The lost practice of teaching common sense

My brother Ted served 17 years in the Air Force, getting an early retirement in 1995 at the rank of Master Sergeant (E7). For a couple of those years, he earned extra money teaching at a local college, where he’d earned his bachelor’s in engineering.

One day, he was running through the breakdown of a complex formula and its application. At the end of it, he saw the students were puzzled … so he ran through it again in a slightly different way. Yet the students’ confusion still reigned. One student said, “We understand how the formula works, sir … but how do you know to apply it there?”

Ted replied, “Practice.” And suddenly he remembered struggling with advanced algebra and calculus in high school, asking the same question of his teachers — and thinking the answer was no help at all.

If you’re a parent, this may have happened to you already; if not, I promise it will: In the midst of remonstrating with your child, you will hear yourself repeat verbatim the same thing your mother or father said to you on a similar occasion (“If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it?”). If you’re not a parent, you may still find yourself repeating as an adult things your parents told you when you thought you weren’t listening … and finally realizing how true they are. Like the time at work when, in discussing annual reviews, I had to find an HR-appropriate way to tell others what my father once told me: “One ‘aw s***’ will wipe out ten ‘attaboys’.”

The lost discipline of logic

Over on The Impractical Catholic, I related my theory that very few people now really have a firm grasp of what the words moral and morality mean. From all I can gather, they generally believe morality has only to do with sexual and reproductive choices, and that its only basis is the “Thou shalt not’s” of the Ten Commandments.

I also have a theory that people no longer have a firm grasp of what logic means and what a logical argument is. Many people, thanks to Gene Roddenberry and Mr. Spock, think it has something to do with being emotionless. But for everyone else, a logical argument is one that makes sense to them … even if it makes sense to no one else. After all, as Gloria Steinem so famously (and fatuously) declared, “Logic is in the eye of the logician.”

This is the only way I can reconcile an atheist’s claim to be logical when he says, “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence,” as if that weren’t a classic example of an ad ignorantiam (appeal to ignorance) fallacy. The ad ignorantiam fallacy argues that if you can’t prove x true then x must be false, or vice versa. This is an incorrect inference, since what hasn’t been proven true may yet be true for reasons still undiscovered; if evidence is absent now, it doesn’t follow that evidence will never come.

Why businessmen shouldn't run the government

My friend Steve, whom I’ve known now for over forty years, does a lot better job of keeping up with the political players than I do. (He’s also smarter, more educated and quick-witted than I am; I’m the ugly friend, if you get the reference.)

Yesterday, he watched a debate between a collection of the current GOP presidential candidates. As he noted, none of them said much to distinguish between the lot of them; the strategy they’ve all apparently adopted is to be the Anti-Obama. Good luck, guys; it worked so well for John Kerry against Dubya back in ’04.

Now, I would hardly bother you with retailing a political nonevent secondhand if something didn’t get revealed worth ranting about. Newt Gingrich’s desire to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, as much as it is an indicator that he lives in cloud-cuckoo-land, is a pointer in the direction. But even more illustrative is the position of Herman Cain.

As is seemingly prerequisite of anyone who’s been a CEO of a large corporation, Steve said, “Cain advocated lowering corporate tax rates (OK with me, if you also close the loopholes), eliminating capital gains taxes altogether (sounds crazy and probably is, but sure, with the restrictions suggested by the first George Bush and others), and instituting a flat income tax structure (will he leave the federal government with any revenue?).”

Apologetics toolbox: Sedevacantists

“The other Protestants"

What is sedevacantism?

Sedevacantism describes a segment of people who, while holding themselves out to be Catholics, maintain that the documents of Vatican II teach heresy. As a result of this, the popes and bishops responsible for this council were de facto excommunicate; by extension, since heresy impedes priestly and episcopal functions, there were no true apostolic successors after that point, and the Chair of Peter is an empty seat (sede vacante).

Excepting for our current purposes the Eastern and Orthodox Churches, we can state that Protestantism begins with the rejection of the authority of the Pope and the bishops of the Catholic Church, and assumes that the identity of the true Church of Christ is transferable (i.e., Martin Luther would have never separated himself from Rome if he weren’t convinced that he and his followers were the true Church).

If we accept this model, then the central problem becomes clear: sedevacantism is a form of Protestantism. The only real difference is that, where the Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists and their descendants prop their rebellion on the twin pillars of sola scriptura and sola fide, the sedevacantists support theirs through appeal to their interpretation of Catholic dogmatic statements and comparison with their interpretation of the Vatican II documents.

Saletan, Kevorkian and the progressivist fork

Whenever I read William Saletan’s apologiae for the culture of death, I read a man who’s never completely comfortable with the positions he takes.

In a post on The Slate dated June 3, Saletan writes about his father’s passing from cancer two months ago, and places it in the context of the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian and assisted suicide. The core of his argument was that, although “Kevorkian … was lax about investigating palliative options and verifying that his patients were terminally ill”, nevertheless, “he brought assisted suicide out of the shadows, and behind him came a wave of reformers more careful about drawing lines.” As a result, Oregon’s assisted-suicide law has provisions that prevent it from giving legal shelter to euthanasia … at least on paper.

Along the way, Saletan commits the “people are gonna do it anyway” fallacy: “Assisted suicide, it turns out, is a lot like abortion. No government can stop it — I would have risked jail to get the pills if necessary — and efforts to enforce its prohibition only make it less careful and humane.” To which Ross Douthat, in a NYTimes.com blog entry dated June 6, responds:

[Saletan] doesn’t want to live in a police state where hospice nurses are arrested for dispensing morphine too freely, and neither do I. But it’s possible to accept that no government can “stop” assisted suicide or abortion completely (and that no government should create the kind of deeply- invasive mechanisms required to try) without believing that either practice should therefore be legalized and legitimated.

Telling the truth is offensive

There was a story I once admired about a German diplomat who walked into Thomas Jefferson’s White House office and found a Whig newspaper, filled with scurrilous libels about the “Sage of Monticello”, sitting on the President’s desk. When the diplomat wondered that the editor of the paper had not been clapped in prison for his seditious nonsense, Jefferson handed him the paper with a smile, saying, “Take this back home with you; and when you hear your countrymen express doubts about the liberties we have, show them this, and tell them where you found it.”

Now that I’m older, the story disturbs me.

I’m all for honest disagreements in the public square, and I can understand it when people get their facts wrong — or right in the wrong way, as happened with Sarah Palin a few days ago. But the story now strikes me as though Jefferson considered the First Amendment a license to lie. And since SCOTUS’ unanimous decision in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), which practically disemboweled libel laws, it’s a license with very few limits.

If freedom, as Bl. John Paul II said, is having the right to do what we ought, then the freedoms of speech and the press ought to be the right to tell the truth. Why? Because, even respecting the bounds of charity, prudential discretion and national security, we owe each other truth as a matter of justice.

Playing the bully card II: Maslow's hammer—UPDATED

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

— Abraham H. Maslow, The Psychology of Science

On Monday, the CDC released a study of high-school student health-risk behaviors that showed a higher prevalence of unhealthy activity by students who self-report as gay or bisexual, including tobacco use, alcohol and other drug use, sexual risk behaviors, suicidal behaviors, and violence. The overall prevalence for gay and lesbian students was measured at a median of 63.8% of the behaviors measured, and 76.0% for bisexuals.

Monday was also the first day of the LGBT Youth Summit, where HHS Substance Abuse and Mental Health administrator Pam Hyde, who is gay, announced, “Your federal government has finally come out of the closet in support of LGBT youth.” The study shows that behaviors linked to depression and attempted suicide are significantly higher among gay and bisexual students; HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius explains it, “We know these behaviors are not the result of who these young people are. They are the result of what’s happening to them.”

Enter Maslow’s Hammer. “Sebelius went on to say a federal interagency taskforce is partnering the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Agriculture, Defense, Interior and Justice to come up with strategies and programs to fight bullying.”

Secularism and the establishment clause

Most discussions about religion in the public square treat the words secular and secularism as if the antonyms were religious and religion. Strictly speaking, however, the antonyms of secular and secularism are sectarian and sectarianism. You don’t need to be an atheist, an agnostic or even irreligious to be secular … you just need to not belong to a specific religious community.

Now, let’s look at the First Amendment in its entirety:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that the provision prohibiting the establishment of religion is paired with the guarantee of free exercise of religion. The ideas were yoked together on paper because they were yoked together in the minds of the Bill of Rights’ authors.

Moreover, both of these protections are included with other provisions that, boiled to their simplest forms, guarantee the citizen the right to have and make known opinions on how we ought to be governed. They’re included in this Amendment because, in Europe and in the colonies prior to the Constitutional Convention, affiliation with a church not supported or established by the State was treated as grounds for exclusion from participation in government.

Freedom and relationships

Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

—    Bl. John Paul II[1]

The five weeks or so between Memorial Day and Independence Day, which also embraces Flag Day, could be designated the “Patriotic Season”. It makes for an especially appropriate time to reflect on liberty, what it means, how it can be defended or delineated.

Over the last few days, Mark Shea, the Anchoress, Stacy Trasancos and I have all commented on the scurrilous “Foreskin Man” cartoons published by the “intactivist” group behind the San Francisco circumcision ban initiative. I respect all three writers, who have all been at the apologetics game longer than I have, but Stacy I find most simpático.

But in her remarks, Stacy made a statement I had to read twice:

Much of the debate over homosexual marriage has turned from the fact that marriage has a meaning regarding families and the foundation of society, a good meaning — good for all — and instead become rhetoric about religious ideas oppressing homosexuals from exercising their freedom. That is a distorted view of the issue. Real freedom comes from defining your own relationships without depending on the government to do it for you [emphasis mine — TL]. That is the essence of personhood — freedom to exist.

Ah. Er. Hmm. Is that really true? On the face of it, it almost seems that Stacy grants precisely what gay-marriage activists want: the ability to define their relationships as they see fit. [That isn't what she was going for, though; see our discussion in the comments below.—TL] The opposing argument, which we Catholics back, is that the essence of marriage is an objective, immutable fact, not open to redefinition.

Apologetics toolbox: Communion of saints III

First, let me apologize for the little hiatus in my posting. Actually, I’ve posted almost as much in the last three months as I did in 2008, 2009 and 2010 combined, so I’m happy the “writer’s block” lasted no longer than it did.

In Part I, we argued that God does make saints, and that we’re all called to sanctity as part of our call to faith. In Part II, we tackled the “praying to saints is necromancy” argument; as Jesus told the Sadducees, “The Lord is God of the living, not of the dead” (Mk 12:27).

So okay, there are saints that are already with God in the heavenly kingdom. That doesn’t mean they can hear our prayers, though, right? In the last post, I dismissed the question out of hand. Frankly, there’s no good Scriptural argument to say saints can’t hear prayers; one passage — Revelations 5:8 — tells us that they pass on prayers meant for God, which argues that they can hear prayers, even when the prayers aren’t directed to themselves.

Jesus the “One Mediator”

Given the lack of Scriptural arguments against saints hearing prayers, there’s an indirect approach to the matter: Jesus is the only mediator between God and man (1 Tim 2:5). We can even back this up with another freebie proof-text: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Ac 4:12).