[Grovenet] Genesis 4:9

[Gary Duncan-Gates]

Walt,

Do you get paid by the word?  You are right about political parties; they intentionally oversimplify the issues and in so doing, obfuscate them.  It is a shame we all can't just talk to one another as individuals without the labels.

However, you also said,

Is it best to take care of oneself? Of course it is, particularly 
when the opportunities exist to do so. Yet, if I got mooshed by a 
truck tomorrow, all my opportunities vanished and I had to spend the 
rest of my life as a jigsaw puzzle with a lot of the pieces missing, 
I know I'd rather have a "Liberal" administration in power, which 
mandated decent care for the disabled and the terminally strange, 
than a "Conservative" administration which operated on the assumption 
that nobody was obligated to take care of anybody, particularly not 
through (shudder) TAXES.

TAXES, by definition, come from your fellow citizens and the economy that sustains us all.  To take more than is absolutely necessary because you are too cavalier to get your own insurance is offensive.  To suggest that there is no alternative in our society than to live on the governmentally mandated largesse of others is, to say the least, disingenuous.

It is a nasty, demanding world out there.  We have enough to worry about taking care of ourselves, without having to fund other people's follies.

Gary


----- Original Message ----
From: Walt Wentz <waltw at teleport.com>
To: Forest Grove local interests list <grovenet at rdrop.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 6, 2008 11:07:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Grovenet] Genesis 4:9

Carol:
Actually, we'd have to go back to the Aramaic or Hebrew (or 
Babylonian or Akkadian, or wherever the Hebrews got this story from) 
to know the sense of the work "keeper" in this case. I'd always 
assumed it to mean "custodian or caretaker" in this connection, 
rather than "guard or jailor," which is another sense of the word in 
the English of King James' day.