(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.

(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 (more…)

(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…)

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.  (more…)

by TZ

“A good parson once said that where mystery begins, religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least,
of human laws, that where mystery begins, justice ends?”  – Edmund Burke

I speak as an informed Roman Catholic, and in the tradition of the churches that have a tradition of using philosophy and reason to illuminate theology, man and society, and the natural world. The doctors of the church were both spiritual and practical.  Augustine and Aquinas were both very earthly and heavenly.

Those who hold to the sola scriptura and sola fides vary in how much philosophical ability they bring when resolving the words of scripture.  Some, especially who have learned philosophy believe in natural law much as I described above.  Some are learned but relativist, not holding to any foundational standard of law as derived from reason.  Many if not most do not hold to the concept of the natural law, and of those, many support the mixing of biblical laws falling into the “get into heaven” portion of God’s laws (sacrilege, words like abomination), with those for civil society (words like detestable) and see no distinction or separation as they are both in the Bible.  Not going to church on Sunday may be a sin but they will take every sin and make it a crime.   Note this is something the right and left have in common when they abandon natural law which makes fine distinctions.  Smoking is evil so both move to make it a crime.  Neither accept shame as an appropriate response, either things are required to be both crimes and sins or neither.  Many on the left aren’t otherwise religious but their list of “sins” is often longer and their zeal for punishing greater than any fundamentalist.  Both often make discoveries of new sins and go on crusades. (more…)

By TZ (building off of http://www.archangelinstitute.org/saint-thomas-more-and-civil-rights-part-i/ )

I have little in common with the gay community, except that they are human beings with human rights. I would not stand shoulder to shoulder with someone who wishes to do lewd acts in public. But I must stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone defending their human rights. Under the natural law. God’s law.  My Christian friends might object: “But it is a grave sin”.  My response comes from the scene just earlier in “A Man for All Seasons” which was the reason for the original quote and this was not about some third party but the man that would ultimately betray him and be responsible for being found guilty and his execution:

Margaret: Father, that man’s bad.
Sir Thomas: There’s no law against that.
Roper: There is: God’s law.
Sir Thomas: Then God can arrest him.

Such things are a matter for the confessional, not the constable.  What they do in private that doesn’t cause public disruption is none of the state’s business as their home is their castle.  Even civil disobedience and the disruption is often because people aren’t being left alone except when the defense by the law and authorities ought to be protecting them.

Almost. A man’s home is his castle in 49 states and where the Magna Carta  still prevails.  The exception in (more…)