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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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




On the other hand....


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




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


I await a happy correction.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• mustard flour
• paprika
• dried garlic
• spice
• natural flavor

Keep in mind those last two.

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

• salt
• lemon juice
• natural flavors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But...

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

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

Why not?  What alternative is there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Another item from public radio...

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One item from public radio...

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

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

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

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

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

I saw displays for Easter stuff.

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

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

Celibacy is not the problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear not the devil (II)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

I had said;

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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