A question of interest—CLOSED

I hate to admit it, but there's a much better, much more fully documented and informed article by Thomas Storck in The Distributist Review.  Go read that one.

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Most of us know that the key to successfully managing our money is to avoid spending more than we earn in a month.  While certain debts can never be cleared because we’re paying for ongoing services, we know to avoid spending on credit and obtaining loans as much as possible.

Paradoxically — not to say ironically — we also know the only way to establish a good credit history is to obtain loans and pay them off on time.  Since your credit report is, for all intents and purposes, your public reputation, and is becoming essential to maintain in order to get good jobs and decent apartments, more than ever there’s a social incentive to spend modest amounts on credit.  This is without considering Corporate America’s constant push for you to buy, buy, BUY a bunch of crap you don’t really need so you can keep the economy expanding (and money flowing into investors’ hands).

As I’ve written before, debt as an economic engine eventually leads to an unsustainable imbalance of wealth.  But moreover, despite its normalization, we can’t help but feel that the only difference between the multi-billion-dollar national lender and the street-corner loan shark is that the former pays some attention to federal regulations. Put differently, we feel that “predatory lending” is a redundant phrase.

But is it immoral? Didn’t the Catholic Church use to teach that all lending was de facto a sin? Traditionalists will insist that the answer is “yes”.

“Moral neutrality just isn’t going to cut it anymore”

The alternative of moral neutrality should not be an option.  You can’t fight something with nothing.  Because if we don’t stand for something, we can’t stand against anything.

—David Cameron

In “Lost in Transition: I”, the first of a three-part review of Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith et al., developmental psychologist Thomas Lickona barely has room to give us an overview of the book’s segments. And yet the facts he pulls out of Smith’s ongoing longitudinal study gives one very little hope that the moral and spiritual malaise corroding our society from within will start reversing within the next 25 years.

Nearly three-quarters of Smith’s sample say they themselves, as individuals, intuitively and automatically know what is right and wrong in any given situation, and they normally try to follow their conscience.  They typically explain their “instinctive knowledge” of what’s right with reasoning that sounds like the traditional natural law notion that there is a moral sense embedded in our human nature.  Said one subject, “I think everybody has a sense of right and wrong unless you are clinically insane or chemically imbalanced.  It’s just kind of innate.  There’s a lot of gray in between, but on the far end of each spectrum you know what’s absolutely wrong and right.”

That’s all well and good … except that these same young people can’t see any tension between this instinctive “natural law” understanding of moral behavior and their non-judgmental individualism/moral relativism. “For about two-thirds of the 18-23-year-olds in Smith’s sample, extreme moral violations such as rape and murder are clearly wrong, but beyond that, ‘many of the truly moral features of life experiences are invisible.’ One interviewee said, ‘I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often.’”

Why the March for Life wasn’t “news”

I don't own the copyright.

Two days after record-breaking hordes of people, the majority of them under 25, marched in freezing rain in Washington, DC — between four and five hundred thousand; that’s almost half a million, folks — at the annual March for Life, the pro-life blogosphere is humming with barely-suppressed fury and indignation. 

Why?  Because once again the bulk of the MSM blew off what MSNBC grudgingly admitted was “the largest and longest-running peaceful human rights demonstration for the unborn” (which didn’t stop Andrea Mitchell from posting a slavishly sycophantic interview with Planned Barrenhood president Cecile Richards). 

Clay Waters at the Media Research Center noted that the New York Times blew the March off for the fifth year in a row.  John Jalsevac of LifeSiteNews noted that WaPo’s photo montage of the event “focused primarily on a tiny cadre of pro-abortion counter protesters that gather every year on the steps of the Supreme Court (mostly, I am convinced, just so that the mainstream media has pro-abortion counter protesters to photograph): a group so small that, if you weren’t looking carefully, you would probably miss it.”  Michelle Malkin writes sardonically that “it has become an annual ritual to watch the national media and liberal commentariat strain to ignore or marginalize the burgeoning movement of increasingly young and minority activists taking to the street to stand up for the unborn.”

And when Erik Wemple of WaPo used a story of a cat slain in Russellville, Ark., to claim a conservative media bias, Mark Judge of The Daily Caller hooted, “After The Post ignored half a million people, most of them young people, marching to let one million babies a year live, the paper’s media critic screams media bias because Fox didn’t break into ‘The Five’ with news that a cat had been the victim of a political hit.  Hang on, I just want to check that Post link again.  Nope, it’s not The Onion.”

Paul VI read the signs of the times prophetically

One of the hardest things for many people to understand is, “Why would the Catholic Church insist, after all these years, that contraception is wrong?  Moreover, why do they insist on resisting the tide?  After all, most Catholic women practice some form of it!  Can’t they tell that no one is listening to them anymore on birth control?”

Well, that’s not quite true.  While 98% of Catholic women have practiced birth control at some point in their lives, the most recent Guttmacher study only claims that nearly 70% currently practice birth control.  In this area, the Church is beginning to gain some traction.

Nevertheless, it is true that, when Pope Paul VI promulgated Humanae Vitae in 1968, it caused a severe rift within the Church, as many Catholics of the time expected and hoped for a change in doctrine.  Since then, it’s been the one area in which otherwise-orthodox Catholics have entrusted themselves to God’s forgiveness even when they confess other sins … that is, when they agree that it is a sin, which many don’t.

Of course, many people understand that the Church shouldn’t change its teaching to match every whim and fad of the people.  But after fifty years, it’s not really a “fad” anymore, is it?  Can’t the Church recognize the signs of the times?

Choose to say “no”

Hosted by Jill Stanek!

What do pro-aborts mean by “choice”?

For many years I’ve recognized that “freedom of choice” is simply a catchphrase aimed at taking the moral high ground.  More options = good, less options = bad, and if you force someone to do something they don’t want to do — like raise a child they didn’t plan on conceiving — then you, sir/madam/small child, are a fascist.

So I find myself amused whenever a pro-abort argues, “Women are gonna do it anyway.”  Besides the inherent meaninglessness of the argument, a dreary statement of the obvious that leads to no intelligent moral principle, it contradicts the very premiss of calling the pro-abortion faction “right to choose”.  If women are “gonna do it anyway,” then in what way do laws against abortion take away their ability to choose?

What’s really being argued for here is a right to choose without legal consequence.  But remove legal penalties and you haven’t removed all consequences.  In truth, the last thirty-nine years of legal abortion has seen the gathering of evidence that shows abortion — even so-called “safe abortion” — has physical, emotional and social consequences that compound the inherent horror and injustice of taking an innocent human life.  More to the point, though, is that there are some choices that should never be tolerated, let alone celebrated as a “right”.

Links, citations and the pro-life story

I recently made the mistake of trying to slap down a troll.  You know the type I’m talking about — the one who tries to pass off insults as arguments, then puts on the air of superior reasoning when called on it.  Let’s call him “Gorbag”.  Granted, it’s the name of an orc, not a troll, but it’ll do.

In one of his patronizing replies to my demand that he apologize for his snot-fest, Gorbag sniffed, “If [third person] wants to use actual quantifiable claims to back up her stories, then she needs to back up her numbers: ‘Porn addictions are now implicated in over 50% of divorces.’ — that’s a lot of implications, so a source should be cited, otherwise it comes across as a fabricated truth — something that religious types like to toss around all the time as ‘fact’.”

Okay, granted that Gorbag is guilty of a gross generalization that he himself won’t back up.  As I’ve said before, hypocrisy is by no means limited to us “religious types”.  I remember reading a claim in an extract from the late Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great that “most Christians are hypocrites”, and thinking, “Gee, for a guy who worships the Golden Calf of Scientism, he has a distinct aversion to backing up such a claim with scientific data.”

However, once you clear away the arrogance and anti-Christian bigotry, Gorbag does have a point.  Many people who write blogs don’t come from backgrounds where sourcing one’s claims is necessary.  And while many if not most writers are good about linking back to story sources, backing data — not so much.  In debate terms, we’re the ones indicting the present system; therefore, we bear the burden of proof.

Wealth inequality “somebody else’s problem”

Perhaps you remember this T-shirt from almost twenty years ago which had all the major religious belief systems classified according to variations of the expression “S*** happens”.  Catholicism was defined as, “If s*** happens, it’s my fault.”  Protestantism, by contrast, was defined as, “Let s*** happen to someone else.”

I happened to think of this T-shirt — and this definition of Protestantism — in reading Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ talk to the Pontifical Gregorian, “Has Europe Lost Its Soul?”  In it, he specifically mentions Max Weber’s seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one of the foundational books of sociology.  Weber found Calvinism to be highly influential in the development of capitalism, especially as income inequality was easier to rationalize through the doctrine of predestination: material wealth as a sign of God’s favor and blessing upon a policy of prudential spending, saving and investing.

Another Protestant influence shows up when we consider the effect of sola fide on distributive justice.  When corporal works of mercy and responsibility to the larger community are deemed irrelevant to salvation, it becomes easier to allow vague, impersonal “market forces” to drive wages and salaries rather than consideration of the employee’s actual contribution to the success of the enterprise.  Rabbi Sacks drove this point home for me even further by what he would probably consider an aside: “As for moral responsibility, it seems that that too can be outsourced. It is someone else’s problem, not mine.”

Paving the road to an authoritarian government

Doubtless you’ve already read two or three posts from other people explaining why the House of Representatives’ proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)[*] is such a horrendously bad piece of legislation.  Jeffrey Tucker has a quick piece on The Chant Café which tries to explain how SOPA’s passage would affect the emergent renaissance of sacred music. 

There are several major concerns with SOPA’s current language.  The most disturbing of these is its placement of primary responsibility for enforcement, along with burden of proof, on host websites for policing not only themselves but sites to which they link for potential copyright infringement.  “A provision in the bill states that any site would be blocked that ‘is taking, or has taken, deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the U.S.-directed site to carry out acts that constitute a violation.’[†] Critics have read this to mean that a site must actively monitor its content and identify violations to avoid blocking, rather than relying on others to notify it of such violations.”[1]  

The Sunday obligation

“I’m so tempted not to go to Mass,” Mom said as we prepared to pull out of the garage.  “I have so many things to do before we go over to Ted’s house tonight” — we were to celebrate the January birthdays together — “and I have a hard enough time hearing the Mass anyway even without Fr. George’s accent.”  (Mom’s hearing is severely impaired, though not completely lost.)

“It’s your decision, Mom,” I replied neutrally.  I don’t want to force her to go, but I don’t want either of us to fall back out of the habit of going, either, which we did while Bob was alive.

“Well, lead me not into temptation,” she sighed, and put the car in reverse.

The first reading, of course, was from 1 Samuel 3:3-10, 19, in which Samuel, called by God to be his prophet, responds, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening!”  Deacon LeRoy gave the homily, building on that passage, telling us to listen for His voice, through all the noise pollution that surrounds us every day and in the stillness of quiet.  And, of course, the Communion hymn was “Here I Am”.

When we were walking to the car, Mom started talking quite enthusiastically.  Everything about this Mass had been perfectly timed to reach her where she was.  “I’m really, really glad I didn’t give into the temptation to skip,” she said happily.  “Well, next time,” I joked, “I promise I won’t give you an ‘out’.”

Reversing Protestant acceptance of birth control

For a brighter-than-average guy, I can be pretty slow on the uptake.

Back in August, in “The ten percent solution”, I wrote: “A recent study by the Guttmacher Institute — if you can believe those puppets of the National Abortion Rights Action League — tells us how badly the Church has lost: Around 98% of sexually active Catholic women have used proscribed contraceptive methods.”  But what I skipped in the original Reuters story was this: “Nearly 70 percent of Catholic women use sterilization, the birth control pill or an IUD, according to the Guttmacher Institute research.”

Okay, seventy percent is still way too high, as far as faithful practice of Catholicism goes.  And some of the gap is attributable, no doubt, to women who have gone past menopause.  But it’s still a 28% difference between “ever used” and “currently using” — a big difference.  And I wonder how many other writers besides myself missed it in our rush to either celebrate or mourn the 98% number.  The penny didn’t drop, however, until I read Peter Baklinski’s review of Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control 1873-1973, by Dr. Allan Carson, in LifeSiteNews. 

The book itself demonstrates how Margaret Sanger and Planned Barrenhood played divide-and-conquer with Christians by using the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control as a wedge issue, counting on a reflexive anti-papist sentiment to keep Evangelical communions from uniting with the Church on traditional reproductive values.  But more importantly, Baklinski mentions that “some American evangelicals are rethinking their position on birth control,” using as his example “the Quiverfull Movement who ‘eagerly accept their children as blessings from God,’ eschewing not only artificial birth control, but even natural family planning.”