Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1361

For Those Struggling with Addiction...

...to the anti-human and barbaric godlessness of post-Christian capitalism, the American Chesterton Society offers this helpful 12-Step Program to help you get clean and sober.

A (Canadian?) reader writes:

I have just read in the news of this (a little bit whacky) church group that loudly demonstrates against homosexuality at the funerals for killed military people. They just won their case, it was decided they have the right to express themselves (is it 1st Amendment in the US?). I do not like the manner they are doing it, but it seems to me to be good news: now maybe you and others officially have been declared as having the right to NOT approve! Are you going to have a comment on your blog?

I think my reader is referring to the recent decision that Fred Phelps and his cult of nuts have the right to free speech in shouting "God hates fags" at funerals. Yes, that is a first amendment case and yes, I'm happy that the Court preserves first amendment rights even when evil people like Phelps abuses those rights.

Indeed, I've been struck by the recent brouhaha over the weirdo fashion designer who is apparently being brought up on charges in France for some anti-semitic rant he slurred his way through in a French bar. I think it much more sinister that the state inserts itself into what some drunken idiot says in bar than that some drunken idiot in a bar makes a spectacle of himself. Fire him from his job, don't buy his stuff, treat him with opprobrium: all well and good. But it's none of the *state's* business. I regard the first amendment as one of the most precious rights James Madison ever had the foresight to preserve with the force of law.

What the modern academy calls...

"furthering the advancement of knowledge" is what used to be called "public lewdness.

The more I look at what a college education can get you for the vast outlay of cash, the more I suspect a lot of people would be happier and better adjusted with a Voc Tech degree that gives them marketable skills. Then they can educate themselves via reading groups without the ministrations of tenured pervs and activists for evil.

How to make me crazy

Tell me, in one and the same breath (regarding the Lila Rose contretemps):
"this whole debate isn't worth the candle and has been the most fruitless, counterproductive effort in the Catholic community since Dawn Eden started attacking Christopher West's work" and "I still haven't seen any responses to Janet Smith's recent, very thoughtful paper on the issue. Mark, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that paper."

This is fairly typical of the sort of mixed messages I get from readers: "Shut up already! You are sowing division." and "Talk more! I want to see if you can wriggle out of this one!" are messages I get a lot.

FWIW, I have said all I have to say on the matter. Really. I have nothing to add to the considerable amount of verbiage I have already emitted. If that does not satisfy folks, then oh well. I'm still under deadline pressures and would prefer to devote my energies to work that feeds my family rather than to gilding the lily on arguments I have already exhaustively discussed.

Prayer Request

A reader writes:

Please, could anyone with a prayer to spare, put a word in Upstairs for my 'little' (6' tall) brother Alasdair. He's got a possibility of a job as a psychologist at a Boys' Town in South Africa, and he and his small family really need him earning proper money. He's been working for starvation wages installing security gates for a few years now, and he needs all the help he can get.

Father, hear our prayer for Alasdair that he get a good job that pays a living wage through Christ our Lord, amen. Mother Mary and St. Joseph, pray for him!

Edgar Mueller...

...is the greatest street artist of all time. Seriously, check his stuff out!

A reader writes from...

...apparently, Somewhere in the UK:

About this:

• First, isn't it interesting how things that appear to be "elementary" moral teaching ("Don't lie") suddenly get complex when it's Us and not Them who are pondering the problem. Case in point, not long ago we were all being told how peculiarly immoral Muslims were for their concept of Taqiyya or lying in defense of some sacred truth and how almost inhumanly different these barbarians are from us good Christian folk. ....Remember this discussion that next time you are tempted to harshly judge some Muslim who thinks you can lie in a good cause. We're not so very different after all.

Very true - it's nice to see that point about taqqiya made. And best of all to see that last sentence. There is so much demonising of others on the Net (I've done it too, so I'm blaming no one), that seeing that is very refreshing.

From this other side of the Pond, I'm very struck by the similarity between much anti-Muslim talk, and much 1960s anti-Catholicism. Taqqiya seems to be the Muslim counterpart to mental reservation: both practices function as proofs of the unreliability & general nefariousness of the body attacked. Read Loraine Boettner's 1962 famous book "Islam" - he could have been describing Roman Catholicism, if words here and there are changed. He complains of Taqqiya, persecution by Muslims, of how they have a divided allegiance between America OTOH & the teaching of the Hadith & the Koran OTO. He speaks of they are good neighbours in parts of the world, which to the more foolish Christians in the West gives the impression that they are not as tyrannical as their Koran & their religion require them to be. This good impression is of course strongly emphasised by their imams & mullahs in the US, who fail to point out that any decent & human & democrats attitudes among Muslims, far from being the fruit of Islam, are due to contact with US, which is well known to be the most Protestant, & therefore most Christian, nation upon earth. Real Americans will rally round, and expose the deceitfulness of Islam, & show it up as the corrupt thing it is.

It's just as well Boettner did not write a book called "Roman Catholicism" ...

Joking apart, ISTM very curious, & very striking, that so many of the accusations against Islam echo those made against CCism only two generations ago. I know of the USA *only* what I've read - but from here, it looks very much as though there is a set menu of accusations against alien bodies, & that once the alien bodies became part of US life, two things happen: they join in the chorus of dislike for the next alien body, and that alien body is described in much the same terms as its predecessor.

Does it make sense to ask "What makes Christians in the US think as they do ?" ?

On taqqiya - might it have its roots in the teaching of some Greek Fathers ? It would be interesting to know what would be left of Islam, if (1) all the Christian element were removed; (2) all the Muslim element were removed.

It certainly makes sense to ask it, particularly from Across the Pond since I often get the sense that we are as mysterious to Brits, as the popularity of cricket is to us. There is, I think, a certain pattern to our waves of hostility to Newcomers and our peculiar genius for absorbing those newcomers. And you are right: there is an eerie similarity between Protestant anti-Catholic nativism.

Of course, at the same time, it should be noted that no Catholic committed acts of mass terrorism that killed 3,000 innocent Americans and bid fair to completely decapitate the state by either crashing a plane into the White House or the Capitol. Also, not a lot of videos of barbaric Catholics decapitating helpless civilian hostages while shouting, "Hail Mary!" So there are some differences in this clash of civilizations: the primary one being that Islam has not received the chastening lesson both Catholics and Protestants received from the religious wars of the 17th century. Islam experienced immediate and vast worldly success. Mohammed was, as the saying goes, his own Constantine. Islam learned early to be gracious to subject peoples, so long as Islam ruled the roost. Learning how to cope with being an underling has not been such a successful lesson. In short, Islam is a sullen bully that beats people up and complains about being a victim.

Americans are not immune from this, of course. But it is striking how often Radical Muslim terrorist slaughter innocent people and call themselves "martyrs". Also, a culture that forms its children this way:



Does seem rather different than, say, Catholic immigrants who were taught to revere saints who allowed themselves to be killed for the Faith rather than going around slaughtering innocents for the Faith.

To be sure, the pathetic kids in that video are not living in the US and are responding to stuff in their neck of the woods (just as Irish members of the IRA were not cut from the same cloth as Hofficer Stacy J. O'Casey Shea walking the beat in Brooklyn circa 1920). So I'm skeptical that legions of young American Muslims are tunneling under my house in preparation for the Great Intifada. Indeed, my guess is that Muslim parents are worrying about a lot of the stuff Catholic parents worry about: MTV, sex, drug, rock 'n roll, crass consumerism, and the dulling effect American culture has on one's concern for spiritual matters. Some of them will be radicalized, just as some Christians get radicalized (and often this is the young, who react violently to something in their youth and make some eternal vow of consecration to radicalism). But Islamic radicalization does tend to be deadlier than Christian radicalization, since radical Christians have lots in their tradition driving them toward radical vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, while Radical Islam tends to direct its radicalism outward in violence toward the enemies of Islam in the Dar el Harb. And Islam doesn't seem to have any checks on radicalization internally. When some Christian shoots an abortionist, the condemnation is almost universal. When some radical Muslim kills a Christian, the condemnation is typically muted in the Islam world while there are lots and lots of people high fiving each other all over the Islamosphere.

In short, Islam doesn't need a Reformation. Islam needs a Pope, because there's no particular way of controlling the crazies and the crazies make up a much bigger percentage of the population than the crazies in the Church.

I wish I knew what to do. Happily, that's not my job. Running history is God's problem.

Thanks for a thought-provoking letter.

552 Followers!

Today, my toadies, lickspittles, and cringing dupes, I give you...



I want to see all of you doing that tomorrow morning during exercise period in the prison yard of the Dark Tower. I will be on the Tower balcony far above, sipping my pina colada and picking off random people with my phaser rifle should your performance displease me in some way.

That is all!

Prayer Request

A reader writes:

I am asking if you could put out a prayer request to your readers. My oldest son is 10 years old and severely autistic. He has become increasingly violent and has started targeting my pregnant wife's belly. We now have to have him admitted to a residential facility until such time as he can be reintegrated into our home. It breaks my heart to think of him under any roof but ours but it is simply too dangerous for my wife and our children.

Father, hear our prayer for a healthy birth, for a happy outcome for this troubled child that you love, and for this family struggling to do what is best for everybody. Grant skill to his caregivers and healing for his mind, body and spirit through Christ our Lord. Mother Mary, pray for him, the new baby, and mom and dad in this difficult hour.

Toldja

Prolifers: get ready to be played for suckers again. After that big showy "defunding of Planned Parenthood" last week, done to impress the troops and keep them on the reservation, we get this:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) today would not rule out that the Republican House leadership would permit taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood in the final continuing resolution that Congress must enact to keep the government funded through the rest of fiscal year 2011, which runs through Sept. 30.

They. Don't. Care. They will do whatever the strongest political wind tells them is expedient. I hope we get lucky and they stick with the showmanship. But I won't be a bit surprised if they don't. Because they don't care.