tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36905436097723737692024-03-05T16:30:52.278-08:00The Social ContinuumSometimes the Middle is the most Extreme.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger121125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-62327673332716248392013-05-06T11:02:00.003-07:002013-05-06T11:02:35.023-07:00The Living, Loving Multitude<br />
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My wife and I were up until past three o'clock this morning talking, my wife close to tears much of the time and I not too far behind. The context? I had just watched Bret Baier's hour-long special on Kermit Gosnell and my wife, unable to take the graphic nature of the pictures, had only listened to the audio. Not like the audio descriptions of Gosnell's 'House of Horrors' were any less intense or oppressively gruesome. One didn't have to see Baby A's scissor wound or the jars full of trophy baby feet to appreciate the horrific gravity of the crimes committed. The words were more than adequate. And what a great many words there were...<br />
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But the tears came from other quarters, surprisingly enough.<br />
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My wife admitted to me that she was not crying so much for the babies lost, although their short lives are more than irreplaceable. No, it was for Gosnell's soul that she was sorry, terrified that he would follow the path of the obstinate and never repent of his wretched sins. God's judgment is far worse than man's, we were reminded, and heaven help him if he does not repent.<br />
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There were actually two reasons tears had come to both our eyes speaking of this wretched man, however. One was the aforementioned. But the second reason was even closer to home. It was due to the fact that all of the past week my wife and I had been discussing what it'd be like to have another child, wondering with excitement if we might want to try to get pregnant again this year. Talk of babies and their tremendous beauty and fragility, and their ability to wrench love out of us humans. And then this story. A story of abject disregard for human life, a story of a man and a culture that don't give a damn about women or their unborn children, a story of subhuman acts of cold-blooded violence for financial gain. It is a story repeated again and again in America, a story of lies and hatred and fear. It all hit like a punch to the gut for us as a couple who have never even touched chemical contraception.<br />
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How did the family move from being such a revered unit of society to being the butt of every joke on network television? When did such a profound societal selfishness settle in that women are routinely taken advantage of by men, and are then encouraged or forced to abort the consequences? When did the great lie finally take so profound a root in our nation's heart, the lie that having a family is a millstone around one's neck and that the child is a weird leftover fluke of an act that evolution meant to be a mere pleasurable pastime?<br />
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All of these are grievously important questions to ask, to be sure, but the more important thing is that I do not ask them rhetorically. I am not whining for a bygone era supposedly drowning in innocence and charm. I am also not asking these questions in a state of shocked disbelief, in order to demand that standards be raised or some other such woefully inadequate response. I have seen evil before, and it does not shock me. I am asking these questions in order to dig to the heart of the whole big festering ugly problem and find an answer. An antidote.<br />
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Many have written and spoken of the corruption and demise of Western civilization and its corresponding values, including me, and it is not really my purpose here to rehash all of those arguments. My purpose here is to look at all those previously thrashed out 'why' arguments and formulate a simple 'how to' antidote. Because I firmly believe that there is a simple solution to this problem, a solution so simple it may be regarded as naive and even irresponsible by many. We suffer from a stream of consciousness culture that has no clue what a family is supposed to be, no hint of what real love looks like, and no idea what happiness is. So what's the antidote?<br />
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Get married and have kids. Lots of kids. And bring them with you everywhere.<br />
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It is simple, and also frustratingly difficult. C. S. Lewis once remarked that the really important and difficult concepts in our language are summed up in short, simple words: love, hate, heaven, hell. He couldn't have been more correct. I am the second son in a family of ten children, and so I was keenly aware of society's mockery long before I ever had a wife or children of my own.<br />
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Getting married is the first huge step. So many people, especially younger people, simply choose to live together without marriage. No vows, no commitment, just simple cohabitation centered around the convenience principle. There is no real love in this arrangement, because there has been no act of will, just a simple change of location. The 'union', if it could ever be called that, exists on the very thin ice of mutual selfishness. Marriage remedies this by destroying the blasé of convenience, of creating a relationship that exists on purpose and for a purpose.<br />
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Having kids is somehow an amusingly huge leap of logic for many even after they get married. One would think the knowledge that sex is how babies are made would be enough to make this clear but it is sadly not so. The mere act of having more than one or two kids nowadays is an act of revolt against the established order. So revolt away and have many children. Demonstrate to the world that your empowerment comes from the fact that by a simple act of physical union with your spouse you can help create another completely unique and irreplaceable person. Demonstrate that your fulfillment comes in serving those new persons and providing for their welfare, and that your reward is their little grateful smiles and enthusiastic attitudes.<br />
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And finally, bring them out in public. Everywhere. Church, restaurant, park, you name it. There is so much negativity about large families in large part because people don't see enough of them. So show your kids off, let them be kids in public. Let them be the ones to demonstrate to the world how badly it needs love. Children do not judge, are trusting, vivacious, energetic, bold, brash, and funny. They will make the world less judgmental, more energetic, bolder, and will ensure that it laughs more.<br />
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I am issuing a challenge of sorts to all those who balk at new life, who claim it is too expensive, too draining, too much work, or who like Gosnell think it is just plain worthless or toxic. As you debate abortion policy, assist in the indefensible slaughter of our nation's children, or just plain decide not to have any children, my wife and I will be busily making our own. Not because we have no self control, as is so often suggested to those who decide not to load their bodies with toxic contraceptive chemicals, but because we are fulfilling a mandate. We were told to be fruitful and multiply, to fill this earth and subdue it. Every time we decide to have another child we are rewarded beyond our wildest expectations. Having children is work, but a work of joy.<br />
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Our society needs to relearn how to be normal, how to see the truth about itself and to not shy away in fear when presented with the difficult choices. And what better way than for us to lead by example? We need to see love, see it as normal, and see it as desirable. Only then will the world be rid of the likes of Kermit Gosnell.<br />
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God forgive them all, for they know not what they do.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Ernest F., Courtesy of Wikipedia.</span><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-75477511623093444232013-02-20T00:11:00.000-08:002013-02-20T00:15:05.384-08:00Of Meteors and Conclaves<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am so glad the Mayans were wrong about the world ending in 2012. Because 2013 has barely begun and it is already far more interesting.<br />
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It really isn't every day that a massive chunk of space rock comes tumbling headlong into our atmosphere and explodes. Even more amazing is the fact that the 10,000 ton space rock careened to earth over a populated area and, though injuring many with the massive blast, killed no one. It is enough to make an unbeliever reconsider the concept of guardian angels.<br />
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In my mind, however, what was even more amazing about last week was not this natural event but a human and divine one. That would be the now famous address in which Pope Benedict XVI announced his upcoming renunciation of his papal office. It was a stunning move, to say the least. This incidentally occurred on the same day that the Vatican dome was struck by lightning. Twice.<br />
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Whether the strike be a sign from God or not (a sign of <i>what </i>we aren't told), it certainly marked a momentous day. No pope in 600 years has abdicated his throne. It would be a first in recent history, at a time when the Catholic Church has reached a critical point in her ad the world's history. Even putting aside the more egregious examples of the mostly secular, mostly political, and mainly awful mainstream media coverage of the entire affair, one theme has emerged in a resoundingly clear crescendo:<br />
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<i>The Catholic Church is the only institution left that has not altered its official stance on the issues that dominate the modern world: abortion, contraception, homosexual sex, Marxism and capitalism. For the Church to remain relevant, it MUST CHANGE ITS VIEWS. NOW.</i><br />
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Implicit in that unified outcry is the assumption that the new pope, chosen from a pool of cardinals hand-picked by men who championed against these issues, will do nothing to "move the Church forward." For the journalists, politicians, and activists who are doing the crowing about progressivism in the Church, they couldn't be more right.<br />
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Thank God.<br />
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Their beef with the Church is really quite silly when you think about it. The Church has been a monument of rock-solid permanence for the past 2,000 years or so. She has seen empires rise and fall, has watched great men flare up and burn out, has born through fierce storms of mankind demanding violence and change. And yet here she still stands, still unmoved by those pleas to alter her first principles. In a way that the secular world is unable to understand, the Church does not change not because she <i>will</i> not, but because she <i>can </i>not. When her identity contains within itself the bearing witness to an unchanging truth, then consequently being untrue to that truth would make her cease to exist. It is just that simple.<br />
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But this is only half the silliness of the world's beef with an unchanging Catholic Church. The other half is why the secular world gets its pants into such a collective bind when the Church once again, for example, mildly insists that we will never see women priests. For such an enlightened, reasonable world where democracy reigns supreme and tolerance is the byword of the day, why then is there such a problem with the Catholic Church?<br />
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The problem appears to be a simple one of identification. When a man of the modern world devotes himself to secularism, he thinks that he is simply extricating himself from the noxious tangle of religion and belief in God in order to put himself on a higher plane of understanding than the rest of humanity. From this higher plane he can view the world from a truly enlightened angle and judge impartially what is best for it. Reality, sadly for him, is somewhat different. What the secularist does not realize is that on the natural level he can never become a detached observer of his own kind, because he himself is of that kind and probably knows just as little about humanity's ultimate good than any other human. This inevitably will lead him to clash with religion because his imagination has become his own religion.<br />
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The Catholic Church, meanwhile, adds another layer to this assessment by giving us the supernatural reason that the secularist has a beef with unchanging truth. Mere men in many ways would not have such a burning hatred of the truth if it were merely they that were engaged in the battle. Leaving each other to believe as they please only works for so long. The Church's unwavering doctrine of Satan and his power are as true today as they have always been, as well as the teaching that the Devil hates humanity with all of his heart and desires to egg them on against the truth with all of his might. So the secularist, in his indifference to truth, becomes its enemy and by default the ally of a host of evil spirits that are engaged in an epic war against said truth.<br />
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Author Steve Jalsevac, in an <a href="http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/benedicts-renunciation-and-the-wolves-within-the-church" target="_blank">excellent article on LifeSiteNews.com</a>, quotes Vatican observer Robert Moynihan as saying this:<br />
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<i>“Are there facts the Pope has weighed in making this decision that we simply don't know about, or don't know fully? … Does the Pope have information about the possible course of events in the months ahead that led him to conclude that he needed to allow a younger, more energetic man to take over his office from him, so that the Church's highest authority could take action quickly and decisively as events unfold?”</i><br />
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I am becoming more and more convinced that Moynihan has hit on something extremely important here. Whether it be the need for stronger discipline of the Church's errant leaders, as Jalsevac suggests later in his piece, or the ominous rising tide of American-style sexual liberation by government coercion, or something else entirely (or all of these things), I am in admiration of a move by Pope Benedict that I think will be perceived only later as the brilliant move that it is. It is a move that I imagine will create a counter-crescendo to the rising cacophony and blathering disunity of secularism.<br />
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It is a move of unity, continuity, humility, and permanence.<br />
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The new pope (whomever he shall be) will only proclaim one thing, the truth. It shall be the same obnoxiously immovable and unchangeable truth as it always has been, no matter how many or how few people adhere to it. The media loves its facts and figures concerning the average Catholic's attitude towards the Church's teaching; what they fail to realize is that waning church attendance and liberal attitudes about contraception and abortion are not signs of the Church's irrelevance. A drought is not a sign of the irrelevance of rain, but of the desperate and all-encompassing need for it. So it is with the Church and her truth.<br />
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God bless Pope Benedict XVI, and bless all the cardinals as they meet to discover which of them shall sit on the throne of Saint Peter next. I will be waiting with baited breath.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Panorama of St Peter's Square in Vatican City</i>. Photo by François Malan, via Wikipedia.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-17277810412457866092013-02-11T02:36:00.000-08:002013-02-11T02:36:00.954-08:00The Sliding Puzzle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I had a friend a while back who, while visiting with us got a hold of an eight-piece sliding puzzle and attempted to solve it. The final result was supposed to be a three-dimensional lizard emerging from a pond, but my friend was not getting it to work and became more irritated and more humorous the more tries he made. Finally, in a fit of desperation, he took a butter knife to the edges and proceeded to pry the pieces out. Then he rearranged them correctly on the tabletop and re-installed them in the sliding frame in the proper order.<br />
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The only problem was that the frame was now loose at best, and broken in places at worst.<br />
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The more attempts that were made to solve the puzzle incorrectly (i.e., by violent prying at the edges with said butter knife) the looser the whole puzzle got. It would not be long before the whole thing would be broken and worthless.<br />
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Though funny, the episode says a lot about our fallen human nature. We are impatient, temperamental creatures, decidedly stupid on occasion. On a darker note, however, we are more often than not unwilling to take the time to stand back and understand something, before diving in and trying to "solve" it. This is, for example, the problem with much of modern philosophy, which concentrates on assumptions that are made before any real observation has be done. One can always construct a theory out of thin air and then force the facts to fit later. Humanity is often not interested in discerning something's true nature.<br />
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This inevitably leads to trouble, because in failing to understand something's true nature, we cannot properly assess the thing's value, and consequently very little meaningful interaction can take place between us and the thing in question. More often than not our interaction will result in damage and destruction, either of the thing or of us.<br />
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We do this with everything, it seems. Americans, I fear, are especially good at this sort of dense behavior. For instance, we look at the male and female sex of all different kinds of creatures, and we see them mate with each other, and we know that this process brings forth new life of the same species. Mankind has known this for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. When we are old enough to understand, we realize that we are creatures similar to the aforementioned observed animals, being male and female and possessing all the proper equipment to mate amongst ourselves. And yet we make the monumentally stupid leap of non-logic to the conclusion that sex between male and female humans has no connection or bearing on the creation of new life.<br />
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Or we look at government. Anyone with a semi-firm grasp of history knows that governments do not necessarily have the greatest track records when handed more and more centralized power. Imperial Rome crumbled under the weight of its own corruption and emperor-switching. Emperor Charlemagne's new Holy Roman Empire fell apart because it was built more on him and his charisma than on robust and widespread rule of law. The Soviet Union collapsed under the crushing pressure of unsustainable spending, repression to the breaking point of its subjects, the proven inefficiency of central planning, and the obliteration of the individual. And yet, parties on both sides of the American political spectrum will conclude that either centralized governance or centralized production and ownership is the key to solving all our ills.<br />
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Or look at guns and gun control. Or marriage. Or the concept of beauty in art. Or practically any other aspect of our lives. In every case, the loudest voices offering "solutions" to the challenges handed to us are also the ones that advocate tearing apart the frame of the puzzle in order to solve it without any observational work. And this approach has never worked. Not for very long, at least.<br />
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Our race is drowning in its own boneheaded sins. To refuse to understand the nature of the world for whatever reason is to doom oneself to incompatibility with that same world and the people in it. When burning fossil fuels for energy is all that we know or will accept, we will run out. When factory farming and mass pharmaceutical production is all that we will consider in those respective fields, we will continue to wonder why the modern man is becoming less and less healthy. When we accept that long hours of work in a factory is the only path forward to financial peace and happiness, we will wonder why we are burnt out and unfulfilled. When we rob from the wealthy to give "compassionately" to the poor, we wonder why both the wealthy and the poor no longer wish to work. When we "accidentally" conceive a child during an act of fornication or adultery and then proceed to have responsibility for it destroyed through abortion, we will wonder why the woman suffers psychological torment and physical ailments for the rest of her life. (And, in relation to that, we will wonder why men are such bums.)<br />
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We will wonder, and we will think about the problem after we have already screwed it up. We will suffer pain and regret and loneliness and hollowness because we did not try to understand the <i>nature</i> of the issue at hand, but only applied our own theory of operation to it and hoped like hell it would work. It is not a good way to live.<br />
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There is a way out, a way forward towards the light. Or, more accurately, there are two ways out. One is divine and the other is earthly. There is a facsimile of the divine solution floating around, and it is probably the one thrown in people's faces more, pitched to mankind without its proper context or background, used unfortunately as an "easy fix" type approach. It is catchy to be told that Jesus is the answer to all our problems and if we simply believe in Him then everything will be okay, and the hole in our lives will be filled. The real divine solution is much more involved and all encompassing, a labor of love and a transformation of life, but it must inform and work in tandem with the earthly solution to be effective. The earthly solution is this: to be aware. To open our eyes and our minds and to struggle to understand how the world actually works. To reason our way from honest premises to reasonable conclusions. To embrace our intellect, to think for ourselves, and to demand that the world do the same.<br />
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It is not a hopeless cause, getting to the root of things. It just takes a healthy dose of humility to admit, as Socrates once did, that we know nothing. We need to look long and hard at every issue in our lives to determine if we are solving the puzzle or breaking it.<br />
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Because unlike the plastic eight-piece sliding puzzle, our lives are fixable.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-26978532668485712082013-02-09T01:11:00.000-08:002013-02-09T01:11:00.150-08:00Just Because It's Awesome!I am posting this video here just because, well, it's pretty awesome. I like to appreciate awesome when I see it, so here it is. Some crazy long football and basketball shots.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/n58bFRauLL4" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-85872109215100057602013-02-08T00:47:00.000-08:002013-02-08T00:47:59.761-08:00Tiny Houses and God-Men<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Quadragesima_-_Cuaresma_-_La_Semana_Santa_en_Oratorio_de_San_Francisco_de_Sales_en_San_Luis_Missouri,_Estados_Unidos.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="303" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Quadragesima_-_Cuaresma_-_La_Semana_Santa_en_Oratorio_de_San_Francisco_de_Sales_en_San_Luis_Missouri,_Estados_Unidos.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Wow, the Lenten season is almost upon us again. This year is already going by way too quickly.<div>
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For those of you who don't know, the season of Lent in the Catholic Church is a six-week trial-by-fire in the early springtime of heavy spiritual lifting (fasting, abstaining from meat, giving up our daily pleasures as sacrifices, praying.) It is a sort of boot camp for the soul, especially for those who will be baptized on Easter. In the end it becomes a time to scrap everything in your life that you really don't need, to dig until you find the real naked <i>you </i>underneath, to detach yourself from all that you thought important in order to rearrange your priorities. </div>
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It is very cathartic, to say the least.</div>
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It is a season that begins with a reminder of death, when ashes are applied to the forehead with the words "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust you shall return." It is also a season that nearly ends with a re-imagining of one of the most brutal kinds of deaths, being nailed with iron spikes through the hands and feet to a cross and left to asphyxiate/bleed to death. But in the very end, Lent is preparation for a miniature heaven, that of the remembrance of the resurrection from the dead of a man who was also God.</div>
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This year I think is going to host a very good Lent. My wife and I have already resolved on our own special sacrifices and my children are getting old enough to understand what is going on this time around. Also, on a more national level, our country is gearing up for what looks like a showdown between God and government, between the laws of men and the laws of the Almighty. It will separate the mediocre from the fervent, the true from the false. It will be a trial by fire.</div>
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But more importantly I think is the small, individual purifying struggles that will be the arbiter of the quality of this Lent. An example of this: I was recently inspired by secular sources on YouTube concerning the <a href="http://tinyhouseblog.com/" target="_blank">Tiny House movement</a>, in which people realize that their big mortgage, big square-footage houses are not providing happiness and so downsize to very small homes. They in many ways unconsciously express the great truth of being poor in spirit, of being happy with fewer things, of ridding themselves of excess and unnecessary clutter. My wife and I have become inspired to do the same thing, but infused with a Christian sense of poverty of spirit, and it has yielded amazing results so far (we aren't nearly done yet...) Our tiny apartment seems so much larger now that we got rid of a few things and rearranged others and generally dealt with the mindless junk that we have kept for so long. It is freeing.</div>
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So next week, when Lent begins in earnest with that very long hungry Wednesday, be of good cheer. We are about to decompress and declutter for 2013. We are about to become more free, more ourselves, and more good, as long as we let the God-man in to do His work.</div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by LemosaCorel, via Wikipedia.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-76537457407070064402013-01-30T00:58:00.000-08:002013-01-30T00:58:58.722-08:00Europe As We Know It...<i>This article is reprinted with permission from Population Research Institute.</i><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;">Europe as We Know It is Dying</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">What Will Follow the Winter of Western Civilization?</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>by Steven W. Mosher</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s happened before.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Writing a century and a half before the birth of Christ, the Greek historian Polybius observed “nowadays all over Greece such a diminution in natality and in general manner such depopulation that the towns are deserted and the fields lie fallow. Although this country has not been ravaged by wars or epidemics, the cause of the harm is evident: by avarice or cowardice the people, if they marry, will not bring up the children they ought to have. At most they bring up one or two. It is in this way that the scourge before it is noticed is rapidly developed.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He concluded by urging his fellow Greeks to return to their historic love of family and children. “The remedy is in ourselves,” he wrote. “We have but to change our morals.” His advice, unfortunately, went largely unheeded.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The demographic winter of the Greek city-states led to economic stagnation and military weakness, which in turn invited invasion and conquest. After a century of increasing dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean, Rome finally annexed the Greek city-states in 146 B.C.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Will a Europe in the grip of a similar demographic winter come to a similar unhappy end? Certainly Europeans of today, like the Greeks of old, are barely having children. The birthrate across the entire continent is far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. Italy, Spain, Austria, and Germany have total fertility rates, or TFRs, of only 1.4 or so, while Poland and Russia languish at 1.32 and 1.2 respectively. The more or less generous child allowances these countries pay the prolific has scarcely caused these numbers to budge. The birth dearth continues to widen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Meanwhile, adherents of pro-family sects such as Islam are moving in, having children, and repopulating historic Christendom. Is this process likely to continue? And to what end?</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Most Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East have fertility rates two or three times as high as Europe. Afghanistan and Somalia, whose fertility rates are above 6 children (6.62 and 6.4 respectively), may be outliers. But other Middle Eastern countries with above-replacement TFRs include Iraq at 4.86, Pakistan at 3.65, and Saudi Arabia at 3.03. Even immigrants from the most Westernized Muslim countries such as Turkey and Tunisia average nearly twice as many children as the extant populations of most European countries.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">While falling fertility may be humanity’s general fate, it is this differential fertility that will determine Europe’s destiny. Although the birthrates of Muslim immigrants to Europe are far lower than they were just a generation ago, they are still far more open to life than highly secularized Europeans. Moreover, these immigrants, once in place in Germany, Italy, Spain, etc., tend to maintain their relatively high fertility for a generation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As a result of this potent mix of immigration and procreation, the number of Muslims will continue to grow. Europe as a whole, some demographers suggest, will have a majority Muslim population by 2100.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What a strange twist of history! Over the centuries, various Muslim armies have repeatedly attempted to conquer Europe. Time and time again, at Tours, Vienna, at Lepanto, at Malta, they were thrown back. Yet now what their forebears were unable to accomplish by force, their distant descendants will achieve by peacefully winning the Battle of the Cradle.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whether they will be radicalized or secularized Muslims is the central question. If they are radicalized, then we can expect efforts to impose Sharia law in country after country, along with the growing persecution of the Christian minority. Catholics in Germany, for example, may come to be treated in largely the same way that Coptic Christians in Egypt have been for the last few centuries, that is to say, as second-class citizens, to be maligned, taxed and beaten almost at will.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If, on the other hand, the second- and third-generation Muslims are largely secularized, then the Christian minority will be, presumably, treated somewhat better, though still subject to some level of discrimination. As everyone knows by now, the Secular Left preaches a tolerance that it generally does not practice.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Either way, believers in once-Christian Europe will probably find themselves living in what might be called a pre-Constantine moment. In others words, they will be living under regimes that punish, even persecute, them for their beliefs.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.078125px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At the present moment, Europeans still control their own destiny. As Polybius, were he alive today, would surely remind them: “The remedy is in yourselves. You have but to change your morals.”</span></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-46536003140987064652013-01-22T23:10:00.001-08:002013-01-22T23:10:24.031-08:00There And Back Again<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Duerer-Prayer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Duerer-Prayer.jpg" width="218" /></a></div>
I'm back.<br />
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I will try to explain my absence as well as I possibly can. It could possibly be chalked up to being busy, which I have been. Life, job, other extracurricular activities that required my attention. Or it could be attributed to being sick, which I most certainly was around Christmas. Or having a new baby in the house, or any other of a thousand reasons.<br />
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But none of them would be quite completely true. Because they aren't the real, deep, underlying reason. The real reason is pretty simple. I suppose you could call it literary despair. Let me explain.<br />
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2012 had been a pretty eventful year, packed from one end to the other with intellectual, emotional, political, and religious happenings of every size and shape, from the HHS mandate to the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Obamacare. It was a year of a certain kind of hope, that maybe finally, the long four-year drudgery of Obama's presidency was finally reaching its end. That maybe the country would turn a corner, make a real change, demand a good leader. I hoped and prayed along with everyone else who hoped and prayed the same thing. I begged that God's will be done with America (a double-edged sword of a prayer, I know.)<br />
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I wrote to convince, I wrote to persuade, to possibly add a modicum of sense that had not existed in the argument before. I wrote from my heart about things I thought people should hear. I linked to other people's writings that were more eloquent than my own.<br />
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And then I allowed myself, to some degree, to get plowed under. Obama got reelected, bad policy became firmly cemented in place, the attacks on my religion and my church increased. The heavy hand of a faraway tyrant became more ever-present: on this New Year when my taxes went up, for the past couple weeks with all this asinine "discussion" concerning guns and gun control, the constant din of divisive and dangerous rhetoric from both sides of a dysfunctional government.<br />
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I honestly despaired that my writing had any effect whatsoever on the discussion, any purpose other than to occupy my time. I am a person who likes to <i>see</i> the results, and I was not seeing them. So I stopped.<br />
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And I realize that stopping was an enormous mistake on my part. For all honest dialogue, all honestly considered and honestly spoken thought, is worth hearing. Maybe I get things wrong, or nobody listens, or my words drown in the sea of other voices saying sort of the same thing as me. But it shouldn't matter. Because, as my wife so eloquently posted on the wall over my computer, "I am a writer, I will write." God gave me the gift of putting words together in a way that makes some amount of sense. You will be the judge of how much sense I make, I am sure. But I will be damned if I don't use that gift anyways, for my own benefit if not for yours too.<br />
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So my New Year's resolution, if I have one at all (I honestly hate New Year's resolutions) is to keep pouring out some part of my soul onto this corner of cyberspace and not worry so much about the concrete results it may or may not have. Because, if I speak truth, and I hope that I do more often than not, then it benefits somebody out there.<br />
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So as I like to say, Be Aware. And God bless. I promise to stick around. Will you?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-72869287411261308362012-11-23T09:11:00.000-08:002012-11-23T09:11:42.403-08:00Thoughts Concerning Music<i>This post was originally published on the blog <a href="http://catholicsocraticforum.blogspot.com/2012/11/live-music-vs-recordings-my-thoughts.html" target="_blank">The Catholic Socratic Forum</a>. It was re-posted here with permission from its author, John. I hope you enjoy!</i><br />
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<b>Live Music vs. Recordings: My Thoughts</b><br />
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Just this past Sunday, I played in a strings ensemble concert. We’re a mixed group; some of us are professionals while some are not. But the magic that all of us created there—for just the space of an hour—was indescribable. We really cast a spell there. <br />
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And this magic didn't just happen. We practiced our music until it became magic. We worked it until it became perfect so that we could create something sublime.<br />
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But recordings can be played over and over again at the push of a button. Recordings are certainly very convenient and wonderful, and without them we would never be able to listen to old recitals or violin concertos or any other music that we would otherwise be unable to experience. <br />
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The things that I am going to say are really just my own thoughts. I am not saying that recordings are bad, but I think that live performances are preferable to recordings. When you go to a concert, you not only get to hear the music as it’s being produced, you see the musicians as they are playing, and form a sort of connection to them. If you are a musician, you are producing the music yourself, which is an even more wonderful thing.<br />
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On the other hand, recordings are static. The process has already taken place, and the music is now packaged frozen, just waiting to be microwaved. While this is very convenient, it’s certainly not as good as having it fresh from the garden. <br />
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I have another objection to recordings. They can be an occasion for musicians with little or no playing talent to impress the world, and I’m sure they have. All that anyone has to do to make a spotless recording is to put lots of little bits of music together with the aid of a computer—plus the necessary equipment. (A few people don’t even try to sing anymore. All they have to do is talk into a computer and bend their voice pitch to particular frequencies.) Still, a great many recordings are produced by very talented musicians, and my objection is only that they can be done by people with little or no musical talent; I’m sure they have been. (If I'm wrong about anything in this paragraph, please correct me.)<br />
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This entire article is just an attempt to voice my somewhat embryonic thoughts on this subject (thoughts that might not all be right). I must admit that I don’t know much about the ways that live music can be better than recorded music. I also admit that I listen to a great quantity of recorded music all the time; I love it. In fact, I listen to more recordings than live music. Either one is good in its own way, but perhaps our culture makes music too easy, like frozen food.<br />
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If you have thoughts on this, please tell me. This is going to be a very interesting topic for discussion.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Derek Gleeson, via Wikipedia.</span><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-22665966032358473092012-11-21T21:31:00.001-08:002012-11-21T21:31:22.315-08:00I'm Thankful<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am thankful for my job. A job that makes just enough for me and my family to squeak by and yet employment that is both honorable and that has a future.<br />
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I am thankful for my home. It is smaller than 700 square feet, with only two bedrooms for five people. It has brown shag carpeting from the eighties on the floors, a finicky septic tank, no yard, and obnoxious rent. Yet it is still a home.<br />
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I am thankful for my family. For my wife, especially, who always sees the potential in me that I never do, for my kids, who love me with abandon. For my parents and siblings, who give my life texture and tension, insight and humor.<br />
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I am thankful for my country. A country with mediocre leadership and a shaky moral compass, skewed logic and overwrought emotions, but a country nonetheless.<br />
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I am thankful for a world that continues to spin, grow food, get warmer and colder, make snow, erupt, spew, destroy and renew. Weather that continues to startle and amaze, creatures and geology that continue to manifest themselves.<br />
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I am thankful for my faith. A faith that is only made stronger and more vocal in times of trial and crisis such as these. Catholicism has never been about the easy path, but it is about the good one.<br />
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And I am thankful for my God, the Maker and Sustainer of my job, home, family, country, world, and faith. Without Him I would be nothing. Literally.<br />
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Happy Thanksgiving, to all of my readers and everyone else.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-1384182283496755702012-11-15T00:56:00.000-08:002012-11-15T00:56:06.950-08:00Minor Epiphany<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Stipula_fountain_pen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Stipula_fountain_pen.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Inspirational. Timeless. The One you've been waiting for. These words/phrases in your experience probably best describe a Disney direct-to-video movie trailer. I recently saw one particularly egregious example, involving Tinkerbell and a land full of other similar fairies that nearly made my Dr. Pepper go out my nose in amusement when the narrator made the announcement: "The Wait Is Over." I was not aware I had been waiting. Need creation taken to the extreme, I suppose. Then again, how else is Disney supposed to sell such saccharine vacuity if not by creating a need?</div>
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It is intriguing, and sad, that such hyperbole is applied today for the basest of reasons, i.e., to sell product that generally does not live up to the hype that is heaped upon it. Hyperbole loses all of its impact when used liberally, as any regular viewer of Disney trailers is painfully aware. Saving your adulation for the right moment and the right thing will make others perk up and listen when yo have something real to rave about.</div>
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Which is why I hope I have saved my adulation for the right moment here, because I found something tonight that I consider truly remarkable. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of essaymanship that I have read in a great while. It is, dare I say, Inspirational and Timeless. And maybe the one you've been waiting for, if you are discouraged by evil and boneheadedness.</div>
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The article is written by a woman named Susannah Black, and it concerns the joy (and the necessity, by odd extension) of writing. Writing in order to philosophize, writing in order to cheer, writing in order to convince. Her style is simple, but powerful. In many ways it was an eye opener for me, because everything she writes about in this piece is concerned with why I started this blog in the first place. She meaningfully and convincingly ties thought to action, the written word to impetus, the power of speech to the ability to move. </div>
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She ties God and a sinful world together, accurately describes their proper relationship to each other, and proceeds to infuse that relationship with a kind of whimsical joy. Her writing treads lightly, because she realizes that writing that is true and good is not of this world.</div>
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I hope I am not over-hyping her work, but it quite honestly almost brought me to tears in that it hit so close to home for me. <a href="http://distributistreview.com/mag/2012/11/on-writing-in-dark-times/" target="_blank">Take a read for yourself</a> and tell me what you think.</div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Antonio Litterio, via Wikipedia.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-71553809627332074012012-11-11T21:30:00.000-08:002012-11-11T21:30:44.810-08:00It's Over, But Not Really<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Obama_Austin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Obama_Austin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
In chapter eight of the first book of Samuel, the people of Israel cry out to the prophet Samuel to appoint them a king to rule over them, instead of the direct rule of God through His prophet. In an odd twist, God does not refuse the request of the Israelites; rather, He has Samuel appoint Saul as the first king of Israel. Within three generations the kingship of Israel degenerates into a crushing burden on the backs of the Jews, an oppressive regime of over-taxation, corruption, and debauchery unwilling to answer to God's call for change. God had given the people what they wanted: the glamour and pomp of a secular king, the rule of a human being, a "messiah" of sorts to wave his hand and right the wrongs of the people. It did not take long for the humanity of Israel's kings to show its ugly side. In the act of giving the people what they desired, God let them unwittingly enact His own vengeance on them..<br />
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This scenario seems all too familiar.<br />
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In 2008, America craved a change in its leadership, in its policies, and in its general direction. John McCain, stodgy and inarticulate, was seen as merely the continuation of eight long years of George Bush's perceived presidential ineptitude. America fell hard for Barack Obama, a dynamic and inspiring figure whose freshness and youthful attitude led to McCain's obliteration at the polls. Democratic rule dominated Washington and the Republican party was left for dead. Things would get done, greedy people would be punished, jobs would be created, the environment would be saved from human ravages. It was a new golden age.<br />
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Close to four years passed. Obama's administration bypassed, ignored, or downright contradicted established American law on numerous occasions. Guns went to Mexican drug lords on Obama's watch. Diplomats and SEALS died while Washington watched from afar. The economy continued to sputter and struggle. Money applied to green energy companies disappeared in multiple bankruptcies. A corrupt attorney general chose to prosecute peaceful groups opposed to his agenda, whilst leaving other known criminals to live free. The list goes on and on.<br />
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And yet, at the end of the day as we all know by now, Barack Obama was not only reelected as president, he was reelected with a rock-solid margin of victory. Mitt Romney did not just lose, Obama <i>won</i>. Big. Again.<br />
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I was listening to the radio Tuesday night after the election results came in, and there was all manner of finger-pointing. Some blamed Obama's ground game being more formidable than originally thought, others blamed a Republican candidate who was not as articulate expressing conservative ideals as a Ronald Reagan might have been. And then the funniest and saddest (in my opinion) excuse for the loss came from a Republican operative who blamed everything on Senator wannabes Mourdock and Akin's abortion remarks. The GOP leadership almost immediately began calling for a toned down approach to abortion and social issues in their campaigns, essentially blaming their electoral hemorrhaging on a "misguided" attempt to hold the high moral ground.<br />
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Essentially that view is correct. But in expressing that view Republicans have made a diagnosis of themselves that even they do not understand. What the Republican Party does not seem to realize is that this election had little to do with a political process failure, a procedural issue that can be re-calibrated in the next election. They are correct in thinking that the abortion remarks brought down both Mourdock's and Akins' campaigns, and maybe Romney's by extension, but their solution to the problem is their own indictment. Barack Obama won a second term because the people are more willing to put their faith in a man than in a God. Obama won because too many of the people who stand for the sacredness of life, marriage, and sacrifice (the proper building blocks of a society) were not only silent but in many cases complicit. The people of God could easily pass for people of the world, and they voted en masse in the guise of the latter.<br />
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Catholics hold the most blame in this regard. A long-standing bulwark against the slaughter of innocent people, the leadership of the Catholic Church has grown soft and complacent. There is a <a href="http://www.all.org/article/index/id/OTg1OQ" target="_blank">good case to be made</a> that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was in large part responsible for the passage of Obamacare, in their starry-eyed frame of mind after hearing the words "universal healthcare." Catholic priests have failed to adequately express from the pulpit the evil of abortion and its corrupting influence on society's moral structure. The number of Catholics using birth control is statistically indistinguishable from secular society's numbers, despite the fact that chemical and mechanical birth control is expressly forbidden by the Church. Divorce rates are similar. The media and entertainment industries continue to barrel headlong towards a fully homosexually integrated culture, with nary a peep from the same Catholic Church. Far from being the light of the world, let alone the light to the United States, Catholics have devolved into a socially embarrassing version of fundamentalist Christian.<br />
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So yes, the Republicans did lose the election in part because of some of their members' remarks about abortion, but not because opposing abortion is a bad platform. Rather, it is because the morals of the American people have evaporated to such a degree that abortion is now a politically losing issue. And to stand for something like the ending of abortion is a career-ending move, so Republicans naturally gravitate towards the mushy lukewarm middle. It is so much easier to compromise one's moral position than to possess a spine and lose.<br />
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Democrats in many ways now hold a distinct political advantage. Their party platform is now unambiguous in its support of absolute evils (abortion and the glorification of homosexuality) and people I think gravitate towards absolutes. Especially when those absolutes are as pleasure-seeking and selfish as those the Democrats espouse, and especially in the absence of a strong witness to the truth. Obama's ground game was not merely a GOTV (get out the vote) effort, it was a systematic attempt to create both material and moral dependency on his administration. If you don't believe me, take a look at the following video. This woman is bought and paid for.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tpAOwJvTOio" width="560"></iframe><br />
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The truth is that Obama is an elected official. We the people put him there, maybe not by directly voting for him but quite possibly by not evangelizing the person standing next to us in the grocery checkout line. Obama's corrupt views and morally oppressive policies are a reflection of our lives as citizens. Before we complain that he stands for a tyrannical top-down approach towards the citizens he is meant to govern, we need look no farther than ourselves for the blessing he got to proceed.<br />
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So I urge all those people who still refuse to participate in the group-think of secularism to consider two things: number one, realize that we do not have a <i>political </i>problem on our hands, so much as we have a serious <i>moral and social</i> corruption problem; and two, live your life according to the actual dictates of your faith in a visible manner. Especially after this election is no time to hide what we believe, but to make absolutely sure that the truth is on display for the next four years in a way that it hasn't been in this country for many years.<br />
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It is time to pick a side. Not a party, not a candidate, but a clearly delineated moral side based on absolute truths. Proclaiming the truth will not necessarily win elections in the short run, but it may win hearts. A democracy (or representative republic) is only as good as the people that constitute it, and when the people are corrupt their leaders will necessarily follow. However, the opposite is also true. When enough people come to realize the true scope and evil of abortion, they will demand its censure by law while simultaneously eliminating the demand for it. When enough people come to grips with the fact that homosexuality erodes the core of a healthy and growing society, then the "gay marriage" argument will cease to hold any political water. And so on...<br />
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None of these good things will exist, however, if the truth is not shouted from every rooftop regardless of who we think is listening. I think we failed this time around. Let's not fail again.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Roxanne Jo Mitchell, via Wikipedia.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-36992720466148070202012-10-11T11:17:00.000-07:002012-10-11T11:17:33.832-07:00Libertarian Vs. Christian<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A <a href="http://distributistreview.com/mag/2012/10/utopia/" target="_blank">brilliant expose</a> of the problems with the libertarian solution to the American social and economic crisis.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Kowloonese, via Wikipedia.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-25498049269379049632012-10-09T00:57:00.002-07:002012-10-09T01:03:22.391-07:00"Nazis...I Hate These Guys."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Flag_of_the_NSDAP_(1920%E2%80%931945).svg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Flag_of_the_NSDAP_(1920%E2%80%931945).svg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nazis. Nobody likes them. They have to be one of the most hated, reviled, condemned groups on the planet. The takeover of Europe and parts of Russia and Africa by brutal attack, the horrifying mass extermination of the Jews, the extreme authoritarian iron rule of millions of people, and the terror brought down upon the rest of the world have created history's worst possible nightmare group of people. No wonder they are so universally upheld as the benchmark of evil. In short, as an Indiana Jones would say in echoing the world's sentiments: "Nazis... I hate these guys."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because of this widespread derision and hatred, to be called a Nazi has become a shorthand label of politicians and journalists to aid in the obliteration of the opposition party. Or rather in particular, it has become a favorite mainly of Democrats and their hangers-on in the United States. This election cycle has seen some particularly <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/comparing-republicans-nazis-started-070000889.html" target="_blank">egregious examples</a> of this reckless name-calling.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So let's explore this name-calling a bit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Its most direct effect, I would think, is the same effect that shouting "racism" ad nauseam has had in this same presidential race. The words "racism" and "racist" have had their true ugly meanings drained away in the rush to demonize the other side faster than they can demonize you. So to with Nazism. As Larry Elder says in the aforementioned article, "By calling political opponents 'fascists' because of policy disagreements, Democrats trivialize a regime responsible for exterminating 6 million Jews in a war that resulted in the deaths of over 50 million people." "Nazi" becomes equivalent to simply "anyone who disagrees with us," just as the word "racist" becomes an equivalent to "anyone who says otherwise than us."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I might point out that there is more going on here than simple trivialization. There is also over-simplification and hypocrisy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It might be instructive to look at who the Nazis really were. The caricature that the modern American draws of Nazis is usually just as silly and stupid as the caricature drawn of them during World War Two by the Allies. The Nazis were real people, with real ideas, with a real effect on history and a real heritage from earlier history. They were not some purely evil force from hell unleashed upon the world in a vacuum. They emerged in a historical context and were, I might add, in large part embraced by the German people as a political and social step forward.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">The Nazis were a German political party that really came into their own after the effects of the American stock market crash reverberated around the world, helping to destabilize Germany's economy for the second time in a decade. Germany was suffering under the crushing load of war reparations imposed upon her by the victorious powers, embarrassed by an emasculated military, and plagued by political instability caused in large part by a strange power vacuum left by the First World War and the subsequent regime change. The time in Germany was ripe for a strong leader to seize the opportunity, and a man named Adolf Hitler did just that. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">Hitler and his party, the National Socialist party (or Nazi, as it was abbreviated), came to power between 1932 and 1933, promising a renewed Germany with a renewed military and most importantly, a renewed sense of purpose. The Nazis came to power in the midst of an economic and social crisis of which they made sure to took full advantage. Certain groups (communists, Jews, and Catholics being examples) were suppressed and harassed for their beliefs or ethnicity. Whole industries were placed under state supervision or outright control. Political power was consolidated, centralized.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">War became the new normal for Germany's new regime. Breaking promises, lying to other powers, invading other nations without sufficient reason, imposing harsh regulations, stymieing travel and transport also became the norm. Killing campaigns commenced, in an effort to rid the world of inconvenient or imperfect social groups. And all this in the name of the new ideology. Nazism was a worldview, a cult. Its leaders were dedicated to its survival and perpetuation, and carried out their work with efficiency and brutality.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">So I come back to the question of American politicians accusing one another of being Nazis, and I must make a series of blunt observations, the first of which is this: If Democratic politicians were the least bit self-reflective, and I think some of them are, then they would realize that in practice their own party platform embraces many of the things that they accuse Republicans of believing. In other words, many things that </span><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">are perennial favorites of the Democratic Party were things</span><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"> the Nazis espoused .</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">One would be the use of a crisis in order to enact government-empowering legislation against the citizenry. I can hold up numerous examples of mass shootings being used as political fodder for anti-gun lobbyists, bank failures and economic collapse as an excuse to take over various industries (most notably the Dodd-Frank legislation, the Auto Industry "bailout," and Obamacare), and intimidation of various groups for opposing said legislation (e.g. the HHS contraception and abortion mandate targeted against the Catholic Church, the media harassment of the Tea Party.) Also, I could note here the disinterest of the Obama administration in prosecuting groups like the New Black Panthers, who exist to harass and intimidate especially at voting places. Lastly, but certainly not least, I could mention not only that the Democratic Party has always been the friend of legalized and permissive abortion, but that they have now </span><i style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">officially</i><a href="http://www.democrats.org/democratic-national-platform" style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;" target="_blank"> enshrined it in their party platform</a><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">. Yes, the extermination of a particular social group, the unborn and somehow unfit to live, is now on the Democratic Party agenda.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">And all this in the name of "progress."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">However, this observation should not be understood apart from my second observation, which is that if Republican politicians were also the least bit self-reflective, which some of them must be, then they would also realize that in practice their policies and attitudes also reflect some favorites of the Nazi Party as well. They are far from innocent on this front.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">I could mention the insatiable appetite for war among many Republican politicians and presidents, cleverly wrapped in the tenuous guise of patriotism and idealism. </span><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"> U</span><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">nder Republican leadership, </span><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">American interference and intervention in two major countries in the Middle East has cost thousands of lives on both sides and earned us the hatred of many in the overseas Muslim community. The Republican blank-check approach of support to Israel has kept relations between the Israelis and the rest of the Middle East frosty at best, leaving Israel in a perpetual state of war of defense against her neighbors. Republicans are constantly clamoring for intervention in states like Libya as well, a country which has very little to do with anything connected to America except for oil.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">Let's not forget the associated evil of torture here, which is widely accepted as an effective technique of questioning amongst Republican lawmakers but disguised under cutesy politically-correct terms like 'enhanced interrogation,' plus laws like the Patriot Act which seek to invade the privacy of American citizens for the sake of supposed protection.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">I could also mention the rampant nationalism present in so many a Republican speech concerning the state of our economy and the perception of our nation in the eyes of the world. How often have Republican politicians looked down on the rest of the world as being beneath America, simply because other nations do not necessarily hold dear the same values we do, or follow the same constitutional system? We are told that America is the "greatest nation in the history of the world." Why? And does this give us the excuse to trample the rest of the world when it does not bend to our whims? </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">Add the Republican obsession with big business and you have a decent picture of the problem. Somehow, conservative Republican lawmakers believe that big government could not possibly be good, while at the same time proposing that big business could not possibly be bad. Big government bureaucracy = bad, big business </span><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">bureaucracy</span><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"> = perfectly fine. Dependence on government for one's livelihood is evil, depending on big business for one's livelihood is good. In other words, it is fine to be dictated to, just not by the usual suspects.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">All of these policies and attitudes are posited by each side as coming from deeply felt philosophical or moral sources. They are policies and attitudes based on ideals that do not necessarily have their grounding in truth.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">American government, at the moment anyways, tends almost inevitably either Republican or Democrat. In such a divided system, compromise is usually the key, and yet compromise has led so many times to the worst of both ideological worlds. Am I calling either side Nazi? No. But I am calling on them to look at what these positions accomplish in the end. As of this moment, we have both legalized abortion and unnecessary foreign wars, overly-centralized government and excessive dependence on both government and business. Democratic and Republican ideas, both enshrined in law and policy side by side.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.450000762939453px;">It would seem that by its own moral inertia, our country is sliding its way to a situation similar to Hitler's Germany. While America will probably never find or elect such a powerful crusader for the kind of violence and hatred that Adolf Hitler enflamed, America by compromise between two such lacking ideologies and between competing groups of power-hungry politicians, has created its own lukewarm version of the same.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-87197771587911683612012-09-11T01:48:00.000-07:002012-09-11T01:48:43.666-07:0011 Years This 11th<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/September_11_Photo_Montage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/September_11_Photo_Montage.jpg" width="185" /></a></div>
I wish I could write something to bring solace to those families that lost loved ones eleven years ago today, but I would probably fail in the attempt.<br />
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I can only say that I pray the victims rest in the peace of Christ, that the families of the victims heal from the pain of loss, and that we as a people do not lose ourselves in the pursuit of justice.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by UpstateNYer, via Wikipedia.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-57328488892224766672012-09-03T19:20:00.001-07:002012-09-03T19:20:37.835-07:00Eeeek!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkdO61UHJiHR7Oz5p4aJ6T_1QhWBb4-gZ3ugOMHqAGmhE1x1aBIpG1Qpj2yhfsiJIvPFpsRHUYmymbNjB_2PnhYlpYa7VUpaGp6uQWFvi00JCELE8g9_5JZItT1wTyzhIaJ8_9lmn-M-NZ/s1600/2012-09-02+13.13.38.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkdO61UHJiHR7Oz5p4aJ6T_1QhWBb4-gZ3ugOMHqAGmhE1x1aBIpG1Qpj2yhfsiJIvPFpsRHUYmymbNjB_2PnhYlpYa7VUpaGp6uQWFvi00JCELE8g9_5JZItT1wTyzhIaJ8_9lmn-M-NZ/s320/2012-09-02+13.13.38.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I had mentioned earlier that my wife had plastered the bathroom walls with morning-sickness vomit; well, this weekend was the payoff for all the months of pregnant illness and misery. After having five male grandchildren, my parents finally have been introduced to a change in the form of a girl. Yes, my wife had our first daughter. Once the impact of that sinks in, maybe I will share my thoughts. Otherwise, my two sons and I will look on in shock and awe as we draw a collective happy blank.<br />
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Cheers!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-26635027938095878682012-08-29T02:06:00.000-07:002012-08-29T02:06:49.460-07:00He Who Has Ears to Hear, Let Him HearI had the good fortune to find, whilst trolling the great Interweb for content worth sharing, a very special video on YouTube. It is a very short, simple video of a woman sitting in a chair holding a device to her head, while a technician slightly off-camera fiddles with a computer and gives softly spoken directions. The woman in the chair slowly begins to smile as the video plays, then suddenly breaks down in tears, an uncontrollable emotional reaction to what she has just experienced. Her next line is telling.<br />
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"I don't want to hear myself cry."<br />
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This woman was 29 years old and had been deaf from birth up until the moment that she sat down in that chair with the technician. It was the first time she had ever heard anything, and the first sound for her to hear had been the sound of her own voice. It was uniquely heartrending to watch.<br />
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I have read all four Gospels many times and have often wondered what it must have been like to witness a miracle performed by Christ for the people of Galilee. Many who were blind, deaf, and paralyzed from birth are reported by the Gospel writers to have been completely cured by Jesus. Those writers say things like "amazement seized all who saw it" and other such descriptive commentary on the reactions of people who witnessed the cure and the people who had been cured. Being healed of a lifelong illness in an instant, being "made whole" as the Gospel writers are fond of saying, was one of the most dynamic aspects of Christ for drawing people to Him.<br />
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This woman had been given the gift of hearing through a scientifically developed medical implant device in her ear, but I somehow think the reaction is similar to the instant gift of healing from God. The power of that experience is evident as you watch her hear not only herself for the first time, but also her husband speaking too. Her face and her actions bespeak volumes in both gratitude and amazement as the world around her is suddenly brought to a new kind of life.<br />
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I followed the YouTube <a href="http://sarahchurman.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">link to her blog</a> and liked what I saw, so Mrs. Sarah Churman's site is now a resident link on my Relevant Sites sidebar. I would encourage you to check it out, as well as watch the video below. Enjoy!<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LsOo3jzkhYA" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-65778999968110777292012-08-28T02:38:00.002-07:002012-08-28T02:41:43.999-07:00Parenting: Don't Take It Too Much To Heart!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I tell you, you will learn more about life and love in one year of parenting than you will learn in fifty years of living the single life.<br />
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There is no sufficient way to describe the feeling of having your beauty rest interrupted by a screaming child, nor are there words for the joy of having your three-year-old son throw himself against your leg and declare that he loves his "daddy." My wife just redecorated the walls and floor of our bathroom with morning-sickness vomit and I had to clean it up, but she also dragged two feisty boys to our rental agency to pay the bill because I was too busy to do it myself. My children draw with chalk on the sidewalk, then decide it will be cute to walk through it with bare feet. But my older son figured out on his own how to draw a stick figure. <br />
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As I write this, both of my sons are sleeping peacefully in the room behind me, looking so adorable that it hurts.<br />
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As I said, I can't really express in words just how much I have learnt about life and love through parenting. And of course, I shall be cliche and say that there is always more to learn and that four years as a parent is comparatively small. But I must share with you all a little something that I learned over the past three months, about being a parent but also about being a child. I found it surprising and maybe even a little harsh, but true nonetheless. <br />
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My observation is this: of course there are parents who neglect their children and deadbeat dads and some deadbeat mothers. But of the parents who actually give a crap about what happens to their children, I have noticed that many of them take their role <em>way</em> too seriously.<br />
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It may sound counter-intuitive, but it seems the more I obsess about my children's future and consciously instilling certain values and habits in my children, the less effect it seems to have. It seems like I have the most effect as a parent when I just sit down on the floor and give a damn about them enough to play with them. Children, I realize more and more, are simply sponges that soak up love as fast as it is squirted at them. And like a sponge, when they are squeezed (and tickled) they tend to leak it back out again.<br />
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The real reason I say to not take parenting too seriously, though, is because I now can say I know how it feels to be hated by my child, at least temporarily. I have been hit by both my sons before because they didn't agree with whatever I was doing for them as a parent. They have both yelled at me. And I have done my share of losing my temper back at them. But I found that when I let their temporary hatred roll off my back and let the child cool down, then something special happens. That something is an understanding of sorts, that they don't really hate you, and that you are not really as angry as you thought you were.<br />
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Maybe this post is rambling a bit, but I have been suffering from a severe lack of sleep, an overdose of my job, and the looming prospect of an unborn child who was due yesterday. I hope this is an encouragement to those parents out there who give a care about their kids and yet lose sleep over those same kids' development and future. I am beginning to understand both those concerns.<br />
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Don't sweat it, you are all probably better parents than you think you are. However, it never hurts to try even harder. The next time it's a choice between washing dishes and playing with the kids, play with the kids. Those moments are when you are building up emotional capital to draw on when the time to discipline comes. You'll probably both be grateful for it later.<br />
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Be Aware, and have fun.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-5823999540963587362012-08-25T22:39:00.002-07:002012-08-25T22:44:44.705-07:00Chicken or Egg?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Henney3991106635_18c9ef6d23_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Henney3991106635_18c9ef6d23_o.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I've had a question on my mind for some time now and it has been irritating me to the point that I feel the need to ask it of you, my audience, and see if we might come up with an answer. The question is a bit more complex than it seems at first blush, so bear with my explanation. My query comes as a two-part problem. It makes an assumption first, then asks an either/or question.<br />
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The assumption is (and there may be some disagreement here, so if you do please speak up) that multimedia in general (e.g. TV, movies, books, music, news, Internet) are as a whole moving in a downhill direction in regards to morally upright content. Acceptance of perverse moral ideas appears to be an ever-widening phenomenon in multimedia, as is the normalizing of aberrant behavior. That is my assumption. The question, then, is this: Is "the media" the <i>cause</i> of this downward slide in morality and decency, or is the media merely the cultural <i>expression</i> of already extant moral degradation and change? In effect, does the media simply report on the change?<br />
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I will offer my humble opinion that this is not only a perfectly valid, reasonable question to ask, but also an entirely necessary one. Where does this world of multimedia fit into our lives or is there no place for it? Does the media shape the culture, or is it the other way around? Or, put differently, is the media we ingest daily the soul of our culture or its body, the animating principle of our society or simply its proper expression? This whole issue is so fiendishly tangled together and I would like to have some fun untangling it.<br />
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As a good example, I would like to throw out there three TV shows that illustrate my point. One is an already-popular and critically-recognized show called <i>Modern Family</i>, the second is a show to be released this fall I think, called <i>New Normal</i>, and the third is an FBI crime show called <i>White Collar.</i> The first two are comedies that prominently feature gay couples attempting to raise children, surrounded by mostly understanding parents and relatives who may raise an eyebrow once in a while at the homosexuality at play in their midst, but who otherwise could care less. The third show involves a secondary character who is engaged to her lesbian lover. Now I believe homosexuality to be a grave moral problem, but regardless of your beliefs concerning homosexuality, it is hard not to see a connection here between the content of these shows and the current vigorous lobbying by homosexual groups nationwide for legal and societal acceptance of their particular orientation. These groups seek, in effect, to normalize the status of homosexuals in America. So do these shows then simply reflect this particular change in American public thinking, or are they the actual driver?<br />
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It is tough to say.<br />
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The news networks are famously known for being, at least historically, major drivers of public opinion. So if the presentation of the news can change opinions about differing subjects, then why not TV shows and movies? Do they not shape us in subtle ways and guide part of our decisions and actions?<br />
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But then, on the other hand, the major networks and studios are driven by a bottom line goal. Their goal is to make money, and lots of it. To make lots of money, one needs to be in tune with what the public wants to see and hear and then provide it <i>en masse</i>. So these companies must simply be responding to perceived public demand for this sort of content, living dangerously on the "cutting edge of societal evolution," to steal a line from Rush Limbaugh. Right?<br />
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Or, do these two things go hand in hand? Was the proverbial chicken first or the egg?<br />
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Feel free to leave your thoughts below!<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image by <span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">LGPER, via Wikipedia.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-57349391577501625512012-08-23T01:22:00.001-07:002012-08-23T01:22:30.040-07:00I Couldn't Have Said It BetterThank you, Nicole, for finding this!<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vjJ3BZ9U-SQ" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-84238276286327177462012-08-21T00:55:00.000-07:002012-08-21T00:55:28.297-07:00Savin' MeIf you haven't seen this music video yet, you should. One of the best I've seen.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_JQiEs32SqQ" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-90178300668150524862012-08-17T03:46:00.000-07:002012-08-18T01:39:51.017-07:00Gun Violence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Colt_Model_of_1911_U.S._Army_b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="197" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Colt_Model_of_1911_U.S._Army_b.png" width="320" /></a></div>
It seems like every time I thought about sitting down to my computer to write something about the shooting at the Aurora, Colorado theater, another shooting would pop up on the news. There have been no less than four nationally publicized shooting incidents in the past two months: Aurora in Colorado, the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, Texas A&M, and the Family Research Council in D.C. It's more than enough to make one sick.<br />
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And enough to raise major questions.<br />
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There was the usual fight between the "mainstream media" and the conservative talk-o-sphere, on the one side crying out for tighter gun control legislation and on the other side retorting that guns don't kill people, people do. The one position is impossible to maintain, the other is over-simplified and cliched.<br />
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To briefly address the first position, I might mention that there is some evidence that exists for low crime rates in cities and counties where guns are easily available. But even if you are unwilling to accept that evidence because of disagreement over the methodology of studying a law's effectiveness, you are basically forced to concede that, as the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/weekinreview/29liptak.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">New York Times</a> put it, "criminals are the people least likely to obey gun control laws, meaning that the laws probably have a disproportionate impact on law-abiding individuals." I might also mention countries like Switzerland that have enough armed citizens to make an anti-gun American cringe, and yet their <a href="http://guncite.com/swissgun-kopel.html" target="_blank">"gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept."</a><br />
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To address the other position, I have to characterize the conservative attitude as I see it before I really tackle it in order to make some sense. It seems to me that conservatives make these shooters out to be a couple of bad apples in a normally fine apple pie. The insistence is always that these shooters "acted alone", that they are "animals" ( a favorite expression of talk-show host Andy Dean), and that their actions reflect on them and them alone. The implication is that our consciences may remain unruffled by such mindless killing, because heck, we weren't the ones that did it, <i>they were</i>. Right?<br />
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I find this conservative position an awkward one to defend for several reasons.<br />
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The first is the assertion that these were only a couple of "bad apples." With the increasing number of these high-profile, increasingly creative, and wildly violent shooting sprees, I would say we have had something of a growing problem for several years. Add in the number of shootings involving the military in some way over the past three years and you begin to get the point. One shooting is an isolated incident, two is a coincidence, but three or more is a trend.<br />
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The second reason is that not only are these people not "animals" ( I find rationalization by denigration particularly offensive, Mr. Andy Dean), but many of them are relatively intelligent people who acted in a very methodical way.<br />
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The third reason is connected to the first: these individuals may have acted out these shootings by themselves with no accomplices, but as I mentioned before we seem to have a bit of a trend going. Culture and society have a huge influence over the actions of a human being, and to see so many of these shootings occur in such a short amount of time makes me think there might be a connection. Mightn't more than just the shooters have to carry some small share of the blame?<br />
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To illustrate the last point, I would point to America of the 1940's and 1950's. In those decades some of the favorite games for young boys were playing soldier, fighting mock battles with wood sword and fake guns, and pretending to be gun-slinging cowboys. Good guys would win, bad guys would die. Boys were taught to shoot and hunt with very little incident. Up until about 1966 with the <a href="http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/whitman/index_1.html" target="_blank">mass killings</a> committed by Charles Whitman from a bell tower in Texas, the kind of public massacre of the sort in the Colorado theater was virtually unheard of in the U.S. Now it seems there is a fresh shooting every couple months. Why?<br />
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I submit my humble opinion that our culture changed. Drastically.<br />
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Now, I am not a starry-eyed nostalgic who thinks that any time in America before 1960 was beautiful, good, and wholesome. There was plenty of wretchedness before 1960, as there has been plenty afterwards. But not this kind of psychotic violence. This is the sort of violence that holds the preciousness of life in reckless disregard, approaching other human beings with a cold calculating eye. Charles Whitman is a great example of this; he killed both his mother and his wife in the same 24 hours, systematically snuffing out their lives and then writing his thoughts about it. His murders and massacres were all methodical, studied, deliberate.<br />
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Perhaps this change came about partly in response to the Vietnam War, where more and more Americans became disillusioned with the bloody conflict and viewed it as a massive waste of human and material resources. Soldiers returning from the war certainly would have carried its mental scars. Perhaps the change occurred because of the cheapening of human life intertwined with the use of "the Pill." Man's own self became the center of existence, an attitude aided by the frustration of the sexual act and precipitating the sexual revolution. Pleasure would be sought at all costs, and consequence be damned.<br />
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The changing attitudes inaugurated in the 1960's I believe is the true culprit for these shootings. Shared heroin needles, multiple sexual partners, demented music, and complete moral relativism combined to form a toxic societal cocktail that would cripple or destroy the family lives of countless Americans. We still feel the effects of this lethal combination in the form of high abortion rates, countless teen pregnancies, general cultural ennui, and yes, these shooting massacres. Now it seems the only way to have one's five minutes of fame and importance is to do something shocking like killing people.<br />
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Yes, these killers are the ones doing the killing. They have only happened to settle on the gun as the instrument of massacre and the blame does not lie with the availability of the gun. But the blame also does not lie solely with the shooter. As I said before, boys have been playing with mock swords and guns for ages. Since the advent of adventure books and movies and television, good guys have been killing bad guys with guns, and vice-versa. But somehow John Wayne riding in and cleaning up town with a six-shooter was not what it would eventually take to incite young men (and some women) to kill their fellow citizens with firearms. It would be <i>Dirty Harry</i>, <i>The Last House on the Left</i>, and <i>Straw Dogs</i> with their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film#1970s:_The_.27New_Hollywood.27_or_Post-classical_cinema" target="_blank">morally ambiguous depictions of characters</a> that would create the heroes of the new generation. Suddenly the good guy was no longer so good, and the bad guy was sorta cool. And this trend has never really stopped. Think <i>The Italian Job </i>and the <i>Oceans</i> heist films. Those are relatively new films, and all are morally aimless. Revenge is the new justice, and the criminals are the good guys.<br />
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Once there was a sense of communal responsibility for protection of life and property in this nation. The young generation that volunteered to fight World War II was eager to defend, to serve, to go and maybe never come back. The Vietnam War-era generation was the opposite. And with this loss of eagerness to serve and defend comes a confusion about the role guns play in our lives. When we no longer have a robust sense of responsibility for our own safety because of our willingness to rely solely on government protection, then the firearm becomes a novelty item. When the gun loses its proper purpose at the same time that we lose our moral way as human beings, that is when it becomes truly dangerous.<br />
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Restore the concepts of duty, honor, and moral uprightness to the culture and the questions about gun control fade away. Besides the moral problems of our culture, America does have a certain fetish for guns presently speaking, probably because many Americans who own them see them more as fun items to own, shoot, and flaunt rather than as practical tools with a martial background. Almost all the male citizenry of Switzerland carry firearms and own firearms, but not because of machismo. They carry them because the <i>citizenry is the military</i>. I could almost guarantee that the average Swiss male between the ages of 18 and 45 could take on the typical YouTube gun-toting American in a shooting match and come out on top. The difference is in the reason for the gun. The American showing off his guns on YouTube owns those firearms in many cases just because they are cool. The Swiss male owns his because his life and his countrymen's lives depend on it.<br />
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Culture is a river that man is immersed in every second of every day. Clean the pollution from that river. Change society, not the legitimate tools that society uses. And pray for all the victims of all shootings, publicized or not. Those families are hurting more than they can ever express, and neither calling for gun control nor" blaming the person and not his weapon" gives them any extra ounce of comfort.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Sam Lisker, via Wikipedia.</span><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-45833536141150138082012-08-13T13:17:00.002-07:002012-08-13T13:17:33.472-07:00Maybe, Just MaybeThis is one of the most concise summaries of last year's and this year's presidential election shenanigans. Be forewarned, there is a bit of crude content about two-thirds of the way through, but I think the overall message is worth it.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/P3qCJHAaiKg" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-54141067193271363072012-08-08T13:14:00.000-07:002012-08-08T13:14:12.305-07:00Busy MonthI haven't forgotten about you all!<br />
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I do have an explanation for my absence; I am attempting to start a video production business on the side, along with my fifty million other jobs and tasks. Needless to say, it has taken up a huge portion of my time. The current video project had a very hard set deadline, because the client I was working with died in the middle of the project and I had to create a video for his funeral. It was a most intriguing month and I will probably write about it soon since it got me to thinking on many different tangents.<br />
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So, this is to show that I am still around and plan on releasing a bunch of different articles this week and next week about everything from distributism to the massacres in Colorado and Wisconsin.<br />
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Stay tuned and Be Aware!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-37331966998880241112012-07-26T03:37:00.001-07:002012-07-26T03:37:40.601-07:00The Power to Kill<div><p>A friend of mine found an <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/07/18/obamas_killings_challenged_again">intriguing article</a> concerning President Obama's administration and yet another lawsuit being brought to bear against it.</p>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3690543609772373769.post-44537755989554205182012-07-10T12:22:00.000-07:002012-07-10T12:22:41.412-07:00PWNDThis video pretty much speaks for itself. I'll let the kid, his sister, and his dad do the talking.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/I_BdAk7H6Lk" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0