(TZ here – this is not to endorse any candidate, but to make an observation. I should also say I’m a pacifist mainly because of the issue, so my use of irony below might be taken the wrong way so let me make it clear that I do not believe in the use of violence except under the law following proper legal procedures, and in the just war teachings of the church)

Ron Paul is also against assassinating doctors (or whomever) who perform abortions.

You are probably saying to yourself, “Well, Duh!”. So are the other candidates…

I don’t think the other candidates are.

What if one of the hundreds of “number 2 in Al Queda” insurgents happens to be an abortionist, and runs into an abortion clinic somewhere on that other side of the world where we are sending predator drones with hellfire missiles.

Whether or not he has killed tens of thousands of innocent babies in their mother’s wombs might be irrelevant to whether he is a terrorist, but what would the other candidates do? Probably blow up the building and/or assassinate the guy. Even if he was an American citizen on US soil.

Of course a million innocents perish in our homegrown Abortion Holocaust each year, but war is hard and creates hard choices, like not to bomb the rails to Auschwitz because there were other, more important targets. Maybe back then we thought “The Final Solution” was an internal German political matter and they had courts who could rule and MPs and the rest of the political and judicial system and maybe just needed time to come around and realize the mistake. But sending the Luftwaffe, Buzz Bombs and V2s to crater London was serious! Serious enough to firebomb Dresden which some peaceniks disagreed was necessary.

Iranian scientists who have not yet shed any blood either on a battlefield or innocent can be assassinated. Muslim preachers who merely speak from a pulpit and not on the battlefield and their children can be assassinated. Large buildings with many people including innocent women and children can be blown up on suspicion – and another missile to blow up the firemen and paramedics trying to rescue the wounded. That is what the rest of the field call for and will do.

The others claim the power to do such things, to assassinate anyone – even American citizens – without review by signing a death warrant, to torture, to violate international law and treaties, to shred the constitution, trash the rule of law, immunity from any recourse. If you read carefully the “unitary executive” presidential power they claim to have like Bush then Obama has, it is more than sufficient to end abortion within a few days of taking office. Yet they are very clear they won’t use their power for that purpose, though I’m curious as to their reasoning.

There is no comparison between a thousand deaths from terrorism and a million from abortion.

Any president has the constitutional power to pardon any person who took it upon themselves to assassinate someone who even are a threat to innocent life, e.g. Scott Roeder. I don’t think Ron Paul, who would pardon large numbers of nonviolent offenders, would.

Someone should ask the candidates in the upcoming debates or on the campaign trail about this.

The video like the post is intended to be ironic or satire.

Thank to all who kindly welcomed  TZ, a  thought-out Christian willing to risk his reputation by hanging out here at the ArchAngel Institute.

I (Bryan) have been more than impressed by his analysis and writing.

And I am in dire need of a sabbatical from beating my head against this Wall.

So I have thrown the keys to this gateway to TZ.  I do not plan to post again until the Seventh Circuit rules.

I plan to work on my new column for the News Sentinel, among other projects.   Most will post on Facebook (Arch Angel Institute), some on Linkedin (Bryan J. Brown).

Thanks to those who have regularly read me out these past four plus years.  You deserve a change.  TZ is a change in the positive direction, so please lend him your gaze.

Peace Be With Y’all.

(TZ here – Today is Martin Luther King day)

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”

I wonder if 40 years hence if there will be anyone to honor on “Life Day”. In this battle, every leader is highly imperfect. Moses broke the 5th commandment. David committed adultery then murder. Elijah despaired moments after his great victory. Peter thrice denied Jesus.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Is honored for his role in slaying a grave evil in our country. He was a sinner. If reports are true, a grave sinner. But I think if asked he would have admitted and repented if he had not already done so. He also saw the evil of the Vietnam war and spoke against it.

Sometimes God will raise up a Wilberforce or Peter Damien, but most often leaves it to the crackpots filled with anointing of the spirit and on fire to light the way and come against the darkness.

He simply spoke clearly and uncompromisingly against the public evil of his day.

Before discussing if it is worthy of a national holiday, how many would be willing to go to jail today? To march into riot police with water cannon? To declare a pet policy of your allies as evil?

Today we have the greater evil of the culture of death. I would worry more about following and even exceeding his example of nonviolent civil disobedience, and when we are no longer in his shadow, having gained our victory, we can discuss shortcomings.

Keep your eyes on the prize.

Don’t worry about minutiae, but end funding for abortion, encumber it with reasonable laws (e.g. that it should be like a hospital operating theater, not a slaughterhouse), ban euthanasia, require ultrasound and written consent and a waiting period. There is so much to do.

He wanted men to judge people on the content of their character. God will do so, so the more important question is how we will measure up.

(TZ here)

There has be a titanic shift in the culture:

(Link Warning, the UK has đifferent sensibilities on what might be offensive, but that seems to be an irony that even British humor can’t get).

Forget women and children first. Burly crew men led the race for the lifeboats

• Survivors tell of panic as men ignore order that women and children should go first and passengers fight to get on boats
• Passengers say they saw captain leaving ship instead of helping people
• Pregnant woman says she wept as captain stopped her going ahead
• Eight British dancers among the last to leave the sinking ship
• One dancer involved in magic show was trapped in a box as the stricken vessel began to sink

The big, burly sperm donors would live over the weaker, expendable egg donors. Darwin is what is being taught. A softer, more subtle eugenics. The lessons have taken root it seems.

Or as C. S. Lewis put it at the end of the first part of ‘Abolition of man’:

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

One thing we remember about the Titanic is that it was women and children first. There was honor and chivalry. Even important rich men went down so poorer women could have a space in the lifeboat. Orderly, prayerfully, they went down. And defended the principle blocking those who in the moment were less chivalrous. There is a story of a man who dressed as a woman which is likely to be untrue – as most people thought the ship unsinkable, the early lifeboats were half empty and filled with whomever was worried early on.

But that was before feminism. And when we didn’t teach the nazi like eugenics of Margaret Sanger Darwinian evolution by natural selection. And “sex ed” that other people are objects for your pleasure.

The Marines still have the motto “sempre fi”. But what is still left of western civilization, it could be said “He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day”.

Worse, when I think about it, I might find it easy to act chivalrous to any Victorian woman. Most were women of substance. But my immediate thought imagining myself and most modern feminists on a sinking ship, the temptation would be to (Oops…) push them off the deck to as jetsam to help keep the ship of civilization from sinking.

Times are getting tough, and instead of turning back toward God and looking into our hearts as to how we let this happen and our responsibility, most whine to Nanny government. Occupy at least realizes that Nanny government today is more like “Mommie Dearest” and needs to be cleansed, and haven’t recognized they themselves are doing a better job in microcosm taking care of themselves than big government would ever do. So there may be hope. When the god of government fails, we will have to turn to the true God and each other – but we will see ourselves in that light. On the Costa Concordia trampling the weak to save ourselves – and probably not doing so even then. Or on the Titanic where sacrifice and honor will result in salvation and resurrection.

(TZ here, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade is approaching)

Many years ago I met a woman who had a stroke, and she could not see anything on one side of her field of vision. She had no problems getting around, but had to force herself to look in order to see things like in traffic.

Both on the right and left, there are honest people who haven’t thought or looked into the issues, and would be shocked and change their mind. But there is a lot of pressure not to look, to trust the labels, to assume others are wiser in what they are doing and permitting.

Nat Hentoff is on the left but is anti-abortion. I think all he did is look honestly at what abortion is.

Many on the left are shocked at torture and the horrors done by our government at black sites. They won’t accept the euphemisms of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and won’t accept that “National Security” knows better or has the right to do such things. The victims are dehumanized, hadjis, towel-heads, or something equally vague – it is “collateral damage”. And showing pictures or releasing descriptions of what is happening is unpatriotic. Read the rest of this story »

(by TZ)

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton

We discover what the civil law should be via reason. Look for what makes for a peaceful society. Things like “don’t steal”. This is not different from what scientists do. Physicists have discovered the laws F=ma and e=mc2. These are also God’s laws written into the fabric of the universe. Many have found God by looking at Nature. How the planets dance to the music of the spheres. How light is split into a rainbow or glory.

It starts with logic and mathematics.  Some things are merely abstract symbols, but they grow and resolve and form patterns like a Bach fugue or an Escher drawing.  They ask “is there any conceivable universe where 2+2 can equal 5?”.  Or is the shortest distance always a line, or do all triangles internally add up to 180 degrees?  Sometimes it depends on an assumption we cannot prove, only define or assume. Some worlds are complex and wondrous, others are simple and elegant, all are from reason.  But all are imperfect. Kurt Gödel showed that any such system we can construct will be incomplete or have contradictions – and he did it using the very mathematical proof technique as everything else in mathematics is discovered.  So we may never know if there are an infinite number of prime pairs (11,13; 17,19) or an odd perfect number.  But we can keep looking to find them or find a way to prove their nonexistence.  They are searching the mind of God in the purest sense for the foundational laws – laws which even precede the real world.  And rules for reason itself and where reason can take them.  You can hear it in Bach more directly, but there is something astonishingly beautiful in an Read the rest of this story »

(by TZ)

Shakespeare has a debate scene from “The Taming of the Shrew”:

PETRUCHIO
Come on, i’ God’s name; once more toward our father’s.
Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
KATHARINA
The moon! the sun: it is not moonlight now.
PETRUCHIO
I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
KATHARINA
I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
PETRUCHIO
Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father’s house.
Go on, and fetch our horses back again.
Evermore cross’d and cross’d; nothing but cross’d!
HORTENSIO
Say as he says, or we shall never go.

Most sciences end with the suffix “-ology”  meaning the study of, not revelation.  Sometimes this is misleading when the wrong thing gets the suffix.  We have Astronomy and Astrology.  Alchemy has become Chemistry but maybe should be Chemicology.

I’m most skeptical of “science” that tries to explain the distant past or the future.  In the case of the past, we have just dinosaur bones, so what the animators created for Jurassic Park isn’t science.  Small bone fragments that end up being painted into a full specific body, when any forensic expert would say you can’t tell age or gender.  What is the age of the earth and the universe?  Read the rest of this story »

(By TZ)

Part II concluded with a brief introduction to the worst pseudoscience, Psychology. Most people don’t realize how wrong and destructive it is. Both it and astrology are in the daily paper, but the authorities today don’t accept horoscopes.

What they thought over the years and today was published. They had their reference book called “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”. A generation ago, it considered “homosexuality as a mental disorder”. Subject to being treatment with lobotomies and electroshock. Or worse as in the case of Alan Turing. Earlier there was the eugenics movement which sterilized the “feebleminded” – this is also where the state got involved in marriage. The legal system was just following the orders that “Science” gave them.

The Bishops listened to the psychologists when choosing men for the seminary and when confronted with an abusive priest. The Church had to handle such monstrous evil since its inception and did so with charity, repentance and quarantine. But the psychologists said they could be cured, sent away to get treatment, then they would be safe in another parish. Not since the Popes had court astrologers has pseudoscience caused such sorrow.

Today, there is money in pharmaceuticals to treat Read the rest of this story »

by TZ

I forget the details but a few years ago a state passed a law declaring that π (PI), the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle was exactly 3.14 to make calculations easier.  I think it was a joke, but it illustrates that law can’t change fundamental reality, only contradict it.  3.14 is a rational number according to mathematics.  Of course π is a transcendental number, an “irrational number”, and although the law always should strive to be rational it ought not try to do so in this sense.

The intractable problem with man creating law is that he is fallible, and we need courts and wise judges to resolve the contradictions and ambiguities. There are some statutes that says “you can’t” and “you must” in nearby text.  This is normal and isn’t merely a problem with the fall, but with our finite minds.  A worse problem is that power corrupts man, producing some very rational, consistent, clear, but evil laws.

Were we in Wonderland, the Queen would simply add this contradiction to one of the six impossible things before breakfast and declare both valid at the same time.

In this real world, are we to accept irrationality, insanity, to be a feature of Man’s law? What if some contractor only delivered 3.14 times the diameter of a planned circular swimming pool? Or if the law said 2+2=5?

What Catholics mean by “God’s Law” can be two things.  Read the rest of this story »