The Ark and The Dove

Opiate of the Masses?

According to FoxNews.com, 55% of people in a survey of people aged 13-24 said that religion was a source of their happiness. A vast majority of those youngsters also counted family-time and parents as sources of happiness as well. So what happened to the inherent rebelliousness of youth?

Luther Must Be So Proud

According to Frank Pastore at Townhall.com, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America has just voted to "to no longer enforce the celibacy requirement for their unmarried staff--both straight and gay..."
In his column, Mr. Pastore is understandably concerned that this might send a confused message to the youth that these staff members minister.
I would love to know what the early reformers would think of their modern namesakes...

Well Her Expertise is Vampires...

Anne Rice endorses Hillary Clinton.

My list of grievances
1. There's no way Peter would give her better than a C- is she were to turn this in for an ENGL 101 paper.
2. Blogs are nice in that they can be personal, and off-the-cuff, but logic is nicer. Logic supported by evidence is better.
3. This line: "the Democratic Party best reflects the values I hold based on the Gospels. Those values are most intensely expressed for me in the Gospel of Matthew, but they are expressed in all the gospels. Those values involve feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison, and above all, loving one’s neighbors and loving one’s enemies." is tired. Jesus was in fact addressing individuals about what those individuals should do. If Hillary Clinton as a Senator votes for a policy that gives food to the poor or as President signs such a bill into law, she did not in fact feed the poor. The money that is spent on government policies is NOT the politicians' personal money. Taking money by threat to fund a federal program is nowhere in the gospels. In fact Jesus didn't really care all that much about what the government did. He cared about individuals. This is somewhat related to the fallacy of those who are overly concerned about government that society equals government. It does not. Society can and does feed millions of needy without government coercion.
4. Does she realize that the DNC says, "Choice is a fundamental, constitutional right. (Aug 2000)"

No More Parties at my Place...

If you haven't heard, College Park just underwent a new zoning regulation. You now must own a residential permit to park your car on the street. This wasn't a huge problem for me, since I already have a permit to park in my apartment complex. My apartment community also gives me one visitor pass to park in specially marked visitor slots.

The problem is that if I have more than one guest coming in, there is nowhere for them to park.

After going to the City Hall Web page, I saw that residents can acquire two visitor's permits, so I wandered down to the office to pick them up. I was foiled. Apparently my zone, number eleven, does not offer visitor's permits. In fact, zone eleven only offers one permit per address, so if you live with roommates, only one of you can park on the street.

In terms of the larger scope of things, this new regulation is causing huge problems for the Catholic Student Center. Once the minuscule parking lot at the CSC fills up, visitors can no longer park nearby and walk to the CSC.
They will most likely have to use the UMD parking garage across the street.

This has to be one of the most obnoxious laws I have ever seen passed in my time in Prince George's County. I'm not even sure how it is meant to benefit the community.

Loophole in Partial Birth Ban, and Other Life Considerations

The FoxNews opinion section has a rather lengthy piece by its correspondent Lauren Green pointing out how Harvard doctors are litigiously reading the letter of the law on the partial birth abortion ban and about her own conversion to the pro-life side of the argument.
What's most interesting about her change of mind was that it isn't written as being a faith-based choice. Instead, she became pro-life as a reaction to seeing the consequences that abortion and childbirth have had on other people.

All God's Creatures, Great and Fangy...

This one is for Michelle, the pastoral assistant at the CSC...

I stopped by the Center on my way home from work tonight. When walking up the path, I had one of those annoying encounters with an invisible spider web. After the obligatory waving about like a madman, I decided the web was sufficiently cleared and continued on my way. About two hours later, I was sitting here in my apartment, typing away at my computer, when I noticed some motion out of the corner of my eye. Just beside my right hand, the largest arachnid I have ever seen within a domestic setting was skittering over my mouse. Needless to say, I leapt away from my desk shrieking like a school girl and fetched my handy Sharper Image Bub Vacuum (a gift from Isabel). The littler bugger put up quite a bit of resistance, but I finally managed to get it locked away in the observation compartment...where  it will stay until I have assessed whether or not I have any wounds from the beastly thing (it would make my third assault from an invertebrate that required medical attention). Anyway, I was so impressed by the monster that I wanted to share some pictures. You will note that in one shot, there is second smaller spider in the observation compartment. He is a prisoner from a previous encounter that I had not managed to free. Sadly, he is no more. Even more sadly, the video I attempted to capture of the two spiders fighting was too blurry to reproduce.

What I've Been Clicking...

I agree:
Fr. Jonathan politely corrects Bill Maher and invites him to a chat (via Foxnews).
I was relieved to see just the kind of polite and reasoned retort that I had just been talking about below. Apparently Bill Maher wants to be the next Michael Moore and is making a documentary about the absurdity of faith. Fr. Jonathan rather patiently explains why just about everything Maher says about Christianity has almost nothing to do with what Christians say about themselves.

I'm ambivalent:
Catholic Bishop recommends calling God Allah to open a dialogue with Muslisms (via Drudge).
I see his point, and I understand that Allah is not an exclusively Islamic name for God. I also think it would be nice to be the better man and extend the olive branch first. The problem is that too many Muslims will see a white flag waving on the end of the olive branch, and too many Western Christians would be confused. That being said, I certainly see benefit of claiming Allah as our own in a sort of "We saw him first" kind of argument.

I disagree:
Whacky theoretician seriously proposes that there is a 20% chance we are a computer simulation (via NYTimes, via BBSpot.com)
The reporter seems to be writing the essay tongue-in-cheek, but you know there are whackjobs out there who would base a heresy on it. Do I even need to state that the obvious problem with this theory would be our own consciousness and self-awareness? The reason simulations work is because they appear to simulate behaviors to those outside the simulation. That's the illusion. The illusion wouldn't be for the bits of data inside the simulation, because they aren't really capable of perceiving anything. If the "simulated" people inside the simulation were actually perceiving something, they wouldn't be "simulated" people. They'd be real people. Creating a math equation that can predict how people would behave in a given situation, and then getting a computer to solve that equation, is far different than actually creating little bodiless people.

Golden Years?

So, I read (via Drudge) the article about how the U.S. is ranked as having the 42nd highest life expectancy in the world.

The article makes this sound somehow tragic, as if America is somehow at some severe disadvantage from the rest of the world, as when one quote reads: "The starting point is the recognition that the U.S. does not have the best health care system. There are still an awful lot of people who think it does."

Now don't get me wrong, life is good. I want to live as many years as God sees fit to give me...but I think it's worth putting into perspective that America is only lagging behind the top nation by about five years:

A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years... Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, had the longest life expectancy, at 83.5 years, according to the Census Bureau.

Gee, I wonder how a tiny country in the middle of nowhere could possibly manage to have the longest life expectancy. But look at the years we're talking about: between 78 and 84. Are most Americans really going to freak out when they realize that they are missing out on some of the best cafeteria food they'll ever be forced to eat...possibly through a straw? Let's face it, before America revamps its entire health care system to force us all to live longer, we should probably start revamping the entire way our culture treats its octogenarians. Much of our society already treats our seniors with a throw-away mentality, and that simply isn't incentive for us to take better care of our bodies.

We should also start asking ourselves why a culture that typically advocates things like assisted suicide should suddenly become so invested in squeezing out another six years of life out of everyone...because something tells me it has little to do with valuing the dignity of the human person.

Again, I think medicine should be treated as a healing ministry. We should always strive to preserve life, and we should never intentionally end it, especially not on the basis of quality of life issues or for the convenience of society. Still, if you are going to try to get me panicked about the health care system or if you are going to try to convince me not to eat more ice cream, then you are going to have to do better than to tell me I might miss out on five more years of slurping applesauce and cleaning dentures.

The Real First Commandment: Have Sex

A couple of years ago I was at a little reunion with some high school friends, many of whom are n.p.c.'s (that is, non-practicing Catholics...not non-player characters). At the said gathering, the topic of religion came up. Rather, an encomium on atheism came up. I don't really recall what arguments, if any, I made in defense of faith. I sometimes find you score the most persuasion points by not getting in the fight at all in these types of situations. Anyway, at one point, a certain friend made the comment that if he were an omnipotent creator, then all of his created beings would just undergo a permanent experience of maximized physical pleasure. He used a little less circumlocution and a little more graphic language. It wasn't just that there was suffering in the world that upset him; it was that God wouldn't make us permanently pleasured.

It was a puerile argument to say the least.

That argument from several years ago came to mind, and it occurred to me that, as juvenile and sophomoric as that philosophical point appeared to be, he actually wasn't that far off from the mark. That is, I turned to God's first words to man in the first account of creation in Genesis:

God blessed them, saying: "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it..." (Genesis 1.1:28)

I rather wish I could have thought of the line when my friend made his comment, since it suggests that God's original plan was, in fact, for man to pretty much do precisely what my friend's more concupiscent heart had hoped for.

That is, God's first commandment was for us to have sex. That's it. Pretty simple. His original first commandment wasn't even a reminder that he was God. He only had to do that long afterwards. But, at first, our primary duty was to be fertile...followed by keeping the plants and animals in line.

Not a bad deal, if you ask me. But the important thing to note here is that we turned it down.

We were the ones who complicated things. We were the ones who decided that pleasure wasn't enough to satisfy us. We decided (according to the second story of creation) that we needed power in addition to pleasure. It was in grasping for illicit power that we came to have knowledge of good and evil, and that desire for power is what ultimately led us to forsake the existence my friend thought would be totally gratifying.

Why do Onions Smell Bad?

It's not that I don't get satire. I spend a lot of time doing literary analysis of the stuff.
Nevertheless, a recent Onion piece left me scratching my head regarding its closing remarks:

The deities were all unanimous in agreeing that the sole Catholic fatality should be condemned to forever roam the Earth as an anguished, wretched ghost, as Catholicism is the only truly false religion and has no god to accept its faithful when they die.

The mock-article is about how a bus accident that killed people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds in New York. The gods of different faiths were then forced to sift through the remains and take their own believers to their respective afterlives. For whatever reason, the author decided to take the jab above at Catholics.

Isabel and I have been debating how to read it. On one hand, it could just be anti-Catholicism. That seems too easy of a solution, since this is a satirical newspaper. Of course, the fact that it's a satirical newspaper lets it make open and blatant hate speech and then just excuse itself by saying that it's satire, so it must not mean what it says.

Maybe it's a commentary on anti-Catholicism itself. The fact that it can blatantly attack one religion and no other, and the fact that it probably won't see its offices bombed or any innocent civilians killed in the streets in retaliation, shows the state of affairs regarding the public's view of Catholicism and the Catholic's patient response. The article pretty much ends by saying everyone hates Catholics.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, maybe it is meant to addresses the recent document asserting the supremacy of the Church. In this case, we still have a crux. Is it sticking it to Catholics for having the audacity to claim it is the one true Church? Or is it sticking it to all the other religions by showing how absurd pluralism is in actual practice?