Fire and Knowledge

A little more than a month ago I commented on the Supreme Court’s decision to allow personal property seizures for commercial uses. Today the New York Times has an article talking more about this and some problems it poses.

It was encouraging to read about how people have responded to it, and hopefully the decision can be reversed. This is a huge issue. If the government can take away people’s property and sell it to a developer, that can easily make citizens lazy, messy, and unfruitful–not to mention the ruling tramples on the entire idea of private property.

Strangely, even the House seems to be against it.

The House voted 365 to 33 to pass a resolution condemning the decision, and proposals in both the House and the Senate would prevent the federal government from using eminent domain for private development, as well as local governments using federal money on such projects.

Unfortunately, Supreme Court rulings have no accountability and all we can hope for is a reversal of the ruling.

“This decision opens a new era when the rich and powerful can use government to seize the property of ordinary citizens for private gain,” said State Senator Tom McClintock, a Republican who proposed the amendment.

Private property allows each man to engage with the world as an earnest artist, to be a creator in his humble corner of Creation. Even small property is a complete studio for the human spirit: it needs not a whole orchard, but merely a whole garden. To labor over one’s property is to infuse things with humanness; it is to add our memories to the tangible world, like silent hanging trinkets of hopes and struggles shared, fears realized or relieved, lives lived and lives lost.

—John J. Cella III, “Technology and the Spirit of Ownership,” p. 56

Attacking popular culture, which is the underpinning of so much of our conventional wisdom, usually earns one the sobriquet of Puritan or crank. Praising popular culture, which few people can resist, can give any modern-day guru a temporary following.

—Christine Rosen, “Playgrounds of the Self,” p. 19

This seems almost unbelievable to me, but ‘tis true.  Liberty University gives the same penalty (30 Reprimands + $500 Fine + 30 hours Disciplinary Community Service + possible Administrative Withdrawal) for abortion, assault, stealing, and—get this—drinking or possessing alcoholic beverages.

It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t.  They must really think drinking or even possessing alcoholic beverages is as bad as having an abortion or sexually assaulting someone.  At the very least, they treat it like it is.  Even if you don’t agree with drinking alcohol, to put it on the same level as those other acts is ridiculous.  Do they realize most of the people in the Bible (including Jesus) would qualify for their punishment?  Students who are underage and drink should be punished (by law), but this makes no reference to age.  It applies to all students.

But if you think it is just about drinking alcohol, you would be wrong.  If you happen to even associate with those who drink The Evil Strong Drink, you get “18 Reprimands + $250 Fine + 18 hours Disciplinary Community Service.”

“For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:18-19)

So if a student goes to a bowling alley with non-Christians who drink, and then witnesses to them, he gets fined $250 and is reprimanded.

But wait!  What if a student desires to watch Jim Caviezel get his flesh torn out by a whip and nailed to a tree?  The Passion of the Christ is rated R. That will be 12 reprimands plus a $50 fine.  The same punishment, by the way, as “entering the space above ceiling tiles” or participating in an unauthorized petition or demonstration.  Oh, and viewing pornography.

[HT: Foreword]

From The New Atlantis’s Summer 2005 Notes & Briefs section:

Many trips on trains in Britain are “much slower” than the same trips in the 1980s, when the government ran the train system—and in several cases, the trips are much slower than in the era of steam locomotion. As one advocate for rail passengers told the Times of London, “Passengers are baffled why, despite new trains and advanced signaling, their journey takes longer than it used to twenty or even fifty years ago.” “On some regional routes,” the paper notes, “journeys were faster when Queen Victoria was on the throne.”

And, in another story for the “newer-isn’t-always-better” files, a number of recent experiments pitted some of the world’s fastest “texters”—those who use their mobile phones to send text messages—against veteran Morse coders, one of whom was 93 years old. The high-tech whippersnappers were beaten, badly and repeatedly. “Texting” proved to be considerably slower than the 170-year-old code of dots and dashes, even though the texters were allowed to use common slang and shorthand, such as “UR” for “you are.”

There is a new issue of The New Atlantis online. Be sure to take a look. Here are some article highlights:

• Playgrounds of the Self by Christine Rosen
• The Computerized Academy by Matthew B. Crawford
• Technology and the Spirit of Ownership by Paul J. Cella III

Personally, I print out the PDF version of longer articles to read.

Charles Colson, in a speech entitled “Can We Prevent the Abolition of Man?,” speaks to U.S. Congress Members and Staff about Brave New World, Neil Postman, technology, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, worldviews, sin, C.S. Lewis, bioethics, and more.

It is a few years old, but there does not to seem to be a date listed on when this speech was presented.

Here is a third point. You find very few people who want to eat things that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare. But perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful. I am sorry to have to go into all these details but I must. The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not….

There is nothing to be ashamed in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

—C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity (1952), pp. 97-99