I should never have given my boss my personal cell phone number....

He always could have gotten it from HR, but now it's all "Are you coming in Saturday?" and "Can you be here Sunday at nine AM?"

Granted, he's less demanding of my time than past bosses, but they just demanded long hours and didn't talk about it; now, if I say "No," then I'm the bad guy.

Caveat operator:  don't let them think you're negotiating casual overtime (if you're exempt) or on-call/no-advance-planning scheduling.

I even had to tell my boss once that I refused to work Sundays because I can normally get the work I am personally responsible for in fewer than six days ("You shouldn't have to work Saturdays," he said; "I know I shouldn't," I replied, "but the way things stand right now, I nevertheless do"), and if the people who "need" me to assist or cover for them a little can't get that taken care of in the 86% of the week I'm in the office, then they need to plan better.  He agreed, but he still asks.

Rachel Dolezal is...

...you know, I don't have the energy to attempt to peer into her soul.  She's not the first white girl to wish she were something else, but whatever.

Can we just please all admit that this emperor has no clothing, and move on with civilization?

So my employer recently got bought by a much larger company, one with deep enough pockets and enough stability that it recognizes the value in employee engagement even when we don't hit our revenue targets.

One of the manifestations is a monthly newsletter.  It's just a four-page glossy little thing written by the employees; articles range from good business and manufacturing principles to informative and acculturative stuff about the new parent company to important things about what we do at our facility.  All well and good, if often predictable enough to warrant just a quick skim.

Then there was a cover page article by our new plant manager, imported from the parent company.

Wouldn't you know it, it's about how they value Inclusiveness and Diversity.  In the opening paragraphs there even was the line"Diversity and inclusiveness is at the forefront of everything we do."

Really?  We're a manufacturing facility.  Diversity and inclusiveness may inform everything we do, but to put it ahead of production of quality product is to place the cart in front of the horse.  Are there hourly employees not getting scheduled to work because we shun them?  No.  Do employees of different races work well together?  Actually yes, because they are united in their outrage at the former, draconian owners and the hostile, dysfunctional legacy they left; although I think the new owners hoped for something a little higher minded.

Driving these things for their own sake?  You won't want to do it the way it's been done before now.  First pass yield is bad, customer satisfaction is worse.  We can pat ourselves on the back for our acceptance of each other while we wait in line at the unemployment office, if we have any more never-hit-our-revenue-target quarters like all the ones we've had since we got acquired.

The article went on with a paragraph that went something along the lines of "Diversity of talent...and apropos of nothing, we're pretty smug about our transgender employee group."

With what, two members, at different sites?  It's a big company but it's not that big.  Diversity of talent, if it means "broad base of expertise," I get; but putting this stuff together?  Props to them for coming up with a name that is a pronounceable acronym, but how does having your genitals surgically mutilated and making a wardrobe shift afford you fresh insights into our engineering problems?  And why is it anybody's business?  I'm not an especially private person, but I don't make a point of dragging my social proclivities into work discussions; apparently I act straight enough that people who would be inclined to make an assumption are comfortable doing so, but then again, I do happen to be middle aged and single, and even in this day and age you can interpret that differently.

See what they did?  It's a bait and switch, or in the political arena it would be a caption bill.  They start talking about one thing, and then take a half step to the side and make it about something related but distinct, all the while pretending they're still talking about the first thing.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Like when they say "Why don't you want gay people to get married?  They should be allowed to love whomever they want."

You can have a reason for refraining from extending legal coupling benefits to pairs who are not in a position to bring the next generation of citizens into society, and hence do not have heroic need for such benefits.  But permitting or banning how people feel about each other?  No way to control that, and in fact there have never been laws against  people's feelings, so now it seems like you're the one trying to change society for the worse, and you might as well give up trying.

I just hope our company is inclusive and tolerant enough not to fire me if I can keep my mouth shut about not changing my performance expectations of the woman from the lab who recently started growing a beard and insisting everyone call her Bill.

Although I will be interested in watching people grapple with the issue of male athletes who want to "identify" as female so they can compete in women's leagues and divisions.

Why is it that people who criticize the Church for admonishing people to help starving and destitute families while preaching against contraception and abortion, themselves never spare a second thought  for helping starving and destitute families who already have children?  Whom are they really trying to help?

Why is it that, nowadays...

...when a couple of cops beat up a witness or a suspect only tenuously tied to a crime, the media call it a human rights violation, instead of the less abstract "assault" or "police brutality?"

I actually don't prefer to focus on recent events...

...but naturally I could not resist this.

A nine year old boy was suspended for bringing "the One Ring" to school and "threatening" to make a friend disappear.
Just let that sink in for a minute
I could see administrators suspending a child for bringing a gun to school, whether or not he understood the real threat it presented; and even a ouija board at a Christian school; but a toy replica of a fictional piece of jewelry? An obviously playacting "threat" that would have caused no real harm (except to the wearer, if the administrators had the faintest grasp of the One Ring's inherent malevolence)?  Sounds like they're the ones who can't tell fantasy from reality.
This child was suspended twice before, once for referring to a black classmate as "black" and once for bringing a children's book to school that contained a sketch of a pregnant woman.  It was for an astronomy unit, but I guess the book Nazi was asleep at the switch when the kid got the book and when, presumably, his classmates looked elsewhere in the book and noticed...well, I have no idea if the illustration seemed risqué or if there were a depiction of a coherently formed fetus that seemed pro-life or something.
No wonder they're hiding behind some confidentiality policy instead of defending or explaining their actions. Clearly this boy is perfectly normal. It's the adults who have issues. 

Chincy bits from around the 'Net

So I'm minding my own business, snooping around my usual haunts, when I find a couple odd things I couldn't resist commenting on.  First:

What I find so amusing is that Christians will criticize Islam for promoting slavery, complete destruction of their enemies, etc. when the Bible says almost the exact same things.

This one got my attention because the critic doesn't even go so far as to say "Well, Crusades and Galileo and the Inquisition; that's the same as 9/11 and what's happening to the Chaldeans in Iraq."  He only goes so far as to say "Sure, Christians might condemn Islam because some Muslims of dubious fidelity can justify their actions by the Q'ran, but the Bible has examples of violence and human rights violations too!"

So what?  My response was "Show me the Christians today who kill their daughters for being raped."  The Crusades didn't happen because some "warrior pope" noticed that Psalm 150 gleefully endorses smashing the skulls of an enemy's children.  They happened because--and I realize I'm grossly oversimplifying, so bear with me--the Seljuks replaced the Arab hegemony in the Levant with something that took a much dimmer view of European pilgrims and traders.

All those nasty Bronze Age values taught in the Bible?  Old Testament.  Not to say they don't have their own significance, but there was never a time during Christianity when that stuff was considered the right and proper behavior of a Christian.  Unless you count the 21st century GOP.  Maybe that's what is inspiring this critic.

So yeah, the response to people who criticize terrorism and dhimmitude doesn't even rise above "Well, your past is checkered!"  Maybe so, but we know better now.  If opposing terrorism and dhimmitude is also wrong, then what's right?  Or is it just wrong because we're the ones doing it?  Do you have some better ideas, or are you just going to sit up there and gloat about how you and your intellectual tradition have never been uncharitable to people outside your in-group?


Second:

Atheism isn't an ideology.  It is the default position for understanding the world.

Okay, so atheism is your ideology of choice.  Good to know.

All I can figure here is that this critic soaks himself in a positively atheistic scientism.  He went on to say something about how belief in an afterlife is not exempt from science, because "the soul survives death and goes to exist in some new state outside the universe" is "vaguely scientific" because it describes something that is partly in nature.

No, it isn't scientific, unless you are the one who is vague about science; and not every phenomenon in the natural world is subject to science.  Some of those phenomena can be cataloged obliquely, but science won't reveal to you what they truly are.  If you're not sure, try to calculate for me the difference between the density of boogie woogie at STP, using the van der Waals equation, and the relativistic length of umami traveling at 0.92c. 

Whether the soul occupies or animates the body during life is a philosophical question.  Scientists may see the change when a soul departs from a body, but the sciences don't.

I think this distinction gets overlooked a lot.  Most scientists, believers and otherwise, just go about their business doing research and pimping for funding and whatnot.  A few atheistic evangelists who happen to have a STEM degree or pursue science as their day job or avocation then get credit for being "prominent and well-respected scientists who don't believe in God."  Okay, that's a half dozen any American might be able to name off the top of his head, compared to thousands or millions who don't sit down each morning at their lab benches and say "Okay, I do/don't believe in God, so this is the experiment I'm going to do to prove it for my next book."

Optics and theater

"Part of this job is also the theater of it," Obama said in reference to the presidency on Meet The Press.  “Well, it’s not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters. And I’m mindful of that.”  This all in reference to the "optics"--I presume a technical term for how the public or the media would be inclined to interpret certain juxtapositions of facts and ideas--of the president having a press conference about the circumstances surrounding journalist James Foley's brutal murder right before going out for a round of golf.

To be honest, he's right about the theater, at least to a degree.  If nothing else, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; Dubya was made fun of for flippant remarks about the War on Terror in the middle of his backswing, and I'm glad to see that there's not a lot of "Bush did it!" noise being made.

More to the point, there's an aspect of morale to leadership, of setting an example and displaying comportment that respects the dignity of a leader's charges and the weight of his responsibilities.  People, bearing their own inherent dignity and those pesky things we call feelings, need to be led and respected as whole humans so that they can appreciate what their leaders ask of them and so that they can see they are appreciated by their leaders.

This is true in different ways for different situations.   I worked for one company where the subliminal message from management was "you're a lousy excuse for a human being and you better be grateful for the charity I show you every payday, and every day that you come to work."  It wasn't entirely ineffective because even people who don't respond well to insults recognize the implicit threat of unemployment and were motivated to stay off the radar of the more destructive managers.  I worked for another that seemed autistic by comparison but had pretty much the same dynamic; they didn't care if you had a good reason for not wanting to do something (whether it was telling somebody at three o'clock that they would have to stay until ten pm that night for a special project they decided had to be run on the second shift, or telling a rep from Quality to sign off on bad product so they could ship it), they just saw "people who help get product out the door, who help the company make its numbers, who help the company stay in business" and "people who make decisions that cost the company money."  To say this view of the world is two-dimensional would be overly generous, but it wasn't entirely ineffective because moving product is the nuts and bolts of business, whether or not anything else matters.  Even in the military, where complaining about your feelings getting hurt would be seen as even more preposterous than the nominal leaders I've personally experienced, there is some effort to instill in soldiers a sense of loyalty--of mutual loyalty--and an appreciation for what soldiers do and for what they are asked to sacrifice for their country.

Okay, I'm going off track a little.  I want to come back to Obama focusing more on his contrition for bad theater than for that just being a symptom of bad leadership.  I've had this sense for a while, especially with his presidency but on and off throughout politics for as long as I can remember, that politics is known to politicians as just the art of managing expectations and appearances, of getting people to think what you want while you go off to do something else that you want.  And again, that's true to a degree; it's difficult to do your job when it's scrutinized so closely, and especially when there's so much going on with a job like that that even today there's too much misinformation for real transparency.  But it reminds me of a line from the Bard:

If we shadows have offended,

 Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not

reprehend:

If you pardon we will mend.

Else the Puck a liar call.

Give me your hands, if we be friends, 

And Robin shall restore amends.

Is this where we are?  Is this how bad things are, that when the president errs, he need only apologize for providing stale bread or a circus with a lousy trapeze act, and we're content to ignore his other malfeasances?  

I didn't think we were.  I thought part of the increased hostility between the reds and the blues was that they speak different languages, indeed use language for different reasons, not so much to communicate but to persuade and manipulate.  Hence comments like "I was for the war before I was against it" or "I didn't inhale" as if no explanation for a change of opinion or position were needed once the politician had so charitably thrown a bone of empathy to voters across the aisle, or campaigning on buzzwords like "hope" and "change" instead of a platform consisting of at least a few relatively concrete ideas we would get to learn about and discuss before getting some omnibus bill railroaded through Congress.

My examples are admittedly one-sided, because I am not entirely without bias, but it takes more people than either party has to maintain a facade of this magnitude for this long, so I'm not trying to play favorites.  

I just want to know:  have we gotten this bad as a society that it's sufficient to us for our leaders to keep up appearances, and then apologize for not doing so when we fail, with little concern being paid to accomplishing things worth accomplishing?

Maybe so.  Maybe this goes hand in hand with being a society that has evolved to where it wrings its hands over straight white men acknowledging attraction to pretty women in public, whereas not two hundred years ago the same were killing natives like varmints.  Maybe we don't have Washingtons or Churchills anymore because we don't take the serious things seriously anymore.  We're still the biggest actor on the world stage, at least for now, but we don't have the stomach to win another world war and we don't have the leaders who could steel us to do it.  

I mean, yeah, before Churchill there was Chamberlain, but....

The next time someone asks you if or why you don't support a woman's right to choose, don't answer the question.  Try saying something like this:

"I can't help thinking that when people ask me that, they're not being honest, but rather are trying to set some kind of rhetorical trap so they can use any answer I give them to prop up either the assertion that they have support for abortion amongst the hypocrites who claim to be pro-life but really don't want to see abortion go away, or the assertion that we're really the villains in some Marxist morality play who want to keep women barefoot, pregnant, and away from the polls.  But keep in mind that abortion to us is a legal issue above and beyond any legal considerations for which women are the sole subject.  You might as well be a plantation owner in 1860 asking an abolitionist whether or not he supports the owner's right to choose to employ the labor of slaves or free men."  

Sure, they could make the argument that the plantation owner shouldn't have to bend to the whims of Washington, but whatever evidence currently supports that argument takes a back seat to the grave injustice that was chattel slavery, and they know it.

It is a fact that slavery, as an institution, was first and most thoroughly stamped out of civilization, and most effectively remains at bay, by Christian nations.

This is not obvious from the New Testament, with Paul even admonishing slaves to be good servants and masters to treat their slaves as brothers; but at the same time these notions were planted as the seeds of slavery's demise.

There are some who may wish to point out that in the American Civil War, many Christians fought for the Confederacy, and so either formally supported retaining slavery or at least were willing to tolerate it even though the tide of history had shown that a nation supported by a class of imposed servitude was not inevitable.

Disregard these people.  They are trolls.

If they honestly don't see the difference, remind them of how the rest of the world did not oppose slavery in some form or other, and how even in the now-free Christian nations, it took time to win hearts and change laws and the ways of living.

If their only criticism is that, compared to a world full of slavery, only Christians abolished the practice, but had to struggle to do so, then what point do they think they can make instead?  Do they have any position to stand on but the anonymized residue of Christian values?

The next time someone comes to you with an argument about redistributing wealth, and you hedge a bit, and they retort with "Hey, we're not trying to take what you've got to punish you for being rich.  It's just that we want something off the top shelf, and you're the only one tall enough to get it!" Tell them that it's your shelf they want something off of.

I'm not going to say we shouldn't help the poor; we should.  But there is more than one way to give to them, and while they all have their place, redistributing wealth does not impart the same momentum to the economy as creating wealth does.

There is the preferential option for the poor, and there is the universal destination of goods.  But there is also private property because in this world we tend to be better at managing things we are directly responsible for.  The person who wants to give away stuff on your shelf doesn't understand that, and I don't want someone like that trying to run a charity.

Prayer request for my sister

Please pray for my sister. She and her family just moved across the country. They were about to close on a house but just found out her bank account is empty.

She's never been rich, but she's no spendthrift either. Being broke is not something she would just let happen, but she really needs this to work out.

The matter is under investigation. I pray that they find the money, and find it soon. This house is perfect for her family

Saint  Joseph and Blessed Mother Mary, pray for them!  Saint Michael, protect them! Heavenly Father, we ask You for Your help in Your Son's name. 

So, the Hobby Lobby case was argued before SCOTUS....

According to the news report I heard on the radio yesterday, the supporters of Obamacare argued that if family-owned businesses are allowed a conscience exception here, it will open a veritable Pandora’s box of private businesses attempting to get exempted from obeying the HHS mandate on moral grounds.

It’s called establishing precedent.  Or, perhaps “re-establishing;” until recently, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone in this country that we shouldn’t presume that liberty and individual conscience to be given priority in how people can run their lives, both at work and at play or worship.  So what's the problem?

One of these things is not like the other...

So I'm in a colleague's office Saturday (yes, Saturday...yes, I'm looking for a new job) and he pulls his web browser up to show me some pictures of a dog breed he's interested in.  His home page is some news headline site.  I didn't catch which one it was.

What I saw from the headlines really made me wonder about our priorities--or at least the priorities of who passes for journalists these days.

Most of the top stories were about the Olympics:  who took gold, what America got, and so on.  Another one or two were about all the violence in Syria.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that because especially with the Olympics on, news about the Levantine powder keg has been perhaps not where it should be.

Okay, so maybe old news is no news, "dolphins still missing" and all that.  But still, if nothing else, the Christian genocide in the Middle East gets almost as much attention as the back-alley-type abortion mills that we were warned would crop up if abortion were never legalized (but, it turns out, cropped up anyway).  But I digress.

So there are all these articles about the Olympics, and a few about violence in Syria, and one other one. What was that one about?

Some actress turns out to be a lesbian.

Wow.  That's really on par with a major, peaceful, international event; and with violence in the Middle East?  Color me dissenting.

Okay, I know that in this day and age it's still sometimes to explain why, for example, your parents may never have grandchildren.  I don't mean to trivialize that or any other particular reason.  In fact, just the opposite.

Part of the reason it's still sometimes tough to talk about your sexuality in public?  It's because sexuality is not a public matter.  It's normally addressed discreetly because it's such an important and often delicate topic.  Everybody poops, too, but that's not an excuse for you to do it in public.  And I don't want to see any pedantic criticisms about me comparing sexuality to defecation; you'll notice first that I didn't specify any kind or sort of sexuality, and you'll notice also that I'm only pointing out that they are both discreet topics, which any lucid adult will acknowledge without getting hung up on any differences or similarities that I am not bringing up at all.

I realize a lot of this is part of a concerted effort to normalize homosexuality, to get people used to the idea that it's out there, it's everywhere, it's natural and normal and no big deal.  Granted, that's going to be tough when it makes the headlines every time someone well-known or a close relative of someone well-known comes out; and when people introduce themselves in irrelevant situations by "Hi, I'm So-and-so, and I'm gay."  I don't care.  It doesn't matter.  Are you interviewing housemates and are worried about the drama of renting a room to a bigot?  Okay, that's worth considering.  Did your pushy mother and father compel you to go on a blind date with someone they think will be compatible enough with you to get them the aforementioned grandchildren?  Okay, good to get that out in the open right up front so you're not wasting each other's time.

Otherwise?  It's not news, pal.  It just isn't.  Word's going to get out enough when the gossip rags start mentioning actress A being more than a little chummy with actress B.

You know who else introduces themselves by "Hi, I'm So-and-so, and I'm X?"  Alcoholics.  But they don't do it for the acceptance of everyone else.  They do it to admit it to themselves.  And they don't have the media embedded in their AA meetings.

Even the famous ones.

I was thinking and reading about Obamacare earlier today and I was suddenly struck by the parallels with the housing bubble:  a whole industry forced to make bad financial decisions for the alleged good of the less fortunate, without concern for how it would affect the less fortunate or the industry in the long run (economic LeChatelier's Principle, anyone?  You can't force a whole country to pretend nothing's different because changes are being made for a good cause).

The only defense I've heard against wiping the slate clean and starting over with deliberate care (other than "all those actuaries who had to scramble to accommodate recent changes will need to start all over, again")?  "Defunding the ACA would have a greater negative impact."

Maybe so, in the short run.  In the long run?  I can think of things a lot worse than both Obamacare functioning only as advertised and things being exactly as they were before.

It's Halloween. Go ahead and have fun.

Halloween.  Short for All Hallow's Eve, or the vigil of All Saints Day.  Perhaps more transparently in Christmas Eve and the Easter vigil, celebrating a holiday the night before is certainly not some inherent mockery of the holiday.  If you lived in Detroit, you'd recognize that devil's night was the night was the night before.

Don't sweat any real or alleged pagan roots of the holiday.  Some trappings of Easter and Christmas are pagan too, and people know not to get upset because bunnies and evergreens are innocuous.

Heck, "Harvest festivals" are more pagan than Halloween; firstly because paganism isn't identical with satanism, it is--as Mark Shea puts it--mankind trying to reach the divine via imagination, which is informed by such larger-than-man phenomena as the changing of seasons; secondly because there's a world of difference between offering thanks or appeasement to Ceres and making a celebration out of "where, O Death, is thy sting?" But either way, pagans have harvests and contemplate their eternal destiny as much as Christians, and that doesn't make them satanic, it just makes them human.

We have nothing to fear from or on the holiday itself because death has been conquered.  All the macabre imagery is there to remind us that death (and yes, evil) are not to be feared.  The devil hates laughter and not being taken seriously; what better way to thwart his two-pronged attack of being either feared as some God-rivalling eater of souls or a human abstraction we don't need God's help to fight, than by acknowledging such a thing is real and then not giving it power over you?

To be fair, I'm not advocating glutting yourself on gorn, or saying the opportunity to dress up a something naughty is justification to do something particularly immodest (there was a comedian whose show I caught part of one time who had a routine that went something like "'What are you supposed to be dressed up as?' 'A witch.'  'Yeah, if she was a hooker.'" If you remember who it was, let me know in the comments); and I'm not saying it's a good idea to use ouija boards this one night of the year.  Like I've said, the devil is real.

He's real, but he only has the power you and God allow him to have.  Dressing up like a zombie is not opening yourself up to the demonic; that is a superstitious attitude, or at least a scrupulous one.  If you can't stomach it in one sense or another, I'm not saying you have to, but feel free to dress up as a saint, or a robot, or a Rubik's Cube (or a skeleton--everybody's got one).  It's not some imitation-is-the-highest-form-of-flattery thing; that completely misses the point:  it's a parody.  "It looks to me like something bad"--either a costume or the practice--"therefore the worst possible interpretation must be true" is the same argument I face from iconoclasts about veneration of the saints, and it's wrong when they make it, too.

Also, ah loves meh some canday.

News penetrability of the pro-choice side of things

I was driving to the East Coast this week for business when I caught part (alas, not all; I would have loved to hear the whole thing) of a show where Abby Johnson, pro-life activist and former Planned Parenthood employee, was a guest on an upstate New York NPR radio station.

The show's host, whose name I didn't catch, reminded would-be callers to keep things respectful, and so the one call I heard was from a guy who was quite civil but seemed very concerned that Abby Johnson might be willing to relegate poorer women seeking abortions in an era after Roe v. Wade were overturned (since richer women could more easily travel to other abortion-friendly countries) to resorting to the much defamed back alley abortions.

Johnson pointed out that the statistics on back alley abortions before 1973 were grossly inflated, as had been admitted by the former abortionist (who also had had a change of heart) who inflated the statistics.  She then gave the example of a woman--her name was given, but I don't remember it and the Google results are sketchy, so if you know please post it in the comments--who went in for an abortion to a clinic, and afterwards continued to hemorrhage for four hours while the clinic didn't call for an ambulance, and the woman died from blood loss waiting at the clinic.  Following that up with the example of Kermit Gosnell, Johnson pointed out that illegal back-alley clinics don't get much worse than what he was doing.

The show's host then said that she thought she might have to go into the other room to help her sound engineer pick his jaw up off the floor.

It made me wonder:  why?  Did he not know this kind of thing went on?  Did he just not follow the abortion issue very closely, or did he only pay attention to information sources that believe that women dying of complications from abortion distracts from the "true and consistent compassion" message?

I pray it's the latter.  But either way, there's a lot of ignorance to be overcome.

More hot air

So Democrats are all cranky about Republicans trying to starve the federal budget in order to stop Obamacare before it gets entrenched in American society.  They’re talking like Republicans are hostage takers who shouldn’t be appeased, for fear of what they’ll demand next time.

I suppose, also, that the Republicans were asking for it.  When the bill was being discussed, the Democrats would say things like “you’ll have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it,” and would get responses like “I hope they’ll change the things I disagree with, but I’m voting for it anyway.”

It’s more than a little silly, since we’ve had budgetary crises resolved after the government shut down on more than one occasion in recent history with no collapse of civilization or explosion of galaxies, but I am concerned about the elevation of the threat language (see also the recent abrupt introduction of “war on women” talk regarding the Vatican’s longstanding and unchanging teachings on abortion and contraception), about how the landscape has apparently changed from conservatives and liberals being neighbors who could negotiate with each other over differences of opinion on how to achieve goals held in common, to viewing each other as alien powers incapable of dialog who each could only hope to modify the other's behavior.

That’s what alarms me.  Talk isn’t just transparently manipulative and senile to the hypocrisy of the speaker, it’s hostile:  we talk about Islamist terrorist groups this way.  What’s next? 

The crowding out of childhood

As Mark Shea says, show me a culture that despises virginity, and I'll show you a culture that despises children.

Case #1:  Montana 14-year old Cherice Moralez is raped the first of several times by a teacher at her school, 35 years her senior.  The kind of person who had loved life and living, her mood deteriorated along with her grades, and within a month of her 17th birthday, she kills herself.  The judge, asserting that Moralez was equally in control of the situation along with her attacker, handed down a sentence of 30 days.  The age of consent in Montana is 14.  
I've heard of precocious juveniles accused of heinous crimes being tried as adults, but this is the first time I've heard of it for the victim of a crime.  The purpose of consent laws are in part to protect children who are not quite as mature as they think, from adults who think they are more mature than they are, and from adults who may be deterred by the force of law and to prosecutes adults who aren't, who would defend themselves with arguments like "She seemed older/more mature" or "she wanted to."  I wonder what this judge had in mind...you know, having actually gone to law school and all that.
Case #2:  Miley Cyrus does an obscene reprisal of a twerking video she made several months ago, showing the whole world that, just like all those girls before her who used to star in Disney sitcoms, she's not some wholesome tween anymore (if she ever was).  
Granted, she hasn't been a teen star in a while, but Hannah Montana is still her claim to fame.  I get that being typecast can kill a career, but it's not like we haven't seen this to varying degrees before (remember Fergie and Britney Spears).  In fact, working against the relatively wholesome model for the girls of America by doing something outlandish is almost a cottage industry for Disney girls, so it's sort of typecasting in itself.  Maybe the reason they keep trying harder and pushing the envelope younger and younger is audiences (the creepy old guys and the media peddlers, anyway) can always say"Yeah, we were titillatingly scandalized when we forgot that your predecessor had achieved her majority by the time she pulled a stunt like this; what are you going to offer us?"
She didn't even look that good.  She's not an unattractive woman, but they way she was done up?  Lots of skin contrasted to her androgynous mid-80s styling (which wasn't even a good look in the 80s) and uncomfortable facial expressions.  What kind of reaction is that supposed to elicit?
Case #3:  Creepy back-to-school ad campaign from some clothing store that will remain nameless because I've blocked it out.  The one where they show not just tweens but even kids with single-digit ages worrying about what kind of impression they want to make.  I’m not sure it’s bad to depict kids knowing they have some influence over how others perceive them, but it is strange to me to see kids that young being--no, acting--so savvy, and I am sure it’s not good that it’s teaching kids “other people’s opinions of me are worth worrying over,” even if it weren't just as leverage to get kids to manipulate their parents into buying them all the clothes the popular kids are going to be wearing.  Okay, others' opinions are important to the extent that you have to deal with other people, but nine year olds creating and projecting an image that you can put a label on?  That they can demand on the grounds that it will help them be more successful and likable than their parents were?  Come on.  They should hardly be recognizing it when their older siblings do that.

Prayer request

For my brother in law, and his family; for his job and his relationship with my sister.

The job he had for most of their marriage was not a well paying one, but they were saving money on day care by him going in to work very early and then coming home shortly before my sister would leave for the closing shift at her store, sort of a tag team arrangement.  After a few years it was starting to wear on all of them, with my niece's demeanor changing and my sister getting stress related illnesses.

Finally, last year a former boss of his asked him to apply for a position with his new company, one that sounded like it was created with him in mind.  It wasn't everything he hoped, but it was something he seemed well enough suited for him, and they had to make some kind of change, so my sister quit her job and they moved across the country.

A few months later it comes out that his boss seems to have adopted a "sink or swim" policy; he's leaving my brother in law to figure things out on his own, on the grounds that he'll learn it better, but it's to the point where he can hardly get ahold of his boss, and when he e-mails him, his boss waits until he leaves his desk and then leaves a note for him.

He's not the only one who feels this way; one of his other coworkers feels adrift and suspects their boss likes to travel on business to avoid whatever's going on at home or at least the home office, and has trouble delegating.

I've had bosses who had their own struggles at work before.  In the worst case, it cost me my job and then it cost him his (I can't blame him entirely, I wasn't quite ready for a job like that, but some timely mentoring might have made the difference).  So let's pray for his boss, too.

And this is weighing on the family as well.  Their kids--I'm back on my niece and nephew again--are doing better now than when he and my sister were doing the tag-team job thing where they're only all together about twenty minutes a day, but now my sister is home with the kids instead of being the breadwinner, which she's growing into, but my brother in law isn't used to having to shoulder all the financial responsibility alone.  I'm sure there's more going on that I'm just not hearing about, too.

Please pray, also, that he comes back to the church.  He's nominally Catholic but is pretty lukewarm; she goes to church every Sunday, but goes alone.

Abortion, the battle from on the ground

You sometimes see me post an example of something ludicrous and alarming and say "this is what we're up against."  These posts, while highlighting specific examples of whatever the issue at hand is, tend to have an abstract angle to them; a pro-choice politician may be saying what he personally believes, but being a politician his actions will tend to affect people more conceptually than personally.

I mentioned my un-PC coworker a few days ago.  In the conversation he was having with some of his other coworkers who are pretty liberal (I'm currently residing in a very blue state, so we're all soaking in it), the talk somehow turned to abortion.  My coworker said that, while he is perfectly happy with prevention, he won't countenance abortion especially when used solely as birth control.

I think he used the word "pro-abortion" at this point, because one of the others denied being pro-abortion, but rather was pro-choice...and that if she had a twelve year old daughter who was molested by some guy and ended up pregnant, the first thing she would do would be to drive her to an abortion clinic.

"So she doesn't get a choice."
"No!  At that age she's not mature enough to understand the consequences."
"What if she doesn't want the abortion?  Would you at least discuss it with her?"
"No.  She's not capable yet of making an informed decision."

Okay, she's a minor and the parent gets the last word on medical decisions; even the law agrees with this, except when the situation is reversed.  But the hypothetical daughter is 12, not an idiot; she's going to have an opinion, despite having been raised by an "I'll choose who has abortions in this household" mother, it might not be the same, and she's at least going to want to feel like her feelings and preferences are being considered before they're overruled.

This; this is really what we're up against.  People who have listened to the rhetoric and already made up their minds, who don't believe in Choice as a virtue and civic right to be protected so much as they believe abortion is just a means to some other end, who are going to vote for politicians and laws that will let them pursue those other ends without inconvenience.

This is the battle we have to fight:  not just beating with rhetoric the sin-darkened intellects of talking heads who themselves may only be using the abortion issue to achieve some other end, but breathing on the embers of conscience in the people who both who are on the fence or see abortion as a necessary evil, and those who have inclined themselves to using the last resort of abortion so cavalierly that it is the first resort.

We have to win hearts.  You can get a little traction by winning arguments, at least trying to plant seeds, but it's such a charged topic, like evangelization itself, that if you come after them with logical guns a-blazing, they'll retreat into emotional counterarguments that you can't touch.  The woman who said she would choose abortion for her underage daughter no matter what walked out of the room before I could add anything to the suggestion that her daughter's feelings should be considered whether or not her own choice would be.  The topic might come up again and I might have another chance to play the "kindler, gentler conservative" next to my other coworker, but it might not.

But I'm still curious:  if someone says "I'm not pro-abortion, I'm pro-choice," what does he think someone admitting to being pro-abortion would say differently?  That he just wanted to kill babies for the sake of killing?

As a nation, we turned a corner yesterday.

I'm not sure which bothers me more, the fact that SCOTUS decided that no one has any business opposing gay marriage in California when Californian legislators can't be bothered to defend traditional marriage, or the fact that POTUS has merely promised that he would refrain from trying to bring to heel any dissenting groups.

I concede to painting with an overly broad brush.  I just had to read the verbiage about California residents not having standing to oppose the overturn of Proposition 8 several times before I gave up trying to see how the logic was not actually applied in reverse.  Would people with same-sex attraction be permitted to participate in the debate if they opposed gay marriage, or would they also be told that they don't have a right to promote their opinions or reasoned arguments because they're on the wrong side of history?  How tidy:  you're on the winning team or you're not allowed to play.

As for the president, well, I've seen him promise not to abuse his power in the past.  One time, he even said he wasn't going to get into the whole gay marriage thing.  Now he's reassuring Christians that they will be able to indulge their own bigotry undisturbed in private.  Of course, he won't be able to stamp out every last vestige of orthodox morality, that's too vast and tedious a task to bother with, but there are terms for an announcement like this.  In sparring, it's called a telegraph.  In literature, it's foreshadowing.  In naval warfare, it's a shot across the bow.  

I do think it's true that there's a supernatural conspiracy here, and possibly not a human one on top of it; and thus I agree that ultimately gay marriage is a vehicle to persecute the Church.  What scares me on this matter is I cannot imagine the circumstances in which homosexuals will be thrown under the bus when (that is, how) they cease to be useful to that end.

I wish people had some perspective.  Gay people have never been banned from marriage; they just don't have the right to marry absolutely anyone they wish.  This prohibition is in place for all of us.  Romance literature is chockablock with stories about unrequited or thwarted love.

"Why, Ed, don't you want people to marry whomever they love?"

Setting aside the question of whether the person they love loves them back and wants to be married, the government has no truck with whom someone does or does not love.  Marriage is to provide a stable environment for raising children, and well-raised children make for a healthy nation, so the government is wise to promote that.

Stray into emotional territory, and you open the door wide to abuse.  I promise you, there is nothing the government can do in applying itself to the emotional domain that is not going to be abusive.

Finally, an anecdote illustrating the "ruthless narcissism" Mark Shea describes comprising this whole movement.

I have a coworker who is terribly fond of using politically incorrect humor. He loves talking about cooking meat and killing animals in front of one of our technicians who is an on-again, off-again vegan; he talks in front of his female coworkers about how he orders his wife to do this and orders her not to do that, and how women shouldn't be allowed to do various things; when talking to one of our black technicians, he often refers to "your kind." He doesn't mean a word of it and he doesn't offend any of the people he teases (trust me, they dish it right back). But this morning, he was asked if he had talked to the sole admitted lesbian in the office. She's a sweetheart, but he said "What, are you crazy?  I'm not stupid!"

Some people just want to mind their own lives, and when they do it really is nobody's business, but it

Take a lesson from Evangelicals, abortion clinic bombers, and Phil Plait:  you're not going to prick consciences and win hearts and minds by being a jerk.  For every George Takei there are ten Andrew Sullivans, and the Sullivans are undoing whatever progress was being made by the no-big-deal desensitization plan.  Granted, a lot of progress has been made on that front, judging from prime time TV and the nigh-complete failure of everyone to articulate the fact that the Boy Scout thing from a few weeks ago now means that sexuality has to be discussed openly with ten year old boys instead of leaving the sensitive topic to be broached at a discreet time.

This ain't exactly Gandhi's M.O.  Don't pretend it's even close.

A little perspective on the privacy issue

I've heard more than one person say "Well, I've got nothing to hide, so I don't care what the NSA does."

This scares me as much as the proverbial government official saying "Well, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."  While in the latter case you have a threat from an authority figure hidden in a reassuring deflection, in the former, you have a civilian acquiescing to the encroachment of the police state because they are not exercising any forethought.

It amazes me sometimes how people see things like this and never consider what might go wrong.  It doesn't affect them now, so that's the end of the story, until they're shocked down the road that someone let something bad happen.  Haven't they noticed anything in human history?

You know, I don't have a lot to hide, either, but my concern isn't that the NSA was probably already doing something clandestine under the ECHELON protocols, or that the NSA might be doing something good with its burgeoning powers now.  My concern is that if it's out in the open and appears to enjoy the benefit of being legal, if unpopular, it is going to embolden and empower the government universally to do more of the same.

Whether or not abuses have happened in the past or are happening now, it creates vast new opportunities and temptations for abuses to happen in the future.  This isn't exactly new legal ground we're covering; there are already laws curtailing the actions of government forces precisely in order to minimize the damage to society, whether or not there is foresight to anticipate specific problems.

After all, we don't have the Fourth Amendment simply because Madison said "What if..." and Jefferson responded "Well, just in case...."  The Bill of Rights was largely inspired from abuses that really did happen that the Founders wanted to prevent from being repeated.

Post hoc procrastination roundup

I haven't had much time to write lately, as you might surmise. I'd try to jot down a few thoughts at work while on break, to e-mail myself later, but I never seemed to get around to checking my e-mail for this account and cleaning the prose up.  I'm taking some time now, though, and what with it being so far after the fact on some of these issues, I'm just going to take some pot shots at several of them at once.

Pope Francis: I like his style.  I think Benedict was more my speed, I think we would have benefited from having someone in charge who made a point of focusing on things like orthodoxy and liturgy, but God knows better than I do and it's not like I really have a problem with the preferential option for the poor. My only worry would have been if people would see Francis give an inch on social justice and then take a mile in the direction we're already headed.  But, maybe someone who doesn't give the first impression of "Oh, he's that kind of Catholic because he's politically conservative," which tended to be the [mis]understanding by modern pundits of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, would seem less threatening to people who....aren't politically conservative.  Apparently it's the right time to show that you can help the needy and still stand for something more foundational than the endless advance of novel civil rights.  Plus, it gives the old Jesuit conspiracy theorists lots of fodder to play with it, and we're one step closer to being done with the silliness of the alleged prophecy of Malachy.  Also, it was interesting to see early and frequent criticism from people who are ignorant of the College of Cardinals or at least ignorant of the limits of their understanding of the Church; after hearing and reading comments from both Catholics and non-Catholics like “There was no one of intellectual stature after Ratzinger,” “John Paul packed the College full of yes-men,” "The only thing we have to look forward to is a papacy of mediocrity, because there is no one to choose from other than lousy bureaucrats” and “I don’t like him; it was a political move, he’s just the first pope from Latin America,” I know I can sleep easily knowing he's already made all the right enemies.

The IRS scandal: Sure, maybe Republicans did much the same under Dubya. I don't know why it wouldn't have gotten more press; I'm still inclined to believe that reporting is more honest during Republican administrations because reporters are happier to air the GOP's dirty laundry, but whether it was just covered up better or they just focused more on warrentless wiretaps, it's happening now; as Mark Shea says, Obama voters, own this.

The Boy Scout decision to accept openly gay boys:  I don't think it was a mistake to be accepting, but I think getting drawn into the debate to where they felt they had to say something one way or the other was a mistake.  I don't know how much has changed since I was active in Scouts, but no, we didn't really talk about girls or sex much at all, what with busy doing boy stuff and camping and learning about good citizenship and character.  There was one boy I know of who came out of the closet in college, and I don't know if he was hiding it the whole time or hadn't quite figured it out for himself yet (my tangential knowledge suggests this was common, especially so before homosexuality got normalized), but it just didn't matter, and while most of the guys in my patrol probably would have been more scandalized if he'd said something to us when he was SPL, we still would have been a bit off-put if other guys just started talking about what he liked about girls.  It's just not the place for it, and that is the whole pitfall. If there's someone who can help a confused kid, great; I think that's why the national council ruled the way it did. But it introduces sexuality explicitly where it should never have been in the first place. On top of that, how are they going to handle all the gay Eagle Scouts when they hit their 18th birthday? It's one thing when all the concerned parties in a scandal are minors, but how long is the fear of gay ephebophilia going to withstand the pressure of youths who want to have their sexuality approved--and behind them, the pressure of real gay predators who have just been waiting for this target-rich environment to expose itself?  And I'm kind of surprised the LDS Church didn't kick up more of a fuss, what with Scouting being a huge component in its youth program for boys; for years, the Mormons provided the backbone in resisting encroachment by the gay agenda.  Again, just to summarize, I don't think gay boys should be kicked out of Scouting--a concrete, masculine but otherwise asexual environment is probably the most healthful place for a confused youth; but Scouting should never have gone down this road.  There's no way to answer "Have you stopped beating your wife?" without sounding guilty, and there's no way to address the issue without introducing it into Scouting culture.

Meh, I thought this was going to be brief, but it's late and I'm tired and I have to work today, so if I think of anything else worth going over old ground for, you'll be the first to know.

So, Gosnell's guilty...

...and what little I’ve heard from the pro-choice side is in the vein of “Well, of course we need to make sure women have access to safe abortions.”

This really makes me think someone hasn’t been paying attention.  They used to say “safe, legal, and rare,” but really all that was being pushed was “legal.”  Gosnell might be an epitome but he’s not the only one.  I’ve known pro-life people who voted straight ticket pro-choice because they believed that all the other social policies advocated by pro-choice political candidates would lead to lower demand for abortion in the long run; meanwhile, pro-choice politicians end up compromising with other politicians who may have different goals and who may actually have a lot of the same values but want to follow a different path to the same goal.  The only thing clung to and promoted, the only thing there isn’t room for compromise on—come on, nobody really wants to perpetuate poverty, but there is a plethora of opinions on how to alleviate it—is access to the procedure.  So the wagons are circled around abortion clinics and the media are mute on the topic of badly run clinics, for fear of handing ammunition to the pro-life movement.

Well, folks, you shot yourself in the foot with that very ammunition, and no amount of “Pro-lifers made us resort to this” whining is going to change that.  You talk safety and then refuse to take steps that might even bring you a few allies from the pro-life movement in at least helping to ensure that expectant mothers were treated well, lest the disconnect between respect for women and the abortion culture become undeniably overt—maybe it doesn’t have to be the case that bosses fire pregnant employees for deciding to go to term, or that domineering boyfriends and husbands will insist on not becoming fathers but stay in relationships with women who are willing to become mothers; but all to often, it is the case.  More abortion isn't the answer.  If it's a symptom of greater societal ills, then we need to cure the greater ills; we need to put a bandage on whatever abortion purports to cure in the meantime, but in taking a stand at abortion, you gather the rhetorical points of choosing lesser goods over greater ones, and you win poster children like Kermit Gosnell.

Might as well put a briefcase nuke in the hands of every person on the planet, on the grounds that MAD worked for the US and the USSR, so it's got to work for individuals as well.  A few people set 'em off anyway?  Get more into the field, so we can really make our point that more violence means less violence; all this carnage is just a blip.  Still more?  It's not you, it's them; it should work, and we're not going to stop until they stop.  We just need to clap for Tinkerbell harder.

I wonder maybe if Moloch is really in the service of Mammon these days.  Help build up a controversy, recruit desperate people, offer them an escape to the nightmare of motherhood, and then...start cutting costs.  High school dropouts are a lot cheaper than certified anesthetists, and frightened and unsure expectant mothers have low sales resistance, even to snake oil.  

Fortieth day of Lent

Doctor Leo the Great's seventy-second lecture, on the Resurrection (complete)

It's Holy Saturday.  Meditate on the Harrowing of Hell.

Easter Vigil begins in the evening.  Meditate also on the extended readings for the night's liturgy, which summarize the history of salvation.

Thirty-ninth day of Lent

Doctor Leo the Great's forty-ninth sermon, on Lent (complete)

It's Good Friday,  a day of fasting and abstinence.  Go to the Stations today if you haven't been able to before now.  If possible, meditate on the necessity of the Crucifixion at the Hour of Mercy.

Thirty-eighth day of Lent

Doctor Leo the Great's twenty-first lecture, on the Nativity (complete)

It's Maundy Thursday.  Today will be the last mass before Easter.  Some churches will also have Washing of the Feet.  You may also find one where the Seven Churches Visitation is practiced.

Thirty-seventh day of Lent

Doctor Leo the Great's twenty-eighth letter (complete)

Pope Leo I was the first to be called "the Great."  This letter, also called "The Tome," helped to resolve the controversy over the two natures of Christ at the Council of Chalcedon (which in turn brought the Monophysite heresy, easily confused with Miaphysitism, to schism).

Thirty-sixth day of Lent

Doctor Ambrose on the Mysteries (chapters 5-9)

Thirty-fifth day of Lent

Doctor Ambrose on the Mysteries (chapters 1-4)

Ambrose of Milan was an influential Christian writer who, like others of his era, faced an uphill battle against the Arians.  He once advised Augustine of Hippo to follow the liturgical norms of whatever locale where he happened to find himself (like the Sabbath, liturgy was made for man, not man for the liturgy):  "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

Sixth Sunday of Lent

No required reading today.  Feast when the Church feasts, fast when the Church fasts.

However, if you want to keep your momentum, I might recommend Book Five of Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus of Lyons, although this treatise is a little long in parts.

Holy Week starts today.  Make sure you get to confession and pray the Stations of the Cross, if you haven't done so yet!

Thirty-fourth day of Lent

Doctor Cyril's twenty-third catechetical lecture

Thirty-third day of Lent

Doctor Cyril's twenty-second catechetical lecture

Thirty-second day of Lent

Doctor Cyril's twenty-first catechetical lecture

Thirty-first day of Lent

Doctor Cyril's twentieth catechetical lecture

Thirtieth day of Lent

Doctor Cyril's nineteenth catechetical lecture

St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote (or spoke and later his words were committed to paper) twenty-three known lectures intended for new converts.  Along with a prologue, they can be found here.  The first eighteen are  intended for the season of Lent for catachumens; the final five are meant to be read to the newly baptized during the octave of Easter.

Twenty-ninth day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 81-94

Fifth Sunday of Lent

No required reading today.  Feast when the Church feasts, fast when the Church fasts.

However, if you want to keep your momentum, I might recommend Book Four of Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus of Lyons, although this treatise is a little long in parts.

Twenty-eighth day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 71-80

Twenty-seventh day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 61-70

I know, I know, it's kind of long, but two more days and we're off to Saint Cyril.

Twenty-sixth day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 51-60

Twenty-fifth day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 41-50

Twenty-fourth day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 31-40

Twenty-third day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 21-30

Fourth Sunday of Lent

No required reading today.  Feast when the Church feasts, fast when the Church fasts.

However, if you want to keep your momentum, I might recommend Book Three of Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus of Lyons, although this treatise is a little long in parts.

Twenty-second day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 11-20

Twenty-first day of Lent

Doctor Athanasius on the Life of St. Anthony, chapters 1-10

Athanasius is known, amongst other things, in the Eastern Church as the "Father of Orthodoxy."  He had an important role at the Council of Nicea.  The Athanasian Creed seems more to be named after him than written by him.

This Saint Anthony is St. Anthony the Great, Desert Father.

Twentieth day of Lent

St. Cyprian on the Unity of the Church, sections 19-27

Nineteenth day of Lent

St. Cyprian on the Unity of the Church, sections 10-18

Eighteenth day of Lent

St. Cyprian on the Unity of the Church, sections 1-9

Seventeeth day of Lent

St. Justin Martyr's first Apology, chapters 60-68

Third Sunday of Lent

No required reading today.  Feast when the Church feasts, fast when the Church fasts.

However, if you want to keep your momentum, I might recommend Book Two of Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus of Lyons, although this treatise is a little long in parts.

Sixteenth day of Lent

St. Justin Martyr's first Apology, chapters 48-59

Fifteenth day of Lent

St. Justin Martyr's first Apology, chapters 36-47

Fourteenth day of Lent

St. Justin Martyr's first Apology, chapters 24-35

Thirteenth day of Lent

St. Justin Martyr's first Apology, chapters 12-23

Twelfth day of Lent

St. Justin Martyr's first Apology, chapters 1-11

Raised a Gentile, Justin sought the tutelage of several Greek schools of philosophy before finding that Christianity best answered his hunger for God.

Eleventh day of Lent

St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to Polycarp

Polycarp, as you've seen by now, was mentioned by Ignatius in his letters to the Magnesians and the Ephesians.

Second Sunday of Lent

No required reading today.  Feast when the Church feasts, fast when the Church fasts.

However, if you want to keep your momentum, I might recommend Book One of Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus of Lyons, although this treatise is a little long in parts.

Tenth day of Lent

St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Smyrnaeans

Much of this letter is spent answering the Docetist heresy, which denied the Incarnation.  It is also the first known use of the term "Catholic Church," but with a lack of explanation, suggesting the term was already in common use.

Ninth day of Lent

St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Philadelphians

Another of the seven letters written by Ignatius.

This is the Philadelphia in western Turkey and mentioned as one of the seven churches in Revelation, not the city in eastern Pennsylvania, which was called Shackamaxon at the time if it was there to be inhabited by the Lenape that far back.

There's your random trivia for the day.

Eighth day of Lent

St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Romans

Another of the seven letters written by Ignatius.

Seventh day of Lent

St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Trallians (complete)

Another of his seven letters.

Sixth day of Lent

St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Magnesians (complete)

Another of the seven letters written by Ignatius.

Pious tradition holds that Ignatius was the child mentioned in Mark 9:35.

Fifth day of Lent

St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Ephesians (complete)

Ignatius, another student of John the Evangelist, was made the third bishop of Antioch by Peter.

This is one of seven letters written by Ignatius on his way to Rome and martyrdom.

First Sunday of Lent

No required reading today.  Feast when the Church feasts, fast when the Church fasts.

However, if you want to keep your momentum, I might recommend the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians.

Clement of Rome was the fourth pope, following Linus and Cletus after Peter.

Fourth day of Lent

Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians (complete)

Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna, a contemporary of Irenaeus, and a disciple of John the Evangelist.

Third day of Lent

Epistle to Diognetus, chapters 7-12

All known copies of this document were made from a 13th century manuscript after damage caused the loss of two lines from the middle of the text.  The last two chapters are possibly additions from later in the second century or possibly early in the third century.

Second day of Lent

Epistle to Diognetus, chapters 1-6

An anonymous apologetic ("Mathetes" is not the author's true name but a word that means "disciple") from the late second century.

First Day of Lent

The Didache (complete)

The Didache is one of the oldest non-canon documents of Christianity.  Written in the late first century AD, it is thought by some to be the constitution of the Council of Jerusalem mentioned in Acts 15.  Thought lost, it was rediscovered in the late 19th century in Constantinople.

40 days of patristics for Lent

Since many bloggers largely stay offline for Lent, I thought I would try something different.  Lent is a good time to pray and meditate by turning to Christian writings that have already stood the test of time, but I don't mean to go against that.  Since I normally don't write very much (except when I really get going), and not all that well, I wanted to provide something worthwhile for people whose Lenten penances do not include avoiding the Blogosphere, to try facilitating some Patristic reading that everybody should at least develop some passing familiarity with.  Also, I compiled all the stuff I'm going to be posting over the next six weeks in advance, and I didn't personally have to write any of it, so it keeps this from becoming a chore for me as well.

When I was in grad school, someone turned me on to the Lenten Fathers devotion.  Over the course of the 40 days of Lent (Sundays excluded--they're feast days), with an average of 10-15 minutes of reading a day, you will have read some of the most influential documents of ten writers from the Patristic era.

Starting tomorrow, I will post links to the various Patristic writings from this reading plan at ChurchYear.net  I'd post the whole texts but I'm not entirely clear on the intellectual property rules for particular translations of documents in the public domain.  Most of them are short enough you can read the entire thing in one sitting, but for the longer ones I will link the whole document each day from New Advent, and list the chapters prescribed by ChurchYear.net for each day's reading because I don't know of a way to create links that navigate to specific locations inside a document that doesn't already have anchor tags where I'd want them.  If you know how, please let me know.

Since Sundays aren't included, in order to help keep in the habit of reading and reflecting every day, I have included additional Patristic documents to keep things consistent.  Some of them get a little long, but since Sundays are a day of rest, maybe you'll have more time for reading, anyway.

Prayer request

So, I took a new job back in July, moved across three states to do it.  I wasn't sure that I'd like it a lot, but it was a good career move.  The guy who interviewed me warned me that the hours would be long, which gave me some pause, but assured me that dedication and hard work were well rewarded.  So, I took the chance.

Things were okay at first.  I hadn't quite been trained on enough of my new responsibilities to fill the 60-72 hour work week by the end of my second month, but that didn't matter because they thrust me into a supervisory position.  My boss wasn't thrilled with losing me, and he was sympathetic because in every way except the most abstract I had no qualifications for the job or for the department I was now on loan to ("they figure," my boss said, "you're smart enough, you can figure it out"), but neither of us really had a say in the matter.

I don't want to go into details now about the corporate climate; suffice it to say our management was accurately described in an online review of the company as having "comic-book villain personalities."

So here's my concern.  I left my last job for a lot of the reasons I don't like my current job.  I know it's not like this everywhere, but this seems to be endemic to the industry, if not to American business in general.  It's making me think that engineering isn't what I'm supposed to do for the rest of my life, if I can't go somewhere that isn't going to make me sick.

I ask, then, for your prayers:  that for now I continue to get by, and that I may discern what the rest of my career should be, and succeed in whatever that is.

Never pass up an opportunity to float some propaganda

I haven't been following the tragedy in Newtown, CT very closely; I can't quite bring myself to stare it in the face and I'm reluctant to desensitize myself with another media frenzy.  Instead I want to talk briefly about the media.

As you've noticed, the events of last Friday have provided a great opportunity to bring a long neglected national debate back to the forefront:  gun control.  I tend to see the debate from one side of the argument that you will probably be able to guess easily if you don't already know, but I don't want to talk about gun control itself right now.

I read part of an article this morning that focused on how the gun debate has awakened in the wake of the Newtown shooting.  It attempted to sum up the debate in a few sentences that, for lack of an eidetic memory, I will paraphrase:

Advocates of less restrictive gun laws point to states that have more widespread gun ownership and claim that there is a lower incidence of violent crime.  Gun control advocates disagree, however, and say that jurisdictions with tight gun laws have records of lower gun violence.

Both sides of the debate could be right, because they're talking about two different things.  Through either sloppy or dishonest reporting, the reader is left to wonder which side is going to massage the data better.

Read the paraphrased paragraph over again.  Advocates of gun ownership say violent crime is lower where law-abiding citizens are not prevented from defending themselves with guns.  Advocates of gun control say gun violence is lower where there are fewer guns on the books.

Violent crime ≠ gun violence.  A crime could be committed violently with guns, knives, baseball bats, binder twine, a roll of quarters, or bare fists.  Gun control only attempts to take one class of tools out of the hands of criminals.

Today I'm not going to argue about whether gun control would be fruitful or not.  I only want to draw attention to the fact that honest and informed dialog is not going to be possible if we're not going to hold our sources of information up to better scrutiny.  This instance happened to be obvious to me because I've had practice looking for cases where my political opponents try to have a debate on their grounds under their terms and treat any sign of skepticism as an act of bad faith or ill will.  There have been other instances when I've been let down by sources I thought were more trustworthy (I know, trust not in princes and all that...), and I'm sure yet others that I haven't become aware of.

I strive to be more perceptive.  I don't know if I'm any better at it than anyone else, but I'm better than I used to be.  I encourage everyone to do the same, to challenge their own suppositions from time to time.

A coworker of mine mentioned a few weeks ago, "I don't like FOX News.  They lie."

Honey, lying news outlets are the only game in town, including the networks and publications that tell you FOX is not to be trusted.  Best get used to checking your own facts.

"If marriage is opened to anyone who wants it...so what?"

A chilling exchange crossed the forums at ISCA recently.  A user posited the question "If we opened marriage up to everyone, so what?  What are the things that would go bad in society if this happened?"

These are not unreasonable questions.  Too often the most common argument made is the "appeal to squick," the notion that if something seems gross, there's something wrong with it.  True or not, it's a subjective and emotional standard that can't stand on its own.  It was the discussion that followed that was bothersome.  Paraphrased nuggets of wisdom from the "discussion:"

"Who cares?"  "Are we supposed to clutch our pearls and say 'land sakes, God a'mighty' while all these terrible things happen?"  "If there's some species-ending occurrence like not enough people preferring to couple with adult humans, instead preferring animals or machines or children, so what?"  "Only adults have legal standing and the ability to sign contracts, so the line is drawn at polygamy and gay marriage; anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot."

It's these last two that bother me.  I don't know what kind of idiot it would take to realize that people are already pushing beyond plural and gay marriage, beyond the line Mark Shea describes as "consent as the sole criterion of the good."  Sure, statues and children and dolphins can't sign contracts legally, but children at least have the ability to do so, and machines could be programmed to do so, as long as we're maintaining the facade of mutual consent.

If you want to blur the line between what's accepted now and what you want accepted, start on the fuzzy cases:  machines programmed to do what you already want, children who might be precocious enough to be emancipated or who might just be brought before a judge more sympathetic to the head of the local chapter of NAMBLA than to the well-being of children.  If you can throw the matter of consent into question, you really don't have to stop there.

"Oh, but plural marriage isn't illegal--bigamy as an instance of fraud and adultery/cohabitation laws being excepted--it's just not legally recognized," it was said.  Um, no.  Legally recognizing these arrangements is the whole point.  There are already people who do these things and it is decreasingly held in check by the forces of shame and law.  If it weren't unhealthful we'd already have more than the alleged hundreds or thousands of people practicing these things successfully.

And if "species-ending occurrence" doesn't strike you as a bad thing, how can, or why should, anyone else explain that any of the problems that are less dire than suigenocide are both problems and real possibilities?  If you want to have a thorough discussion, more power to you, but do you honestly think the burden of proof is not on the people saying "What could it hurt?"  If you really want to be honest, you should be calling to heel your allies who are making bad arguments that you already understand well enough to counter on behalf of your rhetorical opponents.

"Well, even two-person marriages don't always last forever, so what's it matter if larger ones don't, either?"

The fact that polygamous arrangements are not more successful than normal marriages is beside the point.  The point is that they are less successful.  Between nuclear families and plural marriage you have millions of people who cheat in secret; or who start seeing someone new before breaking it off with the current significant other, because they know it's not going to last long if they're open and honest with everybody about it; or who do so with the knowledge and toleration of the other party because they have some other compelling reason to keep up appearances.

Again I am compelled to remind my reader of boiling a frog in a pot of water.  If all it takes for evil to succeed is good men doing nothing, then all it takes to get good men to do nothing is trick them to make a thousand trivial compromises while evil hides in plain sight.  We see it on TV, we see it in our communities, we see it at work:  something unpleasant happens, people shrug and say "Well, it's just the times we live in; who can mount a crusade against a swarm of gnats, let alone this?" and everyone gets used to things being worse than they should be, without quite being able to explain what's wrong.

ISCA seems, more than most places I've been on the Internet, intolerant of the slippery slope argument. I think it is because back in the heyday of BBSes, it was not uncommon to find debaters who committed the classical slippery slope fallacy.  Whether it is a fallacy, or a bad argument, in contemporary usage depends on the circumstances, much as the appeal to authority does:  while an appeal to authority is valid if one can accurately cite the position of a legitimate expert, the slippery slope is valid if one can demonstrate the progression from making the first trivial compromise to reaching the state that the debater warns against.  While one can still sometimes have interesting discussions there, this propensity for assuming that arguments they don't like are badly framed arguments really makes me question the value of coming there to mine for post fodder.  Maybe it's a good intellectual barometer for the state of society, but there's not much room these days for new or unpopular ideas.

I wonder if there's a good theology on tap that runs during the winter around here somewhere.