Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Do unemployment benefits encourage people to avoid working?

9 Comments

This is from the radically-leftist New York Times. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Before this recession, most economists probably thought that some amount of unemployment benefits were just and compassionate, and offered a sense of security even to people who were lucky enough to retain their jobs, despite the fact that the program would raise unemployment rates and reduce both employment and economic output.

In other words, unemployment benefits shrink the economy to some degree, but shrinking the economy a bit may be a price worth paying.

Unemployment benefits were thought to reduce employment and output because, by definition, working people were ineligible for the benefits. In particular, an unemployed person who finds and starts a new job, or returns to working at his previous job, is supposed to give up his unemployment benefits. Economists had found that a large fraction of unemployed people delay going back to work solely because the unemployment insurance program was paying them for not working.

Fewer people working means a lower employment rate, and less output because unemployed people are not yet contributing to production.

The recession has seen a number of economists ignore prior findings on unemployment insurance, at least as long as this recession continues. For example, in evaluating the stimulus law economists at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office assumed that the law would raise gross domestic product, and took no account of the fact that the unemployment insurance and other provisions of the stimulus law give people incentives to work less.

Here’s a new study explaining how the “generosity” of the radical left actually encourages people to avoid working, and to remain dependent on the government for their income.

A study published by two labor economists, Stepan Jurajda and Frederick J. Tannery, looked at employment histories for unemployment insurance recipients in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s. Unemployment rates got quite high in Pittsburgh in those days, reaching 16 percent at one point, and staying over 10 percent for two and a half years.

The chart below summarizes their findings for Pittsburgh.

The chart displays the fraction of persons (in Pittsburgh) receiving unemployment benefits who began working again, as a function of the number of weeks until their unemployment benefits were scheduled to be exhausted. For example, a “hazard” value of “0.04″ for week “-14″ means that, among unemployed persons with 14 weeks remaining until their benefit exhaustion date, 4 percent of them either began working a new job or returned to their previous job.

The chart:

Unemployment offers a disincentive to find work
Unemployment offers a disincentive to find work

That chart basically shows the breaking down of the American working spirit by the radical left – making large segments of the American population dependent on government. This isn’t good for the producers, and it isn’t good for unemployed people to be out of work by choice. (Although to be sure, many many unemployed people are not unemployed by choice).

Commentary

Youth pastor Tory Ninja writes about the importance of parents

12 Comments

This was a comment to one of the posts on tithing and the church. I had argued that pastors should only be paid when they produce.

Tory Ninja wrote this:

I’m a youth and children pastor. I include “apologetic” minded material in everything I do. Even when the topic isn’t apologetic I bring out some apologetics (for example, if I am teaching Christ dying for our sins, I spend some time talking about objections to that idea). We are currently going through the Hitchens/Wilson debate documentary.

Sometimes we have good dialogs. We even go out into the community sometimes and do social justice. But the sad thing is is the Christian faith isn’t taking hold. As soon as they graduate, they’re gone. No one reads their Bible. People don’t remember what was talked about 5 hours after class, even if they participated! People are texting all the time, playing games on their phones/ipods, and just aren’t very engaged. Parents buy them the most messed up video games, let them watch the most messed up movies uncritically, and pay for their life sucking WoW [World of Warcraft] accounts. Last week a 9 year old boy, the son of an elder, told me his favourite type of movies were horror movies and he loved Saw.

To be honest, I feel kind of like a failure. I feel a little guilty taking money from the church. I’m giving it my all and trusting the Lord, and that’s what keeps me going, but the youth and children of today just have so many distractions. Also, not to mention the fact that parents do almost nothing to disciple their kids. I can’t do everything!

Anyway, I agree with you. A pastor shouldn’t demand his wages. But the church shouldn’t put him into indentured servanthood. I think a church should pay a pastor enough for him to do his ministry properly without having to worry about putting food on the table and clothes on his children. I’m happy that the church treats me well.

This comment was all over the place. I guess I just wanted to say that the future doesn’t look bright.

I think his point that parents have to work together with the pastors is a good one.

UPDATE: More from Tory Ninja. And I changed the title to make more sense! My fault.

So I thought I would add some more context to this comment.

For starters, I am in Canada. I’m not sure how different the church culture is from Canada to the United State so everything I say may not be representative of what you experience in the States. I am again a little over the place. Also, I apologize if the tone seems negative. There are of course positives in today’s youth and children ministry but that is not the topic of this comment.

Their are two major things that I have noticed a change in over the ten years I have been doing youth ministry. The first is that everyone is connected. When I started doing youth ministry texting wasn’t quite in yet. But now it is like there is a symbiotic relationship between teens and their texting. I have contemplated doing a no texting and gaming policy but I hesitate as it is such big part of their life and also because sometimes the texts are important and I rather them take a text then a phone call. Also, many people have their Bibles on their phones now. I know during sermons I will often check the greek on my iPhone, look up commentaries, and various other things based on what the pastor is preaching. So I know they’re legitimate ways for people to be using their phones.

Usually though, when I see someone doing something on their phone, that is when I will ask them a question about what is being taught at the moment. This strategy has kept texting down to a certain degree since I started doing it but it is still there.

Also, as soon as I am done teaching, or their is a break in teaching, bang! Out comes the video games. PSP, DS, iTouch/iPhone. Of course, these are all jail broken or hacked so they all have 100s of illegal games on them.

No one is ever where they are. They always need to be connected elsewhere. The sad part is is that when they aren’t at church they are never at church if you know what I mean.

The second thing is that parents are even less engaged with their children now then they were ten years ago. The reason for this is technology. Parents haven’t kept up. Kids get away with so much stuff because they know their parents don’t have an inkling of how to keep tabs on them. Even if you put draconian measures on them they still find a way to outsmart the parents. For example, Facebook. I am still surprised at what youth and my youth leaders will put on their Facebook pages. It seems like they forget that I can see them. Even the people who seem most devout and engaged at church will have Facebook profiles of nearly naked women, constant swearing, positions on issues that are noticeably non-Christian, etc. They will create a separate Facebook page for their families and parents and have one for their friends. Parents often aren’t engaged in their children’s life enough to find these “secret” pages.

Youth are also up late at night playing video games, talking online, or texting. Some parents are able to stop these things by removing the computer and cell phones from the room, but not all. One reason youth are barely engaged in church is because they are up till 2-3 on a Saturday night playing Starcraft 2 or Call of Duty.

Now I realize that most of these problems existed before technology. I stayed up late playing games and talking on the phone when I was in high school. Especially Saturday night. But it was more challenging and less “church” people did it. We also had a more reasonable schedule during the week and thus weren’t as dead tired on Sunday. But social media type technology has totally changed the game.

Christianity has always been on the cutting edge of technology and social movement. The codex, equal rights, social justice, the printing press, music, etc. But we have totally lost that edge in this new age. It’s been on the decline for the last century but we have totally lost it now. The way we promote issues aren’t engaging. I’m not talking about numbers. It’s easy to get numbers to a certain degree. Bring live camels with tigers jumping through flaming hoops to your Christmas pageant and you’re likely to get numbers. I’m talking about creating disciples of Jesus Christ that are engaged and want to grow Christ’s kingdom. We just don’t know how to do that yet.

We even do apologetics wrong. I’ve shown kids William Lane Craig debates and they almost always think he loses. They usually think he had better arguments, but they always find what the non-Christian says to be more convincing. Non-Christians know how to engage the audience with the issues that are close to them. While the Kalam cosmological argument may be great, we need to figure out how to present it in a way that engages the heart.

Youth will even acknowledge that what I say or the Bible says is right but they just don’t care. They don’t want to follow it. Not that they don’t want to be Christians or not that they won’t tell others they are Christians, but rather on issues they disagree with they will just not follow it. Oh yes pastor, I know getting totally wasted is wrong but I just don’t think you understand my context. Oh yes pastor, I know piracy is wrong, but I just don’t care.

Anyway, I apologize if this seems overtly negative. Also, not every single youth is like this. There are good apples. There are parents who are discipling their kids. I’m also not saying that I am free from blame here. As a pastor I have a responsibility to disciple those entrusted to me and I have definitely made mistakes in this process. I’m not saying this to shift blame off of me. I’m saying these have been my observations over ten years.

The earliest Christians knew how to engage their culture. No one was really lukewarm about the Christians. Strong emotions, either pro or con, were caused by these Christians. They knew how fight the good fight. I think we are losing that fire. I think apologetics is key, but I think we need a new way of framing the material. What the way is however, I’m not so sure. Maybe someone here can paint some insight or point me to people/books who do!

If anyone else has experiences like this, send them to me. But you have to have a good alias like “Tory Ninja” or “Wintery Knight” or I can’t print it. Kidding.

Commentary

Paul Copan interviewed on the hard passages of the Old Testament

2 Comments

How would you respond to all of the troubling stories in the Old Testament, (conquest, slavery, etc.), and the characterizations of God as jealous and angry and vengeful? Paul Copan has written a new book on those topics and more.

From the Evangelical Philosophical Society blog. (H/T Mary)

What surprising thing did he learn while researching the book?

Surprising—and yet not surprising—is the fact that the more deeply I dug into understanding the ancient Near East, the more the biblical text made sense and the more favorable it looked in comparison to other relevant texts in the ancient Near East.  For example, the strong bravado and exaggeration typical of ancient Near East war texts (“leaving alive nothing that breathed”) was used even when lots of the enemy were left standing and breathing!  What’s more, Israel’s warfare—directed at non-combatants in citadels or fortresses (“cities”)—is tame in comparison to other ancient Near Eastern accounts of, say, the Assyrians.
As far as servitude (“slavery”) goes, this was voluntary and contractual rather than forced (unless Israel was dealing with, say, hostile foreign POWs who might be pressed into service to cut wood and carry water).  Yet Israel’s laws prohibited (a) kidnapping, (b) returning runaway (foreign) slaves to their masters, and (c) injuring servants.  If these three Mosaic regulations were observed during by Western colonial powers, slavery would not have emerged and the nineteenth-century history of the United States would have looked much different.

What kinds of questions will people who read the book be able to answer?

While I can’t cover all the territory I would like in this book, I try to address the range of topics that are most pressing and most frequently raised by the critics.  Part I deals with the phenomenon of the New Atheists and their arguments—and their case against the “Old Testament God.”  In fact, as you can see in the table of contents below, I use their quotations as my chapter headings!  In Part II, I deal with issues related to the nature of God: Is God narcissistic?  Why should God get jealous?  How could God command Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?

Part III looks at life in the ancient Near East and how Israel’s laws look in comparison to those of other ancient Near Eastern cultures.  I maintain, first, that while many of Israel’s laws are not ideal (human hard-heartedness is part of the problem, as Matthew 19:8 indicates), they are generally a significant humanizing improvement over other ancient Near Eastern cultures.  God meets his people where they are—with their embedded, fallen moral and social patterns—but he challenges them to greater moral and spiritual heights.  Then I go on to address topics like Israel’s kosher and purity laws, its civil laws and punishments, the treatment of women in Israel, slavery (or better “servitude”) in Israel (and I extend the discussion to include the New Testament), then finally the question of Canaanite “genocide” (which it most certainly is not!) and of whether “religion” produces violence.

In Part IV, I argue that the biblical God serves as the basis for objective moral values and that atheists borrow the metaphysical grounding for human dignity and rights from a theistic worldview in which God makes human beings in his image. Finally, I refer to the role of Jesus Christ as the fulfiller of the Old Testament, who illuminates the Old Testament and puts it into proper perspective.  Moreover, his followers, when living consistently with his teachings, have actually made a remarkable moral impact on the world which scholars in both the East and the West, both Christian and non-Christian, acknowledge.

If some of you are following my debates on Facebook, then you know that I am using this argument against one of the atheists I am currently debating on the topic of spanking. Never, ever let an atheist get away with making moral statements. Moral statements are meaningless in an atheistic universe.

Paul Copan’s new book might be worth picking up because I don’t have anything on that topic. Not many people ask me questions like that, but maybe that’s God’s grace since I would not be able to answer them well anyway. Usually when I read something, he sometimes gives me that question from someone the very same week. It’s very interesting when this happens. But that’s what I mean when I say relationship with God. I mean we work together.

By the way, if you are looking for some good apologetics books for Christmas, take a look at this list at Apologetics 315.