Yogi Berra and his sayings

Yogi Berra is a well-known American baseball player for the Yankees, but he is just as well known for his off-the-field comments that make people scratch their heads. I read an article on him and collected some of his sayings, which I wanted to share with you here.

1. After visiting the Louvre and being asked whether he liked the paintings there, Berra said, "Yeah, if you like paintings."

2. Another time, after attending a performance of an opera in Milan, he said, "It was pretty good. Even the music was nice."

3. After someone mentioned to him that a Jewish man had been elected mayor in Dublin, he supposedly said, "Yeah. Only in America can a thing like this happen."

4. When he saw the late Steve McQueen in a movie on television, Yogi said, "He must've made that before he died."

5. "You got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

6. "Slump? I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting."

7. "I'd be pretty dumb if all of a sudden I started being something I'm not."

8. When he was asked what made a good manager for a baseball team, Yogi said, "A good ballclub."

9. When someone asked him what time it was, he said, "You mean right now?"

10. He once had this advice for a young hitter who had adopted a well-known ballplayer's batting stance but still wasn't hitting: "If you can't imitate him, don't copy him."

11. Yogi once went to a reception at the home of the New York City mayor. It was a hot day, everybody was sweating, and Yogi strolled in late wearing a light-colored suit. The mayor's wife saw Yogi and said, "You certainly look cool." He replied, "Thanks. You don't look so hot yourself."

12. One night, Yogi was honored with his own Yogi Berra Night at the ballpark. He said, "I want to thank all those who made this night necessary."

There are a lot more of these, but I'll save some for a future blog. Enjoy these for a while.

What about those federal loans for college students?

I enjoy reading Imprimis, a small monthly publication from Hillsdale College. The price is right (it's free), plus it has interesting articles. One that especially got my attention because I teach at a local college had to do with federal student aid and its unintended consequences.

The author made a bold statement at the beginning. He claimed federal student financial assistance programs are "costly, inefficient, byzantine, and fail to serve their desired objectives. "

He takes on opponents who argue that these programs allow more young people a higher education, which, in turn, has positive spillover effects for the country. He says these effects are very difficult to measure. In fact, there may be more negative spillover effects. For example, he focuses on spending by state governments on higher education compared with their rate of economic growth. The relationship between education spending and economic growth is negative or, at best, non-existent.

A second argument given for these programs says that higher education promotes equal economic opportunity, a way to achieve the American dream. But he notes that over the last four decades, a period in which the proportion of adults with four-year college degrees tripled, income equality has declined. So, higher education today does not promote income equality.

But there is a third argument for these loans – private markets for loans to college students are defective, so students need federal loan programs. He believes that if financial institutions can lend to college students on credit cards and make car loans to college students in large numbers (and they do these things), there's no reason why they couldn't also make student educational loans.

There is much more to the article, but I will stop here to allow people to digest this information first. More to follow in the next blog. In the meantime, consider subscribing to Imprimis. Just go to hillsdale.edu.

On the Resurrection of Jesus

I'm on a kick of finding interesting quotations. Here goes another batch on the resurrection of Jesus. Some good things . . .

Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won't stay there.  - Clarence W. Hall

In truth, faith needs apologetics. It needs it to answer both the negative arguments of the resurrection and to construct positive arguments in favor of it. Apologetics will not create faith, but perhaps, for some, it will pave the way for it or make it possible. What is destructive of genuine Christian faith, in my opinion, is not apologetics, but unfounded beliefs, unjustified commitments. Unsound arguments are irrational leaps of faith. It is the aim of apologetics to prevent Christian faith from amounting to anything like that. - Stephen T. Davis

I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible. – Charles Colson

The Gospels were written in such temporal and geographical proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate events. Anyone who cared to could have checked out the accuracy of what they reported. The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they proclaimed was true, for they could never have proclaimed the resurrection under such circumstances had it not occurred. - William Lane Craig

The truth of the resurrection gives life to every other area of gospel truth. The resurrection is the pivot on which all of Christianity turns and without which none of the other truths would much matter. Without the resurrection, Christianity would be so much wishful thinking, taking its place alongside all other human philosophy and religious speculation. - John MacArthur

It will not do … to say that Jesus’ disciples were so stunned and shocked by his death, so unable to come to terms with it, that they projected their shattered hopes onto the screen of fantasy and invented the idea of Jesus’ ‘resurrection’ as a way of coping with a cruelly broken dream. That has an initial apparent psychological plausibility, but it won’t work as serious first-century history.

We know of lots of other messianic and similar movements in the Jewish world roughly contemporary with Jesus. In many cases the leader died a violent death at the hands of the authorities. In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. ‘Resurrection’ was not a private event. It involved human bodies. There would have to be an empty tomb somewhere.

A Jewish revolutionary whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest himself, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. We have evidence of people doing both.

Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was. —N.T. Wright (from Who Was Jesus?)

Any position in which claims about Jesus or the resurrection are removed from the realm of historical reality and placed in a subjective realm of personal belief or some realm that is immune to human scrutiny does Jesus and the resurrection no service and no justice. It is a ploy of desperation to suggest that the Christian faith would be little affected if Jesus was not actually raised from the dead in space and time. - Ben Witherington III

Let us ban together to invent all the miracles and resurrection appearances which we never saw and le us carry the sham even to death! Why not die for nothing? Why dislike torture and whipping inflicted for no good reason? Let us go out to all nations and overthrow their institutions and denounce their gods! And even if we don’t convince anybody, at least we’ll have the satisfaction of drawing down on ourselves the punishment for out own deceit. – Eusebius

Either the men of Galilee were men of superlative wisdom, and extensive knowledge and experience, and of deeper skill in the arts of deception than any and all others, before them or after them, or they have truly stated astonishing things which they saw and heard. - Simon Greenleaf

It is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning. ― Thomas Merton

The evidence for our Lord’s life and death and resurrection may be, and often has been, shown to be satisfactory; it is good according to the common rules for distinguishing good evidence from bad. Thousands and tens of thousands of persons have gone through it piece by piece as carefully as every judge summing upon a most important case. I have myself done it many times over, not to persuade others but to satisfy myself. I have been used for many years to study the histories of other times and to examine and weigh the evidence of those who have written about them, and I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort, to the understanding of a fair inquirer, than the great sign which God hath given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead. - Thomas Arnold

I went to a psychologist friend and said if 500 people claimed to see Jesus after he died, it was just a hallucination. He said hallucinations are an individual event. If 500 people have the same hallucination, that's a bigger miracle than the resurrection. - Lee Strobel

Last comments from Dennis Prager

I have been putting comments here from Dennis Prager's book Still the Best Hope. Here's the last section of quotations:

1. Americans who believe in American exceptionalism do not have a high moral regard for the United Nations, do not trust the World Court more than American institutions, regard Amnesty International as a morally confused left-wing organization, recognize the biases of the world's news media, do not share Hollywood's values, and regard "world opinion" as morally useless.

2. If "good" means more or less perfect or flawless, America's not good. But America is good in the three ways the word matters: in comparison with other countries, especially historically powerful ones; in all the good it has done for the great majority of those were born in or came to America; and with regard to all the good it has done, at tremendous cost, for vast numbers of people in other countries.

3. If there was no America, Islamists would take over many Muslim-majority countries, free Taiwan would be overrun by the communist regime in China, Iran and other Islamic states would seek to annihilate free Israel, tyrants throughout Africa would be emboldened, the United Nations would become even more so than today a tool of anti-democratic regimes, the non-democratic regime ruling Russia would increasingly suppress liberty in Russia, and Latin American countries struggling to create democratic institutions would be subverted by anti-democratic regimes.

I have used several blogs to cover this important book. But I can't do justice to it in the brief quotations I have posted here. You owe it to yourself to take a look at the book.