Outside the Asylum

“Moral neutrality just isn’t going to cut it anymore”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:50:00 +0000

The alternative of moral neutrality should not be an option. You can’t fight something with nothing. Because if we don’t stand for something, we can’t stand against anything.
—David Cameron

In “Lost in Transition: I”, the first of a three-part review of Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith et al., developmental psychologist Thomas Lickona barely has room to give us an overview of the book’s segments. And yet the facts he pulls out of Smith’s ongoing longitudinal study gives one very little hope that the moral and spiritual malaise corroding our society from within will start reversing within the next 25 years.

Nearly three-quarters of Smith’s sample say they themselves, as individuals, intuitively and automatically know what is right and wrong in any given situation, and they normally try to follow their conscience. They typically explain their “instinctive knowledge” of what’s right with reasoning that sounds like the traditional natural law notion that there is a moral sense embedded in our human nature. Said one subject, “I think everybody has a sense of right and wrong unless you are clinically insane or chemically imbalanced. It’s just kind of innate. There’s a lot of gray in between, but on the far end of each spectrum you know what’s absolutely wrong and right.”

That’s all well and good … except that these same young people can’t see any tension between this instinctive “natural law” understanding of moral behavior and their non-judgmental individualism/moral relativism. “For about two-thirds of the 18-23-year-olds in Smith’s sample, extreme moral violations such as rape and murder are clearly wrong, but beyond that, ‘many of the truly moral features of life experiences are invisible.’ One interviewee said, ‘I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often.’”

As a result of this diminished capacity for moral reasoning, Smith concludes, emerging adults are more likely to engage in risky behavior, less able to function effectively as thinking citizens, are unable to conceive of happiness except in terms of material possessions, are politically and civically disengaged, and apt to drink more. And more are dissatisfied with the “serial monogamy” that characterizes sexual interactions; one young woman even said:

I think obviously sex is no longer sacred, and people are just giving it away. ... Men get what they want with women, which generally speaking is physical fulfillment, and women think they’re gonna get what they want, which is commitment. And people just go from one person to the next.

In other words, the trend towards cohabitation and single parenthood creating, in the words of Kay Hymowitz, “a nation of separate and unequal families” in a virtual caste system, shows no signs of stopping soon.

In this context, the speech UK prime minister David Cameron gave shortly before Christmas, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, carries added significance. To quote just a section:

… [Those] who advocate secular neutrality in order to avoid passing judgement on the behaviour of others … fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality … or the role that faith can play in helping people to have a moral code. Let’s be clear. Faith is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for morality. There are Christians who don’t live by a moral code. And there are atheists and agnostics who do. But for people who do have a faith, their faith can be a helpful prod in the right direction.
And whether inspired by faith or not — that direction, that moral code, matters. Whether you look at the riots last summer … the financial crash and the expenses scandal … or the on-going terrorist threat from Islamist extremists around the world … one thing is clear: moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn’t going to cut it anymore. Shying away from speaking the truth about behaviour, about morality … has actually helped to cause some of the social problems that lie at the heart of the lawlessness we saw with the riots.

It should be obvious by now that the entire appeal of moral individualism is its readiness to serve self-indulgence and hedonism; it’s not so much that I can’t judge you than it is that you can’t tell me what to do and what not to do (“You’re not the boss of me!”). But it should be equally obvious that it’s destructive to social institutions and social cohesion, since it deliberately frustrates the sharing of a common moral code in the name of “freedom” and “tolerance”.

Let’s take as our example the issue of trust. “I’m not going to tell other people not to cheat,” one person in Smith’s sample said, “even though it’s something I wouldn’t do.” But too many aspects of community life — especially commerce — depend on the perception of fair dealing, that both sides of a transaction are being transparent and above-board in their dealings. When trust fails, regulation is a poor substitute. Therefore, it’s not enough that I don’t cheat: you must not cheat, either. There’s no room for a helpless non-judgmentalism here; cheaters don’t deserve to prosper by their dishonesty.

As a society, we can no longer afford this ridiculously reductionist idea that what happens in “private” has no potential to affect anyone else, that “freedom” means “I can do whatever the hell I want, and screw you if you don’t like it!” Rather, as Bl. John Paul said in his homily at Camden Yards on his 1995 apostolic visit, “Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”

“True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.”
— Bl. John Paul II

Why the March for Life wasn’t “news”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:48:00 +0000

I don't own the copyright.

Two days after record-breaking hordes of people, the majority of them under 25, marched in freezing rain in Washington, DC — between four and five hundred thousand; that’s almost half a million, folks — at the annual March for Life, the pro-life blogosphere is humming with barely-suppressed fury and indignation.

Why? Because once again the bulk of the MSM blew off what MSNBC grudgingly admitted was “the largest and longest-running peaceful human rights demonstration for the unborn” (which didn’t stop Andrea Mitchell from posting a slavishly sycophantic interview with Planned Barrenhood president Cecile Richards).

Clay Waters at the Media Research Center noted that the New York Times blew the March off for the fifth year in a row. John Jalsevac of LifeSiteNews noted that WaPo’s photo montage of the event “focused primarily on a tiny cadre of pro-abortion counter protesters that gather every year on the steps of the Supreme Court (mostly, I am convinced, just so that the mainstream media has pro-abortion counter protesters to photograph): a group so small that, if you weren’t looking carefully, you would probably miss it.” Michelle Malkin writes sardonically that “it has become an annual ritual to watch the national media and liberal commentariat strain to ignore or marginalize the burgeoning movement of increasingly young and minority activists taking to the street to stand up for the unborn.”

And when Erik Wemple of WaPo used a story of a cat slain in Russellville, Ark., to claim a conservative media bias, Mark Judge of The Daily Caller hooted, “After The Post ignored half a million people, most of them young people, marching to let one million babies a year live, the paper’s media critic screams media bias because Fox didn’t break into ‘The Five’ with news that a cat had been the victim of a political hit. Hang on, I just want to check that Post link again. Nope, it’s not The Onion.”

Now, I’ll admit that those of us raised in a different era of journalistic integrity (i.e., when “journalistic integrity” wasn’t an oxymoron) would naturally expect along with young Marc Barnes that a protest march so large would be newsworthy. (I don’t chide Marc for naïveté; rather, I envy his already formidable writing skill.) Equally attention-grabbing should have been the 50,000-strong march in the City by the Gay this last Saturday and the massive turnout in Paris on Sunday. And we should at least note that the few examples of explicit bias were nowhere as ridiculous as in 2010, when CNN’s Rick Sanchez wondered out loud which side was represented most (follow link for clip) and Newsweek had a story claiming that young women would be missing from the demonstrations.

But we need to step back for a minute and gain some perspective. One muttonhead sneered in Marc’s combox, “Of COURSE the biggest newspaper in the world doesn’t cover this; they’re busy covering things that matter, like war and disease and famine.” And when another commenter asked some ABC camerapersons, “this many people could be marching in protest of vegetables and it would make the news so how can they ignore this? They ignored me and made sarcastic comments like ‘Oh yeah, real newsworthy’.”

Okay, so how can the world’s longest running human-rights protest be a journalistic non-event? Possibly because it has been running for such a long time?

Yesterday, Richard Collins of Linen on the Hedgerow used Abp. Fulton Sheen’s simile of the frog in the bucket in a different context to remind us of how gradual changes are harder to notice. In the same way, the March for Life has been going on for so long that to many journalists reporting on it at all is like pretending that Mardi Gras parades just came out of nowhere. So not until something about the parades really grabs their attention will they finally notice that, gee, there’s a lot of young people in Washington every January.

Another factor that works against MFL is the very youth of the marchers.

Although in the last couple of years more people have been identifying themselves as “pro-life” rather than “pro-choice”, the extent to which people have been “pro-life” has been ambiguous at best. Depending on how the questions are phrased, various polls over the last ten years have shown that the majority of people would favor some restrictions on abortion, but not heavy restrictions or complete illegalization.

Consider the graphic below, taken from the recent Marist Poll/Knights of Columbus study:

Looked at one way, the number of people favoring heavy restrictions on abortion has remained constant at 79% over the last two years. But in fact, there’s a slight difference when considered by type than when considered by time frame: the number of people who would restrict abortion to certain grounds actually slipped, from 42% to 40%, while the number who would restrict abortion to a certain timeframe slightly increased, from 34% to 36%.

Because the new pro-life movement is predominantly young, it hasn’t grown enough yet to disturb the “mushy middle” who are “personally against” abortion but who haven’t connected the dots (i.e., “I’m personally against atrocities, but I wouldn’t want to tell somebody he can’t commit one”). The people who make decisions in the MSM are mostly in the 40-60 bracket, so it’s going to be some years before the pro-life youth of today are going to be in a position to dictate the terms of the new culture from the top down.

Now, this is not to say we shouldn’t celebrate the growth and youth of the pro-life movement — that would be a truly dumb thing to say. It’s one of many indications that promise we will be victorious in the end.

I’m just saying that the MSM is going to need a few more shocks before they realize that a new counterculture has come to undo the mistakes of the last. Then you’ll start to see the kind of coverage that comes with panic.

Paul VI read the signs of the times prophetically

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:08:00 +0000

One of the hardest things for many people to understand is, “Why would the Catholic Church insist, after all these years, that contraception is wrong? Moreover, why do they insist on resisting the tide? After all, most Catholic women practice some form of it! Can’t they tell that no one is listening to them anymore on birth control?”

Well, that’s not quite true. While 98% of Catholic women have practiced birth control at some point in their lives, the most recent Guttmacher study only claims that nearly 70% currently practice birth control. In this area, the Church is beginning to gain some traction.

Nevertheless, it is true that, when Pope Paul VI promulgated Humanae Vitae in 1968, it caused a severe rift within the Church, as many Catholics of the time expected and hoped for a change in doctrine. Since then, it’s been the one area in which otherwise-orthodox Catholics have entrusted themselves to God’s forgiveness even when they confess other sins … that is, when they agree that it is a sin, which many don’t.

Of course, many people understand that the Church shouldn’t change its teaching to match every whim and fad of the people. But after fifty years, it’s not really a “fad” anymore, is it? Can’t the Church recognize the signs of the times?

In fact, the Church can read the signs of the times (Mt 16:2-3). And if you actually read Humanae Vitae, you begin to understand that it was a very wise and prophetic document:

Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the Church in this field is based, if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificial birth control. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men [homines; i.e., people] — especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point — have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man [viri, “male”], growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.
Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies [China, for instance]. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy.[1]

Papa Montini had no illusions about the likely reception of his encyclical: “Too numerous are those voices — amplified by the modern means of propaganda — which are contrary to the voice of the Church. To tell the truth, the Church is not surprised to be made, like her divine Founder, a ‘sign of contradiction’ (cf. Lk 2:34), yet she does not because of this cease to proclaim with humble firmness the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.”[2]

The Church’s understanding of sex and marriage is that it isn’t simply ordered toward love and companionship. “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare.”[3]

This orientation is one of the oldest principles the Judeo-Christian tradition has received from God, from the punishment of Onan for committing coitus interruptus (Gen 38:6-10), through various proscriptions in Mosaic Law against infidelity (Ex 20:14), fornication (Ex 22:16-17), rape (Dt 22:25-29), incest (Lev 18:6-18), bestiality (Ex 22:19; Lev 18:23), and homosexual intercourse (Lev 18:22), to Christian proscriptions against divorce (Mk 10:11-12), pederasty (1 Cor 6:9) and abortion (Gal 5:20; Didache 2).[*]

Common to all these proscription is respect for the procreative aspect of sex and its primary role in marriage:

… [The] fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life — and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man [homo] is called.[4]

The “contraceptive mentality” is a mindset which has already done violence to the sex act — even before the person reaches for a contraceptive — by splitting it off from its biological imperative: Man’s participation in God’s creation is cut off, and the most powerful, meaningful act of which he is capable becomes a toy with which he can amuse himself and degrade or oppress others.

The Catholic Church wasn’t established to confirm the status quo in its foolishness but to teach the truths imparted to her by Christ, to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19). Paul VI read the signs of the times rightly; we chose to ignore him. And the consequences are still multiplying because we persist in our foolishness.

[*] Saint Paul refers to malakoi (catamites) in 1 Corinthians 6:9; in Galatians 5:20, pharmakeia (from which we derive “pharmacy” and “pharmaceuticals” embraced both the administration of drugs and resort to “sorcerers”, who often dispensed abortifacient potions. Pederasty is also referred to in the Didache, which is one of the oldest writings of the Church Fathers, dating back to the late first century.

[1] Humanae Vitae §17; bold font mine.

[2] HV §18.

[3] Gaudium et Spes §50; cit. in HV §9.

[4] HV §12.

Choose to say “no”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:29:00 +0000

Hosted by Jill Stanek!

What do pro-aborts mean by “choice”?

For many years I’ve recognized that “freedom of choice” is simply a catchphrase aimed at taking the moral high ground. More options = good, less options = bad, and if you force someone to do something they don’t want to do — like raise a child they didn’t plan on conceiving — then you, sir/madam/small child, are a fascist.

So I find myself amused whenever a pro-abort argues, “Women are gonna do it anyway.” Besides the inherent meaninglessness of the argument, a dreary statement of the obvious that leads to no intelligent moral principle, it contradicts the very premiss of calling the pro-abortion faction “right to choose”. If women are “gonna do it anyway,” then in what way do laws against abortion take away their ability to choose?

What’s really being argued for here is a right to choose without legal consequence. But remove legal penalties and you haven’t removed all consequences. In truth, the last thirty-nine years of legal abortion has seen the gathering of evidence that shows abortion — even so-called “safe abortion” — has physical, emotional and social consequences that compound the inherent horror and injustice of taking an innocent human life. More to the point, though, is that there are some choices that should never be tolerated, let alone celebrated as a “right”.

Since we’re dealing with choices, let’s confine ourselves for the sake of this discussion to women who conceive as a result of consensual sex —the vast majority of women who abort. At issue, supposedly, is the bodily autonomy of women: pregnancy forces women to take certain risks and measures for a period of nine months to ensure the healthy delivery of the unborn child. As Erika Bachioichi phrased it:

… [Despite] the gains pro-lifers have made in this regard, pro-choice feminists still adhere to another set of arguments entirely, arguments that resound in a popular slogan: “get your hands off my body.” In this view, because women, rather than men, get pregnant, a pregnancy forced by abortion restrictions signifies a basic gender inequality that no practical, pro-life social supports can alleviate, no matter what the medical data (which they still consider questionable) say about abortion’s aftermath. Indeed, “forced” pregnancy, for the most radical of pro-choice scholars and jurists, amounts to something akin to military conscription. As Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in his opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey[*] nearly twenty years ago, “[Abortion restrictions] conscript women’s bodies into [the service of the State], forcing women to continue their pregnancies, suffer the pains of childbirth, and … provide years of material care.”

The classic argument in this regard is Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “famous violinist” rationale, which relies on the idea that, by hosting the unborn in her body, the mother is merely being a Good Samaritan. From the perspective of English common law, people aren’t required to take undue risks to their own lives, health or finances for the sake of others. If the mother chooses to maintain the child’s life, it’s morally praiseworthy; if not, she can’t be condemned.

There are two inherent weaknesses to this argument. First, the “famous violinist” argument presupposes no moral difference between refusing to save someone who’s drowning and holding his head underwater, between just unhooking yourself from the famous violinist and shooting him in the head. Even if common law required a “good Samaritan” act from an innocent bystander, the most a refusal to do so could garner is negligent homicide, if not a civil claim of wrongful death; deliberately destroying another person is first-degree murder.

The more fundamental weakness is that the mother can’t be considered an “innocent bystander” in the “good Samaritan” sense. Indeed, this is a glaring hole in the argument, one that just begs us to ask, “Where do they think babies come from?”

The premiss of the “famous violinist” argument is that the violinist contracts his disease without any effort on the part of the person upon whom he must impose for his cure. But women don’t “catch” conception as they catch viral infections; rather, conception requires a positive act: sexual intercourse. Pregnancy is not incidental to sex; it’s the precise biological end the body is attempting to accomplish through sex. Contraceptives don’t change the reproductive nature of sex so much as they try to frustrate it.

So the mother who consents to sex, whether or not she contracepts, is not in the position of a person who, while walking alongside a pool or canal, comes across somebody drowning. Rather, she’s in the position of a person who pushed the other person into the pool or canal, whether deliberately or by accident.

This fact changes her level of responsibility: it’s literally both her and her partner’s fault that the child is alive. It rules out exculpation by ignorance and by precautions — conception is a built-in risk of sex that not even the most effective of contraceptive devices completely removes.

In the father’s case, physical autonomy does not translate out to a moral autonomy: because he is equally responsible for bringing the child into existence, he is responsible for bringing that child to adulthood. A significant chunk of common law and case law has been devoted to reinforcing that fact, and in giving women legal recourse to force men to assume their responsibilities as fathers.

It’s no wonder, then, that in every poll taken on the issue more men than women say they’re pro-choice. And it’s no wonder many women, suffering from grief and from post-abortion syndrome (PAS), report they were emotionally coerced into abortion by the fathers of their children (among others).

Saying “no” to sex is a choice, too. “No” is an empowering word. If a woman really wants to exercise control over her body, her sexuality and her reproductive ability, then learning how to say “no” when the time isn’t right and the partner is an irresponsible lout is much healthier and much more an exercise of freedom than are pills and abortion.

[*] 505 U.S. 833 (1992).

Links, citations and the pro-life story

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:14:00 +0000

I recently made the mistake of trying to slap down a troll. You know the type I’m talking about — the one who tries to pass off insults as arguments, then puts on the air of superior reasoning when called on it. Let’s call him “Gorbag”. Granted, it’s the name of an orc, not a troll, but it’ll do.

In one of his patronizing replies to my demand that he apologize for his snot-fest, Gorbag sniffed, “If [third person] wants to use actual quantifiable claims to back up her stories, then she needs to back up her numbers: ‘Porn addictions are now implicated in over 50% of divorces.’ — that’s a lot of implications, so a source should be cited, otherwise it comes across as a fabricated truth — something that religious types like to toss around all the time as ‘fact’.”

Okay, granted that Gorbag is guilty of a gross generalization that he himself won’t back up. As I’ve said before, hypocrisy is by no means limited to us “religious types”. I remember reading a claim in an extract from the late Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great that “most Christians are hypocrites”, and thinking, “Gee, for a guy who worships the Golden Calf of Scientism, he has a distinct aversion to backing up such a claim with scientific data.”

However, once you clear away the arrogance and anti-Christian bigotry, Gorbag does have a point. Many people who write blogs don’t come from backgrounds where sourcing one’s claims is necessary. And while many if not most writers are good about linking back to story sources, backing data — not so much. In debate terms, we’re the ones indicting the present system; therefore, we bear the burden of proof.

Let’s put the matter a different way: Gorbag, in essence, accuses us of pulling numbers out of thin air to make our cases against the “culture of death”. Presenting the numbers by themselves, without links or endnotes, contributes to that appearance. Citing or linking other people’s blogs — especially when those other people don’t cite their sources — can be written off as just us passing around subcultural myths and urban legends. Above all, it doesn’t make full use of the Internet’s power to share information.

We have the facts on our side. To make our case, it’s essential we show that we’re not making this stuff up.

For instance: In 2007, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer put combined estrogen-progestogen contraceptives — the Pill — on its list of Group 1 carcinogens (carcinogenic to humans). To quote the evaluation: “There is sufficient evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of combined oral estrogen–progestogen contraceptives. This evaluation was made on the basis of increased risks for cancer of the breast among current and recent users only, for cancer of the cervix and for cancer of the liver in populations that are at low risk for hepatitis B viral infection [italics in original; bold font mine].”

Okay, what’s my source? Well, my original source was hearing Teresa Tomeo talk about it on Catholic Connection on EWTN. And if I were just trading emails with a friend on the matter, that might be enough. But if I were trying to convince William Saletan that contraceptives are a bad idea all around, simply saying, “Well, Teresa Tomeo says that the WHO put it on a list of carcinogens!” … well, as they say down here in Texas, that dog won’t hunt.

So the obvious first choice is to link the summary page of the monograph inline. There’s just one problem with that: links degrade and break over time. In fact, when I went to get the IARC monograph, I first tried accessing it from Dr. Gerard Nadal’s site Coming Home, but his link led to an “oops page” on the IARC site. Nevertheless, for most purposes, links will suffice … you just have to check on them every so often.

However, this won’t work for sources you only have in printed format, including Kindle books and PDFs. Moreover, if you’re citing scientific sources, you often can only access the abstract online… unless you’re willing pay a lot of money for full access. So you may want or be forced to use inline citations.

Inline citations are simple, as they don’t require any additional HTML coding. The citation itself is just a matter of putting the authors’ name, the publication year and page number in parentheses in your sentence: “There is sufficient evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of combined oral estrogen–progestogen contraceptives” (IARC 2007, p. 175). At the bottom of your post, you then list your sources in APA format:

IARC (2007). Combined Estrogen-Progestogen Contraceptives and Combined Estrogen-Progestogen Menopausal Therapy. Retrieved January 21, 2012 from International Agency for Research on Cancer: http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Monographs/vol91/index.php.

OR:

IARC (2007). Combined Estrogen-Progestogen Contraceptives and Combined Estrogen-Progestogen Menopausal Therapy. In IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, Vol. 91. Lyons: International Agency for Research on Cancer.

A lot of work? Most of the work is in doing what we should be doing in the first place — namely, research. It’s actually easier to put the citations in your post than it is to find the numbers to begin with, or to write something interesting and original about them!

Whenever possible, get the facts straight from the source. While there are plenty of people who deliberately misrepresent data — including some of the scientists who produce it — neither foolishness nor knavery is required to do so unintentionally. Make sure the study says what it’s supposed to say (or what other people think it says) before you quote it to bolster your argument.

Of course, citing our sources isn’t always going to shut the Gorbags of the Internet up. But the Gorbags carry the burden of rejoinder: once the evidence against the status quo is present it, they must find countervailing evidence to rebut. And that is getting harder to find.

Another writer misuses “theocracy”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:16:00 +0000

What is a “theocracy”?

The term itself was coined by Flavius Josephus in Against Apion to describe the kingdom of Israel (2:17), although the word is probably more descriptive of Judea under the Sanhedrin. Literally, it means “direct government by God”; less literally but more technically, it means government controlled or influenced by a state-sponsored church.

However, in the same way other emotionally charged words get tossed around casually to provoke reaction or beat down opposition, “theocracy” is now being used as a buzzword for any government in which religious people have a say in their laws. It’s bad enough when “Brights” invoke the horrors of repressive inquisitions and jihad when Christians express a desire for certain laws; it’s all you can do to keep from rolling your eyes at the shameless melodrama.

When you see a headline that screams, “Error Has No Rights: Time to Ditch Liberalism for Theocracy”, the first thing you have to do is unclench your sphincter. No, a Catholic couldn’t seriously be proposing the very thing that’s caused nativist bigots to riot at the thought of papists living in America: rulership by the Church! And as it turns out, author Philip Primeau isn’t going quite that far … he’s simply using it in the same imprecise fashion as anti-Christians are. Which isn’t the end of his sloppy terminology, as “liberalism” turns out to be the half-baked muddle of secularism, materialism and narcissistic individualism that passes for progressive thought nowadays; the fact is, progressives stopped being meaningfully liberal thirty years ago.

Let me give Primeau as much credit as I can: I know very few Catholic writers who haven’t at some point railed and ranted against the toxic “culture of death” that’s chipping away at our institutions and Constitutional rights in the name of an irresponsible freedom from moral constraints. It’s out there, and it’s slowly destroying us as a nation and a society. In the little goldfish bowl we inhabit, self-professed Catholics who not only drink the progressive Kool-Aid but pass it around to others through the National Catholic Fishwrap, the Tablet (aka the Bitter Pill), US Catholic and other organs of dissent — they’re all quislings and CINOs, worthy only of our ire and contempt: “Treat them as you would a Gentile or a tax collector” (Mt 18:17). Ranting against liberals and progressives … heck, that’s almost de rigueur, the minimal manner of establishing your orthodox street cred.

Mea culpa, I’ve done it too, and am likely to do it again. So I could hardly fault Primeau for engaging in Catholic bloggers’ favorite pastime: librul-bashing.

Once we correct for Primeau’s misuse of terms — and filter out his overwrought prose and shallow historical analysis — we see he’s calling for a religiously homogeneous polity:

Since liberalism has shown its true colors, let us abandon it for the certain comforts of Christian commonwealth. There is no reason to be embarrassed of theocracy. It was the norm up until the eighteenth century. And what have the last three hundred years given us but a few hundred million deaths thanks to the godless spawn of Enlightenment infidels?
We need not conceive of theocracy in terms of the Muslim model. Christian theocracy is built upon Jesus Christ, who is love incarnate. It is therefore inherently charitable, oriented toward freedom tempered by truth. Quite an improvement on the present heathen consumerism! Only the presence of God in our social life ensures that the human being is respected in every dimension of his existence. Only when we recognize His sovereignty do we enable the “responsible use of freedom, in accordance with the dictates of the moral law” (Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 48).

Okay, very little in details, very long on hyperbole. But in essence what Primeau calls for is not much different from what Rick Santorum calls for: laws that respect God’s law, the law He encoded into the universe, and a society of faithful Christians — yes, he’ll grudgingly concede citizenship to our separated brothers and sisters — to obey them faithfully.

Only when Primeau starts to answer questions in the combox does he reveal: “Well, in a perfect world, we would thrive under a benevolent Catholic monarch who works in harmony with the See of Rome. … I would settle for a sort of non-denominational theocracy established upon moral and cultural truths which are traditional and explicitly Scriptural, and thus common to all the Nicene orthodox.” As for Jews and Moslems? “Prohibit the construction of new mosques or synagogues. Forbid evangelism or propaganda of any sort. Teach Christianity in the schools but ignore Judaism and Islam except in so much as they address the Faith. Bar Jews and Muslims from running for office (though allow them to be appointed by Christian politicians).”

Yikes. The major problem with a monarch, benevolent or not, is that you can’t fire his butt if he proves incompetent, short of civil war. Nor can you guarantee that his successors will be either benevolent or competent. As for squelching Jewish and Moslem participation … can anyone see why such a position would be attractive outside of a small circle of rad-trads?

For Primeau is the very kind of traditionalist who makes traditionalism look ugly and unappetizing, the kind that Simcha Fisher once said “always make me want to hide in the catacombs, to get away from those awful Catholics. Brrr.” To a commenter who took issue with what she perceived as his wish to “do away with the American experiment,” Primeau adopts an irritating condescension, dismissing her objections as “spirit of Vatican II” and “liberal” with the same profound disregard for accuracy that led him to call for a “theocracy” rather than religious unity.

In sum, “Error Has No Rights: Time to Ditch Liberalism for Theocracy” is the right message coming from the wrong person, in words more provocative than substantive. We have enough problems trying to return sanity to the public square without monarchist street-corner agitprop.

Wealth inequality “somebody else’s problem”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:29:00 +0000

Perhaps you remember this T-shirt from almost twenty years ago which had all the major religious belief systems classified according to variations of the expression “S*** happens”. Catholicism was defined as, “If s*** happens, it’s my fault.” Protestantism, by contrast, was defined as, “Let s*** happen to someone else.”

I happened to think of this T-shirt — and this definition of Protestantism — in reading Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ talk to the Pontifical Gregorian, “Has Europe Lost Its Soul?” In it, he specifically mentions Max Weber’s seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one of the foundational books of sociology. Weber found Calvinism to be highly influential in the development of capitalism, especially as income inequality was easier to rationalize through the doctrine of predestination: material wealth as a sign of God’s favor and blessing upon a policy of prudential spending, saving and investing.

Another Protestant influence shows up when we consider the effect of sola fide on distributive justice. When corporal works of mercy and responsibility to the larger community are deemed irrelevant to salvation, it becomes easier to allow vague, impersonal “market forces” to drive wages and salaries rather than consideration of the employee’s actual contribution to the success of the enterprise. Rabbi Sacks drove this point home for me even further by what he would probably consider an aside: “As for moral responsibility, it seems that that too can be outsourced. It is someone else’s problem, not mine.”

Catholicism receives its understanding of distributive justice as a legacy of its Jewish roots, in which property is not an absolute right or permanent gift but rather a trust bestowed by God for proper stewardship. It doesn’t follow from this that a Catholic can’t stay rich, but rather that the rich Catholic has greater opportunity and responsibility to give back to the community.

This idea of personal wealth as temporarily entrusted rather than permanently and irrevocably given is cropping up more on Catholic talk radio, and one that deserves wider consideration. More to the point, though, it stands as an indictment of a system that has become dependent on people spending well beyond their means, mortgaging significant chunks of future income (which may or may not ever be earned) to satisfy “needs” created in corporate boardrooms and identified by Madison Avenue marketing firms.

The problem with debt as an economic engine is that it bakes into the system the gradual, inevitable transfer of capital from the working poor and middle class, concentrating it into the hands of a relative few. Why is this a problem? Because the wealthy in whose hands the wealth is concentrating depend on the ability of the working poor and the middle class to consume their products; the less capital that’s in their hands, the less the consumer classes can consume. The more of the consumer classes’ income is taken up in servicing debt, the less that can be invested for their own wealth.

John Maynard Keynes saw this problem and attempted to correct it with the blunt meat-axe of government redistribution — not, David W. Cooney contends, as “a transition to Socialism; it was developed as a means to maintain Capitalism. … The economic divide between conservatives and liberals is not that of Capitalism versus Socialism; it is the division of two schools of capitalists who are arguing over how much wealth the government should redistribute.”

Another aspect of this dissociation of the individual from responsibility to and for others also gives rise to “big government”, even statism. As I pointed out in “Of robber barons and moral codes”:

This is precisely why the robber barons are held in dishonor. To achieve their successes, they literally ruined their competitors whenever they could, and built their empires on the broken backs of men to whom they paid bare subsistence wages, most often with no consideration for their safety even when the work was highly dangerous. Nor were they above cheating their customers, misrepresenting their products, bamboozling investors through stock-market fiddles, or bribing government officials. For every good business practice developed by industrial and commercial interests, at least two have been imposed upon them by the government against their stiff resistance.

Indeed, so far as business interests are concerned, government exists to provide contracts and socialize expenses or losses, and steps over its bounds when it attempts to impose social controls. The market does not “regulate” itself in our understanding of the term, except so far as rapacious business practices and wealth inequality eventually force a “market correction” (i.e., a “bust” cycle) with devastating consequences society-wide.

Of course, this treatment of capitalism as a “Catholic versus Protestant” issue is painting with a broad brush; I’m sure we can scour our economic history and come up with examples of both Catholic “robber barons” and Protestant “stewards”. More to the point, though, this view of wealth inequality as “someone else’s problem” is so prevalent that even Catholics faithful to the Church fail to recognize it as an economic threat. So poor is our collective comprehension that, as Joseph E. Stiglitz posted last July, various free-market advocates are pushing for further deregulation and tax breaks despite the role that deregulation played in creating the current economic crisis.

The best way we can pull back from disaster is to break ourselves from slavery to “the market” and exercise good stewardship over our own wealth: either avoiding credit altogether or buying no more than can be paid off within a billing cycle, “self-tithing” (i.e., saving a set percentage out of one’s pay), maintaining an emergency fund, and rationing luxuries. In the long run, social survival may depend on a ressourcement to agrarianism (about which, see Devin Rose’s excellent post) and the deliberate construction of a distributist economy.

Fixing the present system, though, requires we be honest about its inherent flaw: it says that wealth inequality is “somebody else’s problem”. Unfortunately, we can’t outsource poverty.

Paving the road to an authoritarian government

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:09:00 +0000

Doubtless you’ve already read two or three posts from other people explaining why the House of Representatives’ proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)[*] is such a horrendously bad piece of legislation. Jeffrey Tucker has a quick piece on The Chant Café which tries to explain how SOPA’s passage would affect the emergent renaissance of sacred music.

There are several major concerns with SOPA’s current language. The most disturbing of these is its placement of primary responsibility for enforcement, along with burden of proof, on host websites for policing not only themselves but sites to which they link for potential copyright infringement. “A provision in the bill states that any site would be blocked that ‘is taking, or has taken, deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the U.S.-directed site to carry out acts that constitute a violation.’[†] Critics have read this to mean that a site must actively monitor its content and identify violations to avoid blocking, rather than relying on others to notify it of such violations.”[1]

In immediate practical terms, it would be like a requirement for McGuffin Heights Mall to do full background checks not only on its own employees but also on those of their vendors and lessees. But there are other complaints, ranging from privacy issues to national security issues.

Addressing transparency of enforcement, Brooklyn Law School professor Jason Mazzone claims, “Much of what will happen under SOPA will occur out of the public eye and without the possibility of holding anyone accountable. For when copyright law is made and enforced privately, it is hard for the public to know the shape that the law takes and harder still to complain about its operation.”[2]

Even more disconcerting, at a time when federal infringement on individual rights is taking ever more ominous shapes, leading George Washington U. professor Jonathan Turley to claim that “the United States now has much more in common with such regimes [as China and Cuba] than anyone may like to admit,”[3] SOPA gives the U.S. Attorney General greater power over the flow of information over the Internet. According to Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “PIPA and SOPA would also give the Attorney General new authority to block domain name services, a provision that has been universally criticized by both Internet security experts and First Amendment scholars. … The Attorney General would also be empowered to de-list websites from search engines, which, as Google Chairman Eric Schmidt noted, would still ‘criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself.’ The same applies to payment processors and advertisers.”[4]

Wikipedia explains their opposition this way:

SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won’t be effective at their stated goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won’t have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn’t being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won’t show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

Tucker expresses his concern:

The sharing of content has been the key to the renaissance of sacred music in our time. Musicasacra.com, CPDL, and many others, have provided the music that has inspired a generation. It was all provided for free and put into the commons.
… [Very] little of this would have happened if the burden of proof over copyright and piracy had shifted against the institution doing the sharing. There are always deep pockets ready to make a claim of ownership, whether true or not and however ambiguous the claims. The legal tangles and possible penalties alone would have been enough to keep the entire library off line.

“Deep pockets” … ay, there’s the rub. The main motivation for this legislation comes from large corporations that have been victimized by large-scale foreign pirates and vendors of name-brand knockoffs, from Ford Motor Co. to Macmillan US, from Viacom to L’Oreàl, from the Business Software Alliance to the Entertainment Software Association. In theory, justice belongs to the side with the better case; in practice, to the side that can better afford the attorneys’ fees.

In theory, we can concede that, while most of these businesses are far from going bankrupt because of Internet pirates, consumers themselves are often hurt by second- and third-rate shoddy products pretending to be high-quality goods. However, because many electronic media are subject to widespread illegal distribution through sites such as isoHunt and SUMOTorrent even though such sites receive no direct compensation for providing the torrent links, the legislation penalizes noncommercial infringement. This has plenty of social networking sites, from Facebook and YouTube to eBay (and even the American Library Association) up in arms.

Granting that sharing a $600 software package with 76,845 of your closest friends tears the back out of the “fair use doctrine”, is that just cause for legislation that effectively allows major corporate interest groups to “create an Internet blacklist”[5] that shut down not just pages or sub-domains but entire domains with little more than a single accusation? Granting that every dollar given to foreign pirates is another dollar out of our already sagging GDP, is it then smart to adopt a series of restrictions that, according to some estimates, may negatively impact as much as $2 trillion in GDP and 3.1 million jobs?[6]

Good intentions, it seems, are paving the road to an authoritarian government of the élite, by the élite and for the corporations, through the medium of badly-considered laws. We’ve already had our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights nullified this term. Let’s not throw the First Amendment under the bus as well.

[*] 112 HR 3261; see full text here.

[†] The language is taken from Sec. 103a:1, which defines “An Internet site dedicated to the theft of U.S. property”. See pages 25-26.

[1] Parker Higgins (November 15, 2011). "What's On the Blacklist? Three Sites That SOPA Could Put at Risk". Deeplinks blog. Electronic Frontier Foundation. David Sohn (October 27, 2011). "House Copyright Bill Casts Dangerously Broad Net". Center for Democracy and Technology. Cited in Wikipedia (January 18, 2012). Stop Online Piracy Act. Retrieved January 18, 2012 from Wikipedia.

[2] Jason Mazzone (November 12, 2011). "The Privatization of Copyright Lawmaking". Retrieved January 18, 2012 from Torrentfreak.

[3] Jonathan Turley (January 13, 2012). “10 reasons the U.S. is no longer free”. Retrieved January 18, 2012 from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-the-united-states-still-the-land-of-the-free/2012/01/04/gIQAvcD1wP_story.html.

[4] Trevor Timm (January 16, 2012). “How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation”. Retrieved January 18, 2012 from Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[5] "Julian Sanchez | Cato Institute: Policy Scholars". Cato.org. Cited in Wikipedia (January 18, 2012). Stop Online Piracy Act. Retrieved January 18, 2012 from Wikipedia.

[6] Mike Masnick (November 22, 2011). “The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas”. Retrieved January 18, 2012 from Techdirt.

The Sunday obligation

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:03:00 +0000

“I’m so tempted not to go to Mass,” Mom said as we prepared to pull out of the garage. “I have so many things to do before we go over to Ted’s house tonight” — we were to celebrate the January birthdays together — “and I have a hard enough time hearing the Mass anyway even without Fr. George’s accent.” (Mom’s hearing is severely impaired, though not completely lost.)

“It’s your decision, Mom,” I replied neutrally. I don’t want to force her to go, but I don’t want either of us to fall back out of the habit of going, either, which we did while Bob was alive.

“Well, lead me not into temptation,” she sighed, and put the car in reverse.

The first reading, of course, was from 1 Samuel 3:3-10, 19, in which Samuel, called by God to be his prophet, responds, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening!” Deacon LeRoy gave the homily, building on that passage, telling us to listen for His voice, through all the noise pollution that surrounds us every day and in the stillness of quiet. And, of course, the Communion hymn was “Here I Am”.

When we were walking to the car, Mom started talking quite enthusiastically. Everything about this Mass had been perfectly timed to reach her where she was. “I’m really, really glad I didn’t give into the temptation to skip,” she said happily. “Well, next time,” I joked, “I promise I won’t give you an ‘out’.”

Of course, it would be nice if every Mass had this synchronic effect on everyone, where the confluence of theme, setting, actors and mood suited just perfectly to pull yourself out of yourself and into the embrace of God. But more often than not, you have to do the heavy lifting of opening yourself up to Christ, especially when homily, liturgy and mood all suck rotten eggs.

But the synchronic effect isn’t really why we go to Mass in the first place, is it? We’re not there to “have an experience” or to be entertained, which is the problem I have with charismatic communions and mega-churches. It’s not all about us. We go to worship God as a community; we go to be instructed in the Faith; we go to partake in the real Body and Blood of our Savior (1 Cor 10:16). Anything beyond that is pure gravy … or, rather, unmeritable grace.

Now, you do occasionally hear about people who complain that they’re “not being fed” when they go to Mass. It’s not all spiritual thrill-seeking. Lukewarm, superficial preaching is all too common a complaint among Catholics, and has been for some time. This problem can be corrected, but only when the bishops begin to recognize it as a problem.

Nevertheless, there’s no real implicit bargain which says, “If you preach a decent homily, I will come to Mass regularly.” The Sunday obligation obtains whether or not Fr. Joe Schmuckatelli is a good preacher. If Fr. Schmuckatelli falls down on the job, it’s no excuse for us to fall down with him. If you don’t have the luxury to “parish-shop” — especially if, like me, you live in a part of the country where the next parish can be a couple dozen miles away — then, as Father Z has suggested, the first thing to do is give thanks to God that at least you have access to the sacraments of the Church. As Fr. Ray Blake commented (in re Father Z): “I think this bit of advice applies to all who realise that most bishops and priests [] fall short of Christ the High Priest.”

This isn’t to advocate clericalism but rather to put first things first. While laypeople are on the whole becoming better educated about the faith than twenty years ago, and are entitled to priests who don’t preach heresy or dissidence, the primary reason to go to Sunday Mass is not to play what Supertradmum calls “heresy watch” or to score priests and deacons on their zeal. Nor is it — bringing up a fault of which I’ve been guilty — to pass judgment on the quality of the music and singing of the cantor and choir. Criticisms have their place … it’s just not first place.

Since the laity is becoming better educated about the faith, and there are other faith resources available, perhaps we need a better model for the sermon. Perhaps the homilist could spend less time drilling into the Scripture — that could be done on-line on the parish website, or in Scripture classes — and more into lighting fires under keisters, less time on reflection and more time on exhortation. Perhaps the bishops could require so much attendance at classes and seminars on effective public speaking, especially if such a course could be specially tailored for Catholic preaching.

Nevertheless, staying away from Mass — or moving to a different faith community — just because the Mass at your local parish doesn’t particularly move you does you more spiritual harm in the long run than good. You want to be “fed”? You’re partaking of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist! How can sleeping in or going to a big ol’ church with a great band top that?

Besides, you never know at which Mass everything will suddenly come together to give you that lightning-bolt epiphany. It could very well be that same lackluster parish with the same boring priest and same cacophonous choir you’ve been attending more off than on for years. It could be the one time you make your obligation while traveling, at (say) Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Or St. Columba’s in Conception Junction, Missouri. Or Midnight Mass at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC on Christmas Eve.

Wherever you go to Mass, He is there, waiting for you to say, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening!”

Reversing Protestant acceptance of birth control

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 05:52:00 +0000

For a brighter-than-average guy, I can be pretty slow on the uptake.

Back in August, in “The ten percent solution”, I wrote: “A recent study by the Guttmacher Institute — if you can believe those puppets of the National Abortion Rights Action League — tells us how badly the Church has lost: Around 98% of sexually active Catholic women have used proscribed contraceptive methods.” But what I skipped in the original Reuters story was this: “Nearly 70 percent of Catholic women use sterilization, the birth control pill or an IUD, according to the Guttmacher Institute research.”

Okay, seventy percent is still way too high, as far as faithful practice of Catholicism goes. And some of the gap is attributable, no doubt, to women who have gone past menopause. But it’s still a 28% difference between “ever used” and “currently using” — a big difference. And I wonder how many other writers besides myself missed it in our rush to either celebrate or mourn the 98% number. The penny didn’t drop, however, until I read Peter Baklinski’s review of Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control 1873-1973, by Dr. Allan Carson, in LifeSiteNews.

The book itself demonstrates how Margaret Sanger and Planned Barrenhood played divide-and-conquer with Christians by using the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control as a wedge issue, counting on a reflexive anti-papist sentiment to keep Evangelical communions from uniting with the Church on traditional reproductive values. But more importantly, Baklinski mentions that “some American evangelicals are rethinking their position on birth control,” using as his example “the Quiverfull Movement who ‘eagerly accept their children as blessings from God,’ eschewing not only artificial birth control, but even natural family planning.”

Atheist Austin Cline has noted the increase as well. In his Atheism.About.com page “Contraception & Birth Control: How the Christian Right Undermines Birth Control”, Cline notes several tactics, among them opposing education in contraceptive and contraceptive techniques in sex-ed classes, pushes for abstinence-only education, suppression of advertisement and refusal to dispense emergency contraception. “Limiting access to emergency contraception keeps women from preventing pregnancies and increases the demand for abortion,” Cline argues, adding disingenuously, “It also helps blur the lines in between abortion and contraception, useful in any long-term effort to undermine contraceptive rights.” (Pro-life activists have known for years that contraception feeds the abortion mills.)

In a New York Times Magazine article from May 7, 2006, “Contra-Contraception”, Russell Shorto writes:

As with other efforts — against gay marriage, stem cell research, cloning, assisted suicide — the anti-birth-control campaign isn’t centralized; it seems rather to be part of the evolution of the conservative movement. The subject is talked about in evangelical churches and is on the agenda at the major Bible-based conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. It also has its point people in Congress — including Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, Representative Joe Pitts and Representative Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — all Republicans who have led opposition to various forms of contraception.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled “Can Christians Use Birth Control?”[*] he wrote: “The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm. ... A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies.”

Of course, RH Reality Check is ready to trumpet a different tune. On June 1, 2010, they reported on Opposing Views that the National Association of Evangelicals, representing over 40 denominations, “noted results of a Gallup poll of evangelicals that ‘Significant majorities of (evangelical) respondents indicated support for a wide range of possible methods for decreasing the abortion rate — from parental consent and waiting periods before abortions to efforts at making adoption, pre- and post-natal care, and contraceptive services more accessible.’”

(Simply as a Catholic apologetics point, this merely illustrates that, in the absence of true human religious authority, religion devolves to the individual rationalizing his self-assertion, reinterpreting God’s will to suit his personal needs.)

However, the collapse is not complete. In the same year, Bryan C. Hodge, a graduate of Trinity Evangelical and former Presbyterian minister (now an Orthodox Presbyterian layman), published The Christian Case Against Contraception: Making the Case from Historical, Biblical, Systematic, and Practical Theology & Ethics.

Another critic of contraception, according to Kristen Moulton of Religion News Services in Christianity.com, is James Tour, a Rice University chemist specializing in nanotechnology and a convert to Evangelical Christianity from Judaism. Tour endorses NFP “but wonders if Christians ought to forgo even that measure of family planning. He says young lustful men who have had unfettered access to their wives actually welcome a message of self-restraint. ‘The women are looking for relief. The men are looking for relief. … They’re like, “I want that. I want to live in peace. I want to live in fulfillment.”’”

Now, just because we have our 28-30% of women not practicing contraception doesn’t mean we have the 10% vocal critics of contraception needed to get the domino effect going on the rest of our culture. If anything, it’s like ten thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean … that is, a good start.

We’re starting to see the pro-abortion culture being pushed back. The next generation of Christians is going to be pro-life. But we need to get more of our separated brothers and sisters back on board the anti-contraception bandwagon. We need to convince them that the “pregnancy is bad” mentality is what drives both contraception and abortion, that a sexual morality based on the traditional family has no room for pills and condoms.

However, things aren’t looking so bleak anymore.

[*] http://www.christianpost.com/news/can-christians-use-birth-control-6701/.

Bucking the Established Paradigm

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:24:00 +0000

In his book Pragmatism, William James recounts a discussion he and his friends had concerning a squirrel on the trunk of a tree: Suppose it were to move from the north face counter-clockwise to the west, then the south, then the east, and then back to the north. The question they debated (half-fun and in full earnest, I gather): Does the squirrel go around the tree or the tree go around the squirrel?

James answered: Both answers are correct; it just depends on what you consider the fixed point to be … an answer of which I’m sure Albert Einstein would have approved.

This story popped into my mind when I received an e-mail from Stacy Trasancos concerning the Galileo Was Wrong conference. As an honest-to-goodness, Ph.D.-and-all scientist who has actually worked in the field, Stacy is more qualified to evaluate the group’s claims than is a guy who’s still trying to pay off the BA in sociology he didn’t get. (Story for another time.) Granting that her doctorate is in chemistry, she’s still better prepped than I am: physics isn’t irrelevant to chemistry, after all.

So I gotta give Stacy props for at least considering the GWW’s claims in public. She’s already demonstrated her courage under threat of physical violence; now she has the courage to risk being marginalized as a tin-foil-hat-wearing loon. I say this not in detraction but in admiration; there are many scientists alive who will unthinkingly risk their lives for the sake of their children by assaulting a predator, but who won’t risk their reputation for the sake of the truth by bucking the Established Paradigm.

In a way, this is of a piece with the Established Paradigm’s “Galileo myth”, in which the poster boy for priestly obscurantism knuckles under to ecclesial knuckle-draggers, having barely the stones to mutter under his breath, “E pur si muove” (And yet it moves), as he signs the instrument of his craven surrender. Hardly the picture of rebellious intellectual defiance! And superhero Einstein himself scathingly remarked that the universities — so devoted to the cause of truth — remained silent in the face of Nazi tyranny (though not in the exact words attributed to him).[*]

But my object here isn’t to tar scientists with the charge of intellectual cowardice. Rather, in discussing the matter with Stacy, it finally dawned on me how much the consensus meta-narrative of Science — its mythos, to use a technically precise term — subtly influences the interpretation of data.

Key to understanding this point is to realize that facts don’t “speak for themselves”. Rather, they must be fit into an explanatory model or schematic before they become useful, before they can shed light on why grass is green or why pigs don’t have wings or why people suffer from hunger and malnutrition when we produce far more food than is necessary for everyone to eat three full meals a day. Those explanatory models, in turn, are driven by larger theories which themselves are subject to particular theories of the universe that aren’t empirically derived but rather precede empirical investigation.

Some people consider Science to be agnostic, in the sense that it neither posits a God nor demands His absence — Science, in essence, exists to explain How It All Works and not Why It All Exists. And, indeed, if we look at the history of the philosophy of science aright, we know that St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics were the first to argue that searching this knowledge out was a proper use of human reason because the facts of the universe could not fundamentally contradict God’s revelation. (Whether it has contradicted God’s revelation has been debated ad nauseam.)

However, beginning with Baruch Spinoza and David Hume, scientists and philosophers began to see Science’s charter as not just explaining the mechanics of God’s creation but explaining them in such a way that God as Necessary Being was no longer needed, a fundamental irrelevancy that could be excised from the picture via the Law of Parsimony (Occam’s Razor). Not only was God to be pushed off the cosmological stage as an Actor, He was no longer even to be given credit as Author of the play.

Religious people, even clerics, have made and continue to make important contributions to the development of science, from Nicholas Copernicus to Fr. Georges Lemaitre. However, more and more the disciplines have come to be dominated by the Established Paradigm: no God, no material level to the universe, no miracles, the Earth and all on it exists by chance. Faith is irrational; science and religion are at war with one another; science can’t be pursued in the presence of priests; Christians can’t be trusted to “do” objective science.

However, as atheist physicist Leonard Krauss explains in “The Energy of Empty Space that Isn’t Zero”, recent experiments are completing and verifying current working models but no longer pointing to further answers. “It’s been very frustrating for particle physicists, and some people might say it’s led to sensory deprivation, which has resulted in hallucination otherwise known as string theory.” Moreover, by the terms of conventional theoretical physics, empty space should not have energy … and yet it does. Even more strangely,

... [When] you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.

Krauss is dismissive of string theory because it’s incapable of making predictions that can be falsified; to his view, it bookends intelligent design. And this is what gives us the key to understanding what string theory really is.

In Harper Magazine’s “The accidental universe: Science’s crisis of faith,” physicist/novelist Alan Lightman quotes Steven Weinberg as saying, “The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.” But if, as both Lightman and Krauss contend, string theory can’t yield falsifiable predictions, and to make it work physicists must believe in things they won’t be able to prove empirically for some time, then it’s precisely what intelligent design purports to be — a meta-narrative (albeit one created with mathematical symbols).

Or, to put it in precise, technical terms, a creation myth. To take the implication of falsehood off of it, you can call it an “interpretive framework”. Nevertheless, it remains a story about our universe that proposes an answer to Why It All Exists, which is precisely what a religious mythos does.

Back to Einstein, who wrote in his obituary for Ernst Mach:

Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they might come to be stamped as “necessities of thought,” “a priori givens,” etc. The path of scientific progress is often made impassable for a long time by such errors. Therefore it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing long-held commonplace concepts and showing the circumstances on which their justification and usefulness depend, and how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. Thus their excessive authority will be broken. (Source: Wikiquote)

It’s not part of my argument to say the Galileo Was Wrong crowd is right. Christianity — Catholicism in particular — doesn’t depend on Earth being the center of the universe (whether flat or round), or the direct creation of Homo sapiens after six twenty-four-hour days, or Earth being the only planet bearing a creature capable of reason. At any time, experiments could suddenly reveal something that turns the physics world upside-down … or they could just continue to add to the current models without striking any new fact.

However, as I argued on my very first post, the atheist meta-narrative inherently “closes off avenues of investigation merely because those avenues might lead towards an unwanted answer.” Even if the geocentric universe isn’t the answer needed to shake up the physics world and produce testable predictions, it may very well be that the physical sciences have reached an impasse precisely because of various scientists’ determination to exclude an intelligent Designer. The Established Paradigm has been given excessive authority.

So the question is: Are physicists willing to question all their assumptions in order to solve the current riddles? Or is it more important to be an atheist than to be a scientist?

[*] Einstein, a deist and devoté of Baruch Spinoza, was critical of all religious clergy, and later disavowed the statement for its excessive praise of the Catholic Church.

Catholic ≠ Democrat, Republican or Libertarian

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:46:00 +0000

Would he were alive ... and American ....

One of the things that frustrates me about the American two-party system is that there’s no viable third party a Catholic can join without rationalizing the odd platform plank or five that a Catholic should at least have some qualms with, if not outright oppose. But this is equally true of the two major parties as well.

So during every presidential election cycle, you have to wade through scads of blog posts and comments in which the author attempts to square support of (Mostly Protestant) Party X with Catholic social and moral teachings … usually to the detriment of Catholicism. It’s one thing to rationalize support of Candidate N, who holds positions in conflict with Catholic teaching, in order to promote other good policies that aren’t in conflict. As well, we do have to recognize that, within the teachings of Catholic social justice, there’s some room for prudential judgment as to which policies would better serve social justice.

But it’s another when support of Candidate N becomes not just a matter of being a “leftist”, “right-wing reactionary”, “pinko commie” or “fascist” but also prima faciae evidence of heresy.

In this blog, I’ve taken progressive Catholics to task for reading the progressivist agenda into Catholic teaching, for blatantly ignoring or openly deriding irreformable doctrines and creating a “good Church/bad Church” paradigm for rationalizing disobedience and disrespect for the Church’s magisterium. But if it’s wrong for liberals to make the Church a party organ, it’s wrong for conservatives and libertarians as well, as my friend Julie Robison said about another issue. Sauce for the goose, Mr. Saavik.

The War on Terror

One of the ironies of this presidential election cycle is that, in terms of the War on Terror, there’s actually very little to distinguish between the various Republican candidates and the Democrat incumbent: almost all of them seem willing to sacrifice Constitutional liberties and moral warfare for the sake of religious rights and economic de-regulation … including my own choice, Rick Santorum. The only exception is Ron Paul, and as Simcha Fisher put it, “Every good idea he has brings a brain damaged twin along with it.” (In fact, Paul doesn’t scare me as much as some of his disciples do.)

On the other side of the fence, to defend key progressive agenda items — abortion and gay rights — Democrats are willing to back an incumbent who has betrayed over forty years of cherished party principles. As Glenn Greenwald (himself a liberal) so trenchantly observes, “Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. … [The] leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they don’t exist.”

Economic policy

Speaking of Pres. Obama’s betrayal of long-standing Democrat principles, shall we talk about the billions of dollars of corporate welfare thrown at various “too big to fail” companies with little in terms of oversight or accountability? Here’s one scathing indictment by Greenwald: “He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists.” Twenty years ago, had George H. Bush distributed government largesse with such abandon and so little effect, Democrats would have called for his impeachment; as it was, Bill Clinton was able to defeat him only with the help of Ross Perot’s quixotic candidacy.

But what’s the Republican response? De-regulation, reduction of income taxes and reduction of entitlements. First, the policy of “starving the dragon” has only led the dragon to eat Chinese money. Second, we have all those “burdensome” regulations, as I’ve pointed out in a post on Catholic Bandita, because businessmen have overwhelming financial incentives to not regulate themselves; their self-interests are rarely if ever enlightened. Third, with all due respect to the principle of subsidiarity, I have yet to see a credible explanation of how the private-charity sector will suddenly grow large enough to replace the billions of entitlement funds to be (theoretically) cut … but I guess that’s the welfare moms’ problem, right? (The most infuriating comment I’ve seen advocating this position said, “Let’s face it, the war on poverty is lost” … a pseudo-Christian defeatism as indefensible as the most outrageous Randian diatribe about the undeserving poor.)

Health care

It doesn’t matter whether you say “Obamacare” or “Romneycare”, you’re still talking about a system that does no more than put a Band-Aid on a cancer lesion … and government funds in corporate pockets. And that’s without the increased federal funding of what’s laughably called “women’s health care”, considering the health risks of both abortion and contraceptive pills. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are facing up to the massive challenges that making healthcare affordable would really entail. But while I don’t buy Dr. Bill Oddie’s argument that a British-style National Health plan isn’t to be compared to Soviet-style socialized medicine, a so-called “market solution” pulling federal funds out of health care would be functionally an agreement to let the health-care system run amuck until it collapses under its own weight, leaving medical services only to the wealthy and saying about everyone else, “It’s not my problem.” (Okay, I found something about Ron Paul that scares me.)

Because Catholic social doctrine as laid out to date speaks mostly to general principles, there can, is and will be room for disagreement as far as the best way to carry them out. However, a lot of what’s passing for political discussion in the Catholic blogosphere is merely the trading of buzzwords and memes, leavened with casually-considered anathema sit’s[*] as writers who ought to know better fail to distinguish the non-negotiable from the merely prudential, the de fide from the opinio tolerata.

The fact is, none of the candidates are saints. They all carry considerable baggage from their pasts; they all have issued agenda items that, when considered closely, should cause the orthodox Catholic to flinch in dismay … or keep you up nights worrying about the future of our country. And as the two parties come closer to mirroring each other (“Meet the new boss, /Same as the old boss”), eventually we may have to force the formation of another party to represent us rather than slightly different flavors of the Élite Oligarchy. Since we can’t vote for a dead Englishman, we must settle for a living American.

But let’s try to remember in charity that none of us bloggers or combox warriors have the right or duty to excommunicate others.

[*] Anathema sit = “let him be accursed”; sometimes abbreviated A.S., many conciliar dogmatic definitions have been accompanied by parallel condemnations: “If anyone says thus, A.S.”

The tortured rationalization of torture

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:50:00 +0000

Wherever Christianity has had some cultural influence, torture has been increasingly regarded as intrinsically evil. Because it’s still perceived to be useful, though, arguments increasingly turn on what constitutes torture … the classical “appeal to finer detail”.

Consider water-boarding, as illustrated to your left. Granting that it’s drawn and written to provoke a specific reaction (notice the brown skin on the victim!), the effect is accurate enough: the victim isn’t really drowning … he only thinks he’s drowning. No harm, no foul, right?

At least, this is the conclusion that Teresa Rice of Catholibertarian wants us to draw:

What the Japanese did to American POWs which some now conveniently classify under the contemporary term “waterboarding” was in reality one part of a larger torture regimen known as “the water cure”. During the “water cure” torture the Japanese did not place a cloth over the person’s mouth. They poured water over the person’s face which caused actual drowning. The water went down their victim’s throat after which some would go into the lungs and some into the stomach. It de-salinated the victim’s blood and often ended up drowning his intestines. In other words, there was often actual physical harm involved and always the very real danger of serious physical harm. That is a key morally relevant difference between the Japanese “waterboarding” technique and the way the CIA practiced waterboarding under the Bush administration. For the latter there was never any physical harm inflicted nor was there any real danger of serious physical harm. There was no actual drowning, only a psychologically convincing simulation of it.

Rice continues:

The Justice Department under Bush had strict guidelines for the administration of waterboarding. There was a cloth placed over the terrorist’s mouth and nose. The individual does not take any water into his lungs, and it is never permitted that harmful amounts of water should be ingested by the terrorist. Also, while the Japanese had no moral scruples about how often to apply their water cure torture, the CIA was not permitted to apply their waterboarding technique more than once in a 30-day period.

This explanation is part of Rice’s larger argument, which is that there’s no objective standards by which we can measure the victim’s pain: “Now, there are some obvious instances such as when a person’s finger nails are pulled out or there is a blow torch burning someone’s skin where we can intuitively know that these are torture.” Otherwise, ¿quién sabe? Shrug.

But then she moves on from there to a dishonesty: “How do we *know* that when the U.S. and others classified waterboarding as ‘torture’ that they were correct in doing so? Is it because some today have preconceived notions, follow [a] secular Leftist definition of torture, and the past assertion fits into their narrative” [bold font mine.—TL]?

What is this “secular Leftist definition of torture”? Unfortunately, Rice chooses not to enlighten us, because she doesn’t know herself. Obviously, though, it was much too strict if it included something harmless like modern American water-boarding. I wonder if this “secular Leftist definition” was “physical or moral violence [used] to extract confession, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred,” because, gee, that’s the same definition the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2297 uses.

It gets even worse. Here’s Rice’s peroration:

The concerns and examples I stated above is why I titled this post, the tortured definition of “torture”. Some people have butchered the definition of “torture” and twisted it up like a pretzel in order to fit the politically correct culture of today. This even departs from Church Tradition. Since the Catholic Church is infallible and it has sanctioned torture in the past how can it possibly be an intrinsic evil? If the Church committed an intrinsic evil that would mean that the Church is fallible and that is impossible.

I’ve already written a post on The Impractical Catholic explaining how Church hierarchs could commit intrinsic evils without affecting her magisterial infallibility; an Apologetics Toolbox entry on infallibility is here. I also offered an abbreviated response in her combox, to which she replied, “Do you consider the ‘Great Council’, also known as the Fourth Lateran Council, to be a legitimate ecumenical Council?” Absolutely … and how Lateran IV, which mentions neither infallibility nor torture, applies to the issue escapes me.

One of the Lateran IV canons does forbid clerics to shed blood, which is mentioned in paragraph 2298 of the Catechism:

In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood [see, I told you!]. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

In this paragraph, the Church admits that she was wrong to use torture in the correction of heresy. Since the use of torture was never a matter of doctrine, but rather one of discipline, the doctrine of infallibility doesn’t come into question … only Rice’s understanding of it.

Rice would like a “clear and concise” definition as a Catholic Libertarian; as her header explains, her mission is to reconcile the two platforms. I’m simply a Catholic; while I have Republican leanings and am supporting Rick Santorum (yeah, I know, but all the candidates have baggage), parties no longer define me because none of them represent my understanding of Catholic social justice.

As Catholics, we have a clear and concise definition of torture. Rice’s problem is, water-boarding fits within it. Calling it “secular Leftist” or “politically correct” won’t make it go away.

You don’t have to be “for” torture to be a Libertarian … in fact, it would fit libertarianism much better if you’re against it. But if you’re Catholic, you must be against it.

Bloggers who have helped me

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:00:00 +0000

So yesterday I was adding a quote from Richard Collins of Linen on the Hedgerow to my sidebar widget, “What They’re Saying about OTA”. To be taken seriously by other writers who are (or should be) taken seriously — even if they write humor — is both a great honor and a great aid to getting the message out.

It’s also an invitation to let your head swell. There’s a quote floating around in the back of my mind, which I paraphrase here: All writers, no matter how humbly they present themselves, keep an outrageous vanity locked within their breasts. Fortunately, blogging with a combox open also presents many opportunities for other people to puncture your balloon, letting your ego deflate a bit.

It also helps if, now and again, you step back and acknowledge the help you got. One of the reasons why confession works is because it forces you to accept ownership of your sins in a way that merely flicking a mental prayer heavenward (“Sorry, God!”) doesn’t. In the same way, publicly saying “Thank you” to people who have helped you is to own the fact that you didn’t “do it all by yourself” — the great heresy of the Church of the Autonomous Individual.

Now, not all of these writers have plugged OTA or linked one of my posts to theirs. In a couple of cases, I’m not sure they know me from a hot rock. That’s not the point: either they’ve boosted me with their support and encouragement, or they’ve been people I’ve learned from — in one or two instances, what I’ve learned from them is as close to an epiphany as I’m likely to experience. In many cases, they’ve done both.

Also, since this isn’t an “awards post”, no particular ranking or level of importance should be attached to the order in which I list them. Finally, I’m bound by my humanity to err by omission; if I don’t mention your name, it’s because I truly suck at expressing gratitude, for which I’m ever so sorry and chronically repentant.

Richard Collins (Linen on the Hedgerow): Richard was one of my first followers, and has linked to me quite a few times. I enjoy reading his takes on what’s going on in Merrie Olde England, especially as we have quite similar senses of humor. And he’s also introduced me to the Guild of St. Titus Brandsma, a collection of British and European writers worth following.
Subvet (Blowing San #1): I can count on a trenchant comment from the ‘Vet at least twice a week, and often more. Plus, he comes across news items that are sure to either make me chuckle or rage (or both) at the follies of the government. He’s an “old salt” with a heart of gold — most retired NCOs have that quality — and I believe he rates a salute, officer or not.
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (What Does the Prayer Really Say): Some traditionalists can really turn you off the tradition with their more-Catholic-than-thou snobbery and spite. Not Father Z; while he prefers the TLM, he also has respect for the Novus Ordo, especially the new translation. In fact, if you read his blog for no other reason, read it for his breakdowns of the propers of the Mass, which he pulls apart and puts back together with beautiful “mini-homilies”. But you can go ahead and read his commentary as well … and buy some Mystic Monk coffee!
Stacy Trasancos (Accepting Abundance and elsewhere): This woman is much smarter than I am, and has demonstrated her courage under frightening verbal abuse and threats. Stacy is the kind of blogger I want to be when I grow up.
Msgr. Charles Pope (Archdiocese of Washington): Always worth reading. In fact, Msgr. Pope penned one of the best posts I’ve ever read — “Five Hard Truths That Will Set You Free”; reading it for the first time was one of those “thunderbolt” moments in my spiritual life.
Tito Edwards (The Pulp.it): The Pulp.it was the first digest to bring OTA and IC out of their remote little corners and into the bigger bubble of the Catholic blogosphere. I hope in return that The Pulp.it grows to be as popular as New Advent without losing that willingness to find new writers and bring them into the circle. I can’t thank Tito enough.
The Bright Maidens (Trista, Elizabeth Hillgrove, Julie Robison): Three bright spots in my day. More to the point, they’re not only what feminism should have produced but couldn’t, they’re precisely the young, on-fire, orthodox Catholics Bl. John Paul II was hoping to produce with the New Evangelization. Reading them, and the young people who read them, gives me an insight into the next generation of Catholic Americans … and gives me hope.
Lisa Graas (Catholic Bandita): Has not only widened my audience and acquaintances, but has given me a third soapbox from which to speak. But moreover, she carries her crosses with grace and honesty that make me wonder whether I’ve ever truly taken mine up.
Doctor Anthony Lilles (Beginning to Pray): Introduced me to the mystical side of Catholicism and really put the intellectual, rational side of it into context. Alfred North Whitehead once said that truth without interest is irrelevant; Dr. Lilles showed me that religion without mysticism is like a car without an engine — irrelevant and impotent.
Devin Rose (St. Joseph’s Vanguard): A great guy who introduced me to Brandon Vogt, gave me a copy of his first book (If Protestantism is True) to review, and has given me many suggestions about the book I want to write. Moreover, he’s a great example of charity in apologetics.
Frank Weathers (Why I Am Catholic): Friend, retired Marine, finance whiz, finder of great Catholic classic books … what’s not to like about this guy? Plus, he’s a snappy writer. All around, the kind of man you can kick back and talk religion with over a cup of joe or a cold, frosty mug of beer. Semper Fi!
Katrina Fernandez (The Crescat): One day, it’s quirky, snarky humor, especially when she writes about The Boy or Craptastic Art. The next, it’s a moving description of the beauty in the Catholic tradition or trying to find love as a single mother. She’s really a great person, and I hope Nate Fillion falls in love with her.
Matt and Pat Archbold (Creative Minority Report): They’re always good to read; besides, I got from them one of the best pieces of blogging advice: “When you’re finished with your post, don’t sit around admiring it or tweaking it. Move on to the next post.”
Father Dwight Longenecker (Standing On My Head): I love Todd Unctuous and Mantilla the Hon. I also like The Gargoyle Code, Fr. Dwight’s “sequel”, if you will, to C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. But he’s also pretty darned profound when he writes in his own voice.
Patrick Madrid (Patrick Madrid): He doesn’t update often enough, which is probably due to his intensive schedule. But he does update. Plus, I have three of his books, which I highly recommend: Pope Fiction, Search and Rescue, and The Godless Delusion (with Kenneth Hensley). No, I don’t get paid for these plugs.

There is one other person I must thank, although he’s not a Catholic blogger … in fact, he’s a travel coordinator: my cousin Greg Reese, who’s been behind my writing from the very beginning, although I’m sure I’ve written things he disagrees with or even finds uncomfortable. “Above all hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Pet 4:8).

Again, there are plenty of other people who deserve thanks, such as Elise Hilton, Fr. Tim Finigan, Dylan Parry, The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named, Brigit at St. Conleth (are you praying for a Holy Year for Nuns?), RAnn at This That and the Other Thing, my new friends Richard Evans and Steve Gershom, Kate at Australia Incognita, Randy at Speak the Truth in Love, LarryD at Acts of the Apostasy … the list just goes on and on! I keep this up, I’ll find myself thanking Pres. Obama and the OWS crowd!

This has been a marvelous year, and I’ve been blessed with a wonderful opportunity. This next year already has some built-in interest, with the Olympic Games and the Presidential Follies, and of course, the ever ancient, ever new Church. Thank you, Patient Reader, for putting up with my behavior!

Further thoughts on “Judeo-Christian Sharia”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 04:27:00 +0000

Yesterday I stripped apart a post by comedian Dean Obeidallah on CNN, in which he regurgitates the boilerplate liberal “establishment of religion” red herring under the label “Judeo-Christian Sharia”.

My main focus was on the examples he brought up of the horrible dhimmitude Rick Santorum, if elected President, would somehow manage to force on an unwilling electorate all by himself … almost all of which social conservatives of every religious background have been calling for, including some atheists and agnostics. No porn!? No federally-funded contraceptives!? No gay marriage!? O the inhumanity!!!

Particularly objectionable is how Obeidallah equates a law based on traditional Judeo-Christian morality with Sharia to play upon American anti-Islamic feelings: “Santorum wants to base laws on the Bible; Arabs want to base laws on the Qur’an; what’s the difference?” [Not his exact words, I add in honesty.] Sharia creates oppression; Sharia is based on a particular religion’s sacred scripture; laws based on religious scripture oppress; Santorum wants our laws to be based on Christian scripture; therefore Santorum wants to create a Christian Sharia.

Not only is this kind of “see Spot run” association implicit in Obeidallah’s argument, it’s illogical, counterfactual and reprehensible. And as his examples of “Judeo-Christian Sharia” demonstrate, like most pampered children of the West since the “baby boom”, Obeidallah has no real grasp of what oppression is.

Part of the problem is that very few non-Moslems know much about Sharia except for brief mentions in news clips and occasional oblique references in news and opinion blogs. Unfortunately, I don’t know much more than the average American except what I’ve gleaned through Wikipedia (not a fully authoritative source) and a few websites here and there.

Another part of the problem is that our view of Sharia has been influenced by over sixty years of anti-American hatred, at first due to our support of the state of Israel, but more recently inflamed by almost a decade of military intervention and experimentation in bringing our vision of democracy to the Middle East. Our concept of democracy grows out of our cultural Judeo-Christian belief in the fundamental dignity of the human person, and therefore entails a concept of human rights that Islam has not fully embraced.

Several major, predominantly Muslim countries criticized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) for its perceived failure to take into account the cultural and religious context of non-Western countries. Iran claimed that the UDHR was “a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition”, which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. Therefore in 1990 the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a group representing all Muslim majority nations, adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.
Ann Elizabeth Mayer points to notable absences from the Cairo Declaration: provisions for democratic principles, protection for religious freedom, freedom of association and freedom of the press, as well as equality in rights and equal protection under the law. Article 24 of the Cairo declaration states that “all the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic shari’a” [bold font mine.—TL].[1]

Still, there are several schools of thought on Sharia; “reform” schools do their best to incorporate human rights into them. Writes Eric L. Lewis:

Religious groups often compete to have their notions of morality enacted into law. Indeed, religious Catholics, Jews and Muslims often agree on such hot button issues as abortion or gay marriage. Moreover, Sharia law, like other religious laws, is not monolithic. There are numerous schools of Islamic law and, although there are common threads, the laws in Muslim countries differ greatly and there is great scope for judges to exercise their conscience and their discretion. The specter of stonings and amputations is a caricature of Islamic law. In any event, American Muslims are not agitating for veilings or beheadings (although the U.S. alone, among modern democracies, shares approval for the death penalty) [bold font mine.—TL].

My point isn’t that “Sharia isn’t all that bad”, but rather that, by calling a legal code based on Judeo-Christian morality a “Sharia”, Obeidallah is exploiting our ignorance and prejudice to create a “threat” out of whole cloth.

The fact is, there is no “secular morality”. Irreligion doesn’t come packaged with a moral code; secular humanism is what’s left of Christian humanism after the irreligious pick out what they don’t like. Nor is Judeo-Christian morality so different from the morality of other religious traditions that Buddhists, Hindus or Taoists find our ideas of right and wrong incomprehensible. Most atheists and agnostics are “cultural Christians” or “secular Jews”, adhering to most if not all Judeo-Christian mores. Indeed, the only people who complain about conservatives imposing morality on the country are the lefties who want to impose a hedonist (im)morality on us all … even using the laws to educate kids into decadence.

As we’ve all been seeing the last few months, the democratic “Arab Spring” has meant that Christians are not only being squeezed out of representation in the governments but also being driven out of their countries. This isn’t the result of Sharia but rather of a growing anti-Christian sentiment caused in no small part by inept Western meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. In the US, in a democracy informed by human rights that are a Christian legacy, Moslems of good will can participate with Christians and Jews to shape the laws of our country … as can Buddhists, Taoists, atheists and agnostics. At least theoretically.

The only obstacle is an aging liberal hierarchy, formed in the moral chaos of the Sixties, doing everything in their power and using every semipodexed legal theory to shut social conservatives out of the public square and the democratic process so they can finish wrecking Western civilization. And they don’t really care whether the conservatives in question are Christian or not.

Which is the best reason I can think of to vote for Rick Santorum. I’ll happily take a “Judeo-Christian Sharia” over this Randian mess any day.

[1] Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islamic Law and Human Rights: Conundrums and Equivocations, chapter 14 in Carrie Gustafson, Peter H. Juviler (eds.), Religion and human rights: competing claims?, Columbia University seminar series, M.E. Sharpe, 1999; cit. in Wikipedia (2012, January 3). Sharia. Retrieved January 6, 2012 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia, f. 180.

A “Judeo-Christian Sharia” … really?

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:33:00 +0000

I keep thinking there was a time when, if a media outlet wanted a respectable opinion written or spoken — something the public would read/watch and consider carefully — they would ask a prominent politician, or a “think tank” analyst, or eminent scholar. Alas, how “infotainment” has bankrupted our culture: to make an analysis of Rick Santorum, fresh from his Iowa triumph, CNN asked Dean Obeidallah.

The editor informs us, “Dean Obeidallah is a comedian who has appeared on Comedy Central’s Axis of Evil special, ABC’s The View, CNN’s What the Week and HLN’s The Joy Behar Show.” So even if the title of the hit piece — “Santorum wants to impose ‘Judeo-Christian Sharia’” — didn’t give it away, you would still be warned that Obeidallah would hardly give Santorum a bouquet of flowers, judging by the venues he’s playing.

Imagine if either of the two Muslim members of Congress declared their support for a proposed American law based on verses from the Quran. The outcry would be deafening, especially from people like Santorum.
One of the great ironies is that Santorum has been a leader in sounding alarm bells that Muslims want to impose Islamic law — called Sharia law — upon non-Muslims in America. While Santorum fails to offer even a scintilla of credible evidence to support this claim, he continually warns about the “creeping” influence of Muslim law.

So okay, Obedallah’s first complaint is hypocrisy. I might buy that if Santorum weren’t speaking in the context of a democracy where the concept of God-given inalienable human rights obtains as a Christian legacy (despite secular humanist attempts to take credit for it). As it is, Obeidallah’s attempt to make the two equivalent merely strike one as ludicrous.

Then Obeidallah asks dramatically, “So, what type of nation might the United States be under Rick Santorum’s Sharia law?

“1. Rape victims would be forced to give birth to the rapist’s child. Santorum has stated that his religious beliefs dictate that life begins at conception, and as a result, rape victims would be sentenced to carrying the child of the rapist for nine months.
“2. Gay marriages would be annulled. Santorum recently declared that not only does he oppose gay marriages, but he supports a federal constitutional amendment that would ban them, invalidating all previous gay marriages that have legally been sanctioned by states and thus callously destroying marriages and thrusting families into chaos.
“3. Santorum would ban all federal funding for birth control and would not oppose any state that wanted to pass laws making birth control illegal.
“4. No porn! I’m not kidding. Santorum signed ‘The Marriage Vow’ pledge authored by the Family Leader organization, under which he swears to oppose pornography. I think many would agree that alone should disqualify him from being president.”

Yep, ladies and gentlemen, this is the horrific dhimmitude that Rick Santorum will somehow singlehandedly impose on the whole United States.

The idea that the mother’s victimhood justifies the killing of her child is possibly the most horrific bastardization of “compassion” ever foisted on a civilized society, one that does the mother more harm — both physical and emotional — than good. It was bulls*** in 1973 and it’s bulls*** now. Let’s stop pretending it’s “freedom”: it’s naked barbarity. Under Sharia, women would have fewer rights than they do now, and would be under the thumbs of the family patriarchs.
I might buy the argument that a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages would be callous if I could first agree that “gay marriage” was not a contradiction in terms. As it is, my tears stick in their ducts refusing to be jerked by Obeidallah’s overwrought prose. And, under Sharia, homosexuality could be punishable by death (the actual penalty varies from country to country).
And refusing to pay for people’s contraceptives with my tax dollars would be a problem … how? Gee, I suppose that, without federally-funded pills and rubbers, people would have to actually think before they f***! [My apologies for the strong language, but in this particular instance the F-bomb is definitely called for.]
"I think many would agree that [opposing porn] alone should disqualify him from being president.” I think this statement alone should disqualify Obeidallah from being taken seriously as a policy analyst. Oh, wait a minute, I forgot — he’s a comedian; why are we supposed to take him seriously?

For his peroration, Obeidallah invokes the tired “separation of church and state” red herring. As I’ve discussed before (here and here), the whole point of a representative democracy is to reconcile the conflicting moral imperatives brought by different religious imperatives. By contrast, secularists simply want to exercise veto power over every law by classing them “religion-based” and “not religion-based” according to their own whims … effectively handing over control of the law to a privileged, self-selected minority.

In fact, the attempt to equate the implementation of Christian morality with the imposition of Sharia is both facile and disingenuous. The concept of human rights is a European construct based on the Christian belief in the fundamental dignity of the human being. When Thomas Jefferson (he of the “wall of separation fame”, you know?) penned that humans were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, he wasn’t merely employing ceremonial deism but articulating the consensus opinion that God was the source of these rights, that they hadn’t just been pulled out of a philosophical hat.

By contrast, Sharia doesn’t recognize “human rights” per se, but rather is constructed on the concept of mutual obligation. This is why Sharia doesn’t recognize freedom of religion, women’s equality or gay rights, why religious dissenters and ethnic minorities are persecuted and harassed. To say that Santorum’s desire to encode Christian moral principles in law is a “Judeo-Christian Sharia” is merely the kind of shrill, “jack-booted right-wing fascist” agitprop lefties resort to when logic fails them.

You know what the funniest joke in Obeidallah’s piece is?

“Follow him on Twitter.”

Clohessy’s double standards—UPDATED

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:28:00 +0000

SNAP director David Clohessy told CNA on Jan. 3 that his organization should be held to a “different standard” of transparency than Church leaders and dioceses, which he described as “organizations that enable and conceal thousands of pedophiles to rape tens of thousands of kids.”

I read this paragraph in Michele Bauman’s CNA story and my jaw dropped. Surely this must be a misquote, even a false quotation! Not even David Clohessy could be this nakedly hypocritical and hysterical! But no, here’s his response as reported by the adulatory National Catholic Fishwrap:

Asked whether he thought his organization’s refusal to hand over certain documents contradicted its calls for transparency from diocesan offices regarding allegations of sex abuse, Clohessy said he believed there “are two standards of transparency.”
“Our view is that agencies that counsel and help sex crimes victims should never be transparent about the people who call them desperately in pain and seeking guidance,” Clohessy said.
“We believe that there are two standards of transparency,” he said. [So he’s honest about having double standards.] “One for institutions that have enabled thousands of pedophiles to assault tens of thousands of kids and conceal the crimes. And another standard for organizations that enable kids to be safer and expose heinous crimes.”

In other words, “We should be able to hide whatever information we want because we’re the good guys. Our intentions are noble, right and just; rules are for bad men, like those sneaky, lying bishops.”

Okay, let’s ignore the factual exaggerations in Clohessy’s last paragraph; for those who hate the Catholic Church, no disproof is possible. Besides, as I tire of saying, I have no wish to defend the indefensible or excuse the inexcusable, so nothing I say from this point forward should be taken as such.

How many action-adventure movies feature a rogue cop or average citizen — that is, an average “ex-Special Forces with a specialty in demolitions” citizen — who, after destroying hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars’ worth of private property, creating numerous accidents on the roadways endangering countless innocents and taking the lives of a couple dozen bent-noses, doesn’t spend five minutes in Interrogation let alone face trial to answer for his vigilante rampage? Especially the rogue cop … how is it Internal Affairs gives him a pass? (And boy, isn’t it lucky that the good guy’s stray bullets never hit innocent people across the street, let alone five blocks away?)

Now, I remember growing up in the wake of Miranda v. Arizona, when it seemed every year there were a number of crooks who went free because of technicalities. Or, at least that’s the meme the adults passed back and forth among themselves, while we slowly absorbed it; that’s the trope that made its way into the movies and cop shows, where rogues like Harry Callahan, Tony Baretta and Martin Riggs could bend the rules into pretzels and solve the problem of “release on technicality” with .357 and .44 Magnums.

We still live informed by that trope, even though improvements in law enforcement training and technology have mostly overcome the problems of forty and fifty years ago. To talk about the rights of the accused is still to be “soft on crime”; in fact, the improvements I just mention make it harder to believe cops could ever arrest, and courts convict, an innocent man for a crime.

But the situation of Fr. Michael Tierney is different. There’s no material evidence in question, but rather accusations from 25-35 years in the past. The conditions under which police investigate crimes and make arrests aren’t an issue. SNAP talks about “protecting kids”, but kids aren’t making the accusations; rather, the alleged victims are middle-aged men who may or may not have an economic motive to falsely accuse a priest of molesting them in the ’70s and ’80s.

Yes, people can still be falsely accused of crimes. Just over a year ago, according to Dave Pierre of The Media Report, “veteran attorney Donald H. Steier stated that his investigations into claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests [in the Los Angeles area] have uncovered vast fraud and that his probes have revealed that many accusations are completely false.” In one story reported just yesterday, Fr. James Selvaraj’s name still turns up on Google searches as an accused pedophile despite a charge so decrepit that the grand jury saw no reason to continue the investigation and an attorney general took the extra step of expunging the accusation from his record.

With over $1 billion in Church funds paid out in settlements, economic motive isn’t that hard to find: thar’s gold in them thar lawsuits.

In fact, as Steier pointed out, “a person who wanted to make a false claim of sexual abuse by a priest could go to [SNAP's] website and find a ‘blueprint’ of factual allegations to make that would coincide with allegations made by other people.” Such “templating” seems to have taken place in the sad story of Fr. Gordon MacRae: the substance of the accusations came from the victim of another priest, down to almost the same exact wording.

The fact is, Clohessy and SNAP aren’t by definition trustworthy accusers simply because they act as victims’ advocates. They aren’t by definition trustworthy simply because they include in their organizational outreach people who have been real victims of real predator-priests. In fact, as I’ve noted before, Clohessy’s victim’s-rights advocacy appears to be a Trojan horse for the more vicious goal of getting the state legislatures to emasculate the Catholic episcopacy … in words which John L. Allen, Jr. attributes to him, to curb “the virtually limitless power of bishops.”

There are no “two standards of transparency” — you’re either transparent or you’re not. Being a victim’s advocate doesn’t give the State the right to withhold information vital to the accused’s defense, let alone a private 501(c)3 non-profit. Sorry, no “white hat discount” here. Neither does putting on a Roman collar mean giving up the right to a fair trial.

Time for Riggs and Murtaugh to face Internal Affairs.

Update: January 5, 2011
In an interview with Catholic World Report, Dave Pierre alleges that David Clohessy worked for almost a decade with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In fact, a court filing for ACORN v. St. Louis County (930 F.2d 591) includes David Clohessy as co-appellant.

To refresh your memory: ACORN was founded in 1970 by former SDS and NWRO member Wade Rathke. The mission statement on their website, which is still up and running despite their Chapter 7 liquidation, carries the somewhat innocuous aim "to organize a majority consituency of low- to moderate-income people across the United States"; according to City Journal writer Sol Stern,

ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains [this was written in 2003] the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism. “We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform,” whose prose Orwell would have derided as pure commissar-speak. “We will continue our fight . . . until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom . ... We have nothing to show for the work of our hand, the tax of our labor” — claptrap that not only falsifies the relative comfort of the poor in America but that also is a classic example of chutzpah, given ACORN’s origins in a movement that undermined the work ethic of the poor. But never mind — ACORN claims that it “stands virtually alone in its dedication to organizing the poor and powerless.” It organizes them to push for ever more government control of the economy. ...
ACORN’s revival of its Baltimore chapter is a textbook example of this style. Several years ago, a top ACORN organizer, Mitch Klein, injected a new aggressiveness into the Baltimore chapter. Underlings piled garbage in front of City Hall to protest lack of services in poor neighborhoods, wielded huge inflated rubber sharks to disrupt a bankers’ dinner, and — most controversially — staged a profanity-laced protest in front of Mayor Martin O’Malley’s home. “They unloaded a busload of people shouting pretty ugly things and scared the daylights out of my wife and kids,” an angry O’Malley complained. “I thought it was a pretty cruddy thing to do.” ...

Stern's critique is heavily laced with the reflexive magic-of-capitalism bilge that had a lot more traction in 2003 (the year he wrote it) than in 2011. Yet, as Stanley Kurtz reports, "in an Acorn-friendly reply to Stern entitled 'Enraging the Right,'” academic/activists John Atlas and Peter Dreier tersely admitted that “Stern accurately outlines Acorn’s agenda.”

The Dallas-based site Workers View, a Communist blog (no, I'm not being insulting; it actually belongs to the Texas branch of the CPUSA) had this to say about ACORN:

Some ACORN employees were totally dedicated to the organization. Some of them believed that they were not just social reformers getting potholes fixed or traffic signs replaced, but were actually revolutionaries. Their underlying theory was that the "most oppressed people," not the working class, would eventually make a revolution in the United States. The "most oppressed" people, those with the lowest incomes, were the most motivated to overthrow capitalism. All they needed was organization, and ACORN was better at that than just about anybody!
Those of us who realize that Marx was right, that the working class is the only class capable of standing up against capitalism, tried to work with ACORN on critical issues. Usually, they were difficult to work with, since they felt that ACORN itself, and its legions of "most oppressed people," was the key to a bright future in America. They didn't make good coalition partners, but they were very effective on their own projects, and they welcomed help from unionists and others, even though they were unlikely to reciprocate.

Let me make clear first: I am not calling David Clohessy a "pinko Commie". For all I know, he may have voted straight-ticket Republican in the last four or five elections. But I doubt seriously that Clohessy could have worked for ACORN for so long if he hadn't some sympathy for their radical-leftist aims and appreciation of their Alinskyite tactics.

Speaking of SNAP's relatively low spending on victim support, Pierre tells CWR, "When one examines the activities of SNAP, it becomes apparent that the organization is more about bludgeoning the Catholic Church than providing any concrete support to clergy abuse victims. ... Although it may have started with the noble intention of assisting abuse victims, SNAP has simply evolved into a Church-bashing operation." Indeed, they want (in the words of one member) "a ‘going out of business’ sign in front of every Catholic parish, church, school, and outreach center.”

If there's anybody who should be angry, it's the victims SNAP purports to represent, who have been used as a Trojan horse to advance a different agenda.

Update: January 7, 2012

H/T to Dave Pierre, who, when I asked him for source links on the Clohessy-ACORN connection, kindly provided them. Dave has done so much research to uncover and expose to daylight SNAP's hidden agenda and assorted dishonesties that the very least I can do for him in gratitude is plug his new book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories (US $9.95 paperback, US $3.00 Kindle).

The fact is, when the scandals of 2002 uncovered so much dirt, we over-reacted and threw our priests under the bus. There was a reason Bl. John Paul insisted that the Houston Protocols retain some protection for the accused's good name, a reason that got overlooked in our righteous anger and haste to clean house. It is critical to have safeguards for children, and I think we can be proud that our bishops have, on the whole, been so successful in instituting child-safe policies. But if we truly want to support our priesthood — a desire especially important to us Knights of Columbus — then we need to re-engineer the "zero tolerance" policy to insure that those who are falsely accused are restored to their proper positions of respect and responsibility promptly and without cowering under media pressure.

Beef stroganoff and whine

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:03:00 +0000

There’s a reason I prefer writing out my opinions: it’s easier to control the flow of an explanation when you’re writing than when you’re discussing the matter with a clutch of contentious Irish-Americans after a heavy meal and three glasses of wine.

Sunday night was a case in point. I was cast in the role of defending the responses in the revised liturgy against the complaints of my mother and older brother, with kibitzing from his wife (Methodist) and daughter (lapsed). Such discussions never take place according to the rules of Lincoln-Douglas debate, and sometimes barely observe Marquess of Queensbury rules. You can’t even get a good foundation for the affirmative case going before you’re dealing with the negative team’s objections and cross-ex.

Well, at least the beef stroganoff was good. And the wine was a ’10 pinot noir (Hob Nob).

So it was with a rueful smile that I read Fr. John Zuhlsdorf’s savage fisk of Fr. Richard McBrien’s crab-fest over the revised liturgy. People who write to be read by the general public — including Your Humble Blogger — set themselves up for equally public spankings, and Fr. McBrien’s errors of fact and logic practically beg for ridicule. But wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall if ever the two had to share dinner at a rectory? Not knowing either priest personally, I have no idea who would come out on top should the topic of the Mass revision come up.

At the end of the day, though, my brother’s grumbles come mostly from being put off his stride. He’s a very educated and intelligent man, an engineer and a corporate executive, but church is one of a couple hundred things he does in a given week; he’s not driven to follow all the latest developments in the Church’s intellectual life. In five or ten years, the changeover will be little more than a slightly tender spot in his memory.

By contrast, Fr. McBrien’s life is the Church. More to the point, he’s cast himself in the role of a “thought leader” of the Church in America. But if the Church is changing direction, then he’s no longer in front.

In many ways, Fr. McBrien’s screed reads like a PAC leader trying to buck up the organization after a bill has been passed into law despite heavy opposition:

… [The] changes were inspired and promoted, not by liturgists, but by traditionalists in the hierarchy and a minority of ultra-conservatives [not just bad guys … really bad guys!] within the Catholic church generally.

Such Catholics were never supportive of the liturgical reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council: turning the altar around so that the priest would face the congregation during Mass, receiving Holy Communion in the hand, celebrating the Mass in the vernacular, having altar girls as well as altar boys, and so forth. [That’s partially because these “reforms” were neither initiated by the Council nor called for in the documents.] …

To be sure, the advocates of the “reform of the reform” have won only a partial victory with this new translation (for example, “I believe …” rather than the more communal “We believe …” in the Credo). But the Mass is still in the vernacular; the altar is still turned around; the great majority of people receive Communion in the hand; and there are more likely to be altar girls in the sanctuary than boys.

But it’s like the anti-Christians who get lathered up over Tim Tebow’s overt Christianity: the first defeat, be it ever so minor or “partial”, implies that other, future defeats are possible. People like Fr. McBrien and Sr. Joan Chittister no longer own the playing field. And thus Fr. McBrien warns his readers that he’ll be returning to the subject, because it represents a more substantial reversal than he’s willing to admit.

“Only some of the younger (or not-so-young), conservative priests, ordained during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, would more likely be in favor of the changes than opposed to them,” Fr. McBrien postulates. The last class of seminarians ordained in the pontificate of Paul VI was the class of 1978, and these priests are now coming into their sixties. After over thirty years of declining seminary classes, the numbers are starting to rise again, precisely because of the influence of Bl. John Paul and Pope Benedict. The future very much belongs to the “young fogeys” being ordained now, and beneath the rah-rah Fr. McBrien realizes it.

Moreover, the simple fact is that an undefined yet significant number of people, both lay and religious, aren’t ideologically committed to a particular ecclesial agenda. To them, the Mass revision is just not that big a deal. Whether they’re conservative or liberal, in effect they’re part of the “mushy center”.

It’s unfathomable to Fr. McBrien that a liberal priest could praise the new translation; he must be either dissembling or a “stealth trad”. This is the kind of “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” whine that alienates the mushy center.

The revision is a big deal, of course, a bigger deal than many people realize. As Tom Hoopes recently said, it represents a “tectonic shift” in catechesis whose full bloom will be realized within the next generation. It’s the kind of victory that sets up further victories well beyond the foreseeable future — especially as the “biological solution” further reduces opposition.

Most of the people who attend Mass weekly have already incorporated the changes in their parts into their routine. By Easter morning, “And with your spirit” will be as natural to most people as “And also with you” was … and as Et cum spirito tuo was before that. Five years from now, the Eucharistic prayers causing priests to stumble today will be spoken naturally, almost from memory.

By then, if God gives us so much life, my brother and I will be having other dinner-time arguments.

2011: the 1968 of the New Evangelization

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:35:00 +0000

Today it’s time to write the last post of 2011. On the purely personal level I’m ready to put this year to bed.

On the macroscopic level, it’s been full of events that may define the last twelve months as a watershed time similar to 1968. While it’s still early to say the culture of death has come to the end of its chain and that Catholicism is firmly on the path of resurrection, our hopes for the return of sanity have pretty firm grounds.

Just over a year ago, a “progressive” nun speaking for a schismatic group called FutureChurch proclaimed, “It is clear that change is happening, and that it is bigger than any of us. … [The positions taken by some bishops in the last decade and a half] have led to more Catholics saying we have to resist this and be about a different kind of church because that’s not working anymore.”[1] FutureChurch is indeed ahead of its time, applying the thoughts of the mid-Sixties to the Church of the mid-Forties.[*] By contrast, the evidence pouring in since then indicates that change is happening in the opposite direction, that the movement is towards becoming more faithful to orthodox, traditional Catholicism.

Pro-life progress: It was only a couple of years ago that poll numbers started showing a definite swing in American attitudes against abortion. Events of the last year have rocked the pro-abortion camp, starting with the indictment of Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell and several of his employees on seven counts of murder, two counts of infanticide and 33 counts of felony abortions. Then “sting” journalism from LiveAction revealed that Planned Parenthood workers were prepared to act as accessories to teen prostitution, which started the first calls from Congress to investigate how the abortion giant spends its Title X funding, followed by the first of over fifty legislative victories in 24 states as Virginia passed a law requiring hospital-standard safety measures in abortion clinics. One event that nearly slipped under the radar, but which has massive implications, is the withdrawal of the Geron Corporation from fetal stem-cell research.

This hasn’t come without pushback, as the Obama Administration has threatened to withhold federal funds from states that have voted to defund local PP organizations and brought forth new HHS standards overriding all but the most vestigial conscience protections of religious organizations in providing contraceptive coverage through employee health plans. Nevertheless, if attendance at protest rallies and marches is any indication, the coming generation of American youth is overwhelmingly and actively pro-life, spelling the doom of the abortion industry.

Catholic youth: Speaking of the coming generation, Tom Hoopes of CatholicVote.org notes that the first class of “Denver babies” — i.e., Catholic children born in the wake of Bl. John Paul’s Denver World Youth Day, itself a watershed event of the Church in America — started attending college in 2011. Since ’93, there has arisen a solid phalanx of self-identified “JP2 Catholics” (now also identifying themselves as “B16 Catholics”): better catechized, more orthodox and more “on fire” for the Faith. Along with this development have been the foundation of several Catholic colleges and universities centering their identity and teaching on the doctrines and disciplines of the Faith, along with growing seminary classes filled with young men hungry to return to the traditions of the Church.

It is hard to overestimate the power of universities to change a culture [Hoopes writes]. A Spanish Marxist once said “give us 10 universities and we will change the face of Europe,” and that is what happened. As Catholicism becomes even more of an intellectual countercultural force in America, developing leaders convinced of its truth and its importance, its influence will grow exponentially.[2]

View Emerging Anglo Catholic Ordinariates Worldwide in a larger map
Conversions: As of 2009, according to Fr. Bill Casey CPM (who got the information from The Journey Home host Marcus Grodi), over 800 Protestant ministers had converted, and another 700 were “in the pipeline”.[3] While this is great news in itself, one news thread which didn’t get much coverage but which bodes well for the Church in America was of growing Lutheran interest in the Anglican ordinariate scheduled to be erected on January 1. One of the largest is the Anglo-Lutheran Catholic Church, which has been working since 1997 to bring more Anglicans and Lutherans back into communion with the Holy See. The Catholic Knight has provided a Google Map (above), last updated December 3, which shows the various Anglican and Lutheran parishes looking to join the Latin-rite Church through the medium of the Ordinariate, to be headed by former Episcopal bishop of Rio Grande Fr. Jeffrey Steenson.

Mass revision: The transition from the older, dumbed-down, doctrinally iffy ICEL translation of the Roman Missal to the more literal version saw Catholics staying in the Church in droves, with nary a whimper except from the usual sources. In some media, this would mean the transition was a “non-event”. However, as Hoopes points out, the new liturgy is along the lines of a “tectonic shift”, bolstering the correct catechesis of the next couple of generations.[4] While the lack of protest from the pews argues that the event wasn’t that important to them, it also shows that the “Spirit of Vatican II” crowd didn’t have that much influence or sway over them.

At one time, about twenty-five years ago, it was estimated that conservatives and traditionalists formed no more than ten percent of the Church in America. Well, as we discovered back in August, a committed core of ten percent is all you need to change majority opinion over time.[5] Moreover, I would submit that progressivist excesses in pushing their agendas — especially those taken by the current White House — will help to further crystallize the core of the Catholic countercultural movement and create further tipping points, enabling further, more far-reaching successes in the next ten years.

So was this a good year for the Catholic Church in America?

Was John Paul II beatified this year?

[*] The phrase is doubly ironic, as I stole its structure from Fr. Andrew M. Greeley.

[1] Roberts, T. (2010, December 7). Outline of a new life. Retrieved December 30, 2011 from National Catholic Reporter: http://ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/outline-new-life.

[2] Hoopes, T. (2011, December 29). Seven 2011 Events That Will Change the Church’s Story in America. Retrieved December 30, 2011 from The Gregorian Blog: http://www.thegregorian.org/blog/seven-2011-events-that-will-change-the-churchs-story-in-america.

[3] Casey, B. (2009, July 13). Superficial Preaching, Video Clip. (Fathers of Mercy) Retrieved December 30, 2011 from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G95wTNGr7Ls&feature=player_embedded, at 5m 56s.

[4] (Hoopes, 2011).

[5] See Xie, J. et al. (2011). Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities. Physical Review E 84:1 (July 2011).

Do religious beliefs matter?

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:47:00 +0000

To my dear friend religion is just another personal choice, like who to date or whether to have coffee or tea for breakfast. It doesn’t matter what religion you choose to follow if it works for you. But that is not what Catholicism is. It is not just another choice on the buffet of beliefs. He thinks my stubborn persistence that Catholicism is the True Faith founded by Christ to be nothing more than a desire to be right. [In the previous paragraph, “He finds it elitist a Catholic’s claim of belonging to the One True Church.”]

What our friend the Crescat is describing, in her post on dating outside the Faith, is described in the old Catholic Encyclopedia as “restricted indifferentism”: “all religions are equally worthy and profitable to man, and equally pleasing to God. … God looks only to the sincerity of intention, and that everybody can serve Him by remaining in the religion in which he has been brought up, or by changing it at will for any other that pleases him [i.e., the worshipper] more.”[1]

This is not an uncommon position to take. In fact, a very dear friend of mine holds (or at least held at one time) this position almost exactly as stated. If there’s anything enviable about the position, it allows one the benefit of having religious convictions, even strong convictions, without either the uncomfortable imperative of examining them for flaws or the equally uncomfortable need to challenge the beliefs of others.

Let me grant as much as I can:

First, studies do show that religious practice is much healthier than irreligiousness. “So impressive are the health benefits of religion, in fact, that after reviewing more than a thousand studies on the impact of religion upon health, Dr. Harold Koenig of Duke University Medical Center recently told The New Republic, that ‘Lack of religious involvement has an effect on mortality that is equivalent to forty years of smoking one pack of cigarettes per day.’”[2]

Second, while we are given the ideal of all men worshipping the one true God as part of the One True Faith, we live and operate within the reality of religious heterogeneity as a result of the political ideal of religious freedom. Compelled worship is inauthentic worship, a fraud perpetrated on God and the community at large.[*] We may lament religious apathy and agree that some participation is better than none, but if it’s wrong to force a young Coptic woman to convert to Islam, then it’s wrong to compel a Moslem to go to Mass. Compelle intrare (cf. Lk 14:23) should not be interpreted so literally as a command to frog-march people into the pews.

Having said that, though, the charge that the Catholic claim to being the One True Faith is “elitist” is not only misdirected but not a little bizarre. Just how exclusive can a club be when it seeks to make everyone a member?

Next, if the ‘Cat’s description of her non-Catholic friend be accurate, then he speaks of the “desire to be right” as if it were a bad thing, as if it were some unreasonable impulse deleterious to health and society at large.

A little over twenty years ago, I read an essay by Isaac Asimov titled “The Right to be Wrong”. In essence, it was a plea for the recognition that to be wrong is not equal to being evil, defective or insane. While this is true enough, it still doesn’t follow that to be wrong is desirable or inconsequential; indeed, even meteorologists can’t afford to be wrong all the time. The number of possible examples in which to be wrong would be to invite and even create disaster simply boggle the mind. The desire to be right is not only natural but a necessary component of our thinking; a person who’s just not that fussed about getting his information straight is a potential candidate for a Darwin Award.

But there’s a more invidious implication than mere carelessness about facts. By saying that our stubborn persistence is “nothing more than a desire to be right,” ‘Cat’s friend is indirectly saying that we’re engaged in wishful thinking.

Some logicians have gone so far as to define wishful thinking as an informal fallacy. But while the desire to be right can lead to cognitive bias, too often the charge of “wishful thinking” is itself a kind of fallacy, a circumstantial ad hominem attack of the kind C. S. Lewis called a “Bulverism”:

Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time.[3]

Ideas have consequences: nothing demonstrated this fact more thoroughly, or with such devastation and horror, as the history of the twentieth century did. It’s precisely because ideas have consequences that orthodox Catholics, like other people, struggle so hard not only to maintain and promote the authentic faith but also to make their voices heard and votes count in matters of public policy.

Frankly, it’s not necessary to be religiously indifferent to treat other people’s religious beliefs with respect. At the same time, whether you hold theology to be a subset of philosophy or philosophy to be a “handmaiden” of sacred doctrine,[†] the fact is that both attempt to answer “three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?”[4] Because ideas have consequences, these questions not only can but must have right answers — at the very least, best possible answers.

Religious beliefs matter, in a way that choice of breakfast beverage never could.

[*] This argument doesn’t pertain to the question of basing laws on religious morality, which is another subject entirely.

[†] Per St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1:1:5 A, RO2.

[1] Fox, J. (1910). Religious Indifferentism. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved December 29, 2011 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07759a.htm.

[2] Newberg, A., D’Aquili, E. & Rause, V. (2002). Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine Books, pp. 129-130.

[3] Lewis, C. S. (1941). Bulverism. Retrieved from God in the Dock: http://www.barking-moonbat.com/God_in_the_Dock.html.

[4] Sacks, Jonathan H. (2012, January/February). The Limits of Secularism. Retrieved December 29, 2011 from Standpoint Magazine: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/4264/full.

Who cares about religious apathy?

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 04:01:00 +0000

The joke example of “mixed emotions” is “Watching your mother-in-law go over a cliff in your brand-new Maserati.” Well, never having been married, my experience of other people’s mothers-in-law has been nothing but positive. So I’ll have to settle for this example: reading that Richard Dawkins is a Christmas traditionalist.

In the Christmas issue of the New Statesman, published this week [writes Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times], the eminent zoologist and author of “The God Delusion” began an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain by heartily wishing him “Merry Christmas!,” adding that he will accept no substitutes.
“All that ‘Happy Holiday Season’ stuff, with ‘holiday’ cards and ‘holiday’ presents,” is a tiresome import from the United States, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than atheists,” Mr. Dawkins wrote.
As a “cultural Anglican,” Mr. Dawkins continued, “I recoil from such secular carols as ‘White Christmas,’ ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ and the loathsome ‘Jingle Bells’ [he’s obviously never heard Andrea Bocelli sing it with the Muppets], but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige — only from the King James Version, of course.”

Of course, Dawkins’ encomiums for traditional carols and robust, unapologetic references to Christ as part of Christmas merely set up attacks on government support of religious schools, the “faith-labeling” of children, and on PM Cameron’s own religious sincerity. But the mental picture of him, bundled against the cold, appearing on some Belgravia doorstep and regaling the residents with “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” (perhaps in a barbershop quartet with Sam Harris, Philip Pullman and P. Z. Myers?), does much to alleviate the “after-Christmas blues”.

We need not spend any time chaffing Dawkins for any inconsistency, as there’s enough hypocrisy among Christians to make a baker’s-dozen tu quoque responses. As Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker wrote:

… Once we brush away surface similarities, we discover that in principle Christians and atheists inhabit different moral universes, where in great part what is good for the atheist is evil for the Christian, and what is evil for the atheist is good for the Christian. We stress “in principle” because in practice most atheists and Christians historically and culturally combine a confused mixture of moral principles, some of which can be traced back to Christian sources, some of which can be traced back to secular sources that arose in antagonism to Christianity and culminate in atheism.[1]

Dawkins is content to be a “cultural Anglican” just as many people are “cultural X”; whatever you can say about his atheism, he at least has recognized the shreds of religiosity he retains for what they are.

According to Cathy Lynn Grossman of USAToday, just under half of Americans today are what Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist calls “apatheists”: that is, spiritually apathetic, not interested in the deeper questions of life and meaning. At one time, they would have gone to church regularly and expressed conventional pieties in public speech and writing because “that’s what respectable people do”. Now, with all social requirement for church attendance gone and public expression of piety frowned on (when not litigated against), they drift into a “default agnosticism”, even picking up scattered dog-ends of philosophical materialism and forging them into a smug irreligiousness. They become atheists not because of Deep Thinking about such things but because “that’s what the cool kids are doing”.

In “The Decline of Religion”, C. S. Lewis took stock of the spiritual apathy of his own day and saw it as more or less of a good thing: “At the very worst, it makes the issue clear. … The fog of ‘religion’ [i.e., conventional piety] has been lifted; the positions and numbers of both armies can be observed; and real shooting is now possible.”[2]

But Lewis wrote this in 1946, and in the context of academia. In some ways, the position has since degraded: now religion is too sensitive a subject to be brought up in the office. Otherwise, spiritual apathy is still with us, manifesting in everything from “spiritual but not religious” to a neo-Victorian philistinism that can’t be bothered with impracticalities.

But this is not a good thing. Whatever other strengths irreligiousness may have, it doesn’t “do” social cohesion very well. Moreover, “default atheism/agnosticism” doesn’t have a default myth (or meta-narrative, if you prefer) to share. A recurring theme among both New Atheists and “default atheists” is that “religion is for the blind, uncritical masses”, that other people need religion but they don’t; such an attitude doesn’t lend itself to community-building precisely because it stresses a radical separation of individual from community as a positive value.

Contrary to popular atheist belief, while religious homogeneity may have worked in the interests of priests, secular rulers took advantage of the social bonds shared religion creates to promote their own interests … not just war and conquest, but also civil order and respect for authority. Christian missionaries succeeded in converting whole European tribes and communities because, once he was converted, the king, baron or thane himself would require his subjects’ conversion. On the flip side, whole German states and principalities backed Martin Luther’s revolt against the papacy because it was in the political interests of their masters to do so.

Dawkins may believe that people don’t need religion, and find it condescending, patronizing and cynical for nominally Christian politicians to promote institutions like religious schools. But if, as Chief Rabbi Jonathan Baron Sacks has argued in Standpoint, Western society can’t survive without religiosity, then the challenge before us is not simply to convert the atheist but also to awaken the apathetic. “Cultural Christianity”, whatever its sentimental value, has little more social binding to it than a shared feeling that it would be really keen if people were nice to each other for a change.

Even if it’s strong enough to get an atheist to sing Christmas carols.

[1] Hahn, S., & Wiker, B. (2008). Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God. Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, pp. 96-97; bold font mine.

[2] Lewis, C. S. (1970). The Decline of Religion. In Hooper, W. (Ed.), The Grand Miracle and Other Selected Essays on Theology and Ethics from God in the Dock (pp. 131-136). New York: Ballantine Books, p. 133.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas ....

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:36:00 +0000

What are you doing here? Listen to the song, then shut your computer OFF and go be with your family! I'll be back Monday, 12/26. In the meantime, God bless you all; have a merry, merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Awkward science problems

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 01:40:00 +0000

In Harper Magazine’s “The accidental universe: Science’s crisis of faith,” physicist/novelist Alan Lightman, writing for Harper’s Magazine, explains the dilemma that string theory, which posits multiple dimensions and multiple universes, places the discipline of theoretical physics.

On the one hand, it promises a workable Theory of Everything, the Holy Grail of physics, which would finally reconcile general relativity with particle physics in a coherent, mathematically expressible way. As well, as Steven Weinberg explains, “The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.” No need for “fine tuning” here, so sorry, folks; you can pack up your intelligent-designer bags and go home.

On the other hand, with 10⁵⁰⁰ universes in play, it means that the fundamental principles of our universe are accidental; the whole point of string theory in the beginning was to prove those principles necessary. Worse, because of technological and financial limitations they can’t prove eternal inflation or string theory true, and won’t be able to for many, many years (if ever):

Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable [sic] [; in] addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

Excuse me, I gotta get this out of my system: BWA-HAHAHAHAHA-AA! O the irony!

Of course, Weinberg’s contention is off-base cosmologically, because string theory doesn’t solve the problem of either causality or contingency, no matter how many alternate universes it postulates. More to the point, though, if Lightman is correct, then theoretical physics has come to the end of its chain for awhile, at a spot particularly awkward for those attempting to argue against God from scientific discoveries.

Speaking of awkwardness: I’m sure everyone has read by now of the Italian researchers at the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development who recently announced that the image on the Shroud of Turin was caused by “some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength)” by using UV light to create an image with characteristics similar to the Figure on the Shroud. The scientists did not prove that the image was created by UV lasers; nor did they use the word “supernatural” to describe the process. However, they did finally prove that the cause was beyond the capability of medieval technology.

Shroud researchers have known since 1978 that the image on the Shroud consists of fibers whose chemical composition in their surface fibrils was changed, producing a monochromatic yellow color (i.e., one consistent shade; darker and lighter areas are differentiated by the number of fibers affected, not by changes in shade). Almost invariably, attempts to show how the Shroud was “faked” have failed to take this characteristic into account, even after “years of research”, mostly depending on use of some medium to bond pigments to fabric. A couple of attempts have been made to use radiant heat from a solid object; however, the resultant images were fuzzy and indistinct.

Skeptics everywhere were relieved when in 1988 carbon-14 dating presumably proved that the Shroud was produced between 1260 and 1390. However, several issues arose that undermined the credibility of the tests, from bad methodology of the sample selection, to possible confirmation bias on the part of some of the researchers, to issues with carbon-14 itself as a reliable method of dating. This didn’t stop Eric Pfeiffer of Yahoo! from claiming, “There has been substantial evidence working against it, including a 1988 radiocarbon test conducted at the University of Oxford, which dated the cloth to a time between 1260 and 1390.”

What other evidence? The one positive piece of evidence in the pile is a memorandum by Pierre d’Arcis, Bishop of Troyes in 1389 claiming to have gotten a confession from the artist. However, the memo only appears in a rough draft, and doesn’t name the artist; nor have the archives coughed up a signed confession.

And a couple of years ago, a couple of Israeli archaeologists found a burial shroud from the first century whose weave was different from the Turin shroud. The archaeologists claimed that the Turin herringbone pattern wasn’t introduced for over a thousand years after Christ; since the conclusion is based on one sample only, we can feel free to doubt the certainty of their facts.

Stuart Chase’s dictum about the necessity of proof has been over-quoted. Obviously, just as there are those who are emotionally vested in the Shroud’s authenticity, there are those who need to believe that it’s a medieval hoax. As the authentic burial cloth of Christ, the Shroud wouldn’t give us prima faciae proof of Christianity’s truth, though it would give us highly suggestive evidence in that direction. But as a 14th-century fraud, it would be even more inexplicable and bewildering than as a first-class relic.

Lightman says, “If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles — to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are — is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true.”

The thing is, it was never physics’ mission to make the properties of the universe necessary. To the extent that it became a goal, it did so only as part of an effort to chase God out of the universe with the law of parsimony. All string theory does is set the infinite regress up another level: instead of explaining where the universe came from, now you have to explain where strings came from.

Is it really that hard to say “There was a beginning”?

Can’t we just be friends?

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:24:00 +0000

I wonder if I even know what constitutes “romance” anymore.

I bring this up because there’s a pretty heavy discussion on Steve Gershom’s blog, where one of the readers is trying to “appeal to finer detail” on gay romance (no sexual contact implied) vis-à-vis Catholic sexual morality. And I don’t mean to appear as though I ridicule the idea, but my unruly mind can’t help but reel under the assaulting image of one man presenting another a bouquet of roses and a box of chocolates.

At one time, to say that something was romantic was to say that it had the air of epic adventure, that it was an Iliad or Chanson de Roland waiting for the right bard to cast it into poetry. Within the context of love, it was love both idealized and realized, having all the required, even scripted, elements yet evoking wonder and beauty, like a performance from Michelle Kwan at the top of her game. (No, I will not turn in my guy card.) The sexual tension was maintained almost perfectly, awaiting the honeymoon for its resolution and consummation.

The postmodern sexual madness always has to find new ways to shock because, wherever it’s occupied territory for awhile, it’s become yawningly banal. While I get that calling an ardent admiration for another person a “crush” is supposed to be funny, as is calling a close male friendship (such as that between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) a “bromance”, it has all the stale emptiness of too many knock-knock jokes, of hearing somebody say “Houston, we have a problem” as though Apollo 13 just hit the big screen last weekend. “Man-crush” was cliché as soon as it was coined.

Examples abound of “repressed homosexuality” injected into male friendships, from Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (lampooned in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes), even to the extent of an S/M cult among female fans of Star Trek: The Original Series centering on Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock. Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood and Sean Astin attempted to celebrate heterosexual male friendships in the Lord of the Rings trilogy; however, the result — and I say this as one who loved all three movies — verges on a sappy sentimentality that would have had Tolkien, who wrote the friendship between Frodo and Sam in a very old-school British manner, rending his garment.

It’s precisely this tendency to see sexual feelings where none need be that Robin Williams sends up in Aladdin: When Aladdin (Scott Weinger) expresses gratitude for being saved, Genie (Williams, who ad-libbed his dialogue) replies sentimentally, “Aw, Al, I’m getting pretty fond of you.” Then, as they fly off to Agrabah, he adds awkwardly, “Not that I want to pick out curtains or anything.”

Do you see the point? As funny as the line is in context, it begs us to ask: Why should a man need to add such a disclaimer?

According to the new meta-narrative, we’re supposed to conclude that the man is uncomfortable with his homoerotic feelings and is therefore forced to push them away in a display of machismo, like Gunny Highway (Clint Eastwood) in Heartbreak Ridge: “Don’t think this means we’ll be taking long, soapy showers together.” But it’s just as easy to respond to such psychobabble with more psychobabble: by importing homoeros into friendships, aren’t we trying to rationalize same-sex attraction just as some are trying to rationalize pedophilia by sexualizing children?

We could well ask why man-woman friendships “get to have” sexual tension but same-sex friendships don’t. Again, though, why does the sexual tension between a man and a woman need to be acknowledged, let alone resolved? More to the point, is it really true that all male-female relationships have sexual tension, or are we just trying to rationalize sexual stupidity? Can’t a cake just be a cake, for crying out loud?

Melinda Selmys of Sexual Authenticity makes a valid point about Theology of the Body devotés’ tendency to over-emphasize the sacramental nature of married sex, out of her concern that others will be led to believe that every marital encounter ought to be mind-exploding in its awesomeness. If it’s an over-emphasis, though, it’s a corrective to the contradictory memes that sex is “no big whoop” and at the same time something one must have — and regularly, too! — to be a well-functioning human being.

To sneer that Catholic teachings about fornication, contraception, homosexuality, yadda-yadda-yadda, are all about “not liking sex” or sex being “dirty” is to completely miss the point: “sexual freedom” spoils sex itself. Absent its biological imperative — reproduction — it’s like a weekly social requirement to eat cake: cake loses not only its association with special occasions, it loses the extraordinariness of its taste, even while it diminishes the nutritional wholesomeness of every meal with which it’s eaten. Even the most basic act, masturbation, cheapens any positive value to orgasm, like getting drunk alone in one’s kitchen.

People go to the fringes of sexual deviance — “water sports”, S/M, bestiality — because everything less outré has become stale … like knock-knock jokes. Or, as Erica Jong discovered, they lose interest in sexual license; it’s just not everything it’s been made out to be (pun intended). Others, like Steve Gershom and my friends the Bright Maidens, deliberately choose to live chaste lives, not only in response to Christ but also because that’s the direction in which sexual sanity reposes.

Sexual tension — where it does exist — doesn’t need to be resolved, explored or even mentioned in the context of a friendship. Friendships have value for their own sake, and ought not be ruined by mindless boundary-pushing or political coöptation.

A person can enjoy Men at Work’s “Dr. Heckyll and Mr. Jive” without ever knowing that the last chord is a dominant seventh rooted on the subdominant of a mixolydian scale (and therefore, according to classical theory, “needs” to be resolved into a tonic major). Why can’t we enjoy our friendships that way?

Terrorists are criminals, not soldiers—UPDATED

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:55:00 +0000

On December 1, the Senate passed S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. The last action taken as of this date was on December 14, when both houses adopted a modifying resolution which pretty much imports the language of the Senate bill into the House companion bill H.R. 1540, passed back in April.

Originally I had written that the legislative process gives Congress the chance to correct mistakes. Actually, it appears not; it justs gives a committee power to perpetuate mistakes. For instance, Section 551(d) of the bill repeals — not "amends", mind you, repeals — 10 USC 925, Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice;[1] while the Senate intended to legalize homosexuality within the military, this provision if the bill is signed would also legalize bestiality within military jurisdiction.

Yeah, “oops”. I seriously doubt our congresspersons are that “progressive”; I honestly believe they were so excited to strike a blow for gay rights that they didn’t do their homework to see what all they were repealing. Nevertheless, now they’re stuck with the language, since BHO can’t do a line-item veto.

But of greater concern — one that’s spurred Mark Shea to new heights of purple anti-government invective — are Sections 1031 and 1032.[2] Simply put, these two articles make the category of “people with Constitutional rights” subject to the say-so of the Executive Branch. Congress has drunk the Kool-Ade.

Let’s look at the relevant wording, shall we?

First, Section 1031 (Title X, Subtitle D) affirms that “the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force … includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons … pending disposition under the law of war.”[3] “Covered persons” include “A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks,” and “A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”[4]

Under subsection (c)(1), this detention can last until the end of authorized hostilities[5] — in other words, indefinitely.

While Section 1031 merely authorizes military detention, Section 1032 requires military detention for people determined “(A) to be a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force that acts in coordination with or pursuant to the direction of al-Qaeda; and (B) to have participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners.”[6] Paragraph (3)of this authorization refers right back to §1031(c), limiting that subsection only by disallowing with exceptions transfer to other countries; again, the person accused under this section may be held in military custody indefinitely without trial or release.

It’s in this context that Subsection (b)(1) becomes relevant: “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States” [bold font mine].[7]

The rationale powering the inclusion of these provisions is the contention that “We’re at war, dammit,” and that in war captured enemy soldiers are always held as prisoners to take them out of play. Except that in this “war” there’s no real opposing army, no navy, no air force — only harum-scarum, loosely-connected cells of fanatics with bombs and guns who merit neither the honorable name of “soldier” nor fit a meaningful definition of an “army”. They aren’t recognized by international law as representatives of any government; nor are they rebel claimants to any government under ius gentium.

This is what makes the difference: Over time the nations developed protocols by which soldiers could be distinguished from civilians, the distinction which governs how they’re treated under current rules of war. While governments have been known to support terrorist groups sub rosa, as proxies in undeclared wars, those governments have been free to dissociate themselves from terrorist groups precisely because they weren’t official representatives of those governments under international law.

Terrorists aren’t soldiers, except in their own fantasy worlds. Because of this, the distinctions that allow different treatment of soldiers and civilians don’t pertain; we only have our government’s word that they are terrorists. And that’s the disturbing fact.

The main principle underlying the Anglo-American common-law tradition, from Runnymede to Miranda v. Arizona, is that people ought not lose their lives, liberties, property or reputations solely on the say-so of the government. However, under this provision the military, as the legally-empowered representative of the government, is free to decide who fits the description of “covered persons” and hold them without trial or legal counsel for however long the “authorized hostilities” last. While they aren’t required to detain American citizens or lawful alien residents, neither are they forbidden from doing so; in law, semantics are everything.

Even if we could trust the good intentions and sincerity of the present Executive Branch, just the fact of passing this into law would make it a precedent, leaving it as a bomb to be set off later by a less well-intentioned executive. Indeed, people cite as justification for these provisions Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in April 1861, which Congress reluctantly authorized after the fact, as well as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. And it’s by no means certain SCOTUS would find it unconstitutional.

Fear is a bad position to legislate from. If the government has evidence that a person has committed or has conspired to commit a crime against us, then let them prove it to the people in a court of criminal law, with all the rights that pertain to due process.

Terrorists aren’t soldiers; they’re mass-murdering criminals. Let them be treated as such.

Update: January 9, 2012

On December 31, Pres. Barack Hussein Obama, presumably of sound mind and body, signed into law HR 1540, which is now Public Law 112-81.

God help us all.

[1] US Senate. (14 Dec. 2011). 112 H.R. 1540. Retrieved 19 Dec. 2011 from Government Printing Office: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr1540pp/pdf/BILLS-112hr1540pp.pdf, pp. 169, 171.

[2] Ibid., pp. 418-423.

[3] Ibid., p. 418.

[4] Ibid., pp. 418-419.

[5] Ibid., p. 419.

[6] Ibid., pp. 420-421.

[7] Ibid., p. 421.