My run in with the idiots at Hit and Run, and a past episode with Jody the Atheist, reminded how much historical knowledge is really on the level of Saturday morning cartoons. Particularly with the rise of Science where the contemporary Weltanschauing paints a Manichian conceit where ignorant and superstitious religion Had It All Wrong until Courageous Scientists proved that the world was round, or somesuch. I wonder how long historical knowledge is going to be in the thrall of "Inherit the Wind."

The problem for the secularists and atheists is that science was largely a religious project. Scientists were clerics who saw no Manichian dualism in their endeavors. As Victor Davis Hanson notes several posts below, the Church was instrumental for communicating the rationalism of the Classical period to the modern world. More than that, I think the West was fortunate in having a "calling" toward science. Genesis is, in my understanding, unique in that the natural world is mechanistic. Gods and spirits do not cause the rain;God opens the sluice gates of water. St. Augustine handles the problem of evil, in part, by defining God's Creation - the World and Reality - as Good. If the real world is good, then it must be true, and if it's true, then it's also real. How different is that from the Eastern view of the World as Illusion. And since it seems easy to reason that something that isn't real isn't going to merit deep study, that fundamental orientation may say alot about why science took off in the West.


Greg Krehbiel's Home Page has a couple of links to good essays on the subject. This First Things article, Retelling the Story of Science makes some salient points:

The Book of Genesis was itself in large part intended, scholars tell us, as a polemic against pagan superstition. For example, whereas the sun and moon were the objects of worship in pagan religion, the Book of Genesis taught that they were nothing but lamps set in the heavens to give light to day and night: not gods, but mere things, creatures of the one true God. Nor were animals and the forces of nature to be bowed down to by man as in pagan religion; rather man, as a rational being made in the image of God, was to exercise dominion over them.

On now to the Galileo episode. I have, of course, been forced to argue the Galileo episode more times than I care to remember. [The mantra of the shallow secularist seems to be "pointy hat, pedophilia and Galileo."] The First Things article amplifies the point made in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution - the Galileo episode was not "about" superstition versus science; it was about academic feud by sides who both had empirical evidence and scientific support. [It was also about Galileo mistakenly using heretical images for his publication.]

Perhaps I can best introduce it with a personal story. I was asked a few years ago to give the response at a conference of scholars to a talk on the teaching of evolution in high schools. In my presentation I quoted the following piece of antireligious propaganda from a currently used high school biology textbook: “Every so often scientists stir up controversy when they explain part of the world that was considered beyond natural explanation—that is, belonging to the ‘supernatural.’” I disputed the idea that such controversies arise “every so often,” as the textbook asserted. I said that except for the battle over evolution I could think of no significant controversy that fit this description. At that point, as I had expected might happen, several members of the audience shouted out “Galileo!” But they had no reason to, for (as I went on to observe) the Galileo affair was most certainly not a debate about the supernatural. The geocentric theory that the Church in effect endorsed was no more supernatural than the heliocentric theory that it condemned. This was a clash between two perfectly naturalistic theories of astronomy. It was the veracity of Scripture that the Church authorities (mistakenly) saw themselves as upholding, not supernatural explanations of planetary motion over natural ones. (It is true that the inspiration of Scripture is supernatural, and that Galileo’s opponents thus thought they had supernatural warrant for believing what they did. But one may believe a natural fact on supernatural authority. I may believe that figs grow on trees or that Pontius Pilate was procurator in Judea because the Bible says so, without thinking that those facts are in any way supernatural in themselves.)

Of course, it's shocking to see a scientific dispute made the subject of an ideological dispute by the instruments of the State. Like, we know, except for Galileo that's never happened before - unless you count my Law School Professor who wants to place research into intelligence and race off limits.

Krehbiel also links to The Galileo Legend which makes this point:

I am aware of only one scientist who was sentenced to death by public authorities prior to the 20th century — when the Nazi and Soviet governments greatly enlarged this number. That was the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution. Although the specific charges raised against him by the Terror were political rather than scientific, the anti-scientific tendencies of the regime that condemned him are a fact of history — curiously, a little-known fact. The science textbooks our children read make free with accusations against the Catholic Church over her treatment of Galileo, but we would be hard pressed to find any that pay similar attention to the French Revolutionists' closing of the Academy of Science and their decapitation of France's greatest scientist.

My earlier point also. Popular history plays up imagined stories - such as Bruno Giordano - of religious oppression, but of secular oppression we hear nothing. Who were the Vendees? Who were the Christoros? Did you know Lavoisier had been executed by the Revolution? I may have, but I was a history major. Likewise, I probably heard about the Vendee Rebellion in passing under the heading "superstitious peasants oppose liberty," but certainly there was no thematic connection that would have created a coherent narrative about secularists and their bloody oppression of free thought.

My only point here, incidentally, isn't to indict the secularist project. Heck, I'm part of the secularist project. The last thing that I would want to see is a return of theocracy. I like living in America with its pluralism, where people shop for churches like they shop for detergent, and where the dominant religious tradition actually hires and fires its own clerics. [Talk about a totally mind-blowing concept that is to a cradle Catholic.]

But let's not pretend that the atrocities are all on one side, shall we?

Old Oligarch's Painted Stoa has some pretty good Matrix related stuff.

You are Neo, from "The Matrix." You
display a perfect fusion of heroism and
compassion.


What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I think this MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF BILL O'REILLY is dead on. I'm not a big fan of O'Reilly. Half the time he is just plain talking nonsense. In his defense, though, it seems that far more often his guests are even loopier. Good entertainment, though.

[Via Instapundit] This "coming out of the closet" by a Jewish Republican has elicited the a round of shallow humor over at Hit & Run about "oppressed Republicans" and "Republican wimps." The article, though, rings true. There are several bloggers on the St. Blog ring that go by aliases because they are academics. I don't think their fears are excessive. I know what happened to my grade one semester in economics when I made a pro-nuclear power pitch against a TA and, hence, I did not major in economics. Likewise, in my role as the "only other conservative" at UCLA law school, I could identify as many open Communists as I could other Republicans. [One to One.]

The Hit and Run comments miss the real point about the ignorance and narrowness that passes for depth among the New Class of academics and urbanites. Bigotry and villification are sometimes appropriate. Nazis should be loathed. Klan members should be loathed. Communists should be loathed. But Republicans? How can any thinking person develop that reaction against either of the two major centrist American political parties?

Shallow bigots would be my guess.

[Via Rand Simberg]This Washington Dispatch - Opinion piece suggests that Libertarian Party may be relegating itself to the dustbin of history because of its desire to occupy the New Left position on national defense.

It hasn't gone unnoticed that the profilers blew it with the serial killer recently arrested in Georgia. United Press International: reports:

An investigator with the state attorney general's office who was working on one of those cases obtained the DNA swab that eventually linked Lee to the serial killings. Lee is a suspect in the slaying of Connie Warner in 1992 and the killing of Randi Mebruer in 1998 at Zachary. Police said they never had enough evidence to arrest Lee in those cases.

The DNA swab from Lee was awaiting analysis along with hundreds obtained by investigators in recent months when circumstances suddenly gave it more importance. A sketch of a suspect in a 2002 slaying released Friday caused Zachery police to push for an urgent analysis of Lee's DNA.

A brother of a victim I saw on Fox was complimentary to the person who kept an open mind and didn't limit himself to white males as dictated by the profile - white male between 20 and 40, bad relationship with mother - or popular prejudice - serial killers are always white males between 20 and 40 and probably Republicans.

You know that the Academic Left is Getting it's Ox Gored when...

...the American Historical Association announces that it will no longer investigate charges of fraud or plagiarism.

The AHA site explains:

On May 5, 2003 the American Historical Association (AHA) announced that it would no longer investigate charges of plagiarism and fraud leveled against historians. The organization explained that it "does not believe that the modest benefits to the profession justify the time, energy, and effort that have gone into the process."

Odd, how the AHA is now worried about the cost/benefit aspect of self-policing, now that the tendentious use of spurious historical data to support partisan political positions by a gauchista historian was thoroughly ventilated in the free market of ideas.

Of course, the AHA is not as concerned about expending "time, energy and effort" on other gauchista agenda items, such as passing resolutions against the Iraq War - -

"Statement of Historians Against the War.

At a meeting on the evening of Friday, January 3, at the 117th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, historians from more than forty colleges and universities agreed to form a new national network, "Historians Against the War." A committee was appointed to draft the following statement:

We historians call for a halt to the march towards war against Iraq. We are deeply concerned about the needless destruction of human life, the undermining of constitutional government in the U.S., the egregious curtailment of civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad, and the obstruction of world peace for the indefinite future."

Priorities - always priorities.

Hometown Alert - Victor Davis Hanson


[Via Penner] Boston Globe has a solid article on Victor Davis Hanson. One thing that you get from reading VDH is his rootedness in the Valley. His first book, The Western Way of War, had its genesis in his reflections on the difficulties that classical armies must have had in destroying grape vines, which reflection came from growing up on a Valley farm where he had had to uproot a few vines. So, the article's title - The Farmer - seems very appropriate.

One thing the article slights is Hanson as a war gamer. I know from a high school classmate of mine - who come to think of it was a scion of one of the big West side farming dynasties - that Hanson used to war game with him. I don't war game, but having hung out with those folks, and played Empires in Arms with them, you can't discount the encyclopedic knowledge they develop along with an unembarrassed and unhesitating belief in the correctness of their conclusions, something which can only be developed in "armchair generals." If you've ever known any war gamers, and if you look at VDH and Glenn Reynold's writings, you can see some of that characteristic. [This isn't a criticism. Not suffering fools is occasionally a virtue.]

I found the following passage in the article particularly pertinent to the Jihad I have been on for the last week:

For Hanson, it can seem like everything is at stake in these battles. The Greeks are not just a subject of academic research to the 49-year-old farmer, but the purveyors of a living legacy. That legacy lies at the core of all that's best about Western civilization, and disrespectful left-wing academics, in his view, risk squandering it.

Hanson is hardly the only scholar to think in such terms. But many contemporary classicists ask whether it is really possible to trace the Greek legacy like a single thread over the millennia. Were there really such impermeable fences between East and West in antiquity? After all, ''One of the great lessons of the ancient world was a genius for cultural synthesis,'' says Gregory Nagy, director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. What we call Western civilization incorporates Egyptian influences, for example, along with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-all of which originate in the Middle East. Nagy adds that during the medieval second caliphate, ''the intellectual world of Aristotle was preserved in Baghdad and Basra in a way it wasn't further west.''

Hanson is unimpressed. Plato and Aristotle ultimately had no impact on Arab society, he claims, because ideas that challenged Islam were uniformly rejected by theocracies. In the West, by contrast, rational inquiry opened the way toward progress and prosperity. (emphasis added.)

Exactly right.

Spread the meme. Omnibus Bill calls attention to a little covered story on Reno's refusal to authorize a mission to capture bin Laden. This is a good resource to keep in mind the next time some Democrat on Hannity & Colmes casually asserts that 9/11 was a failure of the Bush administration.

Omnibus Bill has a solid post on the deceit depended upon by the Affirmative Action project. I hadn't realized there had been so many studies debunking the claims of affirmative action that had seen the light. I am aware that certain studies had been strangled in the cradle on the grounds of academic ethics and privacy concerns.

Incidentally, does Blogville need another crypto-Catholic attorney blogger? Sure it does. Check him out.

The Blog from the Core celebrates Anniversary Number One. Check him out.

Kids. Whatcha gonna do about them?

I found this dialogue on an Atheist discussion group surprisingly amusing:

everyone is vulnerable to religion. The trick is to innoculate her.
Create your own highly irrational religion that's a parody of existing
religions with rules that don't make sense and change often. Get more
strident when she's about twelve. That should do it, and having
rebelled from one religion, she can easily rebel from the rest. Worked
for my parents, although they weren't concious of using this as a
strategy...

Brad Paul wrote in message news:...
> I'm a first time dad and an atheist! I want to teach my daughter to
> think on her own but I do not want to force atheism on her.

The question must be asked by all parents at some time. The response, which offers a strawman approach to child-rearing, is perfectly misguided. The first time the child is actually exposed to a coherent religious tradition - rather than the parody he was raised to believe - he will belong to it. On the other hand, that may also be the only option to left to atheist parents. What tradition are they going to raise their children in? Seems like they just have a big old vacant spot in a fairly substantial part of their life, and something always beats nothing.

Ha, either way we win.

I thought this was a pretty interesting post on the historical dimension of the Real Presence doctrine. Beyond the evidence of the doctrine in the writings of the earliest Church Fathers, in my view the best evidence that the doctrine existed from the beginning comes from the charges of cannibalism and child sacrifice that were levelled at the early church. Those Christians had the same reason for abjuring ritualistic cannibalism which exists today; cannibalism is repellent. There must have been an extremely compelling reason for the early Christians to have adopted a practice that had no textual or sociological basis in their culture, a practice which was as routinely condemned in the Roman world as it is today. Moreover, if the early Christians had taken the same desanguinated, symbolicy and occasional approach to Communion that one sees in most Protestant churches, it hardly seems likely that the abominations, which Tacitus referred to as the reason for Roman popular hatred of Christians, wouldn't have had the same traction. And, Pliny probably wouldn't have to report to Trajan that when Christians reassembled to partake of food, the food was "of an ordinary and innocent kind."

Today, our society generally accepts without thinking what is happening - or being remembered - in the tradition or rite of Communion. [Incidentally, the best literary evidence of that fact is found in Stranger in a Strange Land, where after Duke expresses disguest with Valentine Michael Smith's acceptance of Martian cannibalism, Jubal Harshaw ironically inquires whether Duke was a practicing Christian or just attended services.]

Even today, when people think about what is actually occuring in Communion, they can become disturbed. I had a post on an Episcopalian Bishop who argued against the bloody understanding that pervades traditional teachings on the Eucharist. Let's face it, cannibalism has never been a major selling point for the Christian faith. I suspect some portion of the rationalism of symbolic approach to the Eucharist stems from the understandable repulsion against cannibalism. But if that feeling exists today, what was it like when that repulsion could literally get one thrown to the wolves. So, modern biblical scholarship notwithstanding, the early Christians must have thought they had a pretty good reason to face that danger.

Who the heck is Giordano Bruno?

I confess I didn't know. I graduated with Honors with a degree in History. My area of emphasis was on the rise of the scientific worldview in Western Europe. But I had no idea who Giordano Bruno was. This fact, frankly, speaks more about people like Tim - several posts below - than it does about me. It's not my job to keep track of every crackpot who become celebrated as a "Martyr to Free Thought," but in the interest of education I did a bit of internet research on the subject. Here's a synopsis, with my notes in italics.

The Claim - Bruno: the forgotten apostle of the scientific method, martyred for his scientific beliefs.

According to the BBC News:

Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake on 17 February, 1600, for refusing to recant his philosophical beliefs before the Catholic Church's Inquisition.

Bruno, who travelled throughout Europe writing and teaching, is seen by some historians as a forerunner of modern scientific thinking.

But it was his defence of the ideas of Copernicus - saying the sun could not be the centre of that universe - that landed him in trouble with the Catholic church.

This is very interesting. Roger Bacon, who is often described as the true forgotten father of empiricism, I know. This guy I've never heard of. Why haven't I heard about this guy?

According to this post:

Then a Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno, removed his priestly vestments and became a philosopher to share his knowledge with Europe.

This genius savant claimed that Copernicus was correct - the earth revolved the sun, but went light years beyond the Polish astronomer. Our sun was just a close-by star, he claimed, and the millions of stars have planets about them just as ours does. He claimed this universe of stars was limitless. We are now finding planeted stars as a matter of course. Robert Ingersoll said, "He knew the Jewish records were below the level of the Greek and Roman myth; that there is no such thing as special providence; that prayer is useless; that liberty and necessity are the same; and that good and evil are but relative." Bruno did not believe in life after death - perhaps that's why he did so much while he lived.

For these claims, and for the crime of advancing the notion that priests had no right to use violence in attempting to convert disbelievers, Bruno was charged by his former church. The Catholic Church locked him up for 7 years in prisons of the Office of the Inquisition, in Venice, and Rome. His Starr-like prosecutor scoured Europe for his writings. He was offered freedom, if he would recant. He scoffed at the very idea, and told the bishops and priests who condemned him to death, "Perchance your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it." Decades later, Galileo would accept the same offer.

The church destroyed so much knowledge that it took Western civilization almost 1700 years to arrive where the pagan Greeks were, in 300 BCE. Why do we know of Copernicus and Galileo who mistakenly left the sun the center of the universe, but not Bruno, who saw the infinite? Those who control the present control the past. That's why.

OK, I can see where Tim's sneer about the Church's role in preserving and distributing knowledge comes from. It's an absurd position. The "Church" didn't destroy knowledge. Most - in fact, all - serious scholars blame the "Dark Ages" on something called the "Barbarian Invasions," which destroyed the cultural cohesiveness of the Roman Empire and severed the new Germanic civilization's connection with the tradition of classical learning that had previously existed. No serious scholar disputes the role of monasteries in preserving the classical tradition, albeit I will agree that Aristotle's writings were obtained through Muslem sources. But, their effect on subsequent intellectual history is through St. Thomas Aquinas who "baptized" Aristotle as "the Philosopher."


According to The Giordano Bruno Collection, Bruno was feted by various historical personages, including Upton Sinclair, who wrote:

The Church which burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching that the earth moves round the sun -- that same Church, in the name of the same three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the firing-squad; if it does not do the same thing to the author of this book, it will be solely because of the police.

It is these societies which, in every city and town in America, are pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards so that the public may not have a chance to read scientific books; to get Catholics into the public schools and on school-boards, so that children may not hear about Galilee, Bruno, and Ferrer; to have Catholics in control of police and on magistrates benches, so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or punished. ['The Profits of Religion,' by Upton Sinclair, 1926.]

In 1926, when the slogan "Rum, Rome and Rebellion had only recently derailed the Smith campaign, Sinclair was worried about a Catholic theocracies. Can you say "bigoted loonie tunes?" And, I hadn't realized that Upton Sinclair was such an anti-Catholic bigot. He truly expected a Papist hit squad to appear at his doors? Incidentally, although we forget today, this attitude was quite real. My Catholic mother - whose own mother was a convert from Methodism - remembers a Protestant uncle - presumably in the 1930's and so not far from Sinclair's paranoid prose - standing with his arm on the fireplace mantle announcing that the "Papists have guns in their church cellars." I've heard this story since I was ten years old, and it was never placed in any kind of context about tolerance or bigotry. The story never had any kind of message. It was just told as a matter of simple fact. I guess, now, that the gist of the story is that prior to 1960, if you were Catholic in America you had to accept a kind of alien status as normal.

On the other hand, Bruno was an unpleasant jerk, who injected himself in the big political issues of the age.

OK. The secularist subtext is that Bruno was a proto-Galileo who was martyred by the superstitious bigots of the Church. A gentle, noble soul with a philosopher's curiosity. Reading the Bruno hagiography, one would conclude that Bruno was the poster boy of secularism, which is why the secular atheists have used him as their patron saint. On the other hand, a modicum of skepticism would cause one to ask a few questions. Such as, how come Bruno was martyred and Galileo, who was the better known scientist - and therefore more dangerous to the Church wasn't?

Likewise, if you know anything about Galileo, you know that the Church's focus was really on Galileo's ambiguous relationship with various heretical movements, not per se with his support of Copernicanism. Conventional wisdom aside, the Church's position was not always and everywhere anti-Copernican. For that matter, Copernicus was a Catholic, and later probably became a priest, and nobody sent him to an auto da' fe. Biblical literalism has never been the Church's strong suit; in fact, Augustine counselled such an approach when faced with conflict between the observable world and the Bible. So, some questions need to be answered.

On further investigation we find that Bruno would easily be discounted as a crank if he tried to get a university assignment. According to this laudatory Joan D'Arc piece Bruno speculated about parallel universes, ufos and rejected the limits of the Copernican system. While all of those things may be correct, based on the entire absence of any empirical data, what Bruno was doing wasn't science, it was alchemy. There are probably a million "mute inglorious Miltons" in history who believed as Galileo prior to Galileo, the difference between them and Galileo was that Galileo did the hard work and had data to support his intuition. Mere intuition can be simply kooky. In fact, though, prior to Galileo's empirical data, rejection of the Ptolemaic system was a matter more of faith than fact. Thomas Kuhn has an entire chapter on this in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Copernicus may have been right, but his decision was based more on mysticism than anything like science.[Don't get me wrong - it was a mysticism that worked. The Copernican system was far simpler, which was a good reason to adopt it.]

Not surprisingly, for anyone with any knowledge of the actual history of the Galileo episode, this SETI Editorial: The Folly of Giordano Bruno points out that there is no evidence that Bruno was executed based on his "scientific" beliefs and that those beliefs were what any secular atheist would scorn today as being "wacky" and "religious."

This encyclopedia entry points out the peripatetic nature of Bruno's life. It seems that wherever Bruno went, he provoked anger. The Catholic Encyclopedia points out that Bruno was excommunicated by the Lutherans and may have been excommunicated by the Calvinists. If Bruno had been treated by the Lutherans and Calvinists as they were wont to do with Catholics and Anabaptists, Bruno would be forgotten today.

In between these excommunications, though, Bruno took up residence in the England of Queen Elizabeth, where:

In 1583 he crossed over to England, and, for a time at least, enjoyed the favour of Queen Elizabeth and the friendship of Sir Philip Sidney. To the latter he dedicated the most bitter of his attacks on the Catholic Church, "Il spaccio della bestia trionfante", "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast", published in 1584. He visited Oxford, and, on being refused the privilege of lecturing there, he published (1584) his "Cena delle ceneri", or "Ash-Wednesday Supper", in which he attacked the Oxford professors, saying that they knew more about beer than about Greek. In 1585 he returned to France, and during the year which he spent in Paris at this time made several attempts to become reconciled to the Catholic Church, all of which failed because of his refusal to accept the condition imposed, namely, that he should return to his order.

The Giordano Bruno Collection notes that "Robert Green Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic, a master of wit and intelligence, has said the following in regards to Giordano Bruno"

Let me show you the difference between the theological and the secular spirit. Nearly three hundred years ago, one of the noblest of the human race, Giordano Bruno, was burned at Rome by the Catholic Church -- that is to say, by the 'Triumphant Beast.'

So, it seems fair to infer that Bruno was writing anti-Catholic tracts in Elizabethan England during the midst of an era of religious wars from a country that was regularly executing Catholic priest for the high crime of ministering to a people who had had their traditional religion forcibly taken from them.

Apparently, after burning all his bridges in Protestant Europe, and after he had voluntarily put himself into the Protestant camp, Bruno found himself forced to return to the Catholic sphere of influence, Venice, where he was turned over to the Inquisition and subsequently executed.

In light of the full facts, Bruno was clearly not a martyr to science. His scientific accomplishments were non-existent. Moreover, it seems a great leap to cast Bruno as a martyr to philosophy and science. He was writing anti-Catholic tracts from a Protestant country. Quite recently, Americans became properly cheesed when the Dixie Chicks based the American President in England. While no one would suggest executing the Dixie Chicks, in the Seventeenth Century, there was no definite line between religion and national policy. Sovereigns would regularly change the religion of their people. Sovereigns were expected to maintain uniformity. Although conveniently forgotten by conventional wisdom, England under the Tudors reqularly executed Catholic priests for being Catholic priests and, therefore, agents of a foriegn power. At the end of the Seventeenth Century, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke would still counsel against extending tolerance to two groups - Atheists and Catholics.

The broader point in all this is that Tim was not engaging in history. He was engaging in bigotry. Bigotry is what causes the selective harvesting of data and the mendacious crafting of half-truths into scurrilous scandal. Bigotry thrives on the cheap shot, which can be rebutted only at length.

A last point, when you consider the the Cristeros and the Vendee, you can safely say that more Catholics have been killed by Secularists and Atheists since 1600, than vice versa, Bruno included. [See, all sides can play the game of the "hit and run" and the "cheap shot." Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention Hitler, Mao and Stalin - all of whom were, in their own special way, secularists.]

It looks like the secularists have been "hitting home runs" for human dignity, truth and the advancement of civilization since the Enlightenment.

Polish? I'm being read in Polish?

Wirtualna Polska - Szukaj

I think you people are great and produce the best Popes. Sto Lat.

Speaking of Angels who definitely were not dancing on the heads of any pin.

I understand that Mom has a definite right to kill her unborn baby. It's her body and no one can interfere with her autonomy over her self because that way laws the horrors of theocracy where women are reduced to breeders. But can Mom take drugs that will permanently damage the baby? After all, the greater - death - must subsume the lesser - mere retardation or deformation. Also the sacred principle of autonomy doesn't change between the cases. Any how here is an article entitled Court: Neglect Laws Don't Apply to Fetus. Here are a couple of passages:

Colorado judges can't use child neglect laws to protect fetuses, but they do have the power to issue contempt charges against pregnant women, an appeals court ruled.

The court Thursday upheld a ruling by Fremont County District Judge Julie Marshall that dismissed the county's neglect proceeding against a pregnant woman who was using methamphetamine.

The county filed a dependency and neglect petition seeking to intervene to protect the health of the fetus. The petition said the child resided with the mother and was dependent or neglected as a result of the mother's drug use.

How the court can issue an injunction to preclude something that isn't classified as "child neglect" wasn't initially clear to me. I take it that the drug use was illegal and the court does have power to enjoin illegal activities. I further take it that if Mom was taking a legal mutagenic agent, the unborn baby - this future American citizen - would be S.O.L.

The horrors of this scenario are obvious and should make the most hardened feminist desparate for some loophole to protect said future citizen. This horror may illuminate something fundamentally irrational in the way that this issue is addressed. In his book Rationality in Action, John Searles criticizes the "classical model" of rationality - according to which one's conduct is rational or irrational depending on whether that conduct satisfies current desires - with the example of a 20 year old smoking student of his. The student was willing to agree that smoking would shorten her life and that when she was older she would regret her present decision, but right now she wanted to smoke and was indifferent to that later self's desires. Under the "classical model" this behavior was perfectly rational because there was a "sound deliberative route" from her existing motivational set to the activity of continued smoking. [Id. at p. 130.]

Searles views this conclusion and the behavior as obviously irrational.

The irrationality derives from the fact that the same self that makes the decision now is the self that will die by the age of sixty. It is not enough to say that right now she had no desires about her future. The problem is that, rationally speaking, she ought to have had desires about her future, because her present behavior is such that she is both satisfying and destroying one and the same self.....The point is that on the Classical Model the undesirability of dying later doesn't count at all, because it is not represented as part of the motivational set."

Smoking may not be wrong. Maybe you should go ahead and smoke. But it is irrational to claim that your later self has no stake in your present decision.

In the situation addresed in the article, there are, in fact, two "selves." There's the Mom and the Baby. Leaving aside Mom's sacred constitutional right to kill Baby, if Baby isn't flushed, then Baby's future self will have quite a bit of interest in the conduct which foreseeably would leave him or her deformed or retarded. It is as irrational for the legal system to ignore that interest as it is for Searle's student to ignore the interests of her future self when that self is coughing up her lungs.

Duh?

Yahoo! News - Smoking May Speed Lung Cancer Patients' Death. Isn't that one of the reasons for all those cigarette company lawsuits and the warning that comes with every pack?

Yea, I'm working.

Here's the HHS site concerning
Covered Entity Decision Support Tool Home Page for HIPAA. I have to help a local university determine if it's HIPAA compliant. Incidentally, there's a whole new world developing out there with respect to the management of electronic information, which can be a "trap for the unwary" as we plaintiffs attorneys like to say with awe and reverence.

Funny Hat Day at Hit and Run Blog.

Of course, any discussion of the role of the Catholic church over course of history eventually boils down to "the Pope wears a funny hat." Tim took something like four posts to move to the anti-Catholic equivalent of the JDAM bomb. He also trotted the same list that has been canonized by the grand tradition of the Know Nothings, the Klan, Bob Jones University and Ian Paisley. Here's his rejoinder:

Of course, the Catholic church transmitted Aristotle to the West. Read a biography of Thomas Aquinas some day."

My initial (and future) digs against the Pope were based on the fact that he wears a funny hat and is, like all absolute authorities, hilarious. And long experience has taught me that there is nothing more boring or depressing than a serious discussion of Catholicism. At the risk of giving a straight answer, however, five centuries before St. Thomas, Plato and Aristotle had been translated into Arabic by the Pope's original enemies: Syrian Christians. In the period after that they were widely circulated, commented on and improved upon by Al Kindi, Ibn Sina, Al Rushd (Averroes) and various other heretics. I have no illusions about the glory of the Muslims. But it was no accident that for centuries classical ideas penetrated everywhere around the Mediterrenean except Christian Europe. I'm sure the church is blameless in that, because you know how irreligious people were in those days.

I realize that from the Code of Constantine right up through Pius XII's concordat with Hitler, the Catholic Church has been hitting home runs for human dignity, knowledge and freedom. But rather than explain how the war on vernacular bibles, Pope Clement V's stellar reign in Avignon, burning Giordano Bruno at the stake, the destruction and looting of Constantinople, the Spanish Inquisition, Cardinal Law's kid-happy employment policy, and countless other achievements helped secure the freedoms we all enjoy today, I'll leave that to somebody with more patience for pointless conversations.

Posted by: tim on May 22, 2003 06:53 AM

Here's my counter:

Great. I was waiting for the "funny hat" comment. Likewise, the ideological laundry list of half-fact/half myths regularly trotted out by anti-catholic bigots, including the Klan and the Know Nothings, was overdue. You're right, though, I have no patiences with someone so locked into a hateful worldview that he goes through history collecting his "show stopping" list of irrelevant citations. You cite the Concordat but not Mit Brennender Sorge, which was read in German Catholic churches after the Concordat and declared Nazism as non-Christian. Why? Could that omission be bigotry or ignorance? Try to broaden your knowledge base.

As for your view of the mechanism of the transmission of classical knowledge to the West. Jeepers, you're right. Aristotle became a key element in the development of a scientific method because of Syrian monks, not Thomas Aquinas. You should write a book. It would be revolutionary. Those Syrian monks probably occupied all of the top teaching spots at the University of Paris. Likewise, no one disputes the contribution of Averroe, but science died in the Islamic world and not in the west. Why? I didn't know that Roger Bacon, Copernicus or Gregor Mendel were Syrian but anythings possible. Maybe, Otto, Plato was Belgian.

Likewise, and more germane, what does any of this have to do with your initial charge that John Paul II - who has done more for the cause of human liberty than all the Libertarians stacked together - is a "Roman Dictator." Your approach to reasoning seems to be a continuous appeal to the genetic fallacy. You should read Aristotle, Aquinas, or any random Syrian monk someday to see how reasoning is actually done.

By the way, what is it about Catholicism's view that humans are individually ontologically unique and valuable that so offends you? I would think that a person devoted to a natural rights worldview would at least recognize where that worldview was formalized. Or, is it that you never learned that from your Jack Chick comic books?

By the way what does your demonstration of your deep reading of the collected works of Jack Chick have to do with the question of "are libertarians bigots" except to answer the question in the affirmative?

Posted by: Peter Sean Bradley on May 22, 2003 12:45 PM

You all recognize, of course, my clever homage to "A Fish Called Wanda" in the second paragraph. And do you like the "war on vernacular bibles" claim. Lane Core succinctly describes this as "A plain & simple lie. Just one of the innumerable anti-Catholic slanders that Catholics have had to put up with from Protestant polemicists for nearly five centuries." Libertarian polemicists too, it appears.

Let's move off the history and sociology for the moment and consider libertarian philosophy. Back when I was libertarian, I understood that the essential teachings of libertarianism was "every man for himself." No, wait. That's also from A Fish Called Wanda. The actual teaching was that state coercion was illegitimate. People should be given freedom from state coercion. After that, they were pretty much on their own to do whatever stupid thing they wanted to do so long as it didn't violate the natural rights of their neighbors.

Under that formulation, the RC church - most any church - is not a target of libertarian attack. No one today, and certainly not in America, is drafted at gunpoint by agents of the state into the Catholic church. People become Catholic or remain Catholic as a matter of free choice. It's all very libertarian because none of it involves state coercion.

But Tim, who apparently writes for Reason, is on a crusade against the Pope because he is, or purports to be, an "absolute authority." Now, given the fact that the Pope has no ability to use state mechanism to coerce compliance with his "absolute authority," why would any libertarian be concerned merely with the Pope's assertion of moral authority? The answer would seem to be that the Pope is - properly - viewed as a moral authority and that just ticks Tim off. However, the last time I looked libertarianism wasn't opposed to the authority of ethos or logos, but only to the authority that came out of the barrel of a gun. In sum, the interesting thing is that Tim's publication of slurs and half-truths is not a logical development of his libertarian principles - it's obviously a cultural issue reinforced by a chorus of like-minded individualists. The fact that bigotry passes for deep thought over at Reason's blog is truly sad.

Lane Core has pulled his link to Hit and Run. I'm going leave mine up for now, but I may take it down under the "life is too short" philosophy. Hit and Run isn't very interesting to begin with and I have too many things on my plate than to spend time on smug purveyors of prejudice.

Gratuitous insult of the day.

Is the Libertarian blog Hit and Run bigoted? This post contains a surprisingly unnecessary vilification of Catholicism. Responding to a National Review essay which, inter alia, argues that support in favor of assisted suicide increased when proponents were able to cast the opposition as being "Catholic," the Hit and Run post asserts:

At National Review, Wesley J. Smith analyzes the "good news" that assisted suicide has massively lost popular support—suggesting my own campaign for required suicide must really be doomed. Grain of salt: Smith, the author of Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope From Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder uses a set of presumptions and strategically [bracketed words] to reach the improbable conclusion that the campaign for assisted suicide was basically just an anti-Catholic smear campaign. (I'd feel better if Smith's views on cloning, stem cell research and various other doors man was not meant to open didn't track the Roman dictator's so closely.) (emphasis added)

Roman dictator?!?! I assume that the reference is to the Roman Catholic church and not to Mussolini. But why is there this gratuitious insult in this post? The last time I checked the RC church in America was a voluntary association. In other words, it is the kind of institution which was held up, when I was a libertarian, as the model of noncoercive social legitimacy.

This is the second really outre shot at Catholicism I've seen at Hit and Run. It makes me think that perhaps some Libertarians don't believe that RCs belong in their movement.

Update: I left this comment on the Hit and Run post:

I had to read this post a few times in an attempt at understanding why Mussolini was being invoked. Then I got it - the Roman Dictator is the Catholic Church. Sure, that makes sense. 25% of the US population is Catholic. Why should Catholic viewpoints have any input into politics or policy debates. After all, those "friggin mackeral snapping Papists" are just mindlessly marching in lock step with everything their priests tell them.

By the way, this is the second gratuitously offense slap at Catholics that I have read in Hit and Run. I hadn't realized that one couldn't be Catholic and a libertarian at the same time. Makes me think I my involvement in the libertarian law society at UCLA would have been black-balled if they had known my religion.

Posted by: Peter Sean Bradley on May 21, 2003 04:12 PM

This was the truly remarkable response:

"By the way, this is the second gratuitously offense slap at Catholics that I have read in Hit and Run."

Oh, don't get your scapular in a bunch. Freedom to make fun of the Pope is the greatest freedom of all.

Posted by: tim on May 21, 2003 06:50 PM

My response:

"Oh, don't get your scapular in a bunch. Freedom to make fun of the Pope is the greatest freedom of all.""

You are also free to sound like an ignorant Klan bigot. Congratulations, you have succeeded.

And by the way, that is exactly the point. The reference to a "Roman Dictator" harkens back to the era of the Know-Nothings and the Klan when charges against the "Roman tyrant" were a dime a dozen and there was an effort to stifle non-governmental schools among other things. One of the great decisions promoting liberty was the Supreme Court decision finding a liberty interest in individuals in sending their children to Catholic schools. But, hey, what's history compared to the Klan's, or Tim's, right to make "fun of the Pope."

Steven Den Beste has a long post on why he is not a "raving atheist." The point of the post is to establish his position that there is no ontological difference between his atheistic position and a believer in ethical monotheism's theistic position. Den Beste spends a lot of digital ink pointing out that knowledge is either ontologically inductive or deductive. Inductive knowledge is based on a model of mathemtics and moves from unassailable premises to inevitable conclusions. Deductive knowledge is empirical and requires a host of examples from which one can draw probablistic statements of the real world.

Although this appears to be a hot topic among atheists, who apparently believe that they are in possession of the Truth because they don't believe in "sky god, baby talk," Den Beste's conclusion borders on the banal. Obviously, one can be no more certain of atheism than theism, but not because of ontology. Rather, the problem is epistomology. There is simply no such thing as a rationalistic knowledge of the empirical world. Our only knowledge of the real world is based upon our examination of the real world. One can construct beautiful models of the universe through mathematics or geometry which are consistent and indisputable and wrong. Do the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees? Rene DesCartes proved that they did, and he is wong on a relativistic scale.

Does God exist? If you don't accept Anselm's Ontological Proof of the Existence of God, all you are left with is empirical data. One data point in favor of the existence of God would be if Jesus was resurreced from the dead. I take it that if one saw Jesus dead and then Jesus alive and He explained that this was the result of God, one might take this as evidence for the existence of God.

Was Jesus resurrected? I don't know. I believe He was. Why? Because I have trust in the Church which vouches for it. That source of knowledge incidentally is no different than my belief in Sulla or Charlemagne.
Is the Church's testimony wrong? I don't know how you're going to prove such a thing by logic or reason. You really can't. You can marshall arguments against that testimony. You can point out the improbability of the testimony. [But, frankly, history is by its nature pure contingency and improbable.] You can engage in ad hominem attacks, which can explain the childish mockery of religion that some atheists engage in. [Frankly, Den Beste's position is almost uniquely mature from what I've read on the internet.]

The breakdown of the world between inductive and deductive ontologies and epistomologies does have a glitch. There may be a completely different from of knowledge entirely. Some knowledge may be "noetic," which involves intuition or inspiration. Although I am deeply skeptical about such knowledge claims, at least one of the greatest thinkers believed that noetic knowledge was possible. Saint Aquinas believed that the Angels didn't reason so much as they exercised intuition. In addition, you do have the troubling examples of mathematicians whose greatest insights appear to be noetic:

For the notion of the inspired moment of mathematical creation, we have Henri Poincaré himself partially to thank. Poincaré was not only a monumental figure in the mathematics of the late 19th century but a popular writer on science, creativity, and philosophy. In a famous 1908 lecture at the Société de Psychologie in Paris, he recounted his discovery, at the age of 28, of a principle underlying the theory of automorphic functions.

Just at this time I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a geological excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Countances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience's sake I verified the result at my leisure.

Poincaré's story is the most famous contemporary account of mathematical creation.

Is this a true form of knowledge? It's hardly scientific knowledge, which is quintessentially empirical. It's also tremendously limited since others may not be willing to accept your intuition on faith alone. But it may be a legitimate source of knowledge.

And, if it is, then claims of certainty by atheists become even more problematic.

Remember that old "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" problem that so consumed the attention of the Scholastics? I mean, religion is such a taffy-yank. Is something good because God wills it or does God will it because it's good? What a waste of time.

Not like science at all. Science is real, objective, materialistic, pragmatic, manly and utilitarian. No fuzzy questions for science, thank you very much.

By the way, concerning the light as the absolute limit on velocity, does that limit exist because light can only travel that fast, or can light travel that fast because there's an absolute limit? Whatever the answer is to that question, it looks like the theory of relativity is getting tweaked again.

Angels commence dancing.

On the other hand, so what? They're still "damned smelly monkeys."

This seems to be the "gosh-wow" science factoid of the hour. New Scientist reports that chimpanzees and humans have about 4.5% more genetic similarity than previously thought, which makes the genetic variance between Pongidae and Homo about .6 %. Here's the feed:

The new study found that 99.4 percent of the most critical DNA sites are identical in the corresponding human and chimp genes. With that close a relationship, the two living chimp species belong in the genus Homo, says Morris Goodman of Wayne State University in Detroit.
The closeness of relationship between chimps and humans has become an important issue outside taxonomy, becoming part of the debate over the use of chimps in laboratory experiments and over their conservation in the wild.
Traditionally chimps are classified with the other great apes, gorillas and orangutans, in the family Pongidae, separated from the human family Hominidae. Within Hominidae, most paleoanthropologists now class virtually all hominid fossils in three genera, Homo, Australopithecus, or Ardipithecus.
On the basis of the new study, Goodman would not only put modern humans and all fossils back to the human-chimp divergence into Homo, but would also include the common chimp (Pan troglodytes) and the bonobo (Pan paniscus).

The suggestion is that chimpanzees should be reclassified into the Homo genus:

Goodman's proposal would establish three species under Homo. One would be Homo (Homo) sapiens, or humans; the second would be Homo (Pan) troglodytes, or common chimpanzees, and the third would be Homo (Pan) paniscus, or bonobo chimpanzees.

I guess another way of looking at the data is that very little genetic material makes a significant difference.

FYI - Useful Site.

Don't get caught monkeyfishing. Truth or Fiction vets the veracity of e-mailed urban legends.

When will those yokels at PETA ever learn? Adolf Hitler was the vegetarian, not the other guy.

PETA has a new ad campaign which makes another historical error.

Blogcritics has all your Matrix-related essays. Me, I'm gonna bone up on my Schopenhauer and try to figure out the ding an sich.

Rotary Thursday and the Bush "Aircraft Carrier Landing Stunt.".

It was a great Rotary meeting today. My club was honored to have as its speakers the Commandant for the Lemoore Naval Air Station and a squadron commander who had just returned from a tour of duty on the Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf.

During Q and A, someone asked about the Bush visit and whether the sailors resented it, did it delay their shore leave and was it a waste of money. The squadron commander - who shook the President's hand and then led approximately thirty planes back to Lemoore that afternoon - told us that it was a singularly memorable day for him and that he wished all cruises could end that way. He rejected the idea that Bush's visit to the Lincoln was a political stunt. He felt that the President was honestly trying to give something back to the people who had carried out his orders and was sharing his valuable time. Athough re-enlistment rates are now at an all time high, there is some concern about the effect that ten month deployments may have on re-enlistment. Consequently, he felt that the President's visit could give about 5,000 sailors something to think about when it came time to re-enlist. So, how do you figure that moral benefit in critiques based on cost and benefit? The sailors and aviators generally appreciated the fact that the President was commending them for a job well done. As for the charges that money was wasted, his point was that the pilot would have been flying some other mission and so the notion of squandering money was simply "idiotic." [The speaker - being a military officer and, therefore, officially apolitical - didn't use that term to describe critics, but he didn't agree with the description in Q and A either.]

By the way, this is an opportune moment to share some incredibly trivial, but, I think, interesting military history trivia. My father was on the aircraft carrier Valley Forge when it went on an around the world cruise in 1946. According to the cruise book, the visit by the Valley Forge to the Persian Gulf was the first time an American capital ship had been in the Persian Gulf since Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet in 1908. Since I suspect that there were no carriers in operation at that time, I reckon that my father was on the first American carrier to ever enter the Persian Gulf.

Ah, High School Memories.

Via The OmbudsGod comes high school blogger, The Lone Dissenter solitary campaign against the anti-American group-think at a Bay Area High School. Of course, this is nothing new. I remember several episodes from my late seventies Fresno experience that are not too dissimilar. In one, our AP History teacher pointedly told some Avalon Hill war gaming wonk that the idea of our challenging the Soviet's grip on Eastern Europe in 1945 was impossible and that "you kids have to learn that the United States just can't do everything it wants." The next day the wonk showed up with impressive documentation of the order of battle of the US and Soviet forces, which showed tended to show that the teacher was lacked any factual basis on which to make his claim.

Now, I don't know if the student was right, but certainly he had a better factual grip on the subject than the teacher and the teacher's insight was simply a post-Vietnam a priori belief, not a fact. In other words, we weren't being taught facts, we were supposed to adopt a value-system.

On another occasion, a Government teacher felt that it was necessary to defend the Soviet Union's abysmal record on economics and civil rights with the argument that "I'd like to see how the United States would be faring if another country had invaded up to the Mississippi and destroyed it's infrastructure." It didn't take long for someone to point out that the US had had exactly that experience - we called it the "Civil War" - and, yet, the US seemed to have gotten back on its feet in something less than thirty years.

The amazing thing about both exchanges was how phenomenally ignorant the teachers were. There attitudes and positions may have been correct, but it sure looked like ideology was being substituted for analysis.

This experience would seem to go back even further than the 1970s.. In Robert Heinlein's 1963 book, Glory Road, the story's hero, Oscar Gordon, relates that after being conditioned against patriotism in school, he was not overjoyed when he received his draft notice. [For what is obviously a stint in the Vietnam war.] So, if we accept this oblique references, patriotic high school students were dealing with their wise and cynical teachers as far back as the 1950s.

This makes sense. This column at The Ottawa Citizen issues a warning concerning the Iraq blog "Where is Raed?". The precis of the column is that the mysterious blogger, Salam Pax, is probably the scion of the Baathist class and that a corresponding skepticism concerning the blog's output is appropriate.

Here's an interesting insight from the column:

Salam Pax" is the crème de la crème. He drops brilliantly casual asides. For instance, one of his insightful tips to the Western journalists was that "ordinary" Iraqis despise all these exiles who have parachuted in with the U.S. military, and who have "appropriated" such private property as the old Mansour Social Club, and Iraqi Hunting Club -- which were Baathist social preserves (clubs in which Salam would likely have had memberships). He falsely suggests that these properties were obtained through "looting." (They were assigned to the exiles by the U.S. military.)

Now, Salam would never have known any "ordinary" Iraqis, unless he was interrogating one privately. He does know that Ahmed Chalabi and Kanan Makiya, the politicians coming down from free Kurdish territory, and the other exiles returning to Iraq, are the class that are trying to replace his class. They were the people who were fighting the good fight against Mr. Saddam abroad, and committed their lives irretrievably to a democratic future for the country -- when people such as Salam were making their profitable accommodations with the regime.

One has to keep in mind the nature of totalitarian regimes to corrupt everyone. Totalitarian dictators exploit complicity. One of Saddam's first acts as dictator was to have the survivors of his purge execute the victims. No one gets out untainted.

Purgatory will be a near eternity of "Chick-flicks."

As you can see, I took a few days off from the blogosphere this weekend. Let's get back into action with something that's a little bit religious and a little bit pop culture.

I am fairly convinced that my stay in Purgatory will be rather short as such things are measured in eternity.
Catechism of the Catholic Church para. 1473 notes:

The forgiveness of sin and restoration of communion with God entail the remission of the eternal punishment of sin, but temporal punishment of sin remains. While patiently bearing sufferings and trials of all kinds and, when the day comes, serenely facing death, the Christian must strive to accept this temporal punishment of sin as a grace. He should strive by works of mercy and charity, as well as by prayer and the various practices of penance, to put off completely the "old man" and to put on the "new man."

Me, as the father of three daughters, I'm serving my penance here on Earth. A case in point is the two hours I invested recently in The Lizzie McGuire Movie with my daughters. For those who aren't knowledgeable of the intricacies of the Disney Channel ouvre, the TV show chronicles the trials and tribulations that the show's namesake faces in negotiating the Darwinian struggle for survival which is Jr. High School Lizzie is an obviously attractive, personable blonde who, for reasons which are entirely unclear, is depicted as a social outcast, perhaps to reassure the self image of the 98% of adolescent girls who are social outcasts, that they are as attractive, fashion conscious and misunderstood as Lizzie. The movie starts with Lizzie's graduation from Jr. High school, which she fouls up in such an epic manner as to be worthy of CNN coverage. Lizzie then goes on a class trip to Rome, where she meets up with the fabulous Paulo, a seventeen year old pop singer who sweeps Lizzie off her feet with his attentions.

In all, as the father of pre-adolescent girls, and therefore as a man who is now coaching the other side, I have to say that the movie promotes positive social values. Paulo turns out to be a creep who gets his come-uppance, thereby teaching the eternal truth, which I want to brand on my oldest daughter's soul before puberty, that men are manipulative and can not be trusted. Again, I say as a father of daughters, the only plot device that could have made me happier was having Paulo and Lizzie struck blind by an avenging angel after they shared an innocent kiss. Further, Lizzie does share a kiss with Gordo - a plot development that I did not approve of - who is kind of a nerdy loyal friend of Lizzie's. So, perhaps the implicit message is that girls should look for friendship with the nerds, which is probably a good father-of-daughter's default position since, and again I speak as a father of daughters, nerds can be easily intimidated. In sum, there were good positive messages in the move all around.

Anti-male cracks notwithstanding, Instapundit had a link to a good post on the socially acceptable practice of male-bashing. With very little reflection it should be easy to establish that male-bashing is a real phenomenon and that the message it communicates about male violence and irresponsibility has real effects. I know as a man who fought for the custody of a two and a three year old daughters how the planted assumptions in those stereotypes can have pernicious consequences. I also know that many men have given up their custody rights for a host of reasons, which may stem from some belief in their own incapacity to act as parents. The article's suggestion that male-bashing be fought at the grassroots is one that I second.

I thought this was interesting. Bill Cork has a link to an article wherein an academic stumbles on to the fact that books by the great Catholic intellectuals are apparently not being read by students at a Catholic university. I wonder if this isn't simply part of the "closing of the American mind" phenomenon that has been noticed in other contexts. Is this is a bad thing? After all what is the relevance of a "dead white male" to the issues facing a modern college student? Every generation has to come up with its own answer.

For future reference, HobbsOnline A.M. puts paid to the urban legend that Bush was AWOL during his National Guard duty. This is useful since I had "kinda, sorta" believed the veiled insinuations.

I am posting this link to Country Store simply because I like the sarky tone of the posts over there.

Communio Circle Discussion - Genesis 22 and the Immorality of God

At last week's Communio Circle, the discussion turned from whether the practice of reading great literature was intrinsically valuable or whether that practice was a snobbish tic and no more worthwhile than going to tractor pulls. Somehow the conversation turned to the old chestnut of whether something is deemed morally “good” because there is an absolute and transcendent “good” or simply because God deems the thing good. [The turn in the conversation may have been caused in some small way by the fact that I am listening to the Leaning Company’s Philosophy of Religion series by Professor James Hall (which, by the way, I am enjoying.)] Since I was arguing for the non-relativistic value of literature, I decided that consistency required that I advocate for a transcendental essence of goodness.

This pitch was immediately, and I mean immediately, eviscerated by Mike, who pointed out that God had commanded that a father (Abraham) murder his own son (Isaac.) (See e.g., Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22.) Certainly, argued Mike, if that didn’t show that goodness was goodness only relative to God’s commands, then nothing did. Mike’s point was completely apposite. Proving the universal value of literature, Norman Podhoretz’s new book, The Prophets, explicitly observes that with respect to Socrates question about whether something was good because it was good in itself or because it was deemed good by the gods, the Jews come down on the side of the second position, citing the Abraham and Isaac story.

To me, this story and the conclusion to which it leads are unsettling. The conventional definition of God is that He is all powerful, all knowing and all loving. According to Prof. Hall’s definition of ethical monotheism, God is the only One deserving of worship because of his infinite capacity for those three attributes. Commanding the death of a child in order to “test” the faith of the father seems more akin to Saddam than to God, as so defined.

According to Dori, the Abraham/Isaac story plays a pivotal role in the recent movie The Believer, where a “clever Yeshiva student” repudiates Judaism and becomes a neo-Nazi skinhead because of the ethical conundrum in God’s order that Abraham kill his son.

Genesis 22 and Predestination.

Jeff, though, made what I thought was an interesting observation. What does it mean to have God “test” Abraham. Presumably God knows what Abraham will do. What kind of a test is it where God already knows the answer? Dori’s response was that all teachers know the answers to the tests they give. But, as I pointed out, teachers do not know the answer to the question of what the student knows, which is why they give the test. If a teacher knew what grade to give to a student in the first place, why would they give the test? So, I sided with Jeff on this point.

The problem is that this leads to predestination, a conclusions that apparently is even less appealing than child sacrifice. Both Dori and Mike argued for the position that Abraham had the free will to obey or not obey. The analogy here is with Mary whose choice - “I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "may it be to me as you have said." - is a substantial basis on which she is so esteemed. Mike and Dori’s argument may have been that God did not know the outcome of Abraham’s choice before it was made, although squaring that with the idea of God’s omniscience is something for further development.

Mike’s further development of his observation about the “non-test” in Genesis 22 was that there was a “test” and it was a “test” for Abraham. Now, interestingly, that is Norman Podhoretz’s view also. Podhoretz believes that the mission of the Prophets was to end idolatry and that the “test” in Genesis 22 proved to Abraham that he must trust the true God and not the false, nonexistent gods of idolatry.

Did God premeditate the death of Isaac?

The moral difficulty suggested in Genesis 22 is based on the idea that Isaac’s life was threatened by God. The story takes the reader detail by detail through the sacrificial ritual - wood is gathered, Isaac is bound, the knife is raised - and then Isaac is miraculously saved. In the nick of time, it would seem. These details, however, are nothing more than a cheesy - but effective - literary device like the annoying background music which is played in horror movies designed to heighten anxiety, because Isaac was never in any danger.

If we accept the proposition of Abraham’s free will, then there were only two outcomes and under either outcome, Isaac would live. Either Abraham would obey God and God would stay Abraham’s hand or Abraham would disobey God and Isaac would live. In either case, God is not complicit in the murder of Isaac and, in fact, clearly intended that Isaac would not die. [I will leave it to others to discuss the moral implications of causing Abraham to premeditate the murder of Isaac, which I understand under both Jewish and Christian tradition is tantamount to murder.]

Which leaves us where we started: is there an absolute good such that child sacrifice is wrong or is it the case that things are good only in relation to God’s commands?

[A last, telling point was made by Mike. In essence, who are we to talk to God about the morality of a son being sacrificed by a father? The core of Christianity, after all, is premised upon a Son who is a sacrifice in accordance with the will of His Father.]

Further Reflections: If you're interested, and who wouldn't be?, here's the relevant passage from Norman Podhoretz's The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are:

But among the differences here is that what the idolators do voluntarily in pursuing a goal of benefit to them or theirs, Abraham is ordered by God to do, and for no such purpose or reward. Indeed, none is specified. The point is to put him through the most extreme of all imaginable tests of his readiness to obey. In passing this test, Abraham demonstrates an understanding that acceptance of the one true God who has been revealed to him first and foremost entails submission to His will. (One might say that, to the unresolved conundrum posed by Socrates in Athens many centuries later - "Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?" - the Hebrew Bible has an unequivocal answer: it is holy because it is loved, or commanded, by God.)

But at the same time, Abraham has discovered that what God wills is radically at odds with what many gods of all the pagan religions are believed to demand. Unlike the pagan gods, He will have nothing to do with child sacrifice, the most horrendous in the Hebrew Bible's eyes of all the many "abominations" closesly associeated with and flowing from idolatry.

Generations after generations of believers have been tormented by this story, asking why it was necessary for God to devise so cruel a test. My own theory is that only by undergoing the experience himself - in is own person, and on his own flesh - can Abraham come to fully realize that idolatrous practices are an ever-present danger even to God's chosen people, and that they can exert their insidious power even through the voice of God Himself.

(Id. at p. 24 -25.)

From this perspective, Genesis 22 seems to offer an implicit theodicy. The evil that Abraham experienced - his pain and suffering in being forced to make this cruel choice - is not really evil. It is a good because of the pedagogic benefits that flow from Abraham's experience of the test. Is this explanation sufficient to explain all instances of suffering, or is all suffering a test? I doubt it, and as Podhoretz notes, this easy approach to Genesis 22 is probably not entirely satisfying since the story has "tormented" believers for generations. As I observed above, I have been told that the recent movie, < ‘Believer,’ plays on this torment as the device which kicks off the movie's plot.

I appreciate any comments you have. I intend to take the comments back to my Communio Circle for discussion and reflection.

Further Update: David Heddle has been kind enough to respond to my request to provide the Reformed perspective on Genesis 22, the issue of predestination and an answer to Socrates' question. Check it out. I also find interesting the theodicy implied in the post. I think I understand some portion of that theodicy to go as follows: It seems that the problem of evil is explained by man's fallen state. Man is a sinner and deserves whatever ill falls his way. Because of his natural state, whatever man suffers is better than he deserves or can expect, absent God's grace. Although my initial reaction to the perspective is negative, one has to be honest and acknowledge that my orthodox faith is willing to consign non-believers to eternal damnation, which is altogether more severe than the trials and tribulations of the natural world.

Comments, points of clarifications?

The Christian Conscience points out that one problem in child-rearing is rebellious and radical personalities of the younger generation.

Quark Soup has pictures of the collapse of the "Old Man of the Mountain." Scratch one symbol of flint-like independence. I'd better get up to Yosemite, I understand there are few cracks appearing on Half Dome.

Re: "There's only one standard of morality in this country - If a conservative does it, he's gone."

I recall one of my college history professors noting that with respect to various Marxist "liberation" movements, that the only remaining Puritans to be found in the Twentieth Century were to be found on the Left. The Bennett flap seems to be a case in point. The hatchet job on Bennett is premised on the notion that gambling is a, gasp, sin and Bennett as a religious, "moralizing" person shouldn't be committing sins.

Well, get over it. Bennett is a Catholic and the Catholic tradition is surprisingly tolerant of vices. Catholics may in good conscience drink, dance, gamble and have rambunctious sex within a sacramental marriage. Mark Shea nails the moral dimension:

C.S. Lewis once remarked that he didn't offer advice to people about sins to which he himself was not tempted. I try to do the same thing. I've never felt the urge to gamble and I therefore don't know what constitutes too much vs. just enough gambling. It seems to be somehow to be a bigger deal to Puritans than to Catholics and America, being a nation of apostate puritans, has its undies in a bunch over it, especially Democrats, who are the most apostate puritans of all. Me: I don't much care as long as it was his own money and he didn't bankrupt his fambly. Next story, please.

I'll concur, with this qualification: I don't get gambling at all. How many times do you have to prove the laws of probability and that house rules favor the house. Bennett's claim, as reported in this article that he has mostly broken even, is nonsense. Based on everyone who who tells me that they "broke even" when they get back from Vegas, I'd have to believe that Las Vegas is about to turn out the lights, if they were being truthful. Now, I can accept the argument that gamblers are purchasing entertainment, but they shouldn't delude themselves that they are doing anything other than pumping money into the casino coffers.

I, therefore, believe that Bennett has a problem. Further, even if his conduct is not per se sinful because he manages to gamble only his excess "entertainment" money, I have to believe that he is not following the course of moderation which is the beating heart of the Aristotelian ethos that is at the core of Christianity. Bennett's moral obligation is not only to avoid sin, but the "near occasion of sin" as well, and I think he probably is pretty shaky on that point. But notice that that critique is a far cry from the asserted absolutistist straw man that the libertine element wants to hold up as the image of orthodox morality.

As for the more cogent political point, I think Jonah Goldberg nails the political point. Like it or not, Bennett's personal behavior is personal until he runs for office. After that, go after him with a righteous fury. As for the implicit Clinton comparison, as an attorney who has made substantial sums off the laws that Bill Clinton's wing of the Democrat Party promoted after the Thomas Hearings, let me point out that sex with subordinates is not a private affair. However consensual the activity may have been, or appeared, at the time, I have seen numerous companies taken to the cleaners when the subordinate - usually female - was cast off and only then realized that she had been coerced into sex. Putting your company at risk of that kind of liability is a firing offense.

Update: Forget the above. Mark Cameron offers a salient reason for publicly vilifying Bennett.

Midwest Conservative Journalhas a surprisingly spirited take on the reaction to the Pope's recent encyclical on the Eucharist.

Woohoo!

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to Purgatory!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Low
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very Low

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

Ninomania has some thoughts on the Cross-burning decision and the speech/acts distinction.

KEN LAYNE has a post indicating that the substantial looting from Baghdad's National Museum was maybe 25 pieces. When I first heard the story, I was alarmed and, quite naturally, felt that America might have some responsibility. On further reflection, I tentatively suggested that the evidence wasn't in and that it could well have been the case that it was an inside job by Baathists or Museum employees. It looks like that tentative suggestion might have merit.

But, really, why was it that we all jump to the conclusion of American culpability? It really was a ridiculous proposition. Bombs were being dropped, for Heaven's sake. Was it really unreasonable to believe that the curators would have, or should have, moved their treasures to a secure location? Didn't the fact that it appeared that they had taken no security measures, according to their account, sound suspicious? I know that when a restaurant burns down in Fresno, I start wondering about whether the restaurant was losing money and if it had insurance.

But we all initially accepted the looting story without exercising our critical facilities. Why is that? Well, to extend extend an observation made by Robert Heinlein in Glory Road, at least four decades of the media, academia and certain prominent Americans beating the drum that America's motives or interests or illegitimate or immoral are bound to have some effect.

Dumbfounded. I am just dumbfounded by this post at Indymedia [via The OmbudsGod] which argues that 9/11 was a hoax. And, yet, I just know that within a year bits and pieces of this is going to be conventional wisdom.

Free Speech Anyone, Part II.

Hollywood Idiots has a post about how Boycott Hollywood was shut down. Because Boycott Hollywood was annoying gauchista SAG members, attorneys for the William Morris Agency wrote a "cease and desist" letter to Boycott Hollywood's website administrator and others. Boycott's domain registrar apparently seized upon the fact that Boycott's proprietors in an attempt to protect their privacy gave bogus contact information to shut Boycott Hollywood down. I would be surprised if such a practice was not entirely common in the paranoid and anonymous world of the internet.

A couple of points. I am not a First Amendment absolutist. Never have been, never will be, because of this kind of hypocrisy. The Left talks a good game about absolute First Amendment protections against both legal and social pressures and then goes silent when the ox that is gored is not a dues paying gauchista.

Second, I would think that the William Morris Agency better watch its own six o'clock. In California there is this tort called "interference with contract." Although the registrar may have had the legal right to terminate Boycott's contract, under California law, although a contract may be terminable at the will of one of the parties to the contract, that is simply not a defense to interference with Boycott's contractual rights. If the contract was interfered with through some "wrongful means," such fraud or defamation, then Boycott may have a viable claim against the William Morris Agency. By the way, threatening criminal prosecution in order to obtain an advantage in a civil action is a per se wrongful act. You can ask any attorney or look it up in Rule of Professional Conduct 5 - 100.

Third, what was it that caused the William Morris Agency to claim that there were potential civil and criminal penalties? It was allegations that certain celebrities opposed the war. So what? Hollywood celebrities are public figures by definition. They have the ability to correct the public record through the marketplace of ideas. Too bad for their sensitivities.

I have never read a more concise description of Penner's coffee.

James Lileks has an aptitude for metaphor unseen since Chandler. Check this out:

And I do. I’m an all-day coffee man. I have my last cup around eight at night. I grind it so fine it’s weaponized. But I’ll never nuke that last half-inch in the pot; that’s wrong. You might as well just swab a knitting needle with speed and jab it in your soft palate.