Comments moderation enabled

Dear Readers,

I have reluctantly decided to enable comments moderation for a time, even on such a low-traffic blog as this one. This action is in response to continued traffic from one particular undesired reader whom I picked up quite by accident by writing a negative post about someone he evidently admires and who has ignored un-subtle hints to take himself off. This is not the first time that I have picked up oddball readers by putting the name of a fanatically admired kook into the heading of a post. Google alerts appears to be my bane, and I shall have to learn to give my posts less obvious titles. Since this is my personal blog, I do not feel obligated to interact with comments from people who give me the creeps (either by their handles or by their opinions) or who fanatically admire people who give me the creeps. So that's that.

To all the rest of you, please do not be discouraged by moderation from posting your comments. I am on my e-mail many times a day and will receive alerts and post your comments very quickly. And I hope that this change will not be permanent.

Just exactly like that

I was studying Colossians with Middle Daughter the other day. Got to the part where Paul warns his readers about people who will beguile them with enticing words. It's in the "vain philosophy" section. One conjecture is that the heresy in question was an early form of Gnosticism, so I was trying to explain a little about Gnosticism to her. I got to the part about how the Gnostics tried to create mysteries and then told people that they could be part of their secret "club" by going through an initiation ceremony. People thought this was pretty cool and that they would be profound thinkers like their teachers if they learned this hidden knowledge, but really it was all nonsense.

To which she replied, "That's sort of like postmodernism. Where they say that yes and no are the same thing."

Yes, sweetheart, very much so. Right on.

Some more Easter music

There is so much good Easter music. If I may venture to give advice, I would suggest that you sing to celebrate Easter. Even if you can't sing. Play some Handel and go around humming it. Sing something you sang in church this morning. It's worth it. He is risen!

Here is "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth." Here is "The Trumpet Shall Sound." Eldest Daughter at ages 2 and 3 (which is now getting uncomfortably long ago) used to refer to this bit of Handel as "Wumpable" from the oft-repeated line "And the dead shall be raised incorruptible." It was one of her faves.

I looked all over the Web for a sung version of "Because He Lives" that I liked. Except for the rather sappy verse about "our newborn baby," it's one of my favorite sing-along 70's Gospel songs and has been much in my mind today. We have had some wonderful times singing it with the family I blogged about here. But I just did not like any of the full-length Youtube versions. Some of them just started out with the "newborn baby" verse and entirely left out what is really verse 1, which begins, "God sent his Son. They called Him Jesus," and ends, "An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives." And leaving that verse out would seem to be leaving out the whole point, right? (The newborn baby in verse 2, for those of you who don't know, is the Gaithers' baby in 1970, not Jesus.) One version by a black group that I rather liked at first lost my endorsement and link when it got to verse 3 and gave a crucial line as "I'll fight life's trials, no war with pain." Say what? The line is actually, "I'll fight life's final war with pain," which actually is rather moving and sobering. And some versions were just too self-indulgent. So here is a relatively tame sung version of just the chorus, repeated several times. And here is just the music, with the words displayed, a fun synth version on a site called, of all things, "Mama rocks."

If you have choral versions of great Easter hymns you want to recommend, or links to other Easter music you recommend, post them in the comments. I couldn't quite yet find a choir version of "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" that had all the normal words and sounded good.

Happy Easter

A joyous feast of Our Lord's glorious resurrection to my readers.

I've been thinking a lot about the resurrection lately, what with the paper and all. C.S. Lewis said that he never felt less convinced of a doctrine than when he had just successfully defended it. Thankfully (and I am thankful) that hasn't happened to me in this case.

Over at WWWtW I've posted Updike's poem.

Here are the words for one of the many of the very best of the Easter hymns. By Charles Wesley, of course:

1
Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Sons of man and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!

2
Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once he died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where's thy victory, boasting grave? Alleluia!

3
Love's redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!

4
Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

I was trying to figure out why I was having so much trouble finding these words instead of links that had something strange I'd never seen before--"Earth and heaven in chorus say"--for the second line of verse 1. Then it hit me: That's the PC revision to avoid the word "Sons." Sheesh!

Here is the version of the words in our 1940 hymnal. I'm not quite sure I have this right, but I think from what it says here as well as at the previous link that there were some verses originally in Latin written in the 14th century and that Charles Wesley just wrote a whole bunch of others in the same vein. It looks as though all of the ones I quote above are by Wesley but only the fourth one in the 1940 hymnal is by Wesley.

Songs to Die for--Precious Lord, Take My Hand

A couple of weeks ago Youngest Daughter said, "I want you to sing to me." So I sat down with her and broke out the standard repertoire for such sessions--chiefly Negro spirituals and early American hymn tunes or folk tunes. "Brethren, We Have Met to Worship," "Sweet Little Jesus Boy," "I Wonder As I Wander," "Talk About a Soul," "Poor, Wayfarin' Stranger," "I Want Jesus to Walk With Me," and "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" are the ones I can remember. Eventually Middle Daughter came out and asked, "Are those all songs that were written by the slaves?" I told her that as far as I could tell, only a few of them were, but that the tunes to the rest of them were old American tunes. Except for one. The only one I thought fell into neither category was "Precious Lord."

So I looked it up and got quite a surprise. It turns out that "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" is written to a modified version of the very same tune as one of my other favorites, which I've blogged about already, "Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone." I've known both of those songs for years and never recognized the similarity once. But I was right that it isn't either a spiritual or early American. Thomas Dorsey, the black song writer who wrote the words and put them to the tune in 1932, did something pretty cool. Basically he took what is essentially a "white" American hymn tune (akin in chord pattern and style to "Amazing Grace"), written in the 1800's by a man named George N. Nelson, and he gave it a spiritual "swing," adding a number of extra notes to fill it out and make it slower. So my ear did detect correctly the fact that it isn't a true spiritual, but I also detected correctly its vague resemblance to a spiritual. Dorsey wrote the song after his wife died in childbirth; their child then also died. Here are the words:

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

When my way grows drear,
Precious Lord, linger near,
When my life is almost gone,
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

When the darkness appears
And the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river I stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

Now, if I could just find some confirmation of my gut feeling that all the sources are wrong, and that "Let us Break Bread Together on our Knees" is not a spiritual, I'd feel like a real instinctive music historian. The harmony seems wrong for the genre; the words seem wrong for the genre. But I have to admit that Google is solidly against my gut instinct on this one, so probably that one really is a spiritual.

Thy beauty, long-desired

This morning we sang "O Sacred Head." I always have a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around verse 2:

Thy beauty, long-desirèd,
hath vanished from our sight;
thy power is all expirèd,
and quenched the light of light.
Ah me! for whom thou diest,
hide not so far thy grace:
show me, O Love most highest,
the brightness of thy face.

The image is clear enough: Jesus on the cross had been so beaten by the soldiers that his face could hardly be seen clearly. But what about the "beauty" part? The trouble here is my over-literal mind. I immediately start thinking about what Jesus probably really looked like. We have absolutely no reason to believe that he was especially handsome. In fact, Isaiah 53 prophecies that he will not be particularly impressive in appearance. Considering the matter literally and historically, rather than devotionally, we should picture Our Lord at the time of his death as a Jewish man in his early 30's, toughened by outdoor living, bearded, probably dark-eyed. OMEA, as the new expression is. So what's the special "beauty" the hymn writer is talking about?

Well, the hymn writer isn't thinking literally and historically but rather devotionally. There are several different strands or traditions, both Protestant and Catholic, of the "beautiful Jeus" motif, including the "beautiful name" motif. And I have to admit that none of them speak to me very deeply. So I'd like to take this in a totally different direction from the one the author probably intended: Consider it, in the terms of E.D. Hirsch, a matter of the "significance" of the lyrics (to me and possibly to you) rather than of their "meaning."

I was suddenly struck while singing the song with the thought that babies do appear beautiful to their mothers, even if not to strangers. When you are bonding with your newborn, you do a lot of looking down and gazing. I've never had a son, only daughters, but as far as I know it's the same way with sons as with daughters. Now, Jesus was of course someone's Son. And Mary had doubtless seen him in many different situations before he grew up and became a bearded and perhaps somewhat scruffy, outdoor-living itinerant preacher. She had seen him laughing, running, studying Torah, intent over work with Joseph, asking the questions at the Passover meal, enjoying his food, seen him grow in strength and, yes, in beauty. So even from a purely literal, human, and historical perspective, there was one person at the foot of the cross who would have had a real meaning for the notion that his beauty had "vanished from our sight." That one person would have that contrast in mind--the face battered almost beyond recognition in contrast to the tiny infant face, the laughing boyish face, the young man with a twinkle in his eye, all those images of peace, joy, and relaxation. That human beauty that every mother's son, made in the image of God, has in the eyes of a woman who loves him.

And that thought finally gave me an entrance into the devotional possibilities of that verse of the song. For he "humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross"--and that was what it meant: That by cruel men, his human worth was set aside and his human flesh, that humanity in which he had been loved and had loved, had felt the sun and the wind, had eaten and played, had sung and learned, was tortured and killed. In that, he is like every young man cruelly slaughtered by his enemies, every young man mourned by his mother. But with a difference. Because this Victim was not just a victim, and this Victim finally conquered death. And this Victim died for all the sons of men, that by His death they might be redeemed.

Quick cross reference to new W4 post

I meant to write something here about hymns and songs but don't have time. But I have a new post on What's Wrong with the World that I'm rather pleased with. The writing could stand to be polished, but the structure is fairly tight, which is a pleasant thought.

A reader of W4 is a former reader of Right Reason. He is planning a paper on the subject of the role of religious beliefs in public policy, and he sent me the link to his posts on the subject on his new blog, "Being Appeared to Bloggishly." So instead of just telling him what I thought in his combox or in an e-mail, I wrote up a post of my own about it.

Announcing a new annotated bibliography on historical apologetics

I'll be posting briefly about this on What's Wrong with the World in the next couple of days, too. Meanwhile, I'm very pleased to announce here that Tim McGrew's annotated bibliography on historical apologetics is available on my personal web page, here.

It's taken a while for Tim to be satisfied that the biblio is ready for web posting, but it really is good to make this stuff widely available to people who will find it useful. If you have a history buff in your life or a Christian apologetics buff, and especially if you know someone who is both, get him the link. It's cool stuff.

Humor for mathematical folks

Attention all you readers with some mathematical flair or knowledge. Or even without. (I don't have a whole lot of that myself and enjoyed it.) Here is a video you'll want to watch for relaxation and laughs.

I had never heard of Tom Lehrer until the other day, but I'm told that he taught statistics at MIT for quite a number of years in the Political Science department (he mentions that on the video) and then apparently made a living as a musician. Here's the Wiki article. I gather he was/is a flaming liberal and was best known years ago for his political satire against the "conservative establishment" and on subjects like nuclear proliferation. I must say that he doesn't seem as sensitive on all that stuff as liberals are nowadays in the video (made in 1997); he makes a joke in one of the songs about having a more inclusive mathematics so as not to discriminate against numbers to the left of the origin. A sense of humor is a saving grace that too many liberals lack.

The archive.org video is thirteen minutes long. He begins to introduce my favorite song of the lot at about 7 minutes, 15 seconds. It's "Sociology" and is sung to the tune of "Choreography" from the movie White Christmas. I've always loved "Choreography," sung in the movie by Danny Kaye, which in its turn mocks pretentious, pseudo-intellectual dance forms. Lehrer's version makes fun of the attempt to disguise the fact that one is talking nonsense by putting it in mathematical terms to make it look scientific. You should be able to let the video load while watching the first few minutes, then push the slider to the right until the timer reads about 8 minutes, if you want to skip to the later song. I just tried it, and it worked, though that may be because I already watched the whole thing through once on this computer. But the whole video is funny if you have the time to enjoy it.

Comic and musical relief

Okay, now, just for fun. I was...rather young in 1971 when the Three Dog Night's rendition of "Joy to the World" topped the charts. And besides, I was a sweet little Baptist girl, and what would I know about rock music? It was a while more before we had a TV, and a while more after that before I saw a sappy and silly movie called something like Sunshine in the middle of which the song occurred. I don't remember a lot about the movie--a lot of motorcycle riding, a cute little girl--but the song stuck. It was cool.

In my teens, my taste in music had gone downhill temporarily. By then we were into the era of (ick) disco. But still, "Joy to the World" stuck somewhere in the back of my head. And for something like twenty years now I've been wondering how the lyrics go after "was a good friend of mine." Lyric searches are, surprisingly often, vain on the Internet because of copyright considerations, so I've only just now gotten around to trying to looking it up. And here it is.

Elsewhere on the fun front, from The Onion, here is a news flash on a new Iraqi law to require a five-day waiting period before purchasing suicide vests. Don't drink anything while watching it. It's hilarious. (HT for that one--TROP)

Norman Finkelstein--Kookball Extraordinaire

I had heard only faint rumblings about a professor denied tenure at DePaul last summer/fall. I paid little attention and hadn't wittingly ever heard of Norman Finkelstein until his name came up on Little Green Footballs a couple of months back. (I'm not going to do the search just now to find the link.) Couldn't quite figure the whole thing out. LGF and others call him a Holocaust denier, which could be true for all I know, but maybe he's a "minimizer" instead, given that apparently his mother was a Holocaust survivor. "Minimizers," I gather, come in various shapes and forms, though they are odious enough.

I couldn't quite figure out exactly why he was denied tenure from an academic point of view. I mean, consider all the people who do have tenure. How did they find a way to deny this guy? On the other hand, he's apparently a sort of sycophantic attack-dog for his dear friend Noam Chomsky, which is probably enough to lower the quality of anyone's academic work. And no, I don't mean in linguistics.

As it happens, I have a friend who is on staff at DePaul who tells me that the word on the staff side is that you were lucky if you never had to deal with Norm, because he's a jerk. I put a lot of weight on this, by the way. In my opinion, staff at a large university pretty much keep the place running, sometimes nearly single-handed, and they probably deserve to get paid a lot more than they do get paid. If the staff think a faculty member is a jerk, odds are high that he is a jerk.

I'm not planning to run out and read Finkelstein's infamous Holocaust book, so I basically just went on not knowing very much about the guy but assuming he was bad news in general terms. Until the other day.

Watch this video clip only if you have a strong stomach. Because now I know in more detail that Norman Finkelstein is a scary and completely, ideologically crazy person.

In case you don't want to put your stomach to the test, here's a brief version. The linked video is an interview Finkelstein gave to Lebanese TV on a recent visit. In it he lauds Hezbollah to the skies and pours scorn upon those Lebanese people, including the female interviewer talking to him, who don't support Hezbollah. He calls Lebanese Hezbollah opponents "slaves"--to Israel and the U.S., of course. He calls the raining of rockets upon northern Israel in the summer of 2006 a mere "pretext" for Israel to attack. Because they just want the Lebanese people to be their slaves, apparently out of sheer sadism. George W. Bush, he says, "destroyed your entire country" that summer. (Really? The whole country? And Bush did that?) Norm is infuriated that Bush was received in Lebanon recently on a visit at all. He says that the French resistance against the Nazis in WWII (all of them?) were Communists and were harsh and brutal, but that we admire them--and he clearly thinks we should admire them--because they resisted the enslavement of their country by the Nazis. Hezbollah, he says, is like that. He says that war against Israel is the only way for Lebanon not to be slaves. (Guess that means more rockets fired on northern Israel then. They'd better get cracking. This guy must just love Hamas in Gaza.) Oh, and perhaps the wildest line: He says he wishes there were some other way than war and that probably Hitler, too, would have preferred if "his goals" could have been accomplished in some way other than by war.

A nut. A complete and bizarro nut.

So now I know all I need to know about Norman Finkelstein.

HT Israel Matzav

Weird connectivity problems

(Gee, I almost found myself saying "issues" in the post header. Don't you hate the new use of "issue" to mean "problem"?)

The connectivity problems referred to in the title are not to this site. As you can see, here I am. Ta-da! I also have e-mail and can connect to nearly all of my usual Internet sites. However, I suddenly (as of yesterday morning) cannot connect to my beloved group blog, to which I am a contributor, What's Wrong With the World.

By asking all my friends to try it and see if they can connect, I have narrowed down the problem to, apparently, my own house. My neighbor across the street has the same ISP that I do, and he can get the site.

I found this nifty article that may diagnose the problem. If so, we'll have to call in an expert. (I hope our physically local expert is available; he isn't always.) It says "only experienced Windows-savvy users" should attempt the workaround described, so I think we'll probably not try it ourselves. If this should turn out to be the problem, the mystery is why it suddenly arose yesterday morning, when nothing had changed in our local configuration.

Anyway, to all my many fans, I will be able to blog only here for a while, not at WWWtW, until it's all back up and running. One always hopes, with a trace of superstition, that the problem will just "fix itself." Maybe I'll wake up again tomorrow and it will all be better. Evidently (according to the article) that could actually happen if various servers started sending smaller "packets" that could fit down the "tunnel" of my router. Or something.

Update: The problem appears to be our local wireless router. When we plug the cable modem directly into the computer I use, the problem goes away. All sites become available. Unfortunately this means that no one else can use the Internet from a laptop at the same time. So for the time being, the cludge is that when no one else needs to use the Internet, I can switch the cables, reboot the computer (it doesn't work otherwise), and then go wherever I want on the Internet. When the wireless router is needed, we switch the cables back. Then I can come here, do e-mail, go most places, but not go to a few sites, including What's Wrong with the World. That's until we get an expert out here to find a better workaround. All most odd. I have a feeling some Bright Lad changed a packet size setting somewhere out there in cyberspace overnight between Friday and Saturday.

Update #2: Problem solved. The connection problem was indeed, as the article I linked above suggests, fixed by changing the MTU setting on my Linksys router down to 1492. The mystery that remains is why this should suddenly be necessary now. As far as I know, the setting has always been the factory-standard 1500, and this has never been a problem before, for over a year and a half. I've certainly never touched it before. I keep my ignorant hands off that stuff as much as possible. Anyway, thanks to Zippy and to Todd McKimmey for patient help and advice over the weekend. And thanks especially to Todd for pointing out to me what the linked article is not clear about and what I in my ignorance would have overlooked: If the problem is with the router, then the MTU setting that needs to be changed is the one on the router, not the one in the registry of the desktop computer. Of course. But it wouldn't have occurred to me. So just remember, if this esoteric problem should plague your Internet connection, the magic number is...1492.

Introducing Mark Pickup

For those of you who don't know of him, Mark Pickup is a Canadian blogger with multiple sclerosis who has been writing about life issues for quite some years. I first read Mark's columns in National Right to Life News before anyone had ever heard of the blogosphere. (At least, that's how I recall it.) Wesley J. Smith has also mentioned Mark as a personal friend a number of times. I've just added Mark's blog to the links on the left, even though I'm not a very faithful reader, after seeing this post, "Sickness seen through a lens of Christian faith," from late January of this year.

Mark was diagnosed with MS when he was thirty years old and lives in a wheelchair. He recalls in this post how his wife found an old love letter he wrote to her when they were both young. In it, he wrote this:

What about our health? Health is like money in that it can be taken away. If either of us were to lose our health, we can be thankful for having known good health. There are thousands of people who have never had the gift of good health; they live with sick or twisted bodies that have never been whole. We have so much to be thankful for but most of all, we have each other.

Mark continues:

I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of thirty. Contrary to my earlier youthful words in a love-letter to my wife, I was not thankful I had known good health after it was gone. I was angry I lost it!

Fear overcame me about what lay in store for me. I knew multiple sclerosis is a serious disease that often has a catastrophic impact of the lives of people it strikes. I knew people with MS: often their lives were torn apart as their marriages crumbled, careers shattered, and they were abandoned to a living hell.

Multiple sclerosis devastated my life. It stripped away my health, layer by layer, like pealing an onion, and eventually left me triplegic and in an electric wheelchair.

Looking back over more than twenty years of increasingly profound and crippling disability I must say that I have become one of those people I wrote about who lives with a sick and twisted body. Yes, there were times when my heart broke – along with the hearts of those loved me. There were times throughout the years when it was me (not someone else) who was on the verge of despair. Protracted suffering seemed to isolate me in sorrow – just as my wife’s sorrow seemed to isolate her. At other times we lived two solitudes rooted in the same overwhelming and inexpressible sorrow.

The only way for our two broken hearts to unite was to kneel together before the cross and ask Jesus to console the inconsolable within us.

When people unite their suffering and sorrows with Christ’s Passion, a mysterious solidarity often occurs with other sufferers; solitudes of human anguish come together in mutual comfort at the foot of the cross. Christ’s outreached arms bid welcome to all heavy-hearted people, calling us beyond ourselves and our pain to find our consolation in Him.

Read the whole thing.

I wanna be like Zippy

My hordes of readers will notice the blog's new look. And just in case anyone doesn't get the allusion, it is to Zippy Catholic's blog, the look of which I have always liked better than my own. The content's pretty darned good, too!

The really good news is that now I can put up links to other people's blogs without fearing that warning that "all your changes will be lost if you change your format." I had to do a little html stuff to put up the three links that have always been there, and retaining as I do a bit of the technophobe, this was fiddly and annoying. I also believed that when it said that all my changes would be lost, it meant the links too, and I'd have to redo them, so I've kept it to just three against the day (today) when I would get that seagoing look I really wanted.

But the worry was for nothing. As it turns out, the links all survived the transition to the new lighthouse-y look, and now I don't have to think about it. So I can start adding a few more links. Now, if only they have some new user-friendly way to do that...

Update: Thanks entirely to Zippy for the recent comments feature. This should encourage y'all to comment frequently just to see yourself up there on top of the list!

Men ought always to pray, and not to faint

Luke 18:1 says, "And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint."

Thus begins the parable of the unjust judge. You all know it. A woman bugs and nags an unjust judge, until he finally gives in and defends her against her enemies. And Jesus, according to St. Luke, is telling us by this parable that we should nag God. Really. Jesus himself ends by saying that God will "avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him..."

I believe that it is not always coincidence but sometimes Providence that we hear particular things at particular times. This past Thursday at ladies' Bible study Phil. 4:6-7 was one of the verses we went over, in which we are told not to worry but rather to "make [our] requests known unto God." And this morning the hymn "Commit Thou All That Grieves Thee" was on the slate, chosen by the priest, not by me. Unfortunately, it appears that none of the cyber-hymnals have it, because for some reason the words are still copyright. It's #446 in the 1940 hymnal, and the first verse goes like this:

Commit thou all that grieves thee
And fills thy heart with care.
To Him whose faithful mercy
The skies above declare,
Who gives the winds their courses,
Who points the clouds their way
Tis He will guide thy footsteps
And be thy staff and stay.

And then while I was thinking about prayer, Jesus' parable of the unjust judge came to mind.

The point of all of this seems to me to be that we should get over ourselves. By that I mean that we should stop worrying about wasting God's time with our "little" worries or with things that "might not seem important to him." We have no dignity with God anyway, so let's get on with it: Jesus says we are to pray and not to faint. St. Paul says we are to bring our requests to God. These strike me as biblical injunctions simply to speak to God about our concerns and worries, to make our requests humbly, realizing that it might not be His will to grant them, but not to try to get an "inside line" on what God is already planning to do in the matter or what God wants us to say, the exact feelings He wants us to have. It really isn't about our feelings anyway (unless that happens to be what we are praying about). It's about whatever the subject of the request happens to be, which we should simply lay before Him as we are told to do.

So, since I think these things are sometimes not coincidences, I give you these thoughts for what they are worth, so that if God put them into my mind for a reason connected to one of my readers as well as to my own preoccupations, they are available.

I have nothing in common with this man

Nothing. Whatsoever. Here is an Australian professor who is such an environmentalist wacko freak (see, it's my personal blog, so I don't have to be restrained) that he praises China--China of the forced abortions, the political prisoners, the executed Falun Gong, y'know, China--because...wait for it...they outlawed plastic shopping bags. Yes, folks, this is how environmentalists think. The heck with all that nasty, personal, comfort-loving, individualistic nonsense that they have over there in America. In communist China they know how to do things right, effectively, with authority. Achtung! They just go right out there and ban those horrible, planet-destroying plastic bags that are killing all those beautiful polar bears and melting the ice caps. Or something. We don't need no stinkin' freedom.

He complains that when people suggest such things they are accused of being Marxists. Ya think? (Says Wesley J. Smith)

Next time I hear somebody complaining about all the unpleasant individualism we have in America, about how we need to get rid of our individualism and think instead in terms of "the community," and does so not while discussing murdering unborn people but rather in the context of, say, bemoaning the evils of corporations, I'm not going to be able to help it: I'm going to think of this Australian kookball, Comrade Citizen David Shearman--"Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens." Sweet and addictive, huh? Such people are creepy.

Thank God I live in a country that is an "extreme case" of liberal democracy. God bless America, and pass the plastic shopping bags.

HT Secondhand Smoke

Israel continues not to defend its civilians

And the rockets just go on falling on Sderot. The kassams fall there day after day. Today it looks like an eight-year-old boy may have lost his legs from shrapnel. Just imagine this on one of our border towns. Meanwhile, the "Palestinians" in Gaza celebrate this successful attack.

HT Israel Matzav

It's comments like this

...that make me unsure that I should be called a "traditionalist conservative." Just when I think I'm the traddest of the trads, what with believing women are designed by God to stay home with their children and other such oddball ideas, along comes somebody who lauds as "conforming to natural and divine law" arranged, unchosen marriages of the Medieval period and who cannot see what we would be missing in the U.S. if we didn't have a tradition of freedom of religion.

Hymn--Pass me not

We haven't had a hymn around here for a while. I happened to pick this one to play as part of my organ prelude on Sunday morning--"Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior."

Pass me not, O gentle Savior,
Hear my humble cry;
While on others Thou art calling,
Do not pass me by.

Refrain:
Savior, Savior,
Hear my humble cry,
While on others Thou are calling,
Do not pass me by.

Here is Fanny Crosby's trademark allusion to blindness. The words refer to the story of Bartimaeus, as he is called in one gospel (Mark 10:46), the beggar who cried out to Jesus. The evangelists tell of how the crowd tried to hush him, but he cried all the louder, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." (Luke 18:35ff) Jesus heard him, asked that he be brought to Him, and asked what he wanted: "Lord, that I might receive my sight." And Jesus healed him.

Entirely unbeknownst to me (I hadn't happened to look and didn't remember), the version of this story from St. Luke was the gospel reading on Sunday. A happy coincidence, if a coincidence.

There is something poignant and urgent about the words. One can well believe the story told here about a young man who was moved to conversion by hearing them and by the thought, "What if he should pass me by?" C. S. Lewis said in a letter that anyone who has once known God at all will be awakened one day to the fear of losing him. We may hope so.

I was going to put a post up

...in the last couple of days, with content--specifically, a hymn post. Instead I have become embroiled in a probably futile on-line shopping hunt for waterproof winter boots (with a flat sole, for small feet), having just discovered that mine have holes in them. The sloppy February weather has revealed their hidden weaknesses. I hope that this does not count as descending into low-intellect, over-personal blogging, but take it as an apology for the lack of content.