The really great thing about being Catholic is that since we are still adjusting to hot ticket items" in the 16th century - like "Latin or Vernacular" - we have never gotten around to the really scary innovations that 21st century Protestants are fighting over.

Catholicism at Year Zero.

Interesting - again - how leftwing theologians - who are all about opening up the church and making it responsive to the people - are willing to play the hierarchy card against the people who disagree with them.

Ross Douthat versus Boston College

Unified Field Theory of Evil

Ross Douthat has the most sensible observation about the recent Rotherham sexual exploitation of children case:

In a somewhat similar way, what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class. The local bureaucracy was, indeed, too fearful of being labeled “racist,” too unwilling, as a former member of Parliament put it, to “rock the multicultural community boat.” But the rapes also went unpunished because of racially inflected misogyny among police officers, who seemed to think that white girls exploited by immigrant men were “tarts” who deserved roughly what they got.

The crucial issue in both scandals isn’t some problem that’s exclusive to traditionalism or progressivism. Rather, it’s the protean nature of power and exploitation, and the way that very different forms of willful blindness can combine to frustrate justice.

So instead of looking for ideological vindication in these stories, it’s better to draw a general lesson. Show me what a culture values, prizes, puts on a pedestal, and I’ll tell you who is likely to get away with rape.

In Catholic Boston or Catholic Ireland, that meant men robed in the vestments of the church.

In Joe Paterno’s pigskin-mad Happy Valley, it meant a beloved football coach.

In Hollywood and the wider culture industry — still the great undiscovered country of sexual exploitation, I suspect — it has often meant the famous and talented, from Roman Polanski to the BBC’s Jimmy Savile, robed in the authority of their celebrity and art.

And in Rotherham, it meant men whose ethnic and religious background made them seem politically untouchable, and whose victims belonged to a class that both liberal and conservative elements in British society regard with condescension or contempt.

The point is that as a society changes, as what’s held sacred and who’s empowered shifts, so do the paths through which evil enters in, the prejudices and blind spots it exploits.//

Kind of like the inability of the mainstream media to admit to the liberal bias that everyone knows exists.

They have to maintain the moral high-ground even if they have to be lying hypocrites to stay there.

But this respect is difficult to maintain when these institutions will not admit that this is what is going on. Instead, we have the pretense of universality — the insistence that the post-Eich Mozilla is open to all ideas, the invocations of the “spirit of free expression” from a school that’s kicking a controversial speaker off the stage.

And with the pretense, increasingly, comes a dismissive attitude toward those institutions — mostly religious — that do acknowledge their own dogmas and commitments, and ask for the freedom to embody them and live them out.

It would be a far, far better thing if Harvard and Brandeis and Mozilla would simply say, explicitly, that they are as ideologically progressive as Notre Dame is Catholic or B. Y.U. is Mormon or Chick-fil-A is evangelical, and that they intend to run their institution according to those lights.

I can live with the progressivism. It’s the lying that gets toxic.

Bad Religion.

Ross Douthat and William Saletan debate orthodoxy.

Mark Shea counsels an atheist grieved that someone might say something ever so slightly askance about Hitchens...

...to get real.

Mark Shea got a comment, like the one I got by some atheist, bravely defending the notion that their hero's only destiny is to become worm food with the following:

Dude. Hitchens made a career out of insulting people’s memories in the hour of their family’s keenest grief–on national and international television. It was one of his most revolting traits and a living illustration of how courage, unhinged from the other virtues, can be deployed to do great evil–since it takes “courage” (of a sort) to defy healthy social convention and revile somebody’s loved one in the hour of their death.

In contrast, all Douthat did was offer some kind words. So: Cry me a river, wimpy self-absorbed atheist wuss, if a Christian states a) that he believes Hitchens now knows how wrong he was about God and b) does so in a generally kindly piece that tries to say something generous about a man who reviled his most cherished beliefs. Letters like yours just demonstrate that, yes, lots of atheists seem to suffer from some sort of personality disorder that renders them incapable of picking up the normal social and affective cues that normal people normally perceive. Lots of them are also, like you, full of self-pity and boasting that would embarrass a high school sophomore.

That you exhibit this adolescent cluelessness, O Future of Human Evolution, while simultaneously boasting of superior intelligence simply demonstrates yet again that those who worship the intellect seem particularly hampered in using it. Get over yourself.

The Big Time.



Mark Shea gets noticed by Russ Douthat in the New York Times for his kerfuffle with science-atheist Jerry Coyne.  Douthat is amused that, in this exchange, the atheist is the fundamentalist:

Why Atheists Need Fundamentalists


I’ve written before about the interesting symbiosis that exists between militant atheism and religious fundamentalism — the way the Richard Dawkinses of the world are always eager to insist that a cartoonish figure like Pat Robertson represents the truest form of Christian faith, and that any believer who disagrees with Robertson’s pronouncements on Haiti or Hurricane Katrina obviously doesn’t understand his own religion.

For a recent example of this tendency, consider the fascinating exchange between the prolific Catholic blogger Mark Shea and Jerry Coyne, the author of “Why Evolution Is True” and a Dawkins-esque critic of biblical religion. The subject is human origins, and specifically the debate over whether the Western Christian understanding of original sin — as the fruit of a primal disobedience by the human’s race first family — is compatible with the increasing scientific consensus around polygenism (that is, the theory that today’s human race descends from a larger population rather than a single couple).

Shea touched off the dust-up by arguing that there’s nothing particularly radical, at least from the perspective of the Catholic tradition, about interpreting the first books of Genesis as a “figurative” account of a primeval event, rather than as literal historiography that requires that two and only two human creatures were on the scene when mankind exchanged our original innocence for disobedience and shame.

To Coyne, this idea was absolutely outrageous: In a searing post, he accused Shea of trying to defend “the palpable lies of the Bible” with a lot of hand-waving about allegory and symbolism and myth, when anyone can see that the authors of Genesis were just making stuff up. It’s “nonsense,” Coyne wrote, to suggest that the Old Testament is somehow compatible with human evolution and polygenism: All you have to do is read Genesis itself, which never suggests “that Adam and Eve were anything but the ancestors of all humanity.” To argue otherwise — to “fabricate a huge population of humans, not directly related to Adam and Eve but living at the same time” — is just a crude “attempt to evade the blatant fictionality of the Genesis story by claiming that the book doesn’t say what it seems to say.”

It was a peculiar spectacle, to put it mildly: An atheist attacking a traditionalist believer for not reading Genesis literally. On the merits, Coyne is of course quite correct that some of the details of the Genesis story seem to contradict what science and archaeology suggest about human origins. (For instance, the claim that Adam and Eve were formed from the dust of the ground and a human rib, respectively, not from millennia upon millennia of evolution, the suggestion that they lived in a garden near the Tigris and the Euphrates, not a hunter-gatherer community in Africa, and … well, you get the idea.) But then again some of the details of the Genesis story seem to contradict one another as well, in ways that should inspire even a reader who knows nothing about the controversies surrounding evolution to suspect that what he’s reading isn’t intended as a literal and complete natural history of the human race.

Shea lets slip that the true identity of the person commenting on Coyne's site as "Ye Olde Statistician" - and outclassing all of those worshipper of reason - is none other than science fiction writer Mike Flynn
Good times, good times.

Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.