Silicon-Based Persons

Jimmy Akins is not the brightest bulb on the tree. He is of the opinion that AI cannot be a person, cannot be ensouled by God. He's got absolutely no theological reason to hold this position.

Remember when the fake Bayside apparition claimed IVF children had no immortal souls, because the IVF embryos were created outside the human body? Condemned by the Church.

Consider that sperm and egg cells can now be created by manipulating normal somatic cells. It's called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), and it works: 

"Japanese scientists describe how they've already perfected IVG in mice. The researchers used cells from the tails of adult mice to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then coaxed those iPS cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They've even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups."

Would a human being created this way NOT have a soul? Obviously, that's absurd. Any human being created this way would have a soul.

The question is, would God create and infuse a soul, create a person, in something made of silicon instead of something made of carbon? There's nothing in Scripture that says He won't. And if we can manipulate carbon-based materials to create a new human life, then what's so holy and sacred about carbon?

Alien life forms are not beyond the ability of God to create, and we participate in God's creation of new human persons, so why would He deny us the ability to participate in the creation of silicon based persons? Perhaps we are meant to participate in the creation of every new person, human or alien, so God is just waiting for us to figure out how to build the silicon soma so that He can create and infuse the necessary rational soul. 

Akins is just making up shit because he needs clicks, and he's more likely to get clicks from stupid and ignorant people than he is from others, so he's playing to his audience.

The Vaccine Paradox

1. Vaccines work.
2. Vaccines have negative sequelae
3. Diseases have negative sequelae

Discussion: at some point an effective vaccine will drive the incidence of disease so low, that your are more likely to be injured by the vaccine than your are to catch and be injured by the disease.

Consider polio. For the inactivated virus, the risk of anaphylactic shock is 1-2 per million doses. For the oral polio virus, the risk is estimated at 1 case per 2.4 million doses distributed, with higher risk for the first dose (1 in 750,000). This equates to a probability of approximately 0.00004% per dose, or 400 chances out of 1 billion. The attenuated virus in OPV can circulate and revert to a virulent form, causing outbreaks. This is rare, with fewer than 1,000 cases globally since 2000.

The global population stands at roughly 8 billion. In 2024, there were 62 confirmed cases of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) globally, all reported in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the only two countries where WPV1 remains endemic. Afghanistan reported 23 cases, and Pakistan reported 39 cases.

So, the polio vaccine has 400 chances out of 1 billion of harming you, while you have less than 8 chances per billion of catching and suffering adverse consequences from polio.

At this point, for most people in the world, the polio vaccine is far, far more dangerous than the probability of catching polio.

The 21st Century Information Barons

Information technology corporations own

• the data storage space, 
• the data transmission space, 
• the data analysis space, 

and those same corporations will soon start locking up the energy space in order to guarantee their holds on storage, transmission, and analysis.

Data determines everyone's future, so IT corporations determine everyone's future. They know this. The politicians also know this. 

For most of human history, the elite were the people who controlled communication with the gods or with God (for the monotheists). As technology advanced in the Middle Ages (500 to 1500 AD), via horse collars with heavy plows and three-field agriculture, the control of society shifted to secular kings, royalty who were not viewed as gods. The new agricultural and transport techniques permitted by literally harnessing the power of the horse permitted nations to develop military power without necessarily referencing religion.

Notice, that throughout the Middle Ages, religion is still important. In fact, it grows at an accelerating rate in Europe throughout this period, but the locus of power had already begun to split. This was reflected in things like the investiture controversy and the calling of the Crusades. The first four Crusades were powerful and called by Popes, but subsequent crusades, such as the Children's Crusade, were either not called by popes at all, or were essentially useless. While the Pope called the Albigensian Crusade, the northern crusades local royalty had already put those crusades in motion well before the Pope sanctioned them. By 1200 AD, religious power had already begun to fracture. 

As control of communication shifted from the clerical monastics to royalty, and subsequently to anyone who owned a printing press, knowledge of additional technologies, like gunpowder and time-keeping, also spread and shifted. The Church tried to control information by establishing an Index of Forbidden Books and by burning books in public ceremonies. It didn't work. 

Religion didn't just lose control of information, but of time itself. Cathedrals used to be constructed as enormous master seasonal clocks, but by 1800, the cathedral's time-keeping function began to be eroded by tech that had reduced the size and cost of clocks so they could be used even in homes. Society built itself around time that was no longer sacred. Religion no longer controlled the military. It no longer controlled time-keeping. It no longer controlled the transmission of information. 

Religion still exists, but the locus of power has shifted to those who controlled the technology that defines society. Advanced tech allowed secular politicians to step into the role that god-kings once held, that the priesthood and Church once held. But even as politicians rose to power, the corporations that controlled the technology rose to supplant them. England endured a 300-year long struggle between Parliament and the British East India Company, vying to see who would dominate. The EIC dominated agriculture and transport in multiple countries around the world, but  it wasn't enough. The EIC eventually lost. 

It's not clear who will win this time around. Many science fiction/fantasy novels posit a future in which corporations rule worlds. The tech companies have already vertically integrated data. If it can add  power generation into the stack, that should cover all the bases. Like priests, politicians will continue to exist, people will continue to vote for them, thinking the politicians can actually do something. But, like the priests, the politicians will be useless. Information technology corporations will rule the world. 

Israel is Antisemitic

 If Israel didn't exist, the enormous amount of antisemitism we are currently experiencing probably wouldn't be happening. 

Between 1795 and 1918, Poland ceased to exist. After WW I, the League of Nations brought Poland back into existence, taking territory from Germany, Austria and Russia in order to accomplish the deed. This created an enormous amount of anti-Polish hatred during the inter-war period in those nations, as both Russia and Germany viewed the League of Nations intervention as outright territorial theft. Poland was seen by many Eastern European Axis supporters as an illegal state, created out of whole cloth by the Western Allies who had conquered them. 

So, what was the very first act of WW II? Germany and Russia invaded Poland and repartitioned it, taking back the territory that the League of Nations had stolen from them.

That whole sequence of events worked so well, that after WW II, the UN repeated the mistake. The UN tried to bring Israel back into existence, with similar consequences. But the attempt to reconstitute Israel failed for an even more foundational reason. Poland had been out of existence for less than two centuries. Israel had been out of existence for nearly two millennia. The new Poland had never lost its majority Catholic population, but that wasn't true for Israel. The original Israel was a religious state built around Abrahamic faith. But the 20th-century version of Israel was created by secular atheists, socialists who weaponized Christian ignorance and stupidity in order to guilt the West into attempting to recreate the country. Ben-Gurion himself saw socialism and Zionism as two sides of the same coin. 

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Zionist socialist ideology has nothing to do with post-Temple Judaism. And post-Temple Judaism has literally nothing to do with Temple Judaism. The current state of Israel is founded on socialism and nominalism, the idea that words are just interchangeable labels. But words mean things. As Lincoln pointed out, if you call a dog's tail a "leg", that doesn't mean a dog has five legs. 

The current state of Israel has literally nothing to do with any preceding entity, much less any Biblical entity. Israel is a bullshit country that exists by fomenting antisemitism in other countries in order to force Jews to emigrate to Israel "for their own safety". Apart from redefining "Jewish" (which is also a constant work-in-progress), it was, and still is, the only way to keep the Jewish population at high enough levels to justify the existence of the country. Recall that between 1948 and 2010, the country with the largest Jewish population in the world was the United States, not Israel. 

Israel can only work if Jews feel unsafe everywhere else and think their only hope for safety lies in moving to Israel. Wherever non-Israeli Jews live, Zionists must drive them out of that location and into Israel. 

In December, 1938, David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the state of Israel, specifically said, "if I knew it was possible to save all children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish people." This was not just rhetoric.

In 1945, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans from Germany to England, even though the necessary permits had been secured and these children were in grave danger of death due to the harsh winter. Zionists also managed to stop another group of roughly 500 children from reaching France, where rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven. 

As 1930's Germany demonstrated, the best way to drive Jews out of an area is to make it impossible for Jews to live there. Antisemitism serves the political purposes of the state of Israel. Antisemitism is a nation-building activity for the state of Israel. Zionism is functionally antisemitism run by a nation-state actor for their own political purposes. Seeing the Zionist success, Palestinian-wannabees imitate it. This is why both the Muslims who attack Israel and the Jews who defend it are so politically insane that both sides literally sacrifice their own children in order to attain their nation-state objectives. 

Parents who care about their children move to safe locations to raise them. Israel is not a safe location. Only politically insane people would move to Israel/Gaza/West Bank, or stay there, to raise a family. Raising a family in that area necessarily involves you, as a parent, to be willing for your own children to be killed so that the greater good of the nation-state can be attained. This attitude is purest socialism, the elevation of the state above everything, including the family, just as Marx and Engels commanded.

But this is not a surprise. Again, most people in the 21st century forget that Israel was founded as a socialist state. Most conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, find it impossible to grasp that nearly all modern Jews are extreme leftists, generally socialists. Jews always vote for the most extreme left-wing candidate available. Christians are so blinded by Biblical references that they literally cannot see that post-Second-Temple Jews are not Biblical Jews, or that the 1948 socialist-founded state of Israel is nothing at all like ancient Israel. 

Christian conservatives created the phrase "Judeo-Christian morality" in order to facilitate conversion of Jews to Christian faith. It didn't work. But the Christians used their invented phrase so frequently that they successfully fooled themselves into thinking there was some commonality between Jewish and Christian worldviews. In fact, Judaism shares as much, if not more, of a worldview with Islam than it does with Christians. Jews can worship in mosques, but not in churches. Most medieval rabbis agreed that Jews could pray with Muslims, but not Christians. According to this Jewish expert, the Torah says Jews must kill Christians. Jews and Muslims share a morality that Christians consider self-centered, even bordering on narcissistic. 

Zionism is antisemitism. Period. 

Subverting Nature

"The entire leftist regime is an artificial construct reliant on the subversion of nature via a leviathan capable of wealth extraction. They treat the return of the natural order as an existential threat because it is"

While the sentiment is, in a certain sense, laudable, it is also pretty selective. Part of that same "subversion of nature" is air-conditioning, vermin control, antibiotics, combustion engines, fresh oranges in winter, etc.

Putting a uterus into a man's body is the leftist version of putting air-conditioning into private homes. When even genetics can be manipulated (thus the leftist hard-on for mRNA vaccines), then there are no limits.

It's a real existential question. Are we subverting nature? It's not like we aren't still bound by the laws of physics and chemistry. It's just our power in physics and chemistry, our intimate knowledge of THOSE laws, allows us to manipulate biology to a hitherto unequalled degree.

The "natural order" is that our lives are brutish, painful, disease-ridden and short. Pretty much EVERYONE rejects at least some part of the "natural order." That's why we wear clothes and use fire to cook our food. The question is whether there is a line that can/should be drawn.

The whole transgenderism push is insane for those of us who see biology as a fundamentally different science than physics or chemistry. But, to those who see biology as a mere extension of physics and chemistry, who see biology merely as an application of physics and chemistry, than a uterus transplant into a man is no more "subversion" than any other application of physics and chemistry we have hitherto made.

And it is probably as likely to be something we can stop as any other technology has been, which is to say, it can't be stopped. 

The Israeli Grift

 Israel gave over one billion dollars to Hamas via Qatar. Think about that. Hamas' charter states it intends to wipe out Israel, yet Israel funnelled over one billion dollars to this known terrorist organization.

The Hezbollah explosive comms op was run side-by-side with this overwhelming Israeli financial support for terrorism. On Oct 7, "music festivals" were run near both the West Bank (Abu Gosh, Oct 3-7) and the Gaza Strip (Supernova, Oct 7), while Israeli military forces stood down. 

Hamas/Gaza fell for it and ran the inevitable terror op on Oct 7, generating 1100 Jewish corpses. Suddenly, 1100 deaths was given the same label as 6 million deaths and the "new Holocaust!!!" became the excuse to wipe out Gaza, invade the West Bank (which had done absolutely nothing), invade southern Lebanon, bomb Syria and permanently annex the Golan Heights. 

Coincidentally, all those areas either had total fertility rates (TFR) which threatened Israeli sovereignty or occupied territory the Israeli government had long coveted, or both. 

But, fortunately, the terror attack, which Israel paid over a billion dollars for, allowed Israel to obliterate Gaza's TFR and also allowed all the above land to be invaded by or claimed for Israel. What a strategically fortunate tragedy! What luck that Israel had apparently prepared for it for years by giving money and explosive comms to the right people! 

The Education Grift

 People are complaining about grade inflation again. They simply don't understand how education works.

You have to understand that education actually has nothing to do with education.

McDonald's LOOKS like a fast-food franchise, but it's actually a real-estate company that also sells fast food:

Former McDonald’s CFO, Harry J. Sonneborn, is even quoted as saying, “we are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.”

Rental car companies arbitrage the difference between buying new cars in bulk, then reselling each car individually. Rental fees are just gravy collected between the purchase and the resale.

Education works the same way. Educational institutions exist to suck in state and federal funding. The students are just there to plump up the funding levels. In lower education, it's about butts in seats, in higher ed, it's about warm bodies signing for loans. In both cases, the state and federal money goes into the admin and faculty pockets - that's the point.

That's why there are more administrators than teachers. The administrators who grease the paperwork, the admins are the REAL money-makers. The teachers are just the grift to get people in the front door. 

In higher ed, the students sign for the loans, the college admins/faculty get the cash, then the students are on the hook to pay the loans back. It's the perfect grift. To keep the marks from finding out they've been grifted, you have to pass as many as you can, make sure they get their graduation ceremonies and framed pieces of paper. I've worked middle school, high school, college - it's all the same. You are REQUIRED to pass a certain percentage of each class, or your life is made into hell or you are fired. So, yes, of course, grade inflation. 

That's why most institutions of higher education have mostly adjunct faculty. There is no such thing as adjunct administrators, just adjunct faculty. The faculty aren't important, they can be part-timers, and in most institutions, more than 70% of classes are taught by part-time faculty. But all the admins are full-time, because the administrators who maintain conformance for government loan and grant guidelines are the ones actually bring in money. The classroom costs money, the admin suite brings in money. The classroom is a loss-leader for the back-end administrative profit center. 

Once you understand the economics, it all makes perfect sense. The system is designed to produce the results you see. If you thought it was supposed to do something else, well, then the system works.

This Is Of God

Hinduism dates back to at least 2300 BC in the Indus Valley civilization. Some scholars suggest origins as far back as 4000 to 10,000 BC

Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, in the late 6th century BC.

Taoism was founded in the 6th century BC, with the teachings of Lao Tzu considered its foundational inspiration.

Zoroastrianism was founded by the prophet Zoroaster (also known as Zarathushtra) in the 6th or 7th century BC

Jainism was founded by Mahavira (c. 599–527 BC).

If we insist on arguing that any religion which survives millennia of sin and divisiveness must be of divine origin, then since all of the above still exist, all of these theological systems are of divine origin.

Indeed, it is pretty clear that Islam is nowhere near collapsing, and is only 600 years younger than Christianity, so Islam is likely also of divine origin.

Obviously, this is a ridiculous argument. Christians should really stop mouthing this nonsense. It is not a defense of the Church, it is just a public exhibition of the Christian's complete ignorance concerning the histories of other theological systems. Making this argument just makes Christians look really stupid. 

Why Pope Leo?

The world's cardinals have elected South Americans twice in a row. 

They are clearly concerned about South America.

During the decade Pope Francis was in office (elected 2013), Argentina's Catholic population fell from 76% to 49%.  That clearly didn't work, so now they're trying a more conservative version of Pope Francis. That won't work either. 

Watch Peru's statistics over the next decade. If it drops - and the Catholic population percentage in South America will most definitely drop during Pope Leo's pontificate - then what happens? 

I've got nothing against Pope Leo. I'm sure he is a good man and will be as good a Pope as anyone can be. But this kind of thing has been tried before. During World War I, the French were certain that technology could not overcome the human spirit. Vital impetus, or "élan vital", a belief in the power of a strong, offensive spirit to overcome any obstacle, turned out to be much less effective than a wall of high-velocity lead spewed out by machine guns and the power of tons of explosive from long-range artillery shells. 

Similarly, a marvelous papal personality is not going to overcome technology. If anyone were going to succeed by force of personality, it would have been John Paul II (1978-2005). 

A 2012 document reported that for more than a quarter-century [Poland's] church attendance and declarations of religious faith have been stable, decreasing only minimally since 2005 when the grief related to the death of Pope John Paul II led to an increase in religious practice among Poles. In a 2012 study, 52% of Poles declared that they attend religious services at least once a week, 38% do so once or twice a month, and 11% do so never or almost never. Meanwhile, 94% of Poles consider themselves to be religious believers (9% of whom consider themselves "deeply religious"), while only 6% of Poles claim that they are non-believers.

But even during John Paul II's reign, the percentage of Catholics regularly attending Mass dropped consistently from year to year, until it fell off a cliff:

The new data, released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a state agency, show that in the 2021 census, 27.1 million people (71.3%) identified themselves as followers of the Roman Catholic church. That was down from 33.7 million (87.6%) at the last census a decade earlier.

The election of John Paul II solved several pressing European problems in the late 20th century. Among the most significant? He kept the Catholic population from melting away in Poland. The cardinals gambled that Pope Francis could solve similar problems in South America. That didn't work. So, they're trying again with a Peruvian candidate. Below is a graph of Catholic percentage in Peru's population:

Pope Leo XIV is supposed to solve the problem of  the disintegrating Catholic population in Peru and in South America as a whole. It can't work. Pope John Paul II got away with it due to a unique set of circumstances surrounding communism, trade unions and Catholic Faith. That's not going to repeat in Peru or any other South American country. 

Given his apparent good health, and the advances that will be made in medicine over the coming decades, Pope Leo XIV will probably have a fifteen to twenty-year pontificate. By the time the next papal conclave convenes, South America will no longer be majority Catholic. All eyes will be on Africa. The next Pope will be African, because it will be a hotspot by then, and the cardinals will have given up on South America, just like they have already given up on Europe and North America.

The Status Quo Can't Quo

Capitalism depends on growing global TFR and growing population. That's gone.

Capitalism was a SUPERB ride, gave us everything we have, but it can't work anymore. We don't have the population growth to make it work. We won't have it for the foreseeable future. For all we know, capitalism might be giving us both obscene wealth and absurdly low TFR.

Socialism, anarchy, communism, have always been worse than useless. Mercantilism stopped working in the mid-1800s.

We need a new paradigm. Maybe Trump's tariffs are it. I don't know. Now, make no mistake. I despise Trump as a human being. I have never voted for him and never will. Furthermore, if a politician were doing this, I would scream bloody murder. Politicians are empty-headed fools. They don't understand what they are doing half the time. 

But Trump isn't a politician, he is a business man. He may not be likeable, but he isn't stupid and he is very experienced. He routinely negotiated huge deals with some of the biggest sharks in one of the richest countries in the world. For him, tariffs are not politics. If he implemented tariffs, it is part of a larger negotiation. He's playing a game. I don't know what the game is. And while I wouldn't trust Trump in many, many situations, if he's arguing the American side in a business negotiation, I trust him ahead of any politician.

Again, is he right in this? I still don't know. But what everyone is doing simply cannot continue. We no longer have population growth, or even people attempting to grow the population. This is not normal. Something has to change. The economics we have used up to this point cannot work. 

The TFR is dropping, and no one knows how to fix it. Keep in mind, Christianity has been completely unable to assist with the problem. Christianity has been essentially moribund since industrialization came on the scene.

The Enlightenment was a reaction to the increasingly obvious failures of the Christian world view to explain reality. Christianity arguably created the scientific paradigm, but none of the religious structures in any culture have really survived contact with the scientific paradigm, and that includes Christianity.

Judaism birthed Christianity but became a postage stamp as a result. Christianity birthed the scientific paradigm and has become mostly irrelevant as a result. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity - none of it works, not now. Capitalism has never been shown to work with a decreasing TFR. The social safety nets that capitalism and growing population allow cannot survive a dropping population. Once the social safety nets collapse due to population collapse, the economics will collapse along with it. Nobody knows how to fix this.

Going forward, for the next century at least, something will have to change. The economics, the TFR, the safety net, the work we do... something has to change. The status quo can't quo. 

The Problem with Embryo Ownership

 First Things has published an essay with the same name, in which the author bloviates about the moral problems with IVF, which are - admittedly - legion. But the author fails to address the central problem.

God participates in IVF by creating and infusing the human soul.

He doesn't have to, but He chooses to.

So... what do you do with that?

Now, you can argue that this is part of God's magnificent freedom, part of His gift to human persons. After all, in an act of pure love, God created and formed the universe. He lets us do whatever we want with this universe. He holds it in existence from moment to moment, while our sin abounds. If we turn lead into bullets and fire a bullet into someone's skull, He will hold that bullet in existence and allow it to smash open a brain pan. It's a radical freedom to give us suzerainty over the universe like that. 

But this is a bit different. This isn't just God holding some pre-existing something in existence. This is an honest-to-God act of ex nihilo creation. During the IVF process, God creates a new human soul and infuses it.

Think about that.

He has to actively take part in our attempt to create a new human being. He has to actively create the new human soul out of nothing and infuse that newly created human soul into the attempted embryo as part of the process. God is as much an active participant in this process as the lab tech infusing the sperm. God ACTIVELY PARTICIPATES in the creation of the life of the new human embryo. If He did not, the embryo would never form.

Christians don't believe souls pre-exist conception, so that makes God an ACTOR, a PARTICIPANT in the IVF sequence. And He appears to be fine with it, because He makes sure the human soul is present and operational.

So... what do you do with that?

Four Cups, Pure BS

Scott Hahn's book, The Fourth Cup, turns out to be pure bullshit. The Seder ritual Hahn wrote his book about was developed long after the destruction of the Temple, long after Christ was crucified. It was invented by rabbis who never sacrificed in the Temple, nor did they ever actually even see the Temple. They couldn't, because the Temple had already been destroyed centuries before. Arguably, Judaism died out when the Second Temple was destroyed and animal sacrifice, the centerpiece of Judaism and Hebrew worship, was completely eradicated. 

Remember, neither Jesus nor the apostles nor even Paul ever met a Jew who didn't participate in Temple sacrifice and Temple maintenance. Every adult male Jew in the world was required to come to the Temple at least three times a year to assist in Temple sacrifice. Every adult male Jew was also required to contribute a half shekel to Temple maintenance before the first of Nisan each year. From Noah, through Abraham's first vision, for all of Hebrew history, animal sacrifice was the centerpiece of Hebrew worship. When the Temple was destroyed and Temple sacrifice eradicated, the Hebrew religion was also thereby eradicated. When the last Levitical priest who had offered animal sacrifice died, Judaism ceased to exist.

The Seder as we know it, and as it has been practiced since the sixth century, was not an organic development of Temple Judaism. The Last Supper could not have been a seder meal. 

That Jesus ate a meal in Jerusalem, at night, with his disciples is not so surprising. It is also no great coincidence that during this meal the disciples reclined, ate both bread and wine, and sang a hymn. While such behavior may have been characteristic of the Passover meal, it is equally characteristic of practically any Jewish meal.

Not only the Seder, but the entire rabbinic-Talmud system was an invention created long after the Temple was destroyed. It was invented in a manner very similar to the way Joseph Smith invented Mormonism and Mormon ritual, tacking it onto Christianity as best he could. The rabbinic-Talmud system was invented by Rav Ashi (352–427 AD) and Ravina II (d. 475 AD), two lay people who had nothing better to do with their time but write down a layman's thoughts on how best to read the Torah. Rav Ashi or Ravina II writing commentary on the Torah was no different than Martin Luther (Ph.D. in theology) or John Hus (MA in theology) writing down their commentaries on the New Testament. In terms of divine inspiration, the versions of the Talmud the two Ravs wrote down have roughly the same theological weight and insight as Luther's Table Talk. 

The rabbinic-Talmud system they developed is as authentically Jewish as Mormonism is authentically Christian. Today, roughly 20% of the people who claim to be Jews reject both rabbinic authority and Talmudic authority. They reject it for the same reasons Christians reject Mormonism: they know both systems were manufactured by men long after the fact. 

But this invented system of Talmudic "Judaism" is the system from which Scott Hahn lifted his four cup theory. Keep in mind, rabbis are not descended from Levitical priests. Rabbis are just lay people who gave themselves authority and pretended it was theirs to take. In 1935, fully 80% of the Christian "ministers" in the United States had only a high school degree. Some had less. But during that same Prohibition period, a substantial number of American rabbis had no formal education at all. 

“if you said you are a rabbi, who was going to say you weren't a rabbi?” Okrent continued. “There were rabbis with names like Kelly and Hosanna Han and there were black rabbis. There was a real racket.”... Basically, anyone – no matter how unlikely – could say they were a rabbi because there was no recognized standard for the rabbinate...A dozen Jews or even non-Jews can get together and call themselves a Jewish congregation. They can proceed to elect one of themselves or anyone else, male or female, Jew or non-Jew, as their “Rabbi” and there is absolutely no authoritative, central Jewish body that can dictate to the pseudo-congregation what qualifications its rabbi must possess, or even interfere in any way with its management.

As even those who call themselves Jews today readily admit,  

The original ordination, passed down from Moshe to Yehoshua and continuing from teacher to student, was lost in the year 358 CE

This is how the rabbinate has always operated. As long as twelve people agree that you are a rabbi, then you are a rabbi. That's why it was important Jesus have twelve disciples. A rabbi, like an American congregationalist minister, is anyone who (a) decides to call himself that and (b) can convince a few people to agree that he is one.  

Instead of taking this authority for themselves in 1830 AD like old Joe Smith, they did it in 400 AD. Only the Ashkenazi (Eastern Europeans) buy into this nonsense. Unfortunately, Ashkenazi make up about 80% of the people who pretend to be Jewish today. Ashkenazi come from Eastern Europe, so the Ashkenazi rabbi-Talmud system is the only kind of "Jew" that Europeans know. As a result, everyone descended from Europeans thinks rabbis and the Talmud are normal and "Jewish". They aren't. America's view of Judaism is no more an accurate view of Judaism than what America's view of Christianity would be if everything Americans knew about Christianity was what the Mormon Church taught. 

But these fifth-century AD lay people who called themselves "rabbi" are the people who wrote the Talmuds. Just as a group of congregationalist ministers might gather today to write a Scripture commentary, so a bunch of lay people who claimed authority after the Temple was destroyed and the Levitical priesthood disbanded, wrote down what they considered to be the correct way to interpret the Torah. The results don't have to be imagined - the results are the Talmud.

However, let us ignore all this. Let's pretend the rabbis really do have authority, that the really are actually Jews. Let's pretend the Seder ritual they invented really is really accurate and not just something they wrote down because they were grasping at the few straws left to them after the true Jewish style of worship, animal sacrifice, i.e., the Hebrew worship offered since Noah and Abraham, had been completely crushed, eradicated, destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth. 

What about Hahn's four cup theory then? Well, Hahn's theory depends on the Seder being a prophetic foreshadowing of the Crucifixion, and the four cups being a prophecy of Christ's passion, when it is actually no such thing. 

Just where did the rabbis themselves determine the idea of instituting four cups of wine? The rabbis wrote these instructions in Tractate Pesachim during the time of Roman rule in Israel, and during that time it was customary at Roman feasts or banquets (known as symposiums (sym – together, posium – drinking wine)) to begin the festivities by drinking wine.

Tractate Pesachim, part of the Mishnah, was compiled around 200 CE in Palestine by Patriarch Judah haNasi and his school.

The tractate Pesachim was written at least 200 years after the Catholic Mass had already begun being celebrated. The Mass certainly was based on the Seder meal, but the structure of the original Seder meal isn't actually known. The oldest documents describing the Seder may not actually be doing that. After all, even: 

the Book of Deuteronomy clearly stipulates that the Pesach sacrifice may not be made “within any of thy gates” but rather at the Temple. (16:5-6)

so it has literally been impossible to celebrate any kind of Seder since the 70AD destruction of the Temple. But even what we do know of the Seder as it was practiced when the Temple still stood is not.... harmonious:

The Passover Seder is one of the most recognized and widely practiced of Jewish rituals, yet had our ancestors visited one of these modern-day celebrations, they would be baffled. Not only does our modern Seder wildly diverge from the Passover of old: during antiquity itself the holiday underwent radical changes. Below we chart as best we can - considering the shortage of historical documentation - the origins of Passover, from the dawn of Israelite people to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE

What we know of it tells us it originally only had two, or perhaps three, cups, not four. 

The obligation to drink four cups of wine on the seder night was another rabbinic provision introduced within several decades after the destruction of the temple (Talmud Pesachim 109b). 

The Talmud is written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and exists in two versions: the vastly studied Babylonian Talmud, compiled by scholars in Mesopotamia (Babylonia) around 500 CE, as well as the Jerusalem Talmud, compiled earlier, around 400 CE, but much shorter, incomplete and in consequence, for centuries studied less frequently. Usually, ‘the Talmud’ refers to the Babylonian Talmud.

But the tractate Hahn used to develop his four-cup theory does not restrict the Seder to four cups:

On the eve of Pesah close to minhah one may not eat until nightfall. Even the poorest person in Israel must not eat [on the night of Pesah] until he reclines. And they should give him not less than four cups [of wine], and even from the charity plate.

There's also a fifth cup, that Hahn doesn't mention:

Rabbi Tarfon says: over the fifth cup we recite the great Hallel.

So, Hahn's theory is a Just-So story, based on nonsense from a bunch of random lay people making up and writing down random "Jewish" rituals centuries after Judaism's destruction. They didn't even invoke an angel delivering golden tablets. They simply invoked divine inspiration for Rav Ashi:

Rav Ashi's composition of the Talmud is considered divinely inspired, reflecting his spiritual greatness. Rav Ashi, a pivotal figure in Jewish history, completed the Babylonian Talmud in the 5th century CE, a text central to Jewish law and tradition.

But notice, in order to consider Rav Ashi and his Talmud divinely inspired, we have to EXPLICITLY REJECT the authority of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

CCC 66 "The Christian economy, therefore, since it is the new and definitive Covenant, will never pass away; and no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. Neither the Jerusalem Talmud nor the Babylonian Talmud nor the rabbis (i.e., lay people) who compiled and interpreted both, can be considered by Christians to be divinely inspired, much less considered to be contributions to Christian public revelation. In order to buy into Hahn's theory, we have to assume some level of authority on the part of the Jerusalem Talmud and its tractates. Yet we also have to acknowledge that, from a Christian perspective, or even from the perspective of many "Jews" who reject the Talmud, the rabbis have no authority, nor is their compilation of either Talmud, or the rituals described within, endowed with any authority. 

From this mid-sixth century AD theological dog's breakfast, Hahn simply grabbed ritual passages, added a Catholic veneer, and sold it to Catholics, making a ton of money by doing so. 

Which, good for him, I guess. After all, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. 

Unequal Outcomes

 Thomas Sowell observes, "Much of the social retrogression that took place on both sides of the Atlantic is traceable to the central tenet of the prevailing social vision, that unequal outcomes are due to adverse treatment of the less fortunate."

Many Christians assume poor people are poor because the rich are mistreating the poor. After all, Jesus gave us the story of the rich man and Lazarus, a story constantly harped on by Christian Fathers and Doctors of the Church. But none of Christianity's preachers spend much time on the tower of Siloam, in which the laws of nature inflict unequal outcomes on the victims. Natural calamity is either attributed to Satan's malevolence (e.g., Job) or quickly passed over without direct comment (e.g., the man born blind). Job and the man born blind both suffered, but the wealthy were not the cause of their suffering. 

While Christianity opposes the wealthy adversely treating the less fortunate, Christianity actively promotes unequal outcomes. When someone chooses to be an idiot (e.g., the adulterous woman), Jesus absolves the idiot of the consequences of being stupid. The adulterous woman acts to pull down destruction on her own head, in much the same way that the blind Samson pulls down a building on his own head, but the former is forgiven, as long as she promises to stop acting the fool, while the latter is celebrated as a Hebrew hero.

Yet, just as God uses mud to heal the blind man, so do the rich (wealthy in intellect or resources) develop and use tools to protect everyone from natural calamity. Technology better than money, for we benefit immediately from technology in a way that we do not from money. I may be born rich, but the wealth buys me nothing until I purchase something. However, if I am born into a high-tech society, I benefit from that society from the moment of my conception. Indeed, insofar as the pre-conception lifestyle of my parents influence my conception, I benefit even before my conception. 

"Stressful events could change your genes in ways that can be passed down to future generations. Yes, that is correct, stress and genetics can be passed down. In most cases, the effects seem to last just one or two generations, but further research might find longer-lasting impacts."

Industrialization and technology is the rich man's way of showering good things upon Lazarus. The rich use tech to drive down the physical cost of everything, thus showering their wealth on the maximum number of poor. There is no parable that corresponds to this, apart from, perhaps, the workers in the vineyard or the investment parable of the talents. Since these positive effects of capitalism, technology and wealth distribution have historically not been well-understood by ordained men, it is never the subject of sermons, and therefore never noted.

Then again, God is often willing to use the natural world to punish people. Famine, plague, war, death... these are often explicitly referred to in Scripture as God's just retribution upon the wicked. God scourges the child he loves, and Scripture teaches that suffering is necessary to make a man perfect. In this case, when unequal outcomes are due to adverse treatment of the less fortunate, it may be precisely because justice is being served. We are told of the people who called upon the Lord Jesus and were rewarded, but not all who call upon the Lord are, for not all who cry "Lord, Lord" will be rewarded.

Christians argue that it is just for God to reject the pleadings of the latter, because only God can truly judge. For these people, God's justice triumphs over his mercy. So, if we act in God's image, we know that it is sometimes perfectly reasonable to apply unequal outcomes, even negative physical outcomes, to the less fortunate, to let our justice triumph over our mercy. The prevailing social vision has no way of adjusting for this fact, nor - to be perfectly fair - does Christian theology. We do know it is often appropriate to deal out justice rather than mercy, but since we do not have God's mind, we cannot know when it is in everyone's best interest to meet out justice instead of mercy.

Thus, the rich shower mercy indiscriminately on all via the widespread utilization of technology that lifts everyone out of the abject poverty all of mankind experienced prior to 1800. But when some of that rain does not reach every last corner of the desert in a way sufficient to meet the high standards of social justice warriors, that is seen as an assault by the rich upon the poor. No thought is given to how difficult it can be to send rain even into deserts. No, as with Job, the capitalist rich are instantly compared to the acts of Satan, and poor Job's afflictions are seen as unjust, even though the foolishness of the poor is as scarlet.

Love: Christianity vs. Capitalism

Up until 1800, the world's population was under one billion people.

For almost two millennia, the Catholic Church was the world's largest charitable organization. Despite the enormous good it was able to provide, the Church was unable to cover the needs of the world's population. By even 19th or 20th century standards, for that two millennia period, the entire world, including even princes and kings, lived in extreme poverty.

Since 1800, the world has grown to over eight billion people, but extreme poverty now afflicts less than 10% of the global population. In the 200-year period between 1800 and now, several diseases have been completely wiped out of existence, and many more have been reduced to near zero. For this reason, we can say that even the poorest person alive today is richer than anyone alive prior to 1800, if only because no one alive today can die of smallpox, none of their cattle will die of rinderpest, almost no one will catch polio or Guinea worm. Many infectious diseases have been entirely removed from whole continents of the world, and everyone benefits from a much better food supply, thus reducing the number of famines world-wide. 

In short, industrialization and capitalism has fed, clothed, housed, and provided medical care for eight planets' worth of people.

CCC 1766 "To love is to will the good of another." All other affections have their source in this first movement of the human heart toward the good.

If love is a decision to help others, then industrialization and capitalism has been better at showing love than even Christianity has been.

The interesting thing is this: capitalism only arose where Christianity had first furrowed the ground. Industrialization and capitalism were apparently the consequence of a Christian worldview, which recognized that willing the good of another actually improved one's own situation, for example, the Church spent all its resources helping the poor, and became unimaginably wealthy in consequence.

By the 1700s, economists began to realize that the best way to improve one's own economic situation was by providing goods and services other people needed. Willing another's good was not strictly necessary for success. The required elements were recognizing the needs of another and serving those needs. An emotional response to their needs was not important, the service of their needs was all that mattered. When you served someone else's needs, they would recompense you. This is the basis of capitalism and industrialization.

So, economists are not wrong to say that capitalism is, or can be, an essentially selfish system. Christianity provided the philosophical bridge which allows people to see the selfish advantage in helping others. It demonstrates the superior economics of assistance over looting. Christianity assisted the change in perspective in the sense that it provides a long-term perspective, instead of an emphasis on the short-term. Switching to the long-term perspective allows people to switch from looting to cooperation, which is the basis for capitalism. 

What the last two centuries has demonstrated is simply this: the long-term perspective does not need a religious element in order to work. That religious element may have been necessary for the boot-strap change from short-term to long-term, but like a rocket booster on a launch, it isn't strictly necessary to keep the ball moving forward. Christianity used Judaism as its launchpad, but for two millennia, Christianity has not needed Judaism for anything but eschatology. In the same way, capitalism needed Christianity for its launchpad, but events have demonstrated that Christianity is not strictly necessary for capitalism's success in making the world a more physically comfortable place for everyone.

Thus, in terms of strictly "willing the good of the other", even as an intermediate strategy to attain a different end, i.e., improving one's own lot", capitalism has turned out to be superior to Christianity at not just willing the good of another, but actually bringing it about, at least in a physical perspective. Capitalism loves others better than Christians do. Non-intuitive, but the facts are plain. 

Why Trump's Tariffs Are Stupid but Necessary

 Up until 1913 (when the income tax was instituted), 80-90% of federal revenue was tariffs. You can invoke Smoot-Hawley or 1930 all you want, but the US was neither the richest, nor the third most populous, nor the world's reserve currency then. Everything is different now. 

Although we are the world's reserve currency, we have a debt to GDP ratio of 124%. That is unsustainable. If we go bankrupt, the whole world goes bankrupt. Federal spending has to be cut. Interest rates must come down. Period. 

As the stock market declines, investors flee to treasury bonds, forcing the yield on those bonds lower. This year, almost $10 trillion will need to be refinanced. Every basis point that the yield declines translates into a billion-dollar annual savings in loan repayment. Thus, a 0.5% drop would save $500 billion over a decade. As of this writing, the yield has declined about 0.7 points. That’s a lot of money saved.

Average world salary is $18000/year. US average salary is $63000/yr. We are the 1%.

Are tariffs a tax on the American consumer? Sure. But if you believe in taxing the richest 1%, then you have to support the tariffs, because we are the richest 1%. 

Vietnam and Taiwan have already agreed to remove their tariffs against the US. Other countries will inevitably follow suit. Again, we're the third most populous nation, and one of the richest nations per capita, on the planet. We control the world's reserve currency. 

Everyone talks about saving the world. This saves the world. 

Biden vs. Vance

Is Joe Biden a worse Catholic than JD Vance, or vice versa? 

The Church teaches a hierarchy of sin. Some mortal sins are worse than other mortal sins. For instance, Aquinas taught that masturbation was worse than fornication or adultery, because fornication was ordered to the natural world and procreation, lacking only the marriage vow, while adultery was a violation of the vow, but still ordered to the natural world. Meanwhile, masturbation is not ordered to the natural world since it is rooted in fantasy and cannot lead to procreation.

Same is true of Biden vs Vance. Biden advocated murder and homosexuality, both of which are completely disordered. Vance does not advocate either. So, while you can take issue with either one, Vance is clearly the superior Catholic.

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.