David McElroy

I might have found the person who most strongly represents the kind of thinking that leads people to support really bad government action. Cindy Vinson is a San Jose, Calif., woman who calls herself a big supporter of ObamaCare. But after she found out what it’s going to cost her money, she whined about it to a newspaper.

Although she wants other people to have health care, she found out last week that changes brought about by the law mean her policy will cost $1,800 more per year than before.

“I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Seriously. She said that. It’s not satire.

And that is the idiocy and the hypocrisy of supporters of these “social programs.” People such as Vinson are happy to vote for benefits for certain people — as long as they can demand that other people pay for their “generosity.”

This is the core moral problem with the system we have today. People can consider themselves kind-hearted and generous, but demand that “the rich” pay for what they want other people to have.

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I grew up believing that war was glorious. I read a lot of history and loved what I read. It was about strategy and bravery. It was about men taking risks to do great things for great causes.

For part of my childhood, the Vietnam war was also raging, but I was too wrapped up in my patriotic “war is glorious” narrative to look at the evidence that was becoming available. As a little boy, I cared about the United States winning that war and “stopping communism.” If some people had to die along the way, that was just a price to be paid to achieve a necessary victory.

I didn’t know anything about 9-year-old Kim Phuc Phan Thi, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me if I had. I was sure that the cause of national greatness was more important than the lives of any individuals. In 1972, Kim was a victim of a napalm attack in Vietnam by U.S.-trained and equipped South Vietnamese aircraft.

The pilot saw some people coming out of a temple and he assumed they were North Vietnamese or Viet Cong soldiers and he dropped this terrible chemical on them. Instead, he killed and maimed innocent people, including Kim. She’s the naked one in the famous photo above, running away with her family after she had stripped off her burning clothes. The use of napalm to drop on human beings was a standard operating procedure for Americans and their South Vietnamese allies.

I’ve been thinking a lot about war recently. We like to think of ourselves as living in an enlightened age, yet we still believe that it’s moral and legal for people from one country to kill masses of people in another country, even if many of those murdered people are completely innocent. That’s nothing short of barbaric.

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When I was much younger and even more foolish than I am today, I had trouble saying three simple words: “I don’t know.” Instead, I had a view about everything. And I was right about everything, of course. I was certain of it.

As the years have gone by, I find that I’m certain of fewer and fewer things. I find that there are a few root-level “first things” that I’m sure of, but there aren’t many things outside of those few principles that I can say I know with certainty.

The list of things I proclaim as “truth” shrinks all the time. I have more questions and fewer answers, partly because I’ve seen myself be wrong so many times and partly because I see that the world is far more complex than I realized even a few years ago.

So the idea of asserting so many opinions as absolute fact seems strange to me now. It feels jarring. I wonder if the certainty I expressed about so many things when I was younger was as annoying to others then as it is to me when I see it in others today.

I find that both science and Christian faith offer insights and truths to me about certain things, but scientists go wrong when they go beyond what they reasonably can know to assert things that they don’t know — and Christians go wrong when they claim certainty about things beyond what they’ve experienced as truth.

Why do people assert things as fact when they’re not in the position to know those things? I think it’s because they’re afraid of uncertainty. They don’t mean to “fill in the blanks” when they don’t know things, but they do, because they’re terrified of not knowing. Singer-songwriter Pat Terry addressed this tendency in a song called “Nothing I Say.” He wrote:

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