Mother Teresa

As most of you have probably heard by now, there's a book coming out about how Mother Teresa struggled with her faith and even doubted the existence of God. (There were excerpts from the book in Time magazine, and an editorial about it in the NY Times.)
I don't really think this is bad. I think there is something wrong with never questioning one's faith, and that questioning often leads to doubts. Most of us live pretty sheltered lives, but if we lived at all like Mother Teresa did, in the midst of all that poverty, we'd probably doubt God too. How can there be a good, loving God who lets so many people suffer so much. Fair question.
The thing that I think is amazing about this is that she continued to love people and do what she could to help people and better their lives, even when she wasn't at all sure if God existed. I feel like most people would have a hard time sacrificing that much if they weren't sure that God existed and wanted them to be doing that. Maybe I'm wrong.

thanks for the comments

new house

So, I just moved in to a new place. It's on the college of Western Seminary in Holland Michigan. I'm pretty excited about it. It's an apartment building for Seminary students and highly functioning cognitively impaired adults (and a few Hope College students because they didn't fill it with Western students this year), and me. I'm kind of the odd one out, but I might be taking a couple of seminary classes, so then I'll fit in a little better. I really am excited about this though, hopefully some good conversations and such will come.

Life in these United States

I love having friends in other countries, because I get to read about their adventures and the things they are learning. I also get to learn from their experiences. I also like the fact that I can sit here on my computer and read the News in my inbox. It really gives me no excuse for not having some idea what's going on in the world.
I came across a story in the NY Times today that hits somewhat close to home, as I've spent a significant amount of time in Mexico, just across the border from Texas. Some of the border cities on the US are very nice, but there are many neighborhoods that don't look much different than the poor colonias on the Mexican side of the border. This story deals with those neighborhoods and the people who live there. Check it out. Please.

(If that link didn't work, copy and paste this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/us/27colonias.html?ex=1345953600&en=f932dd57a886c9a8&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

insurance

This isn't deep or thought provoking or anything, but I wanted to throw it out there. I've seen a couple of car insurance providers advertising their accident forgiveness policies...which I think is bullshit. My car insurance is high because of speeding tickets..which makes some sense, but not as much sense as raising someone's car insurance because they got in an accident...sorry, but if you get in an accident that was your fault, you should pay higher car insurance...I shouldn't be paying for your car to be fixed just because I got caught speeding.
That's all.
I need to start reading again so I have something better to post about.

oh yeah

I almost forgot. I think it very stupid that cigarette taxes go to fund education. If part of the goal of raising cigarette taxes is to get people to quit, and the taxes do their job...schools are going to be short funded. Why do they want to get people to quit? Because it's costing so much in healthcare. Why not use the cigarette taxes to fund healthcare? That makes a lot more sense. That way, if the taxes do their job, we wouldn't need as much money for healthcare.
I have similar thoughts about taxes on gasoline. If we tax gas more, the money should be used for public transportation and developing alternative fuels. This would decrease our dependence on gasoline, so that gasoline prices don't keep rising (and we take better care of the earth).
That's all

hmmm

I haven't done this for a while, and I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to write about, but I'm thinking about taxes and health care and farm subsidies, so we'll see where this goes.

The farm bill pisses me off. Am I against small farmers? Not at all. Am I against wealthy people receiving my tax dollars as subsidies because they own farm land? Very much so. It irks me that I'm paying taxes that are going to people who certainly don't need them. I wrote my senator to tell her that I wanted to see this changed about the farm bill and she didn't write me back.

I also don't like that fact that tax rates for the very wealthy keep dropping. There are too many people living in poverty in this country to let the rich keep more and more of their money. People argue that to be able to provide health care for everyone we would all have to pay a lot more taxes, but if we would just raise the tax rate on the wealthy, the government would have a lot more money to help out those who don't have much. Kudos to people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates who are more generous than most and who are using a lot of their money to help people, rather than just a small percentage.

Oh yeah, I just read that Barak Obama thinks we should intervene in Pakistan to attack the terrorists there if the Pakistani government doesn't do more about it. Not sure I like that idea.

Well, that's all for now, I'll try to make it more of a habit again.

I just started reading a book (upon my mom's request) called "Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World" so I'll probably have some interesting things to post from that soon enough.

Peace