Church News, Surprising & Un-

Surprising: the Druid says the Anglican church is going to resist the government's move to further normalize same sex marriage. Good for him...but on what possible ground can the Anglican Church take this position, since it accepts a gay "married" bishop --even if he's about to retire?

he said it held a clear position that marriage is between a man and a woman and would not consider changing this stance. 

Is that what you understood to be the clear position of the Anglican church?

Less surprising: two German lawyers are charging the Pope with crimes against humanity at the ICC. 

They claim the Pope “is responsible for the preservation and leadership of a worldwide totalitarian regime of coercion which subjugates its members with terrifying and health-endangering threats.”

Usual complaints: he's against condoms, which is exactly like personally injecting people with AIDS as everyone knows; and they blame him for abuse of minors. Blah-de-blah, that'll never hold up, especially since incidents dropped to almost nil after he imposed new protocols as head of the CDF. The Church has had a problem, but no person in the world has done more to stop it and root out corruption of this sort than he.

Interesting picture of baptism they paint, though:

“acquires its members through a compulsory act, namely, through the baptism of infants that do not yet have a will of their own;”  “a grave impairment of the personal freedom of development and of a person’s emotional and mental integrity.”

They object to the threat of hellfire...but not, apparently, to the threat of beheading. Cowards!

Even less surprising than B16 being called a criminal for opposition to condoms is hipsters ignoring concrete evidence that he's right. Anyone happen to remember the director of Harvard's AIDS prevention program siding with the Pope two years ago?

"There is," Green added, "a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded 'Demographic Health Surveys,' between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates.

Ceaselessly cleaning up his own Church: that hypocrite! Being completely right on the fact that we produce more of what we subsidize: that bastard! Desiring every person to know he has innate dignity and is dear to God: monster!

ninme Predicts

In keeping with tradition, ninme predicts who'll win the oscars without having seen any of the movies. Though this year she broke down and saw two.

I've actually seen three of the ten nominees, though only two in the theater, as opposed to my usual zero. This does not up my desire to watch the ceremony in the slightest.

Amen & Hallelujah!

Sayed Mussa has been freed and is out of Afghanistan (he's the guy facing the death penalty for converting to Christianity). I never heard the story of his conversion before:

Mussa said his move to Christianity began during the Afghan civil war when the house of his neighbor, a porter with eight children, was bombed.
He saw two foreign women arrive in a white vehicle who were not afraid to search through the rubble despite the presence of armed men nearby.
“Many tried to hide, but the women didn’t,” said Mussa.
He was curious about the women, who were able to find one person alive in the rubble. He later learned they were Christian aid workers who helped Afghans in a clinic.
That prompted Mussa to learn more about the Christian faith. He met a man named Mohammad Hussein, who had recently returned from Iran and was a Christian convert. Mussa pressed him for religious books and other information about Christianity.

Protesting The Mass

I may be mistaken --perhaps the law has been amended since-- but I think this kind of protest is not legal. When the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinics) bill was passed "protecting" abortion clinics from Operation Rescue and creating "speech-free" zones outside of abortion clinics, there was an amendment tied to it that applied the same rules to houses of worship (this was in the days of ACT-UP, and pro-family forces got at least this bone thrown them in a bill that was otherwise a loss for them). If someone called the cops on the protesters, I believe they could be driven across the street by law.

Moot Point

 Shamelessly pinched from here, whence many other pix from inside Libya

ninme had an amusing post title the other day:

A Brief History of Muammar Mo’ammar Moammar Moamer Mu’ammar Mu’amar Muamar Qaddafi Gadhafi Kaddafi Qadhafi El Kadhafi Gadafi al-Qadafi El Kazzafi al-Gaddafi Al Qathafi Al Qathafi el-Gadhafi El Kadhafi al-Qadhafi al-Qadhdhafi Qadafi Gaddafi Qadhdhafi Khaddafi al-Khaddafi Ghaddafy al-Kadafi Ghaddafi Quathafi Gheddafi Al-Kaddafi Ghadafi Kaddafi Khadafy Qudhafi al-Qaddafi, AKA Mulazim Awwal Mu’ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi.

Seems we can retire that question, though I continue to be confused about why it's so difficult for us to settle on an anglicization of names translated from other alphabets. At the very least can't we agree that it's not right to spell things so as to make them unpronounceable in English?

On a similar note, remember when the Contras were in the news all the time and suddenly Peter Jennings et al started pronouncing Nicaragua as Neekarawha? Couldn't help but laugh the past month at the fact that the fellow who's been for 30 years HAHZ-nee MooBAHRak to us suddenly this month became HōZ-nee MoobarAHK. Who decides these things?

All The President's Friends

brotherhood versus the Brotherhood in Egypt

Anyone know what's happening in Egypt? I am confused. ninme's found a hopeful link from Amir Taheri.

In the 1980s, the Arabs were promised their version of “get-rich” capitalism starting with Egypt’s infitah (liberalisation) strategy. In a decade all Arab states moved towards the market economy. But Arab capitalism turned out to be a subterfuge for plunder by a few. Its iconic leader, the Tunisian despot Zine Al Abedine bin Ali, was more Al Capone than Adam Smith.
Nationalism, socialism, capitalism and Islamism, all with an Arab prefix, proved to be nothing but different masks for despotic rule. They all failed, and there is no echo of them anywhere in the unfolding revolt. Today the main slogan is: “Freedom, freedom now.” It is the first time in decades that large numbers of Arabs have gathered together without burning the American and Israeli flags or shouting: “Death to the Infidel.”

We saw the pictures of Christians defending Muslims as they prayed and Muslims attending the Christian Mass during the demonstrations.

But then there's this story of one of the masterminds of the revolution being refused opportunity to address the crowds by wicked Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradawi, who's suddenly returned (having been exiled by Mubarak).

The grand opportunist like a thief in the night and in broad daylight bullied his way to address a million Egyptians, urging them to “Protect the revolution and don’t you dare let anyone steal it from you.” Except for him, of course, promising that soon he “will pray on the Jerusalem Al-Aqsa (Temple Mount)” not as a pilgrimage since visiting it is a “shame” and “forbidden by Sharia” so long as Israel exists.

And then there's this. Apparently they are chanting, "To Jerusalem we go, martyrs in the millions."


Nina Shea reports on a letter from an Egyptian friend. Al-Qaeda's mastermind, al-Zawahiri, who's Egyptian if memory serves, has written a letter to the Egyptian people calling on them to extinguish the Copts, basically.

Christchurch

Blessed Sacrament Cathedral -David Wethey/NZPA/Associated Press

Poor folk: two big quakes within 6 months of each other! This one's considered an aftershock of September's apparently.

 Martin Hunter/Getty Images

Notice anything about this picture? More amazing photos here.

On Wisconsin

The Wisconsin Catholic Conference has weighed in on the revolt in Madison with the kind of statement that shows the bishops don't agree amongst themselves. It's studiously "neutral," and yet kinda sorta critical of Gov. Walker's government.
Bishop Morlino of Madison, however, has issued his own statement --also neutral, but kinda sorta critical of the unions, albeit in a way that makes an important point about the common good. Here's why the Church must be neutral:

the present dilemma comes down to either a choice for the common good, of sacrifice on the part of all, at times that pose immense economic threats, both present and future on the one hand, and on the other hand, a choice for the rights of workers to a just compensation for services rendered, and to the upholding of contracts legally made. As Catholics, we see both of these horns of the dilemma as good, and yet the current situation calls many of us to choose between these two goods. Thus the WCC has taken a neutral stance, and this is the point of Archbishop Listecki’s recent statement, which I have echoed.

The remainder of his letter is an effort to show --without taking sides-- how a person of upright conscience might think through such a dilemma. Reasonable people can disagree, but the demonstrations in Madison tell us a lot about how infected we are by relativism:

The present situation...is one which admits of disagreement in conscience as to which alternative is most appropriate. As I indicated, I believe that the final question boils down to: is the sacrifice which teachers and other labor union members are called to make fair?

The problem with responding to that question, of course, is that there appears to be no common ground in terms of what the word “fair” actually means among various individuals. Some believe that “a fair solution” would require sacrifice from everyone but self. The relativism of our culture and society once again does us grave harm, because the cultural response to the question of the meaning of “fair” is, “well, what’s fair for you is fair for you and what’s fair for me is fair for me,” leaving us no common ground for reasonable and civil discourse. We are left with our emotions about the word “fair.” This, then, is a moment in our state and in our nation when the terrible effects of relativism on a culture are being blatantly displayed.

He asks his people to pray carefully about their own decisions, to read the WCC letter, but also the ponder this quotation from JP II's Laborem Exercens:

Just efforts to secure the rights of workers who are united by the same profession should always take into account the limitations imposed by the general economic situation of the country. Union demands cannot be turned into a kind of group or class ‘egoism,’ although they can and should also aim at correcting — with a view to the common good of the whole of society — everything defective in the system of ownership of the means of production or in the way these are managed. Social and socioeconomic life is certainly like a system of ‘connected vessels,’ and every social activity directed towards safeguarding the rights of particular groups should adapt itself to this system.

A little more.

“In this sense, union activity undoubtedly enters the field of politics, understood as prudent concern for the common good. However, the role of unions is not to ‘play politics’ in the sense that the expression is commonly understood today. Unions do not have the character of political parties struggling for power; they should not be subjected to the decision of political parties or have too close links with them. In fact, in such a situation they easily lose contact with their specific role, which is to secure the just rights of workers within the framework of the common good of the whole of society; instead they become an instrument used for other purposes.”

In other words, the Church supports unions, but unions are meant to be instruments of the common good, not factions or instruments of a political party.

Update: Mr. W. points out something I'd not thought of before. Namely that collective bargaining makes no sense for a public sector union:

A legislature cannot bind itself to a contract at all (though we do say this, it's a metaphor).  It's a sovereign body, which means that it is paramount to every private activity. It always addresses the common good, and the common good, or what it requires, can change suddenly.  If the state is about to go bankrupt, for example, the legislature has no authority from the people to let this happen because the legislature had bound itself to abide by contracts with employees that are causing the bankruptcy.

The general phrase here is sovereign state immunity.  It means that a state (principally the lawmakers) cannot be sued by its own citizens for breaching a contract.  State executives do make contracts all the time, and once the work is done and payment given for it, it's over.  Here's an article that might help:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_v._Louisiana

Earth Girls Are Easy

Paging GDE...who once had the awesome idea of running an Alfred E. Newman-style photo in every college newspaper in the country of some smug, self-involved jerk smiling for the camera and proclaiming, "What, me worry? My girlfriend's pro-choice."
Parody, as is commonly observed, is no longer possible, however:

 

Shamelessly pinched from here

Stung Again

Two updates on two related stories. First, LiveAction's sting videos aren't the only source of trouble for Planned Parenthood. There's also the evidence from Kansas DA Phill Kline in the suit aimed at getting him disbarred (for investigating abortion clinic practices).

Kline just revealed to the court under oath that he found 166 instances during a specific time period when girls 14 years old and younger got abortions at clinics owned either by late-term abortionist George Tiller or Planned Parenthood of Overland Park.
But during that same time period, Kline testified, Planned Parenthood reported only one case of child rape, and Tiller reported only one case of child rape.
This means there were 164 instances when girls 14-years-old and younger had abortions at one of those abortion clinics, and the clinics failed to report the abortions to authorities. 

And LiveAction responds to its critics-- and Janet Smith weighs in on their side, as does Bl. Cardinal Newman.

Update: PS on the Phill Kline trial.

The state's disciplinary board for lawyers concealed for 20 months an internal investigative report concluding no probable cause existed to justify ethics complaints against former Attorney General Phill Kline tied to his criminal inquiries into abortion clinics.

All Your Comments Are Belong To Us

Price hikes and dissatisfaction are about to occasion my switch to another comment system --too bad, because we were right in the middle of a nice "fight" on a series of posts. The old comments have been saved and exported, and I'll make an effort to import them into the new system if possible, but for now they are about to go "poof." If they don't return, blame technology, not censorship: my apologies.

Update: Grr. Echo doesn't play nice with anyone. They made it hard to import comments last year; have been incredibly officious about pricing (I coughed up the nominal fee last year to save my comments, but they did not mention last year that this year the price I paid for the year would become a monthly fee...would have never have used them in the first place had I known); and it doesn't let you export comments in a format usable by other platforms. Boo! Hiss!

Might cut and paste in some of the most interesting discussions...but I have a life, and one must learn to be detached...so probably not.

Obama Beclowns Us

Gaddafi's got his air force bombing his own people and what's the U.S. got to say about it?
/crickets

This on the heels of the U.S. almost voting to condemn Israel at the UN this week; and then when we finally vetoed that course of action, Ambassador Rice rolled her eyes and in every way signaled she didn't believe a thing she said.

And our DIA hasn't a clue what's going on in the world.

This ain't good, kids. The smart sophomores used to getting "A's" after cramming for the exam are running things.The world is learning the US is weak and untrustworthy. Not a way to keep friends; not a way to dissuade enemies.

Bernard Nathanson

So sorry to hear of the passing away, from cancer this morning, of Bernard Nathanson. An ob/gyn and abortionist who helped found NARAL, he was later convinced by ultrasound technology of the humanity of the unborn child, repented, and became an important pro-life champion. He was creator of "Silent Scream," an ultrasound film which shows a child in the womb fleeing from the abortionist's instruments.

In his 1996 autobiography The Hand of God, he told the story of his journey from pro-abortion to pro-life, saying that viewing images from the new ultrasound technology in the 1970s convinced him of the humanity of the unborn baby. Outlining the enormous challenge of restoring a pro-life ethic, he wrote, “Abortion is now a monster so unimaginably gargantuan that even to think of stuffing it back into its cage … is ludicrous beyond words. Yet that is our charge — a herculean endeavor.”
He noted, regretfully, “I am one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.”

His autobiography, The Hand of God, tells the story of, among other things, his conversion to Catholicism.

Nathanson later said that he was drawn closer to God while viewing a massive Operation Rescue event, when hundreds sat down in front of a New York Planned Parenthood building, blocking traffic. The sight of so many pro-lifers selflessly sacrificing their selves and risking arrest made him realize that they must be answering a higher call, he explained.
In an epilogue to the second edition of The Hand of God, Father McCloskey called the book “one of the more important autobiographies of the twentieth century,” which documents “man’s inhumanity both to humanity and to his personal self, and the possibility of redemption.”
Another strong factor in his conversion was the book Pillar of Fire, by noted psychiatrist Dr. Karl Stern, who tells of his own journey from Judaism to the Catholic Church. Nathanson studied briefly under Stern in medical school, though at that time he did not know about Stern’s conversion. It was only years later, when Nathanson read Pillar of Fire that he learned off his former professor’s religious views.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.

More, Please.

 Public penance

We need much more of this....

Handicapping Government Shutdown

Will it or won't it?

Thank You, Mr. Kreeft

Everyone but everyone has now weighed in on the ethics of LiveAction, but Mr. Kreeft does so while making my point about the destruction of moral reasoning and the pernicious influence of Kant --and so much better than I could have. And not a moment too soon, because the casuists and manualists were making inroads with me, against my every instinct, in the LiveAction case.

The controversy about Live Action probably is rooted in a controversy about method in ethics, specifically about which should have priority, (1) clear definitions of general moral principles and valid logical reasoning from them (“casuistry”) or (2) moral experience, instinctive moral judgments about concrete situations by our innate moral common sense. I think it is (2) and I think these critics think it is (1). I think they are so (rightly) afraid of moral relativism that they have (wrongly) fallen into moral legalism.

I would have said --and I disagree with the likes of Robbie George with fear and trembling-- that they fear utilitarianism and consequentialism so deeply that they in effect disallow any consideration of consequences --and this is clearly a violation of the virtue of prudence. It's Kant, not Catholicism. But to let Kreeft speak:

The question of method in moral reasoning has a long and heavy history. Beginning with Ockham (Nominalism), exacerbated by Descartes (Rationalism), and even more by Kant (his ‘Copernican revolution in philosophy’), our concept of ‘reason’ has been increasingly separated from experience and narrowed to something more and more resembling what computers do. The Aristotelian and Thomistic (and, more generally, pre-modern) meaning of ‘reason’ is broader. It had to be, to justify the definition of man as ‘the rational animal.’ It included the immediate, intuitive understanding (‘the first act of the mind’ in Aristotelian-Scholastic logic) and intuitive judgment (‘the second act of the mind’) as well as inductive or deductive reasoning (‘the third act of the mind’).
We moderns have narrowed ‘intuition’ as we have narrowed ‘reason,’ so that ‘intuition’ now means ‘irrational feeling.’ ‘Intuitive reason’ or ‘rational intuition’ sounds to us like an oxymoron. When we read Pascal’s famous saying that ‘the heart has its reasons, that the reason does not know,’ we think he is exalting something else against reason, when he is saying exactly the opposite: that the heart, the faculty of immediate intuition, has reasons. It sees. It has eyes. It is a crucial part of ‘reason.’

This is the meat:

We have also, especially in philosophy, narrowed the term ‘experience’ to mean strictly sense experience, which we share with the other animals. (‘Animals’ has also narrowed, so that we no longer classify ourselves as ‘rational animals’ unless we are materialists.) Thus we no longer see ‘moral intuition’ or its application to our moral judgment of concrete situations like Live Action’s ‘sting’ as part of ‘reason,’ as Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas did. (Aquinas called this moral intuition ‘synderesis.’)
This is not simply a case of altered conventional usage, but of real error. Since we are not angels, all our knowledge begins with experience, and our moral knowledge begins with moral experience—experience of concrete cases. Before we reason about these (by ‘ratio,’ the ‘third act of the mind’), we understand them (by ‘intellectus,’ the ‘first act of the mind’) and judge them (the ‘second act of the mind’) by the ‘habit’ of moral judgment. In other words, we begin with the concrete, not with the abstract. Only after experience do we rise to the level of abstractions, i.e. articulated, defined, and defended principles, definitions, and deductions. If we do not begin with experience, we become nominalists, not realists; we have nothing real to argue about, only names and the logical relationships between them—like a computer.

Well, amen! That is exactly the phenomenon that has troubled me increasingly for years --and I see it in my own field carried over into serious mistakes in the realm of discernment of spirits. People know that faith is not feelings and therefore emotions may need to be resisted; but the deepest motions of the soul are to be followed once we learn to truly recognize them --but people aren't taught to recognize them, and mistrust them if they do! Rather than making judgments and owning our decisions, we try merely to avoid mistakes...and rely a lot on formulae. Back to Kreeft:

That is why the simplest and most common form of argument among ordinary people is arguing by analogy, from one concrete situation to another that is similar or analogous, letting the common principle that justifies the analogy be implicit rather than explicit. The simplest and most basic example of this in morality is the Golden Rule, which is often expressed to small children by the formula ‘How would you like it if we did that to you?’ This is an appeal to the moral imagination, which is concrete, rather than to moral reasoning (either in the form of a definition, a defined universal principle, or a deductive argument from a principle to an application of it). Without this moral imagination, no moral reasoning is possible for us. In other words, we are not angels.

Funny he brings this up, because I got distracted during my holy hour this morning and was thinking through this problem, and the golden rule is precisely what occurred to me as my own way of framing the problem. If I were a child about to be aborted; a mother about to harm her child; or a benighted Planned Parenthood worker committed to error, what would I have others do unto me?

This first step is not sufficient for moral philosophy; of course. We also need to (1) rise by abstraction to universal principles, (2) define them correctly, and (3) deduce conclusions from them. But though not sufficient, it is necessary, like the foundation of a building; for we are neither angels nor computers but human beings with moral experience and imagination and the innate power and habit of moral understanding and judgment, moral ‘common sense,’ which makes instinctive judgments about moral experiences.
These judgments are not infallible, of course. But they do see moral truth, moral reality. They are like physical vision in those two ways. God did not leave us in such a moral limbo that we had to depend on the philosophers....

Another thing to thank him for.

any argument that begins by contradicting our moral common sense is almost certainly going to be wrong.

A good example is Euthyphro, the young man in the Platonic dialog by that name who is impiously prosecuting his own father for murder while professing to be an expert on piety. (‘Piety’ was the ancient virtue of respect both for gods and for elders, ancestors, and family.) In reasoning with Euthyphro, Socrates does not begin with logic, he begins with an instinctive astonishment, which is an implicit moral judgment that Plato expects all morally sane readers to share. Until we read Socrates’ arguments, we don’t clearly know why Euthyphro is wrong, but we know that he is wrong.
Readers of the Gospels do the very same thing when they meet the Pharisees, who could put up strong arguments for a literalism and legalism about the Sabbath and against Jesus’ apparent disregard for it. I think we should have the same reaction to the critics of Live Action. These people are of course far, far better people than either Euthyphro or most of the Pharisees. (But remember Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Gamaliel!). But they are wrong, and wrong not just logically but “you gotta be kidding”ly.

Continuing....

Most of my students, however confused their abstract philosophical and ideological principles may be, are ordinary people of normally sane and fairly healthy consciences (except, of course if it has anything even remotely to do with sex). When they are confronted by a moral legalist like Kant who holds that all lying is morally wrong, they instinctively sense that he is wrong, though they cannot explain why—just as most students, when confronted by St. Anselm’s ‘ontological argument,’ instinctively know it is wrong somehow, though they cannot refute it logically. Similarly, most (though not all) pro-lifers instinctively side with Live Action even if they cannot answer the arguments of its critics. (Is it an accident that its critics are more Kantian than Aristotelian?)

And see, it is all Kant's fault:

Similarly, when we discuss Kant and the issue of lying, most of my students, even the moral absolutists, are quite certain that the Dutchmen were not wrong to deliberately deceive the Nazis about the locations of the Jews they had promised to hide. They do not know whether this is an example of lying or not. But they know that if it is, than lying is not always wrong, and if lying is always wrong, then this is not lying. Because they know, without any ifs or ands or buts, that such Dutch deception is good, not evil. If anyone is more certain of his philosophical principles than he is that this deception is good, I say he is not functioning as a human being but as a computer, an angel, a Gnostic, or a Kantian.

 And one more thing, because this argument has really troubled me in the ongoing discussion the past few days.

But can’t we solve the problem of the Dutchmen and the Nazis by saying that all lying is wrong but the Dutchmen don’t have to lie to save the Jews because they could deceive the Nazis without lying by a clever verbal ploy? No, because effective deception by clever verbal ploys cannot usually be done by ordinary people, especially by clumsy Dutchmen. I know; I’m one of them. Our moral obligations depend on abilities that are common, not abilities that are rare

Not to mention, as Brett McS pointed out in comments, you're already "lying" in the casuist definition if you're hiding Jews in the first place.

Then he comes up with the analogy that has occurred to me and troubled me greatly in all the discussion about enhanced interrogation techniques over the past few years.

If you were watching your son or daughter being raped while you were disarmed and tied up and had only words as weapons, and if there was some lie you could tell to the rapist that would stop him, do you really mean to tell me that you would not tell that lie? If so, I thank God that you were not my father.

That's exactly what I think whenever reading about the "rubber-hosed right."

I know there are universal, objective moral absolutes. I know that a good end does not justify an evil means. I know that we should not ever murder or rape or blaspheme even to save the world. But I think your child would probably understand that. In the above horrible scenario, if the rapist could be deterred only by watching you rape or murder some other victim, or defecate on a crucifix, you should not do it—and your child, his victim, would probably understand that. But your child would certainly not understand why you could not save him by lying to the rapist.

Update: and in jumps Hadley Arkes, also on the side of LiveAction. Though kinder to Kant, he stands on ultimately where Kreeft does: in what Frederick Wilhelmsen used to call the "real."

Is he [Tollefson, who got this ball rolling] earnestly saying then that householders speaking to the Gestapo at the door are obliged to refrain from speaking untruthfully, for they do not directly intend the consequences of turning in the Jews they are hiding? That those are merely consequences that flow, regrettably, from their insistence on avoiding the taint of speaking an untruth? Is he really willing to stand by that?
Tollefsen falls into an embarrassing ellipsis in side-stepping a matter pressed even more recently, and raised in the challenge by Christopher Kaczor on the matter of infiltrating terrorist cells: We have undercover agents working with terrorists, and they have managed to disrupt operational plans that were surely aimed at the killing of the innocent. Is Tollefsen really willing to bar that kind of subterfuge against evil and sternly turn away from any responsibility to act, where he could to save innocent lives? His response comes in a haze:

A firm commitment, by any person, or any group, to avoid all lies would inevitably have radical consequences. … Yet these are only consequences of my view, they are not themselves arguments, and anyone who believes, as members of the great Abrahamic religions do, that the Father of Lies is at the root of much evil, must make a constant struggle not to let their commitment to truth become obscured by the demands of the fallen world.

 Well, OK, but Arkes argues such a view disqualifies you from public office.

Not only is that finally a non-answer to a deadly serious question, but a response with no residue, no judgment, of moral substance. And it finally forces itself to the test in this way: Any man who holds to Tollefsen’s view and offers himself for the Presidency of the United States should be obliged to reveal to his fellow citizens that he would not use the devices of subterfuge even to protect the lives of innocent people put under his charge. I would submit to my friends—and here truly “call the question”—that anyone holding to that doctrine would forfeit any moral claim to stand in a position of authority in which he bears responsibility to protect the lives of the American people.

Updater: Here's the strongest counter-argument in my opinion, and it is strong, dammit. I still hold with Peter Kreeft that a definition of lying which precludes hiding Jews in the attic or priests in the barn is mistaken. Not saying a little part of you doesn't die when you speak an untruth even in those circumstances, only saying that in the Judgment, I think I'd rather take my chances with a coerced untruth on my conscience than the betrayal of innocents in my charge.
Obviously this blog is not going to resolve a dispute that's been going on for centuries but I find the debate bracing: stretches the mind. I'm pleased, too, about the back and forth on the various blogs; the discussion for the most part has been calm and reasoned: very little of the usual "you're a heretic if you even raise the question" nonsense that bugs the stuffing out of me. So, well done, various debaters and even most of the commenters.

Death Panels In Action

So here's what happens on Canadian death panels, and what we can look forward to if Obamacare's not dismantled.

One-year-old Joseph Maraachli of Windsor, Ontario will have his life support removed Monday at 10 am. after the Ontario Superior Court today rejected an appeal by the parents to bring him home where he can die under their care.

The poor family had an older child who died of the same condition; she was permitted to die at home. What, pray tell, is the pressing therapeutic reason a child doomed to die may not die at home?

Score another for the perky little tyrants.

Curtsy: CMR

When Is A Lie Not A Lie?

Here's Robbie George wondering if those LiveAction videos exposing Planned Parenthood are actually moral. I'm not caught up on the whole conversation yet, so won't comment, but basically the matter comes down to an old debate:

The question in dispute between them is whether lying is a legitimate means.  Tollefsen, in line with the teaching of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, argues that lying is always and everywhere wrong, and may never be resorted to, even as a means of preventing wrongful killing and other grave injustices.  His account of the moral wrongness of lying focuses on its damage to the integrity of the liar and to the relationship (the communio) of the liar and the person to whom the lie is directed---damage that is unavoidably done whether one's lying is in a good cause or a bad one.  Kaczor appeals to a counter tradition, one associated with Cassian and St. John Chrysostom, that maintains that there are narrow circumstances in which lying (to those who have "no right to be told the truth") is permissible as a means of frustrating the efforts of a grave wrongdoer to achieve his evil objectives.

George seems to think the Catechism has settled the matter in favor of the former position. I'm thinking about it.
I raise it, however, because my anti-Kant rant last week touched on a similar point, and one of my commenters thought I took the matter of lying to Nazis too lightly (which I admit I did, but my point was about the finiteness of the human condition). Anyway, a commenter at the link shares my own initial reaction:

I can't help but note the comparison to the all-encompassing torture debate of recent years. There was an enormous amount of righteous indignation directed against the idea that one could legitimately debate the scope and meaning of "torture" and acknowledge the hard cases. I'm not sure there's any difference in our present case: "lying" is one of those words where "everyone knows what it means," and yet people are far more willing to debate its scope and meaning and acknowledge its hard cases. The blood just doesn't boil as much and as a result, real inquiry into something we don't know as well as we think we do is possible.

That was my criticism of certain popularizers of Catholic teaching:  the tendency to turn "discussion" into no discussion at all. I would have liked to have had the actual argument rather than just be boxed about the ears.

Update: Various: It is a sin to lie, even to Planned Parenthood. Dawn Eden's post Building a culture of lie; Mark Shea unsure. And then surer. And Pat Archbold on Just Deception Theory.

Our Lady Against the Dictators

See, I toldja election 2000 was about the rosary (Dec 8, FL results certified; Dec. 12, SCOTUS calls halt to recounts). The Anchoress correlates world events and Marian feast days.

I Was Like, "Whoa" When I Saw This

City Journal records the demise of language: What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness. Why do we all talk like this now?

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

A former speech-writer for Ed Koch brings the sad and the funny.

Even nasal passages are affected by fashion. Quack-talking, the rasping tones preferred by many young women today, used to be considered a misfortune.

He pinpoints the exact year English died in this country.

Expanding The Oxymoron

"Military intelligence" is supposed to be an oxymoron, hahaha, but US intelligence is growing to be a worse one under this administration, as Mark Steyn explains.

Jubilation, She Hopes?

Michael Ramirez, shamelessly pinched from here.

Praying for your success, Egypt. Here's why I'm hopeful.

And Nicolas Makes Three

Multiculturalism is a failure says Mssr. Sarkozy.

We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him," he said in a television interview in which he declared the concept a "failure."

Ahem. You know who they got it from, right? 

First Angie, Now David: Multiculturalism Has Failed

A second European leader turns against multiculturalism. Money quotes begin at 2:30 or thereabouts --stick past the parts about Islam v. Islamism. Or skip to part two. V. important.


part II.

Update: what Cameron missed.

Get On The Defund Bandwagon

At a Planned Parenthood in the Bronx, undercover reporters get 2 PP employees to work with a pimp on how to declare himself the legal guardian of underage sex slaves --and then how to get the U.S. taxpayer to pick up the tab for these secret abortions. 

So There Is One

A pro-abortion feminist lawyer horrified by Planned Parenthood.


She raises the question I always raise: who the hell cares?

The women's groups' answer? Eh. It's only women.

"We Need To Answer The Questions Americans Are Asking"

CAIR & the Muslim Public Affairs Council are protesting Rep. King's terrorism hearings. The Ahmadiyya Muslim community argues otherwise.

“We think it’s an issue that needs to be discussed openly. We need to answer the questions Americans are asking and we need to do it repeatedly,” the Ahmadiyya national spokesman Waseed Sayed told me today.
“Wherever they may be asked, we will go, unapologetically, and we will answer the questions.”
Sayed also added that simply complaining about media perceptions of Islam is unhelpful. He called on American Muslims to take responsibility for changing negative views of the religion by actively promoting peace and opposing extremism. “We try to focus on what the Muslims living in America need to do to improve their own situation. We don’t want to focus on us complaining,” he said.

The group has also launched a campaign against extremist rhetoric. It's called "Muslims for Loyalty."

I Blame Kant

Against the Grain points me to a post from Common Sense Catholicism, itself a response to a discussion over at First Things, but the post makes this point, which I've been mulling over ever since the BXVI condom conundrum, which I found truly depressing:

Many Catholic apologists in this age of social networking and the blogosphere have long ago stopped writing about actual apologetics. They feel their expertise in apologetics (an expertise earned) makes them relevant on various other matters as well, some of which aren’t even remotely religious. (One could read Mark Shea’s rants on foreign affairs and “torture” and one realizes there’s really nothing pro or anti-Catholic about them, they are simply an attempt to use alleged Church teachings to mask his political beliefs.

This trend has proven quite disastrous when many of the apologists started wading into matters where Catholics of good will could take varying prudential stances.

Yes! This is a point I return to again and again whenever Catholics in the public square have anything to say about the conduct of war, capital punishment, pro-life voting or care for the poor: four topics on which otherwise intelligent and eloquent public Catholics routinely beclown themselves (to use Tim Blair's excellent neologism) by stepping into debates in which they don't seem to be aware of the intellectual ground that's gone before them: as if political philosophy didn't exist.

He blames careerism--

If you’ve been writing apologetics at least once a week for 3 years, you’ve basically demonstrated all that is wrong with Protestantism. Yet your children still need to eat. So people start going into other areas they really have no business being in, but attempt to speak with the same level of authority. In the secular world, this is known as the mentality of “publish or perish.” 

--and also an intellectual mistake he's calling "sola intellectua."

In this mindset, the Catholic Church is simply a proposition of intellectual formations. Provided one demonstrates an intellectual belief in a given doctrine or principle, that is the height of catholicity. This is obviously wrong. As Fulton Sheen famously said, “Catholics do not submit a dogma. They submit to a person, Jesus Christ.” The intellectualism problem infects all circles of Catholicism. One can see it particularly on display in the debates surrounding Christopher West. It is practically a belief of “sola fide” in Theology of the Body, and one will be cured from all the ills of this vale of tears.

I'm not sure either criticism is fair, especially not the accusation against the Theology of the Body  folks, whose mistake might be the opposite of intellectualism. In my experience their zeal springs more from having been so "caught" by the beauty of the teaching--which points towards Beauty itself-- that they can forget the Lord lays different things on different hearts at different times, so it will not be the only means of reaching people. They are -- at least those I know, including some of the movement's major figures-- people profoundly in love with Jesus, so I flat-out absolve them on that score. And Mark Shea's rants appeared on his blog not in his professional columns, right?

I think the real problem is two related pernicious influences on modern thought that have completely infected the Christian mind in such a way as to destroy genuine moral thinking by destroying our understanding of the virtue of prudence and reducing everything into do and don't lists.

The condum conundrum was a wearily depressing example. Janet Smith got it right when she said:

[Benedict XVI] was speaking only to the question of what the intention of the agent might indicate about the possibility of moral maturation; he was saying nothing about the morality of the use of condoms by anyone for any purpose

but all over the Catholic sphere --even among "us good guys"-- everyone wanted to turn the pope's comment into a prescription: can a prostitute use a condom or not? 

Never mind the fact he explicitly said the Church "of course doesn't consider condoms either a real or moral solution," which should have been an end on that score.

The Pope's remarks were inherently evangelizing. As he always does, he engages "the world," rather than hectoring it, trusting people to be able to be honest with themselves and think though some of these questions.  He was inviting the world which insists that an AIDS-infected male prostitute use a condom ask itself why it so insists.

A thought process that might go like this: I am going to use a condom. Why? To prevent my john from dying. And why do I care whether or not he dies? Because...he is a person with inherent value who doesn't deserve to die. And if he doesn't deserve to die, how does he deserve to be treated? Should he be used as a cheap trick? ...and so forth, until he saw that no one needs a condom who has understood what a person is.

The pope made a wise and humane observation, no doubt trying to spark for those who had ears to hear a re-thinking of progressive morality by appealing to what is obvious and true in the depths of people's consciences and their own experiences. And almost the whole Catholic world fell into the secular press' trap by immediately leaping on the topic to "correct" the "naive" pope and be sure the take-home message was, "Don't use condoms, you sinners!" Flat, flat, flat. Soul-crushingly flat. Thanks, guys.

And don't get me started on the reduction of Just War theory from a noble teaching on the value of the human person and a support for the consciences of politicians and commanders who bear the burden of the consequences of battle decisions into a list of rules we use to judge people in situations most of us are ignorant of and ill-informed about.

Servais Pinkaers, O.P., the principal author of the pillar of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the moral life, teaches in The Sources of Christian Ethics there are two streams of Christian morality. One is authentic, and can be traced back through Aquinas to Augustine, back to the Fathers and the Apostles. It is a morality which begins from the premise that God is Father, and the fundamental moral question is, "How can I be happy?"  In this school --the authentically Christian school of morality-- the moral life is rising to higher and higher heights of human flourishing under the guidance of the Creator and Father who loves us, and the human being journeys by virtue and grace into greater and greater freedom and joy. Freedom is for excellence, and excellence brings joy.

At the beginning of the Modern Period, beginning with the nominalists and especially William of Ockham, moral theology became reduced almost entirely to a set of obligations. In this view, the question of how to be happy drops out, the fundamental moral question is, "What must I do?" and the central notion of God is that of Authority. This trend culminates in Kant, who not only ignores the question of happiness, but denounces it as itself immoral.  "To make eudomonism the foundation of virtue is to euthanize morality," he says.

He had the utilitarians, with their false notions, in mind, but didn't seem to notice that he wiped out all of Christian morality before himself in the process.

The result of this turn is a complete change in the notion of freedom. In authentic Christian morality, freedom is like a seed within us, and by virtue and grace we gradually grow in to full freedom, rather as a musician passes from a child's dull fingering exercises into the joy of creative musical expression. At first he doesn't like it, but with each new step towards mastery, he becomes happier within himself and music becomes more enjoyable. Similarly, we pass through a kind of moral infancy --based on the thou shalt nots of the commandments, which are simply a distillation of natural law and can be known from reason-- and rise gradually to the perfections of the Beatitudes step by step, in response to gentle invitations from the Lord in our consciences. As we grow, so does our joy.

What the nominalists introduce and Kant solidifies is a divorce between morality and happiness and perpetual opposition of man's will and God's. Freedom is not for excellence and joy, it's the freedom of indifference, where I negate my own happiness to do what God wants and learn to be indifferent about it. Everything is just staying within the rules. In the end that even divorces man from himself. Where the Founders invoke "self-interest, properly understood," which is at bottom a conception of the common good, Kant thinks even the slightest consideration of self-interest is impure --which has left a decidedly inhumane element in a lot of what passes for Christian morality.

This is the real problem with most debates in the Catholic media world, it seems to me. We seem to be unsettled when people think through problems in the way genuine freedom requires us to --and by answers that vary according to needs and circumstances. We want to rush to slap down a rule for everyone at all times: Breastfeed for x months; don't wear pants; you must homeschool or you mustn't; don't read Harry Potter; do "X" in warfare, never-mind if the enemy's conduct of warfare has changed completely since the last war.

Kant's categorical imperative turns out in my view to be the most self-centered morality of all, because in the effort to be "pure," what Kant actually throws out is genuine consideration for the common good. Now --no matter how high the body count that results--  we're allowed to feel smug and "right" as long as our own behavior has been "pure." Go ahead and tell the Nazi there are Jews in the attic; at least you won't have told a lie.

So we vote for "pro-life" politicians even if they are obvious kooks whose siphoning of votes will cause a virulently pro-abortion crusader to win an election. Because "God doesn't call us to win, he calls us to be faithful." And we are constantly threatening to break into tiny, pure, third parties, tolerating no weaknesses in our friends and allies --all the while feeling no obligation to learn the real distinctions between the parliamentary systems of Europe and the winner-take-all mechanism of our own political system: which makes a difference that matters where voting is concerned. And we invent rules for family life that help some folks but only lay up burdens for others, and impose our strictures mercilessly on ourselves and others. And we impose on men responsible for the lives of countless persons regulations that no human being could actually follow because "we may not do evil that good may come" -- and never mind that the rule is we may not do what is intrinsically evil that good may come. If it's not intrinsically evil, we don't know yet whether it's evil until we've examined the matter.

I deny, in other words, that it's intellectualism that causes Catholics to make these mistakes. I think we actually think too little --far too little-- about moral questions and how a person begins down the road of conversion. Hint: it usually begins with a question, not a prescription. Questions like: is this all there is? How can I be happy?

Having a rule for everything is not morality and it makes the Christian project seem small and ridiculous to people who may be off track but are genuinely seeking. In fact, Pinckaers points out, the modern Christian form of morality is only one step away from relativism, because it's so easily toppled if you can poke a hole in one little orthodoxy.

I believe this is not unrelated to the point R.R. Reno made here: 

In my experience, although the modern university is full of trite, politically correct pieties, for the most part its educational culture is cautious to a fault. Students are trained—I was trained—to believe as little as possible so that the mind can be spared the ignominy of error. The consequences: an impoverished intellectual life. The contemporary mind very often lives on a starvation diet of small, inconsequential truths, because those are the only points on which we can be sure we’re avoiding error.

I think Christian thought is not exempt from this crushing smallness in our day. If we can reduce Just War theory to a few never-to-be-traversed rules, we'll be sure of never committing error. But life --especially Christian life-- is more interesting than that, and requires leaps of faith. You're not allowed to bury your talents, you have to risk them, remember?

Prudence --whatever else it is-- is a virtue for real life and real men, who are finite and therefore sometimes thrust into situations in which no perfect act is possible. Yes, you're going to have speak an untruth to protect the Jews in your attic. If you are one of those fortunate people who can pull off a deception by saying, "Yes, of course there are Jews" in such a way that the SS thinks you're fooling, bully for you. But most people will have to make a choice at that moment between two imperfect acts. Decisions have to be made at times when information is incomplete, there can be complications unforeseen through no fault of our own, and the results are not guaranteed.  Moral reasoning is for that --for human life. Yet as far as I can see Kant all but killed it, and left us with the instinct to elevate our every prudential judgment into a moral mandate.

I'll Be Spending The Day Sniffling

I don't have anything to add to the many Reagan retrospectives running for his 100th birthday today. I loved the man and tear up over stories about him --like the many personal anecdotes you'll find if you scroll around at The Corner for example (like this and this and this and this). The times Reagan made me weep most were actually during the Clinton presidency. Every time I'd see a clip of Reagan then I wept, because the come-down from Reagan, the magnanimous man, to the appalling littleness of Clinton literally made my heart ache.

Here's Reagan addressing Parliament in his 1982 Speech at Westminster; it seems relevant to Lebanon & Egypt today. A little intro, just because I like it:

This is my second visit to Great Britain as President of the United States. My first opportunity to stand on British soil occurred almost a year and a half ago when your Prime Minister graciously hosted a diplomatic dinner at the British Embassy in Washington. Mrs. Thatcher said then that she hoped I was not distressed to find staring down at me from the grand staircase a portrait of His Royal Majesty King George III. She suggested it was best to let bygones be bygones, and in view of our two countries’ remarkable friendship in succeeding years, she added that most Englishmen today would agree with Thomas Jefferson that "a little rebellion now and then is a very good thing."
Well, from here I will go to Bonn and then Berlin, where there stands a grim symbol of power untamed. The Berlin Wall, that dreadful gray gash across the city, is in its third decade. It is the fitting signature of the regime that built it.
And a few hundred kilometers behind the Berlin Wall, there is another symbol. In the center of Warsaw, there is a sign that notes the distances to two capitals. In one direction it points toward Moscow. In the other it points toward Brussels, headquarters of Western Europe’s tangible unity. The marker says that the distances from Warsaw to Moscow and Warsaw to Brussels are equal. The sign makes this point: Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.
Poland’s struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we often take for granted demonstrates why we dare not take those rights for granted. 

Getting to the point:

No, democracy is not a fragile flower. Still it needs cultivating. If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.
Some argue that we should encourage democratic change in right-wing dictatorships, but not in Communist regimes. Well, to accept this preposterous notion — as some well-meaning people have — is to invite the argument that once countries achieve a nuclear capability, they should be allowed an undisturbed reign of terror over their own citizens.
We reject this course.

 [snip]

We cannot ignore the fact that even without our encouragement there has been and will continue to be repeated explosions against repression and dictatorships. The Soviet Union itself is not immune to this reality. Any system is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders. In such cases, the very repressiveness of the state ultimately drives people to resist it, if necessary, by force.
While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them. We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings. So states the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, among other things, guarantees free elections.
The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.
This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy. Who would voluntarily choose not to have the right to vote, decide to purchase government propaganda handouts instead of independent newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt for land to be owned by the state instead of those who till it, want government repression of religious liberty, a single political party instead of a free choice, a rigid cultural orthodoxy instead of democratic tolerance and diversity?

 Who, indeed? I go all John Boehner over this portion of the text:

I’ve often wondered about the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for these ideals that have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world. This reluctance to use those vast resources at our command reminds me of the elderly lady whose home was bombed in the Blitz. As the rescuers moved about, they found a bottle of brandy she’d stored behind the staircase, which was all that was left standing. And since she was barely conscious, one of the workers pulled the cork to give her a taste of it. She came around immediately and said, ``Here now — there now, put it back. That’s for emergencies.’’
Well, the emergency is upon us. Let us be shy no longer. Let us go to our strength. Let us offer hope. Let us tell the world that a new age is not only possible but probable.
During the dark days of the Second World War, when this island was incandescent with courage, Winston Churchill exclaimed about Britain’s adversaries, ``What kind of a people do they think we are?’’ Well, Britain’s adversaries found out what extraordinary people the British are. But all the democracies paid a terrible price for allowing the dictators to underestimate us. We dare not make that mistake again. So, let us ask ourselves, "What kind of people do we think we are?" And let us answer, "Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well."

They're Suing Nutella

A mom claims to be shocked, shocked that chocolate and hazelnut paste has the nutritional content of chocolate and hazelnuts.

Defund!

Here is CNN's report on Lila Rose's exposure of Planned Parenthood's systematic instinct to aid pimps over under-aged girls. Rose does very well. What's funny is the reporter's incredulity that anyone could be against Planned Parenthood -- and she says, "in Planned Parenthood's defense, they have reported all these incidents to the FBI." Yes, but to complain about being "stung," not to protect any girls!

Making Witches Catholics

Is there a spell for that? No, but there is a hard-hitting but respectful pamphlet. Damian Thompson can't resist taking a few pokes:

I should make it clear that Wicca & Witchcraft: Understanding the dangers by Elizabeth Dodd doesn’t make any silly cracks about broomsticks. But I can’t resist. There’s no eco-bore like a Wiccan eco-bore. I’ve met a few and, believe me, you need to be under a spell to sit through a three-hour whinge about Mother Gaia from a practitioner of white magick. It makes one long for the days when witches restricted themselves to a quick cackle before riding off into the night. (Just kidding, witches and pagans! Seriously, last time I had a go at them they reported me to the Press Complaints Commission, which proved resistant to their magick.)

Yeesh!

If the cyclone bearing down on Australia right now were on top of us instead, this is how it would look.

The eye alone is larger than New Orleans. Just another day in Oz, however:

These maps are merely visualisations of relative scales and are not meant to suggest storms of this level would form anywhere in the world.
Instead, they illustrate an annual threat that is, if not uniquely Australian, at least so much a part of our summer that we speak of "cyclone season" as though it is on a par with "cricket season".
But every so often, we are forced to confront the raw power of our country and its dangers.

Curtsy: ninme

Laughter, the Best Obamacare Medicine

In Sioux Falls, a state representative has introduced a law requiring all citizens to own a gun. Love it.

Planned Parenthood Is Not A Legitimate Organization

Forget whether or not you agree that abortion is wrong. How many times does this have to happen before Congress stops funding and politicians are ashamed to do fundraisers for this organization?

In this 10th video in a series, a PP counselor counsels a pimp (actually an undercover operative) how to evade any inquiry into his exploitation of minors who don't speak English.

WaPo thinks the story is that Planned Parenthood reported the private investigators to the FBI.

'Cause why should we care about reporting rape and exploitation of young girls? They're only women!

Update: Jill Stanek has more.