The Ark and The Dove

The Fool?

Is it just me, or does the background in the first picture suggest an ass-eared fool's cap? It even looks like it has bells hanging from it.

(The picture was taken from Drudge's headline, btw...the engraving comes from an illustration to Erasmus' In Praise of Folly.)

Getting Superstitious?

Okay, so I just read that a SECOND asteroid came close to earth this month...

According to the article, this size asteroid usually bops by Earth every couple of months, so it's not that unusual. Still, the lead on the article makes one a little nervous that we are in for Sodom and Gomorrah II.
Here we are all nervous and panicky about the economy and global warming...when... SLAM-BANG! one asteroid dropping on a major city could really change our perspective on everything.

Aragorn's Dilemma

I was watching a video from one of the more prominent YouTube Athiests the other day. A lot of these goes are pretty obnoxious, although a couple of them make some worthwhile points. As I've said before, a truly religious person should probably agree with an atheist about 99% of the time since having faith in a single religion precludes the possibility of other religions being correct. (For some reason, athiests don't always seem to get this subtle point.)
Anyhow, the athiest in question was Pat Condell, and he was condemning a recent UN motion to make defamation of religion a globally recognized hate crime. The motion in question seems to be led by Muslim countries, making the whole thing seem very suspicious...especially since Islam isn't known for its tolerance towards other religions (consider my previous point about where the faithful and the faithless seem to agree).
On this point, I agree with Condell. As much as I love the Church, it seems a very dangerous thing to outlaw defamation of it. We see how well history has treated the burning of heretics and blasphemers.

In our post-Enlightenment age, we have to hope that the Truth of the Church to shine on its own rather than rely on punitive laws to silence oppositional views.

So what does this have to to with Aragorn?

In the course of his video, Condell takes a pot shot at the Church's position regarding abortion and how it relates to the recent story of a 9-year old Brazilian girl who was the victim of rape. According to news outlets, the local archbishop excommunicated the girls mother and doctor when they pursued an abortion.

Now the anti-religion gang is using this to argue a flaw in Church logic. How can they publicly excommunicate a mother and doctor who are trying to save a nine year old's life by preventing an obviously dangerous pregnancy, and yet not publicly excommunicate the rapist.

It's another sign of how excommunication is little understand in popular culture, just as when the media had a freakout over the pope attempting to lift the excommunication on a heretic who happened to also be a Holocaust denier.

It is as if people think the Church is more okay with rape but not abortion...when it should be painfully obvious that this is not true.

Early in the Two Towers, Aragorn faces a dilemma. All of the hobbits have gone missing. Two have fled on their own with the Ring. Two have been abducted by orcs. Searching for one party necessitates the abandonment of the other. Aragorn can't make a choice with betraying his pledge to one of the two groups.

Sometimes, the world leaves us with only evil choices. Such is the case with frozen embryos. Implanting them is gravely immoral. Letting them die is gravely immoral. There is no good action.

Such is the case with this nine year old girl. It is mortal sin to kill the baby within her; but it also seems gravely sinful to knowingly allow a nine-year old to undergo a pregnancy that very well may kill her. Yet, if the Church recommends abortion in this case, then it would create a scandal...a confusion that could lead to even more death. The public excommunication makes clear the Church's position. It is to preserve the consistency of Church teaching that leads the Church to excommunicate. It is not as if those who are excommunicated cannot ever be reunited with the Church so long as they renounce their now public views regarding abortion.

This, then, hopefully explains why the Church hasn't felt the need to publicly excommunicate the rapist. Assumably, this scumbag, who was the girl's stepfather, hasn't made a public declaration that rape is morally acceptable. If Catholics were, by the millions, voting to legalize rape and making public expressions defending rape, the Church would surely step in and start dishing out excommunications.

It is unfortunate that the archbishop is quoted as saying the father would not be expelled from the Church. I can only assume he means formally expelled, since, as any Catholic should know, rape divorces him from any relationship with God until he receives absolution.

The other hitch that seems to stand in the way of critics of the Church is the archbishop's defense that the abortion is a graver sin than the rape since it is the taking of life.

He also said the accused stepfather would not be expelled from the church. Although the man allegedly committed "a heinous crime ... the abortion - the elimination of an innocent life - was more serious".

This statement does not lend itself well to this attention-deficient age of soundbites and YouTube clips. It sounds cold and dismissive of the barbarity of rape. Still, it is philosophically true. It is also Augustine's argument against Lucretia's suicide after her rape -- that her violator, Tarquin, did a heinous thing in assaulting her, but that her own murder of an innocent woman (herself) is even worse. (It is worth noting, however, that the archbishop spoke against the mother and the doctor, not the nine-year old girl herself.)

The fact of the matter is, however, that there was no good or right choice to be made in the case of this girl. It is one of the consequences of the horrible sin of rape that it creates such scenarios where only evil could be done. Should the Archbishop spoken in support of the abortion, he would have created global scandal and perpetuated the sin...encouraging in others. If he had remained completely silent, he would have bred confusion and seemed to have supported this abortion as a precedent. If he speaks out against it, he seems to be cruelly honest.

In the end, Aragorn goes in search of the hobbits that had no say in their fate, leaving Frodo and Sam to fend for themselves as they clearly chose to break from the Fellowship on their own. Merry and Pippin are the more defenseless, the more helpless...and it was the most helpless victims that the archbishop sought out

Pop Culture Quick Takes

I've been buying a lot of older DVDs for cheap at Blockbuster to help me through the lonely times up here, and thought I'd share some thoughts on here...

There Will Be Blood -- snoozerville; Big Oil in and out of bed with deranged evangelical Christians; no unity of character...Should have been title, "There Will Be Bored."

Igor -- A poor man's Nightmare Before Christmas meets the least funny parts of Shrek; kids might laugh at it; proves why narration is usually a bad idea in film; turned off after twenty-five minutes.

Balls of Fury -- What was I thinking? Jack Black wannabe in Wayne's World spin of a Mortal Kombat / Natural hybrid plot. Lame, crude humor fills in gaps between trailer's jokes. Also turned off after twenty-five minutes...and I never even got to see Christopher Walken.

Curse of the Golden Flower -- Toss in three scoops of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, a pinch of Return of the King, and two table spoons of Hamlet. Mix in absurdly low-cut period costumes. Cook for two hours for surprisingly entertaining melodrama with bleak social commentary, awesome spider ninjas, and unexpected plot twists.

Sin City -- Visually striking, if often obscene. Very depressing. Imagine the worst stories you possibly can, multiply that by your most recent nightmare, and varnish it with a layer of tragic film noir.

And on the video game front...I picked up some dirt cheap PS2 games in the last few weeks.

Midway Arcade Treasures 2 -- The arcade versions of Mortal Kombat are way too hard when playing against the computer. Multi-player games make you more lonely when two-thirds of the screen are left blank. It would be more fun if I was still at an age where "the guys came over." Mostly, this compilation had nostalgia value. MK3 and Primal Rage were huge when I was a freshman, and I always liked Xenophobe (although the play controls on the PS2 aren't intuitive). It's more fun to own this than to play it.

Dirge of Cerberus (Final Fantasy VII) -- A confusing melodramatic computer animated cartoon with characters you barely remember from FFVII, and some new characters you never heard of. Oh, and every now and then you get to shoot at something...usually the same trooper you killed four or five levels ago. Seriously, this thing is less of a video game with cutscenes than it is a confusing movie with brief interactive components. A disappointment. I was suckered in by the FF franchise...

Shadow of Colossus -- Freaky cool game consisting essentially of nothing against boss battles...with really, really big bosses. I know God of War has some big bosses, but you almost always beat them by punching in patterned codes...you don't have so much of a sense of playing the battles as you do just triggering animated sequences, a la Dragon's Lair. In Colossus, you actually have to control the player character as he climbs all over the bosses' gigantic bodies, and then grip their fur as he strikes their vulnerable points. (It did take me about an hour, though, to realize that the little guy has to take breaks or else he loses his grip.) I still have no idea why I'm killing these things...and I actually feel pretty bad whenever I do kill one...but I'm expecting the game will resolve this mystery eventually.

So...I really should have been working on my daily exegesis instead of writing this...daily exegeeksis?

I am Batman

I finally got around to watching The Dark Knight this weekend.
It was a very, very good movie, but Isabel and I both thought it might have been a little too heavy on plot. One got the impression that the film was setting up Harvey Dent to become two-face for a sequel...but when the film decided it still needed to wrap up his plotline within the same movie, we could feel a certain degree of narrative exhaustion setting in.

But the real surprise for me watching the movie was how could anyone not think it was about George W. Bush. By the end of the movie, I had a similar feeling as watching Horton Hears a Who (Did no one making this movie realize it was really about abortion?).
It might be that every movie critic has already made the Bush-Batman connection, but I was skipping reviews so as to avoid spoilers...so it's news to me.

There are essentially three components of the movie that, at least to me, make this movie seem like an allegory on Bush. First, the Joker has been rewritten as a terrorist. Sure, the Joker always had his schemes and plots and attempts to hold the city hostage. This time, however, the Joker wasn't in it for money, or revenge, or really any reason at all. This Joker just wanted to generate fear, evil, and panic in the city. At one point he calls himself an anarchist. He's constantly setting up bombs, sometimes roadside and often remote IEDs. He even distributes videos of him slashing and torturing his hostages, a la the distribution of various Islamic videos depicting beheadings. Also significant, the Joker's terrorism encourages the citizens of Gotham to turn against one another to meet his demands. Gone are the days when the Joker wants a pile of loot...now, he just wants to decentralize authority by creating mobs of angry people who obey his command so as to avoid his threats to blow things up. The Joker finds ways to make the citizens complicit in their own ultimate demise. This is most poignant when, after the Joker has demanded the city turn over Batman, he starts requesting the death of private citizens or else he'll blow up hospitals...and other citizens prove more than willing to comply.

Secondly, Bruce Wayne appropriates a rather implausible sonographic-cell phone device developed by his R&D man Morgan Freeman. Freeman originally creates the device so Batman can sneak into an enemy facility and get its layout on the go. Wayne, however, even more implausibly has this technology used, without Freeman's knowledge, to create a giant listening station enabling him to eavesdrop on every cell phone in Gotham City. When Freeman discovers this, he says Wayne has gone too far and that he will resign his position. Wayne (who is dressed at Batman at the time of the confrontation), explains that the surveillance technology is only to be used this one time to catch the Joker. To prove his honest, Wayne gives complete control of the technology to Freeman, who can then destroy the system after the Joker has been caught.
How is that not about Homeland Security and wiretapping?

Thirdly, Batman goes from being an icon of justice and a defender against terrorism, to a hated, rogue vigilante who takes the rap for the crimes committed by Two-face. Batman decides that the city needs a protector, not a hero. If the city knew that seemingly virtuous, "white knight" Harvey Dent had become the diabolic two-face, the city might lose hope. The city needs its heroes, but it also needs its pragmatic defender. Thus, Batman sacrifices his identity as a hero, taking on (rather Christlike) the sins of Two-face. He who was without sin, becomes sin (this is not to then compare Bush to Christ by some transitive property). My point here is that Bush completely sacrificed his reputation. He let the media savage him, essentially becoming a villain in the eyes of the populace, so that he could continue to protect an ungrateful nation. This seems even more relevant now that we have Obama, who seems so preoccupied with his own image, that he has to attack cable personalities anytime they criticize his position.

As a fourth clue that Batman can be read as a Bush figure, you only need to look at the boxart of the DVD set. Batman stands below a New York skyscraper with the Batman-logo burning across its face.

How such a poster got through the production company post-9/11 is beyond me.

Guilty as Charged

FoxNews is running a front page article on Benedict recommending abstinence from technology for Lent.

The Pontiff warned on his YouTube site in January that "obsessive" use of mobile phones or computers "may isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development."

And here I thought blogging more was going to help me with my Lenten mediations!

But this request does makes sense to me.

At this point in my life, the only real interaction I have with any other human beings during the week is with my students. I don't even have a noon Mass anymore where I can loiter around a kibbitz with stragglers. I'm lucky if I even get to hang out with friends or family once a month, although I'm fortunate that I still get to see Isabel once a week.

So, yes, I pretty much do spend more time interacting with Mario, Link, Cloud Strife, and little German kids playing Battlefront II than engaging actual human beings (not to imply that little German kids aren't human beings...although seeing how well they can snipe me from across the forests of Endor, I do have my doubts).

Heck, I'm actually worse off than the people in the article because at least they are being faulted for excessive texting. I don't even know how to text, but at least they are communicating with other people.

Sex in the Environment

Rosa sent me an article about how environmentalists are encouraging married couples to stay married rather than divorce in order to reduce their carbon footprint.

"We understand that there is a social problem (with divorce), but now we're seeing there is also environmental impact as well on the footprint," AAP quoted him as saying.

Ignoring the fact that this means Rosa must be betting on how long I intend to stay married when the time comes, I found this immensely amusing (please read that with the snobby tone as I intended). The article indicates that, at least for the Australians who concocted this silly argument, protecting the environment has become a more important reason to stay married than, say, the psychological welfare of children, the salvation of your own soul, or even, gasp, personal honor. (Exception for abusive marriages implied.)

What is even more knee-slappingly funny is that the implications of this article suggest that, if living as a couple reduces waste of resources, then perhaps monasticism is the best option of all for the environment.

In a monastic environment, you are going to have a large group of people living within a single dwelling. The simplicity of the lifestyle and vows of poverty means that you are not going to have huge consumption of goods or waste. Best yet, celibacy means that you won't have any of those nasty little human larvae coming around generating an even larger carbon footprint --

BUT WAIT--THERE'S MORE!

Environmental scientists are suggesting that estrogen from birth control pills are mutating aquatic life, often into hermaphrodites (yikes!). Not only does celibate communal living cut down on population (which environmentalists will love), it does so in a completely natural way without emitting pollutants into the environment.

So, whether you are discussing the insolubility of marriage or the communal monastic life, it turns out that the Church has been way ahead of the curve when it comes to environmentally friendly life-styles..

Trying not to babble...

Well, it didn't take me long to start missing days, did it?

Anyway, today's a doozy, since the Gospel reading includes the Our Father. I'm just going to go line by line and see what happens.

Our Father who art in heaven,

Okay, so how many times have I heard the importance of the first-person plural pronoun emphasized? People love to point out that this is a collective prayer (and I'm sure that must be appealing to neo-Marxists).
I'm not really sure I want to tackle the very significant nature of God as Father just before dinner either.
What does strike me a little differently looking at this line as the editor's break it up, however, is that the first utterance of the Our Father is a profession of faith in the mere existence of God. God is...and more to the point, He is, in an essential way, someplace that is not here.
Sure, God is omnipresent. God is "everywhere." But not in the same way that the Father is in Heaven.
This, I think, is crucial for reclaiming the opening line from an atheist, collectivist mindset.
When we say God, we really do mean a Being who exists apart from us.
We don't pray to "Our Father who are in our hearts" or "Our Father who art in us." This would become to close to seeing God as some manifestation of ourselves, as if God were made in our image rather than us being made in His. Of course, God does exist in us, but that isn't the whole picture. He isn't just imminent; He is transcendent.

hallowed be thy name,

It's also kind of peculiar that God bothers to have a name. He doesn't have to have a name mind you. It's not like He needs people to be able to identify Him on a personal level. Naming is usually a tool of the superior to be able to classify, identify, and organize the superior. The first man gets to name the animals...they don't get to name him. And we only usually use names when there is more than one of something. Adam and Eve are simply "the man" and "the woman" for the most part of their story. If Adam were the only man, he'd never really have to be called Adam.

Obviously, I'm not suggesting that the fact that God has a name suggests there are other gods beside Him (although scholars say that the very earliest Hebrews might not quite have approached monotheism as the idea that only one god exists...it was more a matter of only worshipping one god and rejecting all of the others). That being said, God, in His usual God way, goes beyond necessity. He allows Himself to have name, even though He doesn't really need one.

thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done,

For me, these two lines are curious. If the coming of the Kingdom ultimately serves as the Eschaton, Armageddon, the Second Coming in Glory, this makes sense.
But if the coming of the Kingdom is meant in the sense of extending the Kingdom on the presently broken Earth, this seems to have less to do with God taking action and more to do with us taking action.
We are the ones who are supposing to be doing God's will, so these two lines are really about us conforming, submitting ourselves to God's plan so that we might act in accordance with it.
We still need to pray for this because, after all, none of us are really able to do this on our own.
When we say this, we are aligning ourselves with God and hoping that He will strengthen us to do His will.

on earth as it is in heaven.

Is this then a call to change our attitudes about God's will? I can't imagine the angels and the saints begrudging serving God in Heaven, or struggling with their own desires to accomplish whatever He has them doing up there.
God doesn't want servants who do their duty; He wants a creation that fulfills its purpose with joy.

Give us this day our daily bread;

This seems especially poignant given our current economic crisis...although I'm always a bit worried by the use of the understood "You" in this line. The way it is punctuated in English makes (and the lack of a subject in the sentence) creates an imperative form. It sounds like we are issuing demands of God.

and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us;

I don't like that comma. With the comma, the editor creates a caesura, a break between the two thoughts. It sounds like we are demanding forgiveness...and, oh, by the way, we'll try to get around to paying some of that forgiveness forward. I'd like to drop that comma so that we have a more conditional statement: Forgive us as (i.e. in the same manner that) we forgive others.

This seems more in keeping with the Gospel lines that follow the Our Father:

If you forgive men their transgressions,
your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you do not forgive men,
neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.

The more conditional version makes it sound less like we are making demands, and more like we understand how our actions have a degree of potency in our own fates. This goes along with my thoughts on the previous lines where God's will being done is ultimately our own responsibility.

I think what I've realized more this time through is that the Our Father isn't just about asking God for His assistance. It's partly about pledging ourselves to do God's will so that we become the answers to our own prayers.

This isn't simply a matter of the Franklin's extra-biblical motto: "God helps those who help themselves." Or, perhaps it is, but only if we really invoke the plural third person of Franklin's quote.
Franklin's motto is about individuals taking responsibility for their own actions -- doing things for their individual selves rather than waiting for Divine intervention. Forgiving others isn't just about insuring our own forgiveness from God. Forgiving others is about bringing a taste of God's forgiveness to others.

That initial "Our" comes back to mind.

Just as we are to bring a taste of God's forgiveness to others, we are to bring the Kingdom and God's will to one another.

How often is it that a person is the answer to the prayer we had...and how more often would that happen if more people were pledging themselves to God's will? And how often is it that we then, even if unconsciously, are the answers to others prayers?

In a way, I think I've just proven that I am, in fact, God's gift to humanity.

...but so are you.

and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

Ah, but lest I get too confident in my new purpose as God's gift to humanity, Jesus throws in a monkey wrench.

Avoiding temptation and liberation from evil -- real evil, not just general human naughtiness -- are not things for which we can rely on ourselves or each other.

There is real evil out there -- malevolent forces beyond man. We really do need God to protect us from those. There is no corresponding force of human agency at this point. There is no, deliver us from evil as we deliver others from evil. We can't. We are, as sinners limited by our now fallen bodies, essentially vulnerable to the diabolic unless God protects us.

So the Our Father is 1) a reminder of God's existence as something that extends beyond us, 2) a call to arms and a reminder of our own agency in God's plan of Salvation, and 3) a reminder of our own limitations.

Omnipotent God and the Problem of Evil

It's one of my pet theories that the story of Noah and the Flood is the ancient Israelite answer to the question about why an omnipotent God tolerates evil in the world.
I can imagine the story of the Flood being framed by an ancient story teller being asked by a precocious pupil, "Why doesn't God just kill all the evil people in the world so the rest of us can live in peace?" The story teller pauses for a moment and then launches into a story where God did just that, and found the experience to be so unpleasant that He swore never to do it again.

I will establish my covenant with you,
that never again shall all bodily creatures be destroyed
by the waters of a flood;
there shall not be another flood to devastate the earth.

This is also a big change from the version found in Gilgamesh, where the gods send the flood to destroy humanity simply because they've gotten too annoying with their loud parties.

It seems to me that people who get upset with the idea of God's judgment often fail to see how unpleasant an ordeal it has to be for God, but I think the story of the flood points towards this issue in an anagogical sense. Sure, the person who damns himself goes through horrible torment and suffering...but how painful must it be for a loving God to witness it happen?
God knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows us on levels of intimacy beyond anything we can ever imagine. He understands better than we do what it means for us to be damned. Indeed, while the suffering of Hell is separation with God, God knows the full extent of that separation, whereas the damned soul can't possibly fully know what has been lost.

I'm almost inclined to say that, in a way, God suffers our damnation more than we do...although this would seem something of a paradox given that God is complete in His happiness.
God can lose nothing of His happiness because God is complete in Himself. He doesn't need us to be happy.
Nevertheless, God clearly desires to love us and desires to be with us. Therefore, the frustration of that desire by a refusal on our part to be with Him must be a displeasure to God to some extent.
Thus, when God utters His final judgment against a soul, one might imagine it is not with the glee of some sadistic judge...nor quite the stoic countenance of blind justice.