Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1393

John C. Wright...

has some typically wise, insightful, and puckish things to say about Malthus and the Reverse Cassandra Effect. It is truly amazing how, the more frequent and grotesque the sheer wrongness of the overpopulation doomsayers proves to be, the more they are believed as infallible oracles. Wright has great fun with this.

This One Goes Out to My Friend Virginia

You don't see a lot of blues cellists:

Why Creeds?

In which we begin to answer the musical question, "Why Creeds?"

Prayer Request

A reader writes:

I would appreciate any prayer for my older son's marriage. He is close to deciding to walk out. The situation is very bad - divorce would be a disaster, but the marriage itself needs a real miracle for it to turn from the present bad situation into what it should be.

Father, hear our prayer for the salvation of this marriage and this family through Jesus Christ our Lord. Mother Mary and St. Joseph, pray for all involved in this situation.

Some post-Soviet Hell Hole?

Guess again.

This seems suitable:

DOWNFALL

When I saw the ruined city
And the walls that would not stand,
Broken buildings, rough graffiti,
Parodies of what was planned,
Scattered books and ruined theaters
Schools and churches holed and shattered,
Inheritors as useless eaters
Abandonment of all that matters

Then I knew how thin and fragile
Every cultivated art,
How defeat can swing a cudgel
Break the breastbone and the heart,
Teach the one who wanders through
Downfall, downfall ever new,
Give the lesson of despair:
Cities fall and rise elsewhere

Pavel Chichikov
January 5, 2011

The New 15 minutes of Fame

In which the National Security Bogeyman is properly skewered.

Zac Alstin is an Obesophobic Bigot

Instead of recognizing that Jolliness is a gift from God and my appetites are Blessed, Alstin writes a sick temperanormative diatribe in which he actually expects that we exercise "moderation" by suppressing and denying the way God made us. Instead of urging us to practice safe eating through regurgitation, lap band surgery, liposuction and other forms of technological prophylactics against the dangers of eating, he arrogantly demands that I not experience the full range of flavors available to me. Invoking some outdated Eurocentric Christianist standard of supposed "health" he posits such nonsensical notions of "Natural Law" as "optimum weight" in order to reinforce his temperanormative ideology. He even goes so far as to try to impose some oppressive notion of "self-control" and "discipline of the appetites" in his Stone Age lust to destroy our modern freedoms.

I am amazed, at this late date, that he does not recognize that with 74% of Americans sharing in my lifestyle choices (which are not choices but dictated by the Way God Made Me) it's pretty obvious what the sensus fidelium is on this matter and no dried up old fasting men in Rome are going to tell us glorious liberated Americans what we can do in the privacy of our dining rooms.

Alstin is Australian, so let me just say loud and clear on behalf of all freedom-loving American Jollies: Keep your Bibles off our Tibles, mate!

We're out and we're stout!

524 Followers!

Today, my minions, I bid you go and contemplate the various prognostications about E.T. in this article and ask yourself, "What do these different scenarios for dealing with the utter silence from space tell us, not about the existence, non-existence, bellicosity, godlike transcendence, brutish Darwinian contempt for weaker life, technological prowess, pagan doom, or Kubrick Evolutionary Wonder of alien races, but about the persistent insistence of the post-Christian mind in finding a replacement for Christian eschatology?" The whole article seems to me to be one huge attempt to do just that, with all the attendent failures of those who, getting rid of God, believe not nothing, but anything. The conclusion--that utter silence from space--somehow holds promise for the future of the human race is as pure an attempt to replace eschatological hope with mere secular physical expansionism as any I know of. The possibility of Heaven or the Second Coming never once figures into our author's calculations. He is resolute in his refusal to abandon the hope that we can make a heaven of this creation if we just get *big* enough and trust in ourselves sufficiently. It's the credo of every totalitarian regime of the 20th century.

Of course, with your Dark Lord at the helm of the project it would be different. Then it would work, because I really *am* competent to run your life and (with sufficient applications of our article author's "liberation biology") live forever. A sufficiently well planned, orderly and compassionate World Administration under my rule would oversee an expansion to the stars that would colonize the universe and bring happiness, first to me, as the Representative of Mankind, and eventually to you (trust me). Meanwhile, however, you must make sacrifices so that my dreams can come true. Start with sacrificing your children to the Earth, our only true source of life since God does not exist, there is no transcendent hope of Heaven, and all our hopes are pinned on nothing higher than biological success. This is the first thing they teach you at Dark Lord school.

That is all!

Now That's What I'm Talking About

A grown-up response to the slaughter of Egyptian Christians from a writerf who does not shrink from speaking clearly. I can't tell if he's a Muslim, but many of the readers agreeing with him appear to be, which is a good sign.

Who could ever have guessed...

...that people would gin up false charges against innocent Catholic priests in the wake of a massively lucrative scandal? That's okay. They're just Catholic priests, not human beings. So feel free to assume they are guilty till they prove themselves innocent. Then, just go on assuming they are guilty anyway. What are priests for if not to serve as punching bags for the Righteous? And who is more righteous than a lawyer?