We Give Thanks to Thee for Thy Great Glory

I've started going through parts of the Anglican liturgy (the Cranmerian parts, mostly) with two of my daughters. We were doing the Gloria in Excelsis the other day and came to my favorite line: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory..." There have been plenty of songs and, I'm sure, many sermons on this line. We praise God and thank God for who He is, not only for what He has done for us.

As I was trying to explain what is so important about this particular line, I was inspired to make a point I have never made before: We catch a small glimpse of this notion of praising God for who He is when we have a sense of thankfulness for someone we know, just for that person's being, for that person's existence. Sometimes we have this sense about a person in the past whose works we have read. It's hard to communicate this to children, especially children who have been loved and sheltered, but there is so much evil in the world, so many people who are not what they seem, who fail us and let us down, so much bad faith, that to find and know a man of integrity and greatness, to be able to admire someone, brings a sense of enormous relief. The mind and the heart rest in the sense that here at last is someone truly good.

If, in mere mortal human beings, sinners like ourselves, we can find greatness, if we can feel gratitude for their character and for our opportunity to know them or even just to know of them and to be refreshed by the knowing, how much more is this true of God Himself, the source of all goodness?

And so the mind moves upward from the creature to the Creator, and we say with the church throughout the ages, "We give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory."

"Shall We Gather At the River" with Irish whistle

Here's a really nice rendition of "Shall We Gather At the River" with accordion, penny whistle, and acoustic guitar. Has a folk sound. Buddy Greene singing, Jeff Taylor on accordion and penny whistle.




Buddy Greene is the harmonica player for many Gaither homecomings, and here he is bringing the house down at Carnegie Hall (!) with his harmonica:

New manuscript discovery (satire)

Those of you who have been following the outrageous treatment of Christian missionaries in Dearborn, MI, through my coverage at W4 or at the blog of Acts 17 ministries may or may not be aware that the Acts 17 guys and their friends have had a fair bit of their time wasted--on blogs, on Facebook, etc.--answering Christian "friends" who accuse them of being "too confrontational," etc., and hence getting themselves in trouble. (Never mind the rule of law, the freedom of religion, the mandate to proclaim the gospel, and all that. We're busy proving how hard we can be on fellow Christians who have the audacity to run afoul of the sharia police.)

Anyway, I cannot reveal here how the following came into my possession. I will only say, for the record, that I did not write it. I wouldn't want to take credit for something that isn't my own.

Don't forget to note the acronym at the end...

***************************************************************************

[The following document, written in Koine Greek on a surprisingly intact sheet of fine vellum, was recently found in a drawer in the British Museum, where it had lain uncatalogued for an unknown time. Scholarly opinion is divided, but some experts believe that it may have been a document that was considered and then rejected for inclusion in the fourteenth chapter of Acts. It is translated here for the first time.]

Dear Brother Paul,

We were grieved to hear of the commotion caused when you and Barnabas were here last month. Though we are, of course, grateful that you suffered no bodily harm, we feel it our duty to point out that what you were doing was in every way calculated to inflame strong passions and to incite violence. Because we love you as brethren, we feel it necessary to “show unto you a more excellent way,” lest your actions should cause a breach in the excellent relations we enjoy with the Jewish community here and in our sister cities to the south, Lystra and Derbe.

First, it is reported that you and Barnabas entered a synagogue. You of all people must understand that this placed you in a sensitive position. It is one thing to speak on a public street – sensitively, of course – but it is quite another to go forcing one’s way into the very house of worship of our Jewish friends. Ask yourselves: what would Jesus do? Would he have caused trouble in the Temple itself?

Second, it is reported that when you and Barnabas had entered the synagogue, you began openly preaching the gospel. Brethren, this is out of character with the behavior of our blessed Lord and Saviour, who, as the prophet Isaiah foretold, “opened not his mouth” – a moving description that we have taken as our motto for the Ministerial Society.

Third, it is reported that you engaged in this activity for an extended period of time, speaking boldly and with confidence. We entreat you: was there any need for this? Was there not a time and a place for sharing your convictions that would have been more compatible with the excellent advice you yourself have been known to give from time to time, that “all things might be done decently and in order”?

Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that the civil authorities and a sizeable portion of the religious population joined forces to prevent your actions. Without seeming to condone any violence you might have suffered, we feel compelled to point out that we in the Ministerial Society have never been the focus of such actions from either the civil or the religious direction. Indeed, several of the leading Rabbis here in Iconium have assured us that they have not the least problem with the manner in which we conduct ourselves.

This manner of conduct we earnestly commend to you. There is no need for you to suffer for your faith, whether out of misplaced piety or a juvenile desire for public attention. Our God, who is able to make the rocks cry out His praises, neither requires nor is glorified by brash attempts to proclaim His word in unseasonable circumstances. It is better – safer, and, we think, wiser – to remember the words of the preacher, that there is “a time for silence.”

Sincerely,

M. W. T. Rollos, secretary

Worship, Iconium! Ministerial Peace Society

“... ουκ ανοιγει το στομα αυτου”

New phonics material

A couple of years ago I put up on the Internet a first set of phonics lessons for beginning readers, along with some instructions for starting to teach your child to read. Here is my post on that, which I see is almost exactly two years old.

I now have a huge amount of additional phonics material available here. It begins with quite easy lessons, and most of the first one hundred pages or so are hand written. (Some of these were small pages from a tablet, so it isn't quite as impressive as it sounds. Still, I'm impressed looking back at how much was hand written. Don't know quite why I didn't start typing sooner.)

The lessons get quite advanced as they go on, teaching complex phonics concepts like words ending in -tial, hard and soft c and g, and many more. There are, unfortunately, no supplementary materials such as instructions or even a table of contents. It's just the lessons themselves. You have to browse for what you need. One suggestion for browsing would be using the underlying OCR layer to search for a word that has the phonics idea you need to drill, though this won't work on the handwritten portions.

The lessons are obviously written for my own children and sometimes refer to specific family situations and so forth. Parents who want to use the material might have to skip some of that or adapt it, unless you just want to use it as drill as you would with any material that uses unfamiliar names and situations.

I'm proudest of the stories in this big document. With a very few exceptions (toward the end) these stories were written by me (occasionally adapted from other things I have read), and nearly every story drills or reviews a phonics concept. Sometimes this leads to stiltedness in the prose, but looking back from the distance of a decade, I'm surprised at my own energy and ingenuity.

Here, for example (from pp. 122-123 of 327 total), is a fairy tale that drills single and double consonants before suffixes (for example, filling, filed, stopping, hoping). With apologies to lots of other stories, including the stories of Pandora, Psyche, Cinderella, the fairy tale version of "Beauty and the Beast" (not the movie), and probably others I'm not thinking of. I think I called the girl "Marie" because my reader at that time was having trouble distinguishing "Marie" and "Maria." (I also notice now that for most of these I wasn't observing the requirement to start a new paragraph for every new speaker in a dialogue.)

Once upon a time there was a lovely little girl named Marie who lived with her wicked stepmother. Her father and mother had died, and Marie's stepmother made her work hard all day, filling buckets of water and scrubbing the floors. If she did not do the work fast enough, she was whipped and put in a dark room in chains. Marie was very unhappy, but she kept hoping that she would be free some day.

One day, while she was sitting in a small room, wiping tears from her eyes, a little mouse came in carrying a file which he had stolen from the kitchen. He began sawing away at her bonds. Finally he had filed them loose, and Marie was free. The mouse led her quietly out of the house and into the woods. Suddenly, when Marie looked, the mouse was gone. At first she was frightened, but then she saw a robin looking at her very brightly. "Can you help me?" she asked the robin. It said nothing, but it pointed the way with its wing and then flew in front of her.

At last, she arrived at a golden house in the middle of the wood. Marie went up to the door and rang the bell, but no one she could see carne to the door. The door opened, and invisible hands led her inside. They took her into a room with a long table, filled with all sorts of food, and helped her to sit down. Marie began to get the feeling that she was not alone. The room appeared empty, but soon, someone spoke. "You cannot see me, but I am the master of this house. I am a prince, and I am under a spell. Your wicked stepmother is a witch who has also enchanted me, so that I am invisible. Only if you will go on a long journey can I be freed." "What must I do?" said Marie. "You must take this golden box, without saying a word to anyone, and without opening it, and carry it through the woods to the good fairy of the lake."

Marie picked up the box and carried it away. But the task was hard. The wood was scary; it was full of matted thorns, and bats which hated people and flew at her. Once she met an old woman who tried to talk to her, and once a man who looked kind asked her where she was going, but she remembered what the prince had said and refused to say a word. sometimes she found herself scraping away clinging vines in order to make her way. Sometimes she stopped and rested, but she never gave up. And sometimes she wished she knew what was in the box, but she never opened it.

And at last, the wood was behind her and a beautiful lake was in front of her. And there, beside the lake, was a lovely woman who could only be the good fairy of the lake. Taking the box from Marie, the fairy said, "My child, you have fulfilled the task which was laid on you. Now I shall open the box, and both you and the prince will be free forever." The fairy opened the box, and a sweet smell filled the air. Suddenly, the prince was standing beside Marie, now visible. He kissed her and said, "Your wicked stepmother, the witch, is dead, because you were faithful. Now you shall be my queen."

And they lived happily ever after.

I hope there are some parents out there who will find the material useful, despite the need for browsing. I've been wanting for a long time to get it preserved electronically. The problem was that much of it was hand written and, beyond that, the old floppy disks containing all the typed lessons have been misplaced. My heartfelt thanks to Jason Thueme for the scanning job and to Tim McGrew for help with the scanning, for the use of his fancy scanner, and for the underlying OCR layer.

Welcome "Ruminations" readers

At the urging of a friend I've recently installed Statcounter, a free software that allows me to find out how many people are viewing Extra Thoughts and where they are coming from. In this way I have learned something I hadn't noticed before--namely, that the Israeli historian Yaacov Lozowick has a link to Extra Thoughts from his blog, Ruminations. And people do come to Extra Thoughts by way of that link. I am extremely pleased to learn this.

Those of you who come to Extra Thoughts by that route may find yourselves a bit surprised or even disoriented. Here is a link from a blog by an Israeli historian to the personal blog of a devout, Protestant Christian who, nowadays, seems to be blogging American gospel music videos in more than half of her posts. Well, stranger things have happened in the blogosphere. Nor should this be very surprising to the politically astute, who have long known that evangelical Christians in America are Israel's best friends--sometimes even more vocal in Israel's defense than Israel's own leaders. Please do look around, and especially, please see the Israel label, the Holocaust label, and the Buchanan label. (There is some overlap among the posts under these labels.)

If you are an Arab or Muslim reader of Yaacov's blog, please understand that I am much less nice than he is, as well as a good deal farther to the right. I treat Extra Thoughts more or less as a personal space, and I don't lose a wink of sleep over deleting comments from Israel-haters, leftist trolls, and the like.

Just now my main thought about Israel is a feeling of bafflement that Netanyahu would consider it something gained to have "direct talks" between Israel and the "Palestinians." As far as I'm concerned, something gained would be cutting off all talks, since they are obviously worse than pointless from Israel's perspective and can do only harm to Israel and no good. (Lawrence Auster calls the Middle East "peace process" the Dance of the Undead, and boy, is he right.) Which, if you are new to Extra Thoughts, probably tells you (along with the scare quotes around "Palestinians") all you need to know about my perspective on Israel.

Bonus: I just learned today of this incredible outrage. The rule of law in England is taking a real beating. A judge (who, despite his blandly British name, apparently was born in Jaffa) led a jury by his summing up to aquit seven thugs who did 180,000 pounds in damage to a factory on the purely political grounds that they were motivated by opposition to Israel. (Evidently they believed that the company in question sold arms to Israel.) The judge sympathizes with their political motives and brought the supposed plight of the Gazans into his summing up to lead the jury to aquit them, despite the fact that the evidence of their actual destructive actions is beyond all question. This isn't the first time that political motivation has been used to acquit thugs in England. The previous time a jury found that a group of thugs had "lawful excuse" to damage a power station because it was allegedly contributing to global warming. But in the anti-Israel case, the judge appears to have been more directly involved; in the "green" case, the cause of the jury's acquittal was apparently sheer propaganda from defense attornies. (HT on this story, VFR.)

How long, I wonder, before this kind of rank court anarchy comes to the United States?

God Bless America

A happy July 4 to all my readers. America needs God's blessing now, more than ever, with those at her helm who are out to destroy her. Herewith, an America medley:

Ernie Haase Signature Sound

Continuing to blog a bit here about the concert in Shipshewana from (now) two weeks ago. (The beatings will continue until morale improves. Which is to say that I'm going to keep on blogging about Gospel music even if none of my readers are interested in it, though I'm not entirely sure why.)

It would probably be an understatement to say that Ernie Haase is one of the most powerful gospel music tenors of the past fifty years, but I'll just stop with that generalization. He has a truly wonderful voice--able to hit high notes, but also mature and strong--and is, in my opinion, justly beloved by his fans. "Oh What a Savior" is considered to be a song that Ernie "owns," and for good reason.



At the concert two weeks ago, Ernie had a kind of quietness about him. He came out at the very beginning of the concert in jeans and a casual shirt (about which he made a humorous comment) and led the audience in prayer, which somehow I hadn't expected. He did not sing "Oh, What a Savior" nor, as far as I can remember, any "big ballads" that showcased his amazing voice. There was plenty of high energy from the group as a whole, including songs like "Swingin' On the Golden Gate" (not actually one of my favorites), but Ernie himself, by himself, was low-key. He made some comments, always with self-deprecating humor, that made it seem that he was tired and feeling his age. (He's only forty-five.)

Ernie clearly loves children, though he and his wife (Lisa, daughter of gospel music great George Younce) have no children of their own. In a classy break from our tell-all celebrity culture, Ernie doesn't talk about this, though indirect evidence indicates that it is a sadness to them. Toward the end of the concert he sang a song that I'd never heard before, which he said he originally wrote as a lullaby for his nieces and nephews. If you have children, don't be ashamed if it makes you a bit misty-eyed.



After the concert, Ernie was very kind in meeting his fans. Eldest Daughter asked him to sign an old Cathedrals CD (from the group he used to sing with) that was cut in the year she was born. When she told him that (that it was recorded in the year she was born), he said, "Oh, don't do that to me!" smiled, and signed it.

EHSS is on a vacation now for a few weeks. May they come back refreshed to bless more people with their lives and music.

Collingsworth Family

A week and a day ago we were privileged to go to Shipshewana, IN, to a concert by Ernie Haase/Signature Sound and the Collingsworth Family. (The Browns--children and mother--were the supporting artists. I'll say a bit more about them in a later post.)

In many ways I'm still processing the concert and deciding how much to blog about. I can't really do it justice and could say so many different things. The thing that will always stick with me the most is how very, very kind these Southern gospel performers are to their fans and especially to young people. My girls got to meet and have pictures taken with all of the performers, to get autographs, and there was no impatience at all, even though it was quite late by the time the concert was finished.

More in a later post about Ernie Haase/Signature Sound, a great bunch of guys with a great sound.

If you have any interest at all in Christian music, especially somewhat old-fashioned, God-honoring music, hymns, etc., I cannot recommend the Collingsworth family too highly. They are incredibly talented. What I didn't know before going to the concert is how hugely talented a pianist the mother is. Kim Collingsworth is simply amazing. Here is (part of) her rendition of "How Great Thou Art."



The entire arrangement is here. (Embedding disabled on this one.)

I was privileged to speak briefly with Kim Collingsworth during the intermission. She has a beautiful, soft Southern accent and is a true lady, sincere, kind, and gracious, which is so striking in a person of such high musical professionalism. She told me, "If you will do the best for God, God will do the best for you. And that's a good deal."

Here are the Collingsworth ladies (mother and two eldest daughters) singing "Fear Not Tomorrow," which I have not heard elsewhere.



Brooklyn, the eldest daughter, is getting married this winter.

Trinity IV

One of the greatest collects in the Prayer Book or in the English language:

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Here is an earlier post on this collect.

I see that I did not note in that post the epistle reading for the day. It is from Romans 8 and begins,

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

And that's all I have to say. I recommend just thinking awhile about those two pieces of prose, one from the pen of Thomas Cranmer, the other from Holy Writ (and the Apostle Paul). And I present the first to any readers unfamiliar with the Prayer Book as a reason for reading the collects in it and using them in your own devotions.

A Tribute to Walter Kronemeyer: 1910-1996

(This is a post that I thought I already wrote. I was surprised upon googling my own blog to find that it didn't already exist. Apparently I started researching for it and then never actually wrote it.)

When I was quite little, and for something like a decade thereafter, I knew a former missionary to Africa--a missionary for several terms from 1946 to 1960--named Walter Kronemeyer. We all called him Uncle Walt, and he came year after year to do child evangelism at Camp Manitoumi in Lowpoint, IL (which I have also talked about here). Uncle Walt seemed ageless-old when I first new him, and he never seemed to age thereafter. He was like that. His face was bronzed and leathery the first time I met him, and bronzed and leathery it remained. It's hard to imagine that color fading even in the dead of winter, though in Grandville, MI, his home town, winters get plenty dark and long. But I always thought of him in connection with the sun.

Camp Manitoumi has plenty of trees in the surrounding woods, but on the hilltop (such a hilltop as it is) where the buildings are, there is little shade. The landscape is mostly flat, and the sun beats fiercely on the baseball field, the cabins, and the chapel in the center. Occasionally Uncle Walt would seek out a tree to sit under, but often not.

It's an odd thing: Year after year he came and told stories and preached to us children, and I loved him dearly, but I remember now very little of the preaching, except for the sense of a man wholly dedicated to God and to the salvation of souls. I hope he will forgive me. And it's a humbling thing to think, as an adult and a mother--How little do we remember when we are grown up of what the adults said to us when we were children? We remember what they were and what they did.

What Uncle Walt did was to sit cross-legged, often as not in the sun, and carve wood, and talk gently with the children and adults who gathered around. There was a catalpa tree out in the woods somewhere. I don't know who found it for him, but he always liked to use catalpa wood. He would send one of the camp workers out to chop him some round chunks of it, and then he would get to work. I can almost see it now: He would chop off the bark on each side of the chunk in a slab. Those were the sides of the elephant. Then he would begin rough-carving over the top. Gradually the elephant emerged. Always basically the same, yet each one a little different. Acquisitive child though I was, I understood that he had to give them to adults--usually to the camp director or the pastor in charge of that particular week--because there were so many children, and feelings would be hurt if he picked out one child to whom to give an elephant. Occasionally he rough-carved an African mask from one of the side pieces, and somehow I got one of those. I have it still.

It was privilege enough just to sit and watch him. The old hands, very sure and deft. He always knew exactly what he was doing with the wood. And then it was a kind of magic to see the wood get smoother and smoother after he had made the general elephant shape appear.

I know that I talked too much while watching him, because I remember the following incident quite clearly: I'd been sitting and watching for a while, not much thinking about what I was doing, when finally Uncle Walt turned to me with a twinkle in his eye. "Now I tell you what," he said. "I want you to try something. For the next half hour I want you to sit there completely quiet and just watch and listen to everyone else, and see what you notice." So of course I did. (I was terribly disobedient and disrespectful to my parents at home, but camp had a magical effect. While there it seems to me now that I became--mostly--conscientious, hard-working, and obedient to authority.) At the end of a half hour, Uncle Walt turned to me again. "Now tell me," he said, "Who talked most while you were being quiet?" I instantly pointed to a lady nearby. This being family week, there were lots of adults around. She was rather flustered, and everyone laughed. "But I was telling a story!" And that was true. But he asked a question, so I answered. From then on, I was much quieter while watching.

I remember one of the last times I saw Uncle Walt. By then I had graduated to the lofty pinnacle of camp worker. I was fifteen years old. I was in the chapel, where I spent much time that summer. It always seemed cool in the chapel at midday, despite the sun beating down outside. And there was Uncle Walt, coming in the door. I ran and hugged him. But something was different. There was a box under his shirt. "What's that?" I asked--not thinking, as usual. "Oh, it's a pacemaker," he said, quite calmly.

Five years later, when I married, I sent him a wedding invitation. Really, just to let him know that I was getting married. He and his wife Ruth wrote back a loving letter, which I wish I had kept. It was reassuring to think that the pacemaker hadn't meant anything, after all. In the end he lived to be 85.

And we also bless thy name, O Lord, for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, especially Uncle Walt. Amen.

(Thanks to Kim Raterink Fye, Uncle Walt's granddaughter, who responded so kindly to my out-of-the-blue electronic request for information about her grandfather.)

Father's Day

Please see my Father's Day post if you have not already seen it over at What's Wrong With the World. (Aside: It really seems like it should be "Fathers' Day." Wikipedia says that the woman who originally suggested the holiday called it "Fathers' Day" but that Congress passed the declaration for it with the apostrophe moved over.)

An addendum to that post, which didn't seem to fit in it smoothly: I am adopted. Mr. and Mrs. W. adopted me as a seven-month-old baby. There are a couple of different back-stories to this, most of which I knew nothing about until I was grown. Suffice it to say that I have every reason to be extremely grateful for my adoption and for the stability and love that I have received.

Creative destruction

Okay, this is for fun. Periodically one discusses with anti-capitalists the problems of progress and the way that change puts people out of a job. For the most part people like me are not sympathetic to such complaints per se. The invention of the car put plenty of wheel-makers and blacksmiths out of jobs, and by itself that was not a reason not to invent the car. The light bulb put candle makers out of jobs, but the candle makers were themselves better off for the better light and could likely find other jobs. Anyway, this is a perennial irritation between Marxists and anti-capitalists of many stripes on the one side and advocates of the free market on the other.

In the following funny set of videos we see Dudley Moore (of all people) cast in the role of advocating an inferior product as "progress" (and of course, when the product is inferior, that's highly relevant) and as a movement of the "human spirit" and Animal and Floyd defending the old ways and the old jobs. Very funny.





Apropos of the band's comment, "It's a musical garbage can. Playin' musical garbage," I thought of this video, which the Ironic Catholic rightly calls "simultaneously impressive and abhorrent." Color me skeptical that this is going to put many real drummers out of jobs. It certainly shouldn't. I think I prefer Animal.



HT for "Mama Don't 'Low" to Romish Graffiti

You can keep your insurance--Probably not

My assiduous readers will remember this detailed post of mine in which I discussed the repeated claim that if you like your current insurance plan, nothing will change under Obamacare, you can keep you plan. "Move along folks. Nothing to see here but us Democrats helping poor people. You gotta problem with that?"

There I discussed both the elimination of catastrophic-only policies and the setting of all benefits (maximum as well as minimum) by the government for all plans.

Now, post-passage of Obamacare, we hear about something else: So-called "mini-med" plans can and probably will be eliminated under Obamacare by government rules. These are often used for poorer workers such as part-timers or waiters who cannot afford more expensive plans. Poof, gone.

Obamacare--the gift that keeps on giving.

Ordinary care and "expensive" lives

I am not Catholic, but a recent conversation elsewhere has brought back to my mind the fact that the USCCB has implied that a means for preserving life may be "disproportionate" if it imposes "excessive expense."

Some people attempt to use this loophole to justify the murder (yep, I call it that) of helpless people like Terri Schiavo by depriving them of mere nutrition and hydration. The claim is that it is "excessively expensive" to "keep alive" someone like Terri.

My own strong preference would be for understanding ordinary and extraordinary care in biological terms, in terms of whether the body is actively dying, in terms of what everyone needs, and so forth, rather than in terms of expense. But it may be expected that the ordinary/extraordinary distinction will track the "very expensive/not-so-expensive" distinction, on the assumption that extraordinary care involves expensive technology.

People--especially Catholics--who want to excuse depriving the Terris of the world of mere food and water via a perceived "expense" loophole in the Church's teaching need to be brought up short by the following consideration: It is not the "artificial" nature of the nutrition and hydration that are the chief cause of expense for such helpless people. It is the fact that they live, are helpless, and need ordinary care: things like diaper changing, being turned in the bed, bathing, etc. This sort of care is what is most expensive, especially if the people closest to the helpless adult are unable because of strength considerations or unwilling to do that work.

Thought experiment: Suppose that a helpless, severely disabled adult like Terri were magically made able to survive without food and water but still needed day-to-day bodily care. Would the "expense" of her life be drastically decreased? I say that it would not. It's not the cost of the insertion of the PEG tube nor the cans of adult "formula" that are the heaviest expense. It's the fact that the person is alive and needs to be cared for as a baby would.

But so what? Question: Do we consider it "medical care" to bathe, clothe, change, and otherwise care for a baby? Do we consider such normal forms of care to be "extraordinary" or "disproportionate"?

The care of helpless adults is deemed "medical" because their being helpless means that something is wrong with them and also, practically, because it is so much more work to take care of them and is best done (though not necessarily done) by those with special training and a good deal of physical strength.

Once we realize that it is paradigmatically ordinary care that is so expensive for these people--"expensive," at least, in terms of time and effort, even if able to be undertaken by loving family--that it is simply their existence as helpless people that is expensive, I think we will realize that it is the merest sophistry to talk as if it is their "artificial" feeding that is "extraordinary" or "excessively expensive" and focus on that as an excuse for getting rid of them. One irony here is that tube feeding actually decreases the difficulty (and hence, the expense) of caring for a helpless person. It enables that person to get the necessary nutrition and hydration fairly easily, where spoon feeding would be much less efficient, enormously more time-consuming, probably would not provide adequate nutrition to an adult, and takes more skill to do safely.

The issue, then, is not that tube feeding is specially expensive, hence extraordinary, hence conveniently optional. The issue is that people who can't care for themselves need a lot of care.

But we knew that already. And if someone thinks that morally excuses dehydrating them to bring their expensive lives to a quicker end, he has a major problem.

(Warning to liberal trolls: I have a delete key, and I'm not afraid to use it.)

Trinity I--Collect

O God, the strength of all those who put their trust in thee; Mercifully accept our prayers; and because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Thomas Cranmer translated this collect from Latin with virtually no change. It sounds like a rather Augustinian collect. We cannot do any good thing without God. All our righteousness is as filthy rags.

I don't fully understand that. No matter how hard I try, I have trouble believing that the goodness--real goodness--of unbelievers is as filthy rags in the eyes of God. I would prefer to think that even they are, at some level and in some sense, receiving the help of God's grace. Which does not mean that they, we, or anyone can in any measure earn his favor by being good.

But at a practical level, this is a good collect for all occasions, the sort of prayer one can pray on any given day and find applicable. One needn't bother with Augustinian theology. We know ourselves. We know the weakness of our mortal nature. We know how we start out the day and can scarcely get through an hour without some sin--even if it is a mere matter, and not so "mere" either, of tone of voice. We start out full of the milk of human kindness and good resolutions, and then someone does something that throws our plans out of whack, someone else's tone of voice doesn't seem right, we notice that little thing that has always been so darned irritating, and there we are, back in the soup.

One cannot make hard and fast predictions in the spiritual life, but perhaps starting the day with this collect would be helpful.

Breath of Life Quartet--Found on-line [Updated--Lost again]

Update: Bummer. Big-time bummer. Alerted by reader Doug Downing, I checked today and discovered that the music has all disappeared. The site appears to be there, but not only do embeds not work, when you try to download, you get an offer to sell you the domain name. Very bad sign. Looks like the music itself is gone and only the playlist left. We have the tracks, downloaded in June, but I feel bad for readers.

Below is the original post as it appeared three months ago.

****************************************************************************

This is a truly great find. Back in the 1970's and (I think) into the 1980's there was a black group called the Breath of Life Quartet. They seem to have disappeared from the scene without a trace, unless you count a follow-up group that (of course) calls itself "BLQ" a trace. I'd rather not. The original Breath of Life Quartet had an ethereal sound that was absolutely amazing. I've now learned that the album I listened to over and over again on cassette tape in the church van (Pastor Aycock weaving back and forth to the public danger, for which God saw to it that he never received a ticket), was called Spirituals.

Ever since I've had Internet access to speak of, I've been periodically searching for these recordings on-line. Not knowing the name of the album was a real problem, and I never could find it, not even on e-bay. (It doesn't help that there is a woodwind group also called the Breath of Life Quartet.) I have what sounds like a copy of a copy of Spirituals on a cassette tape, labeled simply "Black Quartet" in handwriting. I kept listening to that, copied it again before it broke, and played it for my kids many times.

But a few weeks back, when I was once more lamenting the difficulty of finding the music on the Internet, Eldest Daughter went to work on her own. By the simple expedient of dropping the word "quartet" from her search, she found the entire album on-line for free embedding and download. Within minutes. Kids are amazing on computers.

Suppose that you think my Gospel music craze is more than a bit strange. No problem. Forget that. This is not a Southern Gospel sound. These are black spirituals sung in an indescribably pure style. No emotional vocal display. No blast-your-ears excitement. They are really very beautiful. Below are three of them, but all the rest are available at the link, even though it comes up with a particular one. Just look at the box on the right that says "Album related Spirituals" for the other tracks. And if you like them, download them now and burn 'em to a CD. It would be a real shame if they disappeared again from mortal ken.


Breath of Life Quartet

Breath of Life - Ezekiel Saw De Wheel Found at abmp3 search engine

Breath of Life - No More Sorrow Found at abmp3 search engine

Breath of Life - King Jesus Found at abmp3 search engine

Leaving long-faced religion behind

An old friend, C. B., from whom I haven't heard in a while, used to tell me that the Catholic view is that it's an obligation to get drunk at weddings.

Obviously, I'm not going to agree with him there. But there's a Protestant version of that, which is that we should, in the words of a Stephen Curtis Chapman song, "Leave long-faced religion behind."

Scripture says, "Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord." It seems to me that in the Christian life there is definitely a place for fun, even specifically Christian fun, and that this carries over to Christian music as well. Not everything has to be deeply nourishing. Some things can just be an encouraging way to start the day.

With which introduction, here is "Every Day, Every Hour" by the Cathedrals. The video features a very young Ernie Haase. As George Younce says in a different video of a different young singer, "I've got socks older than that." I like the studio version better, because it has a higher sound quality and is easier to hear the guitar and the jazzy piano, but the Youtube version is lots of fun, too:

What's wrong with paleoconservatism

Wow. Well, in keeping with my use of this personal blog as a sort of safety valve for all manner of things I can't sound off about elsewhere, herewith an endorsement of the following summary of the problem with paleoconservatism:

Their lack of any larger idea of the good is perfectly expressed in the way the paleocons typically express their positive belief. Over and over, you hear them say something like this: "I believe in hearth, home, and kindred." This is their affirmation of the particular and the local as distinct from the universal and the massified. But the problem is, it's not enough. "Hearth and kindred" boils down to one's family, neighbors, and locality. It has no reference to a political order, no reference to a cultural order, no reference to transcendent moral order, no reference to philosophical truth, no reference to a nation.

The rest is here.

Kudos to VFR on Israel

I am grateful for the coverage at Auster's View from the Right of issues related to Israel, most recently, of course, the pro-Hamas flotilla incident. Auster is the only high-profile conservative blogger I know who is not simply a predictable mainstream conservative (he's interestingly quirky and trad-conservative) but who is staunchly and loudly pro-Israel. And being loud is good in this area, I would add. I can't think of the last time--maybe there hasn't been a time--when Auster said something about Israel that I disagreed with, right up to and including his repeated comments that in reality Israel is far too liberal and near-suicidal, doesn't present its own case forcefully enough, makes foolish concessions to its enemies, etc.

It depresses me when I give myself time to think about it to realize how many people who identify themselves as conservative are anti-Israel and even accept the ridiculous nonsense about the "peace activists" in the "aid flotilla." Here, too, Auster calls a spade a grub hoe and discusses directly the disgusting coverage at TAC and Alternative Right. For some reason I find this refreshing and a kind of relief, perhaps because it's the kind of thing that I wish I had the time, emotional energy, and courage to do myself.

Not being a Bob Dylan fan, I had never before read the words to "Neighborhood Bully" before seeing them the other day at VFR. They really are astonishing.

Christendom Review Volume 2, Issue 1

The latest issue of the on-line journal The Christendom Review is here. Editor Bill Luse has an introduction on the subject of gratitude which is a small work of art in itself. (I just now got a chance to read it.) The emphasis here upon gratitude is spot-on. I find that with every year that goes by I really cannot be grateful enough for all that there is to be grateful for. This is just literally true. There aren't enough hours in the day or enough energy even to think of all the things for which I should be grateful. Says Bill,

I read somewhere to let the evil of the day be sufficient unto itself. The nihilist is right when he opines that we’ll all be carted to the cemetery forthwith, but I also suspect that, like the rest of us, he is grateful for having seen the light in the interim. I’ll try to remember to say a few thank-yous before the first shovelful of dirt comes down. But I’ve a reputation as a procrastinator, for which my wife often rewards me with an observation no less timely for being well-worn: “Better late than never.”

I've just begun to go through the issue and am looking forward to the visual art, the poetry, and the fiction (one short story by Bill himself, which he doesn't mention in his introduction).

And while we are talking about gratitude, let's remember to be grateful to Rick Barnett, Bill Luse, and Todd McKimmey for producing the journal.

What Did He Die For

Courtesy of Eldest Daughter, a song and a video for Memorial Day, here. Embedding is disabled; it's "What Did He Die For," by Twila Paris.

(Paleocons, pacifists, and others who break out in hives at any glorifying of the American military are discouraged from clicking on the link.)

The glorious samenes of eternity

This was part of one of the readings for Trinity Sunday yesterday:

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, LORD God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever,

The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying,

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.
(Revelation 4:8-11)

And it suddenly reminded me, of all things, of Dante's Inferno. One of the most horrible things about Dante's hell is the repetitiveness of it. In one circle, for example, people are eternally hacked into pieces, over and over again. It never, never, never ends.

What's interesting about this vision of heaven is the use of the present tense. The beasts never rest, day and night. They continually cry, "Holy, Holy, Holy." And when they cry, the elders fall down and worship.

One could think about this uncharitably: What, is it sort of like those window displays at Christmas in downtown Chicago when I was a child? The beasts saying the same thing over and over and the elders mechanically falling down and worshiping, getting up, falling down and worshiping again?

What is John conveying here? Well, first of all, I think he did have a vision like this, so I think he's telling what he saw and what he understood--that praise to God in heaven is unceasing.

But another idea, which I think we find hard to receive aright, is this: When we are finally in heaven at the end of all things, human history is over. The beatific vision is not at all like ordinary human life, with its ups and its downs, its reversals, its suspense, failure, success. But when we become what we should be, this will not bother us. We will not be, to put it bluntly, bored. We will want, as the catechism has it, to enjoy God forever.

And I think that in our best moments here on earth, led by the Holy Spirit, we catch a glimpse of the true glory and excitement of that state in which we praise God forever and ever and ever.

May we love that which God commands and desire what he promises, "that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found."

New tune for "Praise My Soul"

Eldest Daughter showed me this video the other day, and I was much intrigued by the tune. I hadn't known that tune to "Praise My Soul the King of Heaven" and wanted to know the name. Checked out the cyberhymnal but got no insight.

Hat tip to our friend Alan Forrester who, after being asked at church, went home and googled and found out. The tune name is "Lauda Anima (Andrews)." The usual "Lauda Anima" tune that is more familiar is by John Goss and is from the 19th century. This one is by one Mark Andrews and is from 1930. I think Andrews has succeeded in capturing an almost 18th century feel. Something Handel-ish about this tune.

This one you may like better without the video, so close your eyes if you just want to hear the music:



Tune in later for (hopefully) some thoughts on the reading from Revelation for Trinity Sunday and for a Twyla Paris Memorial Day video.

The Head that Once Was Crowned With Thorns

Today is Ascension Sunday, meaning it is the Sunday in the octave of the feast of the Ascension. The Ascension is one of my favorite liturgical seasons; I only wish it lasted longer. For one thing, it has some great hymns associated with it, and it can be hard to convince Anglicans to sing those hymns at any other time of year, so we never fit them all in.

Here and here are my last two posts on the theological richness of Ascensiontide from previous years. Here at What's Wrong With the World is a post on the apologetic problems with the "objective vision theory" of the resurrection of Jesus and the way in which that theory is incompatible with the doctrine of the Ascension.

I would also add that the Ascension has special apologetic importance in the following way: Those who treat the apostles as sincerely mistaken in their belief that Jesus was risen must (though they don't always admit this) be attributing some sort of hallucinations to them. But in that case, why did the hallucinations stop, for all of them, at the same time, and with their asserting that they stopped walking and talking with Jesus because He ascended into heaven? Interesting, that. One would not expect severe mental illness and mass hysteria among all those people to be so abruptly cut off, so self-limiting.

Indeed, if the Ascension were not narrated in the Bible, we would have to invent it. It's the only explanation for the obvious difference between the interactions narrated in the resurrection narratives and the behavior of the disciples in the early chapters of Acts (after the Ascension narrative), where they don't seem to be under the slightest impression that Jesus is walking and talking among them.

Notice, too, that if they did not really believe (as some claim) that Jesus was literally, physically resurrected, they did not need to have an Ascension at all. Jesus could have gone on being spiritually present to them in the same way indefinitely. If, on the other hand, he was physically resurrected, the Ascension is very nearly a necessity to explain his physical absence later on. His body had to have gone somewhere.

The teaching of the Ascension is thus strong evidence against hallucinations and against non-physical theories of the resurrection (and of the disciples' teaching) and in favor of the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Hymn time. Below are the words to "The Head That Once Was Crowned With Thorns." We sang it this morning. Singable and with great words.

The head that once was crowned with thorns
Is crowned with glory now;
A royal diadem adorns
The mighty victor’s brow.

The highest place that Heav’n affords
Belongs to Him by right;
The King of kings and Lord of lords,
And Heaven’s eternal Light.

The joy of all who dwell above,
The joy of all below,
To whom He manifests His love,
And grants His Name to know.

To them the cross with all its shame,
With all its grace, is given;
Their name an everlasting name,
Their joy the joy of Heaven.

They suffer with their Lord below;
They reign with Him above;
Their profit and their joy to know
The mystery of His love.

The cross He bore is life and health,
Though shame and death to Him,
His people’s hope, His people’s wealth,
Their everlasting theme.

Your Blesser Ain't Never Been Blessed

I put up a post about not being cranky in our conservatism in the course of which I included a Gaither Homecoming version of "Amazing Grace." I got some interesting responses and realized that some good conservative friends have a deep suspicion of all Gospel music, which I think is rather a shame. Anyway, I doubt I will make any converts with this post, but it did make me think of the following song, which (by chance) my daughter got on a CD during the very time that the discussion was going on over my post.

If you haven't enjoyed old-time Gospel singing, then your blesser ain't never been blessed. The late Glen Payne tells us all about it.



Since it specifically mentions "The Haven of Rest," just to make sure to give everybody an opportunity to get blessed, here is "The Haven of Rest" as sung by Glen Payne with, of all people, a younger (still dark-haired) Guy Penrod. Eldest Daughter tells me that the first time they sang this together, Bill Gaither chose Guy as a surprise, and the first Payne knew of it was when this very large, long-haired young man was joining him on the stage. (In the version below I especially notice Ernie Haase and, I believe, the late George Younce sitting behind them listening. Also the late Jake Hess is in the audience.)



While we're at it and I'm inflicting Gospel music on my readers, here's a fun one I never put up when I was doing a series from the Gaither reunion video. One of my liberal readers opined that he couldn't understand why I put up the "Amazing Grace" video as iconic of mainstream, Protestant conservatism. Perhaps this one would help him out. I really tend to think a liberal would feel like choking a little singing this--"Build an Ark." Sounds like home schooling...



Oh, and speaking of arks, if you want to read what I must say is an eloquent rant, see VFR reader Kristor here. It ends,

But it's not nice to fool with Mother Nature. There'll be hell to pay, and hell is damn sure going to collect; God is not mocked. Apres nous, le deluge. Eventually, I suppose, some virtuous trad marooned on a mountaintop will spot a rainbow, and we'll get another shot.

Seeing

My sense of sight is not the best. I wear glasses, but lately I have to take off the glasses for reading and computer work, which means that everything further away is a bit blurry. I tend to forget where I've left them, walk around without seeing clearly, then scurry to find them when I have to drive anywhere.

But when I go walking, I wear the glasses. Now it is spring in the Midwest, the kind of spring that man has been writing songs and poems about since forever, the kind of spring that might make even a hardboiled atheist and naturalist wonder if just perhaps this world is more than bouncing atoms in a vacuum.

As it happens, my walks tend to be about an hour before sunset, and for a good deal of the time, I'm walking east. The sun catches the boles of the trees and the green of the young leaves. (Not so young anymore. Spreading a bit now. You can hear them say, like a seven-year-old, "Now I'm big!")

And I can see. No sun in the eyes. The sun shining on everything, and everything clear, standing out in sharp relief. It's an amazing thing, the way it strikes you. The sheer gift of clear physical sight. On those evening spring walks, away from the sun, all the etching of all the bark on all the tree trunks seems clearer than most things ever are, much clearer than the hand in front of my face right now. Everything is itself and seems to be trying to tell me what it is.

"Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known."

The writers of holy writ and the theologians and poets from St. Thomas Aquinas to the blind Fanny Crosby were wise to tell us of heaven in terms of sight. How did Fanny know, though? Blinded at six weeks of age, she never walked east in the evening and watched the sun on the trees. But she knows now how right she was.

And I shall see him face to face
And tell the story, saved by grace.

Easter IV--That we may love the thing which God commands

One of the greatest collects in the entire Book of Common Prayer is the collect for today, the fourth Sunday after Easter:

O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

John says that if we ask anything according to God's will, he hears us (I John 2:14). What could be more the will of God than our loving that which God commands and desiring what he promises? And it isn't as easy as it sounds, either.

Here is my older post on this very collect, in which I said it much better and also gave a bit of the history of the collect.

Also of possible interest: Long comment I wrote at W4 on ecumenism and forms of worship.

Pure philosophy of religion--Miracles and Natural theology

There is an idea going around in various circles (some of them not natural allies of one another) that can be expressed in very general terms like this:

One must argue first, cogently, for the existence of the God of traditional theism (hereafter TT--omnipotent, omnibenevolent, eternal, unique) before one can argue that a particular miracle has happened.

A corollary to this is:

A miracle cannot be an argument for TT, which must have been already established, but rather is evidence only for more particular versions of TT--e.g., for Christianity as an extension of Judaism.

I have been fascinated for quite some time with this position, ever since a spin-off of it emerged in Alvin Plantinga's confused discussion of the so-called Principle of Dwindling Probabilities. In the most recent exchange between Esteemed Husband and I, on the one hand, and Plantinga, on the other (in Philosophia Christi), Plantinga was still treating the prior probability of theism (before taking into account the specific evidence for a miracle) as if it were the posterior probability (after taking into account that evidence), and then using the Theorem on Total Probability to argue that an agnostic can never come to believe that, say, the resurrection of Jesus has occurred. The idea from Plantinga was that the agnostic's probability (notice the ambiguity on whether it is the prior or posterior) of approximately .5 for TT will constitute an upper bound on the probability of the more specific proposition that God raised Jesus from the dead, the probability of which must be lower than the .5 probability of TT. But of course the agnostic's prior probability for TT doesn't constitute an upper bound on the posterior probability either of the resurrection or of TT, both of which could, in principle, be as close to 1.0 as you like on the basis of evidence not already conditioned on by the agnostic. And if the agnostic refuses to take into account strong evidence for a miracle that he hasn't previously taken into account, treating his .5 probability as immovable even on the basis of new evidence, then he is simply being irrationally stubborn, and this has nothing to do with probability theory but only with the potential irrationality of agnostics.

Plantinga's argument for the position that a miracle cannot be an argument for theism is a particularly sophisticated one, although it embodies a plain mistake in probability. We cite several vaguer versions in the section called "Hume's Maxim and Worldview Worries" in our article on the resurrection. The assumption behind those versions appears to be that there is such a thing as a prior probability for theism "too low" to be overcome by historical evidence, so that one must cross some prior probabilistic "threshold" before giving an argument for miracles. Sometimes this is expressed by saying that one cannot argue to God from miracles but can only argue from God to miracles.

A particularly surprising statement of the position that context is everything even comes from a philosopher known for his Bayesian analysis of theistic questions, J. L. Mackie.

[W]e should distinguish two different contexts in which an alleged miracle might be discussed. One possible context would be where the parties in debate already both accept some general theistic doctrines, and the point at issue is whether a miracle has occurred which would enhance the authority of a specific sect or teacher. In this context supernatural intervention, though prima facie unlikely on any particular occasion, is, generally speaking, on the cards:...But it is a very different matter if the context is that of fundamental debate about the truth of theism itself. Here one party to the debate is initially at least agnostic, and does not yet concede that there is a supernatural power at all. From this point of view the intrinsic improbability of a genuine miracle . . . is very great, and one or other of the alternative explanations...will always be much more likely – that is, either that the alleged event is not miraculous, or that it did not occur, that the testimony is faulty in some way.This entails that it is pretty well impossible that reported miracles should provide a worthwhile argument for theism addressed to those who are initially inclined to atheism or even to agnosticism. . . . Not only are such reports unable to carry any rational conviction on their own, but also they are unable even to contribute independently to the kind of accumulation or battery of arguments referred to in the Introduction.To this extent Hume is right, despite the inaccuracies we have found in his statement of the case(Miracle of Theism, p. 27, emphasis added).

This position, however, is simply incorrect if taken to be (as it is intended to be) an in-principle argument. While it is of course true in specific cases that a particular prior probability is too low to be overcome by a particular set of evidence, there is no such thing as a "slippery" prior. In principle, any finite low prior probability can be overcome by sufficiently strong non-deductive evidence. One might argue that in fact all of the evidence we have for some particular miracle, such as Jesus' resurrection, is too weak to overcome the prior probability of theism without natural theology arguments, but this claim (which I think is probably false) would not be an in-principle argument in any event.

Another approach to all of this is that of my esteemed blog colleague Ed Feser, when he implies in this excellent post that, since natural theology arguments are so strong, they naturally precede arguments for specific miracles. After all, if you can metaphysically prove TT, why would you start out first with a merely probabilistic argument for a miracle? And once you have given such a metaphysical proof, why would you bother saying that the argument for a miracle was an argument for the existence of God, which had already been proved?

Ed reiterates this position briefly in a comment apropos of the investigation of Catholic miracles:

Re: Lourdes, yes, but that's because God's existence is already assumed on independent grounds. It's not an argument for God's existence. The claim isn't "This sure looks like a miracle; so, probably God exists." It's rather "We already know God exists; and given that plus the specific evidence at hand, this looks like it is probably a case where He has caused a miracle." In general, A-T writers tend to approach the question of miracles only after establishing God's existence (e.g. as part of an apologetic for Christianity specifically) rather than using miracles as themselves an argument for God's existence.

One way of looking at this position, which Ed does not spell out, is a sort of diminishing returns view. If you have an absolute proof for TT, then what is there for probabilistic arguments to add to TT? It has a probability of 1.0. Or even if we allow (as I think we should) for some slippage if you aren't absolutely certain that you got all the steps of your metaphysical proof right, the probability for you will still be fairly close to 1 given high confidence in what purports to be an absolute proof, so there will be diminishing returns from additional arguments from miracles for TT. It would be like a billionaire digging for changing in his couch. Hence, the arguments from miracles should be seen as arguments for something else, something with a lower prior probability "going into" the evaluation of their evidence--e.g., the probability that God is a Trinity, that Jesus was God, etc.

(I had hoped to deal with these issues in the article I'm currently working on on history and theism for a Routledge volume on theism, but space constraints made that impossible, so I'm taking the lazy way and doing it in a blog post. The nice thing about a blog post is that you can put digressive comments like this in parentheses right in the middle when you can't find anywhere else to put them, while not being too bothered by your writers' conscience for doing so. But I digress...)

One immediate answer to the "change in the couch" objection is that it is simply true, as a matter of logic, that an argument that supports the occurrence of a miracle is an argument that supports the existence of the one who did the miracle. This is evident from the fact that "God performed a miracle" entails "God exists," so evidence that makes it probable that God performed a miracle makes it probable that God exists. Perhaps this won't seem interesting, but I think it's rather interesting. In other words, you can't say, "This shouldn't be seen as an argument that God exists" when it is a logically necessary fact that it must be an argument for the proposition that God exists. It's rather like saying that an argument for "Lydia went to the store" shouldn't be seen as an argument for "Lydia exists." It just is an argument for "Lydia exists" whether it "should" be or not, since the proposition that Lydia did something entails the simpler proposition that Lydia exists. (The question of whether I can have my own personal probability for "Lydia exists" raised by that argument, given that, as a good Cartesian, I really do have a probability of 1.0 for "I exist" is complicated and gets into issues like opacity and what I would mean by "Lydia" in such a proposition and so forth.)

Second, I'm afraid that there are some people who are unable to see the force of the metaphysical proofs of TT. Here I include myself, particularly when it comes to Divine goodness. I've really tried, but the interconvertibility of the transcendentals just is over my head. That's not to say that I don't think any natural theology arguments are any good. The ones that seem to me most cogent thus far are something like a Kalam cosmological argument and the argument from mind. But those don't get you to a full TT, whereas the existence of the God preached by Jesus does.

Now, this may well be a limitation on my part. But if I can't see the full force of the a priori arguments for TT, there are no doubt a lot of other people who can't, either. And the prior probability for TT for some person like me, before taking miracles (including evidence of fulfilled prophecy) into account, will therefore be a good deal lower than it is for the convinced Thomist.

Here we enter muddy waters, epistemologically. For if the Thomistic arguments really do work, but I just can't see it, then my probability distribution in that case is, to that extent, incorrect and incoherent. No doubt all of us have areas of incoherence in our probability distributions, especially when it comes to deductive logic and our own failure of logical omniscience. I am strongly inclined to think that such problems in distributions do not necessarily metastasize throughout the whole distribution. That is to say, one could still see correctly the impact of some further piece of evidence even if one were putting it together with a logically incorrect prior. But the fact remains that for people in my situation, or even people who know even less natural theology than I do, the historical evidence for miracles is certainly not going to be a "change in the couch" matter.

The Cathedrals singing around the piano

This is great. The combination of young and old singers here is really neat.



The young Ernie Haase is one of only two of the men there who is still with us, though of course he's no longer that young. George Younce and Glen Payne, the two elderly gentlemen, have both passed away, and the pianist, Roger Bennett, died of leukemia in 2007. It gives added meaning to the song about heaven that they sing with such gusto.

HT: Eldest Daughter

Boys will be boys

I enjoyed this, from another blog, but only because it was happening to someone else. I have only girls, so hopefully I will escape. Dialogue reported between mother and son:

The Boy: Can I have a pet snake?
Me: No, I don't think you're old enough for the responsibility.
The Boy: But what if I found it and it didn't cost you anything?
Me: That is not the issue.
The Boy: Are you afraid of snakes?
Me: No.
The Boy: Good. Because I lost my pet snake.
Me: You don't have a pet... wait. What?
The Boy: I was hiding it under my bed.
Me: [through clenched teeth] You mean to say there is a snake loose in the house?
The Boy: It's OK really! I think the cat will eat it.

(Language warning on the original post at The Crescat, but I thought it probably would be contrary to blog etiquette not to link it, so here it is.)

Words of wisdom from the 19th century

Before we proceed to the consideration of any particular defects in the religious system of the bulk of professed Christians, it maybe proper to point out the very inadequate conception which they entertain of the importance of Christianity in general, of its peculiar nature, and superior excellence. If we listen to their conversation, virtue is praised, and vice is censured; piety is perhaps applauded, and profaneness condemned. So far all is well. But let any one, who would not be deceived by these “barren generalities,” examine a little more closely, and he will find, that not to Christianity in particular, but at best to religion in general, perhaps to mere morality, their homage is intended to be paid. With Christianity, as distinct from these, they are little acquainted; their views of it have been so cursory and superficial, that, far from discerning its peculiar characteristics, they have little more than perceived those exterior circumstances which distinguish it from other forms of religion....

Does this language seem too strong? View their plan of life, and their ordinary conduct; and let us ask, wherein can we discern the points of discrimination between them and professed unbelievers? In an age wherein it is confessed and lamented that infidelity abounds, do we observe in them any remarkable care to instruct their children in the principles of the faith which they profess, and to furnish them with arguments for the defence of it? They would blush, on their child’s coming out into the world, to think him defective in any branch of that knowledge, or of those accomplishments, which belong to his station in life; and accordingly these are cultivated with becoming assiduity. But he is left to collect his religion as he may: the study of Christianity has formed no part of his education; and his attachment to it (where any attachment to it exists at all) is, too often, not the preference of sober reason and conviction, but merely the result of early and groundless prepossession. He was born in a Christian country; of course, he is a Christian: his father was a member of the Church of England; so is he. When such is the religion handed down among us by hereditary succession, it cannot surprise us to observe young men of sense and spirit beginning to doubt altogether of the truth of the system in which they have been brought up, and ready to abandon a station which they are unable to defend. Knowing Christianity chiefly in the difficulties which it contains, and in the impossibilities which are falsely imputed to it, they fall perhaps into the company of infidels; where they are shaken by frivolous objections and profane cavils, which, had their religious persuasion been grounded in reason and argument, would have passed by them “as the idle wind.

William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country; Contrasted with Real Christianity (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1834), pp. 5-7

HT: Esteemed Husband

Okay--I think this is funny

HT: Secondhand Smoke

Originalism and post-modernism

I posted this to my status at Facebook but decided it deserved a wider audience. At the same time, I really don't want to deal too much with the liberal commentators at W4, so I'm compromising by posting it here. Which probably means it won't actually have a wider audience. Anyway, this is what I said:

Does it ever occur to the people who teach in U.S. law schools that there is great moral hazard in teaching, even requiring, the most intelligent young people in the country, its future leaders, to regard the reality governing all the citizens of the most powerful nation in the world as literally created by the will of nine human beings?

Further ruminations on the subject: I see people talking about whether the individual mandate in Obamacare is constitutional, and what I realize is that when lawyers talk about this, they are simply making a prediction. What will SCOTUS rule? Ultimately, that's going to be the question. Lawyers are taught that the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. The Supreme Court, in other words, creates the meaning of the Constitution in an on-going act of pure will and power. So if the Supreme Court rules that the federal government has all powers not expressly forbidden to it in the Constitution (which is directly contrary to the 10th amendment as well as to the entire assumption of enumerated powers that makes the Constitution necessary in the first place and that governs its structure of laying out the powers of the different branches of the federal government), why, then, that's what the Constitution means. If they somehow descry this grant of plenary power over every individual in the country to make that individual do what Congress wishes hidden somewhere in the 16th amendment (that's the income tax amendment), why, then, that's what the 16th amendment means.

Now, if that doesn't bother you, as an American, it should. Yet that's what the law schools have been teaching for decades. The Constitution has no external meaning. It means what the courts rule.

I don't care if you regard yourself as a natural law theorist on con-law. I don't care if you think Antonin Scalia is a "positivist" and this is a bad thing. I ask you to think: Isn't there something very, very wrong with a purely postmodern view of the very constituting document of our country according to which it has no stable meaning? Isn't there something very, very wrong with a situation where the question, "Is it true that the individual mandate is constitutional?" has nothing to do with a stable meaning of the Constitution but is merely a question of prediction about what nine black-robed rulers will say in a few months?

Alleluia! He is Risen! A Musical Easter

He is risen! Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for death is swallowed up in victory!

Below are several entirely different types of Easter music. Take your pick.

Side note: I wish someone would put on-line the old Don Wyrtzen setting of "Worthy Is the Lamb." It is simple but beautiful, but it seems not to have stayed in fashion long enough to make it to the Internet. If I find it before next year, I'll put it up next Easter.

Blessings to my readers for a joyous Eastertide. (No new Easter apologetics material in this post, but here, here, here, and here are some of my other posts on that topic, and here is Tim's and my paper on the resurrection.)


"Worthy is the Lamb" and "Amen" from Handel's Messiah



Glad--"Christus Dominus Hodie Resurrexit" (When Imeem went to Myspace, this disappeared from another post that included it, so here it is again.)




"Because He Lives"--Gaither Vocal Band, especially good solo by Guy Penrod