Resolved Question: Regarding a health care plan.... would you rather pay for an emergency room visit or a clinic visit with your?
tax money? Average cost of walking into an ER is $300.....Average clinic cost is $85.......Insurance companies and tax payers pay the brunt of the uninsured who visit ER's and fail to pay.......doesn't it make sense to give everyone affordable insurance benefits instead of the uninsured having to use the ER's?
Source: _http
Resolved Question: Does the Tower of Babel story work as political metaphor, and make sense of US politics today?
What I'm getting at is the reason that God provides for giving everyone a different language at Babel. I believe He is quoted in Genesis as saying that He will sow confusion that human beings will not ever complete the tower, ascend to heaven, and challenge God's pre-eminence. Today most Christians, atheists, Jews & Muslims in R&S make very little reference to the Tower of Babel story; we all fight about other things in here. But politically and economically, aren't we a little like the people in the Tower of Babel story? We face a world that's in a severe economic recession, and in the US the unemployment rate is at 9.5 percent and rising. Millions of people in the US are losing their houses; many millions more are still without affordable health insurance. Meanwhile the big Wall Street banks have accepted enormous financial bailouts from the government, and yet they're still not making easy credit available to individual consumers and small business owners who need it. It's also unclear, so far, that the US government will be able to overcome the resistance of the big oil & coal companies and enact a good program to curb global climate change. So all Americans - religious believers and atheists alike -- face some really important political challenges and political and economic problems, and the futures of our children and grandschildren depend on meeting and solving those problems well. But we are scattered in confusion -- so just because of speaking many different languages, but because we belong to dozens of different religious denominations -- or in some cases to no religious faith at all. The unemployment rates keep rising, and the banks keep getting money from the government without providing credit to people who need it -- and we're permanently divided & impotent because of our disagreements over religion. Is this a new Babel, perhaps? Are there "principalities and powers" who want to keep us perpetually divided over religion and anti-religion, so that we never challenge the power of the economic & political elites? Sorry; there are some confusing typos in this question; my bad. What I meant to say is that we are divided -- NOT just because we speak different languages, but also because we adhere to possibly dozens of different religious traditions, and some anti-religious traditions as well. As the people at Babel failed to complete their tower because of a confusion of languages, so, also, we in the USA today (and around the world) are failing to unite to solve common problems, at least partly because we embrace a confusion of different religious faiths. Are we getting fooled by a powerful economic and political elite into division and powerlessness, based on religion -- just as the people at Babel were fooled by God into a similar kind of powerlessness, this one arising from different languages? K Bell - Thank you for seeing my point. I think you're not quite right to say that God saw nothing wrong with the tower building, though. This is from part of the Genesis story: 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 It looks to me as if God in this story is worried that "they have all one language ... and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. " He then, on that basis, decides to confound their languages, etc. I mean no disrespect to God, if he really exists. How could I? But isn't this the classic behavior of the power elite - any power elite? To divide the powerless according to language, religion, race, nationality etc, and thus keep them powerless?
Source: _http
Labels: