The Ark and The Dove

What Are Our Rights to Children?

I'm going to make a wild conjecture and say that if you aksed the average person whether or not they had a right to have children, that they would say yes.
Now, some of us might say that some people shouldn't have kids but, unless you work for the government of China, it seems a pretty absurd argument to deny a person the right to children.
But what would such a right, if it exists, actually entail?
It seems to me that the most logical and plausible definition of this right would be a right to conceive and bear children through the process of male-female sexual intercourse, and that any person has a right to bear a child already conceived.
That is, no person or institution should be allowed to tell an individual that they must prevent conception during heterosexual activity or that they must terminate a pregnancy (regardless of the process of conception).

Friend or Foe?

So Drudge did squeak a shout-out to the rally on his page this evening, linking to a Yahoo News article.

Here's one I haven't seen yet, though. Instead of calling pro-lifers "anti-abortion," the article refers to us no less than THREE TIME in the article as "abortion foes." Once, pro-lifers are called "opponents of abortion."

The other side (because there are only two, evidently) is referred to as "Abortion-rights advocates."

If you are pro-choice, you are an advocate...not a "foe to unborn people."

Now, I don't want to complain too much. After all, I am a foe to abortion, insofar as a human being can be the mortal enemy of a form of murder.

The problem is that "foe" is language of war, and that one is usually a foe to another person not an action. It makes me feel like I'm some kind of Iraqi insurgent, rather than a fellow American.

A foe is generally someone who would like to kill his own foes. The irony, of course, is that the pro-life movement advocates for the indiscriminate protection of friend and foe alike, whereas the pro-choice movement defends the opportunity to kill either of them. The pro-lifer would rather spare the life of an abortionist than have blood on his hands, whereas the pro-choice advocate would just as soon kill their own children. The pro-choice advocate is actually a foe to every human being yet to come.

We would save those who would kill us; they would kill those who would save them.

So who looks like the real foe?

March For Life Mass

Re: the homily -

Someone told me that Fr. Groeschel said that Fr. Bill's homily was the best homily he's ever heard at a youth Mass.  That's the rumor I heard on the street.  It was a good homily.

Re: news coverage -

The Post has an piece on us.  I notice that in the interest of being "fair and balanced," they somehow managed to find the handful of pro-abortion counterprotesters and devote three of seven pictures to them.  If you don't believe me about the numbers, note that they did not have any wide-angle crowd shots of the pro-abortion rally like the first picture.

Sit for Life

Well, I've had to sit out this year's March for Life due to a really nasty bug I picked up last week. I'm all for martyrdom, but coming down with walking pneumonia seemed like a less than effective protest strategy.

Of course, you might not know that the March for Life is even going on since there is no news coverage of it on either CNN.com or Drudge.

Perhaps my biggest diappointment, though, is that I'm missing Fr. Bill's big homily at the Youth Mass. Hopefully some of the CT regulars will be able to clue me in on how it went.

Anyway, in an attempt at solidarity with those braving the elements, I have sworn off playing FFXII for these twenty-four hours...which is no mean task, I tell ya.

"People called Romanes they go the house?"

We had a little debate about Monty Python's Life of Brian a while ago on this site, but one thing that's not up for debate is how great this portion of the movie is - the Latin lesson.

Borges

So far I've read six or seven of Borges' short stories.  They're fascinating because of how he starts with an interestesting premise and swiftly develops it to a conclusion.  And the conclusion doesn't seem to be just for the purpose of being weird (though they often are strange enough), it ends up being a statement of some philosophical idea.

For instance, the point of Funes the Memorious (en español) is that nominalism, followed consistently, leads to the death of thought.  Read it and see what I mean.

What do you think?  Should I write something about this for Wikipedia's page on it?  They do not have anything on this in the "analysis" section, which is only a stub.

My favorite so far is still The Library of Babel (en español).  Maybe I will get around to writing something on this one.

Another thing that you might find interesting is the connection between Borges and G.K. Chesterton, of whom he was an admirer.  Borges was Catholic, too, but he seems to be a much more tortured soul than Chesterton, less jovial, and more strange.

Die Grosse Stille

The English Dominican Studentate blog has a review of the new silent documentary film about the Carthusians.  They really like it.  Which means I will probably like it.  I think if I can find a theater that's playing it I will go see it.

The Helmet of Horror

Right, so remember back when I said I was reading all those books, and maybe I'd tell you what I thought of them?  Yeah, I read those and moved through a whole slew of other books afterwards, but maybe I'll still get to them.

Ok, so one of them was The Helmet of Horror by Victor Pelevin.  I have to say I was a little disappointed, but mainly because my expectations were so high.  Not only because of how it is billed on the cover, but more because of the traditions the novel hooks into - classical mythology, the work of Jorge Luis Borges, and the promise of philosophical speculation - I had big expectations which were not lived up to.  If I look at it as more of a light entertainment book, however, then I regard it  more favorably.  I thought it was worth my time reading (so thank you for lending it to me, Sebastian), but I would not put it in my mental literary canon (yet note that I do find it interesting enough to write about).  I will discuss what I interpreted the book as, what I liked, and what I didn't like.

First of all, if you haven't seen the book, it is a novel about some people who find themselves in a bizarre sort of labyrinth.  They communicate via a text-messaging system (like AIM), and the text of the novel is a "transcript" of what they write.  Weird stuff happens.  You are left to figure out what it means.

The similarity I see between Helmet and a Borges short story is in the M.O. of writing.  A lot of Borges' ficciones are not so much "stories" as much as pieces where he says to himself "I have this strange yet fascinating idea X.  I shall make a sketch of what a world would be like wherein X is true."  If I haven't made myself intelligible enough, The Library of Babel (here is the original Spanish if you are so inclined) is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, as is The Lottery In Babylon.  In this way I see it as sort of akin to sci-fi, except that it's more like "intellectu-fi" or "philoso-fi."

I see Helmet as belonging to this same genre.  Neat idea.  What Pelevin has done is to take some important truths, find the opposite, and use those as his "idea X" to make his world-sketch.  One of those is "a whole is greater than the sum of its parts" - remember the construction of the Helmet?  Another seems to be the logical consistency of the world in general.

Now for its weaknesses.  One category of objections stems from the choice of (what I've called) his "X's."   Borges' genius lies in no small measure in thoughtful choice of this kernel in each story.  It is as though Pelevin, though, wanted to outdo Borges by finding weirder starting premises in order that his story be more outlandish.  In order to accomplish this, he picked the contraries of self-evident or very fundamental truths about reality.  In doing so he overreached, leaving himself too little reality to stand on, so that he ended up making a story that is largely incoherent.  Of course, it may well be that he did this on purpose in the interest of being post-modern.  But I do not necessarily find this redeeming; I detest the despair that is all too common in postmodernism, the spirit that uses art or literature to proclaim that there is nothing to proclaim - or nothing worth proclaiming (and then often enough congratulates itself on its cleverness and irony).

The other categories of objections are about storytelling and picking on the philosophical premises he seems to take for granted.  He should have either followed Poe's advice and chosen one effect and pursued it relentlessly or made the book a lot longer so he could develop his ideas properly.  Borges is tremendous at the former.  From the introduction of his starting idea to a terrible and seemingly inevitable conclusion is only a few tight, intense pages.  But Pelevin is all over the place.  He'll open up a new thread - The Matrix-type virtual reality, linguistic interpretation, etc. - and play with it for a little while, then toss it aside for something else before he's really made anything of it.  Is it that he can't, or that he just doesn't care to?  I think maybe he could, but just doesn't.  It struck me as something written by someone who is smart, but content with a facile and superficial kind of intellectualism, sort of like Scott Adams' writing.  At least it all seems to be focused toward one general theme, epistemology - what we can know and how we can know it.  But unfortunately he seems beholden to Locke's dictum that we can't know things, only our own ideas.  Unlike the more sensical view that we know things by means of our ideas, developing this one consistently to its conclusion leads to a despair at ever knowing reality.

Ok, so I spent a lot of time being critical.  But I obviously liked it enough that I cared this much about it; and I enjoyed the literary thinking it occasioned.  I'd much rather read a book that aspires to greatness than one that insults my intelligence by aiming at mediocrity and achieving it.

Tragic story

A lot of us would like to be proud of Nancy Pelosi right now.  A prominent Catholic in public office; the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House; maybe she's out to pass some legislation you really like.

But a lot of us can't help noticing that she is stridently pro-abortion, despite being Catholic.  Which means that on top of all the innocent life that the laws of the United States of America protect the "right" to take, there is a dreadful scandal in that thanks to her bad example, the public thinks that it is a-ok for Catholics to be pro-abortion, and that those who strive to inform their consciences according to the perennial teaching of the Church are pro-life for reasons of political convenience, or squeamishness, or meanness, or whatever reason they invent to account for what they observe.

It would be easy for me to use this space to express my consternation and dismay over this, but I expect you've heard that sort of thing before. 

So instead I will talk about something that Catholics who have the benefit of being correctly taught about the Church may think about immediately.  You may think it's hard to get through to someone who thinks the Catholic Church is wrong.  What's hard is to get through to someone who already knows the Church is right, and thinks he knows what the Church says, but is wrong about that.  Also, the Jesuits have a saying, "Give me the first seven years of a child's life and I will give you the rest."  Keep that in mind as you read.

Nancy Pelosi apparently is under the impression that she is an integral Catholic following the teaching of the Church to the best of her knowledge.

Please read this SFGate article on Alexandra Pelosi, the Speaker's daughter, and observe what's going on.  To begin with, her mother is genuinely upset and offended that she (Alexandra) has become a lapsed Catholic and considers it a failure on her part as a mother.

Learning about [Evangelical Protestants] was a shock to the woman who spent her childhood in progressive Catholic schools. "We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given," [Alexandra] Pelosi says. "I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.  ...

"My mother, throughout her entire life, has been faithful to the church, even though the church has not been that faithful to her because of her politics. And I think that takes a lot of perseverance," she says. "And still, people protest her right to go to her own church."

What, do you think, is the likelihood that Nancy Pelosi understood what the Church requires well enough to knowingly reject it?  Not that that solves our problems.

I'll be reading this book when it comes out

Pope Benedict's book on Jesus.

Sounds like he's going to (among other things) 

• Denounce abuse of the Historical-Critical method
• Denounce the false dichotomy between the "historical Jesus" and "Jesus of faith"
• Denounce false conceptions of Jesus that deny His divinity by fitting Him to a procrustean bed of modern or postmodern thought
• Call for proper use of the Historical-Critical method and other modern exegetical techniques
• Proclaim the reality of Jesus' presence in history
• Call modern man to hail Jesus as true God and true man

Should be a good book.  Don't forget - in the above link you can read Pope Benedict's preface to the book, in German, or translated into English if you'd like.