I'm often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: "Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world."
From the point of view of fertility, a compulsory pension scheme externalises the value of children (or, to be more precise, a portion of their productivity). Children can no longer support their parents in old age, because a chunk of their salary is forcefully taken away from them and distributed to the entire population of retirees. That chunk is growing systematically, because governmental pension schemes are heading towards insolvency due to, among other things, low fertility rates.
Now, such socialised generosity sounds nice. Unfortunately, it wreaks havoc on social structures and private incentives. Individual parents no longer retain the economic benefit of having children, but they must still bear the bulk of the costs in terms of time and money spent. Everyone receives the same pension rights regardless of how many children they had, if any. Many are tempted to take a free-ride on the children of others.
In other words, the welfare state becomes a "forced family" that replaces the traditional family as a provider of social insurance. It is not only an alternative to the traditional family, but an option one is not allowed to refuse. Undoubtedly it provides some benefits, but it lacks the sense of common goals and reciprocity which is essential to real families.
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off', you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.-C. S. Lewis
HAUERWAS: That I have some sympathy with those who would refuse to allow another person to be unjustly injured or killed is simply a statement that any person should make. But that sympathy does not mean I think we should kill in order to prevent another from being killed. I've always insisted that Christian nonviolence is a harsh and dreadful love requiring that at times we may have to watch the innocent suffer for our convictions. But that is true of any serious moral position including the just war position. Of course Christians should have tried to prevent the massacres in Rwanda and Darfur. The question is how?
There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest - what we call investment - is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed on forbidding interest (or 'usury' as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. That is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.- C. S. Lewis
We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree.
We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons.
We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights.
We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.....
We say to Muslim believers: there is a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine;
to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha’is, and all members of non-Muslim faith communities: we stand with you as free and equal citizens;
and to nonbelievers: we defend your unqualified liberty to question and dissent.
Before any of us is a member of the Umma, the Body of Christ, or the Chosen People, we are all members of the community of conscience, the people who must chose for themselves.
VOM sources report police burst into a church in Qarshi ("Karshy") on February 25, 2007, confiscated literature and demanded to know who was funding the church. Police also brought video cameras to video tape the worship service. When police started to film, Pastor Sergei Shandyvayev did not panic, but simply continued the worship service. After the service finished, the officers shut the doors and began to question the believers gathered there, especially asking why they had become Christians. Pastor Shandyvayev's church is not registered with the Uzbek government. The Christians expected to be summoned to court for a hearing. Pray God gives Christians in this area wisdom and protection as they face persecution. Pray they might even have opportunities to witness to police and court officers as they are questioned.
Peter H. Diamandis, chief executive of Zero G, said that "the idea of giving the world's expert on gravity the opportunity to experience zero gravity" was irresistible.
Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.
I am actually listening to these songs we recorded. I haven’t done that since share the well,and before that long line of leavers. that was me, Cliff/the boring guy in the hat that can’t write songs or think very good.
