Shadowlands: Why Does God Allow Pain and Suffering?‎ Essay -- God, Tra

If God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer? The central question in Shadowlands challenges traditional religious and moral conventions. It is a question asked by many, with few satisfactory answers. Before attempting to answer the question, and explore its relationship to Shadowlands, let us first define the question, so its implications may be more clearly understood. At the heart of the question is a doubt in the goodness of God, "If God loves us". From the beginning it is clear that God is being judged and criticized by the question. Then the second phrase follows"Why does He allow us to suffer?". The assumption made in the second phrase is that God has enough control over the world to prevent suffering. If He can prevent suffering, and He really loves us, then why shouldn' t He excercise that control, and prevent needless suffering? Not preventing suffering is the same as actively inflicting it. Humans generally believe that if they love another person, they should prevent their loved ones from suffering. Why shouldn't God be the same? If a human causes suffering for an... Shadowlands: Why Does God Allow Pain and Suffering?‎ Essay -- God, Tra If God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer? The central question in Shadowlands challenges traditional religious and moral conventions. It is a question asked by many, with few satisfactory answers. Before attempting to answer the question, and explore its relationship to Shadowlands, let us first define the question, so its implications may be more clearly understood. At the heart of the question is a doubt in the goodness of God, "If God loves us". From the beginning it is clear that God is being judged and criticized by the question. Then the second phrase follows"Why does He allow us to suffer?". The assumption made in the second phrase is that God has enough control over the world to prevent suffering. If He can prevent suffering, and He really loves us, then why shouldn' t He excercise that control, and prevent needless suffering? Not preventing suffering is the same as actively inflicting it. Humans generally believe that if they love another person, they should prevent their loved ones from suffering. Why shouldn't God be the same? If a human causes suffering for an...

History of American Education

Every human infant comes into the world devoid of the faculties characteristic of fully developed human beings. The process of growing up is the process of the development of the child’s faculties. The overwhelmingly important aspect of the growing-up process is mental, the development of mental powers, or perception and reason. Margaret Szasz`s `Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination Since 1928Margaret Szasz traced the evolution of federal American Indian educational policy during a critical span of time beginning with the Meriam Report in 1928 through the Kennedy Report of 1969 and the consequent passage of the Indian Education Act. These reports which resulted from intensive government sponsored studies of conditions in American Indian life, provided the impetus for important changes in Indian Administration and ultimately influenced a federal policy shift away from the earlier assimilationist ideology toward a culturally pluralistic perspective w hich fostered the possibility of self determination for American Indian nations.In American Indian education from 1928 to 1973 there are two types of studies that have become popular. These are historical monographs on regional or tribal education and general accounts of contemporary Indian schooling. The Meriam report suggested that education should be the primary function of the Indian bureau. It advised that Indian education be geared for all age levels and that it be tied in closely with the community.It encouraged construction of day schools to serve as community centers and proposed extensive reform of boarding schools, including the introduction of Indian culture and revision of the curriculum so that it would be adaptable to local conditions. In addition, the report attacked the physical conditions of the boarding schools, the enrollment of preadolescent children, and the inadequacy of the personnel. It recommended that salaries and standards be raised and that a professiona l educator be appointed Director of Education.(Margaret Connell, 1999)Utilizing archival materials, congressional records, and interviews, Margaret Szasz focuses on those systems of Indian education directly impacted by the federal government and federal policy. The assimilation programs of the Dawes Act era, the reform movements of the New Deal with the accompanying positive attitude toward Indian cultures, the economic impact of World War II and the disastrous termination measures of the early 1950s are analyzed for their effects on education in day schools and the on- and off-reservation boarding schools directed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).She presents the emerging power of â€Å"Self-Determination† from the supportive legislation of the Kennedy/Johnson years and the setbacks of the Reagan era to the present administration, and the resulting growth of yet another genre of education for American Indian people – tribally controlled schools and colleges. Sza sz closes the most recent chapter in American Indian education policy with the story of the rise and expansion of tribally controlled colleges concluding that â€Å"their commitment to community, to students, and to future leadership among tribal peoples suggests that they serve as the hope for the future for American Indians.Szasz closes the most recent chapter in American Indian education policy with the story of the rise and expansion of tribally controlled colleges concluding that â€Å"their commitment to community, to students, and to future leadership among tribal peoples suggests that they serve as the hope for the future for American Indians. † In this work Szasz has shown herself again to be the consummate researcher, presenting a sensitive but objective, comprehensive account of federal American Indian educational policy. Education in United States was segregated upon race.For the most part, African Americans received very little to no education before the civil w ar. In the south where slavery was legal, many states enacted laws which made it a crime for blacks to even be able to read, much less attend school alongside white classmates. After the civil war and emancipation blacks still received little help from the states themselves. The federal government under the radical republications, set up the freedman’s bureau to help educate and protect former slaves and passed several civil rights bills, but neither survived the end of reconstruction in 1877.The idea of equality in America has owed much to its proven ability to get used to varied and often argumentative environments by meaning different things to different minds, and furnishing rival interests with equally satisfying terms of moral reference. All of which throws some doubt on the undeniable character claimed by the Republic's founders for human rights determined forever by the laws of nature. The idea of equality been able to stamp an unmistakable and lasting imprint on soci al institutions.The Great Awakening, within certain very marked restrictions and with correspondingly limited consequences, was probably the first such period after colonial institutions had taken a settled shape. Accordingly it is chronologically the first to appear in the pages that follow; and because it’s religious character merges with the theme of the attitude of the state towards the individual's moral identity, giving the subject an inherent unity which bears on all other aspects of equality, two separate chapters are dedicated to that dilemma.The American Revolution and its consequences composed another period of upheaval. For all the rhetoric and invocations of principle that accompanied the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, and the policies of Andrew Jackson from the early campaigns for his election through his veto of the Bank bill and other pronouncements to his retirement in 1837, the administrations of these publicly dedicated reformists did little to defle ct the advancing inequalities that characterized the distribution of wealth and all that followed from it.The Jacksonian affirmation could be described in terms of the comparatively new concept of equality of opportunity, an imperfectly digested notion which actually conflicted with other egalitarian precepts, held by some of Jackson's contemporaries to be of even more urgent importance.It was only with the tremendous upheaval wrought by the Civil War, and then after more moderate policies had failed for political reasons that the principle of the equal protection of the laws, with all that it could be held to require in making sure that the laws themselves were genuinely equal, was written into the Constitution and transformed from a common and weak ideal into a optimistic commitment of government. The language of equal protection, however, soon proved to be as flexible as the blurred idea of equal prospect.Soon after achieving the modest and, as it seemed, short-lived triumphs of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, egalitarians lost their grip on American development more completely than ever before. The idea of equality thus revealed over the two hundred years of the nation's independent survival a tenacity which afforded a strange kind of glamour to American claims and pretensions, and a kind of explanation to the offer or threat of social justice which America had always seemed to hold out to the common people in face of the empires, monarchies, priesthoods, and social hierarchies of the Old World.This tenacity of egalitarian principles owed a great deal to the historical structure of American institutions and to the formal and constitutional beginning of the American nation; and in the same way the idea owed much of its strength to the fact that equality had entered into the language of justice in a more explicit and more public manner than in most simultaneous political systems.The movement in this course, through which equality began to define the obligations of government to the people, had its deeper origins in the nineteenth-century America, gained power to affect the character of religious, legal, and political institutions in the middle of the nineteenth century, and emerged in the higher reaches of popular thought as a successor to the idea of the Great Chain of Being. (Pole, 1979) Development of common schools 1820 – 1890The motivation to provide a public school education for all children was twofold. First was the desire to indoctrinate them with religious teachings to assure the continued existence of a devotee and moral populace. A second motivation for providing public education was the need to educate for social, economic, democratic and national reasons. There was a common belief that the democratic representative government would fail unless the state took a real responsibility in educating the children of all people.Common schools at this point were in bad shape, they were poorly attended, and basically taught by whomever available. The direction of education at this time was influenced by the teaching methods of Prussian schools, as developed by Pestalozzi. These schools were opened through all over the state. The shift towards accountability, outcomes, and higher expectations in our schools is leading us in the right direction, although we recognize that schools face legitimate difficulties during this change process.But the response to these challenges should not be to back down on expectations for students with disabilities and those who have been perceived as unable to meet the standards. Policymakers and practitioners must remain committed to the goal of closing the achievement gap for all students. To lessen this commitment would be to return to the days and the mindset that only some students could and deserved to be taught to high standards.We now know that by setting high expectations, and helping students, teachers, administrators, and family members reach those high st andards, we can close the achievement gaps for all students. The educational landscape for students with disabilities is undergoing vast changes. Thanks to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and its push for increased access to education for students with disabilities, and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), with its push for improved student outcomes, educators across the U. S.are reexamining their practices to find ways to close the achievement gaps between groups of students. Students with disabilities are a focus of this attention, as schools and states labor to improve their academic outcomes. The Progressive Era 1890 – 1950 The Progressive era has long been noted as an era of national administrative expansion combined with the growth of newer progressive and egalitarian idealism. One would expect this era to be one of great expansion of the central administrative capacity in the area of education as well.Curiously, this outcome is not what we find. To explain this puzzle, we must remind ourselves of what the Federal government had already given the states to promote education rich tracts of land that came to form the endowments that states built upon during this period. By the end of the 19th century and continuing into the early 20th, the development of secondary education for the masses was well underway. Between 1890 and 1920, the US secondary school population grew from 360,000 to over 2.5 million. Educational Equality and its future in America Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, and of the institutions which regulate schooling no less than others. Education policy, just like social policy more generally, should be guided principally by considerations of justice and only secondarily by pragmatic considerations such as what compromises must be made with existing social forces opposed to justice in order to optimize the justice of the existing institutions.The â€Å"equally good provision† for each ind ividual child is the meaning of equality in education. Different readers will interpret â€Å"equally good provision† differently depending on their conception of what constitutes a good education. The equality consists in ensuring that social class background and racial background have no impact at all on achievement and that inequalities of achievement that have a significantly unequal impact on the life prospects of individual children are unjust.Equality led reforms might deploy choice, but they do so only in the service of equality, either because choice will directly produce greater equality or because permitting choice will allow policymakers the political freedom to implement other measures that will produce greater equality. Reference: 1. J R Pole, The pursuit of Equality in American History, University of California Press, 1979 2. Matthew Hirschland, Sven Steinmo, The federal Government and American Education, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2001 3. Margaret Connel l Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The road to self-determination since 1928

Barangay Management System Essay

Introduction Barangay Record Management System is an advance and automated process of managing a barangay, to let go the manual process in the usual barangay hall such as, hand written documents, keeping records inside the drawer that tends to lose some records. It is automated in such way that all records and transactions that the barangay is needed will be totally organized, easy to process and fast. Brgy. Sto. Rosario is using a manual process of transaction in their barangay, and they said that sometimes encounter problems like lost of records, unorganized files. This system facilitates barangay management by enabling the client to maintain their resident records as complete and up-to-date as possible and as easily accessible for verification, monitoring and reference purposes based on the available residents’ census data kept by the client barangay. Data provided by this system in the form of comprehensive reports are invaluable for planning, program implementation and related purposes. With the Barangay Records Management System, it will be a great help for them to lessen their work specifically with transactions that the citizen of the said community will might need. Statement of the Problem Often times the barangay officials lose the records of the citizen’s, they didn’t keep it orderly. The barangay is using a manual process of trasaction. The idea of developing the Barangay Record Management System for barangay was helpful to provide an easy process of transactions in a convenient way.

The Bill of Rights and the 2nd Amendment essays

The Bill of Rights and the 2nd Amendment essays We as Americans have more rights and freedoms than any other nation in the world. Our founding fathers laid down a basis for all Americans to be able to live in a free society without the fear of government oppression. That basis is found in the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The actual wording of the Constitution was written to allow for various interpretations, which has led to many arguments of its validity in an ever-changing society. The Bill of Rights gives a specific outline of what freedoms we have, but due to its vagueness, it has come under fire many times. The 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights gives us the right to bear arms to protect our freedom not only from other people and nations but from our own government as well.[Bearnards,1991] The 2nd Amendment: Is it a Guarantee? When the Bill of Rights was written in 1791 there was included in it the 2nd Amendment which states, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" [law.cornell.edu]. At the time it was written the U.S. government could not afford to support an army to defend against foreign threats, thus calling upon the people to take up arms to defend our young nation. [O'Sullivan, 1989] The first part of the 2nd Amendment states that very clearly. The second part can be interpreted that we have the right to protect ourselves from our own government to ensure that all states remain free. The last part, which clearly states that it is a right, is under the most scrutiny. There are many lobbyist groups that present proposals to Congress each year to make amendments to the Bill of Rights that would suppress the 2nd Amendment. Among the groups opposing the 2nd Amendment are the Coalition against Gun Violence with an average membership of 75,000 and Handgun Control Inc. (HCI) with an average membership of about 300,000 [Roleff, 1997]...

Tips for Expressing Sympathy

Tips for Expressing Sympathy Unfortunately, bad things happen. When we hear about these events happening to people we care about, expressing our sympathy can go a long way. Doing so is often difficult as we want to communicate  our concern but dont want to be intrusive or offensive. With these tips and your sincere sentiments, your words of comfort are likely to be meaningful to the person in your life who is having a tough time. Structuring Common Phrases of Sympathy in English Here are some common phrases to help you express sympathy. Im sorry to hear about Noun/Gerund   Im sorry to hear about your difficulties with the boss. I know he can be really difficult at times.Ellen just told me the news. Im sorry to hear about your not getting into Harvard! Please accept my condolences.   This phrase is used to express sympathy when someone has died. Please accept my condolences. Your father was a great man.Im sorry to hear of your loss. Please accept my condolences. Thats so sad. Thats so sad that you lost your job.Thats so sad that he doesnt love you anymore.  I hope things get better soon. This phrase is used when people have been having difficulty over a long period  of time. I know your life has been difficult lately. I hope things get better soon.I cant believe how much bad luck youve had. I hope things get better soon. I hope you feel better soon. This phrase is used when someone is experiencing health problems. Im so sorry you broke your leg. I hope you feel better soon.ï » ¿Stay home for the week. I hope you feel better soon.   Example Dialogue Expressing sympathy is used in a number of situations. For example, you might express sympathy for someone whose family member has passed away. Generally,  we express sympathy to someone who has difficulties of some sort.  Here are some example dialogues to help you learn when to express sympathy in English. Person 1:  Ive been rather sick lately.Person 2:  I hope you feel better soon. Another Example Person 1:  Tim has been having a lot of troubles lately. I think he might be getting a divorce.Person 2:  Im sorry to hear about Tims problems. I hope things get better for him soon. Writing Sympathy Notes Its also common to express sympathy in writing. Here are some common phrases you can use when writing a sympathy note to someone. Notice that it is common to use the plural we and our when expressing written sympathy as a way to express that a family. Finally, its important to keep a sympathy note short. My heartfelt condolences on your loss.Our thoughts are with you.She/he was a lot of things to many people and will be missed tremendously.I am thinking of you in your time of loss.We are very saddened to hear of your loss. With deepest sympathies.You have my sincere sympathy.You have our deepest sympathy. Example Sympathy Note Dear John, I heard recently that your mother passed away. She was such a wonderful woman. Please accept my heartfelt condolences on your loss. You have our deepest sympathy. Warm regards, Ken

The Rationale of Equity Indexation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Rationale of Equity Indexation - Essay Example Capital market transactions are deemed efficient in the absence of intermediaries except for brokers who put buyers and sellers together and get a small commission, making the deal almost frictionless. With transaction costs negligible, the only real factor that determines the current price of a stock should be the net present value of its future cash flows in the form of dividends and, assuming the company lasts long enough, capital gains when the stock is sold at a future date. After all, a stock is nothing else but a claim to a company's future cash flows, and that its price indicates its net present value given the amount of cash it would generate over a future period of time (Graham, 1984). A company's cash flow is affected by several factors, such as business prospects, management quality, the economy's over-all performance, and the company's past performance. If these sets of information are known, computing for free cash flow looks relatively straightforward, and using a discount rate, the stock's present value can be easily calculated. If the market price is lower than the present value, the stock is bought. Otherwise, if one is holding the stock, it is sold. The low transaction costs of capital markets... "Beating the market" means that an investor cannot generate a rate of return from investing in the equities market that is above the rate of return of the whole market. The rate of return of the whole market is measured by looking at the rates of return of a basket of equities that is representative of the whole market of equities. This basket consists of stocks of companies of different sizes and from different industry sectors from amongst the list of all companies traded in the capital market, say in the London Stock Exchange. Using a formula that takes into account market capitalisation, historical share prices, and other considerations, the financial authorities determine which stocks to include. The stock prices of these stocks in the basket are mathematically added up to come up with the index that reflects the behaviour of the market as a whole. There are several indices formulated for the London Stock Exchange by an indexing company called FTSE International Ltd., an affilia te of the Financial Times Ltd., a U.K.-based firm. Amongst the indices monitored by FTSE are the FTSE All-shares (688 stocks), FTSE 100 (102 stocks), FTSE 250 (250 stocks), and the FTSE SmallCap (336 stocks) indices (FTSE ASWB, 2005). At the end of each trading day, FTSE adds the prices of the stocks in each of these indices and then publishes the results. Under the assumption that the market is efficient and that it is not possible to beat the markets, an investor can decide to adopt an equity index strategy, which consists of buying a basket of stocks in the same proportion as they are included in the basket of stocks used to calculate an index. Several fund management firms have made the job of investing easier by developing funds that

Euthanasia should be legalized by the AMA Essay

Euthanasia should be legalized by the AMA - Essay Example In some countries it is against the law to assist terminally ill patients to commit suicide. Euthanasia plainly means painless death but this has become a worldwide debate because doctors are helping people die rather than saving their lives, patients with chronic disorders are given pills and they die painlessly but is this justifiable? Doctors should not take lives; they are supposed to save lives. More will be presented in this paper about euthanasia. Final exit network is another NGO which helps terminally ill patients in assisted suicides. This NGO is known for accepting patients who are suffering from fatal diseases like cancer, heart failure, Parkinson’s disease and so on. Usually it is very difficult for such patients to be adopted by an NGO but Final exit is an exception and it accepts almost everyone. The near and dear ones of the terminally ill die each day, they suffer from physical and emotional trauma isn’t assisted suicide better than dying each day? It may not be the best option but when emotional pain and suffering supersedes everything, one is left with a handful of options. There are two ways in which euthanasia can be performed, the first one is when the doctor or the nurse gives a medicine which takes the life away of a terminally ill patient and the other is when the doctor or the nurse choose to ignore the patient and the patient dies upon not getting the proper medication. The zillion dollar question is who should decide when a terminally ill patient should be assisted with suicide or not? This is one question which is extremely difficult to answer, most times it is the relatives of the terminally ill patient who take a call and the doctors go ahead with it in some countries where assisted suicide is allowed. â€Å"Euthanasia groups  appeared  for the first time in England and America in the early 20 th  century. During the Second World War the Nazis in Germany had their own euthanasia