(considering) 8:28

Implications of the Sovereignty of God

recent posts

  • Persecution.

    Generally, these things come to me at strange times. I was just last night reading through James 1 concerning trials, and as a result was praying today about the decisions Christians have to make about following Christ in this world.

    Francis Chan asks a good question in this video. Basically, who is it that the Church sees as heroes, and if we say that the modern martyrs are heroes, then do we say that we want to be like them?

    Well, do we?

    Persecution in India: Francis’ Response from Cornerstone Church on Vimeo.

  • Why Increasing Minimum Wage is a Bad Idea for Business

    This week I read a story about how the Newfoundland minimum wage was going up to $9.50 an hour, and how a local business leader thinks that this is a mistake.

    In the interest of inflaming people, I think the guy is right.

    For some reason, people think that price controls on things are a good idea, even though there are very few instances where a price control has actually benefitted people.

    why do I refer to price controls? Because minimum wage is a price control. It is a minimum price set on a particular resource that businesses must have in order to function. Without employees, most businesses cease to exist, so an increase in the price of labour will increase the costs for all businesses that must have labour.

    Like all price controls, this one seems like a good idea on the face of it. After all, who doesn’t want to have more money? The problem is that it is only a good idea in the short term, as there are effects to such a decision.

    Businesses make profits by charging customers a slightly higher price than they pay out in costs. Costs include things like the place the business is (rent), the raw materials needed to produce the product, and labour. when the costs increase, the business must make decisions to continue making a profit or go out of business.

    The business could charge more to the consumer. This could be possible since consumers have more money now, due to the increased minimum wage (resulting in inflation, and eliminating the benefit to people who got the raise in the first place so that they could afford more). This will not always happen, though, since most businesses have competition. The competition would use a price increase to (if possible) undercut their competition, and so make more money off of increased sales.

    This leads to the businesses other option in maintaining profits. The business can cut costs. It can do this in a number of ways, but with an increased minimum wage (which only affects businesses that hire minimum wage, and hence low-skilled, workers), the most obvious ways to lower price is to either hire fewer people or relocate to a place in which there is a lower minimum wage. This increases unemployment.

    If the company cannot cut costs or raise prices, they will go bankrupt, also adding to unemployment.

    With increased unemployment, the government is forced to pay out more in unemployment benefits, meaning that the government will need to increase the amount they take in from workers, or lower the benefits they get (or borrow more money, putting the problem off on future generations).

    The end result is thus simple. An increased minimum wage is simply bad for business.

    Of course, it’s also bad for workers, and is simply a bad way of getting to the goal of better wages for people, but I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

  • Is Brit Hume out of line?

    Many people on the blogosphere have been commenting on the statements of Brit Hume on Fox News Sunday, where he said essentially that Tiger Woods should turn to faith in Jesus Christ.

    Now, most will recognize that I would agree with that statement (though I might quibble with Hume’s phrasing). I agree that Buddhism is insufficient to provide redemption of a person in the position of Tiger Woods at the moment. Funnily, since Buddhism would advocate the elimination of attachment to worldly (and hence illusory) desires, it seems that some Buddhists would agree. Redemption for a Buddhist, is unnecessary, as the desire for that would be grasping at illusion, and so the wrong move for a Buddhist. I think Buddhism is incorrect, and so would most Christians. Is that a surprise? No. At least not if you have any idea about either Christianity or Buddhism.

    The problem that Hume has though, is not the many Buddhists in the world, his problem is actually secularists in the media. As far as I can get the problem, it is that a commentator should not mix their field (providing commentary based on their opinion) with religion. Besides being patent nonsense (religious opinion is opinion, and thus fodder for commentators….. the reason I don’t freak out at Christopher Hitchens slagging my belief… he has a right to his opinion, and I have the right to publicly disagree), the assumption itself seems very hypocritical.

    The secularist belief is that religion is best left to the private sphere. Secularists are entitled to that belief, but they should not be surprised when Brit Hume and many other Christians (and many other religionists) disagree with that assumption. The opinion the secularists hold is not universal, so it behooves them to convince others of their position, not simply attempt to bully people into adhering to their (minority) position.  Join the marketplace of ideas, and (as Hunter Baker said on a radio show recently) stop playing the game of public opinion

    while simultaneously pretending to be umpires.

    Brit Hume is not out of line, but his secularist detractors are.

  • A Word on Using Logic

    One of the main topics dealt with on this blog is Religion, and especially Christianity. Now, I do not expect all (or even most) of my readers to agree with me on this topic. It’s a highly debated one. That said, I have noticed a disturbing trend when it comes to this topic as its debated on the internet.

    Among some factions, it has become almost axiomatic that religious people are irrational. From this assumption, they then leap to the (unfounded) conclusion that because they are not religious, they are automatically more rational than a religious person. This further leads to a further unfounded leap that such means that an irreligious person thus automatically understands both formal and informal logic better than a religious person, and especially a conservative Christian religious person. This leads these same people to lecture them on how their arguments are illogical using logical terms of art, often incorrectly.

    Now, I am not saying that irreligious people always do this, but it is clear that some irreligious people do, and for some reason I seem to usually get them writing me posts about how I am falling into a “no true scotsman fallacy” or how my argument is “non-sequential” at 6:30 in the morning when I haven’t had my coffee, and am already irritable.

    This is the reason for the rule that you explain yourself when you use a term of art (and I consider logic terms, terms of art because in normal conversation eyes glaze over when I use the terms). This serves two major purposes. 1) It keeps all reasonably educated readers in the loop of the conversation even if they haven’t taken a course in logic and 2) it keeps misuses of the terms to a minimum.

    When I say “explain yourself”, I mean that you should first define the term of art you’re using, and then show how the argument in question fits that definition. This makes it easier for us conservative Christian religious people to check the logic textbooks on our desks to see if we can learn something here. It also means that you will have to do the work of linking the argument to your accusation, and in my experience, not all accusations survive that process. As examples, I offer the following three terms of art, with an explanation:

    “non sequiter” – Often best tested for by using the question “so what?”, it’s a fallacy involved in giving information or arguments unrelated to the argument being discussed. For example:  When pro-life advocates say that a foetus in the womb is a person deserving of full legal protection as such, the response that a woman has a right to choose what happens to her own body is a non-sequiter. The question is the moral status of the infant. After that point, the rights balancing can be done, but not before dealing with the claim at hand (that a foetus is a person deserving of legal protection).

    “ad hominium” – This is a form of a non-sequiter. I also call this the “yeah, well, you have cooties” fallacy. It is frighteningly common in most debates, despite its illogicality. It is essentially when a person is attacked directly rather than attacking their arguments. An example is when an atheist makes the statement that there is no positive proof for the existence of God, and a theist responds with: yeah, but you atheists are immoral. Besides not necessarily being true, it really doesn’t speak to the claim being made. Now, this is not happening when the conversation moves to the moral (positive) argument for the existence of God, and the theist makes the different claim that atheism has no account for objective morality (a claim which does not impugn the atheists’ morals, just consistency of the underlying reason for those good morals).

    “straw man” – This is the argumentative tactic of redefining your opponent’s position in such a way as to make it easier to attack when the redefinition does not actually express the ideas of the opponent. One example is when a person says that there is evidence for the existence for the Christian god, and an opponent begins to attack faith in a teapot orbiting the sun, flying spaghetti monsters, or invisible pink unicorns. The latter are far easier to attack, but they are conceptually different (none of the latter examples can be defended by the ontological argument, for instance).

    In any event, the upshot is that when you want to use any of these things, think it through and do the hard work of applying your ideas.

  • A Word on (comment) Etiquette

    With the positive things dealt with over the last 2 days, it’s now a good time to give the basic rules for the (now fully moderated) comments section. I get to choose whether or not I post your comments.

    I reserve the right to edit your comment (usually if your ideas are worthwhile, but you’re using language not acceptable for a family blog). Both publishing and editing are at my discretion (I choose). I cannot be appealed, and abusive followups will be met with blacklisting. I know that sounds harsh,

    but after a few years talking about the topics I’m told polite people never discuss, I have had too much experience to be light on that. Following are the guidelines I’m going to use in grading comments. I will try my best to hold to these myself as well.

    1) Don’t swear. Usually, I don’t demand this of people around me, but there are a variety of readers to this website, and some do not appreciate frequent f-bombs. Besides, it makes you sound like you can’t express yourself without an appeal to your possibly astounding command of the profane vernacular. Since I also have many readers for whom English is not their first language, I also don’t want to explain many of the terms, especially to members of the board of deacons.

    2) Don’t be rude. This is a harder one to gauge, but still a hard rule. I do not want to have comments that you wouldn’t say to someone if they were sitting across from you, and neither of you were drunk or stoned. This means I don’t want you to call people names.

    3) Don’t get snooty. Again, a bit subjective, but I know that I’m not a complete idiot, and I know that many of my readers are much smarter than I am. On the internet, you don’t know which ones are which. (“kutiepi314” might actually be a triple PhD in topics related to the one you’re trying to lecture them on). I also don’t want to clean up the mess if the J-School grad word-ninjas decide to take you down a peg using their finely sharpened lexical skills. Take the linguistic fisticuffs outside.

    4) Respect others. Even if people don’t use the best words, and even if they seem less intelligent, they may still be right in their comments. We live in a universe in which intelligence does not guarantee truth. Smart people can be wrong, morons can be right. Assume the best of those that disagree with you, and you might be surprised and learn something.

    5) Explain yourself. In this I mean, try to avoid using terms of art, or words that not everybody understands. I’ll explain further tomorrow when I do “a word on using logic”. For now, however, just remember that non-sequiter and ad hominium are latin, and very few people speak latin these days. It’s more fruitful if you actually tell us why a given statement is illogical than using the phrase “that’s a clear non-sequiter”. You can still use the term, but I’ll need to hear why you think the statement in question has no bearing on the argument.

    I pray this will keep our conversations civil. :-)