My Country Used to Have a Constitution

My country used to have a constitution, but sadly it no longer does. I say constitution by what the word used to mean, not in the way that it means nothing, as it does today. Let me explain.

            
Constitution comes from the root constitute. As in made of. Formed from. If a woman is pregnant, and the pregnancy weakens her constitution, then it took a lot out of her. It made what she was made of less durable. It made her less her. A constitution for a country is what the country is made of. The stuff it’s formed from. The principles it stands for. In the case of the United States of America, it was made of a set of principles. The document that we call The Declaration of Independence, the precursor to the “constitution” of the United States of America, says as much in its first few lines. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” In modern language, “This is the stuff our country will be made of, formed from, stand for. The following principles will define our country.”

           

Creation... Yes, I said Creation

Introduction

It has been argued down through the ages that the world has had a number of different beginnings. Rather, there are a number of different arguments that attempt to explain the beginning of the world. In general these arguments can be divided into two main camps. Camp one: someone, somehow, created the world. Camp two: the world became this way by a complicated series of chances. These Two camps, according to C. S. Lewis, can be classified “the religious view,” and “the materialist view.”[1] In this paper, these two camps will loosely be titled “Creationism” and “Evolutionism.” The former being that camp which says someone created the world, the latter being that the world evolved this way. Within both camps there are a number of various views, too numerous to detail here, but in general they all boil down to one of these two views. There are also large groups of people who believe an odd hybrid of the two. There are a number of these hybrids. The point being made is that consensus on this subject is far, far away.

The Morality of Esther

This is a paper I wrote for my historical literature class... not my best work, but not terrible. The prompt was "Write a paper discussing the moral character of Esther." Enjoy.

Introduction

The book of Esther, one of the two eponymously feminine books of the bible, details the story of a young woman who’s moral character is tested by being made queen and then forced to make a choice either personal harm for her own nations sake or personal safety at the cost of her nation. Her story will be summarized more fully later in this paper. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate her moral character in making this decision. The cultural, historical, and personal levels of her situation will be most principally evaluated in an attempt to determine Esther’s moral character. Of course, moral character is such a loose term that it will also be more accurately defined later in this paper. Overall, this paper will attempt to paint a picture of Esther in a culturally and historically accurate context and determine whether or not she displayed good biblical moral character or bad biblical moral character. It will then attempt to isolate which traits of Esther can and should be emulated and which traits should be disregarded.

Halloween Hate

A recent incident occurred on Halloween. A woman dressed up in a tasteless Halloween costume depicting a bloodied Boston Marathon runner. 

This is a link to the article reviewing the incident, which I have seen posted all over facebook. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/boston-marathon-victim-costume_n_4208720.html

I had someone ask me my thoughts on this incident, so I'll share. 3 main points come to mind.

(1) First of all, obviously it was incredibly stupid for her to do this. That is pretty much universally agreed upon. She even admits that. It was disgusting, and insensitive and downright cruel to the people who suffered... BUT...

(2) Did she have a right to do this? Yes. In America we have the right to make whatever statements we want, in as poor of taste as we want, without legal action being taken as long as that expression does not violate some other law (such as public nudity, murder, rape, etc…). To my mind this right was best solidified in the Supreme Court case Texas v. Johnson when the right to burn American flags as an expression of free speech was upheld. It's appalling, and disgusting, and in incredibly poor taste to do so, but it is a right that we have as Americans.

Why Pray?

There’s an age-old question in Christianity. It goes like this: “Why do we pray?” It’s a fair one to ask.

To the casual observer outside of Christianity it makes absolutely no sense, because they have absolutely no sense… of the God to whom we are praying. For the non-Christian this question is really asking, “why do you pray to no one?” For the Christian, however, the question is just as valid and is more layered. Assuming that the Christian understands that you’re not just talking to thin air when you pray, the question they are asking is usually the more verbose, “Why do we pray if God is all powerful and all knowing? Doesn’t he know what we’re going to pray for/about before we pray for/about it? What’s the point then? Aren’t we wasting his time?” I firmly believe that every Christian comes to this question at some point in their walk, and hopefully the following will give you some sort of perspective on the problem, if not resolve it outright.