(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?  (more…)

(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 (more…)

BJB Note:  Replace “law school” with “bar admission review process” and replace “hiring” with “certifying” and this case could be my own.  Of course, we yet await a ruling from a sister court, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ….

Suit by Conservative Sees Bias in Law School Hiring
By ADAM LIPTAK
January 9, 2012

WASHINGTON — Teresa R. Wagner (pictured) is a conservative Republican who wants to teach law. Her politics may have hurt her career. An official of the University of Iowa College of Law, where Ms. Wagner applied for a job in 2006, certainly seemed to think so. “Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it),” Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson wrote in 2007 to the law school’s dean, Carolyn Jones.

Ms. Wagner, who graduated from the law school in 1993 and had taught at the George Mason University School of Law, was not hired. She sued, alleging discrimination because of her political beliefs. Late last month, a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, ruled that her case should go to trial, saying she had presented enough evidence to suggest that “Dean Jones’s repeated decisions not to hire Wagner were in part motivated by Wagner’s constitutionally protected First Amendment rights of political belief and association.”
Ms. Wagner’s lawyer, Stephen T. Fieweger, said the decision was a victory for an important sort of academic freedom. “It’s gotten to the point where the law school’s diversity efforts are to eliminate everyone from the mainstream,” he said. “They espouse cultural diversity, but won’t consider the conservative viewpoint.”
According to Ms. Wagner’s lawsuit, the law faculty at Iowa in 2007 included a single registered Republican among its 50 or so members. The Republican professor was appointed in 1984. In 2009, The Des Moines Register found that there were two registered Republicans on the faculty.
Ms. Wagner would have added some balance, her lawyer said. “My client is an ideologue,” Mr. Fieweger said. “She does believe in conservative values.” Ms. Wagner has worked for the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion and euthanasia, and the Family Research Council, which takes conservative positions on social issues.
Walter Olson, a fellow at the Cato Institute, the libertarian group, and the author of “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America,” said there was nothing unusual about the number of Republicans on Iowa’s law faculty.
“What would count as freakish would be to find two dozen registered Republicans on a big law faculty,” Mr. Olson said. “Law schools are always setting up committees and task forces to promote diversity on their faculty, which can serve to conceal an absence of diversity in how people actually think.” (more…)

(by TZ)

In the upcoming elections there will be said to be a list of non-negotiable issues, but I only see two in the bigger picture.

First is the nearly complete erosion of civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism.

Obama has said he will sign the defense authorization that allows the military to arrest anyone including a US Citizen in the US without a warrant, probable cause, and they will be denied a lawyer and held indefinitely. Lawyers attempting to defend such will probably be arrested themselves.

Do you feel confident Obama will never find an excuse to round up pro-lifers and put them into FEMA camps? Charge pro-life advocacy organizations with material support of terrorism and seize their assets? A real persecution of the Catholic church, at least the Bishops holding true to orthodoxy? Do not think that any pro-life advocate or organization is safe the next time there is an explosion near a clinic even if it is from a defective propane tank.

I can also point out someone should ask the GOP candidates that now they would have the same power, can they not declare abortion a form of terror and end it within a few days of taking office? Most have already rejected “The Rule of Law”.

There are a list of social issue non-negotiables, but what happens when presenting such a list becomes advocacy for terrorism? When you have no right to speak? When you can be imprisoned or assassinated if you do? Will you even be safe in another country?

Or what #Occupy does which DHS is already looking at, or a Tea Party gathering with all those gun-owners? Progressives should also hold to this as strongly as all Christians and other people of faith who have ever suffered persecution.

Any candidate for any office that doesn’t believe in due process, warrants, habeas corpus, and the rest of the Constitutional rights U.S. citizens used to enjoy should be immediately and irredeemably rejected.

So the first fundamental non-negotiable is to restore the Constitution and civil rights to what they were before the fear-mongering of 9/11 started. If we don’t reverse it now we might be in for a dark night like the USSR, Maoist China, or the Third Reich. Remember that Hitler was granted every power he exercised by democratic means, not through violence. Gradually, and first to fix the chaos – he did stop the Taxi Murders. But the true cost became visible far too late. If the terrorists really hate our freedoms, they already have a near total victory.

The second is related. End the crony-capitalism and corruption. Taking any money from Wall Street, a hedge fund, or a big bank ought to immediately disqualify the candidate from your vote since they cannot be trusted no matter what they say on any other issue or what their earlier record might be.

The economy is already in a tailspin, or about to stall and crash. There is a good chance that people will be starving because of the disruption – the food on grocery store shelves doesn’t simply appear. Food Stamp cards don’t help if the shelves are empty. Trucks, trains, which need fuel and parts, all which need to be paid for. There are already riots and bank-runs in Greece. Watch Europe closely.

We cannot slow or stop this without fundamental change. Preserving the oligarchy will prove as fatal to the rest of the economy as it has to housing – we now have abandoned houses, squatters, people who can’t move because they can’t sell, homelessness, broken chains of title, a frozen market that sinks when it unfreezes. That must be allowed to crash even if it takes every Wall Street firm and bank into receivership and every CEO and CFO into prison. Will we allow freezing the rest of the economy into some kind of third-world disaster area just to save the big banks and wall street?

This again is something Christians, #Occupy, Progressives, and the Tea Party ought to agree on. We can only fix the economy if we get past the corruption.

If we don’t make both of these fundamental non-negotiables for every candidate at every level of office in the next election, there may be no country, economy, or rights to do it later, and no other list of “non-negotiables” will matter.

Both can be summed up under the phrase “Rule of Law”. There is one law for government, individuals, the rich, the poor, everyone.

If we prefer to fight with each other, and elect totalitarian dictators that will preserve the oligarchy but throw our side a few juicy bones – and I’m talking to every group here – we will only get a dictatorship of the oligarchs and nothing else since the rest will cancel out. If we decide instead to destroy the violations and corruption, we can iron out our differences as together we heal the deep wounds in our country as we differ mainly in means, not ends.

In a recent interview from the Vatican, the head of the Roman Catholic “Rota”  (the ecclesiastical court rooted in the believer’s court system first mentioned by our Lord in Matthew 18 and then the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 6) warned that secularism is a very real threat to the freedom of Christians in the West.

VATICAN, November 28, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – One of the highest ranking cardinals in the Vatican has said that the United States is “well on the way” to the persecution of Christians. 

Cardinal Raymond Burke

Cardinal Raymond Burke, former Archbishop of St. Louis and now the head of the Vatican’s highest court, told Catholic News Agency that he could envision a time when the Catholic Church in the U.S., “even by announcing her own teaching,” is accused of “engaging in illegal activity, for instance, in its teaching on human sexuality.”

Asked if the cardinal could even see American Catholics being arrested for their faith he replied, “I can see it happening, yes.”

In his remarks to several U.S. Bishops meeting with him Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI made similarly emphatic warnings about the U.S. The pope told the bishops that “the seriousness of the challenges which the Church in America, under your leadership, is called to confront in the near future cannot be underestimated.” 

He added: “The obstacles to Christian faith and practice raised by a secularized culture also affect the lives of believers.”

In the interview published today, Cardinal Burke declared that “it is a war” and “critical at this time that Christians stand up for the natural moral law.”  Should they not, he warned, “secularization will in fact predominate and it will destroy us.”

I, Bryan J. Brown, can testify firsthand as to the desire of secularists to destroy those who stand on natural moral law.  My law career was impacted by my refusal to renounce the Higher Laws doctrine (i.e., deny the Kingship of Christ) when ordered to do so by agents of the Indiana judiciary. 

The rest of this LifeSiteNews article is right here ….

In a related story, Pope Benedict XVI recently said the following to the U.S. Bishops:

Speaking to various bishops of the United States Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI responded to concerns expressed by the bishops about “the grave challenges” coming from secular society against the practice of faith.  The pope noted that many in society are now beginning to recognize the damage of crumbling moral foundations and urged the bishops to speak out in defense of Christian morality. 

“The present moment can thus be seen, in positive terms, as a summons to exercise the prophetic dimension of your episcopal ministry by speaking out, humbly yet insistently, in defense of moral truth, and offering a word of hope, capable of opening hearts and minds to the truth that sets us free,” he said.

I can also testify firsthand to the state of this “prophetic dimension” among the prelates of the United States and the extent that “hope” is extended to those who are, like me, under the heavy hammers of the secular  powers.  The secular elite acts out, the religious elite …..   (My situation would make a fine case study in this topic for any interested journalists.)

The rest of this LifeSiteNews article is right here ….

More on this general theme of a coming (and even here now) persecution of American Christians is found throughout this website, including in this category:  http://www.archangelinstitute.org/category/rrr/secularist-onslaught/

Thanks to LifeSiteNews for these fine articles.  Consider donating to that fine alternative media source right here:  https://www.z2systems.com/np/clients/lifesitenews_us/donation.jsp?campaign=34

Dallas, Texas, Nov 8, 2011 / 06:11 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Increasing hostility to religion and growing restrictions on religious expression are “the biggest challenge the pro-life movement faces,” Bishop James D. Conley told a benefit for a Dallas pro-life group.

“If we think it’s been hard over these past four decades, I think the biggest challenges we face lie ahead of us,” the apostolic administrator of the Denver archdiocese said Nov. 5.

“America today is becoming what I would call an atheocracy — a society that is actively hostile to religious faith and religious believers. And I might add — (more…)

Alternative title:  Last one to the gallows is a rotten disciple

From an article in Portland, Oregon’s secular newspaper by editorialist M.D. Harmon (mharmon@mainetoday.com) ….

On Sept. 29 [the Feast of the ArchAngels], the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the umbrella policy group of American Catholicism, announced the formation of an “Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty.”

Why might the bishops be concerned about freedoms that are protected both in ordinary law and the Bill of Rights?

They’re worried because they have good reason to think that our current national leadership places other priorities much higher than mere constitutionally protected liberties.

In a statement released by Archbishop Timothy Dolan, (more…)