Abnormality, Thy Name is Homeschool

For most Americans, homeschooling seems rather odd. Why bother with it? We have had public and private schools with us all of our lives, as have our parents before us and their parents before them from time immemorial. Why not stick with what works? The thought would be touching, if it were historically accurate. It isn’t.

The concept of compulsory schools with mass attendance is a radically new idea to Western civilization, no older than industrialization. Indeed, industrialization arguably could not have taken place without the mass school, and therein lies a tale.

As John Taylor Gatto points out in his impressive work, The Underground History of American Education , America’s schools were not very much used prior to 1870. The reason is simple.

The printing press was invented less than 50 years before America was discovered. The press enabled the Protestant Reformation. Because Protestant Faith argues that Scripture alone is authoritative, Protestants have a strong drive to be literate. The religious wars in Europe also drove many Protestants to find safe haven. The discovery of America was fortuitous in that it gave Protestants, that is, literate men, a place to flee.

As a result, the United States had a uniquely literate population. As numerous commentators of the time noted and US Census figures confirm, white men in America were essentially 100% literate prior to 1870. While schools existed, they were not much used. Like children from time immemorial, American children were educated at home and self-educated, not schooled.

The first compulsory school law was passed in Massachusetts in 1852. The second law would not be passed until 1864, in Washington D.C. The great wave of compulsory school laws were passed between 1870, with the last falling into place in 1917.

In 1860, one-third of the 300 high schools in the country were located in Massachusetts, where the school year was twelve weeks long, and only six of those weeks were consecutive. Even by 1890, the school year was only twelve to twenty weeks. Even by 1900, only six percent of American teenagers had graduated high school, only two percent of Americans 18 through 24 were enrolled in a college.

While most Americans had attended an elementary school of some sort prior to 1900, they spent no more than two to three years in it, if that – perhaps forty weeks total. While in school, they were generally not learning to read. They learned that at home.

Instead, they were reading. Fifth grade basal readers included works from William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The late-nineteenth century mass school system was America’s response to two enormous driving changes in American society: industrialization and massive immigration. Waves of Irish and German immigrants broke upon American shores between 1830 and 1860, with another massive wave entering from the Southern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe between 1890 and 1910. These immigrants tended to be poor, illiterate and Catholic.

As I noted in a previous essay, the agrarian model of instruction required apprenticeships. For reasons beyond the scope of this article, Protestant American industrialization had to destroy that agrarian apprenticeship system. It did.

First, the states passed child labor laws, throwing young immigrant men and women out of apprenticeships and out of work. Once the streets were flooded with these legally invented delinquents, compulsory school laws were passed, requiring these same young men and women to attend school. These schools were consciously modeled on insane asylums. The youth who were to be housed in them were, after all, immigrants, poor illiterate wastrels, often swarthy non-whites (Italians, Greeks and their neighbors can take a bow here), and worst of all, Catholic. They had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.

While compulsory school laws were passed, compulsory attendance was not popular. Armed troops were required to pacify the Massachusetts countryside as nearly eighty percent of the population fought the state government. As late as 1882, thirty years after the state had passed the compulsory attendance law, the militia had to march children to school. New York City parents rioted in 1917. The examples could be multiplied. The literacy rate began a steady decline that has reached its nadir today.

The school system is so effective at passing on knowledge and forming young minds that this entire history is lost to most of the Americans who pass through its gates. We no longer remember how or why today’s school system came to be what it is. The modern college student is radically less well-read and radically less moral than the average twelve-year old was in colonial America.

So, yes, homeschooling does seem a little odd to many. It seems unnecessary, not a good fit for most families. And in a certain sense, that assessment is correct. Homeschooling is not a good fit for the modern family, if only because the family has, in modern times, ceased to exist. Family cohesion has been obliterated by the mass school.

Our society requires massive consumption. Needy, ignorant people consume more goods and services than educated, emotionally stable people do. The quickest way to create needy people is to obliterate the family. The quickest way to create ignorant people is to divorce them from their parents. The mass school is an excellent exercise in creating a market for your goods, whatever those goods might be. Unfortunately, what counts as goods for the market does not count as goods for the family.

This essay is based in large part on the soon-to-be-released book Deception: Catholic Education in America" and John Taylor Gatto’s "Underground History of American Education."

Catholics Are Stupid

With the election of Benedict XVI and the evident jubilation at his reign in many Catholic quarters, the intellectual elite has again returned to its habit of bashing the intelligence of Catholic laity. To be fair, this is hardly a new phenomenon. For centuries, non-Catholic Christians have remarked on the evident sheep-like ignorance of Catholics. The papists have a robot-like obedience to a pontiff that thinks for them because they are too ignorant to think for themselves.

Stereotypes

It is often remarked that stereotypes do not arise out of nothing. No matter how slanderous the stereotype, at least some small part of it must have its origin in reality or the stereotype would not be adopted as true by the culture.

Consider, for instance, that slaves who are regularly whipped tend to be less than enthusiastic workers. This is a fact. It is also the origin of an American stereotype concerning men with dark skin. Similarly, Jews were, for centuries, lawfully forbidden from working in most trades. About the only profession they were permitted to work in was banking. A man’s got to make a living, but those who had reason to be dissatisfied with bankers rarely noticed this. Instead, they noticed that most of the bankers they worked with had a specific non-Christian origin. Today, suicide-bombers and other terrorists tend to be a different kind of non-Christian. While most members of Islam do not blow themselves up in crowded cafes, the stereotypical Muslim is the suicide bomber.

In much the same way, the stereotypical Catholic is stupid. Why? The answer is quite simple, and quite well-known to an industrial society: it is the classic “legacy system” problem.

The History of Ignorance

Prior to the invention of the printing press in 1450 AD, literacy was an expensive hobby. A book the size of a Bible cost as much as a private airplane does in today’s dollars. Vellum and parchment writing materials were made of calf, kid or lamb-skin. It took an entire herd of animals to supply enough skin for a single book. Only rich men could afford that kind of wholesale slaughter, or the expense of hiring a writer who could copy the book out by hand over the course of months or years.

Just as most of today’s population knows nothing about flying airplanes, so most medievals knew nothing about reading. They didn’t need to.

The printing press and Luther changed all that. By 1500, the cost of a book had dropped to two percent its former value. As literacy began to grow, Martin Luther proposed a novel idea (pardon the pun). The words of Scripture meant not what the Catholic Church said they meant, rather, those words meant whatever you wanted them to mean. Luther was the first deconstructionist.

St. Jerome famously said, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” Since less than ten percent of the Roman population could read, we can be sure that Jerome was not insisting on literacy. While Catholics can practice their faith regardless of literacy rates, Protestants suffer no such luxury. It is nearly impossible to be an illiterate Protestant.

This put America in a unique situation. Protestants colonized America, which is to say, literate men colonized America. Prior to 1800, over 99% of the inhabitants of the British colonies were Protestants. America didn’t have a legacy system to maintain. Europe did.

Legacy Systems

As even the lowliest technician knows, the biggest impediment to upgrading a computer network is the legacy on the desktops. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of older machines are out there. They all have to be upgraded or replaced before new software can be rolled out.

A company that has just formed does not have this upgrade issue. It can buy the newest, cheapest equipment and begin operations before a well-established company has even finished filling out its purchase orders.

America had no illiterate legacy population. Precisely because of its peculiar foundation, American literacy ran above 95% even before the Revolution. This level was maintained through roughly 1870. Immigrants were the only fly in the “total literacy” ointment. When European immigrants came across the water, they tended to be illiterate. Literacy might have been growing rapidly in Europe, all things considered, but Americans didn’t consider all things. Instead, they simply noted that the Catholic immigrants were mostly poor and unable to read. Catholics were stupid.

Catholicism in America did not grow through conversion. It couldn’t. The Catholic population was too poor, too small and spread too thin. Few Catholics knew their own Faith well enough to proselytize even if the American population had been open to such a thing, and American Protestants weren’t. No, Catholicism in America grew almost entirely through immigration. Even as late as 1920, an estimated 75% of the American Catholic population were European immigrants.

Catholics may have founded nearly every major university in Europe, their monasteries may have kept the very skill of literacy alive during the Black Plague and the famines, they may even have invented the printing press which allowed literacy to become commonplace, but none of that mattered. Americans only knew poor, illiterate Catholics. Thus, Catholics are stupid.

The Importance of Literacy

Christ preached to a population that was between one and ten percent literate. The most literate of that population, the scribes and lawyers, rejected Him. Catholic Faith spread through the lower echelons of Roman society first, the segments least likely to be literate. It was the literate segments of Roman society that ferociously maintained their pagan ways. It was the literate population that fueled the Arian heresy. It was the secular literati of European society who insisted on burning witches and following socialism, both in its national (Nazi) and international (Communist) forms.

So, when we see modern intellectuals make snide remarks, we should not be surprised. “Anyone who has not read Foucault, Derrida or Andrew Sullivan is really not literate,” they say. Let us grant the statement without argument, as we have already granted similar statements concerning Arius, Marx and the rest. It hardly matters. As was noted before, faithful Catholics don’t need to be literate, as the world views literacy, in order to be faithful to Christ.

This essay is taken in part from information available in Deception: Catholic Education in America.

Back to the Ghetto

“Catholics have no rights a white man is bound to respect.” This is essentially the position of Illinois Governor Ron Blagojevich and numerous other commentators on the issue of prescription abortifacients, also known as hormonal birth control drugs. Those who argue that Catholics cannot be pharmacists join the chorus arguing that Catholics cannot be judges, doctors, nurses, and in the most recent revelation from Florida’s Judge Greer, cannot act as parents. Not since the Middle Ages has there been such a determined push to outlaw the right of a religious group to work in certain trades.

Federal law stipulates that a business cannot refuse to employ or trade with someone on the basis of race or creed, but it is perfectly legal for a business to refuse to trade in a specific item. If the local restaurant refuses to serve pancakes after ten o’clock, if the local burger shop will sell fish sandwiches only on Fridays or perhaps not at all, no customer can sue them for these lapses. A business is permitted to refuse the sale of any item it pleases so long as that refusal is based on the item and not the customer requesting the item.

If an employee decides not to sell an item, the business owner may take what steps he deems against that employee, especially in the state of Illinois, where “at-will” employment holds sway. Perhaps a business owner hires Bartleby the Scrivener for his marvelous accounting skills and, as a side benefit, has him man the store counter as well. Perhaps the businessman discovers that Bartleby prefers not to sell playing cards on alternate Thursdays, and cannot be induced to do so. The man can fire Bartleby or accommodate him, but how is it the state’s business which course of action he chooses?

This is especially true when we consider the doctor-patient relationship. Those who insist this relationship is private fail to consider that the pharmacist is a doctor. When a woman’s medical doctor writes a prescription, he thereby transmits a privileged medical communication from himself to another doctor. The prescription is a request for a second opinion. The first doctor writes out his opinion concerning proper treatment and asks the doctor of pharmacy if he concurs. The patient is the courier for the communication. The professional judgement of the doctor of pharmacy concerning appropriate drug usage is critical to the entire medical profession, yet Illinois governor Ron Blagovich has arbitrarily decided that pharmacists are not doctors and have no professional judgement.

Thus, the same people who insist that the government has no right to interfere in medical practice applaud Illinois government’s interference in medical practice. Apparently, the right to privacy between doctor and patient is sacrosanct except when the doctor determines that she cannot, in good conscience, collaborate in a specific kind of treatment the patient insists on having. It was not illegal for doctors to refuse to work with chiropracters, and it still is not, but it has become illegal for doctors to work with Catholics and other Christians.

In America’s early years, Catholics made up less than one percent of the population. Before 1800, one in eight Catholics in that one percent was a slave; most of the rest were poor farmers. Because they had no political clout, because they were manifestly hated by the Protestant majority, Catholics paid a double taxation and were forbidden the right to vote or hold office. Catholic churches, convents and homes were burnt; mobs harassed or murdered adherents to the Faith.

Many claim that this kind of attitude no longer holds in an America where John Kennedy won the presidency. Few people bother to note that Kennedy won the election only through his insistence that he was an avowed apostate from the Faith. To be elected, he first had to insist that he would consider his Catholic convictions useless when it came time to act on any matter.

During the course of this year, America will lose its numerical Protestant majority. It will not lose its anti-Catholic bigotry. Thus, we watch Governor Blagojevich viciously attack a woman’s right of conscience. We wait in vain for the National Organization of Women to support an Illinois doctor of pharmacy in her decision to refuse to dispense what she considers a dangerous drug. We wait for the courts to rule that Catholics should return to the ghetto from whence they came.

Caretaker Pope

Having no television, I've been listening to the streaming audio from NPR. All the commentators keep insisting that Benedict XVI is a caretaker pope.

Methinks they dost protest too much.

Vive il Papa!

Stealing Home

With the new Minuteman Project, illegal immigration is in the headlines again. The debate isn’t new, of course. 150 years ago, it wasn’t the Hispanics that worried us; it was the Chinese and the Irish. The irony is enormous. We created the very problem that vexes us.

Consider the history. Our problem with Mexico began in 1846 with the Mexican-American war, a war literally invented by the United States. We simply took the Mexican territory that is now New Mexico, Arizona and California. In his Memoirs, President Grant, who fought in the Mexican War, said, "For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory." Abraham Lincoln denounced the war as a fraud, and John Quincy Adams lamented the intentional dismemberment of Catholic Mexico.

The 1849 California Gold Rush occurred one year after the war’s end. This brought thousands of Chinese into what had been Mexico but was now, through fraud and force of arms, the United States. American California responded by making it illegal for Chinese immigrants to testify against whites. Congress responded by forbidding American ships from transporting Chinese immigrants. But due to a silver strike in Nevada, Chinese laborers were needed to build the transcontinental railroad, so they were brought in despite the laws.

Thousands of Chinese died in the construction effort of the transcontinental railroad. One year after the 1869 celebration of its completion, America commemorated the event by refusing to allow any Asian to become an American citizen. The subsequent 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricted their ability to even set foot on American soil. The Chinese would not be permitted to become Americans until 1943, two years after we had joined China in its WW II fight against the Japanese. Japanese had been permitted to become citizens in 1924. Restrictions on immigration from the rest of Asia would not be removed until 1968.

But, while Protestant America hated Asians, it had hated Catholics first. Between 1776 and 1830, Catholics made up roughly one percent of the U.S. population. At that time, one in eight Catholics was a slave. Most of the rest were poor farmers. The U.S. Catholic population increased to today’s 24% primarily through immigration and annexation. First, we stole Catholic Mexican territory, then Irish and German Catholics flooded in due to famines in their home countries in the 1830’s and 1860’s. We annexed Catholic Spanish territory like the Philippines in the 1898 Spanish American War but did not allow (Catholic) Filipinos to become American citizens until 1924.

And even as we let the Filipinos in, we shut Mexican and European Catholics out. A large influx of southern Mediterranean and Eastern European Catholics had streamed in around 1900. In 1892, New York’s Ellis Island opened as the primary processing station for the East Coast. By 1903, attempts were made to require inspection of aliens (Catholics) crossing the Mexican border. By 1907, Arizona, New Mexico and a large part of Texas was reorganized into the Mexican Border District in stricter attempt to stem the flow of Catholics across that border. It wasn’t enough. The per capita immigrant rate was still four times higher in 1913 than it is today.

So, by 1921, the attempt to keep Jews and Catholics out (Germans, Poles and Italians) was further strengthened through immigration quotas, quotas that became even tighter in 1924 - the same year Catholic Filipinos were finally permitted to naturalize. Those anti-Catholic quotas stayed in effect until 1965. They were justified in part by safety concerns. After all, President McKinley had been assassinated by a Polish anarchist in 1901. To a WASP, there was really no difference between an anarchist and a Catholic.

People like to portray the history of American immigration law as a history of racism. While it certainly was that, it was equally a history of anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic hysteria.

This year, for the first time in history, Protestant Christianity will no longer be the majority religion in the United States. However, even before it lost its dominance, secular humanistic atheists wielded abortifacient contraception, euthanasia and surgical abortion like swords, legally murdering America’s inconvenient and disabled. WASPs and atheists still export the American culture of death across the world.

But even as they labor to build their slaughterhouse, hundreds of thousands of Catholics steal across the border into the United States. Like the parable of the thief who breaks into the house to tie up the strong man, like the God who stole quietly into the virgin’s womb to overthrow the prince of this world, these illegals steal in to America. They are, after all, devoted to the Patroness of the Unborn, the Virgin who was herself an immigrant into the idolatrous land of Egypt.

So, here's a bit of information for the Minutemen to contemplate. When Hispanic Catholics look to the crucifix, they remember one critically important fact: God blessed the thief.

News Update on Terri Schiavo

The Empire Journal found a neurologist who says Terri Schiavo's brain scans while in the hospital were initially normal. He alleges that she suffered a blow to the cranium while in the hospital, thus the problems in later brain scans.

http://theempirejournal.com/14902_new_evidence_of_alleged_as.htm

Allegations are that employees of DCFS intentionally collaborated in a cover-up of the evidence.

Of Living Wills

Pope John Paul II was schizoid. At least, that’s what George Negus said in his interview with Cardinal Pell. “There was this man who was incredibly conservative on social issues, domestic church issues - like celibacy, like abortion, like birth control, like marriage, married priests, like AIDS, like homosexuality, that was one Pope John Paul II. The other Pope John Paul II was this man who was very aggressive on the international stage. He's opposed the war in Iraq. He's said that the pre-emptive strikes are not morally justifiable, etc. He's spoken out against the Third World debt. He's campaigned against racism and world poverty. So there were - he was almost a schizoid figure and I use that term advisedly.”

How do we reconcile these two faces of the man? The question is rather reminiscent of one posed by James Thurber, “ ‘I don't understand’, said the scientist to the lemming, 'Why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves.’ ”

“ ‘How curious,’ said the lemming. ‘The one thing I don't understand is why you human beings don't.’ ”

We can make the point more bluntly. It is certain that there is schizophrenia in the world. The question is, who suffers from it: the Pope and his people or George Negus and his associates or both?

An objective observer might find it initially difficult to choose between the two. On the one hand, we have a man whose Christian Faith finds the sense of his guiding document (Scripture) forbids things like contraception, abortion and homosexual marriage while it embraces things like indulgences, the sacrament of confession and the Real and Substantial Presence of God in the Eucharist. On the other hand, we have men whose secular humanism finds the sense of their guiding document (this or that national constitution) requires contraception, abortion and homosexual marriage while it denies God’s central relevance at all.

In both cases, people have asserted that the documents themselves deny what the men involved claim they teach. For instance, many assert Scripture says not a word against contraception or for indulgences, while others assert the US Constitution, for example, says not a word requiring legal abortion or denying God’s grace. What to do?

There are many ways to differentiate one group from the other, but one way is compelling: the assignment of purpose. The Pope and his people believe that both the Church and every human being have an enormously important purpose to accomplish. The purpose is single, that each person accomplish it is of the highest importance and that the Church is necessary to each individual’s accomplishment is unquestionable.

From John Paul II’s point of view, he was the head of an organic whole that has to exist. If the Church did not exist, no man could attain what he needed to attain: heaven. John Paul II knew he existed in order to assist every man, woman and child alive. He knew the purpose each person fought to attain was critically important, and he was a critical part of attaining it.

George Negus and associates believe in purpose as well, but the purpose is not single. For some, the purpose is to maximize pleasure, others mean to maximize wealth or power, none have purpose beyond the grave. Because of this, each who carry Negos’ worldview believes his own purpose to be the most important. Those who agree with him are better men. Those who do not are not. Consequently, some men and women are more important than others.

The Pope opposed contraception, abortion, homosexual marriage and simultaneously opposed racism, world debt and poverty. He knew each of these things to be a stumbling block to attaining the only important thing. Negus and company, in contrast, oppose racism, debt and poverty only insofar as they reduce the chances of attaining personal objectives, whatever those objectives might be.

The infamous example of seven people in a six-man lifeboat comes to the fore. In the Pope’s understanding, it is better that he himself, or all aboard, starve than that any one aboard treat another one as expendable or less important than another. For Negos, it is different. He would never volunteer to die. He would expect someone else – someone who does not share his principles, someone less important – to die in his place. For John Paul, each of us was as important or more important than himself. For Negos, each of us is less important than himself.

In a certain sense, the Pope doesn’t understand why the rest of us would commit suicide. Negos and his friends don’t understand why the rest of us won’t.

Thus, the ACLU helps a husband kill his injured wife. She can find no more pleasure in life, and he can; indeed, he already has, so she must be thrown overboard. The judges who look to a national constitution instead of a living God will always make sure it is so. They can do no less. They must act so because they are themselves expendable.

You see, in Negos’ worldview, the US Constitution, any national constitution, does not need to exist. I can, if I am smart enough, obtain my goal of maximizing sensual pleasure, wealth, power, even in anarchy. The laws, the judiciary, these are tools to help me get my way. Insofar as they assist me, I will allow them to exist. Insofar as they do not, I will crush them. The executive branch, the legislature, the judges know this. If there is no God, no single purpose, then each must bow to Negos and company or be crushed.

Because they are one with Negos in worldview, they are each prospects for enforced suicide. The only way to avoid being forced to open one’s own veins is to open someone else’s first. Christianity sees a Great Chain of Being, in which each lower creature supports and glorifies the one above it. Secular humanism sees a Great Chain of Being in which each higher creature consumes the lower.

The Scriptures, the US Constitution, and a living will have this much in common: each embodies a purpose. The purpose of each is known only through the interpretation given to it. If each man is his own Pope, if each man ultimately seeks to be free of the intrusion of all government, then each man will interpret these documents as he will. But, if there is only one Pope, if Church government is necessary, then there is but one purpose, and each document will be interpreted to contribute towards that purpose.

As one of the documents points out, there are ever only two choices, thus, for the objective observer there can be only one question: who would you rather have as the interpreter, John Paul II or George Negos?

Gift for Blog Readers

I've been working on several projects recently, one of which is a new coupon system at Bridegroom Press. For those of you who might be interested, I am currently offering a free $5 coupon off any book purchase made at www.bridegroompress.com.

You get a chance at reading more of my stuff without spending nearly as much money, while I get a chance to make sure this thing actually works in more than a test mode... :)

The coupon code is GMCHE and it is good through the end of April (only one use per user, but feel free to give the code to anyone who might be interested).

Musical Tribute

If you would like to watch a musical tribute to the Pope, check out
www.bridegroompress.com/jpii-tribute.wmv.

You need Windows Media Player to view it and a broadband connection will be helpful.

Papabile

Many people are trying their hand at prophecy, making guesses at who will be elected the next pope. Study the history and the problem becomes a lot easier to solve.

Pope Pius XI was elected in 1922, a scant year before Hitler forced the Nazi movement into the public spotlight through his failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The Nazi movement was an on-again, off-again threat during the 1920’s, marginalized almost to insignificance by 1929. Unfortunately, the world-wide economic depression of the early 1930’s brought them roaring back from the grave. Though the Nazis never received an electoral majority, electoral politics and the miscalculation of several prominent political figures in Germany convinced German President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to the office of chancellor.

Thus, upon Pius XI’s death in 1939 the world was faced with a crisis of evil in the heart of Europe. The cardinals responded by electing to the papacy a man who had been the papal nuncio in Germany for over a decade (1917-1929). He knew Germany and the German people intimately; he knew perfectly well that the new-pagan Nazi regime was thoroughly evil. Of the forty-four speeches the papal nuncio had made on German soil, forty of them attacked the Nazis. In March, 1939, this papal nuncio became Pope Pius XII.

Pius XII was the only man in Europe willing to stand up to Hitler. Germany’s Nazi government immediately repudiated his election. The New York Times declared him the “lone voice” in Europe objecting to Nazism. Reinhard Heydrich of the Reich Central Security Office warned, “In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order...the Pope does not refer to the National Socialists in Germany by name, but his [1942 Christmas] speech is one long attack on everything we stand for.”

Pius XII helped coordinate the communications of the group that attempted to assassinate Hitler. Hitler became so frustrated at his inability to silence this thorn in his side that the Nazis drew up secret plans to kidnap him. Pius' efforts saved more Jews than all other European efforts combined. The anti-Semites who assert differently implicitly call the Jews who lived through the war liars, for these same Jews uniformly praised Pius XII for his uniquely heroic efforts. The Nazi threat was ground into dust during his reign and due in no small part to his witness.

However, with Nazism crushed, a different menace arose. Communism grew through the post-war years to reach a crisis point during the late 1970’s, as Jimmy Carter’s ineffectual presidency exacerbated problems throughout the world. In 1979, as the crisis reached its height, the cardinals elected to the papacy a man who had lived through both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes, a man who understood the communists intimately and had fought them to a stand-still time and again in his native Poland.

Pope John Paul II was virtually the only man in Europe willing to stand up to the Communists. Though he never attacked a specific Communist regime by name, he secretly assisted Poland’s Solidarity movement and diplomatically outflanked every move the totalitarians made. He frustrated the communist hierarchy to such an extent that the famous assassination attempt on his life is still suspected by many to have been the result of a Communist-inspired contract on his life. Today, the world praises him for his uniquely heroic efforts against the totalitarians. The Communist threat was ground into dust during his reign and due in no small part to his witness.

Today, there are crises developing on many fronts. Biotechnology issues, such as cloning, IVF, stem cell research and euthanasia rock through the headlines, threatening the sanctity of human life. On the political front, violent members of the Muslim community seriously threaten world peace. On the religious front, new strains of paganism run throughout Europe while the Orthodox communities crack and fall away from ancient Christian practice under the assault of secular sensibilities.

So, who will be Pope? It will be the man ready to deal with the next real crisis. Perhaps a man who knows the ways of medical science intimately, or who is thoroughly acquainted with the Muslim community. A man who intimately understands the defects of pagan philosophy or who is capable of permanently re-uniting the Orthodox and Catholic faiths. Study the background of the next Pope, and you will discover what the real world crisis is. Then wait and watch. You will see the ones who fomented the crisis crushed under the heel of the Vicar of Christ.

Necrophilia

In his book Breaking the Thread of Life, Robert Barry reminds us the slightest difficulty or insult is sufficient to provoke those without a good understanding of God into suicide. As history shows and modern psychology confirms, suicide is contagious. When one person commits suicide, hordes of others typically follow.
Consider the Romantics, for instance. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) claimed that he dreamed of suicide and he and his friends “lived in a strange world, I assure you; we swung between madness and suicide; some of them killed themselves… another sterangled himself with his tie, several died of debauchery in order to escape boredom; it was beautiful.”
A young Frenchman of the period pushed his pregnant wife into the Seine and watched her drown. At his trial, the man defended himself by saying that this was an age of suicide.
Today, many would agree. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among teenagers. But sometimes death needs help.
Dr. Verhagen of University Medical Center Groningen, Netherlands has participated in the intentional killing of four infants. He has watched one child die and was there moments later for the three others. All had severe forms of spina bifida.
"The child goes to sleep," he said. "It stops breathing… I mean, it's difficult to give the right emotion there, but it's beautiful in a way…"
"Abortion, it's beautiful,” said Chris Rock, the comedian who hosted this year’s Oscars, “it's beautiful abortion is legal. I love going to an abortion rally to pick up women, cause you know they are f------,"
"I will tell you that as it appears to me, Mrs. Schiavo's death is not imminent by any means," George Felos told the Associated Press Saturday. "She is calm; she's peaceful, she is resting comfortably… Frankly when I saw her ... she looked beautiful. In all the years I've seen Mrs. Schiavo, I've never seen such a look of peace and beauty upon her," said Felos.
One explanation for Felos' comments is suggested in the attorney's own 2002 book, Litigation As Spiritual Practice. Felos, a longtime volunteer hospice worker, discovered killing as a spiritual experience:

"As I continued to stay beside Mrs. Browning at her nursing home bed, I felt my mind relax and my weight sink into the ground. I began to feel light-headed as I became more reposed. Although feeling like I could drift into sleep, I also experienced a sense of heightened awareness. As Mrs. Browning lay motionless before my gaze, I suddenly heard a loud, deep moan and scream and wondered if the nursing home personnel heard it and would respond to the unfortunate resident. In the next moment, as this cry of pain and torment continued, I realized it was Mrs. Browning.
I felt the mid-section of my body open and noticed a strange quality to the light in the room. I sensed her soul in agony. As she screamed I heard her say, in confusion, 'Why am I still here … why am I here?' My soul touched hers and in some way I communicated that she was still locked in her body. I promised I would do everything in my power to gain the release her soul cried for. With that the screaming immediately stopped. I felt like I was back in my head again, the room resumed its normal appearance, and Mrs. Browning, as she had throughout this experience, lay silent.
I knew without a doubt what had transpired was real and dispelled the thought as intellect’s attempt to assert its own version of reality."

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church fought the incredibly pernicious Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy. For Cathars, the world, the flesh, all of it is pure evil, a hellish existence from which we can only be released through death. Cathars saw procreative sex as evil because the ensoulment of the body trapped the divine spark of the human person in the hell of the material world. It had one sacrament, the consolamentum, which was immediately followed by the endura, ritual suicide by starvation.
The heresy became so popular in southern France that entire geographical regions were depopulating through decreased family size and ritual suicide. It was so pernicious that the Cahtolic Church had to create the Inquisition, the Crusades and St. Dominic's new order of priests to stop the spread of the suicidal sect. Even so, it continued to have adherents through the 1400's.

The power of the Catholic Church to intervene in the culture is largely gone. Secular government will have to deal with today’s Cathars. Sadly, there is no evidence we really understand what we are up against.

Marshalling Evidence

Here’s a trivia question. Did you know the Supreme Court’s review of a law’s constitutionality is itself a violation of the Constitution? Judicial review is the power of a court to review a law or the actions of a public official and declare that law or act unconstitutional. Nowhere does the Constitution give such a power to the Supreme Court or any other court, nor has any law ever done so. This puts a whole new spin on many of the court rulings made in the last fifty years, especially those concerning subjects like contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and marriage.

The assertion above, of course, poses an interesting question. If the courts don’t have this power, why do they act as if they do? Gather round, friends. The history is instructive.

In 1800, outgoing President John Adams decided he would stack the courts with Federalists before he was forced to hand the presidency over to the newly-elected Thomas Jefferson. In the last days of his presidency, Adams and the Congress created 58 new judgeships. The outgoing secretary of state, John Marshall, signed the commissions the night before Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, but Marshall neglected to deliver them. As soon as he was sworn in, Jefferson directed John Madison, his new secretary of state, not to deliver 17 of them. William Marbury, one of the men Adams had named to office, sued.

This is where it gets interesting. One of those 58 judgeships had gone to John Marshall, the same man who had been Adam’s secretary of state and who had sealed Marbury’s commission. That’s right. Former secretary of state John Marshall had, with the help of Congress and the outgoing President Adam’s, created himself Chief Justice of the Supreme Court under his political opponent, Thomas Jefferson, just hours before Jefferson took office. Like today’s liberal Democrats, the Federalists had lost the elections but had retired into the fortress of the courts in order to continue their political battle.

John Marshall, the model for Florida’s Judge Greer, not only failed to recuse himself from Madison v. Marbury (1803) due to his howling conflict of interest, he managed to attack his political opponent, Thomas Jefferson, and grant himself new powers without leaving an opening for Jefferson to retaliate. While judicially asinine, the ruling was politically brilliant.

Marshall ruled that Marbury had indeed been wronged, thereby tarring President Jefferson as having illegally violated Marbury’s civil rights. Then, he went on to rule section 13 of the Judiciary Act unconstitutional, thus granting himself the power of judicial review. But he ended by denying that the Supreme Court had the power to compel Jefferson to give Marbury the commission, thus giving Jefferson very little grounds to attack the decision.

The utter absurdity of judicial review was so obvious that the Supreme Court wouldn’t attempt to invalidate another Congressional law for over a half century. In Dred Scott versus Sanford (1857), the Supreme Court’s second foray into ripping apart the Constitution, Chief Justice Taney, another Judge Greer prototype, ruled that no Negro could ever become a citizen of the United States because Negroes were beings of an inferior order. He further declared that the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in some new territories, was unconstitutional and that Dred Scott could be put back into chains.

Of course, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, if Taney was right and Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in new territories, there was little reason to think any state had the power to prohibit slavery at all. This was, of course, Taney’s position. He wanted slavery extended to every state in the Union so he just Marshalled the evidence.

Since then, of course, judicial review has Marshalled all manner of emanations and penumbras concerning all kinds of things that merely mortal men cannot find in the Constitution. Whether it be enslaving blacks, killing unborn children, requiring homosexual marriage, legalizing pornography, or a host of equally savory legalities, it matters not what you voted for, the courts will strike it down to get what they want. This is the history of judicial review.

Today, the courts are Marshalling their power to take it all one step further. Now they have built legal precedent for authorizing the starvation and dehydration of people they don’t like. With judges like this in office, no living will can protect you. It matters not what a piece of paper says concerning your desire not to be dehydrated or starved to death. It matters not what you say, what the law says, what the Congress says, what anyone but the judges say. You will die if it pleases them that you do.

Affadavit

AFFIDAVIT

STATE OF FLORIDA

COUNTY OF PINELLAS

BEFORE ME the undersigned authority personally appeared CARLA SAUER IYER, R.N., who being first duly sworn, deposes and says:

1. My name is Carla Sauer Iyer. I am over the age of eighteen and make this statement of my own personal knowledge.

2. I am a registered nurse in the State of Florida, having been licensed continuously in Florida from 1997 to the present. Prior to that I was a Licensed Practical Nurse for about four years.

3. I was employed at Palm Garden of Largo Convalescent Center in Largo, Florida from April of 1995 to July 1996, while Terri Schiavo was a patient there.

4. It was clear to me at Palm Gardens that all decisions regarding Terri Schiavo were made by Michael Schiavo, with no allowance made for any discussion, debate or normal professional judgment. My initial training there consisted solely of the instruction "Do what Michael Schiavo tells you or you will be terminated." This struck me as extremely odd.

5. I was very disturbed by the decision making protocol, as no allowance whatsoever was made for professional responsibility. The atmosphere throughout the facility was dominated by Mr. Schiavo's intimidation. Everyone there, with the exception of several people who seemed to be close to Michael, was intimidated by him. Michael Schiavo always had an overbearing attitude, yelling numerous times such things as "This is my order and you're going to follow it." He is very large and uses menacing body language, such as standing too close to you, getting right in your face and practically shouting.

6. To the best of my recollection, rehabilitation had been ordered for Terri, but I never saw any being done or had any reason at all to believe that there was ever any rehab of Terri done at Palm Gardens while I was there. I became concerned because nothing was being done for Terri at all, no antibiotics, no tests, no range of motion therapy, no stimulation, no nothing. Michael said again and again that Terri should NOT get any rehab, that there should be no range of motion whatsoever, or anything else. I and a CNA named Roxy would give Terri range of motion anyway. One time I put a wash cloth in Terri's hand to keep her fingers from curling together, and Michael saw it and made me take it out, saying that was therapy.

7. Terri's medical condition was systematically distorted and misrepresented. When I worked with her, she was alert and oriented. Terri spoke on a regular basis while in my presence, saying such things as "mommy," and "help me." "Help me" was, in fact, one of her most frequent utterances. I heard her say it hundreds of times. Terri would try to say the word "pain" when she was in discomfort, but it came out more like "pay." She didn't say the "n" sound very well. During her menses she would indicate her discomfort by saying "pay" and moving her arms toward her lower abdominal area. Other ways that she would indicate that she was in pain included pursing her lips, grimacing, thrashing in bed, curling her toes or moving her legs around. She would let you know when she had a bowel movement by flipping up the covers and pulling on her diaper.

8. When I came into her room and said "Hi, Terri", she would always recognize my voice and her name, and would turn her head all the way toward me, saying "Haaaiiiii" sort of, as she did. I recognized this as a "hi", which is very close to what it sounded like, the whole sound being only a second or two long. When I told her humorous stories about my life or something I read in the paper, Terri would chuckle, sometimes more a giggle or laugh. She would move her whole body, upper and lower. Her legs would sometimes be off the bed, and need to be repositioned. I made numerous entries into the nursing notes in her chart, stating verbatim what she said and her various behaviors, but by my next on-duty shift, the notes would be deleted from her chart. Every time I made a positive entry about any responsiveness of Terri's, someone would remove it after my shift ended. Michael always demanded to see her chart as soon as he arrived, and would take it in her room with him. I documented Terri's rehab potential well, writing whole pages about Terri's responsiveness, but they would always be deleted by the next time I saw her chart. The reason I wrote so much was that everybody else seemed to be afraid to make positive entries for fear of their jobs, but I felt very strongly that a nurses job was to accurately record everything we see and hear that bears on a patients condition and their family. I upheld the Nurses Practice Act, and if it cost me my job, I was willing to accept that.

9. Throughout my time at Palm Gardens, Michael Schiavo was focused on Terri's death. Michael would say "When is she going to die?," "Has she died yet?" and "When is that bitch gonna die?" These statements were common knowledge at Palm Gardens, as he would make them casually in passing, without regard even for who he was talking to, as long as it was a staff member. Other statements which I recall him making include "Can't you do anything to accelerate her death - won't she ever die?" When she wouldn't die, Michael would be furious. Michael was also adamant that the family should not be given information. He made numerous statements such as "Make sure the parents aren't contacted." I recorded Michael's statements word for word in Terri's chart, but these entries were also deleted after the end of my shift. Standing orders were that the family wasn't to be contacted, in fact, there was a large sign in the front of her chart that said under no circumstances was her family to be called, call Michael immediately, but I would call them, anyway, because I thought they should know about their daughter.

10. Any time Terri would be sick, like with a UTI or fluid buildup in her lungs, colds, pneumonia, Michael would be visibly excited, thrilled even, hoping that she would die. He would call me, as I was the nurse supervisor on the floor, and ask for every little detail about her temperature, blood pressure, etc., and would call back frequently asking if she was dead yet. He would blurt out "I'm going to be rich!," and would talk about all the things he would buy when Terri died, which included a new car, a new boat, and going to Europe, among other things.

11. When Michael visited Terri, he always came alone and always had the door closed and locked while he was with Terri. He would typically be there about twenty minutes or so. When he left Terri would would be trembling, crying hysterically, and would be very pale and have cold sweats. It looked to me like Terri was having a hypoglycemic reaction, so I'd check her blood sugar. The glucometer reading would be so low it was below the range where it would register an actual number reading. I would put dextrose in Terri's mouth to counteract it. This happened about five times on my shift as I recall. Normally Terri's blood sugar levels were very stable due to the uniformity of her diet through tube feeding. It is my belief that Michael injected Terri with Regular insulin, which is very fast acting.

12. The longer I was employed at Palm Gardens the more concerned I became about patient care, both relating to Terri Schiavo, for the reasons I've said, and other patients, too. There was an LPN named Carolyn Adams, known as "Andy" Adams who was a particular concern. An unusual number of patients seemed to die on her shift, but she was completely unconcerned, making statements such as "They are old - let them die." I couldn't believe her attitude or the fact that it didn't seem to attract any attention. She made many comments about Terri being a waste of money, that she should die. She said it was costing Michael a lot of money to keep her alive, and that he complained about it constantly (I heard him complain about it all the time, too.) Both Michael and Adams said that she would be worth more to him if she were dead. I ultimately called the police relative to this situation, and was terminated the next day. Other reasons were cited, but I was convinced it was because of my "rocking the boat."

13. Ms. Adams was one of the people who did not seem to be intimidated by Michael. In fact, they seemed to be very close, and Adams would do whatever Michael told her. Michael sometimes called Adams at night and spoke at length. I was not able to hear the content of these phone calls, but I knew it was him talking to her because she would tell me afterward and relay orders from him.

14. While at Palm Gardens, I became fearful for my personal safety. This was due to Michael's constant intimidation, including his menacing body language, vocal tone and mannerisms.

15. I have contacted the Schindler family because I just couldn't stand by and let Terri die without the truth being known.

Your Lying Eyes

As I noted in an essay some weeks ago, people who support evolution have a wondrously strange habit of using language that is diametrically opposed to their meaning. Now, we see this same tendency coming to the fore again, only this time the consequences are somewhat more immediate.
The problem revolves around the meaning of the phrase “vegetative state.” According to the National Institutes of Health, “a persistent vegetative state (commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as "brain-death") sometimes follows a coma. Individuals in such a state have lost their thinking abilities and awareness of their surroundings, but retain non-cognitive function and normal sleep patterns…. Spontaneous movements may occur, and the eyes may open in response to external stimuli. They may even occasionally grimace, cry, or laugh. Although individuals in a persistent vegetative state may appear somewhat normal, they do not speak and they are unable to respond to commands.”
Note that the NIH definition does not say the individual is dead. It merely describes an inability to communicate. This distinction appears to be lost on many. Instead, today’s commentators on the situation want to have it both ways. They want to insist that Terry Schiavo is both alive and dead, sometimes insisting on both in the same sentence.
Take, for instance, Ronald Bailey, Reason’s science correspondent: “So is Terri Schiavo still alive? The odds are way against it. It's time that her long-suffering parents and the grandstanding politicians let her go in peace.”
Or Michael Schiavo himself: "Terri died 15 years ago. It's time for her to be with the Lord like she wanted to be."
Now these statements, and all the statements like it, are absurd. Simply put, there are only two possibilities here: either Theresa Schiavo is a person or she is not there at all - her body is a rather unusual corpse. Despite what biological evolutionists might say to the contrary, there is nothing in between. Either the entity under discussion is a person or not.
Death is the separation of human soul from human body. When the soul leaves the body, the person is no longer in the body. The soul is the organizing principle of the body. When the soul leaves the body, the body decays back into the dust from which it was made. That is death - the divorce of soul and body, the divorce of two entities that were meant to be indissolubly joined. Divorce is a concept that Michael Schiavo and his supporters don't seem to understand very well.
If Terri Schiavo is no longer there, then it matters little what happens to her body. She’s already gone. Her body could be slapped around, burned, kicked like a football, what difference would it make to Terri? She isn't there. If Terri isn't there, Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers are both arguing over a corpse and have been for the last several years. You can’t torture a corpse. You can’t rouse the peacefulness of a corpse. Corpses don’t suffer. Whether her parents get her corpse back or Michael incinerates her corpse today while it still moves, laughs, grimaces, makes no difference at all.
If, on the other hand, her soul has not left her body, then Michael Schiavo is trying to murder Terri and the courts are going along with it.

There is no gray in this matter.
So, why do so many of those who support the removal of the feeding tube insist on using language that both denies and implies that Terri is “there”? For the same reason the evolutionists intentionally use distorting language. They want us to empathize with what it would be like to be in Terri’s state. But that isn’t possible.
If we were in Terri’s state, according to their own testimony, we wouldn’t be aware of it because we wouldn’t be in our bodies at all. We would either be somewhere else (assuming God exists), or we simply wouldn’t be (assuming He doesn’t). This whole argument is not just an attempt to deny Terri's personhood, it is actually much more subtle than that. It is an attempt to pretend that personhood is subject to evolution, that there are various grades, states, levels of personhood.
The assertion is interesting in one respect. The only individuals who have ever raised such an argument have been totalitarians.
Stalin believed there were kulaks and peasants. Kulaks exploited peasants. Kulaks were blood-sucking parasites (his phrasing) and had to be destroyed. Hitler, of course, believed in exactly this distinction, this caste system, even this phrasing, in reference to the groups he disliked as well. Hinduism accepts this kind of gradation among its people, insisting that ninety-five percent of the population exists in order to serve as slaves to the Brahmin caste of the enlightened five percent. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was built on a caste system of Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons, each level less human than the one above it.
The concept is absolutely ludicrous and completely at odds with the facts of Judeo-Christian truth. It is also in perfect harmony with the mindset created by modern science. Ever since the French Revolution, many proponents of science have explicitly attempted to destroy Christianity, the mother who gave science birth. Unfortunately, by attempting to supplant the system of thought that made science possible, scientists have been forced to adopt language that is self-refuting.
Science cannot determine intention, it can never be more than neutral on the subject. However, it also cannot conceive of the universe as purposeless nor is it able to create a purposeless language to describe it.
This is not surprising. Language embodies purpose. We communicate for reasons, not for randomness. It is not possible to describe the universe as lacking in purpose precisely because the use of language presupposes the existence of purpose. Because we are unable to describe a universe without a purpose, and because science cannot determine intention, we know there is an aspect of human knowledge which science cannot plumb. This fact enrages the humanistic rationalists no end. It means science is incomplete. It means God must exist.
We are told that the responses Terry Schiavo makes to her surroundings are random, not directed, that she cannot communicate. Many people have gone to great lengths to insist on this point over and over again for the last several years. Notice that this kind of insistence is rarely necessary when we view a corpse. By the very fact that these movements have to be interpreted again and again, by the very fact that we need to be constantly reminded that what we see is not real, we are reminded of the story of the adulterous man caught in the act by his wife. “Who are you going to believe, honey?" said the man as he looked up from his harlot, "Me, or your lying eyes?”
This debate has been an interesting intellectual exercise, in the sense that watching a man manipulate the placement of a pea beneath several small shells is an interesting intellectual exercise. But, as with the shell game, the point of the current debate is to take something by trickery that cannot be taken in justice. The question is a good one. Who are you going to believe?

End of the Road

What do Judge Moore, Sandra Cano and Norma Jean McCorvey have in common with Terry Schiavo? Each has become a principle actor in the legal test for how far the law can lie.

Private Lies Smash the Law
When Norma Jean McCorvey, the Roe in Roe v. Wade, approached lawyers in order to get an abortion, she lied about how her child had been conceived, asserting she had been gang-raped. Stoned or drunk during most of the proceedings, she never actually got the abortion. She gave her child up for adoption instead. But, when she discovered that her case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court and had resulted in legal abortion in all fifty states, she twice attempted suicide. She was disgusted by how far her lie had been taken. She did not want her name, even in a pseudonym, to be associated with that kind of mass slaughter.

Sandra Cano, the Doe in Doe v. Bolton, had an even worse experience. She wasn’t the one who lied: her lawyers were. All she wanted was a divorce from her husband and custody of her children. Her lawyers forged documents in order to mislead the courts into accepting a case on abortion. They carried this lie all the way to the Supreme Court, duping everyone along the way. The Supreme Court ruling was based on a complete fabrication, but no one knew it except the lawyers who had invented the lie.

Nothing Smashes the Law
Ironically in the summer of 2003, the same summer that both Cano and McCorvey returned to the courts seeking overturn their own Supreme Court victories, another legal controversy erupted. The case of Judge Moore and the placement of the Ten Commandments in his own courthouse eventually resulted in his removal from the bench.

Now, keep this in mind: the legal principle that ostensibly evicted Judge Moore is found nowhere in the law at all. While the Constitution says the federal government may not make a law concerning religion, it does not anywhere say that Church and state must be separate or separated, nor does any other law make such a statement. The celebrated “wall of separation” is simply a personal opinion expressed by Thomas Jefferson in a private letter. It exists nowhere else. Thus, it does not even carry the interpretative weight of the Federalist Papers, the public discussion of Constitutional principles carried on by the Founding Fathers in the newspapers of the day. Judge Moore was removed from his position precisely because he did not disobey any known US law.

Public Lies Smash the Law
Now, watch the progression. Norma Jean McCorvey knowingly lied to her lawyers. Sandra Cano didn’t lie to her lawyers, rather her lawyers lied to both her and the courts. In Judge Moore’s case, it was no longer lawyers who were lying – now it was the judges. Other courts publicly lied about the content of the law itself. But in Terry Schiavo’s case, we have reached the end of the road. Now, the court isn’t even bothering to lie about the law. Now, the law simply isn’t relevant.
It does not matter what the law says concerning minimum standards for Terry’s care. It does not matter what the truth is. Indeed, in Terry’s case, everyone who tells the truth is forbidden to testify. When they do testify, their testimony is thrown out. The law is no longer admissible in court. The truth is no longer admissible in court. There is a reason for this.

Deicide is Suicide
In his book Breaking the Thread of Life, the eminent moral theologian Robert Barry, O.P., demonstrated that pagan societies have always had enormous difficulty respecting human life. Pagans would commit suicide at the slightest provocation, whether to escape shame, pain and suffering, or to promote certain kinds of community values. From the Greek habit of keeping stores of poison available for popular use to the Japanese practice of hari kari, where ever personal suicide was accepted, assisted suicide and socially required suicide always co-existed. The widow had to be strangled, burned alive or buried alive with her husband’s corpse, for if she refused to die, she would be offending the community understanding of marriage. Wives would certainly suffer without their husband, and suffering was evil, so it were best the wives were put out of their misery immediately, even if they were not yet miserable.

This attitude, taken to its logical extreme, permitted human death for any reason or for no reason at all. As Rev. Barry points out, Russian roulette is ancient. In Thrace, a group of boys would hang a noose on a tree with a stone beneath it and draw lots. Whoever drew the short lot picked up a scythe, put his head in the noose and allowed the stone to be kicked out from underneath. He had to cut the rope with the scythe or die, as his friends watched in amusement at his frantic writhings, walking away merrily no matter what the outcome. Human life existed to be enjoyed, and if you did not enjoy your life, others would enjoy your life, and its ending, at your expense. Human life was nothing special.

The influence of Christian thought radically changed this idea. Where Christianity reigned, suicide disappeared. Prior to the Incarnation, it was not uncommon to find entire towns commit suicide on the approach of an armed enemy or in response to the ravages of pestilence and famine. After the Incarnation, a new idea became embedded in western society – suffering might actually be ennobling. It might actually contribute to the honor of the individual, it might have worth. The value of individual life infinitely elevated.

Post-Christian society has not only returned to the pagan notion of human life as valueless, it has actually degraded it more thoroughly. Pre-Christian pagans at least insisted the woman be a widow before she was thrown screaming into the fire. Post-Christian pagans aren’t so punctilious about details. So the husband is alive, so what? All the more reason the wife should die. Instead of throwing the wife alive onto the funeral pyre, just throw her alive into any old fire. The thirst of dehydration lasts enormously longer than the kicks of the hanging man with his blunt scythe, and pagans can take that much more morbid enjoyment in the process as we cluck sympathetically about the sad situation.
As we remove the requirement that God be the basis for the legal system, we remove the requirement that truth be the basis for legal action. At this point, it would not matter if Terry miraculously gained the power of speech tomorrow. The principals plotting her death have become so enamored of their power that even her own spoken testimony would arguably be inadmissible before the court. They need only a doctor who would assert that her plea for life was just an artifact, a spasm of diaphragm muscles that really could not be held to mean anything, regardless of the words they seemed to form. As has already been demonstrated, one can find a doctor who will testify to anything given the right motivation.

Terry is being killed in order to establish a principle: God is dead. Whereas the pre-Christian pagans sought to establish law in harmony with divine principles, but could not do so because they did not fully know God, the post-Christian pagans actively seeks to divorce divine principles from the law because they have learned of God’s existence and they reject Him. As everyone knows, it is easier to destroy than it is to create. Destruction takes no imagination, no power, it takes merely determined blindness, an adamant refusal to accept the reality of anything except one’s own will. We see in this struggle three men – a lawyer, a husband and a judge – attempt to decree the death of a bride. We know God, the Lawgiver, the Bridegroom, the Judge, desires life for this bride. If Terry dies, it is because three human men will what three divine Persons do not.

Florida's Fast Food

“Thank you for coming to Burger Biggie’s. May I take your order?”

“Yes, I would like a Biggie Bun, large fries, and a water, please.”

“Water?”

“Yes, a water please.”

“Alright, hold on just a minute. Doctor!!”

“Doctor?”

“Yes, doctor. As you know, water is a medical treatment. I’m not a doctor and I can’t prescribe that for you. We need to get our doctor out here to assess you and determine if this is appropriate treatment.”

“But, I…”

“Hmmm, what’s all this? I was in the middle of filling an inside straight when you… oh.…. wait… we have another one, don’t we? Open your mouth please.”

“Look, I just wanted to get a meal.”

“Orderlies, hold this man down.”

“Wait, I … wahh, mmfff…mmfff”

“Ah, I see the patient has a sore throat. Has he had trouble swallowing?”

“Well, it’s just a cold, and I…”

“I can’t understand a thing this man is saying.”

“Well if your orderly would keep his towel out of my mouth…”

“I’m sorry, this man needs rehabilitation before he can safely be given a dangerous medical treatment like a Biggie Bun, fries or water. Where is his guardian?”

“My what?”

“You see? He can’t communicate effectively. Bill, you were taking his order. Has he been like this since he came in?”

“Well, he’s certainly disoriented. Seemed shocked when I called for you. He didn’t seem to realize he’s in Florida now. And when he drove up, I couldn’t really understand him through the speaker in the drive-through.”

“Did he swerve around a lot as he drove?”

“Well, doctor, you can see how far he is from the curb.”

“Exactly. Hmmm… well, this is just what I thought. My diagnosis is he’s in a persistent vegetative state. People like him really shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Bill, have you checked his wallet?”

“Let me look – hold him down tight, men… Well, it seems like he’s got several credit cards and about fifty dollars cash.”

“We’ll need a judge to verify that his assets should be transferred to us, but that won’t take long. Judge Drear is in the back office with a pair of aces. Did this man mention anything else?”

“I heard him say ‘it’s all done’, but his enunciation was so bad, it sounded like ‘Biggie Bun’”

“Clearly he wanted to die then.”

“Yes, I would say so.”

“Alright, tie him up and throw him in the back with the others.”

“Hey, doc, can I have the Visa this time? That last guy’s Mastercard was nearly maxed out.”

“Alright, Bill, but I get the cash. I think I can take Judge Drear on this hand.”

The Return of Child Labor

In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school.

— Helen Todd, "Why Children Work," McClure’s Magazine, April 1913

In one experiment in Milwaukee, for example, 8,000 youth...were asked if they would return full-time to school if they were paid about the same wages as they earned at work; only 16 said they would.

— David Tyack, Managers of Virtue (1982)

In an agrarian society, children are producers from almost the time they can walk. They work the farm side-by-side with their parents, thereby both putting food on the table and learning adult methods of thought and speech. Children in such a society are expected to pull their own weight and help provide for the family. In such a setting, the example of adult habits and interactions, specifically the habits of their parents, are constantly before them. Children in an agrarian society are socialized by adults. Prior to about 1820, essentially the whole world was agrarian except for England, which had only just begun industrialization. The agrarian model was how children had always been raised.

This expectation that children should be treated like adults because they had spent the first decade of their life working side-by-side with adults was so common as to merit no discussion at all. Precisely because they were treated as adults, children were expected to master adult subjects. Consider:

• At the age of nine, Samuel Johnson was, according to his own testimony, reading and enjoying Hamlet.
• At the age of ten, David Farragut, the U.S. Navy’s first admiral, was commissioned midshipman on the warship Essex while Benjamin Franklin was helping his father in the chandler business.
• At the age of eleven, the fatherless George Washington started school. Though judged an absolutely ordinary intellect by everyone who knew him, he was already as literate as today’s college graduates before he crossed the threshold. Calvin Graham had enrolled in the US armed forces and won a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in WW II combat in the Pacific. 
• At the age of twelve, John Paul Jones began working at sea as a cabin boy, while twelve-year old Farragut – with two more years of experience at sea under his belt – was already in command of a prize ship captured during a fierce battle in which he actively participated. At this age, Thomas Edison, judged feebleminded by the school, was working on a train, and had started his own newspaper using cast-off type from a printer. Before his thirteenth birthday, his newspaper had five hundred subscribers. Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed to his brother, James, the printer. He was also reading Bunyan, Burton, Mather, Defoe, Plutarch, and works of “polemic divinity” or what we would today call Christian apologetics. Andrew Carnegie was a bobbin boy in a textile factory, and a delivery boy a year later. Abraham Cowley was taking infinite delight in Spenser’s epic poem, The Fairy Queene. In colonial Mexico, young girls were able to marry by age twelve.
• By thirteen or fourteen, Southern women in colonial America could marry.
• At the age of fifteen, Farragut was hunting pirates in the Mediterranean.
• Between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, many young men and women in America were getting married. Compare this to ancient Rome, where a fourteen-year old was given his sword and shield and could legally take a wife.
• At the age of seventeen, George Washington was Virginia’s surveyor general.
• At the age of nineteen, Lafayette was a major general in the French army and a member of George Washington’s general staff.
• At the age of twenty, Alexander Hamilton was leading the retreat from New York. By this age, roughly half of the colonial population was married. At the age of twenty-one, Aaron Burr and Light Horse Harry Lee were leading troops into battle.

One might argue that since adult life expectancy was only about forty-five to fifty years, children in pre-industrial society had to grow up fast. Indeed, this is true. But given that children had grown up this way throughout the entirety of human history, save for the last one hundred years, it might be more accurate to say that industrialization forces children to grow up slowly.

Prior to the advent of “professional” education, agrarian America had an essentially one hundred percent literacy rate, as Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed. The adult was prized for his sound judgement, not his technical skills. Samuel Pepys, president of the Royal Society, the most prestigious intellectual body in Europe, and Secretary of the Admiralty, only learned how to multiply and divide after he assumed the latter office. As the British knew, skill at math is pleasant but not a prerequisite for sound judgement.

Washington, Franklin, Edison, Carnegie, Farragut – their childhoods were not exceptions to the rule. Their lives are examples of the rule that had existed for all of human history. They were doing neither more nor less than any other boy their age had ever done. By the age of twelve, boys were expected to be doing adult work in every aspect of their lives: reading, writing, working – it was all the same. There was no such thing as adolescence because these gentlemen and their colleagues had, by the age of twelve, already entered into manhood. They did this through apprenticeships.

Today, biologists tell us that brain development in adolescents is enormously more complex than we first imagined. Due to the adolescent surge of hormones, the teenage brain is subject to fundamental structural changes that affect how teens think and behave. Their brain is changing.

In an agrarian society, teens living through this extremely malleable period are already in an apprenticeship. They live in the midst of adult supervision and guidance. They perform concrete tasks with concrete rewards. The shopkeeper or farmer to whom they are apprenticed models adult standards in his daily life for the impressionable adolescent, and continues to require of his charge high standards of behavior and a high work ethic.

The young man whose pubescent brain begins to undergo enormous change already has a solid foundation of prior adult work experience and habit. He also has a mentor to emulate. These steady him as his biology catches up with his lived experience. The ever-present adult mentors keep the young man in line and on track while his hands continue the work they have always done and his brain becomes accustomed to seeing the world through the newly-formed eyes of an adult. The apprenticeship system both contained and trained young men as they learned to become what they already were – men.

At first, when agrarian society began to move towards industrialization, the agrarian model of apprenticing youth attempted to follow. Children who had worked in the shop and the fields now began to work in the mines and the factories. But experience soon demonstrated problems with this solution. While the farm had many dangers for an unwary child, the mine and the factory had more. Besides, factory work required obedient workers, a caste system in which the men on the floor obeyed a foreman without question. Yankee farmers abhorred caste systems. They had to be broken to obey the new culture.

In order to break a man, you must break his family. In order to break the family, the members must first be physically separated from one another. Agitation for child labor laws began. Children had to be removed from the workplace for their own safety. These laws required the complete segregation of adults and youth, with the youth being thrown entirely out of work. To answer the problem of newly idled youth, compulsory mass schools were created. Between 1870 and 1920, America followed the European example as every state in the Union passed compulsory schooling laws. Industrialization had already begun to tear at the agrarian model of youth education, but with the advent of mass schooling, the last traces of the agrarian system were wiped out.

Now young men were no longer under the personal tutelage of adult mentors, rather, they were grouped en masse with dozens of other young men going through exactly the same unsettling changes they themselves experienced. Whereas the number of adults to apprentices in a trade shop would generally be roughly comparable, or might in certain situations even provide more than one adult per apprentice, this was most certainly untrue of the school. As a result, the culture young people lived in was no longer controlled by the biologically stable adults, it was controlled by biologically unstable young people. This is the mass school environment.

Worse, the young man in the mass school environment no longer had a fixed concrete purpose in his work. It is often noted that young people are not good at abstractions. The agrarian society remedied that by making sure the apprentice dealt in concrete things; concrete work recompensed with cash payment for the adult work done, payment that fed the family. The twelve-year old knew his worth because the family needed his income. Indeed, in an agrarian society, women and children often generated about half of a family’s income.

In the new mass school system, not only was the income the youth formerly generated now lost, the young man was forced to abstract his formerly concrete life during precisely the time he was least able to manage it. What he was doing in school today would pay off at some nebulous, unknown future date, according to persons unnamed. The young man did not know he was useful. Instead he knew he was not useful, and he would not be useful for at least some unspecified period of time. This culture plays to weakness, not strength. It tears the heart out of a young man.

Now, let us note two things. First, the system of compulsory mass schooling is but a century old. It has not worked at all well for at least half its history, and it is proving incapable of reform. Second, America is now a post-industrial society. The economy has over five times more information and service jobs than it does manufacturing and construction jobs. The workplace is no longer dangerous.

Taken together, these two facts indicate a change should be considered. The child labor laws of the late 1800’s ostensibly protected the youth from the ravages of the factory. But the economic landscape has changed; the rationale no longer applies. The workplace no longer represents a life-threatening danger. Likewise, commentators regularly point out that today’s adolescents feel adrift, left out, purposeless. We can say many things about twelve-year olds like Carnegie, Franklin, and Farragut, but we cannot say they were purposeless.

We have millenia of data to demonstrate that the agrarian model of apprenticeship transforms children into stable adults. An information society can implement that model today. At this point, America has literally no reason not to return to the agrarian model of child-rearing. Mass schooling doesn’t work and has never been successfully reformed. The child labor laws are anachronistic. Why do we retain either?

This essay constitutes part of the forth-coming book, Deception: Catholic Education in America. It is scheduled for release in August, 2005 from Bridegroom Press.

An Evolving Discussion

The recent column on the way evolution takes over theological language created quite a furor. Not since I pointed out the problems with Islamic sharia have I seen such heated replies. The objections were interesting, if only because they so completely missed the point.

Objection 1: How dare you attack the fact of evolution! You are just a creationist religious nut!
Reply: As I pointed out, I find both creationism and evolutionism very silly and highly amusing. While evolution can certainly affect the size of a finch’s beak, there is little evidence it does anything beyond that. No one has seen a macro-sized creature evolve from one species into another in the lab, no matter how many years they’ve worked at it. Even today, fruit flies are still fruit flies and have never become anything else. No scientists has observed evolution create new species, only variations within a species. Although it may well be correct, it has not yet been proven, it is not a fact. Sorry, but the scientific method requires the alleged change to be observed. It hasn’t been. It has just been hypothesized.

Saying this does not make me a creationist. I am not. Scripture is entirely about man’s relationship to God, thus it says nothing about dinosaurs. Creationists can't use Scripture to explain the presence of large, reptilian bones in the ground, and they should stop trying. Similarly, evolutionists, can't use science to explain the existence of human persons, since “person” is a theological term.
The argument between Luther and Voltaire was absurd from its beginning, and the creationism versus evolutionism argument is just a variation on the theme. It doesn’t matter who wins an argument when both sides are wrong.

Objection 2: Your supposed etymology of the word “person” is wrong. It is not a Christian or a theological term, it was used before Christianity ever took it over.

Reply: The modern English word person arose when modern English did, in about the16th century, in the middle of a Christian millennium. If you are talking about derivation, the word person is derived from (take your pick of theories here): (a) the Etruscan term phersu, meaning the image of a masked dancer, (b) the Greek prosopon, meaning the mask an actor wears or (c) the Latin persona meaning the role a stage actor took. Which is correct hardly matters. In each instance, the term refers to the part (role) played or the mask worn, not the substance of the actor. Even Roman law usage follows this understanding.

Put another way, using the word person in reference to the substance of a person, instead of just the mask, role or act a person put on, is decidedly Christian. The idea that the person is a substance is due entirely to Christian theology, and this theological understanding was held wherever Christianity dominated human culture from the second century to the time of Descartes, Locke and Hume at least. That is, the theological meaning of person encompassed Europe and good chunks of Asia for over a millenia. It entirely drove out the pagan notion.

Objection 3: Not true! The legal definition of “person” is not theological.

Reply: Well, it isn’t now. The English system of law always recognized only human beings as persons. Corporations were at best “artificial persons,” i.e., corporations had no divinely ordained rights because they had no relationship with the divine. They were purely human inventions. Most of America’s Founding Fathers hated corporations, because they had such enormous control in pre-Revolutionary America. But, with the rise of industrialization, railroad lawyers finally managed to accomplish in American courts what the evolutionists are now trying to accomplish in American culture.

Due to the facts of history, American courts consistently refused to award corporations personhood. As Thom Hartmann demonstrates in his book, Unequal Protection: the Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights (Rodale Books, 2002), the railroads got around this by paying off a court reporter. The reporter deliberately lied in his summary of the 1886 Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad. Though that decision said nothing about corporate personhood, the court reporter wrote a summary of the opinion which said in part, ““The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment…which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Harvard graduate and court reporter Davis (who had close ties with railroad industry) knew full well that lawyers often depend more on case summaries than the case law itself. Based on a pre-trail comment by the judge, that summary accomplished the job. It was good enough. Judges and lawyers used the summary to argue that corporations were real persons, pretending this was settled case law. No public discussion or decision needed to be made. It is an interesting coincidence that this “personhood by judicial fiat” entered the law at the same time Darwinian (that is, evolutionary) eugenics was all the rage in Europe and America.

Objection 4: You can’t know the evolutionists actually intend to take over the meaning of theological words.

Reply: Only two possibilities obtain – evolutionists are incredibly lazy and stupid or they are intentional liars. Consider the discussion of evolution in the “Intro to Evolutionary Biology” FAQ at www.talk.origins.org. for example, a website that has won three science awards. The essay begins by putting words like “higher” and “lower” in parentheses, to make clear to the reader that these words are not correct when used in reference to evolution. So far, so good.

But, within a few paragraphs, the quote marks suddenly disappear. The author begins describing bats as selfish and altruistic without any quote marks to indicate his mis-use of the words. He realizes he has to explain himself, so he writes the following amazing statement:

“The words selfish and altruistic have connotations in everyday use that biologists do not intend. Selfish simply means behaving in such a way that one's own inclusive fitness is maximized; altruistic means behaving in such a way that another's fitness is increased at the expense of ones' own. Use of the words selfish and altruistic is not meant to imply that organisms consciously understand their motives.”

Let’s count the errors. First, it isn’t the connotations that are the trouble, it is the denotations – that is, the definitions – that hobble the biologist, as any dictionary will show. But, to keep you from going to the dictionary, he quickly provides his own new definitions. And, to further quiet your questioning mind, he ends with a disclaimer saying the words he is using are completely inappropriate.

Now, if you do not intend people to think organisms have consciousness, why intentionally use words that explicitly say they do? Aren’t there enough words in the English language, the largest language in the world, to do the job you want? Are evolutionists incapable of understanding how antonyms work? Can’t they figure out how to open a thesaurus (hint: put the shovel away, it isn’t a dinosaur). And, remember, he intentionally used antonyms to his real meaning but didn’t put them in quotes – he just used them straight out, as if they really applied. If instructors with these habits aren’t lazy idiots, then they are clearly intentional liars. Choose whichever conclusion you find more charitable.

Objection 5: Nonsense! Your entire argument is that use of a metaphor (anthropomorphism) negates an entire argument.

Reply: Read a little more closely. Note what the evolutionist on talk.origins did. He did not just use the metaphor and stop there (which might have been defensible, although that is arguable). Rather, he used the metaphor, remarked that the metaphor was the opposite of his intended meaning, and then he redefined the words he used in the metaphor so it wasn’t a metaphor anymore.

By redefining the words to strip out all references to purpose, references which were integral to the original meaning of the word, he isn’t using a metaphor. We think it’s a metaphor because we can’t get the original definitions out of our heads, but it isn’t. He redefined the words. Why do that, unless you intend your hearers to make this error? Why do that, unless you want to make an absurd theory palatable by dressing it up in what is now, through the new fact of the redefinition, nothing but a false connotation?

As the Marines say, “Once is bad luck, twice is coincidence, but three times? That’s enemy action.” Supporters of evolution have been doing this for decades. This is double plus un-good.

Objective 6: But biologists do not deny the existence of individual organisms (including humans), nor do they deny the existence of perception, emotions, language, the mental concept "table," or any other part of human experience!

Reply: And therein lies the inconsistency. If the component parts of the universe have no purpose associated with them, then how can purpose suddenly appear in the universe? If I said I knew my biological parents were blood type O, but I knew I was AB, a biologist would shake his head. Type O is recessive – it is the absence of certain proteins on the blood cell. Type AB is the presence of those proteins. You can’t get presence from absence. Two type O’s can only beget a type O.

What is true for the expression of genes is also true for the expression of purpose. Biologists cannot deny in DNA what they admit in the person who embodies it.

Ultimately, the theory of evolution has a problem, a problem it cannot overcome. It doesn’t make sense. It describes a world without purpose, and no one – not even the evolutionists – can consistently envision such a world. A world without purpose is so alien to human thought that even those who claim to espouse the idea find themselves returning again and again to words that speak of purpose in order to explain it. Though they hate doing it, though they try mightily to avoid it, they can’t help it. There is nowhere else to go.

Even redefining words in order to strip them of purpose does not entirely do the trick. Like the little red quark that keeps blinking in our mind’s eye long after we have told ourselves that a quark’s “color” is a figure of speech, a calculating device and nothing more, so the words evolutionists attempt to redefine – words like selfish and altruistic, higher and lower, good and bad - keep whispering into our ear. “Purpose,” they whisper, “It all has purpose.”

Evolving Lies

As even disinterested observers admit, any theory that has to account for both Giganotosaurus and Genesis is going to require nuance. Unfortunately, the people involved in the evolution-creationism debate tend to lack the quality to a startling degree. As a result, the evolution-creation debate is extremely silly and wildly amusing. But, that having been said, one side has waged a dirty fight, and it is time that we who watch the struggle with popcorn in hand insisted on fairness all around.

Have you heard of The Selfish Gene? It is Exhibit A in the gallery. The problem lies precisely in the title of Richard Dawkins’ book, and I use the verb “lies” most deliberately. You see, Dawkins gets in an illegal kidney punch on the creationists before you even open the book.

He isn’t alone. When we read through the evolutionist arguments, we hear constantly of “the evolutionary imperative to preserve the individual” or “self preservation is the first law of nature." We hear about good genes, bad genes, junk genes, advanced species, less advanced species. There is only one thing they don’t mention. This whole line of conversation is a lie.

Every time a supporter of evolution speaks this way, he is explicitly denying the evolutionary theory he pretends to support. But how can this be? Dawkins seems quite the supporter of evolution.

He is. And that’s the problem.

You see, Dawkins, Gould, et. al., are quite willing to punch the daylights out of a creationist and knock him to the mat, but they don’t fight clean. They simply refuse to stay in their own corner of the English vocabulary while the referee is giving the count. Let me explain.

Take the word “good”. Something can only be good if it has a teleology, a purpose. That is, something is good only insofar as it is a necessary component towards achieving a good, as opposed to a bad, end. But here’s the kicker. In order to have a purpose, there must first be an intellect and a will. That is, you must be a person. Only a person can have a purpose. Tables don’t have a purpose. They don’t think, “I suppose I will support the dishes for breakfast today.” Tables just are. “Good” is a value judgement persons use when they consider the use of an object in reference to the purpose they have in mind. The words “good” and “bad” have no meaning apart from persons.

Now, there’s a debased word: “person.” What is a person? The word “person” is a strictly theological term, developed in the second century to describe the three Persons of the Trinity. There is one God, but three Divine Persons. The three Persons of the Trinity are distinguished only by their divine relations. Human persons are in the divine image and likeness. A human person is a created entity that is called into a relationship with the Divine Persons of the Trinity by the Trinity Himself. We humans are persons only because we are called to participate in communion with the Original Three Persons.

This is very important. From the creationist’s point of view, if God didn’t call us into relationship with Himself, we would be animals, not persons. Because God is Himself, because He calls us, we become ourselves, persons.

So Dawkins cheats when he uses the word “selfish.” "Self" can only be distinguished through personhood. In a room filled with inanimate objects, none of the objects think, so none of the objects have a "self-ness." It is only persons who make the distinction between "self" and "other." This is precisely because we, as human persons, are defined only by our relationship to the Three Divine Persons. Divinity is wholly “other” compared to my puny “self.” That’s how I know my self exists – I ain’t Him, so I must be me. The logic is impeccable.

The World According to Evolution

But, the whole point of evolutionary theory is to explicitly deny the need for persons at all, human or divine. Thus, evolution necessarily and specifically must deny the idea of "self." Evolutionary theory teaches one foundational truth: everything depends on the random interaction of chemicals, interactions completely unaffected by the presence or absence of personhood, self-ness or anything like it. Evolution insists on this foundation, in fact.

But, without persons, evolution has no teleology, no purpose. Thus, atheistic evolutionary theory specifically denies that evolution is either good or bad. According to the theory, evolution simply is. It isn’t headed for an endpoint. It doesn’t have a purpose. Evolution doesn't select good traits or bad traits. It is a mindless process. It can't select. It just is.

Even if it could select, there would be nothing to select. There are no good or bad traits. There are traits that survive and traits that do not survive. Just because a trait survives does not make it good - the trait may only be useful in a highly specialized niche which is swiftly disappearing, and the species with the trait will therefore disappear as the environment changes. The same is true for a trait that does not survive. Complexity only means the trait is probably newer, but newer is not better, nor is older worse. Everything is just a random swirl of chemicals, no meaning, no purpose, no end, no "higher forms" versus "lower forms" of life. Even life is not better or worse than being an inanimate object. Everything just is.

The Lab Test for Sin

So, when evolutionists use the word “imperative” in regards to evolution, they are lying. As Merriam Webster points out, the word “imperative” is drawn from the Latin imperare, "to command." It means: “of, relating to, or constituting the grammatical mood that expresses the will to influence the behavior of another; expressive of a command, entreaty, or exhortation; having power to restrain, control, and direct; not to be avoided or evaded : NECESSARY [an imperative duty].”

“Will,” “influence,” “entreaty,” “restrain”… all of these words require purpose, each requires an intellect and a will. A tree doesn’t command. A fungus does restrain. Bacteria are agents of influenza, not influence.

Evolutionists know all this, but they insist on using language that pretends otherwise.

When evolutionists start talking about "self," "selfishness," “good,” “bad,” or anything remotely touching on personhood, they have – by that fact - stopped using the language of evolution. Poorly-schooled students of evolutionary theory may think they are still discussing evolution, but evolutionary theory specifically denies that they are. The students have anthropomorphized the discussion, pretended a will and intellect are present when none are, they have brought in a factor that is completely extraneous, absolutely irrelevant, to the evolutionary discussion. They are, in short, discussing theology, not science.

But evolutionists don’t just pull this trick when discussing DNA. They do the same things when discussing animals. They claim, for instance, that animals make and use tools. But the words “make” and “tool” imply purpose. Only persons have purposes. Certainly we can observe that an animal acts in a specific way, but that does not prove the animal has intentionality. Vines grow toward the sun. Do they intend to grow towards the sun? No. Even if they did, there is no way to prove it scientifically.

Funhouse Mirrors

Science cannot test for intentionality. If science could test for intentionality, then it could test for that subset of intentionality known as disordered intentionality.

Put another way, if you can scientifically prove that apes act intentionally, then you can scientifically prove apes can sin. In fact, if you can prove intentionality, you can prove apes do sin. If you can prove it for apes, you can prove it for men.

I've heard science make a lot of claims, but I've never heard a scientist claim he could demonstrate through lab technique what is a sin and what is not. Yet this is precisely the claim that scientists make when they claim that apes, dolphins, orangutans, tangerines, pick your favorite animate or inanimate object, make and use tools. They are claiming that they can test for intentionality, for sin.

They see an ape take an action - it throws a stick. They anthropomorphize that action (which is not science), saying "Wow, we throw sticks too!" Then they claim that science has demonstrated something when, in fact, the scientist has really only observed and anthropomorphized. Just because a scientist does something doesn't make it science.

In fact, we could extend their reasoning to show the fallacy. I fall down. So do apes. So do unbalanced bricks. Thus, all three must be persons.

See how easy it is? I simply have to begin the observation with the assumption that the things I am comparing myself to possess an intellectual state like mine. By the very fact that anyone assumes this kind of similarity, this kind of connection between the actions of bricks, apes and man, those actions are anthropomorphized. Thus, the scientist assumes what he set out to prove: apes are persons.

"But wait," says the scientist, "I have further argument!"

"Oh?" I reply, "And what might that be?"

"Apes, bricks and persons are all made out of the same subatomic particles! See, this proves definitively that all three are persons!"

Well, no, it doesn't. But this is essentially the DNA argument. So we share much of the same DNA (and all of the same subatomic particles) with apes. So what? Personhood is a function of God's divine call to us to share intimate communion with Him. That call is completely independent of whether or not we have a particular somatic structure or particular material components. Personhood is a gift from God, it is not a consequence of the particular arrangement of components in material reality. Personhood is bestowed from above, it does not bubble up from below.

Why do they think apes are persons? Because they do bad things? So do virii and tsunamis. Oh, so apes have a brain? Very nice - so does an ant. Oh, so it's a rather complex brain? Yes, so is that of a human corpse. So it's a rather complex living brain? Yes, I suppose it is. And?

And... And... AND... So what?

Brains are tools for the intellect. The intellect is an aspect of the immortal spiritual soul. The brain is not itself the intellect, it is the mediating tool the intellect makes use of in human beings to express itself. Strictly speaking, the brain is not necessary for the possession or expression of a person’s intellect.

God is Three Persons. God is also anencephalic, but He seems to get on just fine without a brain or even a skull to house it in. So do the angels. So do we. If you don't think so, talk to the saints in heaven. God is Three Persons. He has no DNA. Angels are persons, they have intellect and will. They have no DNA. Human beings in heaven are persons, and they are totally separated from their DNA. Personhood, intellect, will, these things are from God. God gives us an intellect and a will so we can respond to His call to enter relationship with Him. Personhood, intellect, will, this is a theology discussion, not a science discussion.

The Language of Kudzu

So why do smart people keep making extraordinarily stupid mistakes of language? The first question is obvious: are these mistakes? Evolutionists are not stupid. They know perfectly well they are mis-using the language. In their own texts, they even go out of their way to point out that their own use of these theological terms is not correct. They put the theological words in quotes, they warn the reader that evolution really doesn’t have intentionality, nor does anything that is subject to evolution (including us?). They knowingly, routinely encroach on theological discourse; they knowingly, routinely violate the very science they claim to want to explain.

The scientist might argue that he is simply using the theological word in a new, narrowly scientific technical sense. Alright. It is certainly the case that words change in meaning over time. But, the fact is, due to cultural usages, words have meanings that are independent of what anyone might want them to mean.

Take, for instance, the way particle physics has taken over the use of the word "color" for quarks. “Color” in the macro universe refers to specific wavelengths of light. Quarks are not photons, so speaking of a quark’s “color” has no relevance or reference to color as a child with a box of crayons knows color. Intellectually, everyone who has ever read an article about quarks knows this.

But the word "color" is so culturally laden that any use of it, even in a context in which the original definition clearly has no application, causes the person encountering the word to react in a certain way. When we see the word “color” next to a quark, we inevitably picture the quark as a pinhead speck of a specific color - red or blue or green - even though we know intellectually that this is perfectly silly. Quarks don’t emit photons, they don’t have color in a macro-sense.

Now, in physics, this double meaning of “color” is not a problem because mentally visualizing a red quark doesn't interfere with the quark concept. None of the calculations involved, none of the discussions concerning the particle, touch on anything remotely close to the original meaning of the word "color." The habit of the mind to visualize the color is slightly annoying, but nothing more.

But with evolutionary theory, it is different. Evolutionary theory intentionally and repeatedly mis-uses theological terms, terms relating to the person. It specifically attempts to take over the use of the theological vocabulary critical to expressing the very ideas it attacks. It intends to destroy the ability to speak of divinity or personhood at all. Evolution supporters simply co-opt all the words we use to discuss theological concepts, and then they implicitly define those words in ways which divorce them completely from the original theological concepts they were meant to express. And they do this despite the fact that the discipline itself denies it needs those terms.

Like kudzu, the foreign vine in the Southern United States that covers over and destroys everything it touches, evolutionary theory has invaded the English language and stripped it of all theological meaning.

Now, I don’t mind hearing a good discussion of evolution. But I strenuously object to the intentional destruction of the English language. If you want to discuss evolution, go right ahead. But stop taking and using words that don't belong to the lexicon of evolution.

In evolution, things happen, neither good nor bad, just things. There is no self. There are just chemicals. That's it. Talk about evolution correctly or don’t talk about it. Those who don't stick to correct language, go crazy. Worse, they drag the rest of us with them. I, for one, don’t want to go.