Bogus Gold

Something fundamental to the nature of mankind is the belief that we are important. By that I mean human beings don't tend to wonder whether or not we're important. We wonder how we're important. The variations in how this is expressed cross-culturally are staggering, but the fundamental belief in mankind's importance seems as fixed in human nature as bipedalism or language.

One of the purposes religion serves (note: this has nothing to do with whether any particular religion is true) is to address this belief in mankind. To take one example, it just makes sense to us when we hear we are the children of God rather than just one of many animal species. Children of God are obviously important in the grand scheme of things in a way random animal species are not. This satisfies our belief in our fundamental importance and addresses "how" we're important in a very satisfying way.

To me this doesn't seem a minor aspect of human nature, but a rather important one. We have a long history of grasping for explanations about our own importance, seemingly needing to believe even when those explanations bring us misery and despair. This has long been a criticism leveled at some religions (e.g. teachings about sin and eternal damnation make people's lives more miserable than they would otherwise be), but I think the observation goes well beyond religion, appearing with just as much frequency and intensity among the agnostic and atheistic. Everyone needs to understand their place in the universe, and conclusions that we’re just not that important do not suffice.

And that brings us to the modern Green movement. Stewardship of the environment is not a new concept. There are plenty of precedents in history across many cultures. But something seems different about the modern Greens. It's widely noted that they seem to regard their interaction with the environment in ways that draw comparisons to the way Christians regard sin and salvation. The simplest explanation for this seems to be that, in a post-Christian world, environmentalism has become a new religion.

I don't find that explanation quite satisfactory. It's not that environmentalism is a religion. It's that environmentalism is motivated by the same basic need in mankind to understand their importance. This makes it attractive, not only to atheists and other kinds of unbelievers, but to anyone finding insufficient explanation for the importance of mankind in their other beliefs.

There's good reason you see a strong Green presence among the more progressive churches. It's not that they have abandoned belief in God. It's that they've abandoned those teachings that made mankind seem particularly important in God's grand scheme of the universe. Modern environmentalism provides that. This has practical importance for its adherents that can be summarized in one word: meaning.

A traditional Catholic may find meaning in attending daily mass, participating in the sacraments, perhaps saying the rosary. They believe this is a means of perfecting their soul and working toward salvation and eternal life. In the same way a Green might find meaning in recycling, choosing to purchase organic or sustainable products, and finding ways to lower their carbon footprint. In both cases adherents have a very tangible sense that their everyday actions are connected to a larger purpose. Even more, they believe that the accumulation of such actions over their lives is something of real importance - not just to themselves, but in the grand scheme of the whole world. Their life therefore matters in a very tangible way.

But as this belief in mankind's importance is not derived by rational understanding, but rather arrives as an a priori belief escaping examination, it has a tendency to distort thoughts upon which it is based.

Dr. Roy Spencer makes an interesting observation about a problem with climate models that examines exactly this sort of distortion. Bold emphases mine below (the italics are Spencer’s):

It turns out that the modelers have made a critical assumption that ends up leading to the their conclusion that the climate system is very sensitive to our greenhouse gas emissions: that the climate system was in a state of energy balance in the first place.

There is a pervasive, non-scientific belief in the Earth sciences that nature is in a fragile state of balance. Whether it is ecosystems or the climate systems, you will hear or read scientists claims about the supposed fragility of nature.

But this is a subjective concept, not a scientific one. Still, it makes its way into the scientific literature (read the abstract to this seminal paper on the first satellite measurements of the Earth’s energy budget…look for “delicately balanced”). Just because nature tends toward a balance does not mean that balance is in any way ‘fragile’. And what does ‘fragile’ even mean when nature itself is always upsetting that balance anyway?

Why is this important to climate modeling? Because if climate researchers ignore naturally-induced climate variability, and instead assume that most climate changes are due to the activity of humans, they will inevitably come to the conclusion that the climate system is fragile: that is, that feedbacks are positive. It’s a little like some ancient tribe of people believing that severe weather events are the result of their moral transgressions.

I would argue it’s a LOT like some ancient tribe of people believing that severe weather events are the result of their moral transgressions. But it’s also a lot like traditional Catholics meticulously listing every sin they can think of to their parish priest before taking weekly communion. And it’s also a lot like workers in the Soviet Union being celebrated as champions of the people for performing the most menial chores. All are examples of mankind’s need to find meaning in their lives based on an underlying assumption that the meaning must be in there somewhere.

And this far more than anything else is why it’s so difficult to shift the thinking of global warming alarmists. It’s the reason they contradict their professed belief in science with non-scientific assertions of “consensus,” and “the debate is over,” and “it’s beyond questioning.” If it is shown that all the industry of mankind at the height of our industrial progress and greatest extent of our population makes a collective impact more like a whisper than a shout upon our planet, what does that say about our own importance? Surely mankind’s powers are greater than that! Surely we must take care lest our very negligence destroy the world itself!

But maybe not. Maybe the world is far greater and we far smaller than we’d care to believe. Maybe searching for greater meaning in the natural world, a world in which we are ultimately just collections of atoms drifting through time, was always a fools errand.

Does it really matter whether we’re finding meaning in the recycling bin rather than the rubbish heap? Both place our importance squarely in the material world, and perhaps that’s not the proper place to be looking for meaning at all.

One of the inevitable consequences of a political party suffering an electoral butt-whoopin' is the wave of smarter-than-thou lectures from its pundit class explaining how to "fix" the problems that lead to such disaster. Sometimes this is a healthy exercise. Frequently it's thoughtful. Regularly it's at least earnest.

But now and then it's just there to fill the empty space because... well that's what one does when one is a pundit and one's party has just been whooped. We're getting a lot of that this post-election season - aimless chattery in which one pundit or another pretends a personal bias or pet peeve is secretly the key to reforming the entirety of the conservative movement and leading the way back to electoral success.

And as long as we're talking about Kathleen Parker...

Let's take a look at her latest attempt to make sense of her previous nincompoopery. Today she tries to define "oogedy boogedy," a phrase she used in a previous column of the aimless chattery & personal bias sort, as serious political commentary.

Before we go in I'll get my own biases out on the table:

1. KP's original "Oogedy Boogedy" column wasn't a piece of serious political commentary. It was so clearly intended as provocative I more than half believe she was just mooking for attention. But in order to avoid saying something like, "I was wrong," we now get the attempt to spin it. Or beat it into the ground. Or whatever she thinks she's doing.

2. I had never heard of Kathleen Parker until she got briefly famous for hating on Sarah Palin. She didn't offer much serious political commentary then either. She simply joined the fashionable class that gave Barack Obama a complete pass on his sketchy record of non-accomplishment, while feigning cosmopolitan-set outrage over Sarah Palin's lack of experience. I didn't then and still don't think the right needs its own catty commentator a la Maureen Dowd.

3. I'm chiefly interested in Kathleen Parker only because others I read regularly have opinions about her stuff from time to time. If they stopped mentioning her, I'd forget her in the space of a week.

Anyway, let's look at her latest effort to fill-the-void in a world desperate for her wisdom:

She starts out by acting like she invented the phrase "oogedy boogedy" and trying to explain how it appeared, Athena-like, from her noble brow. This would be easier to take seriously if it wasn't common knowledge that the phrase "oogedy boogedy" has been used as a comic euphemism for "scary" for at least several decades now. As she used it in exactly this manner, it wasn't really difficult to understand.

So let me clue in KP why so many of her fellow pundits feigned ignorance about what she meant in using the term: They were trying to be nice. They didn't want to say, "KP is full of crap." So they pretended you must have some secret meaning other than the very obvious and stupid one in using the term.

Let's look at the original quotation to see if any of that was necessary:

"To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh."

And now her current re-iteration:

"How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one’s values, but let reason inform one’s public arguments.

That was and remains my point. It isn’t so much God causing the GOP problems; it’s his fan club."

What Kathleen Parker was saying is: The scary God-people (such as evangelicals) are the problem with the Republican Party. We need to marginalize them.

What she's saying now is: The scary God-people (such as evangelicals) are the problem with the Republican Party. We need to marginalize them.

It really doesn't matter how artfully she spins the statement, the qualifiers, or demographic and polling information she apparently thinks bolster her case. We're confronted with the basic stupidity of someone recommending a political party alienate a large and reliable block of its grassroots support in order to better its chances to compete for OTHER blocks of voters to build upon.

I have no doubt some non-GOP voters are turned off by the notion of being associated with Bible-thumping evangelicals. I knew that before any pundit looked at polls in the wake of the last election. However, serious political thinkers look for ways to reach out and bring in new voters in some way other than wishing away around a third of one's party base, along with a disproportionately larger number of its grassroots activists.

The thing about political parties in America is that they are, by definition, big tents because we only have two major parties (we'll leave the tedious explanation about why our innumerable third parties don't matter for another time). This means that, far from ideologically coherent or hierarchical entities, underneath the basic organizing structure our political parties are coalitions. These coalitions come together because they have more in common than they have with those in the other party. They don't agree all the time. Sometimes the disagreements can even break a whole coalition apart. But the main point is that one cannot treat loose coalitions of self-interested entities like a centrally planned, ideologically coherent organization.

Therefore when KP says something like:

"By all means, let faith inform one’s values, but let reason inform one’s public arguments."

She's ignoring the fact that some people within the Republican coalition are only engaged in politics because of their religious interests. They speak in terms of faith and God all the time, and don't really feel like shutting up about it in order to make the Kathleen Parkers sharing their party happy.

If Kathleen Parker feels like making reasoned arguments without reference to her personal faith in advancement of socially conservative positions, she is free to do so (though it won't be like she invented this concept any more than she invented the phrase "oogedy boogedy"). She is free to persuade others that this is the most effective way to make these cases - superior to arguments based on faith. Where she's absurdly over-stepping here is taking in the notion that this is - or indeed that it ever can be - the only way for such arguments to be advanced in the public sphere.

Less you think I'm not being fair to KP's full point above, I'll let her elaborate it further:

"The glue that binds the GOP’s religious right — social issues, especially abortion — is not insignificant and doesn’t deserve to be dismissed. But nor should those issues be tied to scripture. Some religious conservatives understand this, but the memo apparently isn’t reaching all the pews.

They might take a cue from Nat Hentoff, a self-described Jewish-atheist..."

No memo is ever going to "reach all the pews." And even if it did, why would you expect all those scary God-people who read such a memo to fall into line, suddenly start acting like non-threatening sheep? Why expect a kind of bland uniformity in which one cannot distinguish a Jewish-atheist from a Born-Again Christian? Why expect one and only one kind of argument from people who approach such issues from a dizzying complexity of perspectives and life experiences?

Kathleen Parker's deep insight seems to be "Imagine a world in which no negative religious baggage could be used against our party in elections. Wouldn't that make it easier to attract the kind of voters turned off by that?" Yes it would, Kathleen. And if all black voters had suddenly swapped parties because of Bush's appointments of Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice, we might have more easily picked up a few more Congressional seats in urban areas. Meanwhile, back in the real world...

It would be one thing if Kathleen took the parts of her column asserting that reasoned arguments are more effective than faith-based arguments in advancing social conservative ends in the political sphere and made that her thesis. But, as she makes clear two columns running, that isn't her main point. Her main point is that we need to whip these scary God-people into a secular line, or at least shove them to the back of our metaphorical bus.

How can anyone with any serious education in American politics think in such crude and unrealistic terms, let alone persist in such thinking? The answer, I suspect, is that she doesn't. She's just trying to make her previous idiotic outbursts captured in print appear thoughtful. They weren't. She isn't. Can we please stop pretending otherwise?

Far be it from me to lecture others regarding the best manner in which to live out the Christian faith. I can duke it out on obscure matters of theology at length. But when it comes down to more basic things like getting my sorry butt out of bed and into church on Sunday morning I confess I have more to learn than to teach.

That being said, when one's attempt to live out Christianity includes embracing Islam, I think there may be a tiny problem.

Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.

On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

She does both, she says, because she's Christian and Muslim.

Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she's ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she's also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved.

Yeah, that's right. This woman is not only a Christian/Muslim. She's also an Episcopal priest who until recently was in charge of "faith formation." I wonder how well that worked out for her?

Already beyond parody, this story gets even weirder as the religion reporter writing this story attempts to give it the old J-School attempt at objective reporting. She finds some people on either side of this Monty Pythonesque situation, reporting them both with equal credulity.

Friends generally say they support her, while religious scholars are mixed: Some say that, depending on how one interprets the tenets of the two faiths, it is, indeed, possible to be both. Others consider the two faiths mutually exclusive.

Of course one obscure tenet of contention between the faiths is messily raised.

"There are tenets of the faiths that are very, very different," said Kurt Fredrickson, director of the doctor of ministry program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. "The most basic would be: What do you do with Jesus?"

Christianity has historically regarded Jesus as the son of God and God incarnate, both fully human and fully divine. Muslims, though they regard Jesus as a great prophet, do not see him as divine and do not consider him the son of God.

Yeah, there is that messy "Christ" at the center of Christianity. Not believing in Him as the Son of God, and the savior of mankind makes you - not to put to fine a point on it - not a Christian. And yet believing this would tend to make you ineligible to be a Muslim.

Not to worry. Our curious reporter has it covered.

Redding doesn't feel she has to resolve all the contradictions. People within one religion can't even agree on all the details, she said. "So why would I spend time to try to reconcile all of Christian belief with all of Islam?

"At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible. That's all I need."

Let's not go on and on about who's the Messiah, and who is or isn't God. Getting lost in pesky details like that obscures the greater truth... not that we're exactly informed what that might be. We do get this:

"It wasn't about intellect," she said. "All I know is the calling of my heart to Islam was very much something about my identity and who I am supposed to be.

"I could not not be a Muslim."

I know it seems to defy the intellect, but I feel a calling to be Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as Doug, pasty Midwestern blogger. I only hope my new subjects will treat my calling with the deference Rev. Redding gets from her church.

Redding's bishop, the Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner, says he accepts Redding as an Episcopal priest and a Muslim, and that he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting. Her announcement, first made through a story in her diocese's newspaper, hasn't caused much controversy yet, he said.

Interfaith possibilities, hell! It offers the Borg-like potential to absorb all the world's faiths under the Rt. Rev. Warner's glorious direction.

It's a fairly long article, and you can read it all if you'd care. It doesn't get any clearer, and certainly never takes that terrifying leap for any J-School grad - common sense.

They do quote some of her personal beliefs which would tend to undermine her contention that she's either Christian OR Muslim. To whit: she doesn't believe in the divinity of Jesus or of the Koran. Like most others in our age of faith-based nonsense her true belief seems to be about her own emotions. She feels that she's both Christian and Muslim, and all the rest is window-dressing. Who cares what others might say you have to believe to be either one. She feels that she's both.

Mark Steyn, from whom I got the story, says it's never wise to satirize the Episcopal Church. Maybe so. But someone ought to pass the message to their bishops so they stop doing it to themselves.

You don't have to be Whitney Houston to believe the children are our future. Brian "Saint Paul" Ward has some interesting observations sparked by seeing the film Children of Men.

Far from a message about alienation and xenophobia, though my goggles, Children of Men is the most powerful pro life message I've seen in any mass media vehicle.

The context of Children of Men is science fiction, a world where the human race can no longer procreate and the resulting collapse of society. The impact of this scenario was enhanced by the Mark Steyn commentary I had been reading before hand, through his recent book and related columns. As he documents, the real world is full of societies systematically, by choice, eliminating its children. All European countries are below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1. In Mother Russia, abortions outnumber births by a ratio of 2-to-1. Even here in the God-fearin', allegedly theocracy-leaning USA, around a million abortions per year.

The reasons are varied, but, especially in this country, it is the teaching of modern secular society that children are an expensive burden and an impediment to the good life, which consists of acquiring material possessions and indulging any personal whim you may summon. What's extraordinary about Children of Men is its reminding us that for the good life, for any life, children are all that matter.

I think Brian is right, and especially so on that "expensive burden" part. Yet that comes down to more than simple selfishness and materialism among potential parents. There is perhaps an even more crucial reason birthrates are becoming dangerously low, at least in Western countries: environmentalism.

Not all environmentalism off course. But there is a core concept that seems to have been enthusiastically embraced by the environmental movement which posits that human beings are wrecking the planet by using up all its resources. Therefore more humans equals more harm. Therefore it is environmentally irresponsible to have lots of children. Far from being thought about as an act of sacrifice and love, having many children is viewed as a selfish act causing harm to the planet.

This is the reason I see economic work, like that of the late Julian Simon, as critical in reviving what Pope John Paul II called a culture of life. People don't just need to be told to stop seeing having children as hindrances to living a fun life. They need to stop seeing them as plunderers of the earth's limited natural resources. Rather than seeing children as more hungry mouths nibbling at an already finite pie, they should be recognized as the future bakers of more pie.

Simon put it well in an article he once wrote for the Cato Institute:

How can it be that economic welfare grows over time along with population, instead of humanity's being reduced to misery and poverty as population grows and we use more and more resources? We need some theory to explain this controversion of common sense.

The process operates as follows: More people and increased income cause problems in the short run--shortages and pollutions. Short-run scarcity raises prices and pollution causes outcries. Those problems present opportunity and prompt the search for solutions. In a free society solutions are eventually found, though many people seek and fail to find solutions at cost to themselves. In the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen. This theory fits the facts of history.

Of course, Simon himself - the struggles he had being taken seriously, and the way he was demonized in his lifetime - is an illustration that this concept is a hard sell. The cultural consensus has so completely embraced the notion that "more people" is a bad thing for the future of the planet most won't even consider the notion that this might not be true.

Despite being a hard sell, I think it's an important one to attempt. As Brian correctly noted above, there is no serious hope of "the good life" for society in the context of a childless future.

Simon frequently employed satire and humor in his attempts to break through this stubborn refusal to think. Take the jump to see a great example.

The Anchoress has a post up today reacting to a "yank on your heartstrings" political ad featuring Michael J. Fox which apparently aired during the World Series. The ad links support for a political candidate with curing Fox of his Parkinson's Disease by way of that candidate's support of embryonic stem cell research.

The problems with the ad are plentiful, and The Anchoress does a nice job of pointing them out. She also points out that the ad is likely effective anyway - as Craig Westover likes to note, when it comes to politics bullsh*t often is.

But really, one of the main problems here isn't with the ad itself. It's with the way political leaders on the pro-life side have dropped the ball (again) when it comes to explaining the fundamentals of their opposition to a public being saturated with misinformation by embryonic stem cell research proponents.

To understand that opposition you need only grasp some very elemental points of ethics. Deep understanding of the scientific data is not required, because the opposition isn't based on some technical detail subject to empirical discovery. The opposing case is very simply this:

A. It is wrong to kill innocent human beings for the medical benefit of other human beings.

B. Human embryos are human beings.

That's it. Every argument flowing out of opposition to embryonic stem cell research logically procedes from there.

The issue is obviously extra heated because of that "embryos are human beings" proposition. Not even all those opposed to abortion go that far. Embryos are, after all, a VERY early stage of human development.

And yet I find that position entirely defensible. Embryos are - speaking in terms of pure science - individual members of the species homo sapiens at an early stage of development. If you decide to assign them some kind of "less than fully human" status, you certainly can. But in doing so you are implicitly embracing the notion that humans may arbitrarily decide which human lives they are bound to respect, and which they may conveniently ignore. Even if you personally don't agree that embryos are "fully human" you might take caution about endorsing that proposition, because not everyone will stop at "embryos." Indeed, history suggests a very real slippery slope on the other side of that line.

This was one of the main themes of the late Pope John Paul II when he spoke about a "Culture of Life," and "Culture of Death." The most vulnerable human lives - from voiceless, defenseless embryos, to the old and infirmed, to the chronically ill, to the mentally incapacitated, to those deemed "useless" - are most at risk when people start entertaining arguments about which human lives they are bound to respect. Aw, heck. He said it better than I can:

Another area in which political and moral choices have the gravest consequences for the future of civilization concerns the most fundamental of human rights, the right to life itself. Experience is already showing how a tragic coarsening of consciences accompanies the assault on innocent human life in the womb, leading to accommodation and acquiescence in the face of other related evils such as euthanasia, infanticide and, most recently, proposals for the creation for research purposes of human embryos, destined to destruction in the process.

A free and virtuous society, which America aspires to be, must reject practices that devalue and violate human life at any stage from conception until natural death. In defending the right to life, in law and through a vibrant culture of life, America can show the world the path to a truly humane future in which man remains the master, not the product, of his technology.

While extending the "human" line to the embryo seems extreme to some, it's only so because the line is set in principle rather than convenience or utilitarianism.

Opposition to embryonic stem cell research requires no more than the acceptance of a clear and simple ethic. Supporting embryonic stem cell research rests upon deformed and unpredictable ethics, fueled by increasingly dubious scientific hope.

I like to think about it like this... Whether the scientific benefit of extracting stem cells from human embryos is real and certain, or concretely impossible, my position on the issue is the same. If you support embryonic stem cell research and you KNEW it would never produce a viable cure for people like Michael J. Fox (or anyone else) would your position also remain the same? If not, how is that anything other than utilitarian formulation? And is utilitarianism ever a good way of determining a human being's right to life?

Over the weekend I became aware of the case of Charlotte Wyatt, a two-year old brain damaged child whom an English court ruled could have her life support terminated at the discretion of her doctors regardless of her parents’ wishes.

Others will cover the details of the case, the peculiarities of British law, and the socialized medicine angle better than I can. But one aspect that I hope is not overlooked is the slippage (I would argue continued and predictable slippage) down a particular slippery slope of morality related to the sanctity of human life.

Obviously since this is not a domestic story it will not get the attention of a case like Terri Schiavo. Yet among those who do pay attention, I will make a bold prediction: There will be no great outrage over the will of the parents being violated in this case among those who support the right of involuntary euthanasia in general. Don’t get me wrong - I expect discomfort and disagreement aplenty with the court’s decision among such people (though I also expect plenty to defend the decision as well). I just don’t expect excitement or emotional power behind their objections anything close to what was on display in the Schiavo case.

This deserves more attention. Why should the overriding of parental wishes in preserving the life of their child bestir so little passion, whereas issues regarding the right of a patient to die bring about great passion among the very same group? Why isn’t a fundamental issue about parental rights as powerfully defended when those parents don’t choose euthanasia?

I would suggest that the answer lies upon a deeper principle regarding the sanctity of human life. I approach this issue from a traditional Catholic understanding, which many others find an "extreme" position in that it disallows voluntary suicide in cases of extreme suffering just as strongly as it opposes involuntary euthanasia.

Yet from my "extremist" Catholic perspective I watch with dismay as the worst-case scenario predictions of the Church regarding the consequences of violating the sanctity of human life become reality. The Church warned in 1968 in Humane Vitae that:

“It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.”

To slightly restate that in terms more specific to the Charlotte Wyatt case, when a society has already determined that it will not respect the sanctity of human life in general, it is likely to entrust difficult matters of life and death to public authorities rather than the personal decisions of parents. (By public authorities, think not only of the judge who ruled, but the doctors and associated medical experts to whom the judge handed ultimate responsibility to in this case.)

I don’t know that I could have predicted it. But as I look around I observe that for those prepared to deny the sanctity of human life for those like Charlotte Wyatt (by denying the sanctity of human life, I mean those who believe killing her might be a greater good than allowing her to live) are more powerfully disturbed when euthanasia is prevented than around who gets to make that life and death decision. Allowing that many people will be bothered by both things, it is clearly the withholding of euthanasia that arouses the greater passion, rather than overriding of the authority of any particular guardian.

I think the reason comes down to the basic sanctity of life issue regarding euthanasia. If killing Charlotte Wyatt to end her “intolerable” life is the right thing to do, how can it become wrong just because you change the person making the decision? For those who accept euthanasia as an act of good and mercy, parental responsibility must eventually become a secondary consideration.

It’s not a comfortable conclusion. And it may (hopefully) open some eyes among those who have previously not considered such outcomes. But I believe this is where legalized euthanasia must lead, by pitiless moral logic. Once society rejects the fundamental sanctity of human life, situations like this emerge as if from Pandora’s box.

Other links on the topic:

Charlotte Wyatt's parents' blog

The Catholic Church Declaration on Euthanasia

The Night Writer (who has followed this case for some time) offers insightful commentary.

I want to make it clear that I am not some kind of eco-radical PETA-type activist regarding issues like the one I'm about to mention. I do not oppose animal testing in general, and I readily recognize the important medical advances brought about by such testing.

Nonetheless, one of my favorite courses in college was my anthropology course in primatology. Even before that I had always loved primates from the mighty gorilla to the lowly lemur when I visited a zoo. For all the talk about "missing links," these are creatures within which man can catch a glimpse of himself, yet still recognize wild and untamed nature.

Perhaps because I have more than a passing understanding of primatology, or perhaps for purely aesthetic reasons, medical experimentation with chimpanzees has freaked me out for some time.

This post at TMV reminds me about that, and deserves some further consideration.

In a move proving they are "with it," as mobs of British Muslims join with mobs of Muslims around the world promising indiscriminate violence toward any person originating from any country (good news for the E. U. - someone finally considers you a real country) in which any newspaper printed fairly mild cartoons critical of Islam, The Church of England has decided to take bold action - by divesting from investment in Israel.

The former archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday he was "ashamed to be an Anglican" following Monday's vote by the Church of England to disinvest from companies whose products are used by the Israeli government in the territories.

The February 6 divestment vote, which was backed by current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, was "a most regrettable and one-sided statement," Lord Carey said, and one that "ignores the trauma of ordinary Jewish people" in Israel subjected to terrorist attacks.

Sadly, Lord Carey seems to be an exception to the state of the Anglican Church these days. Arch-Druid Rowan Williams (no relation I assure you), the head of the Anglican Church, seems to be quite mainstream within his church. Which is to say his church is nuts.

I think this statement sums the situation up quite well...

Dr. Irene Lancaster, of the Center for Jewish Studies at Manchester University, said the vote marked "a very black day for Anglican-Jewish relations."

"The Jewish community will have to reconsider their attitude to interfaith work with the Anglican community," she said, adding, "The writing is on the wall for the Jews of Great Britain, 350 years after they settled here."

The symbolism of this vote was that "Israel will be criticized regardless of what happens," Benjamin said. In the mind of the Church of England, "nothing Israel ever will do will be right, while nothing the Palestinians will do will ever be wrong," he charged.

It seems that in the face of an increasingly hostile, demanding, and militant Islamic presence within the C of E's sphere of influence, the official Anglican response is to try to find common cause with their Muslim bretheren... in anti-Semitism.

Highly recommended: David Strom's take on Richard Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale.

Strom is an avowedly agnostic child of atheist parents. So why should Dawkins' critical take on religion bother him? Oh, he has plenty of reasons. The post includes great food for thought others should consider before treading into the many "science versus religion" debates that seem to pop up like weeds in popular culture.

(Hat-tip to Freedom Dogs, who also have some interesting words on the matter.)

Lk 2:1-14

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus
that the whole world should be enrolled.
This was the first enrollment,
when Quirinius was governor of Syria.
So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town.
And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth
to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem,
because he was of the house and family of David,
to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.
While they were there,
the time came for her to have her child,
and she gave birth to her firstborn son.
She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger,
because there was no room for them in the inn.

Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields
and keeping the night watch over their flock.
The angel of the Lord appeared to them
and the glory of the Lord shone around them,
and they were struck with great fear.
The angel said to them,
(Do not be afraid;
for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy
that will be for all the people.
For today in the city of David
a savior has been born for you who is Christ and Lord.
And this will be a sign for you:
you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes
and lying in a manger.(
And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel,
praising God and saying:
(Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.)

Me: So this guy Flash once had some stuff stolen.

Randomly Chosen Rhetorical Foil: That’s terrible.

Me: Yeah, but he says he learned a valuable lesson from it.

RCRF: Oh? What lesson was that?

Me: I’m not entirely sure. Something like, “count your blessings,” I guess. It’s difficult to tell because he only brought it up in defense of his suggestion that some guy who vandalized and destroyed a bunch of stuff owned by another person and then apologized was a stand-up guy who should make us all proud.

RCRF: That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

Me: Well he didn't have to apologize.

RCRF: He didn't have to vandalize either.

Me: True.

RCRF: Are you sure Flash really meant to excuse that?

Me: Well his actual words in defense of the vandal were:

Now in reality, he didn't do anything wrong. You snooze you lose, right. Maybe so, but the class and integrity of Matt was more then just staying within the guidelines of the Blogger rules. Sometimes one must do what is morally right, not legally correct, and Matt took the moral high road.

RCRF: You’re putting me on.

Me: No, seriously. That’s a direct quote. This about a guy who vandalized and destroyed someone else’s stuff and later apologized for it.

RCRF: "Matt" is the name of the vandal presumably?

Me: Correct.

RCRF: What’s so great about a guy apologizing if he hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place?

Me: Good question.

RCRF: I mean, I wouldn’t apologize to you for saying, “Have a nice day.” That would be stupid.

Me: Agreed.

RCRF: I wouldn’t apologize to you for calling you on the telephone either. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff where no one did anything wrong. So an apology makes no sense.

Me: Right

RCRF: But here there was a noteworthy apology, so apparently there is some underlying sense here that someone DID do something wrong, despite the silly spin.

Me: Would you go back to being my rhetorical foil and let me drive the conversation here?

RCRF: Sorry.

Me: What a standup guy! Anyway, back to Flash… He says when his stuff was stolen he left it with a bunch of people he didn’t know at a place he was moving from.

RCRF: That sucks.

Me: Yeah, I guess he thought he could trust these other guys not to… well, not to steal his stuff. But they did. And then they denied any knowledge about it.

RCRF: Not even an apology.

Me: Right. But then, Flash didn’t know these other guys. In the case of this other vandal, it wasn’t a stranger involved.

RCRF: You mean the guy who apologized… he knew the guy whose stuff he destroyed?

Me: Not like best buds, but yeah.

RCRF: What a dick!

Me: But he apologized.

RCRF: For being a dick.

Me: Essentially.

RCRF: And then Flash goes around saying he wasn’t being a dick at all AFTER he apologizes for being a dick?

Me: Yeah, that’s the part that confuses me too. I mean, if Flash’s thieves came forward only able to return a tiny fraction of what they stole, how would he feel if some of his own buddies told the thieves they hadn’t done anything wrong, chastised Flash for not taking better care of his stuff, and then took the thieves out for drinks in celebration of their great courage coming forward?

RCRF: There were drinks involved?

Me: I made that part up. I’m thirsty. Consider it a metaphor for offering great praise.

RCRF: Good metaphor.

Me: Thanks.

RCRF: So you’re suggesting Flash’s metaphor isn’t quite right.

Me: I’m suggesting his metaphor ignores the role he himself has played in this little vandalism incident – acting as an apologist for vandalism. I mean, he literally said about the vandal, “He didn’t do anything wrong.” Which is saying it’s okay to vandalize other people’s stuff. That’s pretty fundamental moral confusion.

RCRF: Hard to interpret it another way.

Me: Well, there is another interpretation. But it’s a little unkind.

RCRF: Unkind? How so?

Me: See there is a political angle too all of this. The vandal is a lefty like Flash, and the guy whose stuff was destroyed is a righty.

RCRF: What does that have to do with anything?

Me: It shouldn’t. But it turns out there wasn’t a single lefty, Flash included, who condemned the vandalism. So there is a bit of a pattern here.

RCRF: But surely Flash wouldn’t excuse basic thuggery in the name of politics.

Me: I told you the other interpretation was unkind.

RCRF: So which interpretation do you believe.

Me: I was going with “moral confusion” at first.

RCRF: Only at first?

Me: Well at first I expected to see something pop up somewhere on the left, however mild, condemning the original vandalism. Even if the apology exonerated the vandal in their eyes.

RCRF: And now?

Me: A guy can only wait so long before he has to admit the unkind version fits better with the facts in hand.

Yeah. This pissed me off a bit too. I'm mostly over it now. I think. Sort of.

But really, it would have been nice to see ONE voice among the local left condemn the original behavior. What behavior? You know... the behavior that lead to the virtual beatification caused by the (insert choirs of angels) noble apology (end choir).

I'm half enjoying / half mystified by the not-so-underground "militant atheist" reaction to the new Narnia movies.

The enjoyment is a guilty pleasure: pure schadenfreude seeing unpleasant people make fools of themselves in public. The mystified part comes when pondering the source of the emotional power fueling their irrational foot-in-mouth behavior. It's not like the Narnia books are new. Nor is their popularity a flash in the pan.

And, of course, the Christian allegory contained within the books (as it undeniably is) runs in only one direction. I don't know of a Christian child anywhere who learned Christianity via Narnia. For the most part children reading the books entirely miss any Christian allegory unless an adult explicitly draws it for them. They're really just gripping tales told within a framework compatible with Christian belief.

Yet much of what is being objected to by the "militant atheists" seems less about Christianity than about other issues. From the link above:

Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America — that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peel in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis's view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis's earth.

Can I get an Amen?!!

Seriously, some of the best fire & brimstone preaching today comes from sermonizing atheists. Lacking an objective Hell, they seek to inflict one upon those fallen from the Truth in rhetorical form. Pity their poor congregations, whipped into ethical line by preachers offering plenty of Hell to avoid, but no Heaven to speak of.

For the record, I'm seriously looking forward to the upcoming film release. If enough atheists blow a gasket over it, I might even go twice.

As many of you know, I'm a Catholic, born and raised entirely in the post Vatican II Church. If any of you think the Supreme Court interpreting the U. S. Constitution has gotten ridiculously complicated, it's a paragon of clarity compared to the contortions and cartwheels Catholics go through interpreting Vatican II.

A typical example is on display in Ireland, where a local bishop has decided Vatican II requires him to vandalize an historic and beloved cathedral.

The alterations are part of his plan to extensively remodel the sanctuary, nave and transepts of the cathedral designed by Edward W Pugin, a man regarded as one of the most important Victorian architects of the Gothic revival.

Dr Magee, the Bishop of Cloyne and the former secretary to the previous pope, believes the changes are necessary to bring the style of worship in the cathedral into line with Vatican II guidelines that modernised Mass by ending the use of Latin and bringing the priest closer to the congregation.

Dr Magee wants to strip out 20 pews to extend the sanctuary into the body of the cathedral and lower it to the same level by removing three steps. He also wants to bring the bishop's chair and altar forward.

The move requires the removal of large portions of the mosaic floor laid by Ludwig Oppenheimer, of Manchester, who worked on the Co Cork cathedral built between 1867 and 1919.

The delicate mosaics depict religious symbols as well as the harp, signifying St Colman's sixth-century role as the Bard of Munster.

Bishop Magee would also like to redesign the adjacent marble-floored chapel built by Pugin and his partner George Ashlin for the lying in state of a bishop. He wants to transform the chapel into an ordinary mortuary for lay people.

Breaking up the altar rail will deprive people of the place where they have knelt to take communion for almost 100 years.

If you've never been into an historic church transformed in this way, you can't quite appreciate how ugly and deforming these kind of "wreckovations" can be. Yet they've become extremely common. Almost always they are rationalized as necessary in the name of "community." Almost always the resut is a continued fall-off in church attendance, replacing actual communities with the pretend-staged kind.

Part of the reason is obvious, and has nothing to do with matters of intricate theology which cause heated debate between traditionalists and modernists in the Church. The problem lies in sacred aesthetics. Churches like the one in question were created with the explicit purpose of creating a sense of sacredness and mystery. The rennovators, in the rare cases where they pay any attention at all to this aesthetic, are uniformly inferior to their predecessors in this regard. Sometimes they seem outright hostile to such notions.

Here's the cathedral in question:




Wouldn't it look much better with a few felt banners with words like "Alleluia" and "Love" dressing up the altar, and a groovy priest sitting right out in the middle of the congregation? Wouldn't that increase the worship experience of the congregation? No? What are you, some kind of reactionary radical traditional clod?!

I'm hoping and praying the new Pope Benedict starts reversing, or at least slowing this trend. He has written many things in the past which suggest this doesn't align with his own ideas about the meaning of Vatican II.

This one is a difficult topic for me to broach, though I care deeply about it. It's just that in my experience many people take this topic defensively and personally.

In fact, were this article written by someone who had many children I very likely would read it and let it pass - no less persuasive or interesting to me; but far more easily dismissed by "Us vs. Them" argumentation.

As it is, this article is written by Lionel Shriver, a 48 year old childless author of several novels, and self-proclaimed representative of the "Anti-mom." Even the title of her article is more incindiary than I would dare: No kids please, we're selfish

Yet she raises many points that people ought to ponder. Among them...

Contentment. Happiness. Satisfaction. Fun. There's nothing, strictly speaking, wrong with these concerns, but they are all of a piece. They fail to take into account that our individual lives are tiny beads in a string. Our beloved present is merely the precarious link between the past and the future - of family, ethnicity, nation and species. We owe our very contentment - which Hurricane Katrina reminds us heavily relies on potable water and toilets - to the ingenuity of our ancestors, yet it rarely seems to enter the modern childfree head that proper payback of that debt might entail handing the baton of our happy-happy heritage on to someone else.

Many, myself among them, have noted the problem of the suicidical demographics of Western Civilization. But unless people of childbearing age have a personal reason to care, all it gets is a Gallic shoulder shrug. It's someone else's problem, after all.

It's notable that until the modern age, people with such values would be considered borderline sociopathic. Yet today this is the norm. I don't raise the point to accuse anyone in particular, because no one person in particular can do anything about it.

This is one of the issues where I find myself in most profound disagreement with atomistic philosophies, such as libertarianism. I, like Edmund Burke, see a social compact between the living, and the dead, and those yet to be born. I think this is a fundamental pillar for sustaining any civilization. I think we've allowed our society to discard this value very cheaply. And I think unless there is a massive cultural shift, all but the oldest among us today will learn in very personal terms what was so important about Burke's compact.

But whether you agree or disagree, Ms. Shriver gives much to ponder in her article.

A powerful post at The Doctor Is In regarding reports that:

"Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals…"

To be quite honest, as pro-life and anti-euthenasia as I am, I am reluctant in judging this behavior. It obviously occurred under duress, and is hardly something they drill for in Med school.

But the reponse from one who is himself a doctor is important. He reacts to those doctors who explained their decision:

The doctor informs us: “You have to understand these people were going to die anyway.” Yes, I do understand–and that is true of every living breathing human on this planet. But your patients died early–in your time, not theirs, under your hand, not that of a looter, nor the ravage of a disease, nor the savagery of storm. Your hand, doctor. Who granted you this right, this power?

The total response is more complex than this quote can hope to capture. Read the entire post.

I know it's not Friday, but The Anchoress posted this quiz, and... well...


Ratzinger! Your personality reflects that of the
shy but friendly Benedict XVI. You prefer
thoughtful, refined themes in your music and
liturgy, and a smaller, purer Church.


Where do you fall on the Wojtyla-Ratzinger Continuum?
brought to you by Quizilla

Truth be told, I seem to have come pretty close to the center between these two, barely shading in the Ratzinger direction. But I'm not arguing with the description about what I'd prefer in terms of music and liturgy.

How would you feel about someone deciding to post the names and addresses of every homosexual he knew about on the Internet? Let's further stipulate that this wouldn't violate any laws, because he'd obtain all the name and address info through public sources.

Would a person who published such a list be considered a "good guy," or a "bad guy" in your book? Is this behavior ethical in your opinion?

How about if the situation I described above was just slightly altered?

A pair of gay activists are raising the stakes in the fight over same-sex marriage, vowing to post on the Internet the name and address of anyone who signs a petition to ban gay marriage and civil unions in Massachusetts.

Discuss.

Rabbi Marc Gellman has an article in Newsweek explaining the difficulty confronting the rescue workers in the aftermath of Katrina: Katrina's Triage

The allocation of scarce resources to an overwhelming number of needy people is one of the most daunting ethical conflicts a healer or protector can face. Who is to be saved when not all can be saved? This is not just an ethical question, it is an ethical nightmare, and we are watching the nightmare on television every night. Still inside the nightmare, there are choices that must be made and watching triage work may give all of us hope that even in the depths of chaos and death, moral virtue is still possible. What looks like unfeeling cruelty on the TV screen is most likely the result of hard but decent choices made by people who see exactly what we see, but who, unlike us, are charged with facing the chaos and turning it into hope. The triage of the city of New Orleans, and the other Gulf Coast towns is at one and the same time both heroic and nauseating, both morally inspiring and infuriating.

Far from casting this as some sort of abstract exercise in the theory of emergency triage itself, Gellman notes it is the reality of how it applies in this situation that matters most of all.

Triage is not a way to decide whom to kill. Triage is a way to decide whom to save so that in the end the most people can be saved. Triage choices are tough, but they are necessary because doing nothing is a choice, and because following the loudest scream is a choice, and because only helping those on television is a choice, but all those choices are driven by impulse and are not supported by coherent moral values. If the resources were unnecessarily limited, and if the triage decisions were made in error we will know in time. The point now is that any finger-pointing must be mollified by a good dose of trust, humility and patience. Just because we see a helicopter on the news flying over a group of victims here does not mean that the helicopter is not following a triage decision to save a group of more needy victims there. Triage is where morality meets reality. It is precisely at times of chaos that morally informed but tough-minded triage decisions must be made, otherwise morality is simply a dilettante’s luxury and a mere intellectual puzzle for the philosophy classroom, but irrelevant on the street.
(emphasis mine - ed.)

Gellman's conclusion also speaks to our current condition on another level.

...I believe we are compelled to acknowledge that no possible scenario of human existence will ever free us from more than occasionally having too much need and not enough help. Killer storms, wars, famines and other natural catastrophes will test us forever. That is the most sad fact of life here on planet earth. And in the face of temporarily scarce lifesaving resources, there will always be those whose idea of helping is to scream, accuse and point fingers at people they hated before the storm.

All in all, and excellent piece of moral perspective on the Katrina relief situation. Deserves to be read in full.

Check out this post from Swiftee regarding the recent AMA report about how an unborn fetus doesn't feel pain before the third trimester.

Couple of days ago, I posted a story about a report published by the Journal of the American Medical Association that, at that time, was being attributed to two "doctors" at UCSF Medical Center.

I said then that the report, which purported to suggest that an unborn fetus being ripped from the womb feels no discomfort, is nothing more than a laughable bit of quackery and an embarressment to any competent scientist.

It seems that I may have understated the case.

Indeed, he might have. Check out the rest of the post for details.

This is hardly the only problem confronting this study (see Swiftee's original post on this for more), but it seems to be the one most suggestive of political advocacy interfering with proper scientific objectivity, and laxity at the Journal of the AMA letting it pass without proper scrutiny.