I suppose what we (and the Catholic Church) are left with, then, is the "watchmaker theory" of late eighteenth-century European deism, i.e., the theory that God laid out the rules and structures of existence at the beginning of time, then started the universe running and stood back to watch it unfold.  Such a theory is friendly enough to science, insofar as it encourages humans to investigate the nature of the laws that govern the universe, but I suspect that most fundies would find it abhorrent.  After all, its logical implication is that the best way to understand the mind of God is to study the world, not the Word.

Posted at July 13, 2005 9:54 AM in response to Missing Link

Here's the thing about twenty-somethings:  we don't know what we want.  Lots of us are working jobs we hate in expensive cities, trying to pay off student loans as we watch home prices grow steadily further out of our reach.  A lot of us never really chose the lives we've fallen into; we ended up here because the circumstances of our growing-up made us painfully risk-averse.  Our educational years, bookended by the Bush I recession and the dot-com bust, prepared us to be flexible professionals with generically marketable skills, but were so time-consuming and expensive that we haven't had the chance to figure out what would make us happy.

Now we can't leave our jobs because we need every penny we can earn to recoup our educational investment while retaining health insurance and paying the rent.  Meanwhile, our hours are so long that we don't have the time to go out and have experiences that might help us figure out what makes us happy.  Our problem is that our lives are expensive to us but cheap to everybody else.  Maybe this is always the lot of the twenty-something, but today it definitely feels like while we were working hard in school like our elders told us to, they were out spending our inheritance, and now they expect us to earn it back.

Education costs too much, the income gap is too wide, and cost of living is too high.  We're running to stand still, and we can't even figure out where we're going.  We are a generation in fear for our standard of living, and those of us on the high end of our twenties are worried for the life we'll be able to provide our kids.  We cannot afford to be bold or daring, and we don't have the luxury of taking up causes other than our own.  Make our lives measurably more secure, give us the mobility to discover who we are, and you'll have our votes for the rest of our lives.

Posted at June 30, 2005 3:52 PM in response to Progressives and Twenty-Somethings