Overheard at a Denny's - IV

“So I’m still waiting on your answer, Derek. What is it with the Catholic Church and gay people?”

“Good grief, Mark. Can’t even let a guy finish his pie before the interrogation?”

“No! You’ve been stalling the last couple of weeks. I think you’re chicken.”

“Yep. That’s your postmodern Christian for you … willing to die for Christ but not to be socially embarrassed.”

Laughter. “C’mon, I promise I won’t get you fired!”

“Okay.” Sigh. “Part of the reason that science is at an impasse is because the psychologists aren’t talking to the biologists. Let’s pretend for a minute that I’m not a Catholic and you’re not a Southern Baptist … we’re both Darwinians without religious convictions of any kind. So what does homosexuality represent in biology?”

Nose puppies and breast implants

An early Dilbert™ cartoon has Our Hero approach a sidewalk vendor whose sign advertises NOSE PUPPIES for the reasonable price of $1.00. The vendor explains that nose puppies are ceramic puppies that you insert in your nostrils. “‘Find a need and fill it.’ That’s my motto.”

The market, he explains in the next day’s strip, for ceramic puppies was rather small, and he wasn’t doing too well … until he hit on the idea of putting them up people’s noses. “I don’t want to get rich. I just want to leave the world a little better than I found it.”

“Nose puppies” is a good description for items that marketers have decided we “need” but serve no real purpose other than to bubble cash out of the hands of the improvident and into the coffers of the rich. Sometimes they work as advertised; sometimes they don’t; almost always they’re unnecessary.

Case in point: who was the genius who decided to create windshield wipers that turn themselves on? Who is so freaking lazy they can’t be bothered to flip a switch? (On the other hand, I can see definite value in cars that parallel-park themselves, since I’m not the best judge of distance … but I still wouldn’t call it a “need”.)

"You're not the boss of me!"

One day, listening to Catholic Connection while driving to work, I heard Teresa Tomeo make an observation that cracked me up: “There may be a shortage of vocations to the priesthood, but there’s no shortage of vocations to the papacy!”

I reflected on this mordant truth as I read Frank Weathers’ “Thoughts on Obedience and Reading Maps without Guidance” on Why I Am Catholic:

I have a friend who can’t understand why I enjoy being a Catholic.

From discussions I have had with him, it appears that he believes I am now enslaved by an organization that is run by a tyrant who bears the title of “Pope.” I reckon that his libertarian tendencies bristle at the very idea of submitting to an authority, even if that authority is ordained  and conferred by Christ Himself.

It's not that the Pope or any other form of religious leader is illegitimate. Rather, many people want to be their own pope; the fact that the job is taken is inconvenient. So let me add  a few thoughts to Frank's:

Some thoughts on Godwin's Law

"60,000 reichsmarks: This is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the Community of Germans during his lifetime. Fellow Citizen, that is your money, too."

Just yesterday, I read on Father Z’s blog a quickie extract from an opinion in the Fishwrap by Thomas C. Fox on the revised English missal. Not wasting any time, in his second paragraph Fox dragged in the predator priest scandals:

These are tough years for the U.S. bishops who have fallen under dark clouds for their failings in their handlings of the decades’ long clergy sexual abuse tragedy in our church. To the failing of protecting our children from clergy abuse many will now be adding another: the failure to protect clear and simple — and meaningful — English in our mass liturgies from an assault by ideologically led bishops.

This prompted me to make a new addition to Layne’s Laws; to wit, an exception to Godwin’s Law I’ve named (in characteristic modesty) “Layne’s Exception”:

In any online discussion where the topic is the Catholic Church, its leaders or beliefs, as the discussion thread grows longer, the probability of a reference to pedophile priests approaches 1 (100%).

• Corollary 1: The reference will be not only invalid but inappropriate and abusive.
• Corollary 2: The earlier the reference is made, the greater the probability the rest of the discussion will follow the reference down a rabbit hole.

At the same time, I’ve been having second thoughts about a derivative of Godwin’s Law, the “Hitler card” fallacy. As proposed, the argumentum ad Hitlerum is considered a fallacy if it takes the form “Hitler/the Nazis accepted idea I, therefore I must be wrong”. An argument is also consider an ad Hitlerum if it associated Hitler or the Nazis with a weak analogy, especially a question-begging analogy.

Erica Jong's poisoned sugar

One of the weaknesses I have, as a Catholic writer who focuses largely on issues of sexuality, is that I haven’t kept up with feminist literature. So it took me by surprise to see an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Erica Jong, who vaulted into the spotlight so many years ago with her book Fear of Flying, titled: “Is Sex Passé?” (“God, she’s not dead yet?”)

In editing her most recent work, Sugar in My Bowl, Jong noticed a distinct difference in attitude towards sex between the younger and older women: “The older writers in my anthology are raunchier than the younger writers. The younger writers are obsessed with motherhood and monogamy.”

It makes sense. Daughters always want to be different from their mothers. If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called “They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To.” Her friend Julie Klam wrote “Let’s Not Talk About Sex.” The novelist Elisa Albert said: “Sex is overexposed. It needs to take a vacation, turn off its phone, get off the grid.” [Wasn’t it Andy Warhol who said “Sex is the biggest nothing of all time”?] Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Uncoupling,” a fictional retelling of “Lysistrata,” described “a kind of background chatter about women losing interest in sex.” Min Jin Lee, a contributor to the anthology, suggested that “for cosmopolitan singles, sex with intimacy appears to be neither the norm nor the objective.”

Arguing with blowhards

Yesterday, I was manning … er, personing the pro-life barricades on Facebook in tandem with Stacy Trasancos. Our main opponent was this one woman who apparently has drunk deep at the wells of scientism.

Scientism isn’t to be confused with science; in fact, scientism is rather confused about science, though the devoté (or, in this case, devotée) will never see the confusion as such. Scientism isn’t so much a philosophy as an attitude, or even a platitude: “What isn’t measurable isn’t an objective fact.” Which leaves you to wonder how they manage to measure their names or their tastes in ice cream.

But leaving behind the more risible of scientism’s incoherencies (the statement above isn’t measurable; therefore, by its own terms, it isn’t an objective fact), devotés tend to have a smattering of ill-understood philosophical terms, a contempt for religion, and the strange, inexplicable belief (verging on childlike faith) that scientists are beyond the foibles that lead lesser people into error.

Whatever other gifts God has given me, patience isn’t one of them. I certainly don’t take to being treated like a fool, even when I am being foolish. When a person makes basic errors in logic and terminology and sneers at correction attempts, what patience I’ve developed over the years wears quickly.

This is why I prefer to debate by email. Or by blog entries.

Is college a scam?

John Stossel has a new gripe: “… [F]or many people, college is a scam.”

First, getting a college degree doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a job that will pay off your student loans, let alone provide a better income than you’d get as a high school graduate. Second, people who graduate from college tend to do better because they’re generally more disciplined, and would likely succeed if they never stepped foot on a college campus; Stossel leads his article off with names of famous men who either never went or dropped out, like Bill Gates and Peter Jennings. And many professors aren’t there to teach; teaching students actually takes away from their main source of income, research.

I can add to the indictment. According to Stossel, “A Slate.com writer called [entrepreneur Peter] Thiel’s grant [$100,000 to drop out of college and start up a business] a ‘nasty idea’ that leads students into ‘halting their intellectual development ... maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich.’” But for many college students, “mind-broadening” consists solely of learning college progressivist cant; they may learn many facts they never knew before, but they’re not necessarily any better thinkers than they were when they left high school. Besides, people who don’t take to the world of abstractions naturally won’t become abstract thinkers under social compulsion.

Equivocating American secularism

You ever read something and find yourself thinking, “Y’know, I’d agree with this if the blinking author had just found a different way to say it”?

On Monday, historian and author Kenneth C. Davis wrote an interesting think-piece for CNN, “Why U.S. is not a Christian nation”. Davis, most noted for his Don’t Know Much About … series of books, makes hits the expected points very well:

No one can argue … that the Founding Fathers were not Christian, although some notably doubted Christ’s divinity.

More precisely, the founders were, with very few exceptions, mainstream Protestants. Many of them were Episcopalians, the American offshoot of the official Church of England. The status of America's Catholics, both legally and socially, in the colonies and early Republic, was clearly second-class. Other Christian sects, including Baptists, Quakers and Mormons, faced official resistance, discrimination and worse for decades.

But the founders, and more specifically the framers of the Constitution, included men who had fought a war for independence — the very war celebrated on the “Glorious Fourth” — against a country in which church and state were essentially one.

Here’s where it gets hinky:

They understood the long history of sectarian bloodshed in Europe that brought many pilgrims to America. They knew the dangers of merging government, which was designed to protect individual rights, with religion, which as Jefferson argued, was a matter of individual conscience.

Overheard at a Denny's - III

Again I apologize for inflicting an experiment in place of my usual ponderous, obfuscating commentary. But today got away from me completely — no time to recuperate, too many things to do around here! And besides, I had a lot of fun writing these dialogues. Hmm, maybe I can build a book out of these ….

*          *          *

“So tell me something, Derek: What is it with the Catholic Church and gay people?

“Aw, Mark! I don’t have another job lined up, so I gotta keep the one I got!”

“Hey, come on, we’re buds! You know I don’t get all scream-y like some gay guys do! … Hey, I tell ‘fag’ jokes, for Pete’s sake!”

“Yeah, I know, and I always flinch and look for the PC Patrol to come frog-march us off to HR.”

Overheard at a Denny's - II

I was going to save this second installment for a little later this month. However, I spent yesterday in the hospital being treated for pneumonia I didn’t know I had, so I’m running a bit behind. Thanks for your patience!

*          *          *

“So anyway, Derek, I was thinking about what we were talking about the other night——”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I’m not entirely convinced. You said we work backwards from the moral wrongness to the psychological illness …”

“Right.”

“… but different cultures have different moralities.”

“Not as much as you think. People cherry-pick the differences and ignore the commonalities, then pretend that the differences mean there’s no intersections. It gets really bad among the college progressives, who tend to split moral sets into ‘white male Christian homophobes’ and ‘everybody else’, really overworking the socialist language of ‘oppressor class’ and ‘oppressed class’.”