Another prayer request for the fam'

My dad recently got word that he's going to be heading back to Mayo to get those tumors on his liver removed. They're going to do a hi-res scan and then open him up to go over the organ with a fine toothed comb. It's scheduled for a month from now. Any and all your prayers would be welcome.

I'd be happy for them to actually find the tumors and finally get rid of them, although I'd be happier if they disappeared like the last couple times but didn't come back.

Saints Luke and Peregrine, pray for us.

Baa baa <blank> sheep....

A while ago I caught a snippet of Sheila Liaugminas on The Right Questions (yeah, you can tell how long I've been sitting on this post, can't you?) on my way from church. She was talking about some person or group--I didn't catch the whole bit--who wants to change "baa baa black sheep" to "baa baa rainbow sheep," since apparently it offends and alienates little children, or at least young minorities.

I'd like to say I'm surprised. Actually, I am, but I'm shocked that I'm still surprised at this kind of thing.

From a full sixty seconds of research I just did, the lyric change appears to date from an English city council meeting proposal in 1999; the suggestion was dumped the next year after black parents reminded the council that the idea was ridiculous.

Of course it was--yet Concerned Citizens seem to be making such suggestions with increasing frequency, with as far as I can tell no sign of learning to develop a sense of perspective after being dismissed this way. Kids that young don't know enough to be offended by an innocuous nursery rhyme. They can be offended by truly offensive things, even by patronization, but what's wrong with this ditty?

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full.

One for the master,
One for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.

I guess the master is offensive because it suggests a condition of servitude, and the dame is offensive because in the original it stands for the Church or maybe because it's slightly outdated slang for "woman," and supporting the little boy is offensive because it gives caricatured capitalists something to complain about.

Black sheep, though? It's got nothing to do with race. The term "black sheep" as a euphemism for pariah comes from the fact that black sheep, incredibly, have black wool, which is understandably hard to dye, and so isn't worth as much as white wool. There's nothing more to it. I'm not sure the matter of less valuble wool is even germane to the nursery rhyme; it was probably just something alliterative. Unless some demographics are basing their whole identities on their hair color, there's not even room for reasonable concern here.

(Wait for it: topical lemma in 3...2...1...)

What does concern me, though, is this Orwellian push to make everyone forget everything that might be even misconstrued as bad. I see it on multiple levels, but I'll restrict myself in the interest of brevity, so please hold off on accusations of overgeneralizing. Sometimes it's a preemptive attempt to protect certain demographics from certain unpleasantries about the world, other times it's an overreaction to a nonissue, either by the would-be slighted parties or their "enlightened" self-appointed guardians. A plain example would be dismissing the opinions of pro-life men, because they're not women and can't relate and have no standing in the matter, as well as the opinions of pro-life women, because they obviously aren't clearheaded enough to be worth listening to. Ever notice that They rarely wish to protect young people from the dangers of sex, though? Only from its tangible consequences, which don't seem to include things like reduced sense of self-worth, distorted priorities about certain life issues, and a fatalistic attitude about all the concomitant prices and inconveniences that you only have to learn to tolerate when you take something special out of context in an attempt to maximize its specialness. Oh, and children--I guess they're a "risk" of sex between a man and a woman that are, um, best kept in a special context, such as the life of a well-off middle aged professional (or slightly younger and famous) single person no longer satisfied with keeping pets.

If you want to protect your children from the bad juju that's out there, I say more power to you; however, the kids eventually will need to be able to deal with nasty things, even things that aren't nasty at all but might just seem confusing, so simply keeping them in the dark isn't going to help. I'd be pleased if my kids could grow up and never have things like racism and violent crime even occur to them in thought or deed, but I know that the world's not that innocent so they will need some coaching in how life can be hard and unfair, or how certain words have different meanings that don't even relate to each other between contexts. I certainly wasn't traumatized because my parents never kept me out of church to make sure I never saw something as brutal as the corpus on a crucifix. Well, maybe my readers would disagree, but I assure you, any trauma is unrelated.

Pretending this stuff doesn't exist is not the solution. It just leaves people ignorant and vulnerable, and conditioned to look for frivolous violations of increasingly diaphonous "civil rights" instead. Remember the guy who got in trouble for saying "niggardly?" Granted, it's not the most common word, but I knew the proper definition of the word when I was a child; here, adults were getting upset because it merely sounded like a word that's actually bad, which is not a standard any other word I can think of is held to. If I'm white and run a labor-intensive business, should I also never employ a black man, in case someone suspects that I might be propagating a metaphorical stereotype that harkens back to early 19th century agricultural labor patterns, or in case someone thinks I've got a token minority on hand just to deflect criticism?

If this attitude continues, I doubt we'll stop anywhere short of flatly prohibiting speech about offensive topics, whatever "offensive" will mean by then. A couple years back I was having a discussion with a graduate of the University of Illinois, whose Chief Illiniwek was featured prominently on sports gear, and at sporting events, and so on, until just recently. Many people find the reduction of an entire native American tribe to a debatably traditional dance by an iconic tribal chief at athletic events to be in bad taste, and wish to retire the tradition of the dance and of all imagery featuring the Chief. Many other people believe it is a suitable tribute--since basically it's a festive dance at a festive event--to the cultural history of the Illinois region and an opportunity for raising awareness thereof, which is pretty much the attitudes of the Chippewa to Central Michigan University and the Seminole to Florida State University, to name two off the top of my head.

There's also relatively little support in the same circles for abolishing drink-until-you're-Irish "'unofficial' St. Patrick's Day." I guess integrity is only trumped by convenience.

I'm not an Illinois resident, so I was only dimly aware of these particular controversies before I met the alumnus, who is avowedly anti-Chief (or pro-retirement, but I'm getting ahead of myself). I ended up playing the Socratic to learn more about the situation, since this guy was pretty quick to spit out smooth-sounding catch phrases (I'm not being snide; he really sounded like a pile of secular progressive fortune cookies) about interesting things I was unfamiliar with.

I was on the fence--I like the idea of historical ties to modern society, but mere caricatures taken too seriously do tend to be degrading, yet from what I understand, the Chief's dance routine and regalia are authentic, if embellished--and the guy almost had me, until he said one thing. He summed up his entire position by confirming that the best way to honor the legacy of the Illinois Confederacy is to remove all contemporary manifestations and references to it: that it should be no more than a historical footnote in a reference book.

I am not exaggerating.

I hope you can see the problem I have with so extreme an idea. The mere display of cultural artifacts doesn't add up to being a bd thing. There are other, legitimate arguments, but they don't temper the suggestion that only the forgotten can rest in peace. We should honor the dead, yes, but we can't do so by removing the headstone.

Yeah, I know, kind of a roundabout way of getting to a point, but it was an interesting conversation I still sometimes think about.

It's attitudes like this guy's that make me wonder if this redacting of culture isn't on the up and up after all (aside from the fact that it's rather PC and I'm Catholic). I don't think the guy's really a latent racist--although some (mostly other white people) make the argument that the Chief should be "retired" because white students portray him, which is a suspicious kind of incongruity that doesn't get any other historical reenactors into trouble--just an iconoclast who happens to have found an agenda before he found a philosophy that could inform it for him.

What's next? Are white people who oppose all visual reminders of history going to tell people who like visual reminders that they're not a valid part of the debate because they're from the opposing side? What are they going to say to the Peoria Illiniwek (or the Seminole, or the Chippewa) who don't have a problem with Native American imagery? The opposition isn't unanimous. That their opinion counts less than the white man trying to protect them? That the Native Americans who do have a problem must be more enlightened? How enlightened do we have to be to make that judgment, to have a dissenting opinion? Aren't we using peculiar values of dead European men in juding the answers to these questions, anyway?

Lent's growing on me

When I was young, it was just that time of year when I had to eat fish on Fridays and do or give up something for 40 days. I didn't mind the latter, in principle, but I hated fish (my mom, a great cook every other day of the year, tended to favor cod fillets cooked into leather and some canned salmon casserole with whole bones that freaked me out), and so I dreaded the season. I've been finding other ways to avoid regular meat, though, so there hasn't been much of a problem there lately.

I used to think of Lent as a spiritually dry time, reflective of it being a liturgically dry time. I don't think dryness is the most accurate way to describe my experience with Lent, though. It has been that way--just trudging through, not seeming to get anything out of it but having enough motivation to keep at it, and otherewise no more interesting than ordinary time--but I think it was more my imagination or expectation, or just temporarily putting a label on something I sometimes felt at other times of the year.

What it does seem to be, though, is raw; a little tender like a blister that's been popped and is healing. It's not exactly painful, but I am a man of mild and even temperment, so any increased spiritual or emotional sensitivity is unfamiliar, and a little uncomfortable in its strangeness, although it's not entirely unwelcome. Particularly this year, I'm getting more of a sense of how poor a soul I really am; the rationalized conceits I protect my ego with seem less compelling, and even the objective truths I take comfort in don't cover everything--I may know I'm properly disposed to receiving the Eucharist after receiving absolution following a sacramental confession, for instance, but I certainly don't deserve it. Seeing--if only dimly--the distance between where I am and where God is, and seeing God bend heaven and Earth to reach us, to reach me and people like me, is an awesome and humbling thing, humbling and awesome, around and around. Sometimes it's enough to make me weep during Mass, which strangely enough is a sort of consolation in itself. It doesn't always happen in the Lenten season, but maybe times out of ten since I've started thinking about it.

I don't really understand it. It's worth meditating on more, but I'm not sure I'll be able to put it into adequate words for posting here. I'll try, though, if no one objects. Any of you have a similar or related experience? What'd it mean to you?

Hopefully this quiz result is representative, and I didn't just luck out and happen to know the particular answers. Whatever that last 1% is, it's not deliberate.

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Mass attendance...

I heard a priest say yesterday that the usual weekend attendance at his church was around 2300, but on Ash Wednesday, it tops out above 5000. The priest was a little incredulous, and perhaps a little disappointed; at three different times during any day they could come in to receive the Lamb of God, but on this one day a year, which isn't even a day of obligation, they show up to get marked and be told "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."

I didn't think of it then to make the quip with comedic timing, but I thought it was too bad he couldn't offer ashes at every mass.

God, Darwin clash again in Kansas

Briefly, the Kansas Board of Ed is reconsidering the policies it adopted in 2005 that downplay the scientific value of evolution (and probably all science that doesn't support a superficial reading of Genesis).

The usual rationale is that evolution and whatnot is not without its gaps, to which I will say that the critics are correct.

The solution, however, is not to refrain from teaching it. If you want to point out the inconsistencies and the questions it hasn't been able to answer, great; it'll give future scientists some ideas of what to focus their research on next, and keep today's scientists modest and hopefully take the wind out of their politics (evolution as proof for atheism is no more valid than intelligent design is for theism). If you want to stop teaching all science that may be conditional or confusing, then you have to stop teaching all science.

In fact, to avoid confusion and muddying up the classroom with uncertain interpretations of things, you really would need to stop teaching everything. Obviously that option is ridiculous, because education is about removing ignorance, not keeping people from getting confused. Some students will get confused along the way; at some point, probably every student at least once. Educators, like scientists, are just human, so we can only hope to minimize confusion and work through it when it arises. Refusing to do their job to keep people from misunderstandings is plain old wrong. There's withholding knowledge to prevent scandal (which can be permissible), and then there's just preserving ignorance to keep people sedate.

Can science tell us everything? No. Can evolution tell us everything about the science that involves it? No. Evolution does, however, happen to be well demonstrated by more different fields of science than perhaps any other theory. The fossil record doesn't prove it, epidemiology doesn't prove it, DNA and morphological similarities between related species don't prove it, but take them all together and you've got something that isn't going to be displaced unless it can answer all these claims (or provide some unimaginably revolutionary breakthrough in one particular area or more).

What claims does "evolution can't be right" make? The chances of random atomic activity resulting in human life are distastefully low; a superficial reading of a religious text demand that the logic and observation that go into science are wrong--either lies or misinterpreted.

I'm sorry, but "It can't be A, so it must be not-A" isn't science. As simple logic, it's fine, but here, it's like dividing the universe up into bananas and non-bananas, and then implying that the only plausible non-banana is an apple, since the fruit in Genesis is usually thought of as an apple.

Whatever it is, it's not science. Are opponents of evolution even as a tentative (if robust) theory interested in having science taught at all?

In the absence of a theism, scientism often rushes in to fill the vacuum.

A while ago I caught, on the Scientific American podcast, part of Michael Bloomberg's commencement address to JHU's medical school. If ever I dreamed of a nigh-utopia ruled by scientists, Bloomberg's speech woke me up.

Don't get me wrong; I still think the average American needs more science education, and more sophisticated science education. I just think that Bloomberg's speech made it plenty clear that "more science" isn't "enough."

Some of his bullet items are no-brainers to anyone who's been around the Catholic circuits at all. I realized that many of them were extrascientific long ago, but I had fallen into the trap of assuming--probably not with the best justification--that common sense was, well, common.

Now, if everyone just upped their science quotient when it comes to voting and public policy discussion, we'd make great strides. However, there were a few things Bloomberg cited that put the lie to his science-as-panacea thesis:

• Terri Schiavo


• global warming


• funding of stem cell research

He also mentioned how ID, as gussied-up creationism, does a disservice to science by masquerading as it, and to theology by conflating the two; but he still betrayed a penchant for utilitarianism.

You can make valid arguments from utilitarianism, and make different ones from existentialism or some other school of thought that may contradict or not even intersect with the utilitarian ones, but just advocating a purely practical or existential position isn't the same thing as using the logical bedrock upon which all philosophy rests, nor can it (or logic) guarantee truth or goodness as its object.

Obviously, bridging part of the gap between "more science" and "enough knowledge to get the job done well" is some basic philosophy, so people can recognize what informs an argument when they see it. In addition, though, I think fundamental critical thinking skills in addition to "X is utilitarianism, Y is stoicism, etc." is essential. I started learning critical thinking when I was ten years old, in a public school no less; I didn't get to differing philosophical schools until I was in tenth grade. Not that I was precocious, but in the state of today's education, most students don't get to the latter until college when they need to fill some general education requirement, and most students never get to the former. It can't be that hard to add a little elementary logic to a curriculum (just showing students half a dozen propaganda techniques and a dozen common logical fallacies should be enough to get us past the "expert juror" hazard in public discourse).

Anyway, I just wanted to touch on the three examples Bloomberg gave, especially the last one.

The Terri Schiavo bit was typical "society has no compelling interest in preserving her, so look--but not too closely--to her husband." Terri wasn't dying, she just didn't have any usefulness left in her. I suppose the pro-euthanasia types also felt some irony, but I was a little disappointed to see so many people making the libertarian argument, that the federal government shouldn't get involved in saving one sick woman's life.

Global warming I've said enough about. Suffice it to say his "what we now know about water being wet and the sun rising" panegyrics to the environmentalist lobby were about as edifying as an Enzyte commercial.

As for stem cell research, the problem isn't stem cells themselves--which is old news I'm not afraid to repeat. The problem is in killing babies to get the embryonic kind. Last I heard, we have around 95 therapies currently in use--at least as effective clinical trials--from adult and umbilical cord blood stems cells, including a functioning coin-sized liver in a petri dish. The embryonics have yielded nothing so far except tumors.

If Bloomberg--or anyone--is so hot and bothered for really helping people, curing life-threatening diseases, then why isn't he more interested in the most practical solution, the one we've already got?

A bird in the hand, Mr. Mayor.

I like having dissenters around.

They can help keep us humble, which helps keep us honest. Even Voice of the Faithful is right in reminding us not to cover up a scandal. Yes, sometimes it is easier for an educated person to tell a recalcitrant ignoramus "Shut up and trust me," but being easy doesn't always mean it's always appropriate.

Most people aren't experts in all, or any, of the subjects that are major, contentious policy issues in this country, but they're not stupid, either. They can be duped by a propaganda campaign but respond thoughtfully when accurate and balanced information is made available. Sometimes people need to be reminded, but with flawed policy as with heresy, the danger is in unbalancing a complementary set of principles and emphasizing one at the expense of the others. We generally take it with a grain of salt when it's commercial advertising or political campaigning, but it's often confusing when it comes from a different source, and sometimes the paralysis of confusion is the biggest defense against would-be policy makers with strange agendas.

Generally this paralysis can be pushed through with a persevering united front of public institutions, either by getting the honest word out or by spinning a convincing story otherwise. There are several examples--pro-abortion activists perpetually recasting the debate in terms of "women's rights and safety versus oppressive men and their brainwashed wives," war opponents defending Saddam (and I'm not saying the Iraq thing has been clean on any level) and conveniently forgetting UN weapons inspectors' reports of being stopped outside of facilities and watching convoys leaving through other exits, people claiming the APA has certified homosexuality as healthy because it took it off its list of disorders (the real reason being, with no apparent means of treatment, reducing the stigma would at least be palliative), and environmentalists warning us that deleterious climate change is such an urgent matter that we can't take the time to study it before trying to fix it.

I'm going to focus on this last point today. I'm not going to say there isn't good science out there, but I'd like to talk about how science isn't the only thing in play, and how if there weren't skeptics of global warming asking these questions, the stop-industrial-emissions-in-developed-countries program would be a lot farther along, and the climatological evidence would either be undiscovered or underreported (because, hey, if crackpots couldn't make skeptics out of normal people, why divert efforts trying to prove anything to them?).

To wit, Dr. Stephen Schneider, a high profile activist for the global warming theory, as quoted in Discover in 1989:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

In the same quote he also said that scientists are also humans who care about people and how they live, and I do sympathize completely with his motivation; mentioning any single piece or small assemblage of evidence and letting it drop might elicit no more than "How interesting. What's next, evidence of an inflationary universe?" I also can't blame him for oversimplifying--we see it everywhere, with some of the most dramatic examples coming from the field of nutrition, where we were at first told to cut out all fats because they didn't think we could distinguish HDL from LDL, so people binged on low-fat and later low-carb snacks (well, all right, I won't blame the talking heads for people consuming far more than normal because "good in the right amount" was confused with "harmless")--and it's hard to tell when you're above the "a little knowledge is dangerous" threshold but below the "too much information is confusing to the untrained mind" point. However, what Schneider is talking about isn't science, it's propaganda, plain and simple. While making efforts to convince people of something is just a natural part of society, we have to remember the difference.

"Oh, but now we understand the science better than we did before," says many a disciple of global warming. Yeah, and in a decade we'll understand it even more. Thirty years ago, we were sure there was global cooling because scientists were in consensus. After years of propaganda that got way out ahead of the science, do you really think we're just supposed to pretend that enchanting us with doomsday stories has something to do with reality? Fool me once, fool me twice. Why should we believe your story is true just because you want us to find it engaging? If it was clearly overstated from the beginning, but you advertised it as fact anyway, then it's either pure marketing or part of some other agenda.

We can handle the truth, even if it's bad news. We might want it with a pinch of sugar, but if you're just trying to manipulate us into pressuring the Powers That Be into funding your project, into stopping your pet apocalypse, whatever, we're going to be suspicious because unmixing the truth from the propaganda isn't easy. Show us the science--try not to water it down too much--because trying to convince us to believe it because everyone is believing in it is just calling us to jump on the bandwagon.

Oh, and the Atlantic "conveyor belt" isn't in such bad shape, after all (see the 1117-06 issue of Science). Was this oceanic current supposed to be one of those smoking guns that we can trust, or just a curiosity? Will there be any others?

We've also got The Weather Channel quashing open discussion of doubt in global warming, in the interest of raising science above the level of politics. Science isn't about silence. Honest science--I admit, with humans as scientists, egos often get in the way on all sides--requires listening to all hypotheses and their criticisms, finding evidence for the accurate ones and against the inaccurate ones, and addressing the inadequacies that dissenters can more easily see. The answer to "your theory doesn't cover a few discrepancies I'd like to address" is not "Never mind, and listen to us; we're the ones with the consensus." Sometimes criticism is easily answered, but for the sake of us unwashed masses, please make the effort.

It's doubly important when there's public policy to downplay the facts, whatever they may be. The antidote to propaganda is not contradictory propaganda; it's truth. When someone calumns your position, your first responsibility is not to play that game. Present what you know, admit what you don't, address the criticism, but don't incite panic. There's more to being right than just being persuasive.

"The world's about a degree warmer than it was a century ago!" Look, I'll give you shrinking ice caps, but you've got to come clean so we can all try to solve the problem, whatever shape it's taken: Are you measuring temperatures in 1907 the same way you're measuring them in 2007? What's your confidence interval in each case? Just tell us, and show us how. Obviously being patronizingly vague has gained you as many enemies as it has sycophants, neither of which will convert the other.

One degree doesn't tell us much, anyway. We have decades of detailed meteorological data, including some studies of historical outliers like the little ice age and the warm middle ages, and still have trouble predicting a week in advance. Are we putting a reasonable amount of faith in the predictions made for decades and centuries into the future?

Besides, it's not just a question of what some planetary thermometer can tell us. Just being hotter may not mean much; we also need to look at heat capacity, how thermal energy is stored; at the difference between isothermal climate change and adiabatic climate change. Some extra heat energy is hypothetically converted to mechanical energy in the form of more severe and numerous storms, but there hasn't been much of a change there at this point, as well as in the conversion of ice to water, which we have seen (although they're getting thicker--more snowfall is another meteorological effect of heating in current science; this quickening of the polar water cycle might be another means of buffering the atmosphere from greenhouse gases).

"It's our fault! Temperatures are changing more quickly than they should!" How do we know how quickly they "should" change? Are there studies out there using human-excluding models that have much flatter "hockey stick" graphs than what we're really seeing? I saw one presentation where a researcher from, I believe, NOAA presented a model and findings where the opposite was true, where our impact didn't appear to be sufficient to cause what we're seeing. Just one man, yes, verses a horde of environmental activists and journalists who can't distinguish context from slant assuring me that some expert or plurality of experts somewhere is sure that we're mostly responsible. Whatever studies are out there, once they're in the public sphere, they seem to be suffering from the Bush Dictator effect: badly paraphrased, vaguely cited.

Not to mention methane, which is more potent than CO₂, but not anthropogenic, and the fraction of greenhouse gases that are artificially produced. Actually, they don't mention methane nearly as much. Is it because it's not as important, or just because there's less we can do about it? Why don't we plant a few trees and try to reign in a little our enthusiasm for government oversight, and then look at what we can't do without federal or international cooperation?

Don't get me wrong, I'm concerned about the place we live, too. Even if the Earth were on the verge of another ice age and this shrinking ice cap thing were just a fluke, I'd be in favor of trying to minimize our environmental impact in every sphere--fertilize or irrigate when necessary, but try to do no harm along the way. I'd be a little wary of trying to tame the weather when our knowledge of how climate is is so limited we can hardly even ask the question of how the climate should be. I just don't see the loudest advocates treating it like the emergency they tell us it is. Al Gore--not a scientist--is up for a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing American industrial waste gases even more to the public's attention. To paraphrase a recent letter in the local paper, we shouldn't confuse activism, activity, with accomplishment; but I suppose if Yasser Arafat deserved the prize, Gore is no less qualified.

Not to pick on him, but he's a dramatic example.

Come on: he tools across the country on a private jet that puts out more emissions in a single flight than the average SUV does in a year, in order to warn us even more about global warming, including promoting America as being to blame for being so productive. When he lands, he takes an SUV. Conservation for thee but not for me? Is saving the world too important to bother saving the world along the way?

An Inconvenient Principle?

A few lucky guesses, a few easy questions

You know the Bible 100%!

 

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I only got 98% the first time. I don't remember which answer I guessed differently this time.

I recently caught CNN's special on the early Church, roughly from the Ascention through the legalization of Christianity under Constantine. I am at turns interested in and frustrated with purely secular attempts to exegete ecclesial history. It can be fascinating to learn what perspectives can develop when one is disinterested or slightly skeptical, rather than zealously supportive or antagonistic; on the other hand, sometimes things still get lost or distorted in the interest of one scholar or another trying to advance an agenda completely unrelated to the material in question, if not distinct from the orthodox interpretations for the sake of novelty. In CNN's "After Jesus," they candidly admit that historians can only go by the physical evidence available, but it's still interesting to see how they pitch the Church's development as a rather haphazard thing, like the debate over whether Christian converts needed to be Jews first being determined by a battle of wits and egos, by Paul's persuasion of James, rather than as a discovery of some objective truth, which would have been more how Paul and James would have imagined it.

it reminds me of a discussion I followed at ISCA last year, too late for me to participate, but it took me this long to think of what to write about it for you, and like I said, I prefer to lurk. It's about the time, described in John 12, when a Mary annointed the feet of Jesus with nard, and Judas offered the criticism that it should have been sold (ostensibly for the poor, although he'd actually been embezzling, according to John). Jesus's response is "(7) Leave her alone. She has kept this for the day of my burial. (8) For you always have the poor with you, but you don't always have me." The issue in question during this discussion is why Jesus didn't have the nard sold in the first place. When asked what he got out of the first six verses in the chapter, the user said:

I would have "liked" Jesus to have stopped the woman from washing his feet at all and told her to buy bread for the poor and that they will celebrate his majesty by providing for the hungry.

By verse 7 he's kinda in a tight position, though, so there's not much to say right at that moment. If he had said "Oh, Judas, you're right...' he wouldn't have been the all-knowning dude he was, right?

In response:

Yeah, that's the thing, I'm thinking it's sarcasm, sort of a backhanded "you're not getting this money dude, so don't even think about it". Sort of like, it's better for my feet than to have you steal it with your false concern for the poor.

And...the wise are confounded. Didn't other apostles at other times make similar suggestions to Judas's? Jesus wasn't sarcastic, though; He was saying what He meant. He isn't always direct in the gospels, but even when He uses dramatic language--brood of vipers, raising stones up to children of Abraham, children of the devil--it's pretty clear from the narration, if not always the context, that there's a bigger message being conveyed. Maybe Jesus was being direct--or maybe He meant it both ways, that being annointed in anticipation of His burial is also better than having Judas steal the 300 and spend it on, well, probably nothing he'd have time to enjoy.

I think in a way it's also a lesson in sacramentality. Sure, it's great to do things like give to the poor as a celebration of His majesty or comemoration of His message, but loving your neighbor is the second great commandment, not the first. We are limited, physical creatures; if we do not at intervals make explicit gestures of worship to God, then it is probable we will lose sight of why we are making explicit gestures of keeping after our brothers. It's liable to become a chore, either something eventually neglected or at least done out of habit, devoid of the anagogical dimension God likes to introduce into things He elevates to sacramentals.

No, they say: let's interpret it as Jesus merely scolding, and not as teaching his disciples that making great efforts to worship God (a la the first great commandment) is important next to making any efforts to help one another (the second great commandment). Jesus, after all, was just a teacher, wasn't He? Never mind that the Evangelists thought He was divine, as did the other Apostles, and don't forget that the multitudes he fed didn't want to carry off and coronate Him just for inspiring them to generosity. Let's interepret the passage in a way that has Jesus meaning the opposite of what He says plainly, in a way that expressly precludes what the rest of the New Testament has a pretty solid consensus on; let's catch Jesus glutting a bit on Mary's fawning and weeping with the nard, and then have Him turn it around on Judas when he's caught so people can still say "No, it's all on Judas; it's good to pamper God!"

Taking the "Jesus was sarcastic" route makes the orthodox interpretation look like sophistry--which is fair to suspect, as Judas's question was only asked in the wrong spirit--but if the whole of Jesus's message were "be excellent to the poor," then why'd He waste all that time talking about other things of the Kingdom of God? He sure wasn't executed for being a socialist.

Is it so hard to acknowledge that the stuff about the Jesus's divinity might be on the straight and level? To consider that at least the Apostles thought so? Look at verse seven again: "She has kept this for the day of My burial." It's not just about "celebrating his majesty," and Jesus wasn't overindulging in some TLC from the woman. I can buy Christ trying one more time to correct Judas, but looking at "Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?" and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone," where He used situational irony, I can't see Jesus being sarcastic just for the sake of sarcasm, just to cover His behind when He could have just as well told Judas off straight away. It's pretty clear that by this point in the Gospel story, Jesus was anticipating His own imminent death. Why the insistence on reading that verse apart from the rest of the passage? Verses 3-6 set up Christ letting Mary bathe His feet and the others not understanding why resources should be wasted on being good to Jesus. These verses aren't the lesson with Jesus changing the subject in the seventh, they are the question to which the answer is verse seven. It's again like historians trying to reinterpret the story with only secular data: "See, Jesus was all about helping the poor, so when they caught Him enjoying a little luxury, He had to retain an image of modest living and generosity"--a rather one-dimensional image, in the eyes of someone who can accept both/and solutions to an apparent dichotomy--"as well as omniscience, so it's achieved by showing Jesus knowing what Judas was up to and saying that waste is better than theft." At this point I don't see Him being sarcastic, but perhaps ironic again: Judas's suggestion, after all, wasn't bad, but only insincere. The woman at the well also said she had no husband, which wasn't false; it was just inaccurate, as she'd had five, which Jesus made a point of bringing up.

It also seems to have hints of liberation theology. It's a little beside the point, but we've got here another case where someone takes portions of the Bible that fit some philosophy or agenda at face value, and dismiss the rest with a wave of the hand, hardly bothering to rationalize ignoring the other text: Jesus was all about helping and feeding the poor, and only about helping and feeding the poor; when He mistakenly lets Mary pamper Him and Judas calls Him on it, Jesus smacks him down because Judas was just filching from the Apostolic purse anyway.

I'm all for helping the poor, but doesn't it seem rather unoriginal? "Jesus taught us to help the needy! Let's call him God!" seems no less silly than "Jesus goaded us not to hoard our lunch for ourselves! Let's make him king!" I suppose I should expect as much from a one-dimensional philosophy, whether it's a dimension of welfare or a dimension of pacifism.

When it comes to Lord, liar, or lunatic, why is it so easy to say "You know, I don't like the historical evidence. I think he was just a swell guy who got a little puffed up in the retelling by his cultus?"

What's next, wild dogs?

Pro-lifers are sometimes criticized for not emphasizing other quality-of-life (so to speak) issues like poverty, drugs, war, or AIDS. Those issues are important too, but unfortunately, not everybody can work on every social problem. It would be great--and some people do try to make some contribution to every kind of charity--but unfortunately there's not enough time in the day for any one person to do a lot for every issue. The people who fight abortion are just working on that particular thing because it's something they can do--maybe it's personal for them, maybe their talents happened to fill a need that a Crisis Pregnancy Center had that a St. Vincent DePaul shop didn't. Other people work on other things. There are plenty of people working on all the different social problems--or rather, there are some working on each but not enough working on any of them.

If you want to work on one, and it's not the pro-life movement, it's okay. You can't focus on one, though, pretend you think they're all worthwhile, and then tell a pro-life activist "Abortion doesn't matter or can't be stopped; my pet charity is most important or more urgent."

You can't have it both ways. Either fighting abortion is worthwhile (because abortion isn't the solution to the other problems), and you just have different preferences, or you like doing some charitable work but only want to hear support for abortion.

Liberals are moderate?

Seems a logical contradiction, but I often hear things like "over half the population considers itself to be progressive," although apparently there's still some nostalgia for family values (probably in a few of the flyover states that didn't get counted--perhaps the tradcon proclivities held by moderates don't really count, either) and "I'm really a centrist" from people who are clearly to the left of folks who identified themselves as liberal a generation ago--as if it were self-evident that the rest of the country moved that far left around them. Well, maybe two generations ago; the 1960s/1970s are a statistical outlier no matter which way you slice it.

I also hear things like "Reality has a liberal bias."

If it were so, why do we have to be told?

What's the word for the condition where people treat imaginary things that they want to be true as real?

Apologetic for a Random Reader (III)

Today's topic: the death penalty

How can we say we're part of the culture of life if we permit the death penalty? The culture of life bills itself as honoring the value of all life, so how can we execute anyone?

A similar argument can be make for Just War theory, but here isn't the place and now isn't the time.

First of all, while those questions are good ones, there's more to the culture of life than the matter of executing prisoners, which is why we normally associate "pro-life" with ending abortion. A well-ordered culture of life would seek to preserve all life, of both fetus and felon. The difference is the realization that we can't always do both; sometimes we need to protect the innocent from the criminal.

If we categorically refuse ever to use lethal force, then on the occasions that nothing short of lethal force will stop someone from causing great harm, we will be unable to prevent the harm. Our purpose is not just to refrain from causing violence; it is also to protect people from it when necessary (state of California notwithstanding, flight from an assailant is not always an option). If we are charged with protecting life, and we expressly fail to do so, then we are guilty of negligence. We can't wash our hands of it on the grounds that we avoided directly promoting a death. Life is a real thing we are obligated to try to preserve, not an abstract concept we serve only through personal avoidance of cause.

You'll get no argument that in this day and age, in this society, the necessity of applying lethal force after a criminal has been sequestered is just about nil. Thus, we admit the DP in theory, but usually deny it in practice.

If we put health warnings on cigarette packages, shouldn't we also put mercury warnings on cans of tuna?

For my whimsy quota...

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North   You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Whence Christmas?

Mark Shea's got an excerpt from his upcoming book about where we got Christmas, or more to the point, why we have it when we do. I won't repost it here, being a bit long, but it's worth a read, and there's some good stuff in the combox that fills in a few other details. Just permit me to highlight a few details and then ramble on, on my own, for a little while.

Christmas was not merely a reappropriation of pagan winter holidays. Early Christians were very interested in how their Jewish forebears scheduled things, and not so much what pagans did.

While the Church did sometimes "baptize" pagan practices once it had the momentum and resources to evangelize whole nations, it wasn't simply a matter of putting a Christian skin on a pagan animal. Easter--still called Pascha in the Eastern traditions and in many other languages, and described with the adjective "Paschal"--near the vernal equinox, but more importantly it followed (and in the East, still does) closely the Passover, which is in the spring for its own reasons. Christmas, December twenty-fifth, is no more (even less so) pagan than exchanging rings at weddings. First of all, Christmas comes nine months after the independently scheduled (for the most part--when you've got imperfect record keeping, there will always be conflicts between placing an event when it's thought to have taken place and placing it in relation to another event a specific length of time away) Feast of the Anunciation, which gives any relation to Saturnalia a circumstancial flavor, and had been so set since before Aurelian's promotion in 274 of the celebration of Sol Invictus, which had been a minor holiday until the Emperor decided an alternative to the Christians' nativity feast was necessary. The Christians, turning the astronomical imagery into a metaphor for the Son Himself, were not having any of it.

There's no closer relation between Christmas and pagan holidays than there is between Santa Claus and Old Man Winter. The gift exchange doesn't even stem from Hannukah, which is a relatively minor Jewish holiday (you'll find the original events in Maccabees 1 and 2), but rather from the Feast of the Epiphany, which takes place a little after Christmas, but the adoration of the magi as well as of the shepherds got rolled together with the Nativity, at least in the U.S.

But anyway, merry Christmas. I'll probably have a little more for you around the Feast of the Mother of God. I always get good material when I'm hangin' with the fam. Pax.

Development of doctrine and priestly celibacy

There is currently a discussion about the history of marriage restrictions in priestly and religious life in the Church going on in the Bible and Christianity forum over at ISCA. One recent post briefly summarizes the nature and history of consecrated life; in the penaultimate paragraph, a few apparently androgynous mystical experiences are cited, and the piece ends with the following paragraph:

Why does the Catholic church still insist on celibacy and male-only priests? Their justification is still largely sacerdotal purity, though inheritance issues also drove the demands for celibacy in the 11th and 12th centuries. They claim that as priests are the representative of Christ on Earth, he cannot be represented by a woman. But the Catholic church is reaching a crisis point; many diocese are terribly underserved, as older priests retire and die and as the church weathers the storm of child abuse scandals. It's likely that, within our lifetimes, we will see a change on these fronts, but the pontiff will have to be forced into accepting it. If there aren't enough priests to maintain a parish, something has to give. Either accept married priests in the ranks or ordain women.

Some of the flaws in the argument are obvious. Two thousand years ago we learned the significance of a distinct, ordained male priesthood; one thousand years ago, we learned the value of a priesthood not divided between parish and family. These benefits aren't just practical; you don't solve a pragmatic problem by compromising principles. I can see a relaxing of the rules preventing married men from getting ordained, but not anytime soon; the tradition, though not the rule, of celibacy is two millennia old, and orthodox seminarians are on the rise. As for the pope being forced into accepting anything, the user who posted the article apparently doesn't understand papal infallibility; from the Church's perspective, a pope couldn't contradict Ordinatio Sacerdotalis even if he wanted to, and from an external perspective, the doctrine of infallibility itself would shield him from political pressures for compromise.

I've seen this pattern in the Church before, and I don't think it's a coincidence. Five hundred years ago, there were nascent Protestant movements promoting iconoclasm and simplicity of worship. What was Rome's response? St. Peter's Basilica. John Paul II was the most ecumenical pope to date, and what was one of his most favorite topics? Mary, perhaps presently the greatest stumbling block to Protestant dialog with the Church.

Why does the Church not take more opportunities for emphasizing common ground? Is schism not worse than heresy?

Well, it is, but perpetuating the scandal of heresy just to end schism isn't much of a bargain. My point is that this crisis is not a sign from God to the pope that the doors in all the seminaries and iconostases need to be flung open. I think it's an opportunity to emphasize how important a celibate, male priesthood is. In a time when the priesthood is at a nadir in number and quality (sorry, but the pedophilia angle is usually invoked by now), insisting on admitting only single men into the seminary is a dramatic sign of what the priesthood is.

Currently reading...

Science and Religion: some historical perspectives, John Hedley Brooke

A two-foot stack of neglected issues of Newsweek, AOPA Pilot, Flying, and This Rock. There's probably still an issue or two of Parenting mixed in for some unfathomable reason, too.

"Theology of the Body" Explained, Christopher West and George Weigl. Well, I keep starting it....

I just got news that my dad's cancer is still playing hide and seek with his liver, so I don't really feel like posting anything right now. Prayers, for healing for my dad and strength for my mom, would be much appreciated.

Apologetic for a Random Reader (II)

The claim by fashionably skeptical secularists and a few para-Christian groups: "Santa Claus is a myth. We don't even know where the idea came from."

If by "we" you mean "those of us who prop up our own convictions with our own convictions, rather than careful study," then yes, you don't know. If by "don't even know" you mean "can't find evidence documented to 21st century standards," then you're only half wrong; we have documentation on where and when he lived and who he was, and then historical traditions that are pretty consistent in the relevant details.

The popular incarnation of Santa that we see today was started the better part of a century ago in a Coca-Cola ad campaign, but the trail doesn't exactly get cold right afterwards. The name comes from the Dutch "Sinterklaas," which is a contraction of the Dutch for "St. Nicholas."

Nicholas, an actual saint, was a fourth century bishop of Myra, in present-day Turkey. Especially in Europe, he's still depicted as a bishop, complete with miter and crozier. His feast day is December 6, when I should have made this post. He was known for giving anonymously to the poor, to the point that after his death such anonymous charity continued and was still attributed to his actions. He is also the patron saint of pawnbrokers; three gold balls are traditionally hung outside of pawn shops in honor of his best-known anonymous gift, three bags of gold secretly tossed into a poor man's house as dowries for his three daughters. Well, it was anonymous at the time, anyway.

The name Kris Kringle comes from the German for Christ Child (probably thanks to Martin Luther), in the interest of focusing on Jesus Himself over a man who...well, I needn't remind you of the whole commercialization-of-Christmas thing, which even then could have added to the distraction from Christ, if not added to the richness of a Christocentric holiday. Somehow the name and the saint were conflated.

There is the most tenuous of pagan ties through what we think of as Father Christmas. In some places in pagan Europe, around this time of year a man would dress as what we'd recognize as Old Man Winter; centuries ago, the old man would go house to house, where the hospitality shown him was supposed to reflect how gentle the winter would be to that household. There was no association with bringing gifts; the only material holdover I can see would be leaving him a snack, and even that one is mitigated by the fact that hospitality isn't exclusive to paganism, and that St. Nicholas traditions exist even where Christmas doesn't happen during cold winters, so placating a personification of the weather doesn't even have the remotest symbolic value.