Back to the Swamp

Why, do you suppose, this happened? From a mimetic theory viewpoint, it points to the expulsion of a designated and acceptable sacrificial victim - in this case the Christian faith in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Oddly, the latter alone comprises over a billion human beings, and yet the Gnostic EU overlords (so accurately depicted in C. S. Lewis's prescient book, That Hideous Strength) curiously believe that they can will out of existence belief in Jesus Christ - or, at least out of public discourse - by their hubris-filled chicanery.

It points again not only to human folly and pride; but to the deeply embedded roots of the primitive sacred in our fallen human condition.

Those EU ministers should listen, in my opinion, to a different sort of minister: Rene Girard, an Extraordinary Eucharistic Minister who also happens to be a member of the L'Académie française. His work in mimetic theory not only brings broad understanding to the cultural conflagration upon which the EU is throwing kindling, but is in full submission to the Magisterium of Mother Church.

The more "modern progressives" (sic.) try to out-distance Christian truth, the more their actions show a recrudescence and regression into the pagan swamp that our Lord and His Church succeeded in pulling us out of ... for a time.

Mammoth Hubris

File this one under: "We just wondered what would happen ... "

'We Can't Cuff Him?'

I know, I know: the Hitler's bunker gag was old years ago. However, the urge to laugh, ridicule, and yes, scapegoat my favorite "horse-thief" (inside joke to Gil Bailie tape-listeners) is just too strong. Therefore, I give you, gentle reader, the bunker scene of Professor Richard Dawkins discovering he can't have the Pope arrested ... here.

Off Their High Horses

What happened to the kinds of editorials once so common in American newspapers? You know the sort: "It's high time So-and-so realize s/he isn't above judgment. S/he had better start realizing it before s/he gets knocked of her/his high-horse. After all, every one of will have to face a time of reckoning, if not in this world then in the Next."

This goes, in particular, for elected representatives of our government on both sides of the aisle. I am not asking for "citizens' arrests" of some kind or another. Rather, I am speaking about the kind of common sense that once not only prevailed in American society, but was, in a sense, its hallmark; a trait we see in a diffuse, unfocused way in the rather unfortunate phenomenon known as "Tea Parties" these days.

The trouble with Tea Parties is that politicians have become too sophisticated in the ways of media exploitation and manipulation, quickly (and all too easily) branding them "racist" or other accusations that turn sympathy away from them and toward their (supposed) "victim". The trouble with this cool, snarky bit of sophistry is that it lends itself to that kind of hubris we now see in our present-day politicians in office.

I would simply like to see newspaper editorials once again appeal to a moral authority beyond that of focus groups or the set of values of any - ANY - group right or left, Democrat or Republican, etc.

I had better not hold my breath.

Renaming Freedom, Excluding Religion

The Resistance - "Hey, like my new header, meshugas?"

(ht: Spirit of Moscow)

George Weigel spoke recently at an international symposium honoring Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. One thing he said was, "Intolerance in the name of 'tolerance' must be named for what it is and publicly condemned. To deny religiously-informed moral argument a place in the public square is intolerant and anti-democratic." To read his entire address, go here.

It does not take a particularly keen observer to see the grim outline of what is happening in the United States of America under the current administration and their allies in the legislative branch of government. Weigel limns it well.

We are simply seeing the relegation of religious values to the interior of places of worship. This would include the values of the Scimitar, but as René Girard has shown so clearly (and the New Testament long before him) politicians fear crowds and power; a trait so-called "progressivists" share with the Scimitar, structurally speaking. For now, the loud-mouth rantings of the Scimitar are allowed, as long as demographics stay below a tipping point.

But it is obvious that leftist progressives want to exclude the Judeo-Christian voice in general and the magisterium of the Catholic Church in particular from public forum, and they will go to no extreme to make certain this happens. The exceptions, of course, are the Catholic-in-name-only types, those who violate the Church's teachings and leadership as progressivist allies. These will be paraded like loyal lap-dogs, shining examples of the "right kind" (wink wink) of religious thinking.

But for those who are loyal to Mother Church, like the babushkas of Soviet Russian, we are free to "hold" our religious beliefs so long as they do not attempt to intrude into serious social policy. Just sweep the streets, go to church, and keep very quiet.

This is the new "tolerance". This is the new "freedom". Welcome to the late, great American reformation.

P. S. - By the way, the babushkas won (cf. above).

Smartest Rap in the Room

Fatal Conceit

Through me the way into the suffering city

On this eve of Christmas Eve, a sense of foreboding prevails among those who know what will be ram-rodded .. er, voted upon tomorrow on Capitol Hill. It is something so immense, so huge and hubris-filled, like King Herod and Caesar to the tenth power, that one can almost hear Stalin whispering, How many divisions does the Pope have?

In fact, it has a similar feeling tone as when this blunder (?) happened.

While Dante put defrauders of the commonweal in a particularly nasty circle of hell, the political elite who are accomplishing this piece of legislation are feeling a grand sense of pleasure and self-righteousness. Eternal reward or punishment by their standards of judgment are far removed from the Magisterium of the Church, even for rather higher-ups in the legislative society for mutual self-admiration.

They were elected. They enjoy the greatest power and glory afforded leaders in the free world. They are "progressive"; surely they know better than any reactionary ecclesiastical sticks-in-the-mud who flaunt Catholic truth, faith, and morals.

Right? Right?

Inquire Within

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful

And you were beginning to think that the tide of human hubris could rise no higher, eh? Well, as we say in the Midwest, take a gander at the following:

London, England (LifeNews.com) -- Women from around the world are traveling to clinics in various locations that are now offering face lifts and cosmetic surgery using tissue from babies who have been killed by abortions.

Pro-life advocates are strongly condemning the practice and saying the taking of human life is never warranted -- especially for such a self-serving purpose.

Women like Susan Barrington, a 52-year-old housewife from England, are heading to places such as Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Moscow and Rotterdam to obtain the treatments.

She has been given the final go-ahead form a local clinic to travel abroad for the treatment that promises to make her look 10 years younger and doesn't mind that lives have been sacrificed to enhance her beauty.

To produce the treatments, clinics are using tissue from babies killed in abortions from 6 to 12 weeks into pregnancy and stem cells obtained from destroying human embryos to inject into a client's face. The fetal cells then begin a supposed rejuvenation process that makes the skin look younger.

To obtain the cells, women in underdeveloped nations are paid up to $200 dollars to carry a baby up to the optimum eight to 12 week period when the fetuses are “harvested” for their stem cells which are then sold to exclusive cosmetic clinics. More>>

What Terry Gilliam's 1985 film, Brazil, so precociously foresaw was our present mimetic swirl of terrorism, bureaucracy run amok, human hubris, alchemical fusion of paganism and western rationalism, and a suffocating attempt of nearly everybody to get out of it (unsuccessfully).

Want to know how to find peace, joy, and holiness? Inquire within..

Greek Mythology 101

Icarus

Or perhaps, sadly, Phaëton. Someone should have told him what happens to mortals who dabble in archetypal paganism.

Can you think of anyone else grasping at god-like grandeur these days?

Functional Atheism and Scimitar against ...

Listening recently to the CD of Gil Bailie's fifth Emmaus Road Initiative session (2/24/09) - Why did it take the Crucifixion to save us? - I realized again the vital distinction between the sacred and the mythical vs. the gospel and truth.

We live in a time when power is evinced by power of office, of wealth, of clout. How many divisions does the Pope have? is a question not only asked of a former Communist dictator, but every government that is a functionally atheist regime. That is, powers and principalities that look neither for an ally in Heaven nor to be judged by the same on terms not of their own choosing, but that of Heaven's (name one that does, please).

The only major world power that does - save (I hope) Israel - is no longer a temporal power in the normal sense of the word. It is the one, holy, apostolic, and Catholic Church. It occupies very little land, sum total; yet it purports to hold forth on matters magisterial to the entire human race - every man, woman, and child made in the image of God, imago dei.

That it should be such a target of venom and vitriol, such concerted efforts to divide and castigate it should - should - make every man, woman, and child made in the image of God wonder why. Why should the Catholic Church be heaped with such scorn and spite if it is merely an antiquated remnant of medieval superstition?

But, as Mark Studdock discovers in C. S. Lewis's prescient novel, That Hideous Strength, along with the powers and principalities that desire so much to arrogate and usurp for themselves the cult of power, persuasion, and permanence, the Normal (along with the True, Good, and Beautiful) has a remarkably tenacious way of rebuffing them, outnumbered, out-strategized, and out-gunned though it is.

This might be remarkable as a talking point, but right now the people of the biblical faiths - Judaism (and Israel is particular) and Christianity (and the Catholic Church in particular) are being attacked with a renewed vigor by a great many of the "functional atheist" regimes and peoples mentioned above. Even the most powerful man on the planet, President I Won, is catering hugely to Judaism's and Christianity's largest foe: the Scimitar.

Like all good politicians, he knows which way the (foul) wind blows, and he thinks he can harness it for his pitiably puny understanding of what is "good" for everyone. In this way, he merely another Protestant: he has studied under the finest progressive minds of post-modernity and has found Catholic truth, faith, and morals not to his liking. Therefore, he eschews them (read: rejects them) for another Rube Goldberg contraption. Which is passing strange, since his progressivist ideology can't possible assimilate the Scimitar's fervent intolerance for his permissive, Dionysiac values.

What they surreptitiously have in common is ... a common hatred for biblical truth. And it is always of value in politics and anthropological dealings to have a common scapegoat: someone or someones we can agree to sub-humanize and upon whom to cast blame.

And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day: for before they were at enmity between themselves. - Lk 23, 12

Who might that be? Who are those two figures left standing who believe in Heaven's authority, a Law that will not be superseded by human arrogance, hubris, and idolatry?

I think you know, gentle reader. Judaism and Catholicism.

O @ Georgetown - IHS Nowhere Seen

Does it have the same feeling tone - the efforts to co-op the Catholic Church by the Last Self-Help Administration - and the Chinese government's efforts with the Church (not to mention Buddhist leadership succession)?

Dawn Eden reports on the President's visit to Georgetown University and G'town removes the Holy Name to accommodate The One.

It is coming down who believes who has the power to define the terms of discourse: Obama and his ilk think they do.

UPDATE: CNS.com has more. [ht: Spirit Daily]

Future Primitive

The man-made, scapegoat-rich environment of the present financial crisis has shown that technology - or "smarter math" as the new IBM ads would have it - does not mitigate against human fallenness. It exacerbates it exponentially.

As mimetic theory posits on the basis of the archaeological record, the ignoring and/or rejection of the Judeo-Christian influence that is haute couture will not result in the progressivists' pipe dream of a secular-science based utopia; far from it. What we can expect is a newer, more technologically enhanced paganism. Take my word for it; it won't be pretty.

Krauthammer - O's Arrogance

Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics. (Emphasis added)

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand -- this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."

Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem cells, said "if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough." Obama clearly has not.

Read all of Krauthammer's op/ed here.

Decisionism

In legal theory, decisionism had a notable proponent in the German law scholar Carl Schmitt. Schmitt held that it is not the actual precepts of the law which determine its validity, but rather the fact that it has been made into law by the proper authority. Later in life, when Schmitt became a member of the NSDAP, he used decisionism as a way of justifying Nazi policy, when he was quoted as saying "Der Führer has made the law, der Führer protects the law".

Read all here.

Light shines above this present darkness

Recent events have left nearly all Christians flabbergasted by the swiftness of "progressive" moves against life and its sole remaining on-the-books supporter, the Catholic Church. It is a move to remove and silence the voice of faith and morals, as Cardinal Pell recently noted, or, in the case of Connecticut lawmakers, an attempt (pulled for the moment) to cede ecclesial control afforded bishops and priests to the (almighty) powers of state government.

More omnipotently, the president has now co-opted the federal income taxes paid by the faithful to do the work of Moloch, one or two steps removed from the Freedom of Choice Act he arrogated to sign into law before Planned Parenthood. His agenda is clear - to "do away with culture wars," because they are "so 90's" (read: silence foes of the "progressive" agenda once and for all). To what end?

The proponents are sincere. I do not doubt their sincerity. Nor do I doubt their thinking, their logic, their determination, or their belief that they are doing it all for a good reason, even for the good of all people.

What I beg to differ on with President Obama and all who are supporting and working so hard to enact against faith and morals that are NOT "so 90's" - they are so 32 A.D. - is this: their presuppositions.

What we as people of faith in general and Catholics in particular presuppose is diametrically opposed to their presuppositions. And the difficulty is that neither of us can prove our a priori first principles through which we view the same world, same evidence, same data: they are faith statements, and ever shall be.

What we as followers of Jesus Christ say, however, is that the vast heft and glorious weight of wisdom and Tradition vouchsafed in the Magisterium of Mother Church far, far outshines and outweighs the puny, proud secular and humanist knowledge, news and information recently garnered by the advocates of "progress", utopian change, and modern-day Gnostic pipe dreams.

We're in for a huge battle. Our enemies think, naively and proudly, their recent ascension to stately power make them nearly invincible.

We know differently. And that is why we practice the virtues, pray constantly, teach our children, and trust in the perichoretic power of the Most Holy Trinity in and through the sacramental presence of the Catholic Church which Our Lord promised would prevail against all attacks till He comes again.