Back in the day, everyone had servants. The rich employed the middle class as servants, the middle class employed the impoverished as servants. Only the poorest of the poor would not themselves have servants, and even then, they occasionally employed each other in critical tasks such as wet-nursing.
The best servant was the manservant - the gentleman's gentleman.
His job was to know the wishes of his master before his master knew them. Clothes were laid out, baths were drawn, meals prepared before any request need be made.
He knew where all the skeletons were buried, but, being the soul of discretion, never revealed any family secrets to anyone outside of the family, nor even to those within the family, if that level of secrecy be required. Such is the legendary manservant of England.
Now, in order to accomplish these deeds, he needed to know his master perfectly, down to the merest whim. He needed to be able to predict his master's next move without fail. In short, the very best manservants were often smarter, more empathic, more discerning then the men they served. This is the dichotomy portrayed most perfectly in Wooster and Jeeves but also in myriad other art forms of a century long gone to us.
Gentleman's Gentleman 2.0
Why do I bring this up?
Well, the Gentleman's Gentleman has expanded his role. In centuries past, he could be afforded by only the richest of men. Very few men were good enough to fill the role, and they served only the cream of society. Today, everyone wants the job. Moreover, they are willing to serve the absolute lowest common denominator of economic classes.
I refer, of course, to Target. Target, Walmart, Kmart and similar enterprises are trying to create an advertising model based on your buying habits, an advertising model so perfect that they know you are pregnant or ill before you do. They lay out for you the products you will need in your upcoming travail before you are even fully aware that your travail is upcoming.
Now, we kick and moan about this as an "invasion of privacy." And it is, no question of it. But ultimately, we don't mind it because they are molding themselves into being our butlers. And we like having butlers. That's the whole point of the restaurant industry, right?
We create the societies we like to have serve us.
But we haven't fully realized what it is we want.
To Serve Mankind
For instance, take insurance companies. Just recently I had a discussion with another college professor about insurance companies. She was aghast and agog at the possibility that insurance companies might get a hold of her genome, sequence it, and drop her because she has some as yet unknown genetic problem.
I pointed out that, given her own attitudes towards genetic testing, they could hardly be expected to do otherwise. She was shocked by my response.
"Kate," said I, "you fully support genetic testing for Down's syndrome and you fully support aborting any fetus that tests positive for it."
"Well of course!" she replied, "Not all parents have the emotional or financial resources to care for such children. It's better for everyone if the fetus is simply aborted."
"Quite," I replied. "And that's exactly what our insurance companies are telling us. Not all companies have the emotional or financial resources to care for us as our genes start to express. They don't want to have to change their business model to accommodate us anymore than our exemplary parents want to change their lifestyles to accommodate a Down's syndrome child. So, they abort us from their policies. You can hardly fault them for that."
"But the two situations are not the same!" she answered.
"You are quite right," I agreed. "One is built on a parent-child bond, the other is a mere business contract. If parents can genetically profile their own children and kill whichever children turn out to be beyond the parents' resources, then certainly you would agree that business owners - who have much less duty towards their customers than a parent has towards his child - have at least the same right not only to genetically profile us but also to kill off any relationship that they judge is beyond their resources."
"We expect businesses to be butlers. We expect from them the same level of care that parents and children give towards each other. We intensely dislike it when businesses don't provide it. Certainly, if we expect that level of support, we must expect that level of personal inspection. We can also expect to be aborted. Any business or government capable enough to care for us is within their rights to abort us."
She insisted that the situations were different, but suddenly remembered a previous engagement and hurried off.
In short, she had not the resources to handle the conversation, so she aborted it.
Yes.
Quite.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Monday, June 18, 2012
Yoga and Shopping: The Ruin of Women
Women and Yogasms
Women enjoy yoga, and yoga is sexually titillating. The sex scandals involving yoga instructors are so well-known that the New York Times wrote a feature article saying exactly that: "Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise There."
Women and Shopping
Shopping is likewise very problematic. Women who stumble on a sale experience the same rush of endorphins they would otherwise get through sexual stimulation. Really. I'm not making this up.
researchers hooked their subjects up to eye-tracking devices that showed them pornographic pictures, and then clippings from sale promotions, and the levels of excitement were the same! At least one New Yorker wasn't surprised, she told the paper that bargain shopping is "just like sex. Sales feel great for a moment, then you wake up the next morning, see the bill, say, 'What the hell did I just do?'" Men, you are one chocolate sale away from being replaced.In fact, the physiological reaction for women was identical whether they were looking at porn or a great sales coupon. Perhaps this explains why four in ten women would rather go shopping. From a physiological perspective, we would not be wrong to say that for women, shopping at a really good sale is the same as publicly masturbating.
If you find that comparison disgusting, I'm sorry, go talk to the physiologists.
I'm just telling you the facts about the endorphin rush: what women are actually doing, even if they don't realize it.
Men looking at porn, women looking at a sales circular: literally no difference.
Yoga and Shopping: The Horrific Results (And They Really Are Horrific)
What happens when women go shopping? Well, blood banks routinely demonstrate that about one-quarter of the husbands in America (especially those with economically dependent wives) are being cuckolded. A cuckold is a husband that cares for children he think are his, but are actually the result of his wife's fling with her boss or yoga instructor.
The blood bank study concerns just the children in families with serious family medical issues. The blood banks discovered the cuckolding because the families had to go to a blood bank and test for a possible transfusion for a family member. That test has no false positives, but can have lots of false negatives.
How does this work?
Let's just take the most common markers - ABO and Rh.
A, B and Rh are all dominant.
O is regressive.
A, B and Rh+ all indicate that certain proteins exist on the red blood cell's surface.
O and Rh- means those proteins aren't there.
So, if Dad is O and Mom is O, but the kid is A, B or AB, then that child clearly came from a different dad. He has proteins on his red blood cells that couldn't come from Mom or "Dad." So those proteins must have come from the mailman.
Same with Rh. If Dad is (O-) and Mom is (O-), but the kid is (O+), then daddy don't live at that house.
He's got proteins from somebody else.
But what if Dad is A, Mom is B or O, and the kid is O?
Well, we can't tell from just the blood test. Dad may actually be AO. And if Mom had a fling with a Type O man, you wouldn't be able to tell from the AB blood test. Same is true if the kid is AB. Now if Dad is A and Mom is O, the kid can't be AB without outside help, but A, B or O are all possible.
Same with Rh factor. If Mom is (Rh+), Mom can have a fling with ANYONE and the Rh factor wouldn't indicate it. 82% of the population is Rh(+).
So, using only the markers that indicate, without shadow of a doubt, that Dad is a cuckold, 28% of fathers in families with medically difficult situations are being cuckolded by their wives.
This chart shows the potential AB blood types you may inherit.
| Parent 1 | AB | AB | AB | AB | B | A | A | O | O | O | ||
| Parent 2 | AB | B | A | O | B | B | A | B | A | O | ||
| Possible blood type of child | ||||||||||||
| O | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||
| A | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
| B | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
| AB | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
When combined with the fact that up to 90% of divorces are begun by the wife, it gives you a whole new understanding of who is acting irresponsibly in marriage, doesn't it?
So, is the overuse of shopping and the pervasiveness of yoga causing the ruin of women?
Increasingly, researchers say yes, as young men women become hooked on arousal, sacrificing their schoolwork and relationships in the pursuit of getting a tech-based buzz.
Every compulsive gambler, alcoholic or drug addict will tell you that they want increasingly more of a game or drink or drug in order to get the same quality of buzz.
The consequences could be dramatic: The excessive use of video games yoga and online porn shopping in pursuit of the next thing is creating a generation of risk-averse guys sex-crazed women who are unable (and unwilling) to navigate the complexities and risks inherent to real-life relationships, school and employment.
Stories about this degeneration are rampant: In 2005, a worker and two shoppers were killed during a Black Friday sale at Walmart. In the same year, an old woman at a Florida Brandsmart was trampled.
... This new kind of human addictive arousal traps users into an expanded present hedonistic time zone. Past and future are distant and remote as the present moment expands to dominate everything. That present scene is totally dynamic, with images changing constantly.
...Young men Women -- who play video games go shopping and use porn yoga the most -- are being digitally neurally rewired in a totally new way that demands constant stimulation. And those delicate, developing brains are being catered to by video games yoga and porn shopping-on-demand, with a click of the mouse, in endless variety.
Such new brains are also totally out of sync in traditional school classes, which are analog, static and interactively passive. Academics are based on applying past lessons to future problems, on planning, on delaying gratifications, on work coming before play and on long-term goal-setting.
Less extreme cases of arousal addiction may go unnoticed or be diagnosed as an attention or mood disorder. But we are in a national, and perhaps global, Guy Girl Disaster Mode that needs to be noticed and solutions advanced to fix a totally novel phenomenon, which will only increase in intensity and breadth without the concerted efforts of educators, gamemakers shopping malls, parents, guys and gals.
It's time to press play and get started reversing these trends.
Now that the connections have been revealed, I expect everyone to get very, very concerned about about women, shopping and yoga. Fathers will warn their wives and daughters to stay away from really big sales (alright, they already do that). Priests will preach about the dangers of shopping and yoga. I know this article will be passed around all the Catholic sites, and the whole Catholic community will rise up to cluck and wring their hands over the ruin of women.
Yeah, right.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Woman's Work
Elizabeth Wurtzel, a woman writing for The Atlantic, argues that raising children is not work since no one will pay you to do it. Real feminism, according to her understanding, is to have employment that is equal in respect and pay to that of a man.
As I pointed out in previous posts, this conclusion makes sense.
Prior to the increases in hygiene and nutrition that occurred along with the industrial revolution, women had a very tough job. They had to conceive, carry, bear and raise children. Roughly 20% to 30% of their children would not survive the first year. In certain subpopulations, upwards of 75% would not survive long enough to get married themselves. Women had to bear enough children to compensate for those losses. And they only had about 12 years to get it done. That's how long, on average, a marriage lasted before either the father or the mother or both, were dead. So, if any children were to survive to adulthood, women had to be pregnant on a fairly regular basis.
If a crop of wheat failed, it meant everyone in the village would starve for a year.
If a crop of children failed, it meant the village disappeared.
Women's work mattered.
In 2012, a child is about 40 times more likely to survive to adulthood than it was in 1812.
That's an enormous increase in the efficiency of women's work. When production becomes more efficient, both the price and the value of the good drops.
It used to take enormous skill and luck to bring a crop of children to maturity, and able to enter their own marriages. It takes no skill to produce and raise them anymore. Children are no longer valuable.
So, the social value of women's work - raising children - is very much lower than it was in the past. Modern medicine, nutrition and production have made raising children among the lowest paying of occupations. If women want to remain valuable in the eyes of society, they have to switch from child-bearing and child-raising to a more difficult occupation.
Thus, the liberal fixation with "the war on women" has a real economic basis. Those who fixate on this sense that women's work is not valued as it used to be, that it can never again be valued as it was. The only way it will ever again be perceived as "hard work" is if we involuntarily return to a 75% loss rate before maturity.
And this explains the interest in keeping abortion legal. The economists attempted to increase the value of women's work by legalizing abortion. Abortion was legalized at the end of the post-war baby boom - when infant mortality rates had dropped to about 20 per thousand and the country was awash in kids. Too many kids. The cost of children had to be raised.
Abortion imposes an arbitrary 30% loss rate on children before birth. Put another way, legal abortion has returned our infant mortality rates to pre-industrial levels. Demographers do not point this out publicly. It belies the idea of our being "medically advanced." It's embarrassing.
It also hasn't worked. Women's work, the raising of children, is still too efficient. Survival rate of born children to maturity is still 40 times higher than it was two centuries ago. Attempts have been made to allow infanticide, but those haven't yet been successful. Given most people's squeamishness about murdering visible children, it is unlikely to have the necessary levels of success anytime soon.
On some level, Elizabeth Wurtzel and her friends recognize all of this. They insist there is another gambit, a better gambit, that women must employ: end participation in the "women's work" game entirely. They got out of the child-bearing business and they encourage other women to get out of the business as well. Women control the means of production, but too many women refuse to quit producing. From Wurtzel's point of view, women having children are traitors to their sex because their refusal to raise the clearing price of children by limiting supply is reducing the general value of "women's work" throughout society.
You see, even if Wurtzel's work has nothing to do with children, the very fact that so many women do want to have children encourages her employer to treat her as someone who is statistically likely to abandon her job in exchange for pregnancy. Men are statistically unlikely to do that, so men don't get profiled this way. Stay-at-home moms encourage employers to "profile" all women.
In order to get around this perception, there have been various attempts to divorce women from child-bearing and child-raising entirely. Free or low-cost child care, cradle-to-18 "schooling", "it takes a village" sloganeering, all kinds of methods have been used to break the mother-child bond, to get all the women into the public workforce, to get them out of the piece-work of bearing and raising children. If it were successful, this would allow the annual child crop to be undertaken entirely by a regulated industry or the government. This is the goal. This is ultimately why research into artificial wombs, artificial gametes, etc., is subsidized and encouraged.
But we don't have artificial wombs yet. Ultimately, employers are not wrong to profile. Some women really do need to leave the public workforce and produce children if the nation is to survive. Like the pre-industrial village, a nation without children disappears. The wage gap cannot be avoided.
But there is also irony here. While there is, indeed, a wage-gap, it only amounts to about 5 cents on the dollar. As Wurtz herself points out, women have already taken advantage of the efficiencies. 70% of women with children work. Fully employed mothers spend 86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms. How is that possible? How can a woman who spends 40 hours a week working spend "86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms"? Well, nowadays the children work too. They're at school thirty-five hours a week.
So, how much is raising children worth? Apparently, about five cents on the dollar. But there is another way to raise that price.
Wurtz, in her fixation on the corporate world, misses an option that many women have already figured out. Home-based businesses can be worth the time if the units produced are hand-crafted and high-demand. Artisan hand-crafted children, also known as homeschooled children, are becoming more popular precisely because they return value to "women's work." If Wurtz were a real feminist, she would promote homeschooling as a real alternative. If she were a real feminist.
As I pointed out in previous posts, this conclusion makes sense.
Prior to the increases in hygiene and nutrition that occurred along with the industrial revolution, women had a very tough job. They had to conceive, carry, bear and raise children. Roughly 20% to 30% of their children would not survive the first year. In certain subpopulations, upwards of 75% would not survive long enough to get married themselves. Women had to bear enough children to compensate for those losses. And they only had about 12 years to get it done. That's how long, on average, a marriage lasted before either the father or the mother or both, were dead. So, if any children were to survive to adulthood, women had to be pregnant on a fairly regular basis.
If a crop of wheat failed, it meant everyone in the village would starve for a year.
If a crop of children failed, it meant the village disappeared.
Women's work mattered.
In 2012, a child is about 40 times more likely to survive to adulthood than it was in 1812.
That's an enormous increase in the efficiency of women's work. When production becomes more efficient, both the price and the value of the good drops.
It used to take enormous skill and luck to bring a crop of children to maturity, and able to enter their own marriages. It takes no skill to produce and raise them anymore. Children are no longer valuable.
So, the social value of women's work - raising children - is very much lower than it was in the past. Modern medicine, nutrition and production have made raising children among the lowest paying of occupations. If women want to remain valuable in the eyes of society, they have to switch from child-bearing and child-raising to a more difficult occupation.
Thus, the liberal fixation with "the war on women" has a real economic basis. Those who fixate on this sense that women's work is not valued as it used to be, that it can never again be valued as it was. The only way it will ever again be perceived as "hard work" is if we involuntarily return to a 75% loss rate before maturity.
And this explains the interest in keeping abortion legal. The economists attempted to increase the value of women's work by legalizing abortion. Abortion was legalized at the end of the post-war baby boom - when infant mortality rates had dropped to about 20 per thousand and the country was awash in kids. Too many kids. The cost of children had to be raised.
Abortion imposes an arbitrary 30% loss rate on children before birth. Put another way, legal abortion has returned our infant mortality rates to pre-industrial levels. Demographers do not point this out publicly. It belies the idea of our being "medically advanced." It's embarrassing.
It also hasn't worked. Women's work, the raising of children, is still too efficient. Survival rate of born children to maturity is still 40 times higher than it was two centuries ago. Attempts have been made to allow infanticide, but those haven't yet been successful. Given most people's squeamishness about murdering visible children, it is unlikely to have the necessary levels of success anytime soon.
On some level, Elizabeth Wurtzel and her friends recognize all of this. They insist there is another gambit, a better gambit, that women must employ: end participation in the "women's work" game entirely. They got out of the child-bearing business and they encourage other women to get out of the business as well. Women control the means of production, but too many women refuse to quit producing. From Wurtzel's point of view, women having children are traitors to their sex because their refusal to raise the clearing price of children by limiting supply is reducing the general value of "women's work" throughout society.
You see, even if Wurtzel's work has nothing to do with children, the very fact that so many women do want to have children encourages her employer to treat her as someone who is statistically likely to abandon her job in exchange for pregnancy. Men are statistically unlikely to do that, so men don't get profiled this way. Stay-at-home moms encourage employers to "profile" all women.
In order to get around this perception, there have been various attempts to divorce women from child-bearing and child-raising entirely. Free or low-cost child care, cradle-to-18 "schooling", "it takes a village" sloganeering, all kinds of methods have been used to break the mother-child bond, to get all the women into the public workforce, to get them out of the piece-work of bearing and raising children. If it were successful, this would allow the annual child crop to be undertaken entirely by a regulated industry or the government. This is the goal. This is ultimately why research into artificial wombs, artificial gametes, etc., is subsidized and encouraged.
But we don't have artificial wombs yet. Ultimately, employers are not wrong to profile. Some women really do need to leave the public workforce and produce children if the nation is to survive. Like the pre-industrial village, a nation without children disappears. The wage gap cannot be avoided.
But there is also irony here. While there is, indeed, a wage-gap, it only amounts to about 5 cents on the dollar. As Wurtz herself points out, women have already taken advantage of the efficiencies. 70% of women with children work. Fully employed mothers spend 86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms. How is that possible? How can a woman who spends 40 hours a week working spend "86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms"? Well, nowadays the children work too. They're at school thirty-five hours a week.
So, how much is raising children worth? Apparently, about five cents on the dollar. But there is another way to raise that price.
Wurtz, in her fixation on the corporate world, misses an option that many women have already figured out. Home-based businesses can be worth the time if the units produced are hand-crafted and high-demand. Artisan hand-crafted children, also known as homeschooled children, are becoming more popular precisely because they return value to "women's work." If Wurtz were a real feminist, she would promote homeschooling as a real alternative. If she were a real feminist.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Immaturity, Thy Name Is Woman
Recently, a news story about men, video games and porn has been making the rounds.
Every time it is posted somewhere, everyone clucks with concern over the absolute fools that men are making of themselves.
Women, especially Catholic Women (tm), write despairing blogs about the immature male, especially the immature Catholic male. You know the one - he refuses to commit, to settle down, to pop the question, even to date whichever unhappy Catholic woman happens to be writing the blog that day.
It's all his fault. He's using porn, playing World of Warcraft, going to work, instead of paying attention to her. Damnably beastly of him.
The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the world-wide concern about the welfare of Catholic children.
You know the drill - sexual abuse by public school teachers, rabbis, atheists, fast food managers, swimming coaches, football coaches is largely ignored or considered one-off events: odd and unusual. But sexual abuse of Catholic children by priests!!! That's a consistent, continuing abuse that all people are always concerned about.
So, everyone is deeply concerned about immature men, immature Catholic men.
But why don't we get concerned about the way CATHOLIC WOMEN are harming themselves and society?
Let's take one example: divorce.
Women initiate divorce more often than men.
In fact, women initiate divorce over 60% of the time.
If both spouses are college-educated, women initiate divorce 90% of the time.
This is important.
Everyone knows that women and children are more likely to be poor.
No one knows that it is the women who deliberately impoverish their own children.
And why did women financially destroy their own lives and the lives of their children?
Well, these women wanted to find their identity!
It looks like that whole Teen Mom show could extend the age of female participants to about 50 without changing its emotional approach to life one whit.
You know, in ages past, we had a specific word to describe this approach to life: hysteria. "Hystera" is the Greek word for "uterus", the idea being that women are illogical because they let their wombs rule them rather than their rationality. Today, it is considered bad form to lodge such accusations against women. On the other hand, it is perfectly acceptable... nay... it is considered the height of hilarity to imply that a man was thinking with his little head instead of his big one.
Of course, putting it that way is considered crude.
The enlightened, educated way of reversing the stereotype is to ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so wrapped up in pornography and video games.
So, we ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so immature.
But we are no longer allowed to ask why women, especially Catholic women, are so immature.
But don't these questions deserve to be asked?
How can we stop the rampant immaturity, the hypergamic hysteria, among women that is on display in this divorce culture of ours? Why do we allow women to ruin modern society this way? How can we wean women off their mindless pursuit of "self expression" and "self-identity"?
Undoubtedly, men are avoiding commitment to these hordes of immature women for very good reason.
Maybe the problem isn't that men are immature, but that immature women flock around them, whining for a date, for a ring, for a husband ... and when they get it? They divorce the man, pick up the alimony paycheck, and go looking for their identity, which they apparently lost somewhere on the way to the altar.
Obviously, given these divorce statistics, we need to start a national conversation, a national movement to help women stop their narcissistic behaviours.
We have endless men's groups to wean men off of pornography.
Where are the women's groups that wean women off of divorce and their motivation for wanting a divorce?
Where is Narcissists Anonymous?
UPDATE:
I nearly forgot to add this little tidbit in.
Blood bank testing inadvertently shows that 28% of children don't have the Dad they think they do.
Gives you a whole new understanding of who is acting irresponsibly, doesn't it?
And that's just the children in families with serious family medical issues. The blood banks figured it out because the families had to go to a blood bank and test for a possible transfusion for a family member. What are the rates in other kinds of families?
You see, this was a blood bank study, and blood bank studies can be fooled.
Let's just take the most common markers - ABO and Rh.
A, B and Rh are all dominant.
O is regressive.
A, B and Rh+ all indicate that certain proteins exist on the red blood cell's surface.
O and Rh- means those proteins aren't there.
So, if Dad is O and Mom is O, but the kid is A, B or AB, then that child clearly came from a different dad.
He has proteins on his red blood cells that couldn't come from Mom or "Dad."
Same with Rh. If Dad is O- and Mom is O-, but the kid is O+, then daddy don't live at that house.
He's got proteins from somebody else.
But what if Dad is A, Mom is B or O, and the kid is O?
Well, we can't tell from just the blood test. Dad may actually be AO. And if Mom had a fling with a Type O man, you wouldn't be able to tell from the AB blood test.
Same with Rh - if Mom is Rh+, Mom can have a fling with ANYONE and the Rh factor wouldn't tell.
So, using only the markers that blood banks can say, without shadow of a doubt, that Dad is a cuckold, 28% of fathers are being cuckolded.
But you won't see an article wringing it's hands about female flings based on these facts.
Well, except for this one.
Every time it is posted somewhere, everyone clucks with concern over the absolute fools that men are making of themselves.
Women, especially Catholic Women (tm), write despairing blogs about the immature male, especially the immature Catholic male. You know the one - he refuses to commit, to settle down, to pop the question, even to date whichever unhappy Catholic woman happens to be writing the blog that day.
It's all his fault. He's using porn, playing World of Warcraft, going to work, instead of paying attention to her. Damnably beastly of him.
The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the world-wide concern about the welfare of Catholic children.
You know the drill - sexual abuse by public school teachers, rabbis, atheists, fast food managers, swimming coaches, football coaches is largely ignored or considered one-off events: odd and unusual. But sexual abuse of Catholic children by priests!!! That's a consistent, continuing abuse that all people are always concerned about.
So, everyone is deeply concerned about immature men, immature Catholic men.
But why don't we get concerned about the way CATHOLIC WOMEN are harming themselves and society?
Let's take one example: divorce.
Women initiate divorce more often than men.
In fact, women initiate divorce over 60% of the time.
If both spouses are college-educated, women initiate divorce 90% of the time.
"The majority of midlife divorces are initiated by women. Don't believe it? In the AARP survey, 66 percent of women reported that they asked for the divorce, compared with 41 percent of men. And men more often than women were caught off-guard by their divorce.."
So, why are women ruining their own lives and the lives of their husbands and children? After all, women who divorce are much more likely to be single head of households, and single households are largely impoverished.
"The perceived benefits of divorce differ by gender. Women were far more likely than men to say that having their own self-identity was a top reward.... 43 percent of women said they emerged from the split against remarriage. Only 33 percent of men said they wouldn't remarry."
This is important.
Everyone knows that women and children are more likely to be poor.
No one knows that it is the women who deliberately impoverish their own children.
And why did women financially destroy their own lives and the lives of their children?
Well, these women wanted to find their identity!
It looks like that whole Teen Mom show could extend the age of female participants to about 50 without changing its emotional approach to life one whit.
You know, in ages past, we had a specific word to describe this approach to life: hysteria. "Hystera" is the Greek word for "uterus", the idea being that women are illogical because they let their wombs rule them rather than their rationality. Today, it is considered bad form to lodge such accusations against women. On the other hand, it is perfectly acceptable... nay... it is considered the height of hilarity to imply that a man was thinking with his little head instead of his big one.
Of course, putting it that way is considered crude.
The enlightened, educated way of reversing the stereotype is to ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so wrapped up in pornography and video games.
So, we ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so immature.
But we are no longer allowed to ask why women, especially Catholic women, are so immature.
But don't these questions deserve to be asked?
How can we stop the rampant immaturity, the hypergamic hysteria, among women that is on display in this divorce culture of ours? Why do we allow women to ruin modern society this way? How can we wean women off their mindless pursuit of "self expression" and "self-identity"?
Undoubtedly, men are avoiding commitment to these hordes of immature women for very good reason.
Maybe the problem isn't that men are immature, but that immature women flock around them, whining for a date, for a ring, for a husband ... and when they get it? They divorce the man, pick up the alimony paycheck, and go looking for their identity, which they apparently lost somewhere on the way to the altar.
Obviously, given these divorce statistics, we need to start a national conversation, a national movement to help women stop their narcissistic behaviours.
We have endless men's groups to wean men off of pornography.
Where are the women's groups that wean women off of divorce and their motivation for wanting a divorce?
Where is Narcissists Anonymous?
UPDATE:
I nearly forgot to add this little tidbit in.
Blood bank testing inadvertently shows that 28% of children don't have the Dad they think they do.
Gives you a whole new understanding of who is acting irresponsibly, doesn't it?
And that's just the children in families with serious family medical issues. The blood banks figured it out because the families had to go to a blood bank and test for a possible transfusion for a family member. What are the rates in other kinds of families?
You see, this was a blood bank study, and blood bank studies can be fooled.
Let's just take the most common markers - ABO and Rh.
A, B and Rh are all dominant.
O is regressive.
A, B and Rh+ all indicate that certain proteins exist on the red blood cell's surface.
O and Rh- means those proteins aren't there.
So, if Dad is O and Mom is O, but the kid is A, B or AB, then that child clearly came from a different dad.
He has proteins on his red blood cells that couldn't come from Mom or "Dad."
Same with Rh. If Dad is O- and Mom is O-, but the kid is O+, then daddy don't live at that house.
He's got proteins from somebody else.
But what if Dad is A, Mom is B or O, and the kid is O?
Well, we can't tell from just the blood test. Dad may actually be AO. And if Mom had a fling with a Type O man, you wouldn't be able to tell from the AB blood test.
Same with Rh - if Mom is Rh+, Mom can have a fling with ANYONE and the Rh factor wouldn't tell.
So, using only the markers that blood banks can say, without shadow of a doubt, that Dad is a cuckold, 28% of fathers are being cuckolded.
But you won't see an article wringing it's hands about female flings based on these facts.
Well, except for this one.
Saturday, June 09, 2012
The Curious Case of World Population
No matter what else one may argue, one thing is clear: Western culture doesn't value babies. At one time, it did. What changed?
Let's take a look.
In ancient pagan Rome, average life expectancy at birth was about 25 years of age. If the child survived to its 10th birthday, life expectancy was 51.That average life expectancy was pretty much standard around the world for the next two millennia.
What does that mean?
It means a lot of children died before the age of ten.
Infant mortality is generally defined as the number of children per 1000 who die before their first year.Modern estimates indicate that for pre-industrial societies between 200 and 300 infants per 1000 would die in their first year.
In the early 1600s in England, two-thirds of children died before their fourth birthday. 40% of children in colonial America didn't reach age 18.
In 1740's London, 75% died before they were five.
Maternal death was significant, but not predominant. It accounted for about 10% of deaths for women between the ages of 15 and 44, that is, four to seven women died per thousand births (tending more towards four than seven).
The more children a woman had, the more likely she was to survive into old age. Only celibate women lived longer then those who had more than five children.
Age at First Marriage: Ancient and Medieval
For most of human history, parents chose the spouses for their children.
In the Roman Empire, the age of first marriage for pagan girls was 12-15, pagan men 26. Christian women were nearly 19 at first marriage, while Christian men were 27.
Medieval marriages tended to be later: females 23 and males 28, but younger marriages were not uncommon.
St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. Only six of of the 14 children he and Eleanor had survived.
Upwards of one-quarter of the medieval population were under religious vows and therefore celibate.
Age at First Marriage: Colonial Americas
In the southern United States, the legal age of marriage for females was 14.
In colonial America, one in ten women age 16 were married. Average age of marriage for women was 19. Over the next 150 years, it would slowly rise to 23, dropping back down to 20 only briefly around 1960.
In Catholic colonial Mexico, legal age of marriage was set by canon law at 12, as it had been for centuries In Mexico, over 50% of the females in the non-Spanish population were married by age 16, over 50% of the males married by age 18.
Marriage Didn't Last Long
Most families lost at least one parent by the time the eldest child reached 21 years of age. Marriages lasted on average less than 12 years because, about 50% of the time, one of the spouses was dead by what would have been the 12th year of marriage.
In comparison, newlyweds in 2006 had a 57% chance of being divorced before their 15th anniversary.
Think about this.
It doesn't mean that modern sacramental marriages shouldn't last, but it does mean that Christ is asking modern spouses to do something today that earlier generations largely didn't have to do. Earlier generations had to watch their children and spouse die. We must help our children and spouse live.
Up to 40% Illegitimacy
Prior to the 1700s, roughly 20% of all women in England were pregnant at the time of first marriage. By 1750, that had risen to 40%. This wasn't just the fault of the Reformation.
Catholic Spain was considered missionary territory by St. Ignatius in part because fornication was common and accepted. Catholic Mexico had a 40% rate of illegitimacy in several cities.
Fertility
American women had unusually high fertility. Whereas English family had an average of three children per household (four if you were rich), Americans had seven to nine. Mothers typically hired wetnurses. Only five to seven children would survive to adulthood.
From 1890 to 1960, the age of marriage in the United States dropped.
From 1960 to now, it has climbed without interruption.
Infant mortality dropped in all countries around the world. In the United States, around roughly 1900, it dropped from 167 per thousand to the current 7 per thousand. This was fairly typical. By 1967, when we were awash in babies, we legalized abortion in order to crank the infant mortality rate back up to medieval levels.
As a result of increased infant survival, life expectancy across all countries throughout the world went up. Income across all populations around the world went up at the same time.
Today, we marry later, our spouses largely don't die, our children don't die (so we have to murder them via abortion), and we are incredibly richer.
Malthus Makes An Entrance
Thomas Malthus, the first man to worry about the problem of overpopulation, lived in a society that valued women and children. He believed that the wealthier you were, the more children you would have. Between 1798 and 1826, he published several successive editions of his Essay on the Principle of Population. He saw the rising affluence of England and of the West as a positive danger precisely because he thought rich people would have more children survive to adulthood than poor people did.
He couldn't imagine a society that would actively kill children - quite the opposite. He knew that parents would try to preserve the lives of their children.
He knew, with rising affluence, they would succeed. Their very success would create the danger - the rich people would over-run the earth with their children.
As rich people caused the population to rise, people would become more impoverished than they had to begin with, and famine would sweep the land. That's what he saw.
If we judge by Malthusian consequences, then nothing makes sense.
Counter-Intuitive
In fact, if we argue that the world of 1800 was overpopulated because of its impoverished population, then we must conclude the world has grown less and less overpopulated since 1800.
After all, the world has grown from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion in population, yet instead of growing poorer, every corner of the world has become richer. Even the poorest billion people out of the current seven billion live longer than did the richest one percent of that 1 billion alive in 1800. The remaining six billion alive today are inestimably richer than anyone was when the earth held only 1 billion.
Thus, judging by relative affluence, we are growing less overpopulated with time.
How is this possible?
As the population increases, as the number of human minds increase, technology improves. We are able to more fully use and spread the wealth of the world across the population. The tipping point was apparently 1 billion people. It just gets better from here on out.
There is, of course, one problem.
We may have become very wealthy, but we've lost our self-respect.
Earth Doesn't Need Women
When we were poor, when parents and children both died young, when family life was hard, we valued it. Now that we have grown rich, we have decided not to share our riches with the next generation.
Instead, we turned back the clock.
In the entirety of human history, century after century, millennium after millennium, there has been only one 70-year period, from about 1890 to about 1960, when the infant mortality rate fell below 100 per 1000 births anywhere in the world. It went from about 140 in 1900 to about 20 in 1960. For the first time in human history, we kept virtually all the children we conceived.
We saw what we had made, and we didn't like it. So, by pill, coil and cannula, we deliberately re-instated the pre-industrial infant death rates.
We currently abort about 230 babies per 1000 live births. This is the same infant death ratio one would see 1000 years ago in medieval Europe, before the advent of modern obstetrics, hospitals, germ theory. There's only one difference: we aren't watching them die from disease and famine - we're actively killing them. Before birth when we can, after birth if we must.
Family formation rates, fertility rates, child-bearing, is uniformly dropping, not just in rich countries but in every country in the world. And it has been doing this since the middle of the 1800s. You see, every country is getting richer. And, contrary to Malthus' expectations, rich people really don't want children.
Follow The Money
People the world over no longer want children, we want paychecks.
Just ask us. There's no need to live for children because family is no longer a life and death proposition.
But it gets worse.
What Will The Future Bring?
Looking over the last 150 years, we can see our social values have changed enormously.
Sex selection abortion is already rampant in India and China. We can't seem to pass a law against it in the United States. Why? Because women are the bearers of children. Women are dangerous as far as Malthusians are concerned.
Today, we've already invented IVF. We are working to perfect the artificial gamete, the artificial womb, and the sex robot. Where do you think all that will lead?
Well, from the viewpoint of population control, it would be much better if we had no women at all. If women were gone, then all procreation could be regulated and controlled through industry and government. And this future is quite possible.
We could easily get to the point where most men settle for well-crafted robots, and living women are considered the peculiar pass-time of certain well-off gentlemen who like that kind of thing, in much the same way that some men keep horses or prefer golf to bowling. If you think this impossible, consider all the men in China and India who will never marry. There is a market for artificial women. As the technology improves, the market will grow.
This is what happens when we grow rich without growing holy.
This is what happens when we pursue social justice but ignore life issues.
Everyone gets rich, but our values... change.
Let's take a look.
Pre-Industrial Family Life
In ancient pagan Rome, average life expectancy at birth was about 25 years of age. If the child survived to its 10th birthday, life expectancy was 51.That average life expectancy was pretty much standard around the world for the next two millennia.
What does that mean?
It means a lot of children died before the age of ten.
Infant mortality is generally defined as the number of children per 1000 who die before their first year.Modern estimates indicate that for pre-industrial societies between 200 and 300 infants per 1000 would die in their first year.
In the early 1600s in England, two-thirds of children died before their fourth birthday. 40% of children in colonial America didn't reach age 18.
In 1740's London, 75% died before they were five.
Maternal death was significant, but not predominant. It accounted for about 10% of deaths for women between the ages of 15 and 44, that is, four to seven women died per thousand births (tending more towards four than seven).
The more children a woman had, the more likely she was to survive into old age. Only celibate women lived longer then those who had more than five children.
Age at First Marriage: Ancient and Medieval
For most of human history, parents chose the spouses for their children.
In the Roman Empire, the age of first marriage for pagan girls was 12-15, pagan men 26. Christian women were nearly 19 at first marriage, while Christian men were 27.
Medieval marriages tended to be later: females 23 and males 28, but younger marriages were not uncommon.
St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. Only six of of the 14 children he and Eleanor had survived.
Upwards of one-quarter of the medieval population were under religious vows and therefore celibate.
Age at First Marriage: Colonial Americas
In the southern United States, the legal age of marriage for females was 14.
In colonial America, one in ten women age 16 were married. Average age of marriage for women was 19. Over the next 150 years, it would slowly rise to 23, dropping back down to 20 only briefly around 1960.
In Catholic colonial Mexico, legal age of marriage was set by canon law at 12, as it had been for centuries In Mexico, over 50% of the females in the non-Spanish population were married by age 16, over 50% of the males married by age 18.
Marriage Didn't Last Long
Most families lost at least one parent by the time the eldest child reached 21 years of age. Marriages lasted on average less than 12 years because, about 50% of the time, one of the spouses was dead by what would have been the 12th year of marriage.
In comparison, newlyweds in 2006 had a 57% chance of being divorced before their 15th anniversary.
Think about this.
It doesn't mean that modern sacramental marriages shouldn't last, but it does mean that Christ is asking modern spouses to do something today that earlier generations largely didn't have to do. Earlier generations had to watch their children and spouse die. We must help our children and spouse live.
Up to 40% Illegitimacy
Prior to the 1700s, roughly 20% of all women in England were pregnant at the time of first marriage. By 1750, that had risen to 40%. This wasn't just the fault of the Reformation.
Catholic Spain was considered missionary territory by St. Ignatius in part because fornication was common and accepted. Catholic Mexico had a 40% rate of illegitimacy in several cities.
Fertility
American women had unusually high fertility. Whereas English family had an average of three children per household (four if you were rich), Americans had seven to nine. Mothers typically hired wetnurses. Only five to seven children would survive to adulthood.
Summary of the Old Days
From Adam and Eve through Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, Gregory the Great, the Muslim invasion of Spain, the Viking invasions, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent, the Little Ice Age... all the way until 1890, this is what it meant to live in a family.- Your parents decided who you would marry.
- Wealthier people tending to marry earlier since they had the means.
- About half of your children would die before they reached maturity.
- You or your spouse would be dead before surviving children reached maturity.
- Poor people tended to have fewer children than rich people.
- Most people (80% of the population) were farmers.
- Forming a family, keeping the family, raising the family, was incredibly hard work.
- The man sowed, raised and harvested the crops.
- The woman carried, bore and raised the children.
- You were as likely to lose your crop of children to famine as you were to lose your crop of wheat to insects, fungus or weather. A woman's work was just as valuable to society as a man's.
Family Life In the Last 150 Years
The germ theory of disease was not even considered reasonable until Pasteur's work in the 1860s. It did not become firmly ensconced as a science until Koch developed his postulates in 1890. That, along with industrialization and advances in transportation - and therefore advances in transport of food - changed everything. (As a point of contact, Leo XIII released his famous social justice encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in 1891).From 1890 to 1960, the age of marriage in the United States dropped.
From 1960 to now, it has climbed without interruption.
Infant mortality dropped in all countries around the world. In the United States, around roughly 1900, it dropped from 167 per thousand to the current 7 per thousand. This was fairly typical. By 1967, when we were awash in babies, we legalized abortion in order to crank the infant mortality rate back up to medieval levels.
As a result of increased infant survival, life expectancy across all countries throughout the world went up. Income across all populations around the world went up at the same time.
Today, we marry later, our spouses largely don't die, our children don't die (so we have to murder them via abortion), and we are incredibly richer.
Malthus Makes An Entrance
Thomas Malthus, the first man to worry about the problem of overpopulation, lived in a society that valued women and children. He believed that the wealthier you were, the more children you would have. Between 1798 and 1826, he published several successive editions of his Essay on the Principle of Population. He saw the rising affluence of England and of the West as a positive danger precisely because he thought rich people would have more children survive to adulthood than poor people did.
He couldn't imagine a society that would actively kill children - quite the opposite. He knew that parents would try to preserve the lives of their children.
He knew, with rising affluence, they would succeed. Their very success would create the danger - the rich people would over-run the earth with their children.
As rich people caused the population to rise, people would become more impoverished than they had to begin with, and famine would sweep the land. That's what he saw.
If we judge by Malthusian consequences, then nothing makes sense.
Counter-Intuitive
In fact, if we argue that the world of 1800 was overpopulated because of its impoverished population, then we must conclude the world has grown less and less overpopulated since 1800.
After all, the world has grown from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion in population, yet instead of growing poorer, every corner of the world has become richer. Even the poorest billion people out of the current seven billion live longer than did the richest one percent of that 1 billion alive in 1800. The remaining six billion alive today are inestimably richer than anyone was when the earth held only 1 billion.
Thus, judging by relative affluence, we are growing less overpopulated with time.
How is this possible?
As the population increases, as the number of human minds increase, technology improves. We are able to more fully use and spread the wealth of the world across the population. The tipping point was apparently 1 billion people. It just gets better from here on out.
There is, of course, one problem.
We may have become very wealthy, but we've lost our self-respect.
Earth Doesn't Need Women
When we were poor, when parents and children both died young, when family life was hard, we valued it. Now that we have grown rich, we have decided not to share our riches with the next generation.
Instead, we turned back the clock.
In the entirety of human history, century after century, millennium after millennium, there has been only one 70-year period, from about 1890 to about 1960, when the infant mortality rate fell below 100 per 1000 births anywhere in the world. It went from about 140 in 1900 to about 20 in 1960. For the first time in human history, we kept virtually all the children we conceived.
We saw what we had made, and we didn't like it. So, by pill, coil and cannula, we deliberately re-instated the pre-industrial infant death rates.
We currently abort about 230 babies per 1000 live births. This is the same infant death ratio one would see 1000 years ago in medieval Europe, before the advent of modern obstetrics, hospitals, germ theory. There's only one difference: we aren't watching them die from disease and famine - we're actively killing them. Before birth when we can, after birth if we must.
Family formation rates, fertility rates, child-bearing, is uniformly dropping, not just in rich countries but in every country in the world. And it has been doing this since the middle of the 1800s. You see, every country is getting richer. And, contrary to Malthus' expectations, rich people really don't want children.
Follow The Money
People the world over no longer want children, we want paychecks.
Just ask us. There's no need to live for children because family is no longer a life and death proposition.
But it gets worse.
What Will The Future Bring?
Looking over the last 150 years, we can see our social values have changed enormously.
Sex selection abortion is already rampant in India and China. We can't seem to pass a law against it in the United States. Why? Because women are the bearers of children. Women are dangerous as far as Malthusians are concerned.
Today, we've already invented IVF. We are working to perfect the artificial gamete, the artificial womb, and the sex robot. Where do you think all that will lead?
Well, from the viewpoint of population control, it would be much better if we had no women at all. If women were gone, then all procreation could be regulated and controlled through industry and government. And this future is quite possible.
We could easily get to the point where most men settle for well-crafted robots, and living women are considered the peculiar pass-time of certain well-off gentlemen who like that kind of thing, in much the same way that some men keep horses or prefer golf to bowling. If you think this impossible, consider all the men in China and India who will never marry. There is a market for artificial women. As the technology improves, the market will grow.
This is what happens when we grow rich without growing holy.
This is what happens when we pursue social justice but ignore life issues.
Everyone gets rich, but our values... change.
Monday, May 28, 2012
The Future of Catholic Hospitals
Ann Barnhardt has an excellent essay on what the bishops need to do to fight the HHS Mandate.
But I think there's a twist here that she may have missed.
Barack Hussein Obama, our lovely Muslim president, is many things, but stupid is not one of them.
The HHS mandate is timed to come due right before the elections. It has always been timed to do this. Barack expended every bit of energy in his first year as President to make sure this happened. That's why ObamaCare had to be passed as soon as possible - he needed time to set up the HHS mandate. Sebelius did not pick the August 1st, 2012 mandate deadline out of thin air. The timing is crucial.
The mandate is designed to do two things:
1) Energize Barack's base right before the election,
2) Give the government the opportunity to take over every Catholic social service agency in the country.
If you think that idea expresses deep paranoia, I don't disagree.
That does not mean it is wrong.
Look, the man took over banks, he took over major players in the auto industry, for a lot less reason than this. Barack Hussein Obama is a fascist - he believes government should run everything.
Obamacare is designed to allow the government to take over the entire health care section of the economy. The last provision goes into effect in 2018. The Baby Boomers began turning 65 in 2011. They first wave is turning 72 by 2018. Mandatory Social Security retirement age is 70.
Obamacare takes over just as the Baby Boomers begin to enter hospitals and nursing care facilities all across America's fruited plain.
Think of all the people who will be thrilled to see Baby Boomers in body bags.
The Green movement is just socialism for tree-dwellers. Socialists, whether national socialists or international socialists, have no problem with Holocausts. You have to break a few eggs to make a workers' paradise. Eco-fascists have long said there are too many people on this planet. That's a common refrain of the Green movement. They are happy to start the depopulation by getting rid of the useless old people, the Baby Boomers whom they have always hated. Barack absolutely agrees that old people should be killed. He said as much.
Obama is a huge fan of Islam. The Catholic Church has always been the major opponent of Islam. It has also been a major opponent of socialism and fascism.
But it gets better.
Obamacare needs hospitals in order to implement socialist, Green and Islamist policies, especially death panels. Catholic hospitals treat one in six people in the United States. Catholic hospitals are unlikely to implement Barack's agenda. These hospitals generate far too much good will among the lower classes. That cannot be permitted to continue. It makes the government look bad. It makes Islam look bad. It makes the Greens look bad. These Catholics must be stopped.
So, the HHS mandate sets up a win-win for Obama. There are only three ways this can go: Catholic hospitals and social service agencies:
No.
He expects them to die.
But I think there's a twist here that she may have missed.
Barack Hussein Obama, our lovely Muslim president, is many things, but stupid is not one of them.
The HHS mandate is timed to come due right before the elections. It has always been timed to do this. Barack expended every bit of energy in his first year as President to make sure this happened. That's why ObamaCare had to be passed as soon as possible - he needed time to set up the HHS mandate. Sebelius did not pick the August 1st, 2012 mandate deadline out of thin air. The timing is crucial.
The mandate is designed to do two things:
1) Energize Barack's base right before the election,
2) Give the government the opportunity to take over every Catholic social service agency in the country.
If you think that idea expresses deep paranoia, I don't disagree.
That does not mean it is wrong.
Look, the man took over banks, he took over major players in the auto industry, for a lot less reason than this. Barack Hussein Obama is a fascist - he believes government should run everything.
Obamacare is designed to allow the government to take over the entire health care section of the economy. The last provision goes into effect in 2018. The Baby Boomers began turning 65 in 2011. They first wave is turning 72 by 2018. Mandatory Social Security retirement age is 70.
Obamacare takes over just as the Baby Boomers begin to enter hospitals and nursing care facilities all across America's fruited plain.
Think of all the people who will be thrilled to see Baby Boomers in body bags.
The Green movement is just socialism for tree-dwellers. Socialists, whether national socialists or international socialists, have no problem with Holocausts. You have to break a few eggs to make a workers' paradise. Eco-fascists have long said there are too many people on this planet. That's a common refrain of the Green movement. They are happy to start the depopulation by getting rid of the useless old people, the Baby Boomers whom they have always hated. Barack absolutely agrees that old people should be killed. He said as much.
Obama is a huge fan of Islam. The Catholic Church has always been the major opponent of Islam. It has also been a major opponent of socialism and fascism.
But it gets better.
Obamacare needs hospitals in order to implement socialist, Green and Islamist policies, especially death panels. Catholic hospitals treat one in six people in the United States. Catholic hospitals are unlikely to implement Barack's agenda. These hospitals generate far too much good will among the lower classes. That cannot be permitted to continue. It makes the government look bad. It makes Islam look bad. It makes the Greens look bad. These Catholics must be stopped.
So, the HHS mandate sets up a win-win for Obama. There are only three ways this can go: Catholic hospitals and social service agencies:
- Roll over and play Obama's game. That's obviously fine. In this scenario, they've been co-opted. Obama gets what he wants.
- Refuse to implement Obama's agenda, and voluntarily shut themselves down. That's fine. It takes them out of the equation, and as Ann points out, it allows Obama to paint Catholics as evil creatures who would rather watch someone die in extreme agony than discard their silly moral objections.
- Refuse to implement Obama's agenda and dare him to shut them down. That's fine. He won't shut them down, he'll take them over. Just like he did GM. Just like he did the banks. Only he won't give the hospitals back. They will, forever after, belong to the government. What a nice re-election present for Barack! A whole new line of hospitals all taken over in September or October, right before the election! And he will be taking them over for the people! He will be taking these wonderful hospitals away from the rich Catholic bishops! Barack will run them as they should be run, instead of according to stupid Catholic morality.
No.
He expects them to die.
On Marriage
I get questions from readers occasionally that piques my interest. This one asked me to explain marriage in light of a fairly dippy work by a man named Joseph Martos:
Joseph Martos is the author of a highly regarded work on the sacraments called Doors to the Sacred, A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church. In that work, he writes, "During the first three centuries of Christianity, churchmen had no legal say in the matter of marriages, divorces, and remarriages." Furthermore, he wrote, "There was no liturgical ceremony for marriage as there was for baptism and the Eucharist." It wasn't until the year 400 or so, that Christians were bidden to seek an ecclesiastical blessing on their marriages. (It is interesting to note that the only ones obliged to do that were married bishops, married priests and married deacons.) As far as we know, the idea of marriage as a sacrament was first proposed by St. Augustine, the first and only patristic author to write extensively about sex and marriage. Even after Augustine, through the seventh century, "Christians could still get married in a purely secular ceremony." Marriage was declared a sacrament for the first time by the Synod of Verona in 1184. The Church didn't deem marriage definitely indissoluble until the Council of Florence in 1439. (Martos , pp. 409-434.)
Now, a really good comprehensive discussion of
marriage can be found in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
As you can see from that encyclopedia article, Martos is completely clueless.
As you can see from that encyclopedia article, Martos is completely clueless.
If he can't even get the testimony of the Fathers right, then he can't get ANYTHING right.
But even the Catholic Encyclopedia, while it gives some Fathers' testimony, is not comprehensive on this point.
For instance, you can find numerous homilies by Chrysostom on marriage - it, along with holy poverty, was one of his favorite subjects.
Now, as the Catholic Encyclopedia article points out, the word "sacrament" did not have the narrow technical meaning in the third century that it has today, but that doesn't mean anything. After all, if we insist that this has deep relevance, then we must likewise insist that we can't say God is three Persons until well after the Council of Chalcedon, since a precise definition of HOW Christ is God, one Person with two natures, is not defined until then.
Such a position is absurd. The late date of the definition doesn't mean we didn't believe Jesus is God until then, it
just means that we hadn't thought through all the bits of what the phrase meant
to say until then.
It is very much like saying that, since an infant can't say "mother" or "father", the child does not, in fact, have any parents until s/he is at least two or three years old and able to name them correctly.
Most of Catholic Faith is an in-depth meditation on what we are given, connecting the dots between all the points. The more carefully we think, the more carefully we connect the dots, the more careful our language becomes as we try to preserve our understanding of the connections, connections that pre-existed our thinking about them.
The consistent use of a word does not bring the thing it describes into existence, rather, the consistent use of a word merely shows a more mature understanding of both the word and the thing it describes on the part of the person using the word. The thing exists apart from the mature use of the word that describes the thing.
Unfortunately, Martos appears to be a nominalist - he thinks language, particularly human language - is what brings something into existence. Now, language DOES bring things into existence, but only God's Word does that, not ours. God imparts, we just try to describe.
So, instead of believing "God said, 'Let there be light' " Martos would presumably teach "And Martos says, 'Let there be marriage' and there was marriage, and it came into existence when Martos said because he said that's when it happened".
Utter crap, utterly unsupportable by any decent historical method, pure anachronism on Martos' part, but that's what passes as scholarship nowadays.
It is very much like saying that, since an infant can't say "mother" or "father", the child does not, in fact, have any parents until s/he is at least two or three years old and able to name them correctly.
Most of Catholic Faith is an in-depth meditation on what we are given, connecting the dots between all the points. The more carefully we think, the more carefully we connect the dots, the more careful our language becomes as we try to preserve our understanding of the connections, connections that pre-existed our thinking about them.
The consistent use of a word does not bring the thing it describes into existence, rather, the consistent use of a word merely shows a more mature understanding of both the word and the thing it describes on the part of the person using the word. The thing exists apart from the mature use of the word that describes the thing.
Unfortunately, Martos appears to be a nominalist - he thinks language, particularly human language - is what brings something into existence. Now, language DOES bring things into existence, but only God's Word does that, not ours. God imparts, we just try to describe.
So, instead of believing "God said, 'Let there be light' " Martos would presumably teach "And Martos says, 'Let there be marriage' and there was marriage, and it came into existence when Martos said because he said that's when it happened".
Utter crap, utterly unsupportable by any decent historical method, pure anachronism on Martos' part, but that's what passes as scholarship nowadays.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
This Is What Winning Looks Like
The infant mortality rate is calculated by dividing the number of infants who die within one year of birth by the number of infants who are born. The infant mortality rate is usually expressed as the ratio of infant deaths per one thousand live births.
Prior to 1900, infant mortality rates of two and three hundred obtained throughout the world. The infant mortality rate would fluctute sharply according to the weather, the harvest, war, and epidemic disease. In severe times, a majority of infants would die within one year. In good times, perhaps two hundred per thousand would die. So great was the pre-modern loss of children's lives that anthropologists claim to have found groups that do not name children until they have survived a year. (emphasis added)There is no reason to doubt the figures PBS provides above. There is reason to doubt the figure below:
The infant mortality rate started a long slide from 165 per 1,000 in 1900 to 7 per 1,000 in 1997.In fact, this figure of 7 infant deaths per 1000 live births is a complete lie, a total fabrication.
While it is the case that infant mortality began a long slide in this country from 165 per thousand in 1900, the legalization of abortion in the 1960's, and the nationwide legalization of in utero child murder in 1973, reversed that slide.
If we count abortion for what it is - infant mortality via infanticide - then the CDC shows us that our present infant mortality rate is identical to the rates seen before 1900.
The national legal induced abortion ratio increased from 196 per 1,000 live births in 1973 (the first year that 52 areas reported) to 358 per 1,000 live births in 1979 and remained nearly stable through 1981.... The ratio peaked at 364 per 1,000 live births in 1984 and since then has shown a nearly steady decline. In 2000, the abortion ratio was 245 per 1,000 live births in 49 reporting areas and 246 for the same 48 reporting areas available for 1999. This represents a 3.8% decrease from 1999 (256 per 1,000 live births) for the 48 reporting areas.The pre-1900's rate of infant mortality was due to poor understanding of medical issues and relatively poor economic conditions.
To what can we attribute our current high rate of infant mortality?
Well, we could blame the economy.
It is true that the US economy underwent enormous inflation between 1965 and 1981, which might explain the high rates of infant mortality during that period. It is certainly the case that the black community, which routinely kills the majority of its infants each year, is among the poorest in the nation.
But blaming the economy seems somewhat disingenuous. After all, even the poorest country in the world today is richer than the richest country was in 1810. Even the poorest people in America are vastly better off than 90% of the rest of the world. Every American alive today is richer than John D. Rockefeller was in 1916. It's hard to say that poverty is the reason, because essentially no one in the world is poor, at least not when compared to 1810.
We can make a very cogent argument that the Church's call to care for the poorest of the poor has not only been answered, but essentially completed. We won.
In terms of physical wealth and health, no one is as poor today as even the richest person was when Rerum Novarum was issued in 1891. The social justice people can sit down and enjoy their triumph. Everyone is wealthy, just as they say Leo XIII asked.
No, it isn't the economy that is causing the high infant mortality rate.
Rather, we seem to accept a high infant mortality rate today precisely because we are physically rich. We have the means to keep infants alive, we just choose not to use them. No matter where you go in the world, women's fertility is being systematically destroyed. The number of children born to women each year is steadily dropping as the world's inhabitants becomes steadily wealthier.
On average, the world over, the more money we have, the fewer children we have.
For most of human history, infant mortality has stood at around 300 per 1000. For a short century, between about 1880 and 1960, certain Western countries managed to get that rate down to just a dozen or so per 1000.
We managed to become rich in children just as we were becoming rich in physical comfort. But, we didn't like having so many children around.
So, those same Western countries deliberately cranked infant mortality back up to where it has always historically been. No other country has ever managed to drop infant mortality to the exceedingly low rates the West has experienced, nor will they ever again.
Why won't they?
Because they'll abort their children out of existence as they become rich. The West has shown that it is acceptable to do that.
We won the war against physical poverty.
But, as the Fathers and Doctors of the Church liked to point out, physical poverty is nothing compared to spiritual poverty, the poverty of not knowing or living the Gospel.
We are indisputably physically wealthy.
Anyone who tells you different is either ignorant or deliberately lying.
But infant mortality is no different now than it was 1000 years ago, because the just distribution of physical riches was never really the problem.
The world over, there is a direct correlation between increased infanticide and "winning" social justice issues, that is, successfully redistributing physical wealth.
Someone might want to mention that to the bishops.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Conveniently Ethical
Fox News reports that Franciscan University has dropped student insurance coverage because of ObamaCare. Maybe it has. But I think the real reason is buried in the middle of the story, where two far-flung sentences should really appear much closer together:
Why is ObamaCare acceptable for the employees but not the students?
Well, maybe because not enough students were buying insurance through the university.
You see, it costs, money to keep a university-run insurance program in place.
I would bet hundreds of dollars that Franciscan U turned at least a dime off of every insurance policy a student bought through the university.
But there were less than 200 students still doing that.
I'm just guessing here, but I would bet that running a student insurance program through the university would take at least a half-time secretary. So, if the revenue coming in didn't pay the secretary's salary and then some, FUS would not be turning a profit off the student insurance program.
What to do?
Well, ObamaCare is a great excuse to drop the expense of internally tracking the coverage. By announcing the drop of a program that wasn't making money anyway, FUS looks really good, and it saves them the expense of dealing with it.
After all, if this were really about not submitting to ObamaCare, wouldn't they drop employee coverage too? Isn't coverage for university employees going to require the same kind of payment for contraceptives, abortions and sterilizations starting August 1?
But, they DO NOT drop insurance care for their employees, because the employees would scream bloody murder. if they dropped employee insurance, which is an untaxed benefit, they would have to increase salaries to compensate. That would mean more money in unemployment insurance costs from FUS to the state and more city, state and federal tax due as well for both the university and its employees. We cannot have that.
Now, maybe I'm entirely wrong and FUS is really doing it for the reasons stated. Maybe they are all philanthropists at heart. But, I attended that campus, got my degree there, I interacted with the administration there. I really don't trust FUS, or any other "Catholic" university for that matter.
As I said, call me cynical, but I really, really doubt that this is FUS being the pure white hat they promote themselves to be.
So FUS is NOT dropping student health coverage, rather, it is just dropping the requirement that students pay for their own health coverage.
Which sounds a lot less impressive, when you get down to it.
But you would never know any of that if it weren't for the Fox News anchor basically beating the truth out of official FUS spokesperson Hernon.
I want to thank Laura and Justine for their careful attention to the lies the FUS spokesman was attempting to promulgate. I failed to read the interview closely enough. I'm sure Hernon will get out there and correct the record with all the news agencies that are reporting FUS is dropping student health coverage.
The could start by calling up LifeSiteNews, for instance, and telling LSN that their coverage is all wrong! Cough, cough, cough.
Here's the money quote:
Yep, that's the FUS we all know and love.
Oh, and get this! Ave Maria University - famed in song and story as Tom Monaghan's personal jungle gym - saw how much free publicity FUS is getting out of dropping student health insurance and they want in too!
Tom certainly knows how to get free press when he can.
Of course, they aren't going to drop employee insurance any more than FUS did!
Silly of you even to propose it, really.
Anyway, just today (May 17, 2012) the wife of one of the professors at AMU took issue with my characterization of FUS above. She found it mean-spirited, don'cha'know. Of course, she only unsheathed her claws after AMU started getting press for jumping on the NObamaCare bandwagon...
Ahhh... I love Catholics!
Everything I've said about FUS is doubly true AMU.
"[T]he employee health insurance program will remain unchanged....the school says fewer than 200 of its students had been buying insurance from the university."Pardon my cynicism, but I smell a rat here.
Why is ObamaCare acceptable for the employees but not the students?
Well, maybe because not enough students were buying insurance through the university.
You see, it costs, money to keep a university-run insurance program in place.
I would bet hundreds of dollars that Franciscan U turned at least a dime off of every insurance policy a student bought through the university.
But there were less than 200 students still doing that.
I'm just guessing here, but I would bet that running a student insurance program through the university would take at least a half-time secretary. So, if the revenue coming in didn't pay the secretary's salary and then some, FUS would not be turning a profit off the student insurance program.
What to do?
Well, ObamaCare is a great excuse to drop the expense of internally tracking the coverage. By announcing the drop of a program that wasn't making money anyway, FUS looks really good, and it saves them the expense of dealing with it.
After all, if this were really about not submitting to ObamaCare, wouldn't they drop employee coverage too? Isn't coverage for university employees going to require the same kind of payment for contraceptives, abortions and sterilizations starting August 1?
But, they DO NOT drop insurance care for their employees, because the employees would scream bloody murder. if they dropped employee insurance, which is an untaxed benefit, they would have to increase salaries to compensate. That would mean more money in unemployment insurance costs from FUS to the state and more city, state and federal tax due as well for both the university and its employees. We cannot have that.
Now, maybe I'm entirely wrong and FUS is really doing it for the reasons stated. Maybe they are all philanthropists at heart. But, I attended that campus, got my degree there, I interacted with the administration there. I really don't trust FUS, or any other "Catholic" university for that matter.
As I said, call me cynical, but I really, really doubt that this is FUS being the pure white hat they promote themselves to be.
Correction:
As the wives of two FUS employees implicitly point out by their comments below, the FUS spokesman is actually a liar. If you read the transcript carefully, FUS spokesman Hernon first says that FUS "offers" student health coverage and FUS is dropping the coverage. Then when pressed repeatedly by the Fox News anchor, Hernon cryptically admits that FUS doesn't actually offer any coverage at all to the students.So FUS is NOT dropping student health coverage, rather, it is just dropping the requirement that students pay for their own health coverage.
Which sounds a lot less impressive, when you get down to it.
But you would never know any of that if it weren't for the Fox News anchor basically beating the truth out of official FUS spokesperson Hernon.
I want to thank Laura and Justine for their careful attention to the lies the FUS spokesman was attempting to promulgate. I failed to read the interview closely enough. I'm sure Hernon will get out there and correct the record with all the news agencies that are reporting FUS is dropping student health coverage.
The could start by calling up LifeSiteNews, for instance, and telling LSN that their coverage is all wrong! Cough, cough, cough.
UPDATE:
Yeah, like I thought. See this interview with Fox News.Here's the money quote:
HERNON: Yes. We are going to be fighting, as we started in the summer, or early fall, fighting for religious liberty, and we'll continue to do so. For our employees the direct impact economically doesn't hit us as of today. But it does impact our students.
See? It's only worth acting on the morality with our employees when it hits their pocketbooks. If it isn't hitting their pocketbooks, then taking the moral high ground isn't really worth it.
Oh, and don't you just love this?
The faculty - you know, the people who are supposed to be well-versed in Catholic principles, the ones who take the mandatum, the fully-formed adults - they've apparently been leading from behind. All those good Catholic FUS professors are content to sit on the sidelines, hugging their health insurance plans to their chests. And the administration is right there with them... with the faculty, that is. On the sidelines. You know. Waiting for the money to be a problem. After all, FUS has its priorities.
Oh, and don't you just love this?
And our students have been out there in front, really saying we cannot comply.Yeah, the students have been out in front.
The faculty - you know, the people who are supposed to be well-versed in Catholic principles, the ones who take the mandatum, the fully-formed adults - they've apparently been leading from behind. All those good Catholic FUS professors are content to sit on the sidelines, hugging their health insurance plans to their chests. And the administration is right there with them... with the faculty, that is. On the sidelines. You know. Waiting for the money to be a problem. After all, FUS has its priorities.
Yep, that's the FUS we all know and love.
UPDATE II:
And for those of you from Rio Linda, there is no state or federal requirement that forces employers to provide their employees with insurance.Oh, and get this! Ave Maria University - famed in song and story as Tom Monaghan's personal jungle gym - saw how much free publicity FUS is getting out of dropping student health insurance and they want in too!
Tom certainly knows how to get free press when he can.
Of course, they aren't going to drop employee insurance any more than FUS did!
Silly of you even to propose it, really.
Anyway, just today (May 17, 2012) the wife of one of the professors at AMU took issue with my characterization of FUS above. She found it mean-spirited, don'cha'know. Of course, she only unsheathed her claws after AMU started getting press for jumping on the NObamaCare bandwagon...
Ahhh... I love Catholics!
Everything I've said about FUS is doubly true AMU.
In good conscience, I never advise anyone to attend FUS, but I make it a point to tell everyone to actively avoid AMU.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Getting A Clear Vision
Before I begin, let me stipulate a few things.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
Two Kinds of Revelation
Revelation can be divided up in a lot of different ways.
For instance, in coming to know about God, we can talk of natural revelation: "The heavens are telling the glory of God". We can discuss prophetic revelation, the books of Jeremiah or Ezekiel, for example. We recognize the best, and the only complete, revelation is God's own personal self-revelation: Jesus Christ, in which He reveals the Trinity through the Incarnation, His life and His Paschal Mystery.
What we know of Christ comes to us through Sacred Tradition, which has two forms: written and oral. The written form of Sacred Tradition is Scripture. The oral form of Sacred Tradition is the liturgy and the teachings of the apostles as handed down through the bishops and the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. It can also include the lived example of the lives of the saints, approved by the Church for our imitation.
But there is another way to divide up revelation: public or private.
Public revelation is the Apostolic Teaching and Scripture which is the deposit of faith.
Apostolic Teaching and Scripture is the sum total of public revelation.
Public revelation = Apostolic Teaching + Sacred Scripture = the Deposit.
Public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle.
After the Apostle John wrote the book of Revelation, he died.
There is no more public revelation.
So, where do things like Fatima, Lourdes, Knock, Akita, and dozens of similarly approved visions fall? These are private revelation.
I am not bound to accept private revelation.
I can be a perfectly good Catholic and get into heaven yet never believe or accept that Mary appeared at Fatima, Lourdes, Akita, etc.
I do not need private revelation to be saved.
I do not need to accept Fatima to be a good Catholic.
Whether it be the vision of Fatima or the vision of Saint Faustina, it is private revelation. Even if the Church approves a vision as valid, the Church does not compel any Catholic to accept private revelation.
The vision may inform Tradition, it may exemplify Tradition, it may signify Tradition, it may perfectly express Tradition, but it ain't Tradition. Visions are not part of the deposit of faith.
A vision - even a vision accompanied by a miracle that is witnessed by 70,000 people - is private revelation. Nothing more.
I can, like St. Thomas the Apostle, distrust those 70,000 witnesses and, like St. Thomas, still be a saint.
A vision, even Fatima, even Divine Mercy, is not part of the deposit of faith.
At best, a vision is catechesis.
At worst, a vision is condemned.
But that vision is never part of the deposit of faith handed down by the Christ to the apostles to us. Never.
Never.
Visions are fun. Visions are interesting. Visions are buttered popcorn. The deposit is steak. Visions are not informative the way the deposit of faith is informative.
Having a visionary talk about his or her vision - even when it conforms with public revelation - is less part of public revelation than having any non-visionary teach the doctrines of the Church in CCD.
Catechesis means "to echo."
If I correctly teach the Trinity or the Eucharist to a bunch of second graders, my teaching is closer to being part of the deposit of faith than is the narration of any visionary who tells me s/he has personally received the Eucharist from an angel. What I say as I teach CCD echoes the deposit of faith. What the visionary says about angelic Eucharistic reception does not.
Public revelation has ALREADY been revealed.
The deposit of faith was completed before the last apostle died.
It is done. Finished. No more to add.
All we can do is explain it, repeat it.
Still, our teaching of public revelation, our teaching of the deposit of faith, is not itself part of the deposit. Our teaching is the echoing of the deposit.
Insofar as I faithfully echo what the Church says, I am a catechist. Insofar as I fail to correctly repeat and teach what the Church teaches, then I am not a catechist, I am instead someone who presents my own private opinion as if it were the teaching of the Church. That is, I am one who - whether intending to or not - mis-represents the Truth.
Insofar as someone receives a truly divinely inspired vision, like Fatima, Akita, Lourdes, Knock, etc., it is catechesis to the one who receives it. If that visionary decides to tell others about the vision, and does so accurately, then insofar as the repetition accurately represents the deposit of faith, it is catechetical to the ones who hear it.
But, even so, it is never more than private revelation.
Now, Antonio Socci apparently wrote a book in which he said about Fatima, "It is really impossible - after all of this - to continue to speak of a 'private revelation'."
Insofar as Socci is referring to the vision of Fatima, Socci is simply wrong.
It is the Church who says Socci is wrong.
Socci is wrong.
Period.
As I said before, insofar as the message content echoes Tradition, then we must believe the message content. But I don't need to accept the Fatima event in order to accept the message content, since Fatima does not, cannot, say anything other than what the Church has always taught.
If Fatima said something new, different, or in addition, it would not be echoing the deposit.
If it were something more than private revelation, then it would be public revelation.
If it "cannot be spoken of as private revelation," then the only thing left to call it is public revelation.
But it is not public revelation.
The three children were not apostles.
Fatima is only private revelation.
Socci is wrong.
Why Visions Make Bad Catechesis
One of the marks of bad formation is putting visions on par with doctrines. A badly formed Catholic puts private revelation on par with public revelation. He or she thinks private revelation is part of public revelation. The Church says private revelation is not part of public revelation.
Similarly, one of the marks of bad catechesis is extensive reliance on private revelation, visions and miracles. A catechist who is not good at teaching the Faith will rely extensively on private revelation to pass on the Faith because he or she doesn't understand the doctrines well enough to rely on the deposit of Faith as should be done.
Now STOP.
Before you howl with outrage, listen.
Think.
A true catechist relies on the deposit of faith and nothing else because that is all the Church gives a catechist. Insofar as a catechist teaches something other than the deposit, the person is not acting as a catechist. He may still be a teacher. He is not a catechist. The person is not echoing the Church's teaching.
I absolutely believe in miracles.
But I believe because I already trust God and the Catholic Church.
I believe because I studied the deposit.
I do not believe because I studied the private revelation.
Insofar as private revelation led me to believe, it is because the private revelation echoed the deposit.
In order for the Church to approve a miracle or a vision, She has to spend years investigating the event with panels of experts at her side to advise her on the intricacies of the event.
If the Church needs years and years and dozens of investigative experts to rationally reach the conclusion that a single miracle or vision is real and worthy of belief, then why would we expect anyone else to require less time and less resources than the Church to reach the same conclusion? Personally, I would expect it to take a lot more time for other people to rationally reach the same conclusions, assuming they had access to the same evidence, which they don't.
The deposit of faith is accessible in a way that private revelation is not. When I teach Catholic faith on the basis of events which are not part of the deposit of faith, I'm essentially expecting my audience to surrender their rational faculties and simply trust me on the details, which even I probably don't know.
So why would they trust me? Especially when we remember that I am a fallen man who will get details wrong even with the best of intentions.
Sister Lucia says Amelia (a childhood friend) will be in Purgatory until the end of time. The Church doesn't say this. Sister Lucia says it. Is Sister Lucia right? Even Sister Lucia doesn't know for sure. She may have mis-heard. She may have misunderstood what she did properly hear. The Church doesn't say Amelia is in Purgatory until the end of time.
Someone says whistling makes the Mother of God sad. The Church doesn't say this. Someone says dancing makes the Mother of God sad. The Church doesn't say this.
Someone (many someones) says the sun danced at Fatima. The Church doesn't say this.
The Church says that my salvation is not affected by what I think about the sun dancing at Fatima. My salvation is also not affected by what I think about evolution, gravity or the unified field theory.
I must believe in the miracle of the Resurrection.
It doesn't matter what I believe about the miracle of the sun at Fatima.
The Church expects me to study the deposit.
The Church does not expect me to study visions.
The Church guarantees the deposit of faith as necessary for salvation. As part of that deposit of faith, She guarantees that I do not need private revelation. So why would I rely on what is guaranteed to be unnecessary in order to pass on what is necessary?
If I want to pass on the Faith, I'm better off sticking to the propositions of the Faith, reasoning things out through extensive use of the documents. The individuals who have trouble with my explanations can check the documents themselves, check with other catechists, etc. But how could anyone check for what is the correct understanding of a vision?
Catholics need to understand:
Public revelation is the norm which norms all other norms.
It is the touchstone against which everything else is tested.
Fatima, no matter how holy the participants or how pure the vision, is not a touchstone.
It is a consequence, an application, a catechesis.
Fatima, like every true vision, is God inculturating the Gospel to a specific time and circumstance. The Fatima vision, like other visions, may have resonance today, but insofar as it does, that is only because our time and circumstance happen to correspond in relevant ways to 1917 or to 1973 or to 1879, etc.
And for every way in which it does correspond, there are doubtless other ways in which it does not. And for every way in which the circumstances of the Fatima vision do not match our own, Fatima is not helpful. Indeed, it may be seriously problematic.
Why lay out obstacles to understanding?
And make no mistake - just as private revelation eases some minds, private revelation can most definitely present obstacles to understanding to other minds. Even under the best circumstances, private revelation is not a shotgun anyone should fire into a crowd.
You can fire the deposit of faith at any crowd without fear for the deposit carries with it its own grace, the self-revelation of God. Private revelation carries no such grace.
As long as one does not distrust what Sacred Tradition teaches, it is not a sin to put small weight on any particular non-Scriptural vision. Indeed, the Church permits us to entirely discount any non-Scriptural vision.
Can Fatima be a useful teaching tool?
For those who accept the idea that the vision occurred, for use in small settings, sure.
But it is not a necessary teaching tool.
America doesn't need Fatima.
Portugal needed Fatima.
That's why Portugal got Fatima.
If you want to insist that America needs a specific vision, then America apparently needed Champion, Wisconsin.
But America did not need Champion, Wisconsin because the Church says Catholics do not need private revelation at all. Catholics need public revelation, the deposit of faith.
America does not need Fatima.
America needs the Gospel.
Insofar as Fatima is useful to promoting the Gospel, then sparing use may be warranted in certain circumstances.
But it should not become the centerpiece.
Fatima is not the Gospel.
- The Church has approved Fatima as worthy of belief, therefore I have no qualms with people who accept what the Fatima visionaries have to say.
- I accept the miracle of the Sun and other approved miracles.
- Taken with the right understanding, the Fatima message is important (see below).
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
Two Kinds of Revelation
Revelation can be divided up in a lot of different ways.
For instance, in coming to know about God, we can talk of natural revelation: "The heavens are telling the glory of God". We can discuss prophetic revelation, the books of Jeremiah or Ezekiel, for example. We recognize the best, and the only complete, revelation is God's own personal self-revelation: Jesus Christ, in which He reveals the Trinity through the Incarnation, His life and His Paschal Mystery.
What we know of Christ comes to us through Sacred Tradition, which has two forms: written and oral. The written form of Sacred Tradition is Scripture. The oral form of Sacred Tradition is the liturgy and the teachings of the apostles as handed down through the bishops and the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. It can also include the lived example of the lives of the saints, approved by the Church for our imitation.
But there is another way to divide up revelation: public or private.
Public revelation is the Apostolic Teaching and Scripture which is the deposit of faith.
Apostolic Teaching and Scripture is the sum total of public revelation.
Public revelation = Apostolic Teaching + Sacred Scripture = the Deposit.
Public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle.
After the Apostle John wrote the book of Revelation, he died.
There is no more public revelation.
So, where do things like Fatima, Lourdes, Knock, Akita, and dozens of similarly approved visions fall? These are private revelation.
I am not bound to accept private revelation.
I can be a perfectly good Catholic and get into heaven yet never believe or accept that Mary appeared at Fatima, Lourdes, Akita, etc.
I do not need private revelation to be saved.
I do not need to accept Fatima to be a good Catholic.
67 Throughout the ages, there have been so-called "private" revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ's definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.
Christian faith cannot accept "revelations" that claim to surpass or correct the Revelation of which Christ is the fulfillment, as is the case in certain non-Christian religions and also in certain recent sects which base themselves on such "revelations".
Whether it be the vision of Fatima or the vision of Saint Faustina, it is private revelation. Even if the Church approves a vision as valid, the Church does not compel any Catholic to accept private revelation.
The vision may inform Tradition, it may exemplify Tradition, it may signify Tradition, it may perfectly express Tradition, but it ain't Tradition. Visions are not part of the deposit of faith.
A vision - even a vision accompanied by a miracle that is witnessed by 70,000 people - is private revelation. Nothing more.
I can, like St. Thomas the Apostle, distrust those 70,000 witnesses and, like St. Thomas, still be a saint.
A vision, even Fatima, even Divine Mercy, is not part of the deposit of faith.
At best, a vision is catechesis.
At worst, a vision is condemned.
But that vision is never part of the deposit of faith handed down by the Christ to the apostles to us. Never.
Never.
Visions are fun. Visions are interesting. Visions are buttered popcorn. The deposit is steak. Visions are not informative the way the deposit of faith is informative.
Having a visionary talk about his or her vision - even when it conforms with public revelation - is less part of public revelation than having any non-visionary teach the doctrines of the Church in CCD.
Catechesis means "to echo."
If I correctly teach the Trinity or the Eucharist to a bunch of second graders, my teaching is closer to being part of the deposit of faith than is the narration of any visionary who tells me s/he has personally received the Eucharist from an angel. What I say as I teach CCD echoes the deposit of faith. What the visionary says about angelic Eucharistic reception does not.
Public revelation has ALREADY been revealed.
The deposit of faith was completed before the last apostle died.
It is done. Finished. No more to add.
All we can do is explain it, repeat it.
Still, our teaching of public revelation, our teaching of the deposit of faith, is not itself part of the deposit. Our teaching is the echoing of the deposit.
Insofar as I faithfully echo what the Church says, I am a catechist. Insofar as I fail to correctly repeat and teach what the Church teaches, then I am not a catechist, I am instead someone who presents my own private opinion as if it were the teaching of the Church. That is, I am one who - whether intending to or not - mis-represents the Truth.
Insofar as someone receives a truly divinely inspired vision, like Fatima, Akita, Lourdes, Knock, etc., it is catechesis to the one who receives it. If that visionary decides to tell others about the vision, and does so accurately, then insofar as the repetition accurately represents the deposit of faith, it is catechetical to the ones who hear it.
But, even so, it is never more than private revelation.
Now, Antonio Socci apparently wrote a book in which he said about Fatima, "It is really impossible - after all of this - to continue to speak of a 'private revelation'."
Insofar as Socci is referring to the vision of Fatima, Socci is simply wrong.
It is the Church who says Socci is wrong.
Socci is wrong.
Period.
As I said before, insofar as the message content echoes Tradition, then we must believe the message content. But I don't need to accept the Fatima event in order to accept the message content, since Fatima does not, cannot, say anything other than what the Church has always taught.
If Fatima said something new, different, or in addition, it would not be echoing the deposit.
If it were something more than private revelation, then it would be public revelation.
If it "cannot be spoken of as private revelation," then the only thing left to call it is public revelation.
But it is not public revelation.
The three children were not apostles.
Fatima is only private revelation.
Socci is wrong.
Why Visions Make Bad Catechesis
One of the marks of bad formation is putting visions on par with doctrines. A badly formed Catholic puts private revelation on par with public revelation. He or she thinks private revelation is part of public revelation. The Church says private revelation is not part of public revelation.
Similarly, one of the marks of bad catechesis is extensive reliance on private revelation, visions and miracles. A catechist who is not good at teaching the Faith will rely extensively on private revelation to pass on the Faith because he or she doesn't understand the doctrines well enough to rely on the deposit of Faith as should be done.
Now STOP.
Before you howl with outrage, listen.
Think.
A true catechist relies on the deposit of faith and nothing else because that is all the Church gives a catechist. Insofar as a catechist teaches something other than the deposit, the person is not acting as a catechist. He may still be a teacher. He is not a catechist. The person is not echoing the Church's teaching.
I absolutely believe in miracles.
But I believe because I already trust God and the Catholic Church.
I believe because I studied the deposit.
I do not believe because I studied the private revelation.
Insofar as private revelation led me to believe, it is because the private revelation echoed the deposit.
In order for the Church to approve a miracle or a vision, She has to spend years investigating the event with panels of experts at her side to advise her on the intricacies of the event.
If the Church needs years and years and dozens of investigative experts to rationally reach the conclusion that a single miracle or vision is real and worthy of belief, then why would we expect anyone else to require less time and less resources than the Church to reach the same conclusion? Personally, I would expect it to take a lot more time for other people to rationally reach the same conclusions, assuming they had access to the same evidence, which they don't.
The deposit of faith is accessible in a way that private revelation is not. When I teach Catholic faith on the basis of events which are not part of the deposit of faith, I'm essentially expecting my audience to surrender their rational faculties and simply trust me on the details, which even I probably don't know.
So why would they trust me? Especially when we remember that I am a fallen man who will get details wrong even with the best of intentions.
Sister Lucia says Amelia (a childhood friend) will be in Purgatory until the end of time. The Church doesn't say this. Sister Lucia says it. Is Sister Lucia right? Even Sister Lucia doesn't know for sure. She may have mis-heard. She may have misunderstood what she did properly hear. The Church doesn't say Amelia is in Purgatory until the end of time.
Someone says whistling makes the Mother of God sad. The Church doesn't say this. Someone says dancing makes the Mother of God sad. The Church doesn't say this.
Someone (many someones) says the sun danced at Fatima. The Church doesn't say this.
The Church says that my salvation is not affected by what I think about the sun dancing at Fatima. My salvation is also not affected by what I think about evolution, gravity or the unified field theory.
I must believe in the miracle of the Resurrection.
It doesn't matter what I believe about the miracle of the sun at Fatima.
The Church expects me to study the deposit.
The Church does not expect me to study visions.
The Church guarantees the deposit of faith as necessary for salvation. As part of that deposit of faith, She guarantees that I do not need private revelation. So why would I rely on what is guaranteed to be unnecessary in order to pass on what is necessary?
If I want to pass on the Faith, I'm better off sticking to the propositions of the Faith, reasoning things out through extensive use of the documents. The individuals who have trouble with my explanations can check the documents themselves, check with other catechists, etc. But how could anyone check for what is the correct understanding of a vision?
Catholics need to understand:
Public revelation is the norm which norms all other norms.
It is the touchstone against which everything else is tested.
Fatima, no matter how holy the participants or how pure the vision, is not a touchstone.
It is a consequence, an application, a catechesis.
Fatima, like every true vision, is God inculturating the Gospel to a specific time and circumstance. The Fatima vision, like other visions, may have resonance today, but insofar as it does, that is only because our time and circumstance happen to correspond in relevant ways to 1917 or to 1973 or to 1879, etc.
And for every way in which it does correspond, there are doubtless other ways in which it does not. And for every way in which the circumstances of the Fatima vision do not match our own, Fatima is not helpful. Indeed, it may be seriously problematic.
Why lay out obstacles to understanding?
And make no mistake - just as private revelation eases some minds, private revelation can most definitely present obstacles to understanding to other minds. Even under the best circumstances, private revelation is not a shotgun anyone should fire into a crowd.
You can fire the deposit of faith at any crowd without fear for the deposit carries with it its own grace, the self-revelation of God. Private revelation carries no such grace.
As long as one does not distrust what Sacred Tradition teaches, it is not a sin to put small weight on any particular non-Scriptural vision. Indeed, the Church permits us to entirely discount any non-Scriptural vision.
Can Fatima be a useful teaching tool?
For those who accept the idea that the vision occurred, for use in small settings, sure.
But it is not a necessary teaching tool.
America doesn't need Fatima.
Portugal needed Fatima.
That's why Portugal got Fatima.
If you want to insist that America needs a specific vision, then America apparently needed Champion, Wisconsin.
But America did not need Champion, Wisconsin because the Church says Catholics do not need private revelation at all. Catholics need public revelation, the deposit of faith.
America does not need Fatima.
America needs the Gospel.
Insofar as Fatima is useful to promoting the Gospel, then sparing use may be warranted in certain circumstances.
But it should not become the centerpiece.
Fatima is not the Gospel.
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