Sometimes They Listen

After 97 posts on “The Maryland Crustacean”, I am finally writing something about the State of Maryland.  Well, sort of.  Last night I sent emails to at least 16 members of the Maryland House of Delegates.  Each individually addressed message was short and sweet:

I am writing to respectfully urge you to vote NO on any bill attempting to legalize marriage for same sex couples. Such a bill would make a mockery of the institution of marriage and would further erode the social and moral fabric of our state and nation.

Why do they hate you?

I generally enjoy listening to Bill O’Reilly, but with regard to his interview last week with President Obama, I find myself in strange agreement with O’Reilly’s detractors.


On balance, it was about as good an interview as you can expect for a live exchange in a limited time frame and in front of an audience with a limited attention span. One of the criticisms was that O’Reilly seemed rude and disrespectful by repeatedly interrupting the President. The following day on The O’Reilly Factor, he defended himself by noting that it was indeed a live interview limited to a short time span, and his interruptions were designed to keep the President on track and not let him “run out the clock”.

Fair enough, but his interruptions did seem repeated, noticeable and somewhat annoying. But the one part of the interview where O’Reilly really fared poorly was in the following exchange:

Life and Liberty

I mentioned in my post the other day that even a libertarian can believe that abortion should be outlawed. Why? Life begins at conception, as any intellectually honest medical scientist will concede. Once we have established the individuality and humanity of the unborn, they are vested with the same right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as the rest of us.


I was thinking about the issue in church this morning when I was reminded that today is “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday”. The italics in the last sentence are intentional, because it bothers me that I had to be reminded.

Libertarianism and Legislating Morality

In my last post I mentioned how I am increasingly sympathetic to the libertarian point of view, although I am not quite there yet. One of the reasons I am still a little uncomfortable and unconvinced has to do with moral law. Despite the old and stupid adage that says “You can’t legislate morality” (What else are you going to legislate and why would you otherwise legislate anything?), all law has a basis in morality. Even the basic libertarian concession to the proper role of government,--to allow for the “least intrusive government consistent with the maximum freedom of each individual as long as he doesn't interfere with other individuals pursuing their own freedom”--is itself based in moral law. Does anyone remember the “Golden Rule”: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?

Tilting Toward Libertarianism

As a teenager and as a young adult, I pegged myself on the left side of the political spectrum. I called myself a liberal, which is of course a misnomer. Those who call themselves liberal today typically look to the government as the promoter and guarantor of the general welfare. In their view, the government is somehow to achieve this noble end through regulation, control and even ownership of economic activity; by redistributing wealth; or by incentivizing desired human behavior through regulation or the tax code. I prefer to label this ideology for what it is: statism.

Already and Not Yet

It has been quite a while since my last post. I am not sure whether it has been due to writer’s block, a temporary loss of interest or inspiration, or a spate of laziness or lethargy. I figured I would try to break the inertia at Christmas by doing what I did last year, and post an adaptation of my annual Christmas letter. I try to write one each year with the dual purpose of recounting family news from the previous year and even coming up with something inspirational in keeping with the holiday.


I also suffer from writer’s block occasionally when trying to draft the Christmas letter.  This puts me into a panic when Christmas is less than two weeks away and the muses still have not shown up. Part of my writer’s block this year may have been due to a fear of boring the reader by repetition. It does indeed seem that each year is a mixed bag of good news and bad news, joys and sorrows, births and deaths. 2010 was no exception.

We Hold These Truths…

President Obama’s recent faux pas did not get much coverage in the media (At least as far as I know.) Actually, it didn’t even get too much coverage on right wing talk radio or Fox News either. In case you have not heard it, he left out some pivotal words in his speech before the Hispanic Caucus, when he attempted to quote from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed […] with certain inalienable rights: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now I am not here to make hay about the President’s omission of the key words “by their Creator”. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was just an innocent mental blip, or perhaps it was the speechwriter’s fault and the President was just following the teleprompter. I will not even attempt to draw any conclusions about his motives or what the omission might reveal.

Love and Death in Sicily

Both of my parents were born in a small village called Torre Faro (“lighthouse”), which is situated on the very northeast corner of Sicily, right across from the Italian mainland, where the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas converge into the Strait of Messina. Like many of the town’s long time residents, both sides of my family hail from a long line of fishermen.

The Wind Blows on the Road to Damascus and the Road to the Zoo

I was very pleased to get some feedback to one of my previous posts, Reasonable Faith, from a commenter named Steve. His comments were honest, thoughtful and thought provoking. You may read Steve's comments in their entirety by clicking on the hyperlink, but here is a snippet.

That you opened this blog entry with a discussion of Paul fits very well with a long standing notion that I have had about what it might take to convert me to Christianity…. [An] experience akin to what Saul/Paul had on the road to Damascus might be sufficient to provide the impetus to convert me and cause me to begin to evangelize. If I had a personal encounter with Jesus as Saul/Paul did, I might change my name from Steve to Pteve and go out to tell the world of what I had experienced. It would appear that Saul/Paul did not come to Christianity by the use of thought and reason, but rather by a spiritually overwhelming and even physically altering (loss of eyesight) experience that was entirely unsolicited but evidently radically transformative. Am I less deserving than Saul/Paul? Who knows? But I can say in all honesty that after many hours of prayer, meditation, and "opening" myself to the presence of God that absolutely nothing of His presence has been made known to me. After many hours of reading and contemplating the Bible, I have not had one iota of insight afforded me that might begin to compel me to believe in Jehovah or Jesus.

How is it that people come to faith? How is it that some do and some don’t? It does not seem that there are particular demographics that are necessarily more prone to faith. Educated or uneducated, rich or poor, sophisticated or unsophisticated, each group has within its ranks people who accept and embrace the Gospel, and people who don’t. Why?

"Everybody Must Get Stoned!"

As mentioned previously, I have been spending a good bit of time trading comments with atheists at an otherwise Christian blog called “If I became an atheist”. In the latest round of debate, I attempted to challenge the atheist basis for morality if we are nothing but cosmic accidents that will eventually die and turn to fertilizer. This eventually got sidetracked (I am not sure how) into challenges about the consistency of the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Specifically, the Old Testament appears to command practices which seem barbaric from the standpoint of our 21st century moral sensibilities. Even more problematic, many Old Testament commands seem to be downright repudiated in the New Testament. As one commenter named Gandolf put it, the law of Moses included provisions for stoning people to death. Is that still valid? And if not, did God change His mind?