The Questioning Christian

Another Pope Francis, from 1978

2013-03-31T06:34:44-05:00

Like many people, I'm starting to really admire Pope Francis for his humility and simplicity. When I first heard that the new pope had chosen that name, I immediately thought of one of my all-time favorite novels, The Vicar of Christ, by Princeton professor Walter F. Murphy, published in 1978, which spent three months on the NY Times best-seller list. It's on the bookshelf directly behind me as I write this.

The protagonist is an American, Declan Patrick Walsh, the son of a career diplomat, Marine war hero (as was the author), and law professor. Walsh's unusual path to the papacy is imaginatively written but not implausible. As pope, he takes the name Francesco (after both Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier, one of the first Jesuits), and emphasizes simplicity and helping the poor.

The New York Times's obituary of author Murphy quotes a Times reviewer: “If, to keep in touch, you require yourself to read at least one best-selling novel a year, ‘The Vicar of Christ’ is the one. It has the grace to click.”

Highly recommended.

How to get rid of the Hastert rule: Go back to theoldrules for discharge petitions

2013-01-03T17:53:59-06:00

I'm a lifelong Republican, but if you ask me, it ought to be an impeachable offense* for speakers of the House of Representatives to follow the GOP's so-called Hastert rule, the way John Boehner seems to have done until virtually the last minute in the recent "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

The House Democrats should aggressively attack the Hastert rule by pushing to go back to the old rules for discharge petitions. If the House GOP won't go along, the Dems should file suit in federal court to enjoin Speaker Boehner from applying the Hastert rule. The threat of the Speaker being dragged into court and forced to explain his bill-management decisions might be enough to get the GOP to cooperate on restoring the discharge petition rules to the way they used to be.

* Yes, I know impeachment would be a practical impossibility: Under the Constitution, the House itself would have to approve articles of impeachment, and it's hard to imagine any situation in which the majority would vote to impeach its own leader.

The Hastert "rule" can disenfranchise the House minority

In a nutshell, the Hastert "rule" says that the speaker of the House of Representatives will not allow the House to vote on any bill even one that's supported by a majority of House members and therefore would pass if it were brought up for a vote — if the bill does not have the support of a majority of the Republican caucus.

The Hastert rule, of course, isn't actually a rule at all, or at least certainly not a rule of procedure duly enacted by the House pursuant to its constitutional power to do so. No, the Hastert rule is a ruthless political practice followed by recent Republican speakers, notably Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, and John Boehner.

One notable recent exception to the Hastert rule: As New Year's Day drew to a close, the House finally voted on the Senate's fiscal-cliff bill, approving it 257 to 167, with 64% of House Republicans voting "no." A couple of days later, former speaker Hastert reportedly warned on Fox News Radio that Speaker Boehner allowed more bills to come up without the support of the House's GOP majority, hewould be giving up his power; Hastert was quoted as saying:

When you start passing stuff that your members are not in line with, all of a sudden your ability to lead is in jeopardy because somebody else is making decisions. The president is making decisions, [House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi is making decisions, or they are making the decisions in the Senate. All tax bills and all spending bills under the Constitution start in the house. When you give up that responsibility you really give up your responsibility to govern, and that is the problem. [Emphasis added.]

Jesus. Does Dennis Hastert really think that the responsibility to govern, on any issue, lies with just the majority caucus of the House?

The Constitution gives the House's power to the whole House, not to the Speaker or the majority caucus

Certainly it makes sense for the Speaker to have some discretion to decide what bills will be brought up for a vote; somebody has to manage the work flow.

But the Hastert rule grossly abuses that discretion. The constitutional authority to approve or reject a bill lies with the House as a whole, not with any particular caucus.

It's outrageous that recent GOP speakers have abandoned their fiduciary duty to the House — and to the nation — by abdicating to their caucus majorities the power and duty to decide whether a given bill will get a vote.

One way to restore checks and balances here: Go back to the old rules for discharge petitions

House rules do allow members to sign a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill. In theory, that provides a check to the power of the Speaker, or of the majority of a committee, to control which bills are brought to the floor for a vote.

But a discharge petition is a toothless remedy against abuses of that power. That's because any discharge petition needs the public signatures of an absolute majority of the House, namely 218 members. This means that at least some members of the majority party must sign on to any discharge petition. And given all the power wielded by the speaker and other House leadership, how many members of a majority party would be willing to risk retribution from the leadership by signing a discharge petition? That's right: Not many.

A better rule would be that:

signatures to a discharge petition are kept secret until the requisite number of signatures are gathered, as was the case before 1993, and
a smaller number of signatures is needed: either one-third, as was the case before 1935, or perhaps the number of signatures corresponding to one-half of the minority caucus. For example: As I write this, 113th Congress was sworn in today, with the House now containing 234 Republicans, 200 Democrats, and 1 vacancy. If a half-the-minority number were used, then a discharge petition could succeed with only 100 signatures.

This would provide an appropriate check and balance: The Speaker can follow the Hastert rule if he or she chooses, but a significant number of representatives can dynamite the log jam if they so choose, with less fear of repercussion.

Some might complain that this could allow the minority caucus to flood the House agenda with demands for votes on bills that are supposedly doomed to defeat. I say, fine — if a reasonable number of House members are willing to sign their names to a discharge petition, then the presumption ought to be that the bill should get an up or down vote. There would seem to be no more risk of abuse by the minority than by the majority.

Oops — there's another problem: Providing the minority with more power to overcome stonewalling by the majority might lead to more genuine negotiation between the parties about important bills. And we certainly can't have that, can we?

The House GOP won't change the discharge rules voluntarily, so House Democrats should sue to enjoin the Hastert rule

Clearly the existing GOP majority in the House won't change the discharge-petition rule. So what about court action by House Democrats? I won't try to address the constitutional issues in any depth here, in part because the judicial precedent simply isn't clear on this point.

• The Supreme Court has often been reluctant to allow the federal judiciary to get involved in "political" questions, partly on the theory that the democratic process is better equipped than the judiciary to address such questions.

On the other hand, the Court has been willing to wade into a number of cases that arguably turned on political-type questions, such as Baker v. Carr (one person one vote), Powell v. McCormack (Congress's power to expel members), and more recently, Bush v. Gore (Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election).

• Another obstacle to a lawsuit: The Supreme Court has taken a restrictive view of the "standing" of individual members of Congress to bring suit to overturn an enacted law. See Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811 (1997) (holding that individual senators and congressmen did not have standing to challenge the Line Item Veto Act).

On the other hand, the Court might be more receptive to the standing of House minority-caucus members who in effect were stripped of their right to pass a bill that was supported by a majority of the House, just because the opposing minority happened to constitute a majority of the ruling caucus.

• Finally, the Court might not want the federal courts to get involved with the Hastert rule on prudential grounds: It would be difficult for a district court to grant and enforce injunctive relief. Suppose Speaker Boehner were to block a bill, but didn't say why — how is a district court supposed to discern whether he did so because of the Hastert rule, or for some other, legitimate reason? Is the district judge supposed to summon the Speaker into court to have him testify about his motives? That could invite abuse by the minority party. And will the minority party have to demonstrate to the district court that the blocked bill would have passed if brought to a vote? How exactly are they to do that?

So clearly a court challenge to the Hastert rule would not be without difficulties. Even so, for the sake of streamlining the dysfunctional political process on Capitol Hill, it would be good to see House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi bring such a challenge in federal court.

If nothing else, the mere filing of the lawsuit — and the prospect that House speakers might someday have to testify in court about their reasons for blocking a bill — might help motivate the GOP majority to cooperate in reforming the discharge-petition rules.

Some Russians freak out over Mayan calendar end of the world

2012-12-02T18:47:49-06:00

Here we go again ....

A neurosurgeon's time in heaven

2012-10-15T22:38:04-05:00

Newsweek has an excerpt from an upcoming book by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife. The Newsweek excerpt tells of Alexander's experience of "heaven" while in a deep coma caused by a bacterial meningitis infection:

I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.

But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

* * *

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.

According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

(Extra paragraphing added.)

I'm agnostic (in the weak sense) about these experiences; just because we don't know how the brain might create delusions of this kind, that's not proof of a glorious afterlife.

On the other hand, it does seem unwise to categorically dismiss the possibility that some sort of heaven does indeed exist.

Faith can arise through works -- an example

2012-09-17T08:56:30-05:00

Educational researchers have shown that telling teachers to change their expectations about particular students was not nearly as effective as training the teachers to change their own behavior towards the students — which led to just the changes in expectations that the researchers had hoped to see. See this NPR Morning Edition story by reporter Alix Spiegel. Money quote: "... to change beliefs, the best thing to do is change behaviors."

How the American interior was settled -- a word movie that brings to mind the Creator's ongoing organization of the universe

2012-08-14T06:45:01-05:00

You've heard of word pictures? And you've seen those speeded-up videos of how a tall building or a ship is built? A piece in the online NY Times by history professor Christopher Phillips provides a vivid fast-motion "word movie" of how river transportation enabled the settlement of the American interior. It made me think of what it seems to be all about in our universe, in which we humans serve as created co-creators (to use Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner's phrase), helping in a titanic construction project.

What if Aurora moviegoers had rushed the shooter, together?

2012-07-30T08:06:46-05:00

At mass shootings, many people seem either to cower, not knowing what to do, or to flee. Apart from a few who courageously try to protect others, for many it's either deer in the headlights or sauve qui peut, every man for himself. We've seen this going back at least as early as the 1991 Luby's massacre in Killeen, Texas, in which 23 were killed (and the shooter killed himself), plus 20 wounded.

Cowering or fleeing is a natural human reaction. (In cold economic terms, fleeing may be the extreme case of the free-rider problem: Let someone else take care of the problem.)

But ask yourself: At the Aurora theater shooting, what would have happened if a crowd of moviegoers had immediately rushed the shooter, despite the obvious risk, because "that's what we do" for each other?

There's no denying that the shooter might well have shot one or more of his attackers. At the Luby's massacre, 71-year-old (!) Al Gratia rushed at the shooter and was fatally shot in the chest. (It's noteworthy that the selfless Gratia was a World War II veteran.)

But if lots of people had attacked at Luby's or at the Aurora theater, a lot of lives might have been saved:

The shooter wouldn't have had time to get off so many shots before being overpowered.
Nor would he have had as much time to take careful aim, so whomever he did manage to shoot might well have been wounded, not killed.
Conceivably the shooter, surprised at being attacked himself, might have 'frozen,' in which case he might not have shot anyone else.

And would the Aurora shooter have proceeded if he knew in advance that he was going to be immediately attacked by the crowd? He seems to have acted pretty "rationally," in a twisted sort of way. He had full body armor. He was well-armed. He had thought through his plan at least somewhat. If he had known that he was going to be immediately tackled by the crowd, he might have proceeded with his plan anyway — but maybe not.

That's why (it's been said) a 9/11-style airplane hjacking will never happen again: terrorists know that the passengers will rush and overpower the hijackers. The terrorists might be able to blow up the plane, or to crash it, but they won't be able to use it as a fuel-laden guided missile to kill thousands of others. Americans have learned from the heroic example of the passengers on United Flight 93, who stopped its hijackers from flying the plane into the White House or the Capitol. (Something similar actually occurred in the case of the shoe bomber, who was overpowered by flight attendants and passengers.)

Let's be clear about a couple of things here. First, I'm talking here about fighting back against a mass murderer like the guy in Aurora; I absolutely do not mean invoking a stand-your-ground law as an excuse to shoot somebody. Second, special cases exist: Let's say you're a parent with kids in tow (or in your arms); in that kind of situation, your first obligation is to protect your kids as best you can, and that will almost certainly call for a snap judgment call.

But otherwise, we Americans should commit ourselves to a higher standard: If, God forbid, we ever find ourselves in a mass-shooting situation, then we will attack, immediately — and trust that we won't be alone — because we owe that to each other. The Department of Homeland Security says that attacking the shooter should be a last resort, but I think that's backwards.

Would I personally react by rushing the shooter in an Aurora-type emergency? I wish I knew; I certainly hope so.

Jim Greenwood's report on General Convention's authorization of same-sex blessings

2012-07-17T09:37:38-05:00

My longtime friend Jim Greenwood, a fellow parishioner at St. John the Divine in Houston, has said I could post the report he emailed to friends about his experience at the 77th General Convention of the Episcopal Church.

You might have seen in the news that the General Convention authorized a rite for the blessing of lifelong committed same-sex relationships.

Jim is a lawyer / mediator and a former member of the City Council of the city of Houston.

He recounts in his report that he has a personal interest in the issue: His and his wife Cody's twin daughters are both in committed same-sex relationships.

Bravo, Jim!

Download Jim's report (PDF)

Jim Jones's lover thought he was God

2011-08-15T21:47:49-05:00

From a NY Times on-line piece about Jim Jones, who led some 900 followers to their deaths by cyanide suicide in Jonestown, Guyana:

Ms. O’Shea joined the Peoples Temple as a secretary in 1971, when she was 19. She said she eventually became Mr. Jones’s confidante and lover; “I thought he was God,” she said. “I thought God had picked me to be a mate.”

Rick Perry and the efficacy of prayer

2011-08-12T17:06:30-05:00

Um, not really ....

Some Sarah Palin supporters are akin to biblical inerrantists - James McGrath

2011-06-09T14:34:48-05:00

I'm beginning to be a fan of Dr. James McGrath. His recent post on the Christian Century blog, Inerrancy of the Bible and Sarah Palin, addressed those who would rewrite history when it doesn't fit their preconceived notions. He was on the money in this passage:

I suggested recently that one of the most fundamental elements of Christianity is repentance – acknowledging we were wrong and making efforts to be less wrong in the future. And one can see a faithful expression of this core Christian conviction in the history of Liberal Protestantism and its role in developing and embracing the tools of critical study of the Bible, and the integration of new scientific knowledge.

Admitting the Bible was wrong, admitting Jesus was wrong, when the evidence points in that direction, is not a denial of the Christian faith, but an expression of one of its most basic tenets: the fallibility of human beings and the resulting need to be open to correction.

(Links omitted.) I made a couple of comments in the discussion following his post.

It's been said that we're all entitled to our own opinions, but we're not entitled to our own facts. Fidelity to the First Commandment dictates that we live in the world God wrought, not in a 'world' that we create in our imaginations -- and inerrantists of all kinds are guilty of violating that corollary.

Was Paul's real goal to expand the definition of "Jew"?

2011-05-28T11:19:00-05:00

In a blog posting, Dr. James F. McGrath argues that in Romans, Paul was "advocating the inclusion of uncircumcised Gentiles in Judaism, the elimination for all intents and purposes of the Jew/Gentile distinction, to be replaced simply by a multi-ethnic Israel on the one hand, and those who refused to be a part of it on the other." It's a worthwhile read.

After bin Laden's death, a made-up quote from MLK Jr.; what does that suggest about the Gospel of John?

2011-05-03T07:31:54-05:00

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, after doing some Google searching, is pretty sure that a quote attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, is a fake:

Shortly after I posted my piece on feeling curiously un-thrilled about Bin Laden's death, the following quote came across my twitter feed:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I admire the sentiment. But something about it just strikes me as off, like that great Marx quote about the housing bubble that didn't appear anywhere in Das Kapital.

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

Like the Marx quote, it's a bit too a propos. What "thousands" would King have been talking about? In which enemy's death was he supposed to be rejoicing?

UPDATE: Getting in on the fun, Drew Grant at Salon.com asks, "Why did Penn Jillette create a fake [MLK] quote yesterday?"

So apparently there are people who think it's OK to put words in the mouth (so to speak) of an historical figure, presumably for greater authority.

Surely this sort of thing could never, ever have happened in the early church, right? Surely (for example) the author of the Fourth Gospel couldn't possibly have put words in Jesus' mouth decades after the fact?

Um, except that we already have compelling evidence that this sort of thing did indeed happen. Consider Paul's warning to his readers about forged letters circulating in his name, in 2 Thessalonians 1-2:

Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us — whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter ... [Emphasis added]

As someone else has pointed out (Bart Ehrman, maybe?), there are two possibilities:

if 2 Thessalonians was in fact written by Paul, then Paul himself is warning his readers about forged letters bearing his name; presumably he didn't issue that warning for no reason;
on the other hand, if 2 Thessalonians was not written by Paul, then that epistle is itself a forgery, Q.E.D.

So this apparently-bogus quotation from Dr. King gives us still more reason to conclude that respectful agnosticism is the appropriate view to take of Scripture.

Related posts:

Tweeting more than posting

2011-01-02T16:27:25-06:00

I'm doing almost no religion-related writing these days; what little I am doing is taking the form of short tweets on Twitter on account @dctoedt. I've set up a sidebar widget at right to show the latest tweets. (UPDATE: I've consolidated my Twitter accounts; all my tweeting is now done @dctoedt.)

Puritans were pretty cool after all?

2010-11-26T10:31:00-06:00

This NY Times piece suggests that the Puritans weren't the pinched theocrats Nathaniel Hawthorne made them out to be.

Why American government works better when neither party completely controls it

2010-11-07T13:31:52-06:00

Here's an intriguing analysis from Jonathan Rauch that seems to explain a lot about the current state of U.S. politics. He says, in a nutshell, that things get bad when one party is in control not only of the White House but also of both houses of Congress. That's because the majority party's legislators know they can count on a steady diet of obstructionism from the minority party. That in turn means the majority has to placate its own hard-liners to have a hope of getting anything done, resulting in legislation that's more extreme than the country as a whole would like — that is, when the majority is able to enact any legislation at all.

... Today, almost all Democrats are to the left of all Republicans. The result is that the system behaves very differently when one party is in control than when they share.

So differently, in fact, that you can fairly say that the country has one Constitution with two distinct modes of operation.

In Mode 1 — unified government — the minority party in Washington, shut out of power, has every incentive to make the majority’s life difficult, and does so. Its partisans, with no stake in whether anything gets done in Washington, [DCT comment: and worried about drawing a primary challenge in the next election cycle from their party's radical wing] treat the government as if it were under control of an invading army.

The majority, lacking support from the out-of-power party, must govern on its own, which requires holding on to every element of its coalition, which means governing from the center of its party instead of the center of the country.

In other words, Democrats, when in total control, have little choice but to govern from the left. Republicans, who are even more conservative than Democrats are liberal, govern from the right. Policy is driven toward the edges, instead of the middle. ...

In Mode 2 — divided government — the dynamic is reversed. Both parties, responsible for governing, have a stake in success. Forced to negotiate and compromise, they drag policy toward the center, allowing moderates to feel represented instead of ignored.

Most important, the country itself becomes more governable and meaningful laws stand a likelier chance of passage, because neither side can easily blame the other for whatever is wrong and because any major legislation needs support from both parties to pass.

Jonathan Rauch, Divided We Thrive, NY Times, Nov. 6, 2010 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

The Gospel according to the XKCD comic

2010-10-20T19:38:21-05:00

The justly-famous techie comic xkcd.com has one today that ties in nicely with evidence-based theology:

Morals without God? (NY Times blog post)

2010-10-19T06:52:45-05:00

A good read, by biologist Frans B. M. de Waal

"But they're working on that ...."

2010-10-16T11:55:37-05:00

My wife and I were talking while walking the dog this morning. I'd made the comment that 60 was the new 40; she said there are still a lot of ways aging can and does kill you, like Alzheimer's (her mother died of it).

I responded "but they're working on that."

Then it dawned on me: These days, an integral part of our mental framework is the dollop of optimism that comes with "they're working on that."

I wonder whether people 100 years ago had the same feeling.

Related: NPR Planet Money podast, Would You Rather be Rich in 1900, or Middle-Class Now?; see also the discussion of that podcast at Hacker News.

No, there weren't 27 people killed at UT Austin

2010-09-28T13:03:07-05:00

From the Distortions Happen department: My daughter was one of the many students locked down at the University of Texas at Austin this morning. Shortly afterwards, she emailed to let everyone know she was OK (she was several blocks from where the gunman was), and said they'd heard 27 people were killed. No one was killed except the gunman, who turned his weapon on himself, so I wonder where in the world the students got that information?

Atheists and agnostics are the most knowledgeable about religion - Pew survey

2010-09-28T09:53:13-05:00

This isn't a huge surprise: In the United States, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable than Christians about religion, says the Los Angeles Times, followed very closely by Jews and Mormons. Why would that be? The Times quotes a Pew researcher:

American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.

"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."

Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education.

The New York Times's article has a more-acerbic quote from an atheist:

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

(For more data on educational levels of different categories of believers, see an earlier Pew survey.)

Solar cells on cell-phone towers in developing nations may help save lives by powering vaccine refrigerators

2010-09-25T15:14:32-05:00

See 'Off-grid' cellphone towers could save lives, by Harvey Rubin and Alice Conant.

Networking lessons from the Gospel of Luke

2010-09-25T10:50:19-05:00

(Adapted from a comment I made to someone else's posting at Hacker News:) When I've been at business events where I don't know anyone, I don't even bother trying to introduce myself to the "important" folks. (Cf. Luke 14.7-11.) I seem to have enjoyed such events the most when I've looked around for people in the same boat as I; introduced myself; and asked them about themselves. I'll interject bits of my own story when appropriate, but I try to keep the conversation focused mostly on the other person. After a few minutes, I'll smile and say, "hey, it's been great talking to you," maybe swap business cards, and move on - rinse, repeat.

If I can play matchmaker and help get multiple new acquaintances talking to each other, so much the better.

Some open-ended questions I've found useful: How did you end up at X company? What got you into X field? What challenges do you see ahead for X field?

I figure life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie; if I keep going to these events, and keep focusing on making others feel welcome and included (even if only by me), then in due course I'll end up getting to know the movers and shakers.

Oops ...

2010-09-23T06:49:32-05:00

Dear readers who get notified of new posts by email: In my post on the GOP Pledge to America, I clicked "Publish" too soon (I meant to click "Preview"). Please read the complete post.

The GOP Pledge to America: Abolishing "traffic laws"?

2010-09-23T06:28:38-05:00

Give the GOP credit: In offering the 2010 version of their 1994 Contract with America, dubbed the "Pledge to America," at least they're being clear about what they'd do if they regained control of Congress. (I found a draft of the Pledge at Scribd and am working through its 21 pages.) Some of the GOP proposals make sense; others, I'm not at all so sure about.

The Pledge talks about cutting through job-killing government red tape. But if there's one thing we know about people of all stripes, it's that they can focus single-mindedly on the pursuit of what they want; they'd much prefer not to have to think about the possible side effects of their actions. (Economists call these side effects externalities.) That goes for two-year-olds, for tycoons, and for everyone in between.

Rodney Clapp put it well a couple of years ago in The Christian Century: "The theological rationale for the necessity (and the potential nobility) of government can be summarized in two words: original sin. Each and every person and institution is prone to self-deception and destructive self-interest. ... There is no such thing as sufficient self-regulation on Wall Street, on Main Street, in our churches or anywhere else. ..." (Emphasis added.)

It'd be wonderful if we didn't need traffic laws, and every driver could relentlessly put the pedal to the metal to get to her destination, oblivious to everything around her. But that would have been a bad idea even in the days of Model Ts and two-lane gravel roads; it'd be disastrous in this day of SUVs and high-speed interstate freeways (not to mention giant tractor-trailer truck rigs).

The "road" we share is both more crowded and more complex. It seems pretty silly to insist that the simple "traffic laws" of yesteryear are all we need.

Related posts: