The Cult Grows Intolerant of Nonparticipants

“Choice” my foot: If the
new bill to legalize assisted suicide in California (A.B. 374) becomes law,
Catholic nursing homes will be legally required to permit assisted suicide to be
committed within their premises, even though doing so would be a profound
violation of Catholic moral teaching. In-patient hospice facilities would be
similarly coerced, despite assisted suicide being a direct affront to the
hospice philosophy and the medical standards under which programs operate. Other
California medical facilities and group homes could also be forced to comply.
Only acute-care hospitals escape the proposed tyrannical duty to cooperate in
ending patients’ lives.

It seems like in the end no dissent is brooked. You cannot stand on the sidelines of a sacrificial cult and merely refuse to participate and expect that you will remain unmolested in tolerance. The subversion of telos, of that view that things were made for ends given them by God, will leave no neutral ground for those who witness with the earth to that telos. The blood cries out. It is only silenced by repentance or more blood.
Perhaps you have heard of the Al-Qa'ida and other radical Muslims attacking Christian charities abroad, far away, in Africa. But look homeward, angel, the same principle, the same power in different forms, in different garbs, is at work, disbanding orphanages, requiring all doctors to give their moral assent to abortion, and now attacking faith-based hospitals in what could turn out to be a much more insidious way than the bombing of a charity administration building.
Am I being extreme in referring to a sacrificial cult? Am I being extremist to think in terms of there being a sacrificial cult which delivers up nascent human life and aged human life and sickly or handicapped human life to be slain for the benefit, for the well being, for the fortune casting anticipations of the healthiest, the coolest, the most in, even the most "counterculturally" in? Am I being nonsensical in speaking of a broadly secular world as conforming to form of a sacrificial cult? Let me reference the work of Rene Girard here on the scapegoaing mechanisms and sacrificial systems of the world.

7198 (b): No professional organization or association, or heath care provider,
may subject a person to censure, discipline, suspension, loss of license, loss
of privileges, loss of membership, or other penalty for participating or
refusing to participate in good faith compliance with this chapter. (My
emphasis.)
Here’s the sneaky part: Subsection (e) permits acute-care
hospitals to refuse to permit assisted suicide in the facility.
(e)
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a general acute care hospital, as
defined in subdivision (a) of Section 1250, may prohibit a licensed physician
from carrying out a patient’s request under this chapter on the premises of the
hospital if the hospital has notified the licensed physician of its policy
regarding this chapter.
Under 1250 (a), an acute-care hospital is defined as
“a health facility having a duly constituted governing body with overall
administrative and professional responsibility and an organized medical staff
that provides 24-hour inpatient care, including the following basic services:
medical, nursing, surgical, anesthesia, laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, and
dietary services.” Thus, nursing homes, hospices, and other such facilities
would not qualify for the exemption provided acute-care hospitals under 7198
(e), since they do not have laboratories or pharmacies on-site, provide surgical
medical services, etc.
By explicitly identifying acute-care hospitals as the
only facilities where assisted suicides can be prevented from taking place
on-site, the legislation must be construed to require that all other health-care
facilities cooperate with assisted suicide—whether or not they have religious,
moral, or philosophical objections. Nor could these facilities sanction or
discipline staff doctors or other personnel who agree to participate in on-site
assisted suicides of patients.
If A.B. 374 becomes law, Catholic and other
religiously oriented nursing homes will be forced to choose between shutting
down, selling, or cooperating in assisted suicide. That this could cause untold
misery for thousands of helpless sick and elderly people matters to its authors
not a whit. The culture of death brooks no dissent.

(From:
http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2007/02/values-of-doctors-and-nontreatment-of.html)

The media are making a pretty big splash about a New England Journal of Medicine
study, which measured doctors' willingness to refuse
desired services if it violated their personal moral codes. From the story:
"Based on the findings, the researchers estimate that more than 40 million
Americans may be seeing physicians who do not believe that they are obligated to
disclose information about legal treatments the doctor objects to, and 100
million have doctors who do not feel the need to refer patients to another
provider."The focus, of course, was on doctors who hold what are labeled
conservative beliefs, e.g., abortion, contraception, etc. And there is a pretty
strong move underway to compel medical professionals (including pharmacists) to
perform these services at the risk of losing their jobs or licenses to
practice.

[There are intelligent ways to address some of the issues and Wesley Smith gives some good practical decisions that might at least temporarily address differences in the rest of this post I quote from above. However, it seems to me that there is mixture in the making for violent confrontation but the side that truly values life will prefer to be the victim rather than sacrifice other human beings to affirm the perogative of their choice.]

See also regarding
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6293115.stm

Phillip Johnson assesses current ID and Biology

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3914&program=CSC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20History%20and%20Philosophy%20of%20Science

Misrepresentation by omission:

The claim that evolutionary science has discovered and verified a mechanism
which can account for the origin of biological information and complexity by
involving only natural (unintelligent) causes is supported by an immense
extrapolation from limited evidence of minor, cyclical variations in
fundamentally stable species. The current leading textbook example of the
standard neo-Darwinian mechanism involves a species of finch on an island in the
Galapagos chain. Two scientists named Grant published a famous study of
variations of the beaks of these birds, later popularized in a book titled The
Beak of the Finch, by journalist Jonathan Weiner.The Grants had been measuring
finch beaks over many years. In 1977 a drought killed most of the finches, and
the survivors had beaks slightly larger than before. The probable explanation
was that larger-beaked birds had an advantage in being able to eat the last
tough seeds that remained. A few years later the rains returned, and the average
beak size went back to normal. No new organs appeared and there was no
directional change of any kind, just a back-and-forth cycle from small beaks to
slightly larger beaks and back to small. Nonetheless, that is the most
impressive example of natural selection actually observed making changes that
Darwinists have been able to substantiate after nearly a century and a half of
searching for evidence that the mechanism of random variation with differential
survival has the transformative power that it would need to have to accomplish
everything that the textbooks ascribe to it. To make the story look better, the
National Academy of Sciences improved on some the facts in its 1998 booklet on
Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. This version of the story
omits the beaks’ return to normal and encourages teachers to speculate that a
“new species of finch” might arise in 200 years if the initial trend towards
increased beak size continued indefinitely. When our leading scientists have to
resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in court, you
know they are having trouble fitting their evidence to the theory they want to
support.

Free-thinking not allowed. Darwinist turn to authoritarian coercion despoiling the academy:

… Darwinists were so alarmed by the publication of Meyer’s article that they
mounted an angry campaign of protest against it. The governing Council of the
Society was so overwhelmed that it repudiated the article as inappropriate for
publication in its Proceedings, citing the AAAS policy, and reassuring critics
that “the topic of design will not be addressed in future issues.” Following
this disavowal, Darwinists mounted a furious campaign to discredit the editor
who had approved Meyer’s article for publication, accusing him of being a closet
“young earth” creationist.The near-hysterical brouhaha over Meyer’s article did
have some positive aspects. Darwinists have persistently criticized the
theorists of the Intelligent Design Movement for taking their arguments directly
to the public, implying that these theorists are trying to avoid the
professional scrutiny that accompanies publication in scientific journals. The
truth is otherwise. ID theorists have been eager to pursue any opportunities
they can find to publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The history of
the publication of the Meyer article and its aftermath demonstrates that such
publication would be a real possibility if it were not for the enforcement of
doctrinal polices barring publication of articles supporting intelligent design,
and the consequent professional and public intimidation of editors who might
allow such publication. The Darwinist case for opposing public consideration of
Intelligent Design amounts to saying that “You have to publish in the
professional journals before taking the theory to the public, and we have a rule
that doesn’t allow you to publish in the professional literature.” So there is
no way critics of evolutionary naturalism can get started. If journal
publication were allowed, there is reason to believe that scientists would be
highly interested in pursuing the subject. Over 60 scientists from around the
world requested copies of the Meyer article and an accompanying packet of
reference materials. Because a gag order is in force, ID is not discussed in the
scientific literature. This enforced silence tells us nothing about what would
be happening if individual scientists and editors were free to act on their own
judgment, without fear of punishment for addressing forbidden topics…

Those who are not obedient in their thoughts to the doctrine of philosophiocal naturalism, those who have the courage to examine questions for themselves, may be rare but the truth is worth the solitariness if that is where it may lead:

…One early sign of the way the world is headed came in December 2004, when there was much comment in newspapers and internet discussion groups about famed
atheist philosopher Anthony Flew. Flew had just announced that he had converted
to philosophical theism (though not to Christianity or any other specific
religion, at least as yet), on the basis of scientific discoveries and related
reasoning, which had convinced him that there is an intelligent designer of the
natural universe. Flew seems to have investigated the phenomenon of design in
the natural world for reasons similar to my own. He wanted to decide for himself
whether evidence and logic point in the direction of a creating intelligence, or
whether God is nothing more than a subjective idea created by human imagination.
Perhaps these questions about the reality of god are religious in nature, but
they are important questions that deserve to be investigated dispassionately
instead of being barred from consideration because powerful groups define
“science” as committed a priori to naturalism. ....Those who insist that science
is by definition dedicated to seeking out and endorsing naturalistic
explanations for all phenomena dismiss any questioning of their basic premise as
“religiously” motivated and hence irrational--and even unconstitutional in the
USA (where a majority of the population is nevertheless inclined to question the
premise). But religious questions may be reasonable and important questions.
Here is an example: I’ve repeatedly posed the question, “Is God real, or
imaginary?”. Evolutionary naturalism classes god among the subjective products
of the human brain, and thus among the products of evolution itself. If God is
truly real, however, and really our creator, then to enforce a definition of
knowledge based upon the assumption that ONLY nature is real, and that God
exists only in the human imagination, would be to make a big mistake. Surely it
is rational for people who believe that God is or may be the creator to
challenge those who insist that we assume that a mindless nature did all the
creating. It is rational to argue instead that we should evaluate the evidence
impartially, with the goal of coming to the truth about whether it was necessary
that there be a creator in order to accomplish the creating of all the marvels
of the living world. If the Darwinian mechanism or some other combination of law
and chance isn’t able to create the necessary information, then we should
acknowledge the inadequacy and move on to consider alternatives. What we should
not do is to stick with an inadequate answer because we are afraid that
recognizing the inadequacy will tend to lead us back in the direction of
God.

Token proofs and other mock-reasons are all that the exertions that the authoritarian in power generally bothers to perform and for the obedient they are content to not have their minds excercised on questions of foundation:

… In the end, the only important question is not how numerous or powerful are
the people who hold a certain position now, but who is right about what is true
and what isn’t. If evolutionary naturalists are right that unintelligent causes
produced all the complex and diverse forms of life we know without the
assistance of intelligence, then surely our very determined and intelligent
scientists will find a more convincing demonstration of the process and
mechanism than cyclical variation in the beaks of a finch species . On the other
hand, if further investigation tends to confirm that life requires prodigious
amounts of complex specified genetic information, then eventually the unsolved
problem of where all that information comes from will take its place in the
forefront of scientific and philosophical discussion.

Less Blurry Roses

"Now give me your help in drawing the conclusion that emerges from what we have agreed. It is good to repeat and contemplate fine things two or three times, they say..." Gorgias, 499.

Socrates drops that piece of homespun knowledge and in his use of it it is hard to think he is wholely serious because it is a flattery of a hostile person who has resisted entering into dialogue with him and he is suggesting that what this Callicles has said is fine when in fact he is about to bring before Callicles mind his contradiction- so he is to some extent drawing him in and tripping him up by his pride, it seems to me. But nevertheless, I like the saying, which Socrates carries around like a proverb. It can smack of being pat and assume more significance than it ought but I take it as a wise enough formulation of how we ought to pause with the good things, the fine things- the good, the lovely, the pure, the noble, etc.- and after the initial recognition make something of a conscious point of adverting to it again, or stopping there and going over it, savoring it, letting it sink in, giving it its due, not blazing by it like we were on our way somewhere better, seeing the roses in a blurr but not smelling them.

Side note: It is very interesting to see how much the character Callicles resembles Nietzsche in his argument. This has been observed by many apparently.

Socrates on not assuming you know what the other means out of love for the truth

"I won't say that I haven't a suspiscion of your meaning on both points, but that suspiscion won't prevent me from asking you what you believe to be the nature of the conviction produced by oratory and the subject of that conviction. You may wonder why, if I have this suspiscion, I ask you instead of answering the question myself. I am moved to do so not by any consideration personal to you but by consideration of the argument, which I wish to proceed in such a way as to place before us in the clearest possible light what we are talking about. I think that you will agree that my questions are fair if you look at the matter like this..." -Gorgias, 453

"...This is what I suspected you meant, Gorgias, but don't be surprised if later on I repeat this procedure and ask additional questions when the answer seems to be already clear. My motive, as I say, is not in the least personal; it is simply to help the discussion to progress towards its end in a logical sequence and to prevent us from getting into the habit of anticipating one another's statements because we have a vague suspiscion of what they are likely to be, instead of allowing you to develop your argument in your own way from the agreed premises."- Gorgias, 454.

"We need another St. Benedict"- Alasdair MacIntyre

The following quote provides some context for MacIntyre's quote from his book After Virtue in the the preface to the Twelve Marks of the New Monasticism, in which he says what is needed in our day is another St. Benedict. He has deftly and with considerable knowledge of the Middle Ages explained how the way that pagan literature was used by the church fathers and most notably by St. Augustine, how he searched out and found uses for the literature but in the context of their subordination to the Scripture and how exegetical approaches to the Bible developed and the way that pagan literature was also read and incorporated. St. Augustine's uses of pagan literature and the reasoning and theology behind it is what is referred to when MacIntyre refers to his overaching epistemology. He is explaining how to contextualize a famous case in the Middle Ages dealing with an Augustinian thinker Abelard. He remarks that in modern times the story of Abelard is usually addressed in two ways, dry as dust or technicolor, but that it is properly understood in the overaching understanding of the primacy of legitimate authority when it comes to dialectical or dialogical exploration, something that both St. Bernard and Abelard viewed themselves as beholden to. He understands St. Benedict as having layed down practical rules of obedience and of humbling of the self that help bring about the right uses of the intellect. MacIntyre is showing how there is a contuinuity and development within that continuity that has drawn on and in some ways improved the dialogical forms that Socrates embodied. He is explaining how within this tradition of theology and philosophy intertwined there is learning and progress and that practical rules for carrying out that are needed in our day...I think I am not doing it justice at all...


"Bernard [of Clairvaux], as a Cistercian, followed the Rule of St. Benedict, whose practical theology presupposes what St. Augustine had affirmed, that it is only through transformation of the will from a state of pride to one of humility that the intelligence can rightly be directed. Will is more fundamental than intelligence and thinking undirected by a will informed by humility will always be apt to go astray. It is clearly the pride of will which Bernard discerned in Abelard and which Abelard acknowledged by his submission that he had discerned in himself. So it is the underlying epistemology of Augustinian enquiry which requires the condemnation of heresy, since heresy is always a sign of pride in choosing to elevate one's own judgment above that of genuine authority." -Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, p. 91.

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (DVD)

The documentary Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire is excellent and certainly presents something valuable for reflection, a look into the life and reflection of Lt. Col. Romeo Dallaire after the Rwanbdan massacres that he was witness to and in which he tried in vain to get the UN to take heed and intervene rather than following the "live and let die" doctrine of the world. They opted for the later.

Something I noticed was his references several time to the inner sanctum of the Rwandans, for all their poverty and simplicity, and to the sacred. Like Raskolnikov, he was brought to a hieghtened awareness of the holy and the conscience through circumstances, though he was not a murderer like Raskolnikov. Now he looks in a sense from the outside at the Western poers and sees them with a critics eye. He accepts the blunt criticisms by Paul Kagame , leader of the Tutsi army that restored peace, of our countries, knowing very well that we did nothing for them and cared nothing for them and that he has no reason to be diplomatic to those who let his people die.

This partially draws on the book by the same name, but it also adds a lot of material and of course, footage.

Peace

Here is a poem I think would be well worth memorizing. Henry Vaughan conveys such a earnest, pressing joyful spiritual vision of intmacy with Christ. I find him convincing like Herbert and Donne, providing the measure of the matter.

Peace

My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
All skillful in the wars;
There above noise, and danger,
Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles,
And One born in a mangerCommands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious Friend,
And (O my soul, awake! )
Did in pure love descend
To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flower of Peace,
The Rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges,
For none can thee secure
But One, Who never changes,
Thy God, thy life , thy cure.

- Henry Vaughan 1621-1695


See also his "Come, come, what doe I here?" which seems to me to evince an eanest heartfelt English maranatha-ing.

Richard Dawkins's Presentation at Politics and Prose in DC on 24 October 2006

Dawkins at Politics and Prose

I attended Richard Dawkins’s presentation regarding his new book The God Delusion at Politics and Prose Bookstore in DC today, 24 October 2006. Overall I was glad I went. Dawkins has been infamous on my horizon as a militant and eloquent atheist and I wanted to go because I believe Christians have available a mind and a sustainable rationality which famous detractors are in the end on a simple human level, not equal to. Dawkins raised a number of issues and then answered a number of questions from the crowd which I will try to reiterate here. I found him to be overall decent enough though like a silly school boy when it came to mocking religion. He revealed in a number of points what I take to indicate a rather poor grasp of religion, his chosen topic. Nevertheless, I found him in some ways helpful to an extent in defending reason (and in some ways close to the pope in his Regensberg lecture when he affirmed reason against blind emotionalism) though ultimately he undercuts reason itself. I had two questions coming in which I noted down beforehand: Would he give a response to the recent criticism of his book by philosopher Thomas Nagel in the National Review? He did not, but reiterated the argument criticized by Nagel and others (which I will cover briefly below) so I regretted not moving to the mic to try to ask it. However, my second question was asked by another: Dawkins has been taken at times as affirming a “strong determinism” and at other times seeming to contradict this. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, Dawkins’s American counterpart, another aggressive atheist, went into an explicit discussion of this when he wrote about Dawkins’s meme theory in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and he argued that Dawkins’s statements in The Selfish Gene suggesting human freewill were lapses that Dawkins rejects in later writings. Dennett is defending “strong materialism” and the notion that our thoughts are irrational forces that colonize our minds and that ultimately all thought is reducible to just that, irrationality (which is exactly the absurdism that Husserl spotted and described about a century ago in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy). Dawkins replied in this Q & A that he saw there was a philosophical difficulty and that he didn’t know the answer and could only say that emotionally it doesn’t feel that way and that he couldn’t stand the thought of it being that way. He suggested that if it is an inconsistency to believe that we have freewill, we have to live with. So in this case, we may assume, he believes a delusion might be acceptable. This was in perfect conformity, it seems to me, again to Husserl’s description of the naturalist, in which Husserl asserts that the naturalist refutes himself by undercutting his whole moralizing enterprise by leaving no possible philosophical ground for his values and sermonizing tendencies. I think one draws the contention from Husserl that naturalism is more importantly a psychology than an argument. (See Husserl’s statements appended at the end of this summary). I do not wish to be to peremptory in describing his points but most of Dawkins’s comments were made in the form of populist appeal to emotional response and I wish to focus as much as possible on his arguments. Points he raised in the presentation, often mockingly, were: --The Trinity is mysterious… He expressed his certainty that it was just bunk. --The Aryan heresy….the debate about whether Jesus was God seemed stupid to him --The theological usage of the term “substance” seemed stupid to him. ---He accused theology of being obscurantist. ---He specifically attacked the Catholic church and those who wish to include Mary as part of the Trinity but that is condemned as a heresy if I recall right. He also attacked the multiplicity of saints and the many different Ladies. He spoke about some event where a man was shot and it was said that our Lady of Fatima guided the bullet so it didn’t kill him and joked, “Why didn’t she guide it so it didn’t hit him at all?” ---He went to covering content of chapter seven of his book entitled “The Good Book” in which he charged that following the Bible would be morally repugnant. He discussed the event where God told Abraham to go and sacrifice Isaac and then stopped him when he showed himself willing to carry it out. He found this repugnant and could see no way this could be explained. I think that it only looks that way when one makes too many assumptions. God was prefiguring his sacrifice of His Son, His very heart, exposed to the reviling of the world. In this way God clearly put His heart into the world. Abraham, as the father of faith was called a friend of God and entered into a level of reciprocity with God through God’s initiating command by be willing to sacrifice his promised son who doubtless meant more to him than his own life to God. The Scriptures explain that Abraham reasoned that God would resurrect him. They also say that the desire for human sacrifice never crossed the mind of God. The emotional distress, mystery and fear of the situation may have appeared like cruelty to Isaac but God is not afraid to appear bad or frightening when He has larger lessons to teach His faithful than the pastures within a small conception of God. ---He suggested that the jealousy God is described as having is sexual in its overtones because He chastises Israel for whoring after other gods. I often think of G.K. Chesterton’s quip that materialism is a schoolboy’s philosophy when I encounter comments like this which seem to show its enduring aptness. Also Schopenhauer’s quip that “materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself” occurs to me. Dawkins elaborated a little on this, generally showing that he no idea of why ancient people worshipped idols in the first place and preferred simply to ridicule it and make no distinction between Greek pantheons and monotheism. ---The next point he made is one that I think is the most difficult for me. He talked about Jericho and the complete slaughter God ordered the Israelites to carry out. He said these slaughters were morally indistinguishable from the slaughter of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein, etc. Dawkins raised some important points it seems about the life of these verses in the understanding of some modern Israeli children who saw them justified when it came to Israel because of their religious commitment but unjustified if the scenario was switched so that the perpetrator was not the ancient Israelites but a modern Chinese major. Several things I keep in mind in grappling with this issue are 1) it is God’s prerogative and would be His right to finish us all. I do not see how anyone could rationally argue that a perfect God is morally bound to allow any imperfection to exist, and because we are imperfect humans, that includes us. But that really is not adequate in itself. There is an emotional response it seems with some content. 2) God was dealing with a people in that time and situation and He chose only through historical time to unfold His plan. To do this He could not allow His unfolding message to be mistaken for man’s attempts to reach out to God. He had to inculcate in the Israelites the knowledge of His holiness, first by separating them from the Egyptians and preventing their assimilation with the idol worshippers around them. Then when they began to assimilate the idols anyway and turned away from God and oppressed the poor God used the Assyrians and Babylonians to preserve for Himself a remnant. So He was unfolding His plan even through the evil actions and violence of the Assyrians and Babylonians. But this still seems to me a difficulty because I wrestle, not with the right of God to annihilate us all but with the accomplishing of it by commanding the Israelites to slaughter. I think Scripture offers some explanation in the story which suggests that God awaited the sending of the Israelite army to scourge away these peoples until their sins had reached a limit of extremity warranting a terrible judgment such as His judgment on the world of violence through the Flood. --He also listed off some of the things people were killed for in the Old Testament and took some time to focus on one incident where a man broke the Sabbath command by gathering wood on the Sabbath and was stoned for it. He said a few more things. This is not meant to be a comprehensive coverage. I already mentioned the one question asked him above and his answer. He was also asked whether the agnostic position was correct and he agreed that we are all agnostics in that we can’t disprove anything, such as the JuJu and the flying Spaghetti Monster and faeries but in practice most people assume they don’t exist and he equates God with faeries. One man introduced himself as an atheist and related that he had a friend who believed in evolution and was homosexual and went to a liberal church and disbelieved most of the Bible except the Gospels and believed in separation of church and state and that he was really nice. Dawkins responded by saying that he did not believe religious belief could be closely correlated with whether a person is nice or not. (I recalled statements made by Dawkins that religious parents who raised their children religiously were abusing the child and wondered if this was not a contradiction but he later made a comment which helped me to understand his point of view better which strangely enough has some affinities with the Amish and Anabaptists and Church of Christ, etc.). He did say however that we should ask if religion causes an overall trend in bad directions. One man asked if he saw religion as a means that people separated themselves from others. Dawkins apparently didn’t see this as always true but did see friction in parts of Ireland for instance where there was nothing but religion and that by becoming identified with a religious label the anger and desire for retribution is generalized toward counterlabels. He expressed his distaste and his voice changed showing he had an earnest conviction on the point that it was like child abuse to label a child from the cradle upward Catholic or Protestant. But in this I think there is some agreement at least among a wide group of Christians. I am specifically familiar from my Church of Christ background with their belief that a person could not believe until they were old enough to understand for themselves and for this reason they do not perform baptism until a person reaches what is considered the age of accountability and make the decision individually for themselves. The Amish also in their way acknowledge this reality with their coming of age custom that is covered in a well-known documentary whose name I forget. Both the Church of Christ and the Amish share Anabaptist roots. I agree with them and with Dawkins that a person must be old enough to understand and reason for themselves in order to appropriate their faith- that is I agree with Dawkins that a person should not just unthinkingly adopt any set of beliefs, though I would add religious or other, but that he should actively engage the intellect available to him. Yet Dawkins undercuts this rationality with his ‘strong determinism” and does not allude it by avoiding the philosophical issues emotionally but only earns the epithet of Schopenhauer that he has forgotten to take account of himself and demonstrates consistently through his eight or so books the correctness of Husserl’s critique who noted that application of naturalism to an account of oneself ends in absurdity by undermining itself. Dawkins said this point wasn’t related to faith anyway, suggesting that he was merely assuming that the irrationalism of all faiths. A lady, obviously a Christian believer of some kind, asked what he thought of the faith base of the twelve step programs that abound. Dawkins answered by dumb-foundingly revealing that he did not know that these programs were faith based and that he had learned something from her question. He said that it was not obviously stupid to persuade people to believe in a higher power and that even it is a good technique it didn’t matter. She said that in the Baltimore area they end the twelve step meetings with the Lord’s Prayer. He replied, “Well that is just stupid.” Another person noted the two body guards that had been provided by the store standing behind him and asked if he had ever been threatened. He replied, “I’ve never been threatened.” I thought this is interesting because religion supposedly encourages violence but in the West Christians have never threatened this famous atheist. It seems to me quite certain that he would be threatened in the Middle East but he has been focusing on Christians in the West and would like to make no distinctions between religions. Another asked him how he accounted for the doube helix and DNA and someone in the crowd yelled “Read The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins replied that it is a long story that he has been laying out in his eight books. He showed his conviction as he spoke of the “magnificent elegance in how you can get to staggering heights of complexity from a very simple process” and that once you see this your consciousness is raised to the power of science. He made the argument regarding the complicatedness of God which Thomas Nagel addressed in a recent article in The National Review. Here is an example of Dawkins making the argument from his chapter in the anthology Intelligent Thought:: ”Given that chance is ruled out for sufficient levels of improbability, we know of only two processes that can generate specified improbability. They are intelligent design and natural selection, and only the latter is capable of serving as an ultimate explanation. It generates specified improbability from a starting point of great simplicity. Intelligent design can't do that, because the designer must itself be an entity at an extremely high level of specified improbability. Whereas the specification of the Boeing 747 is that it must be able to fly, the specification of "intelligent designer" is that it must be able to design. And intelligent design cannot be the ultimate explanation for anything, for it begs the question of its own origin.” To this Thomas Nagel replies: “But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them… All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical, extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics.” Some of his statements cause one to wonder if Dawkins even knows what he is talking about when he speaks about religion. ---Another questioner raised the question of Pascal’s Wager where Pascal argued that if you don’t know whether there is a God or not isn’t it better to believe in a God in case it turns out that there was one and yo0ur not believing would make Him angry. Dawkins said that was a wonderful conundrum and that he thought Pascal was not serious when he said it but only joking and that either we believe something or we don’t. He went on to mock the idea of God caring whether people believed in Him or not, saying that made God sound insecure. APPENDIX “Characterisitic of all forms of extreme and consistent naturalism, from popular naturalism to the most recent forms of sensation-monism and energism, is on one hand the naturalizing of consciousness, including all intentionally immanent data of consciousness, including all intentionally immanent data of consciousness, and on the other the naturalizing of ideas and consequently of all absolute ideals and norms. From the latter point of view, without realizing it, naturalism refutes itself. If we take an exemplary index of all ideality, formal logic, then the formal-logical principles, the so-called “laws of thought of thought,” are interpreted by naturalism as natural laws of thinking. That this brings with it the sort of absurdity that characterizes every theory of skepticism in the fullest sense has elsewhere been demonstrated in detail. One can submit naturalistic axiology and practical philosophy (including ethics) as well as naturalistic practice to a radical criticism of the same sort. For theoretical absurdities are inevitably followed by absurdities (evident inconsistencies) in actual theoretical, axiological, and ethical ways of acting. The naturalist is, one can safely say, idealist and objectivist in the way he acts. He is dominated by the purpose of making scientifically known (i.e., in a way that compels any rational individual) whatever is genuine truth, the genuinely beautiful and good; he wants to know how to determine what is its universal essence and the method by which it [namely, that which is genuinely true, or genuinely beautiful, or genuinely good] is to be obtained in the particular case. He believes that through natural science and through philosophy based on the same science the goal has for the most part been attained, and with all the enthusiasm that such a consciousness gives, he has installed himself as teacher and practical reformer in regard to the true, the good, the beautiful, from the standpoint of natural science. He is, however, an idealist who sets up and (so he thinks) justifies theories, which deny precisely what he presupposes in his idealistic way of acting, whether it be in constructing theories or in justifying and recommending values or practical norms as the most beautiful and the best. He is after all, going on presuppositions, to the extent that he theorizes at all, to the extent that he objectively sets up values to which value judgments are to correspond, and likewise in setting up practical rules according to which each one is to be guided in his willing and in his conduct. The naturalist teaches, preaches, moralizes, reforms. (Haeckel and Oswald are good examples.) But he denies what every sermon, every demand, if it is to have a meaning, presupposes. The only thing is, he does not preach in express terms that the only rational thing to do is to deny reason, as well theoretical as axiological and practical reason. He would in fact, banish that sort of thing far from him. The absurdity is not in his case evident, but remains hidden from him because he naturalizes reason…It is manifest, of course, by this very circumstance how slight is the practically effective force for arguments based on consequences. Prejudices blind, and one who sees only empirical facts and grants intrinsic validity only to empirical science will not be particularly disturbed by absurd consequences that cannot be proved empirically to contradict facts of nature.This sort of argument he will put aside as “Scholasticism.” What is more, arguments drawn from consequences lead easily to an undesired result in the other direction, that is for those who are inclined to credit them with demonstrative force.” -Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. By Quentin Lauer, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”, (Harper & Row Pub., New York: 1965) pp. 80-82.

Meilander Rebuffed by FT Readers for His Criticism of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons

In the current edition First Things there are four articulate letters replying to Gilbert Meilander's contemptuous review of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons entitled "Hold the Granola". All of the letter writers take Meilander to task and no response is provided by Meilander. One names Russell Kirk, Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry as being along with Dreher among the few voices critiquing Republican conservatism from within a more authentically conservative tradition. I am once again reminded that the likes of Wendell Berry provide an important message which confronts old ways with a need for change, and that rather than being marginalized and neglected it needs to be brought steadily and ponderously forward.

Now my interest is piqued to read Crunchy Cons.

Cured by Freud!

The Psalms, Blood and Violence

But aren't the monotheisms the bearers of a structural violence because they gave birth to an idea of unique Truth, excluding any competing expression?

One can always interpret the monotheisms as sacrificial archaisms, but the texts don't prove that they are such. It's said that the Psalms of the Bible are violent, but who speak up in the psalms if not the victims of the violence of the myths: "The bulls of Balaam encircle me and are about to lynch me"? The Psalms are like a magnificent lining on the outside, but when turned inside out they show a bloody skin. They are typical of the violence that weighs on humans and on the refuge that they find in their God.Our intellectual fashions don't want to see anything but violence in these texts, but where does the danger really come from? Today, we live in a dangerous world where all the mob movements are violent. This crowd or mob was already violent in the Psalms. Likewise in the story of Job. It – the "friends" – demanded of Job to acknowledge his guilt; they put him through a real Moscow trial. His is a prophetic trial. Is it not that of Christ, adulated by the crowds, then rejected at the moment of his Passion? These narratives announce the cross, the death of the innocent victim, the victory over all the sacrificial myths of antiquity.Is it so different in Islam? Islam has also formidable prophetic insights about the relation between the crowd, the myths, victims, and sacrifice. In the Muslim tradition, the ram Abel sacrificed is the same as the one God sent to Abraham so that he could spare his son. Because Abel sacrificed rams, he did not kill his brother. Because Cain did not sacrifice animals, he killed his brother. In other words, the sacrificial animal avoids the murder of the brother and the son. That is, it furnishes an outlet for violence. Thus Mohammed had insights which are on the plane of certain great Jewish prophets, but at the same time we find a concern for antagonism and separation from Judaism and Christianity that may negate our interpretation.

-"What Is Occurring Today Is a Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale."

On the Verge of Coersion: Intolerance for "Freaks" in Our Narcissistic Culture

"Please say it three times after me: preimplanatation genetic haplotyping. It is a technique for screening embryos for six thousand inherited diseases. Elizabeth R. Schiltz, a law professor, writes in Business Week : "From time to time, we are all confronted with the disconnect between how we see ourselves and how others see us. I've always seen myself as a responsible, law-abiding citizen. I recycle, I vote, I don't drive a Hummer. But I've come to realize that many in the scientific community view me as grossly irresponsible. Indeed, in the words of Bob Edwards, the scientist who facilitated the birth of England's first test-tube baby, I am a 'sinner.' A recent book even branded me a 'genetic outlaw.' My transgression? I am one of the dwindling number of women who recieve a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome and choose not to terminate our pregnancies. So when I hear about medical breakthroughs like preimplantation genetic haplotyping (PGH)- a new technique to screen embryos in the in vitro fertilization process for 6.000 inherited diseases- I can't help but see 6,000 new reasons that parents will be branded as sinners or made to feel socially irresponsible for bringing their children into this world." Prof. Schiltz is author of Defiant Birth: Women Who Resis Medical Eugenics. For many people, aborting a potentially "defective" child is a no-brainer. Such a child would be an intolerable burden upon the parents, upon the family, and upon society. Many others simply refuse prenatal screening altogether, or only for the purpose of discovering a problem that might be remedied in the womb. Their commitment is to accepting and loving the life entrusted to them. But Professor Schiltz is right: With the return of eugenics, such people are increasingly viewed as antisocial, if not "outlaws." The late Christopher Lasch wrote that we congratulate ourselves on our moral progress because we no longer tolerate "freak shows" at the county fair. The real reason, he said, is that we are fast becoming a society that has no tolerance of, no place for, freaks... "(See FIRST THINGS October 2006 issue in the "While We're At It" section for remainder.)My commentary:Terms like "genetic outlaw" suggest that the "legitimate violence" of law-enforcement be brought to bear against those who reject the genetic eugenics point of view. The use of the term "sinner" may suggest the social stigmatizing and branding with a Scarlet Letter those that find abhorrent the "not worth living" stamp eagerly applied to the mystery of nascent life at the first hint of extra inconvenience by a narcissitic, narrow and precarious communion of thieves.

"Depravity According to Nature": Herman Melville and the Anthropology of Naturalistic Determinism in Billy Budd

"For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound, such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself? ...In a list of definitions included in the authentic translation of Plato, a list attributed to him, occurs this: "Natural Depravity: a depravity according to nature." A definition which tho' savoring of Calvinism, by no means involves Calvin's dogmas as to total mankind. Evidently its intent makes it applicable but to individuals. Not many are the examples of this depravity which the gallows and jail supply. At any rate for notable instances, since these have no vulgar alloy of the brute in them, but invariably are dominated by intellectuality, one must go elsewhere. Civilization, especially if of the austerer sort, is auspicious to it. It folds itself in the mantle of respectability. It has its certain negative virtues serving as silent auxiliaries. It never allows wine to get within its guard. It is not going too far to say that it is without vices or small sins. There is a phenomenal pride in it that excludes them from anything mercenary or avaricious. In short the depravity here meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual. It is serious, but free from acerbity. Though no flatterer of mankind it never speaks ill of it. " -Billy Budd , in Chp 11 and 12 (by some divisions) by Herman Melville

Here Melville, if my interpretation is correct, enters on an interesting tangential discussion of a naturalistic anthropology which appears to have its counterpart in current beliefs in genetic determinism. Melville makes the obvious parallel between Calvinistic and naturalistic moral determinism but departs from them by suggesting that it is the case only with certain individuals, specifically in reference to a right understanding of their particular depraved or wicked behavior. He suggests that some people's actions can be understood to have the veneer of rationality while finding their true sources in irrational and natural springs of action. I think he is correct to bring to bear critical light on those who would too easily dismiss naturalistic causes of behavior. Many who favor naturalistic determinism quickly and correctly point out pertinent cases where genetic or physical disturbances in the body clearly exert a compelling force on an individual's behavior, which qualify our attribution of evil to the behavior where elsewhere it would be considered evil without qualification. Melville points out, in the text quoted below, that the out of hand dismissal of "natural depravity" by some is not in harmony with the Biblical understanding of the evil in its references to the mysteries of evil. The Biblical account of human nature here seems most clearly to be the most realistic. There is still the moral tone in the reference to evil but there is also the sophisticated recognition of mystery. As far as Melville remains in speculation and does not assert with certainty the naturalistically determined "evil" he is correct but he errs as far as he may assert the certain knowledge of the wellspring of the human behavior as being naturalistically determined. Certainly in specific cases we can see that a person has been compelled perhaps by brain damage so that his violence has an an apparent mitigating factor. But are we free in all honesty to think of such persons as incapable of moral decision-making at some level perhaps remote from our perception? Neither freewill or nature are adequate in themselves to explain the mystery of lawlessness.

"But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so exceptional a nature is this: though the man's even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in his heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law, having apparently little to do with reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational. That is to say: Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of malignity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgement sagacious and sound. These men are true madmen, and of the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous but occasional, evoked by some special object; it is probably secretive, which is as much to say it is self-contained, so that when moreover, most active, it is to the average mind not distinguishable from sanity, and for the reason above suggested that whatever its aims may be -- and the aim is never declared -- the method and the outward proceeding are always perfectly rational. Now something such an one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of an evil nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short "a depravity according to nature." By the way, can it be the phenomenon, disowned or at least concealed, that in some criminal cases puzzles the courts? For this cause have our juries at times not only to endure the prolonged contentions of lawyers with their fees, but also the yet more perplexing strife of the medical experts with theirs? -- But why leave it to them? Why not subpoena as well the clerical proficients? Their vocation bringing them into peculiar contact with so many human beings, and sometimes in their least guarded hour, in interviews very much more confidential than those of physician and patient; this would seem to qualify them to know something about those intricacies involved in the question of moral responsibility; whether in a given case, say, the crime proceeded from mania in the brain or rabies of the heart. As to any differences among themselves these clerical proficients might develop on the stand, these could hardly be greater than the direct contradictions exchanged between the remunerated medical experts." -Billy Budd , in Chp 11 and 12

Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett suggest that all rational behavior is a mask for subrational behavior, that we are merely colonized by memes in service to genes, mere vehicles for naturalistically determined behavior. Melville describes the naturalistic determinism as rare and applying only to individuals but they take it to apply to all human beings. They appear to be less astute observers of mankind than Melville, applying the doctrines of their worldview systematically and dogmatically to corral the empirical, rather than deriving them from a keen and practical apprehension of human behavior which seems to have been a marked trait of Melville's genius. But Melville seems to be playing with the naturalistic notion speculatively close to the time of the inception of Darwinian theory. Dawkins and Dennett and Wilson and other moderns however are not marked by the speculative tone in their naturalistic anthropologies, a speculative tone that still permeated Darwin's Origin of Species to some extent. Rather, theirs is a priestly dogmatism that broaches no primal assessment of human nature but rather assimilates everything to the narrative without questioning the foundations.

Rene Girard on the Goal of Literary Criticism and Its Relation to the Logos

Rene Girard, a tremendous and eclectic intellect, was not a Christian when working on his first book as a lecturer at John Hopkins, but it was through his literary studies that he came to a faith in Christ. The following is an excerpt from this first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, with a few of my comments interspersed.

"All types of structural thinking assume that human reality is intelligeible; it is a logos and, as such, it is an incipient logic, or it degrades itself into a logic."

[Girard is saying this in the context of a discussion of triangular desire, which is basically envy. It is different than the less complex desire between an subject and object. The envier surrenders the individual's "fundamental prerogative", the choice of the object of his own desire. Instead the desire for an object is mediated by another who's desire for the object they imitate. Thus the desire has become triangular and "structural."]

"It can thus be systematized, at least up to a point, however unsystematic, irrational, and chaotic it may aoppear even to those who operate the system. A basic contention of this essay is that the great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries."

[This reminds me of Plato's account of Socrates testing the wisdom of the poets and finding that they apprehended intuitively things that they were not able to explain but only represent in their verse, but they thought they knew more than they did about the things they intuitively felt through their verse. Socrates came to the conclusion that he would rather be ignorant of what they knew and know that he didn't know than to know what they knew and think that he knew more than that when he did not.
But also Girard's point about the artists' imprisonment with contemporaries and an implied degree of transcendance from this imprisonment by the artists in their intuitive correspondence and apprehension of logos, the feeding on logos, the Lord's supper of knowledge, is more of a positive affirmation than Socrates seems to give].

Now here it is, Girard's bold statement of the goal of literary criticism, having laid some preliminary explanation:

"Literary interpretation must be systematic because it is the continuation of literature. It should formalize implicit or already half-explicit systems. To maintain that criticism will never be systematic is to maintain that it will never be real knowledge. The value of critical thought depends not on how cleverly it manages to diguise its own systematic nature or on how much fundamental issues it manages to shirk or to dissolve but on how much literary substance it really embraces, comprehends, and makes articulate. The goal may be too ambitious but it is not outside the scope of literary cristicism. It is the very essence of literary criticism. Failure to reach it should be condemned, but not the attempt. Everything else has already been done."

Solidarity with Africa

I watched Hotel Rwanda again today and thought about the repeated times that I have heard people express the sentiment that really there is nothing we can do for Africa, that they are animals, and that it is evolution and nature red in tooth and claw. This is very different than calling the behavior sinful that for instance was witnessed in the Rwandan massacres. Such expressions are in effect expressions of exasperation and rationalization for disenfranchisement of Africa and they conflate the problem by obscuring human decision making. Such a view ignores both the West’s culpability in Rwanda and the fundamental human nature we both share.

First the West’s culpability is ably indicated in the following account from Human Rights Watch's Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda:

The Transformation of “Hutu” and “Tutsi”
By assuring a Tutsi monopoly of power, the Belgians set the stage for future conflict in Rwanda. Such was not their intent. They were not implementing a“divide and rule” strategy so much as they were just putting into effect the racist convictions common to most early twentieth century Europeans. They believed Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa were three distinct, long-existent and internally coherent blocks of people, the local representatives of three major population groups, the Ethiopid, Bantu and Pygmoid. Unclear whether these were races, tribes, or language groups, the Europeans were nonetheless certain that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu and the Hutu superior to the Twa—just as they knew themselves to be superior to all three. Because Europeans thought that the Tutsi looked more like themselves than did other Rwandans, they found it reasonable to suppose them closer to Europeans in the evolutionary hierarchy and hence closer to them in ability…. This mythical history drew on and made concrete the “Hamitic hypothesis,” the then-fashionable theory that a superior, “Caucasoid” race from northeastern Africa was responsible for all signs of true civilization in “Black” Africa. This distorted version of the past told more about the intellectual atmosphere of Europe in the 1920s than about the early history of Rwanda. Packaged in Europe, it was returned to Rwanda where it was disseminated through the schools and seminaries…. Even in the 1990s, many Rwandans and foreigners continued to accept the erroneous history formulated in the 1920s and 1930s… The very recording of the ethnic groups in written form enhanced their importance and changed their character. No longer flexible and amorphous, the categories became so rigid and permanent that some contemporary Europeans began referring to them as “castes.” The ruling elite, most influenced by European ideas and the immediate beneficiaries of sharper demarcation from other Rwandans, increasingly stressed their separateness and their presumed superiority. Meanwhile Hutu, officially excluded from power, began to experience the solidarity of the oppressed.”

Secondly, our supposition of our own moral superiority is undermined when we consider the following points made by Elizabeth Powers on the First Things blog, September 14, 2006:
“For her ( Heather Mac Donald) it is the achievement of the secular Enlightenment that we are “more compassionate, humane, and respectful of human rights.” Just compare, she writes, the fourteenth century’s treatment of prisoners to today’s, “an advance due to Enlightenment reformers.”
As a scholar of the eighteenth century, I am familiar with this attribution of our supposed moral advance to the sages of the Enlightenment. The philosophes, however, independent scholars of their day, were simply capitalizing on the changed material environment in which they lived. Beginning in the early modern period, in the late fifteenth century, with European exploration of the globe and the opening of vast international trade, men (and mostly they were men) began to have economic opportunities beyond those dictated by tradition. The history of the West since then has been one of continuous improvement in the material life of more and more people, not simply the traditionally rich and privileged. With this democratization of wealth, ordinary men began to chafe at the traditional political and civic arrangements that kept them from wearing the clothes they liked, marrying the person of their choice, or choosing their own profession. The market began to offer “choice” not only in lifestyle but also in products. In response to this more liberal economic environment, philosophers began to enunciate ideas concerning liberty and individual freedom. But where would they have come up with the idea that each of us has a right to determine our destiny, if not for the moral legacy of Christianity, namely, the uniqueness of every person before God and the duty of that person to work out his individual salvation? All of liberalism’s important achievements—free political institutions, religious practice, intellectual and artistic expression—grew, in tandem with the wealth of the West, from that simple idea.
Don’t imagine that because criminals now have clean cells, even telephone privileges and access to law libraries, that we are more enlightened than our fourteenth-century predecessors. With our current material resources—a huge establishment of lawyers (many of them women), college degrees in prison management, cheap electricity, food providers, and so on—it would be irrational to keep criminals chained to walls in unheated cells for years, dependent for food on meals brought by their next of kin, and all the other horrors of incarceration brought to us by Alexandre Dumas. Liberals, and Heather Mac Donald, think that such “progress” is self-evident, as if ethics were something that accumulated in our arteries like cholesterol. But make no mistake: If we returned to the material conditions of the fourteenth century, prisoners would have their law books taken away.
While it is self-evident to Heather Mac Donald that “the rule of law” is transparent to “all rational minds,” try that idea on the Chinese, who are certainly rational (and infinitely skeptical, it would seem). One of the reasons that the concept of human rights has so much difficulty inserting itself in China is because of the absence of a Christian legacy. The Chinese are becoming more prosperous, but they have only the vaguest sense of what is second nature to us in the West—namely, the sacredness of the human person. The greatest reform movement in the world, the abolition of slavery, was led by Christians, not the philosophes. So, yes, Miss Mac Donald, we do live parasitically off the moral legacy of Christianity.”

I take it therefore as a sign of a failure of conscience when we failed to stand in solidarity and brotherhood with Rwanda. We do not have the evidence that we are better. Has not our wealth as a society as a whole come to us from forefathers who set up unjust systems based on stupid, wicked and inhuman pseudoscientific notions of racial superiority, and profited off it? In truth those who soothe themselves with the idea that we are more evolved or advanced than the African peoples are checking out of Hotel Rwanda and checking back into Hotel California.

Little girl: “Please don’t let them kill me. I promise not to be Tutsi anymore.”

Proverbs: “Those who close their ears to the cry of the poor will themselves cry out and not be answered.”

John Donne: Violence and Sexual Deviancy Converted Into the Chaste Holy Fires of the Delivered

Thomas Carew, in his brilliant elegy for the great British metaphysical Christian poet John Donne, writes:


"...But the flame

Of thy brave Soule, that shot such heat and light,
15
As burnt our earth, and made our darknesse bright,

Committed holy Rapes upon our Will,

Did through the eye the melting heart distill;

And the deepe knowledge of darke truths so teach,

As sense might judge, what phansie could not reach;
20
Must be desir'd for ever... "


"Committed holy Rapes upon our Will"?! Carew seems here to make an indirect allusion to Donne's unexpected analogies with violence and sexual deviancy in his poetry (for instance when he says that he will never be chaste unless God ravishes him, or when he says that God is most pleased with the church when she is opened to most men), baffling and counterintuitive in their transformation of a dirty subject and, for the sinner like me, heart constricting for their conversion of the impure into a holy lesson. Like the parable of Jesus of the shrewd and corrupt servant left in charge of his masters finances who uses them to gain friends when he realizes that he will soon be cut loose, Donne's poetry is more earthen and real than otherworldly pieties are likely to permit or approve. This comes from Donne's life reflected in his poetry as he converts overtime from erotic excesses and profligacy (he wrote bawdy love poetry and caused scandal by eloping with a fifteen year old) into a saintly provisioner of true food (he was faithful and devoted to her the remainder of his life) in the black plague years in England as the Dean of St Paul's Church, writing some of the greatest Christian sermons and poems of all time. Here is one of Donne's great poems, a prayer that many like me who have fallen to the wiles of Ashteroth and the pleasure goddesses of this age may hope to say in our soul in full freedom and earnestness, that the sexually broken may be brought to chastity as Donne was:

"Batter My Heart"
by John Donne

Batter my heart, three person’d God, for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt town, to’another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy,
Divorce me untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The Homeless in DC

A group from the church plant I am attending makes bag lunches Saturdays and goes down to Union Station in DC and hands them out to the homeless and talks with them.

One of the girls that leads the effort once advocated for some homeless people who were not being allowed on the Subway, saying that if anyone especially needs access to the subway it would be them. This, it seems to me, conforms to the sober assessment of others in light of the gospel that it is incumbent upon Christians to adopt, an assessment which throws out the favoritism and caste like blind excesses and bogotry and over attentiveness to one's own comfort in favor of respect for human beings. My mind had recourse to this story again and again when I was reading James chapter 2 from the Bible this morning.

One homeless man from Virginia told of his love for mountain climbing and climbing of all sorts when he was younger. He was now an old man. He said that he used to drink every weekend and when he retired he didn't know what to do with himself so he said, "Oh well, I'll have a drink" and things got out of hand.

Lydia and a homeless man who's name I forgot recounted a story about a homeless person they knew who was beaten up so that his face was bloodied and robbed. When the police were called, they did a background check on the man who had been robbed and discovered that he had a warrant out on him, so he had to go to jail too.

The starlings and sparrows hopped around beside the seated homeless. On a simple fundamental level God is always giving us these living object lessons in how He provides for us, whether homeless or wealthy, our daily bread. God is not far from the homeless.

One homeless man was dressed up stylishly and carried a GQ magazine with him.

One showed us her art which was pretty good, unique color drawings mainly of flowers. She talked about politics and anticipated a fatal day of judgement for Bush.

One homeless man, Reggie, had been a Marine and had gone on two and a half tours. He seemed quietly pleased with the fundamental level of human communion like nutrient that was mutually felt.

Life's Course of Study is to Sound Sin and Love

Throughout yesterday, and this morning, my mind adverts back to a poem by the great metaphysical poet Goerge Herbert, one of the greatest Christian poets of all time, and in particular to these lines (which are best taken in their context):

But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love

This is true study. To apply myself to this, all my hour and day, growing wise through every word and every act that might bring me nearer to the living communion with the holy Savior who I treat so unbareably. Here is the entire poem:

from The Temple (1633), by George Herbert:

¶ The Agonie.
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach;1 then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love in that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

"My beloved is mine, and I am his; He feedeth among the lilies" by Francis Quarles

Here is a beautiful poem so full of the love of Christ that I recognize, a mark of the fellowship of the wounded heart of those pierced by the glory and goodness and love of the Lord so that they feel an undieing love that sceptic aspersions cannot put out:

16. My beloved is mine, and I am his; He feedeth among the lilies
By Francis Quarles (1592–1644)

EV’N like two little bank-dividing brooks,

That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,

And having rang’d and search’d a thousand nooks,

Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,

Where in a greater current they conjoin:
5
So I my best-beloved’s am; so he is mine.


Ev’n so we met; and after long pursuit,

Ev’n so we joyn’d; we both became entire;

No need for either to renew a suit,

For I was flax and he was flames of fire:
10
Our firm-united souls did more than twine;

So I my best-beloved’s am; so he is mine.


If all those glitt’ring Monarchs that command

The servile quarters of this earthly ball,

Should tender, in exchange, their shares of land,
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I would not change my fortunes for them all:

Their wealth is but a counter to my coin:

The world’s but theirs; but my beloved’s mine.


Nay, more; If the fair Thespian Ladies all

Should heap together their diviner treasure:
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That treasure should be deem’d a price too small

To buy a minute’s lease of half my pleasure;

’Tis not the sacred wealth of all the nine

Can buy my heart from him, or his, from being mine.


Nor Time, nor Place, nor Chance, nor Death can bow
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My least desires unto the least remove;

He’s firmly mine by oath; I his by vow;

He’s mine by faith; and I am his by love;

He’s mine by water; I am his by wine,

Thus I my best-beloved’s am; thus he is mine.
30

He is my Altar; I, his Holy Place;

I am his guest; and he, my living food;

I’m his by penitence; he mine by grace;

I’m his by purchase; he is mine, by blood;

He’s my supporting elm; and I his vine;
35
Thus I my best beloved’s am; thus he is mine.


He gives me wealth; I give him all my vows:

I give him songs; he gives me length of dayes;

With wreaths of grace he crowns my conqu’ring brows,

And I his temples with a crown of Praise,
40
Which he accepts as an everlasting signe,

That I my best-beloved’s am; that he is mine.

A Wise Reflection on the Best Kinde of Woman to Look For

Upon kinde and true Love

'TIS not how witty, nor how free,

Nor yet how beautifull she be,

But how much kinde and true to me.

Freedome and Wit none can confine,

And Beauty like the Sun doth shine,
5
But kinde and true are onely mine.


Let others with attention sit,

To listen, and admire her wit,

That is a rock where Ile not split

Let others dote upon her eyes,
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And burn their hearts for sacrifice,

Beauty's a calm where danger lyes.


But Kinde and True have been long tried

A harbour where we may confide,

And safely there at anchor ride.
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From change of winds there we are free,

And need not feare Storme's tyrannie,

Nor Pirat, though a Prince he be.

-Aurelian Townshend

(Herbert J.C. Grierson, ed. (1886–1960). Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th C. 1921. )