The True Faith Overthrows Heresy
Therefore, heresy is so-called from the Greek word meaning choice, by which each chooses according to his own will what he pleases to teach or believe. But we are not permitted to believe whatever we choose, nor to choose whatever someone else has believed. We have the Apostles of God as authorities, who did not themselves of their own will choose what they would believe, but faithfully transmitted to the nations the teaching received from Jesus Christ. So, even if an angel from heaven should preach otherwise, he shall be called anathema. – Bishop Saint Isidore of Seville, Spain
The letter below was written by St. Athanasius of Alexandria (296 AD – d. 2 May 373) to the early Christians of the 4th century who refused to accept the Arian heresy, Christians who had lost their Church buildings to the heretics, but Christians who kept the faith.
“May God console you! … What saddens you … is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises — but you have the apostolic faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the faith? The true faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in this struggle — the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the faith?
True, the premises are good when the apostolic faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way …
You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the faith which has come down to you from apostolic tradition, and if an execrable jealously has tried to shake it in a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis.
No one, ever, will prevail against your faith, beloved brothers, and we believe that God will give us our churches back some day.
Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church but in reality they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray.
Even if Catholics faithful to tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ.”
(Coll. Selecta SS. Eccl. Patrum. Caillu and Guillou, Vol. 32, pp 411-412)
Unless the Lord Builds the House…
In the 126th Psalm, King David warns us, “Unless the Lord builds the house: they labor in vain that build it.” Houses must be built on foundations that are slide-rule perfect, lest they tilt. King David’s teaching, of course, goes beyond houses. He means that without grace, whatever we do is in vain.
Philosophy is like this, and especially so. There must be no flaws, it must be perfect. In his Epistle to the Colossians, St. Paul’s words about philosophy are interesting in this regard:
“Beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain deceit; according to the tradition of men according to the elements of the world and not according to Christ” (2:8).
Writing about the mentality that overthrew the Middle Ages, Prof. Plinio Correa de Oliveira noted that by the 15th century, “The appetite of men for earthly pleasures [was] transformed into a burning desire. ” They were increasingly attracted to “a life filled with delights of fancy and the senses.”
The professor went on to say what happened when this mentality penetrated the intellectual sphere:
“This moral climate produced clear manifestations of pride, such as a taste for ostentatious and vain disputes, for inconsistent tricks of argument and for fatuous exhibitions of learning. It encouraged old philosophical tendencies, over which Scholasticism had already triumphed.”
Now then, it matters nothing whether it be “old philosophical tendencies” or new ones that lead men into error. Scholasticism’s foundation was slide-rule perfect, and therefore blocked the program of Progressivism. It had to go, and in the wake of Vatican II it was replaced with something new. Why, exactly, was Scholasticism perfect? And what, exactly, took its place?
It was perfect because it brought “harmony between the laws of being and the laws of thought. Objectivity of our knowledge in the light of being.”
Important words, these. When we examine a thing, we do so as it exists in being. The method of this examination must be divorced from the clutter of our subjective thoughts. Any method of inquiry that seeks the truth must place the object first, and this is exactly what Scholasticism does. For this reason Pope St. Pius X said that Catholicism cannot be understood scientifically without utilizing the major theses of St. Thomas Aquinas, the father of Scholasticism.
The philosophy of John Paul II, known as Phenomenology, replaced Thomism, and locked Catholics globally into the progressivist New Church. Its method directly violates the principle of placing the object first, by taking “consciousness as its starting point, as Descartes did.” This is a problem of vital concern, because “for knowledge to be objective it is essential that things, not thoughts, be known first.” Whereas, “phenomenology sees reality as essentially relative and subjective.”
Fr. Karol Wojtyla wrote his philosophical doctoral dissertation on Max Scheler, an associate of Edmund Husserl. About Husserl the following was written:
“Existentialism is a philosophical movement characterized by an emphasis on subjectivity. It was inspired mainly by the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It, like the rest of the pus-filled growth on the back of philosophy called post-Modernism, should be disregarded by any philosophy that has a desire to know what is true and what is false.”
To repeat, a house built on a bad foundation will end up tilting. This means tearing the building down and beginning over. Phenomenology begins with self, which was the temptation of Lucifer. When God commanded adoration and reverence from the angelic realm, it caused a temptation for Lucifer, for he “was divided in his will between himself and the infallible truth of the Lord. Simply put, Lucifer violated the rule later codified by St. Thomas Aquinas, whereby focus on the object must be pure; it must not become entangled with self.
The house of God has been tilted for a long time. The progressivist New Church has to come down, its existentialist foundation has to be jack-hammered and buried in the hinterland.
Ninety years ago on July 13, 1917, Our Lady of Fatima warned us that “several nations will be annihilated.” Perhaps the present foundation and its tilted house must wait until then to be removed. In the Reign of Mary, her children will return to consulting the slide-rule to check its calculations, returning the foundation of St. Thomas Aquinas to its rightful place in the Catholic Church.
http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/a047ht_Philosophy_Arnold.htm
Mass-Media Recap
“Typical of adolescents the mass media display impulsivity and unstable moods; alternation between hedonism and blaming; between aggression and cowardice; sarcasm and sentimentality; impossible idealism and indignant charges of hypocrisy; wild recklessness and paralyzing guilt; snide arrogance and hero-worship — is obsessed with novelties, fashion and peer approval; is extravert (needing continual external stimulation); and is emotionally cold, selfish and manipulative while burning with resentments, bursting with personal entitlements, prone to self-pity, and zealous for abstract ‘justice’ which other people fail to live up to.”
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-adolescent-society-uganda-to-uk.html
ABCs and 123s
“Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.”
― Benjamin Franklin
According to a recent survey, the average college student’s idea of Tyrannosaurus rex is modeled on Barney the purple dinosaur. Accurate portrayals in movies and textbooks make no difference: students continue to believe T. rex stood upright instead of pitched forward like the real thing.
Once people get ideas in their heads it takes very little to keep them there, and the problem applies to Catholicism no less than paleontology. A veteran professor of history [John Rao] at a Catholic university [St. John’s, Staten Island, New York] notes that despite their terror concerning grades in my courses, almost all of my students completely ignore the pro-Catholic, record-straight-setting information I give them, and recite the dominant errors and mantras aimed against the Faith on tests. As far as I can determine, this is in no way due to deeply-rooted conviction on their part. Rather, it merely indicates the power of the propaganda fed them from practically every social channel since early youth. They simply cannot expel the erroneous and hostile words from their heads. [For more, see comment below]
So how do we drive the historical and philosophical equivalent of fluffy purple dinosaurs out of discussions relating to the Faith when information doesn’t penetrate, discussion doesn’t help, pleading doesn’t work, and nothing we say seems to make any difference? What’s needed, it seems, is shock and awe, or at least their closest literary equivalent: paradox, aphorism, and other forms of pointed statement or questioning that disrupt settled expectations and stick in the mind where they can continue to do their work.
Among their other benefits, such verbal devices could provide snappy responses to anti-Catholic talking points. The assumptions of public discussion presume liberal secularism. They are part of a comprehensive outlook on man, society, the world, and reality itself that most people don’t exactly believe but don’t know how to escape. The result is that Catholics get tongue-tied, or give up points they shouldn’t, because they’ve already accepted their opponents’ basic principles and don’t know how to avoid one objectionable consequence after another. We need the verbal equivalent of jiu-jitsu to turn the assumptions and discussion around. Paradox, aphorism, and pointed inquiry seem to fit the bill.
G. K. Chesterton was a master of the strategy as applied to everyday public discussion, and I think that’s at least half the secret of his popularity. Nicolás Gómez Dávila was another great Catholic aphorist, although one who worked at a less popular level. And at a higher level still, thinkers like Pascal and Simone Weil said things suitable to shock almost anyone out of his torpor.
In an age of memes, tweets, and spin the tradition of aphorisms that transfix and transform seems to have vanished. It’s not at home in a world that rejects boldness and truth in favor of focus groups and what seems likely to sell to this demographic or that. The anonymous English scholar who blogs as Deogolwulf has composed some good aphorisms that debunk the errors of secular progressivism. He doesn’t present himself as Catholic, though, and his recent compositions are all in German, so the rest of us need to step up as well.
A good paradox or aphorism requires imaginative and literary talents, and few of us can match Chesterton in that regard, let alone some of the others I’ve mentioned. Still, as GKC himself said, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” So with that in mind, and to do what little I can to help get things started, I’ll list some snappy questions I included in my book The Tyranny of Liberalism, and append some items a friend gleaned here and there on the internet. Others can and should add their own.
Given where they appeared, mine have to do with secular liberalism, the movement that has given us Benedict’s “dictatorship of relativism.” So they don’t cover everything we must deal with, but may nonetheless be useful against a major fortress of anti-Catholicism:
■If liberalism is tolerant, why all the propaganda and reeducation programs?
■If it’s based on consent, why the emphasis on judges, experts, bureaucrats, and theorists?
■If it’s skeptical and empirical, why the demand for radical transformation of all social arrangements everywhere?
■If liberalism unleashes creativity and emphasizes the individual, why does it make everyone and everything the same?
■If it lets people choose their values, how can it prescribe their opinions of other people’s values?
■If choosing my values is good, why does it become bad if I choose cultural cohesion and somewhat traditional sex roles?
■How can “diversity” (respecting differences) and “inclusiveness” (eliminating the effect of differences) be the same?
■What can freedom in private life amount to if government insists on the reeducation of children and radical reform of family life?
■Equal celebration of cultures means that particular cultural standards must be driven out of social life, since otherwise one culture will dominate others. How is that different from the abolition of culture?
■What’s the difference between saying someone has to treat beliefs about God and morality as equally worthy, and saying he has to treat his own beliefs as personal tastes and thus not beliefs about God and morality at all?
A friend has gathered other aphorisms and pointed comments from the web. Again, they’re mostly political, but that can be hard to avoid at a time when secularism makes all things political:
■What gives us freedom of spirit without self-control is disastrous. (Goethe)
■Liberalism bases human dignity not on having a human essence, but on having an active will.
■When liberty is worshipped as an end in itself, it results in the vulgarizing inclination merely to do what one likes.
■The leftist is fashion-sensitive precisely because fashion provides the stimulating novelty that alone dulls the pain and boredom of life in a Godless, meaningless universe.
■In the absence of virtue the soul gorges on imitations of virtue such as liberalism.
■Liberal society—forever trying to turn anomalies into the norm.
■License is no friend to the poor.
■The real dichotomy is not between democracy and other types of government, but between an authority based on the will, and an authority based on something transcending the will.
■The Great Lie is none other than the promise made by the serpent in Genesis 3:22—the promise that by joining the cosmic revolution against God and His order man could become a god unto himself, defining reality itself by will alone.
■As a lie accrues power, it seeks to obliterate any vestige of the truth that could expose it.
■It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)
■Modern Man is ashamed of innocence and prides himself on understanding evil, while the Christian is ashamed of his knowledge of evil and seeks understanding of Good.
■The faithful believer experiences a deep and abiding inner assurance that cannot be transferred to another person and is thus quite baffling to those without it.
■A coincidence is an event in which God chooses to remain anonymous.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/using-the-aphorism-to-challenge-liberalism
Wishing and Hoping and Thinking and Dreaming
The youth world, he said, has changed “radically,” but the church “is still offering what it has been offering for the past 500 years.”
The Vatican’s culture ministry warned Thursday that the Catholic church risks losing future generations if it doesn’t learn how to understand young people, their language and their culture.
The Pontifical Council for Culture invited sociologists, Web experts and theologians to a three-day, closed-door event Feb. 6-9 aimed at studying “emerging youth cultures.”
According to a working paper released ahead of the meeting, the church risks “offering answers to questions that are not there” if it doesn’t learn “the cultural reality of young people.”
A study released in October by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life showed that young people are increasingly disconnected from religion, with one in three Americans aged 18-29 describing themselves as religiously unaffiliated.
Msgr. Melchor Sanchez de Toca, undersecretary of the Vatican’s culture department, said in an interview that the church’s youth problem is not just “quantitative” — evidenced by a decline in key indicators, such as baptisms and church attendance — but also “qualitative.”
The youth world, he said, has changed “radically,” but the church “is still offering what it has been offering for the past 500 years.”
“We keep on giving the same answers but the way questions are posed is now totally different.”
Even if youth culture is often marked by individualism, superficiality and hedonism, the council’s president, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, said during a Thursday press conference that its “diversity” is “not only negative” but “contains surprising seeds of fruitfulness and authenticity.”
In his effort to understand young people’s language and feelings, Ravasi confessed to listening to a CD by the late British pop singer Amy Winehouse, noting that “a quest for meaning emerges even from her distraught music and lyrics.”
In a first for a Vatican meeting, the event will be opened by a rock concert by Italian Christian rock band The Sun.
Participants, mostly bishops and Catholic lay leaders, will also hear from young Catholic activists from countries such as Indonesia and Madagascar, while American blogger Pia de Solenni will speak on the “emotional alphabet” of young generations.
http://ncronline.org/news/art-media/vatican-admits-it-doesnt-fully-understand-youth-culture
Epidemic Tsunami: Delusional Narcissism
“Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.” –Saint Augustine
A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.
These data are not unexpected. I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.
On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”
Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.
Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters. And while they can turn off their Wii and Xbox machines and remember they are really in dens and playrooms on side streets and in triple deckers around America, that is after their hearts have raced and heads have swelled with false pride for “being” something they are not.
On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the “real-life” characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life.
These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century.
As if to keep up with the unreality of media and technology, in a dizzying paroxysm of self-aggrandizing hype, town sports leagues across the country hand out ribbons and trophies to losing teams, schools inflate grades, energy drinks in giant, colorful cans take over the soft drink market, and psychiatrists hand out Adderall like candy.
All the while, these adolescents are watching a Congress that can’t control its manic, euphoric, narcissistic spending, a president that can’t see his way through to applauding genuine and extraordinary achievements in business, a society that blames mass killings on guns, not the psychotic people who wield them, and—here no surprise—a stock market that keeps rising and falling like a roller coaster as bubbles inflate and then, inevitably, burst.
That’s really the unavoidable end, by the way. False pride can never be sustained. The bubble of narcissism is always at risk of bursting. That’s why young people are higher on drugs than ever, drunker than ever, smoking more, tattooed more, pierced more and having more and more and more sex, earlier and raising babies before they can do it well, because it makes them feel special, for a while. They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside and unworthy.
Distractions, however, are temporary, and the truth is eternal. Watch for an epidemic of depression and suicides, not to mention homicides, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface. We had better get a plan together to combat this greatest epidemic as it takes shape. Because it will dwarf the toll of any epidemic we have ever known. And it will be the hardest to defeat. Because, by the time we see the scope and destructiveness of this enemy clearly, we will also realize, as the saying goes, that it is us.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/08/are-raising-generation-deluded-narcissists/#ixzz2IqKQyjgW
The New Eugenics
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable. –G. K. Chesterton 1909
Each year in America fewer and fewer disabled infants are born. The reason is eugenic abortion. Doctors and their patients use prenatal technology to screen unborn children for disabilities, then they use that information to abort a high percentage of them. Without much scrutiny or debate, a eugenics designed to weed out the disabled has become commonplace.
Not wishing to publicize a practice most doctors prefer to keep secret, the medical community releases only sketchy information on the frequency of eugenic abortion against the disabled. But to the extent that the numbers are known, they indicate that the vast majority of unborn children prenatally diagnosed as disabled are killed.
Medical researchers estimate that 80% or more of babies now prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. (They estimate that since 1989, 70% of Down-syndrome fetuses have been aborted.) A high percentage of fetuses with cystic fibrosis are aborted, as evident in Kaiser Permanente’s admission to the New York Times that 95 percent of its patients in Northern California choose abortion after they find out through prenatal screening that their fetus will have the disease.
The frequent use of eugenic abortion can also be measured in dwindling populations with certain disabilities. Since the 1960s, the number of Americans with spina bifida has markedly declined. This dropping trend line corresponds to the rise of prenatal screening. Owing to prenatal technology and eugenic abortion, some rare conditions, such as the genetic disorder Tay-Sachs, are even vanishing in America, according to doctors.
“There really isn’t any entity that is charged with monitoring what has been happening,” says Andrew Imparato, head of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), “A lot of people prefer that that data not be collected. But we’re seeing just the tip of the iceberg. This is a new eugenics, and I don’t know where it is going to end.”
“I think of it as commercial eugenics,” says Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment. “Whenever anybody thinks of eugenics, they think of Adolf Hitler. This is a commercial eugenics. But the result is the same, an intolerance for those who don’t fit the norm. It is less open and more subtle. Try to get any numbers on reproductive issues. Try to get actual numbers on sex-selection abortions. They are always difficult to get. If you are involved in that commerce, do you really want people to go: So you aborted how many disabled children? That’s the last piece of information people want out there.”
Indeed, intellectual arguments in favor of eugenic abortion often generate great public outcry. Princeton professor Peter Singer drew fire for saying, “It does not seem quite wise to increase any further draining of limited resources by increasing the number of children with impairments.” Bob Edwards, the embryologist who created the first test-tube baby through in vitro fertilization, has also drawn protests for predicting that “soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”
But these comments, far from being unthinkable, reflect unspoken mainstream attitudes and practice. Only through political gaffes (and occasional news stories) is eugenic abortion ever mentioned, such as the time in 2003 when a blundering Hillary Clinton objected to a ban on partial-birth abortion because it didn’t contain an exemption for late-term abortions aimed at the disabled. Women should not be “forced” to carry a “child with severe abnormalities,” she said.
In an interview with TAS, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania recalled his 2003 exchange with Hillary Clinton on the Senate floor in which she endorsed eugenic abortion. “It was pretty revealing. She was saying there had to be an exemption for disabled children being aborted as opposed to healthy children being aborted,” he says. “When she realized what she was advocating for, she had to put in the general niceties. But I don’t think you can read her comments and come to any other conclusion than that the children with disabilities should have less constitutional protection than children who are healthy.”
He added that “the principal reason the Democrats defended the partial-birth abortion procedure was for pregnancies that have ‘gone awry,’ which is not about something bad happening to the life of the mother but about their finding out the child is not in the condition that they expected, that it was somehow less than wanted and what they had hoped for.”
What Hillary Clinton blurted out is spoken more softly, though no less coldly, in the privacy of doctors’ offices. Charles Strom, medical director of Quest Diagnostics, which specializes in prenatal screening, told the New York Times last year that “People are going to the doctor and saying, ‘I don’t want to have a handicapped child, what can you do for me?'” This attitude is shared by doctors who now view disabled infants and children as puzzling accidents that somehow slipped through the system. University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, in his book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, writes that “at my own university, a physician making rounds with medical students stood over the bed of an intelligent, otherwise normal ten-year-old boy with spina bifida. ‘Were he to have been conceived today,’ the physician casually informed his entourage, ‘he would have been aborted.'”
The impulse behind prenatal screening in the 1970s was eugenic. After the Roe v. Wade decision, which pumped energy into the eugenics movement, doctors scrambled to advance prenatal technology in response to consumer demand, mainly from parents who didn’t want the burdens of raising children with Down syndrome. Now prenatal screening can identify hundreds of conditions. This has made it possible for doctors to abort children not only with chronic disabilities but common disabilities and minor ones. Among the aborted are children screened for deafness, blindness, dwarfism, cleft palates, and defective limbs.
In some cases the aborted children aren’t disabled at all but are mere carriers of a disease or stand a chance of getting one later in life. Prenatal screening has made it possible to abort children on guesses and probabilities. A doctor speaking to the New York Times cited a defect for a eugenic abortion that was at once minor and speculative: a women suffering from a condition that gave her an extra finger asked doctors to abort two of her children on the grounds that they had a 50-50 chance of inheriting that condition.
The law and its indulgence of every conceivable form of litigation has also advanced the new eugenics against the disabled. Working under “liability alerts” from their companies, doctors feel pressure to provide extensive prenatal screening for every disability, lest parents or even disabled children hit them with “wrongful birth” and “wrongful life” suits. In a wrongful birth suit, parents can sue doctors for not informing them of their child’s disability and seek compensation from them for all the costs, financial and otherwise, stemming from a life they would have aborted had they received that prenatal information. Wrongful life suits are brought by children (through their parents) against doctors for all the “damages” they’ve suffered from being born. (Most states recognize wrongful birth suits, but for many states, California and New Jersey among the exceptions, wrongful life suits are still too ridiculous to entertain.)
In 2003, Ob-Gyn Savita Khosla of Hackensack, New Jersey, agreed to pay $1.2 million to a couple and child after she failed to flag Fragile X syndrome, a form of mental retardation caused by a defective gene on the X chromosome. The mother felt entitled to sue Khosla because she indicated on a questionnaire that her sibling was mentally retarded and autistic, and hence Khosla should have known to perform prenatal screening for Fragile X so that she could abort the boy. Khosla settled, giving $475,000 to the parents and $750,000 to the child they wished that they had aborted.
Had the case gone to court, Khosla would have probably lost the suit. New Jersey has been notoriously welcoming to wrongful birth suits ever since the Roe v. Wade decision, after which New Jersey’s Supreme Court announced that it would not “immunize from liability those in the medical field providing inadequate guidance to persons who would choose to exercise their constitutional right to abort fetuses which, if born, would suffer from genetic defects.”
According to the publication Medical Malpractice Law & Strategy, “court rulings across the country are showing that the increased use of genetic testing has substantially exposed physicians’ liability for failure to counsel patients about hereditary disorders.” The publication revealed that many wrongful birth cases “are settled confidentially.” And it predicted that doctors who don’t give their patients the information with which to consider the eugenic option against disabled children will face more lawsuits as prenatal screening becomes the norm. “The human genome has been completely mapped,” it quotes Stephen Winnick, a lawyer who handled one of the first wrongful birth cases. “It’s almost inevitable that there will be an increase in these cases.”
The combination of doctors seeking to avoid lawsuits and parents seeking burden-free children means that once prenatal screening identifies a problem in a child the temptation to eugenic abortion becomes unstoppable. In an atmosphere of expected eugenics, even queasy, vaguely pro-life parents gravitate towards aborting a disabled child. These parents get pressure from doctors who, without even bothering to ask, automatically provide abortion options to them once the prenatal screening has diagnosed a disability (one parent, in a 1999 study, complained of a doctor showing her a video depicting the rigors of raising an afflicted child as a way of convincing her to choose abortion), and they feel pressure from society at large which having accepted eugenic abortion looks askance at parents with disabled children.
The right to abort a disabled child, in other words, is approaching the status of a duty to abort a disabled child. Parents who abort their disabled children won’t be asked to justify their decision. Rather, it is the parents with disabled children who must justify themselves to a society that tacitly asks: Why did you bring into the world a child you knew was disabled or might become disabled?
Andrew Kimbrell points out that many parents are given the complicated information prenatal screening yields with little to no guidance from doctors. “We’re leaving parents with complete confusion. Numerous parents are told by doctors, ‘We think there is some fault on the 50th chromosome of your child.’ A number of polls have shown that people don’t understand those odds.”
“There is enormous confusion out there and nobody is out there to help them,” he says. “This is a huge tangle. And it leads people to abort out of confusion: ‘I guess I better abort, because I don’t know. It sounds really bad and I don’t know what the percentages mean.'”
The New Eugenics isn’t slowing down but speeding up. Not content to wait to see if a child is fit for life, doctors are exploring the more proactive eugenics of germline genetic engineering (which tries to create desirable traits in an embryo) and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), which is used to select the most desirable embryos after extensive genetic testing has been done before they are implanted in mothers’ wombs.
“The next stage is to actually start tinkering genetically with these embryos to create advantages such as height,” says Kimbrell. PGD is a “gateway technology” that will advance the new eugenics to the point “where children are literally selected and eventually designed according to a parent’s desires and fears,” he says. (Meanwhile, doctors are simultaneously reporting that children born through in vitro fertilization are experiencing higher rates of birth defects than the average population, suggesting that for every problem scientists try to solve through dubious means they create multiple new ones.)
Many countries have banned PGD. But American fertility clinics are offering it. Two-thirds of fertility clinics using PGD in the world are in the U.S., says Kimbrell. “Reproductive technology is an unregulated Wild West scenario where people can do pretty much anything they want and how they want it,” he says.
Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, coined the term eugenics in the 1880s. Sparking off his cousin’s theory of evolution, he proposed improving the human race through eugenics, arguing that “what nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.” As eugenics passes through each of its stages — from sterilizing the enfeebled at the beginning of the 20th century to aborting the disabled at the end of it and the beginning of the 21st — man is indeed playing God but without any of his providence or care.
Andrew Imparato of AAPD wonders how progressives got to this point. The new eugenics aimed at the disabled unborn tell the disabled who are alive, “disability is a fate worse than death,” he says. “What kind of message does this send to people living with spina bifida and other disabilities? It is not a progressive value to think that a disabled person is better off dead.”
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/NeumayrNewEugenics.php
Blue Pill or Red Pill?
Ever wonder if you remembered to take your pills this morning? A medical tech startup has a novel solution: Swallow a computer chip that will help you keep track.
Proteus Digital Health scored a big victory this week when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted approval for the company’s “ingestible sensor” invention. The 1 square millimeter device — roughly the size of a grain of sand — can relay information about your insides to you, and if you choose, to your doctor or nurse.
The chip works by being imbedded into a pill. Ingest it at the same time that you take your medication and it will go to work inside you, recording the time you took your dose. It transmits that information through your skin to a stick-on patch, which in turn sends the data to a mobile phone application and any other devices you authorize.
The system’s goal is to overcome our forgetful impulses, says Andrew Thompson, the CEO and cofounder of Proteus.
“People live busy and complex lives, and as a result often don’t take their medicines correctly,” Thompson says. “We wanted to develop a solution that would help make existing medicines more effective in real life.”
The European Union approved Proteus’ system device in 2010, according to the company. The Redwood City, Calif., company plans to bring its first product, called “Helius,” to market later this year in the U.K. in partnership with the Lloydspharmacy chain.
Helius includes Proteus’ mobile health app, a supply of its stick-on patches (they last seven days, then need replacing) and a stash of its sensor-equipped placebo chips. The company declined to comment on the system’s planned price tag.
The first wave of Proteus products will rely on placebo pills taken at the same time as the patient’s medication. The company hopes to eventually get its sensors built straight into common medications, Thompson says.
Proteus’ spent four years working through the FDA approval process. Now that it’s got a green light, it plans to begin working on a U.S. version of its Helius system.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/03/technology/startups/ingestible-sensor-proteus/index.htm
Poison Fruit from a Bad Tree
The bishops have advocated for socialized medicine for nigh on a hundred years. Now it is here and it does not look good. Wails of “I told you so” are surely tempting, but are, in the end, unhelpful. What would prove to be the most helpful is to understand how this travesty came to be and what ideas would have to be different to prevent it from happening again.
At the root of the error is the idea that there can exist circumstances in which someone has a morally legitimate claim upon what, in reality, belongs to another. This is the false idea upon which so much other error and lies and sin and spiritual poison has been promulgated. It has been mentioned here before that the government’s taxation/redistribution schemes are treated by the bishops as virtually an eighth sacrament.
On the contrary, it is theft– stealing. No matter how many of our fellow citizens enact a positive civil law providing for the confiscation, the truth of its immorality remains. We are reminded in Mark 7:8-9, by Jesus Himself: “You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions.” And He said to them, “How ingeniously you get around the commandment of God in order to preserve your own tradition!”
The “your own tradition” that Jesus refers to had a specific reference when He made the pronouncement. The statement is applicable to today’s situation as well. Today’s situation in our country is the result of at least a century of unfaithful, false, and careless stewardship– stewardship of our financial well-being, of our natural resources, of our communion among ourselves, realizable in our nationhood.
Adam and Eve were duped by a clever lie. Our own faithlessness is prompted also by a clever lie. The lie which got us into the extant mess is a twisting of the true and valid charge by Jesus to us that we should care for each other, after providing for ourselves as best we can. This is perfect and reasonable common sense. We, as individuals, discern the legitimacy of the claims of need that come our way from others. Based on that discernment we decide upon the disposition of our charity. Sensible though it is, this is not presently the case.
The fantasy of “Wouldn’t it be nice if… ” has come to precede myriad images, such as if everyone had a house, if everyone had a rewarding job, if everyone had “health care,” and the list is endless. It seems the dream will not die. This is the devil’s clever lie of our time. It is fed during every generation by one proposal after another to bring it to fruition; to make it happen; to “get it done.” Writers from Karl Marx to Thomas More (American writer), to Gustav Gutierrez, Saul Alinski, and others, up to and including the present day USCCB bishops have attempted one or another scheme to implement and institutionalize the desired outcome, to wit: That everyone has all he needs and wants, and it’s all guaranteed, if not free.
This fiction, this dangerous fiction, responsible for the murders of tens of millions in only the twentieth century, is repackaged and presented always as caring for the less fortunate, the poor, the trod upon, the disenfranchised… The Roman Catholic Church lionizes the concept, seemingly, in the phrase, “… preferential option for the poor…”
It is an easy exercise to bemoan this sorry circumstance. That would, however, be akin to “cursing the darkness,” rather than “lighting a candle.” It is the dispelling of the deadly, murderous fiction with the bright candle of truth and reality which is necessary. Toward that end, a critical question is whether the Catholic Church, in the persona of the USCCB, can be weaned from reliance on money provided by taxpayers to government. If (and that’s a big one) the Church would be willing to do without the proceeds of theft, it might follow that they would turn against theft in other forms.
The first thing to do is to separate the Church from government money to the extent possible.
http://catholicdaily.net/politicaltheology/2012/07/10/poison-fruit-from-a-bad-tree/#comments
Community, Identity, Stability
“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
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Professor Julian Savulescu said that creating so-called designer babies could be considered a “moral obligation” as it makes them grow up into “ethically better children”.
The expert in practical ethics said that we should actively give parents the choice to screen out personality flaws in their children as it meant they were then less likely to “harm themselves and others”.
The academic, who is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, made his comments in an article in the latest edition of Reader’s Digest.
He explained that we are now in the middle of a genetic revolution and that although screening, for all but a few conditions, remained illegal it should be welcomed.
He said that science is increasingly discovering that genes have a significant influence on personality – with certain genetic markers in embryo suggesting future characteristics.
By screening in and screening out certain genes in the embryos, it should be possible to influence how a child turns out.
In the end, he said that “rational design” would help lead to a better, more intelligent and less violent society in the future.
“Surely trying to ensure that your children have the best, or a good enough, opportunity for a great life is responsible parenting?” wrote Prof Savulescu, the Uehiro Professor in practical ethics.
“So where genetic selection aims to bring out a trait that clearly benefits an individual and society, we should allow parents the choice.
“To do otherwise is to consign those who come after us to the ball and chain of our squeamishness and irrationality.
“Indeed, when it comes to screening out personality flaws, such as potential alcoholism, psychopathy and disposition to violence, you could argue that people have a moral obligation to select ethically better children.
“They are, after all, less likely to harm themselves and others.”
“If we have the power to intervene in the nature of our offspring — rather than consigning them to the natural lottery — then we should.”
He said that we already routinely screen embryos and foetuses for conditions such as cystic fibrosis and Down’s syndrome and couples can test embryos for inherited bowel and breast cancer genes.
Rational design is just a natural extension of this, he said.
He said that unlike the eugenics movements, which fell out of favour when it was adopted by the Nazis, the system would be voluntary and allow parents to choose the characteristics of their children.
“We’re routinely screening embryos and foetuses for conditions such as cystic fibrosis and Down’s syndrome, and there’s little public outcry,” he said.
“What’s more, few people protested at the decisions in the mid- 2000s to allow couples to test embryos for inherited bowel and breast cancer genes, and this pushes us a lot close to creating designer humans.”
“Whether we like it or not, the future of humanity is in our hands now. Rather than fearing genetics, we should embrace it. We can do better than chance.”
“What Makes Killing Wrong?”
The conundrum faced by the organ transplant industry, that the removal of vital organs kills the “donor,” can be “easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing,” two leading U.S. bioethicists have said. In an article titled, “What Makes Killing Wrong?” appearing in last month’s Journal of Medical Ethics, the authors have moved the argument forward by admitting that the practice of vital organ donation ignores “traditional” medical ethics.
“Traditional medical ethics embraces the norm that doctors … must not kill their patients. This norm is often seen as absolute and universal. In contrast, we have argued that killing by itself is not morally wrong, although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability.”
Traditional ethicists have responded, warning that this stream of thought, now common in the medical community, will ultimately undermine the right of anyone to life or the protection of law, and will annihilate public trust in the medical profession.
“If this dreadful doctrine is permitted and practised it is impossible to conjure up the degradation to which it will lead,” said Anthony Ozimic, communications manager of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC). A physician “has but to certify his patients as unproductive and he receives the command to kill.”
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong a Duke University bioethicist and Franklin G. Miller, an ethicist with the National Institutes of Health, the federal health authority in the US, admitted that patients who are routinely declared dead for purposes of organ “harvesting” are in fact alive and that removing their organs kills them.
Pro-life objectors to the practice of “non-heart beating organ donation” have long argued that it is tantamount to murdering helpless patients, reducing human persons to mere organ farms. The article proposes, however, that this is simply not a problem. Killing a patient who has lost all functional “abilities” and autonomy, “cannot disrespect her autonomy, because she has no autonomy left. It also cannot be unfair to kill her if it does her no harm.”
“Killing by itself is not morally wrong,” the authors said, “although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability.” The problem with killing is “not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities.”
Ozimic called the paper “obnoxious” and warned that its authors have “forgotten the lessons of the 20th century,” referring to the utilitarianism-based eugenics programmes of the pre-war Nazi government.
Ozimic quoted the famous 1941 sermon of Clemens von Galen, Cardinal Archbishop of – known as the “Lion of Munster” for his opposition to the Nazi euthanasia programme: “Once admit the right to kill unproductive persons… then none of us can be sure of his life.”
Ozimic said that if it is allowed to continue the concept will spell the end of our current understanding of medicine as doing good for human persons.
“We shall be at the mercy of any committee that can put a man on the list of unproductives. There will be no police protection, no court to avenge the murder and inflict punishment upon the murderer. Who can have confidence in any doctor?”
But the article’s authors admit that the situation is already grave from the point of view of traditional medical ethics. The so-called “dead donor rule,” they say, is already “routinely violated” in transplant practice anyway.
In order to be consistent with “traditional medical ethics” the practice of organ transplants, already a multi-billion dollar international medical industry, would have to be stopped immediately. But stopping organ transplants on the mere grounds that it kills people, they said, would be “extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view.”
Ozimic critiqued the paper, saying, “According to some doctor, or because of the decision of some committee, they have no longer a right to live because they are ‘unproductive citizens’.
“The opinion is that since they can no longer make money, they are obsolete machines, comparable with some old cow that can no longer give milk or some horse that has gone lame. What is the lot of unproductive machines and cattle? They are destroyed.” But men and women, Ozimic said, are neither machines nor cattle who can be discarded when they no longer serve someone else’s needs.
“Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids . . . unproductive – perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live? Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’?”
Shocking as it may sound to the layman’s ears, however, the article’s position is not unusual in the bioethics community. The notion that the value of human life is founded upon the individual’s abilities has become run-of-the-mill in universities and, more crucially, in hospital ethics committees. It was popularised by Peter Singer, the professor of ethics at Princeton University, who infamously proposed that parents have the power to convey personhood upon their newborn children and should be allowed to kill them at will.
The fixation on autonomy, one of the three “principles” that utilitarian secular bioethics regards as the ultimate indicators of human value, has driven much of the international pressure for legalised euthanasia. Around the world, secular bioethicists supported the killing of Terri Schindler Schiavo on the grounds that her “autonomy” was permanently impaired.
Experts have noted that this form of bioethics, as distinct from classical, Hippocratic medical ethics, has since the 1970s become the leading stream of thought in most medical organisations in developed countries. The movement has succeeded in legalising euthanasia in the Netherlands and Belgium and assisted suicide in three US states.
In addition to outright euthanasia and legalized assisted suicide, other means of killing patients are sneaking in under the legal radar in response to the demands of autonomy-obsessed Bioethics. “Terminal sedation” and death by dehydration or withdrawal of life-saving drugs and treatments have become common causes of death among elderly and disabled patients in the UK, Canada and across Europe.
Brave New World: Liberation from the “Dis-benefits” of Motherhood
In remarks that critics have said are disturbingly reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopian novel “Brave New World,” a UK ethicist has argued that since pregnancy causes “natural inequality” between the sexes, women must be liberated from the “burdens and risks of pregnancy” through the use of “ectogenesis”, or artificial wombs.
“Pregnancy is a condition that causes pain and suffering, and that affects only women. The fact that men do not have to go through pregnancy to have a genetically related child, whereas women do, is a natural inequality,” writes Dr. Anna Smajdor in an article that recently appeared in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.
In her Defense of Ectogenesis, published online December, 2011, Smajdor construes pregnancy as a “medical problem, along with other conditions that cause pain and suffering.” Smajdor is Lecturer in Ethics at the School of Medicine, Health Policy and Practice in the University of East Anglia.
“If there were a disease that caused symptoms and risks similar to those caused by pregnancy, I contend that it would be regarded as being fairly serious, and that we would have good reasons to try to insure against it,” argues Smajdor, who lumps pregnancy along with “diseases” that continue for many months, such as the measles.
For Smajdor, currently “men reap all the benefits of women’s gestation, while women bear the risks and burdens.”
Accordingly, in Smajdor’s worldview, “women are disadvantaged as a group through brute luck, because men can reproduce without undergoing the risks of pregnancy.”
In other words, to be a woman, for Smajdor, simply means to become biologically more like a man. To do this, a woman’s innate and natural potential to procreate, nurture, and bear a new human life must be stripped away and handed over to science and technology. Only when all human beings do not bear children will a genuine equality be more closely approached, she proposes.
“Perhaps not all the dis-benefits of being a woman are attributable to childbearing,” acknowledges Smajdor, “but alleviating these burdens would surely help.”
In Huxley’s “Brave New World” reproduction is taken over entirely by the World State where children are created, “decanted” and raised in “hatcheries” and “conditioning centres.”
For Smajdor, the issue is simply a matter of sex equality: “Either we view women as baby carriers who must subjugate their other interests to the well-being of their children or we acknowledge that our social values and level of medical expertise are no longer compatible with ‘natural’ reproduction,” she concludes.
Burning Bodies… Going Solvent Green
In Durham, England, corpses will soon be used to generate electricity.
A crematorium is installing turbines in its burners that will convert waste heat from the combustion of each corpse into as much as 150 kilowatt-hours of juice — enough to power 1,500 televisions for an hour. The facility plans to sell the electricity to local power companies.
Some might find this concept creepy. Others might be pleased to learn that the process “makes cremation much greener by utilizing its by-products,” in the words of cremation engineer Steve Looker, owner and chief executive officer of the Florida-based company B&L Cremation Systems, which is unaffiliated with the Durham enterprise.
In Europe, tightening regulations on crematorium emissions, coupled with the high price of energy, will lead more and more facilities to go the way of Durham in the future, Looker said. Will crematories in the United States follow suit?
According to Looker, whose company is currently testing different methods of utilizing cremation waste heat, the expensive turbine systems being installed in Durham are not yet economically viable for crematories here. “In the U.S., most crematories don’t have enough throughput,” he told Life’s Little Mysteries. “Cremation in some parts of Europe is over 90 percent, but it is not over 50 percent yet here.” That is, less than half of Americans opt for cremation. Most are buried.
Consequently, while burners in Europe typically run 24 hours day, ones in America operate only eight hours each day, Looker said. “A typical turbine system would cost somewhere between $250,000 to $500,000. If it’s running 24 hours a day, that’s a five-year payback. If it’s running eight hours a day, that’s a 15- or 20-year payback, which isn’t feasible,” he said.
However, Looker is hopeful that the situation could change in the near future. “Over the next 10 years, with the baby boomers coming through, cremation is going to reach 75 to 80 percent. Then, this might be feasible.”
Furthermore, a turbine designed by a company called Thermal Dynamic Engineering, which produces just 50 kilowatt-hours of energy but is much less expensive to install than the Durham system, will be available in the near future, Looker said.
Thus, it may indeed come to pass that deceased baby boomers will someday help power your household appliances.
To Each In a Different Measure
Egalitarianism is a moral principle. It is the belief that all people should be equal. This does not amount to an ethical system, though. It has no standard of value. It is the belief that value should be split evenly, but it says nothing about what those values are. Egalitarianism rides piggyback on other ethical systems.
Examples of egalitarianism are widespread. Hatred of inheritance is one. That some people start off life in an easier position than others is despised by egalitarianism. So is the fact that some people have nurturing families, while others don’t. Equality of results manifest itself in judgments about the economy. Differences in salary causes much resentment. The list goes on and on.
Egalitarianism comes in many forms, all of which are destructive. From equality of opportunity, to equality of results, it always has a single result. Those that have achieved values must sacrifice them to those that don’t. Egalitarianism manifest itself as hatred of those that are successful or that have managed to achieve values. Those that have achieved values are despised. They are the ones that have acted to create inequality through the pursuit of happiness. The lazy and incompetent are not to blame. They didn’t cause the inequality.
Egalitarianism is just a mask for the hatred of the good. It is not concerned with the well-being of anyone. It only cares that everyone is in the same position, even if that position is starving and helpless. It asks for the destruction of value so that all can be equal. The rich must be made poor. The strong must be made weak. The beautiful must be made ugly. The competent must be made incompetent. The good must be made evil. The goal of egalitarianism is death, where true equality lies.
All men are equal because they are creatures of God, endowed with body and soul, and redeemed by Jesus Christ. Thus, by the dignity common to all, they have an equal right to everything that is proper to the human condition: life, health, work, religion, family, intellectual development, and so on. A just Christian economic and social organization thus rests upon a fundamental feature of true equality.
But, besides this essential equality, there are among men accidental inequalities placed by God: of virtue, intelligence, health, capacity of labor, and many others. Every organic and living economic and social structure has to be in harmony with the natural order of things.
This natural inequality must therefore be reflected in it. This reflection consists in this: that as long as all have what is just and deserved, those well endowed by nature can, by their honest labor and their economy, acquire more.
Equality and inequality thus compensate and complement one another, discharging diverse but harmonious roles in the ordering of a just and Christian society.
This rule constitutes, moreover, one of the most admirable characteristics of universal order. All of God’s creatures have what befits them according to their own nature, and in this they are treated according to the same norm. But, beyond this the Lord gives very much to some, much to others, and to yet others, finally, only what is adequate.
These inequalities form an immense hierarchy, in which each degree is like a musical note that forms part of an immense symphony to chant the divine glory. A totally egalitarian society and economy would, therefore, be anti-natural.
Seen in this light, inequalities represent a condition of general good order, and thus redound to the advantage of the whole social body, that is, of the great as well as of the small.
This hierarchical scale is in the plans of Providence as a means to promote the spiritual and material progress of mankind by the incentive given to the better and most capable. Egalitarianism brings with it inertia, stagnation, and, therefore, decadence, because everything inasmuch as it is alive, if it does not progress, deteriorates and dies.
The parable of the talents is thus explained (Matt. 25: 14-30). God gives to each in a different measure and He demands from each a proportionate rendering.
Exposing Liberal Lies: Christopher Columbus
According to today’s government run educational institutions, Christopher Columbus was a brutal rapist, killing innocent natives and an atheist. Fortunately we have his original records to refer to so as to debunk all of these liberal lies.
Russell Means, a Native American activist wrote, “Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent. He was a racist, a mass murderer, a slave trader, a rapist and a plunderer.” Too bad he has all his facts made up rather than lean on true historical documents.
Dr. D. James Kennedy writes, “In the past hundred years, we have seen the rise of atheism, skepticism, communism, fascism, socialism and every other kind of ‘ism’ opposed to the Word of God — whose proponents hate God and Christ and Christianity. These people are determined to refashion America in their image — in their unbelieving, ungodly or pagan image. But to do so, they have to move this nation off its Christian foundations.”
This is the ultimate task of everyone from Obama to public educational institutions, including congress and the judicial system with the aid of Communist organizations like the ACLU, Americans United For The Separation Of Church And State, NOW, GLSEN. etc. etc. etc. These are folks who hate the very idea of the God of the Bible and are willing to sell their own souls and professional reputations for a LIE.
Fact is, Columbus NEVER killed any native American, he was actually kind to the natives he encountered since his main goal was to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them and wanted to do nothing that would alienate them from his message of salvation. Don’t believe it? Note the following quote.
“I, in order that they (the natives) might develop a very friendly disposition toward us, because I knew that they were a people who could better be freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force, gave to some of them red caps and to others glass beads, which they hung on their necks, and many others things…”
His very first words upon stepping on the shore of America were: “Blessed be the light of day, and the Holy Cross we say; and the Lord of Veritie and the Holy Trinity.
At the beginning of each day a hymn was sung on board ship during the voyage. The captain of the Nina drew a map of the new world with a picture of Columbus at the top carrying the Christ child across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World.
In a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabelle he said, “At this time I have seen and put in study to look into all Scriptures, cosmography, histories, chronicles and philosophy and other arts, which our Lord opened to my understanding (I could sense his hand upon me), so that it became clear to me that it was feasible to navigate from here to the Indies; and he unlocked within me the determination to execute the idea. And I came to your Highnesses with this ardor. All those who heard about my enterprise rejected it with laughter, scoffing at me. Neither the sciences which I mentioned above, nor the authoritative citations from them, were of any avail. In only your Highnesses remained faith and constancy. Who doubts that this illumination was from the Holy Spirit? I attest that he (the Spirit), with marvelous rays of light consoled me through the holy and sacred Scriptures, a strong and clear testimony with forty-four books of the Old Testament, and four Gospels with twenty-three Epistles of those blessed Apostles encouraging me to proceed, and, continually, without ceasing for a moment, they inflame me with a great sense of urgency.” Columbus, Book of Prophesies, 178-179
Many more such statements are available to all honest seekers of the truth. Only those who want to falsify history will ignore the clear evidence.
The Modern Prometheus
In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, there is a passage that (were it true) claws at the soul until it is left open and raw with spiritual bleeding. In a black paroxysm of despair, Victor Frankenstein’s monster compares his lot to Satan’s: “The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone”.
Shelley’s book originally carried the subtitle “Modern Prometheus.” In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals. The subtitle, therefore, refers to the novel’s theme, whereby modern man is reaching into dangerous areas of knowledge.
Victor Frankenstein used corpses to create his biped, which wanted to become the god of a new race. He intends for it to be beautiful, seemingly a reference to God’s creation of the angelic choirs. But when it comes to life, he is revolted by its gargoyle-like deformities, its shocking ugliness. After taking murderous revenge on various people for his hopeless plight, the grotesque beast commits suicide.
This seems to be a metaphor for some recent news.
On September 5, 2007, in England, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Agency (HFEA) made the decision to allow science to create human-animal hybrids. A bill is soon to be decided that will “make this a positive right … But even if the bill doesn’t pass, the administrative interpretation of the HFEA will permit creation of human-animal hybrids to go forward … Two teams of scientists have already applied to HFEA to create human-animal hybrids”.
In a sense, this was bound to happen, because science today does not believe in the human soul. As the authors of The Spiritual Brain – A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul point out:
“Most scientists today are materialists who believe that the physical world is the only reality. Absolutely everything else – including thought, feeling, mind, and will – can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena … The discipline of neuroscience today is materialist. That is, it assumes that the mind is quite simply the physical workings of the brain”.
Having been created by a human, Frankenstein’s monster had no soul. But having a brain he could think, a process alleged to be “quite simply the physical workings of the brain.” In any case, not having a soul, he is left off the hook of eternal damnation for his murders and suicide. But humans do have souls. So, the grafting of a human with an animal brings up an interesting, albeit a macabre question, as to whether or not the new hybrids will have souls
For anyone who has seen the hideous movie The Fly, this question is accentuated. The story is about a scientist who experiments with a teleportation device. During his testing, his atoms get scrambled together with those of the fly, creating a half-man, half-fly hybrid. One can speculate that the human part of this hybrid retained its soul, so, like the Frankenstein tale, the audience can leave the scene knowing that hell has not overridden God’s creation, but abusively tampered with it.
It is interesting to note that when Our Lady in Fatima showed the children Hell, both animals and humans were seen:
“Submerged in that fire were demons and souls in human shapes who resembled red-hot coals, black and bronze-colored embers that floated about in the blaze … The devils stood out like frightful and unknown animals with horrible and disgusting shapes, but transparent like black coals that have become red-hot”.
The souls had “human shapes,” while the devils appeared as “unknown animals with horrible and disgusting shapes.” Since this vision came directly from Our Lady, the fact that animal forms were given to devils is not adventitious. This leads me to a theory.
Not being a doctor of either positive or speculative theology, I will hypothesize as a Catholic layman, that the human part of the soon-to-be-created hybrids will have souls. Thus these creatures will be similar to the man-fly hybrid in the movie. Similar but not the same, because the man-fly hybrid resulted from an accident, not intentionally – in the teleportation instrument of the movie, the fly had not been seen. The new hybrids will be intentional, creatures that defy thought. God created us in His image, but the new hybrids will be metaphysical monstrosities, something out of Greek mythology. If the hybrids are females, perhaps they will be like Echidna, half-woman, half-snake. Or a harpy, half-bird and half-woman. If masculine, a half-man and half-animal could be like a Centaur. Presently the unbaptized have Limbo as an option, but will the new hybrids have this option?
It was said of Hitler’s Germany, “How could it be that a cultured people at the heart of Europe ever allow such a man and the Nazi party he led to power?” A fortiori, this same question can be asked of present day England regarding its decision to allow animal/human hyrid experimentation to go forward. The insane power of the Nazi quest operated on a kind of presupposition that human thinking had gone mad. But the quest to biologically combine the human world with the animal world goes beyond madness, penetrating into the mind of Satan. It is the roar of Lucifer, “I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the Most High” (Isaiah 14: 14).
St. Michael’s reply to Lucifer will always be repeated by God’s troupes:
“Unable to countenance the impudence of a creature thinking he were equal to God, [St. Michael] courageously stood up in the divine assembly to defend the rights of God with a rebuke that issued from the depths of his being as a question something like: ‘And just who could possibly claim to be like God?’ …”
Then Michael cast Lucifer out of Heaven with all his rebellious companions”.
After showing the three children the relentlessly horrific vision mentioned above, Our Lady said to them, “You have seen Hell…” Now, as the bio-technological Prometheus reaches its nadir in the land of St. Thomas More, the vision seems to be repeated: We could shortly be seeing an image and likeness of hell.
May Our Lady send St. Michael to assist us as the Revolution in the Church and the world spin out of control, trying to “ascend above the height of the clouds.”
http://www.traditioninaction.org/Cultural/E008cpHelInlEngland_Arnold.htm
The Revenge of the Gods of the Copybook Headings
All of our economic woes, more or less, have come from defiance of what Rudyard Kipling called the Gods of the Copybook Headings. These are the nonpartisan, scientific, and implacable laws of economics and human behavior on which Henry Ford elaborated as follows:
Most of the wisdom of the world was in the copy books. The lines we used to write over and over again, the homely old maxims on which we practiced to obtain legibility of our p’s and q’s, were the essence of human wisdom. (Ford Ideals, 1922)
The implacable laws in question include the basic economic concept that no system can deliver more value to its stakeholders than it produces. Ford’s mastery of these principles, along with what we now call lean manufacturing or the Toyota production system, built a multibillion-dollar enterprise and made the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Ford prospered by acting in accordance with the Gods of the Copybook Headings, while Kipling described what happened to those who went against them:
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
The “Gods of the Market Place” refers to temporary fads like Dutch tulip bulbs, dot-com stocks, mortgage-backed securities, and, if the Obama administration has its way, carbon credits. These lesser gods of Kipling’s pantheon are temporary, ephemeral, and mortal, while those of the Copybook Headings are eternal and immutable. Kipling continues:
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Eight-thousand-dollar handouts to first-time home-buyers, $7,500 tax credits to purchasers of the General Motors Volt, and multibillion-dollar “stimulus packages” all sound like “robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul,” or incurring billions in national debt for the same purpose. The next sentence is even more terrifying in light of Bank of New York Mellon’s proposal to charge depositors to hold large sums of cash. The concept of negative interest suggests that the bank does not expect to loan the cash even at trivial interest rates, which suggests in turn that there are no economic opportunities to which borrowers might apply the money.
The Great Depression was the opposite of the scenario described by Kipling because people had very little money. Anybody with the independent means to grow, mine, or make something could, however, usually get by. Farmers could, for example, often exchange food for vital services like medical care. This leads to the point, which Ford stated explicitly, that any society’s affluence relies directly on its ability to grow, mine, and/or manufacture things. Only with the products of mining, agriculture, and manufacturing can we then pay for services like medical care, news and commentary, and so on, along with entertainment that improves our quality of life.
Our country’s problem is very straightforward, and it is quite likely that the investment community recognized it during the first week of August. There is a widespread delusion, which is shared by the numerous members of Congress, that it is possible to have an affluent society without growing, mining, or manufacturing anything. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said openly that we can run an economy by trading in carbon credits:
According to financial experts, carbon permits could quickly become the world’s largest commodities market, growing to as much as $3 trillion by 2020 from just over $100 billion today. With thousands of firms and energy producers buying and selling permits to emit carbon, transaction fees for exchanges and clearing alone could top nearly half a billion dollars.
No, Senator, a commodity is something you can eat (cattle, pigs, wheat, soybeans), burn to make energy (coal or oil), or use to manufacture something (iron, aluminum, and now rare earths that are unfortunately controlled by China). Carbon credits have less intrinsic value than baseball cards, collectible comic books, and Dutch tulip bulbs (an investor who lost his life savings on those could at least plant them and have tulips) and are therefore not commodities.
To this may be added the president’s belief that we can build a “green economy” on “renewable energy.” There is nothing at all wrong with green manufacturing; Henry Ford made enormous profits, paid higher wages, and lowered his prices simultaneously by eliminating material and energy waste from his processes in an era with few if any environmental protection laws. The problem consists of subsidies or mandates for cost-ineffective renewable or green energy sources. If, for example, Mr. Obama’s friends and campaign donors at General Electric could make cost-effective solar panels or wind turbines, they would not need government subsidies or mandates for the purchase of their products.
If delusions like “green economy” and “carbon permits as commodities” represent our country’s understanding of basic economic science, it comes as no surprise that investors don’t want to stay around when, as Kipling concluded:
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Rudyard Kipling, with his gift as a poet and prophet, has put this into focus in his poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” Although written in 1919, it is pertinent to the conditions that exist in the world today. His “Gods of the Copybook Headings” are, in effect, those rules of human conduct that are so well defined by centuries of experience that they have become immutable. To disregard them, says Kipling, will inevitably lead to failure and destruction.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/the_revenge_of_the_gods_of_the_copybook_headings.html
Tolerance and Diversity: America’s Experiment with Dishonesty
Tolerance is a call to allow others of different political, social, philosophical and religious persuasions to be a part of what has long been established in the nation. Sister, diversity, is the gate keeper of new changes that tacitly are the promise of a way to better living, through change itself. The slogan of Barack Obama’s campaign and now his administration is ‘change we can believe in.’ No need to criticize that grand notion, all we need to ask is; how has that been going?
Change is good with practical limitations applied but total change may actually be the axe that smashes the foundations of a people and brings their social construct to the ground. Finding ways to control and utilize the great Mississippi River are changes that we accept but should the river suddenly change course the nation would be plunged into confusion.
It is only when we ask and attempt to answer the question, ‘what is the motive behind the call to change;’ from which we would expect an entirely new reality to emerge. Tolerance and diversity is a concept that has gone largely unexamined and has no clear definition. By allowing other ideas, cultures and behaviors on a new grand scale, do we mean to establish them? If they were not already established why are we allowing them? If they are transient, nascent and mere bumps along the cultural journey of a people then aren’t we submitting our nation to the rule and sway of pop culture?
How have the religions, social concepts and political persuasions we are so eager to allow, faired in their own settings or place of origin? Has Islam done anything to pull nations out of seventh century social patterns that see women as chattel, children as shields for terrorists and other cultures as the great Satan? Until that happens, what is our keen interest in the new to us religion predicated upon? What is the attraction?
Why weren’t we suddenly driven to study and allow the Taoist religion of Japan into our culture immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor? We were all willing to accept that Japan had given us full reason to see her as an enemy. What has changed in the American psyche that after watching two of our tallest buildings crumble to dust with 3,000 people in them we now are urged to refrain from labeling the perpetrators of this act as terrorists. We are encouraged to allow them to build mosques and we have charged or commissioned entire governmental agencies like NASA to reach out to Muslims in good will. It is from these kinds of changes that we get the first clues that tolerance and diversity not only need to be better defined but they need to be scrutinized from top to bottom.
Calling for other ideas to be tolerated is at the surface a very noble idea. When changes are forced on people against cultural norms already accepted and practiced, the real purpose of the call to change becomes apparent. It is not the acceptance of others ideas and cultures that is being called for it is the establishment of them against what already prevails. That, by any other name is known as an invasion or as some might say an attack.
In order for tolerance to be effective it must by nature be allowed to raise questions about what is true and ultimately what is practical. You can toss socialism around or fling it in the face of every American, but we have been established as a capitalistic society and we didn’t get that way overnight. It has been thoroughly tested and proven to work, where socialism is still floundering around the globe and nations have risen and fallen trying to make it work.
When it was accepted that we were a people of the Constitution, founded on Biblical principles and open to any private capitalistic venture that the imagination could conger, we stumbled from time to time, but this great river flowed in only one direction. Now we spend our days struggling to define, address and categorize the so called ‘change we can believe in.’
An advanced degree in psychology is not required to see that any relationship predicated on changing a partner’s entire personality, characteristics and basic beliefs, is doomed to failure. Even if a mate is very young the odds are against us, if we think we can remake them into our own image. America is no young mistress anymore but she is a fully developed women of the world and the idea the she needs to suddenly be transformed or changed is as absurd as trying to reverse the flow of the Mississippi.
It is here that we can say that change is good if it is not an invasion of our culture that results in its demise, but it is not worth anything if it is founded on ulterior motives and practiced at the expense of honesty.
Trying desperately to pull America out of the great cultural melting pot she has always been, and drop her in the great sludge pot where everything is forced on us to the exclusion of our own seasoned and well formed culture, is a kind of rape. We naturally go on the defensive when this happens and the evidence of this active defense is seen in the new isolationism so apparent in terms like, the left, the right, far left, far right, centrist, independents and libertarians. These terms indicate our level of resistance to the great sludge pot of change, not that we can believe in, but that is wrecking the country, if we would be honest enough to admit it.
There are as many definitions of these almost overused terms as there are terms but in general anything left of center could use any one of the following definitions. It can’t be wrong if it feels so right. My opinion is as good as law. Keep God out of everything. The constitution is not progressive and should be re-written. I have a great secular education therefore I’m too smart to be wrong. I’m too ignorant to know what you are talking about. I keep an open mind that hasn’t any room for you or your ideas.
Those to the right of center can be described by other definitions gleaned from their oft repeated exclamations and assertions. Such as; I like America the way it used to be. We should check if that’s constitutional. We’re proud of our men and women in uniform, let’s pray, Stop spending our money faster than we can make it. Abortion is murder. Gay is not natural unless you mean you’re just happy. What does the Bible say about that?
As for those in the center it is hard to imagine a more miserable place to try to balance a life without very much clear definition. Centrists remind me of the scriptural passage in which Christ offered the only definition that would actually describe the middle of the road position.
” But because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth.” Rv: 3:16
Soldiers of truth don’t end their support of the troops when first blood is drawn and they want to know the extent of the victories and the defeats. There is no successful warfare without knowing both. To show the world the enemies of democracy, freedom and this very nation, can never be called; far anything. It is always right to tell the truth and to uphold the great country we all have been so blessed to be born in.
The Orwellian Logic Behind Abortion and Population Control
A recent Associated Press story on the work of the ASPCA had this to say:
It took years of campaigning to change thinking about sterilizing pets, but it has paid off. This year fewer than 4 million unwanted dogs and cats will be euthanized, down from as many as 20 million before 1970.
There are several reasons: Aggressive adopt-a-pet campaigns are carried out every day in cities all over the country and breed rescues save many dogs. But animal experts believe spaying and neutering has played the biggest role in saving so many lives.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal correctly calls this out as eerily Orwellian:
Did you catch that “saving so many lives”? True, fewer animals were put to death, but that’s because they weren’t born in the first place. By this logic, hunting a species to extinction “saves lives” because it prevents any more of the species from being killed.
This sort of deceptive language is commonly deployed on behalf of totalitarian regimes to conceal their brutality to human beings. It’s fascinating to see it used in this context, where the moral stakes are so much lower.
Exactly. It’s a classic case of a warped “destroy the town to save it” mentality. The ASPCA is saving the animals lives by preventing them from being alive. What’s far more disturbing is that the ASPCA’s Orwellian language of animal control is often used against unborn humans, in two inter-related debates: population control (which even has an ominous name), and abortion.
Abortion
Pro-Choice Action Network crows about “the tremendous benefit to society of ensuring that every child is a wanted child.” But abortion doesn’t magically make children suddenly become wanted. What they’re really saying is that they’ll prevent “unwanted” children from being born. Unlike ASPCA, they don’t stop reproduction before conception, so their real message is that if all the unwanted children would die, children would be happier. You might as well suggest raising the per capita income by killing the poor.
Of course, these pro-choice mantras about wanted and unwanted children are false: many women abort children they want but feel they can’t keep, due to pressures from their finances, families, or the fathers of the baby; and of course, an untold number of children who reach childbirth are abused or treated as if they’re unwanted by their families. Two things should be noted about this. First, many of those children grow up into happy and well-adjusted adults – a lousy childhood is a terrible shame, but it’s generally not the final chapter. Second, abortion actually makes this problem dramatically worse, not better.
We can see this most acutely in the realm of children with disabilities. Right now, the statistics for the unborn disabled are disturbing: over 90% of those children who are identified as having Down’s Syndrome while they’re still in the womb will be aborted, and the statistics aren’t much better for a number of other mental or physical disabilities. What message, exactly, does this send (on behalf of both parents and society) to those children who are born with Down’s Syndrome, or to those physically- and emotionally-healthy children who suffer some sort of childhood accident, and become disabled? If you’re aware that your sibling was killed by abortion for being disabled, and then you become disabled, who wouldn’t feel like an “unwanted child”?
The fact is, abortion perpetuates a mentality which treats children like commodities. If you don’t like the hand you’ve been dealt, get an abortion and try again. It’s this mentality which creates a culture increasingly hostile to children, and it’s no mystery why, even as society has become more economically enriched and technologically advanced, we’ve become increasingly barbaric towards the vulnerable. If we could just eliminate the undesirable members of our society, every citizen would be a wanted citizen, right?
Population Control
On the population control front, the parallel is obvious. Not only do the two groups use identical language about controlling population sizes, but many of the more famous would-be population controllers have backgrounds in biology (Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich) or environmental sciences (Club of Rome’s founder Alexander King, Limits to Growth author Donella Meadows, etc.), and have approached the idea of controlling humans as if we’re simply another animal.
Here’s how Paul Ehrlich begins Population Bomb:
I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago. My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fleas. The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, frankly, frightened. It seemed that anything could happen – but, of course, nothing did.
If you didn’t already know that this book was about population control, you could hardly be criticized for expecting that the author was some sort of racist or xenophobe, talking about how disgusting and scary he finds the people of the Third World. And frankly, you wouldn’t really be wrong.
Ehrlich didn’t think that the problem with the world was that there were too many Ehrlichs — that his wife or his daughter simply put too much strain on the Earth to be allowed to live — but that there were too many beggars, paupers, and Indians. Of course, the absurdity is that the natural resources being used by the Ehrlichs (for example, in flying a family of three from the United States to India, and staying at a hotel) dwarf what the average Indian was using, and natural resources, after all, were what Ehrlich claimed to be worried about.
Like the other examples discussed above, Ehrlich was quick to employ the Orwellian claim that he was wanting this for India. It was our moral responsibility to make sure that fewer Indians were poor. Earlier, I remarked that you “might as well suggest raising the per capita income by killing the poor.” Ehrlich drains that claim of any irony — that’s his actual proposal. Widespread abortions, along with birth control and sterilization of the poor, were all part of his plan (and still are). Here’s how he presents this as a sort of charity:
Old India hands will laugh at our reaction. We were just some overprivileged tourists, unaccustomed to the sights and sounds of India. Perhaps, but the problems of Delhi and Calcutta are our problems too. Americans have helped to create them; we help to prevent their solution. We must all learn to identify with the plight of our less fortunate fellows on Spaceship Earth if we are to help both them and ourselves to survive.
So we should prevent poor children from being poor … by preventing poor children from being, period. By this logic, bringing humanity to extinction helps “both them and ourselves to survive” because it prevents any more of the humans from being killed (or worse, poor).
http://catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2011/07/orwellian-logic-behind-abortion-and.html
Global Warming as a Substitute Religion
In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or ourself. It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. G. K. Chesterton
One of the more pernicious follies of our time is the mixing of politics, science and religion. The Global Warming scam is a prime example of what a noxious brew can result from this. Among many of the elites in Western society, environmentalism has taken on all the aspects of a religion. The religious left has been eager to climb on to this new religion. Based upon very dubious science, and fired with the faith that has traditionally been given to religion, powerful forces throughout the West are eager to implement revolutionary changes in our society, most involving a radical expansion of government control over industry. Western civilization has made great strides by developing an intellectual atmosphere of relative freedom that has allowed science to flourish. Today science is often being debased by charlatans and zealots who use junk science as a tool to attempt to win policy debates. There is nothing new about politicians attempting to use dubious science to push their cherished nostrums. What is new is that such a large number of the elites in our society, (academics, politicians, entertainers, media, etc.) are participants in an intellectual groupthink that finds it next to impossible to tolerate, let alone listen to, dissenting viewpoints. What passes for the mainstream media today is a prime example of this type of bias. Thank heavens for a rambunctious new media: talk radio and the internet, where ideological conformity is impossible to enforce. That is all to the good, since some of the more deranged acolytes of the Global Warming religion appear to have a rather intolerant attitude towards heretics.
http://the-american-catholic.com/2011/07/11/global-warming-hysteria-explained-2/
Lights Out: All Over the World
Those in the USA who worry that the world will come to an end in 2012 may have to begin the year worrying about it in the dark, thanks to yet another intrusive “green” law (passed in 2007) scheduled to go into effect: beginning in 2012, the conventional hundred-watt incandescent light bulb will no longer be sold. If the world doesn’t end, the worriers will begin having to worry that if they want their homes well-lit, they will have to go broke lighting them: the new LED (light emitting diode) hundred watt bulbs will cost about fifty dollars apiece, according to a 16 May 2011 Associated Press online article by Peter Svensson.
When 2014 rolls around, the incandescent bulb limit goes down to forty-watts. Given the price of the newer bulbs and the state of the economy, it might be a good idea to start stocking up on candles. The young might be well advised to skip college and take up one of the traditional nursery rhyme careers of “butcher, baker, candlestick-maker,” because otherwise their futures may be darker in more ways than one.
Compact fluorescent light bulbs (the so-called “long life” bulbs) are less expensive and already in use, “but they have drawbacks. They contain a small amount of toxic mercury vapor, which is released if they break or are improperly thrown away. They last longer than traditional bulbs but not as long as LEDs. Brighter models are bulky and may not fit in existing fixtures,” according to the article.
One thinks of British statesman Sir Edward Grey’s remark on the eve of the First World War: “The lamps are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Grey was speaking figuratively, but a century after he made his doleful statement, it may literally start becoming true, at least in the USA; as for Europe and the rest of what once was Christendom, its figurative truth is already upon us in many respects.
Spiritual, moral and cultural darkness is spreading and deepening. The twilight of civilization is no longer merely that of the West—as proclaimed in 1918 by the somewhat peculiar amateur historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler—, but of the entire world. What can one make of a global “society” in which the degenerate and possibly satanic pop icon Lady Gaga has ten million “followers” on Twitter, while a Traditional Catholic organization such as the SSPX has only a bit more than five hundred priests and perhaps one million faithful? What do we make of the bankrupting of entire nations now being carried out by the collusion of corrupt politicians—“leaders”—with criminal banking syndicates? How can we possibly reconcile the now-no-longer-in-doubt perverse sex crimes committed by Catholic priests with the vows they swore? How can one not equate with darkness societies in which abortion is rampant, divorce and concubinage more common than marriage?
A new breed of light bulb may lower energy costs, but it will do nothing to dispel the darkness that is falling upon the world. We need to see the altar lamps re-lit worldwide for that darkness to be dispelled.
http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2011-0531-remnant-staff-lights-out.htm
Why Doesn’t Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they use the terms “Nazi” or “Fascist” but almost never “Communist?”
Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused – 70 million killed in China, 20-30 million in the former Soviet Union, and almost one-third of all Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians; a generation deprived of human rights in Cuba; and much more — why is “Communist” so much less a term of revulsion than “Nazi?”
There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-shirts.
This question is of vital significance. First, without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future. Second, the reasons for this moral imbalance tell us a great deal about ourselves today.
Here, then, are seven reasons.
1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others. Under Mao about 70 million people died – nearly all in peacetime! – virtually all of them Chinese. Likewise, the approximately 30 million people that Stalin had killed were nearly all Russians, and those who were not Russian, Ukrainians for example, were members of other Soviet nationalities. The Nazis, on the other hand, killed very few fellow Germans. Their victims were Jews, Slavs, and members of other “non-Aryan” and “inferior” groups. “World opinion” – that vapid amoral concept – deems the murder of members of one’s group far less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason why blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in the Congo right now elicits no attention from “world opinion.” But if an Israeli soldier is charged with having killed a Gaza woman and two children, it makes the front page of world newspapers.
2. Communism is based on lovely sounding theories; Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories. Intellectuals, among whom are the people who write history, are seduced by words — so much so that deeds are deemed considerably less significant. Communism’s words are far more intellectually and morally appealing than the moronic and vile racism of Nazism. The monstrous evils of communists have not been focused on nearly as much as the monstrous deeds of the Nazis. The former have been regularly dismissed as perversions of a beautiful doctrine (though Christians who committed evil in the name of Christianity are never regarded by these same people as having perverted a beautiful doctrine), whereas Nazi atrocities have been perceived (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazi ideology. This seduction by words while ignoring deeds has been a major factor in the ongoing appeal of the left to intellectuals. How else explain the appeal of a Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to so many left-wing intellectuals, other than that they care more about beautiful words than about vile deeds?
3. Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility for them, and attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything similar regarding Lenin’s or Stalin’s horrors. Indeed, an ex-KGB man runs Russia, Lenin is still widely revered, and, in the words of University of London Russian historian Donald Rayfield, “people still deny by assertion or implication, Stalin’s holocaust.” Nor has China in any way exposed the greatest mass murderer and enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. Mao remains revered in China. Until Russia and China acknowledge the evil their states have done under communism, communism’s evils will remain less acknowledged by the world than the evils of the German state under Hitler.
4. Communism won, Nazism lost. And the winners write history.
5. Nothing matches the Holocaust. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than the Nazis did but never matched the Holocaust in the systemization of murder. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention paid to it since then has helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.
6. There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of communist atrocities compared to those of the Nazis. Whereas, both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the left dominates the teaching profession, and therefore almost no one teaches communist atrocities. As much as intellectuals on the left may argue that they loathe Stalin or the North Korean regime, few on the left loathe communism. As the French put it, “pas d’enemis a la gauche,” which in English means “no enemies on the left.” This is certainly true of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban communism. Check your local university’s courses and see how many classes are given on communist totalitarianism or mass murder compared to the number of classes about Nazism’s immoral record.
7. Finally, in the view of the left, the last “good war” America fought was World War II, the war against German and Japanese fascism. The left does not regard America’s wars against communist regimes as good wars. The war against Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral and the war against Korean (and Chinese) communism is simply ignored.
Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely, the day the left does come to grips with communism’s legacy of human destruction, it will be a very positive sign that the world’s moral compass has begun to correct itself.
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=34460#
Baby Boomers Owe Young People an Apology
We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:
First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a childhood.
We baby boomers were allowed perhaps the most innocent childhoods known to history. We grew up without material want, in one of the most decent places in world history, with media that preserved our sexual and other innocence, in schools that generally taught us well, and we were allowed childhood play from boy-girl play to rough and tumble boy-boy play to monkey bars and ringalievio. Our generation has deprived you of all these things. And while we were aware of the threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, few of us believed that we were threatened with death anywhere near the amount we have scared you about death from secondhand smoke, global warming and heterosexual AIDS, to mention just a few of the exaggerated death scares we have inflicted on you.
Our generation came up with two truly foolish slogans that also ended up robbing you of childhood.
One was, “Never trust anyone over 30.” Our infantile attitude toward adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the greatest needs in your life — adults. That in turn deprived you of something as important as love — parental and other adult authority. With little parental authority, you were left with little personal security, few guardrails and a diminished sense of order in life. And we transferred this denial of authority to virtually all authority figures, from teachers to police.
The other slogan whose awful consequences we baby boomers bequeathed to you was, “Make love, not war.” Our parents had liberated the world from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan — solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics as “Give peace a chance,” as if that deals in any way with the world’s most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not war. And we succeeded.
We made you anti-war and almost completely sexualized your lives. We told you that having sex was terrific or at least to be expected, even in early teens, and that your only concerns should be avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and getting pregnant. And if you did get pregnant, we made sure that you could extinguish the life you were carrying as effortlessly and guiltlessly as possible.
We started teaching you about sexuality and homosexuality in early grade school and we taught you how to put condoms on bananas. It is true that we did not grow up learning about these things at such young ages — certainly our schools never taught us about these things — but we chalked that up to the preposterous, if not reactionary, values of the 1950s and early 1960s. We had contempt for our parents believing that “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver” and “Superman” — with the show’s motto of “truth, justice, and the American way” — were good things for young people to be exposed to. So we replaced these shows with MTV’s mind-numbing parade of three-second images and sex-drenched shows for teenagers. Sorry.
We also made you weak. We did everything possible to ensure that you suffered no pain. Sometimes we changed game scores if a team was winning by too large a margin; we abolished dodgeball lest anyone suffer early removal from the game; and we gave trophies to all of you who played on baseball teams, no matter how awfully you or your team played so that none of you missed getting a trophy while members of another team did. Much of this was thanks to the self-esteem-without-having-to-earn-it movement, which in our generation’s almost infinite lack of wisdom we inflicted upon you. Sorry for that, too.
We also apologize for coming close to ruining so many of your schools and universities. Despite the unprecedented sums of money we had America spend on education, most of you got an education quite inferior to the one we got at a fraction of the cost. But we thought of our teachers as fools (they were, after all, over 30) who just concentrated on reading, writing and arithmetic (and history, music and art). We were sure we knew better and we therefore concentrated on sexual issues, and teaching you about peace, global warming and the horrors of smoking. The fact that few high school graduates can identify Mozart, let alone were ever exposed to his music, is far less significant to many baby boomers than your knowledge of the alleged perils of secondhand smoke. Most of you cannot identify Stalin either, and we are sorry for that, too. But, hey, we did make sure you saw Al Gore’s film.
And a real apology to those of you hooked on drugs. While your choice to do drugs is your responsibility, it was our generation that romanticized them and made them cool. “Mind expanding” we called them. But it turns out that they don’t expand minds, they destroy them. Sorry.
And, young women, we apologize especially to you. Many of us baby boomers bought into the feminist idea that getting married and making a family with a man were far less fulfilling than career success and that marriage itself is “sexist” and “patriarchal.” So, to those of you women who have career success and didn’t get married, we sincerely apologize. Turns out that most careers aren’t as fulfilling as we promised.
So we really blew it, and what’s really amazing is that few of us have changed our minds. Most people get wiser as they get older. But not those of us baby boomers who still believe these things. Of course, many of us never bought into these awful ideas that have so hurt you and our country, and some of us have grown up. But many of us still talk, think, dress and curse the same as we did in the ’60s and ’70s. And we’re still fighting what we consider the real Axis of Evil: American racism, sexism and imperialism.
But for those of us who know the damage baby boomers as a whole did to you, a heartfelt apology.
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Faustus’ Fate
Faustus is the hubristic protagonist in Christopher Marlowe’s ever-popular play, “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus.” Frustrated by human limitations on learning , he negotiated with Mephistopheles, Hell’s emissary, to gain for himself a twenty-four-year period of godhood by selling his soul to the emissary’s lord, Lucifer.
No longer constrained by such ordinary disciplines as philosophy, medicine, law, and theology, Faustus explored new frontiers of knowledge through the occult arts, among them alchemy, astrology, necromancy, numerology, and demonology.
Fatefully, the knowledge Faustus craved did not presuppose wisdom. While enjoying his superhuman powers, he failed to realize that all he really had was knowledge — knowledge that couldn’t be wisely applied to humanity’s betterment. When the twelfth hour arrived, Faustus, with nothing more than a useless, encyclopedic collection of facts, faced his tormentors who tore his body to pieces and introduced him to the worst of punishments: eternal absence of God’s love.
Pride, Faustus’ undoing, often finds fertile ground for bringing itself to fruition in human cowardice. As American Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, “Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.”
In the high drama of current American politics, there are Faustian characters who smugly strut and swagger their hour upon the stage, and risk departing in ignominy.
As well they should. After all, what has taken Americans two and a half centuries to build up — a democracy of, by, and for the people, which is the shining light of hope for oppressed peoples the world over — is in jeopardy of being subverted in the eye-blink of one presidential term.
Archbishop Sheen was right: Those possessed of overweening pride fear dissenters and demonize them in cowardly ad hominem fashion. That may be effective when attacking individuals, such as conservative news commentators, but it’s no defense against an entire population awakening to the fact that its security, wellbeing, and freedom are being endangered by a handful of unscrupulous, dog-and-pony-show politicians.
On the home front, many Americans are coming to grips with the unsettling reality that the socialistic Health Care Law will destroy the best health care system in the world by trying to perform an impossible feat of legalistic legerdemain: giving bureaucracy the responsibility of lowering costs in a free enterprise society. When has bureaucracy ever lowered the cost of anything?
On the foreign front, nations having economic and defense ties with America are dismayed that some of her leaders are far too friendly with foreign fanatics fantasizing about the Great Satan’s fall. For example, in meetings with Iran’s president — a bona fide, fiendish, fanatical fruitcake — some of America’s highest echelon leaders, including the Secretary of State, have basically condoned his country’s right to build nuclear weapons!
Such leaders should take note of the warning given in the sixteenth chapter of Proverbs: “Pride goes before destruction; a haughty spirit before a fall.” If not, America may soon face Faustus’ fate.
Read the play “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus” HERE
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