Children in an Age of Terror

Dr. Carol Lieberman at Family Security Matters offers excerpts from her upcoming book, American Dreams Interrupted - How to Stay Sane and Safe in a Time of Terror. I find it helpful for those of us concerned about chivalry and legitimate defense.

While yet in their cribs, children begin a lifetime addiction to media violence: escalating from cartoons and action toys to movies, music and videogames. Research has concluded that the more media violence a child consumes, the more aggressive and desensitized to violence he becomes. He also tends to see the world as a meaner and scarier place (even more of a liability, now that terrorism has made the world a genuinely meaner and scarier place).

Thousands of children are on swelling child protective registers. Most have been abused by neglect, followed by physical, emotional and sexual abuse. More girls than boys are targeted for sexual abuse, while boys are more often victims in the other categories. The saddest part is that, erroneously, these children blame themselves for somehow causing the abuse and neglect, by not being lovable enough.

Consequently, even before the explosions of 9/11, the bloom was already off the rose of childhood. Our progeny have had to struggle with thornier issues than their ancestors ever imagined. These troubles had already begun taking their toll, manifested as truancy, stress-related medical conditions, shoplifting, anxiety, depression, learning and attention deficit disorders, conduct disorders, alcohol and drug experimentation and myriad other problems. Running in front of a car, eating poisonous berries or drinking household products are no longer seen as “accidents” but are recognized for the conscious or unconscious suicide attempts that they actually are.

The main causes of mortality for children aged one to fifteen are: accidents, cancers, undetermined injuries (including suicide, homicide and mental disorders), nervous system and sense organ disorders and congenital abnormalities (birth defects).

Like most parents, you love your children and probably find these reflections hit too close to home. You want your sons and daughters to have a bigger, better life than yours, with more success, self-worth and security. Already feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility of putting food on the table and smiles on their faces, you’ve been grappling to get by, while barely keeping guilt at bay. Now terrorism is on the scene, as never before, and the precarious juggling act called today’s family is tottering. As plates go flying, metaphorically and literally, children are at risk of being hurt.

Read all …

Jesus’ Resurrection is “Certain Proof” of His Teachings

Vatican City, Mar 26, 2008 / 09:36 am (CNA).- Over 30,000 people swelled St. Peter’s Square today to take part in the weekly general audience with Pope Benedict, who arrived by helicopter from his Castelgandolfo residence. The Holy Father’s dedicated his discourse to the period of Easter, and more specifically, to the fact that Jesus’ resurrection is “'certain proof' ... that what He says is true".

"The entire liturgy of the Easter period proclaims the certainty and joy of Christ's resurrection", the Pope began. This is "the central truth of Christian faith in all its doctrinal richness and its inexhaustible vitality".

Christ's Easter, he went on, "is also our Easter because in the risen Christ we are given the certainty of our final resurrection. ... The death of the Lord shows the immense love with which He loved us, even to the point of sacrificing Himself for us. But only His resurrection is 'certain proof' ... that what He says is true". Read all …

Spring in Washington - On the Mall

Fitzgerald - How A Society Destroys Itself

A new exhibit in Gaza portrays the Jewish state burning Palestinian children in ovens. --from this news article

They have, they are, they apparently will be, destroying themselves. They will make themselves unfit for any coexistence with the Israelis, who can hardly be expected to trust those raised on this steady diet of unremitting hate, and they will be unfit, really, for living near any Infidels and must under no conditions, in any numbers, be admitted any longer to any parts of North America or Western Europe. That would merely be to endanger Infidels here, beginning with, but hardly ending with, Jews.

They are turning themselves, little by little, into monsters of hate.

Take a look again at those pictures of crowds of "Palestinian" men and boys (not a woman in sight), gawking at a burned-out automobile, or raising their hands and shouting in hysterical hate-filled unison, at some funeral or some rally, or some funeral-rally.

What is your reaction?

Read all of Hugh Fitzgerald’s article at the New English Review.

Broken Clock - Right Again

[h/t: Pam @ Atlas]

George Weigel

On ’the baptism’

Second Spring - New Men

From Carol Zaleski at Second Spring, “The Two Benedicts and the Renewal of Catholic Culture”: [h/t: Taki's]

Europe did not make Christianity, but Christianity did make Europe, and thereby gave us Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Chartres, Giotto, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Kant, Newton, and Galileo. Christianity was the matrix of natural science, of the first genuine democracies, of the novel idea of universal human rights and universal human dignity, and of a galaxy of humane institutions – hospitals, hospices, hostelleries, schools, public libraries,sanctuaries,shelters and sodalities –unparalleled in human history. Yet by a curious alienation from its own roots, Europe is evolving a society and culture that, in Cardinal Ratzinger’s words “constitutes the absolutely most radical contradiction not only of Christianity, but of the religious and moral traditions of humanity,” including Judaism and Islam; that proclaims universal rights, but rejects universal reason; that champions individual freedom but violates the freedom of those most vulnerable. A strange miasma has settled over the West, causing us to forget our common stories, artistic traditions, and intellectual patrimony, our neighbours, our kin and ourselves – all because we have forgotten God, because we have trained ourselves to live “as if God did not exist”.

How to recover from this forgetfulness? Should we be devising ambitious programmes for re-Catholicization? What we need, Cardinal Ratzinger said, is not so much new programmes as new human beings. “Above all,” he told his monastic audience: “what we need at this moment in history are men who, through an illuminated and lived faith, render God credible in this world.... Only through men touched by God can God once again touch men. We need men like Benedict of Nursia, who at a time of dissipation and decadence, plunged into the most profound solitude, and after suffering many purifications, reemerged into the light and went on to found Montecassino, the city on the hill where, amid all the ruins, he gathered together the forces from which a new world was formed. In this way Benedict, like Abraham, became the father of many nations.

"What we need at this moment in history are men who, through an illuminated and lived faith, render God credible in this world.... Only through men touched by God can God once again touch men." -- Benedict XVI

Strategies of Faith

Various strategies that give a ragged and dissolute West "borders" are now beginning to emerge. The first was James Pinkerton's Shire Strategy, and, more recently, Timothy Furnish with his Resurrecting Christendom: A Blueprint (the 'Gondor Strategy'). Baron Bodissey does a fine job parsing the latter. But the real question, it seems to me, is what borders are they talking about? The time has come and gone for closing gates, limiting immigrants from Scimitar lands, patrolling the hinterlands. Dhimmitude in the guise of gasoline price gouging, aided and abetted by Detroit and Tokyo -- unless we attempt a REAL Shire Strategy of Amish ilk -- is the way we live and move and have our being. The Pentagon and federal government -- for all the flash, shock and awe -- are inextricably caught in a web of high technology alchemical Gnosticism that can't look backward or downward. Where is the realpolitik hope here?

The only direction hope and faith have ever come, and that is the Catholic Church. Bin Laden knows this; that is why he targeted the Pope as the victim of highest importance to the West (like Nietzsche, Bin Laden knows, but rejects truth that shines the light on Islam's true nature).

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The time for a cohesive, collaborative, and unifying "strategy" is not here and now, though its necessity is great. Our leaders are hypocritically blind and obsequious worshipers of Mammon, as Chesterton, Belloc, and McNabb prophesied. Valor, honor, chivalry, and legitimate defense are the best we can hope for in these darkening days. God give us strength, fortitude, and all virtues we need to give witness, and the discernment to separate the absolutely essential from the merely necessary.

Secularism and the Scimitar

MercatorNet's Richard Bastien asks and looks into a fascinating question, Are secularism and Islam cousins?

Demographic Deluge - UK

The Telegraph (UK) reports that Muslims 'to outnumber traditional churchgoers' by 2020. For those who want an inkling of what this may mean, recall ”Doc” Morris’s demographic taxonomy of Islamic social behaviors.

Personal Field Trip

Daniel in the Lions' Den [1614/1616] - Sir Peter Paul Rubens

The Mill [1645/1648] - Rembrandt van Rijn

The Lute Player [1612/1620] - Orazio Genbtileschi

Ginevra de' Benci [1474/1478] - Leonardo da Vinci

GKC - Put Not Your Trust

IN THE HEART OF Christendom, in the head of the Church, in the centre of the civilisation called Catholic, there and in no movement and in no future, is found that crystallisation of commonsense and true traditions and rational reforms, for which the modern man mistakenly looked to the whole trend of the modern age. From this will come the reminders that mercy is being neglected or memory cast away, and not from the men who happen to make the next batch of rulers on this restless and distracted earth.

- G. K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shadows

BATB on Christopher Dawson

Cat at Brits at Their Best posts on the notable 20th century historian, Christopher Dawson:

Dawson notes that the study of religion and Western culture is so enormous and so specialized a field that many scholars are trapped on small islands of knowledge. A commentator such as Hitchens wanders through this huge, rich field in self-imposed darkness, refusing to switch on his flashlight.

I enjoy this blog a great deal and highly recommend it for fellow admiring anglophiles across the big pond.

To End 'Islamophobia'

Robert Spencer suggests the following points to follow to end "Islamophobia". He says:

Here is a five-point plan that Muslims could adopt to eradicate it instantaneously:

1. Focus indignation on Muslims committing violent acts in the name of Islam, not on non-Muslims reporting on those acts.

2. Renounce definitively not just “terrorism,” but any intention to replace the U.S. Constitution (or the constitutions of any non-Muslim state) with Islamic Sharia law even by peaceful means.

3. Teach Muslims the imperative of coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis.

4. Begin comprehensive international programs in mosques all over the world to teach against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism.

5. Actively work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities.

Do those things, and “Islamophobia” will vanish.

His entire article is A Muslim Battle Plan Against Free Speech. [h/t: Infidel Bloggers Alliance]

McKie - Why I'm a Christian

Andrew McKie, another fine writer at the Telegraph besides Damien Thompson, concludes his three part series entitled, Why I am a Christian. He includes links to the first two posts in the series, and all are worth perusing.