Ah yes, who has not read Plato's 'Republic,' if you have ever taken Philosophy 101 in college, which I did at SCC, a class taught by Professor Baldwin, who has long since passed away. Plato's 'Republic' occupied maybe half of our class time so it obviously was a very important starting point if you want to understand the philosophical building blocks of civilization. There ought to be a starting point found somewhere before we can get into the heart of the matter, but I digress. And we suppose that there are those who wish to contrast Plato's train of thought from the Hebrew origins of the Christian Bible, which argument contains some good points in a way, and yet neither can the Bible fill in all the blanks of math and science. The Bible is said to contain the essentials of what we need to know, and yet there is more that we can learn from the disciplines of college learning, unless you are one of those high school dropouts who think that you can be a self-made man and study whatever you want unhinged from academic rigors. Ok, whatever, good luck with that. I cannot say one way or another which way is better, but there are benefits to finishing a college course that may be helpful later in life. Anyway, you will understand more later if you play the game by the rules now, take it one step at a time, because later on it won't be so easy to go back and rewrite the class schedule plan. Time is short. [And as I said to my Platonic classmate, Tim Cederblom, one day, wasn't that lecture that Dr. Baldwin just delivered nearly identical to the one he had delivered the previous class, as if no one would notice that? But Tim is a bore and never says anything worth repeating.]
So why are we talking about Dr. Baldwin's Philosophy 101 class now? I suppose that you want to make some snarky points about whether his daughter Sharon possesses a hereditary advantage in the expounding and interpreting of Plato's philosophical ideals, given that her own father has a Ph.D. in the subject and teaches the college class dealing with that subject. Building on that point, you will next argue that the daughter of a missionary does not have any hereditary advantage in the expounding of the plan of salvation, which point would seem nonsensical, a comparing of apples to oranges, since all Christians are missionaries in one sense or another, and ought to be equipped for such service if called on to do so, while recognizing that it is not always possible to do that.
Thus we see Sharon clutching greedily the tin-plate tiara she won on Homecoming night, a trifling advantage of little value or interest in comparison to some weightier matters of eternal life. Dr. Baldwin was a very good teacher, and yet sadly his family was among the Kansas invaders who ruined the California district. Will the AG ever get smart and drop California off the map? Who needs that Honduran outpost for anything?
