John C. Wright's Blog, page 124

Obamasickness

A reader asks which group will be disadvantaged by Obamacare. It is horrifying to me that there is any literate person in America who can ask this question.

The voiceless group in America who will be squeezed out of health services will be the poor.

It is obvious that issuing insurance cards without increasing the number of doctors does not increase the amount or quality of care. Do this even need to be said? Seriously?

It is obvious that lowering the rate of reimbursement for medicaid means that more patients will see fewer doctors who therefore will see each patient for less time or not at all.

For a variety of reasons, the poor are on average sicker and sick longer than the rich. When the medical care is cut, it is not going to be “Robin Hood” style cut from the rich and given to the poor. It is going to be cut for everyone, because more demand is being put into the system, and less supply being supplied.

The number of doctors refusing to see medicare patients, on the ground that they government does not actually pay enough to pay for the service provided, surely must increase.

It is a rule of economics. You cannot keep your cake and eat it, too. There is no such thing as a free lunch. You cannot ration a good without producing a shortage of the good, because rationing forces the resources to seek a more economical use. Rationing produces waste, and waste creates an incentive for resources to move elsewhere, namely to a good or service or field where there is some return or reward for one’s efforts.

The other rule of economics is the Golden Rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules. In other words, the bureaucracy having control of the budget will economize according to its bureaucratic and political priorities, not the individual patient according to his.

Because the patients do not pay, the paymaster decides who gets treated and who does not. This means that, in order to economize (or ration) the health care, death panels will decide whose pain and suffering is worth the return on investment.

The old man needing a hip replacement will be told, since he is soon to die anyway, that his suffering can be tolerated by the bureaucracy, and euthanasia will be gently recommended to him; whereas the liposuction and plastic surgery of younger (and whiter) patients, whose family or faction has more political clout, will get a waiver and be allowed.

Or, if there is public furor over some case like this, then the opposite will take place, and some minorities, like Mexicans or Muslims, will get deferential treatment, whereas other minorities, like Muslim Women or Catholics, will be ignored or excoriated. Which factions get the power to decide where the death panels guillotine falls may change from administration to administration, or as different fads of medical philosophy sweep through the halls of power. One year, the medical system might pay only for aroma therapy or acupuncture, and the next year, it might pay only for homeopathic medicine.

If some technology of x-ray is superseded by a hand held MRI device, and the medical system pays for the old technology and not the new one, what reason will there be to remove the policy that subsides the older tech and hence disincentivizes innovation? I remind you that the Depression Era price supports for milk, which paid certain farmers a subsidy to destroy their milk supplies to create an artificial shortage to drive up the price, are still in place. Your government is diligently spending your tax dollars to fend off a problem which has not existed for seventy-three years.

If that possibility seems remote, what about the possibility of the government, in order to economize on the public costs of health care, demanding all citizens to buy and use contraceptives? The administration does not seem to think it outrageous to force all citizens to buy health insurance policies in the name of public health. What in their logic makes it outrageous to force all citizens to buy condoms in the name of public health? It is a sacrament to them.  The liberals have a fetish about putting a balloon on a man’s dick will stop the spread of AIDS, whereas abstinence from unnatural sexual acts will not.

We have already seen fads of education theory change the schools nationwide and change them again and yet again as the winds blow, and no local school board has the power to teach according to their own local needs and local wisdom. Why would this not happen with medical therapy fads?

What makes you think you can keep your doctor or get to decide how he will treat you?  IF SOMEONE ELSE IS PAYING FOR YOUR LUNCH, YOU DON’T GET TO SEE THE MENU!

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

On the Authority of the Church

A reader asks:

<blockquote>What authority do you have to rely on to know that you should rely on the authority of the Catholic Church?</blockquote>

The short answer is that the authority of the Church rests in the Holy Spirit which animates the body of the Church in the same way a human spirit animates a man. The authority comes from Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity which is God; and the Church is at once His bride and His mystical body.

The long answer is a little more complex, so please indulge me:

The Church is either what she claims to be, or not. If she is what she claims, then her authority comes from the Holy Spirit, that is, from God, who is the source of all authority and truth. If she is not what she claims, she is either a human institution making a claim that is somewhere between self delusion and insanity, or she is a satanic institution run by the spirit of Antichrist to deceive were it possible the very Elect.

I do not see any other option: it is either heavenly truth, earthly self-deception, or infernal deception.

The main logical difficulty with the argument that she is infernal deception, let us call this the Mohammedan argument, is that those who claim to be undeceived themselves have no logical basis for their beliefs aside from beliefs taken in part or whole from the very Church alleged by them to be the source of all untruth. Mohammad would not know that Christ existed at all if he were unaware of what the Church, and no one else, preserved and taught. The claim that Mohammedans and other heretics arose from the independent witness of the historians Jospehus and Tacitus, that they only heard about Christ from this and no other source, is too absurd to refute.

Again, the Lutheran idea that the writings of the Church, some of which were gathered into the New Testament, preserved and used as teaching material, and declared by the Church and only by the Church to be authentic and authoritative, have a character which is self-authenticating or self-authorizing involves a logical contradiction. The writings of St. John cannot have more authority than St. John himself, and if Saint John is not a saint, then his writings are merely a human invention.

Whether or not Saint John drank poison without ill effect is a matter not attested to by any scripture, it is Church tradition, and the Protestant might scoff — but then again, whether or not the man who wrote the Book of the Apocalypse was the man who wrote the letters of John, and was the beloved disciple who wrote the gospel of John, is likewise a matter not attested by any scripture but is Church tradition.

I will hasten to add that Jewish rejection of the claims of Jesus and His followers does not involve this logical contradiction. The Jew can reject the writings of St. John by rejecting the sanctity of St. John the Beloved Disciple and rejecting that John the Baptist was a prophet and Jesus was the messiah. The Jew can say that John is a schismatic who departed from the authentic teachings of Moses, and who was deceived by a false prophet and a false messiah.

But the Protestant cannot accept the authority of the Book of the Apocalypse without accepting the authority of St. John; and if he accepts the authority of St. John he cannot logically reject the authority of St. Polycarp, who was a disciple of St John, and learned of Christ at his feet, and was also the Bishop of Smyrna. The Protestant has the Book of Revelations in his hands because and only because St. Polycarp took it from the hands of St. John and handed the book to Saint Pothinus of Gaul who handed it to St Irenaeus of Lyons, and so onward through each of the generations willing to suffer and die to preserve the Christian teaching, including the teaching embodied in that book, eventually to reach the hands of the Protestant who calls the book authoritative. There is no second and independent witness. St. John did not inscribe another copy on plates of gold written in reformed Egyptian for Martin Luther or John Calvin or Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith to find. These four took the Book of the Apocalypse as possessing a divine authority, and addressed an audience which also took it as possessing that authority.

But if John and Polycarp and Pothinus and Irenaeus cannot be trusted not to have altered or invented the book, or invented John as a fictional character, or attributed someone else’s writings to John, then the book itself cannot be trusted. And on whose authority do we trust them?

The same argument could be made for every gospel and every epistle in the New Testament: you cannot trust the authority of the writing without trusting the authority of he who calls it authoritative. And likewise, if we do not trust the authority of the Jewish prophets and priests and lawmakers, if Moses was a fiction person or a madman, then we cannot trust the authority of the Old Testament.

A stronger argument can be made for any Protestant who recognizes doctrines supported by orthodoxy not reflected in scripture, such as the number and nature of the Persons of the Trinity, or the mystery of the Incarnation, or the nature of the human and divine will in the Person of Christ, or the doctrine of Original Sin. Whether he admit it or no, the Protestant who accepts these ideas as dogma has no independent authority for any of them, save only the witness and authority of the ecumenical and apostolic, orthodox, universal and catholic Church.

The Scriptures, just by themselves in all their ambiguity and mystery, provide just as much support for Arianism as for Trinitarianism, or for Nestorianism or Eutychianism as for orthodox Dyophysitism. Or, to take the argument from the other side, the Antenicene Fathers condemned the practice of abortion in a First Century document  called the Didache. In other words, a mainstream Protestant who holds that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, and who hold abortion to be against Christian teaching, is both interpreting scripture as the Church interprets it, and following Church extrascritpural teaching as the Church teaches.

Now, again, one might argue that the sainthood of John issues from God Almighty, and that the Church merely recognizes and spread abroad the news of that sanctity of authority of the saint, but she does not herself bestow that sanctity and authority. And that would be argued correctly. The question then becomes how does Martin Luther or Joseph Smith or Mohammad know that John is true? Mohammad can at least claim that Archangel Gabriel came to him separately from the scriptures, and that he knows of the virgin birth of Jesus and that Jesus was never crucified because the angel said so, not because John or Luke or anyone else said so. Other Christian schismatics or heretics do not have this conveniently independent second witness.

Now, again, the Protestant can argue, and the argument is a sober one, that the Church at one time had the authority to collect, define, preserve, and rule on the authenticity of the New Testament, but she through the abuse of her powers or the weakness of her leaders fell into error and lost and mandate of heaven. The only problem with this argument is establishing the date at which the Church authority was compromised beyond the power of restoration, and establishing to whom the authority next devolves once the Church betrays her trust.

But this question cannot be answered at all if the Church never had any authority to begin with.

At this point, without I hope seeming facile, we can answer that the authority of the Church is based on that selfsame authority that the Protestant recognizes when he recognizes the authority of the doctrine of the Trinity, or of the authenticity of the writings of St John, or the authority of the Early Church and the Ante-Nicene Fathers.

But even the Mohammedans and Unitarians who reject Trinitarian doctrine acknowledge the trustworthiness and truthfulness of the Church to at least this degree: they believe the reports, spoken or written, which says that Jesus or Isa existed, and was a prophet of God, born of a Virgin, and both taught the word of God and did many signs and wonders to affirm a supernatural origin to his ministry.

Of the three alternatives, then, while the Jew can claim either that the Church is diabolical, a deception of Satan, or self-deception of men, the Protestant or Unitarian or Muslim is in the awkward position of saying that the Church tells the truth about the birth and ministry of Jesus, but then added or commingled inventions or fictions of either mundane or infernal origins: the Muslim says Jesus was a prophet and not divine and never suffered crucifixion nor resurrection; the Unitarian says He was crucified and resurrected but was not a Person of the Godhead; the mainstream Protestant says He was crucified and resurrected and is the Second Person of the Trinity, but that He did not establish the Church on a hierarchic basis, did not initiate an apostolic succession, did not literally establish the Eucharist as a type of incarnation, and had brothers and sisters of His mother Mary in the flesh, and so on. The Protestant says the Church is corrupt but not the Scripture, which is protected from error by divine intervention; the Muslim says the Church and the Scripture are corrupt, and that the writings of their prophet Mohammad are incorrupt and correct the errors introduced by Moses and David and the Apostles of Christ into the record.

The position is awkward because each much argue that there was an original uncorrupted writing known to one man alone, Mohammad or Martin Luther or Joseph Smith, which teaches the original and uncorrupted doctrine of the original and uncorrupted communion, AND that this original communion was made known to this one prophet or theologian but was hidden from the later generations of the Church.

A prophet can claim that he was carried away in a vision or received a divine visitation to show him the original claim, but a theologian can only claim that he used his natural reason, no doubt sustained and affirmed by prayer, to deduce from clues and fragments what the outline of the original and uncorrupt teaching of the original and uncorrupt communion was.

No prophet of the Old Testament, nor John the Baptist, nor Jesus Christ, claims to be doing this. Moses never says Abraham was wrong; Isaiah nowhere says that the teachings of Moses became corrupted and had to be restored according to a plan known to Isaiah alone.They all claim, as does Christ, to be preserving or expanding the covenant which God made to Abraham, not revising errors of the current teaching. Even Christ with His astounding rebukes to the Pharisees, claims not to remove one jot or tittle of the law.

The merit of each individual argument on each point of doctrine has been debated to exhaustion through the centuries and by men more learned and qualified than I, and at such a length that I could not even review them, much less argue their pros and cons.

But, leaving the claim of the reformers to one side, the logical point is that each heresiarch from Mohammad to Arius to Nestor to Luther, whether admitting it or not, relies on the authority of the Church at least insofar as he acknowledges Jesus to have been a real historical person and a prophet of God.

Whatever the basis for the assertion, it tacitly acknowledge Church authority. It then claims an additional authority over and above the authority of the Church, namely, a divine version of “Judicial Review” where, like a Supreme Court striking down a law made by Congress in the name of the Constitution, the heresiarch says that something — a golden tablet, a visitation by Gabriel, the insight of his personal conscience, the success of his attempts at healing the sick by prayer — gives him the authority to override as unconstitutional, or, rather, as unchristian, the findings of general Church councils from Constantine onward, and to return the Church to her theoretical pre-corrupt origins.

So, logically, the Roman Catholic Church, and the various orthodox Eastern Churches, Armenians and Syriacs and Copts and Nestorians, who are descended from the various schisms between the Fourth and Tenth Centuries, can make the claim to be the original Church on the grounds of Apostolic succession. Everyone else, Mohammad, Luther, Smith, has to claim some independent ground on authority on which basis he and he alone can reject scripture as corrupted and reject Church teaching as wayward and misleading.

And he must claim a Constitutional legislative authority allowing him to (in the case of Mohammad) overturn all Biblical Scriptures as Corrupt; (in the case of Luther) overturn some books of the Bible and not others; (in the case of Smith) to add another book to the canon.

And he must claim a Constitutional judicial authority allowing him and him alone to overthrow the findings of the general Church councils from Nicene to Ephesus to Trent, and to substitute findings of his own.

And he must claim an executive authority to be his own private Pope, a self elected or self appointed leader of the Church, not appointed by St Peter who was given the keys of the kingdom, or any of his successors.

So the answer is that one should hold to Church authority for the same reason that one holds to the authority of the heretic or schismatic, namely, that one does indeed believe the heresiarch’s authority comes from God faithfully and correctly to preach and to interpret the teachings of the Church established by Christ reaching back to the covenant with Abraham.

The additional question for the Mohammedan or Protestant or Mormon is on what grounds your leaders and founders claim the authority to rule on and overturn previous Church Councils, or all of them?

Because the Roman Catholic Church, even while making the outrageous claim to be the one, true, universal and apostolic Church of Christ administrated by the Vicar of Christ and the Roman Emperor protected by the Holy Spirit from erring in matters of doctrine — yes, even while making this jaw-droppingly titanic claims of divine authority — the Church makes no claim to be able to overturn previous rulings, renounce the teachings of her predecessors, or to revoke, alter or amend.

This point is often overlooked, and perhaps is incomprehensible to those who believe the Church is merely a human institution like a congress or a private club: the Church does not have the legal authority to write Amendments to the doctrines of the Church, or delete or alter or amend the Scriptures as Luther did. We cannot get ride of the doctrine saying homosexuality is disordered or that contraception is a grave moral evil because the writ and mandate of the Church does not grant the Church that power.

Only Protestants and Mohammedans think that they can make up new Churches or revise the life of Christ to make Him not have forbidden divorce, or change the genealogical tree of Christ to give him earthly brothers, or demote him from the status of God to the status of human prophet. The Protestant founders see their roles as legislators, or, rather, as reformers attempting to recreate a pure Church that once was. But Catholic and Orthodox Churches do not have founders in that sense of the word, and their leaders see their roles as messengers, not legislators.

So we can answer the question with a question. On what authority rests the authority of the orthodox? It is the same authority on which the heterodox rest, except that it also has the legal sanction of the Church Councils and the divine sanction of the Holy Spirit. It is the humble authority that does not claim the authority to revoke or rewrite or annul the teachings of Christ or His Church.

This leads to a second question: assuming such authority does exist between the clashing and contradictory claims of Churches of the East and West, Anglican and Coptic and Greek and Russian and Syriac and Malabar and so on, how is the true authority to be found among all the false claimants and pretenders?

Here I can only speak for myself. I came to the conclusion that divorce was illogical and morally evil and that homosexuality or incest was objectively disordered appetites and that contraception inevitably corrupted any society which permitted and encouraged its use back when I was an atheist, merely by the unaided but strict and rigorous use of natural reason. It is a conclusion I hold any honest thinker must eventually be brought by remorseless logic, albeit it may take decades or longer to be brought there.

The non-Catholic Church before 1930′s all and each of them condemned contraception since before the Reformation in the 1500′s or the Great Schism in the 1000′s.  They all forbade divorce save in cases of adultery or abandonment before King Henry VIII.

All these Churches claim to be teaching the authentic doctrine of Christ. And yet the only utterly unambiguous passage in the sayings of Christ is His condemnation of divorce. Everything else He says is a riddle or a parable. Not that. It is absolutely clear.

All Churches at one time forbade the use of contraception, the abortion of infants or the exposure of infants to the elements. This is not a new doctrine, but dates back to the Roman days. Abortion and Contraception is not the product of the march of science; it is a hold over from the dark days of the Iron Age when Gladiators fought in the Circus, or Eunuchs served in the Court.

I say again, I speak only for myself, but when I look between the various claimants who claim to have inherited the mantle of St Peter, I look to see what claim the claimant makes.

First, there are those who claim Christ did not establish a Church, does not crave unity in the Church, and did not mean the Church to have a hierarchy. The claim is pure fiction, and a prima face case cannot be made for it. It need not be examined on the merits: a group of men gathering to pray and study the Bible or even to live with their property in common and do almsdeeds or other good works, is not a Church.  Moses did not appoint the sons of Aaron to be a Bible study group, but to be a priesthood. Christ, who was the new Moses, did not appoint St Peter as the organizer of a prayer meeting or a political party.

Second, there are those that claim that their Church is the one and true and apostolic Church founded by Christ, and that the Roman Church went astray. This is a more respectable position and must be taken seriously: for if the Council of Chalcedon (AD 541) was indeed corrupt or illegitimate, then the Coptic Church of Egypt is and has been and has always been the one true Church. This question is legal and historical: if one accepts the findings of the council of Nicene, as, for example, when repeating the Nicene Creed, one must find a logical reason to reject other ecumenical councils which met with the same authority, such as the Council of Trent.

I do not say it cannot be done: the orthodox faith rejects the “Robber Synod of Ephesus”  (AD 449)  as it was formally repudiated for procedural irregularities (legates not admitted, letters not read, both sides of the argument not heard, etc.) and Second Ephesus was formally repudiated by the next Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon AD 451). If you hold that Chalcedon was not authoritative but that Second Ephesus was, you are not in bad company: such ancient and established communions as Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Tewahedo, Eritrean Orthodox, Malankara Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, and Armenian Apostolic Orthodox agree with you.

Speaking only for myself, I do not see the guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit resting on these Churches, nor on the Greek or Russian Orthodox, only because to me they look like national and established churches, as the Anglican is in England, dominated by Czars and Emperors and Sultans, and lacking the independent and international character which the Roman Church has (albeit less clearly in some eras) always exhibited. This is a matter where I think reasonable men can differ: but I do not think it logical to argue that the Catholic Church has less of a claim to apostolic succession or tenacity of duration in the one true faith as the Eritrean Orthodox.

Third are those who claim that there was no Catholic Church before Constantine, and that the original universal community of Jesus followers before the schisms of the African Churches, was an utterly different creature, composed democratically or voluntarily, uncorrupted by wealth or imperial patronage, and the Fathers lived as simply as monks. Some of this is merely Dan Brown style ahistorical nonsense; some of this is Protestant propaganda with a healthy dose of reading history or study of the Patristic Writings will dispel.

Some, however, of this is legitimate: during this period is when were developed the characteristic doctrines of the Christian faith: the New Testament canon was written and defined, the role of tradition and the ecumenical creeds were fixed,  the doctrine of theTrinity, of Christology, of Soteriology, and the doctrine of Divine grace. Before this, we were an offshoot or heresy of Judaism. After, we were Christians properly so called.

More significantly to me, none of the characteristic doctrines of Protestantism are present in these writings. They are not debated and rejected; they are not addressed at all. There is no argument in favor of divorce or in favor of contraception. There is no mention, before the canon of Scripture is established, of Sola Scriptura. There single dominant characteristic of Protestantism, the radical individualism, is not seen. Nowhere does any Church Father argue that each man by his own conscience and without the intervention of priest or presbyter or Church or curia, can perform all sacraments, bind and loose on Earth what is bound and loosed in heaven; no one argues that each man alone can absolve himself after confessing to himself in isolation, is saved by Grace alone without the need for penance or good works, and is a member of a voluntarily organized body of men baptized as adults without any priests or bishops or metropolitans — there is nothing like this at all referred to, directly or indirectly, in any early writing. The closest is the heresy of the Montanists or Cataphrygians, who relied on private prophecy.

Any Protestant who reject as heresy the claims of the Monophysites or Nestorians or Monothelites or Monergites in effect accepts the authority of the Church which ruled these doctrines heretical — or at least acknowledges that Church just so happened not to get these questions wrong.

How do we recognize this authority?

First, it is consistent.The Holy Spirit does not contradict Himself nor change His mind, so it is impossible that contraception be forbidden to Christians in 1931 and not forbidden in 1939. If a community is teaching a doctrine that all Christians everywhere at one time believed, or nearly all, this adds weight to its claim to be authentic. A doctrine that neither Christ nor the Early Father taught has to be established by some clear and convincing proof of its authenticity.

Second, it is legal. If a doctrine has been established by local synod and ecumenical council, and there is no counterclaim or corruption or procedural irregularity or illegal interference with the outcome, then this lends weight to a claim of authenticity. If you scoff that mortal men by casting votes can arrive at a knowledge of the will of God, then you reject the election of Matthias to take the place as one of the Twelve abdicated by the treason of Judas, which was by casting lots.

Third, it is Holy. There is a particular character and, as it were, a flavor to the decisions and authority of God and those who rightly speak for Him and do His will. It is a matter of tone, and, I admit, some men, including myself, may be prone to tone-deafness, especially where their own interest is concerned. In my own opinion, Jesus is clear and piercing as a two edged sword in some matters, and is subtle and profound as a parable or riddle in others. So, to me, it is not possible to believe that the Church would ponder and debate and for 1500 years come to decisions on very subtle theological matters, the fruit of many minds, some of them rightly called saints, and be overturned in a single hour by the theologian or prophet or worldly prince, and replaced with something so simple and stupid it could fit on a bumper sticker.

Mohammadanism took the subtlety of the Trinity, the Veneration of Saints, the mystery of the Incarnation, and replaced it with a slogan: “There is no God but God and Mohammad is His prophet!” which is no more deep and subtle than saying, “All you need do is accept Christ as your personal savior!” or “All you need is love!” — whereupon institutions tried and true and trustworthy are replaced with stricter and simpler and cleaner rules, such as outlawing wine and stained glass windows, but at the cost of the loss of some part of the humanity and divinity of the doctrine.

If Christ had meant something simple from the beginning, He could have said so from the beginning. The doctrine of Double Predestination is not any more hard to explain than the Buddhist Doctrine of Karmic return, and Christ surely said things more subtle and insightful than this, and at the same time simpler and clearer.

In other words, since Christ is so simple and clear where He needs to be (“If ye love me, keep my commandments“) thus I assume He is being subtle where the subject matter or the limits of the human audience will not allow a clearer explanation. The doctrine of the Trinity is remarkably obscure, maddeningly so, and yet without it, one cannot read correct passages where Christ claims or seems to claim divinity  (“He who has seen Me has seen the Father“) with ones where he denies or seems to deny it (“Why call me good? there is none good but one, that is, God“).

If visionary takes a subtle saying of Christ or the prophets or psalms, and, because of impatience with the hairsplitting of theologians or a distaste for Greekish philosophy, flattens the statement into some simple formula, (“Sola fides” or “There is no God but God”)  and thereby loses communion with an entire millennium of Church history or an entire hemisphere of Christian, I say the Holy Spirit is not guiding that visionary into all truth.

Christ tended to be simple and clear about the hard things, and subtle and riddling about the joyful things. I trust the Catholic Church because she talks exactly the same way.

The Church is only crystal clear and simple on those points where you wish there were wiggle room, like the question of contraception, or moving in with your girlfriend-with-benefits if you really, really like her and are sure it will someday soon but not too soon turn into love and then you can get married and not have kids for a few years because of her career. Or like the question of torturing prisoners of war, particular if it is not technically a war and not technically torture. The Church says No.

On questions where the enemies of the Church wishes she were simple and clear, the Church is cautious and wise, and balances competing principles in this fallen world with the delicacy of a jurist. I am sick to puking of people telling me the Church should be pacifists, and teach non-resistance to any use of force. Instead, the Church teaches the Just War doctrine, which identifies the times and circumstances where a prince or parliament can rightly take up the sword even in foreign lands. People who say the Church should support whatever war the common opinion or the charismatic leaders of the day are trumpeting without regard to its justice is the flipside of the same error.

When the selfsame Church offends the simplistic dove for supporting the Crusades of the Eleventh Century and offends the simplistic hawks for not supporting every aspect of the Global War on Terror in the Twenty-First, that is when my respect for the good judgment of the Church increases, and the argument that her authority is sound and trustworthy becomes weightier.

I do see the working of the Holy Spirit in the Penance of Emperor Theodosius. The events were so unusual, so unexpected yet uplifting, that one sees something outside the normal forces of mundane history and human passion at work. When Henry the VIII declared himself Pope of England, and convoked a court as unlawfully frivolous as the court of Pontius Pilate to condemn Saint Thomas More (my fellow science fiction writer) indeed I see the Holy Spirit in More, and in Henry nothing but cheats, deceits, greed, wrath, human shortsightedness.

I have far more respect for Mary Baker Eddy, even though her doctrines are far less mainstream than anything proposed by the Anglicans, because she can point to signs and wonders, resurrection of the dead and healing of the sick, to lend weight to her claim to have discovered, or rediscovered, the art of the early apostles to do the “mighty works” like those wrought by Christ. King Henry VIII, nor Luther, nor Calvin, nor Mohammad, nor Reverend Sun Myung Moon makes such claims or provide testimonies of miracles. Whether one believes the claim true or false, the Christian Scientists are making an apostolic claim, and these others are not.

Again, I have respect for Evangelicals who make claims of visions and faith healings, first because I suspect far more claims are true than fraudulent, and second because this was the same means Christ Himself used when questioned by the followers of John the Baptist to quell their disbelief.

In my own opinion, a Christian who is embarrassed by tales of wonderworking is too parochial to the modern scientific world view, or, rather, to the popularized science-worshiping world view that has nothing to do with real science, and is more akin to the Deism of some lifeless Watchmaker God. Where our Church is spreading most rapidly is precisely in those areas of the world where reports of miracles are most numerous, however doubtful or otherwise their authenticity may prove.

Read Luther or Calvin and read Thomas Aquinas, Justin Martyr, Augustine of Hippo.  I suggest that any nonpartisan observer will see the difference in the scope of their understanding, the clarity of their reasoning. You can see the difference between a man obsessed by one fixed idea, and a man taking a broad, and, dare I use the word, catholic view of all the rich complexities of human life and not trying to pigeonhole all things into one simple scheme.

That is where I see the Authority of the Catholic Church: it comes from the same place as the competing claims of authority, which is to say, from God, but, unlike them, neither contradicts herself nor claims and authority to rewrite and revise what other prophets of God have taught, nor to reject doctrines when the world suddenly finds Christianity unfashionable, nor to add new doctrines or dangerous simplifications in order to sate the appetite of solitary theologians for schematic elegance.

If the orthodox doctrines of the Church were merely the inventions of men, or the self-delusion of enthusiasts, or the imposition of the Imperial Court, then they would have fallen into the same disrepute and obscurity as other inventions of men, such as Deism, or other enthusiastic novelties, such as Montanism, or other attempt by the powerful worldly authority to impose onto ecclesiastical matters, such as Arianism.

If the orthodox doctrines of the Church were the product of the supernatural deceptions of darkness, and all her miracles and good works were the works of Beelzebub, then Judaism is the only place to flee. Because if you think the Antichrist of the Church lied about the matter of the Assumption of Mary or the matter of Saint John drinking venom without taking harm from it, you have no independent basis on which to think the Antichrist of the Church told the truth about the matter of the Ascension of Christ or the Resurrection.

The only other possibility is that the claim of the Church to be one, and true and holy, and catholic and apostolic is true, and that this is a divine claim, which she claims not of herself, but because the Spirit provides witness. When, upon examination, one sees both the clarity and the consistency of Catholic teaching throughout the ages, the belief the she speaks with a heavenly authority is the simplest and best explanation.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Ad Hominem is the strongest form of argument! Only an idiot would say otherwise!

I am told that most Liberals and Progressives are unaware that the Conservatives claim that the kind of bureaucracy-mandated death referred to in the previous article would and must occur under Obamacare.

It has been a puzzle to me for decades how the Liberals could fail to understand basic rules of cause and effect, such as that when politicians force the market to lower prices on any good or services, the politicians must assign bureaucrats to ration those goods and services, and they are rationed according to political considerations, i.e., the weakest voting bloc suffers first and most.

Or such as that you cannot keep your cake and eat it too.

It has also been a puzzle for decades how Liberals could fail to understand that an ad hominem argument is not a logically valid form of argument.

I would recall many a time asking a Leftish what he would think of my words had they been uttered by some other man, presumably one of better moral character, or not a white Christian male, or whathaveyou. I don’t recall even one ever answering the question, or apologizing, or showing any awareness of their lapse in reason.

I have never heard a Liberal, for example, argue against what was intercepted in the Venona cables, or found in the KGB archives, but to this day I have heard them accusing Senator McCarthy of orchestrating a “witchhunt” and referring to Soviet spies and fellow travelers and useful idiots as innocent victims of irrational popular paranoia. I have heard many a Liberal denounce the Tea Party for being racist or being insincere or being violent, but never heard any Liberal denounce the Tea Party’s argument or principles, or even to show that they were aware, unlike the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, that the argument or principles existed.

I discovered, to my shock, despite all the publicity surrounding, say, Sarah Palin’s claim that death panels (as they have in other countries with socialized medicine) would be appointed in America, that most Leftists are simply unaware that the claim is being made.

They do not hear and dismiss these claims, they simply never hear the claims.

In my life so far, I have met exactly one Leftist who does not make ad hominem attacks. It is not their default mode of argument, it is their only mode of argument.I have always wondered why.

Why? Surely they were not persuaded by such a cheap and transparently childish tactic — or is every Liberal a Liberal because someone called him names, and to escape that shame, he adopts a set of incoherent beliefs and ritualized fetish-words? That could not be, for then the first Conservative who mocked him would likewise shame him into being Conservative.

With a thunderbolt of astonished clarity, I suddenly realized why this is, or, rather, what the great benefit intentional or not would be: if a man says that an opponent argues that price fixing causes rationing, or that politicians cannot be trusted to make decisions over your baby’s health, that man spreads his opponent’s message, even while denouncing it; but if that man denounces the opponent, saying he is a tool of moneyed power, or is a member of an ‘astroturf’ movement rather than a grassroots opposition, then no one who hears that man hears the message. All they know is that they opponent is a man of bad character.

It is simple, simplistic, and effective.

It fits into the paranoid fantasy world that describes all politics as a conspiracy of shadowy evil powers, Jews or International Bankers or ‘the Establishment’ or Capitalists or Crypto-racists or the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, versus the scattered and helpless victims-groups.

It fits into the Manichean worldview of the Left. If every war on earth is a war between perfectly pure angels of the Left and perfectly evil racistsexisthomophobicislamophobicglobalwarmingdenying devils of the Right, then logically merely establishing one bad or selfish motive characterizes the opponent as “Rightwing” ergo a devil ergo wrong by definition without the need to discover his argument or know his position. It is refuting without taking the effort to refute; it is thinking without the effort of thought.

And, with the advent of Marxist or Freudian pseudoscience, the motive of the opponent can be declared to be unknown to the opponent. All the Marxist need do is claim that the alleged scientific rules of history show that each category of economic activity (wage-earning, investing, renting land) produces a separate species of man whose interests are all identical and yet whose interests with Darwinian ruthlessness oppose the other separate species, and further that the economic conclusions of each category are self interested self deception, an ideological superstructure unaware of the basic historical forces producing the conflict. The Freudian has a simpler defense mechanism — all he need do is pretend that he understands the mind of the person being denounced better than that person himself. And you will see this over and over again in the mouths of the Modern liberal.

I should have realized it long ago. It is obvious once you see it.

 

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View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Doctor Shopping Forbidden under ObamaCare

An acquaintance allowed me to convey her story to my readers, asking her name not be used:

My youngest child was born 5 days late, 8 lbs 14 oz with 20 minute’s labor.

Although I was really sick during most of my pregnancy he was considered very healthy at birth and passed all of the tests with flying colors. I had some problems after he was born and they had to give me some additional medicine to stop my bleeding and cramping (and some other things) so we stayed in the hospital a few extra days.

When we brought him home he was sick. He spent some time in the nursery and caught a bug in addition to being jaundiced and needing a belly ring.

At two weeks he was diagnosed with pneumonia. He had pneumonia twice more that year. Our doctor (a personal friend) said that the scar tissue in the lungs can stay for six months or so and make it easier (more susceptible) to get repeat bouts of pneumonia (it is an opportunistic secondary infection). Because of my son’s size at birth and term (he was not a preemie) no red flags popped up.

We moved the week he turned one (he had pneumonia again for the drive). He had pneumonia 10 times by his second birthday. My friend the doctor told me once “trust your mommy sense, if you think something is wrong trust it and find out”.

I kept asking the new doctor why he was so ill… he was having trouble breathing… and when he did not have pneumonia he had croup (over and over again). Just before his second birthday he had his first belly breathing episode. No words can describe the sound of a tiny child frantically squeezing every muscle in their body just to try and get air in, to breath. It is terrifying! In the ER you are rushed past admittance, triage, and every doctor and nurse in ear shot come running to save your child.

Ironically the medicine that they administer to open the lungs has a common side effect of disintegrating bones (usually in the hip) so for 6 – 8 weeks you have to monitor the bones.

I knew something was really wrong. I was told my son had asthma (although he had no other symptoms). I started doctor shopping. When my insurance would not pay for another opinion we paid for it ourselves (by scraping and doing without).

The year my son turned three he had 58 doctors visits, 4 ER trips with belly breathing, and 4 specialist visits. Just before his fourth birthday we had a diagnosis with a theory. The theory was that when he was born he was exposed to and came home with the RSV virus (he was not tested for it because of his size and term) the diagnosis was underdeveloped lungs… they were not growing. They had tons of scar tissue that could not heal and an ever increasing demand on an ever more limiting size.

His biggest growing problem was not that he had trouble breathing in, it was that he was growing less effective (every day) breathing out. Co2 is not your friend. I found one doctor who figured out the best mix of medications, one! Now my son is breathing free and clear. He has not needed a breathing treatment in a year!

What I know (having read the new Health Care Law) is that doctor shopping is strictly forbidden. You can not pay for it yourself. I also know, that Special Needs kids (such as my son), have “managed care” where the decision making power is removed from the parents. The medications are reviewed and if it is not approved you can not get them (even if you want to pay for them yourself) – two of the medications my son took would have fit that scenario.

So for my two cents, my son’s life is worth it! I will do all in my power to help repeal this law that would have cost him his life.

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

For any Independent or Undecided Voters Out there

From the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304141204577506881495497626.html

Partisan zeal tempts me to reprint the whole thing. As an attorney, the one croquemitaine forever feared by our legal system, the overarching point and purpose of having a written constitution, separation of powers, separation of constituencies, and federalism, is to prevent the lapse of rule of law into a rule of popular leaders.

Here we have a reminder of the last four year’s continual engorgement of this selfsame lapse of rule of law. In case you’ve forgotten or paid no attention heretofore:

Strassel: Obama’s Imperial Presidency
When Congress won’t do what he wants, he ignores it and acts anyway.

The ObamaCare litigation is history, with the president’s takeover of the health sector deemed constitutional. Now we can focus on the rest of the Obama imperial presidency.

Where, you are wondering, have you recently heard that term? Ah, yes. The “imperial presidency” of George W. Bush was a favorite judgment of the left about our 43rd president’s conduct in war, wiretapping and detentions. Yet say this about Mr. Bush: His aggressive reading of executive authority was limited to the area where presidents are at their core power—the commander-in-chief function.

By contrast, presidents are at their weakest in the realm of domestic policy—subject to checks and balances, co-equal to the other branches. Yet this is where Mr. Obama has granted himself unprecedented power. The health law and the 2009 stimulus package were unique examples of Mr. Obama working with Congress. The more “persistent pattern,” Matthew Spalding recently wrote on the Heritage Foundation blog, is “disregard for the powers of the legislative branch in favor of administrative decision making without—and often in spite of—congressional action.”

Put another way: Mr. Obama proposes, Congress refuses, he does it anyway.

For example, Congress refused to pass Mr. Obama’s Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for some not here legally. So Mr. Obama passed it himself with an executive order that directs officers to no longer deport certain illegal immigrants. This may be good or humane policy, yet there is no reading of “prosecutorial discretion” that allows for blanket immunity for entire classes of offenders.

Mr. Obama disagrees with federal law, which criminalizes the use of medical marijuana. Congress has not repealed the law. No matter. The president instructs his Justice Department not to prosecute transgressors. He disapproves of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, yet rather than get Congress to repeal it, he stops defending it in court. He dislikes provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, so he asked Congress for fixes. That effort failed, so now his Education Department issues waivers that are patently inconsistent with the statute.

Similarly, when Mr. Obama wants a new program and Congress won’t give it to him, he creates it regardless. Congress, including Democrats, wouldn’t pass his cap-and-trade legislation. His Environmental Protection Agency is now instituting it via a broad reading of the Clean Air Act. Congress, again including members of his own party, wouldn’t pass his “card-check” legislation eliminating secret ballots in union elections. So he stacked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with appointees who pushed through a “quickie” election law to accomplish much the same. Congress wouldn’t pass “net neutrality” Internet regulations, so Mr. Obama’s Federal Communications Commission did it unilaterally.

In January, when the Senate refused to confirm Mr. Obama’s new picks for the NLRB, he proclaimed the Senate to be in “recess” and appointed the members anyway, making a mockery of that chamber’s advice-and-consent role. In June, he expanded the definition of “executive privilege” to deny House Republicans documents for their probe into the botched Fast and Furious drug-war operation, making a mockery of Congress’s oversight responsibilities.

This president’s imperial pretensions extend into the brute force the executive branch has exercised over the private sector. The auto bailouts turned contract law on its head, as the White House subordinated bondholders’ rights to those of its union allies. After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Justice Department leaked that it had opened a criminal probe at exactly the time the Obama White House was demanding BP suspend its dividend and cough up billions for an extralegal claims fund. BP paid. Who wouldn’t?

And it has been much the same in his dealings with the states. Don’t like Arizona’s plans to check immigration status? Sue. Don’t like state efforts to clean up their voter rolls? Invoke the Voting Rights Act. Don’t like state authority over fracking? Elbow in with new and imagined federal authority, via federal water or land laws.

In so many situations, Mr. Obama’s stated rationale for action has been the same: We tried working with Congress but it didn’t pan out—so we did what we had to do. This is not only admission that the president has subverted the legislative branch, but a revealing insight into Mr. Obama’s view of his own importance and authority.

There is a rich vein to mine here for GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Americans have a sober respect for a balance of power, so much so that they elected a Republican House in 2010 to stop the Obama agenda. The president’s response? Go around Congress and disregard the constitutional rule of law. What makes this executive overreach doubly unsavory is that it’s often pure political payoff to special interests or voter groups.

Mr. Obama came to office promising to deliver a new kind of politics. He did—his own, unilateral governance.

——————–

A version of this article appeared July 6, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obama’s Imperial Presidency.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Better Late Than Never

Now that July 4th is past, and the ‘Fortnight for Freedom’ is gone by, only now did my wee and inattentive mind come across the list of the saints and martyrs, whom we were asked to remember in our prayers, asking help from that arm of the Church which is in worlds after this world.

Here is the list.

Since the postmodern mindset demands that the fact of persecutions against the Church be ignored or warped to fit the “narrative” (or, in technical terminology, the lies) of portraying the Church as persecutor, I thought it might be refreshing, if shocking, to be reminded of the terrible, clear truth of the matter.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 14 – July 4

Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati (1900s, Italy): Known as a “Man of the Beatitudes,” Blessed Pier Giorgio was the son of a prominent, non-religious family in Turin who owned a newspaper called La Stampa. He came to know Christ and eventually became an Italian Catholic activist. He worked for justice for the poor and spoke out against political injustice and against the rise of fascism in Italy in the 1920s. He died on July 4, 1925, at the age of 24 from an illness. The poor of the city petitioned for the archbishop of Turin to begin the cause for canonization. The process was opened in 1932, and he was beatified in 1990. His feast day is July 4.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 13 – July 3

Blessed Miguel Agustin Pro (1800s-1900s, Mexico): Blessed Miguel Pro was a Mexican Jesuit priest who was executed under the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles. As a young Jesuit, he studied in Mexico until 1914, when an anti-Catholic sentiment overtook the country. His community fled to the United States, but he eventually was sent to Spain to complete his seminary studies. He was ordained in Belgium in 1925. Blessed Miguel Pro became ill and was allowed to return to Mexico, despite the religious persecution going on there. He spent much of his life ministering in secret and helping the poor. He was falsely accused in a bombing attempt on the former Mexican president and sentenced to death without a trial. He was executed in 1927 and was beatified in 1988. Blessed Miguel Pro’s feast day is Nov. 23.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 12 – July 2

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (1800s-1900s, Germany/Netherlands): Born Edith Stein into a Jewish family, she became an atheist in her teenage years. She went away to a university, where she became a philosopher and earned a doctorate in 1916. She found herself moved by the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, which began a journey of faith that led to her baptism in 1922. She entered the Carmelites in 1934. Because of the dangers in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, she was moved to a convent in the Netherlands in 1938. In 1942, the Dutch bishops denouncing the Nazi activities. In retaliation, they arrested all Dutch Jews who converted to Christianity. St. Teresa Benedicta and her sister, Rosa, were arrested and died at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. She was canonized in 1998. Her feast day is Aug. 9.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 11 – July 1

St. Charles Lwanga (1880s, Africa): One of 22 Ugandan martyrs, St. Charles Lwanga protected his fellow pages (aged 13 to 30) from the homosexual demands of the Bagandan ruler, Mwanga, and encouraged and instructed them in the Catholic faith during their imprisonment for refusing the ruler’s demands. For his own unwillingness to submit to the immoral acts and his efforts to safeguard the faith of his friends, Charles was burned to death at Namugongo on June 3, 1886, by Mwanga’s order. Charles first learned of Christ’s teachings from two retainers in the court of Chief Mawulugungu. While a catechumen, he entered the royal household as assistant to Joseph Mukaso, head of the court pages. On the night of Mukaso’s martyrdom for encouraging the African youths to resist Mwanga, Charles requested and received baptism. Imprisoned with his friends, Charles’s courage and belief in God inspired them to remain chaste and faithful.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 10 – June 30

First Holy Martyrs of the Roman Church/ St. Stephen Protomartyr (first century, Jerusalem): St. Stephen was among a group of men of the early Christian Church in Jerusalem. After a dispute with members of the Synagogue of Freedmen, he was denounced for blasphemy against God and Moses, among other things. He was tried before the Sanhedrin. He eventually was condemned and stoned to death by a mob, which was encouraged by Saul of Tarsus, who later became known as St. Paul the Apostle. St. Stephen’s feast day is Dec. 26.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 9 – June 29

Sts. Peter and Paul (first century, Rome): St. Peter, one of the 12 Apostles and the first bishop of Rome, and St. Paul, a convert who spent much of his life spreading the Gospel message, were among the most influential early Christians. Both were put to death for their roles in spreading Christianity. They share a feast day on June 29.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 8 – June 28

St. Cyprian (third century, North Africa): St. Cyprian, known for his gradual escalation of conflict with Roman authorities, converted to Christianity and became a bishop in Carthage around the year 249 A.D. The following year, a persecution began and bishops were required to make sacrifice to the emperor, but St. Cyprian fled. A new persecution broke out several years later, and again St. Cyprian refused. He was exiled. St. Cyprian eventually was arrested and brought to trial. In 258, he was imprisoned again and was sentenced to die by beheading. His feast day is Sept. 16.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 7- June 27

St. Catherine of Alexandria (fourth century, Alexandria, Egypt): St. Catherine was the daughter of the pagan King Costus and Queen Sabinella of Alexandria. As a young adult, she visited her contemporary, the Roman Emperor Maxentius, and attempted to convince him of the moral error in persecuting Christians for not worshipping idols. The emperor arranged for a plethora of the best pagan philosophers and orators to dispute with her, hoping that they would refute her pro-Christian arguments, but Catherine won the debate and succeeded in converting all of them to Christianity, for which the philosophers and orators were executed by an enraged Maxentius.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 6 – June 26

St. Paul Miki and Companions (1500s, Japan): St. Paul Miki was the son of a wealthy Japanese military leader. He embraced Christianity and became a Jesuit in 1580. He played a role in converting his own family and others because of his preaching. The emperor of Japan, fearful of the rising role of foreign missionaries, banished foreign ministers and arrested Christians. In 1597, St. Paul Miki and 25 companions were arrested and sentenced to death. They marched 600 miles to Nagasaki, where they were crucified and stabbed with a lance. His feast day is Feb. 6.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 5 – June 25

St. Thomas Becket (1100s, England): St. Thomas Becket was an English bishop who was martyred for his conflict over rights and privileges of the Church. In his early career, he was a civil servant and eventually became a chancellor for King Henry II. In 1162, he was nominated as archbishop of Canterbury. He was ordained a priest and consecrated as a bishop later that year. This led to a conflict between St. Thomas and King Henry. St. Thomas, realizing the importance of protecting the Church’s rights and liberties, was unwilling to allow the king to take full control of the Church. He was exiled to France for several years. Upon his return, he refused to give in to political pressure and was killed by four knights in the Cathedral of Canterbury in 1170. His feast day is Dec. 29.

Fortnight for Freedom Day 4 – June 24

St. John the Baptist (first century, Judea): One of the key religious figures of the early Church, St. John the Baptist prepared the way for the coming of Christ as he led a baptismal movement along the Jordan River. He eventually baptized Christ at Bethany. Later, he continued to preach and minister around Israel, even condemning King Herod for taking a woman that wasn’t his wife. He eventually was arrested and beheaded. His feast day is June 24 (Nativity).

Fortnight for Freedom Day 3- June 23

Martyrs of Vietnam, St. Andrew Dung Lac (1600s-1900s, Vietnam): The Martyrs of Vietnam refers to a large group of Vietnamese individuals who lived their faith in hostile territory. An estimated 150,000 to 300,000 individuals were martyred in Vietnam between the 17th and 20th centuries. A group of them were canonized by Blessed John Paul II in 1988 for their witness. Among the group was St. Andrew Dung Lac, a diocesan priest who tirelessly preached. He also baptized many after their conversions. As conditions were growing hostile toward Catholics in Vietnam, he was arrested there in 1835. Even after his release, he continued to minister. He was arrested a second time and eventually was beheaded in 1839 for his devotion to the Church. His feast day is Nov. 24.

Fortnight For Freedom Day 2 – June 22

North American Martyrs, St. John de Brébeuf (1593-1649, Canada) Known as the Canadian Martyrs or the Martyrs of New France, they include St. Jean de Brébeuf (1649), St. Noël Chabanel (1649), St. Antoine Daniel (1648), St. Charles Garnier (1649), St. René Goupil (1642), St. Isaac Jogues (1646), St. Jean de Lalande (1646) and St. Gabriel Lalemant (1649). St. John de Brebeuf and his companions, members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), primarily worked with the Huron Indians in Canada. He converted thousands Indians and composed a dic­tionary and catechism in the Huron language. The martyrs had helped organize resistance to Iroquois invasions during the warfare between the Iroquois and the Huron. They were captured and eventually killed by the Iroquois. Their feast day is Oct. 19.

Fortnight For Freedom Day 1 – June 21

Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher (1400s-1535, England) St. John Fisher, a English Catholic scholastic, cardinal and martyr, was executed at the order of King Henry VIII during the English Reformation because of his refusal to accept the king as head of the Church of England. He also opposed the King Henry’s divorce proceedings against his wife Catherine and resisted the encroachment of Henry on the Church. He shares his feast day with St. Thomas More, patron of lawyers, who was a lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. St. Thomas More also opposed the king’s separation from the Catholic Church and refused to accept him as the head of the Church of England. He spent much of his life writing in defense of the Catholic Church. Both saints were executed in 1535.

My comment: Let us doff our caps in awe and grief at this shed and sanctifying blood the faithful freely gave.

In terms of numbers, the persecution against Christians now is greater than ever before, even if we blithely do not see it in the lazy, fat and happy nations of the First World in the summery days after the World Wars and the Cold Wars. The malice of the darkness does not rest.

ON A LIGHTER note, I also draw your attention to the ecumenical and universal nature of the martyrs and saints: Northern and Southern European, Oriental and African, Black and White, Male and Female, Jew and Gentile, Ancient and Modern.

It amuses me that the Catholic Church is more diverse than the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, but that those groups who most loudly announce themselves to be fans of diversity and multiculturalism are, by and large, middle-aged white guys of the upper-middle-class First World intelligentsia and academia. There is something ironic about an ideologically mono-cultural group trying to practice the catholic and ecumenical and international nature of this one truly cosmopolitan and worldwide institution, but without getting it right.

It is hard to be catholic without being Catholic.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Confiteor and the Pride of Lucifer

From the pen of Mark Shea:

I like that the Catholic Church is so transparently inept and so plainly filled with such obviously failed and ridiculous people, not only among us laity, but throughout the ranks of its clerics as well. My abiding sense, ever since converting, has been one of relief. In sectarian Protestantism, the question is always whether you are pure enough, whether you are a “real Christian”, whether your “really meant it” when you asked Jesus into your heart, whether your latest grotesque failure means your whole life as a Christian has been one huge fraud.

The great thing about the Catholic communion is that it begins every single act of worship with the Confiteor in which we all look at each other and say, “Who am I kidding? i don’t belong here any more than you do, so let’s pray for each other and ask the the Graduates in Heaven to put in a good word for us, trusting that God will cut us slack again just so long as we keep cutting each other slack.” It’s a place where there’s room for me: a screwup who can’t tell my butt from a hole in the ground who has no business darkening the door of a Church, much less brazenly walking up there and receiving the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Almighty God, if you please. The whole project is so outrageous from beginning to end that my only excuse is that God tells all these other people they not only can but must do it, so I guess it’s okay that a dubious jerk like me does it too.

My comment: This is why I am one of the two Founding Member of the Shea-Wright Mutual Admiration Society.

Mr Shea is in good company:

From the pen of Hillaire Belloc:

Hilaire Belloc’s description of the Catholic Church: “An institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.”

From the pen of GK Chesterton:

Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.

My comment: Back in my atheist days, each day I stood in public places, and prayed thus with myself, “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.”

No, not literally, of course, since I neither prayed nor spoke the name of God save to curse Him, but the sentiment was exactly the same. While I have met humble agnostics, who believe human reason insufficient to come to certainty on the question of the existence of divine things, I have never met a humble atheist.

The reason is not hard to discover: even an atheist who starts his career with the humble thought that, since not all religions can be true therefore Christianity has no special claim to truth, must in time inevitably comes to the conclusion that, since he sees truths that superstitious fools like Einstein and Aristotle and Newton could not see, patently obviously and blatantly clear truths, it is therefore clear that he, the atheist, is smarter than nine tenths of the world, and all the geniuses of history, with a few small exceptions: James Randi, Lucretius, Christopher Hitchens, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan.

Now, the clumsy belligerence of atheists is more obvious these days, and that for two reasons: first, we live in a darkening Dark Age, where civilized behaviors, such as showing gentlemanly respect for one peers, has been replaced by childish behaviors, such as demanding respect unearned; and second, the Internet allows and even encourages the anonymous expression of private thoughts, including those which prudence would deter being uttered face to face. But howsoever obvious it is these days, it has always been present.

You see, a Pharisee might be arrogant if he thinks his salvation is his own doing rather than a gift of God, or a prophet might be arrogant if he thinks his prophecies overturn all previous tradition of prophecy: but even these will ultimately have a good reason (whether reason be heeded or no) not to be too unhumble, for the Pharisee and the Heresiarch still bow to a divine source of wisdom.

Not so the atheist. It would be different if he were raised on some globe circling another star among that happy race of Vulcans or Puppeteers who never had anything like religion, and whose civilization (assuming such a thing were possible) grew up without any supernatural roots. But the atheist raised on Earth, even if he respects the historical Christ, of Mohamed or Moses, or Buddha, or Confucius, or Plato, cannot help but feel pity or contempt for the basic thinking of these men, which basic thinking is supernatural (yes, including the arch-pragmatic Confucius) and therefore cannot help but feel pity or contempt for Christendom, for the Ummah, for Jewry, for India, for China, for the Classical Pagans of old.

Now, honestly, you cannot walk around thinking yourself intellectually superior to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and the founders of your republic or kingdom or nation without it being reflected in your demeanor and character.

This is not like being a Babe Ruth walking around thinking he is better at swatting homers than is Chuck Yeager, who admittedly is better at flying planes. This is not taking pride in your accomplishments while admitting that men in other fields are more accomplished in their fields.

This is assuming, merely on the grounds that the philosophers and prophets and sages and thinkers of old come to different conclusions than you, that the difference of conclusion is based on a defect of reason present in them and not in you.

For by the atheist philosophy, the difference of conclusions cannot be based on anything else: it cannot be fate, or a failure of inspiration, because atheists do not believe in fate or inspiration.

The atheist cannot say that atheism is one philosophy among many philosophies of equal merit: he cannot say that theism is like the Steady State Theory or the Geocentric Theory, a model of the universe held by respectable scientific opinion in its day, now discovered to be unsupported by the most recent evidence, on the simple ground that there is no new evidence. The same arguments which promoted atheism now were used to promote it among the ancient Greeks.

Atheism is a faith, undeterred by any evidence no matter how obvious, that you are smarter than men much smarter than you.

You being to act as if you are the one fully evolved human person on the Planet of Apes.

And this pride, like the first drink of hard liquor or the first sniff of cocaine, becomes habit forming. It is pleasant only at first. Then it takes over your thinking, and becomes a constant companion and a constant burden, and an endless, dragging weariness. Human souls are not actually built for pride, any more than our bodies are build for alcohol or cocaine.

I wish there were a way to convince my atheist friends to be Christian for only a day, or an hour, so that they would see what a relief it was to lay down the towering iron burden of arrogance.

Pride is pleasant only at first. In time, it comes to oppress the soul with an airless isolation, a loneliness that lacks the romance of a far island or a high mountain. And in eternity, the worst torment of Lucifer in Abaddon is the ever darker pride of that once-bright and fallen prince of angels.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

On the Antiquity of Confession

A reader put forward the novel idea that there was no sacrament of confession in the Early Church, which was (so he said) much like the Protestant churches in this and in all other regards.

The argument, if I may be harsh, is without merit. I can (and have) quoted half a dozen or more early Church Fathers who refer to Confession not as something done not to God alone, but to God with the aid and ministry of a priest acting in the person and capacity of Christ.

But a stronger argument can be made. If the Sacrament of Confession was an invention of priestcraft or an absurd innovation, when was it innovated?

Where is the record of the debates and anathemas and excoriations and schisms held over this issue? For we have records of the debates and anathemas which accompanied Arianism and Donatism and hairsplitting niceties over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only or from the Father and Son, and hairsplitting niceties over how many natures and how many will, human and divine, where present in the Incarnate Christ. If it is asserted that the Imperial Court commanded such powers as to abolish all written record of the dispute, both for an against, one must in rebuke ask gently why it did not use these powers on behalf of Arianism to abolish all record of Orthodoxy, or why the Imperium of such power failed by force to retain the loyalty of the Nestorians and Monophysites?

Is it to be believed that confession to a priest was adopted into a Church that never knew the practice without any record surviving of the objections, or that no objection was raised, but records about nuances of the controversies surrounding “theotokos” and “filioque” did survive?

Time does not permit me to give the reader a detailed answer, so allow me to make shift by simply quoting counterarguments as clear and forceful as any I might have myself invented. I quote here at length from FAITH OF OUR FATHERS by by James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore.

I have edited the argument slightly for reasons of space and flow, but the original can be read here http://www.cathcorn.org/foof/26.html:

That Sacramental Confession …could not have been introduced into the Church since the days of the Apostles, and consequently … it is Apostolic in its origin.

That Confession was not invented since the days of the Apostles is manifest as soon as we attempt to fix the period of its first establishment. Let us go back, step, by step, from the nineteenth to the first century.

It had not its origin in the present century, as everybody will admit.

Nor did it arise in the sixteenth century, since the General Council of Trent, held in that age, speaks of it as an established and venerable institution and Luther says that “auricular Confession, as now in vogue, is useful, nay, necessary; nor would I,” he adds, “have it abolished, since it is the remedy of afflicted consciences.”[Lib. de Capt. Babyl. cap de Poenit.]

Even Henry VIII, before he founded a new sect, wrote a treatise in defence of the Sacraments, including Penance and Confession.

It was not introduced in the thirteenth century, for the Fourth Council of Lateran passed a decree in 1215 obliging the faithful to confess their sins at least once a year. This decree, of course, supposes Confession to be already an established fact.

Some Protestant writers fall into a common error in interpretting the decree of the Lateran Council by saying “Sacramental Confession was never required in the Church of Rome until the thirteenth century.” The Council simply proscribed a limit beyond which the faithful should not defer their confession.

These writers seem incapable of distinguishing between a law obliging us to a certain duty and a statute fixing the time for fulfilling it. They might as well suppose that the revenue officer creates the law regarding the payment of taxes when he issues a notice requiring the revenue to be paid within a given time.

Going back to the ninth century we find that Confession could not have had its rise then. It was at that period that the Greek schism took its rise, under the leadership of Photius. The Greek schismatic church has remained since then a communion separate from the Catholic Church, having no spiritual relations with us. Now, the Greek church is as tenaciously attached to private Confession as we are.

For the same reasons Confession could not date its origin from the fifth or fourth century. The Arians revolted from the Church in the fourth century, and the Nestorians and Eutychians in the fifth. The two last-named sects still exist in large number in Persia, Abyssinia and along the coast of Malabar, and retain Confession as one of their most sacred and cherished practices.

In fine, no human agency could succeed in instituting Confession between the first and fourth century, for the teachings of our Divine Redeemer and of His disciples had made too vivid an impression on the Christian community to be easily effaced; and the worst enemies of the Church admit that no spot or wrinkle had yet deformed her fair visage in this, the golden age of her existence.

But the doctrine of priestly absolution and the private confession of sins is not confined to the Roman Catholic and Oriental schismatic churches. The same doctrine is also taught by a large and influential portion of the Protestant Episcopal Church of England. It is inculcated in those old and genuine editions of the Book of Common Prayer, which have not been enervated by being subjected to the pruning-knife in this country and the same practice is encouraged by an influential portion of the Protestant Episcopal church in England, and I will add, also, in the United States.

These remarks suffice to convince us that Sacramental Confession was not instituted since the time of the Apostles. I shall now endeavor to prove to your satisfaction that its introduction into the Church, since the Apostolic age, was absolutely impossible.

There are two ways in which we may suppose that error might insinuate itself into the Church, viz.: suddenly, or by slow process. Now, the introduction of Confession in either of those ways was simply impossible.

First, nothing can be more absurd that to suppose that Confession was immediately forced upon the Christian world. For experience demonstrates with what slowness and difficulty men are divested of their religious impressions, whether true or false. If such is the case with individuals, how ridiculous would it seem for whole nations to adopt in a single day some article of belief which they had never admitted before. Hence, we cannot imagine, without doing violence to our good sense, that all the good people of Christendom went to rest one night ignorant of the Sacrament of Penance, and rose next morning firm believers in the Catholic doctrine of auricular Confession. As well might we suppose that the citizens of the United States would retire to rest believing they were living under a Republic, and awake impressed with the conviction that they were under the rule of Queen Victoria.

Nor is it less absurd to suppose that the practice of Confession was introduced by degrees. How can we imagine that the Fathers of the Church–the Clements, the Leos, the Gregories, the Chrysostoms, the Jeromes, the Basils and Augustines, those intrepid High Priests of the Lord, who, in every age, at the risk of persecution, exile and death have stood like faithful sentinels on the watch-towers of Israel, defending with sleepless eyes the outskirts of the city of God from the slightest attack–how can we imagine, I say, that they would suffer the enemy of truth to invade the very sanctuary of God’s temple? If they were so vigilant in cutting off the least withered branch of error, how would they tamely submit to see so monstrous an exotic engrafted on the fruitful tree of the Church?

What gives additional weight to these remarks is the reflection that Confession is not a speculative doctrine, but a doctrine of the most practical kind, influencing our daily actions, words and thoughts–a Sacrament to which thousands of Christians have constant recourse in every part of the world. It is a doctrine, moreover, hard to flesh and blood, and which no human power, even if it had the will, could impose on the human race.

Again, some object to priestly absolution on the assumption that the exercise of such a function would be a usurpation of an incommunicable prerogative of God, who alone can forgive sins. This was precisely the language addressed by the Scribes to our Savior. They exclaimed: “he blasphemeth! who can forgive sins but God only?”[Mark ii. 7.] My answer, therefore, will be equally applicable to old and modern objectors. It is not blasphemy for a Priest to claim the power of forgiving sins, since he acts as the delegate of the Most High. It would, indeed, be blasphemous if a Priest pretended to absolve in his own name and by virtue of his own authority. But when the Priest absolves the penitent sinner he acts in the name, and by the express authority, of Jesus Christ; for he says: “I absolve thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Let it be understood once for all that the Priest arrogates to himself no Divine powers. He is but a feeble voice. It is the Holy Spirit that operates sanctity in the soul of the penitent.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Often the Simplest Explanation is Best

I came across this post by Mark Steyn. It is short, so I will reprint it in toto.

I wrote recently about a small victory for freedom of speech in Canada, but, as always, it’s two steps forward, one step back. Here’s the backward one: Gai Écoute in Québec has announced the launch of the world’s first “register of homophobic acts.”

I don’t mind gay groups keeping a vast database of anonymously-reported homophobic thought-crimes if they feel that’s a productive use of their time. But it is preposterous that this sprawling directory of  cobwebbed flamer cracks and swishy-gait titters will be publicly funded by taxpayers under the Québec Government’s “action plan for the fight against homophobia,” which apparently also includes redesignating Jean-Marc Fournier, the minister of justice and attorney general, as “Minister of Justice, Attorney General, and Minister for the Fight Against Homophobia.”

As usual with these censorious types, “act” is defined with the broadest of brushes to include “moquerie blessante” (offensive mockery) and “couverture médiatique inappropriée” (inappropriate media coverage). The right to mock and be “inappropriate” are about as basic to a free society as any, so nuts to that.

To announce the launch of their secret files of inappropriate mockers, the leaders of Gai Écoute were flanked by Montréal Police Chief Inspector Johanne Paquin and Commander Alain Gagnon. In a sane world, no self-respecting gay would attend such an event. The fact that this sight — policemen publicly announcing a dossier of dissident citizens suspected of thought crimes to the approval of supposedly “liberal” “progressive” groups — is now entirely normal in Western societies is far more disturbing than any problem they purport to be addressing. To modify an ancient joke, how do you make a fruit cordial? Evidently, it’s a lot harder than it used to be. You can have that one for free, lads — just in case things are a bit quiet on the homophobia-epidemic front.

PS I’ll be interested to see how much room the database has for persons of a, ahem, certain background who say things like “all male homosexuals should be killed for their deviant behavior.”

Those of you too finger-weary to click through the link, allow me to present the highlight of the opinion piece to which it refers:

Philips, a Saudi-educated cleric, … is considered controversial because he is on the record saying that all male homosexuals should be killed for their deviant behaviour…

Shortly after his sermon about the importance of gratitude, Philips clarified his views on homosexuality in a one-on-one interview.

In short, he only thinks homosexuals should be executed in Muslim countries and only after four people have witnessed the homosexual act.

“The media tends to take my words out of context,” Philips said.

My comment: As a science fiction writer, I am well aware that there are certain absurdities too absurd for any reader to take seriously should I put them in a space opera.

For example, if I were inventing some Orwellian dystopia where the state, in the name of aiding the poor to afford health care, should instead as its very first public act command the Roman Catholic Church institutions like universities and soup kitchens and orphanages to purchase abortifacients, contraceptives, and fund sterilization procedures; and when the Catholics, as their holy teaching commands, refused to participate in this abhorrent sin, the state called it a “war against women” — no reader would believe such a far fetched scenario, absurd to the point of comedy.

The readers might believe that the cowed and ignorant slaves of Airstrip One would call killing babies in the womb a ‘health’ practice performed by ‘doctors’, but only in the same way the readers accept the dark and morbid humor of Orwell, where Big Brother blithely calls ignorance strength and war peace.

An practice which calls itself a success when and only when the baby is born dead can be called many things, but not a ‘health’ practice.

But no reader would imagine that anyone, no matter how cowed or craven or insane, could with a straight face call the polite refusal of churchmen to hand over their own money to fund and support the fornications and abominations and infanticides of the giddy whores of whoreland an act of war against womanhood.

Such polite refusal has killed fewer women than Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick by a ratio of one to zero, or, in other words, an infinite ratio.

No reader would believe that anyone could say or could believe the perfect nonsense of calling the refusal to aid and abet in harlotry or self-mutilation or child-murder an act of bloodthirsty military aggression against the harlot child-murderesses. Not the outlawing of the fornication or aborticide, mind you, and not even the public denunciation of either: merely the refusal to pay money for those who freely and voluntarily join a Catholic University or Hospital or Charity to violate deeply held Catholic moral teachings.

And this, not as the first public expression of, say, the Plenary Porcine Right to Copulate Act of 2001, or the Atheist Anticlerical Empowerment Act of 2008 but instead as the first public expression of an Act allegedly meant to lower the cost of doctor and hospital visits to the ragged orphans from Oliver Twist or the penniless Okies from Grapes of Wrath. Visits to the cathouse or to the confessional booth do not seem to be anywhere in the scope of the debate.

And yet, somehow, by some odd coincidence, the first thing done by this benevolent law was to have an unelected bureaucrat arbitrarily decide to command the Church to trample the crucifix.

Now, of course, as a science fiction writer, my whole art and craft is to take some manifest absurdity, such as time travel or faster than light drive, and give the reader’s imagination some excuse to exercise a willing suspension of disbelief.

In this case, the reader might be willing to believe the Orwellian absurdity if the story at the outset postulated two counterfactual premises:

First, all the characters involved in the tale, small and great, and all their ancestors back to their first parents suffer some severe and radical depravity which both corrupts the moral sense and darkens the intellect, so that whole political parties and nations and peoples and ages of history can be led into hysteria and madness, neurosis and depravity while at the same time congratulating themselves with excessive self-adulation on their enlightenment and clearheadedness.

I mean, as a science fiction writer, I can postulate an entire race of creatures with radically unstable and self destructive psychology, can I not?  Country of the Blind, or a Nation of Cowards, or a Fallen World?

Second, and because readers love Hitchcockian paranoid thrillers, the tale could postuate a master spy or super-villain of immense, nay, superhuman intelligence and power bending the wills of his victims, even without their conscious knowledge, against the one institution in the West which has always opposed him. As a crowning irony, this Dark Lord could be so subtle as to rob the current generation of knowledge of his existence, despite that all the fathers and all the beloved leaders and founders of days past knew of this Dark Lord and hated him.

More brilliant than any Bond villain planning to ignite a supervolcano or unleash a bioterror plague, this mastermind can get his enemies to destroy each other. For the purpose of drama, we can take an extreme case:

On the one side, we have ardent homosexual activists who (and here the reader will have to stretch his imagination to swallow the incongruity) regard the practice of an unnatural vice as a race or nation, like the Negro or the Irish, so that the practice chastity and decency created by natural affection can be regarded as oppression, the theft of a civil right akin to the Democrat Party’s Jim Crow laws, or even an oppression akin to the slavery in the in Democrat Party’s Antebellum South.

Naturally, since the activists see themselves as facing universal condemnation, which they interpret to be not concern for the welfare of decency and society, including their own, but as an incomprehensible and cosmic conspiracy against them, they will scruple at nothing to defend themselves from what seems to them an irrational yet all-powerful opposition. Their first resort will be to “strong arm” tactics, special laws to protect them, special prosecutors, nay, inquistors to ferret out the enemies who lurk in every nook and shadow. Since the activists are rebelling against nature herself, they will be constantly surprised at how pervasive the opposition to them is. To them, the normal world will seem an endless throng of brain eating zombies, implacable and beyond any power of reason to reach.

So, naturally, the first enemy of the activist will be the centers of moral probity: the Boy Scouts, the Christian churches, and particularly the Catholic Church.

However, despite the overblown rhetoric of the activists, the Boy Scouts do not stone homosexuals to death. There is another group that does this.

Our Dark Lord, at least in this story, can erect a false prophet to announce a religion remarkably akin to Christianity but without the Christ, the redemption, or the humanity. We can call this heresy “the Submission” because the peoples regard themselves as slaves of God rather than sons. The Submitters can be homicidal maniacs who live in a constant foam of rage, eager to knife film makers or behead journalists, or any who oppose the imposition of an inhuman theocracy called Sharia Law on all all mankind.

Now, one would think the bloodthirsty religious maniacs and the paranoiac secular activists would be the worst enemies in the world, since they oppose each other violently at every point but, in this tale, we have to come up with some reason that they make a common cause with each other and gang up against the West in general, Christianity in particular, and the Catholic Church especially.

Of course in our story, we have already set up the explanation at the outset: the innate depravity of man, which we might call a genetic defect or (to use an older language which means much the same thing) an original sin; and this is combined with the malice of a superhuman and implacable enemy of God and Man.

But here is a question for my readers of any persuasion.

1. Do you think that persons of an, ahem, certain background are going into that database in Quebec? More imams than bishops? Really?

2. For those of you who do not believe the tale, the one true tale of the world which makes sense of the world, what account can be you make of the repeated pattern that the efforts of the activists ignore the efforts of the maniacs, but instead concentrate on the Holy Mother Church, as if she, rather than each other, were the frightening formidable enemy of both?

How do you account for it?

If you cannot account for it, I suggest you examine your axioms, question your unquestioned assumptions, and find a philosophy, or, to be precise, a faith, which forms and accurate and explicable model of the word.

You know your model is inaccurate when it cannot, you know, serve as a model to explain what it purports to explain.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Obamacare and Evidence Based Medicine

Concerning Obamacare, now re-legislated by the High Court to be a tax for the purpose of its legality, but not a tax for the purpose of the Anti-Injunction Statue under whose provisions the High Court would not have standing to hear the case, a Mr Gray writes this:

If Obamacare is fully instituted it will have one very terrible darkside that never gets talked about. The bill changes the way medicine is to be practiced in USA. The model for the new way of practice is the VA’s system which is called “evidence-based medicine” which sounds innocuous enough — what else would medicine be based on, tarot cards, ouiji boards, dowsing sticks?

Evidence based medicine is a kind of expert system that operates through a computer network controlled by a central computer. It very cookbook style. You tell the machine the patient’s complaints and your preliminary diagnosis, the machine suggests tests to narrow down the differential diagnosis to a final diagnosis that becomes the basis for therapy at least as your begin to treat the patient.

Medications are prescibed based on the idea of trying every conceivable or imaginable cheap generic medication first to see if any of them have any affect whatsoever on the illness. Only if none of them do any good does the computer begin to consider the possibility of using a first line drug that is still under patent.

The computer comes first. The patient becomes a guinea pig, and the experimental research subject” to see if any generic medications will work at all.

It’s like a big research project into cheapness in operations.

The VA is adamant about this, and so will all doctors be who must participate in Obamacare.

Obamacare is based on the idea that no medical school, and no doctor, outside of Washington DC has ANY information about the practice of medicine. The entire body of medical knowledge is concentrated exclusively in the Expert System Computer in Washington DC.

I struggled for 3 years to get Lipitor and Plavix from the VA. I took my case all the way to the House and Senate, all the way to General Shinseki. Never got a Lipitor, never got a Plavix, even though my own doctor had been prescribing those for me for 9 years previously and they were obviously working, and my blood tests proved it beyond all possible doubt.

Obamacare is going to be a VA style totalitarian fascism of absolute dictatorship in which there’s really only one doctor, and it’s a computer in Washington DC. They call it evidence based medicine.

If you can imagine something nastier than death panels, it’s gotta be a box of wires that sentences you to death.

In my own case, I went abroad to get medical care. That’s why I’m not dead. But, I’m not a follower. In a nation of followers, a lot of them are going to wind up dead if we go to Obamacare. Dead at twice the price. Poor then dead. Heckovadeal! Poor then dead. Heckovadeal!

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.