Catholic and Enjoying It! |
|
 Mark Shea's Blog: So That No Thought of Mine, No Matter How Stupid, Should Ever Go Unpublished Again! Tips are deeply appreciated! Yes! I do take Credit Cards! Atom RSS Feed         Franciscan Friars of the Assumption Province - Religious Vocations for Men   Little Way Web Store  Hard to find holy cards and photographs of St. Therese imported directly from her store in Lisieux. We specialize in carmelite spirituality and offer a wide selection of books and gifts about carmelite spirituality. This is the website you have been waiting for. Gethsemane Garden Stones  Stations of the Cross Garden Stepping Stones transform your garden into a Prayer Garden Check Out "Rock Solid"  Mark Shea's Podcast                   
ARCHIVES
My Site (Mark-Shea.com)04/01/2002 - 05/01/2002 05/01/2002 - 06/01/2002 06/01/2002 - 07/01/2002 07/01/2002 - 08/01/2002 08/01/2002 - 09/01/2002 09/01/2002 - 10/01/2002 10/01/2002 - 11/01/2002 11/01/2002 - 12/01/2002 12/01/2002 - 01/01/2003 01/01/2003 - 02/01/2003 02/01/2003 - 03/01/2003 03/01/2003 - 04/01/2003 04/01/2003 - 05/01/2003 05/01/2003 - 06/01/2003 06/01/2003 - 07/01/2003 07/01/2003 - 08/01/2003 08/01/2003 - 09/01/2003 09/01/2003 - 10/01/2003 10/01/2003 - 11/01/2003 11/01/2003 - 12/01/2003 12/01/2003 - 01/01/2004 01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004 02/01/2004 - 03/01/2004 03/01/2004 - 04/01/2004 04/01/2004 - 05/01/2004 05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004 06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004 07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004 08/01/2004 - 09/01/2004 09/01/2004 - 10/01/2004 10/01/2004 - 11/01/2004 11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004 12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005 01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005 03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005 04/01/2005 - 05/01/2005 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005 08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005 09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005 10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005 11/01/2005 - 12/01/2005 12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006 01/01/2006 - 02/01/2006 02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006 03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006 04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006 05/01/2006 - 06/01/2006 06/01/2006 - 07/01/2006 07/01/2006 - 08/01/2006 08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006 09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006 10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006 11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006 12/01/2006 - 01/01/2007 01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007 02/01/2007 - 03/01/2007 03/01/2007 - 04/01/2007 04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007 05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007 06/01/2007 - 07/01/2007 07/01/2007 - 08/01/2007 08/01/2007 - 09/01/2007 09/01/2007 - 10/01/2007 10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007 11/01/2007 - 12/01/2007 12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008 01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008 02/01/2008 - 03/01/2008 03/01/2008 - 04/01/2008 04/01/2008 - 05/01/2008 05/01/2008 - 06/01/2008 Act One: Writing for Hollywood AirMaria American Chesterton Society Ave Maria Singles Catherine of Siena Institute Catholic Educator's Resource Center Catholic Exchange Crossroads Initiative Decent Films Drudge Report Exceptional Marriages Gilbert Magazine MercatorNet Peter Kreeft Mars Hill Review St. Austin Review St. Blog's Prayer Network Star of the Sea: Catholic Resources from Paul Thigpen David Alexander's Man with Black Hat: Zydeco Catholic Mike Aquilina's Fathers of the Church Rod Bennett: Tremendous Trifles Domenico Bettinelli: Very Sensible Guy Nancy Brown: Flying Stars Elliot Bougis: Fides, Cogitatio, Actio Chris Burgwald's Veritas Cacciaguida: Defending the 12th Century Since the 14th Catholic World News - Off the Record Cosmos Liturgy Sex: That About Covers it All Disputations: Dedicated to Arguing Ross Douthat: The Atlantic's Most Sensible Writer Michael Dubruiel's Annunciations: Sanity in Cyberspace Envoy's Blog: A Banana Republic for Catholic Apologists Dawn Eden: The Dawn Patrol Get Religion: The Smartest Blog on the Web about Religion and Media Dave Hartline: The Catholic Report Heart, Mind and Strength: The Weblog of Exceptional Marriages and Other Fun Stuff Intentional Disciples: The Group Blog of the St. Catherine of Siena Institute Fr. Rob Johansen: Thrownback Christopher Johnson: Midwest Conservative Journal Daniel Larison: Eunomia Fr. Dwight Longenecker: Standing on My Head White Around the Collar Mary's Aggies: Aggies for Mary Mere Comments: Touchstone's blog Mommentary: Elinor Dashwood's Sensible Blog Barbara Nicolosi's Church of the Masses On the Square: The First Things Blog James Preece: Catholic and Loving it! (Not to be confused with another site of a similar name) Dale Price: Dyspeptic Mutterings Scott P. Richert is All About Catholicism Scrappleface: As Funny as the Onion The Shrine of the Holy Whapping: Fun Lovin' Catholic Nerds from Notre Dame Southern Appeal: The Law with 11 Catholic Herbs and Spices Andrew Sullivan: The 800 Pound Gorilla of the Blogosphere Who is Hopelessly Fuddled about Catholicism and Sex Mark Sullivan: Irish Elk Amy Welborn's Charlotte Was Both What's Wrong with the World: Sane People in Insane Times Eve Tushnet: Wide Ranging Mind Daniel Vitz: Committed to an Institute Vox Nova Blog: An Interest Catholic Group Blog Zippy Catholic: Committed to Catholic Common Sense etc
|
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
I will be getting scarce now I've got stuff to write today, and tomorrow we are having a Family Day which will pretty much keep us busy all day what with visits to the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Flight, and other forms of Kid Adventure offered in guilty compensation for the fact that I will be an Absentee Dad for almost two weeks. It's my farewell to the fambly before I head off to England and Ireland early on Friday morning, where I will be till I get back on Nov. 14. If you happen to be reading Across the Pond and you want to know when I will be in your area of the UK, go here. I will try to check in as I can from Europe. Till then, you kids don't put no beans up your noses! Oh! And please don't send me blog links while I'm gone. They will all be fossilized by the time I return. Labels: Speaking gigs One of the ways the world wobbles and calls it "Progress"... is for zealous youth to get tired of being patronized by condescending adults. This is the dynamic that is playing out as Generation Narcissus gets old and can no longer claim exclusive rights to the "We're the Next Generation and We've Got Somethin' to Say" narrative established by the Monkees and the Spirit of Vatican II. So when the rising generation rediscovers how much got trashed in the Revolution of Grooviness that Failed, they get ticked and are highly likely to push in the opposite direction. Some of that push is healthy as young Catholics labor to be a witness to the Faith instead of listening to Generation Narcissus counsels of despair couched in the soft comfy lies of the dictatorship of relativism. But the ever-present danger is that the rising generation will push so far in the opposite direction that they will turn the Faith into an iron cold system of laws and shibboleths designed to keep out the impure, the suspect, and insufficiently orthodox--which will breed another reaction in the next generation of fuzzy, squishy thinkers who want nothing to do with orthodoxy. We are a race of drunkards, perpetually climbing back up on he hose and falling off on the other side. Labels: Generation Narcissus Breck Girl Scratches Out Lady Macbeth's Eyes The spectacle of John Edwards and Hillary arguing about who is more duplicitous and full of phoney rhetoric is delicious. As the Bride of the Triangulator continues her claw to the top by saying Anything, the also-rans make the Dem circus fun by weighing in the really heavy issues such as the need for full disclosure about Roswell. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the government policy on terrorism is driven by Bruce Willis action movie scenarios in which ticking time bombs are an ever-present threat, but a state in which Caesar is empwered to detain anybody he likes as an enemy combatant and torture them is a guarantee of our safety. Under this regime, we have already witnessed the corruption of the AG office under the catastrophic Alberto Gonzales. Now we are in the process of checking out the new guy--Michael Mukasey. He tells us he's against torture (hey! everybody in this Administration says that). But he also tells us he's incapable of figuring out whether waterboarding is torture. The Wall Street Journal (aka Pravda for the Rubber Hose Right) helpfully jumps into the fray at this point and cheerfully informs us that not only is waterboarding not torture, it's probably not even cruel inhuman or degrading. Because, if it were, then the chances of getting another human cipher and sycophant as a rubber stamp for Bush war crimes would be diminished, and we might have to question whether the evil, stupid, sinful, counter-productive policies of the Bush Administration have meant disastrously bad news for America in the war with Radical Islam. and what's more important? That we fight justly and successfully, or that the GOP retain power? Meanwhile, somebody who actually know more about waterboarding than what they can imagine as they sit in the air-conditioned offices of the Journal writes: As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. If this is the case, then waterboarding is unquestionably being used as torture technique. One of the many bullshit arguments used by Bush Torture Apologists (and regurgitated just today by the Isvestia of the Rubber Hose Right) is the attempt to say that *because* we subject our own troops to waterboarding in preparation for the torture techniques inflicted by our enemies, it therefore follows that these are not torture techniques. Other bullshit arguments include "It's not torture if it doesn't leave a mark" (tell that to a rape victim) or "It's not torture if it doesn't shock the conscience" (translation: hire more sociopaths to do your dirty work. They sleep like a baby after a good day's work with the cold cell or the taser.) One unfortunate side effect about all this "How close can we tiptoe to mortal sin without crossing the line" bullshit is that it tends to focus on waterboarding as the ne plus ultra of torture--as though nothing could be worse. That's largely because, as a visual culture driven by images on TV and in the movies, waterboarding is a conveniently cinematic form of torture. So the Wall Street Journal and National Review, like the Administration that give them their cues on how to bullshit the public about war crimes, focuses the discussion there in their ongoing effort to sell the Big Lie. But when you fall for that strategy, it becomes fatally easy for Torture Apologists to then say, "But nobody dies from waterboarding" as though that makes it okay. The point to be made is a) "not dying" is hardly evidence of humane treatment and b) we actually *have* murdered other prisoners using less cinematic techniques. But, of course, the real point, which nobody is yet addressing, is not "How close can we get to mortal sin without crossing the line?" Nor is it to heed the voice of Satan (as some on the Machiavellian neocon Right urge) when he says, "Sometimes you just have to enter into evil and do things you know to be morally wrong for the Greater Good?" No, the real question is "How do we treat prisoners humanely and get the intelligence we need?" The fact that we don't believe that's even a question worth considering, and move *immediately* to the insistence that war crimes are a vital part of the President's "toolbox" for fighting the war on terror, shows conclusively that we, as a nation, do't really believe God when he tells us that mortal sin is never justifiable and is always going to harm us. That's why both parties are so screwed up. The Dems made that decision with Roe and now find themselves led by people who are hollow shells. The Right is embracing mortal sin for similarly consequentialist reasons and will likewise reap the whirlwind. Labels: Evil Party, Salvation Through Leviathan By Any Means Necessary, Stupid Party Murder Inc Gets the Jitters A reader sends along the following letter received by a 40 Days for Life participant who is on the Planned Parenthood mailing list; If ever there was a time to increase our prayer efforts, it is now. God is I like it when Planned Parenthood is in crisis. I will like it even better when the Barad-dur at the heart of our civilization crumbles and falls under the hammer blows of Almighty God--as sooner or later it shall. Labels: Culture of Death Watch Show Me a Culture that Despises Virginity... ...and I'll show you a culture that despises children. Hey! But we sure aren't putting them in burkas, so that makes it alright! Rome or Carthage: pick one, you Christians! No thinking outside the box! Labels: SMACTDVAISYACTDC Some Guy Claims to Predict the Future with Cool New Math Dunno anything about the math. We've been predicting the future with some measure of accuracy since time began. This guy basically claims he can fine tune the accuracy. Maybe so. Maybe not. That will be for be for the specialists to figue out. Labels: News of the Weird Bold Transgressive Artist Commits Arson to Protest the Dogmatic Rigor of the Episcopalian Church Once civilization is destroyed, "art" consists of rearranging the cinders and bragging about your transgressive courage as you mug little old ladies. Labels: Chattering Class Follies Some Advice to Moderate Muslims In which your Blog Host suggests that moderate Muslims try some other approach than one that elicits the cry of "Gimme a break!" and makes a couple of suggestions based on Catholic common sense about the virtue of real penitence. Labels: Clash of Civilizations Watch It was Standing Room Only Last Night... ...for Fr. Robert Spitzer's discussion of the Inevitability of a Singularity in Big Bang Cosmology. 207 people showed up, which was a record for the Chesterton Society. So thanks to all who came! We will try to get a transcript of the talk available soon. And I noticed somebody recording it, so it may wind up as an MP3 somewhere too. That's good, because part of the joy of a Spitzer talk is the sheer verve of the delivery. This is a guy who loves what he does. Essentially his point was that the evidence is now pointing very strongly to the universe as a creation of You Know Who, and a chronicle of the various ways in which determined folk have been attempting to avoid that conclusion, only to be thrust back to reality by the sheer odds of getting a functional universe that could support life (as in "If you wrote out all the numbers the universe could not contain all the zeros" odds). Anyway, a fun talk! Labels: Chestertoniana, Science Jeremy Lott on GOP Groupthink Pigheadedness "That may be a foolish approach but it's the one the Republican party and Republican activists have decided to take, and any dissenters are in for considerable trouble." If, in the mysterious Providence of a universe where sin makes you stupid, we freely vote ourselves into a Hillary v. Rudy election and then are appalled at the work of our hands, it will be very interesting to see what happens with Ron Paul, because for the first time in living memory it will be an election in which huge numbers of the party faithful in both sides will be stuck with a candidate they despise, as well as an alternative they despise. Paul will still lose, of course. But the sleazy antics the GOP is engaging in to shut him down and force everybody back on to the reservation of empty suits and demagogic fearmongerers, combined with the ruthlessness of the Clinton machine, will still make a great David and Goliath story. So far, out of the entire sad spectacle of this election cycle, Paul is almost the only candidate for whom I have any respect. Labels: Politics Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Which Dissenters are Correct? Part Two of my "Tale of Two Covenants" series for the Register, on the relationship of the Old and New Covenants. Labels: National Catholic Register Stuff Abortion: Corrupting Everything It Touches Latest despicable act: Trying to turn doulas into agents of racist "Just enough of me, way too much of you" population control for all those Latina breeders. Dawn Eden remarks: Among the issues raised: Labels: Abortion Polished Post-Anglican Agnostic Hopes that Polished Post-Anglican Agnosticism Can Tut Tut Rabid New Atheists into Decorum In reality, Dalrymple would be the first one to go before the firing squad if Hitchens had his way. His criticisms are all sound, but at the end of the day, his watery secularism and vague appreciation for "western culture" can't commit to Christ Jesus and him crucified. That's the only thing that will suffice to face the mindless hatred of a Hitchens. Labels: Atheism Turns Out When you Have Absolutely No Core Values Except Abortion and the Lust for Power, You Lose Focus and Can't Get Your Act Together The Dems are a hollow shell of what they once were. And (such is the way of fallen man) the GOP is learning exactly the wrong lesson and embracing the consequentialist Machiavellian secular messianism that destroyed the Dems. The party that once rejected the consequentialism behind Roe v. Wade used to have at its helm people that said things like this: "The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiations of the Convention [Against Torture]. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today," - President Ronald Reagan, 1988. What? Not just opposition to torture but to "other inhuman treatment"? Something that looks like an actual attempt to obey the Church's demand that prisoners be treated humanely, and not endless hairsplitting about how we can tiptoe right up to torturing people without technically, legally, precisely having to call it, you know, torture? Thankfully, those days are gone. Now we have the best ethicist money can buy writing in the Wall Street Journal not only is waterboarding not torture, it isn't even clearly "cruel, inhuman or degrading". In this, of course, they are simply following the lead of our Vice President who informs us that this is all just "dunking" and our President, who lyingly assures us that "We do not torture". Somebody needs to send a strongly-worded note to the curators of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, because they have very rudely displayed this painting  which gives the clear impression that waterboarding was some kind of war crime. That kind of Bush Derangement Syndrome is anti-American. Maybe the Dems will eventually be able to formulate a coherent sentence about all this. But since they decided over thirty years ago that murdering babies was okay if you did it for the Greater Good, I'm not going to hold my breath. I expect that God will have to let natural consequences play out as the GOP enmeshes itself more deeply in its Faustian bargain. I hope America survives those consequences. Labels: Salvation Through Leviathan By Any Means Necessary The Future Isn't What it Used to Be This reminds me of this. The guy at the first link is right. The odd thing about America is that our whole system of government is predicated on a faith in the Fall. That's why we have checks and balances: because nobody can be trusted with too much power. The moment fallen man is given power is the moment he is tempted to forget what the power is for and start using it to acquire more power, no matter what it takes. And, just in case you are wondering, "Does this have dark implications for America since we are the sole superpower on earth?" the answer is "Yes." The tension in American culture has always been between Jeffersonian cockeyed optimism and Madisonian realism. Our governmental institutions are founded on the belief that you cannot trust people with power. Our culture is founded more and more on faith in The Wisdom of the Common Man. That, by itself, is not a bad balance. But in the 20th century, there have been fewer and fewer Madisonian voices and more and more flatterers. Our entire advertising industry is all about giving you moral permission to indulge yourself because You Deserve It. Religion has, to a large extent, also been co-opted by the flattery industry. God is crazy about you because you That Sort of Chap. Joel Osteen is the Face of American Protestantism. Jonathan Edwards, not so much. Catholics are afflicted with the Church of Aren't We Fabulous where it's always the Feast of St. Narcissus. Our Manufacturers of Culture are constantly playing to our vanity. And a theology of the Fall is highly inconvenient to this project. It's "guilt manipulation". It's "hatriotism". We want to hear about how wonderful we are, how wronged we've been, how much everybody owes us, how powerful we are. Pavel Chichikov is fond of pointing out that the Sacrifice of Christ was not necessitated because of our failure to use the wrong fork at dinner. Our species is in a desperate plight--even the American members--and Jesus endured nothing less than was absolutely necessary to rescue us from that plight. A culture that forgets it comes of a fallen race is a culture that is doomed to play out out the Fall again. That's why the chipper optimism of The Rev. Carl M. Reinert, S.J., president, The Creighton University circa 1957: Speaking as a clergyman may I dare to predict that after passing through a decade or so of ultra materialistic living we Americans will once again set our sights on things of higher worth and will come to appreciate the greater worth of spiritual values and, though we may find it necessary to defend our position at the cost of many lives, there will stand among us as monuments to our sacred beliefs ancient and new edifices of worship, proclaiming to all who may threaten our borders that it is still God in whom we trust and His Son in whom we find our promise of salvation. is so blackly funny. There is much that is still good and great in America. But it is preserved, paradoxically, by the Madisonian conviction that Americans, like everybody else, cannot be trusted to be good and great. As we become increasingly a culture that says, "Not to you, not to you, O Lord, but to my name give glory" we become increasingly a culture that calls the inhabitant of this prison "free" and has not the slightest idea how to get her or itself out of the dungeon of the dictatoriship of relativism. So we eat popcorn and watch the train wreck. We boast about her and our Bratz wannabes not wearing burkas as they blaspheme, like that makes it all great and glorious. But the truth is, we don't have any more clue how to escape the prison than she does, because we don't know what's good anymore beyond arbitrary license to do whatever I want--just as long as it doesn't hurt other people I regard as people worthy of not being hurt. God is already well out of that circle, which is why blasphemy is no big deal. But blasphemy always leads to oppression because the culture that today is willing to blaspheme the God who is goodness is tomorrow willing to blaspheme the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the weak and the powerless--and pride itself on its daring "transgressiveness". Labels: Doings on Other Blogs Paul Abela, the Development Manager for Campion College in Australia, writes: I have just finished reading your article on the Apostate University which was published in the October edition of Catholic World Report (CWR). Being in Australia, our edition tends to arrive slightly later. Thanks for the note! I am hugely fond of Aussies and Australia and I love that you guys are taking the bull by the horns and creating something good where none exists. Very much in the Aussie spirit! Thanks for your good work! Labels: Cool Stuff Foaming Bronze Age Fanatics Found to Be Foaming Bronze Age Fanatics Tomorrow, no doubt, the UK press will come out with some "fair and balanced" piece about how Methodist tea and crochet clubs are just as bad, what with all the gossip and all. Living in the Dictatorship of Relativism means always having to maintain the fiction that one Abrahamic religion is much of a muchness with another. Labels: Bronze Age Bullies and Media Cowards, One Abrahamic religion is the same as Another Chinese Commies Brutally Pave the Way for the Olympics Commies: As Evil as Ever Don't forget that a fifth of the world still lives under Commie rule. Labels: Commies The Beloved Cow Watches a Little Drama Spin Out in His Room The kid has real promise as a writer. Go here and then here. By the way, in case you didn't know, this--!?--is called an "interrobang". Labels: Cow The ability to come up with new ways to have fun is what separates us from the beasts Labels: Cool Stuff The Delightful Lint Hatcher writes The new website, ChristianHalloweenFan.com, is now open for business — just in time (barely) for Halloween. The podcast area still needs some work, but otherwise everything is functional with an emphasis on "fun". For a look at the unique thought processes of this unique and fun thinker, check out They Made Me a Catholic. Labels: Cool Stuff Monday, October 29, 2007
I just can't decide which I like more: Bizarre Hindi-to-English Misheard Transcription Thriller... or Filipino Prison Inmate Thriller Labels: Humor "And no one - not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments - has found a surefire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms." The answer is obvious: let teachers marry and let women be teachers. Labels: The Situation Speaking of Murder Inc. Marcel LeJeune has an article being carried by the Catholic News Agency about their lies. Way to go, dude! Labels: Abortion, Doings on Other Blogs Charlotte Simmons writes: "I *Demand* Murder Inc Kill the Inconvenient Offspring of my Drunken Slutty Friends or I'll Stomp My Feet and Have a Fit Because I was Raised with the Conviction That it's All About Me" or, as it says before translation: On a campus where drinking seems to be an essential part of life, at least on the weekends, it would seem obvious that our student health center and Planned Parenthood should be happy to stay open to serve UW students in need of help. Labels: Culture of Death Watch Wicca: Spirituality for People Who Still Live in their Mom's Basement When I read this: Donald Lewis, who serves as CEO of Witch School International, said it was the other way around. I think of this guy:
Labels: Humor Pope Benedict Fails to Grasp the Full Implicatins of Living in a Time Where People Think in Sound Bites In a world where people's analytical skills are so compromised that criticizing a blasphemous Israeli jiggle ad can get you tarred as an enemy of Israel, he really should have foreseen that honoring a bunch of priests who were murdered by Commies could only mean that he is an enthusiastic backer of Francisco Franco. Labels: Commies, Persecution, The Last Acceptable Prejudice Wicca: Drivel for Narcissists Whose Sacred Text is the Ny Times Any idiot can worship nature. The greatest pagans of antiquity were and ashamed and puzzled by the problem of nature worship. They knew it was stupid to worship a rock or dung beetle and were embarrased by such ignorant folkways, thought they didn't know quite how to escape the problem. The dimestore pagans of today don't even see that there's a problem. Labels: Chattering Class Follies The Thoughtful and Wonderful Aimee Milburn... writes to tell me of Will Duquette's fascinating story of his decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. It's in multiple parts. Do thou check it out. Will! Welcome! Labels: Converts, Doings on Other Blogs Wow! Two Peter Kreeft Mentions in One Day! A reader writes: I'd like to recommend two excellent CD lecture series by Peter Kreeft. Since they are only sold at Barnes and Noble, it may be that some of your readers who are Kreeft fans are not aware of these series. The first one is, If you are not familiar with Kreeft's work, do check him out. Delightful! Labels: Cool Stuff Top Scientist is Either a World Class Idiot or He's Having One Over on the British Press Labels: News of the Weird Here's a Reporter in Such a Panic About the Menace of Homeschoolers that he Doesn't even Bother to Talk to One Just regurgitates some standard issue agitprop from Dumbemdown District and call it good. Fairly unbalanced. Labels: Reasons to Homeschool Hey Western Washington! Mark your Calendars for Tomorrow Night!
Labels: PSA Friday, October 26, 2007
Perhaps the Silliest Thing I've Posted This Week Hat tip, Mary's Aggies And a suitable place to say, "See you Monday!" Oh, by the way, I will be on "The Right Hook" (an Irish radio program) this Monday at about 10:15ish AM Pacific time (that's 5:15ish PM Irish time). If you click the link you can stream the broadcast. Labels: Humor Professor Bainbridge Wonders Why We Are So Miserable Personally, I think it's due, not to the circumstances in which we find ourselves but to the selves we find in our circumstances. That's why I think "Be Not Afraid" is still the counsel of the Holy Spirit in this hour. One of the consequences of abandoning trust in God is servile fear and all the panic, sin, and stupidity that goes with it. It's all in Leviticus. That's the great lie and blunder of the Strength Through Evil Project our nation embraced with Roe and is now deepening with Bush's embrace of torture. The reality is that only repentance brings hope and restores courage. Continued and deepened hardness of heart does not confer strength. It just leaves you prey to becoming so afraid that the sound of a driven leaf puts a nation to flight. Labels: Consequentialism on Parade, Doings on Other Blogs, Salvation Through Leviathan By Any Means Necessary A reader writes: My next-door neighbor is a good, solid fella and a well-meaning, albeit fairly new Christian. He's married to a former Catholic, and they attend a non-denom (read: anti-Catholic) church. This is not something I've spent much time on, so I don't have a bibliography. Anyone? Bueller? Labels: Mailbag Bellarmine University Keeps Evangelizing for Moloch No doubt it's "in the Catholic tradition". But they did allow Dawn to speak in some closet somewhere, so I guess that makes them "partners in dialogue". Labels: Culture of Death Watch, Doings on Other Blogs James Watson and the Troubled Conscience of Postmodern Culture As the West continues the project of trying to be happy without God, it imagines it can go on living off of Catholic capital forever. And so it imagines that by chasing James Watson and his crazy eugenism from the field it know which way the future is going. Me: I think Watson is (barring the repentance of the West) the future. After all, we have make steady progress on any number of fronts in ensuring that, in a private, neat, and efficient way, much of Hitler's dreams of a race improved by the murder of the weak and inconvenient is realized. Eugenics, in temporary eclipse after the war, is now making a great comeback. The Dutch, who ostensibly withstood Hitler, are now pioneers in his dream of offing the lives unworthy of being lived. Throughout the West, it is common wisdom that the Unfit should be terminated before birth and when they get too old and sick to change the Beatles CD. Beyond that, the dictatorship of relativsm means, at bottom, that the only thing ensuring the claim of "equality" is power since we categorically reject the notion that man is made in the image and likeness of God. And when the temporary truce of peace between different ethnicities and peoples imposed by the rule of law in the US is sundered? The fact is, there's not a thing in the world to stop some bright boy from deciding that Watson is right and [insert undesirable ethnicity here] is "unfit" for survival. As i have repeatedly pointed out, "all men are created equal" is not an empirically verifiable statement. It is a piece of mystical dogma inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition and only that. What Watson has done is take materialist premises that post-modern enemies of Christianity like and follow them to logical conclusions they don't like. The key to defeating Watson' evil eugenicism is to combat, not the conclusions, but the premises. But that, of course, requires repenting of the entire anti-Christ project. And we in the West never meant it to come to that! Labels: Culture of Death Watch Any song with the rhyme "We Don't Fancy/Necromancy" has my vote This is a sort of a concatenation of Catholic Answers Tracts set to music by some guy. The hilarious thing is that I'm sure, within a few weeks, there will be detailed theological analyses of each and every word over at NotRoman.org and the HindenburgSizeEgoistsforCalvinism site. Outraged posts from grim humorless Calvinists filled with zeal for TRVTH will fly around the web pointing out that It's Not Factually Accurate that nobody questioned the canon of Scripture till 1517 blah blah blah. For a look at the weird hothouse subculture of online apologetics wars, go here. Hat tip: Love to Be Catholic Labels: Humor Pete Vere on Phillip Pullman's Atheist Kid Lit Agitprop Yes, but since WETA is doing the special effects for the films, that means they are "in the tradition of The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia"! Let's go, kids! Labels: Atheism Kool-Aid Drinkers and the Seamless Shroud Yesterday, I ran a brief account of yet another moment of shame from this Administration's reckless embrace of Strength Through War Crimes: the FBI's threats to torture the *family* of a suspected terrorist. The guy confessed--and then it was discovered that he was innocent. As a capper, when the 2nd Circuit Court wrote the opinion on the case, the Bush Administration ordered the opinion redacted so all the torture-threats-to-the-family stuff was taken out (for "national security reasons" doncha know). Naturally then, one of the Kool-Aid drinkers in my combox writes "it looks like one FBI agent got a little aggressive" and remonstrates with me for citing a ritually impure source for the story. A little agressive. Right. It will probably not satisfy the Kool-Aid Drinker, but here is the unredacted 2nd Circuit opinion, free of Bush Administration attempts to cover their tracks. In other Kool-Aid drinker news, another comboxer writes the latest "My Country: Right or Wrong" response (which, as Chesterton observed, is like saying "My Mother: Drunk or Sober"): Shocking. In a country of 300+ million with hundreds of thousands of active soldiers and police you hear of numerous instances of unlawful force and threats, which are subsequently investigated and punished. Two lies are at the heart of this post, and I can only hope for the author's sake that he doesn't actually believe them. The first is the "few bad apples" defense. It's hard for me to believe, at this late date, that this particular writer is still unaware that this action is an expression of Administration policy the Executive has fought tooth and nail to preserve. The second, which is far more dangerous for the author if he actually applies it in his own life, is the notion that the only proper response to shame for sin is "to pull up stakes and move out of this befouled land". If he applies that in his own life to his own sins, the only analogous response to grave sin would be suicide. Me: I'm a Catholic, not a pagan Machiavellian consequentialist. I believe when you (or your country) is involved in grave evil, you strive for repentance and trust in the mercy of God. Part of the evil of embracing a pagan torture ethic is that you radically reject the mercy of God. And if you radically reject the mercy of God, the only response to the realization of your own sinfulness is suicide. That's why Jesus has all those warnings about "the measure you use will be measured to you". A person (or people) who reject the mercy of God for others will find none for themselves, not because God is merciless, but because "to the impure all things are impure" including God. They will flee him as a Monster made in their own image and likeness. Juli Loesch Wiley is right: the Culture of Death is a Seamless Shroud. Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy! Labels: Culture of Death Watch, Salvation Through Leviathan By Any Means Necessary The Governator Takes a Big Step Toward Turning California Into Holland Tolerance is not enough. You. MUST. Conform. You must not think of heterosexuality as "normal". Schwarzenegger will fit in nicely with the Giulianification of the Party. Labels: Gay Blackshorts on the March Relic Veneration for Leftist Morons Gotta love the accompanying piece: "Che Guevara‘s ideals lose ground in Cuba" Please God, I hope so! I will never fathom the adulation accorded that filthy butcher. Labels: Commies Naked Sleepwalker Crisis! Something else to look forward to while I'm in the UK. Labels: News of the Weird Nerdular Nerdance from the Beloved Cow Dad!: Today, my son, you are a Shea. Labels: Book recommendations, Cow Truthers Continue to Win Friends and Influence People I think Kathy Shaidle is right: a radical inclination to bizarre conspiracy theories is a sort of personality disorder. Labels: News of the Weird Thursday, October 25, 2007
I am Ashamed of my Country "My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word ‘torture’ comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister... [L]et's just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with terrorists and by the same token, some people who actually could be —might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn’t going to risk that. I wasn’t going to risk that, so I thought to myself what could I say that he would believe. What could I say that’s convincing? And I said okay," - Abdallah Higazy, explaining why he confessed to being a terrorist after the FBI threatened to have his family identified and tortured by the Egyptian authorities. The man was found, very embarrassingly to be innocent. Caesar is already hurrying to cover his tracks on this one. No doubt the Rubber Hose right media will comply with the requisite tergiversation, jokes, and accusations of America-hatred aimed at silencing the critics of the liars and war criminals in the Executive branch who tell us "We do not torture". Labels: Salvation Through Leviathan By Any Means Necessary I Soooo Don't Suck! I am Majorly Not-Lame! This past weekend I spoke at a retreat for students at a Catholic High school in Georgia. I'm always a bit nervous speaking to high schoolers because I basically assume they are a captive audience who thinks the Fat Guy is Boring and Lame. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear from the teacher who organized the talk (on the rather advanced topic of the Four Senses of Scripture): Pretend this email is a professionally-worded thank-you note on our stationery (perhaps one shall arrive in the mail soon) and bask in our appreciation. Note to the puzzled reader: if you want to know what these cryptic references mean, you need to hire me to come speak at your parish, school, conference or gathering on Making Senses Out of Scripture. All will be illuminated! I did a follow-up activity with them on Monday and Tuesday in which they had to read selected passages from Scripture and then match them up with cards containing commentary based on one of the four senses - like, you get the card where Paul talks about how "they were baptized into Moses" and you have to match it up with Exodus 14 and identify it as the spiritual sense of scripture. It is great fun to hear the various pronunciations of "eschatological." They did pretty well and I think this is going to "stick." Zero "that guy was so boring" comments! I feel affirmed in my okayness! It reminds me of that wonderful scene in Hill Street Blues years ago, when Sgt. Belker, filled with gratitude for a kindness the Counselor has done him, exclaims to her, "You're the furthest thing from a hairball there |
