People really do miss the fact it was originally a speration of federal religion from state churches or the lack thereof
That’s what the 1st Amendment protected… which means post due process clause today, states may fund schools of religious education in an equitable manner… what outrage that would cause… but let each state decide it for themself… it’s constitutional
Even so, ‘an equitable manner’ is a bit different than the institution of a ‘state church.’
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Climbing South Sister in Oregon came to mind; all the way up the trail to base camp we got water coming off the glaciers. Then at the top there was Teardrop Pool at the lowest point in the summit glacier, where it was practically a ritual: if you made it to the top, you drank from Teardrop.
Then one time up there a young guy came to the ‘sharp’ end of the Pool, peeled down, dove in and swam to the other end and back. Someone of course had to comment that he just left sweat in the drinking water. The punch line was that there was a ranger there who’d taken some samples just before the guy dove in, and he told us there were other things to worry about besides some swimmer’s sweat: the summit glacier collected residues of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, hormones, disinfectants, and more from all the agricultural areas nearby and to the west, and all that was spread across the surface – until mid-spring when the temperatures rose enough that the top layer started to melt, and all of that collected chemical stuff flowed with the meltwater . . . and all ended up nicely concentrated in Teardrop Pool. He ended up with the admonishment that no one should drink from Teardrop any longer without filtering.
That took away part of the magic of reaching the top. I’ve climbed it twice since, once because my sister organized the trip and they wanted another adult (one fit enough to be able to run all the way back down in case of emergency), the other because two university friends heard me talk about climbing South Sister and came to me and said, “Take us!”
I don’t suppose any water from a mountain stream is safe these days, except for the springs that come out of some lava fields where the water arrived as rain centuries ago and has been filtering all the way through the igneous rock since then – it just comes out laden with minerals leeched from the lava rock, which are actually either neutral or healthy for humans.
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Yeah, I guess! It’s still a nice metaphor. (I’ve done enough hiking in RMNP to know to be cautious about giardia! I was thinking about that when I posted above. 
)
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If a private Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc. school’s educational values are recognized by state and federal laws, then there is nothing unconstitutional about the state providing tax money
Did you notice how the 1st Amendment originally protected state religions from the federal government?
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Interesting episode. Thanks.
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Mark, I almost missed this. I’m glad I didn’t. Thank you.
“Cottonwoods and clouds.” Yes. Our ability to perceive beauty in ways that have nothing to do with maintaining the gene pool seems an incredible gift to me.
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Here’s a lovely word: Erholung (noun, fem. German) = healing (intransitive).
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And hi @Randy . Yes, I really get a kick out of pithy expressions in other languages. Here’s a favourite in Norwegian: " Å tisse i buksene for å holde varmen" meaning “To pee in your pants to keep warm”, or to act in a way that brings short-term benefits but ultimately does more harm than good.
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Sounds like a way of warning against expedient indulgences for a narrowly considered benefit with unpleasant side effects. Wet and cold is worse off than before.
Oops as you already broke it down more clearly. Please excuse my riffing on the expression itself. Just my own processing.
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- Not all quotes come from reading what gives us pause to reflect.
- From the TV series, Annika. Season 1, Episode 4,
- “I believe that engineers have identified six different types of bridges, There’s a beam bridge, which is, well, It’s just a slab of concrete or even a log across the stream. There’s an arch bridge, like the Rialto in Venice. It’s very nice. There’s a suspension bridge, like the Golden Gate in San Francisco. There’s three other type of bridge. What they all have in common, though, is that their purpose is to cross a divide of some sort. And on the whole, they can be very successful, but that’s assuming that the two sides are happy about being connected. 'Cause sometimes all you do is let the enemy across.”
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For those curious about the bridge types:
Though this site has another one, making seven:
Of course these can be mixed; the Brooklyn Bridge is two types together.
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NT Wright in Gifford Lecture #4, referring to apocalytic literature (and quoting an old friend of his, John Bartman) …
When we’re told the sun and the moon will be darkened and the stars will be falling from heaven, we should know - as a matter of literary genre - that the next line will not be, ‘the rest of the country will have scattered showers and sunny intervals.’
Those sorts of things refer to very real political and historical events like the fall of Babylon.
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Another Wright quote from the same lecture with regard to the often underacknowledged ‘already present’ status of God’s kingdom that is actually put forward by all four gospels, and the quite present-world groundedness of Jewish eschatology that the early Christians inherit … He remarks that this is why …
…The second temple Jewish worldview has as its most classic characteristic: hope
The early Christian worldview has as its classic characteristic: joy.
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From “About this Book,” The Dictionary of Obscure Emotions
Of course, we don’t usually question why a language has words for some things and not others. We don’t really imagine we have much choice in the matter, because the words we use to build our lives were mostly handed to us in the crib or picked up on the playground. They function as a kind of psychological programming that helps shape our relationships, our memory, even our perception of reality. As Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
But therein lies a problem. Language is so fundamental to our perception, we’re unable to perceive the flaws built into language itself. It would be difficult to tell, for example, if our vocabulary had fallen badly out of date, and no longer described the world in which we live. We would feel only a strange hollowness in our conversations, never really sure if we’re being understood.
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