A Couple of Classics for Christmas

Christmas Limericks


Way up in the Arctic one day

The elves had a big holiday

No toys would be made

Unless benefits paid,

And dental and severance pay!



The sleigh had broke down in the wet

And Santa was starting to fret

Then Rudolph said "Man,

I've a neat, cunning plan,

Involving a hot jumbo jet!"



Prancer was over the moon

The toy run would be over soon

That Vixen, the sinner,

Ate baked beans for dinner

And the others were starting to swoon.

Fatherhood

Fatherhood. What a wonderful thing. What a great privilege as well as great joy to be given the responsibility of little people. To know that you are loved unconditionally and that there is such a thing as unconditional love; to reawake one’s own wonderment. To see the world through one’s own child’s eyes, once again experiencing the wind, or imagination, or reading Robin Hood for the first time, as we all did when we were little. Fairy dust on cereal. The birthday fairy on the night before your birthday. The tooth fairy. Santa Claus. Seeing a self built model fly for the first time. And the list is endless and wonderful.

I was noticing at Mass, this past Sunday, a young father and his brood, two girls and a little boy, all under five. They were squirming towards the end but he was attentive and softly disciplining them when need arose. And I noticed above all his kissing and hugging his kids, especially his son.

One of the essential elements of “freedom” is that confidence that comes from the core of a nuclear family. One has a more difficult walk towards freedom if one is missing one or both parents; or if one of the parents is abusive—and that abuse can be through a number of ways. I was discussing with a sales manager of a phone company in Portland a few weeks back about his family. He too had three kids that were fairly young. I asked him how much he worked. He replied every day except Christmas. That can be taken a couple of different ways. Hopefully, the reason he has to work that much is to support his family and that it was not a matter of climbing the corporate ladder. Too often, through my corporate career, I was told it wasn’t quantitative time but quality time that mattered in regards to being with the family and the kids in particular. That’s a lie. Kids want to know that you’re there—especially fathers. I know, I’ve had three of my own. It’s that knowledge that the father is there that adds to the security of growing up and eventually embracing that avenue of “freedom”. Too often I’ve run across men who have climbed the corporate ladder to all kinds of success and yet in the end have wondered why there is such a distance between them and their kids; that they lost the kids’ teenage years or toddler years, or whatever years. There should not be enough money in the world to tempt a father from spending the maximum amount of time with his children. And from a selfish point of view, what comes back for that time is tenfold of what was spent.

But for all who know me…..I’d hate to have anyone tempt me with a new Cadillac…..

Quotes for the Day

“Find out just what the people will submit to and you’ve found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Frederick Douglas





"I'd give my right arm to be ambidexterous."

Yogi Berra

The State vs. the Individual

In human beings there is an inherent desire, want, need, for freedom. We are naturally attracted to the concept of “freedom”. Why is that? We are created in the “image and likeness” of God and according to Aquinas “freedom” is one of the attributes of God. We need freedom as a fish needs air in water to breathe. And like a fish out of water wanting to get back, a person who is caged in one fashion or another wants to rid himself of that cage, metaphorical or otherwise.

Over a recent dinner one of my sons brought up the aspect of government and the need for government. The question, or rather statement, that was brought into play was that we need government so that we can be free. I disagree with that statement. We need government to a lesser degree for order, i.e., driving down the right side of the street, ambulances being given the right of way, stop signs at cross streets, etc. Order is also necessary in society. But the more in the name of “order” that is either given or usurped by the hands of government the greater the chance that our freedoms will become less or even vanish. The total breakdown of freedom into totalitarianism has many examples through history, from Rome to Germany, the Soviet Union to Venezuela to Communist China. History is littered with societies, cultures, countries and peoples who have seen government consistently expand, gobbling up assets, money, land and most of all people with the end result of people being enslaved by the state.

The crux of our discussion came down to whom we should trust more in regards to the responsibility and cradle of freedom—the state or individuals. And where is and where should be that balance. Freedom cannot be separated from Truth. You cannot have a government stand long that talks about freedom of the individual when everyone, individually, is not protected by the same government. And government, by its very nature, once it begins denying an individual or a class of individuals protection from itself than it is just a matter of time before the remainder of that society will be in danger as well. With Nazi Germany it was the Jews that were under fire first, than Catholics, then Christians, and finally almost everyone who did not agree with the state. In the United States it is the unborn under assault with the elderly, through Obamacare, following. It’s a short jump from there to the marginalized which is anyone the state defines as not being enough of a contributing member to that state. And one thinks that will never happen? The state, in either its national form or local form is already trying to control us, especially the individual, more and more each day. Who would have thought ten years ago that California would want to ban fast food coupled when sold with toys. There is discussion to put a national tax on carbonated drinks because of the obesity problem in this country. Smoking will be outlawed soon on the University of Oregon’s campus. The individual and his or her freedoms as well as the ability to choose and the responsibility for those choices are quickly becoming obsolete by those who in some form represent the state. Wake up. If we are to trust something or someone to protect and maintain our freedoms it must first be we as individuals.

Quotes for the Day

"Without God, there would be no atheists."

G.K. Chesterton






"Mi casa es su casa. Mi esposa es.......mi esposa."

Marijo de Mattos 1989

Of Tolerance

Over the weekend one of my children made the statement that “tolerance” is a virtue. I began thinking about it and decided that maybe, before the discussion becomes any more heated, I should name the seven virtues—and then the seven deadly sins. But even before that, a little history. The virtues, to begin with, were initially four. They were constructed by a couple of the ancient Greek philosophers, specifically Aristotle and Plato. They are: temperance (not tolerance), wisdom, justice and courage. These were adopted by the Church Fathers and are referred to by their current name of the “four cardinal virtues”. Through the Catholic Church, they were in part, renamed and incorporated as and into the “Seven Heavenly Virtues”. Those are: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility. The Seven Heavenly Virtues were derived from the Psychomachia ("Contest of the Soul"), an epic poem written by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (c. AD 410) entailing the battle of good virtues and evil vices. The intense popularity of this work in the Middle Ages helped to spread the concept of holy virtue throughout Europe. Practicing these virtues is considered to protect one against temptation from the seven deadly sins, with each one having its counterpart. Due to this they are sometimes referred to as the contrary virtues. Each of the seven heavenly virtues matches a corresponding deadly sin. The corresponding “deadly sins” are: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.

What triggered the discussion was the Gospel of Sunday last.

(Luke 19:1-10) At that time, Jesus came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town. Now a man there named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man, was seeking to see who Jesus was; but he could not see him because of the crowd, for he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. When he reached the place, Jesus looked up and said, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.” And he came down quickly and received him with joy. When they all saw this, they began to grumble, saying, “He has gone to stay at the house of a sinner.” But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house because this man too is a descendant of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.”

This Gospel is about forgiveness specifically. Jesus was not being 'tolerant' of Zacchaeus, He was forgiving Zacchaeus. And there is a huge and important distinction. To be ‘tolerant’, coming from Funk and Wagnall, is to bear, sustain or to tolerate another’s beliefs, practices, etc. Tolerance denotes or intimates no change but accepting the individual as he or she is. It is not a virtue for a number of reasons. In “Charity” Christ forgave Zacchaeus and expected him to change—which he did, especially in regards to his interior life manifested by what he did exteriorly. Christ did not ‘tolerate’ Zacchaeus’ living and especially his work practices. If He had done that then Zaccaeus would not have changed and given half his wealth, made amends for this extortion, etc. The same can be said about the Lord’s encounter with the prostitute. In His response He asks the gal if no one has condemned her. She replies that no one has. He then says that neither does he condemn her. But He also adds that she is to commit this sin no more. He is asking for change. He is not being tolerant of her behavior.

Which brings me to the final point. Oftentimes we confuse the aspect of “condemnation” of a person with what that person is doing in regards to living a moral or ethical life. We are all called to preach the Gospel. Part of that is making sure that the people that come into our lives everyday know the love of Christ. And part of that love is to, if one is truly concerned about that person making it to the Kingdom, help that individual understand, and there are a myriad of ways of doing this and one definitely not by condemning, that he or she could possibly be driving their soul off the metaphorical cliff into the reality of hell. To not do that is against the virtue of Charity. But it is Christ and Christ alone who has the power of salvation in regards to heaven or hell.

Liberals and Liberalism

The very definition of liberalism, or being a liberal, is "liberty" or freedom. I find it so incredibly paradoxical that most "liberals" have no idea what their label means, first of all, and that they take the utmost extremes in silencing anyone who is opposed to their view point. The big question is, "why?" Why, if you espouse "freedom" in almost every avenue of life, would you not want to give the other individual or group the "freedom" to put forth speech, discussions, plans, arguments, whatever? At the very least to test one's own theories? And yet, what I have found most often, is a critiquing, a looking down on that person or persons who do not agree--sometimes vehemently looking down, with no reason to sustain their own liberal thought--they walk away, or shout, or throw insults. I think I know the reason. Truth. One cannot have real "freedom" without coupling that with "truth". And I have found that most people, including myself at one time or another, are afraid of the "truth". Why? Because it involves change. When one comes to the truth of anything, one normally has to change at the very least his thought process and at the worse his actions. It becomes a struggle of our definition of "self-hood". If we have to leave our preconceived notions behind, somehow we have to also leave our self, sometimes what we believe to be our very core being. And that involves pain.

Yet the adage that "the Truth will set you free", is in itself freeing. Once one knows the truth, to stray is to go back to the darkness, the past, the yesteryear when we thought we had it right. But we didn't.

Truth is what all human beings were designed to seek out, and once found, to follow. To turn away or deny that is to seek darkness and even greater pain; with the final caveat of never seeing the light.

But Christ has resolved that. We do occasionally turn from truth, from light. G.K. Chesterton was once asked why he became a Catholic at age forty-four. He replied that he wanted his sins forgiven. And he wanted to know for sure. Christ does that. He forgives us turning away from truth, which is ultimately Him, to put us back on the path to "Truth" and ultimately to "Freedom"!

For Freedom

“For freedom Christ set us free.” He will not force us to believe in Him. Similarly, “no sign will be given” if people presume that the marvel of a miracle will convince them to believe in Jesus Christ. “There is something greater than Jonah here.” Only when we expect something greater than we can imagine or plan does faith in Christ make sense. Freedom leads us to that conviction.

The Core Issue

The future will be what we make it; let us reflect on this thought so that it may motivate us to act. Especially, let us realize that all collective reform must first be individual reform. Let us work at transforming ourselves and our lives. Let us influence those around us, not by useless preaching, but by the irresistible power of our spirituality and the example of our lives.

Elisabeth Leseur

An Open Letter to Mr. Chris Dudley and Mr. Bruce Hanna

September 17, 2010

Mr. Chris Dudley and Mr. Bruce Hanna




Dear Mr. Dudley and Mr. Hanna:

I was at your meeting the other night in Cottage Grove. I was the one who initially got up and told you both what scares me more than anything, that both of you are not for really “cutting” government, but for slowing its growth, as you Mr. Dudley stated. There is a direct correlation between the expansion of government and the decrease of the business community in Oregon. There is also a correlation between the expansion of government and the reduction of freedom. Ultimately, if government wins out one of two things will happen: a) economically Oregon will do a reset where PERS and pretty much every other contract of the state will be null and void or negotiated downward to where, in a bankruptcy, income must zero out with outgo; b) currency will implode and this country will be bathed in blood. I reiterate. You both concern me in that both of you remarked that you’re going to try to slow the growth of government down—not reduce it. That will not save us.

Secondly, you, Mr. Dudley, talked about schools and supporting them. You didn’t speak of anything specific. I’m assuming that you’re talking about throwing more money at the problem. I find it VERY interesting that you mentioned we’re forty-seventh in state ranking in the country in regards to how our schools function and how successful they are in standardized testing. You failed to mention that we are third, if my stats are correct, in spending. The problem again is two fold. You have PERS that is way over funded—or maybe I should correct myself, that it is way under funded. Secondly, a full third of the education, and here I’m speaking directly of the teachers and administrative personnel, are people in administration. Talk about top heavy. The OEA as well as the NEA do not give a damn, about the kids, the students. I’m an ex-teacher myself, and an OEA past president. I began my own business over twenty years ago. I’ve seen both sides of the fence. And very honestly, when it comes to the political or educational thought in this state and country, lack of critical thought is the reason that we’re in this ‘fix’. These kids are no smarter or “dumber” than any other child in this country. In some ways they’re smarter than our generation. But the school problem will not be solved until freedom of choice is given back to the parents—that coupled with a heavy, healthy dose of critical thought as part of the core curriculum. And that is only going to happen if you can control the unions. Maybe you both were speaking from an election cycle but I believe you will not get elected unless you specifically say what you’re going to do to break their grip on the education of this state’s children. Mine are through school. And if I had to do it over again I would probably not even send them to Marist and St. Paul’s but would home school them.

Thirdly, the Oregon Health Plan is a joke. Again, a boondoggle against the people of Oregon. Forced charity is not charity at all. The only reason for the existence of government is to protect its citizens from the unlawful. I was forced a year ago to call our Lane County Commissioner because he, a “Republican”, was siding with the rest of the Commissioners in regards to raising taxes. The reason why? Because there were car thieves working the Cottage Grove area and the Sheriff’s department had no money to patrol down here. He, the commissioner, made the excuse, and I think to some degree it was valid, that the governor had mandated and taken basically the majority of revenues ear marked for law enforcement in Lane County to fund the Oregon Health Plan. Law enforcement should be the number one priority. Individuals and churches need to take care of their neighbor socially, health wise, and the hungry as much as possible. It is the individual who is responsible not the government. And what a wonderful job the Oregon Health Plan has done. I read about a gal, a couple of years ago, who couldn’t get her experimental treatment for cancer paid for but the state was willing to pay for her suicide drugs.

Finally, and above all I applaud you, Mr. Dudley, for getting OLCC out of the control of the government. But that is a small proposed step. I would also laud you both if you would work in getting the Feds out of our hair as well. It seems at every turn they are dinging us for increased fees and taxes—everything from imposing an audit on us mortgage brokers every two years, and this is the state by the way—and then making us pay for their fees. The “you know who” doesn’t even do that. A common sense approach would be to audit only if there’s a complaint or problem. And then there’s the new ban on alcohol at Cottage Grove and Dorena Lakes. Ridiculous. The list is endless both from a federal and state’s direction against the people of this state and this country. And yes, I’m ticked.

If you want some common sense solutions please feel free to call. I will be more than happy to give my advice par gratis for the people of this state.


Sincerely,

Tim Crawley

St. Augustine and the Gift of the Person of Christ

By Father Richard Veras


One of the graces of living in a time in which so many people have doubts and misconceptions about Christianity is that it challenges Christians to be more aware of why they believe what they believe. In one of his sermons, Saint Augustine warns us against looking back at past ages as if things were easier then. Augustine himself had to guard his own flock and the entire Church against heresies which came from priests and preachers claiming to speak the truth.

The person of Jesus
In correcting the heresy of Pelagianism, which claims that human freedom is in no need of grace to follow God’s law, Augustine wrote, “This is the horrendous and hidden poison of your error: that you claim to make the grace of Christ consist in his example and not in the gift of his person.”

When I first read this quote many years ago it stuck with me because it was such a jarring correction. How many of us reduce Jesus to a good example? It seems to me that it’s quite commonplace; in fact it can even seem proper and pious. Augustine, however, warns that it is poisonous. Let us consider some of those who encountered Jesus in order to see the truth of Augustine’s warning.

Think of Mathew the tax collector who, like other tax collectors, probably cheated many of his own people while he worked for the Romans. His tax collecting must have put him in contact with many honest workers making an honest living. Matthew had these examples in front of him on a regular, perhaps even daily basis. Apparently this parade of examples never did much to sway Matthew.

Think of the woman caught in the act of adultery. Certainly she must have been acquainted with a great many women who, as far as she knew, had not committed adultery. These living examples of faithfulness and chastity were not enough to stop her from an act that could have led to her stoning.

What changed these sinners? It was the person of Jesus. He looked at Matthew and said, “Follow me.” He looked at the woman and said, “I don’t condemn you…” They were changed by the indefinable, irreducible, unimaginable person of Jesus Christ. The experience of their encounter could not be adequately put into words, but it is as if this is the person they had always been waiting for, perhaps without even knowing it. Yet when he came into their lives there was recognition, as if to say, “Yes, it’s you, something in me knew you were there, knew you would come!” He didn’t look at their sin, or their failings, or their potential, he looked at them in truth and love as they had never been looked at before. He took them much more seriously than they had ever taken themselves.

Wanting to be with Jesus
In front of the person of Jesus, their thought was probably not, “Now I can finally learn how to be good!” It was probably not even, “Now my sins can be forgiven.” What filled them was Jesus. There was simply the joy, fulfillment, happiness of him; the fact that he was with them, he desired to be with them, he overabundantly loved them without measure. A love that was truer than any sentimental idea or approximation of love they had ever had. Matthew didn’t follow to learn to be good, he followed because he wanted to be with Jesus.

When we reduce Jesus to an example, we forget about the core of our own person, which desires so much more than to be approved. We also ignore his love for us because we reduce God to a lawgiver, and forget that he is the Father. Jesus came to reveal to us God’s Fatherhood. Goodness is to live in the Father’s love, depending upon him for everything. I can’t live in that love without experiencing that love. For it is not a love I can create or imagine. I need Jesus. More than his example, or his words, or his miracles, I need him! Reducing Christ to an example is poisonous because it can keep me from humbly begging him to be with me; or it can make me think I have to postpone this begging until I somehow deserve it on my own, with nothing to help me but an abstract example.

Think finally of Our Lady. She is conceived without sin. Theoretically she has no need of good examples. Yet no one is more conscious of her need for Jesus than Mary. It was not the duty off a good mother that kept her with her Son right up to the cross; it was her love, her need, her awareness that she is made for God. That true happiness, i.e., blessedness, is possible only through him, with him, and in him. She is blessed not because she follows a good example; she is blessed because the Lord is with her. She is full of grace because the Lord is with her.

May the Lord be with you, not figuratively through example, but really through the gift of his person.

Quotes for the Day

Saint Jerome penned these lines: "If an offense comes out of the truth, it is better that the offense come than that the truth be concealed."

This is supposedly attributed to President Truman. "How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if he had taken a poll in the land of Israel? What would have happened to the Reformation if Martin Luther had taken a poll? It isn't polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It is right and wrong and leadership."

Prop 8 "Woe to you that call good, evil and evil, good."

“Woe to you that call good, evil and evil, good….”

The overturning of Prop 8 in California is an abomination. Because someone says something is so, based on an interpretation of law, does not make it so. Walker, the Federal judge in the case, used nothing but subjectivity and his own illicit lifestyle to support and define what “marriage” should be, that it makes no difference whether a man is “married” to a man, or a woman to a woman; or for that matter a human being to a donkey or whatever. What about a “marriage” for three people? Polygamy? Many wives?

I have been saying for years, to anyone who would listen—and particularly to my children, WHO really don’t listen—that the state should be completely out of the “marriage business”. Why do we have to take blood tests anymore? Register with the state at all? It’s none of the state’s business. Recently I was challenged on this in that this individual questioned, “….well, what happens if there’s a divorce? Who’s going to be the arbiter of such a thing? What about the children?” (Now the children are what kept Marilyn and me together all of these years. Neither one of us wanted custody. An old joke.) The same arbiter that would or could be delegated to any contract. My contract with Marilyn was that she would get everything. Since I didn’t get a dowry when we were married thirty-three years ago, people might say that I would receive the short end of the “marriage” stick. But then they haven’t had to live with me.

Marriage, especially in the traditional Judeo-Christian philosophy, has always been between one woman and one man. It is also part of the Natural Law. For one judge to determine the definition of marriage based on his personal beliefs, feelings, and total disregard for everything from tradition to culture, is arrogant at best and evil at worse. Do not call evil, good, nor good, evil.

Here’s what Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM, who is the preacher to the papal household, says about the Union of Marriage:

The analogy between human marriage and the union of Christ and the Church lies in the fact that both are based on love: “Christ loved the Church.” But what exactly did He love, we ask ourselves, since at the moment in which He gave up his life, the Church did not yet exist? The exegetes explain that He loved “the Church preexistent in God in virtue of His pre-temporal election and determination.” Christ loved the Church with the same love with which God loved humanity in creating it. Let us listen to how Catherine of Siena describes the love of something that does not yet exist:
“Eternal Father, how did you come to create this creature of yours?....(Your own) fire, then, compelled you. O ineffable love, though in your light you saw all the iniquities your creature was to commit against your infinite goodness, you pretended not to see, and set your eyes on the beauty of your creature with whom you fell in love like a fool or one drunk with love, and in love you gave it being in your image and likeness.”
Gabriel Marcel says that according to Christian metaphysics, “to be is to be loved.” The creature exists because it has been loved. This is especially true of the Church. She exists inasmuch as she is loved.

The Natural Law Part IX

Why do I need anything but conscience?

Reason is implanted in us by God so we will know what our proper end is. What is conscience and how does it walk hand in hand with reason—either against or for? Double effect is when some action can have both a good and bad effect. Every year on January 22nd you can find people in Washington, D.C., gathered around the Washington Mall. They are doing one of two things: either praying for the end of abortion in this country and this world or they are praying in thanksgiving to God for allowing abortion in this country and this world. Both cannot be true. One has to be false. To be truly free one must be in the “Truth”. Truth is the condition of freedom. Conforming to truth of your car gives you the “freedom” to use that car. If you abuse that freedom and put water in the gas tank you no longer are free to use that car—the car won’t run on water.

The Natural Law is the story of how things work. In ‘Veritas Splendour’ John Paul II states that morality and faith cannot be separated from the Law of God. Then how does ‘conscience’ play into everything? Conscience is an act of judgment. It is a faculty of your intellect to judge the objective rightness or wrongness of a particular act.

One of the major points that John Paul II made in Veritas Splendour and Benedict XVI confirmed is necessity of freedom being connected to the truth and the necessity of conscience being regarded as a judgment as to the objective rightness or wrongness of an act rather than just a decision.

In a proper interpretation of conscience one is making a judgment as to whether an act is right or wrong in accordance with an objective standard. If you are a relativist than conscience becomes just your will, your decision, with no relationship to truth. Both Popes have pointed out that that is contrary to authentic freedom.

So therefore understanding forming a conscience must be very important (just like buying a car, how would one go about doing that?) There are two steps involving your conscience in making any type of moral decision. The first is a well formed conscience, the second an informed conscience. And that is the great advantage with the Magesterium of the Church. The Magesterium of the Church is the teaching authority of the Church and is in existence to interpret the Natural Law.

One must follow his or her conscience if it’s clear.

If one is in doubt whether and action is right or wrong one should take the safer course. And if one cannot resolve the doubt than one must follow the safer course (if I do or think that an act of theft and say it’s good, that is “false”. Conversely the reverse is true).

Double effect of conscience—one good and one bad. Can one take two actions? A guy comes at me with a knife and the only way to save my life is pull out my gun and shoot him. Can I do it? There are only two elements that condone taking a life, a just war and capital punishment, and both are heavily restricted in moral terms by the teaching of the Church. I’m not obligated to hold my life more cheaply than his (the dude with the knife). My intent has to be to save my life, not the intent of killing him. Another case of Double Effect: ectopic pregnancy or cancer of the uterus; to save the life of the mother the womb has to be removed first with the effect of the baby dying. Is it moral? Yes. There are four reasons or requirements:
a) The action is good
b) There is sufficient justification of action
c) The bad effect is not the intent of the action
d) The good effect is the intent of the action.

Generally civil and criminal law does not apply to double effect. You are responsible for the possible consequences of your voluntary action. Assisted suicide? Can the state prevent it? Yes, because the intent of the assisting doctor is always to cause death. The state can forbid assisted suicide but allow palliative care (double effect) is legitimate even though it may cause death. To relieve pain even though that relief may cause a shortening of the patients life has all four of the above requirements. Intent is everything and may sometimes be difficult to determine. Euthanasia is moving beyond the Natural Law because of intent.

Good Fruit of the Good Tree

Good Fruit of the Good Tree

Take courage…for when God engrafted himself into us barren trees by joining his divine nature with our humanity, he so strengthened our reason and our love for him that we are drawn to love by the power of love. Sensuality has been so weakened that it can do nothing to us if we are willing to make use of reason. It is clear that our flesh in Christ’s humanity, taken from Adam’s stock, has been so whipped and tortured with anguish and derision an insult even to the shameful death of the cross, that it ought to make our own flesh so submissive that it would never resist or defy reason and God.

Oh boundless love, gentlest Jesus! How could anyone not be softened and melted by you? Oh welcome engrafting, incarnate Word, Son of God, you drove out the worm of Adam’s ancient sin. You got rid of its wild fruit—for sin had made our garden so wild that it could produce no life-giving fruit of virtue. Oh sweet fire of love, you so engrafted and bound God into humanity and humanity into God that the sterile fruit that had dealt us death became sound and productive. And so it will always give us life so long as we are willing to make use of the power of reason…

Look at the sweetness of the tender fruit, the spotless Lamb, the seed sown in Mary as in a lovely field!...Our rational will has been made even stronger by God’s union with humanity.

I beg you in Christ gentle Jesus to lift your love, your affection, your desire up high. Take hold of the tree of the most holy cross and let it be planted in the garden of your soul, because this is a tree laden with fruits, the true solid virtues. For you see very well that beyond God’s union with his creature he has joined himself to the most holy cross. And he wills, he insists, that we too join ourselves to this sweet tree in love and desire. Then our garden cannot help producing sweet and tender fruit.

St. Catherine of Siena

Saint Catherine of Siena (1380), Doctor of the Church, was a Dominican, stigmatist, and a papal counselor.

The Natural Law Part VIII

How does the Natural Law tell us what to do?

John Paul II used Christ as the very definition of Truth. The objective moral standard is a Person—Christ. I can just hear the comments in regards to, “well what if you don’t believe in Christ”? We’ll get to that later.

God made human nature. He knows us backwards and forwards. He also is about “super abundant justification”. What does that mean? Every act of an Infinite Person has infinite value. The Father loves us so infinitely and wants us to understand how important it is to make the right choices so much so that he allowed his Son, The Christ, to go through crucifixion. Why? Because of His Love He wants us to be eternally with Him in perfect happiness.

The Natural Law is what He gave us in our nature knowable to our reason. The Natural Law shows us how to act and to make sure He gave us the Ten Commandments which are specifications of the Natural Law. And finally, He gave us the Church, which is the Body of Christ, in order to provide answers to us in order that we know what exactly to do, and how we are to conduct our lives. The Church is a great grace and gift.

You can know truth. There is self-evident truth; through speculative reason we know the principle of contradiction—a thing can’t be and be at the same time under the same aspect. One example is that the same action cannot be morally right and morally wrong at the same time. All things seek the good through practical reason; that is what is the good and what is in accord with the thing’s nature. What is our good? We naturally know the basic inclinations of human nature are good. What are they?

1) To seek the good including the highest good which is God.
2) To preserve self.
3) To preserve the species
4) To live in community
5) And to know and to choose.

Why is suicide objectively wrong? Because through reason we can see it violates “to preserve self”. But, because someone commits an objective wrong does not mean that he’s subjectively culpable. Culpable means one knows an act is “wrong” and then has the will to decide to do it and then acts. It’s one of the most intense arguments that I have with my children. “You’re judging people, Dad.” No, I’m not. Why? Because the action maybe objectively immoral but for some reason that individual, which I am not privy to, commits it anyway. Judgment has been given to Christ, and Christ alone. An example would be someone stealing a loaf of bread from a store. Objectively, he is stealing. But throw into the mix that individual would starve to death or his children would starve to death if he had not taken that loaf puts it in a completely different light. How do we know something is wrong? Because Christ has given us His Church which is the Body of Christ, to help us to know. The Magesterium of the Church, which simply means the teaching authority, is the body that gives us the way to know the applications of the Natural Law. The Church is the authentic interpreter of the Natural Law; the Vicar of Christ as the bishop in union with Christ.

The Natural Law is in context, or in union, with the Lawgiver. A single act can’t be both right and wrong, moral and immoral, true and false, at the same time under the same conditions. Does the Natural Law change? No. But its applications change. If you borrow something you’re required to return it. Suppose you borrow a gun from a friend to go target shooting. Before it’s time to give it back you find out that the friend wants to murder someone. You have a greater obligation to keep the pistol. This is a facet of the Natural Law; higher duty or obligation.

St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Paul II later, made the statement that sin can darken one’s intellect. The result of original sin is the concupiscence or disorder in our nature where we have difficulty in reasoning towards the correct result. St. Thomas asks his first question in his “Summa” whether or is there something else man needs besides philosophy. The answer is ‘yes’. Revelation is needed with regards to those things we can not figure out by our selves such as the “Trinity”. Revelation is also needed for those things that we can figure out. Why? Because habitual sin, that of turning consistently and constantly away from our Maker, the Lawgiver, dims our intellect and makes it difficult for one to reach the right conclusion as to the Natural Law. The Magesterium becomes all the more important. It is a great gift and not an adversary. People differ in regards to what the Natural Law means (it’s all a matter of private judgment; present minds differ; relativism and boiling down to a matter of consensus. There are churches today that vote on moral actions such as gay marriage, abortion, etc.). That is another reason why we have been given the Magesterium which is the authentic interpreter of the Natural Law.

One of the problems of law is that it has been reduced to consensus, that everything is up for a majority vote, including moral principles. This is legal positivism. Legal positivism makes the statement that all law by the mere factor that it is law means that it’s valid law. St. Aquinas once again states that if a man made law is contrary to the Natural Law the man made law becomes void. We need to know this standard which the interpreter of the Natural Law is necessary not only for oneself doing a bad thing but also being wrongfully cooperative with that unjust law.

There are two types of cooperation with evil: one, you intend to support the evil act and the second is material cooperation or the ability to facilitate the evil act of someone else but we don’t intend to do that evil act or support it formally ourselves.

The Natural Law Part VII

In the encyclical, “Veritatis Splendour” (The Splendor of Truth), states that we, the human race, i.e. mankind for all of you politically incorrect, can actually know our own nature and know objectively what is right and wrong action. We’re not talking now of subjective culpability as individuals. “Do good. Avoid evil.”

The directions for “us” and about “us” by our Manufacturer are in the Natural Law and supplemented by the Ten Commandments. What actually is the purpose of the Natural Law? The purpose lies in two aspects, one of knowing more readily and then the capability of choosing, based on that knowledge, our eternal happiness.

Through reason we can know objective Truth. On the opposite hand, relativism can turn into a dictatorship in the moral sense as well as through all of our other senses. Think of the Natural Law in terms of ‘reason’ but also in terms of the Lawgiver, our manufacturer.

On True Freedom

Humans need freedom. As slaves, fettered and confined, they are bound to deteriorate. We have spent a great deal of thought and time on external freedom; we have made serious efforts to secure our personal liberty and yet we have lost it again and again. The worst thing is that eventually humans come to accept the state of bondage—it becomes habitual and they hardly notice it. The most abject slaves can be made to believe that the condition in which they are held is actually freedom.
During these long weeks of confinement I have learned by personal experience that a person is truly lost, is the victim of circumstances and oppression only when he is incapable of a great inner sense of depth and freedom. Anyone whose natural element is not an atmosphere of freedom, unassailable and unshakable whatever force may be put on it, is already lost; but such a person is not really a human being any more; he is merely and object, a number, a voting paper. And the inner freedom can only be attained if we have discovered the means of widening our own horizons. We must progress and grow, we must mount above our own limitations. It can be done; the driving force is the inner urge to conquer whose very existence shows that human nature is fundamentally designed for this expansion. A rebel, after all, can be trained to be a decent citizen, but an idler and a dreamer is a hopeless proposition.
Human freedom is born in the moment of our contact with God. It is really unimportant whether God forces us out of our limits by the sheer distress of much suffering, coaxes us with visions of beauty and truth, or pricks us into action by the endless hunger and thirst for righteousness that possess our soul. What really matters is the fact that we are called and we must be sufficiently awake to hear the call.

Father Alfred Delp, S.J.

Father Delp was condemned to death and died in 1945 in Germany during World War II.

Marriage Part IV

Marriage: A Path to Eternal Life


Again, from that pamphlet I’ve been telling you about:

“Happiness in marriage is something which must be earned; it does not come as a free bonus with the marriage license. It must be worked for. It must be paid for with self-sacrifice. One might visualize marriage as a pyramid—with pleasure, joy and happiness forming two of the sides, and suffering, forbearance and forgiveness forming the other two—while love is the crowning apex of it all.
Even as suffering is part of every individual life, so it is also part of the life of every family. There are times when sickness enters the home and threatens the life of one of the members. Everyone knows what pain and anguish the entire family goes through then. There are times when the family finances are low. It is then that the parents have to save and stint and deny themselves many things they would like to have, just in order to be able to secure the bare necessities for their young ones. Love demands many sacrifices. But it is also rich in blessings for those who realize the true meaning of Christian charity. They need only to turn their eyes to the crucifix on the wall in their home and remember that Christ sacrificed Himself for love of us, even unto death upon the Cross.
With this imprint of God’s love upon their hearts, young couples embarking upon marriage have nothing to fear as long as they keep the Divine Commandments and the precepts of the Church. Their marriage will be blessed and joyful. It will not “go on the rocks” because it will be built upon the unshakable rock of faith and sacramental grace.
When young Tobias feared to take Sara as his wife because of what he had heard about the others who had married her, the Angel Raphael assured him: “Hear me, and I will show thee who they are over whom the devil can prevail. For they who in such manner receive matrimony as to shut out God from themselves, and from their mind, and to give themselves to their lust, as the horse and mule, which have not understanding, over them the devil hath power”. (Tob. 6:16-17)
Thus, married couples should remember that their most beautiful and most elevating duty toward each other is to provide not only for each other’s earthly welfare, but also for each other’s eternal welfare. Marriage can be a means of sanctification, and it is a great joy for a married couple, as they grow older, to be able to say that they have helped each other attain everlasting happiness. Toward the end of life, the wife might say to her husband, “I want to thank you for loving me and providing so well for me in all things.” And the husband could return the compliment and say, “I have to thank you for being such an understanding wife and for making our home so pleasant.” But the greatest joy of all will come in Heaven, when they can say to each other, “I have you to thank for helping me gain eternal life. I am grateful to you for keeping my soul safe for God.”

It’s interesting, to say the least and for me, that this is almost verbatim what my mother answered when I asked her what attracted her to Dad and what before Dad was she looking for in a husband. To get her to heaven. I thought she had achieved that with her oldest child. Obviously I was wrong.

Marriage Part III

Marital Obedience

Now this will really tick some people off. But I’ve never really cared about being PC. I DO care about Truth. And my experience has related well with the following from the same pamphlet I’ve quoted in Part II.

“Saint Paul, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, gave divinely inspired advice for happiness in marriage, writing, ‘Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of his body. Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things.” (Eph. 5:22-24—I find it very interesting that this passage of the New Testament is rarely, if ever, preached on from the pulpit. I think there is one main reason. That it is not understood. The second reason is that it is incendiary. Truth cannot be negotiated or patronized. Sometimes language gets in the way but on the whole it is Truth that people want to hear—and hear they must at oftentimes a great cost, i.e. change of life style, behavior, confrontation of self, etc.)
Most modern brides resent the idea of being subject or obedient to their husbands. But let them stop to consider this calmly. This idea is not “old-fashioned.” Rather, it is ancient, as ancient as the very creation of the world, and God Himself is the author of it. Where there is harmony, there is law and order. The man leads, the woman follows—carrying with her, like an alabaster box of precious ointment, the secret wisdom of her heart. And a woman is truly wise who recognizes the necessity of man, as husband and father, being the head of the family. When a woman usurps a place that is not hers by right of nature, disorder and discord work havoc in that household. A man’s natural reaction, if his wife will not let him exercise his prerogative of being the head of the family, is to slip out from under the yoke, and let her carry both her burden and his!
Sara followed Tobias (in the Old Testament if you didn’t know what this passage was referring to) without a murmur into a strange land, far from the house of her childhood. Centuries later, the Mother of Our Lord, Mary Immaculate, set an example of obedience and humility for all wives and mothers in ages to come when she followed St. Joseph—to Bethlehem, to Egypt and again to Nazareth—without a question, without arguing or complaining, accepting the part assigned to her by the Divine Will.
Perhaps someone may quickly protest, “These men were Saints. My husband is far from being a Saint!” Obedience and submission in a wife, is not to be confused with downright slavery or servitude to an unworthy husband. For, as St. Paul said, “The husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church.” (Eph. 5:23) From this we are to understand that the wife obeys her husband for the sake of Christ and she obeys him only in those things that Christ approves or that Christ permits. Consequently, the husband cannot order her around just as he pleases, nor can he expect her to cater to every one of his whims and fancies. Christ would not approve of that. (Why? Because He came as servant to us all, even commanding his apostles that if they wanted to be first in heaven then they needed to serve, to be the lowest.)
Just as it is in no way humiliating for the Church to obey Christ, so also it should be in no way humiliating for the wife to obey her husband. Besides, this admonition, if borne in mind before marriage, would prevent many a young girl from rushing into an unsuitable marriage (and for that matter a guy as well. For our natural instinct is not to serve but to be served). For she would stop to consider whether the man she expects to marry actually has the qualities of character which merit her lifelong respect and obedience.
In the same Epistle, St. Paul instructs husbands to love their wives “as Christ also loved the Church, and delivered himself up for it: that he might sanctify if.” (Eph. 5:25-26) The husband must love his wife and show the same boundless and self-sacrificing devotion for her that Christ showed for the Church, even to the extent of gladly giving up his own life for her, if need be. If the husband shows this love and lives up to this side of the contract, the wife will not have any difficulty in keeping her love and respect for him.”

Another couple of caveats: I have found in my life that there are basically two elements that Marilyn wants from me—she wants to feel that she is loved first and primarily, and secondly, she wants to feel protected. Through reason, and the gals that I dated in prehistoric times, I think the same applies to most of society today. Through business I have come in contact with many people—half of them women. It’s amazing to me the comments that have come from these gals, mostly older, that they actually like having doors opened for them, having dinner made for them, in short, doing guy things for them. And guys also like gals doing gal things for them.

Recently I was at a St. Paddy’s Day celebration and was talking to a couple of one of my son’s friends. I asked in their dating life was there any romance. Both of them looked up at me at the very same time and said the very same thing, “No”. And I thought how very sad. If Christ is the very glue that holds marriages together, then ‘romance’ is, to some degree, the tinsel strength of that glue—which is also of Christ. I would put money on it that no one has thought of Christ as a romantic. But He is, He is!

On Marriage Part II

Happiness in Marriage

Why is marriage so important? Why do people want to get married? It seems anymore, with a divorce rate well over fifty percent and a large number of people living together, without the benefit of marriage, there seems to be a ‘throw away’ attitude of not seeing the ‘value’ of marriage.

I came across a pamphlet years ago of which I’m going to relate, in part, verbatim:

‘Ask any young couple today why they want to get married and practically without exception the answer will be, “We want to be happy.” They are right. Marriage should bring them happiness. But are they sure they know what happiness means and how to find it? If marriage is to result in happiness and contentment, it must be prepared for just as any vocation or state in life. Preparation for marriage, or any other calling in life, out to begin in early childhood, because such preparation is part of the general training to meet one’s problems I life. In particular, the cultivation of certain personality traits is important as a preparation for marriage to insure harmony and peaceful order in the family.
The first of these traits is self-control and self-sacrifice. Happiness in marriage requires that two people, two individual personalities, learn too adjust to each other. This can be achieved mainly by the constancy with which they show patience, consideration and forbearance for each other. Naturally, this means that each must deny himself and sacrifice some of his wishes. One of the biggest tragedies in married life results from the fact that one or both of the parties have not learned to respect the wishes and the rights of others. It is only through unselfish love that happiness can be hoped for in marriage.
It is equally important, as part of one’s preparation for marriage, to be trained in simplicity; in other words, to know how to enjoy the simple things of life, how to be satisfied with little, and how to manage on a small income, if necessary. Financial problems are frequently a great source of trouble in married life, but the situation becomes disastrous only when the married couple does not want to or know how to live within their means. Young people with a modest income who dream about two-carat diamond rings, expensive cars and clothes and vacations, are certainly not going to find much happiness in marriage. They refuse to realize that the family budget must be made to fit the actual income. On the other hand, if a young couple has been trained to appreciate the simple things of life, if they have been trained to be thrifty and to enjoy work, they can safely venture into marriage, even on a modest income.
A third essential preparation for a happy marriage is training in chastity. Whatever a person’s moral background may be, whether be is a Catholic, a non-Catholic or even a modern pagan, no one will deny the fact that a youth spent in moral chastity and continence is a solid foundation for a happy marriage. Conversely, a dissolute youth spent in violation of the Sixth commandment is frequently one of the greatest causes of misery and tragedy in married life. The best, common-sense way to assure sexual health and happiness after marriage is to live purely before marriage. This is a recognized fact. Furthermore, the spiritual strength one acquires in the struggle for chastity will serve in good stead after marriage at those times when self-control and forbearance are necessary.”

A couple of caveats: one of the best lines I’ve ever heard in regards to the above mentioned paragraph on “finances” came from my mother-in-law when my father-in-law confronted her about writing checks when there was no money in the checking account. Her response was, “…well then put more money in the checking account.” Seems obvious to me.

But in all seriousness, I have to admit that there are times when there is ‘no money’ to put into the checking account. And yet, looking back on my married life, they were some of the most wonderful times in our life together. I hear from so many young people today that they can’t get married because their careers haven’t kicked into high gear, or they don’t have a house, or they want to see the world. All those things have happened to Marilyn and me, together, in spades. There is nothing like being down to your last four or five bucks and you decide that you’d rather spend the money on a relatively inexpensive bottle of wine, with candles lit on your only piece of furniture—a piano bench (yes there was a piano with it but it was an upright) and you were both happy. Live simply.

On Marriage Part I

My wonderful and beautiful daughter related a story several years ago when she was in med school in San Diego, California. She, and several of her girlfriends, who were in UCSD’s Medical School with her, were at a gathering, involved with wine no doubt, and discussing what was their success based on; in other words these fourteen or fifteen young women were trying to figure out how come, or what was the basic reason for their success in school, particularly getting into med school, their obvious success in undergraduate school, and why their dreams and aspirations were set towards a relatively high bar. It was interesting to hear her response based on that conversation. The common denominator that they all came up with was that their parents had stayed together. She, my daughter, also followed up with an even more base line—that because we had all stayed together, they, including my daughter (although there were some teenage years that I wanted to….er, never mind) felt safe, secure and at the core, loved.

That got me to thinking. Before we can know God and Christ the face of God which is love, we need to know that we are secure and loved by those who we can experience in a material way. Does that mean that any who do not have the blessings of these women not succeed? Absolutely not. But the pathway seems to be more “secure”, or maybe more readily available according to them.

And then I started pondering my own life. Marilyn and I have been married for almost thirty-three years. Not that I’m any great success, or that we are any great success, but what success I do claim does also come from parents who stayed together—through thick and thin—and this year they are celebrating in August their sixtieth wedding anniversary. My in-laws are well over fifty years, and after counting on my fingers and toes how old Marilyn is, well over fifty-six years of marriage. And my grandparents on both my father’s and mother’s side had both well over fifty years of marriage; and the same with Marilyn’s grandparents. Is there something to that? And is it, a good and holy marriage, worth it? I believe an emphatic ‘yes’ for a number of reasons.

The Natural Law Part VI

Revelation is the Foundation of Natural Law

Pope Benedict XVI places the philosophy, or reality for that matter, of ‘relativism’ as ‘the’ dictatorship on the human spirit. ‘Relativism’ is not objective but is rooted in ‘individualism’ which is based on power rather than justice.

In the search for Truth, God, St. Thomas Aquinas asks whether philosophy is enough. His answer is not surprising, or maybe in some circles it is, but basically states that we need ‘revelation’ from God.

Hans Kelson, a legal positivist, makes the statement that man cannot know what justice is therefore any law enacted is valid. He continues that there is no Natural Law because, according to him, any concept of Natural Law is essentially religious in character. Two problems with that are a) the great philosophers, i.e. Plato particularly, was an agnostic b) because something is rooted or it’s essential character is religious in character does not necessarily mean that it does not exist. One has to identify, as we have discussed previously, the law giver.

What has God told us about himself? This is what’s termed ‘revelation’. Through particularly the New and Old Testaments, He refers and infers to his Trinitarian Being; three distinct Persons in one Godhead. That statement is beyond reason but not necessarily at odds with reason or inconsistent with reason. The three great mysteries of the Catholic Faith are 1) The Trinity 2) The Incarnation—two natures in one being/person, and 3) and God’s foreknowledge or how God knows what we’re going to do tomorrow and how that comes into play and is consistent with our free will.

God is eternal, for all eternity. He, the Father, is profoundly bound to the “Word”, Christ, and to the Spirit from and for all eternity. We know this through ‘revelation’. The life of the Trinity is a life of love. Does God have a social life? You bet. It has to be because God’s life is one of love and of relationship. He chose to create. The first creation was of angels. Sharing is the life of the Trinity; one cannot love unless one has the power not to love. Love is an act of the will. Love, agape, is of “self giving”, ultimately of self emptying. It is not about feeling good or romantic although at times that can be part of love. But in its essence, love is about choosing, an act of the will. The first sin ever committed was by the angels. Non servium. ‘We will not serve.’ It is also the beginning of ‘hell’. There is no second chance because they, the angels, had clarity of intellect, of thought. They were fixed in their hatred of God and freely chose not to be a part of Him, their Creator.

God created man, Adam and Eve. He created them so that they could share in the life of the Trinity, a life of love. They had natural gifts: the body, intellect, the will, etc. They also had preternatural gifts: they didn’t get sick, death wasn’t a factor, didn’t have to study for knowledge. And finally they had supernatural gifts: sharing in the life of the Trinity to the end of time.

When ‘supernatural’ is talked about, it means that human beings have a nature; they are also given freedom to act above their nature, i.e. ‘supernatural’. The reward or goal is the sharing in the life of the Trinity. That ‘supernatural’ gift requires us as defined by God, that we love Him, that we recognize God as God. The first commandment is to love God above all.

Adam and Eve’s intellect becomes darkened, disordered when they disobeyed. They were in rebellion against “Love”, which is the nature of God. The human race suffers throughout history because of this one act, although not unjustly. (A father gives his son a commandment. ‘If you don’t drink until you’re twenty-one I will give you a million dollars. The son doesn’t keep the commandment and his inheritance is forfeited.)

Then God gave the human race a second chance. Just as a little boy might break somebody’s window the question that arises is “sorry” or “being sorry” enough? No, one has to repair the damage. Reparations AND redemption. That also begets the question of who can make up for the ‘sin’ of man? Who can make reparation to God? One measures offense by the dignity of the person offended. God is infinite. Who has the capacity to make up for an infinite offense? A person who is infinite. The second person of the Trinity, the Son, took on the nature of man so he could make reparation to God for the sin of man. One person, two natures. Christ claimed to be God and there are only three options we have in how we view Him: a) He was a liar b) He was crazy c) or He told the truth.

The Natural Law comes back to Christ. Christ founded a Church to communicate to us and to help us. He is Truth. “If you know me, keep my commandments”. And the two great commandments from Him are, “to love God with all of your being, and to love your neighbor as yourself”. The commandments of the Old Testament, of Moses, are specifications of the Natural Law. The Natural Law only makes sense in regards to the Law Giver. The Law Giver of the Natural Law is our manufacturer. He has made us for the purpose of making us totally happy, forever.

St. Thomas says that in heaven you have the immediate presence of God; you have the satisfaction of all desires, the company of the blessed, and the certainty that it will never end.

To sum up: God is accessible to reason. We can know Him and He has given us directions, as our manufacturer, on how to get the most out of ourselves. God gave us “directions”, the Ten Commandments, so we can rise above our nature, truly love, and share the life of and in the Trinity.

The Role of Government

The Role of Government


The role of government should be as a minimalist. A small footprint, as small as possible. I have always wondered why it is that people consistently give up their rights of freedom for that of security. And false security at that. I learned a valuable lesson a few years ago when Marilyn and I were traveling in Scotland and by happenstance came upon a falconry. On that, more in a moment.

Why are people willing to give up their freedom for slavery? Because in essence that is what government does—it enslaves. Don’t get me wrong, there are legitimate reasons for government, including police, Special Forces, courts, etc. The list can be endless and yet it, the list (another sort) should end, relatively quickly, and be shorter than not.

Let me mention a couple of stories or allegories, the second referring to the falconry. The first is of a ‘consequence’ from a book most people find applicable and have read at some point during their life experience. Kings Chapter 8, Vs. 1-2: In his old age Samuel appointed his sons judges over Israel. His first born was named Joel, his second son, Abijah; they judged at Beer-sheba. His sons did not follow his example but sought illicit gain and accepted bribes, perverting justice. Therefore all the elders of Israel came in a body to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, “Now that you are old, and your sons do not follow your example, appoint a king over us, as other nations have, to judge us.

Now here is where it gets interesting, depending on perspective. Vs 6-9: Samuel was displeased when they asked for a king to judge them. He prayed to the Lord, however, who said in answer, “Grant the people’s every request. It is not you they reject, they are rejecting me as their king.” As they have treated me constantly from the day I brought them up from Egypt to this day, deserting me and worshiping strange gods, so do they treat you too. Now grant their request; but at the same time warn them solemnly and inform them of the rights of the king who will rule them.”

Vs 10-22: Samuel delivered the message of the Lord in full to those who were asking him for a king. He told them, “The rights of the king who will rule you will be as follows: He will take your sons and assign them to his chariots and horses, and they will run before his chariot. He will also appoint from among them his commanders of groups of a thousand and of a hundred soldiers. He will set them to do his plowing and his harvesting, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will USE (emphasis is mine) your daughters as ointment-makers, as cooks and as bakers. He will take the best of your fields, vineyards and olive groves, and give them to his officials. He will tithe your crops and your vineyards, and give the revenue to his eunuchs and his slaves. He will take your male and female servants, as well as your BEST (again, emphasis is mine) oxen and your asses, and use them to do his work. He will tithe your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves. When this takes place, you will complain against the king whom you have chosen, but on that day the Lord will not answer you.”

The people, however, refused to listen to Samuel’s warning and said, “Not so! There must be a king over us. We too must be like other nations, with a king to rule us and to lead us in warfare and fight our battles.” When Samuel had listened to all the people had to say, he repeated it to the Lord, who then said to him, “Grant their request and appoint a king to rule them.” Samuel thereupon said to the men of Israel, “Each of you go to his own city.”

Sounds familiar? Sounds like what? Taxes? Conscription? Redistribution of wealth? Power elite? Ruling class? And a whole lot of slavery. Personally, I don’t want to be like other nations. The Founding Fathers of this country obviously designed the government with that concept in mind—a unique experiment never attempted before. The Founding Fathers had no blueprint. Human nature as well as history never fails to forget its bloody lessons, over and over again. Part of that fallen nature thing. Notice that the society in the story ends with what’s going to happen because of a kingship. But it also happened with a judgeship. A society is only as good as its individual members are moral and virtuous.

Government by its nature consistently grows, eating more and more of resources not for what it should be in reality, a servant to the people that it governs, but a process by which it stays in power. The Founding Fathers tried, if not to completely eliminate that process, at least limit it. Once again today the ‘process’ is mirroring history. Why? I think two fold reasons a) people, not just in this country but the rest of the world as well, have forgotten that there is a Creator—because there is a creation. That Creator has created us with not only ‘inalienable rights’ but with inseparable moral obligations that are attached to those rights. b) those obligations are as individual as are the rights. Government is not endowed with having either those ‘rights’ or ‘moral obligations’. I can’t tell you how many times people have told me, ‘…well, Tim, I don’t have to give to that charity or take care of that person because I already do that through paying my taxes. And we can’t take care of that many people anyway.’ Christ never said that the government was to take care of our brothers and sisters. It’s our individual responsibility to do that. If you believe in an afterlife, and most theologies, religions, including paganism (Osiris/Isis…Ra), does, then we are going to be judged as individuals. The Roman Government much less the Holy Roman Empire will not be on the docket. But people will. Interesting studies have been completed by the Pew Foundation, The Heritage Foundation as well as one or two others. These studies have found that there is more than enough food, as one example, to feed all the people that are currently on this earth. The problem is not the bounty of the earth, but the distribution of that bounty or lack thereof. And governments are the least capable of delivering anything, much less bounty, to the people who are in need. I give you as an example every place from Rwanda, to the Sudan, to Russia, to Haiti and to finally, yes, the United States. Since Johnson, in the early sixties, began “The War on Poverty”, with the billions of dollars thrown against the wall to alleviate that problem, there is more poverty today in the United States per capita then there was in nineteen sixty-three. Why is that? The reasons are varied. According to some studies, fifty percent of the money earmarked for the eradication of poverty by the government is gobbled up by the bureaucracy. The next twenty-five percent goes to all forms of corruption from those that are supplying the means and solution to the individual fraud that goes on by people that see a ‘free meal’. Which brings me to the falconry and the second allegory.

A few years ago in northern Scotland, Marilyn and I were driving along a very narrow and windy road. I saw a sign with the words Falconry on it and an arrow pointing towards an even more narrow and windy road. No, that’s not the analogy. We arrived to find out that it was the end of the season and that if we waited for a couple of hours we might be able to see a show if enough people showed up. We decided to leave. But as we were walking away the wife of the falconry guy (what DO you call falconry guys?) said that maybe they could start the show within fifteen minutes. We started to look antsy, especially Marilyn, so they moved it up by ten minutes. Here were these long wooden benches that could probably seat two or three hundred people and there was just Marilyn, myself, and one guy from South Africa in the audience. I was happier than a clam. Or maybe a bald eagle. As a matter of fact the first bird that the falconry guy flew WAS a bald eagle—and American Bald Eagle. I almost got up and started to sing the national anthem. But the grimace from Marilyn, for she knew what I was thinking, stifled not only me rising but more importantly my vocal chords. It wasn’t long though before the falconry guy brought out a little falcon. Yes, just like the one you read about in the days of King John and Robin Hood. The day we arrived there was no wind. And I mean no wind. Absolutely gorgeous at the foothills of the Scottish highlands. The falconry guy had the jerkin on his arm and kept swinging his arm upward. The falcon was having none of it. He, the falcon, looked like he was having a great time riding this leather elevator. Except he wasn’t. He didn’t want to leave the arm because there was no wind. According to the falconry guy this little falcon had to work too hard to fly. The falconry guy spoke lovingly at the falcon. The falconry guy coerced with wild gyrations and frantic movements. And the falcon did not move off that arm. During the entire scene, which by the end the falconry guy was quite embarrassed, the little falcon was screaming at the top of its lungs that he didn’t want to fly. But he wanted to be fed. The falconry guy even tried giving a little bit of chicken to it but that just made the falcon scream all the more and louder. Finally, the falcon just jumped to the ground. And screamed. The falconry guy, with an occasional forlorn glance towards us, the audience, didn’t know quite what to do. Then the light bulb went on. He pulled out a little bit bigger piece of chicken (didn’t look anything like the Colonel’s) and the falcon cut the screaming long enough to once more jump up on his arm and gobble it down (no pun intended). The falconry guy at this point gave up. One of the audience asked (and you can guess who since there were only three of us), “So what are you going to do with the little fellow?” “He’s going to be put back in his cage with half rations and maybe, hopefully, in the next couple of days he’ll fly again. But that depends on the wind. And he’s done this before. But very honestly, folks, he’s getting used to half rations.” I wanted to ask, ‘if you fry up the chicken would that change anything?’ But I didn’t. The ‘ugly American’ thing and all.

And so the conclusion. What kind of lesson did Marilyn walk away with? I’m not sure. But I know what I walked away with. Human nature is not so much different than that little falcon. We need to work, if we can, for our keep. Work lends dignity to everything. Someone, and I can’t remember who, once said, “…work when you’re poor, work when you’re rich, work when you’re tired, when you’re full of energy. Work and continue to work…” Some people get used to handouts. Some people just refuse to work for their keep. Some people are truly in need. Do you think government can tell the difference? Do you think an individual can tell whether one person is truly handicapped and not only needs but deserves some help? One word describes government. Enabling. Ok, possibly two. Dependency. Actually there are five or six that I could use and none of them are positive. If I see a guy in need on a busy corner that says on a cardboard box he needs some help, I’m going to give him a can of food; which I usually keep in my car. Doesn’t matter that he looks perfectly healthy. But if I see him day in and day out I’m probably going to rethink my strategy. I don’t want to have to start calling him ‘Smudja’. That’s that falcon.

Oh, a ‘falconry guy’ is called a falconer. So is a female falconer called a ‘falconetter’?

Alex de Tocqueville, who was a French political thinker, historian and writer, lived between 1805 and 1859 wrote this about the great American experiment, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

Says it all, doesn’t it.

A Few Things

Dear Reader:

I’ll be starting a new part of this column involving two different pincer movements—all for your enjoyment, and possibly understanding. The first will be, hopefully, one or two quotes that have caught my fancy and may catch yours as well. Secondly, and more importantly, sometime in the not too distant future, I will be inking my thoughts on the subject of ‘marriage’. I know that everyone out there has a perfect one, and one of my sons has made the comment that I really don’t know what I’m talking about---but I think I’ll take my chances.

So two quotes I’ve run across in the past few days, the first being an old Turkish saying which was applied at one point in time to T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia fame). He being a Colonel at the time and having a love of the spotlight and yet not liking some of the side effects of fame, was admirably quoted in a Turkish newspaper circa 1919 in this way, “He had a genius for backing into the limelight”. I thought it was clever.

Number two is from George Orwell, who wrote “1984” among other novels. He remarked of all saints, and in particularly Ghandi, ‘…that all saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent.”

On a more serious note and because it is Lent this is from Benedict XVI titled:

The Temptations of Christ

The temptations are a descent into the perils besetting mankind, for there is no other way to lift up fallen humanity. Jesus has to enter into the drama of human existence, for that belongs to the core of his mission; he has to penetrate it completely, down to its uttermost depths, in order to find the “lost sheep”, to bear it on his shoulders, and to bring it home….At the heart of all temptations is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion—that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms. Moral posturing is part and parcel of temptation…It pretends to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and throw ourselves into the work of actually making the world a better place. It claims, moreover, to speak for true realism: What’s real is what is right therein front of us—power and bread. By comparison, the things of God fade into unreality, into a secondary world that no one really needs. God is the issue: Is he real, reality itself, or isn’t he? Is he good, or do we have to invent the good ourselves: The God question is the fundamental question, and it sets us down right at the crossroads of human existence.

The Natural Law Part V A

God and Reason

God is a designer. According to Aquinas this is one of the reasons we know him to be a person, has an intellect, and is spiritual. An animal will build because of instinct but has no concept in regards to abstract ideas, or building based on abstract ideas.

The concept that man has a ‘spirit’ means he is immortal. Included in that spirit are some of the things we have talked about before such as creativity, free will, reason, the ability to see outside of oneself, i.e., to reflect. Death is the breaking up of something into its parts. At death the body separates from the soul, eventually decomposing into the basic of elements (sometime remind me to tell you about one of my Bio professors and his yacht named PSNOTCH). A spiritual thing cannot die for it has no parts. The one thing that the autonomous individual cannot do is put him or herself out of existence.

Evolution? We are not some indiscriminate and meaningless product of evolution. Each one of us, and it should give us great joy, is the result of a thought from our Creator, our Manufacturer if you will. Each one of us is willed, loved and is necessary. We are body and soul.

Evolution is about the development of parts, specifically in our case, the human body. It is not proven that the human body developed from an amoeba, which sprang from two chemicals joined together through a bolt of lightning. The soul cannot evolve. It has to be the product of the immediate, the creative thought of God. The human soul has no parts and because it has no parts it cannot evolve.

Natural Law is given to each of us so that we can achieve our goal, the purpose for our very being. For and to this purpose the soul is eternal and will live forever.

The only basis for asserting a human being's transcendency rights against the state is that we are created in the image and likeness of God. Why? Because every state has and will go out of existence. The soul is the opposite, eternal, and will live forever.

Capitalism and Freedom

Individual liberty can only thrive when accompanied by economic freedom.

Milton Friedman

For those of you who think we are under assault--we are. Please read 'Capitalism and Freedom' by the same author. I am starting to put out a book list for those of you who are interested and have not stopped learning. Friedman's book is just the first. The second book is Hayek's 'The Road to Serfdom'. Part V A hopefully will be out tomorrow.

Do Good, avoid evil.

John Paul II

Part V of The Natural Law--God and Reason

God and Reason

The manufacturer of anything, GN, Apple Computers, The Natural Law, each have a lawgiver. In the case of The Natural Law it is the universe’s manufacturer—God. He, for lack of a better word, is our manufacturer and specifically our law giver. The question often arises both as a thesis and also as an anti-thesis—is there a God? Do you believe God and Reason
in God? Can you prove it? God? Can you, can we, know that there is a lawgiver of the Natural Law? Is it reasonable to believe in God? Is it reasonable not to believe in God?

It is reasonable to believe in God. There is something that is called “self evident principle of sufficient reason”. God is self-evident. The “creation” did not come about on its own—that there has to be a reason. Every effect has a cause and that cause cannot be its own. Why? Because it would pre-exist itself.

Can you imagine Galileo dropping the two spheres and being asked the question, “Gee, Gali, why did the balls drop?” And Galileo Gallilei answering, “Hey Columbus (not the same Columbus)—no reason. But that’s not the reason I was dropping them, anyway.”

The question relates to God as He is an eternal being. That statement is reasonable. Why is there something rather than nothing? There always has been. The alternative is that there was a time when there was absolutely nothing. If there was a time when there was absolutely nothing then there could never be anything. It’s self evident—or sufficient reason. The evidence of God is not self-evident but the proof of God is. That would be creation.

There are five principles of God according to St. Thomas Aquinas:
1) Necessity of God
2) Creation
3) Motion
4) Perfection
5) Design

We once talked about a watchmaker who took apart for a client his watch, put it in a brown paper bag, shook up the parts and told the client now watch this. As he dumped out the bag was it possible that the watch would come out whole? Perfect and in its entirety? Possible, yes. Probable, no. Can one think of something more intricate than the human eye. What, it happened by chance? The ear? DNA? You have to be kidding? Right?

We are not the creation and meaningless product, or a by product for that matter, of evolution. “Each one of us is the product of the thought of God.” Benedict XVI. Eyes and ears did not happen by chance. Possible? Yes. Probable? No. Through reason we can know that there’s one God. ‘Something’ cannot come from ‘nothing’.

Then the question, at times arises, well, then, can God make a square circle? The answer is ‘no’ because a square circle is (no thing) nothing. The same with the equally absurd question of God making a rock too big to carry. It’s a contradiction in terms. God, all knowing? Yes. How can we be sure? How can we have ‘free will’ then? There is no ‘time’ in eternity. I have heard the analogy that God looks down from above, picture in your mind’s eye a mountain top. He sees the incredible parade of human history before Him, from the beginning to the end. Why? Because he’s eternal. But before each individual in that parade makes a decision he or she is free. Have you ever regretted anything? Wanted to take back a biting comment? Another decision? Those are proofs of ‘free will’. One of my favorite old black and white TV programs, now I might add, is watching Bishop Sheen. He once said, “’Please’ and ‘thank you’ are two examples of refuting ‘determinism’.” They are proof, in other words, of ‘free will’.

What can we know through ‘reason’ about ourselves? There is an order of reality which is not material alone but also spiritual.
1) material reality has parts
2) spiritual reality has no parts.
We are composed of two elements: a material body and a spiritual soul. The soul is the life principle in anything that is alive. Do animals have souls? According to Aquinas they have ‘material souls’. Their souls are dependent on the ‘matter’ of that animal. When that animal dies, the soul dies.

How do we differ from the animal kingdom, specifically are we eternal? Created in the image and likeness of God? We are spiritual. We can do things that only a spiritual being can do:
1) Abstraction. A quarter is round. What is roundness? It does not exist in the material world. But we have the abstract idea of roundness. Roundness is an abstract idea.
2) Reflection. A piece of paper can be folded and the bottom, if it could see, can see the top or the top the bottom. But it cannot get out of itself because it is bound by matter. Animals the same way. They, according to Aquinas, have a spiritual matter which dies at the end of its life. Because animals do not have a spiritual component they cannot reflect upon their own selves or being. On the other hand, because human beings are in part spirit, have the capability of ‘reflecting’ upon themselves, the world, and even things that are non concrete—such as freedom, charity, truth, and especially love. Human beings even have the capability of reflecting upon their reflections.

St. Thomas Aquinas Feast Day

Christ came in order to bring us back from a state of bondage to a state of liberty.

Saint Thomas Aquinas


Do good. Avoid evil.

John Paul II


Dear Readers:

I have been on a much needed vacation for the past, almost two weeks. Part V of the Natural Law, hopefully, will be out within the next couple of days.

Aloha,
Management

A Conservative Observation in regards to Islam

The conservative response to Islam
By Daniel Johnson
My first experience of Islam, exactly thirty years ago, was a
spectacular one: the Dome of the Rock. This is the place on
Temple Mount in Jerusalem whence Mohammed was,
according to the Koran, taken up into heaven, and the golden
shrine which was built there in 691–692 A.D. by Caliph Abd
al-Malik is the earliest and most elegant example of Muslim
architecture extant. Non-Muslims are not permitted to visit
the Dome today, but since last year they have been
readmitted to the Temple Mount, or Noble Sanctuary, as
Muslims call it. In the last generation the whole situation in
Jerusalem has changed. Muslim leaders and scholars now
routinely deny that the Temple of Solomon ever existed in
Jerusalem, and the Christian population of the Old City has
fallen from more than half to less than 10 percent, the rest
driven out by Muslim persecution. Back in 1977 nonhttp://
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Muslims were still allowed not only onto Temple Mount,
but inside the Dome too. At the time I was studying the
history of the Crusades, so I had some grasp of the
significance of Jerusalem to medieval Muslims such as
Saladin, who promised that after he had recaptured
Jerusalem, he would “cross this sea to their [Christian]
islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face
of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah—or I die [in
the attempt].” What I did not understand was that for many,
perhaps most Muslims, this view had not altered one jot in
the eight intervening centuries. The reconquest of Jerusalem
for Islam is seen as a necessary prelude to the destruction of
the state of Israel and the conversion of Christendom.
The Dome is a simple enclosure, its non-figurative images of
Paradise are authentically Islamic. They are accompanied by
verses from the Koran with a warning against the Christian
doctrines of the divinity of Christ and the Trinity: “The
messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of
Allah… . So believe in Allah and his messengers and do not
say ‘three’: refrain, it is better for you.” The Byzantine
historian Judith Herrin comments: “This monument
symbolizes the decisive shift of power and religious
observance in the Near East.” It is a shift that neither the
Byzantines nor the Crusades could reverse, and the
Islamization of Africa, Asia, and Europe continues to this
day.
After they took Jerusalem, the Crusaders wrongly imagined
that the Dome of the Rock was the Temple of Solomon, as
the round Templar churches all over Europe testify. But the
differences between the Dome and the real Temple
symbolize the clash of civilizations. Beautiful as it is, the
Dome stands as a trophy of victory. Its sacred
relic—Mohammed’s rock—is almost incidental to its
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function as a monument to the triumph of Islam over
Judaism and Christianity. Its inscriptions differ little in their
propagandist purpose from the videos of Osama bin Laden.
This is jihad, frozen in marble and mosaic. The
magnificence of Solomon’s Temple served quite another
purpose: for the people of Israel, this was the house where
God himself dwelt. The functions of these two buildings are
as far apart as war and peace.
From its very inception, Islam has defined itself by what it is
against. It divides the world into two camps: those who
submit to the will of Allah, the Muslims, and the rest, who
are presumed to be damned—including the other “peoples of
the book.” As one British imam told Muslims in his
Birmingham mosque: “Those whom the wrath of Allah is
upon, is [sic] the Jew and the Christian.” (Interestingly, the
West Midlands police showed less interest in prosecuting the
imam than in complaining to the TV regulator about the
Channel Four program Dispatches, which had secretly
filmed his sermon.) The only hope for the non-Muslims is
conversion, an irrevocable decision that reflects the
existential gulf between the inhabitants of the two
metaphysical abodes, the earthly equivalents of heaven and
hell: the House of Islam and the House of War. Muslims
cannot leave the House of Islam for another faith with
impunity: as a recent Dispatches program on Channel Four
showed, even in Britain, such apostates live in fear of their
lives. Islam is a faith that demands unconditional allegiance.
Muslims must be ready to kill or be killed if necessary for
their faith. Sharia, the law of Islam, takes precedence over
all other laws. Likewise, jihad, the war of Islam, takes
precedence over all other wars. When confronted by these
stark, unchanging ordinances, the equivocations of
supposedly liberal Islamic scholars such as Tariq Ramadan
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tell their own story. Nothing that mere men say can
ameliorate or mitigate a code handed down unaltered from
seventh-century Arabia.
These two characteristics of Islam—its immutability and the
fact that it defines itself against the rest of humanity—help
to explain its extraordinary appeal to angry young men and
women. They find refuge in the moral certainties and selfjustification
that other religions, especially Christianity and
Judaism, no longer seem to provide. Because Islam has no
hierarchy, every Muslim may submit to an Islamic authority
of his own choosing. That choice is likely to be driven as
much by political considerations as purely religious ones.
There is no conceptual separation between religion and
politics in Islam. The few Muslim scholars who interpret the
Koran according to the hermeneutic principles that govern
modern biblical scholarship are shunned by the literalist
majority, and enjoy little influence in the madrassas and
universities of the Muslim world. But even in western
countries the version of Islam that is taught is usually
fundamentalist. The result is that in Britain, nearly half of
the mosques are controlled by the extremist Deobandi
movement from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, while
many more are under equally fundamentalist Wahhabi or
Salafi influence from Saudi Arabia. While all Muslims
certainly do not subscribe to all tenets of Islam, enough of
them do to make it virtually impossible for the dissenters’
voices to be heard.
How should conservatives respond to Islam? I don’t know
the answer, and I am not sure that the notion of a correct
response to anything as complex as a religion is a very
conservative idea. Until quite recently, most people in the
West felt no particular need to have any response to Islam,
and so any response they do have is bound to be quite
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personal.
I respond to Islam, therefore, not only as a political animal,
but also as a product of a particular history and a particular
civilization. I respond to Islam as a citizen of a liberal
democracy in which religious toleration is a given, but in
which church and state occupy distinct spheres and religious
traditions or doctrines have no force of law; in which the
freedom of speech includes the right to criticize a religion or
even to insult its founder; and in which personal autonomy
under the rule of law implies the non-culpability of heresy or
apostasy. I respond as a neighbor who objects to the
presence in my community of those who repay my
hospitality by preaching or practicing or excusing terrorist
violence. (The most notorious of them all, Sheikh Abu
Hamza, lived in my London street until he was arrested,
tried and convicted of terrorist offenses three years ago.) I
respond as a father and a husband with certain views about
how girls should be educated, how women should be treated
in marriage, and so on. Finally, I respond to Islam as an
adherent of another faith, and specifically as a Christian,
who wishes to live in peace with other faiths but not at any
price, and who observes the harsh fate of his fellowbelievers
in countries that were once heartlands of
Christendom with alarm and anger. No less integral to my
faith is a special reverence for the Jewish people, our “elder
brothers” whom Christians have often treated with such base
ingratitude, and hence my response to Islam cannot be
divorced from my dismay at the most destructive of the
many consequences of jihad: the revival of anti-Semitism,
not just in the Muslim world, but in the West too.
All these responses are personal, but they are also not
untypical. They have emerged over the years as part of a
growing, inescapable awareness of the unique antagonism
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between Muslims and their neighbors. My natural
disposition to exculpate Islam from responsibility for the
failings of its adherents has given way to doubts: doubts
about whether there is something intrinsic to the theological
structure of Islam that is inimical to the delicate membrane
of moral law and rational order, deriving ultimately from the
Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers, that lies at the
core of Western civilization. Islam is often spoken of as one
of the three Abrahamic religions, and Mohammed himself in
the earlier, less belligerent phase of his life, used to speak of
Jews and Christians as “peoples of the book.”
Unlike Jews and Christians, however, who despite their
orthodoxies were always open to every possible external
influence, Muslims have been moving steadily in the
opposite direction for nearly a thousand years, turning their
backs on the modern world and indeed seeking to reverse the
verdict of history on the medieval empires of the Arabs and
Turks. After centuries of domination, they found themselves
poorer, less educated and hence less powerful than the
infidels they despised. Muslims had become the people of
the closed book.
It is the radicalism of Islam that makes it so threatening
today. Whether or not Islam is necessarily a radical religion,
one that constantly returns to its roots, empirically its history
is one long sequence of such radical revivals. In the
vocabulary of the Left, “radical” is good, and Islam has
always held an attraction for liberals with a hankering for the
terrible simplicities of a revolutionary faith. E. M. Forster
(whose response to Hitler was to offer “two cheers for
democracy”) adored the radical simplicity of Islam.
Admittedly, he encountered it mainly in the relatively
benign form that prevailed when much of the Muslim world
was under British rule—a dispensation that the Left
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destroyed with the premature independence and partition of
India, after the ground had been prepared by novels such as
A Passage to India. Much of the political ideology of
Islamism emerged during the retreat from empire—a retreat
which was accompanied by the wholesale abdication of what
Kipling naively called the “white man’s burden,” but which
the United States still today acknowledges as the thankless
task of encouraging freedom and democracy.
Until quite recently, Islam seemed to be a warrior creed that
was singularly short of warriors. Not any more. But there is
still an inferiority complex, fueled by a large dose of the
victim culture that the West cultivates so assiduously.
Having ostentatiously rejected the decadence of the West,
Islam has in practice absorbed some of its most insidious
vices. The fact that Islam never developed the capitalist
work ethic and enjoined almsgiving to the rich rather than
self-reliance to the poor has enabled radical Muslim
preachers to move seamlessly from oriental despotism to
occidental welfare state, living comfortably on the tithes of
the faithful and the taxes of the infidel.
But the process works the other way, too. Western culture
has always included among its various currents the
iconoclasm that was once Islam’s most visible challenge to
Christianity. One need only think of the Reformation. Still,
the dominant tradition in the West had always been a
figurative, iconographic, narrative art—until the rise of
abstract and conceptual Modernism in the late twentieth
century. This was of course an indigenous movement, but it
has much in common with Islamic art—not least the fact
that, like all forms of iconoclasm, its ideology defines itself
by what it is against. And so we have the strange spectacle
of aging Sixties radicals aligned with Muslims who preach
radicalism of a rather more sanguinary sort. When Karlheinz
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Stockhausen greeted the destruction of the Twin Towers as
“the greatest work of art imaginable in the cosmos,” his
effusions were seen by conservatives as the reductio ad
absurdum of a generation that fulfilled its self-appointed
destiny by the deconstruction of entire traditions of western
culture. But Stockhausen was also unwittingly endorsing
Islamic iconoclasm, symbolized not only in al Qaeda’s
attack on the Manhattan skyline but also in the Taliban’s
dynamiting of colossal Buddhas.
There can be few more potent symbols of Western
civilization than Cologne Cathedral. Built on the site of the
eponymous colony of Colonia, where the Roman world
confronted the barbarians beyond the Rhine, this was the
shrine of the Three Wise Men from the East. Conceived on a
vast scale, left unfinished for five centuries, the erection of
its western façade became the national project of German
romanticism. Now the cathedral’s two great gothic towers
are to be challenged by the minarets of a new mosque to
serve the 120,000 Muslims of Cologne. The Cardinal
Archbishop, Joachim Meisner, admitted to “an uneasy
feeling” at the prospect of the mosque. That was
controversial enough, but the cathedral’s new stained glass
window by Gerhard Richter, Germany’s best-known living
artist, has given a fascinating new twist to the story.
Commissioned to replace a nineteenth-century window
destroyed in the war, Richter came up with a computergenerated
abstract design. But Cardinal Meisner refused to
attend the unveiling ceremony. “It belongs in a mosque or
another house of prayer, not this one,” he declared. The
point to remember is that Richter and Meisner are both of
the same generation, but their experience is utterly different:
the former is a 1968 radical, the latter an East German who
spent forty years resisting the communists. In modern
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Germany, even a cardinal archbishop is not master of his
own cathedral, and his preference for a figurative depiction
of the two saints who fell victim to the Nazis, Edith Stein
and Maximilian Kolbe, was overruled.
The Cardinal hit back in a sermon which denounced
“degenerate” modern art—a notorious phrase associated
with the Nazi exhibition in 1937. In the hullabaloo that
followed this breaking of a seventy-year taboo, Meisner’s
point—that “where culture is detached from religion, from
reverence for God, there religion shrivels into ritualism and
culture degenerates”—was of course drowned out. But if
Cologne Cathedral is ever turned into a mosque, the Richter
window is the one artefact that may be allowed to remain.
This is not an absurd thought: after all, Napoleon’s armies
used this same cathedral to stable their horses, and the Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople, once the greatest church in
Europe, was a mosque for nearly 500 years until Atatürk
secularized it. The combined threats of modern secular
culture and militant Islam mean that the fate of Christianity
in Europe does indeed hang in the balance.
I have already suggested that the resurgence of Islam has
coincided with a renewed threat to Jews everywhere, and the
Jewish communities of Europe in particular. Hostility to
Jews is not, of course, a uniquely Muslim phenomenon, but
neither is it true, as Muslims sometimes claim, that anti-
Semitism was alien to Islam until Zionism and the creation
of the state of Israel poisoned relations between the two.
Anyone who doubts that the tendency of Muslims to blame
Jews for their misfortunes has been around for a long time
should read Niccolò Capponi’s account of the Battle of
Lepanto in 1571, which quotes a description of what
happened when news of the greatest naval defeat ever
suffered by the Ottomans reached the court of Sultan Selim
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II. Jews in Constantinople sent word to Venice that for three
nights the Sultan was kept in the dark, until eventually he
demanded to know the truth: “It was answered that it was
impossible now to hide the news that his fleet had been all
burnt, sunk, and taken by the Christians, with the death of all
his great soldiers, captains, and his General. Hearing this he
gave a deep sigh and said: ‘So, these treacherous Jews have
deceived me!’ And having the Lord’s utterance spread
through the palace and the streets, everyone started shouting,
‘Death to the Jews; death to the Jews!’ and there was much
fear that this would degenerate in a general massacre.” The
only thing that has changed since is that the twisted logic of
the scapegoat enables Muslims now to blame the Jews not
only for their defeats by the Christians, but also for terrorist
attacks perpetrated by Muslims. European Islam has not yet,
it seems, absorbed the fact that after 1945 the new Europe’s
moral foundation was the promise to the Jewish people:
“Never again.”
By contrast, Jews have taken the lead in proposals for coexistence,
integration, and peace between Muslims and the
rest. The latest example is Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi
of Britain and the Commonwealth, whose latest book, The
Home We Build Together, uses the metaphor of the home to
argue against both assimilation and multiculturalism as
models of society. Assimilation treats people as if they were
guests at a country house, he argues, while multiculturalism
treats them like guests in a hotel. Instead, society should
welcome newcomers by inviting them to build a home
together with the indigenous people. Sacks quotes Milton’s
Areopagitica on the building of Solomon’s Temple to
demonstrate that “out of many moderate varieties and
brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional
arises the goodly and gracious symmetry that commends the
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whole pile and structure.” Sacks shows that the process of
contributing together to the recreation of a society will
necessarily integrate the outsiders. This is not a social
contract, but a covenant that respects the “dignity of
difference” between faiths, while requiring in return from
the inhabitants both responsibility and civility.
There’s the rub. How do you build a common home with a
community that refuses to follow the architect’s plans, that
rejects the indigenous style, that dissociates itself from the
entire project? At best, you will end, not with a Temple of
Solomon, but with a Tower of Babel. Islam, as defined by its
leading scholars, cannot be “integrated” into a non-Islamic
society; indeed, it defines itself against such ideals. An
Islamic republic or monarchy bears superficial resemblances
to the kind of society that Western conservatives try to
sustain. There is much talk of morality, tradition, religion,
family. But the absence of liberty and democracy leads to
the perversion of all these things into instruments of tyranny.
The politics of Islam has nothing to do with conservatism as
it is understood in the West, but is simultaneously
eschatological and totalitarian, revolutionary and
reactionary. Ayatollah Khomeini warned: “We shall export
our revolution throughout the world.”
To meet this challenge, the West will need—as it always has
done—alliances with Islamic countries, movements and
individuals. Much of the fighting against al Qaeda and the
Taliban is being done by Muslims, just as Muslims fought
against the Nazis and Soviets. Their courage deserves the
highest praise. But such alliances will always be pragmatic.
And we need to be aware that some of the most subversive
Islamists in the West hail from Muslim lands that have been
long-standing allies: Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia. All of these regimes and others like them are weak,
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The New Criterion — The conservative response to Islam
and their populations are vulnerable to anti-Western
propaganda.
At the risk of being too prescriptive, I would like to
summarize what I would hope the conservative response to
Islam might be. The West will gain no respect from Muslims
if its foreign policy is seen as weak and divided—still less if
at home its cultural and religious identity is seen to be in a
state of dissolution. Rather than allowing a moral vacuum to
open up at the heart of our societies, just waiting to be filled
by the revolutionary, reactionary and exclusive prescriptions
of Islam, our leaders should be reaffirming the absolute
values on which our uniquely inclusive system was founded.
Relativism is the tribute paid by reason to toleration. But
relativism, whether moral or epistemological, can never be
the basis of politics. Skepticism, being quietist, can never
prevail against belief. The only answer to atavism is
activism. It is better to obviate the need for radical solutions
to pseudo-problems by offering conservative solutions to
real problems. If Islam is the solution to the decadence of the
West, then we have been asking the wrong questions. If
Islam is now the problem, however, then the solution can
only be a conservative one. Islam will not overwhelm a
society that draws its morality from biblical and its
rationality from classical sources. The West does not need
an Islamic revolution, but a Judeo-Christian and Greco-
Roman renaissance.