Politics and Religion

                                 Poverty

        A twelve year old girl mentally defective due to being born a 
        crack baby lives in rags in the city park and defecates in the 
        bushes.  Her cocaine addicted unwed mother makes a meager living 
        as a prostitute and by begging and petty theft. 

        Adolph Hitler sees this and orders the girl killed and the 
        mother focibly sterilized and sent to a labor camp.

        Ted Kennedy sees this and raises taxes on Bill Gates to set up a 
        social agency to hire unemployed minorities to visit the mother 
        and daughter once a month to give them money and food.

        Pat Robertson sees this and clamors for a balanced budget 
        amendment, lowering Bill Gates taxes, building more prisons for 
        drug addicts, banning vagrants from cities and hiring more 
        policemen to patrol city parks.  He also asks concerned people 
        to pray for a better world and if they are bothered by poverty 
        to give money to his church to be used to build orphanages 
        outside town.

        A social scientist sees this and applies for a grant to do a 
        statistical analysis to find out how many people live in this 
        condition and run a correlation analysis between poverty and 
        crime. 

        I see this and make a donation to Zero Population Growth to 
        provide birth control information and services.  I also make a 
        donation to the Nature Conservancy to buy unique natural areas 
        to protect them from human encroachment.  Then I petition school 
        officals to hire more competent better supervised teachers and 
        adjust the curriculum to increase emphasis on drug awareness, 
        family life skills, social studies, and job skills.  I suggest 
        that this can be financed by building one less jet fighter and 
        raising Bill Gates taxes a little to reduce the federal debt.

        What would be the net long term effect of each policy?
        Is net long term effect more significant than short term 
        effects?


                                     Rainbow

        After a shower there is a rainbow over the mountain.

        A scientist sees this and remarks that, due to the prism effect 
        of sunlight shining through raindrops, light is refracted into a 
        spectrum of its component colors.

        Pat Robertson sees this and says that this is proof of the glory 
        of God and of his covenant due to his benevolent mercy to 
        forgive human sin.

        I see this and say nothing feeling an inner satisfaction that I 
        can be one with a complex system of natural law that can contain 
        both me and the beauty of the universe.