Thoughts on May 21 Rapture Date

Radio host Harold Camping predicts that judgement day, the rapture, will occur May 21, 2011 at 6:00pm. It will strike when that hour reaches your time zone. Harold Camping claims his analysis of Revelation is evidence for this doomsday date.

The question to ask is why people want to believe that the rapture will happen May 21. Maybe they don't like the way the culture is going, or how the churches are becoming; indeed Camping himself asserts that the churches have been taken over by Satan: his assertions sometimes seem not too far off. But to say that all churches have been taken over bespeaks quite a lot of knowledge held by speaker...

Anyway, we don't claim to know when the rapture is--May 21 or otherwise, so we decided to publish a litany of opinions on the issue.

Setting a date for the rapture means that people will continue to sin until a couple days or hours before the predicted time or date when they will get right with God. Setting a date incentivizes sin, and therefore it is better to believe that the rapture will happen any time. Any proclamation that incentivizes sin is a false one.

Wouldn't it be funny if the rapture happened May 20th?

I hope the rapture happens May 21. My life's miserable.

Is the rapture even biblical?

This man is using an ancient document that isn't exactly meant to be taken literally when it comes to dates and figures to predict when the world will end.

Starlight proves that the universe is older than 13,023 years old but Camping claims this is universe's age. Thus, his assumptions concerning the validity of time span in the Bible are based on falsehood.

This is another example of religion misleading people.

I want the rapture to hold off until I have a chance to get married.

Regardless, we think you should be ready May 21, as you would any other date...but maybe a little more so on May 21.

NATO Bombs Children

Rather than send aid to Japan, the US government via NATO bombs mentally challenged children in Libya.

NATO pilots [performed] an airstrike that took out the Libyan Down's Syndrome Society, a school for children afflicted with the birth disorder.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: NATO airstrike in Libya hits school for disabled children - National Libertarian

The Immorality if Sin Taxes

A Joke: In South Carolina, taxes on cigarettes go to fix the roads. Let's light up and fix these bumpy roads!

Sin Taxes Create Sinful Government Incentives
Presently, corrective taxes are all the rage in policy circles and academic institutions. Although a corrective or "sin" tax may encourage someone to do less of a bad thing, the process creates the wrong incentives for government because the government profits comparatively more from the sin than other taxed activities, or, it profits more from bad behavior than from good behavior. For instance, the government would benefit more from heavily taxed whiskey than from ordinarily taxed orange juice.

The tax penalty a smoker incurs that induces him to buy fewer cigarettes could be considered a moral good if we ignore any principle of liberty* and if the story ended there. But the story does not end there. The government takes revenue derived from a bad activity and then uses it for, let's assume, a good activity like reservoir maintenance or road repair. Doing good things with money gotten from bad activity becomes bad when the incentive to do more good things requires that there be more bad behavior to tax. A sin tax is not a total gain because even though the disincentive to smoke may be a plus, the incentive to do good things with revenue reliant on bad behavior is a negative. Even further, sin taxes are slightly immoral insofar as their objective is to create a greater good, because they inherently fail a little and are therefore a little deceitful. A sin tax is therefore slightly sinful itself.

Consider a sin tax on carbon emissions. The more carbon emissions, the more revenue, the more of an incentive government has for more emissions, and hence the more useless leveraging without actual moral improvement.

Perhaps by utilitarian means, one could argue that the bad government incentives pale in comparison with the good incentives that encourage people to sin less. But, this analysis fails the higher scrutiny used in most Catholic understandings of morality. In order for an act to be considered moral, it must be good in its intentions, action, and results. So even if we assume sin taxes are good in their intent and results by utilitarian reasoning, we have shown earlier that they inherently fail to be good in their action because their action is sustained in part by bad behavior, and this bad behavior cannot be said to be good.

In sum, government cannot create morality via taxation without absorbing some immorality itself, and the overall morality it may create fails to be moral under a Catholic pretext, to the extent that some might even say sin taxes are immoral.
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*We would also assume that the government knows best.

Libyan Rebels Murder Black Africans

And the US GOVERNMENT is helping the rebels. The US war effort in Libya is unconstitutional because congress has the power to declar a non-defensive war, but congress has not been consulted. Unfortunately, most congressmen are not complaining about the unconstitutional actions of Hillary Clinton, NATO, and the UN. Meanwhile, the Clinton-backed rebels are murdering black Africans. All the while Obama seems like a passive observer. http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2011/03/libyan-rebel-atrocities.html

Homosexual Movement's Vocabulary Imperialism

Many formerly straight words have been co-opted for use by the gay movement.

Words
partner, partnership, ally (at King's College), silence, gay, pride, queer, straight, orientation, closet, union.

Concepts
rainbow, equality (or equal), rights, marriage.

The rainbow has even been "enlisp-ed" into an army of words and symbols being used in the effort to normalize homosexuality. By abstracting homosexuality from its essence--a sexual attraction--and by getting people to associate it psychologically with positive things--like a rainbow--that are totally unrelated to said attraction, activists attempt to effect a positive psychological association where there was none.

According to anthropologists, there has never been a culture that has sought to verbally equivocate a man-man physical relationship with a man-woman one, until the modern "liberal" Western culture. In the past, man-man relationships were never considered for normalization or family building, and thus there is no word equivalent to "marriage" to describe them. Rather than come up with a new, appropriately different word to describe the man-man sexual relationship, activists have sought the one already in use known as marriage.

Therefore, no word developed naturally to describe homosexual relationships, and the ascription of "marriage" to them is an artificial borrowing from straight culture.

Perhaps the hope is that by calling a monogamous man-man sexual relationship 'marriage', the stubborn resistors who reject the normality of man-man sexual relationships will soon lose their nerve and acquiesce to the language. Just as in Animal Farm, the hope is that future generations will conform their beliefs to the language.

But language cannot obscure reality. The meaning of words must return to their equilibrium of accurate description.

So even if there is total victory for the homosexual movement, and every human being alive accepts the idea of man-man sexual partnership being called marriage, marriage will then be used to describe two radically different types of unions. Hence man-man relationships will always be distinguished from man-woman ones on some level.

Even today, "gay" marriage is distinguished from regular marriage.

Imperialism for naught.

Malaysia in Gag-a Malaise

Sean Yoong AP- "Broadcasters in this Muslim-majority nation have refused to play lines in the hit song that encourage public acceptance of gays, claiming Thursday they are being cautious because the government forbids offensive content. The precaution was due to government restrictions against songs that might violate "good taste or decency or (are) offensive to public feeling."

Malaysia has also put rules in place for performers, and has even banned Avril Lavigne from performing.

We say that regardless of lyrics, the music ought to be banned for its bad sound.

Socialism Begets a One World Government

Many "progress"ives say they want socialism only up to a certain point. (They usually don't bother to say where, however.) But common wisdom says that as long as the world is imperfect, which it will always be, then there will always be progressives agitating the government to solve problems or perceived problems.

Another question is whether the socialistic impulse leads invariably to a one world government.

I believe it does, because a one world government allows for more efficient redistribution of wealth, which is what socialism is all about. (Disregarding the fact that socialistic types seem most open to foreign aid.)

Consider this thought experiment:

In the county of Luzerne, in Pennsylvania, there are many elderly persons living on a fixed income, in addition to many living on disability and welfare. Average income is not high.

On the other hand, in Lancaster County PA, there's a lot of money. So socialists would jump at the chance to take money in taxes from Lancaster residents to give to poorer inhabitants of Luzerne County. This is socialism on the state level.

But what if we're considering a state like West Virginia where there isn't much money in any county? Then, socialists will lunge at the chance to take money from people living in PA via the federal income tax and to give it to inhabitants of WV.

Do you see where this is going?

Many libertarians like to quote the aphorism, especially in light of the Egypt turmoil, that "foreign aid takes money from poor people in rich countries, and gives it to rich people in poor countries." Those "rich people in poor countries" are strongmen like Mubarak. Even if aid is given directly to the poor living in (for example) Egypt, their rulers may decide to tax them that much more and thus would offset the benefit of the aid.

What would make this conundrum easier would be if there were no Mubaraks to take the money from the poor. In other words, if there were a one world government, wealth redistribution on a global level would seem more politically plausible.

To use an economics term, the "returns to scale" of socialism is world government.

Be advised that a one world government is not on the horizon. The Chinese are ultra-nationalist, and many other countries are as well. Moreover, many countries are closer to breaking up than to unifying with others.

But if a one world government ever becomes politically possible, and if that generation's progressives see an opportunity to redistribute wealth to the less fortunate, then you can bet they'll be on the forefront for bringing about a one world government.

So if socialists have an ideal political climate to work in, then socialism will beget a one world government.