At 3 pm on August 20 of this year, Al Oliver became the first man in the Saginaw Diocese to be ordained a deacon since 1981. The deaconate program had been closed until women would be admitted, but Saginaw's new pastor, Bishop Robert Carlson, had other plans.

Two years ago, Saginaw had two seminarians. Today, they have seventeen.

I'm just sayin'.

With apologies to Stephen Colbert

Newsy, adj. Something, such as a typical MSM item, that would be news if it contained truth, rather than truthiness.

I'm not coining a new term here. A web search will turn up loads of sites where people refer to something that has some quality of news as being "newsy." I just want to emphasize a somewhat less gracious but more precise meaning, increasingly appropriate in recent decades, that more strongly implies that newsiness resembles actual news only superficially, or that it claims to do so but lacks the essence of objectivity and accuracy to a meaningful degree.

I'm tired of ignoring the slow drift to yellow journalism, or having to spell it out each time I'm in a discussion over an article that's much more sloppily assembled than a critical reader should be willing to tolerate.

Agenda-driven "reporting"

Forgive me if I've posted on a related topic before, but it's worth rehashing.

Zombie's got some good coverage of the media fraud at Reuters that's come to the surface recently. While a lot of it is clearly inexcusable, I wonder yet if some of the occurrences are a manifestation of something other than overt malice or sensationalism.

My favorite example is the time when George Bush said that it'd be a lot easier to run the country if he were a dictator. In the earliest publications quoting him, they pointed out that he was joking. Of course: a dictatorship goes against everything we believe in, but if there were no debate, if our government had been designed for efficiency (it was not--checks and balances, remember?), then whoever led the government could certainly get a lot done with all the time he instead has to spend pontificating.

Well, after a while the media would rerun his quote, but they wouldn't point out that he was joking, that everyone he was talking to laughed because they got the joke. Maybe the caption writers thought everyone would remember the context and felt that reminding us of the words alone would be enough for...for something. Whether they were just flirting with laziness (streamlining a story isn't all bad if the original meaning is preserved) or were actually trying to pry Bush into a less tasteful apparent position, the latter seemed to be the effect that was achieved; more than once I heard people "reminding" us that Bush, in the end, just wanted to be a dictator, because the last thing they read about his dictator line made him sound pretty serious.

Were they just short-attention-span types who were confused by reporting that was on the sloppy side of efficient? Were they deliberately misled? Were they willingly misled because it confirmed their suspicions or wishes? Were these suspicions first planted by journalists who made some honest mistakes that fit a political pattern, or by journalists who had a problem with objective reporting, or propagandists who happened to work for the major media and perhaps studied journalism in school?

I don't know, but the "All the news that fits our preconceptions will be printed" era can't end soon enough. Hopefully we can get a little more Matt Drudge and even a little Pajamas Media for contrast. I'm tired of running into people who trust CNN because they watch it, and then dismiss anything different that Fox News says because CNN already reported on it.

It happens the other way, too, but Fox isn't as entrenched yet, so it's a little less frequent. 'Cept maybe to people who only watch CNN, or only read the New York Times, f'rinstance. Folks who think a single news source is comprehensive and infallibly objective are probably even more frustrated by folks who think the same about a different news source.

Catholic Coke Commercial

I'm not up on embedding YouTube clips, so here's an old-fashioned link to a Coca-Cola commercial I first saw on a blog I've already forgotten the name of.

Today's Gospel reading, as you should know by now, was from John 6, about the multiplication of the loaves.

I've heard the notion that the real miracle was the sharing of food that people had already brought, but today was the first time I heard it suggested in the homily.

"We can take it to mean that God created the bread from nothing--after all, he turned the water to wine at the wedding in Cana," he started. Well, yes enough.

He did describe, though, the alleged act of sharing as a miracle of generosity, of God acting through us--instead of upon us--to do more good than we would have otherwise. He gave some other examples, which I don't feel like typing up right now, that made this particular idea more clear

His point's a good one, that we should become instruments of God's grace for one another, rather than simply sitting around and waiting for grace to happen. Without any grace, we can't do anything, but once we have some, we can do good, we can spread the grace around.

On the other hand, making people feel guilty so they share what they have is a little mundane. I have no objection to mundane miracles, but if almost everyone did plan ahead and brought enough food to fill twelve baskets after being shamed into sharing with the folks who didn't plan ahead, wouldn't the really remarkable thing be that so many people were hiding so much food (and hidden so well that none of the Apostles noticed, save for one boy's stash) that they'd have leftovers of that magnitude? Did the crowds really show up that day with lunches prepared but still hoping Jesus would be catering?

I know the Bible's pretty lean on incidental detail, but if we take the less dramatic and less direct interpretation, don't the crowds seem to be a little something other than lucid?

On another note, why don't we call them embryonic humans instead of human embryos?

I briefly locked antlers with Innocencio over at Jimmy Akin's blog (there is some related followup) over embryo adoption. I refrained from posting after a few exchanges because I've been a bit edgy lately so I found it difficult to keep treating Innocencio with the respect he (I presume Innocencio's male) deserves. It's probably from spending too much time watching debates on ISCA get obnoxious and drag on for weeks.

I'll try to clarify why I think the EA-prohibitive arguments are inadequate and then drop the whole matter. If you're interested, you can visit Jimmy or see my older post from a couple months ago to weigh the specific arguments. I'm trying to stay brief here.

Donum Vitae is very specific about how many fertility-influencing techniques are immoral for dissociating various components of the conjugal act, such as the unitive and procreative natures. However, the blacklist isn't exhaustive; there's a thread of silence regarding actual EA. The prohibitions on other techniques are banned on grounds that really don't apply. EA isn't IVF so the fertilization question is moot; it's not surrogate motherhood because it's not pregnancy for a third party. DV does mention embryonic transfer, which would cover EA, but it always cites embryonic transfer with IVF as a single illicit technique, not something condemend by itself.

Not stand-alone proof, but the holes in DV do leave an EA-shaped gap we should examine. Maybe EA's not morally tenable--there are two arguments I still find considerable--but DV doesn't close the book. It would be sloppy reasoning to suggest that DV certainly bans EA even though Cardinal Ratzinger didn't seem think of that possibility, or that he meant to but was also being sloppy.

CCC 2376 (also 2377) says, quoting DV in part, "Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife betray the spouses' right to become a father and a mother only through each other.'" It sounds pretty cut and dried, but it's not that simple. 2376 specifies these dissociative techniques as heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization, neither of which is EA. If it only used these two techniques as examples and intended to rely on the rationale of DV itself, then we're back where we started, except for the two arguments I referred to.

One comes from the DV quote in 2376 about dissociative interference violating the spouses' right only to become parents together. I don't have a solid rebuttal, but maybe someone else could make hay of the few escape hatches I can see. For one thing, a married woman who is raped by a stranger doesn't have the option of "allowing" a child so conceived to die in the interest of maintaining her marriage's integrity. For another, DV is emphatic about protecting life, not just protecting its dignity, so we should hesitate before literally throwing out the baby with...okay, the metaphorical bathwater. For yet another, traditional adoption also circumvents the normal order of a married couple raising the child they conceived normally. I'm not sure the differences from traditional adoption are that meaningful; a child's origin, proper or not, is historical and remote from the adoptive act, and the parents can accept the disruption (albeit a different sort) that opening their home to a needy child would cause. One can also suggest pregnancy itself is sacrosanct, but in light of the rape example and the uniformity of the silence in DV otherwise, I don't think this concern is developed enough to stand on its own.

The other comes from the Magisterium itself. I don't fully grasp how the Holy Spirit works, but it may very well be that CCC 2376 was a comprehensive extrapolation, a small leap of faith and logic to ban the things unspecified that resemble or relate to the things specified. Then again, 2376 and 2377 don't leave room for technological assistance in conception, which DV does provide for.

Since I feel something more serious brewing, here's a dream I had last night to tide us over

The beginning was unclear. I was in the back yard of the house I grew up in. Many weedlike plants appeared to be under cultivation. They were about waist high, but once my sister watered them they soon grew into mature sunflower like plants, and then into ponderosa pines that looked to be almost a century old.

Somehow, as dreams do, things shifted, and I was at some religious...well, it wasn't a retreat in that it was open to the public rather than only to people who'd registered in advance. Most of the people about seemed to be youthful, perhaps college age young adults.

For some reason I decided to go to confession, even though my usual confession day wasn't too long from then. My confessor was the Pope. We didn't have a confessional, but he was sitting behind a fancy desk that would look at home in any church if they made altars out of ebony or mahogany, and I brought one of those portable kneelers up from someplace and set it in front of him.

As I confessed, I saw him taking notes, as if making a list of my major sins (or at least their categories) and then adding details, looking for patterns, or something. My confession wasn't remarkable, for me, but it seemed to drag on, especially because we kept getting interrupted by throngs of youths seeking the Pope's input on one social-spiritual exercise or another. For some reason I wasn't bothered by the fact that many people were overhearing bits and pieces of my confession; maybe I had figured it's just how things are when you try to confess to someone as busy as the Pope.

At one point, the throngs managed to call him away from his desk, and I looked over to see the notes he was taking, but they weren't notes at all. They were drawings.

I'd seen him doodling a bit, but when I first noticed it it looked more like he was sketching ideograms encoding my confession and his assessment thereof. Now that he'd completed many of them, they looked more like coats of arms; not just a decorated shield surrounded by symbolic figures, but a helmet and whole cuirass in fancy textures and colors.

Never figured out what he was on about. I woke up before receiving absolution.

Because I haven't been as whimsical or fun lately as I'd like...

You scored as Neither. You think neither like a man or a woman. What you are you may decide for yourself. Most people will consider you strange, alien, weird or funny. You are probably quite interesting.

Neither 64% Male 57% Either 54% Female 50% Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com

Gender-specific abortions go unnoticed

Maybe it's one of those things where nobody reports on it until a few grassroots organizations start clamoring to bring global attention to it. They tried to do it in Afghanistan around the turn of the century, with the mistreatment of women by the Taliban, but Osama bin Laden brought attention to himself there before anyone else had much of a chance. They've been doing it all over the blogosphere and now in the national media for Darfur. They did it for the Mexican border porosity issue...well, all right, Bill O'Reilly isn't exactly grassroots, but a few other people were making noises about it as early as the last quarter of 2001.

Read for yourself at Mercatornet about societal pressure decreasing live female births in Asia (yeah I know I'm falling behind), with minimal attention from women's rights groups. Maybe the issue hasn't reached a critical mass in the media yet.

Maybe, though, it's pro-choice people who are being consistent in their philosophy. If a fetus isn't a human, or isn't worth considering as a person, what would the gender matter?

(If you're thinking of a mail-order bride from one of these countries, you better hurry up. There may not be many more coming down the pipe)

Worth repeating...

As we all know, some activist atheist is suing to have the cross removed from the Mount Soledad monument in San Diego because it offends him. I don't know what the current status is.

Since when does anyone have the right not to be offended in this country? What happened to "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it?" Does it have to do with the ascention of Tolerance to the pinnacle of all virtues, so that if someone is offended, it is ironically the offender who is not tolerating something about the offendee? I sure don't see it taken seriously in the public sphere the other way around very often.

Oh, he's just looking out for the Separation of Church and State, you say? You mean the Separation of Religion from Society at Large?

What will it take for us to find standing in court to file a suit claiming that the detheization of all things in our society is tantamount to enforced cultural atheism? What will it take to show that this phenomenon will leave us with nothing distinct from a prohibition of the free exercise of religion?

Bleg, as they say

I could use your prayers.

I've been tapped to help someone who got himself into a bit of a crisis. He's the one who needs your prayers, really, but while I'm sympathetic, I'm not always the most helpful person when it's not a matter of "can I help you carry heavy objects and give you a lift across town?"

So, for both of us. That I can help point him to the graces he needs, and that he'll be ready and willing to accept it.

Belated Happy Independence Day

Not just the Fourth of July.

Call it so if you like--sometimes even I am too tired and lazy to use four-syllable words, and I enjoy them more than I should--but don't forget what it's supposed to mean. Remember the reason for the season.

Easter ain't just about eggs and candy, Christmas ain't just presents and an evergreen tree, and the 185th day of the year ain't just fireworks and picnics and the occasional Sousa march.

(Not that the third holiday's in the same league as the first two.)

Remember what we're commemorating, and why it was ever important. Remember it's not just the Memorial Day analog to Sweetest Day alongside February fourteenth.

"Do you know where your Bible is?" saith the billboard I passed on my way home this afternoon, along with a few excerpts from the Psalms about God on His throne.

Yes, yes I do. It's right next to my Magisterium and my Tradition. Where's yours?

Apologetic for a Random Reader (I)

I'm going to try making an irregular series of posts on apologetics. I have a few ideas in mind, but if or how often I come up with new ones is yet to be seen. We may not need yet another blog going on about Catholic apologetics, especially in the shadow of Jimmy Akin, but I figure scattering the occasional capsulized (if not comprehensive, judging from how this post is shaping up) treatment of some poorly understood, highly maligned, or just widely discussed topic a little more widely across the Internet wouldn't hurt; trying to write something capsulized would probably also be a good exercise for me, especially in light of that last post.

I'm going to start with something simple: Galileo.

Back in the day, the Church had much more of a hand in the goings-on of culture. The Church, in short, is in the business of truth, whether it be worldly or otherworldly. Thus did it take great and skeptical interest when Galileo started preaching heliocentrism: based on plainer readings of the Bible, geocentrism seemed more scripturally sound.

If Galileo were right, then what was the Church's beef with him?

For one thing, he was right for the wrong reason, which used to be something people understood. For another, he could be kind of a jerk.

Galileo came to the conclusion of heliocentrism by observing the orbits of the Jovian moons about their planet and by the observation of the phases of Venus. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine was dispatched to evaluate Galileo's science, having dealt with related issues in the past. Bellarmine was cautious, noting the gaps and flaws in the theory and lack of any conclusive evidence, but conceded that heliocentrism did not necessarily contradict the Bible, yet should not be taught until some proof could be found.

Proof would take the form of the discovery of stellar parallax, but in the early 17th century, telescopes were too crude to detect it. Galileo thought he was right anyway--he had been teaching his misfounded hypotheses as fact all along--but he relented.

In 1623, a friend of Galileo's and a scientist became Pope Urban VIII, and Galileo looked forward to no longer censoring himself over cosmology. Urban gave his blessing for a treatise on the movement of astronomical bodies, with the caveat that Galileo give a balanced treatment of geocentrism next to heliocentrism, and to point out that heavenly motions may not be properly understood by earthbound astronomers.

Galileo agreed, but his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems consisted of a debate between an erudite heliocentrist--a Copernican--and a dullard of a geocentrist--a Ptolemist--in whose mouth he put the pope's words.

The pope, whose position on these matters was well-known, was quite upset, brought Galileo to Rome for an explanation, and eventually put him under house arrest for the remainder of his life--not for his cosmology, but for his attitude.

He continued his research, and wrote the Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Science, in which he took the first steps into modern science by presenting some quantitative analysis of kinematics and materials science.

Archived embryos

I just read an article at Lifeissues by Fr. Alain Mattheeuws, S.J. about The Freezing, Implantation, and Adoption of Embryos. While I'm generally in agreement, and I'm not really in a good position to criticize Fr. Mattheeuws' work, I'd like to emphasize a few things he didn't, and demur on a few related things I've seen elsewhere. You can sort them out for yourself if I'm ambiguous at any point; fair warning.

The first question he covers is whether embryos may be frozen. Donum Vitae appears to be pretty clear:

The freezing of embryos, even when carried out in order to preserve the life of an embryo - cryopreservation - constitutes an offence against the respect due to human beings by exposing them to grave risks of death or harm to their physical integrity and depriving them, at least temporarily, of maternal shelter and gestation, thus placing them in a situation in which further offences and manipulation are possible.

The first part of this argument is, I think, contingent more on the limits of technology than on the limits of moral behavior. We now induce hypothermia in adults for certain medical procedures, and the risk of dying therefrom is quite small, especially next to the benefits to be gained by surgery.

I'm not condoning, however, any experimentation like what the Nazis did to bring us what we know about hypothermia today. I'm only saying that medical technology has gotten us this far, and in the future, something mundane, safe, and materially identical to the cryosleep featured in the Alien and 2001 movies might be feasible for a human at any point in development.

Justifying the extraction and preservation in the first place is another matter. If it's not disproportionately dangerous--which is a big if, one our state of the obstetric art can't yet practically answer, and no valid reason for which I can even think of--then I'm not sure how the deprivation of "maternal shelter" would be materially different from having your five year old spend a weekend in the hospital (which, I can personally attest, is sometimes necessary). We don't think that much of a kid getting homesick. Technical problems aside, would an extraction and reimplantation be significantly different? I'm not asking rhetorically. While there can be no tangible emotional trauma if there's no differentiated neural tissue, there are still spiritual matters that might be significant, and I'm less qualified to judge those than I am Fr. Mattheeuws' article (and less qualified to judge them than he is).

(I'm not sure if I'm using such words as "material" in the proper philosophical way, but I trust you'll take my meaning. Feel free to correct me where appropriate; there are, I'm sure, other places where I mean ontology when I say reality...)

I've piled high quite a few contingents, though, so don't think I'm actively dissenting from Donum Vitae. Outside of the unlikely confluence of a successor of Peter saying I can do so and some incredibly bizarre medical condition developing in my wife, none of my unborn kids is going to take a detour through the freezer section.

What about embryonic children who have already been cryopreserved? Let me address a few excerpts directly:

[Parents] cannot relinquish the responsibility that they have taken on in conceiving these embryos, even if it was with the help of doctors....

Here he's saying that parents cannot store or give them away like mere objects. Entirely true, but there is such a thing as adoption, and it is legitimate. Giving up only the second of five children for adoption in order to keep the bills low would be an unconscionable breach of the family, but it only demonstrates that the appropriateness of adoption would depend on the circumstances.

[T]hey should bring their embryonic children back to the dimension of time and take them out of their frozen state. It is in their hands to avoid adding one evil on top of another: to create a surplus of embryos and freeze them is one evil, to keep them in this state is another. To decide to make them material for science is also an evil.

Okay: in vitro fertilization sinful? Check. Freezing them evil? Check, but not necessarily with more advanced technology; DV prohibits risky operations and zygote-affecting operations that are experimental for the sake of experiment, and not all medical intervention across the board. Leaving them indefinitely on ice sinful? Check: they're placed in an unnatural and isolated state, most often for no primary reason. Harvesting for stem cells or cloning sinful? Check. All things we need not cooperate in. Keeping these points in mind, we move on...

But are they to be expected to implant every embryonic child in the body of its mother in view of bringing it into the world? I don't think this should be a 'moral obligation' for them....The only possibility open to them is implantation and gestation in the uterus of a woman. This possibility moreover does not automatically assure their survival.

If it weren't for the idea that a couple doesn't have to have every child they could possibly have, then NFP would be on the rocks; but on the other hand, they have already conceived children, and if parents weren't obligated to make at least a reasonable effort to bring their unborn children to term, then we wouldn't be opposing abortion, either. We don't have to guarantee success to make an effort; God only expects us to be faithful. How many miscarriages happen in the first week of pregnancy, anyway? Are we to sit on our hands because we haven't yet brought the failure rate well below these natural levels? If we do forsake every possible solution, then we are automatically assuring their death.

"What is more, can we really speak of adoption in a strict sense?...I do not believe that this would be a realistic 'response.'

First, yes we can, if we put our minds to it. The age of the child need not matter, and kids don't exactly come with 18-year warranties, let alone nine-month ones. Second, no, the way things are, it's not the most realistic response. No matter how many willing couples we'd be able to find, at this rate we'd never be able to give every embryonic child a chance at development and birth. It's possible that IVF could lose popularity or be banned, but unless such unlikely events transpire, embryo adoption will never be sufficient. Let me know if sufficiency becomes the primary moral consideration for an act.

Certain moralists consider that adopting embryonic children merely consists in moving a piece of a complex and absurd puzzle within a system that does not respect the origin of human life. It is a delicate question of a material cooperation with a technique which, in itself, is a means disrespectful of man. Others think that a massive and visible adoption of these embryonic children would testify to the respect we owe them and would favor, in the long run, a recognition of the evil that has been done to them and thus of the deadly character of these diverse techniques.

I think we're at the crux of the biscuit. By accepting the final act in a process that on the whole is immoral, are we formally cooperating with the evil? Not necessarily. Hearken back to the hypothermia example I gave earlier. Would it be immoral for me today to use that knowledge to save someone's life? No. What about my doctor in saving mine? Perhaps I'd be biased, but I'd again say no. What about the first doctor to read journal articles on the effects of prolonged cold on the human body, based on Nazi research? Not if that doctor is truly--primarily--interested in helping a patient keep his life or regain his health.

Where are we left when it comes to embryonic children? The science is not mature, and the technology is not what I'd like to call robust, but saving the life of a child is prima facie a good thing.

If I had to pay an open clinic to get an embryo and have it implanted, I'd probably pass because payment would constitute material cooperation, in the form of financially enabling an embryo mill to continue its work. If I felt an embryo mill were just another resource for fertility treatment, one that let me keep a little distance from the obviously immoral activity, then I'd still share the culpability.

If, however, I knew that there were frozen children--children who shouldn't exist, but God permitted to bring to the world anyway--and that they would definitely die if I did nothing, eventually discarded during an inventory purge or donated for ESCR or lost during a power failure or natural disaster; then I would really be inclined to give them something they could still have. They may have been denied a natural conception, but technically it wouldn't be too late to give them a chance at an otherwise normal gestation, and hopefully a full life.

Fr. Mattheeuws himself makes what is to me the same point in another part of the article, pointing out that adopting a child conceived by rape does not make one in any way complicit with the rape.

The personal conditions of [embryo adoption]--her condition as a woman, as a mother, as a spouse--seem little considered. With the 'rescue' option, the ethical illusion is profound: a sign of this is that even outside of the conjugal connection, the body of the woman can serve to this end.

Generally agreed. We can't just have lone people going around adopting embryonic children any more than we can have them adopting air-breathing children. Children are more than pets, and women are more than baby-making machines. Marriage provides for the procreation and raising of children, but it too is more. However, I'm still not seeing a durable difference between the goodness of a married, conjugally active, yet childless couple adopting an air-breather and a married, conjugally active, yet childless couple adopting an embryo. A woman's condition as a person, as a spouse, as a mother, should be considered along with her teleology even in the intent of conceiving her own children normally. I won't be so quick as to say these considerations for embryonic adoption are illusory, but it would be possible to commodify motherhood if we follow that path.

I still don't think it's enough to condemn the idea, though. It's not like the "right becomes obligation" argument against euthanasia, where a bad thing gives way to something worse. We just have something that could be very good, which is vulnerable to exploitation. Maybe weighing the quality of the technology, the likelihood of success, against the degree of moral vulnerability should be a judgment of prudence, but the possibility of exploitation doesn't make the matter different from anything else; it makes it just like everything else.

Donum vitae tells us 'surrogate' motherhood is not morally licit. It is contrary "to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person."

I submit, however, that embryo adoption is not surrogacy. Fr. Mattheeuws permits the distinction from traditional surrogacy, but insists that the similarity in the substitutiveness of both EA and surrogate motherhood are definitive and thus morally prohibitive. Let’s let DV define surrogate motherhood for us:

By “surrogate mother” the Instruction means:
(a) the woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of “donors.” She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy.
(b) the woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo to whose procreation she has contributed the donation of her own ovum, fertilized through insemination with the sperm of a man other than her husband. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the child once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy.

DV explicitly leaves room for technical assistance to conception for conjugating spouses (see question #6 under Homologous Artificial Insemination), we can obviously distinguish IVF itself from surrogacy, and we can see that surrogacy as here defined is a commoditization of the woman’s childbearing capacity, a reduction of it to a mere social service.

I’m not trying to argue that the only problem with surrogacy is the objectifying aspects of the practice. Children have a right to be conceived in love by their parents and carried to term by their mothers. Surrogacy deliberately deprives children of at least one and often all of these things.

Embryonic adoption, on the other hand, does not. It bears little similarity outside of some technological aspects, which DV does not prohibit just for being technological. Embryonic children have already been conceived; the likelihood of their conception having been in vitro, while probable, is moot. If it were merely a matter of being something between regular adoption and custom-genotype surrogacy, then it would be a bad thing. Embryonic adoption won’t save every child, even if we found an adoptive mother for every one, but again, we shouldn’t refuse to try saving any lives just because we can’t save all of them.

Doesn’t saving lives often require the tolerance of lesser “evils?” A woman in a car accident requires a leg amputation. A man having a heart transplant receives an organ cut from another’s corpse, is given a highly addictive narcotic to alleviate the pain. A child is removed from an abusive household. Dangerous mentally ill people are institutionalized against their wills. In all such cases “adding one evil on top of another” really doesn’t suit. All the evils are already added up and piled on top of the child. The child was already conceived by IVF; any siblings have already been implanted or killed or are also awaiting adoption; the genetic mother is not coming back; the child has probably already been archived in a fancy freezer somewhere. The only variable is setting the Petri dish out on a counter and letting the children die today, or waiting until next week for the adoptive parents to come in for implantation. I don’t know about spiritually, but biologically, even an adult who could be successfully frozen would not notice the passage of time. Given sufficient scientific advancement, it might be no more violent than general anesthesia.

DV spells out how we shouldn’t procure children. It does not say there is some point during the accretion of material evils against a child that a third party is morally obligated to throw up his hands, refuse to take part in anything even tangentially related, and let the child die. This attitude strikes me as little different from one where a parent treats a child drinking some under-the-counter chemical the same way he’d treat his keys dropped in lava.

“Shouldn’t we call the Poison Control Center?”
“Don’t bother; he’s as good as gone.”
“This stuff might only be a slow toxin!”
“I said don’t bother.“

If I were a zygote stashed in a freezer somewhere, I’d be pretty hard pressed to come up with a course of action that would be worse than nothing. I’d also be pretty hard pressed to overlook the suggestion that I should die because I would be starting life deprived of too many good things.

Birmingham abortion clinic surrenders license after baby's death

From the article:

A Birmingham abortion clinic has surrendered its license amid allegations that a woman delivered a nearly full-term stillborn baby after a clinic staffer gave her an abortion-inducing drug and performed other medical treatments without a doctor present, health officials said Wednesday.

We have two victories here, my friends. One, an abortion clinic has shut down for the foreseeable future. Two, an abortion clinic has been held legally responsible for medical negligence.

The second point may be more far-reaching than the first. Progressives in America will always have an uphill battle when trying to enshrine a social service as a basic human right, especially when they're explicitly pushing one that's only appicable to half of all humans, like abortion. Well, half of all adults. You know what I mean. Anyway, from what I've seen in the lawsuits being brought against Planned Parenthood (see here, here, and here for starters), they've been carrying on as if this "social service" really were some transcendent phenomenon, too important or too ubiquitous to be infringed by the banalities of sanitation mandates, rape reporting, and the like.

Now there's a precedent for not looking the other way in the interest of protecting the idea of "choice" over the fact of it. Now there should be no secrets, no mistakes, no deceptions, to distract from the fact that in a time when appropriate medical (physical and psychological) care is easy to obtain, abortion has not made women safer and healthier than they were thirty-four years ago.

Relevant Radio had someone on this weekend discussing the constitutional emasculation of modern men. I didn't catch the whole thing, but the guy was talking about how one battlefront in the fight against manliness was fashion: starting with male models, longer hair and earrings were introduced, and so on and so forth, until the sight of men dressing and primping themselves as women do seems perfectly natural, making the next step in the progression seem relatively small, blah blah blah. 1980s hair rock bands with their frilly sashes and animal skin print blouses and such probably have something to do with it, too, but I digress.

It's a bit of a hand-waving argument, I'll admit. Long hair was popular in the 60s to spite convention at least as much as to explicitly subvert gender roles, if such a distinction is meaningful. Jewelry, even on the ears, has not always been the bailiwick of women, nor always strictly decoration. French voyageurs sometimes took multiple piercings to indicate their skill in paddling on one side of a canoe or the other--next best thing to a resume in a society of low literacy.

Still, in modern society, long hair and jewelry have been predominantly the decorations of women.

I think the guy on Relevant Radio was overlooking something else, though, and perhaps it was just a matter of topicality. I don't think it's as simple as emasculation; I think it's the neutering of humans, men and women alike. It's not a new idea, but I'm not coming from the usual "feminism is about making women into better men than men themselves" angle.

We see men who are "metrosexual," adopting both the practices and styles of women. What about women? I don't mean the ones with short hair and combat boots. Look instead at many today's models.

They're thin, painfully so, resembling gangly boys as much as girls. Although the clothing they feature is often girly, it billows around them like they're coathangers on legs. Tops are low-cut or splayed open, revealing more ribs than a barbecue shack and nothing else (not that excessive cleavage is actually appropriate). Nominally hip-hugging slacks or skirts don't hug anything at all, which may be deliberate on the part of the designer as well as on the model. They wear makeup, but not so much anymore to look particularly alluring. All the fashion show footage I've seen in recent years, save for a few ad campaigns for a certain brand of underwear, has featured underfed women, and increasingly, girls who appear to be delaying puberty rather than fighting it off, with little more than mascara to make it look like they're coming off the cover of Crack Whore Magazine instead of making their debut in Milan.

Kids say the darndest things....

A little ISCA gold, as I'd warned you about:

Today I went to my first Pentecost church service. I've been going to a small New England congregational church since January after a near lifetime of not going (long story for another date). During the sermons the minister calls the children forward to explain the Bible readings to them. While she was talking about what happened after Jesus died, my 3 year old son, Alexander gasped, looked around and yelled out "Oh no! Jesus died? What happened?" Clearly his education has some holes but I thought it was funny.

Well, he's only three. Based on what I can remember remembering at that age, he's probably in decent theological shape. Probably also as good a time as any to start filling those holes.

Pro-choice isn't merely pro-abortion, eh?

A lot of us who support choice are ardent believers in parenthood, adoption, and childbirth...

Non sequitur. Quality versus quantity? Adoption will cut down on the number of mouths you have to feed, but if you were honestly keen on the saving individual families some trouble, abortion wouldn't be so imperative a "last" resort.

...as well as believers in the domain a person should be able to exercise over his or her body. I think it's unfortunate that, in the battle to keep Johnny Righteous out of the wombs of America's women, many people see only one side of the pro-choice group, and willfully or inadvertently become misinformed about the beliefs and motivations of those who support women's rights.

Well, you don't want anything in the wombs of America's women at all, do you?

If the "pro-choice group" was really interested in showing the other side, maybe they wouldn't relegate a comprehensive birth regulating program to the propaganda of a few scattered armchair apologists. Moral dimensions aside, an abortion is a more profound medical procedure (especially later in the term, which isn't as rare as one might think) than your usual outpatient things like getting root canals and stitches. For that reason alone abortions should not be pursued cavalierly, but apparently the need for them is so dire, the slippery slope to a culture of life is so steep, that they can't afford to really promote these alternatives.

When every child is wanted, and every parent capable of raising a child, these discussions will be over.

Yes. When you learn to want the children you get, abortion will be unthinkable.

How one decides how much wanting or capability is enough, I couldn't guess. Maybe it would have something to do with being ready and willing to bind oneself to a husband or wife for life and take whatever life throws at you together.

Currently reading...

Augustine's Confessions (abridged)

R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness that Comes Before

Christopher West's The Theology of the Body Explained

Joe Dever and John Grant's The Eclipse of the Kai


It's a bit onerous. I'm usually happiest reading one book at a time. Naturally, some of these books are going pret-ty slowly....

Do you have postmodern progressive colorblindness?

There's a simple test for literal colorblindness. A man (usually it's men) is shown a picture, usually a collection of dots, some of them green, the rest of them red (usually it's green and red). If he can see normally, he'll recognize that the green dots trace out some numeral, the red ones comprising the background. If he's color deficient, he'll see something else, probably just a uniform array of grayish dots.

Similar political tests are also possible. I present one below. I might have presented more, but I personally came across this one early in the week and don't feel like waiting to find or writing tests that distinguish other political antipodes.


Definition: Terrorism works to no small degree on the fear of uncertainty, of not knowing where or when or how a strike will take place.

Assertion: The United States is a terrorist state.

Crux of the argument: Compare the following two statements.
1. Hand over Osama bin Laden by the end of October or we will come get him.
2. We will destroy your civilization! You will not know which business, which school, which courthouse, which train station we will destroy next! Perhaps it will be a dirty bomb! Perhaps it will be anthrax! You do not know, so you will cower before us, and your civilization will fall!

In both cases, we have an ultimatum (#2's really an ultimatum; pretend I didn't leave out the conditional) that includes violence and regime change as the only alternative to compliance.

In the first case, we have a statement that implies or comes with expectable military goals, from a power that endeavors to minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage and intends to help get a nation back on its feet, allowing large and recently repressed segments of its population to go out in public unchaperoned and unbeaten.

In the second case, we have a statement that threatens widespread, low-level, random destruction of civilly strategic but militarily unimportant targets, solely for the sake of keeping the population off balance and disrupting society as a whole. Rebuilding, if it is done at all, would result in something rather despotic, maintained by little more than brute force.

If the difference between these two positions is substantial and important, then you are not blind.

If you cannot see that a concrete deadline, an explicit warning, and the intent of causing minimal damage are different from the promise of explicitly random and widespread violence, then you need to cut back on the New York Times and MoveOn.

Why I'm less than entertained by contemporary entertainment

I have a sister. When she was a teenager, she occasionally would bring home magazines like Seventeen and Teen. I wasn't exactly compelled to pick them up when she was done, but occasionally she'd point out an article, or a quiz, or something, that might make me chuckle.

When I was in college, I had a summer job where I basically went camping all the time. Sometimes I'd be staying alone or with small groups at rustic campsites with nothing but a tent or the promise of warm, dry weather for shelter, and other times I'd be staying at staffed camps that had interactive local history programs.

When I was visiting one of the latter camps, I was informed about a latrine that was supposed to have the best selection of reading material in the entire region. Since I do at times have to use a latrine or plumbed toilet, I thought I'd see what they had to offer.

In the reading rack, amongst other things, was a copy of Vogue. Never having read a bona fide women's magazine before, I thumbed through it.

I'm not sure it should be called disappointment or dismay, but I was mightily unimpressed to learn that American women everywhere were taking as a lifestyle standard a magazine that was no different from what American teenage girls everywhere were taking as a lifestyle standard, except for the fact that articles were about sex instead of prom and quizzes were about men instead of boys.

Yes, it sounded a little more sophisticated; add sex and career to a discussion on makeup and relationships and you've easily doubled its complexity, and even immature adults will develop or appear to develop more mature attitudes through observation and repetition. Children play house. College students drink and make merry with all the gluttony they can muster. In between, we have kids making biological jokes of increasing sophistication as they age (if we can speak of sophisticated jokes about poop or sex at all).

What I don't see much of these days is a graduation beyond obscene material in today's television shows and whatnot. I'm not talking about slapstick comedies or other gross-out shows like Blue Collar TV or America's Funniest whatever. Some of those shows, while crass, are not vulgar or prurient. I'm talking about the ones that pretend to be above it all, and so think they're not subject to the usual guidelines for good taste. After all, a documentary can discuss and display bodily functions, so why can't an entertainment program if it's equally frank and clinical?

For one thing, it's entertainment, so it's supposed to stir up subjective feelings rather than coldly convey knowledge. Whether these two can be safely divorced but remain in the same program is something I don't care to get into at this time.

Maybe they just can't; I was originally only going to answer "why not" with "I don't know, maybe it could, but it hasn't worked so far." Apparently Sex and the City, which seemed to focus on the prurient experiences and preferences of four urban women as much as it did on their careers, on their shoes, and on their actual fulfillment as human beings, appeals to someone. Apparently Grey's Anatomy, which has doctors getting more STDs than a college freshman and also focuses on how, in a nutshell, emotionally dysfunctional the physical relationships (to which I can only say "Duh!"), which the doctors are having with each other, always seem to do so.

Fine, fine, harmony makes for bad drama. So does stupidity. The show Going to Extremes went off the air precisely because the main characters were intolerably angsty and whiny. Angst can be funny with the right wit behind the pen and with an actor with the right sensibilities, but usually it just looks like a Generation X high school melodrama. Maybe Going to Extremes was just badly timed, people having appreciated but tired of thirtysomething but not yet having recovered enough to appreciate, well, the stuff that's put out today.

I'm not saying we should sweep tawdry and sensitive stuff under the rug, pretend it's not there. If we learned one good thing from Free Love, it's that abject fear and superstition about the Physical is not the same thing as healthy respect for it, even if healthy respect requires some comprehension of the sacredness of the Physical, the special reservation with which it should be handled. Not that it absolves would-be factual shows from the same lurid ratings hooks. Important things do deserve to be treated frankly, if the only alternative is tentative vagueness, but it's not the same thing as being casual.

What I am saying is that we're not proving our enlightened maturity by just doing things we weren't allowed to do as children. "Hey, I'm an adult, it's time for me to put away childish things, like Not Smoking and Not Talking About Genitalia." So many of us, when we were young, tried so hard to seem mature beyond their years. How many actually grew up?

Criticism of the critique of The DaVinci Code:

• Dan Brown put a "Facts" page at the beginning of the novel....


• It's only fiction!


• People bought into made up stories two thousand years ago, and they're going to do so today, too.


• The male apostles covered it all up; there's no written evidence, just clues left in artwork


• I like the unearthing of a woman-respecting strand in Christian history

Responses:

• The only thing that is true on that page is that Opus Dei has a building in New York.


• Yes, it's fiction, but it doesn't stop people from believing it, and instructing the ignorant is a spiritual work of mercy. Whitley Strieber gets to couch alleged nonfiction in fiction, but at least he admits that he might just be psychotic.


• If it's all fiction to you, why do you care that we care if people can keep their stories straight?


• There's not even artistic evidence. You've got a youthful looking John, and what else? There's nothing at that English chapel from the end of the book. Where would be the sense in reading the canonical gospels and assuming they're strictly disinformation because of Dan Brown's bald assertions? It'd be like saying a crime suspect's claim to innocence is just what a guilty person would say, never mind that an innocent person would also claim to be innocent.


• Yeah, and it goes all the way back, from Dan Brown writing a Sophie who spends more time getting schooled by old white men than saving the day, to the Gnostic gospels where Jesus spent so much time with Mary Magdalene because she was even less fit for heaven than the male apostles were. Equal-time lip service is not the same thing as equality.

It's just the old lies dressed up in old clothes that happen to have been dry-cleaned and pressed. You can't be free, free from the truth, by trying to live a lie. Look at the more radical branches of feminism: women cannot adequately self-actualize until they overcome what makes them women and they stop having kids, start taking traditionally male jobs, and so on (not that childless independent women are bad; they're just untraditional, although a woman specifically trying to become more masculine isn't what I'd call healthy), except when what makes a woman obviously different from a man--her primary sex characteristics--are what makes her special, which basically means the glorification of her primary sex characteristics all by themselves, instead of her self or her Inner Man.

Maybe learning not to be ashamed of part of what makes you unique is the first step in developing a healthy, holistic self image.

Note to self:

Try bringing the average sentence length down, and add some whimsy.

Readers are welcome to encourage, guide, and remind me.

Early Christian Cacophony

From Amy Welborn's combox:

Burge's Protestantism eeks out in this paragraph:

"Ehrman's more important effort appears in the companion volume, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford). Here Ehrman says that early Christianity witnessed remarkable theological chaos. Everything was in dispute: monotheism, Jesus' divinity, creation. Then, Ehrman says, in the second and third centuries, powerful clerics imposed their views on rivals, ending a golden age of diversity and tolerance. The vanquished rivals supposedly were reformed, suppressed, or forgotten. Other religions and other Christian voices, those outside the mainstream, were crushed. And it is only now, Ehrman says, with the discovery of their lost scriptures, that these long-silenced voices are being heard once again."

The emphasis is mine.

I think "Everything was in dispute" is overstating the case a bit. Some people did actually doubt Christ's divinity, for example, but I think most of the people of greatest historical significance--not just to us today, but the ones closest to the "Jesus Event" itself--were wrestling with problems that today we describe as Trinitarian in scope more than problems with describing the nature of Jesus.

No, I'm not assuming the "winners write the history" position, either. I was just saving it. (:

Let's look at the bold sentence, the one with "...ending a golden age of diversity and tolerance." Which alternate Earth did Ehrman study? Sure, there was "diversity," if you want to call the wide speculations of the Gnostics and other sects denounced from the beginning by the Apostles and other patristic figures a legitimate diversity, then for the sake of the argument I suppose you can, but it's this wedding of diversity to tolerance that catches my eye like a screen door hook latch.

There was little to no tolerance for, let alone acceptance of or respect of, heterodoxy in the early days. I think "respect" and "acceptance" might be closer to what contemporary progressives have in mind when they say "tolerance," which tends to have more of a reluctant quality, and reluctance is not something I'd expect to be a regular part of the practice of something that is supposed to be a good end in itself.

Well, I would, what with our tendency to backslide, but someone who disbelieved original sin might be less expectant.

My use of "denounced" three paragraphs up was not by accident or premisconception. (By the way, "premisconception" is a word now. Like a preconception, it's made prematurely, but like a misconception, it's inexcusably incorrect.) This repressive powerful cleric claptrap did not suddenly occur a hundred years after the Council of Jerusalem. Peter had words against this "diversity," and even more of Paul's are widely available today. The only thing that fits any Constantinian conspiracy is that the Church in the fourth century had temporal power to rely on as well as rhetoric and, most importantly, grace.

If there was a golden age at all, it wasn't when or because there existed a variety of belief as well as worship, all of which was happily accepted as being legitimate or as much within the margin of error of the decades-old Church documents as any other denomination's (if we can call Peter and Paul's sect a denomination) manifestation. Christ Himself said that parents and children would turn against each other because of Him.

Just because there was some variety, because there were fringe elements that were congruently documented by the fringe elements and by the core elements, does not mean that there was legitimate diversity or harmonious acceptance.

Legitimate diversity isn't just difference for difference's sake. Legitimate diversity is what keeps unity from becoming stale uniformity. Maybe a little gratuitous variety is all it takes to create a complementarity that becomes a dynamic unity, but some differences do contain inherent incompatibilities.

Try taking your American electronic devices to Europe to see if I'm wrong. There's nothing wrong with American electrical power standards, and nothing wrong with German electrical power standards, but they won't work together. It just doesn't happen. You can keep them in the same room and be safe as long as you're not trying to make one "tolerate" the other, but once you do, you get smoke and fire and maybe worse. If you bring an adaptor, bully for you, but the presence and function of an adaptor to unify American battery charges with European power outlets do not arise naturally from the juxtaposition of the two technologies.

Is this golden age of variety supposed to integrate with or compete with the single, global Gaia worship that men replaced with all those different pagan systems? Now there is a diversity of belief that contained nearly interchangeable parts, if I may paint with such broad strokes.

Of course, there was still religious conflict, but whatever.

Should we call it "Mercy Eugenics" or "Mercy Genocide?"

Via Amy Welborn:

UK euthanasia legislation fails to gain the support of the people it's intended to help.

I think it's telling that this kind of "help" is not wanted. Question is, is anyone listening?

I imagine something like the liver donation scene in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life," only darker and more obnoxious:

"Hi, we're from the government, and we're here to help."
"No, actually, I'm fine."
"Of course not."
"What! Wait!"
"Oh, do relax. Here, Mr. Griffiths will just run upstairs and fill the tub, and after you get to know me a little I'll hold you down in it."
"No!"
"Please come off it, sir. Your neighbor across the street, Mr. Foster, didn't complain."
"No--wha? He was only diabetic!"
"Yes! You may as well give up trying to roll yourself out of here; it won't work. Foster was much more mobile than you, and we ended up shivving him on the way home from the pub last Thursday."
"'E couldn't very well have complained, then, could he?"
"I don't think he would have."
"Right, and even if he did, it would have just shown he wasn't lucid enough to agree with you, wouldn't it?"
"Now you're getting it!"
"Yet somehow I still have a problem with this arrangement."

Wool or plastic?

My brown scapular is plastic.

Well, it's actually brown wool, like the scapular traditionally is, but the two pieces are encased in plastic.

Apparently, some folks think that a "plastic scapular" is invalid. If they mean all plastic and no fabric, then I could understand, and if they meant a synthetic fabric instead of wool, then I might even be convinced.

I would hope that they would not think ill of a scapular with the same material configuration as mine, though. It does have the legitimate material, and for me at least, the sharp edges and corners of the casing are more painful when I lie down, roll over, or anything that requires sitting or standing, than the bare wool would be uncomfortable in an entire day of scratchiness.

Shouldn't this point appeal to some of the more reactionary types?

Hand Holding & Rubrics

There's an interesting (at least if you're into the finer points of the laity's role during the liturgy) thread at Jimmy Akin's blog about, well, holding hands during the liturgy. Why we shouldn't, why doing so isn't bad, how to defuse people who let no social barrier prevent them from making physical contact with you, and such.

I grew up in a parish that was really hand-holdy, so it's not a big deal to me. I've moved away, as have my parents, so I don't even get back there during holidays; it's a little different where I am now. Sometimes a stranger will reach out and I'll comply, but I won't try to get someone else to hold hands with me. I can always shake his or her hand during the sign of peace, if I'm jonesing for some kind of human contact or whatever.

I might have a solution. It's not realistic, and it might not even suffice where it's possible, but why should I constrain myself?

Find yourself a parish, most or all of whose congregation is of recent east Asian descent. If it's like the Korean Catholic church a mile or so from my office, hand-holding is diminishingly rare and the sign of peace is a bow, so there's little to no physical contact, and with any luck the Our Father will be written phonetically inside the cover of your missal or Worship book.

A new Biblical narrative of our Lord!

Late in the second millennium, an ancient document was discovered and widely disseminated in cinematic format. It describes the life and times of a messiah--but not the one you expect.

Jesus of Nazareth does appear in the narrative, but this document, which has been largely forgotten except in a few isolated circles around the English-speaking world, reveals a competing belief of the time: that the savior the Jews of Palestine were expecting was to be a philosopher-soldier who would rout the Roman occupiers, and did in fact appear at exactly the same time, in the same town of Bethlehem, as Jesus.

Learn about contemporaries of Jesus that early "Christians" didn't want you to know about! Discover long-forgotten truths about what the Jews of two thousand years ago really believed! Find out what they really taught!

Do it. Watch the Gospel of Brian. Why do things halfway and limit yourself to Gnostic heresies?

Sometimes I say the Jesus Prayer.

Recently, as I was saying it, I got an uncomfortably impersonal feeling whenever I got to "me, a sinner." I was not so much bristling at the notion of my recidivism, but at being anonymous, at the idea that my unique identity was utterly unimportant, especially next to my recidivism.

I kept saying with it and wrestling with this new and distasteful sensation. Then I went to confession.

I didn't think to bring it up in the confessional, but afterwards, I felt a lot better praying it. The proper perspective was restored to me.

Go figure.

Speeding, even a little, is a sin.

Is it as bad as murder or armed robbery? No, not normally. Doing 72 in a 70 mph zone is not going to be more dangerous than doing an even 70, by any reasonable metric. However, Caesar has set concrete limits, because limits of some sort do help to minimize injury and damage from vehicular incidents, and while it enables arguments about how taking traffic laws as strong suggestions can be sufficient, it also stops people from wasting the court's time with arguments like "I'm smart and fast enough to safely drive at 55 in school zones."

Declining to render unto Caesar by driving 72 in a 70 zone would only constitute a venial sin, of course. I've written about arguments I've had with people who would assert things like being momentarily inattentive to the speedometer whilst passing someone is morally identical to genocide, and how I think it's silly because whether or not marginal speeding is enough of a sin to warrant hell, refusing to distinguish between extinguishing numerous human lives and abstractly defying the social order in a trivial way is rather dismissive of the numerous humans and not at all helpful to the people who are, respectively, struggling with the particular sins and/or temptations to kill massively or drive quickly.

I suspect that this philosophy is also responsible for stimulating the opposite attitude, that certain things that are a little bad aren't really sins at all. I admit, it's the first rationalization that comes to mind when I'm sorely tempted to commit a venial sin (and sometimes mortal ones, but many of them are harder to rationalize), to save me from the fear of despair at having damned myself by succumbing to weakness and habit, but I do remember it's not that simple. I brought up speeding as an example because the first time I remember someone who still believed in sin write off minor things as not being sinful at all used speeding as his example.

I agree it's not very bad; most cops wouldn't pull you over for exceeding the limit by two miles per hour on a highway, and if one did, the penalty would be relatively light. Further, the limits are to an extent arbitrary; if we had sufficient mathematical models, we might find that 73 might be an optimal highway speed, after all, and 17 in a certain residential zone. However, we usually use round numbers because easy to remember and standard values make it easier for us to keep our eyes on the road instead of glued to the instrument panel.

I'm getting sidetracked. If bad sins get us into hell, then it does not follow that minor infractions aren't sins only because they shouldn't get us into hell. If driving two miles per hour over the limit increases accident rates by 0.000043%, and an increase in annual insurance rates of $0.00000079 per driver, then it's not really worth it to Caesar to pursue the matter. However, it is something we can choose to do or not to do. If it's not a morally neutral choice (and if Caesar is legitimately, reasonably, exercising his authority in proscribing one option, it isn't), and you actively choose wrong, you've got the elementary school textbook definition of sin on your hands.

It might not always be that simple, but it is that plain.

This Holy Week, don't just observe the Passion.

Supersize your Easter with The McPassion.

Now, is this little ditty offensive, or just tasteless?
Not the meal. The meal looks about as tasty as fast food can get.

Perhaps Chuck Norris is only superhuman after all...

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

(warning: graphic cartoon violence)

"I'm a person. I have ten toes and ten fingers. I'm also a woman, so I don't have a penis, although twice, for nine months, I had twenty toes and twenty fingers and a penis."

The first time I heard someone talk this way, several years ago, it seemed like a cutesy acknowledgement of the humanity of a pregnant woman's prenatal son. The next time I heard it, which was just a few months back, was after the "my arbitrary threshold for the humanity of a fetus is correct" rhetoric really got fleshed out in the public eye, or maybe just in my own mind and I'm not quite up to date on the propaganda.

Yes, the second time I heard the "twenty fingers and a penis" routine, it sounded trite and thoughtless. A woman pregnant with her son may "have" all this stuff, but they're not hers beyond the point that her son is her own. They are not an inherent part of her. A normal woman is not coded to possess double the normal number of fingers and male genitalia. She is coded, and constructed, to carry them in the form of a developing son, but they are not an ontological part of her. Without the contribution of a male, she cannot produce these things at all, and even then, she'll only produce the distinctly male features about half the time.

Unless you care to patch together some telological definition of Woman as strictly a baby making machine, you can't assert on these grounds that a prenatal human is merely a mass of the woman's tissue that can be thought of and treated as casually as a cyst or wad of phlegm.

Well, maybe you could argue, again, that Woman has the metaphysical ability to impute humanity by fiat, much as how the Fourteenth Amendment imputes citizenship, but I think that argument's even shakier.

The purpose of marriage (appendix)

I had a fascinating discussion with one of my quasi-bosses today. He came over from India the better part of two decades ago. Somehow, our conversation turned to the sad marital statistics in this country these days. Being an old-school Hindu, his marriage was arranged with a woman he didn't even know at the time.

Such marriages, while not unheard of here, are quite alien to most homegrown Americans. Who could imagine leaving such an important decision to the judgment of, well, anyone else?

It's certainly intimidating, but in India, trust and obedience are still more highly valued than they are here, so I'm sure there's a lot less angst about ending up with someone who turns out to be a bad match, and while parents sometimes make bad calls, I imagine the rate of bad matches revealing themselves in the first five years of marriage is probably far lower than 50%. They have fights now and then, too, but occasional marital stress just makes them normal, like the rest of us. Somehow, they keep on keepin' on.

I think there's something to this old school stuff, and I don't mean the higher stigma of divorce, although there's something to be said for being reluctant to just give up when things get tougher than you expect.

Imagine yourself being presented with a marriage arrangement. The people who know you best have selected someone for you to build a life with, someone brought in by the people who know her or him best, someone who has the same expectations and reservations. While you may lack the motivation to bond of a preexisting relationship, you also lack the illusion that whatever feelings you happen to have right now constitute all the foundation and effort needed to make a marriage work. You're not going into it just to up the ante on commitment as a sign of love. You're not going into it just looking for a legal rubber stamp on whatever you're already doing with your girlfriend or boyfriend.

What you are doing is going into marriage knowing what its purpose is. Sure, Americans might have a head start on the unitive angle, in practice if not in principle, but people like my quasi-boss harbor few to no misconceptions about the importance of the procreative angle.

I'm not saying we have to start arranging all our marriages, but I think we could learn something about the way the marital priorities are emphasized. Something all too easily forgotten in western society.

Not even original garbage

Okay, maybe "garbage" is unfair. I suppose that, blurred historical details aside, Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code is decent enough pulp. Then again, I've read other books I'm willing to say are less entertaining than Left Behind, so take it for what it's worth.

Anyway, as you know by now, Dan Brown's up for plagiarism, and to the purpose of his defense he issued a statement, which reads in part:

Being raised Christian and having sung in my church choir for 15 years, I am well aware that Christ’s Crucifixion (and ultimate Resurrection) serves as the very core of the Christian faith. It is the promise of life everlasting and that which makes Jesus ‘the Christ’. The Resurrection is perhaps the sole controversial Christian topic about which I would not desire to write; suggesting a married Jesus is one thing, but questioning the Resurrection undermines the very heart of Christian belief.

I'll parse the choir comment as a sign of devotion to the church, and not a claim to expertise.

I have to wonder what else Brown would actually be willing to write about if he considers the Resurrection to be "controversial." There's a respectable precedent for calling the Crucifixion a "scandal," which might qualify as a controversy of sorts, but is there anyone out there who thinks the jury's still out on the matter of Easter, whom orthodox Christians need concern themselves with?

Now a member of the B-Team!

By now you've probably noticed my Amateur Catholic graphic off to the right, there. I would have posted on it sooner, but, you know.

Rick Lugari, head honcho of the Amateur Catholic blogroll et al, said it was heartening to hear "'dirty papist' being muttered through clenched teeth in [his] direction." I agree, although my confrontations usually end with shocked disbelief. Actually, Rick's word was "heatening," but I presume he meant "heartening," although I confess I still sometimes take it personally when Mother Church is insulted in my presence.

I figured I qualified because the quality of my scholarship isn't terribly impressive. Maybe our good Mister Lugari would have been more impressed with my completely vacant list of regular readers. (; Eh, my work's modest enough to qualify, apparently. Now, if only I could say the same thing about my attitude....

Trans-hyperdulia

The Shrine of the Holy Whapping (see link in sidebar) recently posted an article about the Ebenezer Lutheran Church (aka Her Church). I'd heard about their "goddess rosary" but wasn't going to comment, until I saw this video.

The church seems very communal and group-building, neither of which is a bad thing of itself. You'll notice they don't have any footage of liturgical activity until approximately halfway through the video; I'm not sure if it's designed to sort of warm up the viewers with a montage of cheery social images before showcasing a priestess saying what looks like a mass slanted towards the "sacred feminine" or...not.

I'm not sure if they and Dan Brown are cut from the same cloth or one inspired the other's ecclesial schema or if it's a coincidence. I'm leaning towards a fad rationale.

I think my favorite part was the "active liturgy" on the part of the laity during worship; it wasn't just folks from the pews taking the place of the priestess during the blessing of the bread and what appeared to be merely water, like a cynic would expect in this post-conciliar era, but kids playing musical instruments, making drums and mosaics, and adults going on "photo treks." Maybe the treks were for something else.

Quoth the pastor (maybe I shouldn't call her a priestess, what with being nominally Lutheran):

Ebenezer Lutheran Church, which is also known as Her Church, has taken it upon itself to integrate the heart of feminism and Christianity, which we believe really are interchangeable.

Is true feminism, in essence, compatible with Christianity? Certainly. Is it interchangeable with Christianity? Uh, no; it's severely lacking. In today's postmodern era, I don't think you can turn a gender-based demographic struggle philosophy into a religion until you add the dimension of race-based struggle.

My least favorite part is touched on in the Holy Whapping combox. Drew of the Shrine had accused these Protestants of worshipping Mary, and a commenter disagreed, pointing to a total absence of references to the BVM, Mary Magdalene, or Martha. True, there are no explicit references to the honored women in our tradition at Ebenezer's web site, but in the video they have a brief clip of a recitation of whatever they turned the Hail Mary into, referring to a "goddess full of grace" and the "Holy Cosmic Mother of the Risen Christ."

I think the case for a critically blurred line can be made.

The other thing I want to know is where a congregation that small got such a large and well-appointed church.

News to me...

Apparently "homosexual" is no longer an acceptable term for people with same-sex attraction. This change in preference in the SSA community strikes me as odd, since historically it's a pretty clinical, neutral term, but apparently there are some who will argue with me over both my impression and my use of the word "clinical," since the American Psychiatric Assocation declared some time ago that SSA is not to be classified as a diagnosable mental disorder, but just as another expression of humanity, part of that great diversity that comprises the human species. Maybe it's not a widespread change of acceptable nomenclature, I only heard the assertion made once--I mean, the one about the change in preferred terminology; the APA bit I heard once before, not even a year ago, yet the source I have at hand says the APA published the decision in 1973--although I've been hearing "queer" used a little bit more lately than I did in the past, and the alphabet soup that covers for Gay, Lesbian, Other, Etc. keeps getting richer, but maybe I'm seeing two largely unrelated phenomena.

Excuse me while I dial my credulity and respect for the APA down a few notches.

It's not diagnosable? Is the APA trying to say it's not a distinct condition they should be identifying, even though the symptoms are obvious, at least to the person with SSA? Having SSA might be something worth factoring in during your observations or diagnosis of someone coming to see you as a psychologist, wouldn't it? The only alternative reading I can think of is that they mean it's not actually a disorder, which still wouldn't it make it a nonissue on the couch.

Isn't it a disorder, though? Is being disinclined to form species-perpetuating dyads a legitimate and natural variation in the phenome, an expression of a normal genotype (if it's genetic after all)? We're not talking about a trivial trait like hair color, or something you can chalk up to shyness. We're talking about something as functionally basic to being human as being born without testes or a uterus. Maybe it's neurochemical instead of anatomical (which would still be biochemical in origin, in all likelihood), maybe it's environmental like long-term abuse from a family member, but either way, it's a condition that yields no offspring, and all these other cases qualify as problems to be solved, or managed, so why is homosexuality excepted?

Producing offspring is part of any orthodox (ah, maybe there's my problem--I'm trying to be concrete and consistent) definition of life. Some may elect not to procreate, or may be prevented by external circumstances, but an inherent inability to do so, either physical or mental, logically must be disordered, medically as well as morally.

Why not just define diabetes or bipolar disorder as undiagnosable conditions? Maybe these conditions bring something good to the table. After all, folks with sickle cell anemia boast a higher resistance to malaria.

Oh, wait. SCA still has its own concrete drawbacks, as do radical shifts in mood and blood sugar.

Who's making these decisions? Do we also want to stop referring to people in hospitals as patients, and calling their illnesses diseases or vice-versa, in order to empower them to feel like nothing's wrong?

We all have our debilitating features. Some more than others, some more obvious than others. Saying it ain't so doesn't make it otherwise.

Prayer request

My dad got the results of a CT scan for colon cancer yesterday. He was diagnosed almost a year and a half ago, had surgery the Thanksgiving before last, and responded really well to chemotherapy. Three months ago he had a scan and it was clear--everyone was ready to say it was an actual cure, not just a hopeful case of remission. The most recent scan showed multiple spots on the liver (there were a few there originally, but they all were removed or had disappeared during chemo) around an inch across.

We don't know what it all means, especially after his recovery that even impressed the doctors, but his bloodwork also came back as abnormal, so it's probably not just an image artifact. We'll find out more when he actually goes to meet with his doctor, which I think is tomorrow.

Every prayer you'd be willing to throw our way would be most appreciated. If you want to trade special intentions with me, feel free to follow up with a prayer request for whatever's on your mind and heart, and I ask everyone reading to pray for you, too.

Arguments for abortion I've seen just this week, numbered for your convenience:

1. "[Pro-lifers] do not care that the landmark ruling [of Roe] has stood for over 30 years. Nor do they care that its overturn could threaten the legitimacy of the institution where a change in decision would clearly be due to a change in membership."
   
2. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers tend to argue on a superficial level--how frequent abortions are, the demographics of who has them, and how the fetus/embryo/blastocyst appears. The real issue is when the fetus, etc. becomes a human person entitled to equal protection before the law.
   
3. Newly fertilized ova are biological entities with human DNA in the same way as unfertilized gametes. Fertilization does not make it a person. A kidney cell contains the full genetic code of a person, so why isn't it considered a human being?
   
4. Personhood does not begin at the advent of any milestone in development, like when the heart starts beating or when the child begins to "look like a child." After all, personhood is not lost by grossly disfiguring accidents or debilitating diseases, or temporarily suspended during a heart transplant.
   
5. Humans that are merely fertilized ova are not persons, and claims that they are human persons because their human DNA prevents them from becoming anything else falls flat, for no one denies it.
   
6. Failed implantation of zygotes is morally equivalent to voluntary abortion, so why aren't we focusing on all those tragically killed innocent humans?
   

Responses, respectively numbered for your convenience:

1. Abolitionists did not much care for the "landmark rulings" on Dred Scott or Plessey, nor were they interested in the preservation of the institution of slavery, nor did they feel that if the membership of SCOTUS continued to favor institutionalized servitude, then they should have just given up.
   
2. Arguing about how "human" an embryo looks may be superficial, but many people continue to judge a book by its cover ("If it just looks like a blob of cells, then it can't be a person"). See item #4.
   
3. A gamete may contain demonstrably human DNA, but it only contains half of what it's supposed to. Thus, it either lacks the discrete humanity of a zygote, or it's some kind of haploid miracle or it falls far short of viability and miscarriage before abortion could even be considered is all but a certainty. A kidney cell, as the kidney containing it, is by definition part of the whole, not the whole of an entity. Removing a kidney does not dehumanize a person; the zygote is not an interchangeable part of a person, but can only be removed as a whole (indeed, there is no way to remove part of it without great risk of destruction) from the mother. There's nothing to distinguish it from, as a kidney cell can be distinguished from the whole organ or organism, except the entire mother. Some philosopher must have already tried to make or disprove arguments of this form, of what constitutes a part versus an essence. Anyone care to point me that way? Bueller?
   
4. I'm surprised by this point. Most people pick the detection of brain activity for their arbitrary criterion of personhood. I wonder how many of them consider pets to be people. A good point is raised, though: humanity is not lost with a decrease in our ability to judge a human by sight. What are we left with, though? We have to choose either conception, or an arbitrary point based on such things as viability or risk to the mother, and neither of the latter is particularly satisfactory. The former will converge on the moment of conception as technology improves--and we've already shown conception to be possible through externally applied technology--so it doesn't have any inherent ethical capacity. The latter will also decrease as technology improves, but it leaves unanswered the question of whether we're pitting the rights and responsibilities of a pregnant woman against anyone else's rights, so this point is contingent on other arguments, none of which I find moving, as you can imagine.
   
5. No one denies it because such a ridiculous claim would comprise too direct a means of forfeiting the debate on the account of psychosis. This claim isn't a stand-alone argument; "I say you're wrong, because no one disagrees with your proof, which I will not believe is valid." An alternative criterion for humanity or personhood is still needed.
   
6. I don't know how to stop the famines in Africa, either. Should I then not volunteer at the local soup kitchen? Maybe my example should be reversed--I have no idea how many zygotes are miscarried versus the number of abortions. Either way, there is a world of difference between failing, being unable, to prevent deaths, even a lot of them, and deliberately killing someone, innocent or otherwise.
   

Let me follow up...

Why's it matter, anyway? Don't people, at least in America, have the right to determine the direction and content of their own lives, even if they do make mistakes?

Sure. A diabetic also has the right to eat as much sugar straight from the bag as he could want. A blind man has the right to drive (well, the same entitlement to the privilege of driving as a sighted man; driving on public roads isn't a right) A woman has the right to be a priest.

See?

American jurisprudence may have a few things to suss out, but it's not the hook we hang this meat on. We all have certain capacities, certain charisms, and lack others. A mildly diabetic man could get by without medication if he didn't want to eat more sugar than he could stand, but he's not capable of reducing to the significantly different question of tooth decay like a man who happens to have a healthy pancreas. A blind man, through extraordinary hearing, might do a better job of keeping a car between the curbs than the many people who deposit their own vehicles in ditches, around trees, and all over other vehicles every day, but they're in no position to make an attempt under common circumstances. A woman may be highly capable of being a spiritual shepherd, but it's not an accident that Rome considers itself lacking the authority to extend Orders to them. In fact, we all lack the authority to circumvent the circumstances of our being by philosophical or legal fiat. Rights and privileges aren't a factor, it's the metaphysical authority, not simply the permission to exercise temporal power in an apparently similar way.

What about adoption, as long as we're here?

Homosexual couples might do a better job of raising kids than some heterosexual parents, estranged or together, but they're incapable of demonstrating the fullness of humanity in the way that a man and a woman as the primary parental figures in a child's life can.

Being gay isn't hurting anyone else, so why should I care, right? Okay, it doesn't really impact my life if you're gay, unless one of us chooses to make it so, but the same argument is made for smoking (I refuse to hold the marginal increase in my insurance rates over the heads of smokers), and no one really pretends that people make it to show that it's not actually harmful. It doesn't show it is harmful, either, but you don't get to use that argument for raising children until you show it isn't.

Oh, you say you have the right to raise your children as you see fit? Yes, you do, within other limits you won't disparage, but they're not your children.

Marriage isn't about having kids anyway, remember?

The purpose of marriage

What is it?

Well, there are two: union and procreation. The latter is often downplayed or trivialized by apologists for gay marriage, for obvious reasons, although I realize that the distinction between the inherent sterility of a homosexual union, and the apparent sterility of the union between a man and woman who are aged or have a medical condition, can be hard to appreciate.

Earlier this evening I read a critique of "conservative" marital policy that I found tellingly sad. None of the material was new to me, but it was pretty well capsulized, which you may have deduced by now is something I find motivating. It's not the best case I've found of "I'm so openminded I must be right, and evidence to the contrary is actually evidence of a conspiracy and/or the exception that proves the rule, just like all the other exceptions," but it was convenient.

The thesis was basically that the definition of marriage has been the volleyball of elitist, xenophobic, bigoted politicians throughout history, especially Christian ones as far as those of us in western culture are concerned. Things like "binding young girls from one family to some old man from another." I guess the unwashed masses only practiced the sort of informal marriage that secular progressives teach...oh, except that those relationships were usually based around love and an expectation of children (wait, those ideas are a "Judeo-Christian innovation," which makes it the oldest concept too progressive for modern minds to accept), instead of pragmatic statesmanship and perhaps the production of a single heir, like the far less frequent political marriages that are far more important because of their rarity. Is my irony showing yet?

I was amused to see the procreation criterion being disproven by the halo effect. "Conservatives," especially "good" Christian ones, used to have miscegenation laws for social control, not because Jews or blacks couldn't interbreed with whites and therefore shouldn't try; thus, homosexuals are only prohibited from marrying because someone wants to hold them down, not because it doesn't benefit society in any graceful way.

Well, I don't think it's up to you, me, or anyone in particular to decide exactly what function other peoples' marriages should serve.

I think someone's trying to make just such a decision. You know, I don't think anyone should decide what function roads or courts or skirt steaks are for, either. It should be a decision left to Other Individuals, and you should be careful in case you make a decision for yourself that Other Individuals don't like. We're so locked down by our cultural preconceptions. Maybe we can be like the beatniks and throw off our cultural preconceptions about hygeine, too. They were so free, their doctors had to virtually turn to the history books to diagnose diseases that were thought to be moot, if not actually eradicated.

This line of thought came from ISCA, if it matters to anyone. Well, the beatnik bit was my own embellishment, but I only borrowed it from somewhere else. I used to be impressed with the level of discourse, once the edges were worn off the novelty of people arguing with their intellectual equals and it was no longer just obnoxious flaming, but now most of the discussion is between caricatures of the impressive personas I remembered. Maybe I'm outgrowing it. I hope so. I'd rather burn bandwidth and wetware on something actually important, although in some ways it's a convenient microcosm whose pulse I can keep my thumb on.

I've still never seen a good reason why gay marriage should not be allowed.

Why do I have the feeling this guy never will, either?

A modest theory

Consider the decrease in vocations in America that appears to coincide with the decrease in serious respect for canon law and even some of the coarser points of theology that should have stuck with American Catholics after they finish their run through CCD.

Some suggest that the lukewarm, even blase lay attitudes about the church in this country, and the progressive, banal (insert your own adjectives) execution of liturgy and ecclesial and pastoral work have resulted in a decrease in the number of men recognizing and accepting priestly vocations.

I submit that it may in fact be the other way around. Maybe the priest shortage isn't a symptom of a church that's adrift, a church that would be heretical if it were honestly serious about the oddities advocated in the pulpit or demonstrated before the altar. Maybe the priest shortage is the medicine for it.

The problems with the Church in America are not limited to its parishes, nor to its dioceses. Heterodox and ambivalent pastors by and large come from seminaries that encourage moral and factual relativism and such. If it were my job to make priests and dole out other vocations, I would be making arrangements to minimize the enrollment at deviant or disobedient centers of formation.

Maybe that guest on NPR who thought the Church, if it couldn't survive the sex abuse scandal, would be replaced by something better, was half right after all. Just replace "the Church" with "the church in America" and read "something better" as "the Catholic Church."

The Sorrowful Mysteries

1. The Agony in the Garden

Jesus, taking a few of the Apostles with Him, went into the garden and prayed until He sweat, until He was clearly in anguish. Jesus boldly prayed to be spared His Passion, but submitted His will to that of the Father's. This mystery, along with the crowning with thorns and carrying of the cross, reflect the necessity of sacrifice, of service unto pain and death--suffering brought upon a king by his needful subjects, in their need for more than administration and leadership--for those who look to Christ as savior and king, and for those who look to us as Christians to guide and be an example to.

2. The Scourging at the Pillar

Our sins consign to us guilt and punishment, both temporal and eternal. While Pilate had Jesus whipped to satisfy the baser appetites of the mob rather than out of a properly motivated sense of justice, it shows us that we should not expect a free ride through life, and that justice is not extinguished by love and mercy, even though our salvation was brought to us gratuitously. Christ calls us all to mortifications of a sort, and asks us all to be like Simon of Cyrene in some way.

3. The Crowning with Thorns

In one of the cruelest parodies of His ministry, the Romans mocked Him and placed a crown of thorns upon his head. God is strongest in the weak, however, and confounds the proud by raising up the meek. The Romans acknowledge in a backhanded way Christ's kingship of the humble, the downtrodden, the ones who will be subjects in the only kingdom that matters. The king of the weak, and the king of the Jews, is also the king of kings.

4. The Carrying of the Cross

Christ carried His burden--our burdens, our sins, us--to Golgotha, because only He could. Simon's reluctant aid doubly reflects Christ sharing with us His Passion, as He will share His union with the Father with us in heaven, and the stilling of our own concupiscence.


5. The Crucifixion and Death of Jesus

Christ was rejected by the world but still saved it. He was the sacrifice, and through the instrumentality of the Romans, also the priest. We cannot save ourselves, and will only crucify God (which, without His resurrection, will leave only us as the dead ones) when left to our own devices, but God deigns to work through us, out of love and as a sign of the good we're supposed to do for each other.