Why the Signal Breach Isn't What it Seems

Jeff Goldberg claims to have been part of a top-secret Signal chat. He provided evidence that he was. The question is, how did that happen?

One theory has it that the head of NPR, who also happens to sit on Signal's board, somehow engineered this. That is stupid absurd. Signal keeps zero metadata, all it has is phone numbers and even those can't be seen. This ain't Musk taking over Twitter, where meta data and user info abounds.

Signal is very nearly as anonymous and it is CERTAINLY as encrypted as any app out there. It uses AES and the Signal Protocol, both open-source, both as bullet-proof as anyone knows how to make encryption. There are no known backdoors or hacks to either method.

Signal encryption is end-to-end, which means it makes no bloody difference if your contact is in the Pentagon or the Kremlin. In neither case can outside parties read your messages. It makes no bloody difference what tower you connect to, whether the tower is compromised or not. The message was encrypted on the device BEFORE it was transmitted to the tower. That means the encrypted message still can't be read, even if the enemy entirely owns the tower. Same with receiving a message - only the endpoint device can decrypt it. 

Signal may be "consumer-grade", but in this case that means Signal is as good or BETTER than "military-grade", which latter category is often decades behind the consumer industry due to the government acquisition train (cf, DOGE's work in the Social Security database, or the IRS software nightmare or NASA/Space Shuttle nonsense). Talk to any military personnel. When you mention "military-grade", they laugh. 

This Signal breach was solely, only, entirely, without question or any other concern, the fault of one of the people already in the Signal group chat. Can Signal be compromised via phishing scams? Sure. But so can EVERY encryption method out there, approved or not, authorized or not. This breach is not due to inadequate tech, it is human operator error. Period. 

Now, how did this happen?

The problem is the contact list inside the Signal app. Signal's contact list itself cannot be locked, but you can block individual contacts or groups and set privacy settings to control who can see your phone number. You can also set a PIN for account recovery and registration lock. 

If this was done on secure phones, the techs should have locked down that contact list. But to do that, they have to have a pre-approved list of numbers to load on the phones. Now, maybe that happened, but maybe Jeffrey Goldberg was on a pre-approved BIDEN list of contacts, so he might already have been on the pre-approved list. It might be that this is not the first classified Signal session Jeff has been involved with from the White House, it's just the first one WE KNOW ABOUT because he kept his mouth shut about the one's he attended under Biden.

Jeffrey Goldberg says Mike Waltz sent him a 'connection request' on Signal, but that's not a thing in Signal, so he's clearly lying about that. Everyone involved in publicizing this scandal on BOTH sides have demonstrated they don't know a damn thing about the actual tech or how it works, which is why he is currently getting away with that bald-faced lie.

Signal servers hold zero metadata, so it's not like the server was compromised, because there's no data on the server to compromise. The last time the FBI tried to warrant out contact data, Signal's CEO told them exactly that. Even Signal can't tell you what data it is transmitting or who is transmitting it.

Somebody on that chat either deliberately, or very mistakenly, added Goldberg to the chat. Could Goldberg have assigned some high official's name to his own phone number, to see if he could infiltrate a Signal communication? Yes. Is that felony fraud in communications? Yeah, probably. 

And that, boys and girls, is everything you need to know about Signal. I use it, I recommend it, and I continue to stand by the recommendation because I actually know how it works. If Jeff Goldberg did what was described in the previous paragraph, he needs to be jailed. Everyone needs to curate their Signal contact lists. But, again, that's human error, not Signal's error. 

How Education Actually Works

The reason educational institutions exist is to grab government loan and grant money and give it to administrators. That is the only reason any educational institution exists. It has no other reason to exist.

If you think it does, you are wrong. Grade schools, high schools, colleges, universities, all of it exists just to harvest cash from the government. That's it. Once you realize that, everything makes sense.

Of COURSE the administrative staff grows by leaps and bounds. The actual customer is the government. Students and teachers are just window-dressing. The point of the institution is to fill out the necessary administrative forms to get the government cash. Adding a teacher takes money away from the pot, it is an expense. Adding an administrator means one more person to fill out government cash forms - each administrator increases the pot. Administrators make the institution money. Teachers and students lose the institution's money.

A school's product is not an educated student, the product is government forms. The government pays you more cash for filling out more forms. Period. The students are just there so there are names that can be put on the forms. The teachers are there to fool the student into coming in and getting their name put on forms. The point of the whole process is to fill out the forms and sell them to the government for cash money. It's all one huge grift. That's it.

AI and The Demise of Universities

There are many reasons why the modern university is slowly decaying away, but AI will certainly number among them. According to Britannica, the first true university in the West was Bologna (1088 AD). Universities have spent over 10 centuries producing highly trained explorers in increasingly esoteric fields. One such field is how to efficiently determine protein folding. 

Universities have spent the last 60 years producing people highly trained in just this particular field.

In those 60 years, we discovered how to fold 150,000 proteins. In 2020, over the course of six months, AI not only discovered how to fold EVERY protein that exists (over 200 million), but it can also now outperform millions of years of evolution itself, creating new proteins with specifically tuned functionality. That's two years before the release of ChatGPT. Why does this matter?

 Think of the evolution of the airplane. We spent centuries trying to figure out how to make powered flight work. In 1903, someone finally assembled the pieces correctly. Look what happened:

• 1903 - Wright brothers' first flight (12 seconds, 120 ft).
• 1911 - first planes in combat
• 1914 - first commercial passenger service
• 1915 - first monoplane.
• 1919 - first transatlantic flight
• 1927 - first solo non-stop transatlantic flight
• 1936 - Douglas DC-3
• 1939 - first jet
• 1952 - first passenger jet
• 1957 - first spacecraft

It took roughly 16 years to transition from a 12-second, 120-foot flight to crossing the Atlantic, and another 12 years to do it non-stop, solo. Because we have a much higher population, and a better-educated population, tech moves faster now than it did in 1903. There are more people working tech now than there were in 1903.

 We've been thinking about AI for millennia, working on it directly for about a century, but we have only managed to put the pieces together correctly in the last three years. We're at about 1908 on the airplane chart.

With the advent of the automobile, people don't learn how to take care of horses any more. It is possible that with the advent of AI, people won't need "educators" any more. Not only are universities losing relevance as dropping TFR removes students from their classrooms, AI removes the need for highly trained people. We can afford to be more ignorant than ever, without any real loss of functionality. 

 

Marriage and Prenups

 This is why prenups are important.

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Every marriage has a prenup, even if it doesn't have a prenup. The default prenup is whatever the laws of the state and nation are. That might be straight 50-50 split, it might be split only 50% of property acquired during marriage, whatever. 

But, whatever it is, EVERY marriage sanctioned by a state or national government has a prenup. And the Catholic Church won't allow the sacramental marriage to take place unless you have first licensed the marriage through the government. So, the Catholic Church's insistence that a prenup is somehow damaging to a marriage is pure bullshit. 

The Catholic argument is, "Well, if you insist on a prenup, that's a sign that you don't expect the marriage to succeed, so that means it is not a sacramental marriage." And if I take out medical insurance, am I saying I don't trust that God will keep me healthy? This is not a minor argument. For centuries, buying insurance was seen as a sinful act, because you were not trusting in God's providence. When you bought insurance, you were betting on whether or not something bad would happen. Yet, if the Church recognizes the possibility of state-sanctioned divorce and subsequent Catholic annulment - and it most assuredly does recognize this possibility - then it recognizes that sacramental marriage vows do not always "take." 

Furthermore, it is commonly acknowledged that there is no way for the spouses to know if the vows actually worked. The Catholic process of annulment requires that the spouses show that some deficit of knowledge or moral agency was involved, at the moment the vows were exchanged, so that consent could not be given. That is, the Church requires that the putative spouses show they knew the vows wouldn't work even as they were making the vows. 

The process even takes into account the Dunning-Krueger effect, the possibility that the spouses were so deficient in knowledge that neither spouse was capable of recognizing the lack at the time both attempted to exchange vows. In fact, it could be that one of the two spouses is so deficient in understanding that they NEVER figure out the lack was there from the beginning. That is, one spouse figures it out and seeks the divorce/annulment, but the other one is never good with it and refuses to accept the Church declaration of nullity. And, in fact, since Church declarations of nullity are not infallible (that is, the Church could, indeed, be in error by granting annulment), even the Church recognizes that it may suffer from Dunning-Krueger when it tries to judge the matter.

But, if there is a Dunning-Krueger possibility, shouldn't the spouses have the possibility of protecting against that? A prenup is just marriage insurance, like health insurance, car insurance or any other kind of insurance you can morally take out. If I can take out insurance on the principle that God might not protect me from my own stupidity and ignorance when I operate an automobile, then why not take out insurance when I try to operate myself as a spouse? 

Why Students Use ChatGPT

Teaching is about making the student love a subject so much, that the student WANTS to learn more. Most teachers, including myself, aren't good enough to invest most students with that level of love for the subject.

So, the students do pro forma work. Students who aren't really interested in a subject submit responses  generated by AIs like ChatGPT. They do that because they literally don't care about the subject, they just want to move on with their lives. It's the academic equivalent of saying, "Wow. That's very interesting. We should talk again about this. I have to go now." and then walking away.

In short, when students use ChatGPT, they are voting on the incompetence of the instructor. 

Instructors don't like being told they are incompetent. They especially don't like it when students point it out. And, to be fair to the instructors, it's not like they have a uniformly friendly audience. Most students are only in Class X to begin with for reasons that have nothing to do with the class. The class may be  a required general education course, or a prerequisite that the student isn't really interested in, or whatever. Most of the students walk in with the attitude that they were going to hate the class, and the instructor starts the first day at a substantial deficit. They can't figure out how to move the students out of that "hatred" auto-response. 

Instructors instinctively know that students cheat not just because the student may have inherent character defects (Lord knows many do), but also because instructors frequently suck at doing their jobs. So, the instructors strike back at the student by treating AI use as cheating, which actually doesn't make any sense.

When a student looks information up in a book, is that cheating? Socrates, an oral instructor, would have said "YES!" Plato, who wrote books about Socrates, may not have been so vociferous in agreeing. What Socrates considered a sign of a weak memory and a weak mind, i.e., the need to look things up in books, modern man calls "scholarship". But, as Socrates points out, books were the very first AI:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

By the start of the 21st century, and probably far sooner, the use of AI will be standard across all disciplines. AI use will be considered scholarship.

And the instructors who inveigh against it now will be looked on by future generations with gentle scorn.

The Mis-Match Between God's Word and God's World

 So, here's a conundrum: 

• A woman can get pregnant around age 12 (puberty)
• But pregnancy at age 12 is dangerous, as the rest of her body has not necessarily matured enough to make for a relatively problem-free pregnancy. "Adolescent mothers (aged 10–19 years) face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections than women aged 20–24 years, and babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm birth and severe neonatal condition."
• Meanwhile, the brain does not finish maturing until roughly age 25.
• So, our gametes are operational about age 12, pregnancy is optimal between 20-24, and our brains don't finish maturing until age 25

The times don't mesh. For a fertility plan created by God, the obvious question is "why not?"  Remember, for most of human history (up until the 20th century, in fact), it has been legal in every recorded human culture, throughout the world and the centuries, to marry and begin having children by age 10 or 12. Yes, that was true even in the United States, right up through 1885. 

Now, we know that brain plasticity is important to early childhood development. In fact, language learning is much easier in children precisely because their brains are nowhere close to maturation. For most of human history, until the last century, human beings have been married and started having children while still in their teens (or even pre-teens), it is certainly possible that the brain plasticity of the teen years is uniquely adapted to forming those same teens to learn to be parents. 

If this is true, teen pregnancy, far from being a bane to civilization, is the main source for family formation. By having and raising children before age 25, that is, before decreasing brain plasticity closes off ease of learning, men and woman are "formed" by the child-bearing experience into a parental view of the world. Failure to have children prior to the age of 25 means the parents' brains will be much less plastic, much less able to accommodate the new child-care experience. That is, the parents will be much less amenable to being formed into a parental worldview.

We already know that exposure to the "scent of a woman" increases testosterone levels in men. It is quite possible that male sperm counts are dropping, in part, because so many women are on hormonal birth control. But another part of the problem, the learning capacity of the teenage and adult brain, has not been much discussed. Perhaps it is time to start the discussion.

Christians Refusing God's Call

For most of Christian history, the legal age of marriage was 12 for both men and women.

By refusing to allow marriage until age 18, Christians are artificially forcing ALL men and women to be celibate. What if God is actually calling 12 and 14 year olds to be married? 

He did that for dozens of Catholic saints.

Did He stop calling teenagers into sainthood via marriage?

I strongly doubt that He did.

So, we are forcing millions of teens into the equivalent of convents and monasteries when they are not called to that. That cannot be good.

Now you might say, "Perhaps people were ready for marriage back then so it was allowed, but now by and large we are not by then." Perhaps. 

But that's a failure of Christian catechesis, not a failure of God's call. So... why isn't that a focus for bishops and priests? Why aren't Christians working on getting the age of marriage lowered back down to 12? 

If  "the future of the world and of the Church passes through the family" (Familiaris Consortio, #75), why isn't the Church trying to re-establish, in every way possible, the earliest and longest-lasting marriage traditions of the Church? Why isn't the entire Christian world pushing for marriage at age 12?  Arguing that we are no longer eligible for the grace of marriage until we turn 18 is not only a violation of canon law (which currently dictates 14 for women and 16 for men) but it also implies that the path to eternal holiness via the timeless grace of the sacraments is tied to a specific time period. Marriage used to make you holy in the past, but apparently, now, not so much. God stopped handing out grace to 12-year olds via marriage because... well.... reasons. 

And, apparently, God just stopped calling 12-year olds to holiness via marriage within the last century, because that's when the governments of the world were all apparently inspired by God to raise the marriage age to 18... yet God only told the Pope to raise the marriage age to 14 (for women) and 16 (for men), so.... that's confusing. 

 Canon 1083 sets it as 16 years of age for boys and 14 years of age for girls, a standard most recently revised in 1917, where 1917 Code of Canon Law Canon 1067 changed a longstanding law allowing both sexes to marry at twelve years of age. The Church had an opportunity to reconsider marriage age when preparing the 1983 Code of Canon Law, but chose to retain the 1917 standards and add only a provision allowing Bishops to raise local marriage age, as appropriate to regional customs. (link)

Likewise, God primarily inspired Western governments to do this in the late 1800s (age of consent in every US state was either 10 or 12 in 1885, except Delaware, where it was 7).  But, He waited over thirty years to inspire the Catholic Church (Code of Canon Law, 1918) and apparently, He still hasn't begun inspiring non-western governments, like the Islamic governments of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Or, at least, they haven't been responding. Of course, if their delay is due to their not responding to God's call, then that doesn't speak well to the Catholic Church's decision to wait until 1918 to revise canon law, and it also doesn't speak to the disparity between canon law (14/16 age limit) and secular governments (18 age limit). 

If canon law is the more correct inspiration of God, then why aren't priests and bishops, why isn't the Catholic Church as a whole, working strenously to reduce the age of marriage to 14 and 16 for women and men, respectively? If marriage really, really is the bedrock of secular society and the Church, if marriage and family truly is the future of the Church, then isn't lowering the age of marriage to match that of canon law the single most important fight the Church could wage on behalf of Christ's body?

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Similarly, when we see teens, or any unmarried couple, engaging in sex, engaging in child-creation, outside of marriage, is that because they are trying to respond to God's call to holiness through marriage, but society won't let them, and the Church is deliberately refusing to help them answer this call? Perhaps the crisis of the family is the crisis that the world's cultures, including the Church, no longer prepares 12-year olds to marry. 

Bureaucracy as Code

When you want to "harden" a server, you turn off and uninstall any software programs that are not actively being used. This is called "reducing the attack surface." The less code that is running, the less code that can be hacked.

Bureaucracy is absolutely identical to a computer program. Instead of machines ruthlessly and efficiently running lines of code, bureaucrats "fairly" and efficiently run lines of regulations. In both cases, we want the machines/people to apply the regulations without any emotion or favor to one group over another. In fact, bureaucracies even call the regulations they administer "programs". That is not an accident. "Programs" are meant to be programmatic. Bureaucrats are supposed to be machine-like in their application of program rules, not allowing their personal preferences to interfere with the just implementation of the bureaucratic rule set. 

Bureaucracy is program code that has not been debugged or beta tested. When the system produces what the regulations say, instead of what was intended, the novice bureaucrat/programmers think they can fix it by "adding one more line". But this "code bloat" merely increases the probability of bugs while only marginally adding to the utility of the regulations.

At some point, you have to slash "features" and code in order to reduce the ability of hackers to penetrate and exploit the system.

For the first time in our government's history, that's what DOGE is doing right now. Elon Musk and his team of programmers are "hardening" government against hacking by reducing the attack surface, reducing the number of installed bureaucrats and installed programs. 

Will this reduce the number of "features" that government can offer us? Oh, sure. But those features should never have been part of the code base to begin with. Removing them makes the original code functions much more stable and much more un-hackable. 

That's why 75% of government programs and personnel must be RIF'd. There's too much money in government, too many holes, too many hacker opportunities. Government needs "hardening", and IT tech bros know how to make this work. Their whole lives have been training for this. And, as one might expect, the hackers are outraged. 

Scripture and the Law

So, I had a tremendously interesting discussion last night about Romans 8, which is well worth exploring in more detail. It revolves around what is meant by "the law". The best resource to consider this discussion is Thomas Aquinas' Treatise on Law, from the Summa Theologica, questions 90-97. If you have time to read Aquinas' treatment, the study will richly repay you. Here, I will attempt a summary of the 139 pages, with a bit of explanatory commentary.

Aquinas distinguishes four different kinds of law, each one a different reflection of the one Divine Law:

1. the laws of nature,
2. natural law written on the heart,
3. human law aka "man-made" law,
4. Mosaic ceremonial law, the precursor/foreshadowing of the sacraments

In Romans, Paul references three of those four categories:

Mosaic ceremonial law (with references to natural law in first part of v. 2 and in v. 7)

Romans 8:2-3:  2 For the law of the Spirit[a] of life in Christ Jesus has set you[b] free from the law of sin and of death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin,[c] he condemned sin in the flesh... 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot,

The Natural Law (cf. ceremonial law)

Romans 2:12-15: 12 All who have sinned apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. 14 When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. 15 They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them

Human "Man-Made" Law (cf. natural law in verse 5)  

Romans 13:1-5: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; 4 for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority[a] does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience.

God is several things at once. He is pure Rationality. He is pure Love. He is the Divine Law. So, to fulfill the Divine Law, the only rational thing we can do is love, after the manner of God. And that is where distinguishing the different kinds of law becomes important.

The natural law, that is, the Ten Commandments, is written on our hearts (Romans 2). However, because we are fallen, our intellects are darkened and our will is weakened. We have trouble discerning what we should do (darkened intellect), and even once we identify it, we have trouble doing it (weakened will):

Romans 7:19 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do....22 For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, 23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind...

So, the natural law is the moral law, held in our hearts, but hard to access due to the Fall. Even though the Fall has marred our understanding and our ability to live it, because we are in the image and likeness of God, the law of human nature (i.e., the natural law) is always present in our inmost self. How can we access it? God made it easy by writing it down for Moses in the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are therefore not an external law, but a concise summary of the natural law, which is our inmost self, the image and likeness of God within us. Within us, the natural law is part of who we are, it is wordless. In the Ten Commandments, God wrote it out in order that we might more clearly see and understand it. 

In a like manner, the laws of nature are also wordless, but the laws of nature still reflect God's Divine Law, His Divine Being:

Psalm 19:1-3
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
    and the firmament[a] proclaims his handiwork.
2 Day to day pours forth speech,
    and night to night declares knowledge.
3 There is no speech, nor are there words;
    their voice is not heard;

The laws of nature are the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. These laws are not just extrinsic, they are, like the natural law, also woven into our bodies, our very being. The natural law fills our hearts and mind, the laws of nature weave together and mold our bodies, through both sets of these laws, we function within the physical world. Both kinds of law reflect who God is in Himself. 

The difference between the laws of nature and the natural law is a difference in the ability to choose. The laws of nature cannot be ignored or broken. I literally have no choice in whether I follow them. Gravity, radiation, electron shells - these express God's will, they operate independently of my will. The laws of nature are a reflection of God's love, a love that can be absolutely pitiless, relentless, impossible to ignore, impossible to break. Sometimes these physical laws are conducive to our physical well-being. But, if every intricacy of the physical laws is not fully understood and lived (and even if the intricacies are understood and lived), these laws of nature just as often bring inexorable suffering. In fact, the laws of nature eventually bring death. Yet, paradoxically, even those these inexorable laws of nature inflict remorseless suffering and death, still they "tell the glory of God's" love.

In contrast, the natural law "written on our hearts" is the moral law of the Ten Commandments and their implications. I can choose whether to live by or against the natural law in a way that I simply cannot choose whether to live the laws of nature. This ability to choose has implications.

Consider two sets of parents, each with a newborn child. Let us assume that, due to the laws of nature, each child is seriously ill and suffering. The parents have essentially two possible responses. The first is the response of the ancient pagan Romans: abandon the child on the side of the road, or in the forest, and let the laws of nature take their course. The child will naturally die, possibly in great agony, but will die in a completely natural way. The second possible response is to take the child to the hospital, where s/he will be hooked up to machines, IV infusions, injections, drugs, artificial temperature control, and the like. 

Look carefully at the word "artificial." It means "made by human artifice, human art, human skill." The child will be subject to the tools of men, to man-made technology, to the rules of man-made technology and to all that is artificial. Which response best expresses the natural law? God seeks our good, He does not abandon us, and we are in the image and likeness of God. Thus, since the second response seeks the healing of the child, even though it invokes enormous man-made artifice and man-made rules, taking the child to hospital is in best accord with the natural law. By healing the child, even though we subject ourselves to man-made tools and rules, we image God.  

Man-made tools, whether those tools be heart-lung machines, or man-made law, are in accord with the natural law when those tools (including the machinery of law) properly reflect the Divine Law. Remember, all law flows from the Divine Law. Natural law is a reflection of the Divine Law written on our hearts. Man-made, artificial tools, such as man-made law, are valid insofar as they reflect the natural law, itself a reflection of the Divine Law.

This is why St. Paul can insist that a governing authority (pagan Roman law) which was, at best, indifferent to Christianity, and on several occasions actually implacably opposed to Christianity, was both a man-made law and a governing authority that Christians were required to obey. Any law which did not directly impinge on Christian belief had to be obeyed because those laws came from the hearts of men who were trying to do right. So, Christians could disobey the emperor's command to offer incense to pagan gods, because that human law directly contradicted the Divine Law, but those same Christians could not refuse to be offered up to the lions in the colosseums, because that refusal to accept the legal penalty would undermine the authority of all human penalties, and thus undermine the authority of other human laws which were valid.

By their willing submission to the penalties imposed by even an unjust human law, each Christian could "make up in my body what was lacking" in the human law, which was supposed to reflect the Divine Law. Submission to the law, even the pagan Roman law, was critically necessary for Christian life precisely because that pagan law was a "darkened... weakened" attempt to write in words the law that is written on every person's heart. Human law is man's co-creation with God, it is man's attempt to write the image and likeness of God into the world, it is his imitation of God writing the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Human law is what we are called to do to image God. 

If all of this is true, then what is the law Paul rails against in Romans? This is the ceremonial law of the sacrificial Temple. The ceremonial law was also an expression of God's Divine Law. How could it be anything else, given that God himself gave instruction on the ceremonial Temple Law? 

But if the ceremonial law is a reflection of the Divine Law, then how could Paul insist it only brought death because it was impossible to follow? Why is it the subject of Paul's calumny? Paul takes pains to point out that the ceremonial law is detailed and unbreakable, just like the laws of nature, the laws of physics, chemistry, and the experimental sciences. But, while the ceremonial law is, like the laws of nature, inscrutably complex, unlike the laws of nature, the ceremonial law was a choice. In fact, it was not only a choice, but a shadow of things to come.

The ceremonial Temple law of ritual sacrifice and ritual purity were foreshadowings, harbingers, of the sacraments which Christ established. As long as the Temple stood, the ceremonial law could not be ignored:

Matthew 5:18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter,[a] not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

According to Jewish teaching, the Temple represented the entire earth, it was earth's connection to heaven. In Matthew 5:18, Jesus tells us that even though the ceremonial law no longer had force, the law had to be obeyed until God destroyed the Temple. The Temple tax still had to be paid. But, as Paul pointed out, the ceremonial law was no better than the laws of nature. It was too complex, and like the laws of nature, no matter how scrupulously we follow and implement the laws of physics, chemistry or ritual Temple sacrifice, we are still going to die.

But that sacrificial death was acceptable because ceremonial law was a reflection of Divine Law. Like the pagan Roman law, the ceremonial law still had to be submitted to and obeyed insofar as was physically possible. The punishments of the ceremonial law still had to be accepted, even if we could not, with our darkened intellects, fully understand why the punishments were being administered. None of that mattered. The punishment came from the law, from the authority of God, and had to be accepted. 

In Romans, Paul contrasts the foreshadowing with the reality that it pointed to. Christ establishes the new law of the sacraments, replacing the ritual ceremonial Temple law. Paul knew that, once the Temple was gone, new ceremony, new ritual, the new sacramental law, would replace the old ceremonial law.

The old law came from God's prophets, the new law comes from Christ, His apostles and their spiritual authoritative successors. This new law is the law that describes how to administer and live the sacraments. This is new law is the law of the Magisterium, the laws of the canonical code, promulgated by the successors to the apostles, who carry the divine authority of the First Apostle sent from the Father, Jesus Christ.

The Mosaic ceremonial law was written out by Moses so that the people could learn the foreshadowing, and be able to recognize the sacraments when they came. The code of canon law is written out by the divine authority of the Church, to provide a written guide to our darkened intellects and weakened will on how to live. 

Now, some of canon law may seem obscure or even a violation of modern state or national law. For instance, 

Check the 1983 Code of Canon Law.  Canon 1083 currently sets the age of marriage as 16 years of age for boys and 14 years of age for girls. This maintains the ages set in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1067. But, the 1917 code was a change from the pre-1917 code, which set the canonical ages of marriage at twelve for both ages (younger marriage was possible if the spouse had entered puberty). And for most of the Church's history, one could be betrothed to marriage by the age of seven, although younger betrothals were not uncommon.

I have heard many Christians express horror at these facts. It is certainly the case that canon law is not in conformance with the man-made secular law on age of consent for marriage in some (albeit not all) US states. In fact, it is arguably the case that pregnancy at age 14 is not even in accord with biological laws of nature, as pregnancy at 12 or 14 is often much more dangerous than pregnancy after age 18, and that, precisely because the female body is often not yet mature enough to carry a baby to term.  

So, why does the Church still permit marriage at such a young age? Just as the people at the foot of Mount Sinai spent a long time practicing the ritual ceremonial Temple Law, so that they might more easily recognize the sacraments later on, so the canons remind parents that we must be prepared to accept our children as adults. We must constantly remember we raise the child so we might have a colleague, an adult brother or sister in Christ, who must be treated as an adult, not a child. 

Is the code of canon law primarily man-made law? Most certainly. But, like the injections, the IV infusions, the antibiotics, the artificial temperature control, man-made canon law is the divinely authoritative reflection of the natural law. It is the law written on the heart now written out so that we may more clearly see. 

Every teacher has encountered students years later, outside of the classroom. Both student and teacher see each other with new eyes: the student suddenly recognizes the shrunken old man as a former source of god-like classroom authority, but now a mere shadow, at best, of that former lofty status. Meanwhile, the teacher sees in the student the living adult who was only foreshadowed in the classroom. Both recognize the locus of authority has shifted: one has decreased, the other has increased. Some teachers welcome this, others find it an unpleasant shock. But, shock or no, this is how the laws of nature, written into our bodies and our hearts, work. 

As parents, we must transition from seeing our children as children and constantly practice seeing them as adults, fully capable of making their own decisions, fully capable of leading their own lives apart from our authority. The fourteen year-old may not take wedding vows on her fourteenth birthday, but we, as parents, must be prepared to treat her as an adult woman capable of taking adult vows by that day.

By twelve, by fourteen, by sixteen, our children must be prepared to leave their father and mother and cleave unto each other. God the Father grants each Christian, each of His children, a radical freedom. This freedom is so radical that one Christian may choose to pick up a sword and cleave his brother in two (Luke 22:35-38), and God - who holds all things in existence - will hold that sword in existence as one Christian uses it against another to cleave joints from marrow. It matters not whether the Christian does this out of justice or injustice, God will not cause the sword to fall out of existence. He will hold everything in existence so we may do as we please. Even if we are immature. Even if we mis-use the freedom. Even if the hand that wields the knife is only two or three years old. It doesn't matter. God gives each of us that level of radical freedom from the moment we are born, until the day we die.   

If God the Father grants that level of radical freedom to His children, so also we, as parents, must be willing to grant that level of radical freedom to our own children by the age of 12, 14, 16. We must have raised them in such a way that the children we raised can bear that radical freedom without breaking under the load. This is the cross that parents bear, the cross that they hand onto their children. It is the cross each adult Christian bears, of being personally responsible for one's own life decisions. In a family, parents train children as the vinedresser trains the vine, but parents must also train themselves to release their doves into the flood, knowing full well that they may "not return to him anymore."  And the parent has to trust their own 12, 14, 16-year old children enough be ok with that.