The Dirty Papist

It's not too late to stand up to the White House! (edited)

2012-02-11T05:21:00.000-06:00

Please, go there and sign the petition, if you haven't signed one already. It's morally bad for disregarding conscientious objection, it's legally bad for presuming that "to regulate commerce...among the several States" means "to mandate commerce between as well as wholly within each of the States," and it's ethically bad for perpetuating the myth that "Christian values" are best served by appointing Caesar the power to care for the poor and feed the lambs on our behalf.

I received a response from the White House on Friday, which I will be quoting liberally here.

Thank you for using We the People to make your voice heard about the Obama Administration's decision to ensure that women have access to free preventive care with no co-pays

"Free" and "no co-pays" are two different things. This distinction is not consistently preserved, either throughout the rest of this form letter or in the debate at large.

[T]he Affordable Care Act requires insurance companies to cover preventive services, including preventive care for women, without charging a co-pay, starting on August 1, 2012

This part was interesting. Until now, legal entities that objected were given a one year grace period in which to discover some sophistry for accepting what was still going to be inevitable. Now that's off the table.

This part is important. Jimmy Akin goes into a little more detail on this point. In some ways it appears we lost ground by the USCCB using accommodating diplomatic language, but I don't think so. Evil will do this when it is threatened in order to intimidate and distract you from casting it out.

As the President said: "Nearly 99 percent of all women have relied on contraception at some point in their lives"

I'm highly skeptical. Until last week, I used to hear numbers that were much lower, and the claims were merely that Catholics contracepted at the same rates (over half, but no supermajority) as other Americans. Suddenly it's all but a handful? It's not impossible, but I'd be looking askance at such reports even if they weren't sourced by the Gutmacher Institute.

Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her own health

And every free citizen should be in control of the decisions that affect his or her own soul. Let's not conflate "some people struggle to afford medical care" with "you must agree that fertility is a disease," let alone the other moral problems with arguments framed in terms of self-determination.

And I saw that local churches often did more good for a community than a government program ever could

I appreciate your...appreciation...but so what? A screwdriver is great for driving screws, but you can't port that over to driving nails just because there's a compelling need for hammers. There are reasons it just doesn't work like that.

If a woman's employer is a religious non-profit organization, such as a charity hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, her insurance company -- not the hospital or charity -- will be required to reach out and provide her contraceptive care free of charge if she chooses to use it.

Here's where we're supposed to remember that "free of charge" is, well, impossible in this world. Who's paying the insurance company? You and I. Why do people even think that the government can impose fines or fees on some corporate entity without said entity passing it straight along to the customer? They don't even pretend to pass "you may not raise your prices to cover these costs" legislation to make any punitive damages more painful than the administrative hassle it would be to maintain profit levels.

There are tremendous health benefits for women that come from using contraception. Contraception is a safe and effective way of ....

No, it's not. It can reduce the risk of some types of cancers, which is good, but prescription and OTC hormones range from "too weak to work on more fecund women" to "you'll literally bleed for the rest of your life." I'm being dramatic, granted, but when the mere side effects are as bad as hemorrhaging and stroke, is prescribing it for something as prosaic as acne really the best way to go? They prescribe the pill to alleviate irregular periods because it's easier than recommending an endocrinologist to actually cure irregular periods; does the side effect of good skin rise to the level of a "tremendous health benefit" that is proportional to the disregard of our consciences that make clear that certain things, while convenient, are still evil? Because they still haven't established the point that pregnancy is itself is a disease which should be prevented (which is odd, since they're so happy about treating other "reproductive complications" and unrelated conditions with the pill).

I think I need to make that point clearer. We hear things like "pregnancy would kill me," but it's a possibility of death for the mother versus, when it comes to the point of abortion, certain death for the child. I don't want to get sidetracked, but the choice between "possible tragedy" and "definite evil" should not be a hard one.

Importantly, we also usually hear that pregnancy can cause things like peripartum cardiomyopathy, but the way it's usually billed is that pregnancy is the disease and PC is a symptom. I sympathize that many of these complications are difficult to predict and only get discovered during pregnancy when only symptoms can be treated, but the problem with PC isn't the pregnancy, the problem is the heart.

I'm all for prevention, but let's not fall into "we wouldn't have these problems if we didn't know about them" thinking.

This is an issue where people of good will on both sides of the debate have been grappling to find a solution that works for everyone, and the policy announced today has done that.

The first half is right, unless it means "the policy announced today will further our ends, and will give you an opportunity to embrace white martyrdom," in which case I agree.

The right to religious liberty will be fully protected

If it were, there wouldn't be such an uproar. I'm glad you're not my lawyer or neighborhood cop.

Here are a few statements from groups involved in the issue

Never mind. Quotes from Catholics United, Catholic Health Association, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL. They all make the reasonable point that this is supposed to help them help people who really need it, but PP and NARAL don't even throw a bone to folks who don't think that working evil is a safe and reliable way to achieve good. Thanks, but no thanks for that dose of alleged perspective.

My belated two cents plus interest on Missal 3.0

2012-02-10T01:13:00.000-06:00

My church hadn't done much to prepare for the new liturgy, so I expected things to be rocky, but I found myself on the first Sunday of Advent out of town. I thought to post this sooner but most of my traveling during the year happens around the holidays, so it seemed worthwhile to wait and watch how things were going at five different churches in four dioceses. Also, I forgot to finish writing this up until now.

It was the middle of January before the changes seemed to feel more or less natural to everyone. A few people still say "and also with you"--at random times I also forget--and I still have to refer to that tri-fold handbill for parts of the Creed, the Gloria, and the Holy Holy Holy. I think "consubstantial" stuck out enough that everyone learned that first.

I like the changes, overall. I'd been looking forward to them for a while, since Jimmy Akin started posting excerpts back whenever it was. Some I wasn't too fond of for aesthetic reasons; "seen and unseen" seems to roll off the tongue a little more smoothly than "visible and invisible," and to my ears it understates the idea with a little poetic flair that I always thought served well as emphasis. What's the opposite of hyperbole? Hypobole? Parabole? Anyway, the meaning of "seen and unseen" was never unclear to me, it just sounded like an archaic yet compact way of saying "everything there is to see and everything not permitted to mortal eyes," but on the other hand, it's less precise in modern language. "Unseen" could mean "visible but out of sight." "Invisible" means "unseeable." One might say it's a more technical term, like "consubstantial;" it forces a more accurate depiction of the concept, and I'm all for precision and accuracy, at least short of becoming pedantic. Plus, I'm a child of Vatican II so I have no memory of the Tridentine mass.

As well as being more precise, it helps to elevate the language; there's poetic language, but there's crappy verse and then there's elegant verse, and I can't really argue that the places in the old translation that sounded nicer than the new translation were really worth the risk of misinterpretation, like "for all" at the consecration of the Precious Blood being taken as conclusive proof of universal salvation.

I think it's just going to take a little getting used to. The old translation was only fifty years old but it was defended for its antiquity and pedigree like one might have thought more appropriate for the Liturgy of Saint James. The new translation has its own rhythms and we'll get used to them, the new music written to fit the new words will become familiar, although it seems like a majority of the sung responses I've experienced so far have been in minor keys or obscure modes that don't flow with the rest of the mass. It's almost like some of the composers trying to bring the hymnody up to speed occasionally forgot the difference between solemn and somber. Personally I'm going to miss the Gloria from mass setting 3 the most; it was elegant and I think comes from a place where familiarity made it easy to compose something beautiful. Even though liturgists have been working on the new translation longer than we've been seeing it, it's still chafes in a few places, like a new pair of shoes might, and like new shoes will have to endure a breaking-in period. Or maybe we're the shoes, really.

I haven't heard a lot of complaints, myself. One other person commenting on how the changes don't flow as well as the old translation. A secondhand or thirdhand reference to someone claiming oppression at the sixty-year-old novel translation that was more easily abused and less carefully protected (indeed, I sometimes wonder if part of the motivation to promulgate this new translation is to cut off hangers-on of liturgical abuses cleanly, instead of letting them think this is one more thing they can corrupt according to their own preference) being replaced by this one. An admitted cynic wondering if the publisher of the missals managed to bend an ear of the secretariat of the Congregation for Divine Worship and hatch a very profitable conspiracy. Another wondering why Rome is bothering with all this when there's a sex abuse scandal to deal with. Another from a priest saying "stick with 'and also with you'--I'm more than just a spirit!" One occurrence of not liking how the centurion's prayer now goes "my soul shall be healed" instead of "I shall be healed." Another thinking "consubstantial" is pretentious. Another feeling that the communal feel of saying "We believe" in the Creed is more important than whatever is achieved by saying "I believe."

All these criticisms are interesting, if not altogether valid. I try not to criticize the liturgy too much, because it's just too easy for me to start seeing all the things done badly (and so many of them would be so easy to do correctly) and too easy to compound the ways I'm not paying attention to what I should, but perhaps this is the least bad time to make an exception, if not actually a good time to do so. I will say a few things and then comment on the criticism I have heard, and that will be all for, I hope, a good long time. It's not altogether relevant, but as long as we're changing the mass, I may as well point out a few bothersome things, some of which I have mentioned before, and then I shall hold my tongue until and unless I witness some flagrant abuses that need to be brought to the attention of the local ordinary and the CDW; rest assured, you'll hear about it too.

To liturgical ministers or whomever, whose decision it was to have people in the back of the church come forth for communion first, drop the attempt to shoehorn in some "last shall be first" symbolism. The best symbolic acts arise naturally, with meaning ascribed to them after they manifest, rather than being deliberately constructed by man; or they have already been put in place hundreds or thousands of years ago. The people sitting in the front do so not because they're proud, nor those in the back because they're humble. It's like insisting, contrary to the allowances of canon law, that we all "stand together" during communion in some long standing local tradition that may not go back even as far as my childhood, as if uniformity of posture could somehow contribute to or surpass the communion we all share in those moments through the Eucharist; or worse yet, in some look-at-me-not-God moment, suggesting that we should have married priestesses because when they're pregnant "this is my body given for you" takes on added dimensions. No; all starting communion from the back of the church does is divert everyone's attention away from the sanctuary and the Sacrament and toward the row behind them so they know when they can exit the pew. Those ushers who try to do the crowd control thing, tell us when to go and when to wait? Useless. They sneak up, effectively if not deliberately, through the cloud of people who missed their cue to get in line in the aisle, maybe make a gesture supposed to indicate it's your turn to go but you can't see it if you're not already watching closely enough to pick them out of the crowd, and blow past you if you're not on top of things. I doubt it's just me because as I said it's a cloud more than a stream of people and I see it in every church that has this practice. Maybe if there were some way of identifying them as ushers we could tell they weren't just confused and trying to get to communion themselves--except, no, that hasn't been working. If they started with people from the front, the congregation could start filing out as soon as the Eucharistic ministers came down from the altar, and we only need to keep a small fraction of our awareness on the people around us so we know when to go, instead of turning around to watch the pews behind us empty out.

To the music ministers, please abandon attempts to inject music, in whole or in part, to the petitions; it always ends up as "We pray, to the, Lord hear our prayer." It's weird, it's a run-on sentence. Make it stop.

To whomever who came up with the idea of turning everyone into a minister of hospitality, can we dispense with the de facto sign of peace before mass? We have one in the middle of mass already, and that one's in the rubrics. If I want to socialize, I'll meet you in the narthex after mass; I'm not going to respond effectively to "Rise and greet those around you!" or "Get to know each other a little bit" five seconds before the processional. Either I already know those around me or I've no hope of instantly befriending them simply by your command. Want me to feel welcome? Do something that may actually make me feel welcome. If you have to tell people to welcome me, it's already failed.

To the fans of mutating a mutable and recent liturgy, I say you brought it on yourselves and should not be shocked that a decades-old rite can be replaced despite any familiarity, habituation, or preference after a centuries-old rite has been replaced. I'm sorry, but of all the arguments, that isn't a good one. You'll just have to get used to it, like you did e-mail and DVDs.

To the cynic, I say even if there is a conspiracy to sell more books, those books would have to be replaced someday anyway and all the reasons given to justify the changes, such as weeding out some of the loopier "hymns," are legitimate anyway.

To the jaded person with different priorities, I say there's no reason why Rome can't address the Scandal in the news papers and liturgical scandal at the same time. It would be like complaining that malfeasance on the part of the public defender in Asheville should be tolerated until the animal control unit in Bismarck can get that coyote problem under control. Most of the sizzle these days in the Scandal is the media breaking twenty year old cases--not all, God help us, but most--and it's too late to try rechanneling efforts (I'm also no fan of the "your first priority should be your only priority or you welcome judgment upon your apathy" school of thought, either, if it hadn't already become obvious). There's always going to be a scandal of some sort, anyway; comes with the territory of a Church and a world populated by sinners.

To whoever thinks "consubstantial" is pretentious or a sign of overthinking things, I say you'll get used to it; it's an appropriate formal term, and one that shouldn't continue to bother you if you can tolerate occasional long Greek expressions like Eucharist and Kyrie Eleison; and "overthinking things" is what enables us to ask intelligent questions about complicated matters instead of just picking the tidiest answer and sticking with it despite new information; it's what makes available answers to questions pondered for centuries, so you don't have to rely on your own research skills or the flaky memory of a local pastor (see also G.K. Chesteron's "never mind nutrition and medicine; why can't we just all enjoy Health?" bit). Don't like it? Don't worry about it. We have highly sophisticated and nuanced canon law, too, but that's more something for canon lawyers to worry about than we rank and file.

To the priest who insists he's not just a spirit, I say it's not about him at all, but about the Spirit working within him that effects the sacraments at his hands, and we're not there to glorify a man in the cloth.

To the one preferring to hear about all healing over only spiritual healing, I sympathize, but please remember that we're all going to ail and die from this life and ultimately our spiritual health is all that will matter.

But I have to say, although "born of the Father before all ages" doesn't bring the same connotation to my ears as "eternally begotten of the Father," sounding more like a temporal kind of event that just happened to take place outside of time, I do like the ring of it. "Eternity" means something closer to "equally present to all points of time at once" and is usually mistaken to mean "time progressing infinitely into the future," but "born before all ages," never mind how someone can be born of a father in the first place, better communicates that the Second Person of the Trinity really is "older" than time; "eternally begotten" is such a peculiar phrase it's easy to forget it has any particular meaning, but "born" is still a common word, so that "born of a father" really conveys a mysterious idea, and "before all ages" may do better to indicate that the Son is not just outside of common time but predates all Creation.

And I have to add, I'm glad the last item in the handbill they published that summarizes the changes is headed "Concluding Rites" and "Dismissal." So often I hear the recessional announced as "our sending-forth song," and I get that it's supposed to emphasize us being sent out into the world rather than saying "Okay, you don't have to be here after this song's done, or sneak out before we get to the refrain if you can't wait;" a reminder of the Great Commission, but it just sounds flat, almost Newspeakwise; like the other changes and abused I griped about, it's like a human attempt to pump emphasis into something that ultimately was given to us by God. "Sending-forth" would work in German, and corresponds somewhat better than badly with the "Gathering hymn" at the beginning of mass, but in English...well, if "Ite, missa est," whence may come "sent" (the root for "mission") as much as "dismissed," is good enough to get the word "mass" from, then "recessional" is as good a way to end the mass and bookend the "processional" as anything.

I still hear "sending-forth" sometimes, but hopefully we're at the dawn of an era of liturgy more careful in meaning as well as in construction. I've already rambled and griped about things I've been seeing at church but I've witnessed similar phenomena in technical writing, where inexperienced or unskilled authors feel the key to writing in a professional style involves not just heavy use of jargon but stilted, dry sentence construction, as if it will sound appropriately high-level because it sounds so unnatural. Perhaps I am a good example of that phenomenon. Either way, this may be a good opportunity to correct such misconceptions.

And hopefully clear out some of the other liturgical detritus.

I haven't written yet about the Wall Street occupation...

2012-02-04T19:57:00.000-06:00

...and I hope to make just a few comments and let it drop, since the movement seems to be in low gear for the winter, at least, or having gone into semipermanent or worse hibernation after devolving into another Zombietime photoessay opportunity.

If you take nothing else away, if I make no other comprehensible or worthwhile point, I want you to remember one thing that may have been the bane and doom of the Occupy movement since its conception:

Envy is not the answer to greed.

They talk about the 1% and the 99%, about the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer--cliches that have not been true since before modern times.

It may be true that the gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase, but what isn't talked about much is the fact that on average the rich and the poor are both getting more wealthy, but the rich merely at a higher rate. This is a sign that the problem is not what people say it is.

Certainly, the abjectly destitute continue to have next to nothing, as they always have--or only so much as nearby charitable organizations have been able to supply--but they are also not the ones turning out in droves to heckle the white collar desk slaves in major cities all across the country.

The tycoons who really make up the 1% do not waste their time working mundane jobs like the middle class does. I'm not saying they do or don't work hard, but let's not get distracted and harass the guys who also need to show up every day to support their families, okay?

From the National Taxpayer Union, and the Tax Foundation, some tax statistics:

The top 1% of earners by adjusted gross income, about $343k or higher, paid almost 37% of all taxes in 2009, but made 17% of all income.
The top 5% made 32% of all income and paid 59% of all federal taxes.
The top 50% (AGI about $32k) paid almost 98% of income taxes in 2009.
the bottom 50% paid a little over 2% in 2009, and that rate has been dropping steadily since at least 1999.

You can look these stats up or go digging through the data at IRS.gov if you need to disprove the usual cliches for yourself.

The tax proportions do change with income level, because dividends and capital gains are taxed at different rates from regular income, but richer people tend to have investments and other income sources that are taxable as dividends and capital gains more than the less wealthy, so they're still shouldering the burden.

If you're getting irate now, allow me to remind you that I have said nothing about sticking it to the poor, who have very little left to glean, anyway. My point is that the people who still have decent jobs these days are not the real enemy, and for the most part the richest didn't get that way by substantial theft of the poorest.

The forgotten crux of the economic argument is the middle class. As a rough gauge, we can put the ceiling on upper middle class at the $250k/year mark (also, I was able to find numbers for this income level). About 3% of Americans make more than that. A tenth of a percent make over a million dollars. The poorer half of all American income earners, who pay 2%, are made up of 70 million people.

In case anyone's getting lost in the numbers, it's a median-mean thing; don't worry about it.

3% of Americans, assuming we've got 350 million people, comes to 10.5 million people. 350 million total, minus 10.5 million upper class, minus 70 million lower class, yields a middle class of approximately 269,500,000 people who pay about 40% of all income tax (neglecting the difference between this 3% and the 5% listed above--I'm not trying to teach a math lesson here).

Tax debates usually hit the middle class the hardest because there are just so damn many of us that small changes in tax rates yield large variations in the budgets. Under a progressive tax schedule like we have in this country, maybe the rates in the top brackets are also important variable.

Look: maybe Warren Buffet's right and he needs to pay higher taxes, on top of the charitable giving he does, in quantities surpassing what most of us will ever see in our lives, to organizations benificent and shady alike; and certainly we need to take care of the poor, even if there is some truth behind the presumption that we need the government's help to do it and not just our own personal and willing contributions of time and material resources to places like St. Vincent de Paul or Goodwill or the efforts of religious orders. But a worker is worth his wages. He is not a villain for achieving some success in providing for his own family--and it does us all well to remember that we do not know how much the average Wall Street drone is socking away for his kids, nor how many kids he is trying to support, nor what other expenses he may have like a home in disrepair or massive student loan debt or medical costs, nor how much he already gives to charity.

If you're poor, you have the right to demand help. If you're not, you can provide help and try to attract the help of others. If you need a job and you want a new car and your student loans forgiven too, well, that's silly but I applaud your honesty. If you have made money on the backs of de facto slave labor, shame on you. But if you need help, it is not just to paint a worker who is guilty of nothing but having received his just wages with the same brush as the shameful exploiter.

In your rush to fight poverty, whether your own or a stranger's, do not be eager to embrace jealousy, for it too is a vice.

Well, so much for "just a few comments," but I think I'm done with the situation for now.

Would feminism oppose sex-selective abortion to prevent the decline of the female population?

2011-12-30T22:47:00.000-06:00

Apparently not in this day and age. At least they're being consistent, right? Choose the legal capacity to make choices over the ontological ability to have choices to make.

If I haven't said it before, I've intended to say it a thousand times: evil is ultimately self-consuming, suicidal. It is only parasitic on the good and when it has done all the damage it can do to the particular good off of which it feeds, it turns to other goods and extinguishes them, eventually cutting off the branch on which it sits; or as Tolly put it in the Silmarillion:

...in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last.

Thus do all evils eventually collapse or expend themselves. The great 20th century dictatorships made great efforts to cull millions of their own people; Germany was saved only by attracting the righteous fury of the Allies trying to rescue Europe from fascism, the Soviet Union was spared perhaps as much by the demise of Old Joe Stalin but was felled by a gross overestimation of the propensity of humans to work for others before themselves, and China perhaps was a wiser student of history but is these days merely taking new bait for the same trap.

So we see it in the Roe effect. Evil is sterile and cannot propagate itself, not without corrupting another fecund good. I would speculate that this is why when Jesus touched the unclean, they became clean rather than He unclean. The beast may raise its head again but here is one more reason why abortion will end: there will be no one left to support it.

2011-12-27T08:50:00.000-06:00

From Ms. Magazine, ten questions they think will stump pro-lifers:

How many years do you consider to be a fair prison term for a woman who has an abortion?
How many years for a doctor who performs one?
Will the punishments be greater the second time around?
Where will the state get the money necessary to prosecute one-third of all American women for this crime?
Forty-two percent of women who have an abortion have incomes below 100 percent of the federal poverty level (that’s $10,830 for a single woman with no children, if you’re counting). When women are forced to have children they cannot afford to raise, will those children become wards of the state or simply new Medicaid recipients? Where will the state find the money necessary to support them?
Will you be willing to watch your wife die in front of you when her life is threatened by an unsafe pregnancy that no one is allowed to do anything about? Your daughter?
Will rapists have to pay child support to women who are forced to have their children?
Will the child of incest be in the custody of its rapist father or the father’s teenaged daughter, his mother? In fact, 18 percent of women who have an abortion in America are teenagers. Will they be required to drop out of high school to raise their children or will the state provide free childcare?
Will upper-class white women be prosecuted as vigorously as other women who have abortions?
You are aware that upper-class white women have abortions, aren’t you?

From me:

I don't know, what's the usual penalty for infanticide? If she did it out of desperation, then I might say it's analogous to murder three. It would be, after all, a felony. We're not going to get to the point as a society where abortion is off the table until having a child--even just having one and giving her up for adoption--is not viewed as a greater problem than killing a child; where trying to make the problem go away instead of facing up to it is not viewed as preferable to taking a hit in the lifestyle. Until then, just putting people in jail isn't going to be any better a solution than putting basement tokers in jail under "zero tolerance" laws has solved the drug problem.
I don't know, what's the usual penalty for infanticide? Since he's just doing it as a matter of course, then I might say it's analogous to murder one. It would be, after all, a felony. I'd make the same analogy as I did with the war on drugs, but abortion clinics are notorious for not meeting the professional or hygiene standards of real medical facilities, and that kind of problem is of a more dire order than an agglomeration of college dropouts living smokey lives of quiet dissipation.
Aren't they usually? Why wouldn't they be? Couldn't think of more than nine good questions?
From the money it doesn't give to Planned Parenthood (by some estimations, nearly a million dollars a day--one figure I saw was $363 million a year), if your assumption is correct that the vast increase in number of abortions after Roe would not be reversed by its overturn--and is that one third of all American women, or one third of all American pregnancies? We should be clear on this point; I'm actually uncertain, and haven't seen numbers on the propensity of women to have abortions repeatedly, recently enough to remember any figures. Or maybe we could do things differently: Instead of making it illegal to procure an abortion, just make it illegal to perform one. After all, we already have laws that distinguish between possessing, buying, and selling controlled substances; if we want to be sensitive to desperate and scared mothers, we could focus on the doctors who actually do the dirty work. Similarly, going after drug dealers would probably be more effective than going after people who would just prefer to toke up on Friday nights with a few friends instead of gathering around a box of King Edwards and a bottle of Crown Royal Reserve. But still: if we wanted another zero-tolerance law to enforce, do you think a million a day would cover it?
So fewer than half of women who have abortions live in poverty? Why does it seem natural to kill children who would be born into poverty before finding your own answers to questions like "who would take care of them?" and "who can afford to have children?" And why are you assuming that the state needs to shoulder the direct responsibility to care for children? There is such a thing as finding would-be parents who would handle these details and save lawmakers and voters much grief. Sure, kids are expensive to raise, but decrepit senior citizens are also expensive to keep in nursing homes, and I'd like to give them the chance to do better than hold a pillow over my face when they tire of watching me linger. But if they do neither because they were never born alive, who's stuck with the job? The state--that is, you taxpayers. Does that trouble you now? Sure, you get to start making claims about how your money gets spent, but now your money's getting diluted more and you'll be fighting with more people who are anteing up and also want a say on how their money's spent. You're worried about money? If we ban abortion, start giving money to Distributed Parenthood so adoption fees and whatever medical expenses accrued during delivery are covered for poor mothers, since it looks like Obamacare is going to be driving Catholic Charities out of the business and taking over most everything anyway.
You're asking me if I would be willing to kill my son or daughter to save my wife's life, not just from an "unsafe" pregnancy where the complications surpass current medical arts, but where for some reason doctors are barred from acting (a facile equivocation; in the real world abortion isn't the only possible solution to pregnancy complications). First, two words: double effect. That's an argument too big to pack in here. Second, maybe you should ask my wife if she was willing to kill her son or daughter to save herself. Making this about male oppression makes you the sexist. As for my daughter, well, I would never kill my grandchildren, and I would hope she wouldn't either; I guess you could say we're "barred" from murdering our offspring by the same logic. You want to talk about unsafe pregnancies? Try to frame a hypothetical situation in terms that don't require me to commit or authorize physical violence to resolve a "sometimes life's just a bitch" problem. I wouldn't even kill you to save someone's life, unless you yourself were the immediate threat, and even then my desire and intent would not be your demise but the removal of your immediate ability to propagate harm. Half of all abortions are elective, anyway, which means there isn't a vast majority of genuinely troubled and at-risk mothers desperate enough to risk a D&E in some marginally sanitary office.
I think that's the least they should do. Forcing them to marry their victims like in the old days was never a good thing, but it did reflect at least a dim understanding of accountability for one's actions. Why would you even ask this? Trying to make it easier on rapists by insinuating that they shouldn't, that rape victims should be protected from any possible "reminders" of their attackers? Have you really ever gotten to know mothers whose children were the product of rape? Or is this just another shocker of a non sequitir to keep pro-lifers off balance and pretend you actually scored some rhetorical points?
Again with making every solution a power of the state. Thanks for the patronizing lesson in abortion statistics. Why would a rapist of any stripe now get custody of the child, and why would that change? Does it relate in any way to laws on the books before Roe? The father's a rapist, he should be in jail. Do you realize you're assuming we would stop prosecuting rape in the case of incest? Where the hell do you get that idea? Just throwing out outrageous suggestions to get a rise out of us, so you can either pretend we're the unreasonable people for taking rightful offense at offensive claims and acting like the the only scandalized adult in the room? As for teenage mothers, if it really gets to be a problem, maybe we should start having day care at high schools; in the meantime, we have day care elsewhere, and maybe the feds could offer a tax break or subsidy for child care if we're going to go that route instead of leaving it to today's grandmothers to raise a second generation of kids, hopefully better than the first (don't get hung up on rape--the vast majority of accidental pregnancies are from consensual sex).
Why shouldn't they? Are their children not just as human as the poor brown children you insist we hold to a different standard? Or are you referring to the fact that rich people, perhaps disproportionately, already are not prosecuted with the rigor as other demographics, when suspected or accused of the same crimes? That's a fair cop, since it's something that already happens with all kinds of crimes, and probably has been happening in the West for the last five hundred years, and longer before that and in all other places if you replace "brown" and "rich and white" with any other two disparate demographic groups historically and geographically proximal to each other (whether or not it's just, the double standard between alien or minority and native or majority is almost universal), so I don't know why it's only a scandal when trying to trick people into thinking their desire for mercy for desperate and scared and pressured pregnant women is really a belief in choosing abortion. I can only imagine this is supposed to be a parallel with the death penalty, but to really be a proper analogy, we'd be debating whether to legalize or ban murder on the grounds that fewer white people get the chair for murder: there may be a problem, but this is a different one.
Oh, I see. You're the one who holds poor brown people and, apparently, rich white men to different standards. So you're racist as well as sexist. No wonder I was only incredulous, and not stumped, at your really insightful and penetrating, um, caricatures. You think we don't think about who has abortions? You think it only occurs to us that abortions don't only happen to "not me and nobody I know" but "not me, nobody I know, and nobody of my race or economic class?" Do you realize how artificial a way of thinking that is? In spite of this, do you think it hasn't occurred to us that while perhaps a third of pregnancies end in abortion, half of all pregnancies of black women end in abortion? Do you think we haven't noticed that, while half of abortions are not for reasons of medical or financial desperation (I'm reluctant to say "necessity"), the majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are in poor neighborhoods? Do you think those rich white folks you so disparage are just going to happily come to those run-down and dangerous parts of town you want to pretend we think don't exist? Do you think we haven't noticed that these differences are, as they say, statistically significant? I'll tell you this much: it's not because we're promoting abortion among minorities. What do you think is going to happen to minorities if they maintain the highest abortion rates in the country? But please, by all means: tell me more about how abortion hits close to home. Please, by all means: when you've run out of reasonable arguments to make, make some more graphic or inflammatory comments to try to gin up some squeamishness or frustration to feed your schadenfreude. That's how they roll on the internet, after all.

These things remind me of people I knew in high school and college, and even a few in grad school, who are pretty smart, but maybe not as smart as they think they are, and are hung up on getting by with native talent and not bothering to do any real homework. Sure, someone looked up that 42% figure somewhere, but coming up with this list of questions, it's like they couldn't get past the misconception that pro-lifers are really just about controlling women and hiding that agenda under a veneer of sentimentality. But what's sentimental is talking like we need to save PP because it's such a great provider of women's health services, like it's one of those "too big to fail" corporations loaded up with the nostalgia of an older friend who will hold your hair back when you're puking in the toilet and give you a lift to the mall when you need to Take Care Of Something. No thanks; I like a friend who helps me when I'm sick but I don't want one who would support me in doing something wrong, and I hope I wouldn't be a friend who would, either.

Is there such a thing as truth, or just facts?

2011-12-22T12:22:00.000-06:00

Has anyone noticed a pattern lately?

For the past several months, on and off in the marginally philosophical circles I occasionally run tangent to, I've seen a slight increase in the incidence of people distinguishing truth from facts, and it rubs me the wrong way.

I'm not saying I think there's a perfect correspondence between the two ideas. There just seems, to me, to be a concerted effort to divorce truth and facts, a little undercurrent in human discourse that changes the direction of thought and discussion ever so subtly.

I'm not sure I can give an adequate definition of "truth" in this context; usually what I see is assertions or bald existential conclusions (perhaps justified by observation or reasoning somewhere, and not just presumed, but it's left as an exercise to the reader) that truth is unknowable or nonexistent and all we're left with are facts.

But when I learned what a fact was, I was taught that it was an objectively true idea or statement. You can debate whether it's warm or cool, cold or hot--that would be a matter of opinion--but you can't argue that it's not winter on December 27 in the northern hemisphere.

There's some wiggle room, I get it--if there's a premature thaw and New Year's passes with highs in the 50s, then it's not really wintry weather--but we don't have to go there. I could also say it's a fact that 2+2=4, that it's absolutely true, if we bar silly games with rounding and deviant numeral systems. I'm not dealing with that right now; we can describe those situations with other facts.

There's truth and then there are facts? Last I knew, if it wasn't true, it wasn't a fact. Is the window open? It's true the window's open. It's a fact that the window is open. If the window were not open, it would not be true that it's open, and it wouldn't be a fact that the window was open. You could say "It's open" anyway, but then you would simply be wrong.

It would be a fact that you said it's open, but that's not the same thing, and maybe therein lies the difference. Still, it's a matter of the fact, the truth, being "You claimed, or believe, that the window is open," which if you're wrong could have nothing to do with the configuration of a window. But then the fact is "someone asserted X," not "X" itself. Sure, it's true someone asserted X, but I don't care about that any more than I care about how to label mild weather the week after Christmas; I care about X being true and what's going to happen to the snow. Some things we can only have empirical evidence for, true (ha!), but some things are not empirical and nobody argues about it (see 2+2=4, above).

So, is the window open? You say it's closed. You're right, or you're wrong, or you define "closed" by some idiosyncratic criteria, or it's partway closed and you want to split hairs, but if you're not psychotic we can sort these things out.

You can claim any of these things. Are they thereby facts? No, the only facts are (1) whether the window is open or closed and (2) that you think something about it. These things are true. At first I gave the second as "what you think about it," but that's an opinion, not a fact.

The line between opinion and fact is getting blurred; all we're left with is what people think is going on around them, either poorly documented or uncamouflaged and called opinion or empirically documented and called a fact (even though the fact is not "well-documented X" but "we have observed X to be predominant condition," which is still contingent on statistics).

Anyone else noticing this? Is it a recent development in philosophy that we can have "facts" with no truth value, or just some relativistic claptrap that has trickled down to the hoi polloi who consider themselves bright because they call themselves Bright?

I was annoyed enough when I first heard people making unequivocal assertions like "there is no objective truth," but this seems like an attack on the idea itself. If we can no longer rise above the confusion to even conceive what "truth" would be, how could anyone claim there was such a thing, or that they had it?

Good question. But I'm not playing.

What politician is down to earth?

2011-12-17T00:27:00.000-06:00

Larry Elder at Catholic Exchange concludes an insightful analysis by reminding us that, ultimately, none is--not at the national level, anyway.

But he spends most of the article demonstrating how the Democrats' vocation of championing the unwashed masses does not arise from firsthand experience in the lower class and lower middle class predominating the biographies of the DNC's top players. On the contrary, Democratic leadership is every bit as out of touch as that of the GOP; but that's not the narrative we hear, is it?

No, we hear lots of sentiment about protecting the little guy from corporate fat cats--you know, the one who are tycoons because they either inherited wealth from their robber baron parents or because they managed to foist all taxes off on the people who make under $28k, or somehow stole it from them (or the corporations they own somehow did, or maybe just people with college degrees and desk jobs and as a demographic the lion's share of the tax burden). We hear a lot about punishing the successful and the lucky for the crime of drawing resentment from the destitute, the jealous, and the professional class warrior. We hear not just patronizing propaganda and behalfist rhetoric but weird, presumptive editorializing like claims that "people cringe when politician X says Y about issue Z," where "people" is supposed to be all-inclusive and make X appear to be, again, out of touch, but really only includes the journalist or the propagandist and his staff or circle of friends and probably few others, and definitely not others who have a different but still reasonable view of what truth and virtue can mean.

Elder's article didn't surprise me, but the picture he painted drew into focus an inconsistency I hadn't noticed before. The DNC and its minions have been painting the GOP's candidates as being in various degrees of alienation from at least the rest of America. By contrast, the Democrats are supposed to be relatable and understanding. Like Larry Elder said, both sides are lacking in this department at that level, but what really seemed curious to me was the fact that the Dems were bothering to play the "common man" card, after this theme developed in his support base and went unanswered by the then-future-president.

Is he the superhuman who got elected or is he a common man in the right place at the right time for the next election? If he were both, I guess he would have to be God, wouldn't he? But he's not.

2011-11-22T22:52:00.001-06:00

Marc over at The Bad Catholic wrote an insightful essay--well, he writes several, but this one from several days ago just came back to mind earlier today and I wanted to connect a couple dots.

An agnostic I once read, long enough ago that I have forgotten who it was (I welcome all offers to identify the person and the circumstance for me), admitted that despite the dearth of objective, tangible evidence for God, one thing that materialists haven't really been able to account for is the presence of so much beauty in the world. The idea is that it would be simpler to evolve a psychology in a species that lacked any sense for beauty, and lacked any need for it, than a psychology that has a sense for beauty that helps propagate one's genes, or a psychology that has a sense for beauty that serves no materialistic need.

Marc points out some instances where a Darwinist might suddenly recognize that there are things of value that are not simply material, and then turns them on their heads. To wit:

How can you not believe in God? Have you never seen yourself seeing a sunset?”

What evolutionary end is furthered by being able to admire a sunset? Or music? Or the human form in non-reproductive terms?

Spare me references to magpies hoarding shiny things or the insistence that any appeal of one human to another is sexual. The former may be no more than analogous to a moth with its navigational instincts overwhelmed by a hundred watt light bulb, and the latter forgets that there can be more than one way for people to be just friends.

As CS Lewis would point out, why do we have this appetite for it if there is nothing real to satisfy it? What sense would it make for the human brain to have acquired such a developed and nuanced sense of beauty, only to satisfy it with self-deluding judgments of sensory input?

Ah, but I've been talking about beauty. What about ugliness and pain?

Same thing. Witness a group of animals where one is wounded or brought down, not quite dead, by a predator. The survivors might flee out of an immediate need to survive, and in some species parents might defend their young for the same gene-perpetuating reason (or sometimes a larger social group than the nuclear family, but whatever), but they don't attempt to rescue each other. An ungulate gets caught in the mud near a watering hole and a cheetah is able to reach it without sinking, and starts eating from its hindquarters while it bleats in agony; the other antelope, sensing the departure of an immediate threat, return to drink and just keep an eye on the cat.

People, though? Don't just rescue a person from the lion display at the zoo, look at yourself rescuing the person! What motivated you? A desire to prevent or stop the suffering of a fellow human? Even a desire to play the hero? Both motivations impossible for other animals.

Whether it's beauty or pain, we're capable of abstracting it and nothing else is. Just think about why and where this capability originates.

The inclination to moral bankruptcy of the pro-abortion movement

2011-11-13T01:53:00.001-06:00

I had a weird experience over the weekend, albeit one that wasn't too surprising, upon reflection.

Was web surfing and found an interesting food blog--barbecue I think was the main theme, and for what it's worth I'm a sucker for meat that's been cooked low and slow.

The blogger had posted on a pig roast, and some anonymous vegetarian left a comment to the effect of "your unborn child should suffer the same fate as that hog."

The blogger was understandably on the far side of annoyed, and after a brief and righteous condemnation of a coward flaming from behind the shield of anonymity, the blogger...proceeded to instruct the commenter that "unborn child" is a contradiction ("child" being defined by some assumed authority not to include the medical category "fetus"), and then spent the bulk of the message defending the legitimacy of meat consumption.

You can eat meat or not if you wish, but I was a little off-put by how this blogger just blew past the rhetorical threat to her son or daughter.

I shouldn't be shocked but it still goads me to see people hiding behind technical terminology in casual communication. Especially here, when the retort was hardly a rebuttal.

Whether or not "unborn child" would be acceptable parlance in medical or legal literature, it's specific enough that no one fails to understand the reference. It would be like me interjecting into a conversation on building materials with "You should know steel isn't a metal;" in a sense it'd be true, because steel is an alloy of elemental iron (a metal) and small amounts of carbon (usually forming a stoichiometric compound in the so-called alpha matrix), along with sometimes some other elements; but I would generally only be confusing the non-pedantic people who are concerned with matters to which my hair-splitting is irrelevant; and beyond that I still wouldn't be entirely correct because the steel would remain predominantly metallic in the sense that the iron's conduction and valence electron bands still overlap.

See what I did there? Completely derailed the discussion by insisting on an inappropriate use of strict terminology. Maybe intimidated a few people with my posturing. Certainly confused and annoyed some people who understood perfectly what was going on until I jumped in and pretended to clarify things with impenetrable jargon--in essence, hid an entire forest behind a bunch of trees.

John Wright has written more thoroughly, and superiorly, on the abuse of language and how it is propagated through political correctness, and it's perfectly reflected by what this blogger did and what I just demonstrated: Control of the discussion was claimed by one party, who overtly or subtly tried to dismiss the concerns of another party and redefined the terms from words that were well understood to malapropos words that are so specific they cloud the real issue, divert attention to other matters more easily argued than the matters that were relevant.

But still, why that detour? The vegetarian rhetorically wants your kid roasted on a spit as payback for doing the same thing to a pig, and aside from this horrific overreaction to reading about a person eating meat, before going on a long diatribe about how eating meat isn't so bad, you have to stop to point out that--wait for it--it's not really a child the vegetarian wants to see cooked?

That kind of knocks the wind out of any rebuttal. It would have been more clear how silly it is if the argument had been laid out differently. "Your child should die in a fire as payback for you roasting that innocent pig whole." "Hey, don't be so scandalized; almost everyone in the world eats meat. But it's not really a child, anyway." Huh? So, maybe it would be okay, but if not, at least it's not like they'd be making her give up barbecue? What?

I can only surmise it is part of the perpetual campaign to darken people's vision of what should be perspicuous, that innocent humans born or unborn are entitled to freedom from deliberate harm. Without the high-falutin' rhetoric to counter rational thoughts to the contrary and this disjointed murmuring to keep people off guard and stop them from having quiet enough moments to think, people would be likely to realize the self-evident for themselves, start making well-informed and thoughtful decisions for themselves.

I wonder how the child would feel, looking back at the blog archives ten or fifteen years from now, and seeing his mother imply that while he might have been spared the embryotome, it was not because he deserved or had any right to be.

2011-10-26T19:07:00.001-05:00

Two stupid things I've heard, relating to politics/democracy:

Abortion: "Needs to be made affordable/less restricted because it's the law of the land, and if it's not universally available, it's being discriminated against."
BS. It's a medical practice, not a citizen, and therefore has no rights and is not subject to discrimination laws, but rather to the same regulation as any other operation.

Gay marriage: Voters in MA or PA or somewhere, so it goes, have the same right to vote on the matter as those in CA.
We live in a hybridized democratic republic, but that doesn't mean you're entitled to vote on any issue you want at any point. No. Voting is only one part of the process and only comes at certain times. At other times and places, go campaigning. Don't complain that the movement in different states is in different stages, except to call attention to more or less progress is being made in one state than another. That can motivate people to be more active. It's as fitting (which is to say, not at all) to demand to vote on the east coast because people on the west coast are, as it was to ask Bush to step down early so Obama could get a head start on saving the country. Keep talking that way, though, and you'll give the impression that you or your cause or people on your team are entitled to special civic and legal privileges, which is distasteful to people who are aware that you haven't earned the right.

Are "mysteries" the crutch of the intellectually lazy?

2011-10-11T15:08:00.000-05:00

No, or, not necessarily.

Calling something a theological mystery and not having a solution is not a lack of inquisitiveness or a sign of sloth. All mysteries are mysteries before they're solved; are detectives and private investigators, then, merely lazy? Of course not. A mystery is simply something we can't explain with the facts and logic at hand.

When we speak of transcendental ones, we do generally mean they're unsolvable by temporal means. It's good to accept they're beyond us, in the sense of cultivating trust and patience, but it's not a sign reading "think this far and no further." Mysteries are not devoid of meaning; they are recognized as possessing more meaning than we can apprehend.

It's a race we know we probably can't finish. It does not mean we should not or will not make the effort. Some people may be more or less disposed to apprehending some part of the whole, but some people also may be more or less disposed to apprehending parts or all of complex cobordism, either, and there's no shame or conviction in that, either.

It may be expanded to the subject of religion as a whole. How often do you hear things like "The Catholic Church tells you what to think?" (more on that another time) Sure, there are professional theologians and philosophers, but most of the people you meet on the street are amateur theists, so to speak; they--we--can't answer a lot of the tough questions, or recognize some of the stupid ones, so we end up trusting what the Church tells us.

How is this a moral failing? I'm sorry, but I'm too busy to figure out why the difference between homoousios and homoiousios is important; I will take it on faith, ponder it when I have the means as well as opportunity to do so, and allow the experts in their fields to do their job. They keep me from falling into heresy, and I'll keep their planes from falling out of the sky. Is that not a fair deal?

2011-10-06T14:40:00.000-05:00

Unbelievers keep saying that the miraculous healings attributed to saints are merely rare, natural occurrences that we don't have the science or technology to explain.

I think God, in His infinite wisdom and power, works miracles that happen to be beyond the understanding of anyone who would witness. A miracle to a panhandler a thousand years ago might be transparent to a physicist today; a miracle to a lawyer today might be transparent to a doctor a thousand years from now.

This may seem tidily pat to unbelievers, but hopefully it will remind believers of hope. There's plenty of room for mystery.

God can do whatever He wants, remember? If we explained every mysterious healing by saying "I'm confident medical technology will advance to the point where this sort of thing is commonplace; it just happened to occur spontaneously in this case," then we're making hulking, looming idols out of science and technological progress.

There's nothing wrong with putting mundane faith in science; with as much as the state of the medical arts has advanced, there are lots of reasons to hope for continued improvement in maintaining health. But reasonable optimism is no substitute for sober open-mindedness to unexpected possibilities, or for rational and informed thought.

I'm sure I'll revisit that subject more in the future, as I have in the past. Permit me a disjointed segue.

Most often, the standard I hear for a healing to be considered miraculous by atheists and non-Christians is the regrowth of a missing limb. It would be an understandably dramatic and easily documented event, to be sure. Has such a thing, then, never happened?

In the little research, I've done, I haven't heard of such a thing--the closest I could come was a few references to a surgery in the third century by Saints Cosmas and Damian where the gangrenous leg of Deacon Justinian was replaced by a leg from the cadaver of an Ethiopean. Not quite the same thing, not a lot of corroborating evidence at hand, if still miraculous in magnitude given the era.

There are a few other cases that might be dramatic enough to qualify, however.

In 1921, Peter Smith was born at Mother Cabrini Memorial Hospital. As was custom at the time, a silver nitrate solution was put into his eyes for prophylactic purposes. Instead of using the usual 1% concentration, however, the nurse accidentally used the stock 51% concentration. Young Peter's eyes were burned out of his head, and the solution ran into the crying infant's mouth and down his throat, burning his lungs. His temperature rose to 108&#176F.

They prayed for him before the Blessed Sacrament. In two days, his eyes were restored. A day after that, his fever was gone.

Father Peter Smith died of an aneurysm in 2002.

In 1892, Marie Lemarchand visited Lourdes. A victim of lupus, she bathed in the waters and was cured; her ulcerous skin was regenerated, and she no longer coughed up blood. Atheist and author Emile Zola was there to witness it.

But believing and seeing are two different things, and there is such a thing as a dogmatic faith that miracles do not happen.

Zola had claimed he only wanted to see a cut finger healed by dipping in the miraculous water. Although he examined Ms. Lemarchand closely enough to describe the condition of her skin (he omitted the details of her coughing in the report on his trip to Lourdes) when she arrived, when asked to look at her after bathing in the water, he said "Ah no! I do not want to look at her. She is still too ugly."

Before he left Lourdes, he asserted that he would not believe in miracles even if everyone at Lourdes were healed. In his book on the subject, he suggested that it perhaps wasn't lupus the woman had at all, and that her cure was merely psychosomatic.

You can almost feel Zola considering the possibility that the world was stranger than dreamt of in his philosophy, before falling back on "it wasn't really lupus so it wasn't really a miracle."

Some have even speculated that Padre Pio was only faking his stigmata, since they miraculously healed in the days before his death. While doctors had examined his wounds in life and his woundless body after death, the skeptics comfortably asserted that no medical investigation was allowed or made, for convenience of perpetuating the "myth" of Padre Pio's stigmata.

But what about limb regrowth, you ask? Was that not the original contention?

I submit that limb regrowth is a more trivial matter than the cure of lupus. It may also be simpler than regrowing an eye, although I won't stake anything on that.

We are already culturing tissues in the lab. Teeth and ears have been grown, and in July of this year a trachea was grown and successfully implanted into a human.

To this I say, so what?

We are not talking about "medical miracles" of coaxing stem cells to replace missing or excised tissue. We are talking about spontaneous curing of conditions of missing limbs.

We must be careful, we believers and we skeptics; for to explain how something might have been done is not to explain how something was done. In cases when we cannot be sure of all the events, the gap between "what we know at the moment" and "what we know could have accomplished this" may be large enough to admit reasonable doubt, and there is no shame or conviction either way in that; but when we speculate about likely explanations for bizarre phenomena, and we later come into facts that make reasonable suppositions impossible, it is silly and dishonest to persist.

I say this because at some point I would wager a missing limb will be miraculously restored, and some skeptic is bound to say "That could have been done on an outpatient basis" and be satisfied that no supernatural explanation could disprove a natural means for healing, even if it is known that the subject did not in fact visit a hospital, that no one who had the means to grow a limb "in the field" was present. Theists do have it a little easier in that God can work through natural means just as well as directly intervening, and so we may never know when God may make an exception to how the natural processes run in a case of limb stumps or cancer or lupus, but we want to be careful not to accede a miracle when someone fails to prove a mundane occurrence was possible in opportunity while spending all his effort to prove that a mundane occurrence just happened to be physically possible.

It's the difference between "could have done" and "did do."

Prayer request

2011-10-05T23:40:00.003-05:00

My grandmother was admitted to hospice yesterday. She's ornery and had a series of small strokes years ago, followed by a couple years of mismedication, so it was thought that she was merely getting more ornery and senile, but for reasons I'm not clear on they decided to get someone to review some test results taken about a month ago; it turns out she's got a cracked L4 vertebra, I think it is, and cerebrospinal fluid is leaking somewhere in her brain. She's in pain but lucid; seemed happy to be admitted and is ready for an end to living with all that pain.

Pre-diagnosis, they speculated she might have a month left to live. Knowing that she has actual medical problems and what they are, I'm not sure how it changes her prognosis; if she were younger, perhaps surgery could help, but they don't think she's strong enough to survive an operation on her back. No idea what palliative options may even exist for her brain thing.

Prayers are requested, for a happy death whenever it comes and comfort in the meantime. She gave up going to church a few years ago and agreed to see a priest when asked but didn't want confession because she still harbors a lot of anger.

On that note I would also ask for prayers for my grandfather and her relationship with him; I don't know what may have gone on between them but he is the target of much of her ire. He may be a curmudgeon, but he doesn't have much else in his life than her.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

2011-09-05T12:47:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend I caught part of a show on the radio talking about how the mayor of New York has declined to invite to his 9/11 memorial service any of the first responders or anyone who might have been expected to say a prayer in public for the victims of the WTC attack.

Whatever the real reason, it strikes me as a profoundly tacky and misguided attempt to honor the separation of Church and state, just for starters.

As far as that was part of Mayor Bloomberg's motivation, it's also representative of a larger movement to more broadly and thoroughly enforce the Establishment clause. This trend in Constitutional philosophy is troublesome where the prohibition of establishment is exalted over the prohibition against inhibiting free exercise, and it is promoted in part by misguided sensitive, considerate believers as well as by nonbelievers who feel oppressed by the existence of people from the first group.

The conflict leads to many questions about the relationship between Church and state in this country. Many governmental bodies (including a few in New York) open their sessions with a prayer by rule and not just by tradition or convention; "In God we trust" remains on all our money; "God Bless America" is often sung at sporting events. Should these things be stopped? Should such pious practices be allowed--tolerated, so to speak--but no sign of condonation be made, as long as they are not disruptive (for reasonable levels of disruption, which I will not argue here)? They've tried to stop prayer in schools, such as at graduation ceremonies and before football games, but where the laws get overly broad, as the bumper sticker says, "As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in school."

So it occurred to me that maybe we're asking some of the same kinds of questions that come up in the torture debate--questions that that tend to further torture because they muddy rather than clear the waters. When we ask "How harshly can we treat someone before it's considered torture?" with the purpose of deciding what types of positive or negative punishment may be applied to gain compliance in a subject, then we've already crossed a moral line with regard to intent. As I've said before, I don't believe that mild discomforts or inconveniences inherent to incarceration are properly torture, but if our guiding star is "how much can we get away with," then we're asking for trouble and committing a grave evil against our fellow man becomes a question of "When?" instead of "If...."

What does torture have to do with the price of eggs in China?

The matter of the relationship or lack thereof between Church and state comes up all the time, and whether it's a slippery slope argument bemoaning the repression of longstanding traditions of public prayer or a thinly veiled attempt to trick or convince everyone that formal oppression of religion is real freedom, or something reasonable in between, it often seems that the harder we try to figure out what religious activities the state should keep its nose out of and what the state should butt into in order to protect the interests of people of different religious persuasions, the harder it is to get a clear picture.

So, maybe we're asking the wrong questions. Maybe "What infringements are reasonable?" only has wrong answers.

Maybe, if the state can't do it right, the state shouldn't be doing it at all. Don't get involved in things where there's a conflict amongst believers, or between believers and nonbelievers, unless actual violence occurs.

It wouldn't be unheard of. Laws have been overturned before on the grounds that they were prohibitively difficult or impossible to enforce. I can't think of a law that has been overturned because the only available means to enforce it happened to be prohibited by higher laws, but if "protection from association with religious believers" rulings were challenged, I don't think it would be much of a stretch to frame the argument in these terms.

But I'm not a law scholar. I haven't come up with any answers. I just thought it was an interesting question to throw out there.

2011-08-24T17:49:00.001-05:00

I missed a chance to speak against abortion the other day.

Maybe I was just afraid. If it was something else, it wasn't a terribly good reason either, I'm sure.

I didn't want to jump in with both feet and be trying to defend myself from attacks literally on both sides--I walked into the lab that morning when two of my coworkers started talking about how annoying protesters (particularly March For Life types, since it was just the day before that one of my coworkers saw them, which is what brought it up in the first place, but they got in some jabs at the Westboro types along the way) can be.

I settled for listening to their arguments, trying to formulate responses in my head during a situation that lacks the convenience of time for reflection and referring to other minds for insight, like I do when I'm writing more apologetic stuff here. It was possible, after all, that I might even hear something new, and I wanted to consider some new arguments should I someday be faced again with countering them.

The conversation was pretty short, so they didn't make too many points at all before getting back to work.

One of them was that they just cannot understand why pro-lifers care so much about what other people do. It just purely seemed beyond them. "Not that I'd do it," one of them said, "but I should be able to go into my home, and shoot up with heroin, and if it's not affecting anyone else, if it's not hurting my job, why should it matter to anyone else?"

Well, he's begging the question. If it's not negatively impacting anyone else, then, okay, maybe we shouldn't be regulating it, but it's a pretty big "If," which is why outside of the rhetorical world laws against heroin already exist.

The funny thing there is that coworker of mine is a proponent of gun control. If I pulled a gun on a criminal, he says, the criminal would just take it away and shoot me. There's a lot of assumptions I've addressed before, but a lot of the motivation behind gun control devolves from the argument "Okay, say you wanted a nuclear bomb for your own protection. The government would be right in prohibiting that because there's no way for you to use it without adversely affecting your neighbors, all without their consent." That's a fair argument against certain types or scales of weaponry, but it denies the benefit of the doubt on the personal level that is generously extended to would-be partakers and promoters of narcotic drug use and infanticide.

This "if it's not hurting anyone, never mind" mindset treats the presence of a human life--the entire raison d'etre of the pro-life movement--as a trivial detail. With the specter of private autonomy looming over everything, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that the rights of a "victimized minority," that seem to conflict with the rights of another "victimized minority" that's pushing abortion itself, would be impossible to see.

"When the pro-life people came to my school," one of them said, "what I wanted to do was go stand next to the demonstrators and just hand out coathangers, saying 'Here, if they get their way you'll be needing these.'" I'm ignorant of the statistics (as opposed to the mythology) of coathanger abortions, except that by any lucid application of statistics the total number of abortions did in fact increase after 1973, so if someone can cite a reference, maybe a reliable web site, I'd be grateful. Most of what I've heard has pointed to underground abortion services that really weren't any less professional or sanitary than what's out there now. Anyway, the point of the demonstrations on college campuses wasn't simply to get people to vote against abortion and make it harder for a supposed majority of women to fight some epidemic of chronic unwanted pregnancies. The point is to change the hearts and minds of everyone, so that an evil institution can be seen for what it is and eliminated.

"They're standing out there in the cold, with small children, even having the kids passing out pamphlets with pictures of aborted fetuses on them. Maybe someone should call child protective services on them!" Maybe, if the parents were neglectful of their children's health and safety. They certainly shouldn't be exposing toddlers to hypothermia or tremendous gore, but what's an acceptable risk of harm to body or mind is within the purview of the parents. CPS does have a role to play for when parents are remiss, but there's a world of difference between having kids stand outside and exposing them to the equivalent of an R-rated movie, and tearing kids' limbs off and crushing their skulls. Where's the protection then? I mean, "Don't accuse me of murder with a raised voice and harsh words and photographic evidence?" Really?

I can't speak for every child, but I learned about abortion when I was in, I think, first grade. Not exactly a toddler, but when I stumbled across a pro-life booth at some function at church where they had pictures of post-abortion children on trays and in waste buckets, I certainly found it terrible, but it didn't give me nightmares; seeing the horror didn't do me any more harm than learning in the first place that some adults would have held my existence in such low regard. The only shock I felt was seeing the results of an abortion and having to wonder how anyone could look at what was obviously the mutilated remains of a baby and still think it was any different from doing it to, say, another adult.

I don't think I was dealing with people who spend most of their free time worrying about conservative politics, or they might have realized that pro-lifers aren't just irritated about a lifestyle choice that carries no moral weight, as if they're all Monopoly players who hate people who play pinochle. I have, on very rare occasions, heard some abortion apologists say "I recognize that there is human life within me, but I believe that that person is subordinate to my dignity, so I may act against him as I will;" I wonder how many people fall into this category and how many will just say "What's the big deal?"
But I don't really relish finding out the answer to that.

2011-08-07T18:13:00.000-05:00

"Why doesn't the law allow someone have a spouse of the same sex?"
"What would be the point?"
"I love him; it should be me who gets to make life decisions with him; or for him, and him for me, if we can't make decisions for ourselves."
"The state is not interested in how you feel about someone. It rightly sees that it has no business butting into things based on sentimental motivations."
"You love your wife."
"Yes, and we are also trying to create the next generation of citizens. "
"We can--"
"Yes, you can adopt in some jurisdictions, but you don't need to be married to do that. That justification has already been taken off the table."
"Who is the state to stop two consenting adults making a private decision to share their lives--"
"Hold the boat here, your complaint was about the law, originally. The state hasn't tried to stop you from living together so far, you or any other couple, gay and straight. What you want is public approval, or else you wouldn't be insisting on getting the laws changed and sending out invitations to attend your 'private decision to share' ceremony at a public venue."

"Do you believe in the real presence?" "Yes." "I don't think you do. If I did, I'd be at church every time its doors opened; I would crave it."

2011-07-16T19:45:00.000-05:00

Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't. I've known some people who are very faithful, very diligent, but people who never falter are few and far between.

It's easy to say you believe in something profound and your dedication would never flag, but the human condition is not amenable to putting that into practice. You have to come down the mountain sometime, and even if you live in the lowlands according to what you saw on the peaks, eventually the honeymoon will end. Eventually, you will realize, that if nothing else, you no longer personally have the strength or energy to maintain the level of enthusiasm you started out with. That's just the way things are. People go through dry spells (sometimes, if not always, by God's will, so you learn to rely on Him and trust in Him and not make an idol of euphoria, even in the presence of the Presence), and rare is the person who cooperates with God's grace so perfectly that the rush accompanying some mountain-top or road-to-Damascus experience is not followed by a lull before achieving a healthy balance of disposition or attitude--hence the big deal we make about saints as examples for us to follow.

I mean no disrespect to the enthusiastic. I only mean that great spiritual experiences often come with great spiritual joys or consolations that are meant to buoy us through particular times and not to be permanent in this life, and it is part of human nature to adapt to these things when they come and to adapt to their absence when they go.

Beyond that, it is this faithfulness through the dry times and future trials that the Enemy wants to attack, so that later attacks will be more effective.

So, without turning around and defending lethargy and lukewarmness, we shouldn't be too critical of people who seem to show a lack of zeal. Much of their energies may be taken up elsewhere. It is the greater prayer that is said in the absence of a strong, easy feeling of prayerfulness. Certainly, God will replenish so we should run to Him, but God is more forgiving of our absence than, say, our employers or others who depend on us might be, out in the world which we are called to be light and salt for in the first place.

Even people who followed Jesus, who saw him work miracles beyond what most of us ever experience (with our worldly senses, at least), sometimes fell away. The righteous wealthy man was dismayed and turned away when Jesus told him to give what he had to the poor; many were scandalized during the Bread of Life discourse; even Judas turned on him and nearly all the Apostles fled after His arrest. But we're supposed to be perfectly faithful because we've seen the end of the story? I don't think that's a fair expectation for humans in this life. There are sacraments in the first place so we can have tangible reminders of what God does for us, tangible channels for the most important graces we can receive. If we didn't need to have the Eucharist and confession regularly in our constant struggle against concupiscence and the devil, we wouldn't need anything, except maybe baptism and maybe a single reading of the Bible. But that's more suitable as a religion for angels than a religion for embodied, tempted, men.

It's not always easy to believe. It helps being around believers so you can build each other up; it helps getting spiritually fed at church a lot (not dismissing the call we have to go out and evangelize); it doesn't help being under attack by demonic forces to discredit the Sacrament. Without the Sacrament, there's nothing to attack or cause scandal over.

2011-06-26T12:12:00.002-05:00

Some time ago I was following a discussion about gay marriage over at ISCA. There's a lot of material ripe for dissection that I read, but instead of attacking the whole issue, I want to relay a few comments that were made along the way in order to capture the state of the debate. Quotes are from the pro-gay-marriage side; my comments follow.

"Gay people need marriage because their power of attorney for their partners can be challenged by blood relatives."
It can anyway.

"The child argument has nothing to do with the issue of marriage."
It has everything to do with marriage, as anyone with a lick of historical sense can tell you.

"A marriage is a committment of two people to each other. Why does it matter what their relative genders are?"
Because there are other kinds of commitments between people where their gender has nothing to do with what the commitment is about. If two men or two women--or a woman and a man--open a business, it's irrelevant. If two people want to get married, if it's a man and a woman they can have kids, and that's an important difference.

"I haven't seen any logical, non-moral, non-religious arguments against homosexual marriage."
You're defining anything relying on natural law or absolute truth and morals as religious, which is a cop-out. John C. Wright used to get that kind of criticism even when he was an atheist arguing for traditional marriage, which says to me that critics who make such arguments rather won't see logical, non-moral, non-religious arguments...although I'm not sure why I should be persuaded by someone who would be willing to say "Okay, so maybe X is immoral, but I want to do it anyway." If your argument for sodomy isn't inapplicable to murder, then maybe you'd best go back to the drawing board.

"Repealing sodomy laws hasn't led to gay marriage..."
It's leading there now; hence this debate.

"How does letting two faggots marry infringe on your right to bang your wife at night? Does it suddenly invalidate your marriage? Of course not."
Watch the language, pal. I know it's kind of personal, but if you're the only one throwing around inflammatory language, it's not everyone except you who is going to look like a bigot. That aside, it's not just about who gets to have sex with whom; that's not all there is to a marriage, and if two gay men wanted to get married, I would have thought they would be interested in the other aspects of being wedded as well. If not, why are we having this conversation?

"Folks who oppose gay marriage just say 'it goes against tradition' or 'it goes against nature' when really government should not be involved in it to begin with."
Then we have nothing to talk about. Just throw that baseball over the fence so no one can play with it, and stop wasting our time.

"You are aware that there has been absolutely no interest expressed in inter-species marriage anywhere in Massachusetts, right?"
Keep in mind that one woman had "married" a dolphin in 2006, before this debate took place, so I wonder about the incredulity of the person who made this criticism. Then again, the dolphin wasn't from Massachusetts.

"Actually, we're not talking about changing the basic foundation of marriage. We're talking about dumping marriage as something that the state can regulate, and going only with civil unions for all."
So will civil unions be regulated by the state? If so, that would be a distinction without a difference. If not, it's still defining away the problem--something is being created that is supposed to be just the same as marriage, with all the benefits, but lacking the thing for which the privileges of marriage were afforded to couples in the first place.

"I do not believe that government should legislate morality beyond any which deprives others of their basic civil rights. E.g., if what I choose to do does not harm you, deprive you of your property, or kill
you, then what I choose to do should not be regulated by law."
Your only standards are theft and assault? Bravo! Still, it won't hold up if abortion is going to get a pass--anyone you don't like will just get recategorized as an entity that lacks the right not to be harmed or deprived of anything.
But don't get snared by this argument. The deprivation or providence of civil rights is the matter at hand itself. This critic is assuming the conclusion in establishing the jurisdiction of government. Marriage isn't a basic civil right, anyway, or else we could rightfully sue anyone or anything that kept us from marrying whom or what we wanted--not just a minister or justice of the peace that didn't want to play house with us, but the would-be paramour who turned us down, a jealous spouse, a parent, a coroner.

"Pedophilia and bestiality are a straw man. They're illegal."
No, they're warnings against the slippery slope. I refer skeptics to NAMBLA and the woman who "married" the aforementioned dolphin. Polygamists are also waiting in the wings. Oh, didn't you notice that "Big Love" show? Don't you think it's an attempt to desensitize us to that kind of thing? If you're still skeptical, I refer you to the Internet. Start by looking up Rule 34; if it's out there, there are people who would rather not risk going to jail for what they're viewing or doing.

"The religious types should start with atheist-atheist marriage."
Why? Atheists are capable of conceiving children, provided one is a man and the other is a woman. This has been the whole point of the argument. Stay on topic.

"It's taken decades for the establishment to get as far as it has in accepting homosexuality as just the fairly minor natural variation that it is, and to get beyond the moral stigma of it."
Predispositions to sociopathy and diabetes are also "minor natural variations," but they have far-reaching consequences. Further, I submit that much of the "acceptance" you claim is actually mere tolerance (remember when that word meant something?), heavily seasoned with fatigue and then subsumed by the fear of being branded a cross-burning-caliber bigot.
Honestly, the normal reaction to a campaign that consists of things like the Folsom Street Fair (beware: a even a Google image search with the Strict setting isn't work-safe), punctuated by rhetoric about wanting to be treated normally, is not "Huh, I guess it was silly of me to entertain any anxiety about their lifestyle--I mean, orientation."

"If we want gays to be less promiscuous, then legalizing their relationships would seem like a logical way of doing that."
That would be a thoughtless and insane kind of logic. "Open" heterosexual marriages and adultery already exist and the trend in the past century has been to destigmatize promiscuity. I take it back--it wouldn't be thoughtless and insane logic, it would just be logic unburdened by the evidence.

"Damn right straights are not more promiscuous. In fact that is why heterosexuals never get AIDS, there is no teen pregnancy problem, and there is a 0% divorce rate for adultery."
Straw man. Okay, hyperbole, but AIDS is still more common in the gay community--when was the last time you heard of an "AIDS roulette" frat party? More or less often than a gay AIDS roulette party? More or less often than a swingers party?

"What this all boils down to, and forgive me for the crassness of the whole thing, is that when these people think of gays marrying, they are thinking of two sweaty gay men pounding the hell out of each other, and they can't get the thought out of their minds. (not to mention that some of them have gay tendencies themselves, or watching lesbian porn gets them off, or whatever.)"
Wishful thinking--the most vocal opponents must be those closest to conversion. That's a real enough phenomenon, but it just smacks of "You're going to be so humiliated when you discover the depths of your own hypocrisy, and I'm going to get a big laugh at your grief." Classic example of assuming everything is about sex and power. Do we need to get out of people's bedrooms, or do you need to get out of people's heads?

"Gay couples want to and do raise children, just like you."
Maybe so, but they never tell me that, only their concerned friends do, and then only rarely. All they tell me is they want power of attorney and less harrassment. Even obnoxious activists deserve less harassment than they get, but that ain't the same thing. But even if two men have a kid, who and where is the mother? If two women have a kid, who and where is the father? Did you have a kid so you could bring some joy into the world, or to satisfy your own desires? Not that that's a problem exclusive to gay parents--who hasn't seen Hollywood celebrities with trophy children?--but we may not be able to convey the meaning of marriage until we can remind people that children are not pets.

"I didn't choose to marry because of the exclusivity of the marriage institution, and I don't know anyone else who did either."
A straight answer from a married straight man. That's the danger of playing the victim card: it's not always All About You.

"Gay marriage won't lead to dolphin marriage. One woman does not a slippery slope make. There are no human-dolphin families or human-dog families in need of legal protection. It's a red herring."
What led us to dolphin marriage is what's leading us to gay marriage, is what led us to the guy who "married" the Eiffel Tower. It would be more of a red herring if the dolphin so-called marriage hadn't actually, you know, happened; or if there were actual human-dolphin or human-dog "families."

"Clearly, many heterosexual people engage in unsavory activities as well. And yet, because they already 'have' marriage, it is acceptable to dismiss those activities among heterosexuals, while using them as a reason for denying marriage to homosexuals."
Unsavory behavior is no more support for gay marriage than it is evidence against straight marriage. What are they trying to make us think happens? A guy gets caught by the police in the act of statutory rape, and he says "Hey, I'm a married man; my wife lives next door." "Oh, all right," says the cop, "off ya go?"

"'Unequal treatment is a red herring' is a red herring. No gay person would want to marry someone of the opposite sex, just as a straight person wouldn't want to marry one of the same sex."
I'm a straight man, but there are plenty of women I wouldn't want to marry, not even counting girls and wives of other men. Even if I did, there are reasons for the rules against it. Same as there are reasons for keeping me from marrying some dude.
Regardless, historically, and still in many places, weddings are arranged with little concern for the druthers of the husband and wife. Was it ideal? No. Was it legitimate? Yes.

"And when did society have to "approve" on my ability to have sex with wife or anyone else for that matter? I didn't realize that the rest of the world had to say yes or no to my actions or my marriage."
Marriage is a social institution, not a private one. Don't confuse it with sex, which is supposed to be a private act (cf. Folsom Street Fair). Don't you remember having a public ceremony followed by signing a contract with witnesses? Don't you remember demanding approval? Don't you remember demanding rights, not just privacy? It used to be about privacy, though--that's why we're still making slippery slope arguments.

"We just want to be able to protect our families, relationships and property - y'know: the original basis for the social construct of marriage."
Wow, great--'cept that relationships and property can exist outside of marriage, and property can be regulated independently, but families come from marriage, which some want, but from who's occupying all the bandwidth, it doesn't seem like a lot.

"I say do away with marriage as a civil/legal construct."
So you are against marriage, after all.

"You say marriage is about procreation and an adequate nurturing environment. I say it's a ritual contract declared in a public space; it's like a notary in that it gives more value to your commitment because it had been witnessed by a third party."
What does it accomplish that cohabitation and power of attorney don't get you, if you're not interested in kids? If you want it notarized, get a notary for yourself. Plenty of other public rituals, some that can even get you tax breaks if you want to make a job of it.

"Being gay is not wrong, and since its not wrong, gay couples should have the option to marry if they want. It's not something that heterosexual individuals have a right to deny them."
Being diabetic is not wrong, so people with diabetes should have the option to eat all the sugar they want, and non-diabetics shouldn't be party poopers about it.
Do I need to point out the difference between doing and being, here?

It's this kind of stuff that makes me roll my eyes when secprogs talk about conservatives being the ones living in a fantasy land and reality having a liberal bias. Secular progressives--post-moderns, anyway--don't even have as strong a concept of reality or truth as conservatives (although there is some doubt about the relationship Science has with Truth--but that's a separate matter). Concrete evidence for historical understandings of marriage? Religious claptrap. Statistical evidence that it's more expedient to raise children with a father and a mother than with some other combination? Words that shouldn't be spoken because they have power to hurt their cause, not because they have the power of fact behind them. Sure, invent your own explanation, and of course someone who disagrees will seem hallucinatory.

Cell phones (and more etiquette)

2011-06-12T01:27:00.001-05:00

All cell phones nowadays have a silent ring mode--you can set them so they only flash, or do nothing, or vibrate, or whatever, so the people around you aren't disturbed when the phone rings. You might want to consider setting your phone to a ring mode that isn't disruptive and then putting it in, say, your pocket so only you'll know when it goes off. I won't begrudge you the right to remain available in case you're an emergency physician or a parent of young children, but if something happens that you need to deal with, it's none of our business, and it should stay that way unless you really need to tell us that you have to go deal with someone bleeding to death. Leaving your phone in a purse or velise and then turning it up so you can hear it through the bag at arm's reach (and please keep track of your ringtone--even if a ringing phone doesn't sound like yours, assume it is anyway and check; don't let it keep ringing while you wonder how long that jerk is going to let his phone go) may seem convenient to you, but it's quite the opposite for everyone around you while you rummage through your personal effects trying to find it and then decide to answer it or not.

We are sympathetic to your emergencies. We are less so to your casual call screening.

I'm not sure, but I suspect all phones also have a feature where you can hit one of the buttons that are for use when the phone's closed, and the ringing will terminate, without immediately shunting the call to your voice mail. If you're the kind of person who has to ruminate on call screening, ruminate on finding that button before you take the phone out of the house again. You can stare at that phone all you want, after digging it out of your bag, and not bother anyone else--in fact, it might even help you ruminate more quickly, since there won't be that jarring noise coming from the device in your hand or angry-looking people all around making you nervous.

Am I still the only person who understands that the ice makers in freezers will automatically stop when the tray is full?

The yellow traffic light means "slow down and prepare to stop." It does not mean "hurry up; it will be red soon." The early part of the red light is not an ambiguous safety margin. While it is not necessarily a ticketable offense not to have completely cleared an intersection by the time the light turned red, if you can remember doing it more than once in any given week, you're probably being a little reckless. The standard is "If the light will be red before I can make it past the intersection, I should stop before reaching it," not "I can keep going unless I have the time and distance to stop before reaching a red light." In the interest of safety, assume that the cross traffic is going to underestimate the time between their light turning red and yours turning green, since it's going to vary depending on location and time of day. Also assume that the guy in front of you is going to stop whenever the light turns yellow; probably more than 99% of rear-end accidents are the fault of the driver of the rear car.

Just sayin'.

2011-06-09T06:36:00.001-05:00

"Come on, time to get up and go to church!"
"Mmm...naw, you go."
"You're crying off on me? This is good for you."
"I worship God in my own way."
"What, by sleeping in? I sleep in too and I love it; doesn't make it a spiritual experience."
"No, not just now--"
"Then what, praying by yourself somewhere, sometime during the week? I do that too; it doesn't earn me an excuse from doing what we're supposed to do--unless you have some sort of private mass in your head, as well."
"I don't need to sit there for an hour and have someone read the Bible to me. I can do that just fine for myself."
"People say that, but do they ever get around to to doing it?"

2011-05-31T15:27:00.041-05:00

"There’s nothing reasonable about faith based beliefs," the anonymous trendy atheist said. "Faith is the antithesis to reason...."

No, it is not. Irrationality is the antithesis to reason. Faith is not the lack of capacity for logic or the willful rejection of rational thought and behavior. That is not only not the whole of faith, it has nothing to with faith at all, and not even the most science-paranoid fundamentalist would insist that good Christians should always act contrary to natural thought.

Faith can be described as believing in something without having proof--and it need not be anything so thoughtless as insisting on invisible pink unicorns being the cause of rain or wind, but just something as simple as not exercising positive skepticism in the face of something that, while you may not have hard empirical data to support it, the means by which you have acquired the evidence you do have, have already demonstrated themselves to be reliable and consistent.

Unless it is logical to absolutely reject out of hand everything you personally lack compelling empirical evidence for then our friend will have to admit a closer familiarity with faith than his criticism would lead us to believe. But it's not logical to do so; we can't afford to verify everything for ourselves, and despite assertions that anyone who wanted to could teach himself quantum chromodynamics or cellular biology or Urdu or medieval law (the line implicitly being drawn at Aquinas's Summa), for some people a lot of that stuff remains every bit as impenetrable as metaphysical topics do to people who people who have no interest in studying them.

Paul said faith is proof of things unseen--the faithful act on evidence they have that is not outwardly apparent. This is, understandably, hard to swallow for empiricists and skeptics, but what one should consider is whether this faith in the supernatural or comfortable self-delusion or psychosis, whichever it may be, what kind of effect does it have on their lives?

"Is your god supposedly omnipresent? Yes. Therefore, your god must be part of everything, else he would not be present everywhere."

Not at all. For someone interested in logic, I'm not impressed with this one's grasp of definitions and meaning. God being present everywhere and in all things is panentheism. God being part of all things is pantheism. The distinction between occupying space (all or none of it) and having mass (a little or none of it)? Not that obscure. It would be less inaccurate to say creation was a part of God, but it's still got a lot to be desired.

"As to choosing between animal and spiritual, there is no evidence for the spiritual. By what basis do you determine what is spiritual? Thru [sic] blind faith, beliefs without evidence. It is that kind of thinking that has led people to fly planes into buildings.
On the other hand, there have been atheists who have worked for the betterment of humanity."

Whoa, slow down. Spirituality and faith are not the same thing, and it's a long way from "There's more to life than what I can directly sense and measure" or "I'm willing to accept some things I haven't personally verified" to "Those other guys are the enemy and we need to teach them a lesson written in their own blood." I wouldn't even call having faith or a spiritual life to be a "kind of thinking" at all--category error. Maybe it's too fine a point to be criticizing for sloppy thinking.

A philosopher might say that your ability to reason abstractly makes you metaphysically superior to animals, defines a chasm between you and them that they cannot cross. A Christian would say this is because you have a rational soul rather than an animal soul (which you can take for whatever natural phenomenon it is that makes something not-dead as opposed to inanimate, for the sake of the argument). A historian would say that it wasn't theists who set off humanity's worst genocides all in the last eighty years.

But by all means, remind us that "there have been atheists who have worked for the betterment of humanity." I don't doubt it, but that's mighty faint praise, that can be applied to unchurched charity workers and dictatorial mass murderers alike.

When you say "blind faith," you seem to mean "arbitrary and random designation." That's not the same thing as having no interior experience to guide or motivate us to do or believe something, and it certainly isn't the same thing as having evidence that does not meet your standards for veracity. I'm not saying you shouldn't have standards--holding evidence up to standards is part of peer review--but they help discern what data are evidence for, as well as whether data are reliable or not. Anecdotal evidence may have vanishing utility for a physical application, but that should not lead to dismissing anecdotal evidence out of hand for all cases.

2011-05-28T18:12:00.001-05:00

"Unfortunately," said the progressive I crossed paths with who thinks the Church has to learn from the world as much as modern parents apparently need to learn from their modern children, "Latin America was too brainwashed by JP2 to realize his true mission: to stamp out liberation theology."

I didn't realize JP2 made a secret out of it. Communism didn't work well in Europe and it wouldn't really work well in the New World, either. Priests are not bourgeois, salvation history is supernatural and not simply political, and individuals still possess culpability for their own sins. What's not in need of correction?

This kind of condescending behalfism against easy, high-profile targets rather irks me. I say it's condescending because it materially accuses the whole of Latin America of being too stupid to see what's actually going on around them. Boy, good thing we have these socialists to aid the proletariat out of contempt, instead of some other kind of demographic or philosophical school that allegedly only wants to keep them down out of spite.

Look: a clergyman wants to do charity work? Great. But a clergyman he is first. If you feel you missed your calling, address your concerns and weigh your options against the commitments you already made. You can't take it in halves; it's up to the Church to administrate itself. JP2 didn't chasten Ernesto Cardenal behind closed doors, and didn't do it for some obscure reason. If someone didn't take a hint from that event at his 1983 visit to Nicaragua, then someone's listening to the wrong rhetoric.

2011-05-24T21:57:00.003-05:00

Mitch Daniels helped defund PP in his state. Protests included sob stories about victims of rape and incest.

I sympathize with them as much as with their unborn children. Let's not get sidetracked; abortions for such reasons are the exception rather than the norm.

Can't afford to give abortions to poor victims, Planned Parenthood? Are you a business or a charity? You really want to help your poor clientele? Give them abortions for free and raise the price on cosmetic abortions by a dollar. You should still break even.

Still can't make money? Are you a charity or a business? Take a note from GM and Chrysler: they got one-time bailouts in exchange for federal meddling in what theyre expected to do in return. Are you willing to accept a little regulation like every other industry in the country? Everybody's doing it these days! Don't be the last one to fascist up!

On the other hand....

The Indiana state government giveth, and the Indiana state government taketh away.
On the one hand: PP is no longer funded there--great. A company that performs ethically dubious medical procedures doesn't need to be rewarded for pretending to be a sort of charity that needs government support on top of donations, investment returns, and service fees to provide a necessary service. Plenty of worthwhile charities get by without charging for services because they get donations and volunteers; I would never volunteer for or donate to any for-profit entity (the way for-profit and nonprofit entities are currently defined in the tax code) except as a college intern. The Roe decision even says states can regulate abortion, so people shouldn't be taking it personally. Detroit may as well complain about Lansing regulating speed limits but not giving kickbacks to the automakers.

On the other hand: IN supreme court ruled that Indiana residents are not allowed to defend themselves against unlawful entry by police because there can be justifiable reasons for officers to enter a domicile without a warrant. This is a non sequitir. It has always been the case that officers of the law have been empowered to act without a court order when there is probable cause. Would it have been appropriate to remind people of this fact? Would it have been commendable to clarify for residents and for police departments what some of the more poorly defined criteria are that delineate unlawful entry from justifiable forced entry in pursuit of police business? Yes to both. Is that what happened? Doesn't sound like it.

I await a happy correction.

Slightly belated, a more whimsical topic than the heavy one permeating the blogosphere this week....

2011-05-05T22:05:00.000-05:00

...although I will point out that Osama bin Laden died on Divine Mercy Sunday (depending on your time zone, anyway).

But anyway, Thursday being the day it has been, I got to talking with some coworkers about a certain creamy condiment, and about a certain similar creamy condiment that claims to be a different food product.

Surprisingly, my coworkers were strident in Miracle Whip's defense. "It's got a certain...tang to it."

Really? Put me in a taste test and I think I could tell the difference, maybe even see the difference, but I don't know that I could tell you which one was which.

Maybe I've just never had particularly bland mayonnaise, or despite breathing in corrosive fumes all day long I'm still sensitive enough to spices that the allegedly tamer of the two does not strike me as decisively milder.

Yeah, yeah, maybe it's possible my nose is so burned out I can't taste Miracle Whip either, but it's always been this way for me, before going into industry, before leaving the home of my childhood that was entirely populated by nonsmokers, so I'm shunting that to the bottom of the list of excuses.

I'm thinking maybe it's just a brand loyalty thing, the way some people prefer Pepsi or Coke or RC, but at least none of those brands has the pretense to say "we're not some mere cola!" They're all colas that merely differ by secondary ingredients, just like how Cherry Coke is still a Coca-Cola and Pepsi Blue is still a Pepsi-Cola.

I've seen and experienced so much variation in mayonnaise that it's really going to take more than branding to tell me a spade ain't a spade. Ever try aioli? Farther out than Miracle Whip.

Not that I have anything against Miracle Whip. I've yet to meet an egg emulsion I haven't liked.

But anyway, just for the record, here's a basic list of the ingredients that mayonnaise and Miracle Whip have in common:

water
sugar
eggs (whole and/or processed yolks>
soybean oil
vinegar

Dude, that's mayonnaise. The recipe I use doesn't call for added water, and I leave out the sugar, and I've been using predominantly or exclusively olive oil since before it was hot, but that's your baseline: egg, oil, vinegar. The proportions I use are generally 2 eggs to 1 cup of oil to 1 tablespoon of vinegar, plus whatever else I feel like. Maybe mustard or sesame oil, maybe balsamic or malt vinegar.

Okay, what kind of vinegar do they use? Probably white, if it's not specified, but whatever.

Here's where list of ingredients starts to diverge. First, the "unique" ingredients to Miracle Whip, sans some irrelevant processing items:

mustard flour
paprika
dried garlic
spice
natural flavor

Keep in mind those last two.

Now, the differing (cough) ingredients in an official mayonnaise--I looked up Hellmann's because it's well known:

salt
lemon juice
natural flavors

"Natural flavors?" "Spice?" Okay, lemon juice--it's still a fairly strong acid for a food, but it'll be fruitier than most vinegars. Garlic? Maybe, but I wouldn't call it tangier than lemon juice. Everything else? It's all sausage to me. Paprika, mustard (powdered or the condiment that also contains vinegar and turmeric), chile paste, garlic (dried or oil), it's all good.

But to me, it's all mayo. All different kinds, but it's mayo.

Oh, before I go, a cooking tip: instead of using butter on the outside of grilled cheese sandwiches or cooking spray for panini, spread a little mayo on the bread. The oil will keep it from sticking and the egg will crust up nicely, and it can add a little zing to the flavor (or tang, if you choose Miracle Whip instead).

Seriously, it works. It'll come out looking almost like French toast but you won't regret it.

Social studies curricula soon to attempt explaining the relevance of alternative sexual preferences to the development of California and America

2011-04-10T23:39:00.000-05:00

Mark Shea and others can be visited for a more substantial discussion of the subject itself. Personally, moral objections aside, it seems an exceptionally trivial matter and a case of misprioritized attention, like Jefferson and Franklin arguing about the font in which the Declaration of Independence would be printed but not getting around to nailing down how King George's abuses justified secession. Maybe supporters of the movement look at it as an issue whose time has come, that we've finally progressed enough to seriously entertain notions in the classroom of tying sexual preference to political accomplishments. Maybe somebody from an alphabet-soup orientation didn't feel that having whole programs of study at various universities was enough to make them feel like and to show everyone else they were a part of something bigger and unignorable, and that classroom time should be taken away from geology or fractions to satisfy this need.

Whatever. The one thing I can focus on in this debacle right now is how a whole slew of bored, ADHD, and nonconformist students are now going to get nailed for not being politically correct in the classroom, instead of merely being bored, having trouble focusing, or being nonconformist.

Sure as kindergartners get charged with sexual harassment, this is the direction classroom discipline is going to take. I never thought a one-size-fits-all approach to discipline was appropriate once I was old enough to know the difference between a student who just needed structure in his life and a student with a neurological problem, but neither do I think it is appropriate to treat children like well-informed (or ignorant but responsible for being well-informed--they're students, by definition they're uninformed) free moral agents. Really, save the "scared straight" routine for the kids who are too hard to reach by normal pedagogical means.

Has it been in the headlines yet? Not to my knowledge; but it will be.

2011-04-07T22:10:00.003-05:00

Just got home from work. Stayed late trying to wrap some things up before I take some vacation and then stopped to talk to our second shift chemist for a little while.

Just for the record, I currently (and God willing, not much longer--your prayers are greatly appreciated and fervently requested) work for a third-party lab. In the broadest strokes, companies that manufacture things send some to us and say "tell us what's in it" or "certify that this will meet whatever requirements our customer has," so they can go to their customer and say "Hey, here's proof from an objective third party that we've got what you need."

In the days before my tenure here, the technical people handled almost every aspect of the job: not just testing and sending reports, but interacting with the customer to make sure they were sending us what we'd need to give them the answers they needed, quoting prices for complex jobs, even doing troubleshooting.

The chemist was telling me about a strand of manager-types who are prone to making business decisions based largely on their uninformed gut instincts. He once was given a project that involved some relatively complex testing; he managed to get it done in two days and wanted to charge the customer about $1k for labor and materials. One of these seat-of-the-pants managers (I can't call them all managers; one currently supervises a single room and a single employee when he's not dealing with his non-leadership responsibilities) with no background in chemistry came through, looked at the chemist's paperwork, and said "That price seems too high." She wanted to ask the customer just for a few c-notes. Instead, the chemist suggested she ask for quotes for similar work from some of our competitors. The one she called offered to do it for twice what our chemist figured and said it would take 2-4 weeks. Two or three hundred bucks weren't going to cover our expenses, but it "seemed" more in line with...with what, I don't know; obviously not reality.

So that's heinous but it brings me to my main point. You can't be a loss leader on everything. Sam Walton knew he couldn't make Wal*Mart have the lowest prices on every item in the store, but he also knew that he'd make more money in the long run if he'd have enough inventory cheap enough to bring shoppers in who would decide to buy other things while they were there.

So, what motivates a shopper to go to store A instead of store B? Let's keep things simple and say A and B are competitors in the same niche and the stores are next door neighbors, so except for shoppers with preexisting loyalty, there's no preference for one over the other.

Then B says "That hundred dollar item A sells? We'll sell it to you for $90." Okay, sounds good, right?
But then A says "That special-order item B sells that takes a week to deliver? We'll overnight it to you for the same price." Now things are getting interesting--both are attempting to provide more value for the dollar, one by reducing cost and the other by improving service. To keep things from getting complicated again I'm going to treat all "improve value for the dollar" efforts as just lowering prices.

So B's got that one item at $90. People tend to shop there to save ten bucks. What if B had lowered its price to $80? Would it bring even more shoppers? Probably; most goods do have at least a little elasticity in their prices. What if B cut the price in half? It would probably bring in still more shoppers, but if the managers of B weren't asking economic questions before, they now had better start asking if they're bringing in enough customers to make up the difference.

The average customer knows he would be a fool to pass on such ridiculous prices, all things being equal. The average customer may also wonder how long B was planning on running this half-price promotion or how much the prices of everything else were going to go up to compensate, or how long B's managers expected to stay in business if they continued to pursue business volume at the expense of profitability. The average customer may wonder, if the heavily discounted item in question were perishable or not inherently valuable enough to come with a warranty, what was wrong with it that B's managers were trying so hard to unload their inventory.

You see it at grocery stores; a few months ago I even got half a gallon of milk at a "manager's special" sale price of $0.69 that was going to expire the next day. Usually the price is somewhere well north of a dollar for that volume, but for that price I didn't care if it was going to go sour before I got halfway through it. Ended up lasting nearly a week; go figure. Another bottle was undrinkable a day before its expiration date. Guess that's just one more thing that makes this universe an interesting place to live.

For things that aren't liable to going bad before being purchased, though, how does the customer respond to attempts to make a product or service more attractive?

At what price point, then, do patrons of store B start stepping back and saying "this looks too good to be true"? After that, when business growth starts tapering off, where is the point where customers start saying "There's no way they can do the job right that inexpensively," and label B as merely a cheap store, inexpensive with quality to match, and start shopping elsewhere because they need a better product than B appears to sell? Where is that point where lowering prices causes you to lose business because you are no longer competing in the market you had been in--in the market you think you're still in?

These questions are not purely rhetorical. I'm sure some economist has done studies on this topic and I'd be interested in a treatment by a mind that was better informed, more well-versed, and clearer in these matters. I'm actually wondering if there are usable rules of thumb or some more concrete formulations for roughing out a stable range of prices for goods or services offered; finding the range between where the marginal growth in business volume starts dropping and where it actually becomes negative. Every situation is going to be different, but if someone asked me if a 70% discount "seemed" right, or if a 45% discount from the quoted price on top of a 40% discount from the quoted price (and that one I've seen happen) seemed like a smart way to draw business, it would I think be more diplomatic to say "Well, that seems like it wouldn't quite meet a first-order rendition of Markhov's 80-20 criterion; can you elaborate on your reasoning a little?" than it would be to apply a boot to the head and then ask how many boots to the head they received before they were able to demonstrate a toddler's level of business acumen like I had just witnessed

I get tired of going to confession. It's always the same sins I confess. Does it even work? Why do I bother?

2011-04-03T22:42:00.000-05:00

Of course it's the same sins. Of course it works. Of course you should bother.

Rare is the case when a sinner is immediately healed of all concupiscence, at least for some particular kind of sin or other.

Is it not hard to stop smoking? Of course it is. Would it not still be hard if it were only a habit and nicotine were not addictive? Yes, it would.

Is it not hard for an alcoholic to stop drinking? Is it not dangerous for a recovering alcoholic to pick up just one drink?

The sacraments are grace, not magic. Whatever immediate effect grace may have on our souls, anyone who has sinned and tried to stop sinning can tell you that the recovery in the physical world tends to be proportional to the damage done, proportional to how far one has backslid.

What would you expect? That, having having conquered compulsive gambling one weekend, you would find you had suddenly become vulnerable to pedophilia? Should you be surprised that the devil would play against your weaknesses instead, tempting you with chocolate because you like sweets and not alcohol because you already hate beer and gin and merlot; take advantages of the opportunities he has before trying to contrive new ones, and tempting a convenience store clerk with shoplifting before tempting her with the murder of a random pedestrian?

So you can't seem to shake one particular sin or a particular suite of sins? Did you hope that turning your life over to Christ and going into denial about the inertia of your sin, the scar tissue on your soul, would cause reality to spontaneously conform to your optimism? Okay, maybe you don't think of it that way.

Let's try an analogy. I used to be good at that. Or, I used to be bad at being able to communicate without them.

Say you have a garden in your back yard. Sins are like weeds in the garden, and going to confession is like weeding it. The weeds keep growing so you have to keep pulling them out. The weeds keep growing because the seeds have already entered the soil, or because fresh seeds continue to blow in and deposit. Unblossomed weeds are like concupiscence, the potential for fully-grown weed plants is like the potential for succumbing to actual sin. New seeds blowing in are like temptation. The overall climate of where your garden is, the soil condition, the surrounding flora and insecta, even the fruits or vegetables you decide to grow, will affect what weeds are more and less likely to get a foothold and take root. Maybe you've got encroaching bent grass because of a bad landscaping decision the prior owner of your house made; maybe your neighbor has foxtail because her pine trees provide enough shade and soil acidity to let them thrive (or whatever; I don't know a thing about foxtail).

Each of you has different situations to deal with, situations that are fairly stable if neither of you does enough weeding and situations that nevertheless are going to get worse if you give up and do nothing at all.

So one day in April you find dandelions and pull them up. A week later you have to go out and pull them up again. Should you be surprised? They're everywhere, and you can't expect to have pulled up the ones that haven't sprouted yet, any more than you can claim to have broken a bad habit because you resisted that habit one time.

But...

But, over time, if you keep weeding your garden every Saturday morning, if you keep going to confession and really try to amend your ways and avoid the near occasion of sin, you'll find that as the spring turns to summer and harvest time rolls around, you'll have fewer weeds causing you problems at all; you'll find that as try to cultivate good habits and get regular infusions of grace, the grip of old habits will loosen and their appeal with decrease. Even if you start by doing nothing but uprooting the most egregious weeds, soon you will find you have the time to give some attention to other noxious species that are harming your produce, maybe even some that might enable other opportunistic species which by themselves might not have posed any great risk. At first, you'll be weeding the same things every time, but with grace, the garden itself will become hostile to weeds.

"Just goes to show why you can't trust any magisterium"

2011-03-27T00:18:00.001-05:00

Why not? What alternative is there?

You certainly trust the engineering magisterium to make you reliable cars and trains and airplanes, not to mention buildings and roads and ships. You trust the medical magisterium to diagnose and treat illnesses and injuries.

Oh, but maybe you mean we should only heap a larger than average portion of skepticism on people who attempt to understand and teach about Scripture and the Faith.

How does that pertain exclusively to Catholics? Because we actively use the term "magisterium" in reference to a facet of part of our Church? Then let every bishop and theologian be called Pastor or Brother or Evangelist, or just call him by his name, and let him continue his job.

Because the Magisterium tries to teach others on the grounds that it has read more or has understood more of the Bible? Then let farmers and factory workers give up their trades to learn Hebrew and Greek. But there's no pulling themselves up by their bootstraps; they would be trusting the magisteria of linguistics and history. Can that be allowed?

Obviously it can. Most who criticize the Magisterium for existing don't have day jobs that are in competition with the teaching authority of the Church, although the ones who did would be hypocrites and should also be approached with great caution because of the conflict of interest.

But where does that leave us? Back where we started: trust no teaching authority farther than you can throw it. Read the Bible if you can, try to figure out how it applies to your life if you have the time and wit. But don't listen to a bishop, and if you want to be consistent, don't listen to your pastor, because you can always listen to the Holy Spirit for yourself, whatever the Holy Spirit told someone else who reads Scripture be damned.

No thanks. I'd rather be consistent in yielding to actual experts while they're acting in good faith in their field of expertise, especially when the alternative to Jesus guaranteeing indefectability is tens of thousands of traditions each claiming "No, we're extracted directly from the Gospels and Acts; it's all those guys over there who have it wrong."

I can't decide if it would be more accurate to say I was shocked or merely disappointed again in our government.

2011-03-22T19:43:00.000-05:00

So various Republicans at the state level have been working to restrict the rights or privileges of government employees to participate in collective bargaining units. In response, various Democrats at the state level went on strike in sympathy for their union labor constituents.

That's right. They walked out on their lawmaking jobs when the votes on labor bills didn't go their way. I understand many of them are on their way back now, but apparently it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I'm actually not unsympathetic. True, during my time in Detroit I saw more abuse and negligence caused and enabled by Big Labor than I saw committed against the working man by the Big Three. But in my current (and God willing, soon to be former) place of employment, a midsized company with no organized labor, we have a middle manager who has fired people who disagree with her for voicing perspectives that contradict the stories she passes on to her superiors, has fired award winning employees for refusing to compromise their integrity for the sake of expediency. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were fired as a display of power, to the dismissed employees as well as to those of us remaining.

This is not how you treat adults who act their age.

It might be summed up best by saying that the companies that have unions are the ones that deserve them.

Anyway, it struck me as odd that state legislators would walk out on the one thing they could do to rectify the situation. Striking I get, sympathetic striking I get, boycotting I get, but this smelled to me more like the naively idealistic move of high school students walking out of class to protest a war. That's how things were done during Vietnam, and look how well that turned out, so that's just how you do things now when you have no recourse.

Maybe that's part of what motivated them, and God bless every politician who hews to a noble ideal at all, but what really soured it for me was that these were legislators acting like they had no other recourse in the face of legislation they disapproved of, and in some of the cases, the distasteful legislation had already passed into law. But they're the legislators. They're the ones whose job it is to make sure the good laws get passed and the bad ones don't. They're the ones, by and large, that protestors try to appeal to. What's that say about their intentions and their opinion about the rule of law if they weren't elected in large enough numbers to stop these bills from becoming law or they compromised away enough political traction to be unable to stop the laws, and are now withdrawing their opposition to anything further the Republicans might attempt in their absence?

They didn't get what they want, so they're taking their ball and going home, crying loudly that the other mean kids wouldn't let them be pitcher for both teams. Since they couldn't get votes to go their way, they tried to change the game. Having protests to gain and demonstrate support for a cause is fine, but it's the legislators people need to impress, or fellow citizens if it's something a petition or public vote could effect. These Democrats on strike aren't even out campaigning the cause; they've been hiding out in neighboring states where they're merely out of reach of their employers, never mind their constituents.

Maybe they feel like they're doing some self-imposed exile thing, since the Dalai Lama accomplished so much as the exiled ruler of Tibet. Well, he impressed everyone outside of Tibet, anyway; the country's still more or less under Chinese control.

What kind of country would this be if every time we didn't get the law we wanted, we cried and stamped our feet and argued that this time we should make an exception to the rule of law and make and exception to fair and impartial legal practices? What would become of our society if we could effectively argue "Maybe that's wrong but in this case it's okay to do wrong" and "the legal system failed this time, by which I mean I didn't get the outcome I wanted, but we can all pretend it doesn't matter and go ahead with what I want despite majority of citizens or senators who voted against what I wanted?" It's bad enough when activists try to establish legal precedents in the courtroom that change the legal landscape and we end up with positive legislation from the bench; are we here supposed to suspend not just due process but even the pretense of operating within the law in any sense. Do I have to elaborate on where that could lead us?

I was cynically amused to hear on the radio halfway through this debacle that the Republicans had "found a loophole" that allowed them to continue working when the absence of so many Democrats made achieving the supermajorities needed to pass certain laws numerically impossible. What they did was pass laws that didn't require supermajorities, or possibly (there wasn't much followup on the report I heard) build some porky line items into other bills. In other words, they did their jobs normally. If it was the Democrats' intent to take hobble the state congress by not showing up and the Republicans outsmarted them by finding a way around needing full attendance through the normal performance of their jobs as legislators, it's kind of like saying Jimmie Johnson beat Jeff Gordon at the Ford 400 because he figured out how to shift into his car's top gear.

I certainly don't mean to cast Democrats alone as unethical and Republicans alone as righteous. I just happened to notice some better examples recently on the left side than on the right. Liberal state congressmen boycott their own jobs when things don't turn out the way they want; Obama gets elected president and people suggest Bush step down early so Barack can get a head start on healing the country, and then gets criticized for not having accomplished more as president-elect by the time he was inaugurated (never mind that he still had a job as a US Senator); Gore wins the popular vote while Bush wins the electoral college and Democrats are not only shocked that such a thing was possible (not that ignorance of the process was confined to the left but the people at that level should have remembered their grade school civics lessons) but in between recounts in a handful of Florida districts call for presidential elections to be made only by popular vote.

And just for the record, before you click Reply or Trackback, please note that I haven't commented on whether the union-restricting legislation is just or not. That is deliberate, and it's a matter for another time.

Another item from public radio...

2011-02-11T20:14:00.000-06:00

Caught parts of interviews with people on both sides of the question regarding the constitutionality of Obamacare while I was driving the other day.

The fragment that I heard of the argument for unconstitutionality amounted to this:

"It has been argued that mandating health insurance for all citizens is simply part of the federal government's authority to regulate interstate commerce. The federal government cannot step in to require everyone to buy health insurance, regardless of whether it would be an interstate activity or not, because it crosses a line into something that is not regulation of commerce at all."

Basically, the government can establish requirements and restrictions on the behavior of commerce, things or ways in which one can or cannot sell or buy. We usually think of things like requiring safety or nutritional labels on the packaging. Where the argument says Obamacare is in violation of the Constitution is the fact that this new law requires you to participate. This isn't something like the draft. This isn't even something like where you're obligated to pay taxes to maintain the Eisenhower Highway System in states you never travel in. This is the federal government saying that not only does it have the authority to regulate the terms of commerce and even raise funds to maintain or enhance the flow of commerce, it has the authority to force you to buy a product from a business whether you want to or not.

This is not the case with any other business, industry, or commodity (some service industries do receive funding, but we're not obligated to patronize them), and it sets a dangerous precedent. I may elaborate someday after I've ruminated on the ramifications a bit more, but I'll leave you to worry about what is implied.

The argument supporting Obamacare, on the other hand--the ones saying this will not amount to a congressional encroachment on personal sovreignty--went something like this:

"The 'health care reform law goes beyond commerce regulation' argument misses one thing: that the Constitution grants the Legislature the power 'To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution' the various things that Legislature otherwise already has the power to do, as provided for by the Constitution. This is simply a case of Congress establishing what needs to be done in order for it to implement Obamacare."

The problem I see is that it assumes that Obamacare is within the rights of the government in the first place. It's like saying "Well, if we let citizens have guns, it would really be dangerous for our SS troops when they come to search their houses for subersive materials and other contraband." You're trying to solve the wrong problem, buddy.

The quote in the pro-Obamacare argument comes from the end of Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution. No where in the Constitution does it give Congress the power, in particular or in the abstract, to force health insurance on people who neither want nor need it. Unless you count the "provide for the common good" phrase in the preamble, but this isn't the common good, this is trying to provide for the particular good of a morass of demographics by playing Robin Hood. Again, not saying we don't have an obligation to help the needy, but strongarming the solvent to participate in system that is going to be inefficient and insensitive to real needs is doing evil in the hope that some good may precipitate from it along the way.

Oh, that was another lemma in the pro- argument: "If people aren't forced to participate, they won't get insurance until they need it or they'll just go to the emergency room and we all have to pay for it, and because no one is paying into the pools, it will bankrupt the system." One, why don't we let the insurance companies figure out how to run their own businesses instead of having a bunch of people who don't know the industry try to anticipate every eventuality? Right now, people aren't forced to buy health insurance, but most of them still get it, and companies already make provisions for taking on customers who are greater risks. A lot of them do get it as a benefit through work and simply don't fight to get a higher salary instead (and yes, that is an option, although not every employer is open to it). The medical bills for my dad's cancer treatments and hospital stays broke seven figures, and subtracting the out of pocket expenses...it was still more than my parents ever paid in. Early in the December my dad died in, my mom bought two life insurance policies on my dad, not hiding the fact that he was in the last stages of cancer, with one of them taking effect immediately and the other not until sometime after Christmas. He died before the second policy kicked in but the first one kept my mom in a good financial place. Do you really think the bean counters and strategic planners hadn't made contingencies for this kind of thing their bread and butter?

My mom was really fortunate in that she knew the business, but in most cases people won't be able to use insurance as a payment plan without payments because insurance companies figures all this out a long time ago. Adding a level of bureaucracy isn't going to make them better at their jobs.

Insurance people know their business. If we're only talking money--which is the gist of this sidebar argument--the insurance providers covered sigmoidoscopies for my dad but not full colonoscopies, which would have caught his cancer in time, because it is apparently more cost effective to skimp on thousands of colon examinations a day and shell out a million dollars for the occasional patient who ends up finding something metastatic in the ascending colon.

Not that I like it, but there it is. People don't get to make a lot of million dollar mistakes and keep their jobs, at least outside of boardrooms.

Point is, people who pay taxes and who have insurance are already supporting people who don't. It has its problems, some of which are oriented around the level of care really necessary in the attempt to keep someone healthy or alive and the cost of insurance, not just the fact that some people try to do without, but the feds aren't forcing anyone into the game and the whole health care industry hasn't already imploded. Considering that the problems we have are solvable by other means that more specifically address the particular problems that exist, we don't need to sic the government on reducing the ability to opt out to somewhere between infeasible and impossible. The corruption can be minimized, if not completely eliminated, by addressing the corruption; not by saying I don't effectively have the right to live my life as I see fit because someone--and maybe not anyone involved--might think it wouldn't be fair to someone else whom the government is trying to help because he doesn't have some of the options in life that I do.

That's something I want to emphasize, as an aside. Not every crisis, real or imagined, requires the intervention of a government program. After a while, it stops looking like we have a specific department to fix this and an agency to handle that and a czar to do whatever he gets to do to solve the other; and starts looking like "the government can solve every human problem we put it on!" It's facile, and it hasn't proven itself to be particularly true in reality. For every program that everyone agrees works well, there's a program that doesn't just function poorly but many reasonable people of good will think shouldn't even have that function at all.

But I'm digressing from my digressions and it's not getting me back on track. Rereading my screed, I think I've spent everything that I needed to vomit onto cyberspace. Okay, gotta work on flow and structure. Maybe if I had an editor. Bah.

Anyway, to foreshorten my conclusion: Forcing us to buy insurance isn't regulating commerce, it's mandating it, which no government can do; even assuming that universal socialized health care were the best idea, if the bill that makes it the law of the land stipulates compulsory participation by buying from private companies what the government says the private companies have to sell, then the law as it is cannot stand. There are plenty of good ideas out there that may be impossible to implement as a government program, or at least would be possible to implement as an illegal program, but being good in sentiment doesn't mean we should close our eyes and push it through anyway. It means we have to find a better way to achieve what we want to achieve. The ends won't justify the means. You think making sure the downtrodden have a reasonable chance at getting decent medical attention is a positive and necessary goal? Great. Take some care to make sure you down tread on other people along the way.

One item from public radio...

2011-01-22T16:30:00.000-06:00

Despite what the president says, abortion is not a constitutional right. The Supreme Court saying that implications and extrapolations of constitutional rights leave room for the practice of abortion does not rise to the level of an actual constitutional provision. While abortion is wrong, we should not be surprised that the victims thereof are not granted any rights as citizens or even human residents of America, since there is a precedent where certain sectors of the population were counted at a rate of three fifths of the rate at which freemen were counted.

I may have to read Mein Kampf at some point....

2010-12-28T00:44:00.000-06:00

I was scanning the radio on the way back from my sister's when I came across that rarest of species, a secular-progressive talk station. I've occasionally caught snippets during past trips to and from my sister's house. Sometimes I try to listen, get some perspective on how the other half lives, but usually: no dice. I'm not certain what it means that I can hear about the same stories and personalities (granted, from widely varying perspectives) when I turn on Rush, FOX News, CNN, or pick up a newspaper; but when I find a liberal talk radio station, it's like I'm hearing about a different country that has the same election schedule and officials with the same names. Might be fun to speculate, but I don't feel like it right now; gonna try doing that "concise, focused" thing again.
Anyway, they were going on about how the Republicans kind of got power back in the midterm elections and how the House, I think it was they were specifying, was not a representative body but took most of its influence from relatively few big-number donors. Okay, not an uncommon cynical view in any political camp. They were talking about how Obama was kind of a political island, having been abandoned by his competent advisors and having found only unfit replacements, or something to that effect. Again, not something hard to agree with. I did find it a bit hard to swallow the implied conspiracy that everyone in Congress had fallen a bit under the sway of the same corporate interests; while that itself might not be false, it was too pat of a way to frame Obama as a lonely crusader and martyr.
Then one of radio personalities tried to circumvent Godwin's Law. I wanted to be fair, especially when he tried to assuage his listeners that he was trying to make a valid comparison to the former German National Socialist party and not a cheap villifying one, and particularly because he was referring to something out of Mein Kampf, which I think he said he read, and which I have not read. He said Hitler (actually I think he said "they," meaning the Nazis collectively) was very specific in his manifesto about his plan to rise to power. Allegedly, the idea was to take four major components of the economy--the health care system, I think banking, and two other ones that are in the news in the US so much today I hardly notice anymore--say "The federal regulations on these industries are stifling our economic recovery," and then let them run about lassaiz-faire.
The guy on the radio kind of stopped there, which is part of what confused me. I can see someone saying "Government restrictions make it harder for businesses to make money, which retards economic growth, and during a recession like the one we're in, the effect is to forestall recovery." What I can't see is a national socialist, a fascist, making such a claim. Someone who was interested in centralized control of an industry, or of all industries, would not be willing to relinquish what control he already had.
At least, not without following up any real or trumped-up disaster that resulted with a plea to reign in this out of control company or that one, put a federal leash on some business or other as a permanent solution to the particular sins that a fascist might want to stamp out.
But that's what's already happening. That's the kind of thing he was saying he wants. Was he honestly blind to the irony? Because I was just a little creeped out.

The War on Christmas is over. It's over, and we lost.

2010-12-23T05:38:00.004-06:00

I was at the grocery store last night, and not only did I see Christmas displays that had been up since Halloween:

I saw displays for Easter stuff.

Not even Valentine's Day, the next notable and distinct holiday. Easter.

I'm not even going to comment. Anything I could say would only soften the impact.

Celibacy is not the problem

2010-12-19T21:29:00.000-06:00

I read an online article several days ago, written by one of our archbishops whose name escapes me now, that argued that the Scandal in the Church was not caused and is not propagated by the rules of celibacy in the western Church. I thought I'd already read it some time before, as many of you probably have actually done so, but it only seemed familiar in the broadest strokes, in the terms of things I would have known anyway.

The usual points were made: celibacy's a choice willingly made in pursuit of a vocation, it's been practiced for far longer than the problems associated with the Scandal have been going on (not denying that "protect the reputation of the Church at all costs" hasn't happened at other times and for other reasons), and the rate of sexual abuse is about half what it is in the general population (according to his numbers--I'd heard they were about the same, but the point holds), so it doesn't make sense to cast sole or primary blame on something that doesn't make a net difference in the outcome.

Two responses, conveniently located on the first page of comments (actually, probably on every page), caught my attention this time.

One was the bizarre accusation that pedophiles gravitate towards the priesthood in particular (along with other child-centered professions like teaching) because of the "absolute power" priests have over children. I won't argue the "access to children" point, but power? No priest alive knows the power that was held, or at least imagined today to be held, by priests of the late Middle Ages, whenever clericalism was at its peak. Were they sometimes protected, given the benefit of the doubt, by laity as well as by their respective ordinaries? Perhaps so; but that's a far cry from the pastor of every parish in Europe or the New World being a little ceasaro-pope.

The more tired comment was something like this: "Humans are sexual animals. Repression of the sexual instinct is only going to lead to these kinds of problems." First, humans are sexual creatures, but we are not animals; healthy human adults have it within their power to restrain their appetites and to turn a rational eye to bodily urges and emotional states instead of unwillfully submitting to them. Second, even animals do not exhibit psychotic behavior just for being denied the opportunity to mate frequently. Competition for mates happens all the time and all over the place, and by and large, the Darwinian losers don't take it personally. Third, choosing of one's own accord or willingly submitting to a lifestyle of abstinence is not "repression"--at least, not any more than my fear of getting charged with assault and battery if I didn't indulge my so called instinct of rage on the face of a hostile supervisor is "repression" of my anger.

This sophistry, to put it generously, has been overused and abused to justify a lifestyle that conveniently claims to distill meaning from it's-your-fault-if-I-feel-oppressed-by-imagining-you-mentally-judge-me pleasure seeking, that I no longer think that intellectually serious hedonists would even bother making such arguments--at least, not honestly; perhaps only to provide more chaff for casual leave-me-alone-with-my-endorphins hedonists to throw in the air and slow everybody else down.
Please, people: find a new argument.

Fear not the devil (II)

2010-12-08T22:33:00.000-06:00

The woman and I had another interesting conversation that tied to the first, but I felt I had gone on long enough on Harry Potter. This time we were discussing yoga. We've discussed it before and I may have posted about it once in the past, but the idea annoys me so I feel it's worth revisiting.

She used to practice yoga, primarily as a low-impact exercise, until her Evangelical friends pointed out that the components of Eastern mysticism that are inherent to yoga had been downplayed, and therefore was inappropriate for serious practice by a Christian and contained some spiritual hazard for anyone. This much I have no reason to debate--non-Christian mystical habits of Christians can easily scandalize others, and if you open yourself up to flatly heterodox influences, you risk being swallowed up by heterodoxy and, eventually, hell. The physical components, as you may have deduced--the poses, the motions, the breath control--don't bother me a bit.

As I've said before, or intended to, there's wisdom in refraining from eating meat in front of vegetarians out of a desire to prevent scandal; but it would be wrong for me to lie to vegetarians and to myself by saying "Well, meat is evil after all" when I believe nothing of the sort.

But to me, see, it hinges on that "if" of opening yourself to heterodox influence--to malevolent forces. I don't believe you can do so without willing it. You can do so without fully recognizing the gravity of what you do, but not without your consent or fully contrary to your desire and intent. People who worship money or power or just their jobs make conscious choices to put those things first in their lives, even if sometimes as a means to some other end, even if you showed them a church with dollar signs instead of crosses they wouldn't make the connection.

So when this woman tells that she was warned to stop doing yoga because some of the poses and movements are acts of worship to certain Hindu gods, I struggle to think of a diplomatic way to say "That is a psychotic and paranoid claim, based on an irrational definition of 'worship,' that hardly approaches the truth of what the worshipped or the worshipper do or are." Maybe I should be blunt instead of gently suggesting that a principled willingness to discard the good and the harmless to escape evil ("If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out," not "pluck out your eye, for others have sinned with theirs") is not possibly, maybe, just a harmless metaphysical eccentricity. But saying "I'm sorry, but that's stupid and I would be embarrassed if someone got the impression that I took such ideas seriously" just seems too...too "high school" dramatic to serve as a wake-up-call kind of shock.

No. My contention is that it is not possible to worship something by accident. You cannot, simply by raising your arms at a certain angle or standing with your feet with a certain spacing, offer the praise and adoration due to God alone to any other entity or object.

If it were that simple, we'd have to have someone go around cataloging all the angles to which it's morally safe to bend each joint and all the positions it's spiritually hazardous to keep our limbs in, just in case some pagan somewhere drew some arbitrary or symbolic inference between body alignment and some natural phenomenon, which convinced some terrified and ignorant Christian that such bodily alignments were inherently demonic, which I would say was so offensively stupid if I wasn't afraid that someone would look at my exasperation at such gullibility as protesting a bit too much.

It requires an act of the will. I'm not saying it's necessarily safe to show up at a black mass and go through the motions just to make the point that it can't hurt you, because then you're deliberately initiating spiritual combat, but willfully interacting with preternatural forces, one way or the other, is not the same as doing things that to the best of your understanding may as well be nothing more than coincidence.

Honestly. Giving the devil more power than he really has by seeing him beneath rocks he's not hiding under is closer to worship than doing isometric exercises.

Fear not the devil, especially when he's not there

2010-12-06T19:49:00.000-06:00

A woman I know, raised Catholic but spending a lot of time (too much, in my opinion, but that's a story for another time) in an Evangelical prayer group, has been becoming sympathetic to some of their views on spiritual combat. This is not all bad, since she just wasn't getting much of it at her home parish or in her own search for spiritual reading material, but it's also not all good, because in her pursuit for a more down to Earth (so to speak) Christianity, the line between orthodoxy and heresy is getting blurred.

I don't want to dwell on her condition much at the moment; suffice to say one needs to test all spirits and hold fast to what is good, not just take a sampling and swallow all of what has given a positive impression. I just need a stepping stone to make a few points because I apparently am a lazy writer, after all.

She's mentioned on a few occasions how she used to think the Harry Potter novels were harmless, but now she fears they can be a gateway to occult forces, since the fact of magic being portrayed in the book can open a door to demonic influence.

My philosophy is that the books themselves pose no threat. They contain nothing essentially satanic, the magic that is described within is basically an obscure natural force that can be harnessed only by certain individuals, and if kids are interested in playing at Harry Potter, well, they've always been interested in playing at Hobbits, Superman, Voltron, the Lone Ranger, and every other [super]hero you can think of; nothing has changed, and nothing is going to stop it. There's a disordered hunger for power and there's a desire to pretend at adventure, and these things do not perfectly overlap. Could a child, reading Harry Potter, look at the magic portrayed within and develop an unhealthy desire for special powers? Sure, but the same could be said of anything. Tarot decks are just archaic playing cards, and divination can be practiced with modern four-suit, 52-card decks. Schoolkids who are warned not to play Pokemon on the playground will play Digimon instead. The spiritual risk of any particular book, film, activity, or idea is a question of temperament, the availability of grist for temptation (a child from a home with no TV will not think much of troublesome cartoons), and the aesthetic preferences of the child. Not a question of Harry Potter, inexplicably unlike any other, being some escapist fantasy about how a boy with a great destiny thrust upon him grows to be worthy of the challenges he faces book after book.

But this woman is still skeptical of the more radical caution her prayer group exercises in other areas. Naturally they're opposed to practices of divination like ouija boards and tarot cards, but many of them also find magic tricks--as in illusionism, slight of hand card tricks and such--to be demonic.

As an aside, I think situations like this are where the cohesiveness and coherence of Catholicism can really shine. The objective and subjective risks of the vast majority of these cases have already been sussed out, and we don't have (at least, we have far less often) people who disagree arguing indefinitely, because they come from or choose to follow different schools of thought on such things, or they move forward agreeing to disagree over an issue that has a healthy and balanced solution. In this case, it's "fantasy fiction is not inherently evil because literature is not evil; divination is evil; things are not evil just for resembling other things that are evil; it may be prudent to avoid some of these things anyway in the interest of not confusing people, but it can also be a learning opportunity for the same confused people." It's not rushing headlong into hell with the conviction that baptismal immunity buttressed by good intentions has no exceptions, and it's not calling a good thing bad and cutting it out of your life just in case someone somewhere fears or abuses it.

Remind me sometime to get back to the subject of schismatics--either the Protestant or the secular type--rejecting Catholic teaching, then revisiting old moral problems as if for the first time, and casting about everywhere except Rome for possible sources of help and wisdom in solving said problems. I may have touched on it before but I haven't done the subject the modest amount of justice that I'm capable of.

Anyway, since this woman has come to respect these people in other ways, she's been more circumspect in her disbelief, but to my discredit I could hardly contain my incredulity when she told me. I'm no stage magician but I know a couple card tricks. They're entirely about directing attention away from the cards the mark thinks he is focusing on. As best I can figure, misdirection is being equated with infernal magnitudes of confusion and deception, or the tongue in cheek showmanship that some modern magicians still like to employ, in the vein of old-school illusionists claiming to have studied mystical arts in obscure lands is being conflated with actual demonic augmentation to the natural senses.

Okay, you know what? Pretending to be in league with mystical forces might not be the smartest thing, especially since the only ones likely to help with cheap parlor tricks are going to demand much greater sacrifices in exchange, but it's like blaming a doctor for causing a disease that he just couldn't cure. It puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. Messing with demons is evil; playing with cards is not, no matter how many people ruin their lives gambling and no matter how many people think it's something to do with the little paper rectangles with numbers and faces on them that can rub off on you however you use them.

It reminds me of the fear of some teetotalers that alcohol should be banned because everyone who is not a practicing or recovering alcoholic is simply a latent one. Kind of like the old feminist (second wave?) saw about all men being latent rapists, now that I think about it.

Simply put, this is an attitude of superstition. It's harboring an inordinate fear of normal objects because of the possibility of their abuse, because some such objects have been misused in the past for deliberate or inadvertent harm. It's virtually giving demons power in your life that they don't, or shouldn't, have; and then just trying to flee from them. If that's not a backhanded sort of glory being given to them, I don't know what is.

Do you have a personal problem with gambling? Okay, stay away from cards for that reason. Do you think it is imprudent to spend much time or attention on demonic activity? Great, you're right, so try not to put any more interest into the subject than you need in order to be able to avoid it.

If we're going to go that far in avoiding the devil, then no activity is safe from abuse and everything should be avoided. If people will kill others and themselves for the glory of God, there's no reason to think any lesser motivation will remain uncorrupted.

Would a truly just God levy an eternal punishment for a temporal sin?

2010-11-05T22:11:00.001-05:00

As a followup to my post on whether God double predestines souls by logic or will (since I kind of rambled on and then just tapered off--but it was long enough already), and how hard it is to understand the orthodox explanations of the issues concomitant with a just and omniscient God when you assume the orthodox explanations are unreasonable, I wanted to address something that deserves more attention than I gave it.

I had said;

I'm not saying it isn't reasonable to ask why temporary actions have eternal consequences. It's just that all actions have consequences that ripple forward in time forever, on into eternity, and we only imagine that temporary consequences for our actions are the only result.

People who fixate on these alleged injustices always ask "Why should I go to hell forever if I can only commit finite sins?" One might be able to make some hay by arguing that sin has such an eternal component because it is sin against an eternal being, but it leaves an equally important question unasked:

Why should I go to heaven forever if I can only commit finite good?

If we're talking about earning a ticket to hell, we have to consider what it would mean to earn a ticket to heaven.

A woman was once concerned that her son, a student in engineering, was not on a path to make much of a contribution to the world. She prayed about it and received the message "A doctor saves one life. Your son will save many." The impression she got was of something like a critical defect being prevented or detected in a bridge.

One thing I find interesting is that this sort of thing is rather run of the mill for a decent engineer--literally, the woman's son would just be doing his proverbial job. Can I say "literal" and "proverbial" together this way? Anyway, it's a reminder that when we die, our personal judgment will include an accounting of all things in our life, not just the profound highs and lows, and the final judgment will include an accounting of all the effects our life has had, from the down on his luck man inspired by your simple act of kindness to turn his life around, to the children who never came into the world because an offhand callous remark soured a man's mood and he ended up snubbing in turn the woman who was going to be his wife.

I'm not saying we should go about scrupling our complicity in remote acts whose outcomes we don't have the time or ability to imagine, let alone plan for. I'm just saying we shouldn't be blase about what the stakes really are, or casual about the state of our souls. "I'm no worse than most people, and even maybe a bit better than average, and God's not going to raise the bar to keep most people out, is he?" is just the attitude of complacency we should avoid.

One the one hand, it can be comforting to know you're going to have an "It's a Wonderful Life" event where you learn the true value of all the good you had done and all the positive influence you had. On the other hand, how many missed opportunities and bad choices that seemed trivial, that weren't even thought about at the time, will we also have to answer for? How much will we be saying "I'm sorry, Lord, I had no idea," and how often will we wish we could say it but know that, indeed, we did have some idea, after all?

Would a truly just and fair God send people to hell?

2010-11-03T22:19:00.000-05:00

A discussion some time ago at ISCA BBS covered this question in its non-Catholically shallow manner that really makes me wonder why I keep coming back. The few regular posters seem to be comprised of a handful of liberal Protestants, one or two postmodern pagans, and an evangelical. I don't have a problem with discussing things from perspectives I don't personally share, although I'm not as interested in distinctly Protestant and secular opinions as a lot of other people are. To each his own.

It's just tiring to see people going round and round, occasionally making dissatisfied references to Aquinas, but giving his arguments little more than a cursory look--grasping the immediate arguments but not their foundations or the implications they already "just know are so"--and then returning to "Why? Why? 'God is above mortal ken and the moral reckoning of men' is unsatisfying, so there must be a different answer that makes me feel better about an omnipotent God who only pretends to be omnibenevolent."

Perhaps not, for they either run in circles forever or come to pat conclusions that don't fit Scripture well, like hell either is or will be completely empty, or hell is actually annihilation, or some temporal metaphor or illusion. Perhaps, though, it's a mystery, and we should take it in turns trying to understand mysteries like a good citizen of Western civilization and accepting them as is so that we might drink more deeply of them, ponder them with our hearts rather than our minds.

I'm not saying it isn't reasonable to ask why temporary actions have eternal consequences. It's just that all actions have consequences that ripple forward in time forever, on into eternity, and we only imagine that temporary consequences for our actions are the only result.

There were some arguing that since God had foreknowledge that some souls He created would choose eternal separation, then God was effectively creating them for hell. This argument is common, and facile; omniscience in one being does not preclude free will in others, and all other considerations aside, if this argument is impenetrable and impossible to consider, let alone accept, then you need to reconsider what you think the Christian notion of free will is and what it's worth. A merciful God might seem immoral to Odinolaters, as well, but the Norseman must consider the missionary's ethos on Christ's grounds as well as on Odin's. If he looks at heaven and says "But that can't be right, for the glory of the afterlife is reserved for those who die in battle," then he never leaves his own assumptions to make a fair appraisal.

Some made it out to be a cruel game, like a geneticist who creates lab animals that depend on a certain drug to thrive and survive, and then the geneticist hides the drug with a bunch of other drugs and makes them guess. Of course, God wants us to survive, and all the other drugs were concocted by other lab animals trying to replicate or replace the real medicine, and He doesn't leave you to writhe on the floor like a suffocating fish the first time you mistake poison for medicine.

I don't think the drug and lab analogy is good, although it reflects perhaps a narrow aspect of what's going on. A more apt one may be a couple that has a child on a long ocean voyage; the child's needs are met by the parents and the supplies on the boat, but the child is free to fend for himself in the ocean if he chooses to jump over the rail. It doesn't seem like much of a choice, but if he holds out long enough with the people who really do have his best interests at heart, they will reach a land where anything he could want is available and he's not confined to three heaving, 55-foot decks; should he choose the ocean instead, he will never make it. Could the couple have gotten an amphibious pet instead? Possibly, but they wanted someone who was designed to make and receive the most from the greater good of eventual landfall, rather than something that spent its days dodging jellyfish and sharks. Sure, it might enjoy swimming, but it would be swimming alone, which is a lesser good than walking and running and playing with others from the boat.

If women were in charge of the world, would there be no wars?

2010-10-30T13:58:00.000-05:00

Some say so. They claim to be too empathic to resort to non-dialoging means of resolving conflict.

To these, shall we say, puffed-up feminoptimists, I provide some anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

"Oh," you say, "that's just high school." Sorry, I don't buy it, for reasons that don't require me to positively believe in original sin.

I was that age in the last century, and things are worse now, but that kind of behavior wasn't unheard of then. And one doesn't have to look too hard to find high school kids who never grew up. One didn't have to look too hard to find a little girl carrying a big metaphorical stick and calling herself a woman, but still being catty to the out-crowd and attempting to establish territory through emotional and social bullying.

Fast forward a couple decades, and I have a higher-level manager who once fired someone for dressing only as inappropriately as said manager. If she perceives or imagines a business or political threat, she'll trump up behavior or performance problems; it doesn't matter if we see through it, because her superiors don't do their homework, so ineffective threats and criticisms can always be backed by permanent changes to one's employment status.

If someone like that isn't capable of war as we know it, even a cold war, I don't want to think of what she might do instead. Even if she weren't a woman.

Doctor Howell's dismissal (III)--tardy denouement

2010-09-25T02:07:00.000-05:00

I caught Dr. Howell on Al Kresta's show after the University of Illinois redefined the dismissal of the good professor as...well, they said his dismissal wasn't really a sign of any disciplinary action that was supposed to be formal or permanent. How much of this is backpedaling and how much is political speak for "certain responsible agents overstepped their bounds in dealing with the situation," I don't know. I'd like to think it was mostly the latter, since I'd rather have one administrator indulge a knee-jerk reaction to a hearsay accusation from a party that didn't really have standing to complain.

The situation now is basically that Dr. Howell will have a "visiting instructional appointment," which I think means he'll officially be an adjunct professor, paid by the university instead of provided gratis by the diocese or the Newman Center. Some people following the case feared this would be the result, because now that he is more than before a University employee, the standards for tolerance (the intolerability of tolerance, perhaps) would be--I don't want to say higher, but perhaps stricter--such that it would be easier to fabricate a case with evidence against him in the future. According to a letter sent to the University of Illinois from the Alliance Defense Fund, however, a close eye will be kept on the situation, so for now I'm hopeful.

Al Kresta asked an interesting question during the interview. He asked if Dr. Howell had said anything offensive, which Dr. Howell denied. Of course, sensitivity to scandal is in the eye of the beholder, and there could be different thresholds for different people who come at the situation with all lucid care. But really, Dr. Howell was speaking the truth: he didn't say anything to shock students that wouldn't have been reasonable for anyone walking into the classroom to expect to already be aware of.

I think what might have set some people off was the claim that, in utilitarianism, if the highest virtue is pursuing what you judge to be the most useful, and "most useful" usually being "whatever brings me the most pleasure" (at least when the utilitarianist is off duty, and not breaking laws and lying for professional advancement or what have you), then there's nothing to justify stopping short of bestiality, which most people still rightly are repulsed by.

Most people still know in their gut that bestiality is wrong, but they don't like learning that they've disarmed themselves in the fight with zoophiles, that they can only answer "I feel this is right for me" with "I feel dirty just listening to you." They're probably shocked that a Catholic professor of religion--a man of faith and a professional, an academic; in a word, someone uptight and clean-cut--would talk or even think about such unsavory things, who would be warning them that, once they admit to "do whatever you want but please don't get in my way," there was nothing to stop someone from going as far as the barnyard, despite all protests to the contrary by the people who just want to marry someone of the same sex.

Well, folks, start thinking about the possibility and how we're going to answer it, because the polygamists and pedophiles are not trying all that hard to hide their hope for a libertine precedent in Congress or the courts. It's high time to be asking what good they think would come to them from laws or court decisions that were only favorable on the surface to gay couples.

"What happened to this generation?"

2010-07-27T18:32:00.000-05:00

I've been watching Fringe on Hulu.com. I've been enjoying it--interesting premise, good enough stories, and characterization the way characterization is supposed to be done: varying complexity and occasional moral ambiguity without relying too heavily on the "bad people arbitrarily designated protagonists" crutch. Sometimes there are quantum leaps of deduction used to keep the plot moving in the right direction, but considering they're usually made by the resident lobotomized psychotropic-drug-using genius on a show where such insights can even be plausible, I'm willing to overlook the flashbacks to the early days of sf television.

I didn't mean to dwell on the show. I just wanted to comment on a scene in an episode from a couple months ago. The aforementioned genius, Walter, was taking a break from whatever work he was doing in his Harvard lab, and was sitting outside watching students go by and smoking pot with a colleague, Nina. The following exchange takes place:

Nina: "I forgot how serious this campus has become. I remember my time here quite differently."
Walter: "We did have fun, didn't we? I don't know what happened to this generation."
...
Walter: "Look at all these students. When did they become so afraid? We had the courage to think against the grain of what we were told; we let our curiosity be our guide."

What happened to this generation? Walter and Nina did. Walter's generation looked at the one that invented the bomb, decided to live for today (how that constitutes letting curiosity be their guide, and how what Archimedes and Galileo and da Vinci and Tesla and Einstein was something else, I can't imagine), and he himself went down a path that broke this universe, and the one next to it. Maybe this generation finally learned that some caution is appropriate in this life, after all.

Here's the problem I see. The "courageous" generation that preceded a "serious, afraid" one rejected what they were told, instead of simply playing devil's advocate like an honorable curious skeptic; but then they turned around and tried to teach their successors that this parochial truth of relativism was the One True Way. Nina at least seems to be truer to her principles: if the truest thing you can do is throw off Truth, then you shouldn't be scandalized when the people you try to teach would not scruple to question, doubt, and reject the things you turned out to be taking as absolute after all.

Never mind about what Walter considers to be courageous. Maybe our apparent seriousness and fear is just what prudence looks like to him. Prudence is a virtue. Too bad the consequences of his lapses in prudence were being shared with everyone--with the fearful and serious students he was watching with Nina, and with everyone and everything else known to exist.

But it's just a TV show. Maybe I shouldn't think too much about the words that the writers are putting in the characters' mouths. But that's begging a question.

Doctor Howell's dismissal (II)--followup and corrections

2010-07-13T11:55:00.007-05:00

First, thanks to Gary at Goodwrites for links to the e-mail Dr. Howell wrote, the e-mail written by the aggrieved student, and e-mail addresses for various university officials who would be in a position to do something about the situation. The American Papist also has more detailed and clearheaded information than I have been able to muck up since Saturday, so check thou him out if I haven't entirely burned you out on the subject; then contact UIUC and the Diocese of Peoria.

Second, it was not a gay student group to which the student complained, it was the LGBT Resource Center. I stand corrected; my analogy to the Star Trek club is not accurate.

Third, it was not a student in the class who caused the uproar, but a friend of the student. The student in the class apparently described the lectures as preaching rather than teaching and allegedly found the subject to be inflammatory (I'm not entirely clear whether the person in the class was constantly complaining to his friend, or the friend was merely scandalized at what the person in the class was passing along). Either way, the friend who was agitating on behalf of the student has a loose enough grip on the facts to be unsure if Dr. Howell was a priest or not.

The behalfist pointed out that he and his friend in the class were both Catholic, and that he "didn't go to Notre Dame for a reason." If so, I must wonder why he would be shocked to hear something he should already have known, and if he didn't want a Catholic education, well, I don't see what taking actions he could predict would have a reasonable chance of resulting in the dismissal of someone else's instructor, has to do with him getting the best secular pluralist education he could hope for.

Fourth, I found it very rich that the associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Ann Mester, saw fit to justify the university's decision by saying "The e-mails sent by Dr. Howell violate university standards ofinclusivity." (hat tip to Dave Armstrong of Biblical Evidence for Catholicism. By "rich" I mean "ironic" or "hypocritical." I am somewhat alarmed that a public university, especially one in the vicinity of Peoria, would have "standards of inclusivity" that go beyond honoring the sacred trust of the teaching office, honoring the trust of each student, but are this explicit and binding, on pain of breaking of contract.

I would be skeptical that this code of inclusivity is so explicit that Mestercould point to chapter and verse; I could be wrong, but I find it more likely that vague platitudes would be preferred in that they are easier to twist and easier to slip past the casual, trusting reader.

Perhaps Mester refers to these inclusivity standards that include not only race, age, and the various things commonly lumped under sexual orientation, but actually spell out religion, yet still suffice to get Dr. Howell dismissed on the grounds that he conveyed information about a religious institution.

These inclusivity police are either cowards, trying to "disappear" salient members of the would-be opposition, or they are very patient, working carefully and slowly to make average people afraid to make a wrong move or speak a wrong word, and then act with impunity against people who not only talk about things that some people don't like, but actually believe them openly. Why else would they tolerate Dr. Howell's presence, yet get upset when he tried to resolve a disagreement in class after hours by presenting information that an honest progressive atheist could just as easily have presented?

The university's pledge to inclusiveness goes on to say "In an environment ofinclusivity, there is no place for acts of hatred, intolerance, insensitivity...." Insensitivity and intolerance next to acts of hatred? Are they talking about acts of hatred, acts of intolerance (whatever that would be), and acts of insensitivity (which "there is no room for that here" would seem to demand as a response even to diplomatic differences of opinion and misunderstandings, if they're going to be consistent), or just talking about how attitudes of intolerance and insensitivity are right up there with posting "Irish need not apply" signs and lynching black people? Either way, how do they cope with a difference of opinion? How can they cope with a misunderstanding? Where do they find room to enlighten well-meaning rednecks who show up completely blind to the depths of their latent bigotry?

Okay, speed bump. Sorry. More a theoretical question than a practical one; it's still more common for politically correct people to behave as normal human beings than not, so there's obviously some tolerance of intolerance "in the field." Back on track....

To anyone who is having trouble sorting "conveying facts about Catholicism" from "pushing Catholicism," if Dr. Howell started this class like he did the one I took, he would have pointed out that he was a Catholic and believed what he was teaching, and he would be teaching from that perspective in order that students may get a better understanding of the Church "from the inside," but that he expected and accepted disagreement (UIUC being a state school and all) and would not hold any differences of opinion or belief against any student, either in class or in the gradebook. His job was to rectify misunderstanding and clear away ignorance, not abuse his position and the teacher-student trust.

Dr. Howell is not an unapproachable guy. It's possible a student might be too timid even to approach him over a concern or disagreement, but there's no rational way a friend of such a student, either acting on the timid student's request or taking it upon himself to take up the timid student's banner, would up and...not go confront the professor, instead going first to the LGBT office and notifying the campus media before informing the department head that he's really not a gay activist. Sorry, pal, but you are now; welcome to the club. Dues are 20c a week and you have to bring doughnuts on Tuesdays.

In case any apologists missed the low-hanging fruit in the combox over there:

Don't confuse "nature" with "natural law," or "nature" in the sense of "plants and animals doing their thing unimpeded in the wilderness" with "nature" in the sense of "essential qualities of being." This is a basic distinction, and someone arguing that animals exhibit homosexual behavior, or that straight couples sometimes engage in sodomy, in the fact of that is like being told in a physics class that relativistic effects on time and motion are immeasurable at pedestrian speeds and then complaining that you can clearly see that when two people approach each other at the same speed, they close the distance in half the time it would take for one to walk all the way to the other. You're ignoring the underlying idea to show that you don't grasp the means to challenge the assertion that Newtonian motion is merely an approximation.

Referring to "natural law" is not just making a religious argument while swapping out "God" for "nature." "Nature" doesn't will or intend, in the human sense, anything. If I point out that humans tend to eat meat because the nature of their bodies does not include the ability to synthesize all the necessary amino acids, a reasonable argument would be "that's cruel to animals; complete protein in the diet can be achieved by eating this and that combination of vegetable proteins." An unreasonable argument would be "you're just saying God wants you to eat meat so you don't have to give up your backyard barbecues or stop looking down on us hairy-legged granola types!"

On occasion, rare enough that I'm not inclined to put much stock in the unsupported claims, it's argued that the "gay sex is unhealthy; that's evidence for a natural law position" claim is disproven by this or that anonymous corpus of sociological or biological research. It was brought up in the comboxes I mentioned (where the messages are posted, in case I've allowed myself to ramble into obscurity; not at Goodwrites), but a preponderance of evidence was only referred to in passing.
To anyone who thinks that's good enough reason not to think we could do well to discourage anal sex on the grounds of its dangers, I ask: What's so great about rectal prolapse?

University of Illinois religion professor fired for doing his job

2010-07-11T13:04:00.000-05:00

I encourage all of you to read the article at Catholic Online, but let me summarize.

Professor Kenneth Howell has, since the late 1990s, been teaching courses on Catholicism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Being associated with the vibrant Newman Center on campus, it seemed logical to Professor Howell and then-head chaplain of the Newman Center, Msgr. Swetland, to offer the courses both to edify the Catholic students and to provide an opportunity to the student body as a whole to clear up misconceptions on basic Catholic principles (in Howell's Introduction to Catholicism course) and on the application of these principles to more timely matters (the upper-division Modern Catholic Thought).

Professor Howell is--I can assure you personally--an honorable and faithful man. He made no secret about being a member of the faith he was teaching about, that he believed it was objectively true, and that any differences in belief or opinion between him and his students would be respected--his job was to instruct, not to proselytize.

Until the spring semester of 2010, this was good enough. Then, during a discussion on natural law, one or more students made a disproportionate display of outrage at his example of the Church's position on homosexuality. Hoping to clarify and settle things, Dr. Howell e-mailed the class explaining the differences between a philosophy of natural law and a philosophy of utilitarianism. Somehow this was also inflammatory, and was brought to the campus gay/lesbian/etc. student group, who took it to the head of the Department of Religion.

As an aside, I'm trying to imagine a modern lit/media professor saying something critical about the portrayal of Klingons on the small screen, and having it even occur to the campus Star Trek fan club to formally protest that professor's actions to the department, let alone having the department chair do anything but write a curt yet polite dismissal.

To bring a long story to a short end, the outrage of the student or students in class, the pressure from the homosexual group, and what I can only assume is the e-mail being treated as a confession to causing confusion and discomfort in class; summed up, led to the decision that Dr. Howell's services would no longer be required at the university.

Apparently UIUC did a good job covering its butt legally, that there's little room for a breach of contract suit from the Diocese of Peoria or Dr. Howell personally, but I can't wrap my head around the idea that an instructor can legally be penalized for providing accurate information about what some people believe that other people happen not to like.

It's not like it was a secret. Dr. Howell taught openly for years, and it is a joke so cliched that it's virtually taken as fact that Rome is doctrinally hard on gays because it's so conflicted about its plethora of pedophile priests. Now someone expresses outrage, and that--not the years of sober and fair instruction--is grounds for dismissal.

Sorry, Illinois. The customer is not always right. The vast majority of his students obviously did not feel offended or oppressed or unsafe (or whatever other "hostile classroom environment" words you want to use)--fearing either beratement in class or low grades after the fact--or Dr. Howell's reputation, not to mention his published teacher evaluation scores, would have reflected it. The outlier here is the aggrieved student or group of students, not the behavior of Dr. Howell.

Can you see this happening in other circumstances? Imagine he were teaching an anthro class instead, and brought up some tribe of cannibals back in some equatorial jungle somewhere. Now imagine him talking about their belief that green-eyed people taste better than anyone else. Having green eyes, what grounds would I have for being upset? He's just stating facts. Should I be afraid that one of these cannibals might find me and eat me? Only if I visited their part of the world. Should I be upset that the professor told me they exist? If I were, maybe I shouldn't have taken the class in the first place, because that hypothetical tribe would exist whether I knew about it, wanted to know about it, or not.

Perhaps that's an absurd example. Imagine me, a practicing Catholic, living as a student in the suburbs of Moscow during the Cold War. I go about my business but I keep my head down where it's expedient, and so far I haven't come to any trouble. In a social studies class I'm taking, the teacher spends some time discussing the relationship between religion and the state and society at large. He happens to mention that the Church has been persecuted for being the Church, with burnings at the stake and confiscation of property during the early days of the Reformation, and nowadays with more subtle oppression, to the point where in some parts of the southern US, such as eastern Texas, it's safer to be black than to be Catholic.

What possible rational, lucid motivation would I have for flipping out in class and trying to get my instructor fired? He's not persecuting me. Even if he's a good Party member with some residual Protestant attitudes from his parents from before the Revolution, he's only stating facts. That's his job.

He doesn't have to like what the truth is. I don't have to like what the truth is. I can even think that persecuting the Church is wrong and that my teacher is in error for thinking that religion is a national poison. But he's only saying what happens to be documentedly true and already widely known. I can't honestly be mad at him for that.

I have some angrier words for the people who cost Dr Howell his job in their pursuit of justice or comfort, but it may be best that I don't share them at this time.

Pizza

2010-06-18T21:58:00.000-05:00

Had some 'za for dinner. Got a cheese pizza from the freezer section at Wal*Mart, having forgotten about the crust and sauce left in my fridge from an earlier attempt, and threw on various toppings.

I got to thinking: I like tangy things on my pizza. It makes drinking cool, often sweet beverages in between bites that much more refreshing. I like green olives (black ones I can't enjoy except in trace amounts, as with a potent spice, and I'm just happy not to have them at all), hot peppers (yellow ones being pungent and sweet and not too hot if I'm not in the mood for recreational oral pain), even sometimes onion and tomatoes (which get nice and tangy when cooked down, or when already sun-dried).

What I didn't think about until just now is "If onion, why not garlic?" I've had it as part of a white-sauced pizza, like the flatbread equivalent to fettucini alfredo, but never as an addition to more conventional pizza. But I didn't start this post just to get an idea for getting sidetracked.

What I thought about when I was rounding out my pizza fixings was this: "If olive, and tomato, and pepper...why not pickle?"

It's tangy, salty. Should blend right in with olives and pepperoni and cheese, right?

Well, no twist from me tonight: it actually worked quite fine. I approve of dill pickle slices on pizza. I may be trying other kinds in the future.

Your milage may vary. Let me know what you think if you try it.

2010-06-01T22:58:00.003-05:00

Some time ago I found a book, humorously written in the style of the Worst Case Scenario series, on being Lutheran. It was a pretty compact thing and appeared to contain a lot of wit so I picked it up and skimmed it.

There was, indeed, a good measure of solid advice, both on theological issues that would be of concern to any Christian, including (in not so many words) some suggestions for spiritual warfare, and on more practical matters of belonging to an ecclesial community, such as what kinds of casseroles are considered appropriate pot luck fare in different parts of the country.

Two things struck me as odd, one trivial and one a bit unsettling.

The trivial one was the portrayal of Martin Luther as a lighthearted, even jovial man. One can detect a dry sense of humor even in reading his 95 Theses, if you're a little familiar with the context, but for some reason I always tended to picture Luther as a man who, after spending numerous fruitless hours in the confessional, would come out totally devoid of consolation from either his confessor or directly from God; a man of mounting frustration who perhaps vented it through acerbic wisecracks and biting sarcasm. I see this kind of thing here and there on the Internet, where certain personalities seem to have trigger topics that, once broached, send them off on massive, solidly if hastily reasoned, rants that go on and on and eventually touch on every related subject that the writer has been nursing a grudge for.

Still, I have no reason to think my original mental image is more accurate; it was just interesting to see a different perspective, one that provided a better window into his personality than I've ever looked through before.

The unsettling thing was one of the tactics suggested for spiritual combat.

One of Luther's catch phrases, I suppose you could say, was "Sin boldly." The idea, if I may digest it a bit, is that since in the long run we won't avoid committing sin, we may as well do so with gusto, as an act and show of robust faith in Christ's saving grace, which is greater than any sin or infirmity.

Faith and freedom from second-guessing are good things, no doubt, but I can't candone being cavalier towards sin. We shouldn't despair over the fate of our souls, but contrition is not the same thing as despair, and it is a better antidote to pride than something that amounts to recklessness.

I haven't gotten to the combat tactic yet: the questionable suggestion in the book was that, if you were mired in a spell of temptation to do some great sin, then you should commit some different minor sin to "throw the devil off."

I would really like to know who came up with this idea. It's wrong on so many levels.

First and foremost, it is never a good idea to commit a sin, of any magnitude. The ends will not justify the means; we're not talking "Take a course of action many would find ill-chosen but falls into the category of prudential judgment," we're talking "Commit a sin in order to escape another sin." Paul explicitly warned us not to promote sin in order to multiply grace, but this book's advice is materially contradicting that command. You're not accepting the lesser of two evils as a prudent effort to reduce harm, you're positively choosing evil in a misguided attempt to confuse the author of confusion.

If this advice is the fruit of "Sin boldly," then bold sin is a losing proposition right out of the gate. God never provides us a challenge without also supplying the grace to face it; can anyone argue that God's grace will specifically take the form of an opportunity for a "distracting" evil to disrupt the devil's efforts to bring you down in some other way?

"When I get the urge to kill, I masturbate until the rage goes away." "I couldn't take my eyes off her, so I went to the park and made fun of the kids there until I stopped thinking about her." Does any practice that resembles these sound like a good idea?

All I can imagine is that the author has observed that when he's tempted to do something heinous, if he does something a little less heinous, the inclination to commit the worse sin goes away. For one thing, it's a lack of faith, not a sign of it, in God's providence and generosity to resort to one sin in order to escape another.

For another, what is "throw the devil off" supposed to mean? Satan might be tempting someone with lust; is the person instead supposed to go and eat a whole chocolate cake because a sin that Satan wasn't immediately pushing somehow doesn't count?

It all counts. There isn't some tactical game you can play, hoping you can lose just one battle in order to win the war; Christ already won it for us so there's no reason other than scratching that sinful itch to cave in. Satan doesn't care how you sin; he'll take whatever disobedience from God he can get out of you, and being cunning, Satan probably anticipated your most likely immoral avenues of escape from the primary pressure he's exerting on you. The devil sends errors into the world in pairs, so that in fleeing one you embrace the other, for this very reason. He might even be pushing lust on you simply to trick you into committing gluttony, because he knows it will be a more destructive avenue for you in the long run. Maybe that act of gluttony is less grave than the act of lust you were contemplating, but the devil still gets what he wants: your acquiescence to sin.

Either way, your resistance to sin gets worn down; if at first you show reluctant acceptance of small sin in order to avoid a great one, soon you will show a willingness to do so, and then an openness to doing so with greater and greater sins in order to avoid lesser and lesser ones that, in being consistently tempted to commit, you have come to believe you are especially prone to.

It's a simple high-pressure sales technique. "Can I interest you in a new computer? Then how about a cell phone instead?" "Are you still considering a new computer? How about a digital camera too? Or just the camera?" "Would you like to try our latest computer? Why not get a new hard drive as a backup for your old one instead?" Whether you buy a computer, a phone, a camera, a hard drive, or go in a different direction and get a multimedia device, the salesman isn't going to care: you're still in his store, and you're still buying his product; if you acquiesce to buying one thing, you may acquiesce to buying accessories to it or to buying the other things he's selling. One way or another, in one fell swoop or by a thousand increments, you're giving him your money, and possibly much more than if you'd caved to the first item he offered and then left the store too chagrined to be interested in anything else.

It also leads to pride. I can't speak universally, but I can sum up some personal anecdotes.

I know of two general kinds of people who abstain from alcohol: recovering alcoholics, and principled teetotalers. The alcoholics I know best understand that not everyone is necessarily prone to the same temptations for substance abuse or have the same inability to moderate their behavior in certain activities. Aside from the people who were never alcoholics but abstain merely as a religious discipline, the way Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays but don't think twice about Protestants having cookouts at the end of the week, I have known people who don't imbibe because of all the harm that alcoholism could bring, who have managed to cultivate an air of disdain for folks like me who appear reckless, who aren't insightful or holy enough to take a purer, less carnal and more gnostic path of holiness. God knows I can understand how easy it is to feel smug about how much other people wallow in sin and in the near occasions of sin--I'd be posting twice as frequently if I weren't trying to keep that attitude in check when writing about things in the world that really need to be answered.

But when I hear, in word or in tone, a comment like "Oh, you had a beer once? I'm disappointed," my gut reaction is "Maybe I was young and foolish, but all of a sudden, now I am too. But I'd rather be drunk than judgmental."

2010-05-23T22:31:00.000-05:00

Once again I allude to Chesterton as he pointed out in Orthodoxy that criticism of the Church has been contradictory--that it is both excessively prudish and sex-obsessed, and so on.

Once upon a time I was asked a question, or a number of questions rather, about Catholic doctrine. Having given some answers to the best of my ability, I had to respond eventually with "I don't know." The retort to that was "Exactly!" What? Exactly what? Did I get zinged for not having memorized the whole of the Catechism, or for the suspicion that the Church hadn't thought of everything, which was why I couldn't provide some explanation or other?

One of these options might underlie the derisive tone people seem to take when they say "The Church tells you what to think"--unless the problem they have is that they think it is arrogant to believe you can know any truth, and so issuing instructions under such arrogance is folly.

Well, whatever. I can't really say if they have legitimate concerns because the questions and accusations they extend are so badly constructed. The conversation started out civilly with some honest questions about distasteful points of doctrine. For some reason I'm always surprised when there's a "So THERE!" moment and the whole dialog turns. Maybe I shouldn't be; there are plenty of reasons for someone to get upset at having preconceptions challenged without resorting to endemic anti-Catholicism, and it's not that hard for me to drop the diplomatic ball right after the charitable ball smashes my toes.

My favorite-of-the-moment, anyway, I think has to be when people complain that the Church has an answer for everything--as if it were bad that the Church has had time to contemplate so many (to the point of all) moral questions, or that it had the means or inclination to do so. That it would go so far as to develop overarching principles and philosophies that allow it to anticipate moral questions, even (although Rome is more circumspect with this faculty). That it has or would have done either seems no less likely an offense to the people I have talked to than the mere caricature of out of touch rich white sexless men living atop some crimson tower, standing on the obsolete shoulders of historical giants, making patronizing moralistic judgments based on their vague and uneducated impressions of what people used to take seriously in the Dark Ages.

As if someone else's school of thought is superior in that it has more opportunities to invoke Transcendent Mystery as a conversation-stopper, when it simply hasn't had the opportunity or willingness to think more things through to the end.

You know what I think? If you disagree with the Church and the only grounds you have to fall back on are that the Church has answers to your objections, then you just refuse to consider the idea that you can be wrong about something.

What an interesting world it must be, that we live in...

2010-05-08T17:06:00.002-05:00

...that I would be at most three degrees of separation from Pope John Paul II, Leeroy Jenkins, and Jim Varney?

If for no other reason, this life is a marvel.

Anybody else got other bizarre and/or amazing brushes with the famous, the important, or the fascinating?

I got a little sidetracked the other day.

2010-04-26T20:02:00.000-05:00

I didn't mean to dwell on the notion that trusting the government to micromanage an entire society was foolhardy. I just wanted to bring that up as a compound example of how naive all attempts to date have been. Naive, or come-for-critics-in-the-night fascist. Usually the former morphs into the latter, given adequate time.

Since I am lazy, I will throw out some lyrics from the John Lennon song "Imagine," as it serves as a convenient manifesto-jingle for the pie-in-the-sky progressivism that established itself maybe around the same time the song was penned. Close enough, anyway; but it still possesses some inspirational power that I wish to quell.

Imagine there’s no heaven … imagine all the people living for today.”

The only positive way I can see to read this is “imagine people working on the immediate problems in the world, rather than ignoring them or rhetorically sacrificing the victims of these problems for more abstract goals.” Unfortunately, the reality, the importance, of a problem is not determined from its proximity.

“There’s no heaven” usually means “there’s no God, no moral balance sheet to account for after you die;” and “living for today” usually means not simply “today has enough problems; don’t worry about tomorrow’s until they come,” which is often stated instead as “take it one day at a time,” but also—and especially in this day and age—means “disregard the future; don’t bother planning or preparing for contingencies.” I guess if someone else is taking care of everything, then we can throw care to the wind, or we should throw care to the wind and try to ignore whatever little voices of charity in our head we might still hear.

Imagine there’s no countries … nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace

People don’t kill or get killed just for the sovereign abstraction of their home. They also don’t only kill and die in the name of religion. Animals have no religion or politics, yet they still fight and die for resources like food, for territory, for mates, to defend their young. We are not so different from animals that we would not do the same; and we should be smart enough that we can tell the difference between a war for resources honestly fought and a war for resources rationalized with patriotic or religious propaganda.

But, okay. Let’s say there are not countries, there’s no nation-state or anything. Maybe just local governments and then some kind of enhanced UN handling the things that benefit more from economies of scale than from a preference for subsidiarity. Are people just going to start getting along? It does seem like we’re learning to do that, which was why I said last time that I can understand some of the secprog optimism, but we’re really not trying hard enough to inspire people to look past the little differences that catalyze a thousand playground fights a day, to grow up and see that underneath our subtle and sundry differences we’re all just the same. The modern defender of Marx says his system has never worked because it’s never been tried with the right people in charge. I say there are not enough of the right people to go around for taking charge of such a system, or for filling the ranks thereof.

Same deal with not having any religion. You can’t just take away church and whatever fills the role of church in pagan countries; you have to deal with what and how people think about transcendent truths, about morality and if it were immutable or not, even about the meanings of holidays and the importance of giving honor to honorable people. Humans are spiritual beings, and nigh everything we do overlaps with overt spiritual traditions of one sort or another. How Lennon would propose to treat things that fit into a spiritual system without an overarching formality, things that are still important enough to actual people that they may be disinclined to take disagreements in stride, has never been addressed anywhere that I have seen. Maybe it could be done by those people of adequate virtue and conditioning who don’t actually exist (in anything but paltry numbers, at least).

Okay, starting to look like I'm fisking the whole song. Sorry. You know how I have brevity problems as well as you should have expected me to eventually get around to critiquing these lyrics.

Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood … sharing all the world

Can I imagine no possessions? Yes, and thanks for the vote of confidence. Or maybe John was speaking about the difficulty of living monastically while immersed in the material world. Do we have to have greed or hunger? No, not even now; they are inevitable only because we have not developed perfect economics. Well, hunger, at least; the problem with greed, being a capital sin, is that the greedy want more no matter how much they already have, whereas hunger can be sated. Now, it is more natural for a man to share with his blood brother than with any random stranger whom he, yes, should be charitable to as his own brother; but while I don’t count the cost when I provide for my family, I recognize how fruitless it would be to take everything I have, divide it into six billion parts, and distribute—or even just attempt!—it to everyone on the planet. In His infinite wisdom, God gave us specific families to care for, and we have personal property that is dedicated to our explicit responsibilities to the closest of our brother-neighbors: our children who need us, our spouses to whom we are pledged, our siblings with whom we must share as long as we are under our parents’ care, our parents who are responsible for us and benefit from our cooperation.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I and many others just aren’t capable of maintaining charity on the scale of an entire civilization. I’ve carved out my niche of needy people to care for directly, and I save some on the side to provide to others who have needs that seem important to me. I may get along well with the guy who lives next door to me, but if we share a car because neither of us needs one all the time, eventually one of us will need it to take someone to the hospital and the other will not be willing to postpone yet another trip to the grocery store, and it will take more than the gentle reminders of a prophet of “Be Excellent to Each Other” and goadings from some authority figure to Shut Up, Play Nice, and Stop Arguing.

Imagine sharing? Yeah, in the Kingdom of God. Before then? We ain’t even close to ready.

Sometimes I can understand how people get so excited about the idea that humanity can bootstrap itself into a secular utopia.

2010-04-23T16:32:00.003-05:00

In some ways, we have made great strides. Widespread education, eradication (to the point of extinction) of some major diseases, et cetera et cetera.

But what still gets me is the belief so many often have that we've really come so far that we have more than an inkling about starting the heavy lifting on completely reinventing human society.

The government meddles with the automotive industry as if the strings they attach to bailout money as a matter of principle and of vanity would really help the businesses run better, as if the car market going soft was the result of auto executives needing some firm parenting and not being just a part of a larger economic crisis. The government forces banks to make bad loans, and when the loans default and banks suffer, the government blames the banks for being careless in the first place.

The government tries to give the economy a shot in the arm with "Cash for Clunkers," which is a much smaller scale matter that should have been easier to forecast, budget, and manage, but it still flops. The government can't even handle this, but it's supposed to be able to defy rational economic theory and save us all? Same people who made the first mistakes are going to be in there making new ones.

And that's just a few tangible concerns. The powers that be don't have the sense not to take bad advice and bad philosophy, but the people who come up with bad philosophies and give bad advice don't have the sense to see how disruptive, at the very least, it is to institutionalize the killing of unborn children, dissolve meaningful marriage, and negotiate with terrorists and other bully states that have nothing to offer but negative reinforcement.

You can't just give a severely injured person in cardiac arrest CPR. You have to find out where the bleeding is first and treat that or it won't matter whether everything else you're doing is helpful or harmful.

From the producers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies....

2010-03-01T22:37:00.001-06:00

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

'Nuff said.

Is consent the sole criterion of the good?

2010-02-24T18:19:00.000-06:00

A popular subject these days. I don't have the skill, learning, or currently the inspiration to add an exhaustive treatise to the blogosphere's corpus of moral philosophy, so I will attempt to be pithy.

Consent is not the sole criterion of the good, because one can consent to things that are manifestly bad.

I don't mean just being willing to participate in something while invincibly ignorant of negative consequences, or acquiescing under pressure to something you don't have a good feeling about, although it's still a part of those things.

I mean being presented the chance to do something positively harmful to yourself or others, with a guaranteed result or proportionately probable outcome that is harmful, that by your own moral calculus brings less good than evil; and then doing it, knowing better.

In most real situations there are mitigating circumstances, but I live a pretty safe life, so when I end up in a bad place, I know it's largely because I've said to myself "I damn well am going to do this, anyway." Most of the factors that would overwhelm the remnants of my consent only had the power over me that I chose not to oppose.

If things can be bad despite my willingness, then I can't a priori assume on the other hand that things might be good despite my resistance.

2010-02-20T13:31:00.002-06:00

Went out to lunch with a coworker on Friday. This being Lent, I scoured the menu for a dish that didn't contain carne.

It was difficult finding something I would have enjoyed, as I don't like seafood of any sort. I finally settled on the fish and chips; it seemed simple enough not to offend my palate, and the breading would carry the tartar sauce well.

So I asked for the fish and chips, and the server pointed out that it was all the fish filets and french fries I would want. "Great," I said, appreciative but entirely uninterested. "Thank you." I already had all the fish I wanted--none--and I didn't have to spend ten dollars to get it. Well, fine, whatever; I'll offer it up, like I'm supposed to.

Halfway through lunch, the server came back and offered to reload my plate. I politely declined, almost unable (along with my coworker who was well aware of my distaste for fish) to keep from laughing at her attempts to entice me with even more of something I never wanted.

Later, I was nearly done, and she came back one more time, trying to make a last-ditch effort to interest me in seconds. "You sure? You could have just a little, then take it home for later!" I was briefly tempted, since ten bucks might be fair for tilapia and rice pilaf but was a bit steep for three pieces of whitefish--but no: one meal of fish was enough.

Thank you, no. I've had more than I ever wanted already.

You know what I'd like to see?

2010-02-14T12:22:00.003-06:00

A former coworker of mine has rather eclectic musical tastes. One of the CDs she used to bring in to play in the lab was a Metallica album where they did a lot of covers; on either the same one or a different one (I don't remember), they did a healthy number of tracks incorporating a full orchestra.

What I'd really like to see is Metallica cover some songs from "The Muppet Show." They could do some John Denver-Muppet Christmas carols or just some straight up Muppet standards, but I think it would be both epic and hilarious.

Muppets, or any show tunes, I suppose. I bet Metallica could infuse "The sun'll come out tomorrow" with some overwhelming irony.

2010-01-27T21:48:00.002-06:00

So, Fearless Leader (the national one, not the one temporarily overseeing my department at work) has announced intentions, if not plans, to put in safeguards to prevent future financial crises like the current one from happening in the future.

I hope and pray he means safeguards like the ones put in place after the Great Depression, which to the best of my knowledge were roundly neutered in recent decades; and not new ones that look like they were inspired by the less subsidiarist parts of his health care plan.

What are the chances?

Putting the doctrinal cart before the developmental horse

2010-01-03T09:04:00.001-06:00

On some much more read blog than mine, whose identity I would remember better if I hadn't procrastinated so long before sitting down to write about it, an apparently new visitor to the blog got into the combox and inadvertently drove the discussion off the rails for a bit trying to explain how it was morally necessary to believe in geocentrism.

Most of his argument consisted of citing old Church documents declaring that geocentrism was an obliged belief to hold, like the Trinity or the bodily resurrection, and citing the historical consensus of popes and theologians until the modern era.

I felt some frustration when he continued to assert that geocentrism was held and taught "always and everywhere" despite Catholics with matching credentials, from medieval theologians to the latest popes, being more open to a Copernican conception of the universe. He was quick to point out that the dissenters from geocentrism were only expressing personal opinions, and ones that happened to be erroneous, while everyone else was making official proclamations with whatever weight of authority they could avail themselves of. This dismissal seemed a bit pat in context even before he continued as if to say "Always and everywhere--except for a few occasions of dissent, but I'm not really using hyperbole, so Always and Everywhere." I was almost more alarmed to see him studiously refusing to give more than a hand-waving refutation to these Copernican supposed material heretics, as if spending too much time trying to understand why they would be wrong would make it too hard to believe Always and Everywhere, than to see him stridently warn the blog's readers not to put too much stock in the consensus of their senses and reason.

The geocentrist did, in fact, quote documents where talk of heliocentrism was condemned as absurd or otherwise posed a moral or intellectual danger to the Christian. I will even agree that for pastoral reasons, at certain points in history it may have been prudent to discourage people from fixating on thoughts like "If we've been relegated to the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of some part of the universe, are we still the apple of God's eye?" It seems preposterous today, but before natural philosophy was divorced into physical science and theology, for the layman, maybe such a proposal would have sounded a lot more ominous.

I don't know. I'm only saying I can imagine something of the sort. One wouldn't even have to fall back on "they were a thousand years dumber than we are" to see that the best pastoral action is sometimes to prohibit something that is not inherently evil (such as making same-sex attraction an impediment to the priesthood) or mandate something that is not inherently morally obligatory (such as celibacy for the priesthood).

An idea was raised that I thought may have set the geocentric argument at nines, but it wasn't pursued and then the blogger got things back on topic and that was the end of it.

Someone pointed out that there was such a thing as development of doctrine, that our understanding of old teachings of the Ordinary or Extraordinary Magisterium can expand without contradicting the essence of original understanding. The geocentrist responded that no such thing had really happened, that the authorities who had spoken on the matter had spoken definitively and had left no room for dissent, question, or nuance; case closed--and further, new doctrines are to be judged against old ones, and not the other way around.

I think this is a wounding to doctrinal development. Let me cite the Latin for an example: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, At the time this declaration--already a familiar concept, written about by St. Cyprian and lamented for not appearing true by St. Augustine--was made, there was only one Church, so "Salvation is the Church" was not going to make anybody wonder about possible schismatic saints. Fortunately, although we don't always know what's going on when the Spirit moves the Church to do one thing and not another, the Spirit does, and He does not err. The declaration that salvation only came from and through the Church did not have to be fully understood by the bishops who declared it.

"Ah," said the geocentrist in paraphrase, "but we must interpret new doctrines in light of old, rather than redefine old ones under the light of novel and potentially heretical ones!"

Okay, so we have to be sure that a new dogmatic definition is consonant with old ones before it is accepted as anything more than a hypothesis. Fine, but it is not the same thing as allowing for understanding of an old doctrine to grow.

Development of "extra ecclesiam" would be like "Outside the Church there is no salvation. We used to think that meant only Catholics in good standing went to heaven. In further consideration of the Church's role as the sacrament of grace to the world, and of people who strive for virtue as they can and are not culpable for being outside our official ranks, we believe now that people who are not formal Catholics may be saved, but it is through the instrumentality of the Church that saving grace is somehow afforded to them."

Insisting that doctrines can develop only within the confines of undeveloped understanding, which is the essence of the geocentrist's objection to modern bishops and astronomer-friars taking no umbrage at a relativistic physical universe, is a confounding of development in the first place. It is like saying "We used to teach that only people in good standing with the Church can go to heaven; today we understand that God provides some graces to sincere unbelievers through the instrumentality of the Church, but they have to be Catholic to get to heaven." It's like proving the square root of two is irrational by assuming it is rational and then deducing a contradiction, and then claiming development of doctrine on the grounds that you've found a new way to state the same thing. There's no increase in understanding there, just an increase in confusion about how or why God would dole out some graces and not others.

Consider further that the Church has drawn its own borders of competence around faith and morals. The Church may contain members who are experts in science or politics, but it learned the hard way that acting as a secular power is not the best way to go; by and large, it never had as great a problem with science (if you say "Galileo!" then try to think of someone else who got the same treatment and get back to me--I won't take the time here). If the geocentrist wishes to convince me that I must accept that the Earth is the center of the universe, he's got to offer some proofs of the following:

The universe has a center in some meaningful and detectable way at all

Why the universe's construction leaves only the subtlest clues that our current cosmology still has a few unasked questions; clues so ambiguous that a particular, grossly different geometry never even makes the list of possible explanations for remaining discrepancies between data and theory; clues whose own subtlety suggest that the way we think the universe hangs together at large and small scales is, to the best of our ability to observe it, pretty close to how it actually does. If quadropole and octopole asymmetries in the Cosmic Microwave Background are real, and are physically meaningful anisotropies, why should I have to discard the Big Bang completely for one explanation that doesn't actually explain the observations, instead of another acentric that does?

Presuming the universe does have a center and we're at it, what moral meaning it would have and why I should be obliged to hold it (I'd accept excerpts from or commentaries on the documents he already cited for the former, but for the latter, I'd also like to know what the danger of heliocentrism was besides what usually comes with hypothetical disobedience to moral authorities.)

Failing anything better than "Rome has spoken! Don't trust your senses," at least explain how the Church could declare a physical arrangement of the universe to be a necessary belief and then say it's not competent as a body to judge empirical data. Either the Church lost some capability in recent centuries, old papal bulls trump formal pedagogical documents as cited in the Catechism (the agreement of other councillar or encyclical documents on this matter being the umbrella over this tension), or development of doctrine is bogus.

Update:
Something else occurred to me. If all the geocentric-favoring statements made in Church history were dogmatic and binding, and all the Copernican statements made later on as science improved were merely opinions, what does the geocentrist make of this pandemic of heretical cosmology? Sure, no pope has taught ex cathedra against heliocentrism, but why is the support for geocentrism so...obscure? Where are all the other uncomfortable doctrines that are clearly resolved but disapproved (only personally, not formally!) by popes and theologians?

I thought it would be enough to stop reading news articles online about religion

2009-12-12T16:55:00.004-06:00

Also about science, and the comments posted thereon. Apparently it isn't good for me to read the discussions of touchier subjects at places like Amazon.com, either.

I was browsing for some books as stocking stuffers for my mom and saw a couple discussion topics listed at the bottom that looked interesting. Well, I started reading one that didn't turn out to be interesting in a terribly constructive way, either. One discussion was titled "Why do we excuse God's genocide in the flood story?" and it went downhill from there.

It's an interesting question until one realizes that every death is the result of the permission or will of God, and so we cannot apply the same rules for behavior to God that apply to us out of consideration for the fact that death is not a material good that we should be participating in.

If I'd been a little more mature, I might have been amused to see comments almost as bleak as 'If God wanted to wipe out all those people, why didn't he just will them not to exist, instead of having adults, innocent children, and animals feel the water filling their lungs, and terror filling their hearts? Must be a pretty weak God.' You're willing to posit a God who can create ex nihilo but chooses not to destroy in nusquam, but think that it's a sign of weakness, like you're some competing predator? That even a God who could only destroy by natural means would be too small for you to bother worshiping or deigning to admit might really exist?

Who cares? A God who created everything, one who can control the weather, has at least shown Himself to be what He seems to be, even if you have a measure of skepticism about who He or any of us claims He is.

Or maybe it doesn't amuse me because until I can grow a thicker skin and look at people with that mindset through more charitable eyes, I'm afraid that trying to avoid angry ignoramuses will turn me into one, into the mirror image of someone who goes around wishing more people referred to him as a Bright and acting surprised that anyone still goes to church anymore.

2009-12-08T18:49:00.004-06:00

I learn a lot about good and bad driving by observing the mistakes of others. A lot of it's about the apparent weaknesses in my new state of residence's driving laws and standards for instruction, so I have plenty of opportunities to learn as well how much humility and patience I still need to develop, but it also gives me things to watch out for in case I'm ever a lot closer to the action.

I also learn a lot by being a stupid driver myself. It's a lot easier to see what my weak areas are than to try to imagine them because my commutes are so mundane that my margins of safety are hardly touched.

I think I learn the most, though, when I see other drivers react badly to my mistakes. The funniest one was when I lost control on some black ice and slid off the road. Did some minor damage to the exhaust system. While I was inspecting it, my dad called the police. A cop came out, seemed satisfied that I'd done everything I could and should have done so he didn't give me a ticket, but then asked me to get in the back of his squad car so we could get the accident report taken care of out of the weather. He wanted to get through it quickly, he said, before some rubberneckers came by and hit something. Sure enough, while I'm looking over the form, a car drives the other way slowly with the driver just staring at me in the back seat, and another car does the same thing, only not quite as slowly...*bang* I laughed, the cop uttered a mild expletive, and asked me to wait while he got the other two cars situated. Then he came back to finish with me, call out another car to deal with the two cars that collided, and called the city to get a brine truck out. Man, I still laugh about that.

There were two other very similar ones that I didn't realize I was also guilty of but still don't quite understand why it seems natural for people to do it. On different occasions, I have been backing out of a parking space when someone drove behind me, either because I didn't check a blind spot or they came around a nearby corner and feared I wouldn't look in time to avoid hitting them. Maybe I would have, maybe not; usually I catch that kind of thing but I appreciate being honked at so I can stop immediately and reassess my surroundings.

On the two occasions I have in mind, though, the cars honked to get my attention and then stopped right behind me. When I looked around, I just saw a car there, the driver watching to see what I would do. What do you want, a contrite gesture in my rear view mirror? I'd be happy to oblige, but my windows are tinted. Waiting to see if I've noticed you yet? Either stop before you get in my way or try to scoot past, whatever it takes to avoid a collision. If you're choosing between letting me slowly back into you and running over a pedestrian on ahead of you, hey, good choice, but dinging a fender or bumper would be much less significant than crumpling a door and possibly the person sitting on the other side of it.

I can't say it's not a natural reaction. My instinct is also to try to stop to reduce the variables I have to assess in order to safely defuse a situation. But man, staying right in the path of a moving car is just bad news.

2009-11-30T15:29:00.004-06:00

Interesting fragment of a discussion I caught on...um...I think it was Moody Radio, that's the religious station that comes in most consistently when I'm driving around town, but I don't recall for sure. I wish I'd heard more.

They were going on about how Christ alone saves, not our works, not our works alongside Christ's completed atoning work on the cross, and how all we have to do is believe in Him.

I presume they meant "believe in" in the sense of "have faith in," not "think is factually true," because everyone on the other side of the veil knows the truth of that and they're not all in heaven.

So they were quoting and paraphrasing Paul a lot, making some good points about how if we had to rely on our own works we could never be assured of our salvation, which is true enough--actually, it's half true. If we're honest and have a little spiritual maturity, we should have a pretty good idea that our own works don't suffice. But they were making a good point: we can't save ourselves.

I felt they started leaning off the rails a bit when they mentioned good works coming along after we're justified barely as an afterthought. While someone living a grace-infused life can reasonably be expected to do more to bring grace into the world for others, I think it really does a disservice to James to say "'faith without works is dead' just means 'if I don't do good works, I probably don't have faith, but I have no obligation per se.'" They didn't explicitly go that far, but they thoroughly conflated sola fide with sola gratia. Christ wants more than intellectual assent or resignation to the fact of His saving work.

Jesus did not say to the sheep "You believed in me. Enter into the Kingdom," nor to the goats, "You did not put your trust in me, begone from My sight."

The segment I heard on the radio came shortly after a Catholic had called or e-mailed, quoted a few passages that were not identified after I tuned in, and then encouraged them to come to Mass. The host of the show said the Mass wasn't something he couldn't abide by, because each celebration of the Eucharist, he said, was a resacrifice of Christ, and His one crucifixion was done and finished and He is now resurrected. "Am I right?" he asked his guest.

The guest (A Doctor...I forget his last name, but I imagine his doctorate was in something like theology or scripture rather than medicine) went on about how we was an altar boy at daily mass every morning at 6:15 from grades 5 to 8, or thereabouts, and how he used to stare at that crucifix every day, that Catholics had to remind us of the sacrifice, but that's in the past and constantly being reminded of the Passion is a horrible thing to live under.

Well, no it isn't. It prevents one from developing a theology of cheap grace. How many stories of Easter have you seen where the Crucifixion is portrayed as little more than mildly inconvenient? If I had to scrimp and save and work time and a half to get nice Christmas presents for my children, let alone keep them housed and clothed and fed, I'd know they'd have some measure of gratitude if they really like the gifts that they got and the time I spent playing with them, but I'd know they wouldn't possess a mature gratitude if they didn't understand or care much about the labor I endured and the sacrifices I made to bring them those things. Not that I would expect it, necessarily; such things are often only appreciated in retrospect, from the perspective of their own adulthood. That they are children with childlike perspectives is no slight, but childlike is what they are and immature is what they should not remain.

Further, the good guest doctor didn't answer the question. He should have known well enough; even if he left the faith right after that eighth grade year, if he'd been paying attention to the rest of the Mass, like the homilies, instead of staring at the crucifix and nurturing an aesthetic rationalization against it, he would have been able to say "Actually, sir, you are mistaken; the Mass is a representation of the one sacrifice, the making of us present at the Last Supper and at Calvary." But then he wouldn't have had time to come up with a new excuse for not looking at how Scripture-laden the Mass is.

He did talk briefly about discussions he had with a priest friend of his, how the priest would push the Bible aside (which sounds scarier to sola scripturists, I would expect, than to Catholics) and say he can't trust the Bible on his own interpretation and so he needed the Magisterium. I would have put it differently, that he can't trust his own interpretation; "Can't trust the Bible" followed by anything else just sounds a little pat. Then he would pull the Bible back in front of the priest and ask how he can rely on the Magisterium to interpret a book that predates it by four thousand years.

I would have liked to hear the priest's answer. Mine might have gone something like the following.

The Bible does not, in its entirety, predate the Magisterium. It is this selfsame Magisterium that decided what would constitute the Bible everyone would be using. It included the Septuagint, for which I can understand your disapproval, and it also included the epistles of Paul and James. You seem content to believe the Church knew what she was doing then; why would the Holy Spirit guide the formalization of the canon but not its interpretation? Why would He leave Christians to flounder over the meaning and means of sanctification and justification for over a thousand years? What were they supposed to do until the printing press and mercantilism made viable a literate middle class that had the means to learn without being watched by a teacher? Can you explain why we have Mark and Luke but not the gospels of Thomas or Peter, why we have Acts and Revelation but not the Shepherd of Hermas or the Didache, why we have James as well as Paul but not Clement's letter to the Corinthians?

"There was a reason for the Reformation!" Yes, and the legitimate abuses that Luther pointed out have been corrected. Everything that has developed outside of Rome since then? I'm not so sure.

2009-11-08T00:00:00.001-06:00

A few delinquent comments added to the comboxes below, if you're following.

So now and then someone says that the death of Jesus wasn't enough of a sacrifice because it wasn't permanent. I'm not sure what would constitute "enough," but the idea is that all that suffering and actual death isn't very meaningful because it didn't take.

Well, guess what: no one's physical death is permanent. We're all getting our bodies back someday. People alive at the end of time won't die at all. So, who cares if or how long somebody stays dead? Life and the loss of it, having soul torn from flesh, has some meaning in and of itself. Get used to it. If you have a better example of suffering than Christ's crucifixion, I'm willing to entertain it. Anyone?

Reminds me of some other "arguments" I've heard that I can only describe as satanic apologetics--not in the sense of making the case for Satan specifically, but making a case against Christ and His Church, usually without the benefit of honest logic. They're so twisted I can't see any goal besides possibly satisfying twin urges of Schadenfreude and sadism.

One of the more troubling ones I've seen goes along the lines of "Why would you want to go to heaven? In heaven there is no time, so you will be unable to laugh, unable to smile, to interact with anyone. You'll be in this frozen state." First, let's pretend that's true. If we're not supposed to want to go to heaven, what's the alternative? Hell? They don't make the argument that heaven isn't real, just that it's distasteful; as if ending up in some pagan afterlife or hell is just a matter of preference. But hell is outside of time, as well. There, you won't smile or laugh or enjoy anyone's company, either. From what the apologist has put forward, hell is just like heaven, except it hurts a lot. Why is that supposed to be better?

Another is "The only things that aren't improving are the completely dead, because death doesn't change, and the perfect, which isn't stable and must soon lapse into decay, from everything I've seen." Boy, the afterlife is unlike anything you've seen. There's no entropy in the afterlife because the next world is in eternity, and someone with a less parochial view of time and change in this world would recognize that entropy is the sign that tells us the direction in which time moves--and that real perfection does not include the potential for decay.

Another interesting one: You think "Pope Joan" was the only female contender to the See of Rome? Think again: "Mary Magdalene was almost pope." In this one, since Mary got to the tomb before Peter or John, she would have been entitled to become pope, but she didn't enter, and neither did John, so Peter went home with that honor. Of course, who showed up at the tomb first has nothing to do with who had been named Rock. I could expect this muddling of the truth to perhaps confuse someone completely ignorant of the story of Jesus, but instead I saw it directed to a room full of Christians and well-educated pagans and agnostics. If I had been there at the time, I would have been insulted no matter which of the groups I belonged to. Mary showed up there first? Really? Just looking to get a rise out of people, now?

How's this for timely posting?

2009-10-09T18:43:00.003-05:00

So the president won the Nobel Peace Prize. Nominations had to be in scant days after his election, so I can't help but think he really got the award for becoming president. From the official press release:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics....

Has he? I see some shift in attitudes, but not anything substantial. At least Clinton got the Israelis and the Palestinians to talk--not that it lasted longer than anybody had that "Wow, he did it" feeling. I suppose having people feel optimistic when they see or hear you is a decent passive superpower, though.

Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.

Yeah, because in the past we had leaders who gleefully bathed in the blood of innocent soldiers, and now we're enlightened enough to realize we can talk and listen to each other and resolve things. Or give ourselves a nice civilized feeling while slowing the fuse on historical conflicts that would take more than a week-long summit to assuage. Or something.

The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations

What is this, 1985?

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future

He's captured the world's attention, all right, or at least that of Europe and a few major American metropoli. I'm skeptical that the hope everyone in the world seems to be feeling about times to come was derived from any particular positive action on the part of our president.

You know how the routine goes. Democrat gets elected, the talking heads breathe a sigh of relief about getting back to their agenda of Progress and Getting Alongness. At least, that's how it was this time and last time. I don't have a meaningful recollection of Carter's election, so maybe this is one of those new traditions people keep starting.

His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

I can't tell if this is about who has the largest intellectual market share or if it's really an attempt to cultivate a sort of republican milieu. Fine, if the values of the majority are what you want to perpetuate.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

When most businesses and sweepstakes organizations list the prizes for their contests, they exclude their own employees and their family members from participating because it's a conflict of interest. Organizations with mascots usually pay them hourly.

I was disinclined to comment on international politics after Yasser Arafat won back in the 90s, but when I see something like this, I have to ask if anyone else notices the emperor's absence of clothing.

Remember when they started doing away with pop-up ads because everyone hated how their desktops got so cluttered?

2009-10-05T19:05:00.003-05:00

I do.

Yet, somehow, they're back. Now they're worse, though.

They're embedded in the page you're reading. They pop up when you hover over or move across a link. Often, they don't go away when you move your mouse. It seems that, sometimes, they're not supposed to.

Please, web designers: knock it off.

Since I don't have to talk exclusively about religion and politics here...

2009-09-03T17:51:00.002-05:00

I found some blog a while ago, just long enough I don't remember whose it was, that was talking about Macs and PCs. The thing I recall was a comment that went something like "Macs are okay, once you get past the self-important posing and puffery, but when you really want to get down to computing, you'll buy or build a PC."

Really?

No, I'm sorry, but "reinstalling drivers" is not the same thing as "getting down to computing." I hope that $300 you're saving by getting an Inspiron at Best Buy is worth the downtime.

Isn't one abortion as good as another?

2009-08-26T16:32:00.002-05:00

Apparently not.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed opposition to the incidence of sex-selective abortion: namely, aborting girls more often than boys because of a perception that boys are more valuable.

This perception is not groundless. Boys grow up to be men, and even in places where selective abortions are commonplace, men tend to make more money than women, and so are generally more able to provide financial support to their aging parents.

I wonder, then: if there's nothing wrong with abortion, especially if a mother or couple can't afford to have a child, then what's wrong with making your choice to have one or not contingent on financial concerns that are more remote but no less real?

Well, it's sexist, see.

Maybe what the good custodians of the culture of death should consider is a sort of affirmative action: establish abortion quotas so mothers carrying boys will be encourage more strongly or required to abort, in order to keep things equal. If nothing else, they could start sending unwanted females over to China and India for the boys who grew up without having girlfriends or knowing sisters can get an even chance at getting married.

Of course, the truly unbiased thing to do would be not to look at sex at all when making the "Choice." What I've mockingly proposed is just reverse discrimination, which is still discrimination.

Only way to ensure impartiality is not to find out the sex of the baby at all. So maybe there actually is a reason to keep would-be abortive mothers in the dark and not provide a sonagram at all. Yes, the added risks of an abortionist going in blind are well outweighed by whatever niggling progress is made towards, uh, Progress.

Let me know if you need me to spell out the sarcasm here.

I'm not paranoid...

2009-06-15T17:16:00.002-05:00

I generally find conspiracy theories to be amusing. The (what I hope is a) coincidence I discovered in my mailbox this evening, though, was less than amusing.

I opened the box and saw that one envelope, with no return address but "nonprofit" stamped in the postage mark, had already been opened. I took a peek inside and saw these words:

"Emergency campaign: Stop Obama from passing an abortion bill"

Yeah, just a little unsettling. Probably just a neighbor got it by accident and opened it without looking first at the addressee's name, but the thought "aw man, is it going to come to this?" flickered briefly through my head.

Insipid liturgy

2009-06-06T06:39:00.001-05:00

Some time ago, the Curt Jester derided the tendency to treat the mass as if it were little more than a late night talk show. I wrote a comment but must have forgotten to hit Post or something because it didn't show up and I had to try posting my comment again a day later, when people had pretty much moved on to more current blog entries from the Jester. Or maybe mine wasn't worth commenting on, but probably also almost everyone had moved on, either way. Since this is my blog, well...

On what I hope is a related topic, does anyone else feel this way about being prodded to stand during communion? I don't mean remaining standing for the whole prayer, but proceeding normally, kneeling for the centurion's prayer, and then getting right back on your feet until everyone has received as a sign of "standing with and showing your support for fellow parishoners."
Standing is a perfectly adequate posture and an ancient practice, I realize, but when I see a reminder in the bulletin or hear in before/during mass about a "longstanding tradition" I hardly saw in any church more than five or ten years ago, I picture some committee of aesthetically minded but modern and ignorant laymen going over the rubrics and muttering "stand together...yeah...or, or hang separately. That's good, that's good; let's get that in somewhere."
Anyway, this isn't like clapping for the choir or after the finance committee makes its report instead of having a homily, so I still follow the practice of whatever parish I'm in, but I'm always put off by this "moral support" verbiage. Maybe it's just me, but I'm distracted every time with the thought that I do or don't need an extra gesture of solidarity from people in other pews when I'm walking up to receive.

I mean, we're all the Body of Christ, and if we're in communion with Him, then we can be in no greater communion with each other. While this instance of the communion of saints is not false or a bad thing to meditate on, it seems like one more distraction from focusing on the Sacrament itself.

It's better than turning worship into a simple community-celebrating event with spiritual overtones, but the foremost thing in your mind when you receive should be "Jesus," followed by perhaps something like "How great a Savior who deigned to come to a pitiful creature like me!" If your primary attitude and posture are "Solidarity!" then you're putting the Eucharist behind a much smaller good.

Maybe there's a less modernistic rationale behind it, like a disjointed attempt to capture some of the reverence seen in Eastern liturgies, but no one's ever said anything to me except "solidarity!"

Yeah. It's all about us while we share in the life of God, right?

Put it to God first. Whatever we see or feel connecting us to one another is derivative. Not bad, just derivative.

2009-04-13T17:51:00.002-05:00

My mother e-mailed me a few days ago about Obama's no-longer-hypothetical intent to rescind the shield of conscience from medical professionals who object to abortion. I tried calling a dozen times Thursday but never got through, so I e-mailed the following:

I would like to ask the President not to rescind the conscience protections for medical professionals, particularly with regard to performing abortions.
One thing that makes America great is that with few exceptions we may judge for ourselves what we should do and how we should live. By removing the shield of conscience, I believe that the harm done by requiring doctors and nurses to act in what they believe is an immoral manner would outweigh any good brought about by facilitating some debatably inalienable entitlement to a particular kind of medical service.
The debate over the legitimacy of entitlement to abortion services is often compared, sometimes implicitly, to the civil rights movement, but I submit that the comparison is faulty. Making it illegal for people to exercise bigotry systematically in public does ring of justice, but positively forcing someone to betray his values is another thing entirely; freedom is not necessarily abridged when someone is prevented from doing something, especially if it could bring harm to others, but requiring someone to do what they cannot condone does not promote freedom, either, no matter how lofty the reasons.
Draft boards didn't allow conscientious objectors off with a smile and a handshake during wartime, but they did allow them to serve their country in other ways that did not cause a moral conflict. Can we not afford a similar latitude to physicians today? Are there so few abortion providers that their ranks must be filled by people who aren't trying to women back, but actually believe that abortion harms mother and society as well as child? If not, why would requiring medical professionals to provide abortions be necessary?

It is this last point that makes me think abortion is not just being promoted as a social good in itself but as part of an agenda I'm struggling to describe with happier words than "diabolical." If the Civil Rights Act were an apt parallel, then abortion would be a mandatory service at every hospital, whose administrators would have the responsibility of complying to the law. The CRA did not require every bigot to start giving up their bus seats and holding open front doors of businesses for customers of color.

You can't outlaw racist attitudes, and I don't think we should try. No, I'm not saying it's a good thing; I'm saying that, basic civil protections aside, bigotry and racism are better fought in the streets, so to speak, than by the federal government trying to nuke society's attitudes from orbit.

You can legislate morality, but you can't police thoughts. All you accomplish with the latter is putting a deluding veneer over the top of a decaying system and underground resistance.

This is the kind of problem we run into when we start inventing rights, especially when it comes to things that don't fit in the "I shouldn't interfere with someone's decision over a private matter" category (for the record, life issues are not private matters, which is why murder is a crime against the state and not just against the victim and his loved ones)...or for that matter, so-called rights that do not derive from or even contradict natural and divine law. You end up someplace where your "right" to something requires other people to accommodate your wishes, even if it infringes other rights guaranteed to them elsewhere.

So much for consent being the arbiter of rightness that can hold us back from the precipice.

The same question was raised when universal health care was described as a basic human right. If it were so, how can a basic human right not exist until the advent of a medical profession, and not be discovered until the invention of socialism? Were billions of peasants denied a basic right to cheap and easy medicine in millennia past? By whom? To whom can we address our grievances as descendants of victims of anti-medicalists?

You can make that argument against other aspects of government. In a peaceful anarchy, one cannot have a right to vote because there is no voting going on; in a pure democracy, a democrat is not denied the right to representative government because he directly participates. These rights, though, are contingent, not basic or essential to the human condition.

But I was talking about abortion.

Some time ago, I talked about how voting for Obama on pro-life grounds was, at best, imprudent. The argument given in favor of Obama was that his philosophy was more humane, so that he would reduce the demand for abortion where he wasn't reducing the supply.

So, shortly after being elected, Obama rescinded the Mexico City Policy. Now he may try or pretend to take away our right to follow our consciences. Supply's sure going up. What about demand? No, the president is busy taking care of all the other things a president has to do.

How's that working out for the children?

"Is it fair..."

2009-03-05T17:25:00.003-06:00

...one of the California supreme court justices asked Kenneth Starr, to nullify the 18,000 gay "marriages" that had taken place between the court's ruling that gay marriage could exist and be practiced in California, and the passage of Proposition 8. Is it fair that all these couples, having moved in together, now lack the legal status they thought they were getting?

Fair?

Fair is a question you ask after you answer "Is it right?" Slaveowners 200 years ago demanded of abolitionists a justification that taking away their free labor was fair to them. The obvious answer was "No, but it's the right thing to do."

Do I sympathize with the people who had a public ceremony and pooled their resources? Sure. I hate moving to a new home; doing so with someone else, becoming a single legal entity, and then having it undone has got to be an order of magnitude worse than what I experience every few years, not even broaching the subject of it being a civil rights issue.

Am I going to say "Aww, you've put so much time and effort into it; we'll ignore valid legislation that you find inconvenient because we'd feel bad," though? No. Again, I'm not broaching the subject of civil rights, because "is it fair?" is not that kind of question in this context.

Life's not fair. Unfair things happen all the time, and we have to learn to adapt. Social security runs dry and Generation X has to work longer to get full benefits, if they end up getting them at all; retirees lose their pensions, sometimes after years of retirement, sometimes days before retiring. People wait in lines at stores for hours only to find that whatever they wanted to buy is sold out. Rapists walk free because their victims' testimony does not provide sufficient doubt against his alibi. A man's friends plan a surprise party and don't find out until the big day that he's gone out of town for the weekend. What are you supposed to do, get a court order to declare your former employer solvent, or to get an electronic tether on your friend? Become a vigilante or a thief to mete out your own brand of justice and get what you worked as hard (should I say "no harder?") as anyone else to get a chance for?

You want to know what's not fair? Telling a bunch of people that marriage is something it isn't, and assuming that the opinions or powers available to other people who disagree are simply not worth considering, so when things get rough--poof!

Kinda like promising easy mortgages to people who can't, really, afford to buy a big new home. Evicting them would be awful, but what's unfair is making a promise you can't keep.

There are arguments that can be, and are, made in favor of gay "marriage," although I don't buy them. If you have to suggest that it would be too difficult to do the right thing, though, then maybe you don't believe those arguments, either.

...And, inaugural fallout

2009-01-21T21:46:00.003-06:00

I didn't think Obama's speech was too bad. It was pithy and focused on the high points, and even implied that motherhood was a noble struggle.

I did have a cynical epiphany on my way to lunch Tuesday, though. I don't so much believe it's simply true as think it might be a fruitful mental exercise to consider how it applies to politics.

Every politician preaches hope and change, after a fashion. Some change is an advancement toward a good, other change is a retreat from evil. Still other change is change we want to avoid, the things that the candidate you vote against stands for. Hope is the desire to see the desired changes realized and the motivation to help them along.

Why did Obama get so much milage on just speaking those two words?

The impression I have is that, in the past, politicians tended to couch their rhetoric in terms of what we could hope for and what we should change. "Hope" and "change" were vehicles to political or societal ends, or perhaps more precisely, the fuel in the vehicle.

So, we got used to politicians promising to clean up the mess they'd inherit and get us back on the right track. What it seemed like, just for a moment, was that while Obama was specific enough to keep his reputation with the Democratic Party, his rhetoric about hope and change itself felt to many people like a revelation, like an unveiling of the things they wanted to achieve all along, no longer masked or sullied by particulars. "He's right," they might have thought, "all I really want is for things to get better," and there was enough generic grist for the political mill that people could flavor it with whatever prejudices they wanted.

But I don't know that anybody thought this way in particular.

Electoral fallout

2008-11-06T18:13:00.002-06:00

Yes, the tremendous probable increase in infanticide overshadows the civil rights victory we had this week, one that was almost anticlimactic for people too young to remember the 1960s. Yes, I was touched to see Jesse Jackson's emotional reaction to Obama's election, as well as disappointed that it had to be Obama who broke through the white ceiling.

I wasn't following the race that closely Tuesday night, so I didn't hear the official news until Wednesday morning. Although I wouldn't have been thrilled to have McCain as president, I would have been relieved as well as surprised. So I was of uncertain feelings when I got in the car to go to work and put in my CD of the rosary yesterday.

It was Wednesday, though, and I remembered that Wednesday is a day we usually say the Glorious Mysteries.

The Glorious Mysteries. Signs not just of hope, but of victory.

Yes, we suffered a relative defeat at the national level, but not all hope is lost. Proposition 8 passed in California, on the worldly level, and on the supernatural level, the triumph of good has already been secured.

We still have a lot of work to do. We might not be happy. But we should remember that, while we are deep in this vale of tears and can't see where it ends or what's over its rims, we already have a reason for joy.

I didn't end up voting for McCain, but I did vote against Obama.

2008-11-03T18:18:00.000-06:00

It is not always and everywhere immoral to vote for a candidate who supports evil policies, as long as we do so in spite of those policies, and if we honestly judge that the other goods he is likely to accomplish outweighs the evils he is likely to accomplish. The only way you can be sure you're not voting for someone you don't 100% agree with is never to vote, and that can be an opportunity for shirking your civic duty (even when abstaining on a particular Tuesday in November is the best apparent choice).

The first thing we have to do is remember that in weighing the hazards and consolations between two unpalatable candidates is that we shouldn't just be trying to rationalize a decision that we want to make but is still bad, the way we justify a sin we like. If you're misinformed, scared and confused, and are being pressured, it can mitigate some of the guilt of having an abortion, but it doesn't allow you to say things like "My abortion wasn't bad; it's a good [and] thing I didn't know what I was doing."

As for me, the reason I will not be voting Democrat at the higher levels of government for the forseeable future is that a big part of the DNC's platform is abortion. The reason I didn't vote Republican this time is that their counteroffer to "more abortion means less grief, and stop complaining about the grief" leaves something to be desired. The GOP has more of a tendency to talk a pretty good game and then make some small pro-life gesture. When Republicans controlled both the Executive and the Legislative, they could have done something more timely to end abortion, but for the most part what we've gotten is some individual candidates with hit-or-miss personal opinions and a few Supreme Court justices who haven't done a lot yet. I'm hopeful that the composition of SCOTUS will tilt in our favor around the time the nationwide opinion on the slaughter of innocents becomes a groundswell, but that won't be anywhere as soon as I'd really like.

Meanwhile, the current rate of abortion is around 3000 per day. I can think of few things--certainly not enough considered aggregately--that counterbalance a loss of innocent life on the scale of 9/11 every day. When people are talking about other social policies that Obama (or McCain, really, but one thing at a time) would promote, ask if whatever social welfare or entrepreneur-supporting program he wants to institute would be better than reducing the abortion rate, or better than not increasing it. If it's not clear, ask if it would be worth paying the price of having another 9/11 every day.

Most people who support him, nominally in spite of his pro-abortion attitude, claim that his work will ultimately end the need for abortion, and that will be better in the long run. That's laudable by itself, but I haven't been convinced that abortion was ever needed. If women think they should have an abortion, then we need to change their minds and hearts as well as the circumstances that lead them to that conclusion, but meanwhile children are dying by the thousands.

But let's say it's possible. Let's say abortion can be ended solely by eliminating the demand for it. It's a reasonable hypothesis--people will stop selling if nobody's buying. What's not reasonable, in my mind, is assuming that someone who would libertinize abortion and expand social services could drive abortion to obsolescence in four years. If not in four, then in eight.

In the one or two terms he would have the opportunity--we shouldn't count on candidates espousing "benign infanticide" indefinitely, because as the Democrats said in 1992 and 2008, sometimes a change is needed--would he at least be able to make enough progress that the abortion rate will be lower when he leaves than when he started?

I'm profoundly skeptical. The first thing Obama has said he wants to do is sign FOCA. That will make abortions cheap and easy to obtain, and will have the immediate effect of increasing the abortion rate. Maybe FOCA won't cross his desk immediately after his inauguration, but if the Democrats control Congress, it would be reasonable to expect it to be sooner rather than later, and it's easier to roll back restrictions on abortion than it is to root out the social ills that lead to it. Bottom line, abortion will increase before it decreases. In the time Obama will have, I doubt that he would be able to make enough of a change to make up the difference.

Let's say abortion, right after FOCA, goes up to its peak 1980s levels, around 5000 a day. Let's assume further that it's come down a thousand a day each decade since then because of better social programs, and that the Republicans aren't doing anything because they want that carrot to dangle in front of us. This assumption implies that the decrease in abortion rate, after the FOCA balloon, will continue more or less consistently as long as Obama and his philosophical peers keep doing what they're doing. At that rate, abortion would be obsolete by 2060. Without FOCA, abortion would drop at its current rate to zero around 2040. Let's note the ridiculousness of assuming that "abortion is a sacrament we shouldn't have to need to receive except when we want to" types will maintain power for another thirty or fifty years and move on.

Restarting at 5000 a day and decreasing at the same rate, by the time we got back down to current levels, an additional 33 million abortions will have taken place. Abortion would have to remain at today's rates, preserved by Republicans for political leverage against Democrats who ostensibly see it as a tragic necessity, for an additional thirty years to make up the difference.

Let's not play the "If the GOP didn't fight what led to abortion, we wouldn't have it" game. We're bound to have some candidates who are going to get elected or not based in part on other issues that people on both sides of the aisle are motivated by. Let's also not pretend that the status quo will only be maintained by the GOP. Pro-lifers are wising up, and whether Palin was a stunt or not, she was also the best sign of hope we've had in some time, that someday we might have someone who will really work to end abortion absolutely and abruptly, not just discourage it.

So ask yourself: Does Obama really have the political capital to change society in the limited time he will have? Do Obama and his successors?

I wouldn't plan that far ahead.

2008-10-31T19:03:00.003-05:00

There are some who say we should disregard the negligible effect our vote will have on the election, and instead consider the substantial effect our vote will have on our souls.

I think this is a worthwhile factor to include in the decision making calculus when we go to the polls (or abstain, if that's how you feel), especially when trying to weigh voting quixotically against voting tactically isn't making one candidate stand out. However, I think this philosophy is prone to a few abuses that should disqualify it from being used in isolation.

The first is presuming that the utility of voting is outwardly nil, but the spiritual effect is grave. The former is a reasonable statistical conclusion except in contentious districts, but we never really know how close a race is until the polls close. The latter is true as far as everything we do here echoes in eternity, but in my mind doesn't pass muster because otherwise if we do something, anything, in an attempt to mitigate evil, in a world where remote material cooperation with evil is often (not always, make no mistake) absolutely impossible to avoid, then either committing a particular act out of prudence rather than enthusiastic endorsement cannot be intrinsically grave or everything we do is objectively disordered and there's no point in singling out things that don't have immediate grave effects.

The second is that the primary ends of voting is subverted to the secondary ends, or really the ternary ends. The intent of casting a vote is to participate in the selection of a leader, whether the person is well qualified, relatively well or poorly qualified, or purely unfit for the job. A subsidiary end is to care for the state of our soul. Obviously everything we do should be done with an eye to our spiritual health, but that informs how we do something, not just what we do. For example, the fact that life should be protected and that one person may be too gentle to harm another does not preclude a different person from having the duty and disposition to become a soldier.

Taking our moral priorities as read, then, if we subvert an act's primary end in order to achieve a secondary end, then we commit an abuse of that act, and abuse is always disordered. Just as we are not to dismiss procreation in the marital act in order to pursue pleasure, we should not go to the poll thinking "It doesn't matter whom I vote for as long as I don't endanger my soul." Your soul may be your greatest responsibility, but it is not your sole responsibility, and you even fail in that duty if you are too blithe in disregarding the duty you have to be a conscientious citizen.

This is Catholicism, folks. The dichotomy between CYA and spiritual combat in a communal theater is false.

Maybe there is no good choice, but don't pervert the ends of an act because the effectiveness of achieving one result doesn't seem to scale with another. A safe choice isn't bad but it might not be the best one.

2008-10-10T00:04:00.004-05:00

I can't believe how angry some people are getting over the election.

After the bitterness of Gore's supporters when W. was given the presidency, I'm less surprised than I should be, I suppose. What gets me is how personally the race is being taken.

I've been seeing it more from the liberal side, but I don't know if my experience has been representative.

I'll go online and I'll see screeds left and right with the thesis "I hate Sarah Palin." What? She's running for office with the guy you're probably voting against. Maybe she's dangerous to your way of life and thinking, but she's doing a job and trying to do what seems right.

Heck, the guy I'm voting against (not sure whom I'm voting for, but I know whom I'm voting against) not only differs with me on major policy issues, he supports widespread infanticide, as far as I'm concerned, and while that makes his platform overqualified in the heinousness tryouts, I don't hate the man. His positions and campaigning make me angry, but not hateful.

I just can't understand how rational people can find Palin so infuriating. I mean, I'm a pretty low-energy, even-keel person, and I get that some people are a little more volatile than I am, but where does this fully-flowered hate for someone most people had never even heard of until a few weeks ago spring from?

Anyone have any anecdotes they'd care to share that support or contradict my observations?

"I've yet to detect a liberal bias in the media"

2008-10-05T15:22:00.001-05:00

This observation was made either by a guest or by the host (I think it was George McGovern, but there were several unfamiliar voices on the show last week) on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," a weekly radio show that riffs on current events. I've noticed more Bush-bashing than Democrat-bashing on the show, and tried to ignore it, even when it wasn't particularly witty, because I didn't listen to the show much when Clinton was in power so I couldn't judge whether they were being nicer to him than to his successor, and because Bush does make for an easy target no matter how you slice his rhetoric. I suppose I just got a bit fed up at one more insinuation that conservatives just aren't all that lucid, after all.

Seems a bit rich, coming from the folks who truck with people who believe that truth is personal--relative--before anything else, but...well, maybe I'll answer that attitude another time.

On the very radio network where this denial of visible bias was made, I sometimes catch parts of All Things Considered on my afternoon commute. For most of the first summer after I moved to where I could get NPR on the drive home and little else, they talked about the horrors of the war--dealing with casualties and ruined infrastructure in Iraq, broken veterans' bodies and families in America. For most of the second summer, they gave a pretty round introduction to the person of Barack Obama, which brings us to now.

That kind of programming content isn't liberal, is it? Surely, if it were, it would confirm the trope that reality had a liberal bias, wouldn't it?

No, not exactly; and no, it wouldn't; in that order.

Covering the tragedy of war is a fine thing. Keeping it from getting sanitized helps make us circumspect when we consider waging war. Covering nothing but tragedy, however, is not news. Nothing against human interest stories, but the majority of the stories presented covered nothing but the horrific side effects of war--the collateral damage, not the accomplishment or failure of the war's actual, you know, goals.

What about Obama? He's a relative unknown, so isn't it fitting to do a sort of expose series?

Yes, generally, but it's odd that the few allusions to his dark horse candidacy (three years ago, Illinoisians were expressing surprise at the sudden rise of their now-junior senator, who has now spent half his national career running for president) have a faintly messianic tone to them that goes largely unobserved.

I'm not saying the coverage of Obama has been unfair, either for or against him. I'm just saying that coverage of the presidential race had been largely exclusive of any candidate who didn't have a D after his name.

In journalism, that's technically called slant, so maybe saying "there's no bias" is really a half truth.

Oh, all right. They did talk about Sarah Palin for a few days after her selection, but they didn't seem happy about it.

"Wait, Ed: what about all the NPR you didn't listen to? Surely your drive home isn't that long! Or 'ATC' isn't representative of all their reporting!"

No, it's not a long drive, but do you honestly think that, over two years, I would always and only catch the current-administration-defaming segment on the program?

"Shouldn't the media take a skeptical attitude toward what they're being told?"

Yes, and I would expect them to dig for the truth, rather than assume the guys they don't like are lying and run with whatever facts corroborate that assumption. That's not skepticism. Sometimes good things happen, too, and sometimes bad things happen that don't fit our preconceptions. Question everything, including what you'd like to be true.

People who claim to hate the Church don't hate it because it's bad, they hate it because it's easier than seeking the truth.

2008-09-14T09:07:00.004-05:00

My mom called me this weekend to ask if I'd heard about the campus chaplain at Illinois's Newman Center being arrested for drug possession, since I had known some people there. I hadn't heard about it, but in reading the news articles online Saturday, I learned two things.

1. Don't go to a public news agency's web site expecting a high level of discourse, no matter how well written the article itself is.

2. To paraphrase Archbishop Sheen, most people who hate the Church, hate it mostly for what they imagine it is.

I'd like to share with you a few of the gems I found while looking through articles about this priest's arrest. Hopefully there's someone out there who might have read those comments and thought "Hey, you know, those are good points" who will now have one more place to go where a lucid rebuttal can be found.

What happens to the baptisms, the weddings blessed, the sins forgiven and the eucharists transubstantiated by this man?

Nothing. A sinful man was ordained a priest because all we have to ordain is men who sin. Even if he's laicized, he would still be able to confect the sacraments; it's just that he wouldn't be permitted to. Sure, we'd all like holy men to be our spiritual leaders, but the Church never taught that sacerdotal efficacy depended on the man being in a state of grace, nor on the magnitude of the sins he commits.

I can't tell if this question is supposed to accuse the Church of some kind of works-righteousness, or if it presumes an uncatholic superstitiousness and a distinction between mortal and venial sins to have its point made.

You have to think outside this box put around you...obedience to men will not get you into heaven.

Who told you that? A man? People outside the Church seem to have a frighteningly higher view of the clergy than Catholics do, and they don't see it when it happens in their own midst. Priests and bishops are not just running a company in the church business, but they're not superhuman, either; they are given a few charisms to aid in the life of the Church, but that's about it.

I won't bother with the related accusations about allegedly extrabiblical practices being unbiblical, which is obviously tautological but hardly ever explained as a truly bad thing. Perhaps another time I will address the atheist's related argument, the accusation that we let the Church think for us; it's been handled quite well by other people, but when I'm in a mood I might just toss in my two cents.

I can't be too uncharitable; I've known many Protestants whose prayer lives are fruitful and every bit as personal as they'd like yours to be when they ask what role Jesus plays in your life. Still, there's so much emphasis on the event of getting saved that it makes me wonder what kind of relationship with Christ they're effectively advocating. Can you imagine how it would look if you talked about a friend you had who was really great, and how other people should be his friend too, and all they needed to do was invite him to their house and he would carry the relationship? Doesn't that sound like it would be lame if you didn't already have a good idea of what Jesus was to us?

And, no, obedience to men is not a sufficient condition for entering the Beatific Vision...but I ask in reply: does being disobedient get you into heaven?

People put too much trust in men in everyday things as well as spiritual (even non-Catholics, as evinced by the plethora of ministers in the world) for this to be a meaningful accusation. Come back when you can tell me why I should listen to you telling me not to listen to anybody. I don't care if it's the Bible, history, or science.

The Catholic Church claims to be the one true church, yet its history says otherwise. What a shame they have not learned from the sex scandals that rocked them now it's drugs and again it's the children that are victims.

What does history say? That there is more than one true church? That there might be one true church, but it's not headquartered in Rome? That it really has no objective judgment on the veracity of Rome's claims?

I've read many comments about the sex abuse scandal, most of them of the "at least he was only selling drugs to college kids" variety. A close second, though, was of the "Drugs and sex? Being an altar boy is the most dangerous job today!" variety. Never mind that St. John's Catholic Chapel is not a community parish, and so is unlikely to have many people at all of that age in attendance. It's much more convenient to associate the whole of hierarchical Christianity, or even the whole of theists depending on your perspective, with whatever timely or unspoken historical corruption you prefer.

Reminds me of Protestants whose sole efforts in apologetics consist of, as far as I can tell, paraphrasing the table of contents of Boettner's Roman Catholicism. As if everyone knows what the real story is behind Rome's failings (just like what everybody knows about Galileo's trial), and we only need the reminder to endorse the accusations.

How very typical! First pedophilia, now drug-dealing! Bunch of perverts, hiding behind clerical robes!

Oh, so we can see now that homosexuals and pedophiles are latent drug users and pushers? Why don't we accuse the Church of working with the CIA to create AIDS, and with NASA to fake the moon landings, too?

Any stick will do to beat a dog, eh?

It is precisely because the Roman Catholic Church has been casting so many stones over the centuries that there is so much understandable and deserving backlash.

Understandable? Sure. Deserving? For the sex scandal, okay, there was too much emphasis on protecting the institution and its appearance in America (where, remember, the problem has been generally isolated), and not enough on protecting the innocent and powerless, but if you're going around misattributing vices to people, that's called calumny, and it prevents you from playing the "At least I'm not a hypocrite" card.

Further, if you really don't know the story behind Galileo, or the motivations and statistics pertaining to the Crusades or the Inquisitions, then maybe you can go the "I'm intellectually lazy, but at least I live up to my own standards" route, although that's not much of an improvement, and it's less than impressive if your standards are so low that you never fall short of them.

Perhaps these things are happening to bring to the public's awareness that ORGANIZED Church religiosity is NOT the answer...How impractical to expect young men and women to live celibate lifestyles. In Europe in the old monasteries, they've found corpses of infants sealed up in the walls...This article doesn't say he's accused of sodomizing and raping.

No, the article doesn't say that, but you're going to bring it up anyway, aren't you?

That first "perhaps" is interesting. It's almost as if a higher power were moving to immunize humanity from churchgoing...like God doesn't want us worshipping together? If it's not God, I wouldn't want to be be learning whatever it has to teach us.

And again with the canard that celibacy is virtually impossible. Dawn Eden can tell you more about that than I feel like doing right now. Does anyone have any idea how widespread or isolated the instances of babies hidden in tunnels between monasteries and convents are? I think someone does, but I doubt it's the person who declined to tell us concretely how extensive the problem was.

I suppose it's more civilized for people who can't resist sex to kill their children in the womb and throw them in a dumpster or incinerator like so much suctioned fat or a malignant tumor.

Another prime example of the danger of putting all of your hope & faith in man, in a human being.

Wait, who did that? Those of us who are disappointed? I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised to learn that the priest has sinned. "People sin" is pretty much axiomatic in Christianity. Expecting better from a priest, even from this priest, isn't what got him into the situation. He got himself into the situation.

Just goes to show you that organized religion is pretty much useless.

If it had been a politician, would we be hearing about how the government is useless? I mean, as if it were proven by the arrest of a politician on drug charges. Do they say school is useless when a teacher is caught fraternizing with students?

Priests if anyone should be held to higher standard of living and exemplary life.

Fair enough--priests more than other people in positions of authority and trust are expected to be on good behavior, even if they are more attractive targets to the Enemy. Still, while it is interesting how many professed unbelievers express disappointment that a man of the cloth has sinned, it strikes me as a peculiar flavor of disrespectful to presume, almost gleefully, a guilty verdict was already all but pronounced (and, yes, most of the "He should have known better" comments I've read were coupled with a foregone conviction of guilt). I'm surprised I haven't already heard jokes about how he's going to enjoy the penal social life.

It's probably good that I don't venture into timely political ramblings very often

2008-09-08T23:57:00.000-05:00

Like Mark Shea, I was primed to vote for a third party candidate. I tend to vote Republican these days, but it felt like the time was right to step back and find a third party candidate who better represented my political views, rather than voting for the one out of the two frontrunners who just seemed a little less unrepresentative than the other. I haven't followed McCain's campaign or the associated issues terribly closely, so I didn't develop quite the personally skeptical view of the GOP nominee that Mark has, but I thought it would be as good a time as any to make a sort of implicit vote of no confidence in the GOP. Maybe in the long run, failing to win on an attempted moralist platform against a candidate who wants to ride the fumes of electoral symbolism into utopia is just the wake-up call the GOP needs.

Then McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

I started thinking that these incremental but largely unfruited steps toward ending abortion might come a little more quickly with a serious pro-lifer in the White House. I'm not pleased that ending abortion is like turning back the tide, but I'll prefer being thrown a bone in the Supreme Court or someplace on rare occasions to having a real crusader for life never win and hardly even inspire his competitors.

I think McCain-Palin, out of the two teams that have a reasonable chance at the presidency, is the better one. Policies aside, McCain has some leadership experience from his time as a military officer, and Palin actually has more executive experience than Obama. They'd all be new enough to the job that it's anybody's speculation how they'll handle whatever the world abroad and at home throws at them in the next four to eight years, so I'm not sure it's really worthwhile to worry about things that the candidates haven't had to deal with or comment on during the courses of their current jobs. I'm still on the fence about some of the other issues that get dredged up from the candidates' personal and professional histories in order to show inconsistency in their current platforms, but that's always the case, and I've seen more politicians change their minds on their less environmentally protective policies than I have on their less child protective policies after hitting the national stage, so if you're keeping score, add that in.

There are a few other issues on each side that I don't want to get into right now, but suffice it to say things were looking as well as I could expect until I heard that McCain and Palin don't have a problem with intelligent design and think it would be a good idea to have it taught alongside the traditional stuff.

I'm not trying to put a national science curriculum on par with life issues, mind you; the preceding was just so that we may take the life issues as read.

All right, I can't resist one parallel.

We've got another case of "compromise by concession" here. We see it in the abortion debate not infrequently; the pro-choice side, attempting to leverage the label, claims tolerance of women who choose not to abort, and ask why pro-lifers can't extend the same courtesy; the problem is that in trying to split the difference, we still have abortion, which satisfies the pro-choicers, and merely a strong prevent-things-leading-to-abortion-except-the-fact-that-it's-wrong program, which pro-choicers still consider a good thing; meanwhile, pro-lifers get nothing but blame for being too focused on the real root problem (disdain for the dignity of unborn children, and all too often their mothers), and not enough on the superficial root problem (mothers who fall back on abortion because it's easier than giving birth and everything associated with that). It's not all bad; something isn't good or evil based on quantity, but it can be better or worse if there's more or less of it. It's just that one side gets closer to its ideal society, and the other side has to put up with being a stick in the mud for not settling for half a morality.

What's this have to do with science?

ID, I will remind you, doesn't.

There's no place for it in science. ID might even be true--as a theist I will never deny that what exists came to be through the action of an intelligent, powerful entity--but it's not science. Science is about gathering empirical data and repeatability in testing phenomena. The goal is to accurately, to reliably, describe nature. Intelligent design offers no theories that can be proven, makes no claims that can be properly tested and disproven. All it does is point to inadequacies in the state of the art and make an argument from incredulity. It's a parasite on science--it has nothing itself to offer except what it borrows from philosophy or steals from physics and biology.

In good science, the limits of our understanding are openly admitted (if not always with the most sincerity by enthusiastic researchers). In bad science, one is told either "what you cannot measure cannot exist," or more germanely, "science isn't up to the task of answering these questions," even though in some cases it only might not be yet, "so here's something else you can call science to explain what science can't."

If I were a science teacher required to cover ID, all you'd get out of me is "Okay, we don't have all the chemical kinetics down to explain the apparent rate of mutation and speciation; ID draws a black box around this puzzle and calls it God, or at least an Architect; this is a God-of-the-gaps argument, and advances in science on fronts X, Y, and Z would leave ID without a leg to stand on."

I don't mean to rehash the entire ID thing any more than I meant to beat the dead coach team of abortion and prudent voting. Let's take my concerns on the public school curriculum as read, as well, shall we?

I'm kind of back to holding my nose and punching the chads with R's next to them. In eight years Bush hasn't done a lot to compromise biology and astronomy programs in this country, so I can hope that the next four or eight years wouldn't be any worse.

While I hold out that hope, though, should I expect something different with abortion? With ID, opposition was fierce enough that it just couldn't get much traction; the pro-life movement wasn't in much of a different situation.

So here I am, hoping that the pro-life movement will be advanced in the coming decade, at the grassroots level if not at the Supreme Court, while hoping that whatever salient power the White House has in influencing the national science curriculum isn't used to bring about political compromise in the classroom--and I haven't even gotten to global warming.

It's hard to hope that a brilliant political gesture from a candidate is more than just a gesture, and that another political gesture from the same candidate is nothing more than a gesture. That's the essence of trying to make a prudential judgment, I suppose.

Softball Gospel

2008-09-07T12:05:00.003-05:00

I will probably be adding to this list from time to time. I used to periodically post on boneheaded homilies and statements as they came up but didn't tie them together, but I think they deserve to be compiled. I will introduce this topic with three items:

The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish was Jesus inspiring people to share.

No, it was the creation of a plenitude of food from a dearth. It doesn't make sense that so many people would show up with so much food but still expect catering, and it doesn't take direct intervention from God to goad people out of hoarding their lunches.

Doctrine X hasn't been defined de fidei by the pope, so we're at liberty to disagree with it.
According to the Pontificator's Tenth Law, "All dogmas of the Church Catholic are infallible, but some are more infallible than others." In short, it means that we are obligated to hold true whatever the Church teaches, even if it's not one of the few items that has gotten an ex cathedra stamp of approval. For many of us, on a number of issues, the best we can muster is "The Church says X is true; I disagree, but it is the Church's place to make that call, so I will live in obedience and work within the boundaries of the Church to get the issues I have resolved," and that's good enough.

Jesus, the Prince of Peace, came primarily to bring peace to the world. Take anything in the Gospel that sounds like Jesus being authoritarian or hard with a grain of salt. God is, after all, a Nice Guy.
I like nice guys, I try to be one, but niceness is not the primary quality I want in a God or other authority figure. I didn't always (usually, but not always) think my dad was nice when I was growing up--and really, niceness is in the eye of the beholder--because he sometimes punished me or didn't let me do things I wanted, but it didn't make him a mean person, it just made him a good father--it made him right. I know my feelings are irrational, by definition, so while I like having them respected, I know that there are more important and better things to concern myself with than whether someone is every bit as polite and obsequious as I might like. I wouldn't want a doctor, either, that tried to comfort me by saying I wouldn't have to get some kind of major, risky surgery, but then let me die horribly from disease. So often today, though, genuine goodness is given no higher a definition than "be supporting of and unobtrusive to whatever people want."

This last item deserves a little unpacking. It ties in somewhat with the second item and something I heard during this morning's homily.

What trips people up on the third item so often is that last part--they use their conscience as an excuse to do whatever they want but still claim to be in good standing with the Church. On the surface, it's as silly as refusing to show up to work or badmouthing your product to potential customers and claiming to be an employee in good standing. I'm not talking about when people struggle to make the heroic effort to accept as true everything the Church teaches; it can take a heroic effort just to know everything the Church teaches. I mean that one's conscience is not an escape hatch from obedience. Yes, in principle you should follow your conscience, but if your conscience is properly formed, it will not disagree with the Church, and if you know it is badly formed, you shouldn't follow it in the first place--we see all the time in more secular arenas where people make errors in judgment, and no one bats an eye (okay, these days, not no one) when they're held responsible for their errors instead of being patted on the head and told "we understand, you must have been doing what seemed right for you at the time."

I think it's symptomatic of the "God is nice" school of theology. We see it also when people put an absence of physical violence at a higher priority than justice, or higher than an absence of moral violence--when people are expected to endure everything short of feeling a clenched fist or seeing a gun. We see it when people dissociate Jesus upsetting the moneychangers in the Temple from, well, Jesus upsetting the moneychangers in the Temple.

We also see it with today's Gospel reading:

If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector

The way I used to hear it explained, it was used sort of as a baseline for the practice of excommunication. The way it was homilized (is that a word?) to me this morning, Jesus was teaching His disciples how not to cause excessive harm--basically agreeing to disagree and avoiding situations where you and the person who you think did wrong might be forced together and have to bring the subject back up.

I'm not saying it's a bad practice. When you reach an impasse, all you can do is go away, pray, and try not to be a further obstacle to the other person's spiritual growth. While it's good advice for the laity, however, the Magisterium has additional responsibilities, so the bishops who come out and say "so-called Catholic politicians who support abortion will not receive communion if they present themselves for it" are not out of line. While the bishops who say "Abortion is contrary to Catholic teaching, but what more can we say if they do not listen?" are trying to be inclusive and warm and fuzzy, babies are dying by the thousands. While they're trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the errant member of their flock out of the fear that he might remain willfully in error, talking about how there's nothing more they can say, they are refusing to act to protect the lives of the children the politicians support the killing of (that is, to prevent the politicians from sinning in deed, since they cannot be prevented from sinning in thought), and they are refusing to protect the other Catholics from scandal.

This on the grounds that we are not to judge another's conscience? Please.

I can't judge a particular individual's conscience, but I don't need to be God to be shown a hypothetical person who thinks infanticide is a permissible means to achieving a comfortable economic end to know that the person's conscience is not properly formed. I don't have to try or pretend to look into a real person's conscience to judge that his actions are in fact bad; whether someone commits first degree murder or manslaughter, an untimely death has occurred, and to deny that it is a material evil is to lie, and to lie in order to protect someone's feelings is also evil.

The politician, or whoever, who steadfastly supports abortion has already cut himself off from the life of the Church. There is little harm one can cause a dead thing. We should not try to block any graces God might be sending an erring politician, but telling the unrepentant sinner that his sin is not so great that it needs to be forgiven is not doing him any favors, and allowing him to jeopardize the faith of everyone else who might get that impression does no favors to the Body of Christ, either.

Call me proud, but I'm not quite ready to say a spade's not a spade on the grounds that I am ignorant of the motivations of the digger.

Some look at excommunication as an outdated, barbaric exercise of power on the part of the Magisterium. I would point out that excommunication has been described, by greater Catholic minds than I, as analogous to amputation. Sure, cutting off a limb seems horrifically barbaric, but if the limb is gangrenous and does not respond to treatment, then removing it is necessary for protecting the health of the rest of the body. Neither would we want someone infected with a serious communicable disease to commune with healthy people who might be vulnerable to the disease; certainly, the ill man needs whatever help he can get, but "help" is not the same as "pretending there's nothing wrong and telling him he's fine, even if we find his raspy cough and oozing sores to be a little alarming in appearance."

Some translations don't use "Gentile," they use "pagan." Do we allow pagans to receive communion in the Catholic Church?

No, and we don't look the other way when they say Church officials don't have the right to deny them life in the Church (it is mortal sin that does that, not the Magisterium) and say "Hey, fine, whatever, but let's talk about something besides all the doctrines you don't believe in."

2008-08-14T19:37:00.002-05:00

I think I've landed on what personally bothers me the most about having the tabernacle someplace other than directly in front of (or behind?) the high altar.

I'm not 100% opposed to putting it somewhere else; in small prayer groups, it's nice to be able to get closer to the Sacrament in repose, especially if wandering back and forth in the sanctuary would be disruptive or distracting to others. There might be a canonical solution that can meet this need, as it were, without architecturally denigrating the Eucharist, but I don't know enough about the subject to feel motivated to speculate right now. Or maybe I just don't feel motivated to speculate, but really, I don't know what rules there are that regulate these matters.

Anyway, I just got home from, among other things, attending the vigil mass of the Assumption at one of the churches in town. They have their tabernacle in a niche near the front, visible from most places in the pews, where in older churches of that size you might have found a side altar. I got there early, so I had many opportunities to see people coming and going between the sanctuary, the sacristy, and the music area on the far side of the tabernacle.

What I noticed is that, while people did bow toward the main altar, no one seemed to notice the tabernacle at all.

I'm not saying they should be making some superstitiously repetitive gesture every time they turn or move a little towards it, but more than once I saw people cross the sanctuary, venerate the altar, go to the side podium to rearrange the sheet music or whatever, and then turn around, venerate the altar again, and leave.

Hey! Jesus was right behind you! The altar's just a blessed piece of wood with a relic stone in it!

Maybe this is just habitual neglect peculiar to this church; I don't see side tabernacles get ignored everywhere I find one. Still, it's natural to focus one's attention on things that are placed prominently. When I was young, I used to wonder which I was supposed to venerate if I happened to find myself between the altar and the tabernacle, but then someone explained it to me. These people weren't children, of course, but with Jesus physically moved out of the way, it's easier for Him to be mentally moved out of the way, too, and for little more than the opportunity to put a floral arrangement behind the crucifix mounted above where the high altar would have been.

Maybe the time is ripe for a corollary to Lex orandi, lex credendi: lex aedifici, lex credendi.

Westerners penalized by western governments for preferring western civilization

2008-07-04T12:43:00.000-05:00

How long will it be before America completely forgets that a bad idea, one poorly conceived or some slice of misanthropic, is to be countered with open criticism, including calling it what it is and explaining why, so that the truth can soundly box its ears in the public arena?

Not that long ago, Mark Steyn wrote an article for Maclean's saying that al-Islam and Western values do not play well together. One Muslim--or perhaps a professional behalfist --filed suit with the Canadian "human rights commission," demanding punishment for hate speech.

One should wonder how inflammatory just reading the charges against this guy in any detail would be; would it be sufficient to add caveats like "This jerk said thus-and-such intolerable thing," or will it come to the point where folks get offended for hearing scandalous topics discussed, the way some members of my college Bible study group acted as if I were nearly blaspheming by talking about blasphemy?

I'm curious to see what will happen if these self-appointed cultural vanguards screw up the courage to poo-poo folks who happen to mention in public how Sharia has dealt with homosexuals. If they thought the mere recognition of culture shock was uncivilized, they're going to be in for quite a rude awakening when the people they're tolerating get enough political clout to start enforcing intolerance in return.

Or maybe they'll be like the residents of Erik the Viking's Hy-Brasil island, denying that the ground on which they stand is sinking, right until their last breath. If the height of their political reasoning power is the alleged victim of any perceived oppressor is the friend to any other victim of any other oppressor, then maybe there will be no awareness of reality at the last breath, either.

CPCSM to Nienstedt: "Condone us or we'll scream loudly and stamp our feet!"

2008-07-01T06:21:00.002-05:00

I think the folks who promote "gay pride" still have a lot of work to do. When I hear people talking about events like what was going to be held at St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis, I don't hear about great accomplishments or historical figures like George Washington Carver's many inventions or MLK's principled opposition to segregation and discrimination. Pretty much all I hear is rhetoric about being proud rather than ashamed of their sexuality, and pretty much all I see is public spectacles designed to desensitize us--and maybe them--to acts of perversion (and I'm including the publicity of acts which by themselves, in private, might not be particularly bad things).

I don't think that kind of behavior is is a result of healthy pride. There are plenty of things I'm not this-is-bad ashamed of about myself that have no need to be advertised, and publicizing them would have nothing to do with throwing off the societal yoke of bigotry. If I wanted to shock people I disagreed with into complacency, though, I might go out in public and show people how odd I could be, until everyone got used to it; maybe it's not positive approval, but it would be the tolerance of resignation, and maybe that's a good enough first step.

What would happen to gay pride parades when people reach that point? Would they still go on to spite the memory of traditional values, or just to accommodate people with exhibitionist fetishes?

I know the goal of these kinds of events is to wear down opposition, to get people to give up on opposing publicity and public approval of anything sexual. They might do a lot better if they also provided reasons for their virtue other than sentiments like "You're just like racists opposing the Civil Rights Movement from forty years ago," which is only true superficially and incidentally. As I've lamented before, we don't see gay evangelists going door to door in suits politely making their cases.

There is such a thing as self-esteem. You should value the good that is in you, regardless of whatever troubles or flaws you bear. It is also healthy to recognize the good things that you have accomplished. What do gay pride events usually celebrate? libertinism? Nothing special there; I can see that coming from people of all orientations on any college campus. Is it an inoculation against the disapproving words of people who believe that there is such a thing as sins of lust? Maybe, but homosexuals don't have the corner on that market, either.

They complain that their behavior isn't lauded by the Church and by much of society. Well, too damn bad. My bad behavior isn't lauded either. It just seems like they're picking on homosexuals because the question of homosexuality takes up so much bandwidth in our culture today.

What's "Progress?"

2008-06-08T02:01:00.001-05:00

The word indicates some sort of advancement toward a goal or improvement. In the sense of improvement, a particular goal isn't necessarily implied, but without one, it's difficult to make an objective judgment of the degree or utility of progress. It doesn't always have to be an overarching goal by which we can evaluate the whole of some human endeavor; we can look to science and slap an "understand how the universe works" sticker on it, but for the most part we can only look at how well we're answering specific questions along the way. We may be near the end or the beginning of scientific exploration, but which it is, is more a matter of speculation or philosophy than of empirical research and mathematical modeling.

What about non-scientific progress? I think we have the same problem, but there's no external yardstick or phenomenon to measure "progress" against. We end up taking some values we hold, or inventing some, and plotting a course to follow them, sometimes with little concern for other values, which other people who might have a stake in the matter might hold or which get subordinated to their crusade for inadequately explored reasons.

Let's look at social progress for a few moments.

What do we have? At the forefront is the idea of personal equality and freedom, that a person should be able to do more or less whatever he wants, regardless of circumstances that don't immediately ask for a tempered agenda, like the conflicting rights or desires of another person. Now, equality and freedom are fine things, things we should often err on the side of, but they can also be somewhat empty. Freedom isn't just a matter of "from," but one of "to" as well, and equality unchecked can smear some distinctions that are legitimate.

What we see a lot of in our society is a pattern of identifying social injustices, agitating to eliminate them, and then looking for new injustices. We're at a point now where activists look at the patterns of the past and try to map them onto the future, perhaps more out of a sense of Progress than out of a sense of certain things being just and certain things being unjust. It's a lot more complicated, but Progress itself as we've seen it in our civilization has become the value we use to judge things by, instead of a label for pursuing real virtues. Freeing real or artificial demographics from oppressive (by which I mean "distasteful to some") traditions becomes the primary means for keeping score of our society's virtue, so while achieving legally approved gay marriage and consequence-free sex for children everywhere are themselves lauded, the only price counted is the disappointment of the White Male Oppressors (and a little angsty uncertainty, which is categorized as a healthy disdain for undoubted (not unquestioned--if it'd really been questioned, then some answers might have been considered--authority), and Progress moves on to find the next social power struggle, since it seems to see nothing except demographic conflicts.

I think the problem is right there. For individuals, it boils down to "nobody should be prevented from doing whatever they feel like doing," and at higher societal levels, there's really...nothing. You get the occasional visionary like Marx or the fictional architects behind Orwell's Big Brother, but for them Progress is just a tool to achieve an equality and freedom that are the poorest imaginable.

Progress becomes, not an achievement of justice, but a speedometer by which we measure the rate of adoption of ideas no one remembers trying before.

At that point it's easy to get off track. It's not hard to imagine someone forgetting what the fullness of marriage is, especially when duty was emphasized at the expense of the joys of an intimate relationship and raising children, and be in favor of opening it to everyone who wants it since it can be such a source of joy. It's a little harder to imagine right now that pets should be afforded the franchise, but once they are bestowed with enough human rights? In California, pets are no longer owned by their keepers, so don't think no one's testing the waters. Maybe the slope isn't very slippery, but there are people out there advocating any crazy notion you can think of, so don't be too surprised.

"Progress" toward no real goal, or toward one that isn't particularly (or obviously) good, isn't progress. It's just change. Change can be good, sometimes even for its own sake to break up the monotony, but when someone asks "why not?" we should also ask "why?"

"Why not?" is not an answer that justifies change. It is the question.

What's the Church got to prove to you?

2008-05-18T13:19:00.000-05:00

What makes the Catholic Church the Bride of Christ? What evidence does she--do we--have? Truth claims? An argument from history? Evidence of holy activity in the world? Proof that it's the only ecclesial body that makes sound claims of what defines or identifies the Church and meets those criteria?

Fr. Kimel has some words for the devil's advocates:

Yes, the Catholic Church should do better at making Christians, it should do better at evangelizing, it should do better at catechizing, it should do better at preaching the gospel, it should do better at worshipping God, it should do better in serving the poor and the oppressed, it should do better in every aspect of its life and ministry.

However, if the Church was doing better in all of these areas, or even just the one you have mentioned, would you be persuaded that the Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ, as she claims to be? Of course not! Because performance neither proves nor disproves the claims of the Catholic Church. Ironically, your objection to the Catholic Church—viz., her poor, even sinful performance—is grounded in a works-righteousness understanding of the gospel. You are demanding that the Catholic Church justify herself as the Body of Christ by her works! But the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ only by grace and election!

Are you willing to apply the same criterion of performance to individual believers, to yourself? Are you willing to prove your regeneration in the Spirit by your works, by how well you are living the Christian faith, by how effectively you are proclaiming the gospel in word and deed? Jim, are you not in fact judging the Catholic Church by a standard you would never apply to yourself? What would you say to the nonbeliever who declares that Christianity cannot be true because there are so many bad Christians?

But your criterion of performance also fails for other reasons. For one thing, you are judging the Catholic Church on the basis of her performance in one geographical area in one period of time. But she has no doubt performed better (whether it be at catechesis or evangelism or whatever) in other places and in other times. Why not judge the Catholic Church at her best? Why not judge the Catholic Church by her saints?

I added the emphasis. Funny how even with sola fide in your corner, without having a didactic anchor, "knowing them by their fruits" ends up becoming a back door to Pelagianism.

If one sees fit to judge the Church this narrowly, why not more narrowly? Indeed, some do. Some make employment of women outside the home their litmus test, or the willingness to bless already-sexual homosexual partnerings, and every other concern is secondary, or disconsidered out of hand.

If you are looking at such a small piece of an ecclesial body's doctrine or practice, it's not really a church you're interested in. You want a social institution, of great or small caliber, to make you feel good with a grand gesture.

If you're looking to judge an ecclesial body on how it performs in these other areas--recruitment, training, social service, whatever--then you're also not interested in a church. You want a charitable organization, or a business.

Go ahead. See if you can rate the Catholic Church next to Welfare and Social Security, or against Kaplan and the public school system. See if any evaluation would even make sense and then get back to me.

As for simple skeptics:

[F]or 2,000 years the Catholic Church has been proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and making disciples. How many saints must the Catholic Church produce to convince you? How many martyrs must lay down their lives? How many nations must she evangelize? How many churches must she build? How many baptisms must she administer? How many penitents must she absolve? How many Masses must she celebrate? How many religious orders must she establish? How many hospitals and schools must she found? How many hungry persons must she feed? How many homeless must she house? How many kings and despots must she confront in the name of Christ? And who stands today, pray tell me, more firmly and courageously against the culture of death, abortion, and sexual immorality than the Catholic Church?

If you insist on judging the Catholic Church by her works, then by all means do so, but do so across all categories of mission and ministry. Do not judge her just by your parish church in the year A.D. 2007 but judge her by her remarkable and glorious history that reaches back to the Apostles of Christ.

Yet are you truly in a position to judge her sanctity and sins, good works and failures? Why do you see only her weaknesses and not her strengths, her defeats and not her victories?

Go ahead. Take G.K. Chesterton's advice, and consider judging the Church on how good it has been, as well as on how badly it has failed in its mission. Condemning the Church because over history it has let a million poor people suffer in squalor and die alone in ditches and alleys is premature, to say the least, if you don't even know if the number of people the Church has succeeded in helping is on the order of dozens or of billions.

I wouldn't be satisfied with a statistical rationale if I were making that argument, but if I were bold enough to berate the Church for not living up to a higher standard than I hold anyone else to, I'd still be obliged to determine how well it performed against this new standard.

Abuse of liturgical abuse

2008-04-12T11:09:00.002-05:00

The American Papist put together a video making fun of some of the sillier liturgical abuses that have been committed against the Novus Ordo:

For now I'm not going to comment on the grotesqueries of clown masses, but rather the relatively mundane liturgical dance, whose inappropriateness in formal liturgy is not always self-evident. Most of the arguments I've seen against it fall into one of three categories: it's not a natural part of our liturgical culture (i.e. simply grafting it into the rubrics tends to be disruptive on multiple levels), it tends to draw attention to itself and away from God (which confounds the purpose of the mass), and it's often just badly done (which I don't have to explain, do I?).

If someone managed to convince me that dance could be properly integrated into the mass, and then somehow compelled me to reconstruct the liturgy accordingly, I'm sure what I'd do is have the dancers direct the preponderance of their effort and attention toward the altar or tabernacle. Most of the (thankfully little) I've seen seems to have put a premium on engaging the congregation and showing them what the performers are doing, and hardly in the "Hey you, remember that this is all about praising the Eucharist/Incarnation/trendy theological meme" sense.

If it points to us, even in aesthetically inspiring ways, it is not worship. Maybe if it praised God for the great things He has done in and for and through us, but performing art like what we see here is frivolous decoration at best, and turning the liturgy into self-celebration at worst.

I don't mind art for art's sake, but worship is for the glory of God. We can (and should) see God's greatness in all human activity, but the liturgy isn't simply human activity, and any aesthetic element to the liturgy should expressly draw us toward the Eucharist and upward to heaven. With the stuff like what the American Papist is satirizing, the claim that it's well-ordered worship sounds a lot like a storefront church claiming to be rooted deep in history because its unschooled pastor is teaching himself Hebrew to read the Torah.

Hungering for Eucharistic adoration?

2008-03-11T19:38:00.003-05:00

I keep hearing about parishes that don't have Eucharistic adoration at all. My first exposure to it was at a church that had a perpetual adoration chapel, so when I read about a parishoners here and there who want it, I'm surprised and disappointed that something as simple as exposing a consecrated host for even one hour a month isn't getting done.

There are all kinds of excuses, some understandable, some lame, all insufficient to justify curbing worship.

"The priest is too busy with other ministries/projects/social outreach"
Aside from expressly priestly duties--I mean in particular sacramental duties, although I don't want to draw the circle too small around things that require an ordained minister--most parish activities should be handled by a parishoner. It's what we're for; it's not like the priest is the only professional Christian and we just go in once a week the way we go to see the doctor once a year and expect the professional to do his thing for us. In fact, if we omit the benediction that traditionally comes at the end of adoration, a priest doesn't need to be there at all.

"The parish should focus on serving the community outside of mass; taking extra time for worship isn't a good use of time."
The first great commandment is to love God. The second is to love your neighbor. Doing the second is one way of doing the first, but it is not the only way, and if it were the primary way, then even the Sunday obligation couldn't withstand the logic. It's not like a Holy week service, where there is some expectation of large numbers of people showing up outside Sunday morning; people can come and go as they please. It's more like confession, only the priest doesn't have to be there.

"We're just not a parish that's big on devotionals."
Really? You really think that if you set a monstrance out at some publicized time and day, no one at all would show up because they just lack the interest or time or charism for extraliturgical worship? Do they pray at home by themselves, or teach their children to pray before going to bed? What else is the sanctuary being used for on a weekday evening or a Saturday morning, that would be preventing the few people who might want to spend some time with Jesus in person from doing so? I've already explained how it can't be that the priest is too busy, so even if exposition only lasted for an hour, and only one person stopped by for five or ten minutes between errands, it couldn't be that great a waste of time even if we set aside the fact that it would be time spent in the Presence and thus of inestimable value.

Even if no one showed up the first time, I think there's something welcoming about the Eucharist being displayed, about Jesus waiting for someone to come and sit with Him for a little while.

Here's my thought: if you want adoration and the people who could enable it are dragging their heels, show up anyway. If the church is locked tight 167 hours a week, then stay late after mass and explain that you just want to stay and pray a little while before they lock the doors. Come alone or come with other people who want it. You can get by without having the Sacrament exposed. You could even do the Litany of Divine Praises if you want to add some structure. God will bless the people who are faithful to Him. I would not be surprised if, by the grace of God, you could show the priest that there was enough interest in praying before the Eucharist exposed, then he would soon be moved to allow you to do so.

Is man-machine marriage on the horizon?

2008-03-01T17:30:00.000-06:00

Maybe so.

I find the idea ridiculous, but David Levy's argument from inevitability is persuasive.

I certainly expect that such a silly notion will not be long-lived (although it could enjoy a renaissance once AIs become convincing), but I also suspect there's enough momentum behind the Culture of Death's ambiguization of marriage that someone will be getting a marriage certificate signed before all's said and done.

Said Levy:

"If the alternative is that you are lonely and sad and miserable, is it not better to find a robot that claims to love you and acts like it loves you? Does it really matter, if you’re a happier person?"

Of course it matters--an android (or gynoid, I suppose) isn't going to fake love any better than an otherwise well-adjusted real human can fake it--but if you can fool yourself into thinking you're happy, into distracting yourself from genuine pain with playing house by yourself, and with all the things commensurate with house-playing, then I would be surprised if no one tried it. Marriage with animals has been tried--or aped, rather, if you'll pardon the incongruent pun--at least once. Robots are already being made to perform certain household functions, and in some parts of the world, lifelike and life-sized dolls are already treated as surrogate girlfriends. Having one that can cook dinner and scrub toilets is still a ways off--though Levy only predicts that we'll see it happening by the middle of the century--but having a conversation with a false person that you've programmed, instead of imagining the conversation, will seem pretty appealing to affluent and very lonely people.

Levy naturally assumes that people want to marry just for happiness, but when a robotic "marriage" goes south, it will probably seem as natural as any other human marriage that has failed. It will be interesting to see how many people with failed robotic spouses treat it like with all the aplomb of a cell phone upgrade and how many show the same potentially disturbing overattachment of a guy getting wistful over trading in his first car.

Levy continues:

"It’s not that people will fall in love with an algorithm but that people will fall in love with a convincing simulation of a human being, and convincing simulations can have a remarkable effect on people"

I wonder: does "remarkable" necessarily equal "good?" No, never mind; I know the answer already.

Rutgers University biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, renowned for her studies on romantic love, suggests that love seems dependent on three key components: sex, romance and deep attachments. These components, she remarks, “can be triggered by all kinds of things. One can trigger the sex drive just by reading a book or seeing a movie—it doesn’t have to be triggered by a human being. You can feel a deep attachment to your land, your house, an idea, a desk, alcohol or whatever, so it seems logical that you can feel deeply attached to a robot. And when it comes to romantic love, you can fall madly in love with someone who doesn’t know you exist. It shows how much we want to love.”

Dr. Fisher has a point, but the human drive to love doesn't mean that a three-element reductionism is proper to a well-integrated human. That people will attempt to have real relationships with fancy but stupid machines is--well, people anthropomorphize objects all the time, so it's precedented, first of all--not so indicative of the success of the robo-spouse industry as of the level of dysfunction that can be found in humanity.

It's cute when a child is attached to a doll or invents an imaginary friend. For a child, it's also not unhealthy; the young person becomes accustomed to taking care of a doll and hopefully, by imitating the real mother, will carry some foundation of parenting forward into adulthood; the child with an invisible playmate exercises the imagination, which is a faculty that requires exercise like any muscle and does not cease to be at the onset of adulthood.

When an adult becomes attached to a doll, even a mobile, speaking one, it is somewhat disturbing. Adult skills are learned and practiced in youth so that they will be used in earnest in adulthood. As the youth matures, the exercise becomes more sophisticated and realistic, and playing at adult behavior for the sake of playing should diminish as the lessons to be learned by simulating real social activity dwindle, and real adult behavior can be engaged more and more.

An artist will tell you that you have to emphasize the basics in rehearsal, but rehearsal without performance is empty. It's contraceptive, masturbatory.

People who would strive for a relationship with a lump of metal and latex will be expressing a genuine need for love, but machines aren't a solution. Whether the reason is fear, habit, or lack of thought about what marriage is really about, these people wouldn't be ready for a real relationship, and the solution is to get them ready, not give them a pressure release valve that spares them the risks of living.

If living and loving are like muscles to be exercised, and ones that are atrophied from decades of neglect, should they not be trained as they would have been in childhood? I will not deny the value of some coaching here. Older siblings and friends and therapists can all provide some tools for learning to deal with other, real people. Can androids be used to this end? Maybe, but they'd need to do more than convincingly simulate humanity in order to really do people some good, and it would be a lot more cost effective--if you want to be utilitarian about it--to simply employ actual humans. If someone isn't to the point where he can deal normally with real people even under limited conditions, then he's got more fundamental problems than being shy around girls or comfortable around abstracted personalities on a computer screen, and giving him the means to nurse his pathology is not going to make it better. It just saves him the trouble of doing so.

As long as he's desperately pretending to live the American Dream, though, who are we to judge, though, right?

Silliness in recent years

2008-02-20T17:47:00.001-06:00

Below are responses to half-baked presumptions that have been in the news and on the Internet not-so-lately (would've posted it sooner, but I forgot I had left it in draft status for two years). I try to call out opposing sides on a couple things, although I'm probably not very fair. Maybe next time.

"God sent hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans!"
God sends rain on both the just and the unjust. Was He not also punishing all the other cities that get hit by hurricanes? If New Orleans deserves punishment, would not also San Francisco? When was the last time they had a catastrophic earthquake? Maybe Boston's not getting hit hard, except for the occasional blizzard, because God doesn't condemn whatever's going on there. Does it seem likely in this context? Not to me. It's easy to map Biblical patterns onto current events; it's harder to know what's actually on the mind of God.

Christ wouldn't condemn [insert social misfit of your choice]! He'd probably go have dinner with him!"
Yes, He wouldn't necessarily condemn anyone, just as He didn't condemn the adulterous woman brought before Him by a mob, or the woman at the well who had married several times. He does, however, admonish sinners to sin no more. It's hard to invite sinners to a life of holiness when you distance yourself from them. It's a far cry from "I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more," to "Don't ever change." We should be comforted by the fact that Jesus loves us despite our failings, by His mercy, but we should also be motivated by His justice, not so much out of fear but out of love for Him. Even if God's mercy were greater than His justice, it wouldn't mean that we now get to keep doing whatever it is we wanted to do all along, only now there's nothing bad about it. It's not living under Christ's mercy, it's abusing it.

Late in 2005, in Israel, a British tourist named Sharon Tendler "married" a dolphin she had been visiting for fifteen years. Although assuring friends she'd end up with the dolphin instead of some boyfriend, she concedes she might "marry" a man someday, and hopes the dolphin, Cindy, finds another dolphin with whom to have lots of calves.
I'm not going to say "This fiasco is all the fault of the homosexual lobby!" but one more prediction about the fallout from the de-definition of marriage has come true. In fact, perhaps three have: is Cindy really the name of a male dolphin, and is Tendler going to divorce "him" when she meets the right human, or since she bases her love for Cindy primarily on how comforted she feels by Cindy's presence, and isn't expecting any fidelity (if consummation were even possible between them in the first place--I don't want to know) anyway, then what the heck kind of relationship is it? People can (but shouldn't) get married for whatever reason they want to, yet generally they recognize what marriage is supposed to be, at least in some stunted and partial sense; here, it's not even clear how Cindy could have said, in any way, shape, or form, "I do," how Cindy could have been capable of consenting to such an arrangement, personally if not legally.

"If a woman can't abort a pregnancy that is the result of rape, whenever she looks at her child, she's going to see the rapist."
I certainly sympathize with the victims of rape, but these words strike me as the kind that would only be spoken by someone who has never been or refuses to be a mother. I can hardly imagine how rape victims might react, but how cold and alienated do you have to be to look a person in the face, and not only not see that person, but hardly see a person at all? The solution, it seems to me, would be to put the child up for adoption. I know, continuing a pregnancy that's the result of rape would be a heavy cross to bear for anyone, and that pressure plus the abstractness in which abortion is often painted makes it easier to consider, but if a woman can come face to face with another person and say "I should have killed you," her problem is bigger than lacking the cab fare to Planned Parenthood.

"I could not bear to go through life knowing that my son or daughter, who resulted from a rape, was out there somewhere, being raised by adoptive parents. It would be less cruel to abort."
Less cruel to you than having to know someone else is trying to make good out of a bad situation? Maybe you're right, in a way--maybe people with attitudes like this one and the previous really are unfit to be parents. I know I wouldn't be happy living under the thumbs of people who really had to weigh the inconvenience of tearing my limbs off and crushing my skull against the inconvenience of having me around.

At least one protester's sign at a West Coast Walk for Life (caution: tasteless and vulgar content) read "Free abortion on demand."
I guess this one would go along with HMOs being a basic human right, along with liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Okay, flu shots are free, at least if you're a student or a senior citizen, but why should a major voluntary surgical procedure be free? I'm not talking about bankrupt people who need emergency medical care--they're already tax writeoffs for hospitals, if you're more worried about money than reluctant doctors--and I don't think the protester was, either. Why not demand free surgery for any sort of body modification you can think of? We have the right to self expression, after all.

Read another: Why not outlaw heterosexuality instead! [sic] Strike at the source!" Yet another: "Stop breeding."
Okay, even if you buy the notion that if the population increases by only one person, the global ecological system will completely collapse, what good would come of completely ceasing breeding? A hundred years from now, we'd be extinct. Do we really want to become extinct? I don't, even if it means that when our population reaches six billion and one, a "few" surviving people will find themselves thrown back to the stone age. Imagine instead what would the world would be like in fifty years if childbirth stopped tomorrow: everyone nearly old enough to retire, no one young enough to keep things going for them. I didn't see the people carrying those signs coming in from the woods trying to survive on their own, with as little impact on the environment as possible, and only trying to raise awareness. In fact, I don't see many of them wearing canvas instead of leather and eating tofu instead of beef, although it would be a start.

Things that make pseudoscientists and paranormal researchers look bad:
When Cassini's Huygens probe landed on Titan, a guest on Coast to Coast AM described the conditions on Saturn's moon as a "alternate reality." In my mind, describing anything, no matter how strange, that still follows the physical laws we already know, as "alternate reality" strikes me as distastefully hyperbolic.
On a different episode, George Noory was talking with someone about how medieval stained glass makers were able to create different colors by changing the fineness of the particles used to color the glass, rather than their composition; apparently, some of the particles were so finely ground that they functioned as quantum dots, with significantly different optical properties (like, you know, color) from particles with a more classical size. George commented that if skilled laborers could create quantum devices back then, maybe they were capable of time travel or something equally preposterous. Having a basis in regular science would really help in your study of its fringes.

Even an undergraduate level--skip the advanced stuff so you don't risk getting indoctrinated too much in scientism while you get extra practice at empirical research. I just wish liberal arts majors had to study more science to graduate. If people had more than a passing familiarity with the undisputed aspects of how the world works, it would really save us a lot of trouble all around.

Things that make actual scientists and wannabes look bad:
Examples of hearing second hand about an unexplained phenomenon, proposing a half-formulated rationale, and presuming its absolute veracity despite mitigating details:
Extended Marian apparitions, despite being obvious images of a woman who speaks with some of the people present, are dismissed as vaguely humanoid groups of birds and an unbridled imagination of schizophrenic magnitude in an otherwise and previously perfectly lucid witness. This kind of naysaying is quite common.
When informed that stalks of wheat from a crop circle appear to carry less of an electrical charge than stalks from elsewhere, a statistician on the National Geographic Channel (why they felt he'd be qualified to judge physical anomalies was not revealed) blithely described, without personal observation, the standing stalks as miniature lightning rods, which should hold a charge while stalks lying flat had their charges naturally dissipate, even though the flattened stalks had been on the ground for only a few hours before both groups of stalks were cut, which took place hours before the test; yet after the cutting of the dried stalks, there is no charge dissipation. Come on; you claim to be a scientist, even a plain mathematician, and a rational thinker, and some handwaving about differential capacitance in allegedly normal and uniform samples is all you can come up with, yet you brand your hypothesis as fact? Why is it so hard to accept that there are legitimately strange natural phenomena we simply haven't characterized yet? Another factoid from the NGC show: anomalous magnetic fields in agroglyphs (i.e. crop circles--I like the fancy word more, don't you?) are sometimes attributed to magnetized ferritic globules, but agroglyph hoaxers are believed when they claim it's all because they scattered iron filings around the glyphs, even though (1) the globules do not resemble commercially available filings (2) the globules stick to the plants, rather than to each other, as unconstrained magnets are wont to do.

Agroglyphs puzzle me. People so often seem to crave a paranormal dimension in their lives, at least to have room to believe there is one even if they don't experience it--up to and including faith in science as an omnipotent tool of understanding that we are simply unable to currently wield at its full potential. Something like bizarre patterns of flattened grains show up, and the first people to provide a superficially plausible demonstration are believed at their word with zero concern for the few lingering anomalies. I get better science from Mythbusters.

Materialists probably think they're following the maxim of Sherlock Holmes: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." The problem is that the line of thinking usually runs this way: "I refuse to believe that anything supernatural is real. Some logical, empirical explanation must be able to account for this strange phenomenon. I'm too clever to think otherwise, so whatever I think of off the top of my head is most likely exactly what really happened." After a few implausible assumptions get made, the probability of the half-baked naturalistic explanation starts seeming as low as an actual miracle to objective observers, but admitting that better explanations require more knowledge than is currently possessed often seems too difficult.

Apologetic for a Random Reader (IV)

2008-02-01T18:07:00.000-06:00

Today: the Real Presence

Obviously I'm not going to go into all of it. I just wanted to address one or two points that often come up when discussing the Eucharist with Protestants and other non-Catholics who have some familiarity with the Bible.

I do find it curious that the people most inclined to speak of the literal truth of the Bible tend to be the quickest to ascribe John 6 and related passages to symbolism. Certainly, the Eucharist contains symbolic elements, but Christ made an awful effort to emphasize the importance of the Bread of Life.

First, He uses very graphic language, words with connotations closer to "chew" and "gnaw" than to "assimilate for edification." When His listeners said "This is a hard saying. Who can accept it?" it should seem odd that Jesus would say "I can satisfy all your spiritual needs" and people would take issue with it, but not accuse Him of blasphemy, as happened elsewhere. At other times when people misinterpreted His parables and analogies, He corrected them; this time, He did not, which suggests that the more scandalous interpretation was the correct one after all. If I'm losing you at this point, ask yourself which seems more disturbing: a metaphor for God as the source of all goodness, or a command to commit something like ritual cannibalism.

Second, He spoke quite a bit about being the Bread of Life. More than any other analogy He made. Maybe more than all His other analogies put together. I haven't counted verses, but I'd put money on Eucharistic material outweighing other symbolism not counting Good Shepherd stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did even including the Good Shepherd. If it were just a metaphor, why say things like "My flesh/blood is food/drink indeed?"

Sometimes, other parallels are made with more apparent symbolic language. "Jesus said He was a door," goes one common criticism, "but we know better than to look for a doorknob in His side, don't we?" "He said He is the vine, but we shouldn't be looking for a leaf-covered man at the Second Coming, should we?" Since I believe in the Real Presence, I sometimes wonder if these other metaphors also contain dimensions of truth that extend beyond the meaning we can apprehend (or can expect to lie beyond our apprehension), but true enough, Christ is not a door or a vine quite in the sense that we understand mundane portals and foliage to be.

When someone reminds us not to expect the doorknob, so to speak, though, they're missing a rather critical detail. We knew "I am the door" is a metaphor because there was no doorway to be shown to the disciples. We knew "I am the vine" is a metaphor because we never saw Apostles growing out of Him. How is "I am manna come down from heaven" different?

He did not only refer to Himself as food. He referred to food as Him. At the Last Supper, there was bread present, and there was wine present; and His words were "this is My Body...this is My Blood." Where we lacked signs of gateage or vinery in the other metaphors, so we could know that the language was only symbolic, here we have the consummation of the whole discourse on the Bread of Life, ratified with an unleavened loaf and a fermented drink squeezed from grapes. Here we have bread that is not just miraculously multiplied, but bread that Jesus names as Himself.

It strikes me as odd that John 6 should be so much harder to understand in this sense of identity than "the Father and I are one" is to be understood as a statement of identity. Then again, some people struggle with the Trinity, as well, so maybe at least I shouldn't be surprised.