Acton - Liberty

Public discourse and behavior in our day are flat, boorishly predictable, slavishly partisan, and bereft of virtue and the virtues; they are, therefore, incapable of true liberty as Lord Acton understood it:

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.

NOT

ABC News reports that a Dutch "Adult Shop" is going to be giving away Pope Condoms. Brilliant.

I mean really. It is truly a proportionate response to the insurmountable and incessant barrage of propaganda coming from the Vatican. You change channels on your television and all you hear is what the Pope and the Vatican has to say about sex and morals (to steal friend and mentor Gil Bailie's schtick).

It is striking a blow for human freedom and dignity. And it makes me proud to be a member of the human race.

Hell in a Handbasket

I know and you know the Holy Father wants to help the dwindling faithful in England by visiting. But at some point it becomes apparent that the number of faithful may be dwarfed by those human embodiments of screeching demons who will welcome his visit when hell freezes over.

Perhaps it is time to let old England go to that untoward place for reprobates in the proverbial hand-basket.

Otherwise, let those sitting on their hands in England speak up for what is left of truth, goodness, and beauty in a world destined to become a wasteland of relativism so sought-after and so well-deserved by secularist fools and village atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Vote

Hadley Arkes gives us the predictable yet saddening news regarding the fading of pro-life Democrats and a punch drunk Bart Stupak.

But it may not matter any way since Speaker Pelosi is considering sliding the health "care" bill through without a vote.

Who needs representative democracy when you are unassailable? The image that comes to mind is that of the sea serpent in Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader when it thought it had destroyed the ship: a gleeful, self-satisfied attitude among the flotsam and jetsam. Or, perhaps it is more like ouroboros?

Cassandra Rantings

Sigh. While it is entirely excellent for public relations to be concerned for the safety Scimitar troops in the US military in light of the Fort Hood massacre (9/11, etc.), it seems to me that a bit of healthy skepticism is called for.

After all, the score is still 12-0. Or, 2,993+12-0 if one counts only the Twin Towers incident.

If one were wise, one would consider well Daniel Pipes' concept of Sudden Jihad Syndrome.

When a Muslim in the West for no apparent reason violently attacks non-Muslims, a predictable argument ensues about motives.
The establishment - law enforcement, politicians, the media, and the academy - stands on one side of this debate, insisting that some kind of oppression caused Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, to kill 13 and wound 38 at Ft. Hood on Nov. 5. [...]

Instances of Muslim-on-unbeliever violence inspire the victim school to dig up new and imaginative excuses. Colorful examples (drawing on my article and weblog entry about denying Islamist terrorism) include:

1990: “A prescription drug for ... depression” (to explain the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane)

1991: “A robbery gone wrong” (the murder of Makin Morcos in Sydney)

1994: “Road rage” (the killing of a random Jew on the Brooklyn Bridge)

1997: “Many, many enemies in his mind” (the shooting murder atop the Empire State Building)

2000: A traffic incident (the attack on a bus of Jewish schoolchildren near Paris)

2002: “A work dispute” (the double murder at LAX)

2002: A “stormy [family] relationship” (the Beltway snipers)

2003: An “attitude problem” (Hasan Karim Akbar’s attack on fellow soldiers, killing two)
2003: Mental illness (the mutilation murder of Sebastian Sellam)

2004: “Loneliness and depression” (an explosion in Brescia, Italy outside a McDonald’s restaurant)

2005: “A disagreement between the suspect and another staff member” (a rampage at a retirement center in Virginia)
2006: “An animus toward women” (a murderous rampage at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in 2006)

2006: “His recent, arranged marriage may have made him stressed” (killing with an SUV in northern California in 2006)

Read all…

Juu ... st Jokin', Sorta

ht: Theo

Telling Truth is not Scapegoating

Sadly, some believe that speaking the truth constitutes "scapegoating". This is not true unless we say that delineating between good and evil actions is scapegoating. If so, then relativism has won, and Catholic truth is relegated to silence once and for all.

But you won't find that mistaken attitude here at Chronicles! Truth, goodness, and beauty live, me hearties! And I don't mind pointing a finger to say so, even if liars, evil-doers, and plug-uglies feel "victimized" by my doing so.

After all, how can a sinner repent unless s/he has heard that there IS something as a sin?

In that vein, I give you the following:

Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, blasted Spain’s abortion laws during a July 20 lecture in Madrid. Referring to the 47 million surgicial abortions that take place annually, Cardinal Cañizares called abortion “something unprecedented in the history of humanity.” Emphasizing the penalty of “immediate excommunication,” the cardinal added, “This practice is a crime, the killing of a human life, an innocent, weak and defenseless human being. Is there any other greater atrocity?” More>>>

If the good cardinal's indictment is "scapegoating" abortion-advocates, then I stand with him, not the silencers.

Swallow This

What seems a staple and forced diet for Americans and, now, the rest of the world with I Won's Cairo speech is a table filled with myth rather than gospel. "Let's move on" means a highly truncated selection of tasty tidbits of history, remembrance, and flavoring.

And what is our chef-in-chief preparing by way of a main course? Well, to be honest, we're not supposed to look too closely, leave that to his royal why-ness in the kitchen. In fact, a regular diet of platitudes chosen and oh-so carefully presented - he really is a master of innuendo seasoning and double-meaning - will ensure a lean, forward-thinking society.

Who wants to scour old recipe books like the Bible? The Koran is hip, growing, a force to be reckoned with; kosher is out. Judeo-Christian America? Pass. Didn't you know? America is one of the world's largest Muslim countries. Mmm, boy. That tastes great.

Let's face it. Myth just tastes better than gospel. Consider this first year a palate cleanser. Just you wait. Why before you know it, America will be feeding on a cuisine that will make you never look back. Yep.

Not Like Him

This is not quite the same as today's fawning sycophantism. For one thing, there is this. Americans may be filled disordered passions, resembling Flannery O'Connor-esque rubes, but they rarely let a mere political figure harbor delusions of grandeur too long.

A World of Bestiality

The media - newspapers (yes), television, internet, all - have facilitated the near-global dehumanization of what was once the gradual Christianization of the world. How?

By definition, "news" is not normal, true, good, or beautiful. These don't sell advertisements which are the economic engine that drive the media. What sells ads is the ab-normal, the ugly, sordid, and bizarre. Add to the mix of the public mind the Gospel's mandate to "love one another," which gets truncated into "tolerate all," which is further diluted to "everything is equally acceptable." The last of these, however, is not true or helpful or, even from the viewpoint of natural selection, sustainable.

But the economic "necessity" (?) to sell ads ever puts before our collective attention the ab-normal. With the God-less bait-and-switch of Christian charity for "toleration" we have the oh-so "righteous" secular state's marginalization of revealed Truth and the Church's Magisterium as it clings to its single-commandment of toleration (Who gave the state this commandment? No one). Couple with these two discernible traits the sheer, brute amount of information bombarding us daily and we come to the present state of human culture: namely, a bestiality (high-tech, though it is) with no appreciation for interiority, nor an abiding awareness of our individual mortality, nor our common need for that which all this muddle cannot provide - a Savior, Christ our Lord.

We are caught - right and left, secular, Muslim, Jew, Christian, etc. - in a growing pagan clamor for which only the sacred has appeal (sacred as René Girard has defined it, "false transcendence").

The only way back to sanity will be a kind of monasticism still waiting to be born in these dark, evil, sub-human days. Pray that the light can still get in.

Eagleton's incredible lightness of being

Terry Eagleton gets his head around (as in higher cognitive thinking, not Linda Blair) the difficulties faced by western intellectual. That is to say, he manages to put words to the wispy, ephemeral notions occupying the exurbian denizens who fancy themselves the oligarchical gatekeepers of higher terms of discourse in the West. (Exactly; I find them boring and in love with themselves, too.)

And what rag ... journal features Mr. Eagleton's meanderings amidst the ruins of Christendom? None other than Commonweal (of course). Here is a sampling:

Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side of civilization to the side of barbarism. He is no longer the short-haired, blue-blazered God of the West-well, perhaps he is in the United States, but not in Porto or Cardiff or Bologna. Instead, he is a wrathful, dark-skinned God who, if he did create John Locke and John Stuart Mill, has long since forgotten the fact. One can still speak of the clash between civilization and barbarism; but a more subtle form of the same dispute is to speak of a conflict between civilization and culture. Civilization in this dichotomy means the universal, autonomous, prosperous, individual, rationally speculative, self-doubting, and ironic; culture means the customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective, unironic, and a-rational. Culture signifies all those unreflective loyalties and allegiances for which men and women in extreme circumstances are prepared to kill. For the most part, the former colonizing nations are civilizations, while the former colonies are cultures.

If you so desire, you may read all of it here. Personally, I find it as edifying as root canal work, being captured by a bore at a cocktail party, or the ordeal of listening interminably to the speech of Tolkien's Gollum.

But what it does provide is the state of ontological and epistemological vacuity of western intellectualism. You want to know what passes for current "higher knowledge"? Here it is.

'Not a Christian nation'

Sez you.

O Gnostic Messiah

Grant Havers at Taki's speculates regarding I Won's apparent interest in medieval heretic, Joachim de Fiore, in Obama the Gnostic.

Close, Mr. Havers. I will see you the Gnostic flavoring, and raise you: I Won is the froth on the post-modernist cauldron of a failed nihilistic paganism; a progressivist, messianic remnant of a discarded Christian hope.

Belloc - Wells's Fallacies

Biographer Robert Speaight (Life of Hilaire Belloc, 1957) relates Hilaire Belloc's criticism of H. G. Well's History of the World. As a mental experiment, try inserting a few of our contemporary writers where I place parentheses:

(Wells's) ephemeral fallacies - religion without dogma; the Catholic Church invading Europe like an alien and holding it down; Wycliffe flaunting his vernacular; a priesthood of conspiring conjurers and a laity of servile dupes - these were the mental stock-in-trade of a whole mass of the English middle-classes who imagined they were in the vanguard of progress. (Wells) was their prophet; sharing their shallow antinomianism and their bumptious hopes; a typical product of the Protestant underworld ... (Wells) declared that 'Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn'.

As for (Wells's) 'dawn', Belloc did not think it would last very long, and he did not think it was the precursor of the day. It was 'the shoddy remnant of the Christian hope, and when it is gone there will return to us, not the simple paganism of a sad world, but sheer darkness: and strange things in the dark.'

Future Primitive

The man-made, scapegoat-rich environment of the present financial crisis has shown that technology - or "smarter math" as the new IBM ads would have it - does not mitigate against human fallenness. It exacerbates it exponentially.

As mimetic theory posits on the basis of the archaeological record, the ignoring and/or rejection of the Judeo-Christian influence that is haute couture will not result in the progressivists' pipe dream of a secular-science based utopia; far from it. What we can expect is a newer, more technologically enhanced paganism. Take my word for it; it won't be pretty.

We Don't Need No Catholic Bishops

On Gordon Peterson's Inside Washington this evening, regular panel member Colby King of the Washington Post blandly noted that the discussion regarding stem cell research (no mention of embryonic) needs to be calmed down. Why? Because there are bio-ethicists involved. So have no fear.

Light shines above this present darkness

Recent events have left nearly all Christians flabbergasted by the swiftness of "progressive" moves against life and its sole remaining on-the-books supporter, the Catholic Church. It is a move to remove and silence the voice of faith and morals, as Cardinal Pell recently noted, or, in the case of Connecticut lawmakers, an attempt (pulled for the moment) to cede ecclesial control afforded bishops and priests to the (almighty) powers of state government.

More omnipotently, the president has now co-opted the federal income taxes paid by the faithful to do the work of Moloch, one or two steps removed from the Freedom of Choice Act he arrogated to sign into law before Planned Parenthood. His agenda is clear - to "do away with culture wars," because they are "so 90's" (read: silence foes of the "progressive" agenda once and for all). To what end?

The proponents are sincere. I do not doubt their sincerity. Nor do I doubt their thinking, their logic, their determination, or their belief that they are doing it all for a good reason, even for the good of all people.

What I beg to differ on with President Obama and all who are supporting and working so hard to enact against faith and morals that are NOT "so 90's" - they are so 32 A.D. - is this: their presuppositions.

What we as people of faith in general and Catholics in particular presuppose is diametrically opposed to their presuppositions. And the difficulty is that neither of us can prove our a priori first principles through which we view the same world, same evidence, same data: they are faith statements, and ever shall be.

What we as followers of Jesus Christ say, however, is that the vast heft and glorious weight of wisdom and Tradition vouchsafed in the Magisterium of Mother Church far, far outshines and outweighs the puny, proud secular and humanist knowledge, news and information recently garnered by the advocates of "progress", utopian change, and modern-day Gnostic pipe dreams.

We're in for a huge battle. Our enemies think, naively and proudly, their recent ascension to stately power make them nearly invincible.

We know differently. And that is why we practice the virtues, pray constantly, teach our children, and trust in the perichoretic power of the Most Holy Trinity in and through the sacramental presence of the Catholic Church which Our Lord promised would prevail against all attacks till He comes again.

Woe Bamanation

AP story published in the heartland: Elkhart, IN. Thank God my hometown rag got it right.

Now we are as taxpayers conspirators in an Obamanation - or perhaps with its concomitant consequential judgment Woe-bamanation.

I will give an ever-so slight benefit of a doubt: perhaps he is functioning with bad information and political handlers who see a post-ethical nation (read: he has a deft ability to see the way the crowd is headed, jumped out in front, and got elected its leader).

Hitler did it too. And we'll get what we deserve as a nation also.

Zmirak's Dark Night

A must-read: John Zmirak's "Dark Night of the Civilization" here.

Progressivist Paganism on the March

Kansas Governor Free-and-easy-abortion advocate Kathleen Sebelius is the Obama pick for secretary of health and human services.

With her and Dawn Johnsen at Justice we see the full frontal effort to bring into being a once-and-for-all "progressive" pagan agenda for the United States.

Carthage would be so proud of our cafeteria Catholics who do not affirm the full teaching of the Magisterium of the Church.