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.

¿Habla ingles?

Like my friend the angler, who finds that eating a stack of garlic and anchovy sandwiches before fishing somehow draws entire schools to congregate around his boat, Fatah wait[s] with baited breath to see Layton convert.

Protestant Biblical Exegesis

I joke with my Protestant friends that their number one rule of Biblical exegesis is:

Given that the Catholic Church is wrong about the issue in question, what is a plausible alternate reading of the passage in question?

I joke as I say yet I've yet to see them deviate from it.

Scorn?

Moderns believe pity and scorn are two sides of a penny if not precisely the same thing. They are quite wrong and astoundingly so in some cases.

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.