President Trump

I have to admit I am a bit shocked.

As one who would have wished for someone other than Trump to oppose the lawless and radical Alinskyite Hillary Clinton, I did not believe Trump had a chance.  What does it mean?

For starters it means that Hillary really was a worse candidate than Trump.   Her baldfaced lies about just about everything, her clear corruption in using the Clinton foundation as part of a massive pay-for-play scheme, her utter incompetence on foreign policy and her reckless disregard for both the law and national security with her email server fiasco clearly had an effect.

It also means that a good chunk of the American public are sick and tired of being told that only politically correct left wing ideals can qualify as "justice" or "compassion".   I have no doubt that the race baiting of the left upsets a lot more people than the charges of racism hurled at everyone to the right of Al Sharpton.

But it means as well that both parties have lost touch with a majority of Americans.  The reason Trump was the candidate was in part because significant numbers of voters on the right simply did not want another Bush, another establishment Republican or anybody at all who was part of the system.

While that can be a good thing, it can also be a dangerous one.   Fixing the corruption, cronyism, and inertia that is Washington is necessary - but no doubt some want to burn it down altogether.

We'll see what happens.   My hope is that with Republicans controlling both houses and the presidency, at least the Supreme Court will not become a tool of the left and that some of the illegal executive actions the current president has taken can be rolled back.  I hope that the guiding principles will be the restoration of the Constitution to its rightful place and not the principles of retaliation or mere populism.

I will say with Trump there is hope for that.  With Hillary I truly believe the Republic the founders had envisioned would have been lost.   For that I am grateful, if cautious.

The Central Questions - Part 1

(This is a repost from a few years back.)

The central questions

In my 54 years on earth, I have had only two significant challenges to my faith.  It occurs to me that both of those challenges focused on the same basic questions, perhaps the central questions that all human beings have to ask.

This will sound a bit odd, but those two challenges were evolution and Calvinism. (More)

The Central Questions - Part 2

Evolution, built on a foundation of naturalism and uniformitarianism asserts that what we experience now, including corruption, suffering and death, have been the norm from the beginning of life on the planet.   Death is not an enemy, but is instead part of the engine of progress toward higher life forms. It is necessary for the weak to die so that the strong can prosper.

In it's atheist form, there is no purpose at all to this pattern.  Life arose, but it could have failed to arise.   Creatures that survive are "better"  only in the sense that they were better equipped to survive.

In it's theistic form, God may have devised a universe that made life possible and may in some hidden sense be the energy behind the laws of nature, but the "survival of the fittest" reality is nevertheless the overarching fact of existence.   Death cannot be an enemy if it is a necessary component in the development of more complex life forms.

So why do we suffer?   Because suffering and pain are evolutionary developments that aid our survival, a notion that is brutal if there is no purpose in existence and perhaps far worse if this was "God's method of creation".

In either case the traditional "free will" explanation for the origin of evil and suffering cannot be maintained.   Evil and suffering are part of the fabric of reality from the beginning and by design.