Journal of the Plague Years

In The White Plague, Frank Herbert imagined how society would be transformed if struck by a genetically engineered plague that preferentially killed women. In his vision, post-Christian Europe and the United States ultimately transform the few surviving women into virtual goddesses who control society by choosing which men they would have sex with, choosing whose children they would bear.

Herbert’s future is barreling down upon us, but it will look rather different than he imagined.

While the ratio of marriageable women to marriageable men is indeed dropping throughout the world, albeit slightly more slowly than Herbert imagined, the drop isn’t due to a virus, but to abortion and polygamy.

As anyone who pays attention to demography knows, China and India have both been killing infant girls at an enormous rate, creating male to female population skews as high as 156 to 100 in some areas. Ultrasound machines combine with a cultural preference for males in Confucian and Hindu societies to create massive female infanticide, both in and out of the womb.

Oddly enough, however, few people have noticed another odd fact: though China and India are killing infant girls at an alarming rate, Muslim societies seem to slaughter them at an even greater rate.

Consider the table from the CIA World Fact book, reproduced in sortable format at Wikipedia

Sort the table on the sex ratio at birth for children and you will discover the “under the age of 15” column shows the Arab Muslim countries have essentially normal male/female birth ratios.

But now sort on the “15-65” age bracket. Six of the seven countries with the worst male-female skew are Muslim. For the “over 65” age bracket, all seven countries with the worst skew are Muslim.

We all know India and China kill pre-pubescent girls, no one mentions that Muslims kill post-pubescent women.

But, wait, there’s more.

China is the only country in which the suicide rate is higher among women than men. The male/female ratio of suicide increased between 1991 and 2001 and the trend is likely to continue. The suicide difference is driven entirely by young rural women: only that subgroup had a much higher suicide rates than their male counterparts.

Now, China’s drive to reduce its population growth rests on more than just infanticide. It is also working hard to move its rural population to the cities. Urbanization is associated with lower population growth because it destroys the extended family, and thus destroys the support network into which a child is supposed to be born.

Chinese authorities are forcing rural populations into the cities just as they have forced women to abort children. It is projected that, by 2040, the rapid drop in Chinese birth rates will actually create a greater imbalance between young workers and retired dependents that is greater than the problem the United States will face.

Everyone knows China will soon have an enormous number of single men. A large surplus male population is associated with increased violence (e.g., the American West in the 19^th century). Many fear that China will go to war by 2020 in order to bleed off the excess men and stabilize what will become an increasingly violent society.

But China can’t do that, because most of those young men are only children. You see, by 2020, China will also have an enormous number of old people who rely on their only children for support. If millions of only children are killed in a war, there are that many million fewer workers to care for the elderly.

In short, China can’t afford a war – it will kill too many young people, and the Chinese are already short of young people. The lack of women creates a social pressure cooker with no good way to release the pressure. No matter what happens, the Chinese will be stacking a lot of body bags in the coming years; the Chinese economy will implode, just as Japan’s has today.

But Europe is no better off. Its native population is shrinking, its Muslim population is increasing. Europe will be much older, much smaller and much more Muslim by 2040. Muslim policies of polygamy and sharia will create a severe European shortage of women, both through sequestering and murder/suicide. This will likewise leave a large percentage of single young men on the streets, exactly as happens today in the Middle East.

In all of these areas, the shortages in women are currently being met by buying or kidnapping women from low-income countries for use in areas where girls and women are routinely killed. How long can this continue? It depends on how much money families can get by selling their girls. It depends on how much money slavery can generate.

When Frank Herbert imagined a future lacking in women, he imagined its impact on Catholic Ireland. In reality, the lack of women affects communist, Hindu and Islamic countries.

The vision is quite different from the reality.

He's Got My Vote

"Wasted": that's the assessment of ex-cocaine user Barack Obama on the lives of soldiers killed in Iraq.

The former Muslim now insists that he regrets having made the remarks about US soldiers who died fighting world-wide terrorism.

Obama, who vociferously supports crushing the heads of infants as they are being born, instead wanted to discuss "how we want to put an end to the nasty slash-and-burn, trivialized politics of the last couple of decades."

Now that some of his old financial supporters have fallen out of favor, he also wants to discuss "how we want to reduce the influence of money in politics... how we want to come up with common-sense and practical solutions instead of being driven by ideology".

But the black man who supports gay marriage and opposes school vouchers, even though the majority of the black community oppose gay marriage and support school vouchers, insists "it isn't about me."

The evidence bears him out. After the statute of limitations expired, Barack Obama described in his autobiography Dreams From My Father(s) how he readily engaged in marijuana use and underage drinking, but he never did smack, i.e. heroin. After the book's publication, fellow Harvard Law School graduate and Democrat Attorney General Tom Miller of Iowa called Obama the smartest person to attend the institution in the past 25 years.

Among the members of the audience who applauded the rookie senator's latest address were Miss USA and Donald Trump.

As Senator Joseph Biden observed, Barack Obama is "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Given the decaying looks of the former cheerleader Hillary Rodham, Barack Obama is the Democrat Party's best hope for President.

A Compendium of Problems

It's been several months since the Compendium to the Catholic Church was released, and to date, there have been no corrections to several egregious errors in the text.

The major problem:

#57 - Jesus Christ who died and rose in order to vanquish that moral evil, human sin, which is at the root of all other evils.

Human sin is at the root of ALL OTHER evils?
Human sin caused the fall of Satan and his angels?
That seems very unlikely.
If human sin did not cause the fall of Satan and his angels, then it could not be at the root of all other evils.

In fact, #57 is specifically contradicted by #75 which says When tempted by the devil, the first man and woman allowed trust in their Creator to die in their hearts.

Certainly this phrasing needs to be corrected, right?

Other problems

The Compendium uses the phrase "original holiness and justice" but never bothers to define the terms.

It uses the phrase "human soul" but never points out that the soul is comprised of the intellect and the will, thus the discussion of Jesus two wills #91 is a bolt from the blue.

It mentions Jesus human intellect in #90, but never uses the phrase divine intellect, or explicitly says that He possessed it, although it does admirably state he knew fully the eternal plans which he had come to reveal.

#134 failed to mention that the Lord's Second Coming depends on the conversion of the whole Hebrew people to the Faith, that is, it summarizes CCC #675-677 but carefully omits any reference to #674. Oddly enough, Compendium #215 does the same thing. If you mention the Second Coming twice, wouldn't at least one summary mention this rather important detail? It's almost as if someone systematically removed the portions of the CCC he didn't like.

#168 "Who belongs to the Catholic Church? All human beings in various ways belong to or are ordered to the Catholic unity of the people of God." Compare this summary of CCC #836-838 to the original and the Compendium's distinction between those who are baptized and those who are called to be baptized is shown up as the palest of shadows. This is especially disturbing given how emphatically this same distinction is emphasized in the original CCC articles. As #168 is worded, an uncareful reader might conclude that everyone is Catholic.

#259 fails to mention that parents help children grow in Baptismal grace, although it is at pains to point out that godparents and the ecclesial community do this.

#506 says we must give special attention to those species which are in danger of extinction as part of respect for the goods of others. The CCC makes absolutely no mention of this "special attention."

#507 completely changes the emphasis of CCC #2416-2418. The CCC specifically warns us not to accord to animals the level of respect due only to persons. The Compendium article spends all its words warning against inflicting excessive pain in animal experiments. True, one might argue these are differences in emphasis, not meaning, but the difference in emphasis is exceedingly great, nonetheless.

Finally, according to the index, the Compendium makes no mention of homosexuality, fornication, pornography, sex. It shows that abortion appears one time, adultery thrice, and has a section on birth control but no cross-reference for contraception. Celibacy is mentioned twice, chastity in two sections. Given the challenges faced by the Church in the 21st century, this seems an unusual set of omissions.

It is also interesting to see how many Catholic bloggers over the last several months have praised the Compendium without, apparently, having read it and compared it to the original.

No Pain, No Gain.

Teen sex and drug use leads to depression. That’s a fact established by several studies, most recently one out of UNC-Chapel Hill based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They found that the more sex and/or drug use young girls engaged in, the more likely they were to become depressed. Young men showed similar responses to these activities. Nearly one-third of American teens suffer from depression.

Combine this with another fact: the savings rate of American citizens has dropped to a 74 year low. Only four years in American history has seen a negative savings rate, two of them being 2005 and 2006, the other two being 1933 and 1934. Only 1933 had a savings rate worse than last year. We are spending more than we are making. The Baby Boomers are retiring and they have, in total, less and less money to retire on.

Now, consider a third fact: life-changing events cause people to shop. Advertisers are well aware of this. As Dr. Joseph Pilotta, vice president of Big Research, points out:

“[Life events like marriage, divorce, having a baby, etc.] are disruptions in principle. These are transitional moments. You stabilize transitional events by trying to anchor yourself with things that make you secure. In our world, you concretely rearrange your life so you can see the change. For some empty-nesters, the only way they can manage that change is to move literally into another house to stabilize that transitional effect. We have a consumptive way of operating when it comes to these transitions, but they help stabilize our environment…

The funny part is that in getting married and getting divorced, four of the five items being purchased were the same. When getting married, we found the No. 1 thing that people looked for was furniture, which is not unexpected. Second was a vacation. Third was a computer, then TV, then home appliances. The computer is the new fixture with everybody. Anchoring the household now is essentially TV and computer, as opposed to TV being the centralizing feature. There was always a media that anchored the house and now we have two anchors. The computer was higher on the list than TV…

Getting married and getting divorced involved the same top four purchases. The only difference was number five: in marriage it was home appliances, and in divorce it was a digital camera. There was an interesting affinity between children starting college and retiring. The first four in order were vacation, computer, furniture, home improvement. It only varied on the fifth item, which was a new car when children started college and home appliances for retirement.”

From an economic perspective, all that a national economy needs to create a solid GDP is churn. If the citizens are in constant turmoil, constant life-changing events, they will buy stuff. If they are depressed, they will buy more.

So, from a standpoint of pure economics, from a standpoint of “how much money can Mr. Capitalist make today”, we don’t want stable marriages. People in a stable marriage save more money than single or divorced people. If they save their money, Mr. Capitalist can't get to it.

No, we want people who go through two, three, four or five marriages. We want people who are fornicating drug-users, we want people to have abortions, get raped, see their lives destroyed, re-built and destroyed again. Every time their life changes, our sales go up.

If you have ever wondered why any corporation would fund Planned Parenthood, throw money into no-fault divorce or create the kind of culture that we live in today, the answer is simple. Your pain is their gain. It really is that simple.

Welborn but Badly Considered

We all get caught in contradictory logic at times, but it's jarring to see the examples when they are brought before us.

Consider Amy Welborn's recent post. She felt it was wrong for a deacon to make a homiletic reference to the fact that a parishioner, a politician present at Mass, had voted in favor of embryonic stem cell research. The deacon suggested that parishioners might enter into conversation with the man on that subject. Bloggers have since observed that a close look at the parishioner's voting record as a public servant demonstrates he had a 100% rating from NARAL.

Now, Amy's disappointment with the deacon's homiletic observation and recommendation would be unremarkable - everyone is entitled to their opinion, after all - if not for her earlier public attacks on priests and bishops who have had even the slightest hint of scandal surrounding them during the recent child sexual abuse scandals. In those instances, Amy was in high dudgeon even when there was no actual accusation, much less conviction, of child abuse. See, for instance, this or this.

One could conclude, from Amy's remarks, that looking at the wrong photos of children (even though there was no evidence that any action was ever taken) is infinitely worse than fighting to make sure that children are legally torn limb from limb: sex abuse, even when no actual abuse took place (as in the Allgaier case), is apparently worse than the actual use of deadly force.

This is what over 30 years of legal abortion has done to us. We are willing to publicly chastise every priest who is associated even by rumour with an activity which is (currently) illegal while being unwilling to so much as publicly reference the documented fact that a lay person actively promotes a legal activity.

Like many Catholics, Amy seems to feel that sexual abuse is an opportunity to publicly pile on while abortion is a political third rail that should be dealt with sotto voce. It matters not that abortion is just a more craven form of sexual abuse. What matters to Amy, and Catholics like her, is that one act is legal and the other is not. Legal abortion activists needs to be handled with kid gloves, while illegal sex abusers should be stoned. It is an odd permutation of morality when American Catholics insist on the Protestant principle: separation of Church and State.

Recall that the homily is supposed to be the pre-eminent place for showing Catholics where the Gospel interacts with our daily lives. How many times have we heard from the pulpit that we must give a preferential option to the poor, that we should open our purses to donate to the second collection for Honduras, Guatamala or something similar?

Here, the deacon merely recommends a similar course of action, but instead of asking for monetary support, he asks parishioners to converse with a specific man, a man who not only represents his political district, but a man who represents his Catholic parish to the larger political community. Is this not social justice in action? Did we not see the like when Paul immortalized the incestuous sin of one man in his letter to the Corinthians?

If St. Ambrose could threaten to excommunicate an emperor for slaughtering innocent civilians as he put down an insurrection, certainly a deacon can ask parishioners to enter into conversation with a fellow parishioner who has actively supported the slaughter of millions of children. Given the fact of Childermas, the major feast of the Church whose entire liturgy is built around the commemoration of Herod's slaughter of innocent children, such a community invitation is certainly not out of line with Catholic tradition or liturgy.

Would it not be appropriate to ask parishioners to write their representatives on this point? How much more to appropriate to ask parishioners to personally discuss the issue with their representatives? And is it not convenient that this same representative happens to be here at Mass today?

John the Baptist was the greatest saint of the Old Testament, but he was the least of the saints of the New Testament, because he had not the full Gospel, the fullness of which would not be revealed until the Paschal Mystery had been completed. Still, even that portion of the Truth that he possessed forced him to publicly and repeatedly denounce Herod for his incestuous marriage. If the martyrs under the altar can cry out for justice, as they do in the book of Revelation, then certainly deacons can make factual points about justice from the ambo.

It is not without reason St. Ignatius said that of all ordained men, the deacon is most like unto Christ. As this deacon goes through crucifixion from his pastor, his bishop and Catholic commentators like Amy Welborn, we can recall St. Ignatius as he journeyed towards the circus, guarded by four soldiers of leopard-like ferocity. He rejoiced that he would be ground between the teeth of the lion. We can only hope and pray that this deacon be given similar courage and faith for having done what, if we are to believe the book of Acts, deacons were originally ordained to do: identify the injustices within the Catholic community and work to correct them.

Joy To the World

How many people have sung this song at Christmas Mass?
How many people have sung the third verse, ever?


Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.


Seems odd we would miss out on that one so consistently, doesn't it?

America's Servants

Phyllis Schlafley is a woman to admire, except when she is crazy. This thought came to mind as I read her recent column on the injustice of allowing an increase in the number of H-1B visas, the visa which permits high-tech industry to import foreign tech workers at incredibly low wages. Now, it is certainly the case that industry’s latest attempt to skim the cream of foreign workers from their homelands is unjust, but Schlafley’s reasons for opposing the attempt are nothing short of ludicrous. She claims that such an expansion amounts to indentured servitude, wage slavery, which is “a form of servitude that offends the free enterprise that made the United States the economic world leader.”

Let us leave aside the argument about whether H-1B visas actually create such indentured servitude, and just look at the history.

The New Deal: FDR's Story

The United States was founded on the backs of slaves and indentured servants. By one estimate, three-fourths of the white population were indentured servants when they arrived in the New World. Indeed, many sailed without a contract – if they couldn’t find work, the ship’s captain could sell them to whomever he pleased. Similarly, from the 17^th century through the 1808 federal ban, slaves were sold throughout every one of the original thirteen colonies.

But America did not rise to greatness on contractual and legal slavery alone. We also used drugs to enslave foreigners.

The successful circumnavigation of the globe in 1522 fundamentally changed commerce. By the late 1700's and early 1800’s, global trade had become a real possibility. As it turned out, China had much to sell the West, but the West produced virtually nothing China needed or wanted. As British and American citizens consumed tea in great quantity but failed to produce anything the Chinese wanted, the threatening imbalance of trade between East and West became acute.

Both British and American companies solved the problem by illegally importing opium into the Chinese mainland. Chinese officials had long outlawed the drug because they recognized it as a poison. By the late 1700's, however, Britain had control of India’s poppy fields and her navy made it possible to smuggle tons of the stuff across the Chinese border and into Chinese harbors. American businessmen, having no access to Indian poppies, dealt themselves into the illegal drug trade by encouraging Turkish farmers to plant poppies so they, too, could grab part of the drug business.

China responded by confiscating and destroying the huge opium stocks in British warehouses on Chinese soil. Britain went to war to recover the cost of the lost opium, not once, but twice (1839-1842 and 1856-1860). The resulting British victories not only opened Chinese ports to the Western importation of opium, it also gave American citizen Warren Delano, FDR’s grandfather, the enormous wealth which FDR would use to such excellent effect in his own presidential election campaigns. In short, it is not too incorrect to say that FDR's presidency was made possible in part via drugged Chinese slaves.

A Made Hand

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. Even as legal slavery was abolished in the United States, the practice of wage slavery in Northern industrial factories mushroomed. By the time of the Great Depression, it was not at all difficult to find entire towns dedicated to soaking the factory employee. The factory town, occupied solely by factory workers whose every payment found its way back into the factory owners' pocket, is well-known in song and story. The factory might pay their workers a wage, but that wage was quickly swallowed up by rent payments to the company for housing, by food costs in the company store, and by the various fees the company town charged its virtually captive inhabitants.

Ultimately, this need for factory labor, men and women who were unable to produce anything apart from the factory, and would therefore consume all that the factory produced, was the driving force behind the creation of the public school system. Like their late 19th-century forebears, today’s schools are designed and intended to create needy, semi-skilled consumers, not educated, confidant, self-reliant entrepreneurs.

In short, it is a myth that America was built on the back of independent or entrepreneurial individuals. In fact, it was built on the back of various forms of slave labor. That is how it started, that is how it grew to greatness, that is how it maintains its greatness today. We are an economic powerhouse precisely because we have created the perfect society of slaves – men and women who seek happiness by building walls of consumable goods around themselves.

If freedom is money or creature comforts, than America is a free country. If there is something more to freedom than just raw economics, than America is not free. But in either case, we cannot assert that America is built on anything other than slavery and indentured servitude, for that is her history.

War By Proxy

A dozen Saudi nationals fly planes into American buildings and we invade Afghanistan.

Saudi Arabia pumps billions into madrass schools and we respond by invading Iraq.

The resurgence of Salafi Islam lies at the center of the problems we are having with Islam, but the center of Salafi Islam – Saudi Arabia – gets a pass in every aspect of foreign policy.

Why?

Everyone insists that we are in the midst of World War III, but if it is true then we should be paying attention to some of the problems we faced during and after World War II.

Recall that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union started the deadliest war of the last century as allies. After Hitler outfoxed Stalin by invading first, the Soviets became our biggest ally and in more ways than one. It is rather interesting to read the editorials from the time – men who viciously attacked the USSR as an evil empire in 1940 were extolling the virtues of the Communist paradise by 1944. Of course, the euphoria didn’t last, as those same men were able to return to Soviet-bashing by 1950.

We spent the next forty years fighting a Cold War, a war by proxy, wherein the USSR – our former ally - would gain influence in a country and we would counter by attempting to gain influence in neighboring countries to contain the threat. At times, as with Vietnam, and to a lesser extent, Korea, the “containment” policy would flare into open armed conflict. However, most of the time, we were able to keep a lid on the number of body bags and broken buildings.

Our relationship with Saudi Arabia bears something of the same imprint that our relationship with the Soviet Union bore. The primary differences? Saudi Arabia has something we desperately want (oil, and lots of it), and it sits on top of the holiest sites of one of the largest religions in the world.

If it simply had something we desperately wanted and had not the holy sites, we would simply have destabilized and toppled the Saudi government. Even now, that wouldn’t be hard to do. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia exists primarily because it has been in Western interests to make sure they do not fall out of existence. The thought was that the Sauds would not bite the hands that kept them in power.

Unfortunately for us, the puppets have ideas of their own. When L. Ron Hubbard was asked how best to become wealthy, he replied, “Start a religion.” He promptly did – Dianetics, or Scientology is the result. Similarly, the Saudis have quietly created a plan whereby they become the dominant religion, and thereby the dominant force, in the world.

While we were combating the Soviets, the House of Saud quietly funded the spread of its own brand of militant Islam. This funding was enormously enhances as the post-1970s oil boom brought untold riches into the region. Even as our primary element disintegrated before us, our one of our primary allies in the Middle East became our enemy.

Unfortunately, we can’t afford to say it aloud because we can’t afford to lose the oil.

So, now the United States faces a much more delicate problem than it has ever faced. We have to fight the House of Saud in proxy states like Afghanistan and Iraq, we even have to maintain them in power, because we cannot afford to anger the 1.1 billion Muslims in the world by taking over the country or obliterating the holy sites which fuel Salafi Islam.

The real answer to the problem of Islam is to find moderate Muslims – if such creatures exist – who can simultaneously take the holy sites from the Salafis who currently control them and take down the House of Saud.

Finding moderates with revolutionary tendencies…. Hmmm…. That could take awhile.

Whitewash

Anyone who has ever walked down the long corridors of the Louvre or wandered through the intimate settings of the Musee d'Orsay has seen some of the finest artwork the world has ever produced.

Imagine every wall empty, every canvas burned.

Imagine the gold mosaics of the greatest cathedrals in Europe torn out and plastered over.

Think of the glorious frescoes in the Sistine Chapel covered with a fresh coat of whitewash.

See it happen in every major city of Europe - paintings destroyed, frescoes removed, mosaics smashed, statues crushed, stained glass shattered.

Make no mistake - these things will all be destroyed.
Intentionally.
Deliberately.

Just as surely as artillery shells destroyed the image of the largest standing Buddha in the world, so too will these artworks be demolished.

Europe is becoming Muslim.

Like the iconoclasts before them, orthodox Muslims do not permit images to be made of any living thing under heaven, lest it become a subject for idolatry.

Their idol is not an image.
It is smashed stone, burnt canvas and broken glass.

There is no act so evil it cannot serve someone's purpose.
There are some who see the rise of militant Islam as an opportunity.

If Islam can be portrayed as simply another expression of religious fervor, then perhaps all of mankind can be turned away from all religious fervor. For such people, the destruction of the beautiful things produced by two millennia of Christian faith serves a two-fold purpose.

First, it crushes the idea of religion as a positive force.

Second, it destroys the beautiful things that reminds the world of the God Who is Truth, Goodness and Beauty and of the religious faith that empowered us to create such true, good and beautiful things in His image.

Best of all, both goals are accomplished without supporters of secularism getting their hands dirty. They can quite correctly claim that they publicly opposed the destruction of the beautiful things, but the marauding religious nutcases could not be stopped. Wouldn't it be better if we rid the world of religion, and rule it without regard to fictional deities?

Many ask where the moderate Muslims are.
I ask a different question.

Among those who refuse to fight for the sake of Christ, are there any who will fight and die for the sake of Beauty?

Saving Christmas

Dear Colleagues,
Please use your resources to strongly encourage Americans to see “The Nativity Story” movie, which opens in theatres December 1. It is a powerfully sacred family movie about the birth of Jesus Christ. It is sure to become an American classic. Important Hollywood insiders including Writer/Director, Jonathan Flora and Movie Guide’s Ted Baehr, are promoting this movie. We all have a responsibility to do our part to help make this film a blockbuster.

Hey, here's a thought.
In addition to putting Christ back into Christmas,
how about we also put the MASS back into Christmas?
Let's see the Protestants put their money where their mouth is - all of them should go to Catholic Mass on Christmas.
After all, Christ's Mass - that's the reason for the season!
Yeah, I didn't think the non-Catholic Christians were really serious either...
Steve

Hi Steve,
Interesting idea and thank you for your comments.
Blessings,
Michael

Interesting idea and thanks for my comments?!?
Isn't that exactly the kind of response the Christians get upset with when they get it from Desperate Housewives or Walmart's Gay Initiative?
Explain to me exactly how your response differs from the non-committal nonsense Dr. Dobson refuses to put up with.

I don't believe that you and I have a disagreement.

Abortion is murder, the practice of homosexuality is an abomination, unions are using their powers to promote anti social cultural changes and the list goes on. I cover all of these issues and take the gloves off while doing it.My site clearly testifies to this.

I have many Catholic friends that I work with regularly but there are millions of non Catholic Christians that do go to church on Christmas and all the other days that their churchs are open. It isn't what we call ourselves, it is what we believe.
Dr. Dobson is one of the people I look up to and he takes on the issues. As you say he " refuses to put up with the non-committal nonsense.

So please don't let that brief response color your opinion of my positions. Simply take a look at the papers on our site and it will clearly testify that we are solidly committed, put the cause above ourselves and do what we can to fight the fight.

Blessings, Michael


Michael,
I believe we do have a disagreement.
Read the following two essays and maybe you'll see why I think you and the inestimable Dr. Dobson are hypocrites.
http://bridegroompress.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=204
http://bridegroompress.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=207

Yes, you may take Catholic positions on some moral issues, just like you use some parts of the Bible the Catholic Church wrote and preserved for you, but you have never celebrated Christmas if you have never participated in Christ's Mass.
That's the reason for the season.

You are exactly right - it isn't what we call ourselves, it's what we believe.
And Protestants refuse to believe that Jesus Christ makes Himself present at Christ's Mass. So you get in high dudgeon about the missing Christ, but you are pretty darned pleased that you aren't attending the missing Mass.

It never occurs to you that by missing Mass, you have already missed Christ, and thus aren't that much different from the pagans you declaim against.

Dr. Dobson is a coward on the issues.
Have you ever heard him talk about the problems contraception causes in marriages?
I haven't.

Have you ever heard him mention that every Christian who ever lived, including every Protestant reformer, uniformly denounced the use of contraception until 1930?
I haven't.

Have you ever heard him defend the practice of masturbation as an essentially harmless practice?
I have.

The man refuses to take on the root of the abortion/homosexuality problem.
Homosexuality is simply contracepted sex, rendered sterile by the partners' very beings, but not particularly different from the temporarily sterile sex that most Christian married couples engage in. Take a look at this: http://bridegroompress.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=63

So, don't expect me to get upset with the pagans when they keep Christ out of Christmas.
The Protestants stripped Him out of Christmas quite a long time ago.

The atheists are just trying to match the rhetoric with the reality.
I can't very well find any fault with them for wanting to be honest.

Steve

Steve,

There are thousands who follow my site and Jim has millions who follow his work. In fact it was a Catholic leader and friend in Hollywood who asked me to post the Ted Baehr piece.I did, by the way, completely agree with Ted and his piece.

Just where do you get off calling Jim Dobson and myself hypocrites?

That is plainly ridiculous, false and a self-righteous assumption in your own mind.What is your agenda, what are your credentials and how do you have the right to be so judgemental of fellow Christians genuinely working so hard to change the direction our degrading culture is going?

While I appreciate the Catholic positions on the values issues I don't use the Catholic church or any other denomination as my guide, I use God's word laid out in the Bible.

We are all pitiful sinners who deserve the pits of hell and it is only because of Christ dying on the cross that we are redeemed.
Faith + nothing = salvation. Salvation isn't based on works and you receive grace by faith alone.

As the body of Christ we should not be attacking each other but working together for the good of God.

You are in my prayers. You need the prayer and I need the practice.
Blessings,
Michael

Michael,
To say that a Catholic leader asked you to post the piece is not really responsive to any of the
points I made. My point is that Protestants began the de-Christianization of Christmas, so you can hardly complain about it today.

As for where I get off calling you hypocrites, I thought I made that clear.
It is hypocritical to attack abortion and be silent on the thing that cause abortion: contraception.
It is hypocritical to attack pornography while being essentially silent on the thing that drives pornography: masturbation.

Jim Dobson is either ignorant as a stone, having completely failed to think through his position, or he is a hypocrite. Are we clear on the concept now?

As for my credentials: I am a Christian who is tired of Christian hypocrisy.
I didn't know we needed any more credentials than that.

And you aren't really working that hard to change the direction of the culture.
You are attacking fruits without attacking roots, so you will fail.

Your position is crap.
The problem is precisely that you DON'T use God's Word laid out in the Bible.
You just use the parts of the Bible you happen to agree with.

For instance, Matthew tells us that if two Christians have a disagreement, we should take it to the Church, which will settle the matter.
Now, you have just told me that you refuse to use any church as your guide - you don't listen to any church.
Thus, you have already dismissed out of hand the Biblical guidance on how to resolve disputes.

I thought you followed the Scriptures???
He was handed over for our transgressions and was raised for our justification.
His blood redeems us, but it is only at the resurrection that we were redeemed, justified.
Or don't you accept Romans 4:25?

You may have read the whole Bible, but you never understood it.
If I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.
If faith alone saved, then having all faith, so as to move mountains would give me salvation, right?
But it doesn't.
Your theology is as bankrupt as your efforts to have Christmas without Christ's Mass.

And, of course, since grace is necessary for salvation and "You are not saved by faith alone", then grace does not ordinarily come through faith alone.
Seems to me that is Scripture too, and the Word of God cannot be broken.

As the Body of Christ, we have a duty to correct one another's faults.

Your efforts to "save Christmas" cannot succeed because you aren't interested in saving Christmas.
You are interested in saving Christ without His Cross.
That's all the Mass is - the presentation of His Cross to each generation.

You can't have Christ without the Cross, so a pox on your attempt to "save Christmas", sir.
The very idea that Christmas can be "saved" by concentrating on a cross-less Christ is absurd.

Steve

Elton John's Walmart

Christians can’t decide whether to love or hate Walmart this season. On the bright side, Walmart has decided to emphasize Christmas. “Happy Holidays” is out, “Merry Christmas” is in. In fact, the joy-filled “Merry Christmas” is so strenuously endorsed that our local Walmart had Christmas goods out on the shelves before the Halloween candies had been put on clearance.

If turning the whole of the fall season into an extended Advent season is good, then Walmart is clearly going above and beyond the call.

On the other hand, Walmart is also clearly courting the gay lifestyle. It has become a partner of the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, thereby joining nearly every one of the Fortune 500.

So, support for a lifestyle that results in the early, painful, diseased death of the consumer is nearly unanimous. Like addiction to tobacco, addiction to the homosexual lifestyle creates a consumer, but what a consumer! Instead of spending money only on tobacco products, they spend money on any epicurean delight. Best of all, while tobacco users often had dependents, homosexuals don’t. They have at least as much disposable income as their heterosexual peers, but they have no one to spend it on but themselves.

This is important when combined with another piece of news: the number of married adults with children living in the same household now make up a minority of the households in the United States.

Businesses go where the money is. As the number of families with children drops, the marketing and culture devoted to families with children will also necessarily drop. It is not cost-effective.

Every market specialist knows that twenty percent of the customer base brings in eighty percent of the business. Indeed, businesses that succeed recognize that they cannot aim to please every customer, rather, they must primarily aim to please the biggest spenders in their stores. The infrequent or penurious customer is not worth the money it costs to retain him.

Just as large companies often spin off and sell subsidiaries that are not generating enough profit, so those same large companies will ignore a customer segment that does not generate enough profit.

Customers can boycott stores, but stores can - by the way they market - also boycott customers. For many companies, married heterosexual adults with children are beginning to be a market segment that is simply not worth the trouble.

Indeed, it is in the interest of most companies to see these same families break up. It is easier to sell Happy Meals to overworked, single parents who don’t have time to cook than it is to sell those same Happy Meals to a stable, married couple with children, especially if one is a stay-at-home parent.

Walmart makes less and less money each year from families precisely because there are fewer and fewer families. So, as Walmart tries to transition to the big spenders, it holds one foot in the doorway of its traditional base. It starts to groom homosexuals while it throws a bone to the families. This is Walmart's gift to us: Merry Christmas.

"From my point of view I would ban religion completely, even though there are some wonderful things about it. I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate."

So says Elton John (whose statements above show he also keeps a foot in both doors, and in more ways than one), and who can argue? Compassion, as it is currently defined, means celebrating diversity while making sure all the diverse wallets empty into your own. Sure, the average homosexual may die an early, diseased, painful death, but he bought quite a few of the self-indulgent accoutrements for his death-style at our stores. There's compassion for you.

Walmart isn't the first to do this, it is among the last. It is caught between catering to a dying lifestyle (the family) and catering to the lifestyle of the dying (homosexuals). All the signs indicate the profit margin on the second is better, thus it would be immoral to harm shareholders by concentrating on the first. So, in true Calvinist Christian style, it pursues the largest profit margin as the most moral course. That's as close to Christian compassion as any corporation can expect to get.

Quarrying 300 Million Toasters

A century ago, it was not at all uncommon to have an entire extended family - one or two sets of grandparents, parents, at least a half-dozen children - all in one house. Families like that used to pose an enormous problem to modern economies.

Think about it. A dozen or two people living in one house find hand-me-downs virtuous, they only need one set of cook pots, they only have one toaster. Large households are not good for the economy because they consume fewer goods.

If there were some way to split those people up so they inhabit three, four, five or six households, then we can sell five or six toasters, five or six sets of cook pots, five or six sets of dishes or cars or houses. From a capitalist’s point of view, it would be best if every one of our 300 million Americans lived in a separate house since that would maximize both purchases and profit.

However, as one might expect, while there are enormous economic advantages to creating this level of social disintegration, there’s a downside as well. In order to break up the multi-generational family, sowing social dissension between the members of the family is absolutely critical. The most efficient way to set the various family members in opposition to one another is to encourage every kind of selfish behaviour. If each person thinks only of his own best interests, then each person will spend his income on himself, saving none of it for anyone else.

Unfortunately, this selfishness bleeds over into the workplace. A selfish worker is more likely to steal, to use up sick days and similar benefits at the highest possible rates, in short, s/he will have little loyalty to the company.

Part of the cost of doing business is precisely the controlled anarchy that tends to be engendered in the larger society as each person looks out primarily for number one. As experience shows, anarchy can be managed so as to produce significant profits for particular people.

But, to be fair, most businesses don’t do well in total anarchy. Rather, they do best at a level just below total anarchy, a situation in which everyone invests their money in goods and services that will protect them from the various kinds of physical, emotional, and social harm which the larger society so willingly inflicts on the weak.

Unmade in America
Since World War II, the United States has been the pre-eminent leader in creating an economy whose citizens tremble on that knife edge between maximum profit-generation and general anarchy.

We do this by placing enormous obstacles in the way of every personal relationship. Early daycare, year-round schooling and the perceived need for a two-income family effectively separates parents from their own children for as long as possible each day, guaranteeing that the family is essentially composed of strangers living at the same address. Better yet, the schools teach children how to be consumers: needy, unable to solve their own problems, always looking towards the external authority: peer pressure.

We encourage pornography and contraception, and thereby divorce, by transforming every person into an object of use. Easy access to abortion and euthanasia encourage family members to destroy one another at the first sign of burden. Homosexuals become the icons for our generation because they (1) rise rapidly on the corporate ladder through assiduous attention to their own good and (2) spend all their money on their greatest love, themselves. Homosexuals are the darlings of the media because homosexuals have far more per capita disposable income than a married couple with five children.

But, even as the corporate world encourages homosexuality precisely because it is profligate, encourages contraception/abortion precisely because it is an abdication of responsibility and encourages euthanasia precisely because it does cut costs, Christian faith attempts to undercut these movements. America’s economy works well because it has harnessed two opposing forces: integration and disintegration, and kept both from gaining majority control.

We Need a New Quarry
But there’s a problem in paradise. You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once. America’s famously strong Protestantism has slowly crumpled under the assault of secular capitalism. Even as America reaches 300 million people, a population growth accomplished only by renting the wombs of Hispanic immigrants, it is no longer a majority Christian population. It is estimated that only one in ten households are headed by a married, never-divorced couple with children.

In its endless quest for profits, too many sheep have been skinned. American corporations are running out of families to exploit. There are fewer and fewer families to break up, fewer and fewer children to dispossess.

But not to worry. We still have Mexico.

Hispanics are the ideal foil for the corporation. The Chinese may have more people, but their one-child policy and their non-Christian culture means they are already atomized. Communism has already set them against each other. There is no mother lode here.

Western corporations have been trying to break into the China market for hundreds of years. The only nation that ever succeeded to any great extent was the British, and that only by waging war on the coastal cities in order to force the Chinese into opium addiction. No, for all the talk of the China market, very little market is actually there.

Hispanics, on the other hand, are Christians who still tend towards multi-generational households, households whose piggy banks are growing through the money sent home by immigrant workers. The American economy needs Hispanics not just because they do jobs Americans will not, but also because their unbroken families are as untilled fields to us, their Catholicism is strong enough to maintain the necessary tension against anarchy. Like a new granite quarry, they can be tunneled into, mined, and blown apart. These are sheep we know how to shear.

Update:
2012 statistics confirm this.

America's Dorian Gray

America’s Dorian Gray

Ever since 9/11, we have spent a lot of our time worrying about Islam and its suicide bombers, and rightly so. We find the idea of murder-suicide repulsive. The idea that the suicide might intentionally take more lives with him – it is usually a him, after all – is even more repulsive. Indeed, it is so repulsive we cannot tear our eyes from it. But it is interesting to examine exactly what repulses us.

Nearly 3000 people died on September 11, 2001 just as nearly 3000 had died on September 10, 2001 and 3000 would die on September 12, 2001. We took note of the event on the 11th, but ignored the events on the 10th and the 12th.

On the 11th, several really big buildings were destroyed by two dozen men who had agreed to kill Americans. On the 10th and the 12th, several dozen men also agreed to kill Americans but they chose to do it in the safety and comfort of abortion clinics across the country. Accomplishing the events of the 11th was seen as an act of a criminal mastermind, opposing the events of the 10th and 12th is also seen as the act of criminal masterminds.

To this day, I can’t shake the feeling that we mourn the loss of the 9/11 buildings more than we do the inhabitants. It has always been hard to take the mournful expressions of the bubble-headed bleached blonde seriously when we know that, even as they mourn, they are tracking audience numbers to see how to entice more of us to their news coverage and, more importantly, their commercial breaks. September 11 was a bad day for America, but at least ratings were up for CNN.

A similar lurking hypocrisy seems to simmer below the surface when it comes to suicide bombers. Islam manufactures suicide bombers, and we rightly castigate Islamic culture for it. But, in just the last week, we have seen the United States manufacture several suicide gunners. When confronted by them, we just shake our heads and click our tongues.

Islam we hold responsible.
Us? Well, we are too nice to be responsible for that kind of thing.

Are we? Think back over the last few years. The only difference between Muslims and Americans is the choice of weapons.

Muslims strap on explosives, enter cafes, banks, trains and buses and pull the trigger. We strap on hunting rifles, enter schools and pull the trigger. True, our way is not as efficient as theirs, but we seem to leave about the same number of bodies behind.

We can say, correctly, that Islam seems peculiarly susceptible to creating suicide bombers. But what of us? True, we don’t explicitly train Americans to be suicide gunners, but we seem to be doing an excellent job in implicitly training them. We don’t hold suicide gunners up as heroes, but they get the fame, nonetheless. Muslim suicides get houris in heaven. American news moguls get houris on earth. Everybody wins.

We seem to find religiously motivated murder-suicide to be somehow more frightening than the man driven to suicide-by-police. We ominously discuss Muslims, but every time another American straps on explosives or a rifle and enters a school (and notice it is always a school, never a shopping mall, a football stadium or movie theater), we chalk it off to bad luck, a lone lunatic, a freak occurrence. Why?

Muslims blow themselves up to kill the great Satan. We pull out rifles to kill the schools. Is it possible that, like Muslims, Americans also have a single, driving motive in our collective suicidal events? Is it possible that we, too, carry an inarticulate, uneducated, demonic hatred of the institutions that destroy us?

The Arabic word for “marriage” is the same as the word for “coition.” According to Islam, women exist to serve the sexual needs of the man. Oddly enough, this is precisely what American culture teaches American men. The whole point of America’s love affair with contraception and abortion is to assure men that they won’t have to worry about taking responsibility for the woman they impregnate. Our no-fault divorce exactly mimics Islamic divorce, in which the man simply announces to his wife that she is divorced, then shows her the door.

Islam is a misogynistic culture built around adulation of the Koran and hatred of intellectual inquiry. We are a misogynistic culture built around adulation of Hollywood and hatred of intellectual inquiry. They have suicide bombers. We have suicide gunners. Perhaps we hate the Muslims for the same reason Dorian Gray hated his picture.

Gasoline on the Islamic Fire

After Greg Borse of Chronwatch.com pointed me towards a fascinating interview with the Islamic expert, Bernard Lewis, I spent some time thinking about Lewis’ remarks. The conclusions I reached were not encouraging.

Lewis points out that the current suicide bombing frenzy is a new thing under the sun for Islam. For centuries, Muslims were taught that suicide was a most heinous sin, guaranteed to merit hell. It is only within this last century that the teaching changed to embrace suicide.

This new interpretation combined with another new interpretation to create the current havoc. According to Lewis, non-Muslims have traditionally been only lightly punished if they blasphemed Allah or Mohammed.

In times past, non-Muslims living under non-Muslim rule (such as Americans, the Dutch or the Pope), would not be held to standards of blasphemy appropriate only for Muslims. Even dhimmis, those non-Muslims who were permitted to live as second-class citizens under Muslim rule, were generally not threatened with serious injury or execution for such actions. It was understood that all of these people were pagans, and blasphemy is all anyone could expect from pagans.

But this has all changed. Within the last few years, Muslims have begun treating non-Muslims, even non-Muslims living in traditionally non-Muslim countries, to standards that used to apply only to followers of Islam. Worse, they have taken to punishing us pagans with a kind of violence that used to be entirely proscribed.

And herein lies the rub.

Pagans, Muslims and Christians
I have discussed in numerous other posts how the Judeo-Christian worldview differed radically from the pagan worldview.

Recall that pre-Christian pagans saw the universe as cyclic, with no beginning and no end. Everyone was on an eternal wheel. Most pagans accepted reincarnation, most accepted the idea that there was no point to deep investigation of any event, because every event merely repeated something that had already happened before and would eventually happen again. All of humanity was chained to an endless, meaningless circle with no real hope for escape, no hope that something new under the sun might ever occur.

Christianity changed all that. For Christians, the universe had a definite beginning (Creation) and a definite end (the coming of the Messiah and the Last Judgement). Everything was building, progressing, moving towards a very definite and clear-cut end. Mankind did not live in a circle, endlessly staring at its own tail, but in a story, in which the actors were expected to mature towards a definite goal.

But Christianity and paganism weren’t just two different ways to look at the physical world. The theology was fundamentally different. Pagans saw the gods as quirky, arbitrary. It was necessary to constantly please their vanities, to stay on their good sides lest the gods become angry with you and smite you down. Gods changed, and men had to be nimble enough to follow their caprices.

Christian philosophy, at least Christian philosophy up until the Reformation, took a radically different view. Christians saw God as unchanging Love. He was not vain, He did not anger, no man could get on His good side by being theologically or physically nimble. Rather, you either used the gifts He gave to become like Him, learning to love as He does, or you chose not to love. If you chose against love, then you would spend the rest of eternity without love.

Six hundred years after the first Christians began later, Islam combined Judeo-Christian monotheism with pagan ideas of the quirkiness of the gods and thereby changed a fundamental rule of theology.

According to Islam, God is one but God can change. He might decide tomorrow that idolatry is acceptable and incest is, indeed, best. Whereas Christian theology understands that God holds creation in existence from moment to moment out of sheer love, Islamic theology assumes God keeps existence going simply because He hasn’t gotten bored with it yet (although He might change His mind on that at any point).

So, whereas a Christian strives to imitate God’s love, a Muslim trains himself to blindly and willingly submit to whatever his capricious God may choose to do next.

Reformation theology, coming nearly a millennium after Mohammed made his mark, added a further twist to theological rules by retaining not only Hebrew monotheism and Catholic Trinity, but also the capricious aspects of Allah.

For the Reformationists and their theological descendants, God is love except when He isn’t. He changes at times. For instance, for non-Catholic Christians, God pours out divine wrath on Himself as He hangs on the Cross because man’s sin has alienated God the Father from God the Son. God gets angry at Himself, opposes Himself.

The Problem
And herein lies the problem. Capitalism, at least capitalism as the West currently promotes it, is primarily a Protestant phenomenon. At this stage of the game, the entire system is designed to create highly emotional consumers, men and women who do not think very clearly but who do feel very strongly. The reason is simple: it is easier to pry money out of the hands of highly emotional people than it is to get it away from essentially rational, stable individuals.

Now, as we have seen, most pagans were not enormously enamored of rational thought. For people ruled by a pantheon of capricious gods in a cyclical universe, rationality has not much use.

Similarly, while Muslims clearly don’t believe Allah is as capricious as, say, Zeus, he has his moments. He can and has cancelled some verses in the Quran and “sent better in its place.” He can change his mind. Allah is beyond rationality, not bound by it.

As for non-Catholic Christianity, Martin Luther essentially set the standard for their theology when he declared reason to be the whore of the devil.

So, as anyone who turns on a television can attest, capitalism is not great at promoting rationalism. It claims to operate according to rational principles, but it actually promotes raw emotion. To put it bluntly, the same kind of raw emotion that drives men and women into car dealerships also drives Moslem crowds into frenzies and suicide bombers into cafes. The only difference is the direction of the emotion.

Given Lewis’ comments on the radical changes in Muslim theology, changes that occurred as Western oil money flowed in during just the last few decades, a rather disturbing thought arises.

We invaded Iraq, we support Israel, because we want to bring Western-style capitalism and democracy to the Middle East. But, while it is possible that Islam can be reformed, it is likewise possible that capitalism, at least as currently practiced in the West, is actually antithetical to that most necessary reform.

The cultural system, particularly the educational system, by which capitalist societies produce emotionally immature, grasping consumers is also perfectly suited to create emotionally immature, violent Muslims – exactly the kind of Muslims we are seeing today. Capitalism is designed to create and appeal to pagans; like Protestantism, Islam possesses a partially paganized worldview.

Thus, it is possible that these Muslim crowds look like 1960’s student radicals because the Western occupation of the region after World War I allowed Western methods of education, i.e., training in consumer-oriented emotionalism, to be widely introduced throughout the Arabian territories. This possibility is especially intriguing given that the most violent Muslim demonstrations have taken place within the most highly educated Middle-Eastern population, by Western standards: the Palestinians.

As Protestant capitalism infiltrates Islam, as secular emotionalism stokes religious emotionalism, it may not break the back of the local religion, as it has in the West. Rather, it may act like gasoline on a fire, causing Islam to erupt into a flame that will destroy them both.

In short, Pope Benedict’s plea to marry faith and reason together, a plea directed towards both the West and Islam, is somewhat more urgent than anyone thought.

The Evolution Solution

Christians believe God created the world through love, secular humanists believe random forces established life through violence.

Christians tell us that violence is the result of our sin, an illness no one was meant to suffer. Secular humanists tell us violence is the language and fabric of nature.

So, why do the champions of evolution in the classroom, the people who insist there is no God and that we are just highly-evolved animals, oppose violence?

How does that work? Doesn’t the whole point of evolution revolve around the idea that violence not only cannot be removed from the world, but that any attempt to remove it would destroy the very process that created the rich biodiversity we are all told we must preserve? If we believe in evolution, if we love what it has created, then why oppose the process through which it creates?

Let’s take a look at a specific case. I have already commented on the disappearance of the 1970’s “broody-hen” rhetoric. According to this line of thinking, anyone who opposed legal abortion viewed women as nothing more than egg-laying machines. According to this theory, pro-lifers who supposed to be opposed because they saw women as nothing but baby-making machines.

Oddly, now that embryonic stem cell research and surrogate motherhood has become all the rage, in other words, now that women really are treated like hens who are prized more for their eggs than their intellects, the “broody-hen” argument has disappeared. But that isn’t the only argument that is going by the wayside.

Remember when abortion was supposed to be a privacy issue, an issue between a woman and her doctor? When was the last time you heard that argument? It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Why did it disappear?

That’s easy. It disappeared because pharmacists are doctors of medicine. When a woman goes to a pharmacist to fill a subscription for Plan B, RU-486, or any other abortifacient drug, she establishes a doctor-patient relationship with her pharmacist, a relationship that we were long told is very private, very holy. Government has no place regulating that relationship, except when the doctor decides that drug-induced abortion is not safe or appropriate treatment for his patient.

Today, if any doctor dares to make such a judgment, he is required by law to send his patient to a doctor who doesn’t care about the woman’s life or health, i.e., a doctor who will fill a prescription for a death-dealing drug. Apparently, government has no business regulating the doctor-patient relationship except when the doctor refuses to participate in baby-killling.

Given this reality, is it any wonder that Jill Stanek – the nurse who reported how live-birth aborted children were being left to die – has discovered that the Department of Justice refuses to prosecute hospitals, doctors or nurses that kill infants? In other words, we oppose violence, except when it is directed at innocents?

A burning political question must be answered. What do you do when you are ruled by homicidal megalomaniacs? We can’t vote them out. The leaders of both parties are certifiably insane, as is the media that spins the edicts they issue.

Much as I despise sharia law and hate the idea of being ruled by it, it is becoming barely possible that being a dhimmi would not be a step down. We would simply be trading one set of evil rulers for another. The imams’ particular predilictions for evil may be different, but the evil itself is the same. As one Muslim demonstrator told Pope Benedict XVI, “We will oppose your worship of life with our worship of death.” That kind of sentiment could make him an honorary secular American.

Benedictine Insults

The recent Muslim upset over Pope Benedict’s remarks is entirely justified. Not because Benedict mis-represented Islam, but because he is changing Islam, and the Muslims know it.

Prior to the death of John Paul II, I was often asked who the next Pope would be. I answered by pointing out how popes have, during the course of the 20th century at least, been chosen in order to deal with the problems of the day. As Nazism waxed and waned in 1920’s Germany, Pope Pius XI laid the foundation for the work of the Pope who was instrumental in breaking the back of Nazi Germany: Pius XII. Pius XI had made Eugenio Pacelli the papal nuncio to Germany. Pacelli knew the German people intimately, he understood the Nazi threat, and he was the principle author of the stinging anti-Nazi encyclical Mit Brennende Sorge. His election as Pius XII was the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.

Similarly, when the threat posed by communism to Europe had reached its zenith, Karol Wojtyla knew how to handle it. A man who knew communism intimately because he had grown up under its dark shadow all of his life, Pope John Paul II was considered so dangerous that the KGB tried to assassinate him. To date, even the Muslims haven’t matched the communists on that point.

Now we have Benedict, the man whose stated mission is to rescue Europe from herself. Europe, indeed, the West as a whole, has long entertained the quixotic hope that reason alone is sufficient to answer all questions of human life and liberty. As I have noted elsewhere, the Western decision to sunder reason from faith is the secular answer to the Protestant Reformation’s attempt to separate faith and reason.

By beginning and ending his Regensburg meditation on the futility of the West’s philosophy with references to Islam, Benedict subtly points out that Islam is a non-Christian version of the Reformation ideal. Like Martin Luther, Mohammed effectively separated faith from reason. Indeed, Islamic theology is avowedly non-rational, insisting that God Himself is not bound by the dictates of reason.

Like the non-Catholic Christian god, who assaults and kills his own son for the sake of humanity, the god of Islam can fool himself, change his mind, be other than what he has been. The primary difference between Luther’s non-rationality and Mohammed’s non-rationality lies only in the moderating force of Jesus’ lived example. Luther had at least that much, Mohammed did not.

Thus, Islam lives out an Old Testament style of violence. Prior to the advent of Christianity, about 10% of the Roman Empire was Hebrew. Like today’s Muslims, the Hebrews were known to get militantly defensive about their faith. At least a dozen different rebel bandits occupied Rome’s army in Judea between the time of Herod in 37 BC and the first revolt in 66 AD. The war ended only with the destruction of the Temple, but the violence would not stop there – the Bar Kochba rebellion would require a second Roman response, a response that decimated the land.

Up until that time, Hebrew law looked remarkably like the sharia law Muslims would develop a millennium later. Both required death for apostates from their monotheistic faith, both killed fornicators and adulterers, both permitted polygamy. The primary difference lay in the understanding of God’s rationality. Jews understood that God is rational, that rationality is part of the divine nature and that God does not change. Islam does not understand or accept this.

When the Jewish faith found itself subject to Christian Faith, it gradually saw the logic of the Christian worldview, at least in regards to law and its application. Two millennium of Christian-Jewish interaction led to a serious moderation of the Deuteronomic code. Today's Jews, even the most orthodox Jews, no longer stone adulterers and fornicators, individual Jewish believers are no longer under obligation to kill the idolater in their midst and polygamy, while still permitted from a theological perspective, is under the ban for reasons of prudence.

The question Benedict implicitly raises in his Regensburg speech is quite simple: even if we beat the Muslims, invade Iraq, Iran or any other Islamic nation-state that we can, what good will it do? Will that make Islam theologically capable of accommodating itself to the Catholic - not just the Christian, but the Catholic - worldview?

The current philosophy of the West, a philosophy that separates faith and reason, is bankrupt. Its companion in crime, Reformation theology, is bankrupt as well. Islam, at least Islam lived as Mohammed lived it, is an empty cup. Jewish philosophy and theology, Hinduism, Buddhism – none of them are capable of reforming either Islam or the West.

So, Benedict lays down a question that, when properly understood, insults everyone if only because reality is so rakishly cruel to our lives of illusion. The major difference between Islam and the West is this: Islam understands what Benedict said. The West does not.

The Order of Catholic Parents

I recently received a critique of Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America, from a Cistercian who teaches at a Catholic high school run by his religious community. Actually, I didn't receive the critique directly, rather, I received it second-hand from someone who had given a copy to the monk. The response to the book was quite remarkable.

The Cistercian Critique:
I did get to look at Designed to Fail for a little bit last night before bed. I liked a lot of the points and the style was lively and engaging. I think he's right about the neglected importance of adult catechesis and the importance of its "trickle-down" effects in the family, and I also feel deeply that he is correct that the "ecclesia domestica" cannot rebuilt so long as anti-child sins are not preached against -- or as long as integral family values are not preached for, more importantly -- in the Church. It's also true that parochial schools often trade-off with the resources that could be spent on adult faith-formation (although I suspect that's not the real reason why contemporary adult catechesis is so weak .).

[Editor's Note: I didn't formally respond to this paragraph in my reply below, but I found it interesting that he essentially denies Catholic schools are causing any problems in the Catholic community.]

Still, alongside the basic distaste for the importance of professional assistance/ guidance that Catholic schools can provide, I ultimately take exception to the apparent assumptions that all real Catholic parents can and should homeschool, and that all good lay Catholics should be attending didactic faith-formation classes at their parish. Maybe I'm misreading the tone, but if that's the big idea, I'm not sure I can buy into it.

As you would expect, I also don't really appreciate the implication that teaching children in schools is a misguided ministry. Although I am confident Steve would say different things about Cistercian than about most Catholic schools, the ideas that most families are equipped to homeschool, that well-raised Catholic children can reliably remain Catholic in (note I didn't say "endure") the current public school system, and that the "ex opere operato" grace of matrimony makes most parents sufficient (note I didn't say "basic" or "fundamental") catechists of their children -- these ideas I think are dicey.

The "subsidium" provided by priests, religious, and the greater lay community must be very substantial indeed in many or most cases. Professional theologians and catechists are often needed, as are professional Christian educators in secular subjects, if our children are to really go beyond the anti-modernist ghetto and become robust lay disciples in service of Church and society.

I also wonder if the idea of abruptly switching parish efforts from child-formation to adult-formation would result in grave frictions; for example, the teacher-mothers who are so comptently (or at least potentially competently, given adquate guidance themselves) able to nurture and catechize children would have to be replaced by an entire class of professional and full-time catechists (mostly male, I intuit) who would have to be the primary income-earners of households, thus inevitably promoting a dangerous kind of careerism and cutthroatness around things most sacred.

These are just my brainstorms on the topic; whether they really apply to Steve's view or not, I can't yet tell. It has certainly been a stimulating and thought-provoking book, and I look forward to delving into it again another time. My impression is that, for all of the distaste I have for bombastic Catholic lit that identifies the one "real problem" in the Church today, this book has some very important, provocative, and worthwile insights.

* On further reflection, I thought it might not hurt to explicitly mention that my concern about a full-on class of professional lay catechists has no relevance to the kind of work for parishes that people like you and Steve do now. You are of course welcome to share my thoughts with Steve; I hope he finds them helpful. (You can also paste in the second paragraph above, *if* you wish.) Like I said, I think he's on to something important, and if you think that could help him refine it, so much the better. And also I again emphasize that I didn't catch the whole context, and it's clear that he's done some important factual research. As far as further interaction about my comments, I'm open to that if he wants, because it is a topic of import to me, but maybe we can just leave that as an open question based on his wishes and my energy level! In Christ, Brother XXX

[Editor's Note: I did not respond to this paragraph in my reply either, but it is also interesting.
He is fine with having Directors of Religious Education or Adult Formation at the parish level, yet how is this not a "full-on class of professional lay catechists"? Why would his remarks NOT be relevant to work in parishes? Are parish workers immune from careerism or the need to be paid a living wage? These remarks are quite curious. In any case, my response is below.]

My Response
Thanks for sending me the interesting critique. I've noticed that the book seems to be a Rohrschach test in which different people "see" different sections of the text and fail to see other sections. As a result, it has been quite interesting to read reviews.

In the book, I explicitly point out that: 1) homeschooling is not for everyone and 2) the sacrament of matrimony does not provide the graces necessary to homeschool in every subject (rather, it provides only the graces necessary to do sacramental prep).

It seems to me quite obvious that having the grace (the power) to do a task is not identical to having the knowledge necessary to do the task. I don't have a copy of the book at my elbow, but if I recall correctly, I do have a section on the difference between grace and knowledge in the book itself. I know I certainly emphasize this every time I teach adults about sacraments.
Indeed, I believe I quote at least one papal document concerning the fact that the family is incomplete in itself in order to demonstrate to the more rabid members of the homeschool crowd that Rome does not believe homeschooling in all subjects is the answer.

Likewise, the Magisterium is quite clear on the importance of Catholic schools - my point is that very few of the parochial schools, high schools or "Catholic" higher education in the United States today actually conform to Rome's description of what constitutes a Catholic school.

In short, I agree that Catholic schools are necessary, I simply don't believe we have any (or at least, not many) in the United States.

Furthermore, I never say well-raised Catholic children can reliably remain Catholic in public schools, instead, I point out that there is little functional difference between the current Catholic school system and the public school system - rather a different emphasis. Again, if I recall correctly, I point out that public schools will crucify well-catechized Catholics. It is well-known that not every Catholic responds well to the opportunity for martyrdom.

The idea that all good lay adult Catholics should be attending didactic faith-formation classes at their parish is described in at least one Magisterial document and in the proceedings of the Council of Trent. One might argue that today's cultural circumstances call for different measures, but it's hard to see what else they would be. Thus, it is not clear why this idea is "dicey."

As for the transition to primary focus on adult formation causing grave frictions, it is not clear why that would be the case. Certainly the transition to a six-month preparation requirement in all dioceses for marriage prep went fairly smoothly, and it is not clear why this kind of transition need be any more stressful than that transition was.

Precisely because adults, especially parents, are more responsible individuals than are children, the actual investment in training personnel would be less, not more, than is currently required. As I point out in the book, if we rely on the well-catechized parents in the parish (i.e., the homeschooling parents) we have already gone a long way towards providing the necessary catechists. Even professional speakers in a year-long series would cost less than the grade school teachers.

Finally, if avoiding "careerism" and the need to pay a living wage to teachers are the objections to teaching adults (lest these attitudes grow up around things most sacred), then could not these charges be laid equally well at the door of every Catholic school in the country? Indeed, do I not lay these very charges at the door of every Catholic school? Is it not the case that the Catholic schools currently suffer from exactly the problem of careerism and the need to pay a living wage to people incapable of guarding things most sacred?

Put another way, do even the Cistercians refuse all moneys paid to the school, instead teaching without any recompense at all for their time? To the extent that any Cistercian accepts any recompense at all for his teaching, is this money, food or lodging not part of the "living wage" that comprises his ability to live in community? Is there no "careerism" among any in the community? Perhaps I am a cynic, but I do not believe religious vows strip away concupiscence, so I would find any answers in the negative in these areas rather hard to credit.

And why should the Church find the payment of "the living wage" a problem? Certainly Brother XXXX is not advocating the completely unworkable solution of staffing all Catholic schools with religious orders? The problems with doing this are laid out rather clearly in the book - it is a solution that has been tried and has been found wanting, at least in the United States.

So, while I appreciate the kind words he has to say about the importance of adult formation, I find his objections either seem to ignore passages in the work itself or seem to ignore the conditions in the Catholic schools.

The problem here revolves around enabling Catholic parents to do what they are ordained to do. If we consider Catholic parenting to be the foundational religious order of the Catholic Church, then this is the one order which cannot be allowed to fail. The Church can and has survived without Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, even without Cistercians, but She cannot survive, She has never lived life, without the order of Catholic parents.

Stop Oyster Abortions!

How many people know that Prozac is an abortifacient?

Yes, it seems oysters spontaneously abort when exposed to Prozac in streams and lakes. How would they be exposed?

Well, as I've pointed out in the past, people don't fully metabolize the drugs they take. The unmetabolized drugs used by your neighbors and friends pass out through their urine and enter the water supply.

In the United States, water treatment plants don't filter out pharmocalogically-active drugs like hormonal birth control pills or Prozac. So oysters will continue to suffer. To quote Yahoo News (which made this a headline news story):

"The study found that the drug causes female mussels to release their larvae before they're able to survive on their own.

'The results from this study were quite alarming. When larvae are released too early [i.e., aborted - editor's note], they are not viable, which only contributes to the problems faced by struggling populations of native freshwater mussels,' co-investigator Rebecca Heltsley of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Hollings Marine Laboratory in Charleston, N.C., said in a prepared statement."

Now, no one bothered to note that spontaneous abortion is a known side-effect of Prozac.
And few people realize that RU-486 also works as an anti-depressant. As Plan B, and other high-dose morning-after abortifacients become popular, this problem will just get worse, not better. But no one wants to talk about it.

In fact, it isn't possible to find a news story that indicates Prozac causes abortions in people. Its abortifacient ability apparently only becomes newsworthy when it affects oysters.

Similarly, no one talks about the effects of the birth control pill on the nation's water supply, except insofar as it harms fish.

And virtually no one discusses how the increased presence of all of these drugs in the first world water supplies might be linked to low fertility rates in first-world countries.

People used to eat oysters to increase their sexual prowess. Looks like that tradition will go by the wayside soon.

It's Just Fiction

Bill Clinton is upset.
Madeline Albright is upset.
The Democrat party is upset.

How odd.


Sure, ABC has put together a 9/11 movie that portrays all three in a negative light, but that's not a big deal, right? After all, it's just fiction, it's just a movie, if it were written down, it would be just a novel.

I'll bet they will spend lots and lots of time to debunk a work of fiction.

How absolutely ridiculous.
Just ask Dan Brown and Random House.

Which raises a related question: why is Random House and James Frey, author of "A Million Little Pieces", giving back the proceeds on his sales?

Random House didn't offer to refund the money on Brown's work, even though the only difference between Brown and Frey is that Frey wrote a book claiming to be history which turned out to be partially fiction, while Brown wrote a book which was fiction, but claimed to accurately portray history.

Catholics and other Christians were very angry with Brown, but no harm, no foul.

On the other hand, Oprah got very angry at Frey.

It's comforting to know that Random House knows who they can safely cross and who they can't. This answers all those people who say publishing houses have no standards.

State of Emergency

Imagine living in an area your whole life, and your father before you, and his father before him, when you suddenly began to notice new people in your neighborhood. First just a few, but then it changes. More come in, most from another country. First one stranger, then several, then dozens, the friends and relatives from the old hometown arriving in an ever-increasing flood, buying the houses and land near yours and setting up housekeeping.

The governing authorities notices the influx of newcomers and takes steps to limit the inflow of people. They pass laws, step up border enforcement and try to keep the flow to a manageable level.

It doesn’t help. Due to the problems in their home countries, more and more of the foreigners come in every day. None share your religious faith, which is the religion of the region, many are lawbreakers, some are even terrorists. These newcomers begin to insist they want to set up their own state, a new state that governs itself and doesn’t recognize the lawful authority in the area. Eventually, they succeed.

Does this story sound familiar? Of course it does. It is the story of the formation of the state of Israel.

Due to anti-Semitism in Europe, a group of secular Jews in the late 1800’s became convinced that they should establish a Jewish homeland in the Palestine area, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Following WW I, Britain gained control of Palestine. Even though Jewish land acquisitions were perfectly legal, British authorities recognized the influx of Jews created flashpoints with the native Ottoman Arab population. They attempted to limit immigration.

This was not only unsuccessful, it was radically unsuccessful. The growing anti-Semitism in Europe coupled with the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine created Jewish terrorist cells, bent on overthrowing British rule at all costs. These Zionists were, in fact, allied with the Nazis prior to WW II, since Hitler had his own reasons for encouraging a weakening of British control in the region. Even during the war, Germany always encouraged its Jews to emigrate to Palestine and the flag of Israel was the only one permitted to fly on the same flagpole as the German Swastika.

Eventually, the combination of increasing population, unending violence and world shame over the Holocaust did the trick: Israel became a nation.

Now, of course, at this point some readers are feeling a little cheated. You may well be thinking, “You deliberately mis-led us by your opening. You wrote so as to make us think you were describing events in North America, but you pulled a fast one. That is grotesquely unfair.”

And you would be right. I was being unfair. I deliberately wrote the opening story in order to remind you that this is how the United States annexed Texas and California.
In the early 1800’s, the area that comprises Texas and California was ruled by Mexico. Protestant Americans rode across the borders and settled Mexican territories. Despite laws that required all immigrants into Mexico to convert to Catholic Faith, many of these settlers either did not do so, or did so in name only. Worse, many of the immigrants from the United States had criminal records. They were lawbreakers.

After colonizing the area, often illegally, these immigrants successfully fomented rebellion and formed their own state, the state of Texas. Unfortunately the boundaries of the state were never clearly defined. When Texas was absorbed by the United States, the boundary disputes continued. President Polk sent troops into the disputed area to establish a military outpost. While deliberately attempting to militarize an area that was not clearly controlled by the United States, American soldiers were fired upon by Mexican soldiers.

Polk insisted that “American blood has been spilled on American soil” and thus began what would become the Mexican-American War, in which Mexico lost over half its territory. This is the war Abraham Lincoln publicly railed against (he voted for supplies for the troops, but against the war). It is the war that Henry David Thoreau went to jail over. It is the war Ulysses S. Grant was ashamed to ever have participated in.

What’s that? I’ve switched subjects again? You thought I was talking about the waves of Mexican Catholics coming into the United States? Hmmm… I wonder why?
Most conservatives are (as I am) four-score behind Israel and against the Arabs, even though the Arabs made the same complaints seventy years ago about Ashkenazi Jews that many of those same American conservatives make now about Mexican Catholics. On the other hand, most liberals vigorously support both Hispanic immigrants and the Arabs against Israel, even though the Zionists were merely an early version of the radicals amongst the Hispanic population.

Of all the popular political voices on the spectrum, Pat Buchanan is alone in being logically consistent on these points: he opposes both Hispanic immigration and support to Israel. But that is the beginning and end of his consistency. After all, how can an orthodox Catholic be opposed to pro-life, anti-homosexual Catholics immigrating into Protestant America? Why preserve a culture of death?

In my last post, I pointed out quite a few logical inconsistencies. With this post, I have given you another set. Next week, I will discuss a set of facts that are clearly inconsistent, but whose solution I simply cannot fathom. I'm hoping you will be able to help me out.