Redeem the Time

Yah can’t even make a perfunctory announcement these days without the ID-Darwin debate popping up in the comments section.

I want to avoid this issue for the next 3 years or so, but it’s getting harder every day. One cautionary note to all: after putting ID in its place, one needs to turn immediately back to slapping down and straining the falsity out of modern science. Let’s not pretend that over the last twenty to thirty years there have been strictly “scientific” textbooks in our schools teaching kids science. ID has fatal flaws, but the modern natural philosophy masquerading as science is the real threat to teaching the truth these days, not well meaning ID adherents. Generations of kids have learned that things don’t have specific natures, generations of kids have lost any notion of substance they might have had, generations of kids have learned that chance is a cause, generations of kids have thus lost all notion of causality in nature, generations of kids have learned that morality is based merely on belief, generations of kids have learned that the universe is not ordered, etc., etc., all because of the way they were taught “science” from the time they were little kids in school. Modern science, or rather, the modern philosophies with which it is mixed is THE main opponent of Thomism in the world today. It is because of science, or the way people think about science, that the entire old order of education has been overthrown.

The IDers are trying to solve and fight against real problems—they don’t quite realize their solution is flawed yet, but many of them will in the future. ID adherents have made this mistake because they are so angry about their opposition—they are sick and tired of “science” speaking falsely. They know their opponents are horribly wrong about some things—they and everyone else needs to focus more on what the truth is. We need to clearly delineate the principles and methods of the various sciences, and then use modern examples to show where modern “science” is true and where it mimics natural philosophy. For this to happen, true natural philosophy needs to be reborn.

UPDATE
And another thing: I’d be a whole lot more sympathetic to all these scientists coming out of the woodwork to condemn ID if they’d do the same thing when Dawkins and Hawking and their ilk make millions off another pseudo-natural philosophy book, but the chorus gets awful quite when they speak, doesn’t it? Are the ACLU and the courts putting thirty plus years of crap-ass modern natural textbook philosophy on the stand? I don’t see it happening. The fact that everyone gets upset only when Intelligent Design tries to put a confused natural philosophy into ill-fitting science clothes ought to show that the emperors aren’t wearing any.

And lest anyone take me the wrong way, I’m not speaking against the great work that the shulamite has done on the topic. I think that much like with the conservative Catholic anti-american confessional state-ers, the good side needs to sweep itself up and get its ducks all in a row before marching off to war—but there is a greater war here, and while we need to make sure everyone knows their song well before we start singing we need to remember that. (I can mix metaphors with the best of ‘em.)

UPDATE II
Speaking of all this, I hope everyone is reading this guy and putting money in his tip jar.

UPDATE III
Speaking of all this, I hope everyone interested goes and reads this guy NOW. He’s on the right path, in my humble opinion.

UPDATE IV
And this guy.

He’s right—we should all get each other this t-shirt for Christmas.

UPDATE:
You must read Father Schall on Christmas here:

Shopkeepers did not invent Christmas. Neither did the theologians.

What we most associate Christmas with is a gift. A gift is not something we can demand, not something that is due to us. Ultimately, the structure of the universe is first to be understood as a gift. Who made Christmas? “The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.” It has never been put more succinctly. We can choose other explanations and no doubt we do. All gifts must be freely received by those to whom they are freely given. This is the principle upon which the universe is constructed.

You’d be a fool not to read and enjoy this recent interview with one of the good Jesuits, who happens to be an old and wise man. A sample:
Read the rest of this entry »

I hope you are reading the First Things blog twice daily. Bottum writes a great little piece I can identify strongly with—I think most of us can do the same—and this is a sign of great writing, no?

I emptied my pockets on the way home: another Salvation Army kettle, a drunk man on the sidewalk with a hand-lettered sign I couldn’t read, a woman rattling change in a paper cup. I hate the city, all tarted up in its tawdry Christmas clothes. Mewing us together on its streets, it forces us to see the human stain. It forces us to know.

The post uses oft-reached for thoughts about NYC to get at oft-reached for thoughts about human nature, and succeeds. Top quality blogging! Bottum’s writing, in my humble opinion, is sometimes marred by a heightened self-awareness—but no one can escape from that these days. Call it whatever -ism-ist-ian-istic you want, it is simply hard to break free from—the air we all breathe is from the same regime and time, and there is no escape possible from this—we must simply work within it and use it to our advantage, which he does. However, when Bottum writes something without as much restraint as usual, like the above blog post, I think he is at his best. Same principle probably works for everyone, I’d imagine.

UPDATE:

I had completely forgotten about this hauntingly beautiful Christmas piece by Bottum, which also struck a deep chord when I first read it. READ IT NOW.

Joey posts satirical reviews of the movie Brokeback Mountain, a story about homosexual cowboys, here. My favorite line from Joey’s post is: “It’s not so much a gay cowboy love story as a gay cowboy love story with gay characters who just happen to be gay.”

On the other hand, I imagine that the following warm remarks are likely typical of the glowing reception the movie is getting in the MSM these days:

Director Ang Lee tells the story with a sure sense of time and place, and presents the narrative in a way that is more palatable than would have been thought possible. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay uses virtually every scrap of information in Proulx’s story, which won a National Magazine Award, and expands it while remaining utterly true to the source.

The performances are superb. Australian Ledger may be the one to beat at Oscar time, as his repressed manly stoicism masking great vulnerability is heartbreaking, and his Western accent sounds wonderfully authentic. Gyllenhaal is no less accomplished as the more demonstrative of the pair. . .

I don’t know if everyone in the liberal press likes the movie this much, but certainly the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops does, because the above lines are from the review on their website.

What’s that you say? Calm down with all your value judgements—the reviewer makes the position of the Church clear:

As the Catholic Church makes a distinction between homosexual orientation and activity, Ennis and Jack’s continuing physical relationship is morally problematic.

The adulterous nature of their affair is another hot-button issue. But the pain Jack and Ennis cause their families is not whitewashed. (The women are played with tremendous sympathy, not as shrill harridans.) It’s the emotional honesty of the story overall, and the portrayal of an unresolved relationship — which, by the way, ends in tragedy — that seems paramount…While the actions taken by Ennis and Jack cannot be endorsed, the universal themes of love and loss ring true.

Yes, yes, we’ve all heard this before…[insert movie title here] glamorizes immorality but “it’s so well done,” it simply “shows what’s really happening,” or (my personal favorite) “yeah but it also shows the consequences” and all the other phrases of refuge for scoundrels and immature art critics. It shouldn’t be any suprise that the Conference of Bishops is spineless about movies as well as most other things. Maybe this post’s title is imprudent, but sadly these are the sorts of comments that simply show what’s really happening in the mind of many a Catholic these days.

Story brought to you via Cosmos, Liturgy, Sex via The Curt Jester via Mark Shea
via Jimmy Akin. (Talk about the “long tail” blogging effect…)

The doctor’s wife emails an UPDATE:

I wish I could comment on your dang blog, but, alas, this e-mail will have to do…

I suppose you were unaware of the USCCB orginal rating, and change of rating thanks to a small CANADIAN news service. So, thank you lifesitenews.com, and here is the link you should look at…

I have seen this story, and lifesite news is one of my favorite sources of info on the web. They do an awesome job and I hope they grow and prosper!

UPDATE II
Mrs. Bear emails to point to this interesting site, which has a much more interesting (and better written) review of the movie than the USCCB’s website does. Go read it now:

In the end, in its easygoing, nonpolemical way, Brokeback Mountain is nothing less than a critique not just of heterosexism but of masculinity itself, and thereby of human nature as male and female. It’s a jaundiced portrait of maleness in crisis — a crisis extending not only to the sexual identities of the two central characters, but also to the validity of manhood as exemplified by every other male character in the film. It may be the most profoundly anti-western western ever made, not only post-modern and post-heroic, but post-Christian and post-human.

Plato’s stepchild has a series of pictures relating to certain kinds of liturgical music (see here, here, and here). The stepchild has his critics—see here.

UPDATE:
The Shulamite speaks on the matter here. Among other points:

Modern liturgical music is unfit to be played in any context- since it is intrinsically unable to highlight any emotional state. A sign of this is that modern liturgical music is not used in any movie scene as a compliment to the action- even when the action is religious or uplifting, or expressing intimacy with God. Imagine, just as the most favorable example, a movie scene that calls for a moment in which a man experiences the revelation of the love of God- like St. Peter weeping at the feet of the Blessed Mother in The Passion, or William Wallace praying in his prison cell “Give me the strength, Lord, to die with dignity”. Imagine the movie camera showing him choke on his tears. Then imagine that someone cues up the music “Here I am, Lord.”

CLANG.

Everyone recognizes that this would, at best, destroy the whole scene. There could never be a movie made about the Passion of Christ that used modern liturgical music: so why is it that we think that it should ever be used at the mass- and for that matter, when does it ever work? Is there a single movie scene anywhere that effectively uses modern liturgical music as a compliment to anything?

These TAC grads have a blogging baby.

By the by, comments are off all over the liverevolt domain because of technical difficulties. I’d leave ‘em on if I could, but there is a greater chance that Santa will magically turn them on again for Christmas than there is of me ever figuring out how to solve the problem.

Totally unrelated, but I love the absolutely beautiful picture and the hilarious title of this post. If you don’t know what he is talking about, go here.

Now it’s for reals. As I mentioned below, Achilles is back at it—his anger is aroused by a snide piece attacking conservative intellectuals Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield on sex and women in the online Slate magazine. The article, titled “Theories of the Erotic: Male traditionalists wring their hands at the ‘grim’ lives of young women,” was written by Slate’s female culture editor, Meghan O’Rourke.

Achilles hurls his ashen bronze thusly:

O’Rourke demonstrates that she has fallen victim to one of Freud’s great lies: that sexual desire is mollified by sexual activity. A brief rebuttal to this great deception goes something like this:

Human action is charactized by habit. The desires of men and women inform the repetition of certain types of activities, which in turn informs the establishment of habit. Sex is no exception to this rule – in fact, perhaps more than any other human activity, sex exemplifies this rule. Sexual desires increase and develop when sexual behavior is entertained both in imagination and in act. Sexual acts, committed frequently and under the same psychological conditions, lead to sexual habits. Consequently, it is the height of absurdity to maintain that engaging in sexual activities short of intercourse relieve the desires to engage in full intercourse. I cannot imagine a single individual of either gender who would characterize habitual oral sex as an effective method of ridding oneself of the desire to engage in full intercourse. Perhaps at the time of oral gratification the desire for intercourse diminishes, just as at the time of shooting heroin the desire to shoot again diminishes; but it does not establish habits of purity and chastity. The suggestion is prima facie laughable.

So I guess everyone else already knew about this word, but I missed the memo years too late. Now I look, like, so immature for even talking about it:

Crapulous
(KRAP yuh luhs)
adj. gluttonous or immoderate in drinking; suffering from the effects of overindulgence

After the all-night party to celebrate his graduation, he succumbed to a crapulous slumber.

Indeed.