Yet more on misleading voices in the culture wars

I wanted to bring this to the top of the page. A reader has posted a comment in this older thread in response to a...ahem...kerfuffle at another blog. The topic of the original post at that other blog was the work of Rosaria Butterfield, a former Queer Theory professor who is now a married, Christian mother and has become a kind of "star" in the Christian community. She has a book and has speaking gigs in which she tells people how we can (and should) minister to homosexuals. Frankly, I have heard enough about her at second hand not to be interested in reading her book or getting into discussing her. I got involved in the other thread through a sub-issue--namely, whether feminist literary theory and "Queer Theory" and similar post-modern -isms in English departments are something better than trash, academically speaking. (Hint: No, really, they're just trash.)

Anyway, someone who read that thread came and left some thoughtful comments, considerately finding a fairly relevant thread and expressing some hesitations about Rosaria Butterfield. Apparently finding anyone who expresses hesitations about anything this new heroine says is exceedingly difficult. Certainly, the information I have thus far indicates that she's sincere but, on some issues misguided. And the problem is that, as I said in the comments below, Christians get a kind of affirmative action complex: This is one of our token celibate homosexuals or, in Butterfield's case, ex-homosexuals, so we mustn't criticize. I think that is a very dangerous position to be in, especially if they are going to be treated as advisers. More information relevant to that issue and to Butterfield can be posted here.

"Our highest priority is the safety of our students"

This story is an example of what is wrong with our public schools.

Let's suppose that the worst thing the story says about the teacher is absolutely true. He saw a 13-year-old who looked like he was about to strike another student. He picked up the 13-year-old by his ear and hair, put him in a choke-hold, took him outside, and threw him on the grass.

For this, he faces felony child abuse charges. You read that right. Possibly up to five years in jail.

This is insane. And the school has the gall, the utter gall, to pontificate that its highest priority is the safety and security of its students. Believe me, the school does not mean by this, "We fully support Mr. Cadwell for his desire to insure the safety and security of our students by protecting them from being beat-down by fellow students. We think law enforcement is insane to be prosecuting him. We will do everything we can to fight this unjust charge against a teacher who was attempting to protect a student." No. Somehow, I'm quite sure that isn't what they mean.

What, exactly, do they think is going to protect the safety and security of their students if not men (and I do mean men) who are willing to get physical in order to protect students from others who want to hit them? Are they relying on frowny faces? Maybe they have "no hitting other student zone" signs around. I'm sure that'll work.

Don't send your kid to public school. Just don't.

Women in the Military: Past flirting with disaster

Brian Mitchell's prophetic book was called Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster. It's a wonderful book, full of excellent documentation.

I've been doing a little research on women in the military for a post I'm writing for another venue, and today I came upon this gem, from 1991, over twenty years ago. (Let that sink in for a moment.)

Thirty-six crew members of the supply ship Acadia were pregnant and had to be transferred during the ship's deployment to the Persian Gulf, naval officials say.

More than half became pregnant after the ship was under way, but a Navy spokesman, Lieut. Comdr. Jeff Smallwood, said there were no indications of improper fraternization between men and women on the ship.

What? I must have misunderstood that. There's more:

The remaining 22 women became pregnant while the ship was deployed, perhaps on liberty calls in Hawaii, the Philippines and other ports the Acadia visited on her way to the gulf, Commander Smallwood said.

Right. Or perhaps the Angel Gabriel was making some very unexpected announcements.

The Navy has strict rules against sexual relationships between men and women while on duty or between commissioned officers and enlisted personnel, but Commander Smallwood said there was no evidence any such regulations were broken. 

There was no evidence any such regulations were broken! No evidence. I repeat, no evidence. Perhaps Commander Smallwood needs a refresher course in the birds and the bees. Where again do babies come from, Commander?

The military has been in a state of denial for a long, long time.

Telling ourselves lies

I have recently been thinking about a trend in the Christian, or perhaps I should say "Christian," response to the homosexual agenda. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying the trend is entirely new. I know that in various ways it's been going on for a long time. But let us just say that I've recently come upon some examples thereof, two of which are new, and one of which isn't all that old.

That trend is telling lies.

What do I mean by this? Here's what I mean: Some allegedly Christian organization, church, or individual (and I have both Protestant and Catholic examples) will do something that obviously functionally communicates endorsement of homosexual activity and that conveys a scandalous presentation of homosexual relationships as normal. But a pretense, an explicit pretense, will be maintained that this isn't what's going on. To wit:

A Jesuit boys' high school has recently allowed two boys to go to its prom (Junior Ball) together as a couple. Let that sink in for a minute. Here is the disgusting letter by the principal (whose official title is "president"), Fr. Edward F. Salmon, S.J.,  defending the decision. In it he expressly maintains that by allowing a homosexual couple as a couple to come to a school ball together he is not endorsing homosexual behavior. I'll wait here while you get control of your incredulous laughter. Yes, seriously, that's what he says.

He also has such a warped mind that he makes an express analogy to the heterosexual couples coming to the ball and says that, by allowing the homosexual couple ("our brothers," he keeps calling them) to come as a couple he isn't endorsing homosexual activity any more than he is endorsing heterosexual activity by letting heterosexual couples come to the dance.

That is incredibly twisted. I respond: Of course a prom is endorsing heterosexual activity. And a good thing, too. No, no, I don't mean that it's endorsing premarital sex right at this moment between those particular couples. They aren't married yet. But they might get married later. A dance to which one brings a date tacitly endorses the concept of the complementarity of the sexes, of heterosexual romance, leading ultimately (we hope) to loving, permanent, physically consummated, fruitful marriages. In other words, to heterosexual activity. Some young man might bring his future wife to such a dance, and that would be a charming and a natural thing.

Equally, for two young homosexual men to go to the prom together as an identified couple, and for the school to allow it, endorses the notion of homosexual romance. Which, tacitly, normalizes the idea of homosexual activity. This is blatantly obvious.

So Fr. Edward F. Salmon, S.J., is lying. I'm not going to try to force myself to believe that somehow he's suffering from invincible ignorance, because I can't make myself believe that. He isn't. He knows exactly the victory for the homosexual agenda that this decision constitutes, he knows how his decision and the events of the dance itself will contribute to the normalization of homosexual "love," and he's lying about it.

Example #2: Wheaton College has just started Refuge (isn't that a sweet name?), an LGBTQRSTUVWX...etc., etc., student club. (Yes, I just started typing in random letters and keys at a certain point there.) Here is the smarmy article about it. Please note that the definition of the target group is worded in a carefully value-neutral fashion: "students who experience a sexual orientation and/or gender identity that varies from the majority." Uh, yeah, it just varies from the majority. It's not, you know, intrinsically disordered or anything.

The article, on behalf of the college, claims that this "conversation" about homosexuality (it's always a conversation, isn't it?) does not contravene the school's explicit student covenant which disallows homosexual acts, because having such a club doesn't involve endorsing homosexual acts. The group is just there to provide support, love, etc., etc., to LGBTQRTSTPVX!#$!$...students.

This is a lie.

Many people at Wheaton must know that this is a lie. One of the homosexual (or something-or-other) students pretty much lets ol' Felix out of the bag by saying:

“I saw my future as something that was really bleak because, identifying as gay, I felt like I had been told that I was allowed to be a Christian as long as I fulfilled a certain set of requirements and as long as I stayed miserable and de-legitimized this very real aspect of my life,” a Refuge member said.

So in other words, this student's perverse sexuality is, so he believes, part of his very identity, and the existence of this student group makes things better for him than they were before, he thinks, because now he doesn't feel like he needs to "de-legitimize" that "very real aspect of his life." Well, yes, in terms of Christian teaching, he does need to de-legitimize it, because it isn't legitimate. That aspect of his life is a temptation to extremely serious sin. So it definitely should be thought of in negative terms. It isn't something to legitimize, and it shouldn't be the core of his identity. And setting up this student group is endorsing the idea that it's a legitimate identity and needn't be stigmatized.

Here are a couple of other smoking gun paragraphs. First,

A Refuge member also expressed hope that the Wheaton community will change its approach to this topic.

“There is no reason to fear talking about such topics, and I hope that our campus can approach conversations about the LGBTQ experience in a humble and loving way,” a Refuge member said. “We should be eager to talk honestly about it and not be afraid of perspectives that may be different from our own. I don’t think we should shy away from any conversation no matter how difficult it may seem to us.”

What are these "perspectives that may be different from our own"? Why, what could those differences of opinion be, I wonder? A nanosecond's thought yields the answer: This group (I'll just go out on a limb and hypothesize) includes students who deny the school's position that homosexual acts are wrong. But not only are they not being kicked out for rejecting the school's statement of faith and morals on this point, they are instead being encouraged to promulgate their false ideas more widely and not to have those ideas condemned, to have a "conversation" about them instead. In fact (next smoking gun), members of Refuge want Wheaton's entire atmosphere to be less, shall we say, oriented towards heterosexuality in its "all-encompassing assumptions":

Another source of frustration for Refuge members is the lack of sensitivity in language due to the assumptions about the gender identities and sexual orientations of Wheaton students.

“Whether because of the homophobic comments and jokes in the dorms … or the all-encompassing assumptions made in public … there are many ways that LGBTQ students can be made to feel marginalized or isolated,” a Refuge member said.

Heaven forbid that people talking casually at Wheaton, or speaking in public, should assume that most people are heterosexual. Instead, they should be guarding their tongues at every moment to avoid manifesting heterosexist assumptions about normalcy and about the heterosexual orientation of their audience. Such assumptions could make any homosexual students who might be listening feel "marginalized or isolated."

And I haven't yet pointed out that the T in that alphabet soup refers to gender-confused individuals who are choosing by their behavior to present themselves as members of the opposite sex. Cross-dressing and insisting on being called "Diana" and using the women's bathroom when you were born a biological male aren't just some kind of private temptation. They are in-your-face behavior. Who knows whether there are any male-female transgenders (or vice versa) living in the Wheaton dorms. One hopes not. But the very existence of Refuge tells them that they're welcome if they want to come. We're just here to help and support you, etc., etc.

Obviously, the formation of Refuge at Wheaton means that Wheaton is not remaining true to its principles on these matters. The formation of this group does amount to an endorsement of homosexual activity and other gender-bending activity.

So the school is lying. Probably several specific, concrete people at the school are lying, and have lied, to get this organization approved, about what they must know are the implications and will be the effects of this club.

Now, here is my most controversial example. (Controversial only because, given the circles I hang out with in the blogosphere, this post is more likely to be read by people who will feel uncomfortable or even be offended because of the blogger I'm about to mention than by people who hold a brief for McQuaid Jesuit high school or Wheaton College). Example #3, which is a bit older but has been bothering me for a while.

Catholic blogger Mark Shea, whom some people still think of as some kind of conservative, wrote this incredibly smarmy post in which he idolizes a "gay man" as a "saint." This "gay man" was a professional opera expert in Seattle and a music teacher in a volunteer position at Shea's church. Based on his obituary (see following quotation) it appears that he lived with a homosexual "companion" of many years, whom, the obit. tells us, he is "survived by," just as he is "survived by" his father. Gay partners are family, y'know. This is what the obituary says about the relationship:

Paul Hearn of Seattle, Mr. Lorenzo's longtime companion, said they met when Mr. Lorenzo gave a lecture at the University of Washington 13 years ago. Though Hearn was not Catholic, their first date was to St. James, he said.

Hearn said Mr. Lorenzo brought him to the Catholic Church and broadened his appreciation of opera. The two would pray together and do morning liturgies. "We were monks in love," he said.

The priest of Lorenzo's parish is full of praise in the obituary as well.

"He was a born teacher and a perpetual student who never stopped learning," he said. "He was the quintessential renaissance man. He had a passion for beauty and a passion about his Catholic faith. As much as he loved opera, it was his faith where all this came together and made sense."

Mark Shea castigates anyone who thinks that this was a scandalous relationship or who even asks whether the couple was celibate. Now, if we accept that the couple was actually celibate (which, according to an update Shea added later, Hearn, the "in love" partner, did claim in private communication to Shea, some time well after Shea had first written the post), they were nonetheless living in such a way that the world at large would be led to believe that they were not celibate. Unless Hearn is lying, they conceived of and were presenting their relationship as romantic (they were "in love"). It is utterly, utterly perverse and scandalous for a supposed Christian to endorse and to embody to the world in his own person the idea of homosexual romance, even if it should happen to be the case that the romance is not consummated. But Shea insisted, over and over again, even before receiving any definite communication on the question, that it was no one's business whether they were actually celibate. So, in Shea-world, it was fine for this pair to be together as an openly homosexual couple, qua couple, saying that they were "in love," going on "dates," the first of which was to church. It was fine for a person living in such a way to be admired greatly and vocally as a Christian by everyone, including his priest, in his Catholic church. In Shea-world, who is to blame if someone says, "Gee, this certainly looks like a sexual relationship. Isn't that a problem? Isn't that a cause of scandal? Should this man hold even a volunteer position of leadership of any kind in a Catholic church? Should we be holding him up to our children and to the world at large as an example? Should we be praising him to the skies?" Shea blames the person who asks those questions! Such a person is nosy. He's wondering about something that is "none of his business." Instead he should join Mark Shea in gushing about a "gay man who was a saint."

I will say it right here: The claim that a homosexual "partnership" does not functionally endorse and normalize homosexual behavior is a lie. It's such an obvious, grave, foolish, pernicious falsehood that anyone who puts it forward for serious consideration is to be blamed. Someone, somewhere, is lying. Perhaps it isn't actually Shea. There are always different levels of this sort of thing. There are those who promulgate propaganda knowing it to be utter baloney. There are those who are complete dupes. Though, when the issue concerns the intersection of morals and cultural meaning in ways that are readily accessible to any mature and aware American Christian, it's harder to accept that anyone who says such a thing is really a complete dupe. And there's the large grey area in between, where people say edgy things because they think it sounds profound to do so while strangling their own common sense in the cradle and lecturing other people for allegedly being nosy and judgmental.

Perhaps someone lied persuasively to Mark Shea, aided and abetted by something in the water in Seattle that makes Catholic bloggers susceptible to such nonsense. Maybe it was his priest who taught him this bizarre version of, "Don't ask, don't tell." Which really is, "Hey, they can go ahead and tell people that they are a romantically connected homosexual couple, 'long-time companions,' but no one should ask if they are actually having sex. Then we can assume that they aren't and can venerate and practically suggest the canonization of one member of the couple when he dies, as a shining example of Christian life and devotion." Someone, somewhere, is telling a falsehood that, at some level, he must know to be a falsehood--namely, the falsehood that such a relationship does not functionally promote and endorse homosexual behavior as legitimate.

Shea is so mixed up by the "priests he has talked to" that he thinks it could be legitimate for a priest to counsel a homosexual person to continue in a sexually active homosexual relationship--this is clearly what Shea means to be referring to in the context--because, for various "special reasons" peculiar to that relationship, it would be "more destructive" to end it. See for yourself. It's right in the post. So Shea is so confused about these matters by the people he's listening to that it would be difficult to know how to un-confuse him.

This is the level that we have fallen to in various Christian communities: Openly touted homosexual romance is fine. Live-in homosexual couplehood is fine. Homosexual couples "in love" are fine. Homosexual couples going to dances together are fine (at McQuaid Jesuit High School). Self-styled homosexuals who don't want to "de-legitimize this area of their lives" are also fine (at Wheaton). As long as they don't come right out and say that they are presently having sex with each other, they're fine. We'll just go on loudly pretending that nothing in any of this endorses homosexual behavior. The next step is apparently to say that, you know, even if a pair of known homosexual "partners" are having sex, the rest of us sometimes fail to control the sin of gluttony.

Perhaps Wheaton would balk at that point, though. Or would feign to balk. For right now, my guess is that students in Refuge can hold pretty much any moral opinion, but the school claims (truly or falsely) that students can't admit to being presently sexually active, because that would be hard to square with the student covenant. But give them time; they'll probably start openly using the gluttony line next year. Maybe the year after that they'll tell us that it would in some cases be "more destructive" for homosexuals to get out of their sexual relationships. Where precisely on the whole continuum the Jesuit high school falls in its day-to-day workings, we probably don't want to know.

Lies are bad for Christians. They are at least as bad for Christians working in groups as they are for Christians as individuals. In groups, human beings toss lies back and forth like hacky-sacks until they can't remember what's true and what's false anymore.

Start by thinking clearly. Go on doing it. Neither listen to lies nor be confused by them nor promulgate them, even if they sound conveniently non-judgmental. If you don't maintain this kind of mental clarity, you will harm more people than just yourself.

Alleluia! He is Risen!

A joyful Easter to my readers. He is risen! Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

[Digression: Someday, I'd love to go to a funeral that included a rousing sermon all about Jesus' resurrection and about how our resurrection as Christians is assured by the historical fact of Jesus' resurrection. Wouldn't that be great? When I'm old I should try to convince some preacher to give such a sermon at my funeral, despite the fact that I wouldn't, strictly speaking, be there to hear it. End of digression.]

Herewith, some music. This is the same music that I linked here, but some of the youtube versions have disappeared from where they were three years ago, so these are current links.

"Worthy is the Lamb" and "Amen" by Georg Frederic Handel:



"Christus Dominus Hodie Resurrexit" by Glad. (If you aren't familiar with the Christian a capella group Glad and if you like classy men's a capella music, you have much edifying enjoyment ahead. Look up more of their music.)



A musical Easter post here wouldn't be complete without some Southern Gospel. "Because He Lives" sung by the Gaither Vocal Band:



As readers know, it is my position that Jesus' resurrection is the evidential center, the heartbeat of Christianity. When God the Father raised Our Lord Jesus from the dead with great power, this was a sign. This was not a mystical event that can be seen and believed only by the eyes of faith. It was a miracle. It spoke to the world. When people ask, "Why can't God be more obvious?" it behooves us to remind them: God has been obvious. He raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Jesus showed himself to his disciples by many infallible proofs. They recorded it for us. That's pretty darned obvious.

Jesus' resurrection is thus an indispensable point where metaphysics and epistemology come together in Christianity. We can be saved because Christ arose in both senses of "because." Metaphysically and theologically, Jesus' resurrection was the necessary completion of his saving work. It is because Jesus lives that we shall live also. He had to destroy the work of the Devil by destroying death.

Epistemologically as well, we can be saved because Jesus rose from the dead, for it is by his glorious resurrection that we know that his death was not just another death, not just another act of injustice, not just an emblem of man's cruelty to man, but rather that it was the means of our redemption. Let there be no mistake: Had Jesus remained dead, his death would have redeemed no one. And had he remained dead, we would have no reason to believe that his death redeemed anyone. We would be, as St. Paul says, of "all men most miserable."

Here are some past posts on this subject:

What Not to Tell a Young Enquirer about the Evidences of the Christian Faith

Evidential Ammo for the Christian Soldier

Is "Jesus Rose from the Dead" a Self-Committing Proposition

The Ascension and the "Objective Vision" Theory of the Resurrection

And here is Tim's and my 2008 article, a preprint copy posted by permission of the publisher, on the evidences for the resurrection.

Holy Saturday--Recycling

I've been looking over some of my older posts, searching for the word "Pilate." This occurred to me to do after I listened last evening to my husband reading the Passion of Our Lord according to St. John, with its strangely vivid portrait of that first-century Roman procurator. I'd like to draw new readers' attention to some of these posts, because they may be useful Passiontide meditations here just before the glorious day of Our Lord's resurrection. So I'm taking the risk of seeming egotistical by self-quoting. Please do read the whole posts if you think they could be of spiritual value. 

On Pontius Pilate and historicity:

For this very reason, some have feared that they believe Christianity only because they want it to be true, only because it would be so wonderful if it were true. For this very reason, too many Christians have played along, fearful that the prose might cancel the poetry, separating the "Christ of history" from the "Christ of faith" and assuring the faithful that they can have the latter on which to rest their hearts and feed their imaginations even if the former is...a bit lacking.

This is to separate the prose and the passion with a vengeance.

But this is not Christianity. For Christianity affirms, "He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, He descended into hell, and the third day He rose again from the dead." There is no separation between the great truths of the Gospel and the prosaic truths of history, between the massive miracle of Jesus risen and the all-too-human, bureaucratic hand-washing of a harassed Roman official two thousand years ago.

On "transgressive" art, the cross, and mankind's rejection of Jesus:

Via Dawn Eden, I learned this week of an "artist" (I use the term with some hesitation) in Australia named Adam Cullen who was at least short-listed for (and it appears may have won) an award known as the Blake Prize for his deliberately mocking and cartoonish painting of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. 

[snip] 

 As Dawn Eden says, the real kicker is in the final line of the Telegraph story, when Cullen gives us his response to the brouhaha: "How can he be so offended? It's just a Jew on the cross."

Um, yeah. Huh. And that's supposed to mean what, exactly?

The more you think about that line, the more unintentional resonances it has. It reminds me of what St. John tells us about Caiaphas--that when he said it was expedient that one man should die for the people, he prophesied though he did not know it. And when Jesus died he said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." "It's just a Jew on the cross." Pontius Pilate himself couldn't have said it better. Shaking it off. Telling himself it doesn't matter. How could it matter? How could this obscure Jewish teacher, crucified by the Romans in the first century A.D., matter? Just another of the victims of the cruelty of man in history. Lots of Jews were crucified by the Romans. It's just a Jew on the cross. "All they that see me laugh me to scorn. They shoot out the lip, saying, 'He trusted in God that he would deliver him. Let him deliver him, if he delighteth in him.'" "Come down from the cross, if thou art the son of God."

Cullen is in a long line of the mockers of Jesus on the cross. And all their mockery God Incarnate, the Jew on the cross, took upon himself, and by it they did the will of God against their own will.

Thy rebuke hath broken his heart

The tabernacle is empty, the door standing open. The altar is stripped and bare.

On Good Friday, we remember the Passion of Our Lord, the Messiah.

The genius of Handel was to choose the words of Scripture, and the words of Scripture only, and to set them musically in such a fashion that they come alive.

The two verses used here are Psalm 69:20 and Lamentations 1:12.



And this, from Isaiah 53.

Palm Sunday and Witness

It is Palm Sunday, and I have nothing much new to say. Years ago I poured myself into quite a few liturgical posts, and they still seem good today. The Anglican liturgy is a gift. The Sacrament is a gift, and therefore we cry, "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord!" The gift that makes all other gifts possible is the Sacrifice of the Cross, the death of Our Lord. One's ability to speak about those gifts sometimes decreases with age rather than otherwise. Here is an old Palm Sunday post, also brief, with a hymn text. Here is a post on the epistle lesson for Palm Sunday on the Holy Name of Jesus. Here is a post on the Passion.

This Lent I have been reading Whittaker Chambers's Witness. Chambers says of himself, "I was a witness." If you have not read the book, read it. This time, I'm going to read it all the way through. To whet your appetite for Witness, please do read Bill Luse's excellent choice of selections.

I also began reading I John through with my younger daughters for the second time recently. St. John, very much like Chambers, thought of himself primarily as a witness: "And we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." "That which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes, which our hands have handled of the Word of life." "That which we have heard and seen declare we unto you." "And he who saw it bare record, and his record is true...that ye might believe."

John must have been quite young, in all probability only a teenager, when he lived with Our Lord through His ministry and was the only one of the twelve to witness the crucifixion. It was all burned into his mind in those early years, and then in old age he writes his epistle to "My little children" (a phrase he uses again and again), telling them, as the last living eyewitness, of what he has heard and seen. John was a witness.

This is what Chambers says about the cross, as a witness to his children:

My children, when you were little, we used sometimes to go for walks in our pine woods. In the open fields, you would run along by yourselves. But you used instinctively to give me your hands as we entered those woods, where it was darker, lonelier, and in the stillness our voices sounded loud and frightening. In this book I am again giving you my hands. I am leading you, not through cool pine woods, but up and up a narrow defile between the bare and steep rocks from which in shadow things uncoil and slither away. It will be dark. But, in the end, if I have led you aright, you will make out three crosses, from two of which hang thieves. I will have brought you to Golgotha – the place of skulls. This is the meaning of the journey. Before you understand, I may not be there, my hands may have slipped from yours. It will not matter. For when you understand what you see, you will no longer be children.

I wish all of my readers a blessed Holy Week.

Assist us mercifully with thy help, O Lord God of our salvation; that we may enter with joy upon the meditation of those mighty acts, whereby thou hast given unto us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Immanent teleology and holism

I've been thinking a bit about thinkers who recognize teleology in nature but don't want to attribute this to a superpowerful and intelligent being. Here I have Thomas Nagel in mind, but it may be that Stephen L. Talbott also fits the description. Talbott is particularly interested in organismal holism, and this thought came to me:

If it appears that the parts of an organism do not work without the whole organism and that the whole organism does not work without its parts, or even that "parts" is an overly crude word for the dynamic relationship between, say, enzymes, proteins, or cells and an organism as a whole, this apparent holism argues not for some kind of immanent teleology which (in some unspecified manner) makes gradualist Darwinian explanations more plausible by making Darwinism itself (in some unspecified sense) teleological. Rather, it is evidence for a more radical degree of intervention (that bogey of the theistic evolutionists) even than some Intelligent Design theorists want to hold out for--namely, that an intelligent being made the whole organism at once.

In other words, recognition of the importance of organs as wholes and of the nearly insoluble chicken-and-the-egg problem of an issue like body plan development in the newly conceived embryo constitutes, whether people realize it or not, an argument for special creation of species.

Notice that by itself this says nothing about the age of the earth. Progressive creationism could also involve special creation at widely spaced intervals.

Some Gospel music to make you happy

I linked this a few years ago, but it deserves to be posted again. And who knows, maybe I've picked up a reader or two in the meanwhile who hasn't seen it before. Here are the Cathedrals (again) singing a joyful medley. (Don't knock the misspelling of "medley" in the Youtube video. It's probably part of what has kept this one hidden from the takers-down.)





The March weather around here is a bit gloomy for my taste, so here is something else to brighten it up. The Akins doing "I'll Fly Away." The complete song is on Grooveshark. Some great pickin'.



If you'd like to see a generous clip of it that you can watch, here it is. (Dig the curls on the right!)

Roger Bennett testimony

As mentioned in a previous post, I've been wanting to draw attention to pianist Roger Bennett's testimony from an old Cathedrals concert. I believe it was recorded in 1997.



and the second part:



In hindsight, it gives one a strange feeling to realize that this is a story of healing, yet Roger later died of the cancer that he is talking about.

But here's the great thing: Roger isn't primarily telling it as a healing story! Roger himself realizes that the most important story he needs to tell isn't about the remission of the cancer. One of the most remarkable moments in the video is the point where he says that he would not give up what he has learned about God and the increased sweetness of his relationship with Christ even if it meant permanent healing. He says, "This has been the best season of my life." He says, "I wouldn't trade it. If they said, 'Roger, we'll take away the cancer, but you've gotta give up your walk with Jesus that you've gained,' I'd keep the cancer."

Thus speak the saints of God who have been refined in the fire.

Yet Roger doesn't speak from a mountaintop. He talks to the people where they are. He knows there are likely to be people in the audience who have cancer and are not in remission. To them he says that he knows what it is like to be paralyzed with fear, and his message is, "God isn't paralyzed with fear."

That testimony is the introduction to Roger's song "Don't Be Afraid." And here's that song once again.

Be Not Afraid

The cry of the papacy of John Paul II was "Be not afraid!" It's an encouragement that Christians need. We're certainly not immune to fear, and especially not now in such uncertain times. My heart goes out to my brethren in the Catholic communion today as Benedict has resigned and as they await the news of who the new pope is to be.

But whether Protestant or Catholic, all of us as Christians are tempted to worry and fear at times.

In another of my oddball attempts to bring together southern gospel music and liturgical Christianity, I want to match JPII's exhortation "Be not afraid!" with this song by the justly famed late gospel pianist Roger Bennett--"Don't Be Afraid."



(Do click and watch the song soon, because many of these Youtube videos of Gaither-distributed music are being pulled or blocked, and a lot of my old gospel music post are now sadly music-less.)

This song had to grow on me. At first it seemed a little too loud and repetitive, but now it moves me greatly, perhaps because I've seen it in conjunction with Roger's testimony about his cancer, which comes on the same video. I hope to feature that in a later post.

Christian, don't be afraid.

Slavery as the alternative to the free market

Inspired by a good post by my W4 colleague Jeffrey S. on the minimum wage, I've been thinking a bit lately about anti-free-market approaches to economics and what makes people tick who advocate such approaches. In this comment (as in other posts on this blog) I said that the central error of such approaches is the idea that we can make something from nothing--that by simple fiat we can create prosperity. An obvious example is thinking that we can increase the real wealth and well-being of workers simply by legislating a rise in the minimum wage. Another example is thinking that we can simply (ta-da!) make things free by declaring that from now on they shall be free.

Yet I've encountered a surprising number of otherwise sensible people who are subject to the delusion that goodwill can create something from nothing. Often the form it takes is saying, "Why can't x just be cheaper?" though sometimes it literally takes the form of saying, "Why can't x just be free?" I must admit that I've never yet convinced anyone who can ask such a question to change his mind. But here are some thoughts on it. Pick a product or service. For the sake of keeping this interesting, let's make it a good and valuable product, even a terribly important product. Make it bread or heart medication. Or medical care. (Hmmm.) Now let's ask the question: Why can't it just be "made free"? And if we apply our common sense for the moment, the answer comes back: Because it actually costs something to grow, produce, and distribute that product or service. Because it isn't, in fact, free. But there's more: Even if bread fell from heaven, someone would have to go out and gather it and provide it to people. When it comes to any service, and a fortiori to highly skilled services like medical care, there is actual labor involved as well as many materials. Medical care can't be free both because all the products used in it, from sterile gloves to expensive equipment, don't make themselves, don't mine the raw materials for themselves out of the earth, and don't deliver themselves to the point of use, and also because the doctors themselves are not slaves. Even if they were slaves, they would have to be fed and housed, and guarded so they wouldn't escape from the slave compound, so the work still wouldn't be free. But they should, of course, not be slaves. They have to charge for their services both to pay their expenses and to support themselves and their families. All of this should be obvious. It shouldn't need to be said.

Ah, but our anti-free-market folks will reply that they needn't charge so much for their services. And the same for all sorts of other things. The greedy CEOs and shareholders of the companies that make and sell bread (or medicines or sterile gloves) shouldn't make so much, and so on and so forth throughout all levels of the economy. And if they made less, then all else would remain equal (right?) and that money could just be redistributed in the form of higher wages for their workers, without any rise in prices, because the company would make less in profits. Right? Someone who dislikes the free market can always find someone who, in his opinion, is making too much money and ought to make less. In fact, lots of someones. Therefore, on his view, there is nothing in principle wrong with forcing all those people to make less, if only we could find a way to enforce such virtuous economic behavior. On this view, profit is a kind of pointless epiphenomenon of an economic system. People can always do without it, and if CEOs, doctors, and everyone else won't voluntarily pare themselves back to the point of doing their work for something close to subsistence level, they might as well be forced to do so, or at least to come closer to that "ideal."

The problem with this view is that, to the extent that it is acted upon, it creates economic stagnation, shortages, and loss of jobs, and everyone is worse off. If a potential entrepreneur knows that he can't make a decent profit by starting a company, he won't start a company. If doctors are paid less and less, there is less and less reason for them to go through the long, grueling, and debt-encumbered training required to become a doctor, to work the long hours and put up with the stress of being a doctor, and to subject themselves to the constant possibility of malpractice suits. So we have a doctor shortage. Companies go out of business or are absorbed by other companies that don't need to employ as many workers. Productivity and effort are not rewarded, so the motivation for them wanes. As more and more people lose their jobs, more and more people come to be supported by the government, which is getting less and less tax revenue while paying out more and more in entitlements. The government thus operates more and more on the fiscal equivalent of gas fumes--deficit spending. The whole system creaks on until it is no longer sustainable, and then we have...a problem.

Now, really, that's the end of the story. There isn't really any "on the other hand." But I'll just point this out: How are we supposed to stop people from saying, "The heck with it" and ceasing to produce goods and services, once we have taken that evil profit motive off the table? Isn't, ultimately, the only fallback (and it isn't much of a fallback) to make them keep going? Which takes us right back to enslavement.

Now, that isn't going to happen directly. Nobody is actually going to go to a CEO and say, "You will work for less or we will throw you in prison." But our government is pretty clever at harassing the goose that laid the golden egg. We enact punitive measures via labor law to force companies to pay their workers more, for example. The anti-free-trade folks would like to punish them for outsourcing. The idea is to find that perfect balance where they'll keep on operating, keep on putting out the effort, keep on supplying the jobs, on the terms that are dictated to them. But the very phenomenon of outsourcing shows that eventually, they get tired of hanging around and being dictated to to that extent, so they go elsewhere. We have no record of the number of people who have had an idea or thought of starting a company and said "the heck with it" when brought face-to-face with the regulations and taxation that would be involved in actually starting or running a business. The anti-free-market folks really have no answer to this, but their minds always run in punitive directions. How can we punish "excessive" profits? How can we punish "union busting"? How can we punish outsourcing? How can we punish those who don't pay their employees enough? How can we forcibly cap medical payments? What all of this is essentially saying is, "How far can we go towards making productive members of society slaves without doing so outright? How far can we force them to carry out their productive activities on unprofitable or notably less profitable terms while not immediately causing our economy to collapse?"

Those who pontificate to the effect that "morals should be part of economics" and mean by that not merely that bad products (such as pornography) should not be sold and not merely that fraudulent practices should be punished but something more like, "There is a moral amount that you should make for your goods and services and a moral amount that you are in duty bound to pay your laborers, and it is just to stop you from making more than you should or paying less than you should" simply never confront the cold, hard facts about shortages and economic stagnation. Nor do they confront the tendency towards the enslavement of the productive inherent in their views. They don't confront all of that because it is in conflict with their intuition (or perhaps with their understanding of some religious teaching) that really it should be possible and is right to force people not to pay "too little" and not to make "too much." And that we know what "too little" and "too much" are and can create a healthy economy that promotes human flourishing on that basis. They're so sure that this is possible that you cannot argue them out of it.

And that's a shame. Because you can't make something from nothing, and enslaving people is wrong.

Suicide: "You've got to go back"

God has laid it on my heart today to blog a story that I believed I had blogged years ago. After a long time searching the Internet, this site, and W4 and not finding the story, I searched my computer, found the links in a document, and used the Wayback Machine (hurray for the Wayback Machine) to find the story.

Via the WM, here is the story from 2005. David Preuitt, a former lumberjack in Oregon, tried to commit suicide using prescribed drugs. He slept for several days,  woke up, and told the people around him that while he was out of it he heard a voice saying, "David, I don't want you to do it this way. You've got to go back." Information in this story (also via the WBM) indicates that David Preuitt was not a particularly good candidate for religious suggestions. He was a hard-living logger with a rape conviction and prison term behind him.

After he came back, David insisted to his wife Lynda that she needed to be a voice and to get out the message to other people not to commit suicide, that suicide was not the way to heaven. She attempted to do so, but unfortunately, the story seems to have dropped off the current links on the Internet. Most current stories about David Preuitt just talk about the scandal of David's not having died--the drugs were not effective in the way that they were supposed to have been. The possibility that God really did, you know, send a message back with David against suicide doesn't get much press.

Readers know that I'm more the rationalist type, but evidence is evidence, and this story needs to be heard. The fact that Dave Preuitt's story accords with Christian tradition as well as with the biblical teaching against murder (in this case, the killing of oneself) is confirmatory. The Apostle John said to test the spirits, and in this case there is no biblical reason to believe that David Preuitt's message is not veridical. I preserve the story and the links through the WBM here in case anyone should be looking for them later. Hopefully they will find them this way.

Conservatism and caring for the little guy

Hunter Baker makes a good point here, describing a woman he saw at Hardee's:

With great concentration and methodical effort, she scratched away the silver coating on the numbers.  Occasionally, she punctuated her practice with long, ragged ugly coughing noises.

Those lottery tickets she must have spent at least $20 dollars on (more than for the flip flops on her feet) came from the state of Tennessee.  I thought about how she is addicted to gambling thanks to the active assistance of her government.  I also thought about how addicted the rest of us have become to the revenue.

If you want to understand social conservatives, thinking about the woman in Hardee’s scratching away at lottery tickets is a good way to start.  We want to encourage the things in life that help a person grow strong:  faith, work, education, character, duty, and family.  We want to work against the things that seem to shrivel up a soul such as perpetual dependence, reliance on games of chance rather than personal industry, an inability to connect consequences to choices, and the loss of the kind of strong family ties that prepare a person for life in a hard world.

At a minimum, we don’t want to support a government which invites the poor to sacrifice what little they have for a mirage.  We have lost that argument everywhere.  And more’s the pity.

As we Protestant conservatives view with great dismay what seems to us the hair-tearing foolishness of a new generation of young, "emergent" evangelicals spouting the platitudes of the left and getting their priorities all messed up, either abandoning or downplaying the pro-life movement, voting Democrat, and embracing left-wing economics, we need to think of something that cannot be said too often: What the left wants is not what is best for the poor, the weak, the little guy. In fact, we can sometimes even go farther: The left does not want what is best for the poor and the weak. Viz. the Obama administration's willingness to shut down Catholic hospitals, Catholic charities, and anyone else who won't toe the line on his HHS mandate. Viz. the Obama administration's cutting off the Catholic bishops' funding for anti-trafficking, because they wouldn't refer for abortions. Viz. the left's shut-down of adoption agencies that won't place children with homosexual couples. The list goes on and on.

And there is more: The actual economic policies advocated by the left mean fewer jobs, higher prices, and small businesses pushed out by high regulatory costs, all of which is very bad for the people who need jobs the most. We're seeing this right now with the economic burden of Obamacare, but that's only one example. The actual environmental policies advocated by the left are radically anti-human and will result in grave economic harm both to our own country and, even more, to developing countries. I have just been reading a book I hope to write more about later, Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin. In it he chronicles case after case after case of leftist policies that have harmed the poorest of the poor in Third-World countries, from coercive population control to crackdowns forcing Third-World countries to eschew the advantages of more nutritious modified grains.

When our young people are growing up we Christians and conservatives often teach them biblical principles, and that is very good. But we also need to teach them economic principles. We need to teach them that there is no free lunch. We need to have them read books like Zubrin's and like Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed. We need to talk through with them the ways that policies that sound oh-so-kind to "make things free" or "force employers to pay more" or "give health insurance to everyone" actually harm the people they are meant to help. We need to expose to them the viciously anti-human underside of the environmental movement, as well as its empirical fecklessness.

We also need to show them how the undermining of marriage and fatherhood have been disastrous for the poor in our own country and how further promotion of sexual promiscuity and anti-family perversion will only do more harm, how a recovery of conservative values is the only hope for the poor themselves.

It is these kinds of conversations and teachings that will inoculate them against muddle-headed thinking that pits "care for the poor" and "care for the earth," allegedly embodied by the policies of the left, against social conservative issues like abortion and homosexuality which are the concern of the right. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to realize that too many youth pastors and other pastors even in relatively conservative evangelical theological circles are promoting such thinking, no doubt in all sincerity, but to the great detriment of the church itself. For if our young people get their consciences all tied up in knots feeling that they must choose between caring for the born poor and caring for the unborn and for marriage, I'm very much afraid that they will choose the former and functionally abandon the latter, eventually abandoning it altogether and simply becoming social liberals as well. After all, the born poor can be made so very picturesque.

But it's all a completely false dichotomy, and the poor will be the ones most harmed of all by the policies of the left. I'm not sure how young you have to get hold of 'em to prevent them from falling for these confusions, but start as young as you can and teach all of this explicitly.

Update: I just saw this linked from Drudge. In Louisiana, state regulators force retail stores to mark up the price of milk to 6% above the store's invoice costs. Let that sink in a minute. The state regulators came down on a store that was selling milk on a special every week for $2.99 per gallon. Note that this is even above and beyond state price supports to farmers, which are already economically problematic. But this is a further regulation on the price charged to the customer. Retail stores aren't allowed to sell at cost or to take a loss. The regulators give a convoluted reason to the effect that perhaps if one retailer sold at or below cost he could undersell his competitors, drive them out of business, and then raise his own prices. So really, folks, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this requirement that the retailer make a 6% profit is a way of keeping down profits. By this reasoning, state regulators should do this with all goods as a competition-promotion move. To keep down prices we have to keep up prices. Rrrright. I was saying something about not helping the poor...Sure, this is just one small thing. But it's just one of a million boneheaded things where "government knows best," and the little guy is the one who gets hurt. It was such a perfect illustration that I had to include it.

When he's right, he's Wright

I have posted my thoughts apropos of Sanctity of Human Life Sunday at What's Wrong With the World.

By way of posting something different and independent here, I'm falling back, as once before, on stealing quotations from one of the most eminently quotable bloggers currently writing (that I know of)--lawyer and science fiction author John C. Wright. (I've never read any of his science fiction and am not generally interested in sci-fi, so don't take this as an endorsement of his fiction.) Wright is quirky as all git-out, but when he's right, he's Wright. He is working singlehandedly to revive the art of invective in American discourse, and since the people against whom he's inveighing so often deserve it, and since he does it so well, one can only cheer.

I don't always read Wright, but when I do, I'm usually glad to have done so. He got a little too...focused during election season, but now that that's over he can get back to a broader range of topics. In this treatise he does mention abortion, which he rightly loathes, but only by way of illustration. Speaking of our leftist opponents, he says,

Hating motherhood, they hate children. Go to an abortion mill and see. Listen to their absurd overpopulation fears, now in a day when we suffer underpopulation. Hear how they talk as if childbirth is punishment. Look at how they try to sexualize children as quickly as possible and keep grown men infants as long as possible.

But I give that particular quotation only because of the connection with Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. Wright's lengthy essay, which you almost certainly won't have time to read all at one go, is full of things that are much more biting than that, as well as being extremely funny.

Wright starts off discussing the hysterical reactions to some compliments a sports announcer paid to a beauty queen, and from there he manages to work in everything else in the world and the kitchen sink. He contrasts the silly, PC objections to the compliments with a truly chivalrous and old-fashioned objection, thus:

The point being made here is not that Mr Musburger overstepped the bounds of gentlemanly propriety, and exposed a young woman to embarrassment by too fulsome a compliment broadcast too publicly.

I would respect, and even salute, any man man enough to have uttered that criticism in public. Gentleman do not express lust over the wives and sweethearts of other gentlemen, but may only express respectful admiration. This is because a true man, a man of nobility expressing the best of masculine character, is a paragon of self control, and a wary guardian of the virtue and the sensitive character of the weaker sex.

No doubt my last sentence sounds like a parody to you, does it not, dear reader? If so, you can understand why the objection to Mr Musburger’s comments were not criticized in these terms. My sentence comes from a chivalrous and indeed a Catholic worldview, which affirms both the greater strength and dominion and therefore the greater humility and duty placed on the male sex. For Christian gentlemen, men lead and rule, and leaders are servants who give all they have, body and soul, even unto death, like a shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. (We Christians are also much sexier in every way than the wimpy agnostics and their sad barbarian machismo, and our women are fertile, nubile, feminine, and cute, and make better mates and mothers and human beings than the neurotic unisex tramps from your world, heathen losers. Deal with it.)

(Did you manage to finish that passage without laughing? I didn't. I laugh every time I read it.) He continues,

In this case, I will forgo my usual polite habits, so I will not be referring to Mr Waldron by the name Mr Waldron, because he did not call Miss Webb by the name Miss Webb. He merely called her ‘Webb.’ I merely call him ‘creature.’

Let us now turn to what the creature Waldron’s comment is. What it is, is illogical.

The logical error involved is irrelevance. The words here are strung together to form an emotion impressionistic mood, like a blurry cloud of passion, without sharp edges, definition, or necessity.

For example, the first sentence asserts that Mr Musburger’s comment that quarterbacks often attract an attractive girlfriend is said to be “not puzzling” in something identified as the “beer-wings-and-women culture” of college football.

What is the point of this particular string of terms?

Why, for example, are fans of football (some of whom, or so I am told, are indeed women) not described as a culture of “athletics, statistics, and team spirit” or something else related to the sport?

Why mention beer and wings, as opposed to, say, hot peanuts and hotdogs and crackerjacks and Coca Cola, which fans (or so I am told) also consume at games?

[snip]

No, the rhetorical point here is merely to sneer at the crude and loutish tastes of the hoi polloi.

[snip]

Now, I have as much respect for teetotalers, vegetarians, and celibates as can be, and indeed, I have considerably more respect for asceticism and self-discipline than does the culture, if it may be called that, surrounding me. So one would think me to be in sympathy with the creature Walloon or whatever his name is.

But no, for the thought, if it can be called that, the creature continues with is that Mr Musburger’s comment that a stalwart quarterback will often attract an attractive girlfriend is “troubling” on the grounds that “there is a culture of domestic violence and sexual assault in football.”

As an attorney, I am always delighted when the prosecution makes a vague rather than a specific claim, because it can be summarily dismissed by the defense. The claim is this case is not that Mr Musburger was aiding and abetting any acts of wifebeating and sexual assault, but merely that the average for such crimes is higher among someone or something associated with the National Football League than the national average.

The creature Waldron does not say specifically that NFL players or fans or sportsannouncers or owners have higher rates of conviction for wifebeating and rape than the national average: he merely makes a windy assertion that there is a nebulous something he calls a “culture” which, it is implied without being said, somehow applauds or enables such violent crimes.

The statement is a lie, and an outrageous lie, and, in a civilized nation or age, a football fan would challenge the creature to a duel with sword or pistol, as a warning to others to mind their words before they slander gentlemen of good character.

Now, I do not know if the statement is literally false. It may indeed be that, taken as a group, any random selection of healthy young men will have a higher incidence of violent crimes, including rape, than the national average, on the grounds that the national average includes old ladies who rarely beat their wives and never commit rape.

You see why I like this guy?

But please note that no cause and effect chain is posited by the creature, not even alleged, between the idea that jocks win the hearts of maidens fair and the idea that various horrid crimes mentioned here are permissible. The lack of logic is beyond astonishing, and well in the area of being transcendental and unearthly: it is almost like a Zen koan.

This is the accusation: If you compliment a women, you are a rapist. If you think girls find athletes attractive, you are a rapist. If you wish to attract the eye of the opposite sex with your virility at sports or your self discipline to excel at a sport, you are a rapist. If you drink beer, you are a rapist. If you eat fried chicken wings, you are a rapist. If you are a man, you are a rapist.

Obviously, no one in his right mind believes this accusation nor utters it expecting to be believed. That is why it is not uttered, only implied.

That is why the language used by the creature is both so gassy and vague and yet so pointed and accusatory. Someone, it is not clear who, is being accused of a crime beyond misdemeanor, beyond felony, beyond enormity, beyond abomination, and yet it is not clear what this crime is.

Is the crime the fact that Mr Musburger taught and encouraged AJ McCarron that quarterbacking gives one the right to rape beauty queens? That possessing a beauty queen as an unwilling harem slave was part of the wages offered by the Illuminati to successful quarterbacks?

But, on the one hand, Mr Musburger did not say anything remotely like that, and, on the other hand, the Illuminati do not exist, having been destroyed by the UFO people who live in energy pyramids beneath the Bermuda Triangle.

Okay, so sometimes he gets a little carried away, but still...It's great stuff.

Wright goes on to say, in all seriousness, that the reason PC-ists write such gaseous and illogical gibberish is that they are, in fact, engaging in a kind of liturgical worship of the Nothing. And he postulates a shrewd conjecture, noting  the piece of leftist song liturgy "Imagine," that they hope that by eliminating all distinctions between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong, they can bring about Utopia. They believe, he says, that the absence of conviction means the presence of harmony.

He relates this nihilism to the utterly upside-down values and priorities of modern leftists, of which he offers us examples, including this one,

I have been in a conversation with a man who objected to my using the word “Chinaman” to refer to the people ruled by Mao, but was nonchalant, even innocently puzzled like a wide-eyed kitten, that I or anyone would think there was anything wrong with Mao’s genocide of countless Chinamen. (For the record, his numbers far exceed Stalin’s.) The first was a matter worth shrieking like a steam whistle about, whereas the second was a meaningless historical oddity having nothing in particular to do with the advantages or disadvantages of totalitarian socialism.

There is much more, and he winds up with this peroration:

They hate reason. They hate, hate, hate the truth and regard claims to know to truth to be violent lies. Talk to them and see.

Why hate such delightful and salutary things, things man cannot live without? It is because God is the source and summit of reason, truth, virtue, and beauty. And they would rather die than think, would rather go to hell.

They hate masculinity. This is because God is masculine. They hate superiority and inferiority. This is because God is superior and we are inferior. They hate fatherhood because they hate the Father.
Hating fatherhood, they hate femininity. What else can the sweet and nurturing nature of the female be for them, aside from a Yellow Star of oppression?

Hating motherhood, they hate children. Go to an abortion mill and see. Listen to their absurd overpopulation fears, now in a day when we suffer underpopulation. Hear how they talk as if childbirth is punishment. Look at how they try to sexualize children as quickly as possible and keep grown men infants as long as possible.

They hate man, the idea of man. Look at how they rally to the rights of animals, all the while proclaiming man is nothing but an animal.

Do not be deceived, dear readers. The Leftist hate us with a deep and abiding hatred. They hate everything about us, from sunshine to pretty girls to brave boys to solid gold to warm firearms to truth, beauty, and virtue. Everything good, they call evil, and everything evil they call good.

They even hate calling a beautiful woman a beauty.

But it is not because they are evil, or illogical, or insane, or unwise. It is because they have lost their way. They have gouged out their eyes, and complain the noon is dark. They have locked themselves in a cage and thrown away the only key. They are lonely for divine love, and homesick for heavenly wonders.

The shepherd of heaven is seeking to for them with more craft and stealth and subtlety than you or I can imagine. Choirs of angels more numberless than the stars themselves, and older, will peal songs to shake the orbs of heaven when even the least of these lost is found.

[snip]

Let us praise God that He placed such sublime examples of beauty and virtue in our midst as the Daughters of Eve, knowing we have done nothing to merit such an inexpressible gift.

When the lost fret over beauty queens, let us rejoice. Even to look at such loveliness is a reason for gratitude and a cause for devout reflection on the goodness of the world we Sons of Adam have marred. 

It sure would be fun to be able to write like that. But it's also fun to quote it. If you don't have time to read the whole Wright post, enjoy the plums above.

Steven Curtis Chapman "I Will Be Here"

In this post last year I embedded a 4Shared link to "I Will Be Here" by Steven Curtis Chapman. Unfortunately, 4Shared has now become subscription only, so you can't listen to that link unless you have a 4Shared account. You can find the song all over Youtube, but usually in a newer arrangement. I have a preference for the older musical arrangement, so here it is:



Chapman has said that he wrote the song in response to the shock of his own parents' divorce (which occurred after Steven was married), as a reaffirmation to his wife of the promise he had made to her at their wedding. Christian music buffs also know that Chapman's wife Mary Beth lives with clinical depression, a biographical fact that gives the lyrics even more poignancy, as does the tragedy they suffered later in the accidental death of their adopted daughter.

Chapman's expression of absolute commitment and love is the answer both to the unnatural distortions being currently foisted upon us as "love" by liberalism and also to marital cynicism, whether of the left or of the right. Anyone who has grown or has made himself, through ideology, so hard-hearted, so opposed to chivalry and to true, manly commitment and love for one's wife, that he can listen to that song and think and feel only that the speaker is setting himself up to be a "beta," a "white knight," a sucker to be hurt by some woman, has lost something deeply important. And any ideology that encourages and fosters such a loss is a deeply wicked ideology to which we should give no quarter, regardless of whether its proponents, like a stopped clock, occasionally make a true statement. This is as true for allegedly "conservative" misogyny as it is for man-hating feminism. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. (And if you are a modern misogynist or wish to tell me that I need to take such people and their ideas more seriously, don't bother trying to comment.)

Meanwhile, for all you normal and happily oblivious readers who have no idea what that last paragraph was about, just enjoy the song. It's a wonderful song. It's always been a popular wedding song, of course. May many more brides and grooms shed the tears of joy and awe at the gift God has given them that the song rightly inspires.

Blessed Epiphany!

O God, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles; Mercifully grant that we, who know thee now by faith, may after this life have the fruition of thy glorious Godhead: through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Thou hast made us for thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.

Holy Jesus! every day
keep us in the narrow way;
and, when earthly things are past,
bring our ransomed souls at last
where they need no star to guide,
where no clouds thy glory hide.

I have, by the way, very little idea how the Magi knew what the star meant. In the novel Ben-Hur they receive extensive additional revelation, but we are in fact not told how they knew that the king of the Jews was born merely from the fact of seeing a new star in the heavens. Nor do we know exactly what the star was nor what it meant for them to follow it or for it to "rest over the place where the young child was." (Paul Maier has some interesting discussion of possible heavenly phenomena here.)

Certainly the Magi fit beautifully into the pattern of Hebrews 11. They believed in what was unseen based on the little that was actually seen. And because of that more was manifested to them.

A blessed feast of the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

(See also here and here.)

Love God with your will

Jesus said,

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven....Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock.... (Matt. 7:21,24)

Here Jesus enters into a rabbinic dispute of the day: Which is more important--to hear the Torah, the Law, or to do it? Remarkably, Jesus applies this question to his own words. He puts his own sayings on a par with the will of the Father and, tacitly, with the Torah itself. That estimate of oneself and of the status of one's words and commands was not standard rabbinic practice! This is just one of those passages that utterly blows away the many pseudo-historical pictures of Jesus foisted upon us by faddish "scholarship"--Jesus the (merely) great teacher, Jesus the (mere) man, Jesus whose omniscience was so radically emptied that he was gradually discovering himself and his nature and mission throughout his ministry on earth. That is not Jesus as the Scriptures show him to us. Rather, Jesus knows quite well who he is and what he is here for, and Jesus speaks with a quiet authority that drops like a bombshell into the lives of his hearers. Hence "the people were astonished at his doctrine, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes."

The first and great commandment, we are reliably told, is "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind."

But what does it mean to love God? There are, no doubt, some saintly souls to whom the love of God comes naturally, who find themselves spontaneously filled with love for God in their private and public worship, and who never suffer from the sneaking worry that they are just ginning up their own emotions. I am not among those. To me, God is not vivid. He is a spirit, and I have little idea of what it will be like to have the beatific vision, to "see him as he is" to "know even as also I am known." The solution to that, in Christian theology, is supposed to be the Incarnation: "No man hath seen God at any time," but "the only begotten Son...he hath declared him."

Very well, then, what does it mean to love Jesus? I recently heard a song, new to me, called "The Stranger of Galilee." I have to admit, it didn't resonate. It says, "And I felt I could love him forever,/So gracious and tender was He." Hmmm, really? Read the Gospels. Go ahead; read them. Is your first response to Jesus there to "feel that you could love him forever"? Would that have been your initial reaction had you known him in person? If so, you're a better man than I am, so to speak. I might have been curious about him, fascinated, disturbed, but also, I suspect, annoyed. Just who does this man think he is? Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels is incredibly compelling but not a fuzzy bunny you want to stroke. You take him or leave him as he is, with eternal consequences. Your opinion of his graciousness and tenderness is neither asked nor required.

So if one's ability truly to love God and truly to desire God, to want God above all things, in the sense of experiencing a psychologically and emotionally sensible desire for ultimate union with God the Father or with Jesus Christ, is the measure of a soul's health, I'm in trouble. Of course, that's hardly a reductio of the position that desiring God is the ultimate measure of spiritual health. Probably most of us are, to one extent or another, at most times in our lives, spiritually "in trouble." But the concern here is that there is little one can do about it and that God would not demand something and then sit back and not give us the capacity to fulfill those demands. If the wise writings of C.S. Lewis have taught me one thing (and they have taught me many) it is that it is spiritual folly to try to make oneself feel certain things because one thinks that is what one ought to feel.

This is where the will comes in. Can we not say that to try to unite one's will with God's will is to love God? To ask, sincerely, that "thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," and to commit oneself to doing, to the best of one's ability, what is required of oneself to that end, is to respond to Jesus' words: "Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock." It may be beyond my scope to desire God in the abstract, but I can desire in the concrete that nothing in myself should stand in the way of God's glory and the fulfillment of God's will on earth, that I should, rather, be a tool used to that end.

And it seems to me, though I speak under correction, that at that point "he'll take care of the rest."

Blog housekeeping--Backing up

It's only taken me about 5 1/2 years, but I finally found out how to back up this blog. An on-line friend, Michael Bauman, had the URL for one of his blogs nabbed (somehow) by cybersquatters and was looking for a way to get his content back. The fact that this could happen to him spooked me to a salutary degree, and I did some googling and found that it is possible to back up a Blogger blog such as this one fairly easily using some space on one's own hard drive and the "export" function. Settings ---> Other ---> Export blog. The content is saved in .xml format for  easy import into a new blog. Fortunately, despite the cyber-bandits, Dr. Bauman was able to grab his content in this way and move it over to his other, untouched blog, "The Right Word." 

I'm sure anyone who reads this has known for a long time how to back up a Blogger blog. (Wordpress has a similarly easy function, I hear, though it doesn't grab uploaded images.) Just in case you haven't done this for a free personal blog: Take my word for it; it's extremely easy, takes about a minute, can be repeated as needed, and will provide extra security against various mishaps.