(A snippet from Edward Fesser's blog)
"Here’s a narrative we’re all by now familiar with. Call it Narrative A:
Those who initially downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 were guilty of wishful thinking, as are those who think the crisis can be resolved either easily or soon. This is what the experts tell us, and we should listen to them. Even though those most at risk of death from the novel coronavirus are the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions, this is a large group. Moreover, many people who won’t die from the virus will still suffer greatly, and even those with mild symptoms or none at all can still infect others. Draconian measures are called for, even at the risk of massive unemployment, the undoing of people’s retirement plans, and the depletion of their savings. Better safe than sorry. To resist these hard truths is to be guilty of “coronavirus denialism.”
This narrative is now widely accepted, and I have nothing to say here in criticism of it. More to the present point, it seems to be widely accepted by Catholic bishops, who have been moved by it to suspend most public access to churches and to the sacraments. I have nothing to say here in criticism of that either.
Here’s another narrative that is also familiar, but less widely accepted. Call it Narrative B:
Those who suppose that few if any people will go to Hell are guilty of wishful thinking. This is contrary to scripture and 2,000 years of teaching from the popes, the saints, and the Church’s greatest theologians. They are the experts and we should listen to them. Even if it turned out that a minority of the human race is damned, this could still be a large number. Moreover, even those who will end up instead in Purgatory will still suffer greatly, and those who teach errors or live immoral lives out of invincible ignorance might lead others into damnation. The call for conversion to the Catholic faith and repentance from sin must be urgently pursued, even at the risk of causing grave offense and inviting serious persecution. To resist these hard truths is to be guilty of “damnation denialism.”
I am well aware that secular readers, universalists, and others will scoff at Narrative B. But this post is not directed to them. It is directed to those who claim to accept the teaching of the Catholic Church, such as the bishops.
The question for these Catholics is this: If Narrative A is compelling, how much more compelling should we find Narrative B? After all, as Christ taught: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Since COVID-19 attacks only the body but Hell entails the perpetual suffering of body and soul, shouldn’t damnation be an even more urgent concern than COVID-19?"
Shiningpeak is a portal to a various content, mostly a collection of articles and writings on topics such as religion, ethics, current events, politics, stupidity, modernity, antiquity, atheism, theism, etc, including lectures for the college level intro to philosophy class (phi 101). They include sections on logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, proofs of god, natural theology, ancient Greece, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomism, and more.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
The Brillant Ages - from John C. Wright
Lifted from his blog at http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/11/the-brilliant-ages/
_______________________________________________________
The Dark Ages have a bad reputation.
But, in many ways, the feudal system, with one universal Church and many local kings and barons maintaining the folk law, tied to subjects and vassals by personal oaths of loyalty, with neither the slave markets of the ancient world, the theocratic sultanates, ancestor worship, or caste systems of the Near and Far East, nor with the plutocracies, state-syndicates, and socialisms of modern Europe, achieved something unheard-of in the ancient world and forgotten in the modern:
It achieved maturity. It achieved something never achieved before or since: a form of civilization fitted to the human condition, high and low, male and female, spiritual and temporal. It achieved the modern world without the more notorious evils and drawbacks of the modern world.
It took the wreckage of the Roman Empire, while being attacked from the Norse and the Paynims, and managed to throw the Mohammedans out of Spain. Meanwhile, in the East, the Byzantines has a centralized empire more similar to our modern bureaucracy-state, and collapsed before the approach of Islam.
Monarchy is not a perfect system, but it is better than the Imperial form of government where anyone, from the son of the previous emperor to a famous general to a camel driver can be elevated to the purple as the Praetorian Guard elects, and no one else gets a vote.
Meanwhile, from 500 AD to 1500 AD under precisely the type of government at which you sneer, the West abolished slavery, invented science, erected the Common Law (which is the single greatest juridical accomplishment of Man) created perspective in drawing, the Gothic arch and flying buttress in architecture, the horse collar and stirrup, the romance story in art, individualism in psychology, the Magna Charter, the dinner fork, the Julian calendar, the monastic order, parliamentary government, separation of secular and spiritual government, the University system, the code of chivalry, the notion of limited warfare, Christmas carols, the windmill, modern astronomy, the clock, eyeglasses, the bound book, the Copernican model, and the idea that marriages had to be voluntary for both partners. This was while civilization was wrecked and under remorseless attack by more powerful forces from north, south, and east.
And they did this while preserving pagan culture, arts and letters, unlike their neighbors to the south, the Mohammedan, who destroyed what they could lay their hands on of the previous cultures they conquered.
And they did all this without letting the rich and the moneylender run roughshod over the rest of society. The socialist impulse was channeled into constructive use: anyone who wanted to live without property could join a monastery. Any Puritan who wanted to live without luxuries could be a hermit. Anyone eager for productive work could join a guild or move to a chartered city. There were taxes aplenty, but no tax on income.
One might be tempted to think the guild system and the ownership by many small yeoman-farmers of many small shops and farms imposed undue restrictions on the free market. However, the minute regulation of every aspect and element of life, we whose toilet water tanks are regulated, cannot in good conscience mock the sumptuary laws and guild restrictions of the medieval. They were freer than we are. And their gold was gold indeed.
They had more holidays than we have now. People used to sing in public, together. And churchbells pleasing to the ear from high spires pleasing to the eye sent sonorous echoes across the landscape to mark the hours.
No doubt the Progressive reader is aghast at the notion that the Thirteenth Century was more mature than the Twentieth, but I invite the candid reader to use any reasonable metric to measure what is actually suitable for human life.
The Dark Ages society is the only one, ever, that eliminated both forms of superstition, the consultation of oracles and the worship of autocrats as divine, which have afflicted every other human society ever.
Julian the Apostate had a slave girl slaughtered so that her entrails could be read. He was the last (and only) pagan Emperor of Constantinople. But the Romans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, and every other great civilization of the past thought they could divine the future by consulting the stars or the birds. The Socialists thought they could divine the future using the abortive science of Marx economics.
You may not have noticed that the Brahmin claim to spiritual superiority over their servile classes is not unique to India. In fact, it is a universal conceit outside the Christian world: the ancient Egyptians paid divine honors to the Pharoahs, the Japanese and Chinese to their Emperors, as the Romans to theirs. The descendant of Mohammed claim rulership based on the sacred blood in their veins. The corpse of Lenin displayed for the adoration of the public, or the worship of the Glorious Leader in North Vietnam are modern variations on this theme.
Only the Christian kings know that they will be a naked on Judgment Day as the lowest serf, and that our God is no respecter of persons. Royalty and nobility was thought to be a higher rank than common blood in the Middle Ages, but this was not a spiritual superiority. It was not the elitism of a Brahmin or a Leftwing partisan, who thinks he is morally superior to the common ruck whom he despises. It was an elitism of a military hierarchy only: the king, in the earliest days of the Middle Ages, was merely the commander in chief, not the guardian of your conscience. I assume the medieval practice of routine confession of sins prevented the growth of the spiritual elitism of Brahmins or Leftists.
Only in Christendom could a beggar like Francis be honored with sainthood on an equal footing with King Louis. With the end of the Middle Ages, this great principle was smothered in Protestant nations: both Cromwell and the Puritans in Massachusetts said all their followers were saints, everyone was a saint. Their names are forgotten, and no one erects statues to them. By making everyone a saint, whether he meant to or not, Cromwell made sure no one was.
The Twentieth Century was more violent both physically and spiritually. Maturity is the ability to combine conflicting elements either in a man’s heart or in man’s civilization into a rule and a sense of balance where no one mood, no one passion and no one faction runs away with you.
Maturity in a soul means the reason, the appetites and the passions act in harmony, and the more harmony is achieved, the more the maturity. It is the child who cannot control his appetites and passions, and lets a fierce mood or sudden disappointment throw him into childish rage or erupt into childish tears. Maturity in a community means that the spiritual and temporal powers are balanced, the elite and the commoners agree with mutual recrimination or mutual hatred, that the cities and the country cooperate, men and women are settled into roles fit for human life, and so on.
In the modern day, the elite hates the commons and seeks forever to destroy and enslave them, in the name, ironically enough, of freeing them. The elite and intellectuals in the Middle Ages were clerks in the Church, not vicious and deceptive pundits, newspapermen, and empty headed actors burning with a zeal to subvert and suborn middle class values, and destroy their hated enemies, the Bourgeoisie.
The elite were not a different religion from the commons then, but agreed on the basics of the basic vision of a just life. Not every king was a good king, but there was a basic agreement on what a good king should be. Sneer me no sneers about the divine right of kings placing some men above others: that doctrine dates from the Reformation. The legal theory of the Middle Ages was Roman and hence, in the technical sense of the term, republican.
This legal theory, best explicated by Thomas Aquinas, does not promise civic equality to all men, and so is anathema to the modern age. But then again, the legal theory of the Modern Age started with Machiavelli: both sides of the great conflicts of the Twentieth Century, Democrats or Socialists, justified their politics on the basis of it being a necessary evil, an evil that is done that good might come of it.
The idea of a state whose mission is to encourage the virtue of its citizens comes from the days when the clothing and architecture and music likewise was meant to be both useful and beautiful. Nowadays we dress in drab denim, and live in steel boxes. The society that lives for its own pleasures and powers produces ugliness; the society that lives for God, for something greater than itself, produces pleasure and power.
In the Middle Ages, sacred things were actually set aside from the rough and tumble of common life. Any man or woman could retire from the world and join a nunnery or monetary, and be immune from the class requirements of the surrounding society.
Historians mark the reign of Henry VIII as the end of the Middle Ages. Starting with him, nations began to claim the power to redesign and redefine the contents of the Bible, the nature of the Eucharist, the authority of priests, as well as the doctrines and disciplines of the Church. Separation of the spiritual power from the temporal was lost, and sacred and mundane became intermingled to their mutual detriment.
It was the shipwreck of the world’s most glorious civilization, and a continual loss of personal liberty until, far overdue, some medieval notions of the proper rights and duties of man resurfaced in new guises during ironically-named Enlightenment, the Age of Reason which ushered in the Guillotine and the Gulag.
Once the idea of civil power ruling over sacred things became commonplace, Cromwell became possible, perhaps inevitable: what all such Puritanical movements involved is trying to be holier than Christ, and to force common people to adopt one or more disciplines of the Church: Some foreswear alcohol, some foreswear all worldly pleasures, and some foreswear private ownership of property. The Puritans of Cromwell, the Terror of the French revolution, and the appalling mass murders of the Bolsheviks are, each one in its own way, was attempting to impose the Jesuit life a Jesuit imposed on no one but himself onto the general society in no way suited for such special spiritual discipline.
This confusion of the spiritual and temporal power is the source not of one, but of all the political controversies of the Twentieth Century, and the Twenty-First. That confusion was introduced by the end of the Middle Ages, and introduced a civil war into Christendom which eventually led to its self-destruction at the apex of Europe’s greatest splendor, at World War One. Europe died then, and its dispirited but hollowed eyed corpse has continued from that day to this merely by inertia, waiting from some Christ-hating power, either communism in the East or Islam in the South, to roll over the lifeless Europe, and put a stake through it heart.
If Europe rediscovers Christ, she may be born again from the dead. That is what Christ does for those who have faith in his name.
If not, the churchbells will never be heard again. Instead we shall hear the eerie wailing of the Muslim call to prayer.
_______________________________________________________
The Dark Ages have a bad reputation.
But, in many ways, the feudal system, with one universal Church and many local kings and barons maintaining the folk law, tied to subjects and vassals by personal oaths of loyalty, with neither the slave markets of the ancient world, the theocratic sultanates, ancestor worship, or caste systems of the Near and Far East, nor with the plutocracies, state-syndicates, and socialisms of modern Europe, achieved something unheard-of in the ancient world and forgotten in the modern:
It achieved maturity. It achieved something never achieved before or since: a form of civilization fitted to the human condition, high and low, male and female, spiritual and temporal. It achieved the modern world without the more notorious evils and drawbacks of the modern world.
It took the wreckage of the Roman Empire, while being attacked from the Norse and the Paynims, and managed to throw the Mohammedans out of Spain. Meanwhile, in the East, the Byzantines has a centralized empire more similar to our modern bureaucracy-state, and collapsed before the approach of Islam.
Monarchy is not a perfect system, but it is better than the Imperial form of government where anyone, from the son of the previous emperor to a famous general to a camel driver can be elevated to the purple as the Praetorian Guard elects, and no one else gets a vote.
Meanwhile, from 500 AD to 1500 AD under precisely the type of government at which you sneer, the West abolished slavery, invented science, erected the Common Law (which is the single greatest juridical accomplishment of Man) created perspective in drawing, the Gothic arch and flying buttress in architecture, the horse collar and stirrup, the romance story in art, individualism in psychology, the Magna Charter, the dinner fork, the Julian calendar, the monastic order, parliamentary government, separation of secular and spiritual government, the University system, the code of chivalry, the notion of limited warfare, Christmas carols, the windmill, modern astronomy, the clock, eyeglasses, the bound book, the Copernican model, and the idea that marriages had to be voluntary for both partners. This was while civilization was wrecked and under remorseless attack by more powerful forces from north, south, and east.
And they did this while preserving pagan culture, arts and letters, unlike their neighbors to the south, the Mohammedan, who destroyed what they could lay their hands on of the previous cultures they conquered.
And they did all this without letting the rich and the moneylender run roughshod over the rest of society. The socialist impulse was channeled into constructive use: anyone who wanted to live without property could join a monastery. Any Puritan who wanted to live without luxuries could be a hermit. Anyone eager for productive work could join a guild or move to a chartered city. There were taxes aplenty, but no tax on income.
One might be tempted to think the guild system and the ownership by many small yeoman-farmers of many small shops and farms imposed undue restrictions on the free market. However, the minute regulation of every aspect and element of life, we whose toilet water tanks are regulated, cannot in good conscience mock the sumptuary laws and guild restrictions of the medieval. They were freer than we are. And their gold was gold indeed.
They had more holidays than we have now. People used to sing in public, together. And churchbells pleasing to the ear from high spires pleasing to the eye sent sonorous echoes across the landscape to mark the hours.
No doubt the Progressive reader is aghast at the notion that the Thirteenth Century was more mature than the Twentieth, but I invite the candid reader to use any reasonable metric to measure what is actually suitable for human life.
The Dark Ages society is the only one, ever, that eliminated both forms of superstition, the consultation of oracles and the worship of autocrats as divine, which have afflicted every other human society ever.
Julian the Apostate had a slave girl slaughtered so that her entrails could be read. He was the last (and only) pagan Emperor of Constantinople. But the Romans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, and every other great civilization of the past thought they could divine the future by consulting the stars or the birds. The Socialists thought they could divine the future using the abortive science of Marx economics.
You may not have noticed that the Brahmin claim to spiritual superiority over their servile classes is not unique to India. In fact, it is a universal conceit outside the Christian world: the ancient Egyptians paid divine honors to the Pharoahs, the Japanese and Chinese to their Emperors, as the Romans to theirs. The descendant of Mohammed claim rulership based on the sacred blood in their veins. The corpse of Lenin displayed for the adoration of the public, or the worship of the Glorious Leader in North Vietnam are modern variations on this theme.
Only the Christian kings know that they will be a naked on Judgment Day as the lowest serf, and that our God is no respecter of persons. Royalty and nobility was thought to be a higher rank than common blood in the Middle Ages, but this was not a spiritual superiority. It was not the elitism of a Brahmin or a Leftwing partisan, who thinks he is morally superior to the common ruck whom he despises. It was an elitism of a military hierarchy only: the king, in the earliest days of the Middle Ages, was merely the commander in chief, not the guardian of your conscience. I assume the medieval practice of routine confession of sins prevented the growth of the spiritual elitism of Brahmins or Leftists.
Only in Christendom could a beggar like Francis be honored with sainthood on an equal footing with King Louis. With the end of the Middle Ages, this great principle was smothered in Protestant nations: both Cromwell and the Puritans in Massachusetts said all their followers were saints, everyone was a saint. Their names are forgotten, and no one erects statues to them. By making everyone a saint, whether he meant to or not, Cromwell made sure no one was.
The Twentieth Century was more violent both physically and spiritually. Maturity is the ability to combine conflicting elements either in a man’s heart or in man’s civilization into a rule and a sense of balance where no one mood, no one passion and no one faction runs away with you.
Maturity in a soul means the reason, the appetites and the passions act in harmony, and the more harmony is achieved, the more the maturity. It is the child who cannot control his appetites and passions, and lets a fierce mood or sudden disappointment throw him into childish rage or erupt into childish tears. Maturity in a community means that the spiritual and temporal powers are balanced, the elite and the commoners agree with mutual recrimination or mutual hatred, that the cities and the country cooperate, men and women are settled into roles fit for human life, and so on.
In the modern day, the elite hates the commons and seeks forever to destroy and enslave them, in the name, ironically enough, of freeing them. The elite and intellectuals in the Middle Ages were clerks in the Church, not vicious and deceptive pundits, newspapermen, and empty headed actors burning with a zeal to subvert and suborn middle class values, and destroy their hated enemies, the Bourgeoisie.
The elite were not a different religion from the commons then, but agreed on the basics of the basic vision of a just life. Not every king was a good king, but there was a basic agreement on what a good king should be. Sneer me no sneers about the divine right of kings placing some men above others: that doctrine dates from the Reformation. The legal theory of the Middle Ages was Roman and hence, in the technical sense of the term, republican.
This legal theory, best explicated by Thomas Aquinas, does not promise civic equality to all men, and so is anathema to the modern age. But then again, the legal theory of the Modern Age started with Machiavelli: both sides of the great conflicts of the Twentieth Century, Democrats or Socialists, justified their politics on the basis of it being a necessary evil, an evil that is done that good might come of it.
The idea of a state whose mission is to encourage the virtue of its citizens comes from the days when the clothing and architecture and music likewise was meant to be both useful and beautiful. Nowadays we dress in drab denim, and live in steel boxes. The society that lives for its own pleasures and powers produces ugliness; the society that lives for God, for something greater than itself, produces pleasure and power.
In the Middle Ages, sacred things were actually set aside from the rough and tumble of common life. Any man or woman could retire from the world and join a nunnery or monetary, and be immune from the class requirements of the surrounding society.
Historians mark the reign of Henry VIII as the end of the Middle Ages. Starting with him, nations began to claim the power to redesign and redefine the contents of the Bible, the nature of the Eucharist, the authority of priests, as well as the doctrines and disciplines of the Church. Separation of the spiritual power from the temporal was lost, and sacred and mundane became intermingled to their mutual detriment.
It was the shipwreck of the world’s most glorious civilization, and a continual loss of personal liberty until, far overdue, some medieval notions of the proper rights and duties of man resurfaced in new guises during ironically-named Enlightenment, the Age of Reason which ushered in the Guillotine and the Gulag.
Once the idea of civil power ruling over sacred things became commonplace, Cromwell became possible, perhaps inevitable: what all such Puritanical movements involved is trying to be holier than Christ, and to force common people to adopt one or more disciplines of the Church: Some foreswear alcohol, some foreswear all worldly pleasures, and some foreswear private ownership of property. The Puritans of Cromwell, the Terror of the French revolution, and the appalling mass murders of the Bolsheviks are, each one in its own way, was attempting to impose the Jesuit life a Jesuit imposed on no one but himself onto the general society in no way suited for such special spiritual discipline.
This confusion of the spiritual and temporal power is the source not of one, but of all the political controversies of the Twentieth Century, and the Twenty-First. That confusion was introduced by the end of the Middle Ages, and introduced a civil war into Christendom which eventually led to its self-destruction at the apex of Europe’s greatest splendor, at World War One. Europe died then, and its dispirited but hollowed eyed corpse has continued from that day to this merely by inertia, waiting from some Christ-hating power, either communism in the East or Islam in the South, to roll over the lifeless Europe, and put a stake through it heart.
If Europe rediscovers Christ, she may be born again from the dead. That is what Christ does for those who have faith in his name.
If not, the churchbells will never be heard again. Instead we shall hear the eerie wailing of the Muslim call to prayer.
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Jesu Dulcis Memoria, by Bernard of Clarivaux 1091-1153
It is easy to find the five or six stanzas of this famous
medieval hymn, but not easy to find the longer version in one place, so I have
placed the 20 stanzas I have found over time here for reference. The original
complete Latin title is the "Jubilus Rhythmicus de Nomine Jesu." and
has 48 stanzas. It is dated 1130 or 1140. Because of the length it is not found
in the Church's liturgy in full form, but three parts are broken out into
smaller hymns used in the Roman Breviary.
Jesu dulcis memoria,
Dans vera cordis gaudia,
Sed super mel et omnia
Ejus dulcis præsentia:
Nil canitur suavius,
Nil auditur jucundius,
Nil cogitatur dulcius,
Quam Jesus Dei Filius.
Jesu spes pœnitentibus,
Quam pius es petentibus!
Quam bonus te quærentibus!
Sed quid invenientibus!
Nec lingua vale dicere,
Nec littera exprimere,
Expertus potest credere,
Quid sit Jesum diligere.
Sis, Jesu, nostrum gaudium,
Qui es futurus praemium
Sit nostra in te gloria,
Per cuncta semper saecula.
Jesu Rex admirabilis,
Et Triumphator nobilis,
Dulcedo ineffabilis,
Totus desiderabilis;
Mane nobiscum, Domine,
Nos tuo reple munere:
Pulsa noctis caligine
Tua pasce dulcedine.
Quando cor nostrum visitas,
Tunc lucet ei veritas,
Mundi vilescit vanitas,
Et intus fervet caritas.
Jesu, decus angelicum,
In aure dulce canticum,
In ore mel mirificum,
In corde nectar caelicum.
Qui te gustant, esuriunt,
Qui bibunt, adhuc sitiunt;
Desiderare nesciunt,
Nisi Iesum, quem diligunt.
O Jesu mi dulcissime,
Spes suspirantis animae!
Te quaerunt piae lacrimae,
Te clamor mentis intimae.
Mane nobiscum, Domine,
Et nos illustra lumine;
Pulsa mentis caligine,
Mundum reple dulcedine.
Jesu, flos Matris Virginis,
Amor nostrae dulcedinis,
Tibi laus, honor nominis,
Regnum beatitudinis.
Jesu, dulcedo cordium,
Fons vivus, lumen mentium,
Excedens omne gaudium
Et omne desiderium.
Jesum omnes agnoscite,
Amorem eius poscite;
Jesum ardenter quaerite,
Quaerendo inardescite.
Te nostra, Jesu, vox sonet,
Nostri te mores exprimant;
Te corda nostra diligant
Et nunc, et in perpetuum.
Cum Maria diluculo
Jesum quæram in tumulo ;
Cordis clamore querulo
Mente quæram, non oculo.
Jesus ad patrem rediit,
Cœleste regnum subiit :
Cor meum a me transiit,
Post Jesum simul abiit.
Jesum sequamur laudibus,
Votis, hymnis, et precibus,
Ut nos donet cœlestibus
Secum perfrui sedibus.
Dan nobis largus veniam
Amoris this copiam
Da nobis per presentiam
Tuam videre Florian.
Amoris this copiam
Da nobis per presentiam
Tuam videre Florian.
Laude tibi nos pangimus,
Dilectus es qui Filius,
Quem Patris atque Spiritus
Splendor revelat inclitus.
Gloria Tibi, Domine,
Qui natus es de Virgine,
Cum Patre et Sancto Spiritu,
In sempirterna sæcula. Amen.
The Gregorian chant for each verse repeats as follows:
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Romance or Revolt by John C. Wright
Re-posted from Romance or Revolt
How could everything anyone ever knew about men and women just end up being lost?
How can a whole generation be raised without the slightest notion of why women act the way they do toward men, or why men act the way they do toward women?
It is a sober question, and a sobering one. I think we all know the answer.
The world has two stories to tell about this great mystery.
The new story is a story of revolt. In this story, there is no mystery to explain. The past is a time of darkness and horror, which consists of rapist men victimizing helpless women. The sexual revolution frees one and all to enter into any form of contract for the exchange of copulation rights as “he or she or xe or it” sees fit.
No one has any sexual roles. Instead, one has a “gender” which consists of a set of preferences as to sexual dress and behavior, which each may decide for oneself as one sees fit. On the other hand, same sex attraction is genetically selected by Darwinian evolution to increase fertility, and cannot be opposed or impeded. The male desire for many female partners, including non-consenting ones like the Sabine Women in Plutarch, on the other hand, has no Darwinian reproductive value.
In this story, only fools believe in true love. The sexual appetite is an appetite to the slaked, and the satisfaction is had when the surface appearances are met, and the genitalia stimulated. Sex is the stimulation, not the sex act itself, so any of the fifty genders may indulge.
In this story, consent is the only sacrosanct rule for determining whether the exchange of sexual gratification takes place. All sex is selfish. Love and childrearing play no part in any calculation.
The other story is old. The other story is a love story, where the men seek love by pursuing, and the women seek love by alluring.
In this story, the man takes charge because bold men take charge, and the woman plays coy and modest because that is what fair maidens do, for only the bold deserve the fair.
She arranges obstacles for him, and dallies and flirts with coy and amorous delay, teasing and tempting. She dare not be over-blunt, nor rash and rushing to wed, for she cannot distinguish the frogs from the princes without seeing some sign of princely valor and devotion.
In this story, sometimes a girl is demure, or plays hard to get, but at other times she may be merely toying with his affection. Likewise sometimes a boy is a cad and a flatterer, but sometimes he is true-hearted.
Each player in the masquerade goes threw the steps of the mating dance trying to discover which is which.
And sometimes a suitor who sees himself a cad when he thought himself true, or a girl realizes she is a flirt when she thought herself coy, because the emotion of infatuation, and the drive of lust, all too often disguises itself as true love.
And, of course, in the love story, the man picks up the check and pays for the show whereas the young lady’s contribution is too adorn herself to look pretty and to be a gay and charming companion.
The exchange is unfair, if by this we mean unequal.
But, by nature, the exchange cannot be equal: she is the one being pursued and persuaded. Her task is to encourage the pursuit by the right sort of guy. His is to pursue and persuade, and to convince himself and her of his devotion, accomplishments, and worth.
The tactics for male and female cannot be the same because the goal for each is different. If he is decent, what he wants is nubile, true and faithful wife. Blame no man if, for him, lust seeks young and fertile girls. By instinct, he seeks markers of youth and health, a curvaceous body able to bear the travail of childrearing.
Likewise, If she is decent, what she wants is a virile, strong and faithful man. Blame no woman if her lust seeks older, established men, one wealthy enough to bear the cost of childrearing.
Nature demands different things from either parent. Hence, not the same things. Hence they cannot be sought in the same way. Hence the wooer and the wooed cannot won the complementary goals using tactics suited to the other.
When a man holds a woman in his arms on the ballroom floor, both dancers cannot lead. They dance as equals only when separated.
While dating, he picks up the check. After the wedding, she becomes wife and mother and homemaker, and she gives all she has to give in life. If he blenches at picking up a check on a date, how is he going to afford to keep a wife?
At one time, many a boy at least knew the stereotyped expectations of the elliptical and indirect reasoning of female psychology.
He might not understand the reason why girls were so illogical, emotional, strange, fickle, and practical, but he knew to expect that.
Likewise, the girl might not understand why the boy was so pigheaded, unemotional, honor-bound, arrogant, incorrigible, and idealistic, but many a girl knew to brace herself for it.
For the record, female illogic is perfectly logical once the female viewpoint is known, and male logic grows grossly superficial and heartless without a female viewpoint to check it.
In truth, both sexes are not so different in their sins and virtues, but the expressions and manifestation thereof differ wildly.
Many of us used to know that. We knew men were men and women were women.
We used to know the world was round, and East was far from West. Now, in a strange reverse of the old wives’ tale about Columbus, the children think the world is flat.
Someone has taken all the experience and hard-earned lore of the ages, half cynicism and half rose-colored glasses, which used to be carried in jokes, ribaldry, love songs, novels, and plays and heart-to-heart conversations with parents or older peers, telling the young about the thrills and danger, the deceptions and sudden revelations, the whole wild gamble of the heart known as the mating dance, and flushed it all down the memory hole.
I think we know which group in life is the culprit.
Who interprets all specialization of labor or traditional assignment of roles and responsibilities as a sinister conspiracy to bewitch and oppress the weak? Who regards women as ever in the weaker position? Who sees everything in life, including affairs of the heart, through the lens of a heartless Darwinian struggle between oppressor and oppressed?
Who pretends that liberty is found by leveling hedgerows, cutting the brake lines, severing the safety belts, smashing traffic lights and uprooting road signs, and in a word, abandoning common sense and common decency?
What sort of freedom is it to replace self-control with chaos?
Yes, it is now legal to speed down the highway and run red lights in the wrong lane, so all are “free” in that respect. It is the freedom of mere chaos: the freedom of a free for all.
But no one is free to walk away from the resulting wreckage of broken hearts and broken homes unscathed, or to have friends and family untouched by the predicted and predictable horrors of high rates of perversion, infidelity, abortion, abandonment, divorce, child abuse which flow from unchaining all sexual appetites, wholesome or grotesque.
Nor one is free to breathe the clear moral atmosphere of a society that honors virginity, marriage, motherhood, childhood, romance, chivalry, modesty, honesty, fidelity, because no such place exists, not in any land modernism rules.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
What Happens When Denying Darwin
( From Just Thomism blog)
Denying ”darwinian explanations of life” can mean two things.
1.) If you are denying the explanatory power of natural selection in biology and various sciences subordinated to it, the denial is idiotic. Few theories have the explanatory power of natural selection, and any theory that replaces it will not be an outright denial but either (a) an explanation of how various phenomena appear darwinian within some very common constraints but are non-darwinian under abnormal conditions or (b) a theory that includes selection as a large element in a richer interpretive set of explanations.*
2.) If you are denying the explanatory power of natural selection in abiogenesis, the denial is axiomatic. To an outsider like myself abiogenesis looks like a backwater of research with a whole slough of theories defended by mavericks from all sorts of different disciplines, none of whom commands even a plurality of scientific consensus.
Since we have no theory at all, much less a darwinian one, the ‘official position’ on abiogenesis can be explained in several ways.
a.) Life arose by chance. ”Chance” in this context means an event that, while being relevant to the theory, was outside of any of its predictions. This includes times when we have events with no real theory at all, and the most familiar way in which this happens is the “theory” that things form by molecules banging around and forming things. Sure, if molecules just bang around and form X then, by definition, you’ll have an X, but you wouldn’t have an explanation of it. If you see a puddle of water forming underneath your furnace, you explain its presence by, say, condensation or sabotage but not by ‘molecules banging around’. All “banging around” theory amounts to is the claim that something somehow happened, which we know simply by looking. But a theory has to add something to a blank, bovine stare at the events of the world.
Notice that “by chance” and “improbable” are not only different but contrary. Improbable events have a calculable probability and therefore exist in a theory whereas events that occur by chance, even if they are improbable, are not calculated in advance. A royal flush is improbable in a normal game of poker, but this improbability can be strictly calculated. A chance event would be one that, strictly speaking, has no odds of occurring since the theory cannot (or at least did not) account for it in advance. This is where we are with abiogenesis.
b.) Life is a mystery. A mystery in this sense is an wonderful or important cause that is known to be unknown. If calling an event by chance indicates that it is outside of a theory and is neither probable or improbable, calling it a mystery indicates that we are interested in it or that finding it is important to us, though we might view probing into it hubristic or irreverent.
c.) God caused life. God is the ultimate mystery in the above sense, and so to the extent that nature is mysterious it will inevitably suggest an analogue in divinity. This only gives rise to a God in the gaps fallacy if we assume the mysteries of nature are invariant or entirely given in advance while they are in fact continually shifting. Things that were very mysterious at some times and some places are not to us, and vice-versa. Some mysteries vanish and new ones arise.
There are connections not just between God and mystery but also God and chance. There is a long history of seeing God as uniquely at work in the unforseeable. We spontaneously feel something divine in a stroke of good luck, and some divine abandonment or chastisement in a stroke of bad luck.
That said, we also know how to set chance and divinity against one another. Divinity is the guarantee that intelligibility goes all the way down, even if not for us; but chance can be taken as a denial of this sort of intelligibility. The debate seems to be whether what is unknowable to us, but real, must be knowable to another.
*As I understand “Intelligent Design”, this is the option they go for.
Denying ”darwinian explanations of life” can mean two things.
1.) If you are denying the explanatory power of natural selection in biology and various sciences subordinated to it, the denial is idiotic. Few theories have the explanatory power of natural selection, and any theory that replaces it will not be an outright denial but either (a) an explanation of how various phenomena appear darwinian within some very common constraints but are non-darwinian under abnormal conditions or (b) a theory that includes selection as a large element in a richer interpretive set of explanations.*
2.) If you are denying the explanatory power of natural selection in abiogenesis, the denial is axiomatic. To an outsider like myself abiogenesis looks like a backwater of research with a whole slough of theories defended by mavericks from all sorts of different disciplines, none of whom commands even a plurality of scientific consensus.
Since we have no theory at all, much less a darwinian one, the ‘official position’ on abiogenesis can be explained in several ways.
a.) Life arose by chance. ”Chance” in this context means an event that, while being relevant to the theory, was outside of any of its predictions. This includes times when we have events with no real theory at all, and the most familiar way in which this happens is the “theory” that things form by molecules banging around and forming things. Sure, if molecules just bang around and form X then, by definition, you’ll have an X, but you wouldn’t have an explanation of it. If you see a puddle of water forming underneath your furnace, you explain its presence by, say, condensation or sabotage but not by ‘molecules banging around’. All “banging around” theory amounts to is the claim that something somehow happened, which we know simply by looking. But a theory has to add something to a blank, bovine stare at the events of the world.
Notice that “by chance” and “improbable” are not only different but contrary. Improbable events have a calculable probability and therefore exist in a theory whereas events that occur by chance, even if they are improbable, are not calculated in advance. A royal flush is improbable in a normal game of poker, but this improbability can be strictly calculated. A chance event would be one that, strictly speaking, has no odds of occurring since the theory cannot (or at least did not) account for it in advance. This is where we are with abiogenesis.
b.) Life is a mystery. A mystery in this sense is an wonderful or important cause that is known to be unknown. If calling an event by chance indicates that it is outside of a theory and is neither probable or improbable, calling it a mystery indicates that we are interested in it or that finding it is important to us, though we might view probing into it hubristic or irreverent.
c.) God caused life. God is the ultimate mystery in the above sense, and so to the extent that nature is mysterious it will inevitably suggest an analogue in divinity. This only gives rise to a God in the gaps fallacy if we assume the mysteries of nature are invariant or entirely given in advance while they are in fact continually shifting. Things that were very mysterious at some times and some places are not to us, and vice-versa. Some mysteries vanish and new ones arise.
There are connections not just between God and mystery but also God and chance. There is a long history of seeing God as uniquely at work in the unforseeable. We spontaneously feel something divine in a stroke of good luck, and some divine abandonment or chastisement in a stroke of bad luck.
That said, we also know how to set chance and divinity against one another. Divinity is the guarantee that intelligibility goes all the way down, even if not for us; but chance can be taken as a denial of this sort of intelligibility. The debate seems to be whether what is unknowable to us, but real, must be knowable to another.
*As I understand “Intelligent Design”, this is the option they go for.
Thursday, July 18, 2019
"Punditry" from "Just Thomism"
Below are some bullet points from "Just Thomism" that are thoughtful...
-For devoted Christians looking at their culture, sanity requires remembering it is a Kingdom under the Prince of the World, where most dance down the wide road to perdition.
-You’re not happy that most are damned, you’re just freed from the burden of assuming some recent policy, court decision, historical trend, influential school or philosopher or whatever sent us down the road to perdition. It’s not the decline of civilization, it’s just the world.
-...as with cultures – we assume we are responsible for the evil that happened. Both are irrational attempts to gain control of an evil that was mostly decided before we could do anything to add or detract.
-Much engaging social commentary is a fascination with demonic creativity.
-Take heart, the world is just as God described it. To pull the yoke with Christ is easy for anyone who wants to and the overwhelming majority don’t.
-The plan for saving society is what it’s always been: prayer, meditation, fasting, mortification, alms and works of mercy.
-If we were saved for doing more good than bad, almost everyone would be. Relationships don’t work that way, though, but can be destroyed by single acts no matter the antecedent goods. It would be a clueless husband who thought that his giving his wife a house, money, security, etc. meant she couldn’t blame him for a mistress.
-The case against the faith is always convincing and constantly needing to change.
-For devoted Christians looking at their culture, sanity requires remembering it is a Kingdom under the Prince of the World, where most dance down the wide road to perdition.
-You’re not happy that most are damned, you’re just freed from the burden of assuming some recent policy, court decision, historical trend, influential school or philosopher or whatever sent us down the road to perdition. It’s not the decline of civilization, it’s just the world.
-...as with cultures – we assume we are responsible for the evil that happened. Both are irrational attempts to gain control of an evil that was mostly decided before we could do anything to add or detract.
-Much engaging social commentary is a fascination with demonic creativity.
-Take heart, the world is just as God described it. To pull the yoke with Christ is easy for anyone who wants to and the overwhelming majority don’t.
-The plan for saving society is what it’s always been: prayer, meditation, fasting, mortification, alms and works of mercy.
-If we were saved for doing more good than bad, almost everyone would be. Relationships don’t work that way, though, but can be destroyed by single acts no matter the antecedent goods. It would be a clueless husband who thought that his giving his wife a house, money, security, etc. meant she couldn’t blame him for a mistress.
-The case against the faith is always convincing and constantly needing to change.
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