The recently-released American Express Affluence Survey reports that 50% of Canadians earning $200 000 a year characterize themselves as "getting by" financially. This statistic is largely meaningless without knowing how the average income earner ($58 000 per household) feels about his wealth. If, say, 85% of this group said that they were just "getting by", maybe there would not be such cause for alarm. Interestingly, things are precisely the opposite. 85% of average income earners say they are living "quite comfortably". A further 10% consider themselves "well-off". That means that the rich feel they have less money than Joe Average. What accounts for this? The Canadian tax system? Hardly! The surveyors found that high income earners tend spend their money on luxuries they can't really afford. In other words, once you label yourself as "rich" you suddenly become poor. I certainly know the feeling of having $20 burning a hole in my pocket (it usually goes right through and lands somewhere next to an empty pint glass). What would happen if I had $200 000 burning a (much larger) hole in my pocket? Well, I might do something like regularly spending $100 on dinner (like 94% of high income earners). In my present situation, I don't think I've ever even been to a restaurant where I would be physically capable of consuming $100 worth of food and drinks, although I get the feeling that I would if I felt I had the money. I might even begin to believe that I had sufficient cash to buy my own happiness (like 31% of my fellow jet-setters). When Jesus said "blessed are the poor," he wasn't kidding. When I feel the sting of poverty (which is a relative term for anyone in Canada who isn't actually homeless), I think of that passage and say to myself, "yes, I am blessed because Jesus is consoling me because I'm sad and depressed that I don't have any money (or, rather enough to cover my costs... I mean enough to take a vacation... um...). No! While it is true that Christ consoles the poor, the poor are blessed primarily because POVERY IS GOOD FOR US! It prevents us from spending too much money on stuff we don't really need, which is just about everything. Ironically, it took a credit card company to remind me of this. Make of that what you will.
Psychoceramics: Proving Biblical Truth With Computers
I am not trying to be clever with the heading. The study of Psychoceramics is exactly as I indicated. A group of researchers claims to have gone through the bible finding all sorts of linguistic anomalies that are too weird to be coincidences (thereby proving the divine authourship of scripture). Allegedly, a long list of numbers divide evenly by seven. Things such as the number of words, the number of words beginning with vowels or consonants, the number of words beginning with each letter, the number of nouns etc. etc. Its one of those things that one runs into every so often. The writers are either a) lying through their teeth or b) correct. Neither seems very likely, especially considering the length of the report and the work even a charlatan would have to go through to make it. On the other hand, God usually doesn't give us mathematical surety on matters of faith... come to think of it, that would be a contradiction in terms. Oh, and if you are more convinced by this than me, you may be forced into becoming a Protestant (I'm speaking to you, our fine Catholic readers), since the entire study was based on the Protestant cannon of scripture, which contains only sixty-six books. What we need is typology, not mathematics.