Taxing

A person attempting to read the entire U.S. Tax Code faces a daunting task.

Much more daunting than attempting to read the entirety of the Christian Scripture, for instance.

Admittedly, most citizens of the U.S. are in a category which allows the taxpayer to read the instructions for Form 1040, followed by the instructions for Schedule A and a handful of related documents...or to trust the computer wizards who created TurboTax.

Still, there can be surprises for people who aren't well-versed in the tax code.

Gifts, inheritance, basis points, self-employment taxes, married-filing-separately or married-filing-jointly, ...and the tax-that-was-not-called-a-tax for people who fail to purchase health insurance.

It's a mess.

I'll keep on reading the Bible. And I'll try to keep an eye on the tax code.

But I'll note that it's very hard for mis-interpretation of the Bible to lead to jail terms and hefty fines.

And that if I get bad advice from a tax preparer or an employee of the Internal Revenue Service's help-desk, I am considered at fault.

Hard to explain that one

As seen on "Survive the Streets" on Facebook:

I know that by now all of you have heard about the 18-month old girl that was rescued from an overturned vehicle after fourteen hours in freezing temps. Now, all four officers involved with the discovery have gone on record saying they heard a woman softly calling for help. The child was unconscious and the child's mother had already passed. There was no one nearby.

The story has been reported in many places. (Link to a local news story.)

This is one of those stories that defy explanation. Several different people heard a call for help, but the stricken infant did not make the call. And the deceased adult in the car didn't cry out.

What explanation should be preferred?

If a spontaneous mass hallucination led to a rescued child, is that not a miracle?

If a Divinely-ordained voice mimicked the sound of a woman in need of help, is that not a miracle?

For some reason, I'm reminded of a quote from Hamlet. "There are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies."

Daylight Savings

A couple days late, maybe... but still worth a few words.

The practice of artifically moving the "Local Time" backwards or forwards is odd.

I had no idea of the reason, until I found a chart like this one (sourced from here).

Locally, under Daylight Savings, sunrise comes between 0530 and 0600 in June. Sunset comes between 2130 and 2200. (That 9:30 PM and 10:00 PM to people who don't use 24-hour clocks.)

Without Daylight Savings, sunrise would come before 0500 in the morning in June!

I think that the American culture has decided that it is better to tinker with clocks so that sunrise is after 0500 in the morning. Even if the price is long, late summer evenings in June. And if there is a lot of hassle and dislocation during one week of Spring and one week of Fall.

Winter not yet gone

A few days ago, I was expecting warmer weather.

For the first week of March, the local area has gotten a mix of snow and freezing rain, and lots of cold. The freezing rain left an beautifully-smooth layer of ice on top of the snow.

The weather predictions say that thawing is coming this weekend. We'll see what happens.

Still winter?

One month ago, while traveling to a party involving some sort of football-game championship, I saw a snowmobile. On 8 Mile road. (I could say of movie fame...but it wasn't the section of 8 Mile that separates Detroit from northern suburbs. I was further west, where the road separates Wayne County suburbs from Oakland County suburbs.)

It was a very snowy day, and the Monday that followed was peppered with school closures due to snow.

About a week after that, a temporary warm spell had appeared. While most of the snow was present, it was obviously melting. I even saw a motorcycle on the road one afternoon.

Then the weather snapped back to cold. And remained cold. To produce an average-temperature-for-February lower than most years since the 1880s.

Almost as if the weather were watching the calendar, things began warming up for the first day of March.

But it still looks like winter outside. And the snow will likely remain on the ground until late March.

What does it mean to be Christian?

Left elsewhere, while discussing the meaning of the label "Christian":

About the distinction between "Christian is someone who is mostly a good person" and "Christian is someone who believes the Creed, and has repented and received God's grace.":  I feel like I've met this discussion before.

In Colonial America, during the lead-up to the First Great Awakening, many churches were struggling about how to define membership.

Most churches had charters which required prospective members to profess some sort of personal experience in receiving God's grace. A "born-again experience". Many of the original settlers had such a story.

However, fewer of the grand-children and great-grand-children of the original settlers had such a story. But they wanted church membership. 

A compromise was reached: some sort of half-way covenant. People who didn't live "notorious lifestyles" could become partial members of the church, even if they had no personal experience of repentance and receiving God's grace.

The Great Awakening ended this practice. Mostly because of the large number of people who repented of sinful attitudes, received God's grace, and gave glad testimony about entering into a new relationship with Jesus.

Tellingly, the mark of a Christian became "professes repentance, shows evidence of changed life and receiving God's grace". Instead of "doesn't live a lifestyle that is too far from our social norms."

(I may be over-simplifying the story...the history of the transition from fervent Puritan settlers to the half-way-covenant, and then to the Great Awakening, is a complex one.)

I'm not much of a preacher, but I'm becoming more and more a student of living out the Christian life. And I'm surprised at how little most Americans know about things like the Great Awakening.

The Great Awakening was part of a tumult of cultural changes. (Which may have sowed the seeds that sprouted, a generation later, into the American Revolution.) One of those changes was a re-awakening of the understanding that social respectability is not the key to being right with God.

This emphasis has been lost, and re-awakened, and lost again, several times in American history. The religiosity of the Second Great Awakening also heralded great social change. (Among those changes: a Temperance movement and an Abolition movement.)

Other, lesser awakenings of religious fervor have come in many regions of the nation. When social acceptability meant acceptance of slavery, a growth in religious fervor pushed against that.

When social acceptability meant arguing in favor of no-fault divorce, or relaxing the boundaries of socially-accceptable sexual behavior, religious fervor pushed against that also.

Not all such religious movements have been cultural winners in America. Nor did every part of American history see fervor like the original Great Awakening.

It is worth remembering that these things have happened before, even if it leads me to lament the confusion between socially-acceptable behavior and the life that God approves of.

The past is a foreign country

While reading online over the weekend, I saw this post come up at the TOFSpot.

It's part of a series of articles on Hypatia, philosopher and social leader of Alexandria during the 4th Century.

Reading the careful review of original sources, and the historical narrative, reminded me yet again: the past is a foreign country.

Especially the past of Egypt, during late-Roman times.

The story of Hypatia is strange an interesting.

It is also a story that seems ripe to be embellished into an anti-Christian story. (Or anti-Catholic story, for those who don't recall that Alexandria was part of the Orthodox, and later Coptic, branches of Christianity.)

Mike Flynn does his best to demolish the simplistic, anti-Christian story about Hypatia. It's an interesting story, even for those people who are only dimly aware of Hypatia, or of the history of Eastern Christianity.