Consider killing. In every society in the world, murder is punished more harshly than non-lethal torture. If I waterboard you, or lock you in my basement with Duran Duran blasting at you 24/7, even if I beat you for hours with a rubber hose, my punishment will be less severe than if I murder you, simply because it is worse to take a life deliberately than to cause pain, even sadistically. We all understand this. Would you rather take some lumps in a dungeon for a month, or take a dirt nap forever?
Yet, according to the torture prohibitionists, there must be a complete ban on anything that even looks like torture, regardless of context, even though we'd never dream of a blanket ban on killing.
Jonah's coming at this from a conservative, Jewish, respectful toward religion but not particularly serious about it, perspective. As such, he doesn't much care that he is basically voicing the typical, utilitarian, end-justifies-the-means argument with which most Americans are at home. In short, it's no skin off his nose that consequentialism is condemned by the Church. He's pretty much at home with the "You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette sometimes" approach to life.
The thing is, he raises an interesting question: if you can kill people sometimes, and killing is worse than torture, then why can't you torture them sometimes. Reasonable question.
In answer, I reply "When do you get to kill people?" In war, the answer is: "When they are trying to kill you." However, civilized standards of warfare have always said that once the enemy passes from the status of "combatant" to "POW", the equation changes. They are not equally killable after they surrender. That's why Malmedy is called a "war crime" and not a "battle". Torture is never employed on the battlefield. It is employed on the prisoner who has surrendered. It is as morally licit as threatening to shoot the prisoner in the hope of finding out something from him. And, of course, like all consequentialist thinking, it has to appeal to a Good End that may not, and often does not, even exist. For you don't torture because you know they know something. You torture because you *don't* know they know something. You torture to find out what they know. Many times, that means torturing perfectly innocent people. And that is the sort of thing that gets you sent to hell. Indeed, according to the Church, even torturing people who *do* know something can get you sent to hell, because torture is "intrinisically immoral" and is *never* justifiable. But it is like Satan to take your soul and give you *nothing* in return.
Update: A couple of readers wonder why I note that Goldberg is approaching the question from, among other things, a Jewish perspective. My point is that it's unfair to expect him to care what St. Paul thinks about consequentialism in Romans 3:8. Goldberg is not bound by the Christian condemnation of "ends justify the means" thinking. I don't know enough about Jewish moral teaching to know if consequentialism is categorically condemned as it is in the Catholic tradition. Nor do I know how seriously Goldberg takes Jewish moral teaching, though his general respect for the basic outlines of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition suggests there is bound to be some sort of influence on his thinking. So my point is that Goldberg's question should be met where he is at, rather than demanding that he agree with the totality of Catholic teaching on consequentialism at the outset of the discussion. For what I hope are obvious reasons, I do not cut the same slack to people who claim to take seriously the magisterial teaching of the Church.
True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted. We of Minas Tirith have been staunch through long years of trial. We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause. And behold! in our need chance brings to light the Ring of Power. It is a gift, I say; a gift to the foes of Mordor. It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him. The fearless, the ruthless, these alone will achieve victory. What could not a warrior do in this hour, a great leader?"
When you can't weep, you laugh
"Geneva Article 3 says, 'There will be no outrages on human dignity'. What does that mean?" - George W. Bush, who sounds like countless combox contributors.
The Chestertonians are praying for victory in the struggle with Radical Islam. Me too! Part of my prayer is that we win without it costing our souls. Very Catholic and very Chestertonian, methinks. The Church is almost never fighting on just one front at a time. It makes a habit of being pressured from all sides at once. Radical Islamists and radical secularists, abortion zealots and torture proponents all have one point of happy concord: the Church is their enemy.
The thing is: it's also their only hope from damnation.
A reader writes:
Okay, Shea. Thanks a lot. You’ve convinced me. Six months or a year ago, I was on the fence about the whole torture debate. Intellectually, I opposed torture as immoral. Practically, I didn’t get too worked up about it, seeing as those being tortured would happily kill me and all my family, and don’t even pretend to be bound by Geneva Conventions or even simple morality. But then you came along, relentlessly pounding away with Church teaching and simple logic. I get it. It is always wrong to pursue a good end through evil means. Torture equals bad, and no exceptions.
So now, I have the wonderful choice between those who worship abortion and every sort of sexual perversion as the fount of all that is good and holy, and those that worship torture in the same way. Everybody is being disingenuous, crassly political and venal. It’s disgusting.
But I should have expected as much, since politics is a human endeavor, and doomed to disappoint eventually. I’ve never sat out a national election before, but this time I don’t know that I’ll have a choice.
This is all really depressing.
If I can ruin just one person's day, I can sleep knowing I've done my job.
Seriously though, to be a Christian is to have hope. Our government is currently doing some very stupid and evil things. But we do still live in a place where there freedom of speech a democratic rule. So don't give up. If I can persuade you, then you can persuade somebody else. And we can make use of the ballot in prudential ways. This dangerous and wicked legislation doesn't have to stand forever. My hope is that the SCOTUS will strike it down. And we can vote the bastards out.
Ultimately, though, this far transcends politics. It means we have a job ahead of us creating a culture in which persons are not means to an end and in which the ends do not justify the means. It can be done, as your own note testifies.
Thanks for giving me heart and hope!
Sungenis Weirdness Continues
Earlier this month, Michael Forrest chronicled Bob Sungenis' increasing hostility to Jews and his use of whacked-out sources, as well as his tendency to neglect doing things like "reading the book" before savaging guys like Roy Schoeman.
This was a lot of no fun for Forrest, who used to work for Sungenis and had the painful task a friend sometimes has of concluding that somebody he cared about is embarking on a trip to Crazytown. And, as happenes in such conflicts, the guy who most needs to reconsider what he is doing is, of course, the guy who is adamantly sure of himself and filled with wild and paranoid vituperation against the voice of sanity coming from his friend.
Sungenis, in addition to lots of threats and rage in emails, pretended to insouciantly waving off Forrest's documentation of his bizarre crap about Jews--and then responded with a 72 page (!) "rebuttal".
Now Jacob Michael has replied to Sungenis' increasingly crazy ravings with an endorsement (and documentation) of the veracity of Forrest's points and a smack down rebuttal of Sungenis' threat-laced falsehoods.
... your essay is a gift. It will give me the chance I've been waiting for to even out the playing field and show just how shallow your arguments really are ... I will be responding to you with a full blown dissection of your remarks. On this one I'm pulling out all the stops. Your essay is child's play compared to what I'm going to write about you and your falsehoods, your slander, your distortions and your half truths. (Sungenis, email of September 13, 2006)
Sungenis' habit of countering argument with threats is not new to me. A while back, after I wrote something about Sungenis here, he wrote me threatening to "go public" with all the horrible dirt he had on me, but offering to relent if I would just not criticize him publicly. I responded that if I was such a danger to the health of the Body of Christ, then it was his duty to go public with the dirt he had on me regardless of what I said or did not say about him. His response to this suggestion was, shall we say, less than courtly.
Anyway, sad to see. I think the best thing that could happen to Bob would be for him to put his apostolate on hiatus, get some healthy spiritual direction, get away from the RadTrad kooks, and get a real education. I doubt it will happen though. When you are Truly Anointed Prophet and anyone who contradicts you is Judas, it's tough to back down.
I mentioned yesterday two strategies for excusing intrinsically immoral acts. The first is to say the Church doesn't know what it's talking about when it says that certain acts are intrinsically immoral. This is usually accompanied with huffing and puffing about "living in the real world" (of "24" and other such fictional shows) or with bluster about the damned Vatican II Council and all that kumbaya crap about the dignity of the human person. This strategy is on admirable display here, where the author says, in essence, that the Church is in error to say, in its conciliar and papal documents, that torture is intrinsically immoral. The particular guy I cite achieves his sleight of hand defense of torture by quoting the Catechism and attempting to say that what the Church *really* means is that torture which is not committed for a good purpose is bad, but that *good* torture (done by decent folk for a good end such as saving Keifer Sutherland in the Real World of "24") is okay. He achieves this effect by ignoring the teaching documents of the Church. He simply dismisses Gaudium et Spes and totally ignores Veritatis Splendor, which declares torture--period--to be "intrinsically immoral". This is not an ignorable "prudential judgment of the Pope". This is the Magisterial teaching of the Church.
"Intrinsically immoral", for those in Rio Linda, means "an act that cannot be justified under any circumstances". In short, it is an act, not like mere killing, (which can be justified sometimes, such as in self-defense), but like abortion, which can never, ever be justified under any circumstances. Sorry, but that's what "intrinsically immoral" means and that's what the Church says.
To their credit, most conservative Catholics recognize, at some level, that you can't just declare the Magisterium dead wrong on a matter of faith and morals and expect to be taken seriously as a Catholic. Therefore, those who are still looking for an escape hatch in the debate use the second strategy, which is to say they aren't advocating torture and that the techniques and tactics being advocated are something besides what is meant by "torture". To be sure, they are often muddled and will often veer toward Strategy One. But as a general rule they will go for the "Golly! It's just so hard to define torture!" strategy. Here's a sample of that (fisked for analytic purposes):
You know, the problem with your torture posts is best summed up by your Chesteron quote above on arguing with a madman.
The intellectual circle you describe is too small ... your argument is too tidy and too smug, and comes from thinking in abstract terms, and not from lived experience in protecting the public, or benefitting from lived experience in protecting the public.
This is what I call the "'24' Gambit", which goes "If you oppose torture, you're not living in the real world, where Jack only has hours to stop the maniac from blowing up the orphanage. Because, you know, this happens all the time.
If it comes to it, I doubt most of my readers spend a lot of time protecting the public. But what really convinces me of the weakness of this argument is twofold: first, I have a congenital allergy to appeals which mean "Ignore the magisterium when it says something is intrinsically immoral, because it's inconvenient to the Experience of the Bruthuh and the Sistah on the Street. Heard all that before from the abortion and euthanasia lobbies, who gave me lots of sob stories about how this or that hard case proved that abortion and euthanasia make good law."
And I have thought about the credibility issue, too. But you know what? People can know a lot about one thing, and misapply it elsewhere. I have no problem that you have tremendous insight in some areas and lapse into excessively abstract thinking elsewhere.
Except that this is not abstract thinking, and it's not my idea. It's the Magisterium, not me, that says torture is intrinsically immoral. Our task is to face that fact and order life accordingly. I'm not making this stuff up.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not defending torture. But it really, really depends on what you define as torture. Remember, these are terror suspects -- people who have by definition operate outside the law and outside the Geneva Convention.
Here's where things get completely confused. My reader is not going to try to say the Magisterium is wrong. Instead, he's going to try saying that everything depends on the definition of torture. But then, he immediately changes the subject and implies that the definition of torture depends on who is being tortured. This is manifest nonsense. If an act is torture, it is therefore intrinsically immoral, no matter who the subject of the act is. The teaching of the Church is not subject to Geneva. So the question of the legal status of the torture victim is a total non sequitur.
I suspect what you define and what I define are too different things. I have no problem with waterboarding terrorist suspects -- it's a short process, it causes no physical damage, and it's proven to be effective. On the other hand, humilitating suspects, shocking them, breaking bones, etc., is bad.
The Army appears to disagree, since waterboarding is regarded as inhumane treatment in the new regs. Indeed, even the Bushies appear to have at least tried to give the appearance of backing down a bit on waterboarding. But that said, I think the Interrogator's Golden Rule works pretty well: If you'd call it "torture" if it were done to you or your buddy or (I might add, since American citizens can now be tortured if the President thinks so) your wife or daughter, then it's torture if you do it to somebody else.
And just to bring things out of the abstract, verbal and conceptual, when we speak of waterboarding, this is what we mean:
This image, courtesy of a Cambodian Museum that documents the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, gives us some idea of what the Administration has been valiantly fighting to not only protect, but expand. This is what the Torture Party wants. This is what various Right Wing organs and shills for the Administration have labored to excuse and justify.
The point is this, as is usual, the Church leaves it to the normal process of human common sense and consensus to define what we mean by "torture". The norm among people who do the work and write the regs is not, "What some combox reader isn't bothered by." It's not even "What Mark Shea thinks". It's the Interrogator's Golden Rule, recently codified in the new Army regs in resistance of Bushie attempts to redefine torture and make all sorts of brutalities licit. Since nothing has happened to human nature, nor to the nature of warfare, to make it necessary to re-define "torture" since 9/11, I applaud the Army's resistance to the sleazy brutality of the Bushies. Because the reality is torture is intrinsically immoral and cannot be redefined as moral without doing extreme violence to language and thought, not to mention the human person.
Actually one of the most effective tools, although it takes a while, is neglect. You don't let the person clean themselves.
And now we return to the appeal to ends justify the means thinking. "Besides, it works" to make a man sit in his own shit and urine. But that's not humiliating or degrading or anything.
Try it on my son and I'll kill you. Try it on the sons of other men and don't be surprised if they want to kill you too. Particularly when, like Maher Arar, such victims are subjected to torture, not because we know they've done something, but because we are trying to find out if they've done something.
But the point is this: whether Arar was innocent (as he was) or guilty, the Church *still* says that such torture is intrinsically immoral and therefore cannot be justified by any good end.
Bottom line: for all those agonizing about how to define "torture", there's no need. Army regs have defined inhumane treatment for ever so long. Nothing has changed in human nature that requires redefinition of inhumane treatment. If it's not broken, don't fix it. And if it was inhumane and therefore intrinsically immoral on 9/10/01, it still is.
A reader writes:
As a former US Army infantry grunt, I thank Mark and Zippy for saying what has to be said. It's shockingly disappointing to see how much opposition they are encountering.
Thanks for your kind words, but especially for your service!
The Left Endures its Penance and Purgation
Had the weirdest experience last night. Driving back from Auburn, I'm flipping along the radio dial and come across somebody railing at the Right for the war in Iraq, torture, etc. Then they proceed to talk about how precious human life is and how easy it is to snuff it out. "It only takes a second to destroy life," they said. "But it takes nine months to create it!" They went on from there into a passionate plea you could hear on the lips of any ordinary pro-lifer about the glories of bringing a child to birth and the sacredness of the family.
Then, the station break. It was Air America.
One of the great images of judgement in literature is simply that ghastly moment when you see your own face or hear your own voice. You can find it in in Walker Percy. You find it exquisitely in Lewis' Till We Have Faces. And I couldn't help thinking of it as I listened to this die-hard woman of the Left giving what amounted to an impassioned prolife speech in her ire at the Party of Torture.
I kept thinking of that moment in Till We Have Faces, when Orual presents her case to the gods and finally hears her own voice for the first time, and the gods ask her, "Are you answered?"
The Left, after laboring for thirty years to show that human life is not sacred, is confronted with a foe that has learned well its lessons in cynicism and utilitarian treatment of human beings. And in trying to struggle through to some way to defeat it, the Left finds itself saying things that, not long ago, would have been sneered out of any Dem caucus meeting in the country.
It remains to be seen whether Dems will really internalize the sort of stuff this lady was saying, or merely mouth it for the sake of beating the Torture Party. But it was fascinating to hear.
Apparently the WaPo (and therefore I, who trust the WaPo) was wrong in saying that American citizens would lose habeas corpus should the Prez decide we were "enemy combatants". That's some small comfort. Nonetheless, consider this (and do not bore me with tribalist and Pavlovian reactions to the *names* of the people proposing the amendments):
Senator Reid's statement on the bill
.... The Framers of our Constitution understood the need for checks and balances, but this bill discards them.
Many of the worst provisions were not in the Committee-reported bill, and were not in the compromise announced last Friday. They were added over the weekend after backroom meetings with White House lawyers.
We have tried to improve this legislation. Senator Levin proposed to substitute the bipartisan bill that was reported by the Armed Services Committee. That amendment was rejected.
Senators Specter and Leahy offered an amendment to restore the right to judicial review - that amendment was rejected.
Senator Rockefeller offered an amendment to improve congressional oversight of CIA programs - that amendment was rejected.
Senator Kennedy offered an amendment to clarify that inhumane interrogation tactics prohibited by the Army Field manual could not be used on Americans or on others - that amendment was rejected.
And Senator Byrd offered an amendment to sunset military commissions so that Congress would simply be required to reconsider this far-reaching authority after five years of experience. Even that amendment was rejected.
Incredibly reckless. And the beauty of it is, of course, that 9/11 still haunts the American psyche such that the administration simply has to say that if you oppose this breathtaking act of Leviathan, you are soft on terrorism. Exploding buildings are much more arresting to the imagination than the boring language of a bill that says, "By the way, the President can declare you an enemy combatant, can indefinitely detain you, and can even subject you to torture even if you are a citizen, but don't worry, he's doing it to keep us all safe and all True Patriots will accept this. And no, there is no sunset on this legislation. Hey! Relax, citizens! You've still got habeas corpus! You might even eventually get to bring your detainment to court. That's more than most of the people affected by this bill can say. You should thank our wise and just Leader for letting you keep that.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
I'm speaking in Auburn, WA tonight
at Holy Family parish. I'll be talking about the Four Senses of Scripture.
Don't miss it if you can!
Down Deep, He's Shallow
I take him for an honest fool. Seems to be interested in the truth, whether it's comfortable or not (which is a plus), but doesn't seem too interested in trying to know much that doesn't fit into his little system of order. I'd love to see him in a conversation with N.T. Wright on the New Testament, because his notions of the origins of Christianity and of the New Testament are the sort of thing that would get you flunked out of a sophomore class in any high school.
A reader writes:
Sorry I missed your flame war with Victor the other day but looks like you and the combox crew acquitted yourselves very well. And I think Victor can be credited with a SAKO (i.e., a self-administered knockout) for that amazing "anti-anti-torture" business. Also: I think Andrew deserves an upgrade on your blogroll; "Hopelessly muddled about sex and religion but standing tall against the torture pimps", or something like that. As perverse and infuriating as he can be, I think he'll be forgiven much for what he's done in thisa matter.
I don't think it was much of flame war really. Mostly I was quoting big chunks of text and then trying to figure out what it could possibly mean. The only flamey stuff was the list of various epithets Victor called me, but that's more like turning a flame thrower on oneself, I reckon.
Anyhow, I have to agree with Sullivan has acquitted himself well in the (probably losing) argument about torture and in the (likely doomed) fight to keep the Executive from grabbing dangerous powers to detain anybody he likes indefinitely. His annoying use of "Christianists" still irks me, but not nearly as much as Christians who cheer for torture and seem willing to stampede themselves wherever the Administration wants them to go. And, to his great credit, he finally seems willing to actually listen to Pope Benedict--and is slowly discovering just how great he is.
A reader writes:
I was wondering if you or your readers could help me out. My best friend came over to my place the other night to tell me that he is flirting with sedevacantism. He has been attending Tridentine mass for some time and found great solace in it. Apparently, he heard about a talk that Gerry Matatics was giving here in Boston and decided to go and see what he had to say. He and I had seen him debate James White years ago at Boston College, so he figured he was harmless. Well, long story short, my friend was basically convinced by Matatics that the new order of consecration of bishops to the episcopacy is invalid; hence, Benedict XVI is not a bishop and therefore cannot be the Pope.
He gave me a bunch of stuff to read, mostly by some guy named Fr. Anthony Cekeda. As hard as I tried to show my friend that this line of thinking just makes him a functional Protestant, I couldn't sell him. He says that he doesn't want to be a sedevacantist, but he feels that he has no choice if Cekeda and Matatics cannot be proven wrong. He came to me for help.
This saddens me greatly because this guy basically pulled me out of a secular lifestyle and into the Church, was my best man, and is the godfather of two of my children. If you or your readers have any idea how I can deal with this and help him out I would really appreciate it. In addition, I had previously asked him to be my new infant's godfather and she is to be baptized this Sunday. Should I pull the plug on that if he still has a problem with this?
Thank you, Mark, and any of your readers who might be able to help!
I'm actually not much help here, because I think stuff like sedevacantism, like geocentrism, man-did-not-land-on-the-moonism, JFK-is-being-kept-alive-in-a-lab-in-Area 51ism and other such crazy idea are not issues of the intellect, but of the will and the reason. They seem to me to be classic examples of Chesterton's remarks about insanity:
Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.
Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: “Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, “All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth.” Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, “So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!”
How to implement that with your friend, I have no idea. But I am almost certain that merely appeals to reason are not likely to work. As with many sedevacantists and RadTrads, what is really at work is not reason, but fear (and anger). As opportunity presents itself, it may be useful to address that. But at this distance, it's pretty hard to have any practical suggestions.
Sorry I'm not more help! May God bless you in your efforts to keep your friend in the Church, through our Lord Jesus!
Marty and I will be ordering a case of BOGO wine in the next couple of weeks and wanted you to know about this interesting product. The owner of the company is a faithful Catholic who gives a portion of the profits to adult stem cell research. The wine (Italian) is getting good reviews from wine critics, and has been accepted as altar wine in the diocese of Cleveland. If you are interested, go to the website to read about it. (BOGO stands for ³Buy One, Give One.²) It¹s a good way to support the GOOD kind of stem cell research. Please pass the info along to any friends who might be interested.
Balkinization lays out the details while my comboxers continue assuring us that everything is Just Fine:
These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:
Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.
The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.
Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.
Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.
Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.
Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.
Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.
•There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.
We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.
They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
As I say, a frightened and anxious people are not a source of insight. They are simply more easily stampeded into rash and stupid acts.
Ten Rules
People ask why I hammer conservative foibles on this blog. The answer is not far to seek: most of my readers are, like myself, people who fall on the conservative end of the spectrum. I watched for years as liberals cocooned themselves in an impenetrable web of smugness till they were utter out of touch with reality.
One doesn't achieve this typically without something in your background that you can really be proud of. Liberalism has much to be proud of: the civil rights movement, seeing America through the Depression and WWII, a serious willingness to engage things like the rights of migrant works, etc. And--let us Catholics not forget--a willingness to give Catholics a voice in the public square when Neanderthal Right Wing Fundies and Country Club Republicans had very little use for Garlic Eaters, Micks and other papists who were, as recently as JFK, accused of being "more loyal to a Roman Potentate than to the United States". Liberalism had a legacy of greatness and goodness--and it knew it.
The problem came in, as always, with pride. You begin to isolate yourself from criticism, because the criticism comes from those toads who voted for Nixon, who supported Vietnam, who were so wrong about the Civil Rights Act. They really are quite absurd, aren't they? And the future has been shown repeatedly to lie with us, hasn't it? Even when we lose, we're right (like McGovern in '72). And so the pride starts to eat away at the capacity for seeing clearly. Abortion is like the civil rights struggle. It's right because we've endorsed and we are good people. And besides, all the Right People say it will reduce child abuse and make the world better. And those religious people who oppose it? Well, they were always a little iffy. No sense of how the *real* world works. Time passes, and the Left (which utterly dominated the media in the 70s and 80s) begins to tell itself stories of it victories against increasingly unreal opponents. One need only watch the utterly tiresome leftist moralism of MASH to get a feel for what I mean. But it was endemic every where in the culture and it leaked into the Church, of course. The preposterous victimism, the culture of grievance, identity politics, goofy schemes like Midnight Basketball, all the absurd ephemera of a chattering class that was increasingly out of touch with everybody but its own dwindling numbers.
This was why people like Rush Limbaugh were so refreshing and fun to listen to. It was delightful to hear the idols being smashed and the taboos being broken. And there were real ideas being reiterated that needed saying as well. Opposition to Nanny Statism, the confidence that ordinary people could be trusted to govern themselves, the Reaganesque (and Jeffersonian) conviction that "government is the problem", the suspicion of Leviathan and of absurd projects in nation-building, the notion that goal was to have a government that lived within its means, the hostility to tyrannical regimes that did not respect fundamental human dignity.
It worked very well. So well that conservatives were swept into office in overwhelming numbers in '94 and a Democrat was forced to inhibit his initial desires for massive Nanny Statism by his innate political sense of what would and would not fly. Then, in 2000, the Right achieved a goal it had sought for decades: complete domination of both the Executive and the Legislative branches. And the process of cocooning began to overtake it as well, aided and abetted by the panic created by 9/11.
Now we are five years down the road. We have, courtesy of Compassionate Conservatism a state that is massively in debt, engaged in huge and failing nation-building projects, attempting to give the executive powers that would have scared the pants off Jefferson and Reagan, and known at home and abroad for its desperate attempt to justify the use of torture and abuse. And instead of subjecting itself tot self-criticism, it is, like the Left of my youth, surrounding itself with paid sycophants and media shills, as well as willing volunteers, who tell it what its itching ears want to hear, and who shout down those who suggest that not all is well.
Consequently, out of Bishop Vigneron's Ten Rules (ably expounded at Disputations), I find myself focusing disproportionately on the following:
The Rule of Integrity: "To do evil in order to accomplish good is really to do evil." The Eschatological Rule: "The victory is assured; my job is to run out the clock with style." The Rule of Realism: "Remember that Satan is eager to corrupt my efforts to build up the Kingdom, and he's smart enough to figure out a way to do it." The Petrine Rule: "Nobody ever built up the Church by tearing down the pope."
Much has been said of the Rule of Integrity here, because it is the single most fiercely opposed Rule on the Right at present. It is called all sorts of names. But it remains true: you cannot do evil that good will come of it. If you try it, you will encounter the same Judgment as Judas Iscariot, who found that all the evil was his, and all the good that came of it was God's.
But in addition, there is also the Eschatological Rule, which not a few frightened post-9/11 people seem to have completely forgotten. It is this: "What shall it profit you to win the war and lose your soul?" That, in the end, is what the torture debated comes down to.
The Rule of Realism is the principal defense we have against the pride that cocoons all fallen men from reality as they reflect on their goodness and compare themselves with the badness of their foes.
And the Petrine Rule is about the handiest touchstone for day to day sanity. Recently, I ran across somebody on another board who was baffled over my puzzling inconsistency. He had some kind things to say about my theological scribbles (for which I thank him) and then shook his head, "That's why it breaks my heart to see those "torture" posts. If he's wrong about that, than what happens to his "credibility" on other matters?". It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that my remarks on torture are just as rooted in the Church's teaching as my remarks on everything else. All I'm doing is repeating the teaching of the Church, accessible in any Catechism, as well is in conciliar and papal teaching, that torture is intrinsically immoral, gravely sinful, and so forth.
There are only two ways out of this. One of them is to just say the Church is wrong and torture is *not* gravely sinful, etc. This is usually achieved by saying that the Church is hopelessly unrealistic in not recognizing that "24" is exactly like real life, where "ticking bomb" scenarios are a daily fact of life. Another strategy is to say that human beings who are guilty, or suspected, or foreign, or named "Maher Arar" don't have basic human rights and so we can see to it they are tortured if we think it will keep us safe. All of these have the disadvantage, for the putative Catholic, of ascribing fundamental error to the Church's moral teaching by saying that something the Church declares intrinsically immoral is not really intrinsically immoral.
The other strategy is to endlessly quibble about what techniques constitutes "torture". The problem here is that, in my case, I have resolutely refused to play that game. My argument has been, whatever trained interrogators (which I am not) have hitherto deemed "torture" is not in sudden need of redefinition since 9/11. Attempts to redefine torture are simply attempts to call what is intrinsically immoral by a new euphemism so as to get away with it. From what I've heard from military guys opposed to the Administration--
--the basic rule of thumb is like Golden Rule: If you'd call it torture if it were done to you or your buddy, don't do it. Seems reasonable.
But I digress: my main point is that all this disproportionate hammering on the Right and its self-imposed blind spots seems to me to be necessary because this is a Catholic blog by somebody who is basically conservative. One of the major tasks of the Faith is to conform us to Christ, not confirm us in our prejudices and rationales. The simple fact is, I cannot, for one second, believe that either Christ, nor any bishop in the world (including, particularly, the Holy Father) would do anything but laugh (or weep) at the American Right's excuses for torture. And when it's a choice between the Faith and the Fatherland, I go with the Faith every time. That's the explanation for my mysterious behavior.
I'm rather dumbfounded at the flood of mail I received in response to the piece on "Imagine". Far more (and mostly positive) than I've ever gotten in response to any other piece I've done in several years.
You never know what's going to hit a nerve.
Oh, and philosopher Scott Carson has some pert words about the lyrics of Paul McCartney. I agree with him in not particularly minding Paul's words much. He's a classic of example of a man who, as a lyricist, is a fine musician. And I also agree that, at bottom there's something more real about the guy--even in his narcissism, than there is in Lennon. He's not aiming for Greatness. He's just a guy who like comic books and rock and roll. Hard not to like a bloke like that.
Now you Know!
URGENT ** URGENT ** URGENT
THIS IS AN URGENT CONGRESSIONAL ALERT FROM THE NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE COMMITTEE IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ISSUED ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, AT 10:30 PM EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME
DO-OR-DIE U.S. SENATE VOTE ON PARENTAL NOTIFICATION BILL -- PLEASE ACT NOW!
PLEASE FORWARD THIS ALERT TO ALL AVAILABLE LISTS! IMMEDIATE ACTION IS REQUIRED!
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate will conduct a do-or-die vote on one of the most important pro-life bills ever to come before the Congress -- the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA) -- as early as Friday, September 29.
All pro-life groups and citizens must immediately TELEPHONE the offices of their two U.S. senators to urge them to vote in "in favor of cloture on the parental notification bill, S. 403."
It is this simple: If a senator really believes that a parent should be notified before an abortion is performed on a minor, he or she will vote yes on S. 403, the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act. If a senator wants abortionists to be able to perform abortions on girls of any age without knowledge of a parent, he or she will vote no, or skip the vote. Because of the procedural situation, an absence will have the same effect as a pro-abortion vote.
Sixty votes (out of 100 senators) will be required to send the bill to President Bush. This vote is winnable. But you must act immediately!
Because the vote may occur so soon, you must rely on PHONE CALLS to the Washington offices of senators. All Senate offices can be reached through the Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121. Also, call the nearest IN-STATE offices of your two U.S. senators with the same message. The numbers of in-state offices for each senator are listed on the NRLC website under the profile for each senator, here.
E-mails, faxes, and other modes of communication may not be counted until after the vote has already occurred! So please -- TELEPHONE the D.C. and home-state offices of your senators!
WHAT JUST HAPPENED . . .
Earlier this evening (Wednesday, September 27), in a move that apparently caught pro-abortion forces by surprise, pro-life Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tn.) filed a "cloture petition" on S. 403, the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (also known as the Child Custody Protection Act). This crucial legislation has been blocked for months by the Senate Democratic leadership. Senator Frist's action opens the door to move this bill rapidly to President Bush to be signed into law -- but only if the pro-life side can muster 60 votes (out of 100 senators).
The bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives earlier this week, is strongly supported by National Right to Life and other pro-life groups. It would require any abortionist in any state to notify a parent before performing an abortion on a minor from another state (with certain exceptions). It also prohibits transporting minors across state lines to obtain abortions, if this abridges the parents' right to be notified under the home-state law.
WE NEED 60 VOTES!
It will require 60 votes to pass this bill! If fewer than 60 senators vote to advance the bill, it is dead for this year. If 60 or more vote in favor of cloture, further amendments to the bill can be set aside, and it can be sent directly to President Bush, who is eager to sign it into law.
When the Senate gave initial approval to S. 403 in July, 65 senators voted in favor of it, so this vote is winnable! That 65 included 51 Republicans and 14 Democrats. But the 14 Democrats (listed below) will be under particularly strong pressures to switch their votes, and so will a few Republicans who voted for the bill but who do not have strong pro-life positions. ALL senators should be called and urged to support sending S. 403 to President Bush!
Remember, on this occasion, an absence is the same as a pro-abortion vote. if the vote is 59-0 in favor of the bill -- the pro-life side loses! The pro-life side must have 60 senators on the floor and voting with Majority Leader Frist to send this bill to President Bush!
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
-- To read NRLC's September 25, 2006 letter to House members on this bill, click here.
-- To read S. 403 as passed by the House -- the bill that will be voted on in the Senate -- click here (PDF format --requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
-- To see polls on parental notification, click here.
-- For further information on the issue of parental notification, including a summary of the law in your state, go to the NRLC website page on Parental Notification, here.
THE 14 DEMOCRATS WHO VOTED FOR S. 403 ON JULY 25, 2006
On the do-or-die cloture vote that will occur on S. 403, the key group will be the 14 Democrats who voted for S. 403 on July 25. Their names are listed below. If one of your senators is on this list, he is among the small group that are more pivotal in determining whether this crucial legislation becomes law, or dies. Urge these senators to stick their earlier vote in favor of protecting vulnerable minors and the rights of parents!
Pryor (Ar.) Salazar (Co.) Carper (De.) Bill Nelson (Fl.) Inouye (Hi.) Bayh (In.) Landrieu (La.) Ben Nelson (Ne.) Reid (Nv.) Conrad (ND) Dorgan (ND) Johnson (SD) Byrd (WV) Kohl (Wi.)
HERE ARE SOME ADDITIONAL TALKING POINTS ON THIS ISSUE!
* Many young girls leave their home states in order to avoid parental involvement in their abortion decisions, often under pressure from older boyfriends or at the urging of abortion providers, and the consequences are often tragic.
* Many abortion clinics in states without parental notification laws purchase advertisements in neighboring states that have such laws, enticing girls to cross state laws to avoid parental involvement.
* This important legislation would do much to protect vulnerable young girls and the rights of their parents. Parental notification laws are supported by overwhelming majorities of the public -- around 80% in many polls.
A reader asks:
I read with much interest your article titled "Women Priests?" I am a Catholic with much love for apologetics. Women priests is the one subject on which I haven't read a convincing defense till now.
I simply love your statement "a sacrament does what it symbolizes and symbolizes what it does."
However I have a question on the last part of your article: "That is why the Pope says, "the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.""
How do I answer this question: Since the Church has all authority to bind things on earth and they will be bound in Heaven, how can we say we do not have authority to ordain women as priests? Especially when we even have Biblical support in Galatians 3:28?
I would be grateful if you could answer this question.
Thank you and God bless.
Because the Church is not the author of the sacraments, Christ is. Authority is like authorship: you have the power to change what you write, but you don't have the power to change what you quote. When it comes to the form and matter of the sacraments, the Church is quoting Christ. Since he did not authorize the ordination of women or the consecration of twinkies and 7-Up, we do not have the power to say he did.
If by that, you mean, "Don't you trust the government?" I answer, "No. Never have. Never will." That's because I think the Founders--like Augustine and St. Paul and the prophet Jeremiah--were right. We are fallen creatures and not to be trusted, particularly with great power.
I have a friend, who is also my hero, who went to prison for the crime of praying the Rosary on the steps of an abortion mill. He is also the local leader of Operation Rescue. We later learned that under the Clinton administration that my friend, along with other pro life activists, was placed on a terrorist watch list by the Reno Justice Department. Also on the list was the Cardinal Archbishop of New York. Prior to 9/11/01 the Justice Department spent an enormous amount of its resources trying to find a mythical pro life terror network in the United States. Meanwhile UBL plotted his moves.
Will on some future day our government torture American citizens suspected of pro life sympathies in order to prevent an alleged bombing at an abortion mill or an alleged shooting of a abortion doctor?
Will on some future day our government torture American citizens suspected of harboring homophobic thoughts?
Who is safe now?
Over at the Coalition for Fog a great deal of ASCII is being expended to argue "that the current administration and/or conservative establishment is so depraved that [Shea] no longer feels an obligation to grant moral assent to it". I'm not entirely clear on what this means. If by "moral assent" they mean I am supposed to take my moral guidance from the Administration or the GOP or the "conservative establshment" or something, then things are far worse than the Coalition feared, for I *never* looked to these venerable institutions for moral guidance. My habit is to look to the Church for that. "Trust not in princes" and all that, you know.
However, I don't *think* that's what they mean. I *think* what they mean is that I am just about to declare that I am now a sort of Lollard and no longer feel myself obliged to obey the laws of a nation whose governors are not in what I deem to be a state of grace. If that is their fear, then they are being silly. I'm not a Lollard. I'm a Catholic. I think the laws of the nation are to be obeyed unless they are unjust laws. Under Nero, you still pay taxes. When Henry VIII is sacking monasteries, you still are not allowed to steal. In the Third Reich, murder is still punishable by the laws of God and man.
That said, I don't mean to imply that this is the Fourth Reich, and all the rest of the tired hysteria of the Left. So far as I can tell, the US is not demanding I obey any unjust laws, and policies of the US that I abhor, such as tax-funded abortions, were on the books long before the present Administration.
Nonetheless, I am greatly worried about this Administration, largely for reasons Richard lays out. You see, I *don't* think Bush is Hitler. I think he will serve out his term and be gone on January 20, 2009. I don't anticipate him assuming Emergency Executive Powers, or voting himself Sweeping Dictatorial Control via an Enabling Act of some sort. I don't think we are an incipient Nazi Germany. That's because, unlike so many rhetoricians who dilate on this war from both Left and Right, I don't think it's 1938 all over again.
I think it's 2006 and we are in a unique historical situation.
"History doesn't repeat itself," said Twain. "But it does rhyme." The phenomenon of a frightened people willingly handing their freedoms over to a state or a man or a party that promises peace and safety is not exactly unknown in history. And despite the monomania for Hitler Talk on both Right and Left, not every Man on Horseback who promised peace and safety has been Hitler. But all were something that our Founding Fathers very much wanted to avoid: people with too much power.
The Right is currently the champion of giving the executive the right to decide what is and is not torture, even as he also decides who can and cannot be subjected to it. Something tells me the Founders would find this a dubious proposition.
But the really breathtaking subsection is subsection (ii), which would provide that UEC is defined to include any person "who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."
Read literally, this means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to "hostilities" at all.
This definition is not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It's not limited to aliens -- it covers U.S. citizens as well. It's not limited to persons captured or detained overseas. And it is not even limited to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, authorized by Congress on September 18, 2001. Indeed, on the face of it, it's not even limited to a time of war or armed conflict; it could apply in peacetime.
In short, the proposal is to subject everybody in the United States, indeed everybody in the world, to the judgment of one man. If he decides you are an enemy of the state, you can be detained indefinitely until the end of a war which, by its very nature, will never end (because like it or not, "terror" will be with us till the Second Coming.
Now, call me crazy, but I find the notion of giving the Executive the right to detain people indefinitely, simply on his own say so, rather worrisome. And I find it even more worrisome that conservatives who ought to know better--not to mention Catholics whose knowledge of Augustine and the power of original sin ought to train them better--are not only not bothered by such moves on the part of Caesar, but are positively enthusiastic in favor of them and full of anger and disgust at anybody who does not trust our President enough to grant him such dangerous powers. The cry "Don't you know we're at war, dammit?" seems to blank people's minds from thinking about what we are being asked to hand over to Caesar.
As I said, I don't believe that Bush is Hitler. I don't believe he's about to proclaim himself Supreme Maximum Leader. But I do believe that liberties we give up to the State in panic are liberties that we will not regain soon. And I believe that once the precedent is set that the Executive has the right to arrest and detain anybody it likes for as long as possible on suspicion of being an enemy in the war on Terror, history shows that language will only become more flexible when the Executive has sole discretion in deciding what "enemy" or "material support" means. Indeed, at least one of the Administration's supporters believes that the mere filing of a habeas petition is a form of "aggression against the United States."
No doubt the supporters of a measure like this are sure they mean to use the One Ring for good. Everybody talks that way. But how long till a mere war protest becomes a form of aggression against the State as well? How long till the Executive decides that a bleat of protest on a blog constitutes a) a belief "that the current administration is so depraved that the suspect no longer feels an obligation to grant moral assent to it" and b) therefore that the suspect is materially supportive of the enemy and should be detained indefinitely till a war that can never end is over?
I seriously doubt the Bush Administration is about to erect a Gulag. I have always thought Bush a basically decent, but not a very thoughtful man. I think his dangerous policies are the fruit, not of a Hitlerian Will to Power, but of an over-simplicity that doesn't much like to be bothered with the consequences of a sort of blunt utilitarian approach to getting the job done.
That said, I have great confidence in Man's ability to erect a Gulag, because I believe in the fall. I believe in the American system of democracy with check and balances, because I believe in original sin. The genius of the American system is that it assumes that those with too much power will always wield it for evil, because they will always wield it selfishly. And is just these check and balances that "conservatives" are in a muck sweat to abolish, in order to free our Great Leader to pursue the War on Terror and bring us all peace and safety.
That process doesn't have to happen overnight (though it has done so in the past on more than one ocassion). I think it can also happen in a measured way, moved, seconded, carried, ordered and minuted by polite people who mean well and who would not lift a finger against their dogs. But I have little doubt that a post-Christian society, governed by feelings, swayed by fears and manipulated by panics and promises, is ripe to give us a government in the very near future that will not hesitate to make use of the tools we are handing it right now. Indefinite prison. Torture. Sole executive discretion in the definition of just who is an enemy of the state and just what the state may and may not do. And all varnished over with a promise to keep us safe and peaceful if we will just look the other way.
Not what the Founders had in mind. But it is what contemporary "conservatism" now stands for--which is why I quite proudly refuse it my "moral assent".
Truly Disturbing at So Many Levels
Dawn Eden provides a massive exegesis on the S from Hell. I lived through the Dark Years 1965 to 1974, yet somehow I was shielded from the nightmares the Screen Gems logo gave more sensitive members of my generation. Perhaps it was the sheltering bosom of my loving family. I don't know. But I can certainly understand how this proto-Eye of Sauron graphic could give people the willies.
For me the traumatic portion of Dawn's post is her wilful and cruel posting of some truly groovy closing credits for "The Ugliest Girl in Town" ("She's so out, that she's in!"):
Where to begin? As a Baby Boomer, fresh from being told that "Lennon experienced the 60s--a lot!" I can only wince upon combinining that boast of Generation Narcissus with this sample of the Lofty Summits of Culture the 60s bequeath to us. From the brilliant dancing, to the overpowering music, to the sheer numbing visual power of the cinematography evident in that clip, I think anyone can see what it meant, on a day to day basis, to experience the 60s deeply.
But it doesn't just recall the 60s for me. It also recalls Titanic:
The great mystery is "How Does She Find This Stuff?"
Kathy Shaidle reveals the Horror: "Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean is a Pawn of the Zionist Lobby to Gain Cultural Control".
And don't even get me started about Tom and Jerry!
Letters! Oh We Get Letters! We Get Your Letters Every Day!
Dear Sir,
I am a life-long Catholic, educated by Holy Names sisters in Seattle, Wa. Do you actually write for a catholic magazine?
Yes.
Everybody wants to think they know everything about something, -here’s my attempt: Lennon experienced the 60’s- a lot.
The 60s were a decade. They were not the apex of human experience and the generation that came of age in that decade is not the summit of human life. If you ask me, the generation that came of age in the 30s and 40s has much more to pride itself on than the Boomers. Indeed, the generation that came of age in the 60s (I speak as a member of the Baby Boom myself) is singular in its massive narcissism, in its belief that it more or less discovered all the great human questions such as sex and sacrifice, and in it's calm assurance of it superiority to both its parents and its children. Everyone who lived through the 60s experienced them a lot. Some of them even learned from the folly of that decade.
I don’t know how rich he was or how much he gave.
He was worth $25,000,000 when he died, I believe. Most people who experienced the 60s a lot did not have the enormous cushions of wealth and fame to buffer their experience.
I only know that he was an advocate for world peace and was savagely shot to death.
Everyone is an advocate for world peace, just as everyone wants to be happy. We can't not will our own happiness. Sin comes in, not in wanting something good (we all do) but in trying to get that good in wrong ways. "Imagine" is a sloppy-minded song that seeks the good in wrong ways and so invites chaos, folly, and destruction. As I pointed out in my article, the things the song advocates were all advocated by the great totalitarians of the 20th Century. The fact that these foolish sentiments are wrapped up in a gauzy and hypnotic melody doesn't alter that. Nor does the fact that Lennon was a victim of a foul murder render the song other than intellectually pernicious drivel.
His song as a poetic, ironic comment on what the world chooses to fight over.
There is not an ounce of irony in "Imagine". Lennon could be plenty ironic when he wanted to be. "How I Won the War" is irony. "Imagine" is a straightforward plea--practically a manifesto--of Lennon's vision of the Ideal World. The only problem is: his ideal, when somebody tries to implement it, creates hell on earth.
He was inviting the world to STOP! Please don’t take it out of context as so many others have – as you well pointed out.
I didn't take it out of context. I quoted virtually the whole thing. Anybody can naively invite the world to STOP! and shout "Down with Bad Things!" But Lennon does more than this: he proposes his own solution: the Good Things. Anybody can say war is bad, killing is bad, greed is bad. Lennon doesn't do just this. He says a number of good things are bad too: faith in God, eternal hope of heaven, a transcendant vision, nations, possessions. This is sophomore high school philosophy, not serious thought, not good poetry, and certainly not good theology.
It will be replied, "Well, Lennon was not a philosopher or theologian." True enough. Which is why it is so dangerous to take him as a reliable guide or prophet (which is clearly what many of the devotees of the song do). When he wrote "Imagine" he was a naive man spout doggerel nonsense which many people foolishly regard as full of profound ideas. And the problem is: ideas have consequences. If people believe nonsense, they will act on what they believe. If they believe we would be better off without people who believe in heaven, then (as the 20th Century shows) they will see to it that those who do wind up in concentration camps.
Again, it will be replied that belief in God has led to crimes as well. Yes. However, in the Catholic world view, this is a corruption of the revelation (even when Catholics do it). In an atheistic worldview, there is no such thing as a "corruption" of atheism because there is no revelation higher than the Strong Man to correct him. As Dostoyevsky says, "If there is not God than everything is permissible." John Lennon, when you boil it down, is wishing for a world in which Everything is Permissible. That is the essential folly of the song.
Right now, as you know, Muslim leaders are furious over a statement by our Pope taken out of context. And countries in civil war and upheaval are using starvation and genocide to achieve their own selfish, materialistic goals. Catholics are oppressed in China. Lennon was making us ask ourselves, why?
No. He wasn't. He wasn't interested in why. He was advocating, in an intellectually lazy way, a wish that all that stuff would just go away and not bother him anymore. So instead of bothering to find out what causes social injustice, he just wished for a world where nobody had any possessions (except him and his $25,000,000). Telling a starving man that you hope he has nothing is not a glowing and poetic sentiment. It's a sloppy cop out from the hard work of recognizing that it is sin, not possessions, that is the problem. Telling a victim of genocide that "above us, there is only sky" is another way of saying "the death of you and all you love means nothing in the grand scheme of things, all that matters is power. The regime that slaughtered your people wins!" "Imagine" is a poem by a dilettante who wants to fancy himself a philosopher, but doesn't want to be bothered with the hard work of thinking.
My daughter writes music. In one of her songs, she sings
“Nothing is right, ‘cause we fight For what we love. But why, I ask, can’t we just love? ‘Cause nothing would get done.”
A poetic rock song, Mr. Shea. What does it mean? – don’t answer that.
"Don't answer that" is another way of saying, "Don't think." There is a whole cultural subtext behind that admonition. It's the notion that it is more authentic to feel something strongly than to hold a conviction arrived at by the use of reason. It's the notion (and Star Wars films are full of this sort of thing), that we are more truly guided by "the gut" or by instinct or "The Force" than by the use of our heads. "Don't think: feel!" says Obi-Wan to the young Anakin. Looks great on screen and it always works. But who except a fool would entrust our lives to a pilot or a cab driver who just did their jobs by blind instinct?
I have a healthy respect for intuition, poetic insight, non-linear ways of approaching life, and all that mysterious side of things we associate with mystics, children, and poets. But as a Catholic, I also believe that truth is one and that errant nonsense is not rendered "profound" by being dressed up with rhyme and meter. "Imagine" is errant--and dangerous--nonsense.
It may likely be filled with the spouting sulfuric acid nuclear fire shrapnel that you had in your article, and I don’t think I could handle any more of that stuff.
You do realize, don't you, that you just used a very low form of emotional manipulation to score off an opponent and then run away. Here's how it works on instant replay. Instead of addressing the merits of my argument, you instead opt to give me a sample of your daughter's poetry, knowing that nobody but a true heel would respond with anything but, "That's so beautiful!" to a mother's offering of her daughter's poetry. (You will notice that I did not take the bait, and confined all my remarks to your admonition not to think and to "Imagine".) Then, you peremptorily sign off with a cutting remark about my sulfuric acid and nuclear fire shrapnel (by which you mean my analysis) of "Imagine". Message: "A brute like you would probably savage a young girl's poetry in front of her own mother too and I'm not going to sit around and let you do that! Good day to you, sir!"
Lotsa mail on this one. Seems to have hit a chord (nyuk! nyuk!). One reader observed that Augustine said, "He who sings well prays twice" and added, "So be careful what you sing."
A sharp observation, since I have noted repeatedly that people--even quite sensible and decent people--will sing things they could never be induced to just say.
I don't buy the notion that the people in this video are tapping into their deep wells of anti-semitism. I think they are tapping into deep wells of Niceness to the Stranger. It's the same thing that keeps the majority of people from daring to have a word with the guy whose car stereo is spewing hiphop obscenities at volumes that could level three Balkan nations. Except when the stranger is apparently friendly and innocent, instead of obnoxious and aggressive, he can even inveigle us into singing along.
Not surprisingly, some of the great heresies of the past were accompanied (and spread) via music and hymnody.
Moral: You are not wrong to loathe "Anthem" and "City of God".
More Dems like this please. Though I suspect he will not pass the Realpolitik bloodthirstiness test of some on the Right, just as he is unlikely to pass the abortion bloodthirstiness test of the Left. Still, the world would be a better place with more like this guy. Anybody willing to dare using the word "pro-natalist" in speaking to Dems has courage.
What really makes me sad and angry is that churches are the most peaceful places in the country.
Churches did not turn into bomb factories or hideouts for criminals. They remained beacons for peace and love unlike our mosques and Husseiniyat that drifted far away from their original purpose and sadly became sources of fear and death and changed to become homes to torturers and kidnappers.
What a wonderful witness to the Muslim world this is, as it should be.
Remember, Christians: all your attempts to bear witness the Muslim world are bound to fail, so don't even try. The only thing these animals understand is force.
Another Convert to Pharisaic Moralism writes:
Thanks again for standing firm against the torturers and their apologists.
You might find this quote, from the final two paragraphs of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, useful:
"Christians! every time you pray that the kingdom of Christ may come, can you forget that prophecy associates, in dread fellowship, the day of vengeance with the year of His redeemed?
A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved, - but by repentance, justice, and mercy; for not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law by which injustice and cruelty sahll bring on nations tha wrath of Almighty God!"
(Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1851)
It ain't too late to call your Congresscritter, folks!
My. Who could have foreseen it? What an unexpected outcome.
Goody!
Perry Lorenzo, one of Seattle's best teachers on Practically Everything in the Western Tradition, will be speaking at the Cathedral for the first four Mondays of October! Topic: Deus Caritas Est.
Thursday, October 19, 2006, at 7:30 PM in the Falcon Lounge
“Christianity and Other Religions: Making Sense of Absolute Truth Claims in a Multi-religious World”
Rev. Bernhard Blankenhorn O.P. Parochial Vicar, Parish of the Blessed Sacrament, Seattle
How is it possible for Christians to assert dogmas — especially the most ancient dogmas shared by Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants — as absolute, timeless truths, without becoming intolerant or dismissive of other religions and their truth claims? Can there even be such things as absolute religious truths? This evening, Dominican friar and theologian Fr. Bernhard Blankenhorn will speak to this crucial issue for evangelization and the credibility of the Gospel among non-believers, drawing on the theological wisdom of the Church Fathers and of his fellow Dominican friar, St. Thomas Aquinas.
Fr. Bernhard is a new priest at my home parish, Blessed Sacrament and he's absolutely wonderful! Come check out the Seattle Chesterton Society!
I may have to take the kidlets and check this out!
My only question: was this done by aliens?
The Dilemma of Having to Rely on a Priesthood of Specialists
Case in point: Global Warming and the Is Too! vs. Is Not! specialists.
Me: I don't know nuthin' 'bout meterology, or climate change or all that stuff. All I know (or more precisely, don't know) come from listening to various people with letters behind their names tell me Global Warming is/is not real. I have no access to the primary data and wouldn't know what to do with it if I did. So I listen to specialists quarrel and I have friends who are enthusiasts for one or the other side of the controversy send me links to articles arguing their side. The whole thing keeps me pretty agnostic.
Victor Morton warns against the simplistic moralism of Pharisees like me, who use the Catechism as a Fundamentalist proof text and just gape and grin and think as they are told when the Church says that torture is "intrinsically immoral" and a "grave evil" and "contrary to human dignity" and all that.
He is inflamed with disgust because I noted below the truth of Eve Tushnet's observation that the things which Lynddie England is remembered for doing, such as : "walking the dog", or hooded prisoners forced to stand for hours on a box with electrodes attached, are things which are not torture according to makers of Fine Distinctions. He is also infuriated when I note that just such techniques are what our Glorious Leader is fighting to keep. In response, he begins with this good solid (and revealing) non-sequitur:
In a post that is an embarrassment of riches for pointing out stupidities and lies -- like, Abu Ghraib has nothing to do with the CIA "enhanced-interrogation" program (real interrogators know better than to take pictures of themselves) making his juxtaposing those pictures just vile emotional manipulation -- I'll simply make two small, but unassailable and factual points.
Prescinding from the fact that I did not say Abu Ghraib was a CIA operation, my point remains valid: the things we saw in the pictures I ran from Abu Ghraib are things which Torture Apologists say are not torture. No broken bones. No organ damage. Just a little frat hazing, says Limbaugh and other Administration shills. However, what is more telling is Victor's parenthetical remark about "real interrogators". It means, when translated, that professionals and those who support their work keep things in the dark, shrouded in fog. Not that they have anything to hide, of course. Because, as our President assures us, we don't torture and never have. He just can't talk about the super duper secret methods we use because if that information fell into the wrong hands, why, people would know what "real interrogators" are doing. And if you question that, you are a simplistic torture Pharisee.
The Coalition for Fog takes its name from a conversation in one of my comboxes a few months back (can't find it, sorry!) which revolved around the endless discussions demanding I provide an exact catalog of precisely which techniques and practices are and are not torture, and evidencing bewilderment and bafflement over *ever* being able to define anything as torture when I declined to do so.
The sleight of hand worked this way. Torture Excusers were free to define something as torture if they liked. They never did, because they wanted to keep the thing shrouded in a fog where waterboarding and being held in a cell were morally equivalent. Then they could have fun with the Bedwetters who wept bitter tears for the inhabitants of Club Gitmo. There was no interest on their part in defining torture. Instead, it was always the task of the torture critic to provide an *exact* definition (which could then be picked apart by the Makers of Fine Distinctions).
I declined to play this game on the basis of my ignorance of standard law enforcement procedures. People desperate to know what was and was not permitted were routinely referred by me to people who do the work of interrogation and write the Army regs, much as I refer people who want to know about plumbing to plumbers. This is what Victor calls "evasiveness". But the only real evaders were those who were and are making essentially the same argument that Victor continues to make to this day, that because Mark Shea doesn't know enough about the regulations governing prisoner treatment in the Army regs for the past 50 years, it is therefore impossible for anybody to say what torture is, much less condemn it. In Victor's words:
(1) In describing how he thinks The Vast Neocon Agenda To End Evil, etc., will work to inure the country, Shea says the following, right under a picture of Lynndie England and the naked guy on the dog leash:
Then we need to get people used to euphemisms like "aggressive information gathering techniques."
For someone who often goes cornpone "aw, shucks. I'm just an unfrozen caveman Catholic. That's for professionals to figure out" when asked to define the distinction between torture and interrogation, this is a remarkable thing to say. If "aggressive information gathering techniques" is a euphemism for torture, then under Shea imagines is Church teaching, "aggressive information-gathering techniques" are impermissible. Ever. It is after all ... just a euphemism for "torture" like "terminate a pregnancy" or "choose to control your body," right, with exactly the same moral space. In which case, one wonders, what "interrogation" can meaningfully be. Is it not supposed to be aggressive? Is it not supposed to gather information or not use techniques? As ever, Shea is so eager to get on moral high horse that he doesn't think through what he's saying and will indignantly deny he ever said it. But as long as he maintains that "aggressive information-gathering techniques" is a euphemism for torture, Shea has said there can be no interrogation. QED.
Victor makes this much more complex than it needs to be, and commits a number of what I will charitably call "mistakes" along the way. The principal one is the claim that I think there can be no interrogation of prisoners. This is silly. Obviously, there can be and has been interrogation of prisoners for as long as we have had Geneva and Army regs on how to treat prisoners. My point is not that there can be no interrogation. It is that when we use fuzzy euphemisms to describe torture, we are deliberately fogging language in order to make it impossible to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate interrogation techniques. What those legitimate techniques are, I do not know, because I am neither a cop nor a military interrogator. I simply say that whatever the regs were before the Bush Administration suddenly discovered a need to change them to justify torture seem to have been founded on basic principles of justice and to have worked pretty well.
To go further, I have tried to give examples of what (I thought) all civilized people could agree on to fit the definition of "torture". I stuck to just a couple: waterboarding, cold cells, Palestinian hanging. All of which have been done by the CIA with Bush's approval. To my amazement, I still get quibbles. For some waterboarding is not "really" torture. For other, cold cells (in which prisoners are left to freeze and have been hospitalized for hypothermia and have died) is just called "temperature variation" and voila! the Coalition for Fog wins another victory in the war for euphemism. I simply suggest that if the Army regs frowned on this on September 10, 2001, nothing in human nature or nature of warfare makes it suddenly urgent to call such things okay now.
(2) We get this later bit of ahistoric piffle, worthy of a man with plainly not the remotest clue about either historical practice or legal issues:
Yessirree, what worked during our face off with the two greatest totalitarian systems in history no longer works. Treating prisoners humanely and refusing to adopt the methods of the KGB have suddenly been rendered out of date.
What world has Shea been living in? Audie Murphy movies? Let's make this crystal clear. I am not making a moral point ("whatever we did then must have been right") but rather a historical point ("what DID we do then"). So Fundamentalist Proof-Texting of the Catechism (the only thing Shea knows on this subject) is not on point. But as a historical matter, what Shea says about "what worked during" the Cold War and World War II is a load of crap. To speak only of World War II, German POWs were often abused in retaliation for German abuses of Allied prisoners (it was called "reciprocity," a concept Shea moralistically ridiculed when it was brought up to him that this was how law-of-war treaties were enforced when the world was run by grown-ups); "take no prisoner" orders were issued in response to fake surrenders, mostly against the Japanese; summary executions on the battlefield were commonplace -- against spies, saboteurs or combatants-out-of-uniform; the "rubber hose" was a universally accepted interrogation practice even used in domestic law-enforcement, as were a score of things that is definitely "torture" as Gaudium et Spes defines it, i.e., attempts to coerce the will by force; the CIA sponsored coups/assassinations of foreign leaders such as Allende, Mossadeq, Castro (OK, that one failed, but that's not relevant to what US tactics were).
As near as I can make out, Victor is saying that Army regs on interrogation and just treatment of prisoners were just for show, and that George Marshall's insistence that where US forces went, US standards of civilization and human dignity were to be upheld was just naive hogwash. It appears that Victor is saying that what really got the job done was America's can-do willingness to dispense with quibbles about mortal sin when need be. I am, of course, aware of our various war crimes, schemes, plots, assassination adventures, and so forth. Up till now, I had always thought such things were "wrong" in my simplistic, moralizing way. I still do. I even thought the people who did such things knew, down deep, they were wrong, which was why Patton, for instance, covered up the massacre of German guards at Dachau and did not broadcast it to the world as a triumph of Allied justice.
In contrast, I'm not sure what Victor is trying to say. He sends very mixed messages. First, he tells us "I am not making a moral point ("whatever we did then must have been right") but rather a historical point ("what DID we do then")." But then he reverts to those reliable scare quotes to refer to "torture" and distance the use of the rubber hose (!) from what that tiresome moralistic proof text Gaudium et Spes defines as torture.
Victor then continues with a classic line: one that is almost iconic in these discussions:
I myself would characterize myself not as pro-torture, but as anti-anti-torture.
After this fitting summary of the mission of the Coalition for Fog, Victor continues with, well, a few final bits of name-calling. In sum, as far as I can tell, he is saying that doing evil that good may come of it is okay, as long as you are professional about it and don't take pictures. And anybody who disagrees with this updated and nuanced reading of the Catechism is, let's see, a person of "low, low, low standards", "[a] sheer demagogue", "intellectually vulgar", "ahistorical", possessed of "lowbrow innocence", "intellectually evasive", given to "emotionalism", "sloppy", "intellectual bullying", given to "vile emotional manipulation", "on a moral high horse", "a Pharisee", "utterly hopeless in exegesis of people who disagree with him", "intellectually sloppy", "a vague moral grandstander", a liar, "self-righteousness" full of "moral self-congratulation and self-pleasuring".
Who can be indefinitely detained, according to this bill?
The definition applies to foreigners living inside or outside the United States and does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant.
Now that the battle for torture is basically won by the Administration, and the definition of what constitutes torture will, if all goes well, lie entirely with our Great Leader who has already assured us that we have never tortured (merely waterboarded, induced hypothermia, forced people to stand till they were in agony, and employed Palestinian hanging), I certainly feel safe handing him the power to indefinitely detain anybody, foreign or domestic, that he thinks might be an enemy of the nation. What could possibly go wrong with a system like that? Oh, sure, *lesser* nations with less leaders might be tempted to abuse such power. But not us. We're Americans! So we can be sure that handing our fundamental liberties over to Caesar in a time of (unending) war is a formula for True Peace and Safety.
I'm well past the point of saying Dick Cheney is a liar. However, since some of my readers still express horror at the thought that a politician can lie, I submit the following fact, courtesy of Rod Dreher, who is quoting this piece by Joan Didion:
"It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
Are there yet more mitigating circumstances, fine shades of nuance, delicate psychological factors, super-secret affairs of state, and other excuses that have to be made before we can safely say that Dick Cheney is a liar?
Rod is not alone in his disgust with these people.
I have been following your recent posts on torture with great interest. I should probably give a little history. I am a recent convert to the Church from a non-religious, Secular Humanist upbringing. Following political debates these days leaves me feeling quite dirty, most of the time. My basic position has been to trust those in power (because of the many other vile lies, and hateful speach being spewed by their opposition). How can we really say it is torture anyway, when no one is losing fingers or eyes?
The tone you have maintained while arguing your position on the treatment of detainees has been very influential to me. Because of your persistent (but not ad- hominem or over-the-top) criticism of the administration on this issue, I have come to change my mind.
I also quite appreciate your reiterating that the will to power is not all that should (or does) motivate the world. I know that this is self-evident in even the shortest glimpse of the Gospel, but I find that old thought patterns are hard to break (and perhaps I am a little slow on the uptake).
I hope you do not find yourself discouraged by the relentless criticism you receive on this subject. You've changed my mind, and I'm sure countless others.
Thanks! I'm very grateful to hear it! Don't forget to contact your Congresscritter and tell them you oppose the Bushie attempts to fuzz the law and put torture at the heart of the Republic, subject only to the whim of an Executive who has proven himself totally dishonest on the subject. There was nothing wrong with the law as it stood. If it's not broken, don't fix it.
If you go down to the Hatchery You better go in disguise! If you go down the Hatchery You're in for a big surprise Cuz every bear there ever was is gathered there together because Today's the day the teddy bears murder hatchlings!
I have long believed that Wisdom 2 is one of the most profound prophetic analyses of the logic of fallen man
The cycle has played itself out again and again in history. With the broad American choice to completely embrace consequentialism, first with abortion and now with torture, I would say that we have pretty much completed step 3. It's not just a matter of time, I reckon, before a happy concord is reached between cynical devotees of abortion on the Left, and equally cynical devotees of torture on the right (yes, *devotees*: just as the Left *needs* abortion to fuel its raison d'etre, so the cynical manipulators on the Right are already coming to *need* to justify themselves as the Apostles of Strength Through Torture). When that day is reached, the big losers will the Christian dupes who mouthed the agitprop fed them by the Administration that just a *little* mortal sin was the grease that keeps a modern nation state in fine tune! If they repent of being shills for Leviathan, they will be called goddam torture pharisees and prolifers whose sanctimony has gummed up the smooth running of the party long enough. If they persist in being nuisances, they may well find themselves vehemently suspect of aiding and abetting the enemy.
I wonder if I will live long enough to see the logic of torture play itself out:
Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God's son, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected."
Here is the latest version of the Military Commission Bill, including all of the compromises agreed to by the Administration and Senators McCain, Graham, and Warner. The worst parts begin on p. 81, eliminating the writ of habeas corpus, denying anyone the right to invoke rights guaranteed by Geneva in judicial actions, prohibiting the use of any foreign sources in construing the meaning of the Geneva Conventions, proclaiming that the President is the authoritative source of the meaning of Geneva with respect to the War Crimes statute, amending the War Crimes statute with language that allows the President to continue to engage in torture-lite (after all, he is now the authoritative source of its meaning), and finally, making all these amendments retroactive to November 26th, 1997 (i.e., well before September 11th, 2001. I wonder what led to this particular change?)
This is a bill that all Americans can truly be ashamed of. And it has been given to us courtesy of our elected leaders, the party of Torture-lite.
I blame our leaders. But I also recognize that we Americans bear some measure of responsibility as well. We failed to speak out when the news first leaked out that our forces were engaged in torture and repeated acts of cruelty, and we failed to speak out when further revelations disclosed that our leaders had actually authorized some of it-- and turned a blind eye to the rest. We were told, again and again that this was happening, and we didn't protest. We didn't show our leaders that we cared about the corruption of American values. The reason why the President and his Administration are daring to offer this bill now is that they believe that we Americans will not punish them politically for doing it. Quite the contrary: they believe that we Americans will think them strong and courageous and forceful for doing so.
They think that we Americans will actually reward them at the polls for legalizing torture.
That is one of the most chilling things about this entire episode. Have we become so complacent as a country, so easily lied to, that our leaders now think that they can legalize torture before our very eyes and that we will actually thank them for doing so?
This bill surfaces just as Jews around the world are ready to begin the High Holy Days, celebrating a new year, and asking for God's forgiveness and atonement for our sins.
This year, I think we in America have a great deal to ask God to forgive us for.
At present, it's still just a bill. You have the power to make your voice heard if you believe, as I do, that the Bushies' desire to enshrine torture in law as a tool of Caesar is a cancer at the heart of the Republic. Speak, particularly to your representative and don't let them get away with this. He or she is only an email away.
Miniature Chuck Yeager Not Included
Attention Pavel Chichikov poetry fans...
...in Florida
...in Jacksonville.
A 20 minute portion of Mysteries and Stations will be read on Queen of Peace Radio - WQOP AM 1600 Jacksonville, Florida on Wednesday at 7 am and Saturday at 11 am.
My 11-year-old son was looking over my shoulder Friday as I was reading your blog. He asked about the Homestarrunner icon on the sidebar. I told him to check it out when I was finished on the computer. He spent the entire weekend (or at least it seems that way) laughing at the site. You have corrupted the sweet, innocent little brother of Defensor Veritatis. Actually, he's still sweet and innocent, but Homestarrunner really appeals to his off-the-wall sense of humor. Thanks for providing new entertainment for him!
I'm always happy to contribute to the weirdification of the rising generation.
a) common sense b) safely ignored because it's the Times c) part of a coordinated plot by Colin Powell and others to undermine our Great President d) treasonous defeatist trash that you'd expect from the Democratic Underground e) the brilliant "Flypaper Strategy" ensuring that we fight them over there instead of over here e) other
Just trying to anticipate the usual responses in the combox.
Interesting Reflection on the Way the Fortunes of the Holy Father
Do you believe that Jeb is really Catholic? Is he in good standing?
He has signed many death warrants in Florida.
I live here. I live in Tampa, Florida. So many people went around saying, " Jeb is soooo pro life." He wasn't. Isn't.....
What is the Catholic teaching on the death penalty? Yet you and others in your blog have touted the Republican party as the ANSWER ALL AND BE all answers to our prayers for a nice young man who stands up for good wholesome pro-life values.
Jeb doesn't. He just signed several more death warrants.
Get real. Give us a real Catholic. Go to confession Senor Jeb.
I never understand why people write me letters which begin with a question and then proceed to a dogmatic answer to that question. I understand it even less when it's a question that a) no mortal can answer and b) is predicated on reading complex matters of prudential judgement as though they were simple black and white indicators of the status of a man's soul.
Do I believe Jeb Bush is "really Catholic"? Answer: How the hell should I know? It wasn't my turn to watch his soul and make that call. Is he in "good standing"? Take it up with his bishop.
He has signed a lot of death warrants. Right. And since when did that become the infallible measure of how Catholic somebody is? I oppose the death penalty, basically for the reasons the Holy Father gave in Evangelium Vitae. But then, I am not sworn to uphold the laws of the state of Florida, so I have no conflicting duties. And like it or not, EV does not class the death penalty as intrinsically immoral. There is a fudge factor built into the document whereby Caesar has to decide what is and is not necessary to the peace of the state. If *I* were Caesar I would decide matters quite differently from Jeb Bush. But I'm not. That doesn't qualify me to sit in judgment of his soul.
"What is Catholic teaching on the death penalty?" Okay. So you don't actually know what you are talking about, but you are ready to condemn a man as un-Catholic on the basis of your ignorance. While you are at it, you are ready to make somebody else go do your homework for you *and* insult them while they do it (of which more in a moment).
Very well, since you are apparently too crippled in the wrists to use Google and find out what the Church says about the death penalty, here it is:
2267 Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."
For future reference, the Catechism is on line here.
Now, returning from running your errands for you, let me now address the little insult (and lie) you gratuitously hit me with: "Yet you and others in your blog have touted the Republican party as the ANSWER ALL AND BE all answers to our prayers for a nice young man who stands up for good wholesome pro-life values".
I think only a total illiterate could possibly read this blog and come away with the conclusion that I believe the Republican party to be (in your tangled syntax) the "ANSWER ALL AND BE all answers to our prayers". I was pleased with Jeb's attempt to save Terri Schiavo from judicial murder. Should I have instead have rooted for her death? I hold no brief for Jeb Bush's salvific powers, nor do I have any particular idea what his track record is with respect to pro-life issues. In fact, I don't think I've mentioned him since the Schiavo affair.
I don't know what prompts a reader to writes such an ignorant, impudent, aggressive, accusatory post from out of the blue. But I hope that whatever it is can be cured, cuz it sure is annoying. Any other errands I can run for Your Majesty while you falsely accuse me of more stupid notions?
In the ongoing quest to create new sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance, science helps narcissistic parents create embryos that have the same genetic ailments as their parents--because children are a property rights issue and exist to affirm parents in their okayness.
Droopy Dog says, "Don't forget to celebrate the Muslim Day of Rage." Stamp your tiny feet in impotent rage at being too dumb to understand an academic citation. Remind the world that you invented chess once, ages ago. Stew in the juices of your backward, barbaric swamp of disease, illiteracy, hypocrisy, filth, destitution supporting ostentatious and garish wealth, and savagery. Divert your attention once again from the despots who rule you to the prosperous and free lands you are too stupid, lazy, evil and powerless to imitate. Blame somebody else for all your ills. That'll solve your troubles.
Got a fun little book with the title above the other day. Profiles the saints with a view to the often very rough cloth they where cut from. I find book like that inspirational since I figure, "If God can save people like this, then there's hope for me."
Carson Weber has a new site up devoted to adult catechesis. Looks good and full of tasty content goodness as well.
Speaking of which, Weber mentions a nifty high school textbook Scott Hahn has authored called Understanding the Scriptures. I've taken a gander at it and it does a nice job of presenting solid biblical scholarship and Catholic teaching in an interesting way.
Dunno how accurate this is. It came with some links that make me think it might be some kind of Falun Gong operation. Of course, on the whole, I'd be more inclined to trust Falun Gong sources than Commie sources.
As I have absolutely no interest in getting into a shouting match or argument with many of your combox posters, I just wanted to thank you for your steadfastness in opposing the torture arguments of the administration. I, too, voted for Bush twice and until reading your reasoned analysis was content to not much worry how the gov't got its info from captives. I was always bothered by the "rendition" program but I was of the "who is to say what is torture" crowd.
Since reading your posts and studying the matter further I have come to the realization that I was complicit in not worrying that an evil was being done to achieve a "good" end.
Just wanted to say thank you for opening my eyes. Like you, I think it's going to be hard to find someone for whom I can cast a vote next election. Keep up the good work.
Thanks so much for this. I write on this issue to persuade, so seeing someone get persuaded is a great reward to me. It matters to me greatly that our culture not go even further into the corruption of consequentialist thinking (but then you probably guessed that). :) Many thanks for keeping an open mind and heart on this issue. Now go and argue it with your friends. Hearts and minds can be changed, as I am joyfully discovering.
Folk are asking what I think of McCain's capitulation
I haven't had a chance to digest the deal that was reached, but from what I gather so far, things don't look good.
Meanwhile, a reader writes, expressing the basic man-in-the-street attitude toward "doing whatever it takes" that characterizes the vast majority of moral reasoning among Americans:
What it all comes down to is that for more than a hundred years, a majority of the voters of this country have been willing to do what ever it takes to keep wars as short as possible and to minmize casualties. This includes destroying civilian property in the Civil War; dropping the atomic bomb in WW2 and commiting torture in this current war. Anything to keep from having to sacrifice.
If Bush is right and torture is necssary to protect the Homeland, the next time there is an attack here, we will see far worse atrocities. No one is preparing the country for the sacrifices that will be necessary.
Happily, it looks like Americans will once again be secure from having to think very deeply about such issues. Caesar has promised to keep us safe and strong through prisoner abuse, and as long as we feel safe and strong, we don't much care how the sausages are made.
Eventually the sausages will require we pay the butcher. But hey! Jesus said not to worry about tomorrow!
Some would say this is a "despicable" trend toward "Pick the embryo you like. Flush the rest."
However, we have to remember that we are in Global War on Disease and Crime. Many of the flushed embryos would, in all likelihood, grow up to become serial killers, rapists, and burdens on an already over-taxed social and health care system with their disgusting genetic imperfections--imperfections they would then pass on to poor innocent children. Some might even have become terrorists. So I think that, on the whole, the consequentialist thinking that has served us so well elsewhere comes in here too. Besides, it *works*. You get healthier, *prettier* babies. And a lot of that fetal material is going to go for good ends too! And when it comes to it, surely killing embryos at this stage of development is not as evil as partial birth abortion. Besides, what *is* an embryo anyway? And when is it a person? Has the Church ever dogmatically told us? So we're in a real moral gray area, fussing about these fine hypotheticals while people are both dying and being born less good-looking than Brad and Angelina! Some people are willing sit back and let that happen to this, the greatest country on God's green earth. But not me! So long as there is Disease, Crime and other human suffering such as unprettiness anywhere in the world, I say we have to go all-out in self-defense against those genetic imperfections that are going all-out to destroy us. Contact your elected representatives and let them know we support President Bush's efforts to update our methods of deciding what is and is not a "person".
In California only regular Mass-attending Catholics significantly opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide.
I like that the Death Eaters are afraid of the Church. My friend Dr. Robin Bernhoft, who was instrumental in stopping euthanasia initiatives in Washington and California some years ago, has just moved to California. I hope he takes up the gauntlet again.
You'll always be eleventy-one and thirty-three to me.
I love Rabbi Lapin's Curious Tidbits about Orthodox Jewish Life
Why So Many Famous Comedians Grew Up In Religious Jewish Homes"
by Rabbi Daniel Lapin
The Jewish High Holy Days begin this Friday evening with two days of Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year and end 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Ancient Jewish wisdom teaches that what God thinks of us is far more important than what we think of God. Thus it follows that Rosh HaShana, literally the head of the year, is the time when God judges all humans. Rosh HaShana's solemn role of affirming that God indeed does judge us, makes one of its central themes, laughter, difficult to understand.
Is laughter indeed the motif of this most solemn day? Traditionally, we Jews search for the meaning of the day within the Torah portion designated for public reading on that day. On Rosh HaShana, Chapters 21 and 22 of Genesis are read; they chronicle the birth and early life of Abraham and Sarah's son, Isaac, history's first born Jew. Even from conception, laughter surrounds his life. In fact, out of the 13 Scriptural references to "laughter," nine occur in the context of Isaac's life. His name means "he shall laugh" and it is the name that God instructed Abraham and Sarah to give him after they had laughed about his birth. It must have seemed a comic thought to a 90-year-old woman that she and her 100-year-old husband would become first-time parents.
Ancient Jewish wisdom requires us to blow the shofar (ram's horn) 100 times on Rosh HaShana in a complex sequence of notes composed to sound just the way crying or laughing sounds. (From another room, deprived of visual clues, even mothers often fail to distinguish whether a child is crying or laughing.) With the laughter meaning of Isaac's name as well as the laughing sounds of the shofar all integrated by the day's reading of the Torah portion, Rosh HaShana is not only the day of judgment, it is clearly also the day of laughter. There must be some way of integrating our understanding of both the joy of laughter and the solemnity of judgment.
Laughter is one of the distinctions that humans enjoy over animals. What makes us laugh? People laugh at things that violate a sense of how things ought to be. A pompous mayor who slips on a banana peel is funny. A vagrant who falters and sprawls on the sidewalk just seems sad.
Likewise, a sexual innuendo that provokes howls of laughter among school boys and titters among stockbrokers, elicits yawns of indifference from hardened prison inmates. The dirty joke assaults notions of human refinement, thereby causing laughter. To the depraved, however, it is not a dirty joke, it is reality.
The only reason that we laugh at cartoons of talking animals is because of our underlying conviction that only humans were given the gift of speech. A joke can only be funny in the context of a fixed framework which it contradicts.
The paramount project of secular liberalism is to utterly obliterate most rules and fixed frameworks. In the absence of any system of inviolable, religiously based absolutes, there are no unthinkable acts to perform; there are few rules to violate. In a world in which everything floats, humor has nothing solid to thrust against.
To the dismay of secular parents raising Godless children, their offspring will probably find humor one day only in the absurdity of their parents' Godless lives.
The laughter and joyfulness that permeate the family life of religious Americans springs from the presence of Biblically inspired discipline and structure. Conversely, the grim seriousness with which the secular liberal seems to go about the business of life springs from the absence of absolute values. (One cannot help but recall the famous joke that reflected feminism's humorlessness: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: That's not funny).
Since jokes are only funny if they contradict a preconception, and all preconceptions are becoming banned, many genres of jokes are vanishing from our national repertoire. The political correctness doctrine banishes humor and laughter entirely because humor presupposes an existing standard. If nothing is absolutely good and nothing is unthinkably bad, nothing can be funny. Clearly one of the goals of secular liberalism is to eliminate most existing standards. The unintended consequence will be the dreary and somber atmosphere that was characteristic of life behind the old Iron Curtain. Secularism, and its sequel, socialism, work together to banish laughter from the world.
Jewish tradition has it that Abraham, through his renowned kindness, attracted thousands of devotees to Judaism. Yet, a full three generations later, by which time the world's Jewish population ought to have reached large numbers, the Bible (Genesis 46) indicates a total Jewish population of merely 70 souls.
The great transmitters of the Oral Torah explain that Abraham had focused on the Almighty's capacity for unrestrained love and compassion. Isaac, the icon of Rosh HaShana, introduced an awareness of God's firm hand into Jewish culture. Many of the disciples drawn by Abraham's gentle nature were later repelled by Isaac's unpopular emphasis on law, leaving a core following of only 70.
Yet it is precisely the structure of law that defines boundaries and allows humans to live among one another. Ancient Jewish wisdom in chapter three of Ethics of the Fathers, exhorts "Pray for the welfare of legal authority--without it, men would destroy each other." The origin of legal authority and its best validation is the model of Divine authority. For this reason, civil authorities like kings would often head the Church too. They were aware that their acceptance of God's authority made it more logical for citizens to accept their's.
In other words, my children are more likely to obey my rules and later, society's too, if they grow up watching me accept God's rules. Children of parents whose vehicles sport bumper stickers that read "Question Authority" will grow up doing just that. They will also become rather hard to live with.
We humans are by nature reluctant to submit ourselves to a higher authority. Showing how treasured human moments like laughter depend on that submission, helps persuade us that civilization depends upon allowing God to judge us. That is the paramount message of the High Holy Days and accounts for its laughter motif.
Inspirational Moral Reasoning from my Comboxes
"Torture is not as evil as murder, and definitely not as evil as abortion."
Try new "Torture!" Now with 10% less evil than the other leading brand!
Yep. I'm searching for a third party post haste. Better to be faithful than effective, especially when the effect is evil.
Then there's Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, who told a Chamber of Commerce luncheon that he "voted for torture," only to later concede that perhaps he ought to have spoken more with greater circumspection: "Maybe I shouldn't have said I voted for torture. I should have said I voted against the anti-torture bill."
Westmoreland, by the way, is that sharp knife in the drawer who distinguished himself with his public holiness recently
More telling is this:
"Let me ask you a specific question. There are reports that the CIA in its interrogations would strip a prisoner naked and lead him around by a leash. . . . Would that be legal [under the President's bill], or not?"
BERENSON: "Well, that illustrates the precise problem the President is trying to solve. There are probably a substantial number of people around the world, countries around the world, tribunals around the world, that would say that would be a violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. If that’s true, then as a matter of domestic law the CIA agent who has led the terrorist suspect around that way has committed a felony under the War Crimes Act. And that’s what the President doesn’t want. And under U.S. constitutional standards, that probably would not be unlawful, but you would have to analyze it much more carefully than just an off-the-cuff response."
Think about that remarkable response for a minute. Berenson is lobbed a softball question about how a particularly reprehensible technique, prohibited by current law, would be treated under the Administration's proposed statutory amendment.
Berenson does not say that it's a ridiculous hypo because no U.S. interrogator would ever consider using such a technique. To the contrary: It "illustrates the precise problem the President is trying to solve"!
And he does not say, as one might expect, "Don't worry, Alex: Such conduct would shock anyone's conscience, even the Vice President's, and so 'Walking the Dog' would remain illegal, even under the White House standard."
Instead, he responds that:
1. The technique would probably be permitted under the President's bill; but
2. It would depend on all the circumstances of the particular case. (Imagine the OLC memo parsing the particular variables: How long was the leash? Was the detainee asked to bark? Had the detained previously been forced to answer questions while stripped naked? Etc.)
That is to say: It appears that the President is fighting tooth and nail for the legal authority . . . . to be able to lead naked prisoners around by a dog leash.
In other words, this is among the vital-to-our-security-as-a-nation techniques the current Administration is laboring to preserve:
Remember, what you see here is not wrong and it's certainly not torture. It's just... ahead of it's time. First we need to massage Geneva 3. Then we need to get people used to euphemisms like "aggressive information gathering techniques". Also, of course, is the vital work of agitprop masters whose perfected blend of fear, patriotic bombast, and alleged "realism" helps to get people used to saying things like we need "the clarity and the courage to go all-out in self-defense against those who are going all-out to destroy us". By this means, you can even get lots of Christians to plead for "all of our supporters and affiliated churches to contact their elected representatives and let them know we support President Bush's efforts to update our methods of interrogating terrorist detainees".
Yessirree, what worked during our face off with the two greatest totalitarian systems in history no longer works. Treating prisoners humanely and refusing to adopt the methods of the KGB have suddenly been rendered out of date.
Our children, and particularly the children of Christians, will curse us one day for our supine eagerness to enshrine torture and brutal and inhumane treatment of prisoners as a tool of the greatest post-Christian (and soon to be anti-Christian) postmodern relativist state in the world. It's not just wrong. It's not just stupid. In a nation that is rapidly de-Christianizing, it's suicide. But then sin is always it's own punishment.
The Evil Party Renews Its Commitment to Murdering the Most Defenseless Members of Society--and its Chances of Winning
I really do think I'll have to rename the Dems the Evil and Stupid Party. In the very hour that the GOP has managed to alienate a growing number of old rank and file with their profligate spending, their ill-begotten war, and their growing love of Leviathan armed with waterboard and cold cell, the Dems naturally pick this moment to make the most extreme act of reverence to Moloch in their legislative history
Behold the glorious "Freedom of Choice Act" (S. 2593), summed up here. In short, it can be described as "a bill to invalidate virtually all limits on abortion, and to require tax-funded abortion on demand."
The complete list of Senate cosponsors appears here.
The list of current cosponsors of the House companion bill, H.R. 5151, is of somewhat less interest, but it appears here.
You just don't think the Dems could be stupider and then they always manage to come through for you. It's almost as if the Deaniac wing is *terrified* that the sane people who are disturbed by conservatism's increasing derangement might swamp the Dem ranks and tilt the party away from the only thing it still believes in with its whole heart and soul: the murder of babies. So they make these pre-emptive moves to make sure that the extremists continue to dominate the party and keep normal people from turning it back into something besides a game preserve for baby-killing whack jobs.
Greg Krehbiel is a straight shooter. That often gets him in trouble, but he is gracious enough to not take his opinions very seriously. He seems to have a congenital suspicion of nuance. The problem is, not all nuance is BS. Sometimes it's a recognition that the world is a complex place. Last week, Greg cheered when the Pope gave his speech on Islam. This week, it's time to withdraw his membership in the B16 Fan Club.
Such simplistic approach seem to me to accomplish very little. You don't get any closer to penetrating what Benedict was actually saying, nor do you come to any appreciation of the responsibilities the Holy Father bears, nor, frankly, does it get us much closer to approaching the problem of Islam.
Benedict apologized for exactly what needed apologizing: ill-chosen words that need not have been spoken, yet were not particularly untrue. He did so for a very sound reason: like it or not, he bears responsibility for the lives of his flock. What is appropriate for others to say is not necessarily appropriate for him because when he says it, people get killed, churches get bombed, and populations get persecuted. It is not "cowardly" to be extremely circumspect about subjecting innocent people to martyrdom by one's incautious words. Combox warriors and laptop bombardiers may be that courageous and cavalier with the fortunes of others, but Popes cannot afford to be.
Finally, we have to really begin to seriously ask ourselves if we are going to continue to speak of a billion people as a monolith. There are a significant number of people in Islam who respond violently to criticism. But there is also a vast number who do not. For instance, as far as I can tell there have been no acts of violence in the US. The media has tended to show us close cropped photos of small knots of protestors, or to say "some boring Islamic council condemned violence, BUT HERE'S A NUTJOB WITH A HUNDRED PEOPLE SCREAMING FOR DEATH".
Our tendency to treat Islam as a monolith is in stark contrast with Benedict's willingness to treat it as a diverse phenomenon, and to try to build bridges to the sane people in the Islamic community, the better to contain the violent elements. That sort of nuance doesn't have the satisfying emotional punch of simply consigning a billion people to a world of irredeemable monolithic barbarism and declaring war on them, but it does have the advantage of being sane.
Scanlon was wrong about one thing though. It ain't just evangelicals who can be duped into voting against their own better principles.
Happily, there are now five former Joint Chiefs standing against the Bushie attempt to fix Geneva Article 3 so as to allow techniques that don't "shock the conscience" of Cheney and Rumsfeld, but are in some vague sense more "aggressive". Thank God for honorable military men.
Daniel Larison has fun shaking the chain of a particularly loony Lefty who imagines Pope Benedict is all about fitting the Catholic Church into the schemes of Karl Rove. Not really fair to mock the insane, but still fun.
Speaking of Relapsed Catholic...
Kathy also spots what has got to be the lamest book blurb Ever, on behalf of Sam Harris, whom she dubs "the Right's new favorite liberal" (I would presume this is because Christopher Hitchens' has disgraced himself with his ignorant and dishonest anti-Catholic vituperations so much that he is temporarily useless for the Greater America Nation-Building Project). Anyway, the blurb goes:
I can’t sign my name to this blurb. As a New York Times best selling author of books about business, my career will evaporate if I endorse a book that challenges the deeply held superstitions and bigotry of the masses. That’s exactly why you should (no, you must) read this angry and honest book right away. As long as science and rational thought are under attack by the misguided yet pious majority, our nation is in jeopardy. I’m scared. You should be too. Please buy two, one for you and one for a friend you care about.
Give thou me a break. If you are going to go for melodrama, I suggest this. It's just as truthful, but much more vivid.
"Hello? Is anybody out there? Please listen! I'm writing to you from the bowels of the New York Times building. A few of us have been able to make it to the basement. I don't know how much time we have, so I'm begging you to please read Sam Harris' book Letter to a Christian Nation and avoid our fate! The Christian Reavers broke through the our first line of defense yesterday afternoon. They overcame the security guards, disemboweled them in one of their primitive folk rites and ate their living flesh. I will never forget the screams. We blocked the stairways and shut down the elevators, but they scaled the walls of the building like giant insects and crashed through the windows with their high, alien, and inhuman cries of "Hi diddly ho, neighbor!" as they slit the throats of secretaries, editors and interns in their barbaric rush to destroy. Occasionally they would pause to interrogate some terrified victim with questions like, "How diddly do, friend! Could you point me the way to the godless evolution editor and the soul corrupting arts and entertainment department? I got me some kill diddly dillin' to do!"
Only a few of escaped the horrors of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism that followed.
And so it comes to this: I'm writing this book blurb from the last functioning computer with Internet access at the New York Times building. I can't tell you my name or they will find my family. O my precious little girl. Trapped in a world with Christians! They have flooded the building with their Visigoth hordes, committing unspeakable outrages. Rumor has reached us through the transistor radio that Bill Keller's head has been placed on a pikestaff for the sport of crows. Meanwhile, we wretched survivors...
Wait! They are coming! We cannot get out! They are smashing the doors with something heavy, maybe fire extinguishers. No. It's something bigger than that... It's.... AEIIII!... a Cave Troll and behind it.... something horrible! Something made of shadow and flame! Oh, for the love of all that is civilized and enlightened, buy Sam Harris' book!
Of the over two thousand stories published on the incident in the mainstream media none mention Gill's dislike for 'Republicans', 'God', 'F***ing Religious people who think they know everything', 'Catholics', 'Homophobes'.
He appends a number of questions/critiques which I think are worth mulling:
--we can't simply reverse the situation because a Muslim could not disparage Jesus the way a Christian could disparage Mohammed, because Muslims believe that Jesus in fact did bring new teachings to the world that were from God, whereas Christians are free to reject anything new brought by Muhammad.
I'm not sure how this makes a real difference. The Pope is calling for "reciprocity": the granting of as much freedom to Christians and Jews under Muslim rule as Muslims receive in the (ostensibly) Christian West. That is a problem how?
--isn't the History of Christianity full of Christians inflicting dhimmitude on each other--Catholics were worse off in England, for instance, than they were under the Ottomans, legally speaking. Catholic priests were more likely to be drawn and quartered under Elizabeth I in England than Croatian priests were under most sultans in Bosnia. And Catholics have a long history of reducing non-Catholic Christians, let alone Jews, to second and third class citizens.
All true. Vatican II and the Decree on Religious Liberty is a pretty recent event in the Church's history. At the same time, it really does signal a decisive (and true) development of doctrine from which the Church cannot turn back. Is there anything remotely like this in the offing in the Islamic world?
--we're quick to attack Islam for the violence its members perpetrate around the world today and in the past, but conveniently forget that just a few decades ago, a continent that was overwhemlingly Christian was exterminating 6 million members of one of its religious minorities. I don't think this irony is lost on the Muslims today, which is why they Western Christianity's recently found tolerance as hypocritical. Are Muslims really behaving as badly today as many Christian Europeans did between the years of 1933 and 1945? Have they ever behaved that badly?
Here I think you hit near the quick. If "by their fruits you will know them" then there's something perverse about the Western culture that actually gave rise to Nazism being so quick to ascribe its darkest pathologies to the culture that has never given rise to anything like the efficiency and will with which we Westerners commit murder.
Despite these facts, the Michigan Catholic Conference (MCC), the episcopal body of Catholics in the state, REFUSE to provide factual information to the faithful on the anti-life record* of the state's Catholic governor, Jennifer Granholm, elected in 2002. Please see this link.
The sad thing is, the MCC has all the information on Granholm's anti-life record. They just don't want to connect the dots and provide these facts to Catholics in the state for whatever reason(s). Sorry, bishops, unanswered "voter education surveys" and a pretty picture of the 'gov don't cut it. Shame on them!
How do we know that this creature is a human ancestor?
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
And so the sun sets on Day 7 of the CAEI Pledge Week
Thanks to your wonderful generosity, this site can remain open for another three months! Many thanks to those who contributed/bought stuff or have pledged a donation! Coffers remain open till the end of the day and I remain unabashed in asking for your dough till then. Dough transfers can be achieved either through PayPal on the left rail, or by buying my books and audio materials. In addition, you can write me and send a check if you prefer. Please be aware that This is My Body is being reprinted and will be available in about a month (according to my publisher).
Finally, a really fun way of getting the maximum amount of bang for the buck and rubble for the ruble is to hire me to come speak at your parish, conference, or retreat. I can give you a long list of satisfied customers and I tend to get invited back. So grab me now before my calendar fills up!
You'll like to know that the blasphemous cartoons printed by the student newspaper of the University of Virginia, The Cavalier Daily, were deleted. Because of our protest, they also apologized on August 15, feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.
The power of prayer and peaceful protest is amazing. At first, the newspaper refused to remove the anti-Catholic lampoons or even apologize.
But in no time, thousands of college students and concerned Catholics flooded the paper and the university with e-mails and phone calls. In fact, UVa spokesperson, Carol Wood, acknowledged to The Washington Post, that between 2,000 and 2,500 letters and about 50 phone calls were received.
The protest was a decisive victory. And I would like to thank you in a very special way for participating in this historic effort.
Tradition Family Property Student Action members recently visited Penn State University to defend innocent life and oppose the sin of abortion. One week later, pro-abortion radicals are still ranting in the student newspaper against the TFP's presence on campus.
Being out there wasn't all rosy. For example, a pro-abortionist said: "I'm sick and tired of seeing you. I wish I could kill each and every one of you!"
A while later, other abortion supporters took turns taunting TFP Student Action volunteers: "I wish your mother had aborted you!" "If I see you protesting at the abortion clinic, I'll punch you in the face!" "Your Pope is a Nazi!" "I know a high bridge you can jump off of!"
"Muslims *have* to express their anger." They just *have* to. If they don't, they'll just *bust*. And don't you dare put your western categories on me! If I want to freak out because I'm too ignorant and thin-skinned to grasp a university lecture and take a little criticism, then I will shoot more nuns, call more people "Hitler" and kidnap more priests. The problem is Everybody Else. Not me or my tribe.
What a bunch of maroons. I wonder what percentage of the One Billion they are? I have to hope that it's still quite small.
America: Where One Party Pats Itself on the Back for its All-Too-Leisurely "Achievementt" of Bringing Our Culture Up to Carthaginian Levels of Respect for Human Life and the Other Party Wets Itself Lest Unkilled Babies Lead to the Tragedy of Unkilled Unborn Babies.
A reader writes:
My buddy, who has read more patristics than I have (but that's not saying much) sez basically that no one in the early Eastern churches really believed that universal authority or supremacy belonged to the bishop of Rome. He concedes that the Roman bishops themselves thought they were the cat's pajamas, but states that Eastern Christians rejected this as a kind of megalomania and no one really listened. Do you know of any patristic source material on the web or elsewhere into which he and I could dig together to address this question?
By the way, have you ever heard of the Canadian (Winnipeg) singer/songwriter Steve Bell? He's a Baptist, but purt'near Catholic as far as I can tell. I think you'd like him. Just a teaser: his latest album, called "My Dinner With Bruce", consists entirely of -- you guessed it -- Bruce Cockburn covers!
Hey, what's the story on that Mary book?!?
I'm not your guy for Petrine primacy questions, especially vis a vis the particular issues of the Eastern Churches. Jimmy Akin may be of more use to you, or perhaps Steve Ray (who's written whole books on Peter). The Petrine office was never much of an issue for me. It's always seemed obvious to me that Peter occupies a special position in the apostolic college, the phrase "servant of the servants of God" and "first among equals" pretty much sums up his role biblically, and that the early Church saw him in this way. The very attempts to deny papal infallibility have always struck me as proving what they set out to disprove. And I just have never had much of a problem with the basic Petrine claims as a result. So I'm not not very helpful here.
As a Cockburn fan, I will have to check out your album recommendation! Almost had a chance to meet Cockburn once. I know a woman named Sam Phillips (nee "Leslie Phillips"--you may remember her as the mute assassin in "Die Hard with a Vengeance") and she opened for him once here in Seattle. Since I know Sam, I got to go backstage and visit with her. Cockburn was back there too, surrounded by mobs of people saying variations of "Gee, I love your music!" He looked thoroughly uncomfortable, an obvious introvert, his arms folded protectively across his chest, trying to be gracious, but wishing he could be left alone. So I decided not to be the umptyfirst person to pay dumb compliments to him.
Great concert, though!
Re: the Mary book. Still being reviewed by a publisher. When we see movement you guys'll be the second to know (after my fambly)!
A reader writes:
You've been trying to frame the flareup about the BXVI speech as a media creation, but I don't buy it. The Vatican has had very little real engagement with the Muslim world, in part intending to avoid problems like this latest.
So when the Holy Father gives a speech, the media spins it how they will. Because the Church has not defined itself wrt Islam, the media gets to speak for it.
Well, somebody has to deal with them and so far, the only game in town is the US, mostly the Armed Forces. Truth be told, there's not too many other parties with the institutional strength to have much of an effect. But the Church is one of them, so the fact that it is just sitting this one out is very disappointing.
But by all means this is just a side issue to the main point, which is all about torture committed by US servicemen. Now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
PS. I noticed your citation from Eve Tushnet. You mean we can spell out our commitment against torture in fully legislated bureaucratese, and it _still_ doesn't ban the acts we thought were offensive in the first place. It almost makes you think we have less control over other people than we thought.
Wait. I thought I was blaming the Pope alone. Now I'm blaming the press alone? And it's actually the Church's fault? Because Bronze Age thugs can't take the slightest criticism?
Actually, I was attempting to ask, "What went wrong?" In the course of that, I was suggesting that the Pope blundered by forgetting he was Pope and talking like a university theologian. The quote he introduced was interesting, but not necessary. He ought to have anticipated that ignorami in the press would latch on to it, as they did, and make it the only thing the speech said, which they also did. And the Bronze Age Thugs, then did their bit. Seems to me like I was holding each party responsible for their contribution, not laying the blame at one party's feet. In fact, I should even note that, of course, nothing like the majority of the Islamic world is behaving like babies and bullies. That's why only one nun was shot, only a handful of death threats against the Pope were heard, and only one national figure (in Turkey) compared the Pope to Hitler. Out of a billion people, that's not many. It's just that, compared to the billion people of the Christian world, it's still a pretty dismal performance.
Finally, I'm sure I don't know what you mean about "servicemen" torturing people. The whole point of what I posted yesterday was that the US Military has, to its *enormous* credit resisted Bushie attempts to change the Army regs to make torture possible. As to Eve, her point is quite simple, but I will reiterate it here. All the Fine Moral Distinguishers who have labored to excuse torture would agree that the things depicted in those photos from Abu Ghraib were not torture. Nonetheless, they are obviously morally repellent and contrary to the humani dignity the Church insists is a fundamental human right. That stuff is why Lynndie England and Charles Graner are in prison. And that stuff is what the Bush Administration is laboring to protect and expand.
Bad news: Raised Catholic, of course. As was her sister, who converted to Judaism! No pork at family gatherings! Another triumph of Canadian catechesis!
Good news: Sounds like a very impressive woman who could contribute to the development of moderate Islam in North America
Kathy Shaidle On the Coolness of Vincent Price
She cites the following story from a local Toronto TV show called "Frightenstein":
"Of the hundreds of celebrities I've met in the biz, Vincent Price will always be my favourite, as a result of this show. We shot about four hundred bits with him over a four day session. He accepted the gig because he loved kids and saw the innovation in this vehicle. He allegedly worked for around $13,000 in total when that was commonly his daily appearance rate. He would read the script to himself, put his head down for a few seconds and do a single take read on-camera. Next! At one point the crew was exausted by his pace and he suddenly disappeared. Everyone thought he MUST have gone to collapse somewhere. He had hailed a cab, gone to the local beer store and brought a couple of two-fours into the station. We all sat cross-legged in the studio and listened to his stories of Hollywood and Cecil B. DeMille. The next break we took, he had his picture taken with each crew member in the make-up room. One of the guys blew them up to 8x10's that night and he wrote a personal note to each of us on it. Mine still hangs proudly in my office."
Yes. Very cool.
Nice to Hear from Readers Like This
Rebecca writes:
I'm a frequent reader and infrequent commenter on your blog, and I truly appreciate all the great work you do. I'm a graduate student in genetics and molecular biology (committed to avoiding "creating new sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance"), and your clear, insightful words have helped me to formulate good answers in discussions with colleagues and in my program's mandatory "ethics" classes. During one discussion of embryonic stem cell research, a classmate pointed at me and said, "Ask the Catholic!" Thanks to the beautiful teachings of the Church and people like yourself who apply these teachings to current events, those on-the-spot moments can be great opportunities and not seem intimidating.
"Ask the Catholic" will increasingly be the cry of our culture as it becomes more and more morally and spiritually confused. That's why it's so important for us laypeople to know our faith, so we won't just be blathering the first guess that comes into our heads. Way to go, Rebecca!
Also, Mike writes:
I'm an avid reader and that angel you mentioned has encouraged me to buy a book from you. I don't have the whole PayPal thing figured out yet so could you send me your regular mail address so I can send you a check?
Like I said, I read your blog regularly and it inspired me to make my own . I've talked to your two older sons through it. They seem like really cool guys and if we weren't on opposite ends of the country, we'd probably hang out.
One last thing: I'm in the seminary in pre-theology II so I have several philosophy classes in the college here. Yesterday I sat in Philosophy of God and listened to a college kid explain that torture is ok for national security reasons. Yikes. I've read about the idea on CAEI but never experienced it first-hand. It's scary to think that this is a real discussion and that allowing this sort of thing is being considered.
Anyway, keep up the good work, I really enjoy and benefit from it. Send me your address and I will be ordering a book.
Thanks!
Your brother in Christ,
Aside from the central moral and spiritual lesson of this note--which is that it is good always and everywhere to buy my books and tapes--I am also delighted to hear that Catholics are waking up to the fact that "ends justify the means" thinking is endemic in our culture, and that it is always evil. Way to go, Mike! I'll send you my address shortly.
I'd sure love for them to succeed. The Right is rapidly sliding into the sort of corruption that always overtakes political movements that have no serious opposition. The Dems' lack of ideas and general intellectual bankruptcy is, I am convinced, part and parcel of their death grip on abortion as the last core principle. Sin makes you stupid. And the sin of fealty to the sacrament of abortion has choked out the possibility of the Left interesting anybody but a narrow band of Deaniac, zealots, and conspiracy theorists with very little to say to normal people, which is why they keep losing.
That time, please God, will come for the Right as well, as it continues to morph into the Party of Leviathan With a Cat O' Nine Tails. Much depends on how willing we are to be herded into handing power to commit outrages on the human person over to them in our fear. So far, there is very little indication that we much care about that, since Caesar is assuring us that such power will *never* be used on us, only on Bad Guys. By the time we realize that governments are like Roach Motels--human rights go in, but don't come back out again--we may be too late. Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, I'll be looking for a Third Party. The task is to be faithful, not necessarily effective (particularly if the effect is evil).
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Fails to talk of loss of his total and 100% percent commitment to the sacrament of abortion and the worship of Moloch.
I await more explications of "the Vatican II", the teaching of Pius XXIII, and Mass/Ash Wednesday photo ops from the guy.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Good Morning! It's Day 6 of the Quarterly Catholic and Enjoying It! Pledge Week
We're in the Home Stretch of the Great Autumn Drive. You've done a phenomenal job so far and my dentist, exterminator, IRS collector, kids and mortgage really appreciate it--though not as much as I do. However, we have two more days to go and can use more oomph as we approach the finish line!
Please consider a gift to your humble scribe and click on the PayPal button to the left so that C&EI can stay on the air and nine year old Sean get his teeth fixed. You can either make a straight donation or, if you like to get something for your money (beyond this blog, I mean), you can buy my books and tapes. And if you'd rather not do PayPal, feel free to email me and ask for my snailmail address. I'll happily take a check instead.
Today's your day. All this week, other people have been pitching in to help out. Now the little angel on your shoulder (you know the one that looks just like you with the little tinfoil halo?) is saying, "C'mon, do the right thing! You *love* this blog!"
Remember, if you are interested in my books, don't buy them from Amazon cuz if you do, they get all the money and I get a piddly amount. Get them from me and I'll happily autograph them!
Don't have a TV and so won't see it myself. But it would be a real change of pace to see a Christian character who wasn't just a buffoon, hypocrite, brute, repressive, or ignoramus. TV may grow up yet.
