GMOs and science for hire—UPDATED

I have this horrible suspicion that he's trying to be funny.

Comedian/activist Lee Camp asks, in the meme to your left, “Where is all the Christian outrage against GMO foods? The Lord’s creations weren’t good enough?” The most obvious answer is, “If Christians did get outraged about genetically-modified foods, we’d be written off as ‘anti-science’, so why bother?”

A better answer is that Christianity is more properly focused on us in our relations with God and other people. Proper stewardship of the earth, though not an irrelevant topic, is quite a bit removed from the “ground zero” of divine revelation and apostolic tradition.

Some Christians are against genetic modification; for instance, a fellow Catholic who contributes frequently to The Distributist Review, John Médaille, opposes GMOs. But I think it’s safe to say that the bulk of Christians who oppose GMOs can and do so without dragging the Lord’s name into it. An argument against GM foods could probably be made from Leviticus 19:19 (“You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff”). However, as I’ve noted elsewhere, Christians aren’t bound to observe the Law of Moses; ritual purity is less important than compassion and avoidance of sin.

For my own part, I’ve not read enough of the relevant literature to take a stand either way. But to slam GMO’s opponents as “anti-science” is both wrong and misleading. Monsanto is the main target, but the agro-biotech giant is also the symbol of corporate regulatory capture of federal watchdog agencies. The fear isn’t of science or technology per se, but rather of “science for hire” — the insidious influence over scientific research wielded by the dreaded, dreadful “one-percenters”.

Stress cards and trigger warnings

The "blues card", aka the "stress card".
(Source: Snopes.com.)

Let me ask all the military veterans that stumble onto this post: Do you remember the stories about the Navy’s “stress cards”?

I read about them but they weren’t using them when I was in. If I remember correctly, it was a little yellow card that they gave you. Apparently if things were getting tough for you in basic, you could flash the card and the DI would back off and give you a “break” so you could compose yourself. The standing joke was that the color of the card spoke for itself ... The idea, if I remember right, was heavily criticized (and rightfully so, what are you going to do in real life when the bullets start to fly, pull out the stress card and hope the bad guys stop shooting at you?) and the idea was eventually canned.

This is but one variation Snopes.com reports on the urban legend. In fact, the “stress card”, officially titled the “Blues Card”, was a listing issued in the early 1990s of resources Navy recruits could turn to if they were considering “giving up” or “running away”. Continues author Barbara Mikkleson, “Navy RDCs (Recruit Division Commanders) began reporting that some recruits had taken to raising their cards while being disciplined as a way of signaling for a ‘time out.’ It’s unclear whether any of those enduring basic training really thought that was the purpose of the cards or whether this was just standard armed forces jackassing, but the Navy took no chances and got rid of the cards.”

I was reminded of the “stress cards” by reading Karen Swallow Prior’s Atlantic essay, “‘Empathetically Correct’ Is the New Politically Correct”. Prior, following Neil Postman’s foreword in Amusing Ourselves to Death, contends that trigger warnings follow Aldous Huxley’s vision of “an internal form of control that becomes externalized — empathetic correctness.” The students themselves become the censors.

One hundred eighty seconds

° 2001 United Press Syndicate.

I’d seen the interview scenario before: Two team leaders, neither of whom had the power to hire me, asking boilerplate questions that the real decision-maker would use to determine whether I would have a future with the company. This pair were almost twins, nearly identical down to facial features, except that one positively brightened in response to my warmth and self-effacing humor, while the other remained determinedly serious.

Smileyface asked the question I dread at these kinds of interviews: “What would your supervisors say are your greatest strength and greatest weakness?”

“Well,” I replied cautiously, “my greatest strength is my ability to build relationships with customers. The downside of my approach, however, is that it’s a little more time-intensive.”

Frowneyface, who had been silent up to that point, pounced. “Oh, you take too long?”

This is precisely why I dread that question. On the one hand, I’ve never felt comfortable shading the truth, let alone outright lying. Generally, people have a right to hear the truth and an obligation to tell the truth, leaving aside extreme cases and questions of national security. On the other hand, this interview setup is designed to find reasons to not hire candidates, and I’d just given one to Frowneyface.

To an accountant, the customer service department is an expense; to maximize efficiency, the cost per hour of a phone line must be divided out by as many calls as possible. The word queue is used very much in the British sense: behind the customer you’re talking to, other customers are tapping their feet, impatiently waiting to be served.

One hundred eighty seconds. Or less … preferably much less. That’s the average time you’re given to verify the customer, dope out the issue, resolve it, and get him/her off your line.

Dancing with the Devil—UPDATED

Satanic Temple's proposed statue of Satan ... which is actually
based on a picture of Baphomet, which is probably a 12th-
century corruption of Mohammed. So much for research.

This post was rewritten for length and republished in Catholic Stand on May 15, 2014, at the request of my editor, Diane McKelva.

*     *     * 

The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.

—Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

In today’s academic milieu, you should expect that a Black Mass performed by a group calling itself “The Satanic Temple” under the auspices of an Ivy League university to be a bold, daring exercise in transgressing boundaries, right? Especially if the celebrants use a Host consecrated at a legitimate Catholic Mass for ritual desecration.

Well, not so much. For one thing, a spokesperson for the Temple, Priya Dua, officially denied the use of a real Host (after initially confirming it) in a conversation with Elizabeth Scalia (The Anchoress). Ms. Scalia also quotes an anonymous spokesperson, who told her, “Please understand, there is in fact, respect for the beliefs of others, and our intention was not to be in anyone’s face. We did not mean to mislead.” And Boston Magazine says the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club released a statement that read in part, “Our purpose is not to denigrate any religion or faith, which would be repugnant to our educational purposes, but instead to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices.”

But Doug Mesner, aka “Lucien Greaves”, supposedly the head of The Satanic Temple, doesn’t seem to be reading the same script. According to Kaitlyn Schallhorn of Campus Reform, Mesner asserted that the HECSC Black Mass “will mock rituals of other mainstream religious rituals [sic]”, so Catholics aren’t the only ones being dissed. On the question of the consecrated host, Mesner is suspiciously coy, telling The Anchoress that he doubted anyone would “waste time going to all that trouble” to get one (really? Only falling off a log would be less trouble), but telling Schallhorn “he couldn’t call it a ‘consecrated host’ as Catholics do” … which, The Anchoress points out, implies that Catholics could call their host consecrated.

Check your identity politics

Monster Privilege. (© 2013 garsedj)

Tal Fortgang is sick of being told to “check your privilege”.

Fortgang, 20, is a sophomore at Princeton, which is just liberal enough to suffer a paper/website for conservative students, the Tory. Now, for a student at an Ivy League school to tell another, “Check your privilege,” is at face value unexpected; it’s like two peers of the British realm blackguarding each other as elitists. However, much as G. K. Chesterton once said of Britain’s peerage, it’s precisely because schools like Princeton, Harvard and Yale are bastions of America’s aristocracy that they’re noisy hives of fashionable progressivism rather than museums to staid, stuffy conservativism. For class warfare, no one can make war on the rich like their own children.

Fortgang fumes, “The phrase [“Check your privilege”], handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. ‘Check your privilege,’ they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.”

Fortgang’s rant in the Tory ran April 2. Two weeks later, the progressive Princetonian fired back with a post from freshman columnist Mitchell Hammer. “Once I got past the irrelevant, anti-liberal rhetoric — comparing the use of the phrase ‘check your privilege’ to the descent of ‘an Obama-sanctioned drone’ did little to help me understand Fortgang’s argument — I realized that Fortgang wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t get it.” How Fortgang could “not get it” and still not be wrong, Hammer doesn’t bother to puzzle out; logic, as we will soon see, isn’t Hammer’s forte.

When God and Caesar collide

On Divine Mercy Sunday, April 27, 2014, I had to do something I never imagined I’d have to do: kick beggars off of church property.

A Hispanic woman and her two children were standing at the exit of our parking lot on the driveway median, mooching from the parishioners as they were driving out. Our pastor, Fr. George, is a lovely man, very good-humored and self-effacing. But you don’t want to be within fifty feet of him when he needs to delegate something, because he’s likely to grab the first unwitting soul available. He was discussing the issue with Bret, the Grand Knight of our Knights of Columbus council, when I stepped out of the church and went over to greet them.

“Ah, hello, Tony!” Fr. George exclaimed. As he reached out to give me a perfunctory handshake, he continued to speak to Bret: “Here we are, then; Tony can do this!” Herding me away from Bret and the building, he pointed out the beggars to me. “Go over there and tell them they cannot stand there; it’s illegal and dangerous. Make sure they leave.”

Moving the family on was fairly simple: I simply put my most pleasant face on and requested that they leave. And as I was walking back, one of the children, who unseen by me before had gone up to the church and was now walking back to the family, asked me, “Sir, do you think we’d be able to talk to someone at the church tomorrow at nine o’clock?” Yes, I agreed, someone should certainly be there.

Nevertheless, the irony of bustling poor people away from Christ’s church rather than bringing them in was too obvious. I can hear Jesus say, “I was hungry, and you gave me the bum’s rush” (cf. Matthew 25:42).

What the Bible says about slavery

Discourtesy of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason
and Science.

New Atheists have a tendency to ask questions about Scripture and Christian belief they intend to be purely rhetorical but which reveal defects in their knowledge and assumptions. Case in point: Mira Sorvino’s  set of “rhetorical” questions about the lack of a passage in the Bible stating positively the evil of slavery.

Precisely because the questions are intended to be rhetorical, the New Atheist isn’t looking for an answer — it’s supposed to be a slam-dunk “gotcha”, and anything you say is mere thimble-rigging, a pathetic attempt to rationalize an obvious error. Moreover, the proper response requires something of a full history lesson, for which many people have no patience … especially if it challenges cherished myths about ante-Internet European history.

That the Bible was never intended to be treated as the sole infallible source of Christian beliefs is not a sufficient answer in itself. To understand where the defect lies, first ask yourself this question: How, after thousands of years in which the propriety and naturalness of slavery was taken for granted, did the West come to believe it wrong? I’ll give you a couple of clues: 1) It had nothing to do with the rise of the scientific method; 2) it also had nothing to do with the Renaissance and the so-called “Enlightenment”.

It’s very tough for Americans to remember that we were almost the last of the modern First World countries to abandon slavery, and then only as a byproduct of a horrific struggle that decimated a generation of young men. It’s tougher to remember that people convicted of felonies can still be forced to work by the state, as a stated exception in the Thirteenth Amendment, or that international treaties still conditionally allow forced labor by prisoners of war. But only history wonks like me know that, from about 1100 until 1492, slavery as we understand it was all but dead in Christian Europe, hanging on mostly in the borderlands between the Christian and Moslem worlds.

Catholic Pharisees and the sin of rash judgment

The most dreaded implement of the Internet Inquisition:
the comfy chair. (© 1970 Python (Monty) Pictures, Ltd.)

That the accusations came in on a post dedicated to shoring up the tradition of worshiping on Sunday was bizarre as the accusations themselves. Said Kelly Lexy:

You seem to be an adherent to the Novus Ordo sectarian community. That is bad news. That means you are pro-abortion and a supporter of the engagers of the Sin of Sodom. …

One must say that you are obstinate. You are familiar with the sedevacante position [Indeed I am, especially with its similarity in flaws to Protestantism]. You have a familiarity concerning the heresies of the post-Vatican II claimants to the papacy. Baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation: the heretics you promote reject this Dogma. …

If you’re at all familiar with my writings of the last five years plus, the statement that I am “pro-abortion and a supporter of the engagers of the Sin of Sodom” must have had you howling with either rage or laughter. The bit about baptism is a bit trickier; let me just content myself for now with saying that this is willful misinterpretation of Pope Francis’ words on the part of Ms. Lexy.[1]

When I denied her charge and told her she’d committed the sin of rash judgment, she doubled down on it: “Your false religion recognizes pro-abortion politicians as having a  good standing. Your false religion celebrates the sodomites since you have sodomite ‘masses.’ You are therefore pro-sodomite and pro-abortion since you are in communion with this evil and all such persons. You are an apostate.”

Not even Bernardo Gui — the real Bernardo Gui, not the cardboard-cutout antagonist of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose — would have brought me to trial under such specious reasoning. In any event, since the inquisition is defunct and has been for a very long time (even in Spain), I’m not worried about an auto-da-fé just yet.

Apologetics toolbox: Sunday worship II — St. Paul and the Law of Moses

Part I concerned itself with the basic case for Sunday worship against those communions which argue that we ought to worship on Saturdays, that Sabbath worship is mandated by “God's law” (i.e., the Law of Moses). Part II looks at a particular argument, which tries to reintroduce the Law of Moses via St. Paul.

Yesterday (3/22/14), I engaged in a Facebook argument in which a Seventh-Day Adventist attempted to lecture The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named on St. Paul and Sabbath worship. Apparently it carried over from someplace else, for when she posted to The Blogger’s wall a link to a video that asked, “Can the Majority Ever Be Wrong?”, he replied (quite lucidly), “Of course the majority can be wrong. But that is useless for demonstrating that you are right.” He then asked SAD why Christians are bound to observe the Jewish Sabbath when we’re not bound to observe anything else the Law of Moses mandates (i.e., phylacteries, kashrus, etc.).

Someone else noted that the Israelites were never bound to observe all 613 mitzvoth, a contention on which I held my piece though I felt it didn’t really answer the question. So I cited Colossians 2:16-17, with the punctuation, “Saint Paul FTW.” The Blogger, probably after heaving a mental sigh, advised me, “I’ve cited that previously. [SDA] shrugs it off with ‘you don’t understand Paul’ and then supplies no explanation of what he ‘really’ means.”

To her credit, SDA tried to enlighten The Blogger and me. However, within two sentences, her analysis went off the rails: “When the NT was written it had to line up in agreement with the OT.”

This is a problem we encounter quite frequently in combox controversies with less sophisticated sola scriptura types: Although we all acknowledge Scripture to be “inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16) — literally, Theopneustos, “God-breathed” — and thus to have a unity in the Holy Spirit, some Protestants treat the New Testament as if the books and letters were intended to be treated the same way they treated Old Testament Scripture. In fact, though, the NT works, especially the letters, were “occasional” in nature, written ad hoc to address contemporary issues and needs, without any obvious consciousness that they would one day be gathered together in a single codex.[*]

This makes a difference, because SDA continues, “The OT was the reference guide for Paul used [sic]. Paul had to learn and memorize the entire OT and not only that he was taught by the top notch Rabbi [Gamaliel]. Who is better at understanding and writing the NT. Obviously the NT had to be in agreement with the OT.”

Apologetics toolbox: Sunday worship I — the basic case

As a result of a Facebook argument, I decided to repost this as the first part of a two-part series. Part II was posted March 23, 2013, and concerns itself with an attempt to sneak the Law of Moses into Christianity through a back door; this is the basic case.

*          *          *

“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27-28 NIV).

With these words, Jesus reminded the Pharisees that the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest, was commanded not for the benefit of God, who can be — and ought to be — worshipped any and every day of the week, but for the benefit of his creatures doomed to eat their bread in the sweat of their face (Gen 3:17-19), to give them a day of rest (Ex 20:10; cf. Ex 23:12, 31:15, Dt 5:14). Indeed, the English word holiday is a contraction of “holy day”, a fact G. K. Chesterton played on when he said of the ancients, “And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men.”[*]

But Jesus doesn’t simply remind the Pharisees that the Sabbath is for man’s sake … he also associates the Sabbath to himself: “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:28; cf. Lk 6:5). Tertullian argued from the relevant passages, the plucking of grain from the fields (Mk2:23-28; Lk 6:1-5) and the curing of the withered hand (Lk 6:6-10), that Jesus as Son of Man and Son of God had the power to transfer the Sabbath to another day:

Now, even if He had annulled the Sabbath, He would have had the right to do so, as being its Lord, (and) still more as He who instituted it. But He did not utterly destroy it, although its Lord, in order that it might henceforth be plain that the Sabbath was not broken by the Creator, even at the time when the ark was carried around Jericho. … Now, although He has in a certain place expressed an aversion of Sabbaths, by calling them your Sabbaths (Is 1:13-14), reckoning them as men’s Sabbaths, not His own, … He has yet put His own Sabbaths (those, that is, which were kept according to His prescription) in a different position. Thus Christ did not at all rescind the Sabbath: He kept the law thereof, and both in the former case did a work which was beneficial to the life of His disciples, for He indulged them with the relief of food when they were hungry, and in the present instance cured the withered hand; in each case intimating by facts, I came not to destroy, the law, but to fulfill it (Mt 5:17), although Marcion has gagged His mouth by this word (Against Marcion 4:12).