cannot prove the absence of anything. It is the failure to detect the presence of nuke making [as in India, Pakistan, and now (?) Iran] that is a genuine “intelligence failure”.
Starting wars on the hope that WMD’s are anywhere is a policy failure, as is also slanting the intelligence you are given when you take the matter to Congress.
-admin]
[My memory is that Hillary Clinton - Democrat Senator from NY- made a point of saying that the intel presented by the Bushies to Congress was "completely consistent with the intelligence we'd been seeing" when she and her husband were running things. "Slanted," would not seem to be consistent with the rhetoric of the dems from 1998 on, would it? Do I HAVE To dig out all those old quotes, Joe?
September 28th, 2009 | 1:40 pm | #12
The fact that Hillary Clinton said this is actually primary evidence of the slant. The real data on the possibility of WMD’s was far more mixed than what was presented to Congress or to the United Nations by Colin Powell. In fact, I watched that very speech. I thought then, and I still think, that Powell did not believe the case he was trying to make.
Everything that could be construed as suggesting the predetermined conclusion was presented. Nothing that expressed any doubt was allowed to surface–not even to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee where it could legitimately remain secret.
That is slant.
[Tell me, Joe, with this comment in mind, what do you think about the current Obama/Pelosi Healthcare bill, and the way it's being presented - noting that no doubt is being allowed to surface that we "need" this and "need it now." - any slant there? We're talking about a program that will cost more than these wars, and may cost at least as many lives. Any slant? -admin]
September 28th, 2009 | 1:41 pm | #13
So I suppose I must be a delusional paranoid-schizophrenic since, throughout the 90s, I myself was personally concerned about Saddam Hussein pursuing and, quite possibly, already having nuclear weapons capability.
And I must be a total nut-case (or perhaps just a self-delusional liar) to personally believe, post-9/11, that the possibility that he might have them was a totally unacceptable risk necessitating his removal from power.
I didn’t need George Bush to tell me that in the 90s, and I didn’t need him to tell me that during his presidency.
Anyone who was actually paying attention knew that America could no longer afford to take the chance that he might have nuclear capability. What was an acceptable risk to America when Bill Clinton was getting his jollies in the Oval Office became an unacceptable risk once 3,000 Americans had been killed in a catastrophic attack.
In any event, Bush is no longer president. Obama is. Obama was quite clear when he said “I won.” He’s the president. He’s the one that has the responsibility to act and not simply read offensive partisan attacks and offensive apologies for America off a teleprompter. It’s time, past time, for Obaba to grow up and leave his college know-it-all hubris behind.
September 28th, 2009 | 2:42 pm | #14
Bender, yes; Iran is now Obama’s problem. He’s got to start acting like a leader, and act!
September 28th, 2009 | 3:53 pm | #15
“Dry Valleys, I was under the impression you live in England?”
Yes, I do- always have & don’t think I’m going anywhere
I am just on about Germany because it’s a fairly important European country, perhaps more important than this country for America & the world in general.
September 28th, 2009 | 4:03 pm | #16
Actually, when it comes to Iran, as well as many other issues foreign and domestic, Obama comes off more as a referee than a leader. Witness his “They broke the rules!” statement about Iran. Seems like I’ve heard him say that about other things.
September 28th, 2009 | 8:38 pm | #17
Yes, Peter, he does tend to come off more like a ref, than a national leader, doesn’t he?
Of course, that UN thing was such a fiasco! Really, I wish everybody there had shown some leadership, and walked out on Kaddafi, when he started endlessly ranting.
September 28th, 2009 | 10:51 pm | #18
no doubt is being allowed to surface that we “need” this and “need it now.” – any slant there?
And just what has all the raising of cain in those “town meetings” been? It seems to me that doubt [even if I personally think it largely stage managed doubt] has what the past few weeks have been all about. It has gotten plenty of air time and ink and nobody remotely paying attention is under the illusion that we’re all in agreement about the matter.
Now, granted, the mere constant repetition of the mantra Socialism! Socialism! Socialism! is very limited in its expression of doubt, as is the similar mantra Taxes! Taxes! Taxes! but, it is real doubt and I hardly think anyone has been prevented from expressing it.
Pelosi did not prevent it. Reid did not prevent it. Obama did not prevent it. They think we should do health care this way. So What? John Boerner thinks we shouldn’t do health care this way. So What? And certainly nobody has stopped John Boerner from expressing his opinion every chance he gets. Or you. Or Michelle Malkin. Or anybody.
Everybody thinks what they think and nobody has had a gun put to their head to keep them from thinking it, or to keep them from saying it, holding press conferences about it, raising cain in town meetings about it, and [gasp!] even blogging about it.
At the risk of being annoyingly repetitive, I’ll state the basic problem once again. Over the past two decades we all have steadily been paying more and more money, for less and less coverage, of decreasing amounts of medical care.
In the process people have been steadily losing the access to any private coverage at all, and the financial burden of what care they actually manage to still receive has shifted either to the caregivers, or to the Federal Medicaid program.
I am the embodiment of this personally. Four years back, when I was not officially “disabled”, I had a massive gallbladder attack that required emergency surgery. I was not covered by private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid and the choice for the hospital was to either take my gallbladder out or let it explode and kill me, whether anybody was going to pay for it or not.
This little adventure left me responsible for $22,000 of medical bills which will simply never get paid on a disability income of $8400 a year. All the costs fell on the caregivers. I don’t really like that much, and that’s why I think we should start doing something about it.
I’m also in the middle of it personally, have first hand experience with the actual problem, and get massively exasperated when opponents to my point of view try to pretend either that the problem doesn’t exist or isn’t important as long as we avoid Socialism! Socialism! Socialism! and Taxes! Taxes! Taxes!
And, in fact, we already avoid neither. We already have medical insurance coverage by the Federal Government. Quite a lot of it, in fact. It’s called Medicare and Medicaid.
Had it not been there when my gallbladder clogged up and threatened to explode no caregiver in this country could have afforded to give care to me. There would simply be no economic margin for them to do so. And this is so even though at the time I personally did not qualify for it.
And the dreaded “public option” would mean no more than this: people who cannot now qualify would have the option to pay premiums and buy into the Medicare system with its 80-20 coverage. That’s it. In my state, if you’re employed, you already have the option of buying into Medicaid.
And my state, by the way, is the same state as John Boerner’s. So he should know better.
September 29th, 2009 | 1:59 am | #19
no caregiver in this country could have afforded to give care to me
Joe, perhaps you’ve not heard of the Catholic Church? I hear that they have one or two hospitals in the country. And one of their tenets is to care for the sick — for free even.
It doesn’t take Caesar and his tax collectors (and his centurions to seize your property and throw you in jail if you don’t pay) to provide healthcare. It only takes charity (from the Latin, caritas, meaning “love”). And there have been many people and places very willing to provide it for hundreds and thousands of years before Barack Obama came on the scene to save us all.
And even if there were no such “good Samaritans” to provide care, it really does not bother me one tiny little bit that you might personally be responsible for paying $22,000 for life-saving care. Perhaps you don’t think your life is worth that much, but I do. I should think that you are worth at least as much as a $22,000 car, and I would hope that you would not even think of asking other people to cough up the money to buy you one. Buy it yourself.
Life costs money. I’ll have spent four times $22,000 in student loans alone — money spent for the “privilege” of working — and about that same amount for my condo. And then there are cars and food and utilities. All of which extend into the hundreds of thousands of dollars — and I am responsible for paying for all of it!! Oh the horror!!
It is your life man. I’m sure you have had the same living expenses as we have all had, but I should hope you didn’t moan about having to pay for that yourself, even though without those things you would have died. That is a small price one should be glad to pay for his life.
If you truly don’t have the money, don’t worry, you’ll get the care, just as countless others before you got the care.
September 29th, 2009 | 9:45 am | #20
Perhaps I was a little ambiguous, Bender. I have been poor and bipolar for too long to worry that much about my debts. For the truly and permanently poor, such things merely mean that you must always get voicemail and caller id when you get a phone line and it’s helpful if you can break away about $20 one month to get a paper shredder from Wal-Mart. That’s about what I spend on bus transportation monthly.
I know what my life is worth and I know why I am bothering to live as long as I can. After all, even without suicide, we all have some choice in the matter. Every day I do the Buddhist equivalent of what you call “prayer” and I dedicate what we call “merit” to everybody’s eventual enlightenment.
“Merit” is a sloppy translation, but English has no better. It’s not like scouting and merit badges. I am certain that I am creating the “causes and conditions” of my future by what I am doing now and that by my Buddhist praying I will continue in the future [whether in the short or long term] to be able to pray for the benefit of both myself and others.
That being said, what I am actually bothered by is the fact that the providers are between a rock and a hard place trying to make a living doing medicine. If they can’t make a living doing it, everybody’s care will suffer.
Their student loan bills are now such that my former GP [she now concentrates on acupunture, which no coverage usually pays] says that she never would have considered a career in medicine at today’s debt levels.
It is on these people as a whole that the true burden of our deteriorating coverage system gets dumped. They simply can’t pass along anywhere near all the extra expense to the covered consumers.
If we don’t do something to stop our decades long trend, this system is simply going to crack under the financial strain. Maybe next year. Maybe next decade. Maybe the decade after that. But it will crack.
And no “tort reform” or expansion of private coverage options across state lines is going to fix the basic problem, which is the financial burden of caring for the uninsured and underinsured.
If we wait until it cracks to fix it, the options for everybody will be far fewer and not nearly as nice as they still are right now.
Many doctors in my town are already refusing to take on new Medicare and Medicaid patients [on whom they barely break even, if that], and narrowing the coverage they will accept and bill for to their own PPO’s. For everybody else, it’s cash and carry and you submit the paid bills to your own out of network carrier. Such things make “choice of caregivers” simply unavailable to even the moderately incomed and insured–and a mockery to even mention.
You don’t have to have a National Health System to lose such choice. The market will strip it from you just as easily. It’s been in the process of doing it to most of us, insured or not, for some time now. And despite the constant refusal of opponents to acknowledge it, this whole debate is NOT about nationalizing health care, it is about supplementing health insurance coverage.
I seriously doubt that the courts would sustain the constitutionality of any National Health Care since the majority of the providers don’t do business across state lines.
It is little considerations of fact like this that annoy me when they are willfully and deliberately ignored in the discussion.
My vested interest in the matter is now actually very small. I get adequate care from the providers who make Medicare and Medicaid a major specialty. And they are far more interesting, by and large, to chat with and listen to than those who don’t.
And if the system cracks, you can be quite sure that Medicare and Medicaid will be the very last to go.
September 29th, 2009 | 11:31 am | #21
That’s utter nonsense. In the fall of 2001, the US was subject to an actual WMD attack which –
- used a weapon that we knew then Saddam had (anthrax with the same genetic signature as batches sold to the Iraqi government in the 80’s)
- used a delivery system that we knew then Saddam had access to (the postal and package delivery systems — anybody can mail an envelop or package to anybody in the US from anywhere in the world)
- could be delivered completely anonymously and without detection (we still have no idea who carried out the anthrax attacks.)
It’s pretty unlikely that Saddam was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks. The target choice is distinctly odd for a foreigner. (Heck, at least 80% of Americans think a “majority whip” is an S&M sex toy!) It is most likely that those attacks were done by some American with a pretty good “inside baseball” knowledge of government. BUT — whoever carried out those attacks gave the world an excellent education in just how, and how easy it is, to carry out a WMD attack against the US. While it is most plausible to believe that Saddam had nothing to do with those particular anthrax attacks, it is NOT the case that this belief is based upon of any lack of motive, means, opportunity, or oft-expressed intense desire.
September 29th, 2009 | 12:24 pm | #22
One aspect of “healthcare reform” that has been totally left out of the picture — except to the extent that the proposed “solution” is government force, coercion, bullying, etc. — is the matter of, to use the modern vernacular, medical “ethics.”
By that, I don’t mean medical ethics as it is actually used today — a cold utilitarianism that seeks to justify the unjustifiable in service of a culture of death — but as it pertains to the greater idea of morality. (Why not simply speak of medical morality? Because morality has been expelled and banished from polite American society and we are not allowed to speak of such things — it is too offensive, don’t you know. Start speaking of morality, then you get into the whole idea of morality being a matter of truth, not opinion, and then you’ve ticked off all the relativists.)
What is totally left out of the picture is the matter of morality in the medical sphere. Namely, what is the moral obligation of healthcare professionals? Are they exempt from the obligation of charity in truth? Are they exempt from the corporal works of mercy?
I know that a good many healthcare providers — secular ones — provide free care or otherwise reduce billings for some people. But on the whole, the entire profession of physicians is seen as one that should involve wealth, that doctors should make a lot of money, that doctors should be rich. On the whole, money is seen as the primary objective in medicine, rather than caritas, rather than selfless service.
Now, the “reform” proposals out there do attempt to rein in the money, but by government fiat and force, not by changing hearts, not by implementing a true medical ethic, whereby healthcare providers voluntarily accept a lesser fee and provide more care at lower cost voluntarily because it is the right thing to do, it is the Christian thing to do.
In short, what is missing in the whole healthcare reform debate is Christ. Oh sure, we have plenty of Caesar — we have plenty of Caesar even from Catholic groups and the bishops’ conference, who are jumping on the “government is the answer” bandwagon — but we have precious little Christ.
September 29th, 2009 | 4:40 pm | #23
Health care reform – my favorite topic. Head banging time again.
First, a little f.y.i. Both private insurance and government interference in medicine has made it what it is today. It’s true that before my time, physicians made a pretty good living, but they weren’t in the 20,000 sq. ft. homes that some have now. It was proportional.
They had to have excellent examination and diagnostic skills, as well as a superior body of knowledge, compared with today. They worked long hours, unheard of now, except for a few. And most importantly, they had to cover their own asses.
Here’s something a lot of folks don’t think about – a good percentage of physicians today are ‘employed’ – meaning they aren’t independent. They work for a hospital group or the like and their overhead is paid, their malpractice is paid, they are salaried and have incentives for bonuses. This allows them to work 9 to 5 like the rest of us, although they truly are not, like the rest of us.
Independent physicians can offer discounts or freebies if they don’t accept medicare or medicaid patients. But that puts a serious crimp on their income. They don’t have the corporation to do their billing, so if they are not paid, it’s time off work to go to small claims court. And no one likes to sue their patients.
Employed physicians get paid whether or not the patient pays. The corporation is who eats it, not the physician. This pisses off the corporation because the CEO bonuses depend on a lot of things, and reimbursement is one them!
On to personal matters – with regard to family, it takes two people for a physician to work successfully – the physician and his or her spouse. The spouse, of which I’m one of, has the privilege and benefit of being able to stay out of the workforce and in the home raising the children. Without a higher income, this wouldn’t be possible.
Is this enough for now, or should I go on?
September 29th, 2009 | 8:11 pm | #24
Employed physicians get paid whether or not the patient pays. The corporation is who eats it, not the physician.
I think that is a little overstated. In the case of my surgery, the man feeding me the Dilaudid billed me separately from the lady who evaluated my lab results, the surgeon who did the patching up, and the hospital itself. None of them got paid and the hospital did not make up the difference to those other doctors.
And it also must be understood that many, if not most, doctors are still small business people with business obligations as well as moral ones. My mother was delivered at home by an old country GP who drove a Model-T Ford and had stopped bothering to write birth certificates long before her entry into the world. [This caused an immense amount of trouble for her 35 years later and I can't imagine how anyone would straighten it out today!] All his equipment was carried in one of the black medical bags of yore.
Would any of us seek regular treatment from him now? Look around in any doctor’s office and ask yourself how much of what you see there is part of an overhead far more expensive than that of, say, a small florist’s shop.
healthcare providers voluntarily accept a lesser fee and provide more care at lower cost voluntarily because it is the right thing to do, it is the Christian thing to do.
They already do. That’s the point. My surgery, de facto, was pure charity care. The mere numbers on the bills didn’t mean a darn thing. And we have reached the point where thousands of people are getting this kind of charity care, in whole or in part. And only a limited amount of the cost of this can be made up by the doctor through the rest of his business.
Start speaking of morality, then you get into the whole idea of morality being a matter of truth, not opinion
Well, Bender, I think you and I are equally moral, but the boundaries of our moral views are not quite in the same place. For example, I think that being a tuna fisherman is a morally problematic occupation. I doubt you do.
And when people speak of “truth” in these matters, I am inclined to suspect that they have obtained the answers without really bothering to ask the questions.
The answers are not self-evident. If they were, there would be no need for “faith”.
There are really very few truly immoral people. If this were so we would be constantly surrounded by cutthroats and thieves wherever we went. We really aren’t. We are largely surrounded by wooly brained secular nerds.
The difference between both you and I and most seculars is that we have examined the moral problem consciously rather than merely absorbed moral behavior from unthinking habit.
But that doesn’t mean we have each come to exactly the same conclusions. And it doesn’t even mean that we are better behaved or more moral than they are. The power of habit is often much stronger than that of rational thought.
I think my moral views are correct. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t hold them. You think yours are correct, too. If you didn’t you wouldn’t hold them. But merely because we each think them correct does not make them so. If you hold on too tightly to your possession of the “truth”, you lose touch with this fact.
From my vantage point Descartes had the correct tool for examining these matters–systematic doubt. But he really didn’t apply it thoroughly enough. At least Buddhists apply it far more thoroughly than he did.
I often wonder how many Christians apply it at all. And to any who know the “truth” without having tested it by doubt, I would suggest a re-reading of the book of Job, keeping the question in mind of how you would behave under the same circumstances.
I often see passing references here to homilies, but I can’t remember seeing one on the Book of Job. Is it part of the liturgical cycle at all? If it isn’t, it should be.
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