Jewsweek on the Passion.

Here's the link to the Passion Issue of Jewsweek.

Long story short: they don't like it.

Which is fine. What bothered me, frankly, is the casual prejudice that passes as common knowledge in some of the comments. Sometimes, I had the impression of listening in on a Klan Konklave in 1925. And then there's the simplistic approach to history, e.g., Constantine, the Sun God Worshipper, Christianity as a bad imitation of Mithraism, the Road to the Holocaust runs through the Crusades and the Inquistion. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Let's take the last point. I'm currently listening to Professor Harl's even-handed lecture on the Era of the Crusades. Let's stipulate that during the Crusades the religious zeal released in the "People's Crusades" led to the sacking and murder of Jewish communities on the route of that ill-starred so-called Crusade. Let's further stipulate that the knights of the First Crusade slaughtered the entire mixed Jewish/Moslem/Christian population of Jerusalem. Let's stipulate that anti-semitism has a been a fairly constant feature of Christendom. These things were bad. I'm ashamed that my older brothers in the faith acted this way. I'm certain that many of them are part of the "Church Suffering" and are working off their imperfections, if, in fact,they were lucky enough to get that far. (Of course, this assumes that "faith alone" isn't the whole story. In which case they may be in Heaven on the basis of "Once Saved, Always Saved," since there probably is no better example of "works growing out of faith" than the Crusader's behavior, which, frankly, strikes me as one of the problems of OSAS. But that's another subject.)

Even given all that, how, then, did a Jewish population manage to survive anywhere in Europe during the period of the Crusades?

The question is not, why were there pogroms and persecutions? The question is, why did the Jews survive until the rise of a state expressly and seriously committed to unreseved anti-semitism?

Other groups didn't survive. Historically, Christianity has shown itself to be quite competent in genocide and/or culture extermination when it sets it mind to the task. The 12th Century Crusades against the pagan Lithuanians were succesful. Those pagans didn't survive to the 14th Century. Charlemagne had no problems in axing either the sacred groves of the Saxons or the necks of thousands of Saxons at a time. The net result being that there were soon no Saxon tree worshippers. Likewise, the Albigensian Crusade of the 12th Century was entirely satisfactory from an Orthodox standpoint since the dualist Cathars completely disappeared from Provencal.

If one believes that there is something inherent in the Christian gospels which turns Christians into natural anti-semites, then one has to wonder what restrained Christians from doing in the 12th Century what the Nazis did in the 20th.

Now, there is a possible clue. The Nazis were not Christians. While they may have come from a Christian heritage - in the case of Hitler, a Catholic one, to be sure - the Nazis were like the Communists in their disdain for what they saw as the decadent doctrines of Christianity. Nazism was anti-Christian, as was recognized and preached to the Catholic population of Germany in 1937. In "Mit Brennender Sorge," Pius XI wrote:

Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

I don't mean to say here that the history of the Christianity was always positive or that it lacks a dark side, but there was something that restrained prior populations prior to the Nazis. The other thing is that history is not only about a succession of offenses - the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust - or of heroism, which could just as easily be constructed. It's usually about both threads running through different people, and the same people, at the same time.

Update: An e-mail I received suggests that I am misleading people by implying that Charlemagne was involved in the Albigensian Crusade of the 13th Century. To be clear about this, Charlemagne was crowned Emperor on Christmas Day in 800 A.D. Therefore, he could have had nothing to do with either the Crusade against the pagan Baltic peoples or the heretical southern French peoples.

Lex Communis regrets any confusion this post may have caused and apologizes to Charlemagne and his supporters for any aspersion committed against the reputation of this great and glorious Holy Roman Emperor.

"...a liberal is someone who will defend to the death your right to agree with him."


Agnostic secularist Andy Rooney uses the literary device of "talking with God" to mock one Catholic's religious beliefs. Undoubtedly, the sensitivity police will be all over this and Rooney will be subjected to the usual forced apology and/or resignation that we see when members of other minority groups are mocked or insulted in terms that resonate with prejudice.

Or maybe not. Which should come as a matter of undying shame for any member of the compassionate, tolerant left that has even a shred of principle.

And, by golly, there is one, who feels the shame and notes the hypocrisy. The title to this post comes from his review.

Update: Mark Shea points out this stunning Washington Post review of the Passion, the purpose of which apparently is to revitalize that Old Time Religion of Know-Nothingism among its readers. Check out the following:

Martin Luther's Reformation was a theological rebellion. At its core was a refusal. No longer would the rebels accept the pope in Rome, or the hierarchy he led, or the Latin of the Mass and of the Vulgate Bible, which most of them could neither read nor understand. If they themselves could read the Bible (which Luther soon began to translate into German), they could find their way to God with the aid of faith alone. They didn't need the pope, they didn't need his saints, they didn't need his priests, and -- as some began insisting -- they didn't need his art.

And:

And now along comes Gibson, returning to center stage the vivid Catholic imagery -- sensual, argumentative, Marian and Latinate -- of Counter-Reformation art.

He is, no doubt, sincere. But then the Aztec priests who ripped out human hearts were pretty sincere, too. So are the flagellants who still bloody themselves for God in so many Shiite and Spanish-speaking countries. The act of seeking the divine through blood and gruesome suffering didn't start with Gibson. It must be immensely old.

And:

But pictures bring the past with them. And so do visual styles. There is a lot of "anti" in Gibson's film, and not only anti-Semitism. The film is anti the secular, and anti the sqeamish. And the many clean-cross Protestants who see it ought to be reminded that the style of its images once was aimed at Christians pretty much like them.

So, the Washington Post (!!!) is reminding its readers that Martin Luther and the Reformation threw off the oppressive yoke of the Pope and priests, that "Marian and Latinate" imagery is redolent of paganism, and that the Reformation is threatened by Catholicism. Anyone with even a modicum of historical knowledge would recognize that theme as the core ideology which motivated the Protestant side during the Wars of Religion. Yet, this is from the Washington Post, which is normally so concerned about the rights of minorities, and is written in the United States, where Catholics are the minority in a broader culture whose heritage flows from that same mindset.

One waits in anticipation to see whether the sensitivity police springs to action with a demand that the reviewer engage in the modern auto-da-fe ritual of public abasement and forced resignation.

Second Update: On further rereading, I realized that I had mentally redacted the reviewer's confident claim that "the rebels rejected ... Latin of the Mass and of the Vulgate Bible, which most of them could neither read nor understand."

So once again that canard gets injected into the modern weltenschuaung. First, there were many, many vernacular translations of the Bible prior to 1517. Second, those rebels clearly understood the latin mass. My father - a 16 year who barely graduated from high school in Brooklyn in 1944 in his haste to enlist - understood enough Latin to navigate the Mass. My old man is no intellectual slouch. When I say he barely graduated, I mean that he attempted to enlist before graduation. A move that was frustrated by my grandfather who had enlisted in the Navy instead of going to High School. Nonetheless, my father's Latin from some formal education, going to the Mass and reading the Missal to this day makes me regret being a Post-Vat II Catholic.

Finally, the whole point of the Passion may be to show how one doesn't need a complete grasp of a language to understand a message. I think that was Mel Gibson's guerilla point in having the languages of the film be Aramaic and Latin. If movie theaters filled with Americans are getting the message - even with subtitles - then the "rebels" mentioned by the movie reviewers certainly understood the Latin Mass. (Besides how much proficiency does one need to pick up over the course of a lifetime the meaning of phrases like "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa"? It's not like anyone attending Mass was being asked to construct a Ciceronian speech.)

So what was the purpose of the Washington Post reviewer's tendentious historical assertion?

Reviews of the Passion.

Roger Ebert gives the movie a "thumbs-up" despite the violence of the movie.

Michael Medved finds the movie a worthy project and rejects the claims of anti-semitism:

As I have written in numerous venues (including Christianity Today, in a current article), Jews will not enjoy this movie, but we ought to recognize it wasn’t made for us and it doesn’t focus on us. “The Passion of the Christ” counts as a project of the Christians, by the Christians, and for the Christians. It will open on more than 2,000 screens on February 25 and will draw literally tens of millions of eager filmgoers, regardless of calls for a boycott by Shmuley Boteach and others. The inevitable success of the film makes it an especially foolish strategy for Jewish organizations and individuals to continue expending energy and credibility in denouncing it. This posture makes us look both mean-spirited and, finally, powerless and irrelevant. We also fall into the devastating trap of "crying wolf"--when anti-Semitic depredations fail to materialize as predicted in response to this movie, it will make it far more difficult to mobilize concern over genuine dangers in the years to come. Above all, the misguided agony over "The Passion of the Christ" serves as a tragic distraction at a time when we need unity and allies more than ever before. Let us never forget that the menacing recent wave of anti-Semitism in the Middle East and around the world arises from the Islamic community and the anti-religious Left, not (so far, at least) from traditional Christians.

On the other hand, the people at this Presbyterian church could benefit from reflecting the points made by Medved. They don't like The Passion because - oddly for a film by a Catholic using Catholic themes - the movie is too Catholic:

If we return to the use of imagery and begin endorsing movies like The Passion of Christ, we will be returning to the very state of affairs the first Protestants struggled and died to reform. We must not think that merely endorsing one form of visible representation of Christ will not lead inevitably to others. For instance, it is impossible to make a coherent argument against the use of the crucifix in teaching the Gospel if we have already endorsed the use of a movie that portrays the crucifixion. Merely because one display is static and the other moving does not change their essential nature at all. The Passion of Christ is in essence, an animated Crucifix.

In closing, let me address a common objection, namely that we must use tools like The Passion of Christ in order to reach the lost and that if we don't we are "missing a great opportunity."

Are we really missing an opportunity though? If we are convinced that using a Roman Catholic movie to present the Gospel is in essence a violation of God's law, how could we possibly use it? Should we sin that grace may abound?

Actually, I liked this review because I think the Passion is informed by a distinctive and authentic cultural viewpoint. (For example, I wonder how much of the use of the languages of Aramaic and Latin with subtitles is intended as a proof that one doesn't have to know a language to understand a message. And if that's the case, it puts me in mind of various slaps I have heard about the Latin Mass - to wit, that Catholics didn't understand what was going on in the Mass - and the fact that Pre-Vat II Catholics would follow the Mass with Missals which had the Latin on one page and the English translation on the other. In short, while Mel may be interested in art, I wonder how far his subtlety goes.)

The Presbyterian review is a nice sketch of what to look for in that regard.

See you at the movies.

Happy Shrove Tuesday.

Forget the beads, go to confession and get shroved (or shriven or shrived, whatever.) Per the linked site:

Also known as "Fat Tuesday" or "Mardi Gras," Shrove Tuesday is basically the day of preparation for Lent. The name "shrove" is rumored to derive from the word "shrive" or confess. It takes place on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent). The tradition in the church of having pancake suppers and the secular tradition of just plain partying probably derives from the practice of feasting before the fast.

The funny thing is that a former SDA/former Methodist Minister/current nondenom Protestant minister pointed out the significance of "Shrove Tuesday."

This is Interesting - The Pedophile Strikes Back.

It turns out that Lindsay Ashford, the pedophile who is looking for a little understanding, is an Episcopalian and paid the Episcopalian blogger Midwest Conservative Journal a visit to explain his side of the story. It seems that everyone was perfectly mean to Lindsay who simply wanted to explain that when Jesus said not even to lust in one's heart lest one commit adultery, that applied only to married heterosexuals and not to unmarried pedophiles, and that there really is no good proof text against pedophilia, and so, hey presto, that which is not explicitly forbidden is morally licit. (Incidentally, you'll find the Ashford thread starting about 20 to 30 comments down from the post.)

The comment thread makes for interesting reading in the way that the vivisection of a large animal might be interesting. Interesting as in horrifying. This guy was absolutely convinced of his moral superiority, going so far as to remind his "fellow Christians" that their lack of love for him shows that they are not true Christians. Ashford seemed to back some people off when he explained that he was a "celibate pedophile."

And that is really where our society's loss of the vocabulary of morality has crippled its ability to think clearly about moral issues. Even if this guy is celibate, he's still advocating the moral normality of sex with children. We all have this internalized sense of fair play that says that we really can't criticize someone for mere speech, what with the First Amendment and all, and it's not like he's really doing anything wrong if, as he claims, he's celibate, and we really can't call him a liar without proof.

And, yet, we have the dim sense that there must be something wrong with what he's doing.

And there is, and yet not one person mentioned the concept of "scandal." According to the Catechism:

2284 Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense.

2285 Scandal takes on a particular gravity by reason of the authority of those who cause it or the weakness of those who are scandalized. It prompted our Lord to utter this curse: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea." Scandal is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others. Jesus reproaches the scribes and Pharisees on this account: he likens them to wolves in sheep's clothing.

2286 Scandal can be provoked by laws or institutions, by fashion or opinion.
Therefore, they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice, or to "social conditions that, intentionally or not, make Christian conduct and obedience to the Commandments difficult and practically impossible." This is also true of business leaders who make rules encouraging fraud, teachers who provoke their children to anger, or manipulators of public opinion who turn it away from moral values.

2287 Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged. "Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come!"

"Scandal" has such a quaint, Victorian feel to it. Perhaps, it brings to mind the flush of a dowager aunt on finding a woman appearing in public while in the family way.

And, yet, in this day and age, when a "celibate pedophile" floats the trial balloon of social accptance so that he can prey on our children, the stakes have never been higher, and lacking an appropriate moral vocabulary, we silently rage as these people craft fashions that "leads others to do wrong."

Feeling Old?

Dodd reminds us that Patty Hearst just turned 50.

The Decline of Language, Culture and Rationality, and, like, Why We Should Care.

I went to John McWhorter's lecture on Wednesday. McWhorter's talk focused on thoughts he had explored concerning the development of language in The Power of Babel. The subject of how our seemingly fixed language has been formed like a melting candle and the idiosyncracies of our language and others is endlessly fascinating. McWhorter presented the material in a energetic, lively, confident manner. Odd, although I knew he was young - apparently pushing 40 - he seemed much younger than I imagined. His mannerisms and speaking style were definitely not the kind of fussy style that you think of when you think of academic lecture. (One device McWhorter used was to illustrate some feature of some language he learned because of some girlfriend he had, hence his knowledge of Spanish, Japanese, Dutch and, currently, Estonian.) I definitely recommend that any person with even a glimmer of an interest in language or linguistics should attend a McWhorter lecture if the opportunity arises.

After the talk, I went to lunch with about 40 to 50 others who had the opportunity to ask more directed questions about McWhorter's lecture. One question was the evolution of English, which afforded McWhorter to discuss the decline of the average Americans appreciation for their native language. I think he said that from the turn of the century to the present date, the average vocabulary of the average American has been cut in half.

This allowed me to ask a question directly from his book "Doing Our Own Thing," (which I got him to autograph.) My question was, "Apart from aesthetics and the frustration of not being able to communicate with those under 30, why should we care about the decline of language?"

His answer was "President Bush's State of the Union Speech and Bush's Sunday Interview." McWhorter confessed that he supported the war, but observed that it was scandalous that the President, when given an opportunity to make his case, was unable to string together sentences in a logical structure giving rise to an argument.

I think I would agree. The flaw is not simply President Bush's alone. I suspect that John F. Kerry would have gargled along in a similar fashion. At least, I've seen nothing in Kerry's, or any of the current crop of candidates, apart from possibly Al Sharpton, that gives me any confidence in their ability to communicate.

Communication is a public good. A person can spend substantial time honing their communication skills for their own pleasure, but the benefits of that skill won't be felt until most of a society share the same values. To a certain extent, one can see those values among the blogging world. I've read some beautiful prose on the internet. I suspect that bloggers blog because they know that their calling isn't highly valued among their immediate neighbors. Bloggers are a lonely lot.

Rationality is another public good. What's the point of being the only rational person in an irrational society. Dorothy Rabinowitz's critique of the History Channel's tin-foil hat conspiracy show is a case in point. The fact that a media outlet that defines itself as focusing on history - not on bizarro conspiracy theories - could see fit to inject the risible notion that LBJ was the evil genius behind the JFK assassination goes along way to establishing that rationality - like knowledge of an extensive vocabulary or an aesthetic appreciation of the beauties of a well-crafted phrase - has become another public good whose production is in decline.

Internet Museum of the Curious.

The local paper's religious section mentioned the Ship of Fools website and particularly the "Mystery Worshipper" feature. The "Mystery Worshipper" section involves reports from various correspondents who describe various features of the "worship services" they visit. For example, the Mystery Worshipper who visited All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California had this observation:

Did anything distract you?

I was distracted by the politically correct language that periodically arose. Calling God "She"? Referring to Jesus as the "Cosmic Christ"?

This Mystery Worshipper also questioned the use of the pulpit to launch an extended anti-war diatribe.

The site is, frankly, irreligious. Its self-proclaimed mission is to to demonstrate the "religious lunacy" of "organized religion." So, naturally, the site gets a supportive article in the Faith and Values section of the newspaper, which would be like giving a supportive mention to a site that lampoons people with disabilities in a section devoted to people with "Special Needs."

Because of it's mission statement, the Ship of Fools site has the same kind of shallow tone you might find listening to a teenager who has just discovered atheism. It has the typical and vapid "Men in Strange Hats" featurette, which certainly lost its charm for me when I turned 20. Ship of Fools clearly thinks its being daring at kicking organized religion in the shins, but, frankly, by focusing on cultural tropes it struck me as promoting a kind of mean-spirited approach to things which other folks hold sacred. On the other hand, let's face it, some of this stuff is as fascinating as watching a multi-automobile pile-up. And no one minds it when the mean-spirited attack is on something we don't hold sacred. For example. the "separated at birth" comparison of Bishop Spong to Mr. Spock seemed to be chillingly on point to me.

Check it out, if you like that kind of thing.

Secret Agent Man on the Passion

It's a long, scholarly, worthwhile essay.

And it's free.

The Next Step in Societal Evolution?

Mark Shea has pointed to this article. The article is entitled "I'm Tired of Being Forced into the Shadows by Society" and describes Lindsay Ashford's lonely quest for self-acceptance and social toleration:

For most of his life, he has buried his emotions and masked his long-secreted attraction. It wasn't until recently that Ashford decided to throw off the shackles of pedophilia and shed light on what he says is a misunderstood "sexual orientation." Last year, he became perhaps one of the first pedophiles in the world to put his name and face on a Web site to publicly profess his love for children.

"I am tired of being forced into the shadows by society," Ashford said recently in an e-mail interview. "I have committed no crime, therefore there is no good reason that I should have to hide myself. As long as pedophiles continue to hide, there is no chance of them ever being accepted."

One might dismiss the article as being just weird. But read it and tell me if you think there isn't the same tone that sounds when gay issues have been discussed in recent newspaper articles. If so, let me know what you think it means.

According to my partner Penner, the rare moment of ecumenism between Catholics and Calvinists during the Sixteenth Century was when they agreed to drown the Mennonites.

Which is generally what a fervent commitment to pacifism gets you.

Christopher at the Ratzinger blog offers some worthy reflections on Mennonite-Catholic dialogue.

The Season of Hypocrisy.

Check out this Drudge Report post on the different treatment accorded the "George H.W. Bush had an affair" boomlet of 1992 and the current "Kerry had an affair" boomlet.

Incidentally, so long as Kerry wasn't using taxpayer money in a cover-up, I could care less.

Likewise, why the interest in Bush's National Guard involvement? I thought we had all learned back in 1992 when a bona fide, shot down pilot war hero was running against a fellow who had connived to avoid the draft, that such an interest was illegitimate, unfair and unpatriotic. Then, in 1996, when a bona fide, injured in the service of his country war hero ran against the string puller, didn't we learn the Golden Rule that once an issue has been brought up in a prior election, it can't be brought up again because the public has already spoken about its indifference to such tripe.

Then, there's Rod Dreher's observation:

What I don't get is this: why was it wrong for Judge Roy Moore of Alabama to unilaterally declare federal law wrong, and defy it by installing a Ten Commandments monument in a courthouse rotunda ... but it's okay for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to unilaterally declare state law wrong in prohibiting same-sex marriage, and defy it by issuing marriage licenses to gay couples? I mean, I know why the media was outraged by the former episode of grandstanding and not the latter, but as a legal matter, what's the difference?

Somedays, you can cut the hypocrisy with a knife.

Spin.

I'm watching a MSNBC analyst Lawrence O'Donnell castigate Ted Sampley of Vietnam Vets Against John Kerry for lying about whether John Kerry accused his fellow vets of war crimes.

Here's the passage that caught my eye:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told the stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Kerry was explicitly accusing the American military systematically committing atrocities and war crimes as a matter of habit and routine. Kerry was clearly saying that such war crimes as occurred were not an aberration or a departure from the standards of conduct normally followed by American troops in Vietnam. [I know that the attempt has been made to argue that Kerry was simply reporting what he heard other's tell him, but I don't think that is a fair construction of Kerry's role. Kerry took an oath. Kerry testified. Kerry used his position to give these charges credibility. Kerry, in short, vouched for these claims in some role other than that of an advocate. If the Kerry felt that the charges were false, Kerry should have honorably distanced himself from them some time ago.)

O'Donnell then went absolutely off his rocker, practically shouting that John Kerry "saved his life" because the brave protesters caused Richard Nixon to cancel the war the week before O'Donnell was scheduled to be drafted.

That is a not uncommon reaction among men who are now 50 years old. One of my partners - who is 50 and was never subjected to the draft - would adopt the exact same tone when the subject of American caused civilian deaths. I think there's a deep psychological burden on these people. The fear that they felt in being sent to their perceived near certain death in a hopeless cause was very real and must have been a fixed point in their personal universes.

I think that's excusable. What isn't excusable is the contempt that O'Donnel showed Sampley when he brought up the "boat people."

One of the stars in the constellation of beliefs that Kerry's fellow travellers promoted was that since the Vietnamese were fighting against colonialism, that once Americans pulled out all would become an agrarian utopia. Hawks, in contrast, argued that since the North Vietnamese were communists, they would turn to the tried and true communist strategy of genocide.

As it turned out, Kerry's allies were wrong and the Hawks were right. After 1975, the victorious communists turned to "ethnic cleansing" and drove out over a million ethnic Chinese, "many of whom died." Among the many ironies was, of course, the fact that Kerry had castigated "American racism." So far, as I know, Vietnamese racism has never merited comment.

There was and remains a fair debate about whether America should have been involved in Vietnam, or whether a single American life should have been sacrificed in French Indochina. But people like O'Donnell need to "move on" and admit that there were atrocities, racism and war crimes committed in the Vietnamese war, that one side was fighting against real evil, and that America was, it turned out, on the right side.

Avery Brown at Eleven.

[Via Mark Shea.]

Here is an thoughtful essay on the formation of manhood in post-modern society. Long story short: we're not doing a very good job - we entirely fail to achieve the Aristotelian mean between "wimps" and "barbarians."

The essay reminded me of John McWhorter's book on the devolution of American language - Doing Our Own Thing. McWhorter dates the decline of formal written English to the moment that American society began to celebrate "authenticity" and "naturalness" over hard work that creates an appreciation of nuance. The process that turned men into "barbarians" or "wimps" seems to be part of the basic project that was premised on the idea that we should let people be who they authentically are. Of course, this notion was also premised on the idea that human in their natural glory would throw off the artificial constraints that stifled their true potential.

Of course, the truth is that character has to be formed and that the formation of people who will share, appreciate and exercise the virtues that the society requires for its health is one of the most important thing that any society can do. Left to themselves people naturally gravitate to the satisfaction of their own selfish impulses. The optimistic belief of modernism in education and reason is frustrated by the truth of concupiscence, which involves "a desire of the lower appetite contrary to reason." If a society celebrates authenticity, what virtue is their in the unnatural control of a "lower appetite" simply because reason so argues?

The reference to Avery Brown is well known to anyone who watched television during the administration of Bush I. Murphy Brown was a sitcom character who was a self-righteous, arrogant, professional female investigative journalist. In the quest for ratings, Murphy became pregnant out of wedlock and by one of two men. Murphy had the child, who thereafter simply disappeared from the series, except when it became necessary to tug the heartstrings for ratings.

Vice President Dan Quayle used Murphy Brown as an archetype of the mindset that celebrated fathers and marriage as simply one option in a beautiful mosaic of authentic relationships. The producers of Murphy Brown played off this observation to depict Quayle and Republicans as narrow-minded bigots. One episode actually introduced real people in a variety of broken marriages and relationships as typifing marriage in the contemporary society.

Murphy's son was named Avery, which itself ought to be some evidence of Murphy's unfitness to be the mother of a son. To see how Avery turned out, go to the essay.

Linguistics Expert John McWhorter speaks in Fresno.

If you're interested, John McWhorter will be giving a talk on "The Power of Babel - Language is a Lava Lamp. The talk will be on Wednesday.

I'm going to the talk and to the luncheon afterwards.

I recently picked up McWhorter's Authentically Black. Who am I to judge the "cognitive dissonance" that McWhorter describes in black culture deriving from the existential need not "to let Whitey off the hook," but on the whole it sounds valid. "Authentic blacks" like Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice are virtually ignored by the Black community. Or at least the presence of such important figures - Colin Powell is the Secretary of State for heaven's sake - portends zero change in voting preference. On the other hand, a free pass is given to intellectual embarassments like Al Sharpton. The situation is rife with a cognitive dissonance that simply has to break down when a "critical mass" of African-american intellectuals point out that the victim group/government subsidy plantation model just isn't working.

Communio Thursday - A Reflection on the Passion.

The Fresno Communio group met Thursday. The assigned reading was "Does the Father Suffer?" by Jean-Pierre Batut.

I'll confess. I didn't do the assigned reading, but I wished I had. So all I can provide are highlights. The article contains the usual level of Communio thick obscurantism, but the thrust of the article seems to be a discussion of contemporary theologians who see in the catastrophe of the Holocaust a need to redefine God, generally be reducing him from a position of omnipotence to one of impotence. In discussing Hans Jonas, Batut writes that:

In order to explain this "new idea of God," Jonas relies on what he himself calls a "myth," which he tells in a strongly Hegelian voice. He recounts the adventure the divinity undergoes as a result of having made up its mind in creating "not to keep anything for
itself." He speaks of a kenosis of God. A part of the Jewish tradition has meditated on this kenosis for centuries under the name tsimtsoum, but, according to Jonas, never dared to take things to their logical conclusion. Jonas, by contrast, boldly undertakes to detail the specific
characteristics of the new idea of God on the basis of his "myth." To begin with, the God who decides to give himself up to the world is a suffering God (not in the Christian sense "God does not begin to suffer with the Incarnation and the Cross"but in the sense that he suffers
simultaneously with the creation itself). He is also a God in becoming. By virtue of his "permanent relation to the creature . . . he undergoes an experience from the world" that affects him in his very being. God is also an anxious God, just the opposite of a magician. Finally, and above all, this God is non-potent. If he were omnipotent, he could not be good.

If God were "omnipotent, he could not be good." Well, that's one way to explain Auschwitz.

The following sentence was nominated by Dori for "least comprehensible sentence of the article":

Neo-Hegelian authors, as we have seen, tend to champion a post-metaphysical critique of theism and a "stavrological concentration" of theology normed by this philosophical formalization. Accordingly, they demand a revolution in the concept of God.

"Stavrological"? Huh? Who knew that they'd get themselves concentrated? The next sentence provides no context, just more puzzles.

By contrast, Balthasar has attempted to work out a theology of God's suffering that is in continuity with the Church Fathers' and in conformity with Scripture.

It's not clear what those Neo-Hegelians are up to, but they can't be up to any good.

As is typical for Communio articles, there's always some insight that yields a dividend. For me this was the one:

On the Cross, Christ experiences abandonment. He seems to have lost his own identity - his essential identity with the Father and, therefore, his identity as Son - on account of his identification with sinners and with sin itself. This is the content of his suffering. He experiences a difference from the Father, even as he is one same Being with the Father. And it is insofar as he is God that he cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Sin alienates man from God. On the cross, Jesus was made to become or bear sin in the manner that the Second Temple Era Jews would load their sins onto the animals which they sacrificed. Man's Sin caused Jesus to experience alienation from his Father.

This led Edmund to offer his take on Luke 23: 46. Jesus experienced an alienation because of sin which was near total. When Job, in the throws of his sufferings, had cried out to God, Job had received an answer from God. The answer was something like "you'll never understand," which may not have been a satisfying answer, but at least it was an answer. Jesus, in contrast, received no response, but in Luke 23:46, Jesus says "Father, into your hand I commend your spirit." According to Edmund, the coordination of Luke 23:46 and Mathew 27:46 seem to illustrates the importance of allowing trust and faith in God to transcend evil, even when God doesn't seem to answer. This may not seem like a strong rebuttal of God's purported impotence in the face of Auschwitz, but it is subtle and, one might say, a Mystery.

Update: Welcome to everyone stopping in from Bill Cork's blog.

Does anyone have any idea what a "stavrological concentration" is?

Thanks.

Two Cheers for Gary Sinise

Ith explains.

For What it's Worth.

Be sure to check out CrimLaw and his associated blogs JuryLaw and DeathLaw.

Famous Fresnan William Saroyan wrote about the Human Comedy. Criminal law seems to fit that label.

News of the Weird and Unsettling.

[Via Relapsed Catholic.] Pilot asks Christians to identify themselves and tells everyone else to "make use of the time remaining to them."

Man, that's got to make you nervous.

Then, there's this post, which Kathy Shaidle intuits will never be made into a Hillary Swank movie. It took me awhile to figure out the Victor/Victoria scam, but basically a 29 year old woman poses as a 16 year old boy to pretend to be the boyfriend of a 12 year old girl.

The 29 year old LGBT advocate is being tried for child molestation, but although this would seem to constitute "violence against women," I don't think that this is what the backers of V-Day have in mind when they mind in orgainizing "Vagina Warriors" and "Vagina friendly men."

Sometimes I wonder, "why, oh why, did the wheels have to fall off the vehicle of social sanity during my lifetime?"

Hours of Fun for the whole family.

The Curt Jester offers the exciting game of "John Kerry Medal Toss."

"Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode"

Lane Core has been all over that poseur John F. Kerry. Thanks to Lane, here's an opinion piece by a Vietnam Vet who won't be voting for Kerry.

If you grew up in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam, you got to hear our soldiers complain about how they never got any parades, about how they were called "baby killers" when they returned home. Achieving social sentience as I did only after the Vietnam War had ended, I assumed that this was something we had to lay at the feet of our incompetent military and its misguided war aims. But I never suspected that one reason why our brave soldiers were called "baby killers" when they served their country and refused to go Quisling like John Kerry was because Quislings like John Kerry were libelling their fellow soldiers in Congressional Hearings.

This is why hearing these people say they "support our troops" is such a lie.

Spoken like a true bureaucrat with a pension plan at risk.

An Episcopal Bishop offers advice on proper attitude of the laity to the consecration of unmarried fornicating bishops.

Peter James Lee is one of 60 Episcopal bishops who voted last summer to approve the appointment of V. Gene Robinson, the denomination's first openly homosexual bishop. Since then, Lee has been fighting moves by more conservative congregations in the Virginia diocese that have taken a stand against the biblical compromise.

In his speech to the 700 delegates on Saturday, Lee said: "If you must make a choice between heresy and schism, always choose heresy."

Certainly, any human institution should have a lot of tolerance built into it. Humans are called on to be saints, but before they are saints, they are humans. As St. Augustine knew in dealing with the rigorous Donatists' demands of perfection are self-defeating.

On the other hand, and less philosophically, Bishop Lee's observation reminds me of a line spoken by Sean Connery in one of the greatest "sword-fight" movies of all time, The Wind and the Lion." Told by one of his follower that he "has lost everything," Connery as "Mulli Akmed Muhammed el-Raisuli the Magnificent, Lord of the Riff and sheriff of the Berbery Pirates" replies, "is there not one thing you would lose everything for?," and then the movie ends with Sean Connery roaring with laughter as a man of great spirit for whom the living of life is filled with passion.

Sadly, it appears that Bishop Lee's answer is "no."

Why it's going to be a close election.

Check out this interactive electoral votes map.

The real anti-science Barbarians.

Moira Breen shares the happy news that a three judge panel of Ninth Circuit turned back the attempt to legislate scientific truth and methedology. The case involved the ability of scientists to study the "Kennewick Man." The subject of the dispute centers around the approximate nine thousand year old remains of a human with feautures more typical of Europeans than Asians, thereby raising the possibility that the migration of humans into North America was a lot more complex than anyone had previously imagined. Here is the link to the decision.

The decision is a good primer on things like standing and statutory construction. The decision focuses on the interpretation of Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (“NAGPRA”), 25 U.S.C. § 3001 and specifically whether the Secretary of the Interior's decision to deliver the nine thousand year old remains to modern tribes was irrational or arbitrary under NAGPRA. The Court makes the fundamentally intelligent decision that the since Congress defined the tribes within the scope of NAGPRA's protection in the present tense, only existing tribes could make a claim to the remains, and since there was no evidence of a connection between existing tribes and the remains, the Secretary's decision was irrational, arbitrary or capricious.

Now let's set the intricacies of statutory construction aside for the moment and take a look at the big picture. What was going on here? Obviously, what was at stake was some kind of ideological view that requires that Native Americans not have European antecedents. And, because of that, the government was willing to stifle and suppress scientific research.

There is a fundamentally amazing footnote in the decision:

[Footnote] 10 The Corps buried the discovery site of the remains under approximately two million pounds of rubble and dirt, topped with 3700 willow, dogwood, and cottonwood plants. The lengthy administrative record that Defendants filed with the district court documents only a portion of the process by which the decision to bury the site was made. Nevertheless, that record suggested to the district court that the Corps’ primary objective in covering the site was to prevent additional remains or artifacts from being discovered, not to “preserve” the site’s archaeological value or to remedy a severe erosion control problem as Defendants represented. Bonnichsen III, 217 F. Supp. 2d at 1125. Burial of the discovery site hindered efforts to verify the age of Kennewick Man’s remains, and effectively ended efforts to determine whether other artifacts are present at the site which might shed light on the relationship between the remains and contemporary American Indians. Id. at 1126.

Reflect on that for a second - the United States government dumpted tons of rubble on a scientific site that could have proven invaluable in learning about the origins of man in North America.

Consider also the attempt to enshrine "Native Science" as a basis for allowing the tribes to prove the connection between the remains and their tribes.

So what happened in this case was classic barbarism - vandalism - which was perpetrated by the government against science in the name of ethnic identity politics.

Now let's listen for the sound of outrage by the same folks who express outrage when the fundamentalists try to play obvious and marginal games when the State tries to teach their children things which threaten their faith.

[Sounds of crickets chirping.]

There's a scandal here that should be uncovered, but will probably die in silence. What induced the Army Corps of Engineers to vandalize an archeological site in the name of political correctness? Why didn't the Bush administration pull out of this suit? What induced three democrat judges to do the right thing?

Americans need to wake up and realize that science is under attack and the real threat comes from the side that can tie policy to the prevailing zeitgeist of identity politics.

Daughters, Freedom and Cultural Oppression.

Without mentioning Janet Jackson by name, Amy Welborn posts a thoughtful reflection on how the role models available for girls such as her 12 year old daughter have dwindled to some variant on that of "the courtesan." I recommend the essay particularly for anyone raising daughters.

A dissenting view on Gay Pride.

Classical Anglican Net News, which regularly gets shut down by hacker attacks, has posted a long essay on the discontents of "Gay Pride." The author observes along the following vein:

As an openly gay male, I have no problem conceding that heterosexuality is and always will be the great human norm. But I'm sick and tired of a media culture that faciley equates homosexuality with heterosexuality and asks no deep questions about human psychology beyond the superficial liberal-vs-conservative, freedom-vs-oppression dichotomy. And I'm sick and tired of the sentimental, feel-good, liberal propaganda that conceals and denies the blatant Roman Empire decadence and compulsive, tunnel- vision promiscuity of so many gay men's lives.

And

A well respected Toronto journalist recently expressed to me her dismay that, despite the mainstreaming of Gay Pride, teenagers are still being harassed. Sorry, but I'm afraid the connection is lost on me. For years, I've been warning that the primary contribution of Gay Pride is to reinforce every public prejudice against us and to accelerate the inevitable backlash. When well meaning but foolish politicians, such as Alan Rock or Joe Clark, march in our cheezy, sleazy pride parades, they're not doing us any favours. The media pronounces them cool, enlightened and compassionate, but, like the Emperors New Clothes, the naked eye sees awkward sychophants. Or as my beloved lesbian author and professor of humanities, Camille Paglia, has said, "If you don't swing with the sodomites, you're nowheresville on the A-list".

Now if you happen to be the mayor of any municipality, don't even think about not issuing an official proclamation for gay pride, unless you want to find yourself in front of a human rights tribunal. I realize that Kelowna has managed to dodge this bullet for the time being, but there will be other years, other events and other mayors, and who knows what the future will bring. But this relentless effort toward mass education and forced compliance cannot be achieved without fascist obliteration of all individual freedoms. And since freedom is a hell of a lot more important than political correctness or tolerance, you can rest assured that any perceived threat to freedom will result in a societal backlash which will guarantee oppression of all homosexuals. And gay males, especially, are forever on the edge of a precipice because, in a political cataclysm, we're always the first to be purged.

A similar insight is beginning to dawn about the Massachusetts Supreme Court droit de signeur edict on "gay marriage." a guest blogger at Boy from Troy notes that the decision may be a "Pyrrhic victory."

Update: CanaCon blogger, Shiny, Happy Gulag offers a few reflections on the rush to dump the Western paradigm of marriage in a post entitled, "Do you, Trigger, take these Triplets...?", which is a great title for a post on our "evolving" idea of matrimony. (Darn, I wish I'd thought of that title first.)

There's a rocking "Calvinism v. the World" Cage Match going on in Mark Shea's comment boxes.

The post that kicked it off was:

Question: Does God love me?

Calvinist: I don't know.

That post brought David Heddle out swinging. Then a general melee. Gibes were flying, elbows were poking. Words like "monergetic" were thrown around. Citations to Augustine, Aquinas and many, many biblical quotations were generated. Actually, it was a high level of discussion and very educational, at least what little I could follow. And all of this by people on their coffee breaks.

Truthfully, David Heddle is like a one-man Calvinvist army. I'm listening to a lecture series on Europe in the Age of the Reformation and you can see in Heddle how Calvinism could emerge in the second wave of the Reformation as the "take no prisoner" alternative to Lutheranism.

here's the link to the comments if you like that kind of thing.

Anti-Creationism and Constructive Conversation.

My post on why I don't consign creationists into the emotional nether regions reserved for mendacious villains elicited a number of civil and constructive responses. Three-Toed Sloth notes that there is a perspective that his proposal would not survive constitutional challenge - there not being a sufficient nexus between agriculture funding and science education - before civilly noting my critical position. I appreciate the Sloth's civility, but, really, doesn't the agriculture subsidy defunding proposal suggest the very problem of class stereotyping I criticized. The proposal is based on the stereotype that creationists are redneck rubes, i.e., country folk, i.e., people dependent on agriculture and, therefore, cutting off agricultural subsidies would really hit those fundy yahoos where they lived.

Of course, I don't know what effect cutting off ag funding would have had on my creationist Ukrainian Orthodox high school biology teacher who doesn't appear to fit the stereotype, but maybe it's a good idea nonetheless. Kind of like cutting off the subsidies for bagels until those big city folks finally take care of that crack epidemic we keep hearing about here in the sticks. Frankly, though, both notions are just offensive stereotypes.

Moira Breen seems to share some of the ambivalence of my position. She does make the fair point that the issue comes to "expertise v. freedom."

I think this point may also separate me from the hard-core evolutionists. Evolution apologists tend to take the position that science is exactly like solving a problem in geometry. We have a problem and we collect facts and we make exercise the same logical and bloodless mindset as that of Mr. Spock and, voila, we have our answer. But as we all recall from our study of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that kind of process may work within a paradigm - a scientific worldview - such as evolution, but where the paradigm doesn't work, or where there is a disagreement between paradigms, the decision-making process looks more like a political revolution with supposedly objective scientists picking sides on scientific questsion because of academic loyalties or aesthetic views. Copernicus may have been right, but Ptolemy was largely supplanted because many people thought that a sun-centered solar system was more beautiful than an Earth-centered one; "proof" had little to do with it since at the time both theories were equally "provable."

If you postulate an evolutionary paradigm, then becoming upset with those who do not work within the paradigm makes perfect sense. But if some folks don't accept the paradigm, then the "proof" that's required is not going to be the neutral, objective, logical, scientific proof that evolution-apologists believe they have a corner on; instead, you're going to have to work with the complex of emotional values that make people believe what they believe. Generally speaking, my sense is calling people like my revered 10th Grade Ukrainian Orthodox Biology teacher a "right wing barbarian" is not an effective approach.

Ridiculing creationists as rural yokels may be fine and well, but my view is that we shouldn't pretend that the debate between evolution and creation has anything to do with normal science; (normal in the Kuhnian sense.) It's literally a cultural war and some evolutionists are like the Leninists drawing up their proscription lists. While that may be fine, and a great advance for science, let's admit it for what it is and have some sympathy for the collateral damage.

That said, I think that biology classes ought to be in the business of teaching the accepted evolutionary paradigm. After all, what else are we going to do? Let every person with an off the wall belief deny a paradigm that is thus far working?

Mark Shea on the dysfunctions of material reductionism.

What's wrong with using human cadavers as artwork? What's the harm in one fellow butchering another human for food if the latter really, really wanted it to happen? I mean if humans are simply animals with an enhanced ability to reason?

Mark Shea provides an explanation well worth reading.

"Should the need ever arise, may God grant me just a fraction of the courage of these men."

Midwest Conservative Journal on the sinking of the USAT Dorchester.

So Janet Jackson got up that morning and said, "Hey, not enough under-14 year old boys have seen my tits...

In order to help me assess the merits of her claim that "it wasn't an accident, Justene Adamac at Calblog has thoughtfully directed me to the Drudge Report's photo of Janet Jackson's "undergarments."

OK, I'm no expert, and Lord knows that disastrous "costume failures" are an all too common occurrence among rock divas and porn stars, but I'm thinking that Janet's "undergarments" are designed for show and not for comfort.

By the way, I didn't learn about Jackson's immodest behavior until the next day, and I was in a pub watching the game with about 20 men. Which probably goes to show how boring and unwatchable Superbowl Half-Times have become.

In the same vein, though, on my way to court, the SUV pulling into the underground parking had a license frame holder that informed the world "Beyond B*tch....Gone to C*nt." (Of course, I bowdlerized the nouns because I don't need the kind of traffic that those words would attract.) Now I was alone. I didn't have the Widget, the Wadget and Boff ages 5, 6 and 10 respectively. The Wadget is turning into quite a reader. She reads everything she can see from the car. So, I ask again, raising kids is hard enough, why are there people like Janet Jackson and this cretin who want to make it harder?

It simply is not enough to say, "well we've all seen tits" or "we all know those words." Not my girls and not in public. I think I'd rather have them form the sense that modesty is a virtue and that respect for others is a virtue and that that respect begins with being concerned about offending the sensibilities even of prudes. After all, it's not like we have to worry about the sensibilities of libertines.

Hitchens offers a parable.

The rest of the essay is worth reading.

Germany sentenced to another 50 years of probation before it can return to Western Civilization.

Clayton Cramer notes that Germany managed to scrape out a manslaughter conviction agaainst a German man who advertised for a person to butcher and eat, received a response and a proceeded to butcher and eat that person. Cramer notes:

Oddly enough, while the article admitted that Meiwes had done this for sexual gratification, it neglected to mention that this was a form of homosexual activity--and that there were hundreds of others who had volunteered to be Meiwes meal.

The story is indeed chilling, as Kramer notes. Hundreds of others had volunteered??? That's chilling indeed. Hundreds of people believed that the destiny of their lives was to be an appetizer for some moral leper's sick form of 'sexual gratification'; that after millenia of human evolution and all the myriad chances that were required for them to live, they were called to be the momentary diversion of a human pustule. And all the German law could manage in its majesty is manslaughter? The Cranky Professor views the verdict more positively than I do; a sentence of something like 8 years is hardly an expression of undying loyalty to the idea the importance of human life. Moreover, the fact that apparently the decision took into account the alleged legal complexities arising from the fact that the victim wanted to die, doesn't give me a great deal of confidence in German civilization.

Of course, this tragedy has been used by some to as a whip to hammer Christianity with its alleged hard hearted attitude toward the unloved. Check out the comment to and this Mark Shea post to get a flavor of the argument. Of course, it is Christianity that defines each human being as ontologically unique and infinitely priceless; modern culture, to the contrary, considers human beings to be animals with overdeveloped cerebrums who can be exterminated before birth on a whim. A whim like killing and cannibalizing someone.

And speaking of the modern culture, Aramvirique makes this point about the Dutch euthanasia law which could be applied as easily to the "complexity" of a person willing to enslave himself to the perverse appetites of another man:

What I mean is this: that by legally sanctioning euthanasia we at the same time sanction a view of human life that is superficial at best and morally repugnant at worst. At bottom, it is a view of life that reduces the good to a calculus of pain and pleasure. Life is held to be worth living to the extent that its pleasures outweigh its pains.

One problem with this philosophy of life is that it erases the claims of everything whose reality is not susceptible to the pleasure-pain calculus. Considerations of honor, of virtue, of patriotism, of the sanctity of life: such values are what make us human. And all such things are either ruled irrelevant or are redefined in such a way that they no longer exhibit their original weight and density. (If we try to define honor in terms of pleasure and pain, as some philosophers have done, we wind up with someone that has precious little to do with honor as traditionally conceived.)

Evolution in the News - Neanderthals and Georgia.

Science Daily News reports on the findings of the largest and most comprehensive study on the question of whether Neanderthals were incorporated into the Homo Sapien lineage or were a separate species. The conclusion:

The study found that the differences measured between modern humans and Neanderthals were significantly greater than those found between subspecies or populations of the other species studied. The data also showed that the difference between Neanderthals and modern humans was as great or greater than that found between closely related primate species.

Hence, Neanderthals were a different species who lost out in the evolutionary struggle.

In other news, Georgia's silly law removing the word "evolution" from the teaching of evolution has generated they typical buzz among "skeptics" and "freethinkers." (See, for example, John Scalzi's Post.) Now, obviously, I'm fascinated by evolution and I accept the the theory of evolution as an explanation for what really happened in "deep time." I've had my share of debates with "creationists." I agree with most of Scalzi's observations about the proper way of challenging science. And, definitely, I find that the arguments of creationists have a "fingernail scratching on chalkboard" effect on me.

Why, then, do I get the same "fingernail on chalkboard" feeling about the anti-creationists? What is it about the people who seem to envision themselves as latter day Clarence Darrows manning the lonely barricades against the hordes of ignorant creationists. Pharyngula, for example, with respect Georgia's "rub the serial numbers off of evolution" approach writes:

Why does being a Republican party member have such a strong correlation with this kind of nonsense? I know that there are reasonable Republicans out there: why aren't you loudly shouting down the lunatic wing of your party?

Well, why should I? Because evolution is the prime center of Pharyngula's worldview? Who cares? People managed to live for millenia without any idea of evolution and if, tomorrow, evolution were replaced by a paradigm shift in favor of "space men zapping life into existence," how would anyone's life change? The very next day people would wake up and find that the highways are jammed. Lights would light. Dogs would bark.

Likewise, Three-Toed Sloth proproses a faux-federal initiative that would deny funding to school districts which dissent from the received orthodoxy of evolution. What's next? Marking dissenters with large red "C"s? Denying work visas to anyone who fails to sign a loyalty pledge to evolutionary orthodoxy?

Don't get me wrong. I favor the teaching of evolution because I'm philosophically in favor of Truth, which is one reason why I found the DaVinci Code so obnoxious. But, you know, all kinds of untruths are being shoved down my kids throats at their public schools every year, such as the moral neutrality of homosexuality and the idea that because they're "white" or, as my daughter was led to believe, "English," they are the direct heirs of southern slave owners. ("You're not English," I pointed out to my daughter, "The English were the people who didn't emancipate your ancestors until the 1820s and who drove your ancestors to America where they were drafted into the Union Army to fight the people who owned the slaves.")

Likewise, I have to take my time and money to make sure that my children learn the truths that are of central importance to their cultural tradition. But when it's my core beliefs that are involved, I find that people allied with Pharyngula have created a paradigm that preempts my core beliefs. So, why should I get excited when it's something that the secular left uses to bash the people they hate most, the fundamentalist Christians?

Another reason for my indifference to dissent about evolutionary education is that the very people most exercised by dissent by creationists also regularly post bumper stickers on their care that say "Question Authority" and write histrionics about the stifling of free thought and such-like. Yet, when they are confronted for the first time by such dissent to their cherished beliefs, they start reaching for social control mechanisms like ridicule and denial of funding. It looks like hypocrisy. It looks like a narrow minded attack by the elite members of society on a minority group. It looks like thought control.

And a final reason for my indifference is that evolution has won. No one seriously thinks that evolutionary theory can ever be read out of social consciousness. Too many cultural metaphors are wrapped up in the worldview of evolution. Books on evolution will be published and get wide acceptance for the foreseeable future. Information about evolution will inevitably spread because people like myself find the subject true and fascinating and we'll spread it by relaying the latest findings on, for example, Neanderthals. Outside of provincial areas, evolution has won the hearts and minds of society in general. That's not going to change and if tolerance - I repeat tolerance - means that those with an investment in creationism be allowed to find a formula for reconciling their faith with science, well, then in the interests of tolerance, shouldn't they be allowed to do so.

Ah, to heck with creationists. Fire up the auto da'fe.