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Weekend Update 10-08-2011

Posted: October 8th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Weekend Update | Comments Off on Weekend Update 10-08-2011

Gosh, it’s regrettable that the markets aren’t confirming my warnings! Funny, but also a sad commentary.

Americans give health insurers the thumbs down. No surprise there. The blurb at the bottom is interesting, though. The most favorably viewed insurer? Medicare.

Blessings don’t come in the form of stuff.  Blessing comes in realizing you don’t need stuff.

So, how’d that trickle-down thing work out? The graphs are pretty much self-explanatory.

Celiac diagnosis and management by practicing physicians needs to improve. It’s interesting that there’s a study on that topic.

Mind and Heart. This post helps make clear part of the distinction between the rational, cogitating mind and the nous. And that’s important to understand because a significant part of the New Testament (Romans 12:2 immediately springs to mind) has been deeply misunderstood and misrepresented because we don’t have an equivalent english word for nous. So it often ends up being translated mind and people read that as referring to the rational, active mind. In some places, I think, it is translated heart, but that doesn’t help much either as people tend to associate that with feelings. And that’s wrong in a different direction. (Thoughts and feelings are actually both products of the cogitating mind and can’t really be separated.) I’m still not entirely sure I understand what the nous actually is, but I am working on it. Frederica Mathewes-Green calls it the receptive, perceiving part of our being.

These aren’t bad points on the mortgage interest deduction. Personally, I do benefit from it. I can’t remember if we always did or not, though. However, my wife and I were in our thirties when we bought our first house. We haven’t been typical in much of anything. The point about a targeted credit being more effective at encouraging home ownership is a good one. Our older son and his wife were able to buy their first house precisely as a result of the first-time homeowner credit that was in place for a while. Personally, I would be willing to trade the small benefit I get from the mortgage interest deduction for a targeted deduction that would benefit society as a whole. I also think the capital gains tax rates need to be restored so they at least match the wage tax rates. I don’t believe it’s in our societal interest to encourage slum lords and day traders.

The Pornography of Death. I wouldn’t have thought to use the terms “basic anxiety” vs. “neurotic anxiety” but I think it helps make clear the subtle way our mortality tends to rule us — often below the level of our conscious thought. That’s the true root of our enslavement to death from which Christ died to free us. And in our modern culture, in many ways, we’ve made that subjection worse by pushing death out of the regular routine and experience of our lives into its neat hygienic bubble.

Are women more sexually adventurous than men? It’s a good article. I’ve always found the adage that men want sex and women want love (and all the variations of that duality) never matched my actual life experience. And I thought the same thing about the college study mentioned. That study doesn’t tell us much of anything about sexuality, per se. It tells us that college age men are much more likely to engage in high-risk (a nice term for “stupid”) behavior than college age women. Well, duh! In related breaking news, the earth is discovered to revolve around the sun.

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