Obedience, faithfulness

Father Denis at Life WIth A German Shepherd wrote a nice reflection on the Pope's Chrism Mass homily.  I just want to quote one small bit:

The idea often is out there that obedience to the Church means turning your brain off, becoming passive, relapsing into a kind of ‘pay, pray, and obey’ mode where all the power and initiative of the Church lies with the clergy, while the laity are supine and essentially inert.

This is simply not the case. ... There is nothing passive about it.

He goes on to give some examples of how the difficulties of being faithful to the Church are commensurate with the fruits that result from persevering, but I want to focus briefly on this misconception of obedience.  

I can muster some sympathy for people on the outside.  They look at dogmas, hear something about the necessity of assent of the intellect and will to something, then look at all the contingent notions in their own lives, and somewhat understandably completely miss the fact that, guided by the Holy Spirit or not, the Church has spent the last two thousand years studying the human condition, and so might just have a pretty good idea of what factors that distinguish modern life from that in medieval Europe or ancient Palestine just really aren't game-changers, after all.  

At the very least, it would behoove more of us to look at the prudential teachings found in Tradition, and thereby save ourselves the trouble of repeating all of the mistakes in human history firsthand.  But maybe that's more about the intellect than the libido, so I'm getting ahead of myself.

Some people joke, sometimes nervously, about how they'd hate to be married because then they'd be spending their whole lives with just one person, instead of living it up with whomever and then moving on when they'd had enough.  People in healthy marriages understand, and single people who have a well formed understanding of what marriage and chastity are, recognize, that such concerns completely miss the point, and are often flatly wrong.  They understand that by submitting their will and libido to a monogamous covenant, they make themselves fertile soil for graces that will bear fruit in this life and in the life to come.  So it is with obedience to the Church:  in submitting--not abandoning--their wills and intellects to the expertise and guidance of the Church, they make room for renewal and growth, in ways expected and unexpected.  

It's not too late to stand up to the White House! (edited)

Please, go there and sign the petition, if you haven't signed one already.  It's morally bad for disregarding conscientious objection, it's legally bad for presuming that "to regulate commerce...among the several States" means "to mandate commerce between as well as wholly within each of the States," and it's ethically bad for perpetuating the myth that "Christian values" are best served by appointing Caesar the power to care for the poor and feed the lambs on our behalf.

I received a response from the White House on Friday, which I will be quoting liberally here.

Thank you for using We the People to make your voice heard about the Obama Administration's decision to ensure that women have access to free preventive care with no co-pays

"Free" and "no co-pays" are two different things.  This distinction is not consistently preserved, either throughout the rest of this form letter or in the debate at large.

[T]he Affordable Care Act requires insurance companies to  cover preventive services, including preventive care for women, without charging a co-pay, starting on August 1, 2012

This part was interesting.  Until now, legal entities that objected were given a one year grace period in which to discover some sophistry for accepting what was still going to be inevitable.  Now that's off the table.

This part is important.  Jimmy Akin goes into a little more detail on this point.  In some ways it appears we lost ground by the USCCB using accommodating diplomatic language, but I don't think so.  Evil will do this when it is threatened in order to intimidate and distract you from casting it out.

As the President said: "Nearly 99 percent of all women have relied on contraception at some point in their lives"

I'm highly skeptical.  Until last week, I used to hear numbers that were much lower, and the claims were merely that Catholics contracepted at the same rates (over half, but no supermajority) as other Americans.  Suddenly it's all but a handful?  It's not impossible, but I'd be looking askance at such reports even if they weren't sourced by the Gutmacher Institute.

Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her own health

And every free citizen should be in control of the decisions that affect his or her own soul.  Let's not conflate "some people struggle to afford medical care" with "you must agree that fertility is a disease," let alone the other moral problems with arguments framed in terms of self-determination.

And I saw that local churches often did more good for a community than a government program ever could

I appreciate your...appreciation...but so what?  A screwdriver is great for driving screws, but you can't port that over to driving nails just because there's a compelling need for hammers.  There are reasons it just doesn't work like that.

If a woman's employer is a religious non-profit organization, such as a charity hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, her insurance company -- not the hospital or charity -- will be required to reach out and provide her contraceptive care free of charge if she chooses to use it.

Here's where we're supposed to remember that "free of charge" is, well, impossible in this world.  Who's paying the insurance company?  You and I. Why do people even think that the government can impose fines or fees on some corporate entity without said entity passing it straight along to the customer?  They don't even pretend to pass "you may not raise your prices to cover these costs" legislation to make any punitive damages more painful than the administrative hassle it would be to maintain profit levels.

There are tremendous health benefits for women that come from using contraception. Contraception is a safe and effective way of ....

No, it's not.  It can reduce the risk of some types of cancers, which is good, but prescription and OTC hormones range from "too weak to work on more fecund women" to "you'll literally bleed for the rest of your life."  I'm being dramatic, granted, but when the mere side effects are as bad as hemorrhaging and stroke, is prescribing it for something as prosaic as acne really the best way to go?  They prescribe the pill to alleviate irregular periods because it's easier than recommending an endocrinologist to actually cure irregular periods; does the side effect of good skin rise to the level of a "tremendous health benefit" that is proportional to the disregard of our consciences that make clear that certain things, while convenient, are still evil?  Because they still haven't established the point that pregnancy is itself is a disease which should be prevented (which is odd, since they're so happy about treating other "reproductive complications" and unrelated conditions with the pill).

I think I need to make that point clearer.  We hear things like "pregnancy would kill me," but it's a possibility of death for the mother versus, when it comes to the point of abortion, certain death for the child.  I don't want to get sidetracked, but the choice between "possible tragedy" and "definite evil" should not be a hard one.

Importantly, we also usually hear that pregnancy can cause things like peripartum cardiomyopathy, but the way it's usually billed is that pregnancy is the disease and PC is a symptom.  I sympathize that many of these complications are difficult to predict and only get discovered during pregnancy when only symptoms can be treated, but the problem with PC isn't the pregnancy, the problem is the heart.

I'm all for prevention, but let's not fall into "we wouldn't have these problems if we didn't know about them" thinking.

This is an issue where people of good will on both sides of the debate have been grappling to find a solution that works for everyone, and the policy announced today has done that.

The first half is right, unless it means "the policy announced today will further our ends, and will give you an opportunity to embrace white martyrdom," in which case I agree.

The right to religious liberty will be fully protected

If it were, there wouldn't be such an uproar.  I'm glad you're not my lawyer or neighborhood cop.

Here are a few statements from groups involved in the issue

Never mind.  Quotes from Catholics United, Catholic Health Association, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL.  They all make the reasonable point that this is supposed to help them help people who really need it, but PP and NARAL don't even throw a bone to folks who don't think that working evil is a safe and reliable way to achieve good.  Thanks, but no thanks for that dose of alleged perspective.

My belated two cents plus interest on Missal 3.0

My church hadn't done much to prepare for the new liturgy, so I expected things to be rocky, but I found myself on the first Sunday of Advent out of town.  I thought to post this sooner but most of my traveling during the year happens around the holidays, so it seemed worthwhile to wait and watch how things were going at five different churches in four dioceses.  Also, I forgot to finish writing this up until now.

It was the middle of January before the changes seemed to feel more or less natural to everyone.  A few people still say "and also with you"--at random times I also forget--and I still have to refer to that tri-fold handbill for parts of the Creed, the Gloria, and the Holy Holy Holy.  I think "consubstantial" stuck out enough that everyone learned that first.

I like the changes, overall.  I'd been looking forward to them for a while, since Jimmy Akin started posting excerpts back whenever it was.  Some I wasn't too fond of for aesthetic reasons; "seen and unseen" seems to roll off the tongue a little more smoothly than "visible and invisible," and to my ears it understates the idea with a little poetic flair that I always thought served well as emphasis.  What's the opposite of hyperbole?  Hypobole?  Parabole?  Anyway, the meaning of "seen and unseen" was never unclear to me, it just sounded like an archaic yet compact way of saying "everything there is to see and everything not permitted to mortal eyes," but on the other hand, it's less precise in modern language.  "Unseen" could mean "visible but out of sight."  "Invisible" means "unseeable."  One might say it's a more technical term, like "consubstantial;" it forces a more accurate depiction of the concept, and I'm all for precision and accuracy, at least short of becoming pedantic.  Plus, I'm a child of Vatican II so I have no memory of the Tridentine mass.

As well as being more precise, it helps to elevate the language; there's poetic language, but there's crappy verse and then there's elegant verse, and I can't really argue that the places in the old translation that sounded nicer than the new translation were really worth the risk of misinterpretation, like "for all" at the consecration of the Precious Blood being taken as conclusive proof of universal salvation.

I think it's just going to take a little getting used to.  The old translation was only fifty years old but it was defended for its antiquity and pedigree like one might have thought more appropriate for the Liturgy of Saint James.  The new translation has its own rhythms and we'll get used to them, the new music written to fit the new words will become familiar, although it seems like a majority of the sung responses I've experienced so far have been in minor keys or obscure modes that don't flow with the rest of the mass.  It's almost like some of the composers trying to bring the hymnody up to speed occasionally forgot the difference between solemn and somber.  Personally I'm going to miss the Gloria from mass setting 3 the most; it was elegant and I think comes from a place where familiarity made it easy to compose something beautiful.  Even though liturgists have been working on the new translation longer than we've been seeing it, it's still chafes in a few places, like a new pair of shoes might, and like new shoes will have to endure a breaking-in period.  Or maybe we're the shoes, really.

I haven't heard a lot of complaints, myself.  One other person commenting on how the changes don't flow as well as the old translation.  A secondhand or thirdhand reference to someone claiming oppression at the sixty-year-old novel translation that was more easily abused and less carefully protected (indeed, I sometimes wonder if part of the motivation to promulgate this new translation is to cut off hangers-on of liturgical abuses cleanly, instead of letting them think this is one more thing they can corrupt according to their own preference) being replaced by this one.  An admitted cynic wondering if the publisher of the missals managed to bend an ear of the secretariat of the Congregation for Divine Worship and hatch a very profitable conspiracy.  Another wondering why Rome is bothering with all this when there's a sex abuse scandal to deal with.  Another from a priest saying "stick with 'and also with you'--I'm more than just a spirit!"  One occurrence of not liking how the centurion's prayer now goes "my soul shall be healed" instead of "I shall be healed."  Another thinking "consubstantial" is pretentious.  Another feeling that the communal feel of saying "We believe" in the Creed is more important than whatever is achieved by saying "I believe."

All these criticisms are interesting, if not altogether valid.  I try not to criticize the liturgy too much, because it's just too easy for me to start seeing all the things done badly (and so many of them would be so easy to do correctly) and too easy to compound the ways I'm not paying attention to what I should, but perhaps this is the least bad time to make an exception, if not actually a good time to do so.  I will say a few things and then comment on the criticism I have heard, and that will be all for, I hope, a good long time.  It's not altogether relevant, but as long as we're changing the mass, I may as well point out a few bothersome things, some of which I have mentioned before, and then I shall hold my tongue until and unless I witness some flagrant abuses that need to be brought to the attention of the local ordinary and the CDW; rest assured, you'll hear about it too.

To liturgical ministers or whomever, whose decision it was to have people in the back of the church come forth for communion first, drop the attempt to shoehorn in some "last shall be first" symbolism.  The best symbolic acts arise naturally, with meaning ascribed to them after they manifest, rather than being deliberately constructed by man; or they have already been put in place hundreds or thousands of years ago.  The people sitting in the front do so not because they're proud, nor those in the back because they're humble.  It's like insisting, contrary to the allowances of canon law, that we all "stand together" during communion in some long standing local tradition that may not go back even as far as my childhood, as if uniformity of posture could somehow contribute to or surpass the communion we all share in those moments through the Eucharist; or worse yet, in some look-at-me-not-God moment, suggesting that we should have married priestesses because when they're pregnant "this is my body given for you" takes on added dimensions.  No; all starting communion from the back of the church does is divert everyone's attention away from the sanctuary and the Sacrament and toward the row behind them so they know when they can exit the pew.  Those ushers who try to do the crowd control thing, tell us when to go and when to wait?  Useless.  They sneak up, effectively if not deliberately, through the cloud of people who missed their cue to get in line in the aisle, maybe make a gesture supposed to indicate it's your turn to go but you can't see it if you're not already watching closely enough to pick them out of the crowd, and blow past you if you're not on top of things.  I doubt it's just me because as I said it's a cloud more than a stream of people and I see it in every church that has this practice.  Maybe if there were some way of identifying them as ushers we could tell they weren't just confused and trying to get to communion themselves--except, no, that hasn't been working.  If they started with people from the front, the congregation could start filing out as soon as the Eucharistic ministers came down from the altar, and we only need to keep a small fraction of our awareness on the people around us so we know when to go, instead of turning around to watch the pews behind us empty out.

To the music ministers, please abandon attempts to inject music, in whole or in part, to the petitions; it always ends up as "We pray, to the, Lord hear our prayer."  It's weird, it's a run-on sentence.  Make it stop.

To whomever who came up with the idea of turning everyone into a minister of hospitality, can we dispense with the de facto sign of peace before mass?  We have one in the middle of mass already, and that one's in the rubrics.  If I want to socialize, I'll meet you in the narthex after mass; I'm not going to respond effectively to "Rise and greet those around you!" or "Get to know each other a little bit" five seconds before the processional.  Either I already know those around me or I've no hope of instantly befriending them simply by your command.  Want me to feel welcome?  Do something that may actually make me feel welcome.  If you have to tell people to welcome me, it's already failed.

To the fans of mutating a mutable and recent liturgy, I say you brought it on yourselves and should not be shocked that a decades-old rite can be replaced despite any familiarity, habituation, or preference after a centuries-old rite has been replaced.  I'm sorry, but of all the arguments, that isn't a good one.  You'll just have to get used to it, like you did e-mail and DVDs.

To the cynic, I say even if there is a conspiracy to sell more books, those books would have to be replaced someday anyway and all the reasons given to justify the changes, such as weeding out some of the loopier "hymns," are legitimate anyway.

To the jaded person with different priorities, I say there's no reason why Rome can't address the Scandal in the news papers and liturgical scandal at the same time.  It would be like complaining that malfeasance on the part of the public defender in Asheville should be tolerated until the animal control unit in Bismarck can get that coyote problem under control.  Most of the sizzle these days in the Scandal is the media breaking twenty year old cases--not all, God help us, but most--and it's too late to try rechanneling efforts (I'm also no fan of the "your first priority should be your only priority or you welcome judgment upon your apathy" school of thought, either, if it hadn't already become obvious).  There's always going to be a scandal of some sort, anyway; comes with the territory of a Church and a world populated by sinners.

To whoever thinks "consubstantial" is pretentious or a sign of overthinking things, I say you'll get used to it; it's an appropriate formal term, and one that shouldn't continue to bother you if you can tolerate occasional long Greek expressions like Eucharist and Kyrie Eleison; and "overthinking things" is what enables us to ask intelligent questions about complicated matters instead of just picking the tidiest answer and sticking with it despite new information; it's what makes available answers to questions pondered for centuries, so you don't have to rely on your own research skills or the flaky memory of a local pastor (see also G.K. Chesteron's "never mind nutrition and medicine; why can't we just all enjoy Health?" bit).  Don't like it?  Don't worry about it.  We have highly sophisticated and nuanced canon law, too, but that's more something for canon lawyers to worry about than we rank and file.

To the priest who insists he's not just a spirit, I say it's not about him at all, but about the Spirit working within him that effects the sacraments at his hands, and we're not there to glorify a man in the cloth.

To the one preferring to hear about all healing over only spiritual healing, I sympathize, but please remember that we're all going to ail and die from this life and ultimately our spiritual health is all that will matter.

But I have to say, although "born of the Father before all ages" doesn't bring the same connotation to my ears as "eternally begotten of the Father," sounding more like a temporal kind of event that just happened to take place outside of time, I do like the ring of it.  "Eternity" means something closer to "equally present to all points of time at once" and is usually mistaken to mean "time progressing infinitely into the future," but "born before all ages," never mind how someone can be born of a father in the first place, better communicates that the Second Person of the Trinity really is "older" than time; "eternally begotten" is such a peculiar phrase it's easy to forget it has any particular meaning, but "born" is still a common word, so that "born of a father" really conveys a mysterious idea, and "before all ages" may do better to indicate that the Son is not just outside of common time but predates all Creation.

And I have to add, I'm glad the last item in the handbill they published that summarizes the changes is headed "Concluding Rites" and "Dismissal."  So often I hear the recessional announced as "our sending-forth song,"  and I get that it's supposed to emphasize us being sent out into the world rather than saying "Okay, you don't have to be here after this song's done, or sneak out before we get to the refrain if you can't wait;" a reminder of the Great Commission, but it just sounds flat, almost Newspeakwise; like the other changes and abused I griped about, it's like a human attempt to pump emphasis into something that ultimately was given to us by God.  "Sending-forth" would work in German, and corresponds somewhat better than badly with the "Gathering hymn" at the beginning of mass, but in English...well, if "Ite, missa est,"  whence may come "sent" (the root for "mission") as much as "dismissed," is good enough to get the word "mass" from, then "recessional" is as good a way to end the mass and bookend the "processional" as anything.

I still hear "sending-forth" sometimes, but hopefully we're at the dawn of an era of liturgy more careful in meaning as well as in construction. I've already rambled and griped about things I've been seeing at church but I've witnessed similar phenomena in technical writing, where inexperienced or unskilled authors feel the key to writing in a professional style involves not just heavy use of jargon but stilted, dry sentence construction, as if it will sound appropriately high-level because it sounds so unnatural.  Perhaps I am a good example of that phenomenon.  Either way, this may be a good opportunity to correct such misconceptions.

And hopefully clear out some of the other liturgical detritus.

I haven't written yet about the Wall Street occupation...

...and I hope to make just a few comments and let it drop, since the movement seems to be in low gear for the winter, at least, or having gone into semipermanent or worse hibernation after devolving into another Zombietime photoessay opportunity.

If you take nothing else away, if I make no other comprehensible or worthwhile point, I want you to remember one thing that may have been the bane and doom of the Occupy movement since its conception:

Envy is not the answer to greed.

They talk about the 1% and the 99%, about the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer--cliches that have not been true since before modern times.

It may be true that the gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase, but what isn't talked about much is the fact that on average the rich and the poor are both getting more wealthy, but the rich merely at a higher rate.  This is a sign that the problem is not what people say it is.

Certainly, the abjectly destitute continue to have next to nothing, as they always have--or only so much as nearby charitable organizations have been able to supply--but they are also not the ones turning out in droves to heckle the white collar desk slaves in major cities all across the country.

The tycoons who really make up the 1% do not waste their time working mundane jobs like the middle class does.  I'm not saying they do or don't work hard, but let's not get distracted and harass the guys who also need to show up every day to support their families, okay?

From the National Taxpayer Union, and the Tax Foundation, some tax statistics:

• The top 1% of earners by adjusted gross income, about $343k or higher, paid almost 37% of all taxes in 2009, but made 17% of all income.
• The top 5% made 32% of all income and paid 59% of all federal taxes.
• The top 50% (AGI about $32k) paid almost 98% of income taxes in 2009.
• the bottom 50% paid a little over 2% in 2009, and that rate has been dropping steadily since at least 1999.

You can look these stats up or go digging through the data at IRS.gov if you need to disprove the usual cliches for yourself.

The tax proportions do change with income level, because dividends and capital gains are taxed at different rates from regular income, but richer people tend to have investments and other income sources that are taxable as dividends and capital gains more than the less wealthy, so they're still shouldering the burden.

If you're getting irate now, allow me to remind you that I have said nothing about sticking it to the poor, who have very little left to glean, anyway.  My point is that the people who still have decent jobs these days are not the real enemy, and for the most part the richest didn't get that way by substantial theft of the poorest.

The forgotten crux of the economic argument is the middle class.  As a rough gauge, we can put the ceiling on upper middle class at the $250k/year mark (also, I was able to find numbers for this income level).  About 3% of Americans make more than that.  A tenth of a percent make over a million dollars. The poorer half of all American income earners, who pay 2%, are made up of 70 million people.

In case anyone's getting lost in the numbers, it's a median-mean thing; don't worry about it.

3% of Americans, assuming we've got 350 million people, comes to 10.5 million people.  350 million total, minus 10.5 million upper class, minus 70 million lower class, yields a middle class of approximately 269,500,000 people who pay about 40% of all income tax (neglecting the difference between this 3% and the 5% listed above--I'm not trying to teach a math lesson here).

Tax debates usually hit the middle class the hardest because there are just so damn many of us that small changes in tax rates yield large variations in the budgets.  Under a progressive tax schedule like we have in this country, maybe the rates in the top brackets are also important variable.

Look:  maybe Warren Buffet's right and he needs to pay higher taxes, on top of the charitable giving he does, in quantities surpassing what most of us will ever see in our lives, to organizations benificent and shady alike; and certainly we need to take care of the poor, even if there is some truth behind the presumption that we need the government's help to do it and not just our own personal and willing contributions of time and material resources to places like St. Vincent de Paul or Goodwill or the efforts of religious orders.  But a worker is worth his wages.  He is not a villain for achieving some success in providing for his own family--and it does us all well to remember that we do not know how much the average Wall Street drone is socking away for his kids, nor how many kids he is trying to support, nor what other expenses he may have like a home in disrepair or massive student loan debt or medical costs, nor how much he already gives to charity.

If you're poor, you have the right to demand help.  If you're not, you can provide help and try to attract the help of others.  If you need a job and you want a new car and your student loans forgiven too, well, that's silly but I applaud your honesty.  If you have made money on the backs of de facto slave labor, shame on you.  But if you need help, it is not just to paint a worker who is guilty of nothing but having received his just wages with the same brush as the shameful exploiter.

In your rush to fight poverty, whether your own or a stranger's, do not be eager to embrace jealousy, for it too is a vice.

Well, so much for "just a few comments," but I think I'm done with the situation for now.

Would feminism oppose sex-selective abortion to prevent the decline of the female population?

Apparently not in this day and age.  At least they're being consistent, right?  Choose the legal capacity to make choices over the ontological ability to have choices to make.

If I haven't said it before, I've intended to say it a thousand times:  evil is ultimately self-consuming, suicidal.  It is only parasitic on the good and when it has done all the damage it can do to the particular good off of which it feeds, it turns to other goods and extinguishes them, eventually cutting off the branch on which it sits; or as Tolly put it in the Silmarillion:

...in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last.

Thus do all evils eventually collapse or expend themselves.  The great 20th century dictatorships made great efforts to cull millions of their own people; Germany was saved only by attracting the righteous fury of the Allies trying to rescue Europe from fascism, the Soviet Union was spared perhaps as much by the demise of Old Joe Stalin but was felled by a gross overestimation of the propensity of humans to work for others before themselves, and China perhaps was a wiser student of history but is these days merely taking new bait for the same trap.

So we see it in the Roe effect.  Evil is sterile and cannot propagate itself, not without corrupting another fecund good.  I would speculate that this is why when Jesus touched the unclean, they became clean rather than He unclean.  The beast may raise its head again but here is one more reason why abortion will end:  there will be no one left to support it.

From Ms. Magazine, ten questions they think will stump pro-lifers:

1. How many years do you consider to be a fair prison term for a woman who has an abortion?
2. How many years for a doctor who performs one?
3. Will the punishments be greater the second time around? 
4. Where will the state get the money necessary to prosecute one-third of all American women for this crime?
5. Forty-two percent of women who have an abortion have incomes below 100 percent of the federal poverty level (that’s $10,830 for a single woman with no children, if you’re counting). When women are forced to have children they cannot afford to raise, will those children become wards of the state or simply new Medicaid recipients? Where will the state find the money necessary to support them?
6. Will you be willing to watch your wife die in front of you when her life is threatened by an unsafe pregnancy that no one is allowed to do anything about? Your daughter?
7. Will rapists have to pay child support to women who are forced to have their children?
8. Will the child of incest be in the custody of its rapist father or the father’s teenaged daughter, his mother? In fact, 18 percent of women who have an abortion in America are teenagers. Will they be required to drop out of high school to raise their children or will the state provide free childcare?
9. Will upper-class white women be prosecuted as vigorously as other women who have abortions?
10. You are aware that upper-class white women have abortions, aren’t you?

From me:

1. I don't know, what's the usual penalty for infanticide?  If she did it out of desperation, then I might say it's analogous to murder three.  It would be, after all, a felony.  We're not going to get to the point as a society where abortion is off the table until having a child--even just having one and giving her up for adoption--is not viewed as a greater problem than killing a child; where trying to make the problem go away instead of facing up to it is not viewed as preferable to taking a hit in the lifestyle.  Until then, just putting people in jail isn't going to be any better a solution than putting basement tokers in jail under "zero tolerance" laws has solved the drug problem.
2. I don't know, what's the usual penalty for infanticide?  Since he's just doing it as a matter of course, then I might say it's analogous to murder one.  It would be, after all, a felony.  I'd make the same analogy as I did with the war on drugs, but abortion clinics are notorious for not meeting the professional or hygiene standards of real medical facilities, and that kind of problem is of a more dire order than an agglomeration of college dropouts living smokey lives of quiet dissipation.
3. Aren't they usually?  Why wouldn't they be?  Couldn't think of more than nine good questions?
4. From the money it doesn't give to Planned Parenthood (by some estimations, nearly a million dollars a day--one figure I saw was $363 million a year), if your assumption is correct that the vast increase in number of abortions after Roe would not be reversed by its overturn--and is that one third of all American women, or one third of all American pregnancies?  We should be clear on this point; I'm actually uncertain, and haven't seen numbers on the propensity of women to have abortions repeatedly, recently enough to remember any figures.  Or maybe we could do things differently:  Instead of making it illegal to procure an abortion, just make it illegal to perform one.  After all, we already have laws that distinguish between possessing, buying, and selling controlled substances; if we want to be sensitive to desperate and scared mothers, we could focus on the doctors who actually do the dirty work.  Similarly, going after drug dealers would probably be more effective than going after people who would just prefer to toke up on Friday nights with a few friends instead of gathering around a box of King Edwards and a bottle of Crown Royal Reserve.  But still:  if we wanted another zero-tolerance law to enforce, do you think a million a day would cover it?
5. So fewer than half of women who have abortions live in poverty?  Why does it seem natural to kill children who would be born into poverty before finding your own answers to questions like "who would take care of them?" and "who can afford to have children?"  And why are you assuming that the state needs to shoulder the direct responsibility to care for children?  There is such a thing as finding would-be parents who would handle these details and save lawmakers and voters much grief.  Sure, kids are expensive to raise, but decrepit senior citizens are also expensive to keep in nursing homes, and I'd like to give them the chance to do better than hold a pillow over my face when they tire of watching me linger.  But if they do neither because they were never born alive, who's stuck with the job?  The state--that is, you taxpayers.  Does that trouble you now?  Sure, you get to start making claims about how your money gets spent, but now your money's getting diluted more and you'll be fighting with more people who are anteing up and also want a say on how their money's spent.  You're worried about money?  If we ban abortion, start giving money to Distributed Parenthood so adoption fees and whatever medical expenses accrued during delivery are covered for poor mothers, since it looks like Obamacare is going to be driving Catholic Charities out of the business and taking over most everything anyway.
6. You're asking me if I would be willing to kill my son or daughter to save my wife's life, not just from an "unsafe" pregnancy where the complications surpass current medical arts, but where for some reason doctors are barred from acting (a facile equivocation; in the real world abortion isn't the only possible solution to pregnancy complications).  First, two words:  double effect.  That's an argument too big to pack in here.  Second, maybe you should ask my wife if she was willing to kill her son or daughter to save herself.  Making this about male oppression makes you the sexist.  As for my daughter, well, I would never kill my grandchildren, and I would hope she wouldn't either; I guess you could say we're "barred" from murdering our offspring by the same logic.  You want to talk about unsafe pregnancies?  Try to frame a hypothetical situation in terms that don't require me to commit or authorize physical violence to resolve a "sometimes life's just a bitch" problem.  I wouldn't even kill you to save someone's life, unless you yourself were the immediate threat, and even then my desire and intent would not be your demise but the removal of your immediate ability to propagate harm.  Half of all abortions are elective, anyway, which means there isn't a vast majority of genuinely troubled and at-risk mothers desperate enough to risk a D&E in some marginally sanitary office.
7. I think that's the least they should do.  Forcing them to marry their victims like in the old days was never a good thing, but it did reflect at least a dim understanding of accountability for one's actions.  Why would you even ask this?  Trying to make it easier on rapists by insinuating that they shouldn't, that rape victims should be protected from any possible "reminders" of their attackers?  Have you really ever gotten to know mothers whose children were the product of rape?  Or is this just another shocker of a non sequitir to keep pro-lifers off balance and pretend you actually scored some rhetorical points?
8. Again with making every solution a power of the state.  Thanks for the patronizing lesson in abortion statistics.  Why would a rapist of any stripe now get custody of the child, and why would that change?  Does it relate in any way to laws on the books before Roe?  The father's a rapist, he should be in jail.  Do you realize you're assuming we would stop prosecuting rape in the case of incest?  Where the hell do you get that idea?  Just throwing out outrageous suggestions to get a rise out of us, so you can either pretend we're the unreasonable people for taking rightful offense at offensive claims and acting like the the only scandalized adult in the room?  As for teenage mothers, if it really gets to be a problem, maybe we should start having day care at high schools; in the meantime, we have day care elsewhere, and maybe the feds could offer a tax break or subsidy for child care if we're going to go that route instead of leaving it to today's grandmothers to raise a second generation of kids, hopefully better than the first (don't get hung up on rape--the vast majority of accidental pregnancies are from consensual sex).
9. Why shouldn't they?  Are their children not just as human as the poor brown children you insist we hold to a different standard?  Or are you referring to the fact that rich people, perhaps disproportionately, already are not prosecuted with the rigor as other demographics, when suspected or accused of the same crimes?  That's a fair cop, since it's something that already happens with all kinds of crimes, and probably has been happening in the West for the last five hundred years, and longer before that and in all other places if you replace "brown" and "rich and white" with any other two disparate demographic groups historically and geographically proximal to each other (whether or not it's just, the double standard between alien or minority and native or majority is almost universal), so I don't know why it's only a scandal when trying to trick people into thinking their desire for mercy for desperate and scared and pressured pregnant women is really a belief in choosing abortion.  I can only imagine this is supposed to be a parallel with the death penalty, but to really be a proper analogy, we'd be debating whether to legalize or ban murder on the grounds that fewer white people get the chair for murder:  there may be a problem, but this is a different one.
10. Oh, I see.  You're the one who holds poor brown people and, apparently, rich white men to different standards.  So you're racist as well as sexist.  No wonder I was only incredulous, and not stumped, at your really insightful and penetrating, um, caricatures.  You think we don't think about who has abortions?  You think it only occurs to us that abortions don't only happen to "not me and nobody I know" but "not me, nobody I know, and nobody of my race or economic class?"  Do you realize how artificial a way of thinking that is?  In spite of this, do you think it hasn't occurred to us that while perhaps a third of pregnancies end in abortion, half of all pregnancies of black women end in abortion?  Do you think we haven't noticed that, while half of abortions are not for reasons of medical or financial desperation (I'm reluctant to say "necessity"), the majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are in poor neighborhoods?  Do you think those rich white folks you so disparage are just going to happily come to those run-down and dangerous parts of town you want to pretend we think don't exist?  Do you think we haven't noticed that these differences are, as they say, statistically significant?  I'll tell you this much:  it's not because we're promoting abortion among minorities.  What do you think is going to happen to minorities if they maintain the highest abortion rates in the country?  But please, by all means:  tell me more about how abortion hits close to home.  Please, by all means:  when you've run out of reasonable arguments to make, make some more graphic or inflammatory comments to try to gin up some squeamishness or frustration to feed your schadenfreude.  That's how they roll on the internet, after all.

These things remind me of people I knew in high school and college, and even a few in grad school, who are pretty smart, but maybe not as smart as they think they are, and are hung up on getting by with native talent and not bothering to do any real homework.  Sure, someone looked up that 42% figure somewhere, but coming up with this list of questions, it's like they couldn't get past the misconception that pro-lifers are really just about controlling women and hiding that agenda under a veneer of sentimentality.  But what's sentimental is talking like we need to save PP because it's such a great provider of women's health services, like it's one of those "too big to fail" corporations loaded up with the nostalgia of an older friend who will hold your hair back when you're puking in the toilet and give you a lift to the mall when you need to Take Care Of Something.  No thanks; I like a friend who helps me when I'm sick but I don't want one who would support me in doing something wrong, and I hope I wouldn't be a friend who would, either.

Is there such a thing as truth, or just facts?

Has anyone noticed a pattern lately?

For the past several months, on and off in the marginally philosophical circles I occasionally run tangent to, I've seen a slight increase in the incidence of people distinguishing truth from facts, and it rubs me the wrong way.

I'm not saying I think there's a perfect correspondence between the two ideas.  There just seems, to me, to be a concerted effort to divorce truth and facts, a little undercurrent in human discourse that changes the direction of thought and discussion ever so subtly.

I'm not sure I can give an adequate definition of "truth" in this context; usually what I see is assertions or bald existential conclusions (perhaps justified by observation or reasoning somewhere, and not just presumed, but it's left as an exercise to the reader) that truth is unknowable or nonexistent and all we're left with are facts.

But when I learned what a fact was, I was taught that it was an objectively true idea or statement.  You can debate whether it's warm or cool, cold or hot--that would be a matter of opinion--but you can't argue that it's not winter on December 27 in the northern hemisphere.

There's some wiggle room, I get it--if there's a premature thaw and New Year's passes with highs in the 50s, then it's not really wintry weather--but we don't have to go there.  I could also say it's a fact that 2+2=4, that it's absolutely true, if we bar silly games with rounding and deviant numeral systems.  I'm not dealing with that right now; we can describe those situations with other facts.

There's truth and then there are facts?  Last I knew, if it wasn't true, it wasn't a fact.  Is the window open? It's true the window's open.  It's a fact that the window is open.  If the window were not open, it would not be true that it's open, and it wouldn't be a fact that the window was open.  You could say "It's open" anyway, but then you would simply be wrong.

It would be a fact that you said it's open, but that's not the same thing, and maybe therein lies the difference.  Still, it's a matter of the fact, the truth, being "You claimed, or believe, that the window is open," which if you're wrong could have nothing to do with the configuration of a window.  But then the fact is "someone asserted X," not "X" itself.  Sure, it's true someone asserted X, but I don't care about that any more than I care about how to label mild weather the week after Christmas; I care about X being true and what's going to happen to the snow.  Some things we can only have empirical evidence for, true (ha!), but some things are not empirical and nobody argues about it (see 2+2=4, above).

So, is the window open?  You say it's closed.  You're right, or you're wrong, or you define "closed" by some idiosyncratic criteria, or it's partway closed and you want to split hairs, but if you're not psychotic we can sort these things out.

You can claim any of these things.  Are they thereby facts?  No, the only facts are (1) whether the window is open or closed and (2) that you think something about it.  These things are true.  At first I gave the second as "what you think about it," but that's an opinion, not a fact.

The line between opinion and fact is getting blurred; all we're left with is what people think is going on around them, either poorly documented or uncamouflaged and called opinion or empirically documented and called a fact (even though the fact is not "well-documented X" but "we have observed X to be predominant condition," which is still contingent on statistics).

Anyone else noticing this?  Is it a recent development in philosophy that we can have "facts" with no truth value, or just some relativistic claptrap that has trickled down to the hoi polloi who consider themselves bright because they call themselves Bright?

I was annoyed enough when I first heard people making unequivocal assertions like "there is no objective truth," but this seems like an attack on the idea itself.  If we can no longer rise above the confusion to even conceive what "truth" would be, how could anyone claim there was such a thing, or that they had it?

Good question.  But I'm not playing.

What politician is down to earth?

Larry Elder at Catholic Exchange concludes an insightful analysis by reminding us that, ultimately, none is--not at the national level, anyway.

But he spends most of the article demonstrating how the Democrats' vocation of championing the unwashed masses does not arise from firsthand experience in the lower class and lower middle class predominating the biographies of the DNC's top players.  On the contrary, Democratic leadership is every bit as out of touch as that of the GOP; but that's not the narrative we hear, is it?

No, we hear lots of sentiment about protecting the little guy from corporate fat cats--you know, the one who are tycoons because they either inherited wealth from their robber baron parents or because they managed to foist all taxes off on the people who make under $28k, or somehow stole it from them (or the corporations they own somehow did, or maybe just people with college degrees and desk jobs and as a demographic the lion's share of the tax burden).  We hear a lot about punishing the successful and the lucky for the crime of drawing resentment from the destitute, the jealous, and the professional class warrior.  We hear not just patronizing propaganda and behalfist rhetoric but weird, presumptive editorializing like claims that "people cringe when politician X says Y about issue Z," where "people" is supposed to be all-inclusive and make X appear to be, again, out of touch, but really only includes the journalist or the propagandist and his staff or circle of friends and probably few others, and definitely not others who have a different but still reasonable view of what truth and virtue can mean.

Elder's article didn't surprise me, but the picture he painted drew into focus an inconsistency I hadn't noticed before.  The DNC and its minions have been painting the GOP's candidates as being in various degrees of alienation from at least the rest of America.  By contrast, the Democrats are supposed to be relatable and understanding.  Like Larry Elder said, both sides are lacking in this department at that level, but what really seemed curious to me was the fact that the Dems were bothering to play the "common man" card, after this theme developed in his support base and went unanswered by the then-future-president.  

Is he the superhuman who got elected or is he a common man in the right place at the right time for the next election?  If he were both, I guess he would have to be God, wouldn't he?  But he's not.

Marc over at The Bad Catholic wrote an insightful essay--well, he writes several, but this one from several days ago just came back to mind earlier today and I wanted to connect a couple dots.

An agnostic I once read, long enough ago that I have forgotten who it was (I welcome all offers to identify the person and the circumstance for me), admitted that despite the dearth of objective, tangible evidence for God, one thing that materialists haven't really been able to account for is the presence of so much beauty in the world. The idea is that it would be simpler to evolve a psychology in a species that lacked any sense for beauty, and lacked any need for it, than a psychology that has a sense for beauty that helps propagate one's genes, or a psychology that has a sense for beauty that serves no materialistic need.

Marc points out some instances where a Darwinist might suddenly recognize that there are things of value that are not simply material, and then turns them on their heads. To wit:

How can you not believe in God? Have you never seen yourself seeing a sunset?”

What evolutionary end is furthered by being able to admire a sunset? Or music? Or the human form in non-reproductive terms?

Spare me references to magpies hoarding shiny things or the insistence that any appeal of one human to another is sexual. The former may be no more than analogous to a moth with its navigational instincts overwhelmed by a hundred watt light bulb, and the latter forgets that there can be more than one way for people to be just friends.

As CS Lewis would point out, why do we have this appetite for it if there is nothing real to satisfy it?  What sense would it make for the human brain to have acquired such a developed and nuanced sense of beauty, only to satisfy it with self-deluding judgments of sensory input?


Ah, but I've been talking about beauty.  What about ugliness and pain?

Same thing.  Witness a group of animals where one is wounded or brought down, not quite dead, by a predator.  The survivors might flee out of an immediate need to survive, and in some species parents might defend their young for the same gene-perpetuating reason (or sometimes a larger social group than the nuclear family, but whatever), but they don't attempt to rescue each other.  An ungulate gets caught in the mud near a watering hole and a cheetah is able to reach it without sinking, and starts eating from its hindquarters while it bleats in agony; the other antelope, sensing the departure of an immediate threat, return to drink and just keep an eye on the cat.

People, though?  Don't just rescue a person from the lion display at the zoo, look at yourself rescuing the person!  What motivated you?  A desire to prevent or stop the suffering of a fellow human?  Even a desire to play the hero?  Both motivations impossible for other animals.

Whether it's beauty or pain, we're capable of abstracting it and nothing else is.  Just think about why and where this capability originates.

The inclination to moral bankruptcy of the pro-abortion movement

I had a weird experience over the weekend, albeit one that wasn't too surprising, upon reflection.

Was web surfing and found an interesting food blog--barbecue I think was the main theme, and for what it's worth I'm a sucker for meat that's been cooked low and slow.

The blogger had posted on a pig roast, and some anonymous vegetarian left a comment to the effect of "your unborn child should suffer the same fate as that hog."

The blogger was understandably on the far side of annoyed, and after a brief and righteous condemnation of a coward flaming from behind the shield of anonymity, the blogger...proceeded to instruct the commenter that "unborn child" is a contradiction ("child" being defined by some assumed authority not to include the medical category "fetus"), and then spent the bulk of the message defending the legitimacy of meat consumption.

You can eat meat or not if you wish, but I was a little off-put by how this blogger just blew past the rhetorical threat to her son or daughter.

I shouldn't be shocked but it still goads me to see people hiding behind technical terminology in casual communication.  Especially here, when the retort was hardly a rebuttal.

Whether or not "unborn child" would be acceptable parlance in medical or legal literature, it's specific enough that no one fails to understand the reference.  It would be like me interjecting into a conversation on building materials with "You should know steel isn't a metal;" in a sense it'd be true, because steel is an alloy of elemental iron (a metal) and small amounts of carbon (usually forming a stoichiometric compound in the so-called alpha matrix), along with sometimes some other elements; but I would generally only be confusing the non-pedantic people who are concerned with matters to which my hair-splitting is irrelevant; and beyond that I still wouldn't be entirely correct because the steel would remain predominantly metallic in the sense that the iron's conduction and valence electron bands still overlap.

See what I did there?  Completely derailed the discussion by insisting on an inappropriate use of strict terminology.  Maybe intimidated a few people with my posturing.  Certainly confused and annoyed some people who understood perfectly what was going on until I jumped in and pretended to clarify things with impenetrable jargon--in essence, hid an entire forest behind a bunch of trees.

John Wright has written more thoroughly, and superiorly, on the abuse of language and how it is propagated through political correctness, and it's perfectly reflected by what this blogger did and what I just demonstrated:  Control of the discussion was claimed by one party, who overtly or subtly tried to dismiss the concerns of another party and redefined the terms from words that were well understood to malapropos words that are so specific they cloud the real issue, divert attention to other matters more easily argued than the matters that were relevant.

But still, why that detour?  The vegetarian rhetorically wants your kid roasted on a spit as payback for doing the same thing to a pig, and aside from this horrific overreaction to reading about a person eating meat, before going on a long diatribe about how eating meat isn't so bad, you have to stop to point out that--wait for it--it's not really a child the vegetarian wants to see cooked?

That kind of knocks the wind out of any rebuttal.  It would have been more clear how silly it is if the argument had been laid out differently.  "Your child should die in a fire as payback for you roasting that innocent pig whole."  "Hey, don't be so scandalized; almost everyone in the world eats meat.  But it's not really a child, anyway."  Huh?  So, maybe it would be okay, but if not, at least it's not like they'd be making her give up barbecue?  What?

I can only surmise it is part of the perpetual campaign to darken people's vision of what should be perspicuous, that innocent humans born or unborn are entitled to freedom from deliberate harm.  Without the high-falutin' rhetoric to counter rational thoughts to the contrary and this disjointed murmuring to keep people off guard and stop them from having quiet enough moments to think, people would be likely to realize the self-evident for themselves, start making well-informed and thoughtful decisions for themselves.

I wonder how the child would feel, looking back at the blog archives ten or fifteen years from now, and seeing his mother imply that while he might have been spared the embryotome, it was not because he deserved or had any right to be.

Two stupid things I've heard, relating to politics/democracy:

Abortion: "Needs to be made affordable/less restricted because it's the law of the land, and if it's not universally available, it's being discriminated against."
 BS. It's a medical practice, not a citizen, and therefore has no rights and is not subject to discrimination laws, but rather to the same regulation as any other operation.

Gay marriage: Voters in MA or PA or somewhere, so it goes, have the same right to vote on the matter as those in CA.
We live in a hybridized democratic republic, but that doesn't mean you're entitled to vote on any issue you want at any point. No. Voting is only one part of the process and only comes at certain times. At other times and places, go campaigning. Don't complain that the movement in different states is in different stages, except to call attention to more or less progress is being made in one state than another. That can motivate people to be more active. It's as fitting (which is to say, not at all) to demand to vote on the east coast because people on the west coast are, as it was to ask Bush to step down early so Obama could get a head start on saving the country.  Keep talking that way, though, and you'll give the impression that you or your cause or people on your team are entitled to special civic and legal privileges, which is distasteful to people who are aware that you haven't earned the right.

Are "mysteries" the crutch of the intellectually lazy?

No, or, not necessarily.

Calling something a theological mystery and not having a solution is not a lack of inquisitiveness or a sign of sloth.  All mysteries are mysteries before they're solved; are detectives and private investigators, then, merely lazy?  Of course not.  A mystery is simply something we can't explain with the facts and logic at hand.

When we speak of transcendental ones, we do generally mean they're unsolvable by temporal means.  It's good to accept they're beyond us, in the sense of cultivating trust and patience, but it's not a sign reading "think this far and no further."  Mysteries are not devoid of meaning; they are recognized as possessing more meaning than we can apprehend.

It's a race we know we probably can't finish.  It does not mean we should not or will not make the effort.  Some people may be more or less disposed to apprehending some part of the whole, but some people also may be more or less disposed to apprehending parts or all of complex cobordism, either, and there's no shame or conviction in that, either.

It may be expanded to the subject of religion as a whole.  How often do you hear things like "The Catholic Church tells you what to think?" (more on that another time)  Sure, there are professional theologians and philosophers, but most of the people you meet on the street are amateur theists, so to speak; they--we--can't answer a lot of the tough questions, or recognize some of the stupid ones, so we end up trusting what the Church tells us.

How is this a moral failing?  I'm sorry, but I'm too busy to figure out why the difference between homoousios and homoiousios is important; I will take it on faith, ponder it when I have the means as well as opportunity to do so, and allow the experts in their fields to do their job.  They keep me from falling into heresy, and I'll keep their planes from falling out of the sky.  Is that not a fair deal?

Unbelievers keep saying that the miraculous healings attributed to saints are merely rare, natural occurrences that we don't have the science or technology to explain.

I think God, in His infinite wisdom and power, works miracles that happen to be beyond the understanding of anyone who would witness.  A miracle to a panhandler a thousand years ago might be transparent to a physicist today; a miracle to a lawyer today might be transparent to a doctor a thousand years from now.

This may seem tidily pat to unbelievers, but hopefully it will remind believers of hope.  There's plenty of room for mystery.

God can do whatever He wants, remember?  If we explained every mysterious healing by saying "I'm confident medical technology will advance to the point where this sort of thing is commonplace; it just happened to occur spontaneously in this case," then we're making hulking, looming idols out of science and technological progress.

There's nothing wrong with putting mundane faith in science; with as much as the state of the medical arts has advanced, there are lots of reasons to hope for continued improvement in maintaining health.  But reasonable optimism is no substitute for sober open-mindedness to unexpected possibilities, or for rational and informed thought.

I'm sure I'll revisit that subject more in the future, as I have in the past.  Permit me a disjointed segue.

Most often, the standard I hear for a healing to be considered miraculous by atheists and non-Christians is the regrowth of a missing limb.  It would be an understandably dramatic and easily documented event, to be sure.  Has such a thing, then, never happened?

In the little research, I've done, I haven't heard of such a thing--the closest I could come was a few references to a surgery in the third century by Saints Cosmas and Damian where the gangrenous leg of Deacon Justinian was replaced by a leg from the cadaver of an Ethiopean.  Not quite the same thing, not a lot of corroborating evidence at hand, if still miraculous in magnitude given the era.

There are a few other cases that might be dramatic enough to qualify, however.

In 1921, Peter Smith was born at Mother Cabrini Memorial Hospital.  As was custom at the time, a silver nitrate solution was put into his eyes for prophylactic purposes.  Instead of using the usual 1% concentration, however, the nurse accidentally used the stock 51% concentration.  Young Peter's eyes were burned out of his head, and the solution ran into the crying infant's mouth and down his throat, burning his lungs.  His temperature rose to 108°F.

They prayed for him before the Blessed Sacrament.  In two days, his eyes were restored.  A day after that, his fever was gone.

Father Peter Smith died of an aneurysm in 2002.

In 1892, Marie Lemarchand visited Lourdes.  A victim of lupus, she bathed in the waters and was cured; her ulcerous skin was regenerated, and she no longer coughed up blood.  Atheist and author Emile Zola was there to witness it.  

But believing and seeing are two different things, and there is such a thing as a dogmatic faith that miracles do not happen.

Zola had claimed he only wanted to see a cut finger healed by dipping in the miraculous water.  Although he examined Ms. Lemarchand closely enough to describe the condition of her skin (he omitted the details of her coughing in the report on his trip to Lourdes) when she arrived, when asked to look at her after bathing in the water, he said "Ah no!  I do not want to look at her. She is still too ugly."

Before he left Lourdes, he asserted that he would not believe in miracles even if everyone at Lourdes were healed.  In his book on the subject, he suggested that it perhaps wasn't lupus the woman had at all, and that her cure was merely psychosomatic.

You can almost feel Zola considering the possibility that the world was stranger than dreamt of in his philosophy, before falling back on "it wasn't really lupus so it wasn't really a miracle."

Some have even speculated that Padre Pio was only faking his stigmata, since they miraculously healed in the days before his death.  While doctors had examined his wounds in life and his woundless body after death, the skeptics comfortably asserted that no medical investigation was allowed or made, for convenience of perpetuating the "myth" of Padre Pio's stigmata.

But what about limb regrowth, you ask?  Was that not the original contention?

I submit that limb regrowth is a more trivial matter than the cure of lupus.  It may also be simpler than regrowing an eye, although I won't stake anything on that.

We are already culturing tissues in the lab.  Teeth and ears have been grown, and in July of this year a trachea was grown and successfully implanted into a human.

To this I say, so what?

We are not talking about "medical miracles" of coaxing stem cells to replace missing or excised tissue.  We are talking about spontaneous curing of conditions of missing limbs.

We must be careful, we believers and we skeptics; for to explain how something might have been done is not to explain how something was done.  In cases when we cannot be sure of all the events, the gap between "what we know at the moment" and "what we know could have accomplished this" may be large enough to admit reasonable doubt, and there is no shame or conviction either way in that; but when we speculate about likely explanations for bizarre phenomena, and we later come into facts that make reasonable suppositions impossible, it is silly and dishonest to persist.

I say this because at some point I would wager a missing limb will be miraculously restored, and some skeptic is bound to say "That could have been done on an outpatient basis" and be satisfied that no supernatural explanation could disprove a natural means for healing, even if it is known that the subject did not in fact visit a hospital, that no one who had the means to grow a limb "in the field" was present. Theists do have it a little easier in that God can work through natural means just as well as directly intervening, and so we may never know when God may make an exception to how the natural processes run in a case of limb stumps or cancer or lupus, but we want to be careful not to accede a miracle when someone fails to prove a mundane occurrence was possible in opportunity while spending all his effort to prove that a mundane occurrence just happened to be physically possible.
It's the difference between "could have done" and "did do."

Prayer request

My grandmother was admitted to hospice yesterday.  She's ornery and had a series of small strokes years ago, followed by a couple years of mismedication, so it was thought that she was merely getting more ornery and senile, but for reasons I'm not clear on they decided to get someone to review some test results taken about a month ago; it turns out she's got a cracked L4 vertebra, I think it is, and cerebrospinal fluid is leaking somewhere in her brain.  She's in pain but lucid; seemed happy to be admitted and is ready for an end to living with all that pain.

Pre-diagnosis, they speculated she might have a month left to live.  Knowing that she has actual medical problems and what they are, I'm not sure how it changes her prognosis; if she were younger, perhaps surgery could help, but they don't think she's strong enough to survive an operation on her back.  No idea what palliative options may even exist for her brain thing.

Prayers are requested, for a happy death whenever it comes and comfort in the meantime.  She gave up going to church a few years ago and agreed to see a priest when asked but didn't want confession because she still harbors a lot of anger.

On that note I would also ask for prayers for my grandfather and her relationship with him; I don't know what may have gone on between them but he is the target of much of her ire.  He may be a curmudgeon, but he doesn't have much else in his life than her.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Over the weekend I caught part of a show on the radio talking about how the mayor of New York has declined to invite to his 9/11 memorial service any of the first responders or anyone who might have been expected to say a prayer in public for the victims of the WTC attack.

Whatever the real reason, it strikes me as a profoundly tacky and misguided attempt to honor the separation of Church and state, just for starters.

As far as that was part of Mayor Bloomberg's motivation, it's also representative of a larger movement to more broadly and thoroughly enforce the Establishment clause.  This trend in Constitutional philosophy is troublesome where the prohibition of establishment is exalted over the prohibition against inhibiting free exercise, and it is promoted in part by misguided sensitive, considerate believers as well as by nonbelievers who feel oppressed by the existence of people from the first group.

The conflict leads to many questions about the relationship between Church and state in this country.  Many governmental bodies (including a few in New York) open their sessions with a prayer by rule and not just by tradition or convention; "In God we trust" remains on all our money; "God Bless America" is often sung at sporting events.  Should these things be stopped?  Should such pious practices be allowed--tolerated, so to speak--but no sign of condonation be made, as long as they are not disruptive (for reasonable levels of disruption, which I will not argue here)?  They've tried to stop prayer in schools,  such as at graduation ceremonies and before football games, but where the laws get overly broad, as the bumper sticker says, "As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in school."

So it occurred to me that maybe we're asking some of the same kinds of questions that come up in the torture debate--questions that that tend to further torture because they muddy rather than clear the waters. When we ask "How harshly can we treat someone before it's considered torture?" with the purpose of deciding what types of positive or negative punishment may be applied to gain compliance in a subject, then we've already crossed a moral line with regard to intent.  As I've said before, I don't believe that mild discomforts or inconveniences inherent to incarceration are properly torture, but if our guiding star is "how much can we get away with," then we're asking for trouble and committing a grave evil against our fellow man becomes a question of "When?" instead of "If...."

What does torture have to do with the price of eggs in China?

The matter of the relationship or lack thereof between Church and state comes up all the time, and whether it's a slippery slope argument bemoaning the repression of longstanding traditions of public prayer or a thinly veiled attempt to trick or convince everyone that formal oppression of religion is real freedom, or something reasonable in between, it often seems that the harder we try to figure out what religious activities the state should keep its nose out of and what the state should butt into in order to protect the interests of people of different religious persuasions, the harder it is to get a clear picture.

So, maybe we're asking the wrong questions.  Maybe "What infringements are reasonable?" only has wrong answers.

Maybe, if the state can't do it right, the state shouldn't be doing it at all.  Don't get involved in things where there's a conflict amongst believers, or between believers and nonbelievers, unless actual violence occurs.

It wouldn't be unheard of.  Laws have been overturned before on the grounds that they were prohibitively difficult or impossible to enforce.  I can't think of a law that has been overturned because the only available means to enforce it happened to be prohibited by higher laws, but if "protection from association with religious believers" rulings were challenged, I don't think it would be much of a stretch to frame the argument in these terms.

But I'm not a law scholar.  I haven't come up with any answers.  I just thought it was an interesting question to throw out there.

I missed a chance to speak against abortion the other day.

Maybe I was just afraid. If it was something else, it wasn't a terribly good reason either, I'm sure.

I didn't want to jump in with both feet and be trying to defend myself from attacks literally on both sides--I walked into the lab that morning when two of my coworkers started talking about how annoying protesters (particularly March For Life types, since it was just the day before that one of my coworkers saw them, which is what brought it up in the first place, but they got in some jabs at the Westboro types along the way) can be.

I settled for listening to their arguments, trying to formulate responses in my head during a situation that lacks the convenience of time for reflection and referring to other minds for insight, like I do when I'm writing more apologetic stuff here. It was possible, after all, that I might even hear something new, and I wanted to consider some new arguments should I someday be faced again with countering them.

The conversation was pretty short, so they didn't make too many points at all before getting back to work.

One of them was that they just cannot understand why pro-lifers care so much about what other people do. It just purely seemed beyond them. "Not that I'd do it," one of them said, "but I should be able to go into my home, and shoot up with heroin, and if it's not affecting anyone else, if it's not hurting my job, why should it matter to anyone else?"

Well, he's begging the question. If it's not negatively impacting anyone else, then, okay, maybe we shouldn't be regulating it, but it's a pretty big "If," which is why outside of the rhetorical world laws against heroin already exist.

The funny thing there is that coworker of mine is a proponent of gun control.  If I pulled a gun on a criminal, he says, the criminal would just take it away and shoot me.  There's a lot of assumptions I've addressed before, but a lot of the motivation behind gun control devolves from the argument "Okay, say you wanted a nuclear bomb for your own protection.  The government would be right in prohibiting that because there's no way for you to use it without adversely affecting your neighbors, all without their consent."  That's a fair argument against certain types or scales of weaponry, but it denies the benefit of the doubt on the personal level that is generously extended to would-be partakers and promoters of narcotic drug use and infanticide.

This "if it's not hurting anyone, never mind" mindset treats the presence of a human life--the entire raison d'etre of the pro-life movement--as a trivial detail. With the specter of private autonomy looming over everything, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that the rights of a "victimized minority," that seem to conflict with the rights of another "victimized minority" that's pushing abortion itself, would be impossible to see.

"When the pro-life people came to my school," one of them said, "what I wanted to do was go stand next to the demonstrators and just hand out coathangers, saying 'Here, if they get their way you'll be needing these.'" I'm ignorant of the statistics (as opposed to the mythology) of coathanger abortions, except that by any lucid application of statistics the total number of abortions did in fact increase after 1973, so if someone can cite a reference, maybe a reliable web site, I'd be grateful. Most of what I've heard has pointed to underground abortion services that really weren't any less professional or sanitary than what's out there now. Anyway, the point of the demonstrations on college campuses wasn't simply to get people to vote against abortion and make it harder for a supposed majority of women to fight some epidemic of chronic unwanted pregnancies. The point is to change the hearts and minds of everyone, so that an evil institution can be seen for what it is and eliminated.

"They're standing out there in the cold, with small children, even having the kids passing out pamphlets with pictures of aborted fetuses on them. Maybe someone should call child protective services on them!" Maybe, if the parents were neglectful of their children's health and safety. They certainly shouldn't be exposing toddlers to hypothermia or tremendous gore, but what's an acceptable risk of harm to body or mind is within the purview of the parents. CPS does have a role to play for when parents are remiss, but there's a world of difference between having kids stand outside and exposing them to the equivalent of an R-rated movie, and tearing kids' limbs off and crushing their skulls. Where's the protection then?  I mean, "Don't accuse me of murder with a raised voice and harsh words and photographic evidence?"  Really?

I can't speak for every child, but I learned about abortion when I was in, I think, first grade. Not exactly a toddler, but when I stumbled across a pro-life booth at some function at church where they had pictures of post-abortion children on trays and in waste buckets, I certainly found it terrible, but it didn't give me nightmares; seeing the horror didn't do me any more harm than learning in the first place that some adults would have held my existence in such low regard. The only shock I felt was seeing the results of an abortion and having to wonder how anyone could look at what was obviously the mutilated remains of a baby and still think it was any different from doing it to, say, another adult.

I don't think I was dealing with people who spend most of their free time worrying about conservative politics, or they might have realized that pro-lifers aren't just irritated about a lifestyle choice that carries no moral weight, as if they're all Monopoly players who hate people who play pinochle. I have, on very rare occasions, heard some abortion apologists say "I recognize that there is human life within me, but I believe that that person is subordinate to my dignity, so I may act against him as I will;" I wonder how many people fall into this category and how many will just say "What's the big deal?"
But I don't really relish finding out the answer to that.

"Why doesn't the law allow someone have a spouse of the same sex?"
"What would be the point?"
"I love him; it should be me who gets to make life decisions with him; or for him, and him for me, if we can't make decisions for ourselves."
"The state is not interested in how you feel about someone.  It rightly sees that it has no business butting into things based on sentimental motivations."
"You love your wife."
"Yes, and we are also trying to create the next generation of citizens. "
"We can--"
"Yes, you can adopt in some jurisdictions, but you don't need to be married to do that.  That justification has already been taken off the table."
"Who is the state to stop two consenting adults making a private decision to share their lives--"
"Hold the boat here, your complaint was about the law, originally.  The state hasn't tried to stop you from living together so far, you or any other couple, gay and straight.  What you want is public approval, or else you wouldn't be insisting on getting the laws changed and sending out invitations to attend your 'private decision to share' ceremony at a public venue."

"Do you believe in the real presence?" "Yes." "I don't think you do. If I did, I'd be at church every time its doors opened; I would crave it."

Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't.  I've known some people who are very faithful, very diligent, but people who never falter are few and far between.

It's easy to say you believe in something profound and your dedication would never flag, but the human condition is not amenable to putting that into practice.  You have to come down the mountain sometime, and even if you live in the lowlands according to what you saw on the peaks, eventually the honeymoon will end.  Eventually, you will realize, that if nothing else, you no longer personally have the strength or energy to maintain the level of enthusiasm you started out with.  That's just the way things are.  People go through dry spells (sometimes, if not always, by God's will, so you learn to rely on Him and trust in Him and not make an idol of euphoria, even in the presence of the Presence), and rare is the person who cooperates with God's grace so perfectly that the rush accompanying some mountain-top or road-to-Damascus experience is not followed by a lull before achieving a healthy balance of disposition or attitude--hence the big deal we make about saints as examples for us to follow.

I mean no disrespect to the enthusiastic.  I only mean that great spiritual experiences often come with great spiritual joys or consolations that are meant to buoy us through particular times and not to be permanent in this life, and it is part of human nature to adapt to these things when they come and to adapt to their absence when they go.

Beyond that, it is this faithfulness through the dry times and future trials that the Enemy wants to attack, so that later attacks will be more effective.

So, without turning around and defending lethargy and lukewarmness, we shouldn't be too critical of people who seem to show a lack of zeal.  Much of their energies may be taken up elsewhere.  It is the greater prayer that is said in the absence of a strong, easy feeling of prayerfulness.  Certainly, God will replenish so we should run to Him, but God is more forgiving of our absence than, say, our employers or others who depend on us might be, out in the world which we are called to be light and salt for in the first place.

Even people who followed Jesus, who saw him work miracles beyond what most of us ever experience (with our worldly senses, at least), sometimes fell away.  The righteous wealthy man was dismayed and turned away when Jesus told him to give what he had to the poor; many were scandalized during the Bread of Life discourse; even Judas turned on him and nearly all the Apostles fled after His arrest.  But we're supposed to be perfectly faithful because we've seen the end of the story?  I don't think that's a fair expectation for humans in this life.  There are sacraments in the first place so we can have tangible reminders of what God does for us, tangible channels for the most important graces we can receive.  If we didn't need to have the Eucharist and confession regularly in our constant struggle against concupiscence and the devil, we wouldn't need anything, except maybe baptism and maybe a single reading of the Bible.  But that's more suitable as a religion for angels than a religion for embodied, tempted, men.

It's not always easy to believe.  It helps being around believers so you can build each other up; it helps getting spiritually fed at church a lot (not dismissing the call we have to go out and evangelize); it doesn't help being under attack by demonic forces to discredit the Sacrament.  Without the Sacrament, there's nothing to attack or cause scandal over.

Some time ago I was following a discussion about gay marriage over at ISCA. There's a lot of material ripe for dissection that I read, but instead of attacking the whole issue, I want to relay a few comments that were made along the way in order to capture the state of the debate.  Quotes are from the pro-gay-marriage side; my comments follow.


"Gay people need marriage because their power of attorney for their partners can be challenged by blood relatives."
It  can anyway.

"The child argument has nothing to do with the issue of marriage."
It has everything to do with marriage, as anyone with a lick of historical sense can tell you.

"A marriage is a committment of two people to each other. Why does it matter what their relative genders are?"
Because there are other kinds of commitments between people where their gender has nothing to do with what the commitment is about.  If two men or two women--or a woman and a man--open a business, it's irrelevant.  If two people want to get married, if it's a man and a woman they can have kids, and that's an important difference.

"I haven't seen any logical, non-moral, non-religious arguments against homosexual marriage."
You're defining anything relying on natural law or absolute truth and morals as religious, which is a cop-out.  John C. Wright used to get that kind of criticism even when he was an atheist arguing for traditional marriage, which says to me that critics who make such arguments rather won't see logical, non-moral, non-religious arguments...although I'm not sure why I should be persuaded by someone who would be willing to say "Okay, so maybe X is immoral, but I want to do it anyway."  If your argument for sodomy isn't inapplicable to murder, then maybe you'd best go back to the drawing board.

"Repealing sodomy laws hasn't led to gay marriage..."
 It's leading there now; hence this debate.

"How does letting two faggots marry infringe on your right to bang your wife at night? Does it suddenly invalidate your marriage? Of course not."
Watch the language, pal.  I know it's kind of personal, but if you're the only one throwing around inflammatory language, it's not everyone except you who is going to look like a bigot.  That aside, it's not just about who gets to have sex with whom; that's not all there is to a marriage, and if two gay men wanted to get married, I would have thought they would be interested in the other aspects of being wedded as well.  If not, why are we having this conversation?

"Folks who oppose gay marriage just say 'it goes against tradition' or 'it goes against nature' when really government should not be involved in it to begin with."
Then we have nothing to talk about.  Just throw that baseball over the fence so no one can play with it, and stop wasting our time.

"You are aware that there has been absolutely no interest expressed in inter-species marriage anywhere in Massachusetts, right?"
Keep in mind that one woman had "married" a dolphin in 2006, before this debate took place, so I wonder about the incredulity of the person who made this criticism.  Then again, the dolphin wasn't from Massachusetts.

"Actually, we're not talking about changing the basic foundation of marriage.  We're talking about dumping marriage as something that the state can regulate, and going only with civil unions for all."
So will civil unions be regulated by the state?   If so, that would be a distinction without a difference.  If not, it's still defining away the problem--something is being created that is supposed to be just the same as marriage, with all the benefits, but lacking the thing for which the privileges of marriage were afforded to couples in the first place.

"I do not believe that government should legislate morality beyond any which deprives others of their basic civil rights. E.g., if what I choose to do does not harm you, deprive you of your property, or kill
you, then what I choose to do should not be regulated by law."
Your only standards are theft and assault?  Bravo!  Still, it won't hold up if abortion is going to get a pass--anyone you don't like will just get recategorized as an entity that lacks the right not to be harmed or deprived of anything.
But don't get snared by this argument.  The deprivation or providence of civil rights is the matter at hand itself.  This critic is assuming the conclusion in establishing the jurisdiction of government.  Marriage isn't a basic civil right, anyway, or else we could rightfully sue anyone or anything that kept us from marrying whom or what we wanted--not just a minister or justice of the peace that didn't want to play house with us, but the would-be paramour who turned us down, a jealous spouse, a parent, a coroner.

"Pedophilia and bestiality are a straw man. They're illegal."
No, they're warnings against the slippery slope.  I refer skeptics to NAMBLA and the woman who "married" the aforementioned dolphin.  Polygamists are also waiting in the wings.  Oh, didn't you notice that "Big Love" show?  Don't you think it's an attempt to desensitize us to that kind of thing?    If you're still skeptical, I refer you to the Internet.  Start by looking up Rule 34; if it's out there, there are people who would rather not risk going to jail for what they're viewing or doing.

"The religious types should start with atheist-atheist marriage."
Why?  Atheists are capable of conceiving children, provided one is a man and the other is a woman.  This has been the whole point of the argument.  Stay on topic.

"It's taken decades for the establishment to get as far as it has in accepting homosexuality as just the fairly minor natural variation that it is, and to get beyond the moral stigma of it."
Predispositions to sociopathy and diabetes are also "minor natural variations," but they have far-reaching consequences.   Further, I submit that much of the "acceptance" you claim is actually mere tolerance (remember when that word meant something?), heavily seasoned with fatigue and then subsumed by the fear of being branded a cross-burning-caliber bigot.
Honestly, the normal reaction to a campaign that consists of things like the Folsom Street Fair (beware:  a even a Google image search with the Strict setting isn't work-safe), punctuated by rhetoric about wanting to be treated normally, is not "Huh, I guess it was silly of me to entertain any anxiety about their lifestyle--I mean, orientation."

"If we want gays to be less promiscuous, then legalizing their relationships would seem like a logical way of doing that."
That would be a thoughtless and insane kind of logic.  "Open" heterosexual marriages and adultery already exist and the trend in the past century has been to destigmatize promiscuity.  I take it back--it wouldn't be thoughtless and insane logic, it would just be logic unburdened by the evidence.

"Damn right straights are not more promiscuous. In fact that is why heterosexuals never get AIDS, there is no teen pregnancy problem, and there is a 0% divorce rate for adultery."
Straw man.  Okay, hyperbole, but AIDS is still more common in the gay community--when was the last time you heard of an "AIDS roulette" frat party?  More or less often than a gay AIDS roulette party?  More or less often than a swingers party?

"What this all boils down to, and forgive me for the crassness of the whole thing, is that when these people think of gays marrying, they are thinking of two sweaty gay men pounding the hell out of each other, and they can't get the thought out of their minds. (not to mention that some of them have gay tendencies themselves, or watching lesbian porn gets them off, or whatever.)"
Wishful thinking--the most vocal opponents must be those closest to conversion.  That's a real enough phenomenon, but it just smacks of "You're going to be so humiliated when you discover the depths of your own hypocrisy, and I'm going to get a big laugh at your grief."  Classic example of assuming everything is about sex and power.  Do we need to get out of people's bedrooms, or do you need to get out of people's heads?

"Gay couples want to and do raise children, just like you."
Maybe so, but they never tell me that, only their concerned friends do, and then only rarely. All they tell me is they want power of attorney and less harrassment. Even obnoxious activists deserve less harassment than they get, but that ain't the same thing.  But even if two men have a kid, who and where is the mother?  If two women have a kid, who and where is the father?  Did you have a kid so you could bring some joy into the world, or to satisfy your own desires?  Not that that's a problem exclusive to gay parents--who hasn't seen Hollywood celebrities with trophy children?--but we may not be able to convey the meaning of marriage until we can remind people that children are not pets.

"I didn't choose to marry because of the exclusivity of the marriage institution, and I don't know anyone else who did either."
A straight answer from a married straight man.  That's the danger of playing the victim card:  it's not always All About You.

"Gay marriage won't lead to dolphin marriage. One woman does not a slippery slope make. There are no human-dolphin families or human-dog families in need of legal protection. It's a red herring."
What led us to dolphin marriage is what's leading us to gay marriage, is what led us to the guy who "married" the Eiffel Tower. It would be more of a red herring if the dolphin so-called marriage hadn't actually, you know, happened; or if there were actual human-dolphin or human-dog "families."

"Clearly, many heterosexual people engage in unsavory activities as well. And yet, because they already 'have' marriage, it is acceptable to dismiss those activities among heterosexuals, while using them as a reason for denying marriage to homosexuals."
Unsavory behavior is no more support for gay marriage than it is evidence against straight marriage.  What are they trying to make us think happens?  A guy gets caught by the police in the act of statutory rape, and he says "Hey, I'm a married man; my wife lives next door."  "Oh, all right," says the cop, "off ya go?"

"'Unequal treatment is a red herring' is a red herring. No gay person would want to marry someone of the opposite sex, just as a straight person wouldn't want to marry one of the same sex."
I'm a straight man, but there are plenty of women I wouldn't want to marry, not even counting girls and wives of other men.  Even if I did, there are reasons for the rules against it.  Same as there are reasons for keeping me from marrying some dude.
Regardless, historically, and still in many places, weddings are arranged with little concern for the druthers of the husband and wife. Was it ideal? No. Was it legitimate? Yes.

"And when did society have to "approve" on my ability to have sex with wife or anyone else for that matter? I didn't realize that the rest of the world had to say yes or no to my actions or my marriage."
Marriage is a social institution, not a private one.  Don't confuse it with sex, which is supposed to be a private act (cf. Folsom Street Fair).  Don't you remember having a public ceremony followed by signing a contract with witnesses?  Don't you remember demanding approval?  Don't you remember demanding rights, not just privacy? It used to be about privacy, though--that's why we're still making slippery slope arguments.

"We just want to be able to protect our families, relationships and property - y'know: the original basis for the social construct of marriage."
Wow, great--'cept that relationships and property can exist outside of marriage, and property can be regulated independently, but families come from marriage, which some want, but from who's occupying all the bandwidth, it doesn't seem like a lot.

"I say do away with marriage as a civil/legal construct."
So you are against marriage, after all.

"You say marriage is about procreation and an adequate nurturing environment. I say it's a ritual contract declared in a public space; it's like a notary in that it gives more value to your commitment because it had been witnessed by a third party."
What does it accomplish that cohabitation and power of attorney don't get you, if you're not interested in kids?  If you want it notarized, get a notary for yourself.  Plenty of other public rituals, some that can even get you tax breaks if you want to make a job of it.

"Being gay is not wrong, and since its not wrong, gay couples should have the option to marry if they want. It's not something that heterosexual individuals have a right to deny them."
Being diabetic is not wrong, so people with diabetes should have the option to eat all the sugar they want, and non-diabetics shouldn't be party poopers about it.
Do I need to point out the difference between doing and being, here?

It's this kind of stuff that makes me roll my eyes when secprogs talk about conservatives being the ones living in a fantasy land and reality having a liberal bias. Secular progressives--post-moderns, anyway--don't even have as strong a concept of reality or truth as conservatives (although there is some doubt about the relationship Science has with Truth--but that's a separate matter). Concrete evidence for historical understandings of marriage?  Religious claptrap.  Statistical evidence that it's more expedient to raise children with a father and a mother than with some other combination?  Words that shouldn't be spoken because they have power to hurt their cause, not because they have the power of fact behind them.  Sure, invent your own explanation, and of course someone who disagrees will seem hallucinatory.