The Maze

Some people maintain the word for word accuracy of the Bible and go to great lengths to verify their belief.   Do some Muslims take the same approach with the Koran?  For two thousand years people have been disagreeing with each other over what "the breath of God" or divine inspiration means.  To some it means that every word of the Bible is true.  To others, it can mean that those who wrote the Bible could have made a gazillion little errors.  If God were to come to someone with an average education and say "Write this down.  I'm going to explain how the universe works," how accurate do you think that person would be?

Some ask the question, "Why didn't God just write down the Bible himself?  What's with this divine inspiration stuff?"  Muslims avoided the controversy,  saying that God wrote the actual words in the Koran.

Greek scholars have argued for centuries what the "breath of God" actually means. In trying to give us a sense of what early Christians thought about it, one of my teachers likened a gospel writer to a deflated basketball.  Pumping air into a basketball changes the way the basketball behaves but the basketball is essentially the same.

It is difficult for us to get into the heads of people who wrote so many years ago.  Most everything happened because of gods or spirits.   For example: Man has to do something to grain to make it alcoholic (beer) but wine becomes alcoholic on its own.  How to explain this?  The only explanation they could think of was that the breath or essence of a spirit or God came into the wine.  People who drank wine were therefore drinking a spirit.  This explained why people did foolish and crazy things when they had too much wine.  It was the spirit, the god or magic force, that was acting inside their bodies.

Because everything that happens is done by a spirit, the concept of one God who does everything presented a lot of problems.  If the spirit of this one God is in the wine, then this one God can do both good and evil things.  That presented a problem for those believers who wanted one God who was all good.  The concept of Satan, a fallen angel, solved that problem.  Satan is not a god, preserving the concept of one God.  Believers could say that it is Satan who is responsible for all the bad things that men do.  But if Satan is not a god, then why can't God just annihilate Satan?  After centuries of argument, a good explanation was that God allows Satan to exist as a test of our loyalty to God and His commandments.  But then some asked why does God need to test us?  If God is all-knowing, then he would know what we would do in the face of temptation.  Well, maybe God isn't all-knowing, some said.  But if God is not all knowing what distinguished this one God from the gods of other religions who had varying powers and knowledge?

I call it the God Maze.  Some people get out of the maze by saying that there is no God or gods and that the whole concept of God is a bunch of hocus-pocus, feel good nonsense.  The majority of people on this planet do not like that explanation. Without God, what is the purpose of existence?  An atheist or existentialist might answer that life doesn't need to have a god-given purpose.

This is the Purpose Maze. Who gives our lives purpose?  Each of us or God?  Or is it our family, tribe or community?  If we answer that one, a larger question follows: What is the purpose of the entire universe, of existence?  If a creator God created the universe, why did he bother?  Was He lonely or bored - does God get lonely or bored?  Each answer brings up even more questions, typical of any maze.

This is the Time Maze.  If God is all-knowing, then He knows the future so why bother playing it out?  Amusement? If God is eternal and outside of time, can God have any contact with us in a temporal world? 

Other people get out of these mazes with faith.  Reason can only take a person so far, they say, and then one must leap in an act of faith to embrace God. 

'Bama Bashin'

If you are a talk show host who doesn't like President Obama's economic policies, here are some tips:  Repeat over and over again that this recovery is the worst in "modern history" and its all Obama's fault.  Many of your viewers or listeners won't know that modern history starts after WW2 and does not include the 1930s Depression.  This is the 2nd worst downturn after the 1930s Depression and yes, this is the 2nd worst recovery.  Really bad depressions lead to really slow recoveries.

Repeat the mantra that higher taxes leads to slower growth.  Don't bother your audience with facts or any comparative  analysis.  If your audience wanted that, they would read a book.  Disregard the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s when a higher tax burden was accompanied by economic growth.

Constantly repeat that Reagan lowered taxes.  Any tax increases - and there several of those - were what Reagan called "adjustments to previous tax cuts."  If you repeat "tax cuts" and "Reagan" enough times and your audience does not do any research, they will believe you.  Hopefully, most of your audience wasn't around or doesn't remember much of the 1980s.  They remember only the hairstyles and the music.

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For those of you who want to know more about the tax cuts, increases and reform in 1986 - and like facts and a good story to boot - try Showdown At Gucci Gulch by Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray.  Written a year after passage of the tax reform act, the authors had access to many of the key players, providing us with first hand accounts of the wheeling and dealing, the political feints and parries by all parties involved.  The authors thrown in a small amount of budget math, just enough to understand the drama.  Although the topic of the book is tax reform, the story is about people, alliances and power.