Was Karl Marx Right?

A recent series of e-mails from a self-described “pro-life feminist” demonstrated how badly even well-intentioned people understand the basics of human life and interaction. Though a graduate of an orthodox Catholic school, Franciscan University, she was apparently uncontaminated by its teaching.

For instance, the woman took issue on several levels with homeschooling. She asserted a homeschooled child could never be as well-taught as someone instructed by a professional teacher. This was especially true in Florida, she said, a state with “real standards.” She felt homeschooling was “demeaning” by being forced to stay home with her children. She insisted she would never obey her husband or submit to his authority.

Instead, she intended to get her doctorate in education and work at a job somewhere, competing with men for the most important thing: money.

The immensity of her errors were breathtaking. They are worth examining in detail simply for the instruction they provide.

Completely oblivious to the fact that homeschooled children do as well or better than their public school counterparts in every area, she did not realize that Catholic parents are required to teach their own children about the Catholic Faith. Spiritual instruction cannot be left up to a school or external agent.

A parent is not simply one who gives biological life – s/he is one who gives spiritual life by introducing the child to the God who is the source of life. To the extent a biological parent does not perform the spiritual task, that parent is not fully a parent.

Similarly, she seemed unaware that authority derives from service. To the extent that anyone does not serve, that person has no authority. Thus, when Scripture commands submission to authority, it assumes that the authority in question is serving the needs of the one submitting. If that is not happening, no submission is required. God has authority over us in part because He answers our every need.

We all instinctively know this relationship between authority and service exists. President Bush’s authority was called into question in the New Orleans crisis precisely because he was accused of not having served the people of that city well. The local government of New Orleans stands accused of precisely the same offence. To the extent that a man does not serve his wife, he has no authority over her, and to the extent that she does not serve him, she has no authority over him.

But the most interesting error was the last one: career and money. Although she called herself a feminist, she clearly saw the male career path as the superior choice. Money, power in business circles, careerism: these were her highest goals. In short, this “feminist” put the pursuit of wealth above her relationship with her own future children.

Karl Marx held that capitalism, the pursuit of wealth, led inexorably to atheism. Now, he also thought it would inexorably lead to communism, but that was primarily because he misunderstood one aspect of human nature. He agreed with Rousseau that mankind does not suffer from original sin, thus, he thought everyone would eventually learn to share everything in common.

As it happens, this is not the case. Because we are all greedy bastards, that is, because we suffer from original sin, we kill each other in order to acquire things. But the acquisition of things at the expense of building relationships with one another does most assuredly lead to atheism.

This was the misunderstanding our “pro-life feminist” held. Because she was a capitalist, she held the mistaken belief that life was about acquiring things. Thus, her “feminism” necessarily meant repudiating children, even repudiating her own womb. She necessarily undervalued women’s work because it does not revolve around acquiring things, it revolves instead around helping small people develop into adults.

As I pointed out to her, she held onto a false feminism. She wanted to compete with men in the business world because she was instinctively afraid that she was not good enough to compete with women in the creation of a good home.

As has been noted previously, while capitalism is certainly superior to most alternatives, it does have its own inherent excesses to contend with. In short, while there are certain mistakes that only a communist could make, there are other mistakes that only a capitalist could make. This young woman demonstrated that truth in spades.

Katrina Incentive

I want to thank those who have donated cases of books to the Katrina effort so far.

As a way of saying showing our appreciation for your generosity, Bridegroom Press will provide a special gift to everyone who has donated or will donate a case of books to Katrina victims: premium access to discounts.bridegroompress.com

This site is normally available only to retail stores and wholesalers, but a free membership through the end of the year will be made available to all donors.

Membership is by application and approval - once you have donated, you can go to the discounts site and create a discount store login. That login will be cleared for entry into the store within 24 hours of its creation. The access will afford you a 20% discount on all products (minimum orders and shipping still apply).

Katrina Aid

We have just been informed that St. Vincent de Paul society in Houston is in need of Catholic materials for the victims of the Katrina Hurricane. As you know, over 30% of the New Orleans population was Catholic. There is a great need to help these people in their time of loss. Time hangs especially heavily on their hands since they have no job to go to and nothing to do. The St. Vincent de Paul society is specifically requesting books that deal with grief, pain and loss, along with rosaries, medals, Bibles, and similar items.

In response to this plea, Bridegroom Press is donating nearly $2600 worth of books to the Houston organization. Unfortunately, this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people being cared for. Given our situation, we cannot make a greater donation at this time.

If any of you would like to purchase a case of books to send to the St. Vincent de Paul society in Houston, you can do so. Simply click here. A case of books will be sent to the Houston society in your name and Bridegroom Press will send an invoice and letter to you acknowledging the donation and where it was sent. The packing slip for the box sent to Houston will also contain your contact information so that the Houston society can send you a receipt.

You will be sending one case (128 copies) of Effective Habits of the Five People You Meet In Heaven. This book discusses death, pain, grief and loss from the Catholic perspective. It also discusses the life of virtue and how to follow it.

Thank you for your support.

Living in a Fish Bowl

As the old saying goes, “Man’s best friend is a wall.”

Everyone has commented on the violence in the Superdome, but no one has thought about why it seemed so bad. Because it isn’t clear the violence was really anything out of the ordinary for any city in the nation.

Consider the facts: the New York Times and CNN both tell us the same thing: 10 people died at the Superdome, 24 died at the convention center.

The population of the Superdome was approximately 24,000, a good-sized town in the Midwest. That death rate works out to less than one death per 10,000 per day. The population at the convention center was 25,000, which works out to two deaths per 10,000 per day.

But we know something else about this population. "Two-thirds of the 24,000 people huddled inside [the Superdome] were women, children or elderly, and many were infirm, said Lonnie C. Swain, an assistant police superintendent overseeing the 90 policemen who patrolled the facility with 300 troops from the Louisiana National Guard."

Now, ask any demographer, and discover that most deaths in a population occur in children, especially those under age one, and in the aged. This population was heavily skewed towards the kind of people most likely to die.

Further, according to the New York Times, most did not die of violence, they died on the last day as the physical exertion of walking in the heat while insufficiently hydrated killed them.

"By the time the last buses arrived on Saturday, [New Orleans assistant police chief Swain] said, some children were so dehydrated that guardsmen had to carry them out, and several adults died while walking to the buses. State officials said yesterday that a total of 10 people died in the Superdome."

According to this Harvard study the death rate at the Superdome would have had to be 50% higher just to constitute an emergency, "The term 'complex emergency' describes a situation in which a large civilian population is affected by a combination of war, civil strife, food shortages, and population displacements. Although there are a few exceptions, complex emergencies are characterized by substantially elevated mortality rates, especially in the acute phase. An arbitrary threshold, above which an emergency is said to exist, has been established at one death per 10,000 people per day, or about three per 1000 per month. This rate is approximately two to four times the baseline rate of mortality in developing countries. (This threshold is probably less relevant in developed countries, where baseline mortality levels are considerably lower.)"

For a population of 24,000, that means the Superdome would have had to generate 15 corpses in five days for the situation to be considered an emergency. And even that number doesn't take into account that this population was skewed, with an unusually high proportion of children and elderly. The convention center situation, where the death rate was twice as high, was actually much worse, but also got much less coverage. It wasn't as photogenic.

But the real question is this: why did the people in the Superdome perceive the crime rate as being unconscionably high? After all, we’re talking about a population that tolerates a murder rate ten times higher than New York City’s. This population knows and permits crime rates that would make other cities blanch.

The difference is simply this: for five days, the people of New Orleans lived in a literal fish bowl. All of the walls were gone. They couldn’t hide inside their apartment buildings or houses and pretend nothing bad was going on.

For five days, every person in this literal city of 24,000 saw the flash of every gun shot, heard the cries of every beaten man and the screams of every raped woman in an echoing amphitheater where nothing could be ignored or evaded.

They had to watch - not what they had become - but what they had always been. They had to come face to face with the loss not only of their possessions, but of their illusions about themselves. They could no longer pretend they were good people who would do the right thing. They had to actually do the right thing.

And some of them did respond to the injustices. For instance, we know a man caught raping a young girl to death was himself beaten to death by the Superdome citizens.

We could equivocate about vigilante justice, but the state has always had the right to mete out the death penalty, and in a situation where there is no place to put an unrepentant criminal, it is hard to say the citizens of this temporary city did the wrong thing.

The press would have us write off the Superdome crowd as animals, but the case is not so cut and dried. If we had put 24,000 New Yorkers into a similar fishbowl after 9/11, would it have turned out any differently? How many of us would like to be stripped of all we own and sit in a huge circle with 24,000 fellow citizens of our fair city? For five days? With no walls to hide behind?

Muslim Authority

The Quran calls Jews, Christians and Muslims “People of the Book.” It is an appropriate title, and in more ways than Muslims might like.

I mention this because several Muslims recently wrote me concerning a column that’s almost nine months old, Death Threats from Muslims.

Of the group, two Muslims wrote to apologize for the stupidity of the man who is praying for my death from virulent cancer (p.s. So far, Allah isn’t coming through for you on that one. Sorry, Khalid). They both insisted that he showed ignorance of true Islamic teachings and he did not look hard enough for reliable sources. They both went on to chastise me for having believed him. I should not trust Khalid’s interpretations, they said, I should trust theirs.

Really? How do I know that? Who should I trust? Who has the power to authoritatively interpret the Quran? After long discussions with Muslims on the subject, that answer is obvious. No one.

Near the end of his life, Martin Luther observed, "There was a time when there was one Pope on the seven hills of Rome, but now there are seven popes on every dunghill in Germany.” Muslims have the same problem Luther had: when no one is the Pope, everybody is.

It is a tenet of Islam that Mohammed is the last prophet. That creates an enormous problem.

You see, he didn’t authorize anyone to collect his sayings together during his lifetime into the book we now have, the Quran. The Quran is not a book that Mohammed put together nor did he say it had to be put together. So who did it and on what authority did they do it?

Worse, Mohammed didn’t authorize anyone to authoritatively interpret his visions and sayings. And he didn’t authorize a specific successor to his post.

In fact, all he said was that the next leader of Islam should be someone close to him. Our only witness to this is the people close to him. As one might imagine, this created problems.

Mohammed’s death was the direct cause of the first and deepest schism within Islam: the break between Sunnis and Shiites. Sunnis believe one follower, Abu Bakr, was Mohammed’s true successor, Shiites believe a different follower, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was.

Everyone saw the problem. None of the Companions were prophets, they could easily have misunderstood or mis-remembered what the Prophet said or did and no one agreed on who should lead.

Within thirty years, Islam was in a civil war that resulted in a three-way split amongst the followers of the dead Prophet. The splits have only grown in size and vigor since then.

Today, it’s simply not possible to claim that anyone knows what true Islam is. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, anyone who isn’t Wahabbi Islam can be jailed; certain Islamic sects are even put to death for daring to carry their own literature in that kingdom.

Mohammed himself predicted this would happen. One of the Hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet, is quite blunt: “Jews divided into 71 sects, Christians divided into 72 sects, and the Muslim nation will divide into 73 sects of whom all will be in hellfire except for one.”

So the first question to ask any Muslim who tries to tell you of the wonders of Islam is this: “Are you of the true sect of Islam, or one of the 72 out of 73 sects that will be in hellfire? If you are of the true sect of Islam, how do you and I know this?” Then watch them sputter.

Like Protestants, evangelicals and fundamentalists, Muslims have only the Book. They have no definitive way of knowing exactly how the Book should be read. Which passages should get what emphasis in the varying circumstances of life? No one knows. There is no Caliph who can adjudicate any dispute that arises over interpretation. There are only hordes of competing scholars who each put forward a different understanding: seven popes on every dunghill in Germany and the Middle East.

Now, as the Prophet say "differences among scholars is a mercy." Thus, scholars who reject the authority of the Quran are a mercy from Allah.

When I pointed all of this out, the Muslims struck back. “We have no clear line of authority, but we don’t need it. After all, where is your authority to read your Scripture?” I laughed out loud when I saw the question. That was easy.

Christ is the apostle sent from the Father (Heb 3:1). He appointed twelve apostles and gave them all authority in heaven and on earth (John 20:21). He gave them the very authority of God, even unto the authority to forgive sins. They appointed successors through the laying on of hands (Acts 14), and those successors in turn appointed successors through the laying on of hands. Each generation of apostles created through the laying on of hands had “all authority.” (1 Tim 4:14, Titus 2:15). Even Paul was not called an apostle until after the Church laid hands on him (Acts 13:1-3), and none of his speeches were recorded in Acts of the Apostles until after that event. After all, he wasn’t an apostle until the Church had consecrated him as one.

Together, the apostolic successors have the authority to determine how Scripture is to be understood. Apostolic succession continues today, for neither Scripture nor the history of the Church shows it ever having ended. Christianity is unique in having a clearly established line of authoritative succession, each apostle appointing his successors. Today, some Christians would like to pretend that this line does not exist, but it does, as both Scripture and history witness. The head of the apostles resides in Rome, Benedict XVI.

When all Christians recognize this, Islam will be destroyed.

Freebies

A new free movie series called "Masterpiece Mysteries" is now available for download at www.bridegroompress.com

The series is based on a talk I gave over a year ago at a Michigan conference. The movie files are in Windows Media format and are not trivial in size (between 20 and 60 MB), but they will walk you through how to read the symbols present in several masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance artwork.

Please tell anyone who might be interested in them.

Enjoy!

Superdome Death Toll

CNN reports that 10 bodies were found in the now-empty Superdome.

This is wildly at odds with what the news organizations told us.

After all, there was, at one point, nearly 23,000 refugees at the Superdome. Put another way, the Superdome held a population the size of a small city. Worse, that population was disproportionately old, poor, sick and disabled - the people who could not leave New Orleans. That is, the Superdome population was that remnant of the greater New Orleans population most likely to be killed by adverse circumstances.

But despite the most adverse circumstances imaginable, only ten people were found dead over the course of five days. We know at least one of these dead was a suicide, and two more were the result of a rape - a young girl raped and killed, her murderer himself killed shortly afterwards by the enraged crowd.

Before CNN's report, it seemed distinctly odd that news reports kept telling us of the corpses strewn around the Dome, but their photos and descriptions were always of the same three bodies: a disabled grandmother in a wheelchair, a man on a chaise lounge and a man on a blanket in the median.

Now we know why.

Ten deaths in five days in an old, disabled population of 23,000?
All things considered, that's pretty darned good.

New Orleans' Baptism

According to nearly everyone, New Orleans got nailed because of sin. This isn’t just the opinion of the evangelicals. It is the opinion of atheistic liberals.

European papers assert Katrina was the punishment the US received for the sin of failing to sign onto the Kyoto accord. Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote a column saying Katrina happened as a result of and punishment for Gov Barber's ( R-MS) work against the Kyoto Treaty. Other American Democrats say the sinner was President Bush. He sinned by sending troops to Iraq instead of spending the money on flood control measures in New Orleans.

Islamic militants believe Katrina was Allah’s punishment for the Iraq war. Others suggest the hurricane was God's punishment on the U.S. for cooperating in the removal of Jews from the Gaza strip.

A Catholic pointed out four years ago that Galveston, on the other side of the bay, was destroyed by a category-four hurricane that arrived in 1900 after the city hosted a Mardi Gras with a costume theme of "Beelzebub and the Devils." Ryan Lee points out that Katrina – the name means “pure” – struck New Orleans on the feast of the beheading of John the Baptist, just two days before the scheduled start of the 34th annual Southern Decadence festival, a six-day public homosexual orgy that New Orleans was supposed to host from August 31 to September 5th. The Baptist, you will remember, was beheaded for having told the king to stop debauching himself with his brother’s wife.

So, no matter who you ask, everyone seems to agree that New Orleans had it coming. The primary difference between all of these commentators is why. The Christians think New Orleans got slammed because the inhabitants of the city sinned. The atheists, pagans and Muslims think New Orleans got slammed because people outside of New Orleans sinned.

In a way, they are both right. As I pointed out in the essay on the Indian Ocean tsunami nine months ago, God doesn’t cause evil. He permits us to cause it, if we insist upon it. Grace empowers the world. If we insist on removing grace, if we insist on ordering God out of our world, then our world will fall apart.

For an atheist, for someone who sees politics as their whole world, the reign of an evangelical Christian who wreaks war upon anti-Christian Muslims and refuses to sign onto Mother Earth protection is already a world falling apart. New Orleans is just a finely-tuned example of how bad it is.

For Christians who see one out of three children in the nation murdered in the womb, homosexuality constantly promoted, and debauchery on every television show, it is also a world already falling apart.

No matter who we are, New Orleans isn’t really a surprise. It is what we knew was coming, because we all know that things are terribly wrong. We may not agree on how these things are wrong, but we knew in the back of our minds that something like this had to happen.

On September 11th, two buildings fell and 3000 died. It was a shock if only because we had grown so blind to our own injustices. Since that day, Americans have gone through a long period of self-examination, trying to discover what drove that event. No matter what answer the various commentators have arrived at, the self-examination has made us aware of moral problems in our nation that are obvious now in a way that simply wasn’t true four years ago.

This week we haven’t just lost two buildings. We’ve lost an entire city. Where thousands were homeless, now millions are. What took months to clean up before will take years now.

Revelation is like that. God reveals slowly, allowing us time to reflect and adjust. Four years ago, two towers were taken. This week, a city has been taken. What else will have to be taken before we recognize what is going on?

Catholic Relief Services

For those who would like to contribute to the relief effort but don't trust or don't know enough about many of the relief organizations involved, I will personally vouch for the ability of Catholic Relief Services to get things done.

CRS provides relief services in over 80 countries.
It is one of the largest relief organizations in the world, and it has an incredibly low overhead to boot: the last time I checked, almost 95% of the money it received when right back out on the streets.

Their link is here: http://www.catholicrelief.org/

Their financial statement is here: http://www.catholicrelief.org/about_us/financial_statements/index.cfm

Collective Guilt, Incurable Sin

God doesn’t work the way we would like Him to. Fine examples of this can be found in the Holocaust and the atom bomb, in child abuse and the recent sentencing of the BTK killer.
When Hitler’s Germany was reduced to ashes and its scientific Darwinian eugenics was fully exposed, the world recoiled in horror. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke for many Americans when he opined that the Germans should be collectively sterilized. They had, after all, violated European harmony twice in thirty years. This modern, science-based Thirty Years’ War left the accusation of collective guilt on everyone’s lips. Every German, it was said, was guilty for everything that had been done under the command of the little Austrian.
Today, many lay the burden of collective guilt on America for having waged total war, targeting civilian populations and dropping bombs that wiped out entire cities during our more violent invocations of science.
Only one voice spoke in opposition to this idea: the Catholic Church.
The Church pointed out that collective guilt, whether for Nazi camps or American bombs, was a theological impossibility. There existed only one instance of collective guilt, original sin. The absence of grace that is original sin originates in the fact that Adam, the father of the human race, refused to accept the inheritance of grace that God offered him. Just as I am much more likely to be poor if my grandfather father decided to refuse a winning lotto ticket, so I am poor in grace because my great-great grandfather decided to reject God’s grace. Hitler was many things, but he was no one’s father.
It might have been the case in the Old Testament that when the fathers are sour grapes, the children’s teeth were set on edge, as the Scriptures say, but that changed with Christ. He won the grace necessary for each person to enter heaven. Now that we can be baptized into His Body, my parents’ sins can no longer be imputed to me. Collective guilt doesn’t exist. Each one of us is responsible for his own relationship with God, the Bridegroom.
Incidentally, this is why the annulment of a Catholic marriage does not imply bastardy for the children. Bastardy is solely a statement about inheritance: a bastard can never inherit his father’s property. From a spiritual point of view, my father’s property, that is, Adam's inheritance from God, was grace and he refused that inheritance. As a result, from the moment of my conception, I am already cut out of the inheritance of grace.
From a spiritual point of view, from the point of view of grace, I begin existence as a bastard, whether or not my parents were married when I was conceived. My inheritance of grace is not restored to me through my parents’ marriage. It is restored through my own adoption into God's family in baptism. It is restored by my subsequent marriage to Jesus Christ in baptism. He is the Bridegroom Who pays the dowry. My inheritance of grace from Him does not depend on whether my parents fornicated or engaged in  sacramental marriage. My inheritance of grace does not depend on whether my parents got an annulment or a divorce or both. God cares only about whether I have married and stayed true to the Bridegroom. No matter what guilt or innocence existed in my parent's marriage, I am not responsible for that, nor does my state of grace depend on that, nor does an annulment make any reference at all to the state of the children. Annulment does not imply that children born from the marriage are bastards. Annulment is only a statement about the relationship between two adults who tried, and failed, to establish a specific kind of relationship between each other. A declaration of annulment does not, it cannot, imply that children from this attempted relationship are bastards.
 The state may say this about the distribution of temporal goods, but temporal goods are the state's business. That has nothing to do with the Church. The state does not recognize the Catholic declaration of annulment, so there is no correspondence there. The Church's statement of nulllity is about the existence of grace in a relationship between two human adults. Being a parent is not a sacrament. Being a child is not a sacrament.  The declaration about the state of grace between two adults cannot ever be considered part of the completely separate statement about how an adult and his/her own child interact. The spouses are not collectively guilty or innocent. Neither are the children. It doesn't make any sense to talk that way. Collective guilt does not exist. 
Similarly, just as collective guilt does not exist, so incurable evil does not exist.
During the recent sex abuse scandals, many were amazed to discover that the bishops – advised by the science of professional psychology – believed predatory gay sex with teenagers was a curable disease. Today, we shake our heads and opine wisely, “That kind of activity is incurable, you know.”
Actually, we are wrong and the bishops were right. While it may well be true that modern science finds pedophiliacs and predatory gays incurable, it is not the case that pedophilia or homosexuality are incurable. They can be cured, they just can’t be cured with the tools of modern science. The bishops’ error lay not in thinking these conditions curable, but in thinking the cure lay in modern science. It didn’t.
According to Martin Luther, faith alone saves. In his sermons, he insisted that we can commit adultery one hundred times a day and still be saved, as long as we had faith. For Luther, someone like the BTK killer, a man who bound, tortured and killed his victims while living the rest of his life as a church-going Christian, had done nothing that might imperil his salvation, as long as his faith in Jesus was strong. But that’s just bad theology.
Faith doesn’t save, marriage saves. Faith is a product of marriage. Faith comes from trusting the Bridegroom and remaining faithful to Him. Faithful living is what you do after you take the vows.
Collective guilt does not exist. Incurable sin does not exist. We are each judged on what we have done, on our contrition for the evil we have committed, and on our resolve not to repeat that evil. What the BTK killer did to his victims, we do to ourselves every time we sin. We bind our conscience, torture it with evil, and kill the life of grace within us. We can be brought back to new life, but modern science isn’t able to do that work. Only the grace of God, and our cooperation with His grace, can resurrect us.

Galileo Redux

It’s eerie, really. Five centuries ago, lay university professors invoked Scripture and religion in order to attack and destroy an opponent whose views threatened to topple academia. Today, they are doing it again. The only difference is the targets – in the early 1600’s, the university professors were trying to destroy Galileo. Today, they’re trying to destroy the theory behind intelligent design, using very nearly the same techniques they used against Galileo.

The University versus Heliocentrism
Contrary to popular belief, neither Copernicus nor Galileo were initially attacked by the Catholic Church. Indeed, both received most of their initial support from Catholic priests, bishops and popes. No, when it came to these two mathematicians, it was the lay academic community, the university professors, who hated their guts.

Galileo, you see, had the unfortunate distinction of being a mathematician at a time when mathematicians were universally considered second-class citizens by the academic community. Mathematicians were good only for creating siege engines, building fortifications and casting horoscopes. Galileo was so well loved by his colleagues that he was run out of the University of Pisa, and as the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua, he earned less than one-tenth what the best-paid Aristotelian philosopher earned.

Aristotelian philosophers were at the top of the lay academic pecking order primarily because Aristotle’s physical theories were based not on mathematics but on philosophy. He assumed that every inanimate object had an innate purpose that determined its motion. Rocks fell down because they intended to reach the center of the earth. Hot air rose because it intended to reach the celestial sphere. Since intention determined the direction of motion, and since philosophy was the key to understanding purpose and intention, philosophy was considered the best way to understand the workings of the universe.

A mere mathematician could never hope to plumb the universe’s depths of mystery. Mathematicians played with mindless numbers. They cast horoscopes for superstitious people, and casting horoscopes was a mortal sin. Their number-play was only good for creating accurate calendars and calculating where a cannonball might land.

Heliocentrism was not a violation of Scripture so much as it was a violation of Aristotle. Any theory that seemed to contradict Aristotle also contradicted the authority of the university professors. In short, it directly attacked the prestige of most of the lay academic community.

Consequently, the most vociferous opponents to heliocentrism would be the members of the academic community. Copernicus knew this. As a Catholic priest whose mathematical expertise had been requested by the Fifth Lateran Council when it considered calendar reform, he was not concerned about the reaction of the Catholic Church to his new heliocentric theory, rather, he was concerned about the reaction of the lay academics. He dragged his feet on publishing his heliocentric theories because he was afraid the university professors would rip him to shreds.

Avoiding Peer Review
Thus, even though Pope Clement VII approved of his heliocentric work, Archbishop Schonburg of Capua offered him the money necessary to print it and Bishop Giese urged him to write the work, he demurred. In fact, when Copernicus tried to stall by claiming he needed an assistant, Bishop Giese even went so far as to secure for Copernicus the services of George Rheticus, a Protestant mathematician whose father had been beheaded by the Protestants for sorcery. Even as the Council of Trent was meeting to deal with the problem of Protestant heresy, Giese recognized that the Protestant son of a man executed for witchcraft was the best man for the job.

But Copernicus continued to stall. He knew the university professors would crucify him if he promoted a theory that undercut their authority. He was right. When Rheticus’ colleagues, the professors at the University of Wittenburg, heard that Rheticus was helping Copernicus develop heliocentric theory, they forced him out of his chair of mathematics. As Rheticus left town, he handed his job as Copernicus’ assistant over to a Lutheran minister, Osiander, who continued the editing work. Osiander would take advantage of Copernicus’ age and ill health by removing Copernicus’ dedicatory preface to Pope Paul III and replacing it with his own spurious preface which stated that heliocentric theory had no basis in fact.

Copernicus would never discover his new assistant’s duplicity. He was, instead, fortunate enough to die the same day his book was released from the printer. As a result, he did not face the abject hatred poured out on his head by the university community. Galileo saw the vitriol poured out by the professors upon Copernicus and hated them for it.

He ridiculed his fellow academics from the very first moment he began lecturing at Pisa, writing poetry that made the academic gowns the laughing-stock of the town. His short tenure in the mathematics chair at Padua was not much more successful. Few people remember that Galileo did not work for a university, but for the Count of Florence. He hated the university professors as much as they hated him.

Thus, when Galileo’s telescope brought supporting evidence for the Copernican theory, it was not the Church that attacked him – it was the academic community. Even as the Jesuits and Dominicans threw luxuriant parties for Galileo in Rome to celebrate his new discoveries, the lay academics schemed to destroy this disrespectful upstart, this mathematician. Indeed, while priests and bishops delighted in the new vistas the telescope opened up, most of the academic community refused to even look through the lens. They claimed the visions thus received were optical illusions. Maginini, the famous Ptolemaic astronomer, promised to wipe Galileo’s new planets from the sky.

The Two-Edged Sword
As Protestants vied with the consecrated Catholic men over the proper interpretation of Scripture, the academics saw their opening. It was the lay academics who first brought Scripture into the heliocentrism debate, accusing Galileo of heresy, of violating the God’s own divine word.

It was the lay academics who duped a foolish Dominican priest into attacking Galileo from the pulpit, much to the dismay of the Dominican astronomers who had just feted the astronomer from Florence. The Church was eventually drawn into the controversy not by Jesuit astronomers, but by lay academic advisors to the Church, men who insisted that Rome had a duty to stop Galileo, for he were left unchecked, he would destroy the entire university system.

They were half-right. He destroyed the Aristotelian philosophy professors. For the first time in history, Galileo had begun to use mathematics to systematically describe the way the objects in the world interacted with one another. He stripped away the false Aristotelian idea that we must first understand an object’s purpose before we can understand how inanimate objects interact. He showed that mathematical formulas alone were sufficient to describe movement. In short, he proved that inanimate objects were truly inanimate – they were not quasi-persons with intentions or purposes. Galileo drove the last nail into the coffin of Aristotelian paganism.

Galileo destroyed the chairs of philosophy. They have never regained their places of honor in the pantheon of human knowledge. But, since Galileo’s time, the scientific community has made an egregious error. As it gained ascendancy and public adulation, it has continued to attack and abjure the necessity of philosophy and theology.

Unfortunately for promoters of science, philosophy is unavoidable. The mathematical method of studying the world itself embodies a philosophy, and a remarkably incomplete philosophy at that. Numbers can only tell us what, they can never tell us why. Numbers describe but they do not ultimately explain. Science is about nothing but numbers – measurement is the foundation of everything it does. Because it focuses so doggedly on numbers, it has begun to insist that there is nothing beyond numbers – there is no purpose, no intentionality, nothing beyond measurement and description. This is the theory of evolution in a nutshell.

Any theory which attempts to provide a volitional explanation is derided as mere philosophy, or worse, religion. Thus, today, the same battle lines are being drawn: the academic community versus the philosophers and theologians. This time, however, the roles are reversed. Now the scientists possess the heights of adulation, while the philosophers are paid a pittance in both salary and respect.
In Galileo’s time, the philosophers hung grimly onto their posts by denying the use of mathematics and insisting that only purpose mattered. Today’s scientists hang grimly onto their posts by denying the importance of philosophy/theology and insisting that only measurement matters.

The Crux of the Matter

Today, both sides fail to realize the essential complementarity of science and theology. Science describes the relationship between objects. Theology describes the relationship between persons. Because persons possess bodies, that is, because persons can be treated as objects, science makes the fatal mistake of assuming persons are objects. Because they are so successful at describing the interaction between inanimate objects, scientists they think they can successfully describe the interaction between persons.

But the relationships between persons are not subject to what scientists do best: measure. How much do you love your wife? 4.2? 3.14159? Numbers cannot be assigned to relationships. Quantity is most certainly a quality, but quantity does not exhaust every quality a person may reveal. The qualities of inanimate objects can be revealed through external study, but the qualities of a person are revealed only through self-revelation. We can see what a person does, but we cannot know with certainty why the person does it unless that person reveals the why. What we cannot ask of objects – the why – we cannot refrain from asking of subjects, of each other.

Since objects are not known through self-revelation. But persons are known only through self-revelation, the inquiry into the origins of persons cannot be solved through external study alone, because the very definition of person assumes a presence that is beyond the reach of even the most delicate scientific measuring instruments. These points are too often lost on everyone in the debate.
Thus, just as the university professors of Galileo’s time used Scripture as a weapon to attack the scientist, so today’s scientists use Scripture to attack the philosopher/theologian, but in an oddly perverse way. The original attack was built on the immutable authority of Scripture. Today’s attack is built on the supposition that Scripture has no real authority, and anyone who adheres to it is, in fact, a fool and an ignoramus of the first order.

In modern times, Scripture lacks authority in part because Scripture does not measure. It is not scientific. Insofar as anyone adheres to a non-scientific worldview, that person is a backward savage whose opinion is not to be respected.

Now, it is manifestly true that one can adhere to the scientific worldview when it comes to the study of objects and adhere to the theological worldview when it comes to the encounter with persons. However, because so few people properly distinguish the proper spheres of science and theology, men and women on both sides of the debate constantly denigrate the intelligence and the intelligibility of own positions. Either Scripture or nature is not given its proper due.
While scientists too easily forget that Scripture is divine revelation, theologians too easily forget that nature is also part of divine revelation. The scientist and his measuring tools are exploring a sacred expression of God’s own self-revelation, even if it happens not to be Scripture. To the extent that theologians and philosophers do not acknowledge this, scientists will ignore their pleas for recognition.

Thus, scientists correctly note that intelligent design is not science, strictly speaking, because intelligent design deals in “why,” that is, while it recognizes the complexity of the reality being measured, it does not investigate the “how” but the “why” of that complexity. Unfortunately, these same scientists fail to note that evolution, at least insofar as it attempts to explain the reasons “why” human persons exist, is also not science. It measures the complexity of the fossil record but insists there is no “why” at all.

Now, real science does not pretend to answer “why” questions, it only answers “how” questions. By insisting there is no “why” – a proposition which real science is manifestly not equipped to discuss - evolution is shown to be nothing more than nihilistic philosophy dressed up as science.
Many scientists complain that the debate over evolution remains a debate only in America. They point out that the Communist Chinese and the Europeans do not engage in such absurd discussion. They are correct. The denial of evolution is precisely the denial of the nihilism the rest of the world already embraces. In other words, the complaint tells us only what we already know.

Galileo was the first scientist, the first to apply mathematics to everything he did. He lived and died a sound Catholic who never wavered in the Faith, regardless of what individual men were coerced into doing to him. Because he was a good scientist, he was able to distinguish between the men who attacked him and both the falsehoods and the truths they espoused. But while Galileo was a good Catholic, he was never a good university professor. He hadn't the stomach to live a lie.

Second-Hand Estrogens Revisited

Many people have asked me if I can back up my absurd charge that synthetic estrogens from oral contraceptives are disrupting the environment.

Here's but a few of the hundreds of URLs that can be brought forward:

http://www.aperc.org/docs/bulletin01-16-02.htm

http://sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/news/story?page=b_fea_bt_0412_news_pollution_girly_bass

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/innews/fishfert2003.htm

http://www.anapsid.org/cnd/hormones/estrogen5.html

http://www.healthfinder.gov/news/newsstory.asp?docID=522249

http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2003-07/dnnl-see082703.php

http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/regional/s_354359.html

http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/press/2003/2003-0627-KR-estrogenizedfish.htm

http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2001AM/finalprogram/abstract_25760.htm

http://www.jcaa.org/JCNL0411/MutantFish.htm

Note in the MSNBC piece that estrogens are said to be a “natural” part of sewage, but no one talks about how it gets in there.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6436617/


This is an extremely well-known problem among experts in waste management. Sadly, most of us prefer to concentrate on the evils of big manufacturing plants rather than our own contributions through the use of hormonal birth control drugs.

Brilliant

I was thinking about an essay on this subject, but why re-invent the wheel?

This essay is simply brilliant
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

Many of the themes it explores are discussed from a slightly different perspective in Deception: Catholic Education in America.

Opposites Attract

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” said Mark Twain, and that certainly seems true today. It has been noted in this column and elsewhere that the Enlightenment’s insistence on setting Reason up as a god was due in no small part to Luther’s insistence that Reason was the whore of the devil. Luther’s “faith alone” theology brought about the “reason alone” backlash that was the Enlightenment.

But, the two did agree on some things. For instance, while Luther and Voltaire fought each other bitterly, they did unite against their common enemy: the Catholic Church.

Today, we see a remarkably similar thing taking place. Where Luther insisted on faith alone, Islam insists on rote memorization and constant emulation of the Prophet Mohammed. Where Voltaire insisted on the pre-eminence of Reason, the secular humanists today insist on the pre-eminence of the self. The Marquis de Sade and his modern counterparts have been transformed from lunatics (which is how de Sade was viewed by his contemporaries) to heros. Libertinism is the order of the day.
So, where the first titanic struggle was between faith and reason, this second titanic struggle is between slavery and license. And, as in the first struggle, the common enemy is Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity.

Catholic Christianity has uniquely challenged all competing philosophies and theologies to an extent that few commentators seem willing to consider. Take, for example, the simple system of numbering the Ten Commandments. There are three ways to do it: the Hebrew method, the Protestant method and the Catholic method. Of the three, only the Catholics separate the coveting of a neighbor’s livestock from the coveting of his wife. That is, only the Catholic ordering recognizes that sins against objects differ fundamentally from sins against persons.

Similarly, Catholicism uniquely moderated other philosophies. Precisely because Judaism spent a millennium under Catholic influence, Jews no longer stone members of their community to death for fornication. Precisely because Islam lacked that Christian guidance, Muslims still do. The Christianity that wiped out Aztec human sacrifice, stopped Hindus from forcing their widows onto the funeral pyre, and destroyed the Thuggee cult of ritual murder found its moral force in a world-view that retained an understanding of the Catholic theology on personhood.

Unfortunately, as non-Catholic Christian theology loses its grip on these Catholic concepts, it has degenerated into secular licentiousness. Our culture has again begun to endorse wife-killing and ritual murder.

In this respect, Terri Schiavo is merely a prominent example of a larger trend in murder-suicides. It has already been noted that most such actions are literally triggered by men who murder their often unwilling wives before turning the gun on themselves. Similarly, embryonic stem cell research and abortion have become ritually endorsed by almost all who seek higher office, despite glaring medical evidence that both involve the murder of children.

And here is the most interesting thing about this 21st-century version of the Thirty Years’ War. The struggle between secular humanism and Islam does not just attack the Bride of Christ, it attacks women in general.

Islam views women as the source of most moral evil. According to Mohammed, hell is populated primarily by women. In the same way, secular humanism endorses a lifestyle of casual sex, casual contraception and casual abortion that disproportionately harms women.
And in that sense, it is hard to choose sides. After all, it doesn’t matter which side wins when both sides are wrong.

Torturing Women

Unusual things are happening in the feminist world. The Hungarian representative to UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) said that, in the future, abortion will be viewed by women in the same way that torture is now viewed by human rights advocates. Now, given how often the UN turns a blind eye to torture, Saddam Hussein’s regime being a fine example of the carefully shielded glance, we may justifiably wonder if this means torture will become acceptable or abortion unacceptable. But even so, the possibility that CEDAW members are beginning to question the practice is telling.

The reasons are not too difficult to find. Within the last month, headlines have revealed:

• Danco Laboratories, maker of the abortifacient drug RU 486 (Mifeprex) is changing the labels that appear on the drugs to include updated safety information. Why? Well, five women have died from using their product. Given that four of these five deaths were reported in California, there is growing suspicion that the number of national deaths is rather deeply under-reported.
• Canada’s public health department warned doctors to restrict access to Depo-Provera. It seems the drug causes massive and possibly permanent bone loss in the women who take it. Depo-Provera is a common form of abortifacient birth control for teens and young women – the very group that is supposed to be building up the solid calcium they need to survive old age without osteoporosis.
• The Associated Press reports the birth control patch (also an abortifacient) causes thrombosis, potentially deadly clots in the deep veins, lungs, heart or brain, twenty times as often as the birth control pill.
• Given that the pill itself puts women at increased risk for thrombosis, this is hardly good news. But, the news is doubly damning since it has just been verified that the low-dose birth control pill increases the rate of heart attack and stroke to a much greater extent than previously understood.
• New studies have demonstrated that women who have abortion have drug abuse rates, accident rates, suicide rates and higher morbidity and mortality rates overall than the general population. This merely confirms what has been known for over five years: women who carry to term, on the other hand, have lower morbidity and mortality rates than the general female population.
• Meanwhile, not a few Democrats are considering jettisoning the radical left-wing of the party by removing the staunchly pro-abortion plank of their platform.

Ever since the 1974 authorization of National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), American foreign policy has been built around sterilizing the population of other countries, even as it kills its own women and children through massive application of hormonal contraceptives and abortion. Now, thirty years later, the result has been a world-wide fertility decline never before seen in human history.

As the population of every industrialized country in the world rapidly ages, as the aged and disabled have begun to be systematically euthanized and the specter of depopulation haunts Japan, Europe and eventually North America, some people are beginning to wake up.

“Perhaps,” some of them have begun to say to themselves and, ever so quietly, to one another, “perhaps this approach is not the best.”

Indeed.

From the Terrorists' Perspective

To the south, east and west, Spain is bounded by water. Even at its narrowest point, at the straits of Gibralter, ten miles of ocean separates Spain from her nearest neighbor. To the north, the Pyranees mountain chain forms a continuous natural obstacle from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, with several peaks rising over 5,000 feet.

England is even worse. It is a fortress completely surrounded by water, with the English Channel twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. Due to decades of violence from the northern Ireland conflict, it has more surveillance cameras than any other country in the world, roughly one half million operating in London alone. Indeed, the average Londoner is caught on film over 300 times per day.

Yet, rather than considering these facts, Americans persist in believing that a six-foot cyclone fence would serve as a real deterrent to illegal immigration and – purportedly the real problem – terrorists.

The idea is absurd. Was illegal immigration the root of the problem for Spain a year ago or for London a few days ago? Was it even really the problem for the United States on September 11?

No, it wasn’t. We have all been watching too many Humphrey Bogart movies. Illegal immigration, spies smuggled into the country through clandestine means, this is not the source of the bombs or the men who planted them. By focussing on illegal immigration, we ignore the real problem.

Consider the terrorist’s situation from his point of view. In order to be a successful terrorist, I must blend into the society I intend to harass, wound and kill. I must raise the fewest possible questions about my origin and purpose. To be successful, I must become a non-entity, someone seen but never noticed.

If this is my goal, then I have a few rules of conduct. First, I must enter the country legally if at all possible. After all, to enter illegally, I must transit through small border towns where I attract attention if only because I am a stranger. I must negotiate with natives who do not share my objectives or my beliefs, men who are interested only in money and their own safety, men who would sell me out for the cash reward in a heartbeat if they somehow realized who I was or what I intended.

And how could I avoid betraying myself? I trained to simulate life in America, not life in Mexico or Canada. Why invest months of additional training to transit through an area I will only be present in for weeks at best?

Even if I were successfully smuggled into a country, I must obtain forged papers and present these to every person who requests them, never knowing who will see through the forgeries. To obtain the papers, I must again often deal with people who are not part of my organization: known criminals, people already being watched by the police.

Why go through this trouble? It is much better to enter the country legally, with real documents, never needing to come into contact with the American criminal class. That way, I can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the anti-immigrant crowd, vocally chastising those who seem uninterested in securing “our” borders with barbed wire. With such a cover, I can cry, “Look over there!” and you will look over there while I go about my business.

Many years ago, B. Liddell Hart wrote a classic on warfare called Strategy. In it, he pointed out that natural obstacles are no obstacle at all. Never in the history of warfare has a moat, a mountain chain or a fence stopped persons who were seriously interested in breaching the defense. The key to successful warfare is to hit the enemy where he is not and to lure him into a place where he cannot effectively use what he has.

So, we could build a fence. Better yet, we could dig a moat. But our moat would be measured in feet, not miles, and it wouldn’t stop people determined to get in. It would simply put resources where they cannot be effectively used.

No, illegal immigrant is not the problem and it never will be. It is the legal immigrant who poses the first threat. An even worse threat is posed by the American-born citizen who has become convinced of the rightness of the enemy’s cause.

So, here’s the question we need to answer: how high do you suppose the walls would have to be to separate each of us from the rest – all for our own safety, of course?

The Return of the American Republic - Sort Of

With the upcoming nomination to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, we are witnessing a return to one of the founding principles originally envisioned for American government. Notice that this is just a return to the principles – the founders of the country would no longer recognize the government.

The Original Plan

As many people know, the Constitution was not originally set up as a democracy. Rather, it was established as a republic. What’s the difference? The people in a democracy vote directly on every major issue while those in a republic elect representatives who then exercise power in their name. In the beginning, the United States used some elements of democratic rule but left the primary exercise of power in the hands of representatives.

The original plan specified one member of the House of Representatives for every thirty thousand people. If we had stuck to that, we would have a House of Representatives with roughly ten thousand members.

Likewise, in the original plan, senators were not elected directly by the people. Rather, the people elected their own state legislatures. The state legislature, in turn, chose the senators who would represent the whole state in the Senate. While this indirect method of appointing senators was thrown out in 1913, it is still used to determine the president of the United States. Many voters are under the illusion that they vote directly for a presidential candidate, but it is not so. They actually vote for an elector, a member of the Electoral College. The college of electors chooses the president.

In the same way, the federal judiciary is a creation of the Congress and is therefore filled by indirect election. We don’t vote for judges directly, instead, we choose people who in turn fill the judicial positions, much as used to be the case with senators. The difference, of course, is that senators serve for a period of six years, presidents for four, judges for life.

Today's Plan

Originally, we had three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial, with the last being intentionally made the weakest. Today, we have one branch of government, the judicial, with three auxiliary branches: the executive, the legislative, and the corporative.

The executive and legislative branches bow to the authority of the judicial branch. They do not exercise authority on their own, except as the judicial branch gives them leave. Since the federal judiciary is a creation of the legislative branch, we now have a Frankenstein government, a government in which the creator has lost control of his creation.

Since the judiciary is the only real source of power in America, the indirect election of judges through a republican system should be a source of comfort to all concerned. True, the term is for life, not four or six years, the government is by nine people, not thousands, and there remains not even a semblance of the idea that the judges represent the interests of any of the electorate but the forms are observed. We have maintained the idea of the republic – sort of.

But it can’t last. The judiciary is slowly giving away its own power to its own creation, the last branch of government, the corporation. The irony is delicious.

The New Plan

The modern corporation was created by the judiciary in its 1886 decision Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad. By making corporations full legal persons, “the government of the people, by the people and for the people” took on a whole new twist.

Corporations are elected to power directly by the people through a fiscal vote, in which the corporations are given money in exchange for entertainment and creature comforts. In return, the corporation dictates preferences through its advertising branch, the media. The preferences it permits us to hold are not limited to the purchase of goods and services, rather, they create and embody an entire world-view.

Like the modern federal government, the point of the corporation is to separate money from the consumer as efficiently as possible. Teenagers and children, having little wisdom or foresight, are the most easily separated from their money. Thus, it is in the interest of both the government (i.e., the judiciary) and the corporation to maintain a juvenile culture. But this creates a fatal weakness in the judiciary that is being exploited.

If any American can grow up to be President, and a corporation is a full person, then the corporation can grow up to be President. As full persons, corporations have the right to rule. By granting corporations the right of eminent domain formerly retained solely by the legislature, the judiciary is completing the work it began in 1886. It is recognizing the right of persons to enjoy a share of power. It doesn't recognize that it no longer controls the situation.

The growth of a bureaucratic culture allowed the legislature to be emasculated by the judiciary. The growth of an entertainment culture will allow the judiciary to be emasculated by the corporation. Just as the judiciary began as the weakest branch of government but has become the strongest, so corporations are actually being transformed into the government right before our eyes.

Corporations will attain this power because we the people will vote them into power. The courts, having been duly appointed by the legislators, will in turn appoint to the corporations the power to govern us, the power to take everything we own, just so long as they keep us comfortable and entertained.

O'Connor's Resignation

Not to be too apocalyptic, but...

"Proclaim ye this among the nations: Prepare war, raise up the strong: let them come, let all the men of war come up. Cut your ploughshares into swords, and your spades into spears. Let the weak say: I am strong. Break forth, and come, all ye nations from round about, and gather yourselves together: there will the Lord cause all thy strong ones to fall down. Let them arise, and let the nations come up into the valley of Josaphat: for there I will sit to judge all nations round about." (Joel 3:10-12)

Everyone quotes Isaiah, but no one ever quotes Joel.

Now we will see if the Republican party can be trusted or if a new party needs to be formed.

SCOTUS postscript

After reading the story about a developer attempting to take Justice Souter's house, it occurred to me that this ruling could create a new problem.

Let's say the local board decides to go along with it and grants eminent domain.
Clearly, Justice Souter would want to fight that ruling, so he would take it to court.
No matter how that court ruled, it would go up the ladder to... where?

All the SCOTUS judges would have to recuse themselves. Souter can't rule on the taking of his own property - conflict of interest. And one could argue that all his co-workers on the court would also suffer from similar kinds of conflicts, either wanting to support their friend or wanting to take revenge on an imbecile. That leaves no one on the highest court.

Ah, the fun this could be!

The Taking

The German word for war is “der Krieg.” It comes from the verb “kriegen” which means, “to take.” For Germans, war means “the taking.” With the latest Supreme Court ruling, war has clearly broken out between the rich and everyone else. But one thing needs to be kept clearly in mind – the ruling is not a victory for rich persons per se, but for a particular kind of rich person: the corporation.

The war began in 1776, when America’s founding fathers fought not only the British, but the British corporations that ran much of the American economy. The Dutch West Indies Company ran New York, the Virginias and the Carolinas. The Boston Tea Party was not just an assault on taxation, it was also an assault on the East India Company. Few realize how hated the corporations were, nor do we now remember that Jefferson and Madison attempted to pass an eleventh amendment in the Bill of Rights barring the establishment of corporations. It narrowly went down to defeat.

But even as the founders attempted to extirpate hydra-headed corporations and political parties from public life, both returned, and with a vengeance. The re-emergence of both were assisted by the courts.
America’s founders built the United States Constitution on the idea of enumerated powers - whatever power is not explicitly given to the government is not within the power of the government. The “doctrine” of judicial review is not an enumerated power; thus, the power does not belong to the courts and never has.
An oligarchy is a government by the few, a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes. We are now ruled by an oligarchy. The process of building an oligarchy began ever so slowly with Madison v. Marbury (1804), the ruling in which the Supreme Court created out of nothing the idea that it alone decided what is and is not law.

However, since the courts refrained from exercising their new-found “ability” until decades after the founders were dead, neither the legislative nor the executive branches gave this sudden arrogation of authority much attention. By the time the power was first used in Dred Scott vs. Sanford (1857), the other two branches of government had long since lost the living vision of the constitution’s founders. Political parties and corporations had arisen, both in direct contravention to the original vision.

By 1886, the courts had colluded with the corporations to give corporations unprecedented power. As Thom Hartman describes in Supreme Court documents were falsified, corporations were made to appear full and proper legal persons with full constitutional rights. Whereas Marbury vs. Madison and the power of judicial review had rarely been used prior to this date, it began to appear everywhere afterward. “The government of the people, by the people and for the people” has, through judicial manipulation, became the government of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation, and the corporation is hungry.
Just as the corporation eventually used the courts to create itself a person, so the corporation has now used the courts to successfully create itself a branch of the local government. We lament the fact that real estate can now be taken at will by anyone who can bring more taxable profit from the land than is currently being made. No one notices that it need not stop there.

If real estate can be taken in this manner, why not virtual estates? The Supreme Court has functionally changed the test of what can be taken. Taking is no longer based on blight, but on possible future tax revenues. If one test can be changed, why not another? If local governments’ need for tax revenue is the key, then there is no particular reason to limit takings to physical property.

What if I own patent or copyright to an idea that a corporation could use to generate more revenue than I can? Doesn’t the local government have a right to the increased tax revenue? Isn’t it a vital public interest to keep local government functioning? Why couldn’t city officials take over this blighted area of commerce (my patent/copyright) and hand it to someone who can make better use of it in order to enrich city coffers?
Scoff if you like, but you cannot deny the facts. It isn’t about justice. It’s about the taking.

Science of Theology, Religion of Physics Part III

In the last essay, we saw why science cut ties with Christianity. Now we shall examine the details of what happened. In order to do this, we must have a understand how closely science mirrors faith.

A good scientist is a prophet if only because science was born from religious faith. Consider the two aspects of science: the content of observable experience and the power, that is, the logic, to properly consider true causes and true effects. A well-informed scientist can correctly predict the outcome of a scenario. He knows the properties of the objects in the event, he knows how these properties interact, he can thereby foresee the future.

Faith works in a very similar way. It has two aspects: the content of human experience and the power by which that experience is understood and believed. Like the scientist, the faith-filled prophet is able to foresee the future. The difference lies only in the way it is forseen.

Science and Religion

The scientist knows the qualities of interacting objects intimately and is thereby able to accurately describe the outcome of an interaction. The prophet has intimate knowledge of the qualities of the One who moves the objects. As a result, he is also able to accurately describe the outcome of an interaction. As Scripture tells us over and over, the false prophet, like the poor or uninformed scientist, is marked by his inability to accurately predict what will happen next. Similarly, the false prophet, like the poor scientist, is unable to read the signs of the times, he is unable to understand the significance of something that does not turn out as expected.

This is the basic difference between science and religion. Pure science means to study and elucidate the relationship between objects. Pure theology studies and elucidates the relationships between persons. Applied science attempts to coordinate the relationships between objects in order to benefit persons. Applied theology, also called religion, attempts to properly coordinate the relationships between persons.

Science determines the qualities of an object by intensive study of the object itself. Theology determines the qualities of the person by inviting the person to reveal himself. This is one of the principle differences between science and theology: objects can be revealed by external study, while persons are only self-revealed. No amount of study will fully reveal the qualities of a person - only the person’s own decision to reveal himself will do that.

Science can become confused with theology because the human person is a body-soul duality. That is, each person is at once an object, by virtue of his body, and a person, by virtue of his soul. As a result, the worldview that sees everything in terms of object relations has a tendency to ignore or not fully regard persons. Theology, on the other hand, has a tendency to ignore the object relations in preference to the interpersonal relations. Thus, it is bad science to look at a human being merely as an object, just as it is bad theology to look at a person merely as a soul.

Science is similar to Christian theology in aspect and method precisely because science grew out of that theology. Judeo-Christian belief is unique in saying that creation is good in itself, created out of nothing into goodness. By insisting on creation ex nihilo, the Judeo-Christian understanding insists that the existence of reality has an over-arching purpose. God brought reality into existence for a reason.

Luther as Buddha

Now, one corollary of this insistence of both the Creator and His Creation is the conclusion that evil does not have its own existence. God created everything good. He did not create evil. Since He is the source of all that exists, evil is an absence of good, not a presence of itself.

This distinction is important. Whereas the Hindu and the Buddhist insist that reality is an illusion, the Christian insists that reality exists, good exists and evil exists, but the last only in a negative fashion. For the Christian, evil is a deprivation, a distortion of the good – it does not have existence itself, rather, it is the absence of existence. To say that something is evil is to say that it has lost part of the existential qualities we would normally expect it to have. A thing is evil because it has, in a certain sense, fallen partly out of existence.

The corollary to this is quite stunning. Any theology that asserts the flesh is completely corrupted, full of nothing but evil, implicitly agrees with Eastern mysticism – the flesh is an illusion. America is a famously Protestant culture. The complete corruption of the flesh is a famously Protestant doctrine. The antagonism between Western science and Western religious faith is at its worst in Protestant cultures. This is the reason.

Protestant theology insists both on the total corruption of the flesh and reason as the whore of the devil. It has to. If Luther is right about the total corruption of the flesh, then the total uselessness of reason necessarily follows. All that evil reality leaves is intuition, which Protestants endorse as “blind faith.” Many theologians have attempted to make a correlation between the Christian Desert Fathers and Eastern mysticism, but seen in this light, the real correlation with Eastern mysticism can only be found in Lutheran theology and its offshoots.

But there is another point. Because Protestant theologies insist on the “alien righteousness” of God, it insists on treating God as object instead of subject. If God is object, if God is not person in the way we understand persons, then He should in principle be subject to scientific scrutiny.

In fact, God is Bridegroom. Demanding that God should be subject to scientific scrutiny in order to know Him is much akin to demanding that every prospective spouse be subject to scientific scrutiny in order to determine if marriage should take place: it is exactly the wrong way to go about things. The objectification of God built into the very structure of Protestant theology is, perhaps, why Protestant Faith insists so strongly on the need for personal relationship with God. It is an explicit counter-weight to the insistence on God as alien.

The Right Path

Catholic Christianity takes a different tack. As the Church has always taught, as a very recent papal encyclical again demands, faith and reason are both necessary to personal relationship with God. Faith is not blind and it is never contrary to logic or the accurate perceptions of the senses. Faith is based on personal knowledge of personal relationships lived out in material reality.

If you and I were life-long friends who had been through every trial and tribulation for the last forty years, and you told me you would meet me on the corner of Fifth and Main tomorrow, then I would have forty years of evidence to support that statement. Those years of evidence tell me not only whether or not you will, in fact, be there, but it tells me what car you are likely to be driving and might possibly even tell me what you will be wearing when you get there. I have not yet met you on that corner, but I know what I will find when I get there. I have faith in you because I know you.

I have faith in God in precisely the same way. I have seen how He acts in my life, I have seen the witness of others throughout history. They gave me historical documents describing how He acts in their lives. I have millenia of lived experience to base my faith on. As a result, I have more faith in Him then I have in the sunrise tomorrow, for if the sun does not rise tomorrow, I know that lack is not for evil, but for my good. This is a level of faith that we can never derive from objects alone, but only from the self-revealed knowledge of the One who wields those objects.

Science is no longer acquainted with this understanding. Because Luther shares common ground with an Eastern world-view that is antithetical to the Christian statement “reality exists,” science, especially American science, has found it necessary to reject Christianity in toto. It can hardly do otherwise.

Protestants insist Catholic Faith is false. American science, insofar as it has been developed by Protestants, is predisposed to draw the same conclusion. Catholic Faith has always been foreign to American culture; Catholics have long been an immigrant, illiterate and very minority population whose ideas are rejected out of hand by Protestant worldviews. Thus, most American scientists know Christianity only through its Protestant variants. Since Protestant Christianity is opposed to the basic worldview required in order to do good research, that is, since it explicitly rejects reason and embraces the total corruption of reality, implying that the world is essentially an illusion, science is perfectly correct to reject it.

Unfortunately, by the only variants of Christianity it knows well, it thereby insists that it rejects all Christianity. In short, science throws the baby out with the bathwater. It has now largely rejected the very idea that brought it into existence.

Christianity is built on the understanding that reality has a purpose, that it is brought out of nothing into existence precisely so that God could take on flesh and walk among us in a way our senses can perceive and that He will return in that self-same literally sensible way.

In rejecting Christianity, modern science believes it must also reject purpose, for Christianity is the only world-view that insists reality has a purpose. By rejecting Christianity in toto, science simultaneously and explicitly embraces the idea that the interaction of objects within the universe does not display purpose. This creates a problem.

If objects and their interactions are purposeless, then science cannot exist, if only for the mundane reason that scientists are part of that reality, which means scientists have no purpose. In short, by denying Christianity, we deny that we can explain anything at all. We can only note the movement of purposeless objects, and wonder why we note them since we are nothing but purposeless objects. If the human soul is but a biochemical interaction, if there is no Prime Mover, then reality is indeed functionally an illusion. The Eastern mystics are right.

Here is the great irony. Christianity describes the reality that calls science into existence. By rejecting all of Christianity because of one mistaken variant, science thereby embraces the very Eastern mysticism that its philosophy most adamantly opposes. Unless it realizes its folly and returns to its Catholic roots, Western science will eventually become the means by which Western culture decomposes into Eastern mysticism and non-science. Science will self-destruct.

In his book, The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler points out that Hinduism is built around the concept of self-annihilation. As he puts it, India is a “culture of Thanatos.” It is no coincidence that Pope John Paul II described Western society as a “culture of death.” We need only look at Western fertility rates, contraception, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality. We have already embraced Eastern self-annihilation. There is but one difference between us: the East pursues this annihilation through the self-manipulative techniques of yoga while the West pursues it through the techniques of science, the manipulation of others. In this case, it hardly matters - both roads lead to the same end.

Science of Theology, Religion of Physics: Part II

As was pointed out in the previous essay, neither Eastern mysticism nor any other religious worldview except Christianity was amenable to the development of science. While it is easy to identify isolated accomplishments in non-Christian cultures - individual Indians and Arabs made important discoveries in mathematics and medicine, for instance - each of these accomplishments was due primarily to the spark of an individually brilliant mind. Never do we see the in these cultures the detailed study of reality that the culture of Western Europe developed and accomplished.

India, Arabia, China - these civilizations did not lack the intellect for scientific work, they lacked the outlook for it. The outlook lacked because the worldviews that permeated their cultures insisted on points that science must explicitly deny. These cultures all insisted the world cannot be accurately perceived through the senses, that only intuition is a reliable guide. Science, on the other hand, insists the world can be accurately perceived both through the senses and through tools that extend the reach of those senses. Intuition is a fallible tool, the senses, as used through the tools that extend their reach, are infallible.

Thus, because Eastern mystics insist “...the world is not as you perceive through the senses. Reality can only be perceived through the intuition,” for such an Eastern mystic, it would not matter if tools to extend the senses were developed and used - the senses are still fooled. The study of reality that is science is, for such a worldview, simply a fool’s game.

Christianity sees things quite differently. Precisely because it insists that God made Himself sensible in the Incarnation, it necessarily insists that the material world does not and cannot lie. If it could lie, the Incarnation could be false. The Incarnation cannot be false, therefore reality cannot lie.

Only the Christian worldview insisted on the central importance of sensory perception to faith. As the Apostle John insisted, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, of the word of life. For the life was manifested: and we have seen and do bear witness and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father and hath appeared to us. That which we have seen and have heard, we declare unto you: that you also may have fellowship with us and our fellowship may be with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1-3). Note how emphatic John is on the importance of sensory perception to identifying truth: he heard, he saw, his hands handled. Sensory perception is even called the basis for Christian faith and fellowship. The phrase “reality exists” is an essentially Judeo-Christian religious phrase.

Unfortunately, the truth of this statement is lost because the meaning of one word has been lost. We no longer really understand what “faith” means. If asked for a definition of “faith,” many people today will quote St. Paul, “Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). This seems to be distinctly at odds with science, in which evidence must be seen in order to constitute evidence. What few realize is how badly this phrase has been misunderstood. The Apostle did not mean to tell us that we should embrace faith blindly. Rather, he meant to tell us that faith is formed by facts.

The problem lies precisely in the fact that too many Christians emphasize the second half of the phrase at the expense of the first. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. Hope is based in facts. Every time you order a hamburger at the local McDonald’s, you have made an act of faith. Consider: you entered the parking lot only because the sign said the people in the building served food. Once inside, you see a menu listing food items, tables for the consumption of food, napkins, forks, soda machines while the smell of cooking meat and frying potatoes wafts through the air. The man behind the counter asks what you would like to eat. The facts evince the possibility of food.

Do you know that you will be given edible food if you order? No, you don’t. Perhaps it is all an elaborate hoax. Or perhaps the cook is sick, the food tainted, or the last burger just sold to the previous customer and the counter person is yet unaware of the fact. But the facts give you hope, so you place your order. This is an act of faith – you haven’t yet seen the hamburger that will ultimately be given to you, but you have a lot of sensory evidence and previous experience upon which to base your hope. Your act of faith is based on the substance of hopeful facts, it is an act made on evidence as yet unseen. Your scientific hypothesis - they will give me food - is about to be tested against reality.

As we can see, faith is never blind. The idea that it is grows out of a serious misunderstanding, the embrace of a central principle of Eastern mysticism: “reason is the whore of the devil.” The phrase is from Martin Luther’s Table Talk. When taken in conjunction with Luther’s theory of total corruption, it constitutes an inelegant summary of the principle that reality is an illusion.

Because science must necessarily reject the idea that reality is an illusion, science must necessarily reject the idea of Protestant Christianity. The scientific worldview developed in Catholic Europe just before the Reformation. It is important to realize that Protestant Christian thought never made and has still not made, a complete break from its Catholic roots. Syncretist from the beginning, Protestant theology happily embraced simultaneously contradictory principles. Thus, it was able to simultaneously embrace scientific techniques while proclaiming a worldview that was actually at odds with what science insisted on – the centrality of the senses and of rationality to truth.

As a result, the sciences that grew on Protestant soils of Germany, England and America became increasingly out of step with the culture. Science insisted on rationality, Protestantism insisted “reason is the whore of the devil.” Science insisted on the importance of the senses, Protestantism insisted the sensory sacramental system was useless. The only point of contact was an elevation of literacy in both, but this emphasis merely exacerbated the disjunction between rational science and irrational Protestant religion. Mistaking the part (Protestantism) for the whole (Catholicism), science rejected Christianity whole and entire. As a result, it cut away its own rationale for being.

The next essay will examine exactly how this happened.

The Science of Theology, the Religion of Physics

In the re-emerging debate over creationism, intelligent design and evolution, much has been made of the need to keep religious faith out of the classroom. If this were accomplished, it would, of course, be a great loss, for if religious faith is removed from the classroom, physics, chemistry, and biology will have to be dispensed with and the hard sciences will be completely lost to us. This is a point that is lost on most of the people in the debate.

Take, for instance, the foundational premise of physics: reality exists. As members of a Christian Western culture, we often have a hard time understanding how fully those two words represent a specific religious viewpoint. To assert that reality is not an illusion, but is, in fact, substantial is to take sides in a long-standing religious debate.

The Hebrew and Christian faith insists on independent physical reality. The Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist traditions, along with any number of similar religious traditions, hold precisely the opposite viewpoint. For these other faith traditions, reality is not only an illusion, but an obstacle to real peace. Christians say that in order to achieve peace, we must work for justice. Other religious traditions say that to achieve peace, we must recognize physical reality as an illusion, an artifact of the mind, a stumbling block that prevents our achieving total union with Nirvana or Moksha – Nothingness. For Christians, peace comes from a full transformation from our fallen selves into who we are. For others, peace comes from completely extinguishing who we are.

The idea that physical reality has an independent existence with laws that operate both upon it and upon me is a religious concept because it simultaneously insists we have the ability to know something outside of ourselves and insists there is something outside of ourselves to be known. After all, the very word “religion” is derived from “re-ligare” the Greek words for “tying back together.” For Christians, our investigation of physical reality is part of our task as persons. Through it, we begin to tie back together a reality that was irretrievably broken at some earlier point in time.

This is an important point, for investigation is only possible by means of a pre-existing purpose, and this purpose is the foundation of the statement “reality exists.” Let me explain. No one investigates a thing without having a purpose in mind. The purpose directs and forms the investigation. We investigate in order to establish “why.” But, where reality has no real existence, there is no “why.” Investigation is purposeless and therefore not undertaken. Thus, the statement “reality exists” assumes not only that the investigator exists, it also assumes that the thing to be investigated has a “why” associated with it. In short, “reality exists” assumes the existence of purpose in both the investigator and the thing to be investigated.

The search for a unified field theory is one example of such an assumption in action. The hard sciences exist only because an ordered reality pre-exists them. If the universe were formless chaos, there would be no underlying reality upon which logic could function, nor, arguably, would there be a way to demonstrate the existence of logic at all. Logic would be the illusion instead of the tool.

Physics tells us we can treat the particles that compose the universe as information packets. Physics does not point out the obvious: information exists only where purpose exists. Where reality is an illusion that repeats on an endlessly cyclic basis, there is no information to glean, no reality to tie together.

The Eastern faith traditions are, in this sense, not religions at all, for they carry no sense of the need to heal reality. Even the healing of the individual is accomplished only through personal self-annihilation, the removal of information (although they would call it the removal of illusion) from the equation. For them, the reality is simple: there is no equation.

As this discussion should demonstrate, it is no more possible to remove religion from the classroom than it is to remove religion from public discourse. If we would say “reality exists,” we have injected religion into the classroom. If we say “reality is an illusion,” we have avoided injecting religion into the classroom, but only by virtue of having denied the need for a classroom at all.

The next essay will discuss how science has reached the absurd position of denying its own reality.

Suffer the Children

As the family disintegrates, Western culture has proven itself unequal to the task of keeping up with the change. We have no model for a non-family based society, and our responses to the reality are becoming increasingly incoherent.

Take Jacques Chirac, for example. The president of France tried to convince French voters that the EU constitution was worthwhile by arguing, “[it is] about your future and that of your children, of the future of France and the future of Europe. On Sunday, everyone will have a share of the destiny of France in its hands.”

It was one of the sillier things he could have said. The French have a population growth rate of 1.85, one of the lowest rates of child-bearing in recorded French history. Chirac was appealing to an electorate that didn’t exist: parents. He lost the referendum.

We could write this off as the fate of the French if not for a recent story on San Francisco. It has become an essentially child-free city: only 14.5% of the city’s population is 18 or younger. The city is busily building programs for children who don’t exist. It may not be politically correct to mention the facts, but homosexual sex is functionally sterile. This is apparently only beginning to dawn on the city’s ruling elite and the news media.

Certainly the prime-time networks are unfamiliar with family life, as are the people who tout the prime-time shows. “ ‘Desperate Housewives’ made good on its pledge to solve the posthumous mystery of Mary Alice as its smash first season concluded on Wisteria Lane, the ABC show's mythical but all-too-recognizable slice of suburbia.” So said CNN, but most real parents are at a loss to figure out what is recognizably suburban about any of it. Most suburbanites do not have bodies buried in the back yard, nor stay-at-home moms, nor yard boys to have adulterous flings with.

But this kind of senility isn’t unique to secular atheists either. Christian organizations are attempting to organize boycotts of Carl Jr.’s and Hardees based on the family-unfriendliness of its Paris Hilton commercials. It has not yet occurred to anyone that the burger chain’s number-crunchers may have written off the family market. Indeed, as the American fertility rate hovers just below replacement level, held that high only by Hispanic and black fertility rates, appeals to do something “for the children” are going to fall on increasingly deaf ears. You can’t appeal for support to families that don’t exist.

So where have all the children gone? Well, even as children disappear from cities and suburbs, faux children rise to take their place. Recent screenings of Star Wars were preceded by trailers advertising Spiderman, Batman, the X-men and the Fantastic Four. Advertisers have long known that the adolescent segment is the best market segment, if only because immature people are easily separated from the money they carry. Because commerce is interested in maintaining immaturity for as long as possible, we have become a comic book nation.

And this is not just a cute phrase. As has been pointed out, “[a recent] National Endowment for the Arts survey found a dramatic decrease in Americans who read literature (novels, plays, poetry, short stories), with more than half - HALF! - of Americans not reading for pleasure. The survey found an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, a loss of 20 million potential readers…. it was particularly dramatic among those 18 to 24 years old. Among this group, the decline was 55 percent greater than that of the total adult population. At the current rate of loss among the young, literary reading will virtually disappear in 50 years, the NEA warns.”

The irony is enormous. We don’t have children because we want to indulge ourselves. Our culture encourages this perpetual adolescence because it allows business to strip our money from us more efficiently. Precisely because we keep people immature for as long as we can, we do not raise families. Thus the supply of real children dwindles, resulting in an ever-more desperate attempt to lengthen the period of immaturity among the population that remains.

As I pointed out in an essay several months ago, abortion is self-limiting if only because it kills its own future customers. In this respect, the free enterprise system resonates with the abortion culture. By encouraging immaturity among its audience, commerce kills tomorrow’s market in its insatiable quest for today’s market share.

There are limits to how long this childishness can continue.