Monday Moanin'
Long Weekend
Another weekend, another weekend spent. This one, in Frankenmuth, the annual Summer Music Festival. It's a nice-enough weekend, but I feel like the impecunious father who spends a lot of money on a flat-screen TV for his kids. Nice gesture, yes, and his kids are no doubt excited to get the new TV, but couldn't the money have been spent on something the family really needs?
That's what Frankenmuth is like for me. My kids are excited that I go, but I don't spend enough time with them in areas they really need my attention--their studies, their sports, their hobbies--and I don't volunteer much around town, and I don't spend enough time in prayer and with holy books and with my studies, and I should spend more time at the office to pay the mountain of bills my family is accumulating. Yet I drop everything to drive three-plus hours to . . . . polka? I don't even really like to dance, much less polka. To borrow from the immortal Napoleon Dynamite, it's flippin' ridiculous.
But I did get the nice picture of my two youngest, which is posted above.
Pretty Much Sums It Up
A TDE reader sends one of the more interesting letters flying around the Internet: An Open Letter from Lou Pritchett to President Obama. Excerpt:
You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.
You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.
You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll. . . .
You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.
Philosophy Bites
One of the neatest websites I've run across lately: Philosophy Bites. Two dudes. I've heard of neither of them, but they're taking philosophy to the cyber-street: regularly-updated website, twittering, podcasts. Check it out. One of their blurbs:
The Problem of Evil is usually presented as a problem for believers. How could a good and all-powerful tolerate such evil in the world? In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Marilyn Adams turns this around, arguing that it is a problem for optimistic non-believers.
I haven't listened to the podcast yet, but I wonder if Ms. Adams uses the same approach that I saw Jeffrey Burton Russell use with Bertrand Russell. Bertrand once famously sneered at Christians for believing in a god that would let a small girl suffer and die from cancer. "Tell the girl's parents," scoffed Bertrand, "that the girl died for a good reason. See how the parents take it." JB Russell sneered back, "Right, Bertrand. It'd be much better to tell the parents that it's all pointless, that the daughter died for no reason at all."
At least the Christian gropes for a semblance of meaning in this vale of tears. The atheist crawls around in a web of confusion, convinced the web is simply common sense and clear thinking, blithely ignorant of the fathomless oceans of paradoxes and mysteries that loom on the other side of that web.
(Both quotes by the Russells, incidentally, are very rough. I'm working from memory here.)
Misc.
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Happy anniversary to my wife. Eighteen years today. (That's her father on the left below, not me.)
