The Ark and The Dove

A Familiar Face...

The Washington Times is running a piece on Sister Dede Byrne with video on its Website, here.

She gets mad props for making sure to insert a statement on the Eucharist. Evidently in answer to a question on what keeps her going, she says:

"...our Eucharistic adoration...without without that, I would be nothing more than a glorified social worker."

I also dug this line:

"I'm not just a pro-life doctor, I'm pro-eternal life," she says. "God makes it very clear that he is working through me. … God gave me the opportunity to be a physician, and he creates the miracles."

It's a nine page article on the really tremendous and selfless work that she's doing, so carve out a block of time to read it. It might be the only good news you'll read today...

Charity is Hard on the Internet

I'm thinking in particular of the various forum wars I seem to get myself caught up in.

Even when I try to compose the most conciliatory, open-minded post, emoticon-riddled post, the other person often seems to take me at my worst.

I mean, seriously...when have I ever been the slightest bit satiric or caustic in a debate?

Ahem.

Anyway, religious disputes on the Internet feel like a perpetual reenactment of Paul at the Areopagus...only I ain't no St. Paul.

What I really need to do is start getting off my duff and find some actual people to be nice to in a non-virtual environment.

Stupid isn't an excommunicable offense...

FoxNews has a somewhat (unsurprisingly) sensationalist headline this week:
Jews Slam Pope for Rehabilitating Holocaust Denying Bishop.

The problem with this headline is that it could imply that the bishop was excommunicated for denying the Holocaust or that, at the very least, the Pope is condoning a Bishop whose only attribute is his idiotic denial of the mass slaughter of Jews.

It isn't until you actually read the article that you realize he is one of four bishops who are being brought back to the Church after a schismatic break as LeFevebrists

Ignorance of 20th Century history is not grounds for excommunication, as far as I know, but this article, combined with a general popular ignorance of how the Church works, will certainly give occasion for people to express their already formed hostility against the Church in the general public...

On the other hand, it might improve diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Iran.

Atheism and Imagination

Perhaps the biggest problem with trying to argue against atheism is that it seems like each atheist has to be taken on an individual basis. There don't seem to be particularly well-defined schools of atheism in popular culture...just individuals who develop pet theories as to why God shouldn't exist who grab snippets from their favorite crankcase authors.
At least that's my experience of the matter.
Maybe some one can point me towards a good book that offers a taxonomy of different species of God-deniers.

For instance, is there a reasonable generalization that can be made about atheism and imagination?

Do atheists simply lack sufficient imagination to really understand what us believers are trying to articulate? Or do atheists become so attached to their own imagined cosmologies that they can't shake the thought out of their own heads? That is, do atheists suffer from a lack of imagination or too much of it?

Listening to various atheists on Youtube, one often hears the phrase "I can't imagine an all-loving God who would..."
Do they just use the phrase "I can't imagine" as a common figure of speech, or does it hit something deeper?

For my part, I find it extremely easy to imagine a world in which God does not exist.

I haven't actually perceived God in any directly physical way. Even when I encounter Christ's physical presence, he doesn't look very much like himself.

Thus, it is very easy for me to imagine that nothing has happened at Mass. I have no problem myself imagining a universe that is moving like a big, randomly self-assembled machine. I have no problem mulling over the thought that I might just be a very sophisticated product of evolution, that consciousness and free will are illusions that developed out of a process of selection, and that love is nothing more than a man-made construct that yields favorable conditions for a society's perpetuation.

I can imagine all of these things. They all seem perfectly reasonable positions to hold in light of science.

But I don't believe them.

I don't like Pres. Obama; Communism is Stupid; Radical Islam is Evil

Before random overhearers start thinking that I'm associating Obama with communism or Islam, I am not.

I'm just enjoying the right to free speech in my country, and those were the first three things that came to mind that I wouldn't be able to say if I wasn't living in a country where I had that right.

I can still criticize my leader without worrying about assassination.

I can still criticize communism without being censored.

I can still criticize Islamic terrorists without going to jail.

Take an Extra Step for Me

Unfortunately, I won't be canceling my classes tomorrow in order to participate in this year's March for Life...so make sure to march extra hard in my absence.

I'm not entirely sure why I feel so compelled to make sure I'm doing the job that I'm getting paid for and making sure my student's get their money's worth out of me. After all, plenty of faculty canceled classes just so they could watch the Obama inauguration. It's not like they were even going to be there, and they bailed out.

Conservative marches always seem so self-defeating since anyone with a sense of duty towards life issues probably also has a strong sense of duty towards their immediate responsibilities. Liberal marches have it much easier since their proponents are already confused regarding their duties to their fellow men.

In Praise of Prostitution

FoxNews is running an article about Natalie Dylan, a Nevadan who is literally auctioning off her virginity to the highest bidder. Because prostitution is legal in Nevada (!), no laws are being broken. That's not what I'm here to praise, however.
The real silver lining in this otherwise utterly degrading and pathetic case is that the dehumanizing commodification of Natalie reveals something worth observing:

While the commodity's rarity may be debatable, more than 10,000 bidders have come forth to put a price tag on Dylan's purity. And if the Bunny Ranch's owner is to be believed, someone has offered $3.7 million, a price far above rubies.

What does it profit a man to gain the world, but lose his soul?

3.7 million dollars is hardly the world, and therefore all the less worth losing your soul over.

What Natalie thinks she is gaining or losing is not where I find any hope in this story. Rather, what I find worth considering is how much people are willing to spend to destroy her "purity" as FoxNews describes it (a purity that was surely already lost by virtue of it being offered for sale).

My point is that, as sad as Natalie's case may be, both Natalie and her bidders have expressed, as only capitalists can, their value on virginity...which apparently has a pretty high market value.

Obviously, I'm not suggesting that this is a sound option for young women trying to pay off student loans, but perhaps it offers a useful meditation for the young lady who finds herself propositioned by some charming young man. After all, if you had something worth four million dollars, would you just give it away to some guy, or would you keep it for yourself?

Or, put another way, if the rights to first night are worth four million dollars, then saving yourself for your spouse is, economically speaking, the same as giving them a four million dollar wedding present.

Painful Reminder

via Drudge

Edward Vaughn, the head of NAACP in Alabama, is protesting the use of Trail Maids at the inaugural parade.

The head of the Alabama NAACP, however, wants Mobile's Azalea Trail Maids to stay home on Inauguration Day, claiming the group reminds him of slavery.

"These are not just regular costumes.  These are the costumes that remind someone of the plantation in Gone with the Wind," Edward Vaughn said in a phone interview.

If Vaughn wants to protest the Trail Maids, then he should do so on the only reasonable grounds available: they look really silly.

However, if we are going to start banning things on the grounds that they remind people of slavery, then we are going to have to start banning Edward Vaughn and the NAACP because when they talk like this they are even more painful and even more direct reminders of slavery.

The Language of God

My brother-in-law lent me a copy of Francis Collins's The Language of God over the winter break as a kind of sorbet to watching Ben Stein's Expelled. Collins, if you don't know (I didn't) is the director of the Human Genome project, so it's considered a big deal that a scientist with his standing is also a very vocal born-again Christian. The point of his book is to advance a middle path between atheist Darwinism and the Intelligent Design/Creationist ideologies. He wants fellow scientists to know that it is okay to believe in God and fellow Christians to know that God probably used evolution -- so they better get used to learning it and ditching Intelligent Design.

In Stein's film, Intelligent Design is depicted as a perfectly reasonable alternative to atheist Darwinism -- but there are two big problems with this depiction. First, the film falls prey to the same polarizing tendencies which it tries to unravel. Stein claims to be defending intellectual freedom, not Intelligent Design per se. Nevertheless, he only shows Intelligent Design as the intellectual rival to atheistic Darwinism. That's the first problem. The second problem is that the film doesn't quite seem to grasp that Intelligent Design, as such, does in fact appear to have some major problems with it. If you aren't a geneticist (I'm not) then you would miss the subtleties of the evolution argument that Stein (who is also not a geneticist) misses. Furthermore, there are scientists, as Collins points out, who are ready if not welcoming of the idea of a Creator, but even they can't subscribe to the idea of Intelligent Design. Stein didn't seem to spend much time with these people because he rather foolishly decided to interview people who had appeared to have lost their jobs or funding over Intelligent Design for the sake of sensationalism.

To clarify, Collins points out that Intelligent Design means a very specific set of ideas -- most importantly the idea that any one given animal or human organ is so complex, so developed, and so reliant on all of its different parts, that it could not have been assembled through a random process of mutation and selection. The complexity of life, according to I.D., suggests that a Creator must have engaged in "special acts" of creation for individual species. Collins refutes this argument in essentially two ways. First, explains Collins, there is so much genetic overlap between any two species of animals that it makes God look thoroughly unoriginal if we are to assume he made each species individual. Plus, if God made each organism individually, then it leaves one wondering why he bothered to make vestigial organs or why there are obvious structural design flaws in the human body (like how our pelvis doesn't seem to want to belong to an animal that walks upright). Second, our understanding of genetics has actually become vastly more able to account for large scale mutations thanks to research like the Human Genome Project. Collins gives an example of how DNA occasionally burps and makes duplicate genes. The duplicate genes can mutate in the background without affecting the normal life of the animal. It is possible (and I'm obviously paraphrasing out of my field here) that the genes necessary for a complex organ can be developing silently in the background after long periods of mutation, and not actually be triggered until one last puzzle piece mutates into being. You really should read the book if you want the full argument...The main point is that I was pretty well convinced that Intelligent Design doesn't hold much water when Collins is done with it, and I had a similar sense watching Stein's movie, although I don't think he meant me to.

Incidentally, Expelled is far more persuasive when it shows atheists behaving badly than when it tries to show Intelligent Design theorists being scientific. This is also covered in Collins' book when he articulates how Darwinism gets a bad rap due to outlandish atheists like Richard Dawkins, who want to assert that evolution must deconstruct God when it does no such thing. It also doesn't help that people like Hitler abused Darwinism to defend eugenics. Rather, as Collins' title points out, evolution can reinforce a belief in God through what Collins calls BioLogos -- an approach to evolution that considers DNA as a language system where the signifiers point towards things far more complex than their simple molecular nature should. It should be noted that Collins does not believe that he has found a proof of the existence of God. Most of his conversion was through reading C.S. Lewis...whom he cites copiously, and then falling back on Augustine's arguments for allegorical exegesis to ward of fundamentalists.

I was a bit disappointed, however, that Collins didn't make more of this linguistics angle in his book. Perhaps his editor thought the book was already too long. Perhaps it is because Collins is a scientist and not a humanist steeped in traditions of language. I have the impression that if Collins teamed up with a linguist, he could have a much more compelling (and probably far more confusing) sequel.

New Definition of Conception?

Silly me thought the term "conception" was defined by the moment the sperm enters the egg and their DNA fuse together like a zipper.

Fortunately, I have sources like BBC News to clarify such misconceptions. In an article on what purports to be the first baby born without the BRCA1 gene that almost invariably leads to adult breast cancer, the BBC defines conception as follows:

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves taking a cell from an embryo at the eight-cell stage of development, when it is around three-days old, and testing it.

This is before conception - defined as when the embryo is implanted in the womb.

Doctors then select an embryo free from rogue genes to continue the pregnancy, and discard any whose genetic profile points to future problems.

I was cornfused enough when I heard that pregnancy was technically defined as only beginning at the moment of implantation in the womb (thus allowing people to say that a woman was never pregnant if she uses an abortificeant to destroy the embryo before it implants). But now, apparently, the technical definitions of conception and pregnancy are the same thing.

The article also seems to drastically over-simplify the arguments of those who are concerned about this kind of "therapy":

Josephine Quintavalle, of the campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: "This is nothing personal towards the girl, but I think we have gone too far.

"Underlying all this is eugenics."

Mrs Quintavalle said the message was that "you are better off dead, than being born with this gene".

What the article doesn't explain is that the typical medical procedure to weed out this kind of gene is in vitro fertilization, and that the typical form of in vitro fertilization involves taking a number of embryos, testing their DNA and then only selecting the ones with the desirable traits for implantation (or "conception" according to this article). That means that all of the other embryos, even the viable ones that have nothing else "wrong" with them other than the undesired genes (whether it be for breast cancer, brown hair, or two X-chromosomes), and destroying them -- also defined as killing embryonic humans.

That detail becomes quite muddled when the author of the article suggests that the gene was screened before conception, which somehow suggests that the unfertilized egg and...uhm...free ranging sperm (?) were both tested before being allowed to fuse.

In all likelihood, this so-called miracle baby was born at the expense of a number of her syblings who were deemed not fit to continue living due to the cost, expense, and pain they were likely to experience as a result of their genes.

What I find most perplexing is that so many people who have chosen abortions carry the pain of extinguishing a single life for the rest of their time on earth, yet couples who have chosen in vitro fertilization and extinguished dozens of lives don't seem to carry that much baggage in public. It's as if chosing to have the one baby over all of the others allows them some kind of psychological fire escape...

Heck, my sister and I still get in fights over things I was allowed to do in high school that she wasn't...I can't imagine the kind of anxiety it would cause if my parents didn't even allow her to be born...

I think I just developed the plot for The Unborn 2: In Vitro Decimation.