My Atheist Friend sent me this NYT op-ed.

(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/)

I'm a yutz.

This guy has everything: a soft job, a PhD from Cambridge, a lovely home in the Garden State* and the chance to write op-eds for the gray lady... who lives ONE HOUR AND TEN MINUTES AWAY... IN TRAFFIC!!!** And he's a mental midget--dumber than a cretin. Whereas I am a computer programmer in Winnipeg (which is an hour and a half away from more wilderness in all directions) who lives in a wretched hovel and writes angry letters to the Winnipeg Free Press. And a yutz, did I mention?

Dr. McMahan starts out with a perfectly valid challenge to believers: the problem of suffering innocents.*** He must have read it somewhere; I'm sure he's incapable of thinking it up for himself. Then he applies it to dumb animals as if no one had ever thought of that before. After that, everything he says--beginning with his very next point, "Gotcha!" (I'm paraphrasing)--is not just wrong, but stupid; a base appeal to our emotions masquerading as argument.

The first error he makes is to equate pain with suffering which is invalid even if we confine our study to human beings. The vast majority of people would not equate their own greatest suffering with their own greatest physical pain. Further, when we are in pain it is worthwhile to examine how much of the suffering that does come with it is psychological. The equation of pain and suffering is even less valid when applied to animals. I do not say animals don't suffer, but their suffering is analogous in some uncertain way--not equivalent--to humans'. And while the suffering of animals is not quite an imponderable mystery, we can agree chickens simply do not spend their time in feeding cages yearning to be free to scratch for worms.

I won't go through paragraph by paragraph to dismantle his non sequiturs one by one. His continual and everywhere anthropomorphizing both of animals and of God ("any self-respecting deity" {groan} WHAT. AN. IDIOT!) is enough to cast grave doubt on (if not completely invalidate) his conclusions. However, one particular argument shines brilliantly out in its fatuousness, his defense to the charge of playing God. Forget for a moment it's a straw man in the first place. Can it be that each of the two prongs of his argument is more idiotic than the other? No, I suppose the first one--that believers don't distinguish to his satisfaction between administering patients poison and administering them analgesia--is a simple (self-respecting) tu quoque.

Incredulous: How in the world did you get a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge?!
Jeff: It was easy: luckily in those days you could skip the logic stream entirely.

The second head of his argument is completely impenetrable. From the bare unsupported assertion that there is no God (Wow! Who knew?), he draws the conclusion that therefore it's okay for him to play god. No, if there is no God wouldn't that make it many times more dangerous to play god? After all, God doesn't have your back then. I guess we're supposed to take comfort in his other bare unsupported assertion that he would have made a better god than God. I can only gape.

But then, I'm just a yutz.

* State motto: Our mobsters make great fertilizer!
** Hat tip: Google Map
*** One day I would like to write more about this problem--or at least about how to plumb its depths.

Letter to My Other Protestant Friend (MOPF) and My Trad Friend (MTF) on the suggestion that Christ's miracles were primarily to prove his Divinity

I don't know very much about this--to me, Christ's miracles remain a deep mystery-- but it seems to me "to prove His Divinity" must be among the least of reasons for Jesus' signs/healings. If it is a reason at all, it is certainly less important than the simple demonstrations of kindness {MTF} suggests, and I would even put it beneath His attending to the needs of the needy, though it is significant that He never did--or suggested a way to do--away entirely with the needy by, say, raising their consciousnesses under the tutelage of a priesthood of community organizers. To whom is He supposed to have proved His Divinity anyway? Not His contemporaries; they didn't believe it. Even among those closest to Him (excepting, of course, His mother), we wait until after His resurrection to hear Thomas pronounce Him "My Lord and my God". Not the people coming after him. First: no one hearing the apostolic teaching or later reading the bible will learn of our Lord's baptism, transfiguration and resurrection and believe that they happened as related and yet not also believe that His miracles happened as such. Second, given that, no one believing all these things will take the miracles as proof of His divinity unless they first take the baptism, transfiguration and resurrection as such. So the miracles are either ineffective or unnecessary as proofs of His Divinity.

I would agree that the miracles offered His contemporaries (and Jews of several succeeding generations perhaps) demonstrations of the messianic nature of His ministry at a time when the Messiah and the Godhead were never remotely dreamt to be found in one and the same person. The manifestation of messianic credentials by signs would not only have been in the sense that {MTF} suggests they prove His Divinity (he can do miracles, therefore he must be the Messiah and/or God), but also and more importantly would come to have been seen as fulfillment of prophecy surrounding the Messiah (cf Matthew 8:17 referring, if perhaps obliquely, to Isaias 53:4). But even this would only be noted by men already disposed to welcome the Messiah. So very much like us, the Pharisees and Sadducees comfortable in their offices might theoretically hope for the Messiah to bring salvation, but perhaps not just yet.

Contemplation of the miracles is complicated by some queer circumstances surrounding them. Several things strike me immediately: in no particular order, the fact that He was often reluctant to display His talent for miracles--the conversation at John 2:3-5, a case in point, so short yet with such power to lend understanding and vexation seemingly in equal parts; the fact that so much of the time He admonished people not to spread news of the miracles but to keep them secret accompanied by the fact that He was so often disobeyed in these instructions (Luke 5:14, Mark 7:3). These first two points in the paradoxical way of all deep truths seem at once to illustrate and refute the possible purpose of the miracles being base public relations. It seems beneath our Lord and Savior to trouble himself with PR, yet there is no doubt that it is intrinsic to His mission that He hear first cries of, "Hosanna," and then shouts of, "Crucify Him." The kind of notoriety that makes both Palm Sunday and Good Friday possible surely stems at least in part from unauthorized reports of His private miracles being ratified by His more public displays of power.

Then there is the fact that so often the healings involved children as part of His particular concern with children (e.g. Matthew 15:28, John 4:50). Though rife with meaning, among the important realizations we take from it is the knowledge that Christ is building not simply a spiritual framework upon which individuals can base their one-on-one relationship with God, but a physical and communal Church in which such a relationship as a parent's to his child matters in itself as well as signifying something greater. Fourthly we have the widespread belief at the time (being disinterred by some strange Protestant sects today) that misfortunes and physical infirmities were indications of Divine disfavor (John 9:1,2). This one Christ turns on its head making the sensible sign of physical healing the assurance of spiritual health. A fifth point, the fact that the apostles also performed miracles must be borne in mind (Acts 3:6, 5:12) when considering their import. It would seem definitively to refute the notion that Jesus' miracles necessarily prove His Divinity.

What then are the principle purposes of the miracles of Christ? There may be many, but what strikes me chiefly in considering the word sign so often used in Scripture for miracle is that it is the identical word Catholics use when describing the notion of Sacrament: to wit an efficacious sign of the grace of Christ. I propose that the principle function of our Lord's miracles is to be as types of the Sacraments themselves. I should rather say this is the function of our accounts of the miracles, for, after all, what does it matter that a particular man was cured of leprosy or blindness when so many others are not? The Sacraments in turn, viewed expansively, are mysteries (the Greeks actually say Mysterion for Sacrament) and gifts that adumbrate the principal mystery and gift of our faith--that of the Incarnation. In a circle then, the Second Person of the Trinity takes on flesh (i.e. matter) in time and space and uses space, time and matter in turn to illustrate both the salvific power of the Incarnation and how that power is to be carried forward to the end of time in the Sacraments, particularly that mystery most like the Incarnation itself, the Eucharist.

The Eucharistic symbolism in the miracles {MAF} mentions is obvious. Even so, we do well to meditate on how the signs of bread and wine reach not only forward to the present day Mass but back through Mosaic manna to Abraham's encounter with Melchizedek at the very birth of our Faith, highlighting the essential Sacramental/Incarnational nature of a Church instituted by Christ from outside time for all time. Christ's promise in Matthew 28:20 thus is very real and He keeps it in a very complete (that is to say both physical and spiritual) way.

We could consider each miracle in the Gospel for its sacramental hints and messages, but perhaps just a few will suffice. Recall the blind men Christ heals with spittle and in particular the one at John 9. Why does He use spittle? To prove His Divinity, better to heal with just a word or just a thought--no, the reference to Baptism is inescapable. Then, the words which follow, "Go now and wash in the pool called 'Sent'," of which the closing words "Ite missa est" are so reminiscent, require of us not only the passive acceptance of Sacramental graces, but our continuing cooperation in them. Finally, I find particularly glorious the notion of His mixing spittle with dirt to confect a plaster of mud. Once again Christ reaches back, even farther this time to the very creation of Adam from the same mud, to demonstrate that His is a physical-spiritual relationship with us from creation for all time.

Consider also the healing of the paralytic at Luke 5:18-26 this time as a type of the Sacrament of Penance. At the heart of the passage is Jesus' forgiveness of the man's sins, the physical healing--prefiguring the natural psychological healing which so often accompanies the Sacrament today--merely the sensible sign of that more profound cleansing, and Jesus delivers a short but profound catechesis to this effect at v.23. It is significant that it is not on account of the man's own faith that he is healed, but on account of the faith of those who brought him. The Catholic implications of this are many. It speaks once again to the communal nature of the Church and in particular the validity of petitioning the intercession of Saints, but the point I want to draw from it is just how little Christ expects from us before allowing us to turn back to Him. The fact that the man himself had not enough faith to effect his own healing signals the fact that we do not have enough contrition to effect the forgiveness of our own sins. Yet imperfect (and sometimes very imperfect) contrition suffices, and forgiveness is always forthcoming. The Source of Grace is always one however many conduits it may have.

Again, we could run on about the implications for the Sacramental priesthood (Holy Orders) in the draft of fishes, or the symbols of infant Baptism in the cases of miraculous healing of children, but this is perhaps enough to go on with.

Euclid meets God (or doesn't)

In a letter to my Protestant friend (MPF) (cc'd to my atheist friend (MAF)) concerning MAF I said,

it would be fruitful, if possible, more precisely to spline the curve of that twisted notion of the Divine from the roots of disbelief to the point where its tangent becomes true, that is to say orthodox.

Some discussion ensued in which MAF opined,

Believers are asymptotic to God (growing ever closer but never actually meeting). Non-believers are parallel to God (in the Euclidian sense).

He seems to have been implying nobody ever meets God. With this, MPF disagreed, saying,

The un-believer is obviously not parallel to God, since his distance from God is increasing... The believer is parallel to God, as the two lines meet in infinity.

(which Euclid might have found surprising, but never mind). After some discussion in which I did not join about the meanings of the word parallel, I replied at length,

As you all know, I love to beat dead metaphors as much as the next cretin. So, preposterously hoping this nag'll gallop a little further let me try this.

I like the notion that believers travel an asymptotic path toward God, never (in this life) meeting. What's more, we always view God around our own individual curve, so when we look toward God we don't see Him. Those greatly advanced in holiness travel through life so close to God they might almost turn and touch. Yet they're in the same position as anyone, seeing God around a curve, though they can more profoundly experience in this way that dark night ably described by the mystics: They run or are carried and so they look not at but in the same direction (nearly) as God; thus suddenly they can find Him absent as a child does when his father runs along beside and just behind his first two-wheeler.

At our deaths we must all hop the gap between our own curves and the True at which point our own paths will be trued. This, of course, is the function of Purgatory, and, the farther we are from the asymptote at our deaths the more jarring this correction will be--as through fire, for some. One of the frightening things about death is that it seems we will be losing a dimension of our existence, as the happy little locus free to range across the fruited cartesian plain views eternal imprisonment on the y-axis as a limitation. But those on the increasingly straight and narrow path so close to the asymptote will begin dimly to perceive the truth in the promise of an unfolding of vast and manifold dimensions of which the dreaded axis death is only the visible edge.

Where we go wrong is in assuming that it's different for unbelievers. No, the unbeliever is on the same species of asymptotic curve (this has the happy consequence of obviating debate on the meaning of parallel), he's just looking in the other direction. When he does look over his shoulder checking for God, he doesn't see Him, He's around the curve, same as for the rest of us. Unlike believers he is unpracticed in following the curve round in his heart and mind where his eye does not reach. {The preceding sentence, of course, refers to prayer} If the angle of his curve is very steep he won't even recognize a hint of God. I used the verb "spline" to describe sounding out another's curve (without, naturally, knowing its parameters) as perhaps a "fruitful" step in helping to bend it toward the limit (this itself a spiritual work of mercy). But it is the wicked not the unbeliever, pace {MPF}, who is actually traveling in the other direction; who is willingly steepening his curve and further obscuring God and goodness, making unbelief ever easier, ever more plausible; who, when he hops the gap, will crash and burn, unable to be trued. This is why wickedness will foster unbelief and why unbelief can also lead to wickedness. It is also why metanoia is so often characterized simply as a turning around.

What {MAF} in his heart of hearts recognizes, if I may be quite bold, is that the plane, or space if you will, in which we are all swimming these paths is at least a moral space; that reality has an intrinsic (non-constructed, non-culturally programmed, non-arbitrary, but real) moral character, giving the path itself, real meaning. {MAF}'s problem is not so much that he doesn't believe--for he does and by that I mean he doesn't think it is "superstitious" to love his neighbor as himself--but that he erroneously thinks it is of any consequence that when he looks for God he doesn't see anyone, and what he does see--others' conceptions of God--he (rightly) sees as fairly ridiculous. He knows, or has a fair idea when he is traveling in the Good direction, though he despairs of seeing God--for the moment anyway. Of course our mortal span is a mere moment, but I see no reason not to hope that some beauteous (if distant) day he will ask in wonder, "when did I see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink?"

My letter to the Free Press on this Dawkins' book review...

...if you'll forgive a little self-repetition:

Dawkins and his apologists, in this case Ted St. Godard, tilt at straw windmills in their attacks on young earth creationists. Earth may well be billions of years old; evolutionary theory may well correctly describe the paths of the speciation of life just as Dawkins elicits. However, it remains that to hold that godless chance accounts for not only the existence both of life itself and of ends and purpose manifest in life’s rich garden, but indeed the origins of true intelligibility in the universe right from the tiniest quark, requires a steadfast faith every bit as irrational as that of any Bible-thumping fundamentalist. It remains that all creation animate and inanimate veritably sings its Creator for any with ears. Atheists Dawkins and St. Godard must insist implausibly that theists—the vast majority of humankind—are all stupid or insane. We need only maintain that they the atheists are tone deaf.

Update. It was pointed out that the "they" in the last sentence is ambiguous.

Here's an FLA I once wrote

... to try to explain to a Protestant about grace and merit, indulgences and communion of saints. If this blog had readers, I would hope one would tell me if it is fatuous to the point of embarrassment.

Suppose you love your young son one bright day and make a plan to show him that love. So, you promise to buy him a bicycle that happens to be worth, say, $300—quite a lot of money, though you don’t tell him that. All you ask is that he be a good boy and behave himself. You plan to pick it up for him on Friday (payday) though he has done nothing to deserve it particularly. But all his past less-than-perfect behavior is forgotten. Suppose then, on Wednesday, he misbehaves and breaks a valuable lamp as a direct result. You are no longer so inclined to buy the bike for him, and he runs weeping to his room. However, on Thursday, he comes to you, contrite as the day is long. He quite seriously offers to pay for the lamp (which you know he could not possibly afford to do) and to forgo the bike. Convinced that his repentance is true, your heart rekindles and you offer him a deal. If he will clean his room every Friday for a month (Is it a job you’d value at anywhere close to $300? Not even thirty), then you will buy him the bike anyway. He accepts and gives his word. Next day, out of your paycheck, you lay out $200 for a new lamp yourself. Now suppose the boy, true to his word, maintains exemplary behavior for the month and also does a tip-top job (for his age) of cleaning his room on each of the next three Fridays. (On the third Friday, his younger brother, caught up in the excitement, helps him). On the day before the final Friday (payday, again), smiling indulgently, you tell him to go give his Mother a big hug and kiss in lieu of cleaning his room the following day. He does so, positively beaming, and the next day you bring home the shiny new Schwinn. After all, you tell yourself, he earned it.

Another letter to an atheist

Commenting on the outcry from Christians over some recent end-of-life cases in which the question of euthanasia arose, my atheist friend puzzles at:

...this fervor com[ing] from one who professes to believe in life-after-death. If there really is life after death (eternal life, in fact), why is it important to prolong the suffering career of the cancer-ridden body in this fallen world? To put it another way: atheists, who believe that this earthly life is the only life there is, might be forgiven for clinging to it at all costs. Yet, oddly enough, atheists are generally OK with euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, while it's the supposedly religious people who are the clingers.

I think he asks a good question. At its most stark it is for Catholics (and any who believes in sacramental Baptism): why don't you just douse the forehead then slit the throat avoiding for him so fortunate a vale of tears in favor of immediate beatific bliss and everlasting. But this is to take the atheist's barren world view as our own—albeit with a little heaven tacked on the end—discounting, among many other blandishments of a life of grace, the uplifting dynamic of an ongoing community of man whence rises a Communion of Saints—the reason why any man's death diminished, say, Donne (as he seems to have thought).

To shed the light of a mere burning match on the Christian's strange position we look first at the atheist's, his perfectly reasonable attitude based on two conceits on his part. The first is the idea that he can at a moment in time effectively plot the arc of his future existence and determine whether its integral is positive or negative. It is highly questionable a notion at each step, not the least insoluble term being how to calibrate existential nothingness at our worldly zero. The second, implicit in the first, is the tenet that suffering is always of negative value and this second notion is simply—certainly in terms of the person whose God came to earth to suffer, but also empirically, if we are honest—an error.

Of course I'm talking about an idealized atheist, and when we turn back to the Christians in these news stories the problem of explaining their behavior when facing death is made many times more difficult by the fact that they (and we) are none of them (or us) ideal Christians but are by and large as infected as anyone by the spirit of the post-Christian age in which we are immersed; an age in which peculiarly the ontological if not the eschatological assumptions of the atheist hold sway, but animated by a spirit not at all unlike that which in all ages gains its purchase in original sin. In short, our motives are mixed and when any one does cling to life at all costs (especially at the cost of others’ lives), he does evil. But anyone may fear death as your less-than-ideal atheist also does along with the imperfect Christian, and it is only in folly that the pure and shining, the fearless atheist specimen looks down on such a ragged and craven Christian, scoffing that for the Christian death is—or need be—but a play-acting scene (say, I’ll just lie down here and close my eyes till the end of Act II, then we’ll all go to the wrap party and have a real good time).

This is false. Death, we know well, is the radical disintegration of the body and from it its form the soul. It entails real and utter surrender of oneself to a blackness, perhaps to forgetfulness, and no one knows, beyond an obscure and remote promise, what for himself lies beyond it—even more: what strange and fiery form the self itself may take—and that is a fearful thing. Indeed, the Christian must acknowledge that, again for him, it might be much worse than oblivion. But it must be just so else the Christian concede all love and sacrifice and all hope and thanksgiving are but play-acting exercises as well (say, I’ll just {wink} deposit my pocket change here with this beggar assured that later on I can withdraw it in golden flag—with interest).

Further, it must be remembered that for us death is the novelty, the unnatural thing we were not designed for but rather a punishment for our sins, itself symbolizing, even aping the end of our self willed separation from God. In that, but for Christ's sweet promise, death is an enemy forsooth to be hated and feared. But to unite ourselves truly to that promise and extract all its sweetness requires from us the real love that lies in self-sacrifice so profound that it is to our fallen natures like death before death, and so again, poor Christians, we poor Christians are afraid.

But Christian is the word not so much for what we are but for what we aspire to be, so while one may well fairly judge Christians harshly as lacking the courage of their convictions (though he must grant they are not easy convictions to live up to), better judge Christianity on its own terms. The true Christian view of death begins with Christ. The saints recall His seven last words with great reverence and close attention and are moved to face their own death with the equanimity of St Stephen who begged for the lives only of his executioners. In a modern hospital setting our example is St Gianna Molla. She was no clinger. If the difference between them and us is the Hope born of a plenitude of Grace—which Grace engenders also a more perfect Love—then surely these saints both of unconquerable courage and of a Love most potently expressed in mercy will be in favor of assisted suicide?

Of course the answer, finally, is no, for the saint rejects not only the first two assumptions of the suicide enthusiast, but also even more profoundly the third error of the atheist—the presumption that one can own a life (either ones own in the case of suicide or that of another in the case of euthanasia). To frame it thus is to recognize the hollowness of the question, If there really is life after death, why is it important to prolong the suffering career of the cancer-ridden body in this fallen world? for to equate on one hand doing all we can to alleviate the physical and psychological suffering of the dying—short of stealing something literally of inestimable value and disposing of it as literally worth less than nothing—with, on the other, purposely prolonging (what we arrogantly suppose to be: needless) suffering, is to embrace wholesale all three of the atheist’s errors—that he knows what life and death are (and they are reductive), that he understands suffering (and it is uniformly negative) and that it’s his choice to make (with or without good data). The first two are manifestly false to anyone on a moment’s reflection. While the error in the third may only be grasped by a certain type of theist, the ends of its implications in all facets of life will be dire. But that is a whole other discussion.

My letter to the Free Press.

If supporters of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights are having qualms about building over hypothetical ancient graves they should be many times more deeply ashamed building it on the graves of the very real 100,000 aborted children per year. The notion of any such thing as human rights in Canada is only a sad joke until the humanity of the innocent unborn is addressed.

My letter to the Press

Re Pope's condom message reckless.

The writer, conflating two issues better discussed separately, is wrong on both.

On contraception the position of the Church is well known. She rightly reasons that the spiritual harm it causes outweighs any perceived good; the aging population and pornographic pop-culture of a society in the throes of sexual anomie a mere forty-five years after the inception of the sexual revolution bear this out.

On AIDS prevention we need only compare infection rates in the Philippines and Thailand or in Uganda and Swaziland to discover that the Pope is right again. In each case the latter country aggressively pursued a policy promoting condoms ending with an infection rate more than five times that of the former. The reason which escapes the writer is simple. Public promotion of condoms encourages irresponsible promiscuity at rates which dwarf the sorry effectiveness rate of condoms in preventing AIDS.

An Excerpt from a letter to an atheist.

As to the argument over whether the God of Hebrew and Christian scriptures is anthropomorphic, of course I would argue that the converse is true: we are a theomorphic people (Gen 1:26) in a certain sense. As such, the direction of who is representing whom is reversed. For example, I say that we do we not represent our relationship with God as familial in imitation of the human family, but rather that the human relationship of a father to his children is but a pale imitation of the relationship of God the Father to ourselves. I would like that to settle the matter, but, as our experience of family is apt (outside private revelation) to be entirely human, it's really a more difficult argument than that--or rather two: one, a theological argument, whether an unknowable act of pure existence is also a personal God (we ourselves being persons in that mode); and the other, a philosophical, whether it is possible to communicate any real truth about something of which we can have no experience using equivocal language--i.e. whether analogy has meaning in theology.

About the second argument a couple of things can be said. First, very simply, that we treat as metaphorical all scriptural passages that treat the Divine Nature as human. That said, the second Person of the Godhead became true Man, and so we may treat His human nature in literal language. The upshot: God's right hand (Acts 7:55, 1 Pet 3:22) entirely metaphorical; Jesus' sweat and tears (Lk 22:44, Jn 11:35) absolutely literal. The second point is that to the extent that Scripture is able to communicate any truth about God whatsoever, it must be inspired. So if the atheist is correct (there is no God), the question is moot; but if God exists, we can ask to what extent the Bible is true when talking about God. That truth, then, can only have flowed in one direction (discounting blind lucky guessing). If I've shown what's at stake in the metaphor argument, unfortunately I'm no nearer to answering the argument whether equivocal language about God is not always utterly equivocal, but can be analogical. Needless to say I must answer this in the affirmative or abandon my Faith, and I believe Aquinas does treat it somewhere (this I have only from a faint recollection of a book about St. Thomas I read a while back), but I can't reproduce his argument here. I can only defend my position to this point: that it is not unreasonable absent other assumptions about God, and that it is entirely plausible should God prove to be a personal God.

On that first argument, I'm in even greater difficulty. Not only is it more difficult conceptually, but if I lose the second argument, the first cannot be put at all since we then have no language for it. Once more I can't prove my position but would hope to show it credible. The problem is this. We see the world around us as ordered and purposeful and we want to see what's behind that. We look for causes and causes of causes and we arrive at a first cause. At the same time, we perceive our own imperfection (as meaningful or meaningless a concept as perfection is) and weakness and we want to reach up to someone (not something): our father, and thence the Father to whom our father reaches--for comfort and aid. The myths of our traditions tell us of our ancestors who reached up and were met, and so we hope. But then we attempt to intellectualize our searching and our longing and we find that what we were looking at was an uncaused cause, and a big daddy in the sky. The first is impossible, the second fairly ridiculous and together they're irreconcilable. If we're smart, we reject God and we're left with man, an island of intelligibility--and that just by fluke--in a vast cold universe of nonsense.

Alas, that doesn't square with reality either, for it is not only man who is intelligible, but the universe itself--indeed, with God on the lam and the soul in abeyance, the question of where man leaves off and the universe begins has become problematic. But every strange green quark here or ten thousand trillion miles away is intelligible--a fact, a knowable bundle of information with a course and a history. She spins; she dances with her spouse and her distant cousins, too, perhaps. It’s nuts, it’s so wonderful. Forget about Intelligent Designists' and Creation Scientists' probabilities that there should be life in the universe absent a creator; simply, it is immensely more meet that there should be nothing than something. And that every particle of that something should be intelligible and communicative is just as ridiculous as our big daddy in the sky. But by now we've lost hope--the myths must be false--so we let it sit.

But if Moses heard correctly and God says "I AM", if St. Thomas figured rightly and God is the Act of pure existence, then both sides do meet. As pure existence he can beget existence--He can be the First Cause and there needn't be a cause for Him because He is not an essential thing but an eternal act. As pure existence He contains all knowledge, and the procession of the self-knowledge of all knowledge is the eternal begetting of the Word. But now the begetter and the begotten both become Knower and Known and that is, at base, what a person is: a known knower. The relationship between Father and Son is one of knowledge but of more than knowledge, because it must be one of complete giving of Self--sacrifice, but a fecund not a painful sacrifice. Once more, this Act is the Spirit. We have now a triune, personal, creative God, to Whom (intellectually) we can't get from here. Still, He verifies our sense of order and our search for cause and He confirms that our myths are true (in import if not detail). And isn't that even more fitting than a god perceivable by the intellect? If I may: If religion were a thing that schoolin' could supply; then the smart would live, and the dumb would die. But even the very intelligent can recognize that knowledge doesn't save; that is to say smart and dumb alike can know that God is unknowable, only the proud need insist on maintaining the false dichotomy: knowable or false.

Amazon site lacking valuable information.

Dear Amazon dot com:

I had hoped to publish on your website my remarks concerning the comments about a customer review of a book available on your site, but I could not find the "Remarks" button in the comments section of the particular customer review of the book in question. I feel that the comments section itself should be reserved for comments about the review of the book. Needless to say, I am unwilling to clutter up that space with remarks on the comments about the review of the book.

It would be an interesting and valuable source of information if I could read the remarks of other book review comments viewers as well. Would you please consider providing this service in future? Thank you.

yours,
cricket.

Open letter to David Creamer SJ. (Jesuit Centre for Catholic Studies, St. Paul's College)

Dear Fr. Creamer:

As a relation of mine has enrolled in your course Introduction to Catholic Studies this fall, I trust I will give no offence in having elected to send this from my pseudonymous email account. I realize I risk having my note discarded out of hand by this choice, but I assure you: I write in good faith and if you respond I will happily reveal myself to you at end of term if you wish.

I am dismayed at the choice of a work by disgraced ex-priest Gregory Baum for course reading material. The purpose of the work Amazing Church seems to be to undermine faith in the dogma that the Church is One in time—the first of the Church’s four marks enumerated in the Nicene Creed—by exclaiming the deception that the Church can change Her teaching rather than the truth that the face of Her constant teaching develops to meet the world’s novel challenges while maintaining internal consistency.

I have been attempting to read the text, however I was grieved upon beginning Chapter 1 to find the encyclical Mirari vos of Pope Gregory XVI excerpted with little context and seemingly for no other purpose than to heap ridicule on the pre-conciliar Church, thereby casting doubt for the uncatechized reader on the second mark of the Church, Her Holiness. Trapped in the social and cultural assumptions of our own day, the Holy Father’s commentary on social upheaval does sound ridiculous, however in the wake of the murderous French Revolution (of living memory in his time) his writings are apt, to say the least, and positively prescient considering the coming tide of communism, about which, if the Pope knew nothing specifically, the guidance of the Holy Spirit was true.

I fear the end result of teaching particularly young men and women from Baum’s book, even if not intended, will be to foment dissatisfaction with the Church’s teaching on sexual matters and foster an attitude of accommodation with more worldly, accepting views of fornication, contraception and homosexuality. Will you be able to rise and defend the teaching in the encyclical Humanae Vitae as a priest must, when the tenor of the course is set by a laicized priest who, since long prior to his contributions to the publication of the regrettable Winnipeg Statement, has apparently made dissent from Church teaching his life work?

If the focus of the course is to be the development of doctrine, wouldn’t it be better to start with John Cardinal Newman than with the lightweight and dubious Mr. Baum? He could appear later in a more advanced course, say Apostasy 201. Even if you would defend Baum’s private opinions, you cannot deny that they are contentious to a degree wholly inappropriate to an introductory level course.

Finally, If you will not reject the text I pray you will at least discuss this matter with your colleagues to consider how best to approach teaching it so as to avoid loss of faith in your students, many of them at a time of life wherein their metastatic searching for serious answers will elicit great effect for good or ill in life and eternity.

Yours in Christ,

a cricket