I find that people generally think they have above-average skills in three areas:

1. Driving
2. Communicating
3. Being a good judge of character

That is all for today.

“More is Less,” the most recent radio episode of This American Life looks at the rising health care costs and asks who is to blame. Are doctors unnecessarily ordering procedures and prescribing medications? Are patients demanding costly services they don’t need? Are insurance companies doing little to keep the prices down? The short answer is yes, to all of them. It’s a fascinating listen and I recommend it highly.

All through the debate on reforming health care, something has not sit well with me and it is the fact that we as a society have arranged ourselves primarily as an economic entity. We make our choices based on our wallets and arrange our laws in such a way to reward and punish behavior financially. Many of the solutions discussed for health care reform have to do with how we address the market—tweak it, leave it alone, etc. But is health care really just a basket of goods and services that can and should be understood in purely economic terms? I don’t have a real answer for this, but I’ll give you some examples of why I see a purely economic view of health care as one that breaks down. These have to do with the fee-for-service aspect of health care.

My wife has a family friend who was a surgeon in the U.S., but due to increased insurance costs, decided to practice medicine in New Zealand, where the state pays for the vast majority of health care and patients are not allowed to sue their doctors. The growing cost of malpractice insurance created disincentives for him to continue practicing medicine in the U.S. In New Zealand, he and his staff were paid flat salaries for their work. He expressed a frustration over the fact that he was not doing nearly as many surgeries per day as he did in the U.S. Because the staff was paid a flat salary, there was no economic incentive for them to work faster and do more surgeries in a day. They were paid the same if they did three operations or seven in a day. This surgeon knew there were dozens of people in the queue waiting for these surgeries and it bothered him that his office could work faster, but people simply chose not to. If we do the math, they were actually paid more per unit of work and time if they did less procedures.

On the other hand, when we go to a fee-for-service model like one we have in the U.S., there are economic incentives for doctors and staffs to do more procedures, to see more patients. (Though the U.S. patients hava a longer wait-time to see doctors than in many countries with single-payer health care, which I don’t completely understand.) This model encourages efficiency and competition. It also exacerbates the issue that nearly 30% of health care spending in the U.S. is wasted. By paying more for more procedures and paying more for costlier and riskier procedures, we have created economic incentives for doctors to order unnecessary and expensive tests, operations, medications, etc. That is not to say all doctors do write unnecessary orders just to make money, but in our system the temptation is clearly there and the practice is clearly rewarded financially.

I’m not opposed to economics playing a role in health care. At the same time I am uncomfortable with changes in our health systems happening using purely economic tools. I don’t have real answers to the problem, this is just an aspect of the debate that has had me thinking for a while.

Any thoughts?

“Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.”—Archbishop Desmond Tutu

On his Facebook page, Eddy linked to an AP story about Biblica updating the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible and publishing it in 2011. At that time, Zondervan will also cease publishing the Today’s New International Version (TNIV) that came out in 2005. (Biblica owns the copyright on both versions and Zondervan publishes them in North America.) The TNIV sought to update some of the phrasing in the NIV to reflect changes in the English language. But it was controversial because while Zondervan would continue publishing the NIV, the Committee on Bible Translation that produced both versions would no longer update the NIV and the TNIV would become its primary focus for further revisions. The issue with the TNIV is that it uses gender-inclusive language. For example, “sons of God,” is now translated, “children of God.” Apparently some people were unhappy with the TNIV’s process and wanted more transparency even though Christianity Today devoted a cover story to the TNIV and the debate surrounding it and a whole book was published regarding the gender-neutral controversy.

I’d like to respond a bit to the criticism of the TNIV cited in the AP story. Regarding the changes in the TNIV,

Many prominent pastors and scholars endorsed the changes. But critics said masculine terms in the original should not be tampered with. Some warned that changing singular gender references to plural ones alters what the Bible says about God’s relationships with individuals.

The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution saying the edition “has gone beyond acceptable translation standards.”

I’m curious as to what singular gender references they have in mind that have been changed so as to alter God’s relationships with individuals. In the modern English-speaking world, we don’t really have a problem with emphasizing the relationships between God and individuals. If anything, we read the Bible too individualistically, with too much of an emphasis on the individual that we run the risk of misinterpreting the texts. Granted, our language does not help us. Both Greek and Hebrew have a plural form of the second person pronoun—a “plural you,” as it were—and those pronouns are found throughout the Bible. English does not have a second person plural pronoun and so we have often read the Bible saying, “you,” as if it is speaking to the individual rather than the community. In my opinion, translating the Bible in ways that reflect the communal nature of the texts needs to be one of the primary responsibilities of translators.

I support careful gender-inclusive language in our translations and have no real issues with the TNIV. And as far as gender-inclusive translations go, the TNIV is fairly conservative in its changes. I grew up on the NIV and I think it is a fine translation. I first began using a gender-inclusive translation (the NRSV) in college when I wrote religious studies papers—the NRSV is widely accepted in academic circles. I initially liked the NRSV on a purely aesthetic level and began using it as my primary version for devotional reading. I couldn’t read Greek or Hebrew at the time, so I had no way of deciding if the NRSV was a more faithful translation or not. I still use the NRSV as my primary Bible and find it a very reliable version.

As I have studied Greek and Hebrew, I have come to appreciate gender-inclusive translations not for some politically correct reasons, but for much of the same reasons I choose to read modern biblical translations instead of the King James Version (KJV). The KJV was a fine translation for its time, reflecting the way people spoke and wrote in the 17th Century. English has changed over the centuries. We do not speak or write today as people did in the 1600’s. We do not even spell many of the same words in the same way as they did in the past. The Greek and Hebrew of the Bible have not changed—though we continue to find and use older and older manuscripts to translate—our contemporary English has changed.

The Bible was written in the earthy languages of real people who used those languages for everything in their lives: worship, conversation, trade, poetry, history, etc. Like any language, the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek of the Bible were full of idiomatic phrases. When Paul wrote to his “brothers” to address the churches in his letters, no biblical scholar would say that he was only writing to men. “Brothers” was an idiom that represented the community. “Brothers,” “man,” and “men” used to be gender-inclusive terms in English, but that has changed. So I see nothing wrong with carefully translating an idiomatic phrase in a way that reflects its meaning. I make it a practice to render “brothers” as “brothers and sisters” in my own translations when it is clear that the text is addressing more than just the men of the group. This translation reflects the way we speak and write now. I do not believe that it does violence or changes the meaning of the original texts. The historical nature of the manuscripts and the ever-evolving nature of language creates a problem for translators, especially translators of Scripture. We believe that God speaks to us through the Bible and so we need the Bible to be readable. At the same time, these are historical documents written at specific times and places and we can run the risk of trying to update them. Care must be taken and I believe that the translators of the TNIV were careful.

Even the most wooden, word for word translations of the Bible are not 100% accurate. That is not merely a statement regarding grammar since word order is different and different languages often have different verb tenses. Some translation of idioms and thoughts are required to make sense to us today. Did you know that the Bible says God has a big nose? We often render the term ‘arek ‘apim, as “slow to anger” or “longsuffering,” to describe God’s divine and gracious patience. “The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.” (Psalm 103.8) When translated woodenly, the term is actually “long of nose.” It’s a Hebrew idiom and makes no sense in English without translating the actual thought.

For what it is worth, I think a very wooden, very word-for-word translation of the Bible into English would be of great help to students who do not read Greek or Hebrew. It would be wonderful for the average Bible reader to be able to see how earthy some of the original idioms are and how strange they can sound to our ears. Can you imagine giving someone a complement by telling them they have a big nose?

I am skeptical that the primary reason for the cessation of the TNIV is the mea culpa from Biblica and the NIV’s handlers with regard to how the revision process took place. While Biblica is a non-profit organization, Zondervan is a subsidiary of NewsCorp, a publicly traded company. My assumption is that the TNIV just isn’t selling like they hoped it would. When the Southern Baptist Convention denounced the TNIV, they also announced that they would not sell the version in their stores. If the TNIV were more profitable, Biblica may have re-opened revision on the NIV, but I doubt Zondervan would have shut down publishing the TNIV.

No one is ever going to confuse me with someone who actually likes the Los Angeles Dodgers, but I will say that one of the perks of living in Southern California is the opportunity to hear Vin Scully’s voice on television—and in the Dodgers Stadium bathrooms. There are some other good play-by-play men in the game, but in my opinion, Scully has been the best. He has announced that he will likely retire from the booth at the end of next season. Here’s to hoping that the Dodgers will honor him with a fantastic farewell tour and a monument befitting the man whose voice, in the words of my wife, “Sounds like baseball.” She said that when she hears Scully’s voice, it feels like summertime.

Here’s a bit of trivia: with over 60 years of experience, Scully called many memorable moments, including a home run in the 1988 World Series that will not receive further mention here—may it long be forgotten. He was not only involved with baseball games, however. He called the 1982 NFC championship game for CBS that resulted in one of the greatest finishes in NFL history when San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Joe Montana rolled right, threw the ball to the back of the end zone, and Dwight Clark made “The Catch” against the Dallas Cowboys. So even if he worked for the hated Dodgers for six decades, Scully can’t be all that bad. Here is the that final drive with Scully’s play-by-play commentary.

40 years ago today, Apollo 11 launched from the Kennedy Space Center to make its journey to the Moon. It marked the beginning of a journey that was the culmination of hundreds of thousands of peoples’ work and passion. I wish I was alive to see the launch and landing. It’s amazing to me that the missions to the Moon still evoke awe and wonder in us. It seems we could use a worldwide jolt of awe and wonder now. Check out this site: We Choose the Moon. It recreates the Apollo 11 mission in real time. Very cool.

We don’t have cable or satellite, so we had to get one of those converter boxes. The switch to the digital television signal has proven beneficial for this sports fan. I’m slowly falling in love with Universal Sports, a network of NBC that shows year-round the sports they usually only air during the Olympic Games. Normally, I have to wait four years to watch water polo on television, and even then, it’s usually aired for just a half an hour on a Saturday afternoon. Today I got to watch two whole matches from the World League on the Universal Sports network. Too bad the US lost in the bronze medal game. Still. Water polo! On a non-Olympic year! Huzzah! 5 meters and backhands and exclusions and drives galore!

Thomas Nelson is publishing The American Patriot’s Bible. (Go to the web page now and see if you can spot the typo while it’s still up. Seven points to the first person who spots it.) I’ve never been a fan of the special interest Bibles—e.g., Men’s Study Bible, Women’s Study Bible, Power Forward’s Study Bible, Heirloom Tomato Farmer’s Study Bible—but the American Patriot’s Bible seems to go too far. My belief is that the Bible should continue to prophetically speak to all nations. In my understanding of the cross and the resurrection, ethnic and national boundaries mean very little to God. I don’t mind books and discussions about how the leaders of our nation have been shaped by the Bible or what they said about the Bible. I simply don’t think that such information belongs in a Bible.

(HT: Chris Spinks and Scot McKnight)

It’s over here.