I definitely had that “stranger in a strange land” feeling yesterday. I was listening to Marketplace and they started talking about NASCAR. NASCAR is foreign enough to me to begin with but it wasn’t the racing that got me. Marketplace is a finance program and so they were talking about the marketing of NASCAR. One wag said that NASCAR was “a business opportunity disguised as a sport.” Sponsorship is everything in NASCAR. It is how the fans can actually be involved. They talked to one man who used to drink Chocked Full ‘O Nuts coffee till Folgers started sponsoring his favorite driver so he switched to Folgers. Then Folgers dropped him and Maxwell House picked him up so the guy switched to Maxwell House. It wasn’t “he has it on his car so it must be cool”, no it was more crass. The fan felt that buying that product was helping his driver make money. Who cares that the coffee is crap.

Anyway, listening to all that made me feel very alien. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way that works. People spend money on things they may not be interested in because a rich car owner has charged that company tens of thousands of dollars to paint it on the car. And people think they’re participating by doing this. What a strange world we live in.

What? President Bush asked for only $1B for the Moon/Mars program?? That isn’t enough. The program is probably dead before it begins. I don’t think he’ll get the money for it unless he is careful about what districts he plans to involve in the program. Gotta keep those senators well fed or they get cranky. The Air Force was very good in doing this with the building of the B-2.

I had a dream yesterday and all I can remember is the phrase “Remember, you can’t say ‘toy’ before you go chubby!” What can this mean? Come to think of it, I don’t want to know.

I’m stoked about the rover on Mars. Even more so by the possibility of a future manned trip there. But something is bugging me about it too. The purpose is to see if Mars could have once supported life. Okay. Fair enough. If life exists on other planets, I think it would be cool to see how He did it there. What is brushing my fur the wrong way is that I suspect scientists are doing this in hopes of proving evolution.

If you read Carl Sagan’s book Contact (or see the movie for that matter) what you find out is that Sagan believed that the existence of life on another planet would show that evolution was a law and not a theory. Furthermore it appears that Sagan believed this revelation would send many/most of the religious people in the world over the edge. They would not be able to deal with it. Whatever.

So back on Earth, we’re throwing out judges who refuse to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments* and suspending kids who say “God bless” at the end of a broadcast on a public school radio station (insert your favorite “separation of church and state” story here) while at the same time we’re spending billions to help scientists prove their religion of evolution? I’m not saying that we should scrap the Mars missions, but I’m not sure if we need to go there to find out if Mars once supported life as much as we should be going to see if Mars can be made to support human life now. That’s right, we’re talking terraforming baby!

* I don’t agree with Judge Moore, I think he took it too far and took matters into his own hands when he defied a court order. There was more than just the Ten Commandments written on it, there was a reference to natural law or something like that. Still, I don’t believe the monument needed to be removed.

I’m going in tomorrow to drop Hebrew. I just squeaked by Elementary Hebrew I and when I sit down to study for E.H.II, I stress out so bad. Nothing looks familiar and I should know it. I’ll do E.H.I again in the fall. Instead, I’m hoping to take a class on Karl Barth taught by Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer. Either that or one on church history by Dr. Woodbridge. We’ll see.

Well, at least the Brits are. It’s all because of our schizophrenic way of handling Christmas. They get how ridiculous we look chasing any sign of religion out of the public life. Yes folks, this is American post-modernism at its finest.

I do not look good in a fedora. They were the baseball cap of the 1930’s, everyone wore them. I do look okay in a bowler and a baseball cap.

That reminds me. Back in 1985 (or so) I had an optometrists appointment at an Air Force clinic with an active duty doctor. When I came in I had my hat in my hand. The doctor, sounding like Fred Rogers, said, “You may place your Air Force cap here.” I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing at him. My “Air Force cap”?

In 1991 a woman in France went in for pre-natal care. Her doctor confused her for a woman who was in to have a contraceptive coil removed. He pierced her amniotic sac and therefore she had to have an abortion. The doctor was found guilty of unintentional homicide. It was overturned on appeals. The woman is appealing to the EU high court.

What I find most fascinating about the article is that the defense is chiefly worried about what the ruling means for abortion and birth control, not what it means for the woman or her unborn child. The French courts determined that the fetus is not a human being and therefore the doctor cannot be guilty of homicide. If that gets overturned, then a fetus is a human being and has a right to life. It is just amazing that the primary concern in the debate is not over the welfare of an unborn child.

It is even more fascinating that France is opposed to the death penalty. They claim that a person guilty of murder has a right to life but an unborn child does not. The guilty get to live and the innocent are killed. What kind of logic is that?

Don’t it figure. I just wrote an 8 page paper explaining what I see as the weaknesses in amillennialism and briefly defending historic premillennialism to explain why I waffle between the two positions. I thought it had to be 10 pages so I was going to try to pull out one more example of a premillennial reign of Jesus when I double checked the syllabus. It is a 4-5 page paper. Great, now I have to chop it down, not puff it up. All that work falls to the cut command.