Let me tell you a story.
My hometown is Belleville, Illinois. The western edge of the town is just about ten miles from East St. Louis, Illinois. East St. Louis has long had the distinction of being the crime capital of the Midwest. At several points during the last four decades, it has had per capita murder rates higher than New York City. But it wasn’t always that way.
A century ago, East St. Louis was a fine, upstanding city with neat homes, excellent businesses and a thriving economy. It had the largest horse, mule, hog and cattle markets in the nation, the second-largest meat-packing center and the second largest railroad shipping yard. It also boasted the largest aluminum ore processor in the world. Even better, the soil of Southern Illinois sat atop some of the richest coal reserves in the country: the whole east side of the river was criss-crossed with mines. Legend has it that at the height of operations, a man could drive a mule underground thirty miles from east of the bluffs all the way west to the river without ever once coming out to see the sunshine.
Trouble in Paradise
But there was trouble in paradise. By the early 1900’s, the men working at these various operations had begun to unionize. Plant owners did not want to deal with their demands, so they came up with a solution: they began encouraging poor black sharecroppers from the South to migrate north across the Mason-Dixon line to work in East. St. Louis factories.
Does any of this sound familiar? Read on.
As factory owners later admitted, this not only got them cheap laborers who were more willing to do dirty jobs than the white men in town were, it also guaranteed that unions would not form, since white men would not mix with black men. Thus, the workers from the South were ideal for business, but created a real problem for the native Illinois working-man.
The white laborers knew these non-union (i.e., undocumented) guest workers from south of the border – the Illinois border, that is - were taking their jobs and preventing them from unionizing the plants. And there were thousands of them. The number of black workers tripled in fourteen years and grew exponentially as the conflict in Europe heated up. Even if East St. Louis had not had a policy of strict segregation, this tidal wave of black workers would have meant inevitable housing and business conflicts. But with such a policy, wherein no one on either side had a chance to know or trust anyone on the other, the conflict was certain to be vicious.
As the number of “guest workers” swelled, the white inhabitants began to complain of a growing crime wave, and the growing black population was held responsible for it. The muttering in the streets, the editorials in the newspapers, grew increasingly vicious. Both sides could see which way this was headed. Both sides began to arm themselves.
Now, according to the laws of the time, blacks were not permitted to own guns. Indeed, blacks from St. Louis, which was just across the Mississippi in Missouri, were routinely searched at the border for weapons. Blacks from the South understood how lynchings worked and had no intention of becoming targets. Consequently, gun-running became the order of the day for the black population.
Does any of this sound familiar? Read on.
The Turning Point
In the summer of 1917, life got dramatically worse. From the end of May throughout June, small riots flared up almost every night. Rumors raced through the white population that blacks were planning a terrorist attack: they were planning to kill the whites in the city on July 4th, as the city celebrations wound down.
By July 1, a black man had shot his white assailant. Whites in automobiles were firing into black homes. A police car dispatched to a disturbance was fired on by a group of blacks who thought the car was filled with more drive-by shooters. Two officers were killed. The mayor called Springfield for troops.
On the morning of July 2, the blood-drenched police car lit the match. The whites held a rally, the speakers harangued the crowd, and the townspeople began a military march towards the south, the black quarter of town. The march quickly exploded into the worst race riot the United States has ever seen.
Blacks were beaten and killed, lynched, burned alive in their own homes or shot as they tried to leave the new-made furnaces. Entire city blocks were incinerated. The troops from Springfield arrived late, and either did nothing or actively took part in the rioting.
By that evening, the flames from the black quarter of town shot so high that inhabitants of the bluff community of Signal Hill said nearby Pittsburgh Lake looked like a sheet of flame from the reflected light. Several of my boyhood friends had great-grandfathers who stood guard at the foot of the bluff with shotguns, making sure no black man, woman or child from East. St. Louis could break through to the road up the bluff into Belleville.
By the time the riot was done, 39 blacks and 9 whites were known to have been killed, but hundreds more were reported killed or missing in the newspapers. Given the massive incineration of the southern half of the city, the reports are not beyond belief. The reports of the riot were immediately classified by the US Government. They were not released until 1986.
The Results
The third largest city in Illinois Belleville and East St. Louis have spent the last century reaping the legacy of that hot 1917 summer.
Today, East St. Louis, once the third largest city in Illinois, has no heavy industry at all, and virtually no economy. In the 1980’s, City Hall was confiscated by the courts to pay a city debt. It is 97% black with a median household income of roughly $21,000 and a per capita income of $11,000. 35% of the population is below the poverty line – nearly half of all children are in families below the poverty line.
With numbers like that and a city filled with comparative riches right up the hill, it is not really surprising to find that my hometown, Belleville, eventually began to see a certain number of immigrants itself. Indeed, not too many years ago, the Belleville Police Department had the dubious distinction of being the star of a 60 Minutes broadcast, in which it was alleged to be the most racist police department in America.
The reasons weren’t hard to discover. When eight of ten crime witnesses describe their assailants as black males in their mid-20’s, even the least intelligent police officer will think he begins to see a pattern. Black-on-black crime is rampant in the city near the river and enough black-on-white crime rolls up the bluff to create a fairly racist population in the city on the hill.
My Experience
I am familiar with the problem of crime created by “illegal immigrants,” i.e., black Southern sharecroppers who moved north to take factory jobs in Illinois. My own father has been robbed twice – once with a gun held to his head, the second time with a knife at his throat. If the second man had not been relatively incompetent - managing to lose his knife during the course of the robbery, and so forced to slit my father’s throat with the torn aluminum from an empty beer can – he would have been successful in ripping through to the jugular vein and so silencing the only witness to the crime.
As it turned out, the cut was as inept as the man who made it, and my father survived. But, though he has been robbed and nearly killed, not once but twice - and by the typical Belleville perpetrator - he has never opined that all blacks should be deported.
As a boy growing up in Belleville, I learned the story of East St. Louis at my parents’ knees. I saw the effects on my own community. I saw the dying city every time we drove out of town.
But I also learned the lessons East St. Louis had to teach. As I said, East St. Louis is dying now, and will soon be dead – the population has decreased every decade since 1917. But with its dying breath, it tells me what I need to know about immigration.
I know poor men come north to find work and earn pay. Most of that pay goes back home to feed children they hold only in photographs, to care for wives who must raise the family alone until Pa has bankrolled enough either to come back or to send for them.
Some of those poor men are violent or turn violent. They primarily victimize their fellows, but the violent ones get the deep pockets when they can, and their fellow immigrants hate them for it. They hate them because they are victimized by these violent men and they hate them because the violent victimization of the white man gives every immigrant a bad name.
I know that borders and searches don’t work. I know that segregating the populations with a street or a fence or even a wide, wide river like the Mississippi doesn’t work. You can’t stop people from wanting to live, and they will hate you if you try. If two groups of people learn to hate each other enough, then they will eventually kill each other.
That’s what I learned.
I’ll be damned if I let July, 1917 happen across the whole American Southwest.
The immigrants are here. We must get used to them and learn to work with them. We must mix our life’s blood together with them in our children and our children’s children or we will mix our life’s blood together with them in pools, as we both lay dying on the street. If you want to keep America, then you must be willing to let go of the America you have today so you can grasp the America that waits in the wings. Look back on the flames of East. St. Louis and learn from her mistakes.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The Errors of Ignatius Press
"Gnosticism: The Religion of the Code"
That's Chapter 1 of Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel's book, The Da Vinci Hoax. While the book has been a moderately competent debunk of Dan Brown's novel, there has always been one aspect of it that has been in error, and it is admirably laid out in the title to chapter 1. Gnosticism has absolutely nothing to do with the Da Vinci Code.
In defending the Ignatius book against this charge, Mark Brumley, CEO of Ignatius, has this to say, "DVH makes a sophisticated argument re: Gnosticism and the DVC. Brown draws on some elements of Gnosticism, frames some of his arguments based on how Gnosticism is used by others today, and ignores other aspects of Gnosticism that contradict his overall thesis."
Now, as I have pointed out elsewhere, The Da Vinci Code's contact with Gnosticism is essentially non-existent. It quotes from two documents which contain Gnostic elements: the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In neither case does Brown use the Gnostic elements in those documents, nor does he use the quotes that he does draw from the documents to support any Gnostic idea whatsoever.
In fact, every idea that he brings forward concerning Jesus is antithetical to Gnosticism.
Recently, Carl Olson wrote a column for Ignatius Insight complaining about the uproar over the Gnostic Gospel of Judas. Since his column accepts comments from readers, I pointed out that the uproar was in part fueled by his erroneous book and DVD - he and Ignatius have been promulgating information on a heresy that the Da Vinci Code never even refers to. Two years of Ignatius' hype concerning this straw-man argument undoubtedly played no small role in the rising interest in Gnosticism.
After all, even the word "Gnostic" never appears in the Da Vinci Code. Certainly none of its ideas are present in the Code. Gnosticism is a remarkably complex and relatively obscure heresy that almost no one knew existed prior to the erection of the strawman argument. Given how bad Dan Brown is at research, it isn't clear he even realized he was quoting from Gnostic documents. There's certainly no evidence he taught anything approaching Gnostic philosophy.
So, when I heard about Carl's column, in which he laments the existence of an uproar he and Ignatius helped to create, I asked Carl and Mark to give me one example of Gnostic philosophy, theology or even general thought in the Da Vinci Code.
They couldn't.
Mark responded only by saying "Brown claims X, but he gets this from Gnostic sources..."
I pointed out that Brown quoted from ancient documents which contained Gnostic elements, but he never, in fact, used any of the Gnostic elements. Indeed, as I realized later, if we were to use this new Ignatius Press standard for what constitutes adherence to a particular philosophy, we would be forced to insist that Ignatius Press supports Dan Brown's philosophy and theology, since their book quotes from The Da Vinci Code.
If Brown quoting from Gnostic documents makes him Gnostic, then Ignatius Press quoting from the Da Vinci Code makes them adherents to Dan Brown’s philosophy. QED.
Mark insisted I was not engaging his argument, and indicated that he saw no point in further conversation.
I posted this reply:
As Carl and Sandra correctly point out in their first chapter, Gnosticism held that proper understanding of reality was only available to a few esoteric elite, people who did not need to justify themselves to the rest of us, the great unwashed. The illuminated understand the secret knowledge. The rest of us must just accept what they say.
The Ignatius Press' position is quite clear: "DVH makes a sophisticated argument re: Gnosticism and the DVC. Brown draws on some elements of Gnosticism, frames some of his arguments based on how Gnosticism is used by others today, and ignores other aspects of Gnosticism that contradict his overall thesis."
The argument is apparently quite sophisticated - so sophisticated, that it is not something Mark Brumley, CEO of Ignatius Press, or Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel, the authors of The Da Vinci Hoax, are willing to actually enunciate to the rest of us.
"Brown draws on some elements of Gnosticism" but we aren't permitted to know which.
Brown "frames some of his arguments based on how Gnosticism is used by others today," but we aren't permitted to know how.
In short, Mark Brumley is trying to tell us the arguments Carl and Sandra use in The Da Vinci Hoax are Gnostic arguments.
I guess they are fighting fire with fire. Too bad the rest of us are too stupid to understand.
Just remember: the Ignatius Press use of Gnostic strawmen and/or Gnostic arguments had nothing to do with the uproar over the Gospel of Judas. Not a thing. Just ask them.
That's Chapter 1 of Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel's book, The Da Vinci Hoax. While the book has been a moderately competent debunk of Dan Brown's novel, there has always been one aspect of it that has been in error, and it is admirably laid out in the title to chapter 1. Gnosticism has absolutely nothing to do with the Da Vinci Code.
In defending the Ignatius book against this charge, Mark Brumley, CEO of Ignatius, has this to say, "DVH makes a sophisticated argument re: Gnosticism and the DVC. Brown draws on some elements of Gnosticism, frames some of his arguments based on how Gnosticism is used by others today, and ignores other aspects of Gnosticism that contradict his overall thesis."
Now, as I have pointed out elsewhere, The Da Vinci Code's contact with Gnosticism is essentially non-existent. It quotes from two documents which contain Gnostic elements: the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In neither case does Brown use the Gnostic elements in those documents, nor does he use the quotes that he does draw from the documents to support any Gnostic idea whatsoever.
In fact, every idea that he brings forward concerning Jesus is antithetical to Gnosticism.
Recently, Carl Olson wrote a column for Ignatius Insight complaining about the uproar over the Gnostic Gospel of Judas. Since his column accepts comments from readers, I pointed out that the uproar was in part fueled by his erroneous book and DVD - he and Ignatius have been promulgating information on a heresy that the Da Vinci Code never even refers to. Two years of Ignatius' hype concerning this straw-man argument undoubtedly played no small role in the rising interest in Gnosticism.
After all, even the word "Gnostic" never appears in the Da Vinci Code. Certainly none of its ideas are present in the Code. Gnosticism is a remarkably complex and relatively obscure heresy that almost no one knew existed prior to the erection of the strawman argument. Given how bad Dan Brown is at research, it isn't clear he even realized he was quoting from Gnostic documents. There's certainly no evidence he taught anything approaching Gnostic philosophy.
So, when I heard about Carl's column, in which he laments the existence of an uproar he and Ignatius helped to create, I asked Carl and Mark to give me one example of Gnostic philosophy, theology or even general thought in the Da Vinci Code.
They couldn't.
Mark responded only by saying "Brown claims X, but he gets this from Gnostic sources..."
I pointed out that Brown quoted from ancient documents which contained Gnostic elements, but he never, in fact, used any of the Gnostic elements. Indeed, as I realized later, if we were to use this new Ignatius Press standard for what constitutes adherence to a particular philosophy, we would be forced to insist that Ignatius Press supports Dan Brown's philosophy and theology, since their book quotes from The Da Vinci Code.
If Brown quoting from Gnostic documents makes him Gnostic, then Ignatius Press quoting from the Da Vinci Code makes them adherents to Dan Brown’s philosophy. QED.
Mark insisted I was not engaging his argument, and indicated that he saw no point in further conversation.
I posted this reply:
- "Mark, your book has a chapter entitled Chapter 1: Gnosticism: The Religion of the Code.
In that chapter, Carl and Sandra say, 'It's easy for writers such as Brown, who are sympathetic to the gnostics (or at least to some of their ideas)...'
I asked you to name one Gnostic idea that Brown espouses in DVC. You can't. But your chapter heading says it is the Religion of the Code! How does that work?
How can something be the religion, the philosophy, the theology of a work without ever actually espousing - or even referring to - any of the IDEAS in the work?
Carl and Sandra give a basically accurate description of what Gnosticism teaches and then say, 'Gnosticism was exclusive, elitist, and esoteric, open only to a few.'
But Brown's argument is precisely that pagan goddess worship – which is NOT Gnosticism - was NOT elitist, esoteric or open only to a few.
Your own book's first chapter HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING IN DVC. Your book claims that Brown is sympathetic to Gnostic ideas, but you never connect any Gnostic idea to anything Brown wrote.
Carl and Sandra have been pushing this strawman argument for TWO YEARS. Ignatius has been pushing this strawman for two years.
Engage with that fact."
As Carl and Sandra correctly point out in their first chapter, Gnosticism held that proper understanding of reality was only available to a few esoteric elite, people who did not need to justify themselves to the rest of us, the great unwashed. The illuminated understand the secret knowledge. The rest of us must just accept what they say.
The Ignatius Press' position is quite clear: "DVH makes a sophisticated argument re: Gnosticism and the DVC. Brown draws on some elements of Gnosticism, frames some of his arguments based on how Gnosticism is used by others today, and ignores other aspects of Gnosticism that contradict his overall thesis."
The argument is apparently quite sophisticated - so sophisticated, that it is not something Mark Brumley, CEO of Ignatius Press, or Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel, the authors of The Da Vinci Hoax, are willing to actually enunciate to the rest of us.
"Brown draws on some elements of Gnosticism" but we aren't permitted to know which.
Brown "frames some of his arguments based on how Gnosticism is used by others today," but we aren't permitted to know how.
In short, Mark Brumley is trying to tell us the arguments Carl and Sandra use in The Da Vinci Hoax are Gnostic arguments.
I guess they are fighting fire with fire. Too bad the rest of us are too stupid to understand.
Just remember: the Ignatius Press use of Gnostic strawmen and/or Gnostic arguments had nothing to do with the uproar over the Gospel of Judas. Not a thing. Just ask them.
Maundy Thursday
In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown has one of his main characters argue that Jesus must have been married. Why? Well, Jesus was an orthodox Jew bound by custom. Since Jews customarily married, Jesus had to be married.
Exactly three pages later, the same character argues that Jesus gave authority over the Church to a woman. Why? Well, women were never given positions of authority in Judaism, but Jesus was a rebel who defied custom and refused to be bound by it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. A great person does not have to think consistently from one day to the next.” This is a sentiment impossible to argue with.
As we approach Holy Thursday and the washing of the feet, both Emerson and Brown are reminded to call their offices.
During the Mass of the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, the liturgy calls for the priest to emulate Jesus in washing the feet of several men. Notice the liturgy specifies the sex of the persons whose feet are to be washed. But, for roughly forty years, we have had lay people, priests, even bishops, who insist that the Mass of the Last Supper permits the washing of the feet of anyone who seems disenfranchised.
Why?
Well, we all know that Jesus is God. God can do whatever He wants. He is absolutely free. Thus, Jesus, being the living God, had no choice. You see, he was tightly bound by Hebrew cultural norms, norms that constrained the living God and forced him to wash only men’s feet. If it weren’t for the fact that God was forced into this position by virtue of being the all-powerful creator of everything that existed, He would have washed women’s feet. Probably would have invited the little children in as well. Heck, perhaps Rover or Tabby would have gotten their paws damp. But you know how it is.
In case you thought the reasoning couldn’t get sillier, you’re wrong.
I once had a woman tell me, with obvious awe and wonder at the depth of thought involved, that the priest at her parish didn’t wash anyone’s feet at all. Instead, he washed the hands. “You see, it’s the hands that do the work!”
Which just goes to show how far modern seminary training has advanced over that of the ancients. Jesus is undoubtedly sitting at the right hand of the Father taking notes, nudging Abba occasionally with his elbow, saying, “Wow – why didn’t I think of that?”
Unfortunately for this priest, the Holy Thursday’s washing has nothing to do with labor. Many know that the washing of feet was a task so low that only the most menial Gentile slave could be ordered to do it, but few people realize why. The Hebrew colloquial expression for relieving oneself is “to cover one’s feet.” As anyone who has squatted in an open field knows, the colloquial expression is an accurate description of what can happen during the activity under discussion. By washing people’s hands, the priest was inadvertently making a rather strong comment on what they had been doing with those hands recently.
But it’s actually worse than that. Others have written on this subject with far more Scriptural dexterity than I, so I will steal liberally from them in order to make the point. As Old Oligarch points out, the only Jew in Scripture besides Christ who ever washed the feet of another Jew was Moses. He washed Aaron and his sons in order to cleanse them in preparation for their ordination as the first Levitical priests.
Few people realize that the Catholic Church has definitively interpreted only seven sets of Scripture passages, the Last Supper narratives of the synoptic Gospels being one of those. The Council of Trent infallibly defined that those narratives are the Scriptural foundation for the establishment of the priesthood. The washing of the feet must, therefore, be read within the context of preparation for ordination.
Jesus didn’t wash the apostles’ feet because He was bound by custom to do so. Indeed, Hebrew custom militated against it. He chose only men as Levitical priests in the Old Testament, He chose only men as apostles in the New Testament, and He washed the feet of all priests prior to their ordination because He wants them to be pure. He wants them to walk in purity. How beautiful are the feet upon the mountain of him who brings good news!
Exactly three pages later, the same character argues that Jesus gave authority over the Church to a woman. Why? Well, women were never given positions of authority in Judaism, but Jesus was a rebel who defied custom and refused to be bound by it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. A great person does not have to think consistently from one day to the next.” This is a sentiment impossible to argue with.
As we approach Holy Thursday and the washing of the feet, both Emerson and Brown are reminded to call their offices.
During the Mass of the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, the liturgy calls for the priest to emulate Jesus in washing the feet of several men. Notice the liturgy specifies the sex of the persons whose feet are to be washed. But, for roughly forty years, we have had lay people, priests, even bishops, who insist that the Mass of the Last Supper permits the washing of the feet of anyone who seems disenfranchised.
Why?
Well, we all know that Jesus is God. God can do whatever He wants. He is absolutely free. Thus, Jesus, being the living God, had no choice. You see, he was tightly bound by Hebrew cultural norms, norms that constrained the living God and forced him to wash only men’s feet. If it weren’t for the fact that God was forced into this position by virtue of being the all-powerful creator of everything that existed, He would have washed women’s feet. Probably would have invited the little children in as well. Heck, perhaps Rover or Tabby would have gotten their paws damp. But you know how it is.
In case you thought the reasoning couldn’t get sillier, you’re wrong.
I once had a woman tell me, with obvious awe and wonder at the depth of thought involved, that the priest at her parish didn’t wash anyone’s feet at all. Instead, he washed the hands. “You see, it’s the hands that do the work!”
Which just goes to show how far modern seminary training has advanced over that of the ancients. Jesus is undoubtedly sitting at the right hand of the Father taking notes, nudging Abba occasionally with his elbow, saying, “Wow – why didn’t I think of that?”
Unfortunately for this priest, the Holy Thursday’s washing has nothing to do with labor. Many know that the washing of feet was a task so low that only the most menial Gentile slave could be ordered to do it, but few people realize why. The Hebrew colloquial expression for relieving oneself is “to cover one’s feet.” As anyone who has squatted in an open field knows, the colloquial expression is an accurate description of what can happen during the activity under discussion. By washing people’s hands, the priest was inadvertently making a rather strong comment on what they had been doing with those hands recently.
But it’s actually worse than that. Others have written on this subject with far more Scriptural dexterity than I, so I will steal liberally from them in order to make the point. As Old Oligarch points out, the only Jew in Scripture besides Christ who ever washed the feet of another Jew was Moses. He washed Aaron and his sons in order to cleanse them in preparation for their ordination as the first Levitical priests.
Few people realize that the Catholic Church has definitively interpreted only seven sets of Scripture passages, the Last Supper narratives of the synoptic Gospels being one of those. The Council of Trent infallibly defined that those narratives are the Scriptural foundation for the establishment of the priesthood. The washing of the feet must, therefore, be read within the context of preparation for ordination.
Jesus didn’t wash the apostles’ feet because He was bound by custom to do so. Indeed, Hebrew custom militated against it. He chose only men as Levitical priests in the Old Testament, He chose only men as apostles in the New Testament, and He washed the feet of all priests prior to their ordination because He wants them to be pure. He wants them to walk in purity. How beautiful are the feet upon the mountain of him who brings good news!
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
The Gospel of Judas
Many Catholic commentators are all a-twitter about the Easter special on the Gospel of Judas.
The Gospel of Judas, for those not in the know, is a Gnostic Gospel that was discovered about thirty years ago. The MSM has decided to dust it off and make it a centerpiece for the Easter season, since it contains distinctly weird theological statements.
Take the New York Times' discussion as an example of the nuttiness contained therein:
"The [Gospel of Judas] goes on to relate that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas "you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus."
Now, why is such a silly document getting so much press coverage? Because a bunch of Christians - especially a bunch of orthodox Catholics - made sure it would.
For the last two years, the people who took on the role of official debunkers to Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, have been insisting that Brown's work is a Gnostic heresy.
It is nothing of the sort.
Gnostics said sex is evil and marriage is sinful.
The Da Vinci Code said sex is holy and marriage is sacred.
Gnostics said men are closer to divinity than women, women can only be saved if they become like men.
The Da Vinci Code says women are closer to divinity then men, men are saved by worshipping the sacred feminine.
Gnostics said salvation can only be attained if you acquire special knowledge which allows you to overcome the creator of the material universe, who is not god.
The Da Vinci Code said nothing at all about salvation or the creator of the material universe. The only point of contact here is that the Gnostic creation account had a god-like being named Sophia, whose errors were responsible for the material world being created. In contrast, the Da Vinci Code's protagonist, Sophie Nevue, turns out to be responsible for preserving the link to the divine. Her role is exactly the opposite of the role played by the Gnostic "Sophia."
Finally, and most important, the central aspect of Gnostic theology insisted Jesus did not have a real body and was not a real man. His crucifixion was fake if only because he had no body to crucify - his body was an illusion he clothed himself in to prevent us mortal men from taking fright and running from him. That's the central tenet of the Gospel of Judas.
The Da Vinci Code insists that Jesus was NOTHING BUT A MAN, who had a wife and kids.
In short, the central position of the Gospel of Judas directly contradicts Dan Brown's novel.
There is nothing at all Gnostic about the Da Vinci Code novel.
True, the book quotes a few of the Gnostic gospels, but that's hardly relevant. Not only does he take all the quotes out of context, his argument doesn't really rest on the Gnostic gospels at all. He uses them as a throw-away opening salvo against Christianity, quoting them for roughly six pages and then never returning to them again.
In short, if any Gnostics were alive today, they would be debunking Dan Brown's novel right along with the Christians, since he screws up Gnostic theology and history as thoroughly as he screws up Catholic-Christian theology and history.
But the constant drumbeat from Christian apologists who don't know history or Gnostic theology has incorrectly painted the Da Vinci Code as a Gnostic heresy, thereby raising interest in a train of thought that had been shown up for a farce over 1800 years ago.
Because the Christians kept incoherently insisting Brown's book was Gnostic when it was nothing of the sort, the Gnostic Gospel of Judas is now news.
And now Christian apologists are complaining about the MSM's attention to the newest unveiling of a Gnostic Gospel.
No wonder the world laughs at Christians.
If these people had only bothered to learn a bit about Gnosticism first, or - better yet - had bought copies of Fact and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code...
But I shall say no more, as shameless plugs of my book - currently on sale for just $5 at the Bridegroom Press website - is totally out of character.
The Gospel of Judas, for those not in the know, is a Gnostic Gospel that was discovered about thirty years ago. The MSM has decided to dust it off and make it a centerpiece for the Easter season, since it contains distinctly weird theological statements.
Take the New York Times' discussion as an example of the nuttiness contained therein:
"The [Gospel of Judas] goes on to relate that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas "you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus."
Now, why is such a silly document getting so much press coverage? Because a bunch of Christians - especially a bunch of orthodox Catholics - made sure it would.
For the last two years, the people who took on the role of official debunkers to Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, have been insisting that Brown's work is a Gnostic heresy.
It is nothing of the sort.
Gnostics said sex is evil and marriage is sinful.
The Da Vinci Code said sex is holy and marriage is sacred.
Gnostics said men are closer to divinity than women, women can only be saved if they become like men.
The Da Vinci Code says women are closer to divinity then men, men are saved by worshipping the sacred feminine.
Gnostics said salvation can only be attained if you acquire special knowledge which allows you to overcome the creator of the material universe, who is not god.
The Da Vinci Code said nothing at all about salvation or the creator of the material universe. The only point of contact here is that the Gnostic creation account had a god-like being named Sophia, whose errors were responsible for the material world being created. In contrast, the Da Vinci Code's protagonist, Sophie Nevue, turns out to be responsible for preserving the link to the divine. Her role is exactly the opposite of the role played by the Gnostic "Sophia."
Finally, and most important, the central aspect of Gnostic theology insisted Jesus did not have a real body and was not a real man. His crucifixion was fake if only because he had no body to crucify - his body was an illusion he clothed himself in to prevent us mortal men from taking fright and running from him. That's the central tenet of the Gospel of Judas.
The Da Vinci Code insists that Jesus was NOTHING BUT A MAN, who had a wife and kids.
In short, the central position of the Gospel of Judas directly contradicts Dan Brown's novel.
There is nothing at all Gnostic about the Da Vinci Code novel.
True, the book quotes a few of the Gnostic gospels, but that's hardly relevant. Not only does he take all the quotes out of context, his argument doesn't really rest on the Gnostic gospels at all. He uses them as a throw-away opening salvo against Christianity, quoting them for roughly six pages and then never returning to them again.
In short, if any Gnostics were alive today, they would be debunking Dan Brown's novel right along with the Christians, since he screws up Gnostic theology and history as thoroughly as he screws up Catholic-Christian theology and history.
But the constant drumbeat from Christian apologists who don't know history or Gnostic theology has incorrectly painted the Da Vinci Code as a Gnostic heresy, thereby raising interest in a train of thought that had been shown up for a farce over 1800 years ago.
Because the Christians kept incoherently insisting Brown's book was Gnostic when it was nothing of the sort, the Gnostic Gospel of Judas is now news.
And now Christian apologists are complaining about the MSM's attention to the newest unveiling of a Gnostic Gospel.
No wonder the world laughs at Christians.
If these people had only bothered to learn a bit about Gnosticism first, or - better yet - had bought copies of Fact and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code...
But I shall say no more, as shameless plugs of my book - currently on sale for just $5 at the Bridegroom Press website - is totally out of character.
Friday, April 07, 2006
The Farce is Over
The English judge in charge of the Da Vinci Code copyright trial was nonplussed, "No good reason for not calling Blythe Brown was given. Her evidence could have assisted significantly in explaining how various documents were created and how the text of DVC in respect of the lectures came to be written. Any doubts that could have been explained by her were accordingly to be resolved in favour of the Claimants."
Clearly, he doesn't read the sales figures from Random House. After slowly falling in sales rank over the course of the last year, both books rocketed back into the best sellers' lists.
Did Random House simply engineer the trial concerning Da Vinci Code copyright infringement, timing it so that it would coincide with the movie release? It's hard to see how else the facts can be explained. Indeed, given how the case was run, it would not be at all surprising to discover that Random House fully (and quietly) reimburses the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail for their trial expenses, assuming those authors ever paid such expenses to begin with.
If anyone wishes to argue, one has only to study the judge's ruling. He notes in points 5 and 8 that there were grounds for copyright infringement, but the HBHG authors somehow failed to realize it, as they never mentioned the real grounds for infringement in their suit. He further notes in point 6 that Dan Brown clearly lied about not having made much use of HBHG.
In short, the millionaire authors of HBHG and the expensive lawyer they "hired" were all so bleeding ignorant of their own work and of Dan Brown's work, that they used entirely the wrong approach in the copyright trial - an approach that was doomed to fail.
Further, as the judge notes in point 9, neither the prosecution nor the defense called the one witness - repeatedly referred to during Brown's testimony - who could have cleared things up. The level of incompetence here was mind-boggling.
The whole thing seems to have been a put-up job to sell books and a movie. In essence, Random House was both the defendant and the litigant. They got a month of world-wide publicity in every major news outlet just weeks prior to the launch of a what's sure to be a blockbuster movie. And they got it all simply by paying their in-house lawyers the salaries they have to pay them anyhow.
Brilliant.
As it always has been the marketing associated with the Da Vinci Code is absolutely brilliant.
Clearly, he doesn't read the sales figures from Random House. After slowly falling in sales rank over the course of the last year, both books rocketed back into the best sellers' lists.
Did Random House simply engineer the trial concerning Da Vinci Code copyright infringement, timing it so that it would coincide with the movie release? It's hard to see how else the facts can be explained. Indeed, given how the case was run, it would not be at all surprising to discover that Random House fully (and quietly) reimburses the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail for their trial expenses, assuming those authors ever paid such expenses to begin with.
If anyone wishes to argue, one has only to study the judge's ruling. He notes in points 5 and 8 that there were grounds for copyright infringement, but the HBHG authors somehow failed to realize it, as they never mentioned the real grounds for infringement in their suit. He further notes in point 6 that Dan Brown clearly lied about not having made much use of HBHG.
In short, the millionaire authors of HBHG and the expensive lawyer they "hired" were all so bleeding ignorant of their own work and of Dan Brown's work, that they used entirely the wrong approach in the copyright trial - an approach that was doomed to fail.
Further, as the judge notes in point 9, neither the prosecution nor the defense called the one witness - repeatedly referred to during Brown's testimony - who could have cleared things up. The level of incompetence here was mind-boggling.
The whole thing seems to have been a put-up job to sell books and a movie. In essence, Random House was both the defendant and the litigant. They got a month of world-wide publicity in every major news outlet just weeks prior to the launch of a what's sure to be a blockbuster movie. And they got it all simply by paying their in-house lawyers the salaries they have to pay them anyhow.
Brilliant.
As it always has been the marketing associated with the Da Vinci Code is absolutely brilliant.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Running the Numbers
Illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes. They use up an enormous amount of government-subsidized unemployment and medical coverage. They are lawbreakers. They take our jobs. That’s the image. Is it true? Well, let’s run the numbers.
As Tony Snow recently pointed out, over 60% of illegal immigrants pay social security and income taxes. How do they do it? They use false social security numbers. That means that the majority of illegal aliens are contributing to a system that will never give them back a dime of the money they put in.
Most illegal immigrants are men who have left their families behind in order to build up money here and send it back to their wives and children. As a result, less than 10% of illegals have children in the public school system, while only 5% receive unemployment or food stamps.
Illegals Don’t Pay Taxes
But, as none of the conservative commentators have pointed out, while nearly 40% of illegals don’t pay any taxes, that really doesn’t make them much different from most Americans. Let’s connect a few unconnected dots.
Bruce Bartlett and Thomas Sowell frequently point out that the tax bite on Americans is disproportionate. In 2003, for instance, the top 1 percent of taxpayers, ranked by adjusted gross income, paid 34.3 percent of all federal income taxes that year. The top 5 percent paid 54.4 percent, the top 10 percent paid 65.8 percent, and the top quarter of taxpayers paid 83.9 percent. And this despite the fact that the top 10 percent only earn 43 percent of the money.
Seventy-five percent of Americans paid less than seventeen percent of all taxes. The bottom fifty percent of Americans paid just four percent of income taxes, although they make 14 percent of the money. Indeed, the Earned Income Tax Credit gives many low-income workers a negative tax rate -- that is, they pay no income taxes but get a "refund" from the government anyway. Fully 30 percent of Americans fall into this category. When these facts are recalled, illegals begin to look like a cross-section of America.
And they aren’t the only ones. Walmart manages to keep prices low by effectively getting a subsidy from the government for their workers. A disproportionate number of Walmart workers are on food stamps, medicare and medicaid.
Illegals Are, By Definition, Criminals
Crime rates along the border are lower than in comparably sized non-border cities. Indeed, as Snow points out, California saw its crime rate halve while its Hispanic population more than doubled.
But they are breaking the law simply by entering the country, aren’t they? That makes them criminals, right?
Well, yes and no. Yes, they are breaking the law, but no, it doesn’t rise to the level of criminal court. As Linda Chavez points out, entering the country without proper papers is a misdemeanor civil offense. Similar civil violations are committed by people who don’t put the lids on their trash cans tightly enough or don’t keep the weeds in their yards properly cut. If we wish to reign in this level of lawbreaker, then let’s do it up right.
In Tucson, it is illegal for women to wear pants. In Alabama, you may not play Dominos on Sunday. In Pueblo, Colorado, it is illegal to let a dandelion grow within city limits. In Connecticut, it is illegal to dispose of used razor blades. In Hawaii, it is illegal to appear in public wearing only swimming trunks. (queue Frank Sinatra singing “I Did It My Way”) This rampant lawlessness obviously undermines America’s world-renowned reputation for refusing to break the rules in order to live as we please: we should not and cannot tolerate it!
Illegals Take Our Jobs
Well, what of the Hispanics flooding into New Orleans? Illegals are rebuilding the city!
They are! And do you know why? Because no one wants to do the job they are doing or live in the conditions they have to live in to earn that money. Illegals are living a half dozen and a dozen to a room, working 12 hour days, seven days a week for $8 an hour. That’s assuming the contractor doesn’t refuse to pay, that’s before they pay out the income tax and social security that is docked from the majority of their paychecks.
Everyone is crying that non-Hispanic minorities are being cut out of jobs. Local residents should be doing this work!
Well, perhaps they should, but they refuse to come back and do it. Some complain they can’t find living quarters in the city. Really? How is it that people who walked those streets their whole lives, many of whom were given thousands of dollars of government aid, don’t have the means to travel home? How is it that such fine, upstanding citizens fail to find rooms once they get there? The illegals can barely find the state on a map, much less the city, and they certainly aren’t getting government relocation subsidies for travel expenses, yet they manage not only to get there but they seem to be glad to work.
So, yes, illegal immigrants are displacing Americans born and bred here. But that’s to be expected. We embraced contraception and abortion – they didn’t. We don’t have the people we need to do the jobs we want done. Even if we had the people, we don’t have the stomach.
The Great Wall of Texas
As Tony Snow recently pointed out, over 60% of illegal immigrants pay social security and income taxes. How do they do it? They use false social security numbers. That means that the majority of illegal aliens are contributing to a system that will never give them back a dime of the money they put in.
Most illegal immigrants are men who have left their families behind in order to build up money here and send it back to their wives and children. As a result, less than 10% of illegals have children in the public school system, while only 5% receive unemployment or food stamps.
Illegals Don’t Pay Taxes
But, as none of the conservative commentators have pointed out, while nearly 40% of illegals don’t pay any taxes, that really doesn’t make them much different from most Americans. Let’s connect a few unconnected dots.
Bruce Bartlett and Thomas Sowell frequently point out that the tax bite on Americans is disproportionate. In 2003, for instance, the top 1 percent of taxpayers, ranked by adjusted gross income, paid 34.3 percent of all federal income taxes that year. The top 5 percent paid 54.4 percent, the top 10 percent paid 65.8 percent, and the top quarter of taxpayers paid 83.9 percent. And this despite the fact that the top 10 percent only earn 43 percent of the money.
Seventy-five percent of Americans paid less than seventeen percent of all taxes. The bottom fifty percent of Americans paid just four percent of income taxes, although they make 14 percent of the money. Indeed, the Earned Income Tax Credit gives many low-income workers a negative tax rate -- that is, they pay no income taxes but get a "refund" from the government anyway. Fully 30 percent of Americans fall into this category. When these facts are recalled, illegals begin to look like a cross-section of America.
And they aren’t the only ones. Walmart manages to keep prices low by effectively getting a subsidy from the government for their workers. A disproportionate number of Walmart workers are on food stamps, medicare and medicaid.
Illegals Are, By Definition, Criminals
Crime rates along the border are lower than in comparably sized non-border cities. Indeed, as Snow points out, California saw its crime rate halve while its Hispanic population more than doubled.
But they are breaking the law simply by entering the country, aren’t they? That makes them criminals, right?
Well, yes and no. Yes, they are breaking the law, but no, it doesn’t rise to the level of criminal court. As Linda Chavez points out, entering the country without proper papers is a misdemeanor civil offense. Similar civil violations are committed by people who don’t put the lids on their trash cans tightly enough or don’t keep the weeds in their yards properly cut. If we wish to reign in this level of lawbreaker, then let’s do it up right.
In Tucson, it is illegal for women to wear pants. In Alabama, you may not play Dominos on Sunday. In Pueblo, Colorado, it is illegal to let a dandelion grow within city limits. In Connecticut, it is illegal to dispose of used razor blades. In Hawaii, it is illegal to appear in public wearing only swimming trunks. (queue Frank Sinatra singing “I Did It My Way”) This rampant lawlessness obviously undermines America’s world-renowned reputation for refusing to break the rules in order to live as we please: we should not and cannot tolerate it!
Illegals Take Our Jobs
Well, what of the Hispanics flooding into New Orleans? Illegals are rebuilding the city!
They are! And do you know why? Because no one wants to do the job they are doing or live in the conditions they have to live in to earn that money. Illegals are living a half dozen and a dozen to a room, working 12 hour days, seven days a week for $8 an hour. That’s assuming the contractor doesn’t refuse to pay, that’s before they pay out the income tax and social security that is docked from the majority of their paychecks.
Everyone is crying that non-Hispanic minorities are being cut out of jobs. Local residents should be doing this work!
Well, perhaps they should, but they refuse to come back and do it. Some complain they can’t find living quarters in the city. Really? How is it that people who walked those streets their whole lives, many of whom were given thousands of dollars of government aid, don’t have the means to travel home? How is it that such fine, upstanding citizens fail to find rooms once they get there? The illegals can barely find the state on a map, much less the city, and they certainly aren’t getting government relocation subsidies for travel expenses, yet they manage not only to get there but they seem to be glad to work.
So, yes, illegal immigrants are displacing Americans born and bred here. But that’s to be expected. We embraced contraception and abortion – they didn’t. We don’t have the people we need to do the jobs we want done. Even if we had the people, we don’t have the stomach.
The Great Wall of Texas
The Great Wall of China was a monumental undertaking, so enormous it can be seen from space. It was never taken by military force. It didn’t have to be. The Mongol invaders simply bribed the gatekeepers. Walls don’t work.
The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe was likewise a testimony to the desire to keep populations apart. Ultimately, those walls were crushed as people mined below them, climbed over them, wriggled through them, and vaulted above them in every conceivable way. Barbed wire and machine guns don’t work.
Well, what about a moat?
The enormous moat which is the oceanic strait between Florida and Cuba has been equally successful in keeping immigrants out. Ninety miles of shark-infested water hasn’t stopped men, women, children, even infants, from seeking out a better life. Moats don’t work.
Now, Congress is considering the construction of the Great Wall of Texas. Apart from its utility as a make-work project for government-funded contractors, what, exactly is the point?
Monday, April 03, 2006
Requiem in Pace
The American Way of Life that we so ardently embrace has been in existence for almost forty years, and it won’t survive another decade. This isn’t the first time that it has died, of course, and it won’t be the last. But it is time to write the obituary for this particular version.
In 1776, the American Way of Life had several aspects. In religion, it was strongly Protestant, and tirelessly anti-Catholic. Few people remember that the French alliance with American rebels forced marked changes in America’s way of life. George Washington, for instance, had to order his troops to stop celebrating Guy Fawkes’ Day by burning the pope in effigy. America’s French Catholic allies might take offense.
In Washington’s day, the American Way of Life was built on an economy that was both overwhelmingly agrarian and stridently opposed to the existence of the corporation. The Boston Tea Party, indeed, the entire Revolutionary War, was arguably a war meant to overthrow the shackles, not of the English king, but of the Dutch East India Company and its clones. The American Way of Life was built in no small part upon slavery and indentured servitude – New York had slave cemeteries and slave trading just as surely as Charleston did.
The American Way of Life was also built around the small – the very small – rural town, wherein everyone knew everyone and strangers were looked on askance. Education was the one-room school house in which the students, the teachers and the town’s school board were all related to one another: brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, all were generally one enormous extended family, as was the town it existed within.
The Early Fight
Andrew Jackson fought for the American Way of Life when he opposed a national bank and thereby opposed the creation of corporations. America’s South fought for the American Way of Life when it fought to maintain state’s rights and its “peculiar institution.” The rebels in mid-1800’s Massachusetts fought for the American Way of Life when they tried to keep their children from being marched off to compulsory school by armed troops. All of them ultimately lost.
After the Civil War, the American Way of Life continued to be virulently Protestant and anti-Catholic, but it became increasingly industrialized, which is to say, it began to be ruled by the corporation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the small town was dying, the one-room schoolhouse was nearly dead and the corporation dominated the economy.
As Catholics streamed in from Europe, the reaction to protect the remaining aspect of the original American Way of Life was pronounced. The United States passed its first immigration quotas. After all, every country in the Western Hemisphere was Catholic, except for the United States. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the fight to preserve America’s “peculiar institution,” that is, Protestantism, was on.
Suicide
The Protestants lost. In fact, they cut their own throats. During World War I, the notorious adulterer and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, authorized the distribution of condoms to sailors. The eugenics movement he promoted, along with religious acceptance of condoms permitted by the 1930 Anglican Lambeth Conference, led to nearly virulent promotion of condom usage during WW II. The pre-war myth of the condom, taken together with the underlying fact of mass-produced antibiotics, made the “safe sex” industry a real possibility by 1944.
And that killed the Protestants. From 1973 to 1993, the Protestant majority held steady at 65%. Then, as the first children raised in a predominantly contraceptive/abortive country came of age, the Protestant percentage began to drop rapidly.
Today, less than 50% of Americans are Protestant. The United States is no longer a Protestant country.
Hope Springs Anew
But, at the same time, America has been inundated by Catholics. By 2002, 10% of the United States population was immigrant, the vast majority Catholic Hispanic.
The Minuteman Project boasts over 1000 members. The march in Los Angeles alone was one half-million strong. Unlike demonstrations of Muslim violence in Europe, America’s demonstrations have been peaceful, enormous and Catholic. The Minutemen have lost.
America as we knew it in the 1980’s and 1990’s, is dead. It will not return anymore than the America of the 1780’s will return.
Now, we should be clear. The Catholics of the United States have largely contracepted and aborted themselves out of existence right along with their Protestant brethren, for there is no significant difference between American Catholics and American Protestants in this regard. So, just as Europe will be essentially Middle-Eastern Islamic within fifty years, America will be essentially Catholic Hispanic.
European America, like Europe itself, is dead. The demographics and the immigration patterns are clear. Given the economic realities, those patterns will not change any time soon. Requiem in pace.
But who will triumph? Muslim Europe or Hispanic America? The answer to that is clear as well. We are used to buying products labeled "Made in Mexico." When was the last time you bought a product labeled "Made in Saudi Arabia"?
In 1776, the American Way of Life had several aspects. In religion, it was strongly Protestant, and tirelessly anti-Catholic. Few people remember that the French alliance with American rebels forced marked changes in America’s way of life. George Washington, for instance, had to order his troops to stop celebrating Guy Fawkes’ Day by burning the pope in effigy. America’s French Catholic allies might take offense.
In Washington’s day, the American Way of Life was built on an economy that was both overwhelmingly agrarian and stridently opposed to the existence of the corporation. The Boston Tea Party, indeed, the entire Revolutionary War, was arguably a war meant to overthrow the shackles, not of the English king, but of the Dutch East India Company and its clones. The American Way of Life was built in no small part upon slavery and indentured servitude – New York had slave cemeteries and slave trading just as surely as Charleston did.
The American Way of Life was also built around the small – the very small – rural town, wherein everyone knew everyone and strangers were looked on askance. Education was the one-room school house in which the students, the teachers and the town’s school board were all related to one another: brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, all were generally one enormous extended family, as was the town it existed within.
The Early Fight
Andrew Jackson fought for the American Way of Life when he opposed a national bank and thereby opposed the creation of corporations. America’s South fought for the American Way of Life when it fought to maintain state’s rights and its “peculiar institution.” The rebels in mid-1800’s Massachusetts fought for the American Way of Life when they tried to keep their children from being marched off to compulsory school by armed troops. All of them ultimately lost.
After the Civil War, the American Way of Life continued to be virulently Protestant and anti-Catholic, but it became increasingly industrialized, which is to say, it began to be ruled by the corporation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the small town was dying, the one-room schoolhouse was nearly dead and the corporation dominated the economy.
As Catholics streamed in from Europe, the reaction to protect the remaining aspect of the original American Way of Life was pronounced. The United States passed its first immigration quotas. After all, every country in the Western Hemisphere was Catholic, except for the United States. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the fight to preserve America’s “peculiar institution,” that is, Protestantism, was on.
Suicide
The Protestants lost. In fact, they cut their own throats. During World War I, the notorious adulterer and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, authorized the distribution of condoms to sailors. The eugenics movement he promoted, along with religious acceptance of condoms permitted by the 1930 Anglican Lambeth Conference, led to nearly virulent promotion of condom usage during WW II. The pre-war myth of the condom, taken together with the underlying fact of mass-produced antibiotics, made the “safe sex” industry a real possibility by 1944.
And that killed the Protestants. From 1973 to 1993, the Protestant majority held steady at 65%. Then, as the first children raised in a predominantly contraceptive/abortive country came of age, the Protestant percentage began to drop rapidly.
Today, less than 50% of Americans are Protestant. The United States is no longer a Protestant country.
Hope Springs Anew
But, at the same time, America has been inundated by Catholics. By 2002, 10% of the United States population was immigrant, the vast majority Catholic Hispanic.
The Minuteman Project boasts over 1000 members. The march in Los Angeles alone was one half-million strong. Unlike demonstrations of Muslim violence in Europe, America’s demonstrations have been peaceful, enormous and Catholic. The Minutemen have lost.
America as we knew it in the 1980’s and 1990’s, is dead. It will not return anymore than the America of the 1780’s will return.
Now, we should be clear. The Catholics of the United States have largely contracepted and aborted themselves out of existence right along with their Protestant brethren, for there is no significant difference between American Catholics and American Protestants in this regard. So, just as Europe will be essentially Middle-Eastern Islamic within fifty years, America will be essentially Catholic Hispanic.
European America, like Europe itself, is dead. The demographics and the immigration patterns are clear. Given the economic realities, those patterns will not change any time soon. Requiem in pace.
But who will triumph? Muslim Europe or Hispanic America? The answer to that is clear as well. We are used to buying products labeled "Made in Mexico." When was the last time you bought a product labeled "Made in Saudi Arabia"?
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Matt Dubay and Eminent Domain
A few months back, the conservative world was in an uproar because the Supreme Court ruled that the state has the right to take any property it wants if that land can be used to generate more revenue for the state. Matt Dubay’s lawsuit, in which he attempts to avoid paying child support on the grounds that he didn’t want a child, has an interesting resonance with that ruling.
According to CNN, “the president of the National Organization for Women, Kim Gandy, acknowledged that disputes over unintended pregnancies can be complex and bitter. ‘None of these are easy questions,’ said Gandy, a former prosecutor. ‘But most courts say it's not about what he did or didn't do or what she did or didn't do. It's about the rights of the child.’ ”
Confusion from the Leaders
Indeed? What child would that be, Ms. Gandy? According to the National Organization of Women, the decision to have sex is not a decision to have a child. There is no child at the moment of conception. There is no child, really, until birth. How can Matt Dubay be responsible for a child he didn’t create?
According to the most modern, cutting-edge definitions of sexual responsibility, pregnancy and personhood, Mr. Dubay most emphatically did not create a child nor had he anything to do with the creation of a child.
Abortion supporters insist the act of sex does not create responsibility towards a future child. If it did, no one could support abortion. Legal abortion is grounded in the idea that something which does not yet have its own existence does not yet have any rights. Thus, abortion supporters take great pains to explain why the tissue mass in the womb is not really a child.
- It doesn’t have a heartbeat (except it does by the 22nd day after conception).
- It doesn’t have brainwaves (except it does by the 42nd day).
- It can’t feel pain (except it can by the 7th week, in fact, between 20 and 30 weeks gestation, the tissue mass is more susceptible to pain than a born child).
So, to parrot the pro-choice position, how can Matt Dubay have responsibilities towards a tissue mass? Towards something smaller than your thumb? Smaller than a grain of rice? How can he have responsibilities towards a fertilized egg that doesn’t even exist until hours after he has withdrawn from the woman, withdrawn from the bedroom, gotten dressed and gone home to wash his car? Conception happens hours, sometimes days, after having sex.
Even so, life does not begin at conception, remember? One hundred years ago, fifty years ago, even a decade ago, pregnancy began at conception. Today, it begins at implantation. Today, women aren’t pregnant with children, they are pregnant with undifferentiated tissue masses, tissue masses that are nearly as marvelous a source of stem cells as menstrual blood.
Stem cells and abortion. That’s why we changed the definition of when life and pregnancy began, remember? So we could tear apart those little tissue masses and steal, ahem, borrow, excuse me, use their stem cells. What? Oh, sorry. I meant use the stem cells.
Confusion in the Logic
So, we ask again, Ms. Gandy, how can Matt Dubay have any responsibility towards a child he didn’t create? A child is created through the act of gestation, but what has that got to do with a man? Men don’t have wombs. Men don’t gestate. Remember?
This is why we can create embryos for experimentation – as long as we don’t implant them in the womb, as long as these embryos don’t gestate, it’s moral to tear them apart. Gestation is the key, remember? Not conception, not fertilization – gestation. Without gestation, it’s just potential human life. With gestation, it might become real human life.
But men don’t gestate.
Now, why would Ms. Gandy, who has vociferously supported the aforesaid line of reasoning, suddenly come to the conclusion that the act of sex creates responsibility towards a future child?
For years, we have been taught that Americans don’t understand science, and Ms. Gandy is demonstrating that ignorance in spades. Sex does not create children. Gestation does. Only women gestate. Thus, only women create children. Thus, only women have responsibilities towards children.
According to the logic of neo-science and legal abortion, men aren’t responsible for the existence of children. At all. Nada, zip, zero, nothing, goose egg, empty set.
Those are just the facts of modern biology, successfully redefined by the pro-abortion lobby and Nobel-hungry biologists. It’s just the nature of the thing, Ms. Gandy – not our fault. You insisted on the definitions. We fought against those new definitions. We lost. You won. Congratulations.
Confusion in the Ranks
Everyone who attacks Matt Dubay assumes that Mr. Dubay is somehow responsible for the existence of a child. Even abortion supporters are making this argument. But the whole concept is negated by the new science definitions, which tells us no child exists at the moment of ejaculation, nor at the moment of conception, nor even at the time of implantation, but only some later time. It is likewise negated by the new law, which tells us the woman has no responsibility toward whatever possible child might eventually exist.
So, those who argue against Matt Dubay’s claim are either (1) logically inconsistent or (2) liars out to defraud one-half of the population. And here is where the new learning concerning eminent domain ties in.
Tying It All Together
The idea that the joint act of sex creates a joint responsibility, and that this responsibility is created towards a specific person as yet unconceived and without existence, this is an old idea, an idea so old it no longer applies in this brave, new country. The courts have specifically repudiated the idea in the case of a woman who has begotten a tissue mass.
So, if the court rules against Matt Dubay, it will embrace the curious position that a child has the right to receive money from a man who had nothing to do with her existence, but does not have the right to receive life from the woman who created her.
This is perfectly in accord with the recent eminent domain decision. It doesn’t matter who owns what. What matters is this: can the state legally increase its revenues by taking property from one person and giving it to someone else? According to the Supreme Court, yes, it can. So, the state has every right to take money from any man in order to give that money to any woman with child, and thus keep both the woman and the child off state aid.
So, Matt Dubay will lose not because he had anything to do with creating a child. According to all the most advanced thinkers (which wouldn’t be us neanderthals in the pro-life movement, by the way), he had nothing to do with the creation of the child. No, Matt Dubay will lose because his wallet is subject to eminent domain.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Nonfiction
The Associated Press is taking great pains to support Dan Brown in his defense against the copyright infringement lawsuit leveled against him by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
The very well-named Jill Lawless, the AP reporter who brings us the story, tells us the suit is for copyright infringement, but doesn’t tell us why this is important. She reports on Brown’s testimony in part by saying the “courtroom [was] packed with journalists, religious skeptics and fans” – a phrase her editor somehow failed to strike for its inordinate redundancy.
For a court reporter, Lawless seems remarkably unfamiliar with the legal issues involved. For instance, she takes pains to note that Holy Blood, Holy Grail claims to be “nonfiction” while also telling us “Random House lawyers argue the ideas in dispute are so general they are not protected by copyright.” Indeed, she takes the time to directly quote Brown’s primary defense, “‘I'd never heard of it until I'd seen it mentioned in some of our other research books,’ he said…
Brown's court appearance also revealed a complex and wide-ranging research process undertaken with wife Blythe Brown, whose interest in ‘the sacred feminine,’ Brown said, led to one of The Da Vinci Code’s key themes.’”
Now, let’s take the Lawless article on the law apart piece by piece.
Baigent and Leigh claim their book is non-fiction. But they do not sue Brown for plagiarism; they sue him for copyright infringement. How can this be?
While fiction is subject to copyright law, facts are not. If I wrote a novel based on the James Bond character created by Ian Fleming, for instance, I would be violating Ian Fleming’s copyright, and his estate could sue me for copyright infringement. Fiction is copyright-protected. However, if I wrote a story about the life of William Jefferson Clinton, ex-President Clinton could not sue me for copyright infringement. I might get sued for libel (the written version of slander) if I mis-stated the facts, but that is about it. He cannot copyright the facts concerning his own life.
Now, let’s say you took existing information or discovered new factual evidence and provided a totally novel interpretation of the facts of his life, thereby completely explaining why Slick Willy has women problems and feels our pain. You wrote an outstanding article or book concerning this idea, but it failed to gain wide circulation. I saw your theory and based my biography of Clinton on your interpretation without giving you any credit. Have I violated your copyright?
Not at all. I am a plagiarist, but I haven’t violated your copyright because you have no copyright on facts either. All you’ve done is come up with a new theory that covers the facts – and I stole it without accreditation. But I don’t need to accredit you. After all, I could have looked at the facts myself and independently arrived at the same conclusion through simple logical analysis, and you would have a hard time proving otherwise.
In any case, while I may be dead guilty of plagiarism, and you may well be able to prove it, the most you can do is (justifiably) ruin my sterling reputation by proving I’m a plagiarist. You can’t recover monetary damages from me for plagiarism because plagiarism is only a crime when I’m stealing fictional material or lifting direct and lengthy quotes from your factual material without in any way acknowledging that you wrote it.
Plagiarism is not a crime if I’m stealing facts. It may not be wise, but it isn’t a crime. That’s why journalists get fired for plagiarism, but they rarely get sued for it, while novelists and playwrights sue for plagiarism but only as the basis for proving copyright infringement. Inventions can be copyrighted. Facts cannot be copyrighted.
Baigent and Leigh aren’t suing for plagiarism. They are suing for copyright infringement. They do not allege that Brown lifted whole passages of their book verbatim. Instead, they are suing on the basis that Brown stole their "jigsaw puzzle," the fictional facts upon which he built a fictional plot.
Random House, the publisher of both novels, implicitly acknowledges this. Note, Random House doesn’t argue that the suit should be thrown out because Baigent and Leigh are meticulous researchers who had not an ounce of fiction in their work, thus copyright law doesn’t apply. Instead, Random House argues that the ideas are so generally in use they cannot be copyrighted.
If copyright existed during the life of the Brothers Grimm, a similar defense would have been used. "Your Honor, while it is true that the Brothers Grimm used the character of the stepmother who is secretly a wicked witch in many of their tales, the idea is so general to works of this type that the plaintiff who is suing our esteemed authors cannot be said to have originated the idea.” It’s fiction, Judge, but it’s fiction that is so common everyone has used it.
And, lest anyone read the one-sentence summary of the Random House defense and begin to suspect, the reporter-ette then goes on to re-emphasize that Brown, Baigent and Leigh engaged in research, dammit! After all, Brown’s wife, a learned art historian, is so professional that she couldn’t get any of the art history right. Indeed, she couldn’t even get Leonardo’s name right (no art historian calls him ‘da Vinci’, since that refers to the geographical region he comes from, it is not properly part of his name). Indeed, Brown’s historical and theological research was so complex and time-consuming that essentially every aspect of it was wrong by the time it got into his novel.
Random House, Baigent, Leigh, and Brown are all interested in conducting and concluding this copyright infringement lawsuit without anyone realizing that the very fact of the lawsuit demonstrates the whole thing is an advertising setup for the May 19, 2006 movie release. Brown’s novel is three years old. It couldn’t get on Drudge or CNN without it. Reporters, aka religious skeptics and therefore Dan Brown fans, undoubtedly know this. However, they also know what sells papers, so they aren’t going to give us the facts either.
In short, the Brown-Baigent-Leigh lawsuit is like a Stalinist show trial, but the only thing that gets murdered in this one is the truth.
The very well-named Jill Lawless, the AP reporter who brings us the story, tells us the suit is for copyright infringement, but doesn’t tell us why this is important. She reports on Brown’s testimony in part by saying the “courtroom [was] packed with journalists, religious skeptics and fans” – a phrase her editor somehow failed to strike for its inordinate redundancy.
For a court reporter, Lawless seems remarkably unfamiliar with the legal issues involved. For instance, she takes pains to note that Holy Blood, Holy Grail claims to be “nonfiction” while also telling us “Random House lawyers argue the ideas in dispute are so general they are not protected by copyright.” Indeed, she takes the time to directly quote Brown’s primary defense, “‘I'd never heard of it until I'd seen it mentioned in some of our other research books,’ he said…
Brown's court appearance also revealed a complex and wide-ranging research process undertaken with wife Blythe Brown, whose interest in ‘the sacred feminine,’ Brown said, led to one of The Da Vinci Code’s key themes.’”
Now, let’s take the Lawless article on the law apart piece by piece.
Baigent and Leigh claim their book is non-fiction. But they do not sue Brown for plagiarism; they sue him for copyright infringement. How can this be?
While fiction is subject to copyright law, facts are not. If I wrote a novel based on the James Bond character created by Ian Fleming, for instance, I would be violating Ian Fleming’s copyright, and his estate could sue me for copyright infringement. Fiction is copyright-protected. However, if I wrote a story about the life of William Jefferson Clinton, ex-President Clinton could not sue me for copyright infringement. I might get sued for libel (the written version of slander) if I mis-stated the facts, but that is about it. He cannot copyright the facts concerning his own life.
Now, let’s say you took existing information or discovered new factual evidence and provided a totally novel interpretation of the facts of his life, thereby completely explaining why Slick Willy has women problems and feels our pain. You wrote an outstanding article or book concerning this idea, but it failed to gain wide circulation. I saw your theory and based my biography of Clinton on your interpretation without giving you any credit. Have I violated your copyright?
Not at all. I am a plagiarist, but I haven’t violated your copyright because you have no copyright on facts either. All you’ve done is come up with a new theory that covers the facts – and I stole it without accreditation. But I don’t need to accredit you. After all, I could have looked at the facts myself and independently arrived at the same conclusion through simple logical analysis, and you would have a hard time proving otherwise.
In any case, while I may be dead guilty of plagiarism, and you may well be able to prove it, the most you can do is (justifiably) ruin my sterling reputation by proving I’m a plagiarist. You can’t recover monetary damages from me for plagiarism because plagiarism is only a crime when I’m stealing fictional material or lifting direct and lengthy quotes from your factual material without in any way acknowledging that you wrote it.
Plagiarism is not a crime if I’m stealing facts. It may not be wise, but it isn’t a crime. That’s why journalists get fired for plagiarism, but they rarely get sued for it, while novelists and playwrights sue for plagiarism but only as the basis for proving copyright infringement. Inventions can be copyrighted. Facts cannot be copyrighted.
Baigent and Leigh aren’t suing for plagiarism. They are suing for copyright infringement. They do not allege that Brown lifted whole passages of their book verbatim. Instead, they are suing on the basis that Brown stole their "jigsaw puzzle," the fictional facts upon which he built a fictional plot.
Random House, the publisher of both novels, implicitly acknowledges this. Note, Random House doesn’t argue that the suit should be thrown out because Baigent and Leigh are meticulous researchers who had not an ounce of fiction in their work, thus copyright law doesn’t apply. Instead, Random House argues that the ideas are so generally in use they cannot be copyrighted.
If copyright existed during the life of the Brothers Grimm, a similar defense would have been used. "Your Honor, while it is true that the Brothers Grimm used the character of the stepmother who is secretly a wicked witch in many of their tales, the idea is so general to works of this type that the plaintiff who is suing our esteemed authors cannot be said to have originated the idea.” It’s fiction, Judge, but it’s fiction that is so common everyone has used it.
And, lest anyone read the one-sentence summary of the Random House defense and begin to suspect, the reporter-ette then goes on to re-emphasize that Brown, Baigent and Leigh engaged in research, dammit! After all, Brown’s wife, a learned art historian, is so professional that she couldn’t get any of the art history right. Indeed, she couldn’t even get Leonardo’s name right (no art historian calls him ‘da Vinci’, since that refers to the geographical region he comes from, it is not properly part of his name). Indeed, Brown’s historical and theological research was so complex and time-consuming that essentially every aspect of it was wrong by the time it got into his novel.
Random House, Baigent, Leigh, and Brown are all interested in conducting and concluding this copyright infringement lawsuit without anyone realizing that the very fact of the lawsuit demonstrates the whole thing is an advertising setup for the May 19, 2006 movie release. Brown’s novel is three years old. It couldn’t get on Drudge or CNN without it. Reporters, aka religious skeptics and therefore Dan Brown fans, undoubtedly know this. However, they also know what sells papers, so they aren’t going to give us the facts either.
In short, the Brown-Baigent-Leigh lawsuit is like a Stalinist show trial, but the only thing that gets murdered in this one is the truth.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Outsourcing Parenthood
Outsourcing Parenthood
“Let’s have a child!"
“How are we going to do that, big man? I got spayed and you got neutered long before we got married, remember? We would have to get the operations reversed, and reversals aren’t always successful. Besides, you know I don’t have the time to deal with doctor’s appointments, labor, delivery, recovery and all the rest. The merger is coming up in the next year, and it’s my job to get it done!”
“Don’t worry about the pregnancy. We could get Sally to carry the child for us. She would be a great surrogate mother. She’s always exercising, she eats right and she loves being pregnant. Besides, you still ovulate. We could harvest your eggs.”
“I suppose that’s true. But the follicle stimulation is really not that safe, and it would take almost as much time out of my office schedule as pre-natal visits would.”
“Don’t worry about that. We can get your sister to donate an egg. She’s always short of cash – this is a good way for her to earn some income. And we keep the money in the family.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea! But isn’t it kind of incestuous to have your sperm fertilizing my sister’s ovum?”
“Well, we could contract that out too – she’s got a live-in boyfriend, doesn’t she? He’s a nice guy, pretty good IQ, handsome. He’ll be a good gene source.”
“Oh… but my sister isn’t. Remember how diabetes and Alzheimer’s runs in our family?”
“Oh, right… Hey, well, that’s not a problem either. We could get a nucleus from Beth.”
“Your secretary?”
“Sure – her family is disgustingly healthy. Yes, she’s 60, but her genes aren’t. And she’s very interested in this new reproductive technology. She’s often said she would love to try something like this. It would be a new adventure for her.”
“Yes, I do like her. Alright, this sounds like a plan. Sally for the surrogate, my sister for the egg, her boyfriend for the sperm and Beth for the nucleus. And once we have the child, there’s that great pre-pre-kindergarten down on Elm Street. They operate from 6 am to midnight, so neither one of us would have to worry about working late at the office. We could pick him up whenever convenient. And now that the governor is making funds available for this kind of thing, it won’t cost us a dime to place him there.”
“Him? You already have a gender picked out?”
“Well, sure, why not? We just keep trying until we get what we want – a blond-haired boy, tall with piercing blue eyes. I mean, they’ve got doctors who do just kind of thing now, don’t they?”
“Yes, they do. It’s a little more expensive, but we have always gotten the best for ourselves, haven’t we? That’s what we deserve, after all.”
“Oh, but I just had a terrible thought. The Elm Street daycare only takes children a year old or older. I mean, sure, once our boy is a year old, we will have all kinds of schools, daycare, after-school, before-school and weekend stuff to keep him busy until it’s time for him to go to college, but what will we do for that first year? Remember the merger? I can’t give that up. It’s crucial.”
“Hmmm… You’re right. We have to keep our priorities straight. How about the family next door? I bet they would take care of the kid for the first year.”
“You mean those fundamentalist Catholics with the homeschooling mother?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I don’t know. It feels creepy. I mean, they’ll probably try to brainwash the poor boy with all kinds of weird ideas.”
“Yeah, but he’ll be out of there by the time he’s a year old. Honey, he’ll be in pre-pre-kindergarten by the time he can talk. From that point on, he will be with people who think like we do.”
“Well, that’s true. And if they cause us the slightest bit of trouble, we can always call Child Protective Services on them… Alright, you get the checkbook, I’ll get the phone book. Let’s start making babies!”
“Let’s have a child!"
“How are we going to do that, big man? I got spayed and you got neutered long before we got married, remember? We would have to get the operations reversed, and reversals aren’t always successful. Besides, you know I don’t have the time to deal with doctor’s appointments, labor, delivery, recovery and all the rest. The merger is coming up in the next year, and it’s my job to get it done!”
“Don’t worry about the pregnancy. We could get Sally to carry the child for us. She would be a great surrogate mother. She’s always exercising, she eats right and she loves being pregnant. Besides, you still ovulate. We could harvest your eggs.”
“I suppose that’s true. But the follicle stimulation is really not that safe, and it would take almost as much time out of my office schedule as pre-natal visits would.”
“Don’t worry about that. We can get your sister to donate an egg. She’s always short of cash – this is a good way for her to earn some income. And we keep the money in the family.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea! But isn’t it kind of incestuous to have your sperm fertilizing my sister’s ovum?”
“Well, we could contract that out too – she’s got a live-in boyfriend, doesn’t she? He’s a nice guy, pretty good IQ, handsome. He’ll be a good gene source.”
“Oh… but my sister isn’t. Remember how diabetes and Alzheimer’s runs in our family?”
“Oh, right… Hey, well, that’s not a problem either. We could get a nucleus from Beth.”
“Your secretary?”
“Sure – her family is disgustingly healthy. Yes, she’s 60, but her genes aren’t. And she’s very interested in this new reproductive technology. She’s often said she would love to try something like this. It would be a new adventure for her.”
“Yes, I do like her. Alright, this sounds like a plan. Sally for the surrogate, my sister for the egg, her boyfriend for the sperm and Beth for the nucleus. And once we have the child, there’s that great pre-pre-kindergarten down on Elm Street. They operate from 6 am to midnight, so neither one of us would have to worry about working late at the office. We could pick him up whenever convenient. And now that the governor is making funds available for this kind of thing, it won’t cost us a dime to place him there.”
“Him? You already have a gender picked out?”
“Well, sure, why not? We just keep trying until we get what we want – a blond-haired boy, tall with piercing blue eyes. I mean, they’ve got doctors who do just kind of thing now, don’t they?”
“Yes, they do. It’s a little more expensive, but we have always gotten the best for ourselves, haven’t we? That’s what we deserve, after all.”
“Oh, but I just had a terrible thought. The Elm Street daycare only takes children a year old or older. I mean, sure, once our boy is a year old, we will have all kinds of schools, daycare, after-school, before-school and weekend stuff to keep him busy until it’s time for him to go to college, but what will we do for that first year? Remember the merger? I can’t give that up. It’s crucial.”
“Hmmm… You’re right. We have to keep our priorities straight. How about the family next door? I bet they would take care of the kid for the first year.”
“You mean those fundamentalist Catholics with the homeschooling mother?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I don’t know. It feels creepy. I mean, they’ll probably try to brainwash the poor boy with all kinds of weird ideas.”
“Yeah, but he’ll be out of there by the time he’s a year old. Honey, he’ll be in pre-pre-kindergarten by the time he can talk. From that point on, he will be with people who think like we do.”
“Well, that’s true. And if they cause us the slightest bit of trouble, we can always call Child Protective Services on them… Alright, you get the checkbook, I’ll get the phone book. Let’s start making babies!”
Friday, February 24, 2006
A Child Is Born
It's a BOY!
(actually, we knew that going in...)
Benjamin Dominic Kellmeyer was born this morning at 8:03 am, 6 pounds, 14 ounces, 19 inches long. Mother and child are resting comfortably at the moment.
All your prayers are greatly appreciated. Baby boy is not very skilled at this whole breast-feeding thing, so if you could pray for success in this direction, I know Veronica would much appreciate it.
I would write more, but I'm short on sleep and food at the moment.
I hope to catch up a bit on the blog soon.
(actually, we knew that going in...)
Benjamin Dominic Kellmeyer was born this morning at 8:03 am, 6 pounds, 14 ounces, 19 inches long. Mother and child are resting comfortably at the moment.
All your prayers are greatly appreciated. Baby boy is not very skilled at this whole breast-feeding thing, so if you could pray for success in this direction, I know Veronica would much appreciate it.
I would write more, but I'm short on sleep and food at the moment.
I hope to catch up a bit on the blog soon.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Mortal Sin at EWTN
I recently sent my new book, Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America, to EWTN for a possible inclusion on Doug Kecks' BookMarks program.
Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I've never actually watched any EWTN program, nor have I heard more than a literal handful of their radio shows. We don't own a television, and the radio - when it is on - is generally tuned to classical music. Still, many Catholics swear by EWTN, so it is a useful place to make a Catholic offering known.
Now, Designed to Fail has been very well-received by reviewers, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the book had been turned down for theological reasons.
"Hmmm..." thought I to myself, thought I, "I wonder what on earth the problem could be. Perhaps they felt I treated America's nineteenth-century bishops a bit too harshly. But that seems odd. The analysis of the Americanist heresy is drawn from a Magisterial document they carry on their own website. Similarly, the discussion of Edgardo Mortrara's situation is based on the testimony he gives about himself, testimony also available on the EWTN website. What on earth could it be?"
I e-mailed, asking around at EWTN. This is the conversation that ensued. Only names have been omitted so as to spare the EWTN participants in the conversatuion their much-deserved opprobrium:
EWTN: "Unfortunately, theology has turned this book down."
ME: "Where would I get the theology report so I can discover what the problems are?"
EWTN: "one of the concerns was advising people to through out their tv sets" (sic)
ME: " LOL! Well, they can still listen to EWTN on the radio... I assume you're not being serious, right? "
EWTN: "you assume wrong ... sorry"
ME: "I assume they interpret Vatican Council II as meaning that it is a mortal sin not to watch television?Oh, ... I'm afraid EWTN is going to get SKEWERED on the blogs for this one! I'll be working on a press release ASAP. Thanks for the information!"
EWTN: "So this is not a private communication?"
ME: "EWTN has turned down a book that I submitted to them. If someone were to call EWTN and ask for the EWTN opinion on the book, EWTN would reply that it has theological problems, right? If EWTN is willing to tell people what they think about a book, then why can't I tell people what EWTN thinks about the book?"
EWTN: silence....
Later that morning, I called EWTN to confirm the situation. I was actually laughing at the absurdity of the thing when they answered the phone.
This is the conversation we had:
EWTN: "Actually, we don't tell anyone what is wrong with a book. We just say we don't carry it."
ME: "Well, why on earth wouldn't you say what the problems were? Shouldn't people be told exactly where the difficulties lie, so they can identify similar problems in other works? Shouldn't the author know exactly where the difficulties lie, so he can correct the problems?"
EWTN: "We don't give out imprimaturs. We aren't the Church. There are a lot of reasons not to carry a book - tone, style, etc."
ME: "Yes, but in this instance, you found a 'theological' problem - you apparently think it is a violation of Vatican II's decree on communications, Inter Mirifica, for a family to throw out their television set or for anyone to tell a family to do so."
EWTN: "I don't know what the theology department meant by that. Perhaps it was a joke. Besides, none of your books have ever been carried by EWTN, have they?"
ME: "True. My first book, Scriptural Catholicism, now Bible Basics, was rejected by Deacon Steltemeier on the grounds that it was useless - no one would want such an apologetics text. In the same communication, he also asked if he could keep the review copy I sent him as he thought it would be marvelous assistance to him for composing his homilies. The next book I sent, Sex and the Sacred City, was turned down by EWTN but was subsequently picked up by Dr. Peter Kreeft, who wrote a rave review for it, called it one of the best books of 2005, and uses it in his classes at Boston College. Now this."
EWTN: "Well, Boston College is barely Catholic. Certainly something that is in use there would not necessarily be appropriate here."
ME: "Boston College does indeed have serious problems, but I've never heard anyone say that Peter Kreeft's classes were only nominally Catholic."
EWTN: "Peter is a personal friend of mine. I know Peter. I have the highest regard for Peter. But a college textbook is not necessarily the best thing for EWTN's audience."
We conversed for a few more minutes in this fashion, and then I said goodbye and gently cradled the phone, shaking my head.
I directed a letter to their theology department. This was the only reply I received:
"Thanks for your note. Sorry that I don't know the particulars of Theology's review. Don't know if you caught Fr. Groeschel's Sunday Night Live program last night, but he touched on this very same topic of Catholic education in America. Most interesting."
Nothing more has been communicated.
As far as I know, this is the offending section of the book, Chapter 14:
"So, get rid of your TV. Throw it out. What? Why yes, EWTN has quite a good set of programs. Oh, certainly I agree, the sports channel is mostly innocuous. Yes, it is absolutely wonderful that you have blocked MTV. I applaud the fact that you have restricted broadcast television viewing.
That’s great. I’m proud of you.
Now throw it out.
Television advertisements teach one thing: you don’t have enough. Whatever “enough” might be, you don’t have it and you won’t be happy until you get it, so you must go out and buy it. That is television’s only lesson, it is the lesson that runs through every other lesson. Just as the curriculum of the compulsory school is contraception, so the television curriculum is the curriculum of the needy, the incomplete, the whining child. You wouldn’t let a used car salesman live rent-free in the spare bedroom. Why let this thing live rent-free in your living room?
If you must have it, cut the cable, rip off the antennas and operate solely on the DVD and VCR players. Don’t permit your children to even be aware that broadcast or cable television exists until they have at least received the sacraments of Reconciliation, Confirmation and First Eucharist. They need grace to handle the stuff broadcast and cable have in store for them."
It's a mortal sin not to watch television.
I am a sinner.
Go thou, and do likewise.
Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I've never actually watched any EWTN program, nor have I heard more than a literal handful of their radio shows. We don't own a television, and the radio - when it is on - is generally tuned to classical music. Still, many Catholics swear by EWTN, so it is a useful place to make a Catholic offering known.
Now, Designed to Fail has been very well-received by reviewers, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the book had been turned down for theological reasons.
"Hmmm..." thought I to myself, thought I, "I wonder what on earth the problem could be. Perhaps they felt I treated America's nineteenth-century bishops a bit too harshly. But that seems odd. The analysis of the Americanist heresy is drawn from a Magisterial document they carry on their own website. Similarly, the discussion of Edgardo Mortrara's situation is based on the testimony he gives about himself, testimony also available on the EWTN website. What on earth could it be?"
I e-mailed, asking around at EWTN. This is the conversation that ensued. Only names have been omitted so as to spare the EWTN participants in the conversatuion their much-deserved opprobrium:
EWTN: "Unfortunately, theology has turned this book down."
ME: "Where would I get the theology report so I can discover what the problems are?"
EWTN: "one of the concerns was advising people to through out their tv sets" (sic)
ME: " LOL! Well, they can still listen to EWTN on the radio... I assume you're not being serious, right? "
EWTN: "you assume wrong ... sorry"
ME: "I assume they interpret Vatican Council II as meaning that it is a mortal sin not to watch television?Oh, ... I'm afraid EWTN is going to get SKEWERED on the blogs for this one! I'll be working on a press release ASAP. Thanks for the information!"
EWTN: "So this is not a private communication?"
ME: "EWTN has turned down a book that I submitted to them. If someone were to call EWTN and ask for the EWTN opinion on the book, EWTN would reply that it has theological problems, right? If EWTN is willing to tell people what they think about a book, then why can't I tell people what EWTN thinks about the book?"
EWTN: silence....
Later that morning, I called EWTN to confirm the situation. I was actually laughing at the absurdity of the thing when they answered the phone.
This is the conversation we had:
EWTN: "Actually, we don't tell anyone what is wrong with a book. We just say we don't carry it."
ME: "Well, why on earth wouldn't you say what the problems were? Shouldn't people be told exactly where the difficulties lie, so they can identify similar problems in other works? Shouldn't the author know exactly where the difficulties lie, so he can correct the problems?"
EWTN: "We don't give out imprimaturs. We aren't the Church. There are a lot of reasons not to carry a book - tone, style, etc."
ME: "Yes, but in this instance, you found a 'theological' problem - you apparently think it is a violation of Vatican II's decree on communications, Inter Mirifica, for a family to throw out their television set or for anyone to tell a family to do so."
EWTN: "I don't know what the theology department meant by that. Perhaps it was a joke. Besides, none of your books have ever been carried by EWTN, have they?"
ME: "True. My first book, Scriptural Catholicism, now Bible Basics, was rejected by Deacon Steltemeier on the grounds that it was useless - no one would want such an apologetics text. In the same communication, he also asked if he could keep the review copy I sent him as he thought it would be marvelous assistance to him for composing his homilies. The next book I sent, Sex and the Sacred City, was turned down by EWTN but was subsequently picked up by Dr. Peter Kreeft, who wrote a rave review for it, called it one of the best books of 2005, and uses it in his classes at Boston College. Now this."
EWTN: "Well, Boston College is barely Catholic. Certainly something that is in use there would not necessarily be appropriate here."
ME: "Boston College does indeed have serious problems, but I've never heard anyone say that Peter Kreeft's classes were only nominally Catholic."
EWTN: "Peter is a personal friend of mine. I know Peter. I have the highest regard for Peter. But a college textbook is not necessarily the best thing for EWTN's audience."
We conversed for a few more minutes in this fashion, and then I said goodbye and gently cradled the phone, shaking my head.
I directed a letter to their theology department. This was the only reply I received:
"Thanks for your note. Sorry that I don't know the particulars of Theology's review. Don't know if you caught Fr. Groeschel's Sunday Night Live program last night, but he touched on this very same topic of Catholic education in America. Most interesting."
Nothing more has been communicated.
As far as I know, this is the offending section of the book, Chapter 14:
"So, get rid of your TV. Throw it out. What? Why yes, EWTN has quite a good set of programs. Oh, certainly I agree, the sports channel is mostly innocuous. Yes, it is absolutely wonderful that you have blocked MTV. I applaud the fact that you have restricted broadcast television viewing.
That’s great. I’m proud of you.
Now throw it out.
Television advertisements teach one thing: you don’t have enough. Whatever “enough” might be, you don’t have it and you won’t be happy until you get it, so you must go out and buy it. That is television’s only lesson, it is the lesson that runs through every other lesson. Just as the curriculum of the compulsory school is contraception, so the television curriculum is the curriculum of the needy, the incomplete, the whining child. You wouldn’t let a used car salesman live rent-free in the spare bedroom. Why let this thing live rent-free in your living room?
If you must have it, cut the cable, rip off the antennas and operate solely on the DVD and VCR players. Don’t permit your children to even be aware that broadcast or cable television exists until they have at least received the sacraments of Reconciliation, Confirmation and First Eucharist. They need grace to handle the stuff broadcast and cable have in store for them."
It's a mortal sin not to watch television.
I am a sinner.
Go thou, and do likewise.
Monday, February 13, 2006
It Ain't Natural
As most people know, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has long been a hot-bed of activity in support of intelligent design theory. Take for example, their biology department. The entire staff of the biology department insists, and has insisted for quite some time, that what we see happening in the world is not natural, rather, it is the result of actions taken by an intelligence not properly part of nature or the natural world.
Similarly, the American Association for the Advancement of Science is a strong supporter of intelligent design theory. Just one year ago, on February 19,2005, the AAAS released a report that insisted supernatural phenomena were having long-term, serious impacts on the world we inhabit.
The Environmental Defense Fund, following even earlier findings by the Pew Charitable Trust , now recognizes that there is a force stronger than nature at work in the world, and warns that we must be willing to deal with this fact.
Only one thing remains to be clarified: why do these and like-minded organizations insist intelligent design is the only accurate way of describing the environment while simultaneously holding that intelligent design is junk science?
As Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould both famously pointed out, evolutionary theory made it possible for an atheist to reasonably deny the existence of God and of the supernatural. If they are correct about evolutionary theory, man is simply one more animal - no more, no less. We are only marginally better than the great apes in terms of technology, and certainly not morally superior to them in any respect worth noting.
In short, man is just part of nature.
But global warming? Ahh… that’s not natural. It is unnatural, it is contra-natural, it is a violation of the natural rhythms of the world. And, as everyone knows, global warming is caused by dolphins.
Hmm?? Oh, wait, scratch that… global warming is caused by man.
And there's the rub. If Man is just an animal whose actions are completely explained by natural processes,
AND man acts to cause global warming,
THEN global warming is natural.
Dawkins and other evolutionists imply that mankind’s ability to create houses, computers and similar things is merely an expression of genes – no more unusual than bees building a beehive or mollusks building shells to inhabit.
If Dawkins, et. al., are correct, then global warming is a perfectly natural phenomenon that none of us should worry our pretty little heads about. After all, according to this theory, an SUV is just as natural as a beaver dam. Just as a beaver dam may cause some local flooding, so the SUVs may cause some global warming, but each is a thoroughly natural event. If evolution has no teleology, no purpose, then there is no good or bad and the destruction of diverse habitats caused by global warming is neither good nor bad.
If, on the other hand, we insist that global warming is not natural, then who is causing it? A non-natural event can only be caused by something that is not part of nature. Since everyone seems to think man is the cause of global warming (even the most religious among us fail to blame God for this particular problem), the claim that this warming is not natural is thereby identical to the statement that man is not natural.
In fact, it is worse than this. If Non-natural Man is capable of controlling and impacting nature with powers and abilities for beyond that proper to nature, then he must be - dare we say it? - supernatural.
Even worse, if evolution is a natural process, then man is beyond the power of mere evolution and his presence here cannot be explained by evolution.
So, if global warming is not natural, man must be (a) supernatural, and (b) the result of a process greater than evolution, a supernatural process of some kind.
The positivists and the materialists are always asking for a proof for God’s existence. They don’t realize that they have not only already provided the proof, they insist on it. As a matter of Christian charity, we should take them at their word.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Why Cartoons Matter
When it comes to riots, Muslims certainly know how to do it up right. As Muslims torched embassies over the weekend, the crowds resembled nothing so much as the draft-card incendiaries and bra-burners of the 1960’s. There’s a good reason for that.
While many commentators are discussing the similarities between the most recent Muslim unrest and the 1938 Kristallnacht event, there are other connections that are at least as important. In order to see what is going on now, we have to remember what happened then.
Kristallnacht
When a seventeen-year old Parisian Jew, upset at his uncle’s deportation from Germany, assassinated one of the members of the German embassy in France, Goehring used the event to justify Kristallnacht, the 1938 German pogrom against the Jews.
While everyone remembers the rioting, few remember the purpose behind it: Goehring meant to use Kristallnacht as an excuse to seize goods and materials from every Jewish businessman in the country. Kristallnacht allowed the Nazi government to re-locate literally billions of marks, both in cash and goods, into government coffers.
Seen in this light, Kristallnacht was essentially the same eminent domain process recently approved by the US Supreme Court, although marvelously expanded and focussed entirely on a single group of people. Indeed, Goehring explicitly insisted the situation was an economic one. He intended to remove Jews from the German economy.
In 1938, Germany had been a fully integrated nation for less than seventy years. Prior to the 1871 unification under Bismark (accomplished only by the waging of the Franco-Prussian war), German territory was divided into literally thousands of fiefdoms – in 1781, there were 1,781 separate governments ruling over various pieces of the territory we now call Germany.
Seventy years later, the union had not fully quashed those earlier rival fiefdoms. Even on the eve of World War II, Hitler worried that Bavaria would defect to Italy – everyone knew Bavarians paid more attention to Catholic Rome than to Protestant Prussian Berlin.
While anti-Semitism was real, it was also a tool, a way to unite Germans against a common enemy, a way to maintain national vision and purpose among disparate people. Indeed, anti-Semitism served a very similar role in Poland, a country that had been completely wiped out of existence and only reconstituted at the close of World War I.
Year of the Barricades
Fast forward to 1968. The world-wide baby boom had created a late-60’s world-wide population heavily weighted towards the under-25 age group. The skew was more accentuated than normal because the war had already killed off a large proportion of what would otherwise have been mature adults.
This unusually high disparity between the population of old and young, matched for the first time with a factory school model that eliminated most of the traditional one-on-one mentoring mature adults had historically used to temper the impetuosity of youth, resulted in a world-wide explosion of that same youthful impetuosity. In 1968, riots broke out across the industrialized world.
No matter what country you looked at, violent demonstrations were in full force. Poland, France, Spain, Britain, Japan, America – each one rocked repeatedly as the youth streamed out into the streets at the slightest provocation.
The Muslim Riots
There was in 1938 Germany a very popular joke: “The Aryan is blond like Hitler, slim like Goehring, and tall like Goebbels.” Anyone who looked at Hitler’s dark hair, Goehring’s corpulence or Goebbels’ height could instantly see that none of the people in government lived what they promoted. Still, the myth of the ideal Aryan gave a divided people something to cling to.
Now, according to Muslim theology, faith and state are a single entity, a combined unity stronger than even medieval Christendom ever envisaged. And that’s the match to the fuel.
Today’s Muslims simultaneously face two problems, each of which was enough to cause enormously violent responses in European and American societies.
Like 1930’s Germany, the vision modern Islam has of itself is nowhere to be found. Instead, the reality is rife with dissension. Muslim populations are split both theologically and geographically. Despite the common Quran and the Hajj, there is no common Muslim identity. The two elements of common book and common journey, elements meant to maintain Muslim unity, are beginning to fracture under the load.
As competing groups each seek to make their vision the guiding one, each has to do something that is louder, purer, stronger than the last. Thus, images of Mohammed that had never caused issue before now become lightning rods. Whether this is by accident or design is not particularly relevant. The images couldn’t have been used as lightning rods unless they spoke to an inherent fear within the Muslim community of incipient apostasy.
The Meaning of the Riots
The Muslim fight is not ultimately against the Danes and their cartoons any more than Hitler’s fight was ultimately against the Jews. Certainly Hitler killed millions of Jews, but he did so as a means to an end – he wanted a united Germany, a united vision of Germany, and anti-Semitism was his preferred method for accomplishing that vision.
His anti-Semitism worked precisely because Germans already had an inchoate sense that they were not united, that something was keeping them apart. Rather than blame themselves, rather than blame their history or their vision, they blamed the Jews. It was a convenient story that resonated with an unstable population that wasn’t given to introspection.
And that describes modern Islam in a nutshell. Muslim countries are the only countries that have positive population growth. They have more young people per capita than any other population in the world. Historically, this has never been a problem as long as the economy has something for the youth to do.
Unfortunately, Islam is composed mostly of dictatorial, soviet-style economies that are not strong enough to handle the influx of young workers. As the West has demonstrated time and time again, well-educated youth are more likely to riot than poorly educated youth. Something must be done to keep the young from rioting against their elders, a la 1968.
The West, especially the United States, solves the problem by maintaining an inferior educational system and a hedonistic culture. The strong emotions of youth are kept uninformed, unguided. They are also channeled towards mindlessly numbing entertainment. Bread and circuses worked for the Romans. It works for us. We create eunuchs.
The Muslims took a different approach. They solve their problem through a similarly inferior educational system, the madras schools. However, they have a long history of experience with eunuchs, and are aware of the problems inherent to that system. Today, they choose a different path.
Not only does the madras system of schools keep the youth ignorant of all things except the Quran, it creates strong hostility against all things non-Muslim. Thus, the riotous youth, insofar as they become riotous, are already predisposed to point out towards the rest of the world instead of in towards the despots that rule them. Instead of creating eunuchs, they create xenophobes. For them, anti-Semitism is merely the particular instance of a larger worldview.
This is why cartoons that were published in September become an issue in February. This is why the Muslim who abhors pictures or drawings of persons is willing to smile into the cameras and watch himself on television. This is why all the signs are in English, and why all the Danish flags appeared as if from nowhere.
Even as the orthodox Muslim watches his own image on Islamic television, he knows he is blond like Hitler, slim like Goehring and tall like Goebbels. But that doesn’t matter. The burning is a carthartic balm to the nagging concern that the faith which is Islam, the faith which is his identity, is somehow crumbling into ash and dust. If a few Danes must be knifed, or a few priests must be shot in order to maintain that soothing self-image, well then, so be it. Mohammed assassinated those who questioned his image. It is just.
While many commentators are discussing the similarities between the most recent Muslim unrest and the 1938 Kristallnacht event, there are other connections that are at least as important. In order to see what is going on now, we have to remember what happened then.
Kristallnacht
When a seventeen-year old Parisian Jew, upset at his uncle’s deportation from Germany, assassinated one of the members of the German embassy in France, Goehring used the event to justify Kristallnacht, the 1938 German pogrom against the Jews.
While everyone remembers the rioting, few remember the purpose behind it: Goehring meant to use Kristallnacht as an excuse to seize goods and materials from every Jewish businessman in the country. Kristallnacht allowed the Nazi government to re-locate literally billions of marks, both in cash and goods, into government coffers.
Seen in this light, Kristallnacht was essentially the same eminent domain process recently approved by the US Supreme Court, although marvelously expanded and focussed entirely on a single group of people. Indeed, Goehring explicitly insisted the situation was an economic one. He intended to remove Jews from the German economy.
In 1938, Germany had been a fully integrated nation for less than seventy years. Prior to the 1871 unification under Bismark (accomplished only by the waging of the Franco-Prussian war), German territory was divided into literally thousands of fiefdoms – in 1781, there were 1,781 separate governments ruling over various pieces of the territory we now call Germany.
Seventy years later, the union had not fully quashed those earlier rival fiefdoms. Even on the eve of World War II, Hitler worried that Bavaria would defect to Italy – everyone knew Bavarians paid more attention to Catholic Rome than to Protestant Prussian Berlin.
While anti-Semitism was real, it was also a tool, a way to unite Germans against a common enemy, a way to maintain national vision and purpose among disparate people. Indeed, anti-Semitism served a very similar role in Poland, a country that had been completely wiped out of existence and only reconstituted at the close of World War I.
Year of the Barricades
Fast forward to 1968. The world-wide baby boom had created a late-60’s world-wide population heavily weighted towards the under-25 age group. The skew was more accentuated than normal because the war had already killed off a large proportion of what would otherwise have been mature adults.
This unusually high disparity between the population of old and young, matched for the first time with a factory school model that eliminated most of the traditional one-on-one mentoring mature adults had historically used to temper the impetuosity of youth, resulted in a world-wide explosion of that same youthful impetuosity. In 1968, riots broke out across the industrialized world.
No matter what country you looked at, violent demonstrations were in full force. Poland, France, Spain, Britain, Japan, America – each one rocked repeatedly as the youth streamed out into the streets at the slightest provocation.
The Muslim Riots
There was in 1938 Germany a very popular joke: “The Aryan is blond like Hitler, slim like Goehring, and tall like Goebbels.” Anyone who looked at Hitler’s dark hair, Goehring’s corpulence or Goebbels’ height could instantly see that none of the people in government lived what they promoted. Still, the myth of the ideal Aryan gave a divided people something to cling to.
Now, according to Muslim theology, faith and state are a single entity, a combined unity stronger than even medieval Christendom ever envisaged. And that’s the match to the fuel.
Today’s Muslims simultaneously face two problems, each of which was enough to cause enormously violent responses in European and American societies.
Like 1930’s Germany, the vision modern Islam has of itself is nowhere to be found. Instead, the reality is rife with dissension. Muslim populations are split both theologically and geographically. Despite the common Quran and the Hajj, there is no common Muslim identity. The two elements of common book and common journey, elements meant to maintain Muslim unity, are beginning to fracture under the load.
As competing groups each seek to make their vision the guiding one, each has to do something that is louder, purer, stronger than the last. Thus, images of Mohammed that had never caused issue before now become lightning rods. Whether this is by accident or design is not particularly relevant. The images couldn’t have been used as lightning rods unless they spoke to an inherent fear within the Muslim community of incipient apostasy.
The Meaning of the Riots
The Muslim fight is not ultimately against the Danes and their cartoons any more than Hitler’s fight was ultimately against the Jews. Certainly Hitler killed millions of Jews, but he did so as a means to an end – he wanted a united Germany, a united vision of Germany, and anti-Semitism was his preferred method for accomplishing that vision.
His anti-Semitism worked precisely because Germans already had an inchoate sense that they were not united, that something was keeping them apart. Rather than blame themselves, rather than blame their history or their vision, they blamed the Jews. It was a convenient story that resonated with an unstable population that wasn’t given to introspection.
And that describes modern Islam in a nutshell. Muslim countries are the only countries that have positive population growth. They have more young people per capita than any other population in the world. Historically, this has never been a problem as long as the economy has something for the youth to do.
Unfortunately, Islam is composed mostly of dictatorial, soviet-style economies that are not strong enough to handle the influx of young workers. As the West has demonstrated time and time again, well-educated youth are more likely to riot than poorly educated youth. Something must be done to keep the young from rioting against their elders, a la 1968.
The West, especially the United States, solves the problem by maintaining an inferior educational system and a hedonistic culture. The strong emotions of youth are kept uninformed, unguided. They are also channeled towards mindlessly numbing entertainment. Bread and circuses worked for the Romans. It works for us. We create eunuchs.
The Muslims took a different approach. They solve their problem through a similarly inferior educational system, the madras schools. However, they have a long history of experience with eunuchs, and are aware of the problems inherent to that system. Today, they choose a different path.
Not only does the madras system of schools keep the youth ignorant of all things except the Quran, it creates strong hostility against all things non-Muslim. Thus, the riotous youth, insofar as they become riotous, are already predisposed to point out towards the rest of the world instead of in towards the despots that rule them. Instead of creating eunuchs, they create xenophobes. For them, anti-Semitism is merely the particular instance of a larger worldview.
This is why cartoons that were published in September become an issue in February. This is why the Muslim who abhors pictures or drawings of persons is willing to smile into the cameras and watch himself on television. This is why all the signs are in English, and why all the Danish flags appeared as if from nowhere.
Even as the orthodox Muslim watches his own image on Islamic television, he knows he is blond like Hitler, slim like Goehring and tall like Goebbels. But that doesn’t matter. The burning is a carthartic balm to the nagging concern that the faith which is Islam, the faith which is his identity, is somehow crumbling into ash and dust. If a few Danes must be knifed, or a few priests must be shot in order to maintain that soothing self-image, well then, so be it. Mohammed assassinated those who questioned his image. It is just.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
That's Reassuring
First
It seems the Irish bishops and the principals of Irish schools have read Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America, and have taken it to heart. They are beginning to argue that all sacramental preparation be taken out of the schools and be done exclusively at home by the parents.
This is, of course, the central argument of DTF. [shameless plug] If you want a more complete demonstration of the case than the article provides, buy the book! [/shameless plug]
Second
Google, the organization that has recently been lecturing the world about how important it is to be transparent with information, is now refusing to take part in hearings about its business with China.
We all know - because Google, MSN, and Yahoo tell us so - that providing limited information is better than providing nothing at all.
This rule seems to apply to everything except Congressional inquiries, where it is better to provide nothing at all than it is to provide limited information.
Perhaps computer geeks are under the impression that China, being made up of Godless communists, might still be saved, while Congress, being made up of American politicians, is past hope. Yet another example of why despair is a mortal sin...
It seems the Irish bishops and the principals of Irish schools have read Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America, and have taken it to heart. They are beginning to argue that all sacramental preparation be taken out of the schools and be done exclusively at home by the parents.
This is, of course, the central argument of DTF. [shameless plug] If you want a more complete demonstration of the case than the article provides, buy the book! [/shameless plug]
Second
Google, the organization that has recently been lecturing the world about how important it is to be transparent with information, is now refusing to take part in hearings about its business with China.
We all know - because Google, MSN, and Yahoo tell us so - that providing limited information is better than providing nothing at all.
This rule seems to apply to everything except Congressional inquiries, where it is better to provide nothing at all than it is to provide limited information.
Perhaps computer geeks are under the impression that China, being made up of Godless communists, might still be saved, while Congress, being made up of American politicians, is past hope. Yet another example of why despair is a mortal sin...
Monday, January 30, 2006
Now What Do I Do?
Here's a poser.
A few months back, I wrote a series of essays on the connections between science and religion. In one of those essays, I pointed out that the phrase, "reality exists" is an essentially Christian religious concept which is specifically repudiated by Buddhists and at least one major school of Hinduism.
In the following months, I received a fair amount of criticism for that essay, most deriving from Buddhists and Hindus who refused to accept that their faith repudiated science.
Now, I discover that my article has become part of the curriculum at an on-line Buddhist university (although it is interesting that they cut out the first three paragraphs).
http://www.eng.mbu.ac.th/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=79
The question is, should I be upset that they took the whole article without asking me first, or pleased that they vindicated my position? I am opting for the latter, but with a bemused shake of the head...
And, before you put it out, they aren't necessarily really stealing. After all, if reality doesn't exist, they didn't steal anything, so my protestation to the contrary would fall on non-existent ears, as it were...
A few months back, I wrote a series of essays on the connections between science and religion. In one of those essays, I pointed out that the phrase, "reality exists" is an essentially Christian religious concept which is specifically repudiated by Buddhists and at least one major school of Hinduism.
In the following months, I received a fair amount of criticism for that essay, most deriving from Buddhists and Hindus who refused to accept that their faith repudiated science.
Now, I discover that my article has become part of the curriculum at an on-line Buddhist university (although it is interesting that they cut out the first three paragraphs).
http://www.eng.mbu.ac.th/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=79
The question is, should I be upset that they took the whole article without asking me first, or pleased that they vindicated my position? I am opting for the latter, but with a bemused shake of the head...
And, before you put it out, they aren't necessarily really stealing. After all, if reality doesn't exist, they didn't steal anything, so my protestation to the contrary would fall on non-existent ears, as it were...
Friday, January 27, 2006
Dreams of Democracy
"The whole of the international community has the responsibility to accept the outcome of any fair and democratic election," said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "But in this case Hamas has a clear responsibility to understand that with democracy goes a rejection of violence."
"Television is the most perfect democracy," Aaron Brown, former CNN 'Newsnight' anchor said. "You sit there with your remote control and vote."
The delicious juxtaposition of those quotes is irresistible. What if the population of a country wants violence? What if they specifically elect men or women because those men and women promise to bring violence to their neighbors or to those groups perceived as the enemy?
Now this is not meant as a defense of Hamas. Regular readers know that my love for the redundancy that is “militant Islam” is virtually non-existent. Still, there is a certain irony in the fact that Islam’s democracies are not necessarily superior to Islam’s dictatorships. For Muslims, as for the rest of us, we get the leaders and the culture we want. We always have.
This is a point that too many simply ignore, even when it is brought forcibly forward, as with the recent Palestinian elections. I remember being in one graduate sociology class in which the professor and the students seemed quite oblivious to the fact. During the course of the class, both professor and students lamented the draconian measures undertaken by some medieval towns in order to avoid plague and similar illnesses, and spoke at great length on the degradation of the citizenry.
When I pointed out that the citizens must have found the measures acceptable, else they would have rose up in rebellion, the room responded with shocked silence. No one had ever considered the fact that no leader is stronger than the vision he successfully imbues in the people he leads. Even the strongest man can be overcome by four or five other men who decide they have had enough. More than one Caesar has discovered that his Praetorian guard could also be his executioners. The members of the sociology class never considered that many townspeople were willing to pay quite a high price to avoid the painful deaths of themselves or their families from (microbial) agents they believed were bent on their destruction.
This week, George Bush and Jack Straw both have the look of a sociology professor facing a new idea.
Americans may not commit suicide by blowing themselves up at bus stops, but as Americans, we must remember this country was founded on the ideas of ancient Rome. And Cicero, one of Rome’s most celebrated orators, ended every speech with the same phrase, “Carthage must be destroyed!” The party line was successful – Carthage was so thoroughly destroyed that today we don’t even know what language they spoke.
Hitler did not gain power through a putsch. His party was voted into office as part of a coalition government. Enough Germans wanted him. The same can be said of Bill Clinton, FDR, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain. Democracy or dictatorship, the people always get the government we want.
As long as the leader has a vision which enough people subscribe to – and “enough” doesn’t have to be a majority – that vision will be enacted.
That’s why our visions are more important than our realities. That’s why the war over culture matters as much or more than the war fought with bullets. The Palestinian people don't need democracy. They need a new vision. If all they have is Islam, there will never be peace.
"Television is the most perfect democracy," Aaron Brown, former CNN 'Newsnight' anchor said. "You sit there with your remote control and vote."
The delicious juxtaposition of those quotes is irresistible. What if the population of a country wants violence? What if they specifically elect men or women because those men and women promise to bring violence to their neighbors or to those groups perceived as the enemy?
Now this is not meant as a defense of Hamas. Regular readers know that my love for the redundancy that is “militant Islam” is virtually non-existent. Still, there is a certain irony in the fact that Islam’s democracies are not necessarily superior to Islam’s dictatorships. For Muslims, as for the rest of us, we get the leaders and the culture we want. We always have.
This is a point that too many simply ignore, even when it is brought forcibly forward, as with the recent Palestinian elections. I remember being in one graduate sociology class in which the professor and the students seemed quite oblivious to the fact. During the course of the class, both professor and students lamented the draconian measures undertaken by some medieval towns in order to avoid plague and similar illnesses, and spoke at great length on the degradation of the citizenry.
When I pointed out that the citizens must have found the measures acceptable, else they would have rose up in rebellion, the room responded with shocked silence. No one had ever considered the fact that no leader is stronger than the vision he successfully imbues in the people he leads. Even the strongest man can be overcome by four or five other men who decide they have had enough. More than one Caesar has discovered that his Praetorian guard could also be his executioners. The members of the sociology class never considered that many townspeople were willing to pay quite a high price to avoid the painful deaths of themselves or their families from (microbial) agents they believed were bent on their destruction.
This week, George Bush and Jack Straw both have the look of a sociology professor facing a new idea.
Americans may not commit suicide by blowing themselves up at bus stops, but as Americans, we must remember this country was founded on the ideas of ancient Rome. And Cicero, one of Rome’s most celebrated orators, ended every speech with the same phrase, “Carthage must be destroyed!” The party line was successful – Carthage was so thoroughly destroyed that today we don’t even know what language they spoke.
Hitler did not gain power through a putsch. His party was voted into office as part of a coalition government. Enough Germans wanted him. The same can be said of Bill Clinton, FDR, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain. Democracy or dictatorship, the people always get the government we want.
As long as the leader has a vision which enough people subscribe to – and “enough” doesn’t have to be a majority – that vision will be enacted.
That’s why our visions are more important than our realities. That’s why the war over culture matters as much or more than the war fought with bullets. The Palestinian people don't need democracy. They need a new vision. If all they have is Islam, there will never be peace.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Don't Be Evil - Unless It's Profitable
For those who may not be aware, Google’s company motto is “Don’t Be Evil.” As more than one commentator has pointed out, the sentiment is laudable, even if their conception of evil is not entirely clear.
Take a very specific example. A few months ago, after having heard a lot about it, I signed my Bridegroom Press website and my blog into Google's AdSense program. Unfortunately, while the blog was accepted, Bridegroom Press was rejected. It contained objectionable content, according to Google. I found this rather amusing.
You see, the Bridegroom Press site contains only two things: articles (such as the one you are reading now) and Catholic books and CDs. The only difference between the blog site and the Bridegroom Press site is the presence of the books and CDs. The articles are identical: the two sites mirror each other in article content.
I pondered over what Google might have found objectionable. Given the wrong frame of mind, someone might find the title of my Scripture study on the infancy narratives, The Flesh of God, to be on the verge of blasphemy. Certainly I have had at least one bookstore refuse to carry my book on John Paul II's Theology of the Body, Sex and the Sacred City. They said their clientele would not buy anything with the word “sex” in the title. Or perhaps the reviewer was a big proponent of parochial schools, and therefore took offense at Designed to Fail, Catholic Education in America. It's hard to know, really. All I know is my site is not worthy of AdSense, although my essays on Blogger apparently are.
In fact, the reason is certainly much easier to discover than I make out. No matter how much revenue Bridegroom Press might generate for Google, it won’t begin to approach the amount of revenue that Blogger generates. Thus, Google doesn’t bother to review any Blogger feed – the revenue stream is too large to risk offending the Blogger community.
But Bridegroom Press? That’s a different story. Articles on a stand-alone site that speak out against homosexuality and homosexual marriage, contraception, abortion and similar topics won’t generate enough money to justify Google’s risk. If they allow their ads to become associated with the site’s contents, if someone discovers it and objects loudly enough, Google might face media scorn.
This example is relevant precisely because Google has joined Yahoo and MSN in deciding to censor itself in order to enter the Chinese market.
Google America doesn’t much like those who fight against the expansion of homosexual rights and the killing of children in the womb. Google China will not only refuse to permit discussion of China’s infanticide policy, it will also refuse to allow Chinese computers access to anything that the murderers currently running China deem unfit for public discussion.
Google America fights the US government’s attempt to get a list of key words that would help fight child porn. Google China, “will base its censorship decisons on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.”
A few years ago, Pepsi’s slogan, "Come alive! You're in the Pepsi generation", was reportedly rendered into Chinese as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.” One wonders if “Don’t Be Evil” translates as “Follow the Money.”
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
That explains it
If you've ever wondered why Planned Parenthood snagged the Democratic party and not the Republican party, this article explains it clearly:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/01/24/bat.brains.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/01/24/bat.brains.ap/index.html
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Book Publishing
In the last few days, I’ve had many people ask me about the publishing business – how does one get started, how hard is it, how lucrative is it, etc. This is a short primer on how it works.
Self-publishing vs. traditional publishing
The primary difference between a traditional publisher and a self-publisher is who supplies the money to print and market the books. With a traditional publisher, the author sells them the sole right to reproduce and sell a book in exchange for a royalty (typically 10-12%) from book sales. A well-known author might get an advance, but most first-time authors don’t.
While every publishing house has staff cover design and typeset teams, it is the very rare publishing house that runs its own printing press. Ironically, most of the publishing houses today do only book layout. They don’t consider the actual book production a core part of the business, so they contract that work out to the cheapest printer they can find. Book publishers are, then, essentially glorified distributors, i.e., they are warehouses with good to great marketing departments and good to great layout design teams.
Few authors know or care much about layout design or marketing, so this works well if you happen to be in that group and are happy with 10% of the sale.
But what if you prefer to do it on your own?
The Choice
As I’ve noted earlier, most people see the self-published author as an egocentric incompetent. After all, if such an author were good, he would have been accepted by someone’s marketing department, that is, he would have a publishing-house patron. Since he doesn’t have a patron, he must be lousy. QED.
I could go through a list of excellent best-selling books that were self-published, or list recent best-selling books that were execrable, but there’s little point. Egocentric incompetence is rife in every industry, whether you are paying for someone else’s version or just doing it yourself, so it hardly matters if the charge is true or not. From the author’s perspective, there is only one question: which will bring more income?
When you sign away your manuscript to a publisher, depending on the contract, you lose most to all control over it for a set period of time. Even assuming they make no serious changes, your book will not see the light of day for at least a year after begin accepted. It takes that long for the marketing department and the layout team to agree on a cover design and a marketing plan.
But, going with a publishing house means you have a lot of marketing muscle behind you.
Maybe.
You see, every publishing house rejects 95% of the manuscripts it gets. Of the five percent it publishes, it doesn’t have the money to market each one equally well. So, it picks whichever one it thinks is most likely to succeed and pushes that one hard. The rest don’t get much attention. If you don’t like the odds, this is how you self-publish.
Business and Book Layout
You have two choices: print-on-demand (POD) or traditional printer.
The advantages of POD:
Finally, you need to get your book into bookstores. That means getting a list of every bookstore in your market niche and cold-calling, e-mailing or postcard-mailing them about your work. Call up radio stations and invite yourself on interviews. Write up news releases and send them to magazines and newspapers. Coordinate book signings at your local bookstore. Think of organizations that could use your book and pitch it to them. Give away lots of copies to decision makers.
Being a great writer is not difficult – there are a lot of great writers. There are also a lot of mediocre writers with great marketers behind them. Great marketing sells at least as many books as great writing. After all, when was the last time you bought a really lousy book and actually returned it? Most of us just sell the clunkers at garage sales.
Speaking of garage sales, most bookstores have a return policy of one year. That means they can return any unsold books to you at the end of twelve months, for credit. If you have a high return rate, this is obviously a problem. The biggest book publishers typically have a twenty percent return rate.
I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had a return rate of one-tenth of one percent. But then again, I’m just an amateur, and not really qualified to compete with the professionals. As one friend remarked, my return rate either means I am a phenomenal writer or I am seriously underselling the market. I prefer the former explanation, but, given my marketing skills (or lack therof) am willing to accept the latter.
So, there you go. You can publish a book for well under $700; around $1000 if you want to lay out the money for the publishing software.
Self-publishing vs. traditional publishing
The primary difference between a traditional publisher and a self-publisher is who supplies the money to print and market the books. With a traditional publisher, the author sells them the sole right to reproduce and sell a book in exchange for a royalty (typically 10-12%) from book sales. A well-known author might get an advance, but most first-time authors don’t.
While every publishing house has staff cover design and typeset teams, it is the very rare publishing house that runs its own printing press. Ironically, most of the publishing houses today do only book layout. They don’t consider the actual book production a core part of the business, so they contract that work out to the cheapest printer they can find. Book publishers are, then, essentially glorified distributors, i.e., they are warehouses with good to great marketing departments and good to great layout design teams.
Few authors know or care much about layout design or marketing, so this works well if you happen to be in that group and are happy with 10% of the sale.
But what if you prefer to do it on your own?
The Choice
As I’ve noted earlier, most people see the self-published author as an egocentric incompetent. After all, if such an author were good, he would have been accepted by someone’s marketing department, that is, he would have a publishing-house patron. Since he doesn’t have a patron, he must be lousy. QED.
I could go through a list of excellent best-selling books that were self-published, or list recent best-selling books that were execrable, but there’s little point. Egocentric incompetence is rife in every industry, whether you are paying for someone else’s version or just doing it yourself, so it hardly matters if the charge is true or not. From the author’s perspective, there is only one question: which will bring more income?
When you sign away your manuscript to a publisher, depending on the contract, you lose most to all control over it for a set period of time. Even assuming they make no serious changes, your book will not see the light of day for at least a year after begin accepted. It takes that long for the marketing department and the layout team to agree on a cover design and a marketing plan.
But, going with a publishing house means you have a lot of marketing muscle behind you.
Maybe.
You see, every publishing house rejects 95% of the manuscripts it gets. Of the five percent it publishes, it doesn’t have the money to market each one equally well. So, it picks whichever one it thinks is most likely to succeed and pushes that one hard. The rest don’t get much attention. If you don’t like the odds, this is how you self-publish.
Business and Book Layout
- Go to your local courthouse and register as a business, either sole proprietor or corporation, as you desire.
- Buy a block of ISBN numbers from Bowker. A book without an ISBN number will not be carried in most bookstores, and bookstore sales will account for roughly 80-95% of total sales for any book. They are sold in blocks of ten for about $300, more for larger blocks. There are no smaller blocks.
- Assign your book an ISBN number off the list you bought and get an EAN bar-code for your book. Don’t buy the barcode from Bowker. They are hideously expensive. Note – don’t use the UPC bar-code. Books have their own bar-code system. The bar codes can be purchased very inexpensively ($10 each) from places like Bar Code Graphics. Make sure your bar code includes the retail price of the book. Many bookstore chains won’t carry a book that doesn’t have the ISBN on the bottom back cover with the price included in the bar code.
- Five years ago, professional book printers would only accept files in Quark or Pagemaker. Things change. Today, Quark and Indesign CS 2 (Pagemaker’s successor) are both still desirable for the cover, but Acrobat PDFs are generally used for text. The files are smaller and cleaner to work with. This means if you have access to a program that generates a PDF from your Microsoft Word document, you don’t have to buy an expensive layout program for your text. Indeed, some printers will even accept PDF files for your cover. Even better, some websites generate free PDF files for you, given a Word document. So, actually formatting the documents for the printer can be quite inexpensive, if you want to cut costs and can find a good, free PDF website.
- If you want to use a desktop publishing program, I strongly recommend InDesign CS 2. It is incredibly powerful and relatively inexpensive, and will run rings around anything you can do in Word. Don’t buy it new. Go to Ebay, buy an old version of Indesign or Pagemaker, then buy the upgrades to get the latest version. Software upgrades are always cheaper than new. That will cut your software cost in half, at least.
- There are lots of tricks to cover design, and I won’t go into them here, but the cover sells the book. It needs to be loud and splashy, with a LARGE title. Walmart won’t carry a book unless the title can be easily read from at least ten feet away. They probably won’t carry the book in any case, but at least give yourself a fighting chance. Also, don’t use Times as the typeface on your cover – use something at least a little unusual.
- To figure out where to place things, how the title and copyright page should look, etc., just look at the books you already have and copy them. No need to re-invent the wheel.
- Price several printers and make them compete for the price. They will bid against each other. The price of the book depends on many factors; most of it is bound up in page count. Having a full-color cover is not really any more expensive than having a single-color cover – it adds only a few cents to the cost of the book, and repays itself many times over in sales value.
You have two choices: print-on-demand (POD) or traditional printer.
The advantages of POD:
- Relatively inexpensive start-up cost: Setting up a book at Lightning Source costs on the order of $200 to $300. With a traditional print run, you will spend at least two to three thousand on book production.
- No inventory. With POD, you order only as many books as you think you can afford to buy or can sell – a couple dozen is a perfectly reasonable POD run. Thus, with POD, if your book turns out to be a clunker, you don’t have a garage-full of books to get rid of. And I do mean a garage full. Even a short book – 100 pages – in a 5000-book run will use 40 boxes measuring 12x18x8, each weighing 36 pounds. If you print with a traditional printer, you better have somewhere to store the boxes. And your street had better be able to handle a semi-trailer, because that’s how they arrive. Either that, or you meet them in the local Walmart parking lot with a U-Haul…
- Some PODs hook directly into distribution channels. Lightning Source, for instance, is one of the cheapest PODs out there. Since LS is a division of Ingram, every book you publish with them automatically goes into Ingram’s catalog, which is one of the largest book catalogues in America. Having Ingram as a distributor is no small thing, and is tough for a small publisher to do any other way.
- There are a lot of POD printers who offer more services than LS. Authorhouse, Lulu.com, and literally dozens of others will take care of cover design and certain aspects of marketing for you. I've never used these so I've no comment on them. There are a lot of horror stories, so buyer beware.
- While the setup and up-front cost is high (and no, they won’t give you credit if you are printing with them the first time – it’s half up-front, the rest on the counter in order to release the book for delivery), the per-cost book is quite low. A book that might cost two dollars each to print through a traditional printer will cost well over five dollars per book through Lightning Source, and Lightning Source is pretty inexpensive as POD goes.
- Since a bookstore needs a minimum 40% discount off the retail price, it is nearly impossible to get a book into a bookstore except through a traditional print run or through a POD that hooks into a major distribution channel as part of the contract. Clearly, if you are your own distributor, you maximize up-front profits. However, many bookstores won’t work with you because you aren’t a well-known distributor.
Finally, you need to get your book into bookstores. That means getting a list of every bookstore in your market niche and cold-calling, e-mailing or postcard-mailing them about your work. Call up radio stations and invite yourself on interviews. Write up news releases and send them to magazines and newspapers. Coordinate book signings at your local bookstore. Think of organizations that could use your book and pitch it to them. Give away lots of copies to decision makers.
Being a great writer is not difficult – there are a lot of great writers. There are also a lot of mediocre writers with great marketers behind them. Great marketing sells at least as many books as great writing. After all, when was the last time you bought a really lousy book and actually returned it? Most of us just sell the clunkers at garage sales.
Speaking of garage sales, most bookstores have a return policy of one year. That means they can return any unsold books to you at the end of twelve months, for credit. If you have a high return rate, this is obviously a problem. The biggest book publishers typically have a twenty percent return rate.
I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had a return rate of one-tenth of one percent. But then again, I’m just an amateur, and not really qualified to compete with the professionals. As one friend remarked, my return rate either means I am a phenomenal writer or I am seriously underselling the market. I prefer the former explanation, but, given my marketing skills (or lack therof) am willing to accept the latter.
So, there you go. You can publish a book for well under $700; around $1000 if you want to lay out the money for the publishing software.
Monday, January 16, 2006
The Marriage of Christ
As the Da Vinci Code movie approaches, Catholics will be asked what seems a difficult question to answer: why couldn't Jesus have been married?
I've heard many answers to this question, but none are close enough to a sound-bite to work very well. Perhaps this might serve:
Jesus told the Sadducees, "At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven" (Matthew 22:30). Where God is, there is heaven. Jesus, both God and man, would not marry any individual human person in the human sense precisely because such an act would mean the person He married had, indeed, be given in marriage in heaven.
Thus, affirming that Jesus could marry in the human sense indicates He lied when He spoke to the Sadducees. Worse, such an affirmation denies His divinity.
Note how many Protestant preachers have no particular problem with Jesus marrying...
I've heard many answers to this question, but none are close enough to a sound-bite to work very well. Perhaps this might serve:
Jesus told the Sadducees, "At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven" (Matthew 22:30). Where God is, there is heaven. Jesus, both God and man, would not marry any individual human person in the human sense precisely because such an act would mean the person He married had, indeed, be given in marriage in heaven.
Thus, affirming that Jesus could marry in the human sense indicates He lied when He spoke to the Sadducees. Worse, such an affirmation denies His divinity.
Note how many Protestant preachers have no particular problem with Jesus marrying...
Friday, January 13, 2006
A Morality Tale
I am friends with a married couple - Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
I like Mr. Smith a lot. We've been friends for as long as I can remember, we always hung out together, drank together, played cards together. But when Mrs. Smith came along, I found I didn't much like her.
Now, I would like to spend time with Mr. Smith, but I don't want to spend time with Mrs. Smith.
She annoys me.
I have three choices on how to deal with the situation so I don't have to interact with Mrs. Smith yet can have as much fun with Mr. Smith as I want.
Choice 1:
I can wait until Mrs. Smith leaves the house, then go over and visit with Mr. until such time as she returns, when I will bid a fond farewell until next time.
Choice 2:
I can go over to the Smith house to visit, but slip a mickey into Mrs. Smith's drink so that she falls asleep shortly after I arrive. That way, Mr. Smith and I can have a marvelous time until she wakes up, when again, I will bid adieu.
Choice 3:
I can kill Mrs. Smith. Then I don't have to deal with her ever.
Questions:
From a moral perspective, does it matter which I choose?
If Mrs. Smith was your wife, would you have a preference in how I handled her?
Moral
Mr. and Mrs. Smith are the twin gifts of pleasure and fecundity, respectively.
Choice 1: NFP. I just wait until fecundity leaves.
Choice 2: Temporary chemical and physical barriers. I drug or bind up fecundity so it can't interfere with me.
Choice 3: Permanent sterilization.
Now do you see the difference?
BTW, I stole this story from a friend of mine who thought it up a few years back when he was teaching NFP.
I like Mr. Smith a lot. We've been friends for as long as I can remember, we always hung out together, drank together, played cards together. But when Mrs. Smith came along, I found I didn't much like her.
Now, I would like to spend time with Mr. Smith, but I don't want to spend time with Mrs. Smith.
She annoys me.
I have three choices on how to deal with the situation so I don't have to interact with Mrs. Smith yet can have as much fun with Mr. Smith as I want.
Choice 1:
I can wait until Mrs. Smith leaves the house, then go over and visit with Mr. until such time as she returns, when I will bid a fond farewell until next time.
Choice 2:
I can go over to the Smith house to visit, but slip a mickey into Mrs. Smith's drink so that she falls asleep shortly after I arrive. That way, Mr. Smith and I can have a marvelous time until she wakes up, when again, I will bid adieu.
Choice 3:
I can kill Mrs. Smith. Then I don't have to deal with her ever.
Questions:
From a moral perspective, does it matter which I choose?
If Mrs. Smith was your wife, would you have a preference in how I handled her?
Moral
Mr. and Mrs. Smith are the twin gifts of pleasure and fecundity, respectively.
Choice 1: NFP. I just wait until fecundity leaves.
Choice 2: Temporary chemical and physical barriers. I drug or bind up fecundity so it can't interfere with me.
Choice 3: Permanent sterilization.
Now do you see the difference?
BTW, I stole this story from a friend of mine who thought it up a few years back when he was teaching NFP.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Democrat's Fundamentals
Jimmy Carter, when asked to describe the fundamental Christian basis of the Democrat's political philosophy, had this to say:
I define fundamentalism as a group of invariably male leaders who consider themselves superior to other believers. The fundamentalists believe they have a special relationship with God. Therefore their beliefs are inherently correct, being those of God, and anyone who disagrees with them are first of all wrong, and second inferior, and in extreme cases even subhuman. Also, fundamentalists don't relish any challenge to their positions ... It makes a great exhibition of rigidity and superiority and exclusion.
At least, I'm pretty sure he was talking about his political party....
I define fundamentalism as a group of invariably male leaders who consider themselves superior to other believers. The fundamentalists believe they have a special relationship with God. Therefore their beliefs are inherently correct, being those of God, and anyone who disagrees with them are first of all wrong, and second inferior, and in extreme cases even subhuman. Also, fundamentalists don't relish any challenge to their positions ... It makes a great exhibition of rigidity and superiority and exclusion.
At least, I'm pretty sure he was talking about his political party....
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