Global Christian Perspectives – November 6, 2015

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News Segment:  30  mins  – Times are flexible.

The Morality of Debt.

US Government debt jumped $339 Billion same day the debt limited repealed.   We know owe over $18 trillion.  Is it really moral to make our kids and grandkids pay for the things we were able to enjoy today?

Loosing Religion

Recent poll showing Americans loosing religion.  I am not surprised, as there has been a concerted effort to against religion for decades.


Two different stories are behind this one.  The first is that while some of the polls were correct in 2012,  since then they have been wrong, and often not even close.  In Kentucky this week the republican was supposed to lose by 3 or 4 points but ended up winning by 9. Nor is this just a US problem as the polls were off in Canada, Israel, and the UK.

Given that consider the following story that candidates are being dropped or moved to the second tier debate because of Poll results.  Are Trump and Carson really in the lead or is this just the result of more bad polling?

In-depth Segment:  30  mins


A conservative view of economic history.

For the in-depth segment some from previous weeks.

A key issue here is that I think a major (but not only) reason we hold different beliefs is what we “know” is different.

One thought on “Global Christian Perspectives – November 6, 2015”

  1. Here are some comments:
    I think that the history of the debt ceiling comes from Alexander Hamilton’s plan for the federal government to assume the debts of the various states after the ratification of the Constitution. If I am not mistaken, this somehow allowed the government to gain a line of credit. I think that’s where you have to start.

    It would be nice if our government, or any government for that matter, didn’t have any debt. But it would take a concerted effort by all parties involved to determine what will be paid by a government and what individuals need to do for themselves.

    Once the government part is fixed, then you have some idea of what taxes, fees, levies, or whatever will have to be paid. Funny thing here is that you can’t have loopholes, though if someone is actively involved in social programs, then they should get some sort of credit.

    In the meantime, you can’t have any government agency receiving more than its fair share of the taxes.

    Loosing religion – this is a common discussion in my household. The problem with many parts of today’s organized religion is the limited viewpoint of the world they present. This is what is driving people, especially the youth, away.

    In part it is because so many people do not understand what the beliefs of other religions are and probably don’t even understand what their own religion believes (how else can you explain why so many people view the Catholic church as dangerous but don’t realize that their own Protestant faith is an off-shoot of the Catholic church?).

    Each religion has within it a fundamental core of beliefs and I think it behooves every representative of each religion to understand what those fundamental beliefs are and how they compare to their own.

    What was it the President Dewey say to Harry Truman after the 1948 election? Was it something about telephones?

    Regarding the recent Kentucky election, comments are now surfacing that suggest there was a problem with the voting machines or the voting process and not necessarily the polls themselves. When I lived in Kentucky in 1998 and 1999, vote buying was still a problem.

    Also, there are some issues with the recent elections in Kansas that focus on the same problems as were stated in Kentucky.

    Short of 1) asking everyone in the country who is eligible to vote what they are thinking (which would be equivalent to having the election itself) or 2) making sure that everyone who is eligible to vote does in fact vote, there is always going to be a statistical problem. Note – Eugene Burdick (who was co-author of Fail Safe with Harvey Wheeler) wrote a political novel in 1964 called “The 480”. The 480 in the title were the number of various groups that could be used to classify the American electorate. It was characterized by 1) the computerized nature of the polling process and 2) the apparent invasion of privacy used to obtain information about delegates to a political convention.

    Closing comment – we all “know” the same things (2 + 2 will always be four, except in base 3 when it becomes 11). It is what we do with that knowledge that determines the difference.

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