Sinking the White Witch

From XKCD.com:

Mouseover: If you fire a Portal Gun through the door of the Wardrobe
Space and Time knot together, which leads to a frustrated Aslan
trying to impart Christian Morality to the Space sphere.

Wow. Today is one of those days that I needed something like this to think about. 

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Kant we stop this?

Immanuel Kant

So the Voris-Shea-half of the Catholic Blogosphere-Earth Day dust up is still going on. Shea today posted a link by Fisheaters showing how one can mention Earth Day and Easter and still be within the realms of Orthodoxy. REALLY? I almost want to give all these bloggers a time out and take away their blogging privileges for the day, because they are acting like children... seriously.

Since when did we decide bloggers must be held to the exact wording of their arguments, as if we were all subscribing to some Kantian philosophy of imperatives? I haven't seen such childish and convoluted thinking since my philosophy classes in undergrad. Seriously, Shea-Anchoress-et al... don't really believe that Voris stated his proposition with a strict and literal intention. They don't believe this because it would be silly... and their examples prove it. Ugh... I am not even going to waste my time drawing out this analysis.

What frustrates me is that a lot of folks in the Voris camp aren't thinking to highly of the other side in this right now and in reality, everyone is pretty much on the same side of things in the larger battle for Catholic orthodoxy. I think a lot of the Voris-camp could learn a lot from Shea and the like, but this dust-up is hurting those chances.

If you have no idea what I am talking about... lucky you. If you think I am incoherent and babbling, you are probably right. I'll stop now.

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Because I understand this...

...I am a Nerd.

XKCD.com (click for Larger)

Unfortunately, as an undergraduate in almost any History or Philosophy department you would encounter situations like this, where people do these sorts of things as a joke. I don't know how many times I saw a guys trying to seduce girls by 'proving' that they, the girls, didn't exist... If you thought Freshman Psych-Majors were bad, you really need to meet a state college Philo-Major. Oh the horror!

Just another reason we need more Catholics studying Thomism and Natural Law Philosophy.

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Alice, Wonderland, and The Reform of the Reform..

There is a mini-series which started on the Syfy channel tonight called: ALICE. It is a re-imagine of Lewis Carroll's classic with a syfy - modern - totalitarian twist. I am only about 40 minutes in but so far I like it. It is pretty "family" friendly so far [I would label it 16+]. It is a sort of Alice meets 1984 sprinkled with the Matrix.

One line that instantly caught my attention was the King of Hearts of the totalitarian-esque wonderland who says:

If our people don't feel what they want to feel when they want to feel it - well the whole system breaks down!! Instant gratification, it's a very complex business.

If that isn't a summation of our society I don't know what is. At some point we become dependent on instant-gratification. Once we have it... and then start to lose it, we begin to rebel. But where does that rebellion take us?

Think about the Church as we see it today. We have lived in a sort of WONDERLAND since the 1970's. We felt and worshipped how we wanted, when we wanted it. Then, as Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict have begun to remove that instant-gratification we have rebelled. But against what? And where do we hope to get? What is our ultimate end?

Likewise, what about our culture? When we no longer can feel what we want to feel... what will we rebel against? And what will we hope to "win"? Has right and wrong been destroyed only to leave fun and boring as our "moral poles"?

The show seems REALLY good, at least on an allegorical level... and I look forward to doing a full post about it after I watch the full thing and take some notes. And survive doing so w/o my wife killing me. So until then....

One of the hardest things to do in life...

...is being happy while others you know and love aren't; even worse is being happy when those others can't be happy.

I know God gives us exactly what we need, and that some crosses are ours to bear alone and sometimes we get the luxury of inviting others to join in our struggle.

Faith, hope and love... but the greatest is love.

Catholicism, Capital Punishment, and Terrorism - A new inquiry

Capital Punishment is a question that has vexed me for quite a while. As a pro-life person I have often faced the criticism by liberals and conservatives alike when they ask me the dreaded, "What about Capital Punishment, where do you stand on that?" question.

It isn't easy to answer, and sometimes it isn't even a fair or valid question, depending on who is doing the asking. [For instance, if a pro-abortion person asks it, as an argument against my pro-life conviction it is a fallacy or invalid argument, depending on how they use it.] I have gone back and forth on the issue, and at some point shelved it in my mind. Once I got to Ave Maria Law, I decided to shelve it even further due to the fact that several issues of the Law Review were dedicated to it there, and most of the school had agreed to disagree on the matter, with one another at least.

Recently though, my mind has been calling it into question. The Ft. Hood terrorist attack, [it is important to call it what it is] has made me contemplate it once again. So I grabbed some articles from the Ave Maria Law Review and will be reading them over the next few days. I don't know a TON about this subject, and don't have a lot settled in my mind but I am willing to learn.

Some of the questions & areas that I will be looking into while trying to settle some of this stuff:

• Thomistic View of Capital Punishment
• Personalist View... does it exist? Is it different?
• Pope John Paul II's statement concerning CP...
• CP in todays world
• CP applied to terrorists - especially American born terrorists (i.e. Maj. Hassan)
• Where would CP be justified?
• CP when used in "Cop Killer" & "Authority Figure" statutes

I don't plan on doing this quickly, but over time I should try and draw some of this out, and hopefully I will make a few blog posts about it. A lot of this stuff is thick and since I don't have a library within about 1500 miles [literally] that has Catholic resources - so I will be doing everything online.

If anyone has any suggestions or comments on how to approach this let me know. Especially with good resources.

A few of the directions I won't be going in are:

• CP vs. Pro-Life, Pro-Abortion, etc...
• CP and the financial implications (at least in great length)
• CP outside of this country (again, at least in great length)

I think that Abortion and Capital Punishment are very different things. I may change my mind on this statement, and I may have to address this in my readings... but I don't plan to tackle it in any great length - at least off the bat.