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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What happened to this generation?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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




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


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


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


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

University of Illinois religion professor fired for doing his job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pizza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got a little sidetracked the other day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

'Nuff said.

Is consent the sole criterion of the good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know what I'd like to see?

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

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

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

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

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

What are the chances?

Putting the doctrinal cart before the developmental horse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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

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

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

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