How to think in three easy lessons

Now my expression, "people who don't know what the jiggety they're talking about" will become famous!

Why is it just nonsensical to say that "doctrine" and "pastoral care" are opposed? Because they are both about the same truth, the Truth, in fact.

Saying "The truth is true" sounds like it shouldn't need saying, but in the last two weeks, we have seen it denied either explicitly or implicitly by many, many people who are supposed to know better.
But what does "nonsensical" mean, really?

"Aristotle wrote: “there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories…This is clear, in the first place, if we define what the true and the false are. To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false.”

My first post at Steve Skojec's project 1Peter5

Also, I looked things up to write it, even in a BOOK! So it's a really good one.



~

The Real Always Wins

Catholic World Report is asking the awkward questions about Islam that NewChurch doesn't want asked...

I speak about the violence expressed in the Qur'an and practiced in Muhammad's life in order to address the idea, widespread in the West, that the violence we see today is a deformation of Islam. We must honestly admit that there are two readings of the Qur'an and the sunna (Islamic traditions connected to Muhammad): one that opts for the verses that encourage tolerance toward other believers, and one that prefers the verses that encourage conflict.

Both readings are legitimate.

Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, SJ, the Egyptian scholar of Islam who teaches in Beirut and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, quoted by Carl Olsen in the National Catholic Reporter.

This little point is the essence, first, of the conflict between Islam and the West, and second of the kinship between Islam and what we call "liberalism," which, as it is playing out in western countries, is really just another term for creeping irrationalism.

Both systems of thought look upon the restrictions of concrete reality as "irrelevant". Both are essentially nominalistic, saying reality is what I decide it is, that something that is true for me is not necessarily true for you, a rejection of the notion of objective reality, which results, as we have seen in a "dictatorship of relativism".

This is what Benedict was getting at in Regensburg; that religion, whose purpose is to describe The Real, must first be rational.

What does that mean?

This is one of the problems with having the profession of journalist exclusively populated with people from Modernia and Newfanglia. They aren't educated so much as indoctrinated. Thus they don't know what words mean and use them differently - for different purposes - than someone interested in conveying reality. So when it came time to report on the infamous Regensburg Address none of them had the intellectual tools to understand it.

When Benedict said that religions have to reject irrationality, he was talking about what I like to call The Laws of Rational Thought, those principles by which we can ascertain truth from falsehood, reality from illusion.

These of course weren't "invented" by the Greeks, any more than Newton could be said to have invented gravity. You don't have to be either a Greek philosopher or a pope to understand them. I'm pretty sure that these Greeks simply wrote down and systematised something that the Babylonians and Egyptians knew all about. In fact, just looking at these ideas we know that, as C.S. Lewis liked to point out, everyone knows them. Indeed, Aristotle himself said that even a man who doesn't think about philosophy at all still acts in accordance with the Principles of it: "Why does he not just get up first thing and walk into a well or, if he finds one, over a cliff? In fact, he seems rather careful about cliffs and wells."

The formal Aristotelian formulations are still the most clear and useful.

First among the Laws of Rational Thought is the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction. As Aristotle put it in the Metaphysics: "One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time."

Contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. One cannot both be in a room and not in a room at the same time.

This idea, and the ideas that spring from it, is the foundation of everything in our civilisation. It is our basic descriptor of the physical universe: essentially, that it is what it is, and its nature cannot be opposed to itself.

Islam's "god" contradicts itself; it says that a thing can both be and not be in the same respect and the same time. One day Allah says to be merciful and tolerant of Christians and Jews and the next day a good Muslim is to kill them, and as our Jesuit friend above said, "both are true interpretations" of the "will of Allah". Islam embraces the notion that its god, that it proposes as the creator of the universe, can encompass both itself and its contradiction. It proposes an essentially irrational god, and a universe that has no constant, universal laws. A god that changes its mind is no God.

"Liberalism" proposes something similar, that each person is a god who can decide according to his preferences what is and is not real and can change that reality to suit his immediate needs.

Christianity, however, as Judaism before it, posits first a rational God, one that never contradicts Himself. As it is put in Scripture,"For I am the Lord, I do not change. Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob." and "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." God does not change, and proposes a moral law that is more absolute than the physical laws governing the material universe.

(This, and not even questions of the Trinity or the Incarnation, is the first reason, by the way, that I will never accept the trendy NewChurch notion that "we all worship the same God". It's rubbish because the "god" described by Islam is in many respects entirely the opposite of the God described by Christianity. In fact, it more closely resembles a demon.)

This is the kernel at the heart of Benedict's idea that true religion is first rational, and that irrationality is the enemy of everything good, of a peaceful and orderly civilisation. A thing that contradicts itself is an inherently anti-rational thing, and a society that embraces this irrationality will collapse in chaos. And this outcome is absolutely inescapable. Just as a bridge must be built according to accurate mathematics or it will come crashing down into the river, a society built on anything but accurate philosophy will tear itself apart.

The Real always wins.



~

Every day in every way

the pansexualist movement is revealing itself as Nominalist.

"But now you can choose whether to be male, female, or something else—and when the American Psychiatric Association releases their new manual, it will be perfectly normal."

Oxford Shorter English Dictionary:

Nominalism. The view which regards universals or abstract concepts as mere names, without any corresponding realities.

If "gender" is anything we say it is, no wonder the people in the Modernity Matrix are all so miserable. Imagine living in Upsidedownland, a universe where the real is only what we decide it is from moment to moment, where the walls don't have to hold up the ceiling, where up can mean down, where there is no difference between here and there and two opposing things can both be true.

But don't try to imagine it for too long or you might hurt yourself.



~

Missing the point

I hate to say it, but I find the arguments for Intelligent Design to be somewhat unconvincing. I'm afraid I just don't see why the fact that even fairly simple life forms are actually incredibly, amazingly complex, proves anything. I don't see why incredibly, amazingly complex life forms couldn't have developed their complexity through a kind of biological trial and error over a very long period of time. I just don't really see mere complexity as a sufficiently compelling argument for the existence of a designer.

At the same time, I find the answers of the Darwinians equally unsatisfying. I think both groups are locked into a materialist mindset that cannot grasp certain metaphysical ideas. They are looking for proof of God in the wrong place. And they are giving answers that are, essentially, non sequiturs. Religious people understand that the proof for the existence of God has little to do with the question of the origins of the universe or of life. God doesn't live in the universe. The only way He could have created it is to have already existed before it. Physical reality and all the laws governing it were made by God; He therefore can't be part of it.

Darwinians especially seem locked into a silly argument with Protestant fundamentalists over the origins of the physical universe or of life in it. Because they don't know anything about religion or philosophy, (and can't seem to be bothered to look it up on Wikipedia) they they don't seem to understand that Protestant creationists are not only talking scientific nonsense, they are talking through their hats on religion too. I once had to laugh when some nasty little atheist tried to accuse me of being a Creationist because I believed that God made everything. He seemed incapable of understanding that one can believe God is the author of reality without trying to prove that the early verses of the book of Genesis is a literal historical, minute-by-minute account of the first week of existence.

They don't seem to understand that the dumb Proddies arguing this silly theory are just as irritating to intelligent Christians as they are to the scientists.

Creationism is not properly speaking a religious argument about the creation of the universe; it is a political argument for the literal interpretation of the Bible and for sola scriptura. It is, in origin, a fight not with science, but with the Catholic Church. It goes back to the 16th century and is, frankly, very boring and stupid. (Really? I'm supposed to believe that the earth is 4000 years old because of the genealogies? Seriously?) The problem these Proddies have is a basic misunderstanding of what kind of document the Bible is, what it is for, and the way in which it is inerrant. It's neither a history text nor a book about physics or geology.

But this brings me to Intelligent Design, which is not, as far as I can see, an offshoot of this ancient and tired Protestant fight. It really does seem to be a movement springing from scientists who had no previous association with Proddie fundamentalism. And yet, it is still hampered by the same mistakes that both the Creationists and the Darwinians are making. None of them seem able to think outside their materialist box.

God is not in the universe. He made everything and holds everything in existence moment to moment by a continuous, eternal act of His will. The problem everyone seems to have with this question is the difficulty of thinking of things that exist outside physical reality. Outside time and space.

Darwinians and atheists like to say that the universe was brought into being by a big explosion a long time ago. When you ask them what was there before that big explosion, they will say, variously, "nothing" or "another explosion". But these answers are not even addressing the real question. It does not answer, "Where did the explosion come from? What made it happen?" Saying, "It just happened" or things "just exist" is not only unsatisfactory to people like me, it's anti-scientific. It's an expression of belief.

Dawkins once answered the question about where the big bang came from in an interview by saying, "I don't know." Which is at least honest. But when he is saying, "God doesn't exist," and seems to expect people to believe it because he's a scientist, he is making a fool of himself in the same way a plumber would be foolish to make definitive statements about cosmology.

All these people are missing the point. The existence of God really cannot be either proven or disproven by the natural sciences. Dawkins' assertion that God does not exist is not based on evidence, it is not a scientific assertion, it is an expression of religious belief. And I think that the best the ID guys can say is that they believe that such complexity as can be found in the bacterial flagellum, seems likely to point to a designer.

Physical science is only capable of observing objects and systems within physical existence and God, the author of physical reality, does not live there, as an author does not live in the book he writes. When people are looking for evidence of the existence of God, you can't answer them from inside the box of physicality.

Unfortunately for us, natural scientists are no longer trained in philosophy so they don't seem to understand the limits of natural science, and don't seem to know that they can't answer all questions about reality. It's a pity, because it seems clear that the people asking them for proof or disproof of God don't know this either. Modern people have been conditioned to think that questions about what is and is not real can only be answered using empirical science. Philosophy has become so arcane and intellectually corrupt (thanks Descartes) that it would never cross their minds to look for concrete answers there. That there are other kinds of proofs is something that many people, and apparently most scientists, have forgotten or have never known.

Darwinians have failed to even address the real question and it is hard to escape the idea that they are refusing to address it because they know it is outside their competence. It is very difficult to listen to these people talk about religion without thinking them very arrogant, and quite frankly, ignorant. I have always wanted to hear what Dawkins would have to say in response to Aquinas' five proofs. But it seems likely that neither he nor most of his interlocutors have heard of them and none of them, on either side, seem to have any notion that there is any way to address the question without natural science.

They have no background whatever, it seems, in even elementary philosophy. The Darwinian answer, "It just happened," because it ignores the real issue, is trite and unsatisfying. Things do not "just happen". There's this thing in metaphysics called "causality," which is completely observable and which philosophers have called "the cement of the universe". In other words, you can't have physical reality without it.

I myself have been observing things not just happening all my life. Events inside physical reality, existence, are always caused by some other event. All of existence is linked together by this chain and everything that happens also causes other things to happen. This is something that everyone can observe and figure out.

This means that everything that happens and everything that exists is "contingent". Everything is reliant on the thing prior to it in the chain. In philosophy, the word contingent means, "neither impossible nor necessary". A contingent being, therefore, is something that really exists, but depends on something else for its existence. Contingent beings do not exist out of necessity. It is not their nature to exist. I am a contingent being, there was a time when I didn't exist, therefore it is not my nature to exist.

The trouble that both the Darwinians and the ID people are having is that they are trying to demonstrate the existence of God from observing things within that chain of causality, and all they can come up with are things that do not exist out of necessity. Things that are contingent, dependent upon something else in the chain for their existence.

What they seem incapable of doing, perhaps because their intellectual training has been too specialised, is thinking about something that exists out of necessity. What people are asking when they want to know where did the universe come from is not, when was the Big Bang. It is, where and when did the chain of causality start?

The only way to start this chain that is the "cement of the universe," the foundation of physical reality, is to be something whose nature it is to already exist, to exist outside time and space. It has to be something that is not subject to causality, whose existence is not contingent, or dependent on anything else to have started it.

There is only one thing, one being, whose nature it is to have always existed and which will always exist in the future, and this being by its nature cannot exist within the boundaries of the causal chain.

Next time you're discussing the existence of God or the origins of the universe, the thing to ask is not, when did it all start, but how. All things are dependent upon previous things. What, then, is the first thing?



~

Fundamentally unsound

Islamic person suddenly goes insane, grabs big knife and starts randomly attacking people and cars on the road.

I think I'm not the only one to point it out, but this is what happens when you try to believe logically contradictory things.

This is why I think most Islamic people are insane. Or go insane eventually, once they are taken out of the "Islamic world" where efforts are made to paper over the cracks in their universe. They come to the countries that were founded on The Real, where effect is assumed to follow cause (for example). The contrast becomes acute and they start realising that they believe things that make no sense, and go nuts.

Think I'm making it up or being facetious?

Ever read Nietzsche?

As Jeeves once warned his beloved employer, "You would not enjoy Nietzsche sir. He is fundamentally unsound."



~

A distinction without a difference

I wrote this some time ago.

I'm not saying that it is in any way more relevant now to anything or anyone whatsoever than it was before.

"I'm not pro-abortion. I'm pro-choice!" How many times have pro-life advocates come across this indignant exclamation? Vian has here presented the quintessential "liberal Catholic" position (perhaps not unconnected to the secular humanist position), that the best, highest, most moral stance is that there must never, under any circumstances be "confrontation." There is no greater evil than to take an "ideological position." Peace in our time, and at any cost.

It sounds fine, to some, when we are talking about abortion, a subject upon which there is much moral disagreement. But try changing the discussion just a little. Imagine for a moment we are talking about moral evils upon which there is no dispute. Can there be a non-confrontational position on genocide? Imagine for a moment the editor of the Vatican's newspaper praising Barack Obama for his non-confrontational stand on slavery. On rape. On wife battery.

When a person says, "I'm pro-choice," he is trying to find a middle point between two things that are simply opposed, an obvious intellectual squirm.

But let us examine the "pro-choice" assertion. Say a person were to tell you that he is "pro-choice" on slavery. He would say, with a noble lift of the brow perhaps, "I don't like slavery. I don't feel it is right for me to own another human being. But I also don't believe that it is my right to impose my personal beliefs on another. I believe in personal choice. It is between a man and his god whether he should own a slave".

It is obvious, isn't it? The thing chosen must be moral before the concept of being "pro-choice" can also be moral. For Vian to say that Barack Obama is merely "pro-choice," and to imply that this is a position superior to the "ideological" pro-life stand, he is, first, kowtowing to the abortion industry who invented the slogan to soothe troubled consciences, and second, but most importantly, he is saying that abortion is a moral thing to choose.

In championing the pro-life position, we simply say that between life and death, there is no third thing. You are either alive or you are not. Abortion kills or it does not. It is morally permissible or it is not. There are simply some things that do not admit of a "neutral" third position. Between these two opposed possibilities, there can only be "confrontation," distasteful as that may be to some sensibilities.

In fact, Obama's (and presumably Vian's) ideological ancestors did actually make precisely that argument about slavery.

Something that is not, for obvious reasons, widely admitted these days is that it was the Democrats who argued for the continued existence of legal slavery in the Union. I am ready to be corrected by my American readers, but was it not exactly opposition to slavery upon which the Republican party was founded?

The Lincoln/Douglas debates are still famous (among the segment of the US population still interested in reading books) because in it, the Democrat candidate for the presidency, Stephen Douglas, argued that slavery should remain legal on the same principle that would later be used to defend a woman's "choice" to kill her child.

He said, in a nutshell, that while he would not own slaves, and it should not be something that right-thinking people should want, there is no way to judge a man's personal beliefs and to legislate against slavery would be an unjust imposition of the state in his personal affairs. Or an imposition of the federal law into state law, if I recall it correctly.

Douglas proposed "peace in our time" on slavery and lost.

And it is often conveniently forgotten that Lincoln was the Republican candidate.

Not sure how it would go today, however.

You see, slavery was a deeply "divisive" issue, (as our Democrat/liberal Catholic friends would say today)...

"Uniformity in the local laws and institutions of the different States is neither possible or desirable. If uniformity had been adopted when the Government was established, it must inevitably have been the uniformity of slavery everywhere, or else the uniformity of negro citizenship and negro equality everywhere..."

So, if I were, purely hypothetically, examining the pro-choice vs. pro-abortion issue in, say for argument's sake, a civil court, I might ask the self-described personally-opposed-but, "pro-choice" person, "What choice, exactly, are you defending?"

If the person answered, "The choice to have an abortion," I might then be inclined to ask, "But isn't this the thing you have just said you are against?"

"Oh yes, of course, abortion is terrible."

"Why is it terrible?"

"Well...err...ummm...Well, it's, ahhh,

...

divisive."

Indeed.



~

"The Church teaches..."

I say it all the time. I hear other people saying it all the time. You read it all the time in the newspapers and magazines and on the 'net.

"The Church teaches..." that homosexual acts are sinful...that women cannot be ordained...just to take a few of the MSM's favourites. And sometimes you will even see the (1992) Catechism quoted (well, of course, not often and never in the New York Times, but occasionally) directly on the subjects.

But what is much more infrequently (ie. never) mentioned is the reason the Church teaches the things she does. And the reason she remains "intransigent" on things like women's ordination and same-sex marriage. Here's a little secret that we would like journalists to understand better: When a Catholic, from the pope on down to the parish tea-lady, says "the Church teaches..." they mean "it is objectively true that..." In other words, neither the Pope, nor the parish tea lady has any more power to change it than they have the power to change the rate at which gravity makes things fall down.

What is rarely understood is that the Church approaches these things like a scientist approaches an observable phenomenon. The scientist, when looking at something through a telescope or microscope, asks himself "What is this? What does it do? What is it made of?" He wants to know what is the actual, objective truth is about the phenomenon. He observes its characteristics and writes them down. He tests his observations by setting up experiments and repeating the experiments to see if the observations are always the same. He asks a set of questions about it based on axioms, things that are self-evidently true and are impossible to doubt. In the Laws of Rational Thought, an axiom is what you have to start with, to base your investigations on, if you want to understand anything.

For the Greeks, who invented the idea, an axiom was a claim which could be seen to be true without any need for proof. The deductive method of finding things out means observing a phenomenon, and asking questions about it based on existing premises, or things we already know. When all these pieces fit together, then you can be pretty sure (Thomas might say "morally certain") that the thing you conclude is true.

The Church, similarly, when presented with a new thing, cloning and embryonic stem cell research for example, starts by examining it and asking a set of questions based on what we already know. Both the Natural Law and Revelation give us a set of moral axioms to build with. "Thou shalt not kill," being one that most people are familiar with. Understood properly, it means no individual may kill another individual unless it is for self defence or defence of another.

From this moral axiom, we can draw all kinds of helpful conclusions about things that St. Augustine and Thomas never heard of, like the Vietnam War and germline gene splicing.

One of the best and contemporarily most useful documents the Church has put out recently demonstrating not only What the Church Teaches on embryo research, but the methods the Church uses to come to binding moral conclusions was Donum Vitae, the 1986 document put out by Cardinal Ratzinger's CDF on the new reproductive technologies.

I'd recommend reading it, or at least taking a look, because it really does give an excellent demonstration of the theological scientific methods used by the Church to make conclusions. The question and answer format makes it clear why, exactly, you can't do the various things the Church says you can't do to embryos. And here's the kicker, it's based on real science, not the pseudo-scientific mush most modern Bioethicists ("pre-embryo" anyone?) cite when they say that cloning and embryo research are just fine and dandy.

In other words, despite what the likes of the Dawkinses and the Sr. Grammicks of the world might think, there is really nothing arbitrary about Catholic teaching. And, as Michael says above, when a Catholic says, "The Church teaches..." he is saying, more or less, "It is objectively true that..." He is, moreover, saying, "...and we can prove it."



~

Click your heels together and say to yourself: There is no ontology, there is no ontology...

~

I once had a regular reader here, who (quite aptly) describing him/herself as "Chimera" used to come up with gems like "Well, it's not subjectivism to me!", and would then become all cross when everyone else at the Picnic would fall on the floor laughing. Who knows why this creature continued to pester us, since he/she seemed incapable of grasping anything that was said, but he did provide an excellent living example of the axiom, "liberalism makes you stupid."

No matter how many times, nor how patiently (admittedly, not my strongest suit) I tried to explain the nature of the logical principle of non-contradiction, Chimera would continue to fail to grasp the idea that a proposal and its oppposite cannot both be true. Of course, without the training, I could not identify in detail the nature of the intellectual errors he made, but of course, it was essentially the modernist error in metaphysics. Our world cannot seem to grasp the idea of the thingness of things.

I was having a conversation (perhaps ironically, on Facebook) with an old friend, about something related to the homosexualist ideology, to which she wholeheartedly adheres, and I realised that there was no point in continuing the discussion. She objected, I think I recall, to the prohibition against homosexuals giving blood. The indisputable fact that homosexuals, as a group, have much higher rates of diseases transmissible by blood meant nothing to her. It was discriminatory, and therefore needed to be stopped. Easily verifiable medical facts made no difference to her.

I could have begun the tedious task of taking apart her arguments and explaining the rhetorical errors she was using, and the factual mistakes, but I saw that she simply did not have the intellectual tools to grasp her error, which meant that there was no communication possible. I simply dropped it.

I have often talked about the feeling of living in a strange parallel universe in which I can see others and be seen by them, but in which there is no communication possible.

What is being lost is the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect, of distinguishing between differing levels of argument, and particularly any appreciation for abstraction. Increasingly, students expect to be spoon-fed with concrete examples, operational instructions, mechanical repetitions, and pictorial representation. The loss of language is but a symptom of the loss of thought -- and losing thought means losing much more.

...

The problem ultimately lies in a misconstrued metaphysics, or rather in the absence of any notion of ontology at all. When Bill Clinton was asked whether he had sexual relations with a White House intern and famously replied that this depended on the meaning of "is," his statement was of course evasive and facetious. But it was also intelligent: For apart from the time-indexed meaning of the copula in the present tense, the "is" in "This is a ball" is different from that in "A ball is a spherical object." The first sentence identifies a particular (or token) as a member of a class (or type), whereas the second offers a definition through the synonymy of types. The "is" in "it's like" is neither of these, for it seeks to define a type -- for example, "a ball" or "market segmentation" -- by reference to a token...

Providing merely an aspect of what is to be explained is not only reductionist (by substituting a part for the whole); it is also a subjectivist move that avoids describing and thus reflecting on the essence of what is to be explained. It is indicative of our age of increasing relativism under the guise of "pluralism" and "tolerance" -- your feeling about the nature of something is just as good as my feeling, because there really isn't any "is"; there may not even be an "a." Then a ball might as well have edges, for who can tell me that I can only call something a ball if it is round?

There is a curious reluctance to think about the nature of things, maybe as a result of decades of teaching that there is no such nature apart from what one wants them to be. Rather, students increasingly see the world phenomenologically -- as a haphazard arrangement of "stuff" and of events informed by the sensory impressions of their own experience but devoid of any structure.

...

Where in earlier ages people worked in their gardens, played an instrument, went fishing, read books, entertained guests, or engaged in conversation with family or friends, they have become passive and speechless consumers of canned content. These screens help produce a people that is losing its language. But more importantly, these people no longer see structures in their world but rather a bewildering juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events.

~

So I'm like, 'Dude!..."

Someone else has noticed, using the Laws of Rational Thought, that the loss of facility with language is related to the loss of the ability to think clearly.

Loss of language among the younger population -- that is to say, the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders. The ubiquitous confusion between "there" and "their" may still be considered a quaint and negligible fluke that nearly creates a new orthographic norm; the inability to express lucid arguments must not.

The loss of the distinction (which I have suddenly started seeing everywhere, and in places where I really should never see it at all) between "there," "their" and "they're" is not just a language-snob problem. I don't know if any research could possibly be done to support my observation, but I have seen lately a terrible slump in the quality of writing, even by fairly intelligent people who claim to have attended decent schools.

Some time ago, I posted this that seems to have received some praise in various places.

(Aside: I received a very kind email a couple of weeks ago from a nice chap who asked me for a link. I have to say, and it should be noted by others, that I don't approve of link-fishing. If you have something that is of any quality it will be discovered and its merits will promote it for you. If you go around the web asking for links like a Romanian gypsy begging on the train, you are much more likely to get from me what they get. Which isn't money. But Edward seems like a nice chap, so here, just this once. I'm probably going soft.)

I see that Daniel Mitsui, whose website and work I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorse, has quoted me:

Nietzsche said, I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. If only Nietzsche had lived long enough to see the 1970's and the new education he would have rejoiced at the final triumph of the human will over God...

The Restoration is not only a matter of politics, or even education qua education. It is an essential re-construction of ruined thought. Imagine Western Civilization not as a set of... precious cultural artifacts like the Mass or the Divine Office or legally indissoluble natural marriage or even any philosophical school. Imagine that it is a larger thing than that; it is a framework for our thought, our creative efforts. Imagine that it is the structure that makes something like Chartres or Salisbury Cathedral possible. The container for the idea of Chartres, without which no Chartres could be conceived.

I remember in Narnia, the worst, most horrible fate that the Talking Beasts could imagine was to lose language. To revert to being an ordinary dumb animal, to no longer have the spark of Divine Knowledge that Aslan had given them at the creation of their world.

I know I have written about this before, but I keep coming back to that scene in Prince Caspian when the children and Trumpkin are attacked in the forest by a bear. For a moment, Susan is filled with the horrible thought, "What if he is a Talking Bear, gone wild, who has reverted to the ways of dumb bears." For a dangerous moment she hesitates to fire for fear that she would be killing one of her subjects. When the bear is dead, Lucy, ever thoughtful, says to Susan, "What if, back home, the same thing had happened to men. That however much they may look like ordinary men on the outside, they had really gone wild inside." Susan tells Lucy not to think such horrible thoughts.

I think these horrible thoughts all the time. I think maybe it is what my mother was referring to when she wrote to me once of "the pain you seem to feel all the time."

Probably. It could be that these horrible thoughts have caught up with me, and this could be why I seem never to be able to be happy.

Here I am, typing this on my laptop, sitting in the midst of a glorious, fragrant, singing July day in Italy, 300 yards from the beach, on the balcony of my lovely apartment, surrounded by wonderful friends, employed in good work, in good health and safe. All these gifts, and yet my hope and faith barely clinging on.

I don't know. Maybe I've always been able to see that the facade of the world hides a cultural rot and despair that is only now starting to become visible to others. I remember even as a child, in the hippie-dippy 70s, knowing that the world was not what it seemed. That people were not as well as they pretended to be. That things were falling apart. Or, maybe I should say, being deliberately torn apart. I've always been an instinctual conservative.

I'm going into Rome today, just to hang out a bit. Maybe look at some monuments or art or something. It's important to try to remember that the world keeps going. People keep living and doing things, even when the barbarians are at the gates. Civilisations go up, civilisations go down. True things remain.

Maybe we should have a pop quiz for regular O's P readers. I wish Blogger would set up a thing where, instead of a word verification, you had to complete a literacy verification quiz before commenting.

What are the differences, for example, between the following?

Lay and lie.

Fewer and less.

Who and whom.

Flew and flown.

There, their, and they're.



~

Pro-Life 101 - "Yeah, but what about rape?"

Today's popular Abortion Slogan is a favourite of young men wanting to look good to the girls in the class.

I won't bother spending the time re-typing it all out. I'll just re-post:

~

Now, I know that the principles of rational thought are not popular these days, equally in schools as in parliaments, but one has to wonder at the willingness of so many to have their intelligence, whether real or imagined, so brazenly insulted, and their compassion manipulated, as it is by the abortion lobby in the case of the "rape exception".

The rape exception is the one argument that most irritates me. Not because of its inherent dishonesty - one expects only dishonesty from people conniving to murder helpless infants - but for the blind, drooling stupidity of the people who buy it, normally without the slightest examination. Or perhaps I should say the willing connivance of the marks. It is said that people who go to carnivals with a few shillings to spend on the ring-toss game, actually want to be swindled. Why else would one to go a carnival?

When I am talking to school groups about abortion, naturally after we have painstakingly gone through and demonstrated the existence of a human being in the womb (don't they tell these kids any more where babies come from? What are they doing in all those sex-education classes in kindergarten anyway?) someone in the back of the room will invariably put his (it is always a he) hand up and say "Yeah, but what about rape?"

He says this for two reasons: he has been taught that favouring abortion for rape is a mark of deep sensitivity and that "sensitivity" is a sure fire method of getting girls into bed, and that it is a stumper. He believes, in effect, that because the pro-life position is inherently flawed by its hatred of women and desire to oppress and subjugate them, that this is The Big One that will always end the discussion. This, he believes will establish his feminist political cred...which is also a sure fire method of getting girls into bed.

He expects me to have no answer, and sadly, this is the case with most of the people who consider themselves pro-life.

What is saddest, and most ironic, about the eagerness of most of our progressively-minded modern people, as well as many "pro-life" people, to defend the rape exception, is that they love it because it is held up as a model of compassion and toleration towards the victimised. This is especially tempting to pro-lifers who are possibly tired of being called EVIL FASCISTS. They long to be included in the ranks of the tolerant and compassionate. The same people will, with precisely the same earnest expressions, tell you all about the evils of capital punishment. They have such strong feeeeelings, you see, for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the victimised.

But who has told them that abortion is a requirement in cases of pregnancy due to rape? And what are their motives?

But these goodthinkful people will not question the motives or origin of the received wisdom. That's why we call it that. When you ask them why they support the death penalty for the children of criminals, they simply look at you with a fullwise goodthinkfully blank expression and you can almost see their grey cells desperately rushing to batten down the hatches and close the sea doors.

I once had a conversation with a Parliamentary Aid who had great ambitions. He was a member of the the-Canadian Alliance party and was clearly keen to Go Places. He had an idea, generally, that abortion should be curtailed, but of course, with his skinny under-dressed girlfriend on his arm, was very quick to say that the exceptions should include rape.

I asked him why he supported the death penalty.

He jumped like he had been stuck with a pin. "What?! I don't!"

"Oh good," I said. "For a second there, I thought you wanted to bring in the death penalty for the children of criminals."

Once again, the application of a few pieces of objective reality, connected together with the indestructible ties of rational thought, will create a Logic Grenade that will blow the feathery traces of the "rape exception" to smithereens.

In a discussion with someone who supports the death penalty for the innocent children of rapists, the following questions are often helpful:

Where do babies come from?

Who should be punished for the crime of rape? The woman? Her children?

Since abortion is a procedure that involves risk to the woman, and can be traumatic, wouldn't it be better to wait until the child is born and kill him then?

Maybe, in cases of pregnancy due to rape, we can keep a loaded gun in the delivery room, and if the sight of the child reminds her unpleasantly of the rape, we can give her the gun and she can shoot the baby right away.

Something to remember about the "rape exception" is that it is a red herring. It is not, in fact, an argument for legalised abortion in the exceedingly rare cases where pregnancy has been caused by rape. It is just a slogan, and a slogan is, as I've said before, neither an argument nor a reason. It is a claxon. A noise meant to end discussion and induce a powerful emotional reaction.

Studies have found that rape frequently does not result in pregnancy. There are chemical changes that occur in a woman's body that tend to prevent it. But the rape exception has been extremely politically useful to the abortion movement. It has been used as an emotional wedge issue to force the door open to legalising abortion in all and any circumstances.

As Scott Klusendorf likes to say, "If I change my position to support legalised abortion in the 0.01 per cent of cases of pregnancy due to rape and incest, will you then drop your support for abortion on demand?"

Its effectiveness can be seen in the fact that even in countries that have retained some legal restrictions on abortion, many of them have not dared to cross the line of the "rape and incest" emotional button-pusher. The fact that the "rape exception" collapses on the application of the slightest logic and medical facts, deters politicians not in the least.

Politicians are mostly men. And, like our high-school friend above looking to use his sensitivity to lever down a girl's trousers, politicians cannot afford to risk the shrieking and hysteria opposition to the "rape exception" would cost them.



~

Ah, it's that time of year again!

Ever wonder about the modern world's total inability to think clearly? Ever wonder why five manifestly self-contradictory slogans were effective in convincing the majority of people in western democracies that it's a good idea to legalise infanticide? Ever wonder why we now think it's the ultimate act of love to kill our closest friends and relatives?

Ever read any of my posts about the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction?

OK, I can see we have some new people here.

A little while ago, a friend on facebook approvingly posted a link to a liberal US talking head who was saying how dreadful it is that "gays" are precluded from giving blood. It's DISCRIMINATION I tell you!!! Because in the cloudy pink-tinged intellectual netherland of Homophilia there is absolutely no problem involved in the "gay lifestyle" that is not created by homophobia.

The desire felt by a man for another man is indicative of absolutely no psycho-social distortion of any sort. And their activities have absolutely no medical consequences whatever. Pay no attention to those websites behind the curtain!

There is no such thing as the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction either! And there are absolutely no absolutes!

Gay men are just nice artistically-inclined chaps in turtlenecks who are funny, friendly and ironic, and who are inexplicably hated and persecuted by Catholics and people who watch Fox. They are, to a man, as respectable and salt-of-the-earth as Ward and June Cleaver. Picket fence! Apple pie!

Nothing to see here...

Move along...

I see that Kathy has been using her brain in an unauthorized manner again:

As Gay Pride revs up yet again, thoughtful people are asked to swallow, as it were, the same tiresome and illogical worldview held by so many professional homosexuals.

Somehow, they manage to believe and promote the following contradictory "facts" at the same time:

* Gays are marginalized victims who live in the shadows -- with their very own corporately sponsored parades and festivals that shut down major cities once a year.

* These pride parades have been going on for twenty years -- BUT gays still claim to be as misunderstood, hated and persecuted as they were before Stonewall. Are these parades therefore ineffective? If so, what purpose do they serve?

* There is a "gay gene" -- BUT "everyone is really bisexual" and "sexuality is fluid" -- BUT despite said "fluidity", gays cannot and do not "recruit" or "groom" straight young people, ever.

* All the great people who ever lived were "secretly gay", like Shakespeare. No bad people like Hitler were "secretly gay" -- unless the pent up pain caused by their "secret gayness" was what really made them crazy murderers!

* Religious "gay to straight" treatments are considered a sinister, existential threat to gay culture -- AND can't possibly "work." Anyone who turns "straight" after therapy was never "really" gay anyhow, even though sexuality is fluid etc. The half dozen "gay people" I've known in my life who later "turned" straight (none of whom underwent treatment of any kind, but just... grew up) were also "not really gay" during the years they were having sex with same sex partners, coming out to their parents with mixed reactions, marching in the Pride Parade, taking "queer studies" and so forth. They were just "going through a phase" -- even though a perennially popular queer t-shirt proclaims "It's Not Just a Phase!"

* Gays commit suicide at high rates because everybody is persecuting them. Yet Lithuanians have the world's highest suicide rate despite total non-existence of "Lithuan-ophobia." Russians also have a high suicide rate. Can we somehow blame "residual Cold War hatred"? Discuss.

Blacks, Jews and women experience what leftists would describe as persecution, yet don't have comparable suicide rates.

Only gays practically brag about their alleged suicide rates. (Are they neurotically and pathologically prone to romanticizing self-destructive behaviors? If so, why?)

* Gay activists claim domestic violence is no more common in gay relationships than in straight ones. If self-loathing caused by "homophobia" makes gays beat each other up, then what causes straight domestic violence again...?

* Movies like All About Eve and Johnny Guitar, which feature no gay characters, are all "really" about gays. However, overwhelming evidence of actual gay behaviour in real life (such as the sexual abuse of teenaged boys by Catholic priests and Buddhist monks) is NOT gay, even a little tiny bit.

* Does a movement based upon junk science, urban legends, romanticized non-history, a few sappy Hollywood films (in which, for some disturbing and mysterious reason, the gay characters all die, sometimes horribly...) and an (un)healthy dash of narcissism and neurosis really deserve so much respect?

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

The Great Steyn hath spoken

I initially had mixed feelings about Everybody Draws Mohammed Day. Provocation for its own sake is one of the dreariest features of contemporary culture, but that's not what this is about. Nick Gillespie's post reminds us that the three most offensive of the "Danish cartoons" - including the one showing Mohammed as a pig - were not by any Jyllands-Posten cartoonists but were actually faked by Scandinavian imams for the purposes of stirring up outrage among Muslims...

But, that aside, the clerics' action underlines what's going on: the real provocateurs are the perpetually aggrieved and ever more aggressive Islamic bullies - emboldened by the silence of "moderate Muslims" and the pre-emptive capitulation of western media.

causa finita.


But it's not just the western media.

Just finished this amusing and highly illustrative exchange on a facebook page where a friend of mine had posted a traditional Bomb Turban cartoon of old Mo in honour of the day. FB, whose profile made it clear that she is a white westerner, whould be a shoo-in for a job with the CBC multicultural relations department. Or maybe the CHRC.

FB:
I'm all for freedom of speech but that does not give people the right to say and do anything that they want. ps I am catholic (if you didn't already know and I go to church).

Hilary Jane Margaret White:
So, you like freedom of speech, as long as its not, you know, free.

FB:
Hilary I don't know you but if i started insulting you would that be ok??? You know free speech and all.


Hilary Jane Margaret White:
It should be legal. That's what free speech means. It means that if you insult me and I get mad, I can't have you thrown in prison.


Hilary Jane Margaret White
...or have your head cut off, or blow up your embassy, or shoot your priest, or kidnap and murder your journalists, or...

get it now?


FB
Interesting theory you have got going there. Don't suppose you are American by any chance?


Hilary Jane Margaret White
Nope. Just rational.


FB
Rational? If you say so..that's your free speech!


A,
so logically, from the point of Hilary, people who blow up embessies [sic] are offended by freedom of speech!!!cuz it is not legal?

FB
A, we could be friends but im getting the hell off facebook bc people do think they have the right to say and do anything they want.


Hilary Jane Margaret White
A, do you just put words into a bag and shake them up when you read things? So sentences are kind of like Scrabble pieces for you then...


FB:
A, don't be offended by Hilary. When people don't have anything to say they resort to comments like this.

Hilary Jane Margaret White
Ready to be arrested now, 'cause, you know, free speech should only be free when no one is offended...

Right?

Ok, so let's see if I've got this straight,

Everyone who holds "conservative," that is, traditionally Christian, beliefs about sex and all that, is a "bigot".

My Church is not a safe haven for bigots ...I was hoping that the Church’s antipathy to female and openly gay priests would, in time, weaken and dissolve. Now instead, it seems, a whole lot of bigoted reinforcements are arriving to galvanise those more unpalatable aspects of Roman Catholic doctrine. Should I stay in a club that would welcome these people as members?

Am I getting it right?

Ummm...

isn't that,

well,

kind of

bigoted?

Diogenes grins evilly:

there's no question but that it's got the right people pouting. Across the board, among Catholics, Anglicans, and neutral spectators, hostility varies inversely with orthodoxy.

Self-Identify

Steyn's having a fun time, tweaking that tail:

A female couple can choose to conceive. A male couple—Barrie and Tony from Chelmsford, England—can choose to conceive and both be registered as the biological fathers of their children not so much on the technical grounds that they had “co-mingled” their sperm before shipping it out to their Fallopian time-share in California but out of a more basic sympathy that this is how Barrie and Tony “self-identify” and it would be cruel to deny them.

A woman in Bend, Ore., can choose to become a man, and then a “pregnant man.” A man can choose to become a woman. A man can choose to get halfway to becoming a woman, and then decide it’s more fun to “live in the grey area.”

Biologically, Barrie or Tony, but not both, is the sole father of their child; the “pregnant man” is pregnant but not a man; the he/she living in “the grey area” is in reality black or white—at least according to what we used to call “the facts of life.” But issuers of passports, drivers’ licences, even birth certificates and no doubt one day U.S. Department of Homeland Security visas now defer to the principle of “self-identification.”

So, I think I get the logic here. If we all have to agree that Stan/Loretta can have not only the right to have babies, but the actual babies themselves, then reality really is a construct of the imagination and we can have anything we want and everyone else has to go along with it, right?

OK, index fingers on temples, eyes squeezed shut as tight as they will go, and concentrate...

I hereby self-identify as fabulously wealthy.

Oh, and that I look like a 23 year-old Diana Rigg.



~

Adding to my already vast collection of deathlessly nonsensical Tony Blair quotes is always fun.

Here's the master of self-contradictory blither on religion:

I think that for all religions, the challenge is how do you extract the essential values of the faith from a vast accumulation of doctrine and practice? For many people, the reason for their religious faith is less to do with the doctrine and
practice, and more to do with the values like love of God and love of your
neighbour.

Repost: Taken for Chumps

I just happen to be thinking about it.

Now, I know that the principles of rational thought are not popular these days, equally in schools as in parliaments, but one has to wonder at the willingness of so many to have their intelligence, whether real or imagined, so brazenly insulted, and their compassion manipulated, as it is by the abortion lobby in the case of the "rape exception".

The rape exception is the one argument that most irritates me. Not because of its inherent dishonesty - one expects only dishonesty from people conniving to murder helpless infants - but for the blind, drooling stupidity of the people who buy it, normally without the slightest examination. Or perhaps I should say the willing connivance of the marks. It is said that people who go to carnivals with a few shillings to spend on the ring-toss game, actually want to be swindled. Why else would one to go a carnival?

When I am talking to school groups about abortion, naturally after we have painstakingly gone through and demonstrated the existence of a human being in the womb (don't they tell these kids any more where babies come from? What are they doing in all those sex-education classes in kindergarten anyway?) someone in the back of the room will invariably put his (it is always a he) hand up and say "Yeah, but what about rape?"

He says this for two reasons: he has been taught that favouring abortion for rape is a mark of deep sensitivity and that "sensitivity" is a sure fire method of getting girls into bed, and that it is a stumper. He believes, in effect, that because the pro-life position is inherently flawed by its hatred of women and desire to oppress and subjugate them, that this is The Big One that will always end the discussion. This, he believes will establish his feminist political cred...which is also a sure fire method of getting girls into bed.

He expects me to have no answer, and sadly, this is the case with most of the people who consider themselves pro-life. In Britain, I would suggest, because there is no pro-life movement to speak of and those who imagine themselves to be pro-life have not the slightest notion of what it means, it is doubly the case. The British "pro-life" "movement" has failed so absolutely because it is based on warm fuzzy feelings towards cute little babies and depends wholly on a vestigial culturally generated moral sense that can now be found only in the previous generation, who themselves only ever had a hazy grasp of the meaning of the word "principle". Once the little old ladies, cooing gently over the sight of a sweet-faced cherub are gone, even that will vanish. And nothing will replace it. The world will belong to Generation Why. Maybe we could re-name them Generation Why Not?

What is saddest, and most ironic, about the eagerness of most of our progressively minded modern people, as well as many "pro-life" people, to defend the rape exception, is that they love it because it is held up as a model of compassion and toleration towards the victimised. This is especially tempting to pro-lifers who are possibly tired of being called EVIL FASCISTS. They long to be included in the ranks of the tolerant and compassionate. The same people will, with precisely the same earnest expressions, tell you all about the evils of capital punishment. They have such strong feeeeelings, you see, for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the victimised.

But no one stops to wonder who it is exactly that is doing the "holding up". Who exactly, has told them that abortion is a requirement in cases of pregnancy due to rape? And what are their motives?

But these goodthinkful people will not question the motives or origin of the received wisdom. That's why we call it that. When you ask them why they support the death penalty for the children of criminals, they simply look at you with a fullwise goodthinkfully blank expression and you can almost see their grey cells desperately rushing to batten down the hatches and close the sea doors.

"Doubleplusungoodthink. unoft, plusungoodthink or ungoodthink. Oldthink is unwith BB and party. oldthinkers unluv doubleplusgood waylive BB command. Oldthinkers oft is crimethinkers. Oldthinkers oft make crimethink."

Crimestop.

...

When giving talks in schools, I was able to relieve the tedium by setting these sorts of traps and watching the poor chumps dive eagerly into them. (Even more amusing than tripping blind people).

"Hands up everyone who supports the death penalty." Never any takers for that one, especially in Catholic schools.

"Good. It is true that most western progressive countries, those who have been governed for centuries by the rule of law, have abolished the death penalty. Even for serious crimes like treason, murder and rape.

"We do not execute rapists, in the hopes, perhaps, that they will be reformed. Or perhaps only on the grounds that it is simply wrong to kill, even to kill a dangerous criminal."

General agreement, but at the same time a vague sense of discomfort growing...they know something is going on, but haven't the acuity to guess what.

"Now, let's examine a country that does have it. Communist China has more capital offenses [brief pause to explain the terms 'Communist' and 'capital offense'] than any other country in the world. And they carry out more executions than any other country. Even than the United States.

"Let us pretend for a moment that you are an official of China's legal system charged with carrying out executions. Would you consider granting clemency to a rapist?" [pause to explain 'clemency'.]

...nod nod nod...

"What about to the rapist's 18 month-old daughter?"

Silence.

Crimestop.

A right to his opinions

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was one of us.

I picked up a little paperback of a series of lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1913, the year before the world ended, on the merits of studying English Literature.

He, like all men properly educated in his time, was an objectivist.

On the need for clear definitions:

Definitions, formulae (some would add, creeds) have their use in any society in that they restrain the ordinary unitellectual man from making a public nuisance with his private opinions.

The Reverse Dictionary

Examine the following description:

the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought...The power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

Choose one:

1) a requirement of holding public office in Britain

2) the job description of BBC and Guardian journalists

3) job description for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury

4) all of the above.

Taken for Chumps

Now, I know that the principles of rational thought are not popular these days, equally in schools as in parliaments, but one has to wonder at the willingness of so many to have their intelligence, whether real or imagined, so brazenly insulted, and their compassion manipulated, as it is by the abortion lobby in the case of the "rape exception".

The rape exception is the one argument that most irritates me. Not because of its inherent dishonesty - one expects only dishonesty from people conniving to murder helpless infants - but for the blind, drooling stupidity of the people who buy it, normally without the slightest examination. Or perhaps I should say the willing connivance of the marks. It is said that people who go to carnivals with a few shillings to spend on the ring-toss game, actually want to be swindled. Why else would one to go a carnival?

When I am talking to school groups about abortion, naturally after we have painstakingly gone through and demonstrated the existence of a human being in the womb (don't they tell these kids any more where babies come from? What are they doing in all those sex-education classes in kindergarten anyway?) someone in the back of the room will invariably put his (it is always a he) hand up and say "Yeah, but what about rape?"

He says this for two reasons: he has been taught that favouring abortion for rape is a mark of deep sensitivity and that "sensitivity" is a sure fire method of getting girls into bed, and that it is a stumper. He believes, in effect, that because the pro-life position is inherently flawed by its hatred of women and desire to oppress and subjugate them, that this is The Big One that will always end the discussion. This, he believes will establish his feminist political cred...which is also a sure fire method of getting girls into bed.

He expects me to have no answer, and sadly, this is the case with most of the people who consider themselves pro-life. In Britain, I would suggest, because there is no pro-life movement to speak of and those who imagine themselves to be pro-life have not the slightest notion of what it means, it is doubly the case. The British "pro-life" "movement" has failed so absolutely because it is based on warm fuzzy feelings towards cute little babies and depends wholly on a vestigial culturally generated moral sense that can now be found only in the previous generation, who themselves only ever had a hazy grasp of the meaning of the word "principle". Once the little old ladies, cooing gently over the sight of a sweet-faced cherub are gone, even that will vanish. And nothing will replace it. The world will belong to Generation Why. Maybe we could re-name them Generation Why Not?

What is saddest, and most ironic, about the eagerness of most of our progressively minded modern people, as well as many "pro-life" people, to defend the rape exception, is that they love it because it is held up as a model of compassion and toleration towards the victimised. This is especially tempting to pro-lifers who are possibly tired of being called EVIL FASCISTS. They long to be included in the ranks of the tolerant and compassionate. The same people will, with precisely the same earnest expressions, tell you all about the evils of capital punishment. They have such strong feeeeelings, you see, for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the victimised.

But no one stops to wonder who it is exactly that is doing the "holding up". Who exactly, has told them that abortion is a requirement in cases of pregnancy due to rape? And what are their motives?

But these goodthinkful people will not question the motives or origin of the received wisdom. That's why we call it that. When you ask them why they support the death penalty for the children of criminals, they simply look at you with a fullwise goodthinkfully blank expression and you can almost see their grey cells desperately rushing to batten down the hatches and close the sea doors.

"Doubleplusungoodthink. unoft, plusungoodthink or ungoodthink. Oldthink is unwith BB and party. oldthinkers unluv doubleplusgood waylive BB command. Oldthinkers oft is crimethinkers. Oldthinkers oft make crimethink."

Crimestop.

...

When giving talks in schools, I was able to relieve the tedium by setting these sorts of traps and watching the poor chumps dive eagerly into them. (Even more amusing than tripping blind people).

"Hands up everyone who supports the death penalty." Never any takers for that one, especially in Catholic schools.

"Good. It is true that most western progressive countries, those who have been governed for centuries by the rule of law, have abolished the death penalty. Even for serious crimes like treason, murder and rape.

"We do not execute rapists, in the hopes, perhaps, that they will be reformed. Or perhaps only on the grounds that it is simply wrong to kill, even to kill a dangerous criminal."

General agreement, but at the same time a vague sense of discomfort growing...they know something is going on, but haven't the acuity to guess what.

"Now, let's examine a country that does have it. Communist China has more capital offenses [brief pause to explain the terms 'Communist' and 'capital offense'] than any other country in the world. And they carry out more executions than any other country. Even than the United States.

"Let us pretend for a moment that you are an official of China's legal system charged with carrying out executions. Would you consider granting clemency to a rapist?" [pause to explain 'clemency'.]

...nod nod nod...

"What about to the rapist's 18 month-old daughter?"

Silence.

Crimestop.

How to be a professional Pro-lifer

I promised to put up a couple of links to the American Protestant apologetics people I know about who are confronting the "liberal" secular culture and the abortion lobby.

Stand To Reason blog
Stand to Reason:
Greg Koukl, Steve Wagner,

plus a few others.

STR has an extensive archive of very good, very clear apologetics on a number of Christian doctrines and their work is not really badly hampered by Protestant anti-Catholic biases. This is an altogether laudable effort at expanding on C.S. Lewis' idea of Mere Christianity, and Uncle Jack features prominently among their sources, along with a number of Catholics. STR's work is focused on answering the secular left on religious and "social conservative" issues, including the Life n' Family ones.

* ~ * ~ *

Scott Klusendorf came out of this school and worked with STR for a while before becoming more focused on the life issues and splitting off to do this as an independent. Scott's workshops got me going in all this when I still lived in Halifax. He has spoken to the Canadian Parliament, and the effect has been seen in some of the debates in the House, esp. in the debates on the Human Reproductive Technologies bill.

Scott divides his time between giving training seminars for young pro-lifers and debating abortion advocates around the country. He's the one-stop guy for learning the entire thing.

Scott has written the book on doing pro-life apologetics. Literally. You can order Pro-Life 101 here.

Scott's thing is to tell young audiences, "I want you to consider becoming a full time pro-life apologist, to do the work I do." When first heard him say this to a room of about 20 Nova Scotians, it was like an electric current had been zapped into us all. I found myself three months later boarding a plane to New Jersey to attend a five day seminar. (He also gives training seminars in how to do "support raising", to create a full time salary for yourself to do this work. This is a method of fund raising for religious missionaries that is very common among American Protestants, but of which I had never heard. I know a few brave Canadian souls who have done this, but what Scot perhaps fails to take into account is that this something that requires the American national character to pull off. It is not really something that many Catholics would be able to do, and even fewer Canadians, and I would say almost no Britons. But maybe I'm wrong.)

Scott has a lot of articles posted to his website that spell out very systematically the rhetorical method to approach nearly all the abortion lobby's slogans. If you read them carefully, and learn the basics, you too can start your career as a pro-life troublemaker in six easy lessons.

* ~ * ~ *

The Center for Bioethical Reform:

WARNING. clicking on the link opens the front page of the site that has a very gruesome and extremely graphic video of an abortion that begins automatically five seconds after the site opens.

CBR is founded on the principle that images are the only way to reach people about the reality of abortion. The Graphic Images theory is one that I do not refute, and I've done a lot of GAPping in the last few years. But I also think that it's not always appropriate in every situation. The GAP (Genocide Awareness Project) has been extremely effective where it has landed, especially on university campuses, and it always goes along with careful training of volunteers who are taught to make the rational case against abortion without mentioning religion and without recourse to emotive answers. The pictures are only the ice breaker; the other crucial factor is the training. Without it, I think you are only asking for trouble.

CBR founder Greg Cunningham came to the national pro-life conference in Toronto I went to at the end of 1999 and said that the problem Canada's pro-life movement faces is that the Canadians are too polite. Canadians are afraid to confront and correct and argue coherently. Not only do they not have a firm enough grasp of the issues and the abortion lobby's rhetorical tactics, but they are afraid to step up. He challenged a room full of the Canadian pro-life movement's complacent and comfortable to do a better job. "We need more rude Canadians" was one of those electrifying moments for me.

* ~ * ~ *

CBR + Scott's training seminar in New Jersey gave rise to the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, run by the zany and wonderful Stephanie Gray and my friend Jojo Ruba. Same kind of thing, only with a Canuckistani flavour.

* ~ * ~ *

Peter Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and is probably the last Catholic in the place. He is a convert from Calvinism and has written 50 books on Catholic apologetics and is probably the only Catholic apologist in the US (which means also anywhere else, since it is only in the US that any of this is happening) who is also answering the "liberal" secularists. (Most of the Catholic apologetics being done there is aimed at answering the usual slurs of the Protestant fundamentalists ("Y'all do so worship May-Ree, an ah can prove it!"). I personally think this is a waste of time. It's not the fundies who are going to end up putting us all in camps and who have taken over the world.)

Kreeft is the guy and if you haven't made yourself familiar with his works, now's the time. Especially if you want to know how to approach Thomas but are scared stiff, as I was. Kreeft was the first place I ever discovered Thomas's five logical proofs for the existence of God.

A lot of his articles, and audios of a few of his talks are available here. He's a huge Tolkien and C.S. Lewis fan and has done a lot of stuff on them.

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Research and reference

I would say that if you wanted to buy one book that would teach you a totally comprehensive pro-life apologetic, one that covers in great detail and with lots of examples, the entire issue, this is the one:

Book -Pro Life Answers To Pro Choice Arguments by Randy Alcorn.

Other stuff that's good: Greg Koukl's "Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air" on why moral relativism is self-refuting and how to answer it.

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This is the basic stuff. Get through this and you'll be pretty well prepared in the Laws of Rational Thought. After that, the sky's the limit.