Jan. 25, 2012 

“The Bell is Tolling”

By Most Rev. James D. Conley, S.T.L., Apostolic Administrator

“Any man’s death diminishes me,” wrote John Donne in 1624, “for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

The bell is tolling for religious liberty in America. All of us should listen well.

On Friday, Jan. 20, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that most religious institutions – including Catholic hospitals, schools and social service agencies – would not be exempted from a federal government requirement that employee health plans must provide free contraceptives. This is a critical issue for us that must not be ignored.

The announcement was a death knell for religious liberty in the United States. Many recall that in August, HHS announced the obligation of contraceptive coverage in private insurance plans, and a narrow religious exemption which will cover, in fact, only some churches – and almost no other religious entities.

Many recall the outrage of religious leaders over this plan. Many recall that the Catholic Church, among others, pleaded with the federal government to reconsider. The pleas fell on deaf ears.

Moving forward with the plan, and in a weak attempt to provide concession to religious institutions, HHS announced that nonprofit groups would be given a year to “adapt” before being required to provide contraceptive coverage. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebellius stated that “this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.”

Let’s be clear. This decision does nothing to respect religious freedom. Without change, Catholic institutions will soon be legally required to provide services which violate a fundamental principle of our religious beliefs. If plans go unchanged, the Catholic Church, acting through our Catholic institutions, will no longer have legal protection for the free exercise of religion.

Secretary Sebellius is wrong; this is not a year to “adapt.” The Catholic Church will not adapt by violating fundamental elements of our faith. Instead of adapting, this is a year to unify, and to fight injustice and flagrant disregard for the institutional protection of our religious practice.

The recent decision by HHS should make clear for all Catholics that under the proposed health care plan, the freedom to practice our religious faith is in jeopardy. Catholic groups who claimed that this health care plan, with its narrow “conscience clauses” and “religious exemptions,” would respect Catholic teaching must face the facts.  Compromising with pro-choice, pro-contraceptive political agendas can have dangerous consequences. The bell tolls for our religious freedom.

Catholics must take the lead in restoring our Constitutional religious freedom. We need to work in all reasonable ways to convince the Department of Health and Human Services to reverse its policy; the Church will continue to lobby for this change. If that fails, which it may, we need to work with Congress to protect basic religious liberty.

There is an answer to this attack on our religious freedom. The “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act,” now before Congress, is more important than ever before. All Catholics need to support its passage. All Christians should join us by praying for a return to justice and by visiting www.usccb.org/conscience to begin contacting their representatives.

For many Christian denominations, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has just concluded. Unity has never been more important. Certainly, there is disagreement among Christians about the legitimacy of contraception. But there should be no disagreement among Christians about religious freedom. Each of us has an interest in defending liberty. Now is the time. The bell tolls for us all.

Most Rev. James D. Conley, S.T.L., is Apostolic Administrator of the Archdiocese of Denver.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Yet they sound not unlike Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld when they call ripping the limbs off a small human being that can feel pain “reproductive rights”, and say (if a man) that women know better and have the right to do such things. And it is a “medical procedure” being done to “a blob of tissue” anyway. And showing “product of conception” just confuses the issue.

I won’t reproduce (pun intended) the arguments as to why it is a baby and not a blob here. They are available from any search engine. But I do call them to honestly look at what an abortion is. Is it a blob of tissue or a small baby, with current technology uniquely dependent on the mother? Does it have a heartbeat and brain waves? Does it feel pain – if I did to your pet what is done to the baby/fetus would you charge me with extreme cruelty? Is recreational sex so much an absolute right that it would allow any unspeakable horror not unlike “the ticking time bomb”? Go beyond the euphemisms and disinterest. I can’t see inside Bagram but I’m called to care about what happens to “not persons under our constitution” there – but an ultrasound can see inside the womb. Look, or don’t be mystified when people shrug when shown or are told of monstrous things happening in some dark place “to preserve our freedom”. For if you refuse to look, think, and carefully consider you are no better.

Ann Coulter is outspoken to the point of being nasty, but she is correct that Abortion is the sacrament of the left. You can be a liberal for gay rights, socialized medicine, steep progressive taxes, and anything else, but if you are pro-life you will be shunned worse than any leper. That doesn’t change what abortion is. What is the truth of the matter? Not what is pragmatic and acceptable.

“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 elegant mathematical proof though it is pure abstract thought.

(Note: if your browser can’t handle the Bach media link, James Kibbie has recorded all of Bach’s organ works, for free but copy righted so I won’t deeplink the audio but here here is the page for the work, but you can and probably should browse the entire collection).

The hard sciences like physics and chemistry often come up with surprises like the uncertainty principle, but even the surprises can be reduced to equations and those can be verified by experiment and demonstrated.  All this is still reason, but discovering what God has in mind when electrons follow some path, become waves to tunnel through barriers, or go around the nucleus in an atom.  There is wonder at the universe and everything in it from the veil beyond the uncertainty principle at Planck’s constant up to the large, powerful, and remote quasars.

Our green earth provides even more discoveries – the simplest archebacterium is a feat of nanotechnology that the semiconductor makers can envy.  Chloroplasts still are the most efficient solar energy conversion devices – and they are still finding out how it works, channeling an excited magnesium atom, through chlorophyll, to antenna proteins, to splitting apart a water molecule.  And as you move up the scale it gets more surprising.  What appear to be simple worms are complex machines where the parts are functioning in harmony and many things have to work to keep it alive.  By the time you get to mammals it is clear that for what we do understand we still don’t understand orders of magnitude more.

It is a cosmos – as it has laws governing it and you can see the order.  The opposite of cosmos is chaos.  There isn’t any.  For all the destructiveness of the flood, each molecule of water is following its ordained path, the surface tension is kept, the turbulent or laminar flows are acting according to their laws as we have reduced to equations.

When we come to human beings, we have all the things preceding, yet we have something more or less than a cosmos.  Man has will.  His body will act like an animal’s, and even parts of his brain will work automatically.  But there is a will and intellect.  There are shadows of reason in animals, but only man has the full power. Animals have some “will”, but without reason, it can only be or serve instinct. The will decides on the ends, and reason will give the means, corresponding to justice and law.

Men find their own law – they govern themselves as individuals first.  They cannot break biology, chemistry, or physics, only try to understand and apply those laws. Natural law is the same.

When men create a community, then there is the possibility that such governance will start to contradict.  I’m not even talking of the fall here – where there is something pulling us to violate our own laws and enthrone chaos for some pleasure.  That is where we have to seek and find out which laws are truly right and which only seem right.  I won’t go into detail as C. S. Lewis in the short Abolition of Man details what he calls the Tao – what every society, from aborigines to Confucians, to Christians all accept.  Don’t lie, steal, or murder to begin with.  These weren’t sent down by angels or a heavenly finger onto a sacred stone, these are written in man’s soul and in the universe and discovered, first as mathematics, a set of abstract rules, then as physics – what seems to work, then as an ecosystem to create a small economy.  At some point God did clarify things by writing them in stone because of the fall, since they are easy to forget or close our eyes to.  But they are laws in the same sense as those science discover.  Culling predators might not show something immediately, but the prey overpopulates with disease and starvation later.  Similarly violating the natural law, or even getting it wrong will not result in a bolt from the blue.  That would be too easy.  It results in disorder, unhappiness, quick pleasure but long and deep despair.  And society falls apart.

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?  Models say much more than 6000, but how many million or billion depends on your models and assumptions. The correct answer is “I don’t know” –   We can only see the current “freeze frame” and the echoes and shadows of the past.  We only see distant points (as in infinitesimally small) for the stars.  We barely see our own Sun change – and it is amazing earth wasn’t either incinerated or frozen if we’ve been around that long.

The models of the future fail to predict the known past.  Where is my flying car? Power too cheap to meter? Back in the 1970′s it was scientifically certain we were beginning a new ice age.  Today it is global warming.  These happen to correspond to ocean decadal oscillators that make the east coast and Europe alternately cold and warm (and Greenland once green).  I don’t completely reject global warming, but meteorological and climate science has been replaced with politics for government grants to confirm Armageddon, and open models, data, and equations have been replaced with fraud and fudge so no matter what input, Armageddon – fire, ice, or both – are the output. I would like some real science, open data and models, and an honest discussion where the orthodox don’t strive to banish heretics from peer review.

There is something so obvious to almost anyone such as denial is far more irrational. The science was settled long ago and simply confirmed in more profound ways as technology lets us see more. Trying to present it makes the learned and leaders recoil. What is in a mother’s womb is not a blob of tissue. It has fingers, toes, a heartbeat and brain waves. As you go back in gestation these become less obvious and more potential. Just as a baby is a stage before adulthood, a zygote is just the first step. The law and science are both settled yet contradictory. Irrational. Maybe the States can declare in law real human zygotes are abstract paper corporations so they would then be persons protected under the constitution.

Is it wrong or rude to point this cognitive dissonance out?

Economics is a strange case as the ones with the least pleasant news that there is no free lunch – the Austrian school – is the most accurate, but the others that say you can use Laetrile instead of chemotherapy to cure the cancer are listened to – and when it doesn’t work they make excuses. We are watching it play out. Here you have to sift out the truth from the falsehoods, not what sounds pleasant and makes superficial sense, but whether they actually work in the real world where people react and change behavior as policy changes.

Perhaps the worst pseudoscience is the one is what should be translated as the study of the human soul: psychology. Today most people doing so don’t believe in the soul as such.  They are trying to find the wind-up box, or a copy of the software code or whatever is there in the body that is creating the intellect and the will. Not the entity acting on and observing the physical world from outside. Worse, they are trying to reprogram it.

This has acquired respectability as a science – but rarely for any actual science (like repeatable experiments, e.g. rats running mazes, double blind drug tests).  There are related real sciences like neurology, but that studies the brain, not the mind. They have a tiny core, yet pretend that they are doing the equivalent of physics when making pronouncements about persons.  Electrons follow paths laid down by equations.  Rats won’t even follow a maze the same way identically twice in a row.  Persons are subjects, not objects.  How can they be studied as objects? The study itself might not be injurious, but the conclusions and prescriptions are.

Stay tuned for more nonscience and nonsense …

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 children who won’t sit still or pay attention to boring lessons in the classroom. Not developing self-control nor making lessons interesting nor overloading them with sugar. Instead if the parents won’t cooperate with the psychobabble, the authorities literally call in the SWAT team. Maybe “homophobia” will be the next new mental disorder. At least a “-phobia” is a neurosis, especially if means an irrational fear instead of amorphous political incorrectness. How much of the current popular and even accepted psychology of today will be the subject of future horror films? Three generations of imbeciles aren’t enough since the authorities still listen to psychology today.

Sin is a moral problem, not errant programming of human behavior. Sin and vice are not mental illness. There can be problems with habits and temptations, but the ancient and even modern philosophers knew virtue and vice, even in the medieval times they knew good and evil, and the Church today knows these too from the traditional wisdom and much better. C. S. Lewis’s words in Abolition of Man and other works like The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment still ring true today whereas psychology texts of the same vintage read like the dark ages. The ancient texts from most religions and philosophies know man very well. When applied, they work.

The Popes and Emperors of old had court astrologers. Those in authority today have psychologists. But who are psychologists to declare someone fit or unfit? It is one thing to have a record of bad behavior, another thing to engage in some arcane ritual involving entrails and make pronouncements without review or appeal. Usually something has to be obviously wrong to declare that someone cannot exercise his rights or make decisions for himself. Jim Crow had “literacy tests” before someone could vote. Are we now to have psychological tests before we let exercise rights such as voting? When a friend dies, it becomes depression to be treated with a pill, not sorrow and grieving to be helped by sympathetic friends and relatives. There were good experiments, but few in authority realize they are subjects in a Milgram Experiment writ large. The authorities let these “scientists” go on last generation. Will they say stop today?

Churches, Families, and the Community throughout the ages everywhere – used to know with fairly good accuracy when someone was good or bad – or even incompetent. “Bad” wasn’t a disease or some condition. There were many names for the gradations such as “shame” or “vice”, but it was known that it was a defect in the will, not the intellect or body. Care was taken since everyone realized they themselves would fall short on occasion. “There, but for the grace of God, go I”. Wrongdoers were most often subject to shame, not physical punishment. Even criminals retained their basic human rights. There had to be a crime, evidence, testimony of acts committed, and a finding of guilt. Only then punishment – the just deserts – pay their debt to society. Not treated and experimented on.

There always was a claim that psychologists could read minds, and predict the future, though before most such claims were ultimately rejected. When they weren’t it was because they said bad things about people already considered bad, or good things about people already considered good. Today too they say we don’t have to wait for either an act or even some clear intent, in the decade of the 2010s they know who will be bad or good. Even Santa Claus only claims to know who has been bad or good, not who will be. We are already living in a version of the movie “Minority Report”.

The desire to reduce human beings into objects that can be quantified and modified is itself an unspeakable evil. But science needs to have objects to experiment on. So psychologists turn persons into objects of quality control, for the experiments to determine the accept/reject stamp. But their definition of “good” and “bad” doesn’t fit anything so much as whether someone is a conformist to the fads and fashions of their day. They will then insist on burning out the nonconformity – today with drugs, which are merely less ugly and messy than the old techniques but no less monstrous. I’m not speaking about some actual brain chemistry problem where drugs have proven useful and with the consent of the patient or guardian, but otherwise normal people with normal brains that have opinions and thoughts which are out of fashion and unpopular.

Is it that so different when someone was declared a witch using techniques that sounded plausible in their day? Witches had no rights. Neither it seems do the nonconformists the psychologists have stamped “rejected”.

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.  The first meaning is the set of rules you must follow to get to heaven.  They are specific to Catholics, and only binding to the extent that a particular Catholic wishes to have a high or low place in heaven, avoid hell, and/or avoid a long period in purgatory.

The other meaning is the “Natural Law”, as the section in Thomas Aquinas Summa on the law goes into detail about.  It is the law derived from right reason as to what the government needs to do to promote and keep the peace among men in civil society.  What the king, not the church should do and be limited to.

Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail says:

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.

Segregation wasn’t unjust because of some Bible verse, or progressive idea, it contradicted reality – distorting it.

Man can write whatever caprice and whim into the civil code, and it need not be logical, rational, or sensible.  But only laws which fall within the proper authority of the government, and are consistent with reality are just and valid.  They may not even be prudent.  But they cannot be nonsensical.

I believe the Civil Rights movement has failed, and that Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream has become at best a caricature, at worst a nightmare. What he wanted was the natural law to shred Jim Crow, segregation, and discrimination, so that people of character and ability would all be treated equally in the sense of being proportional to their character and ability.

That is what he was arguing for. That is what the natural law requires.  Treat equal things equally.  Treat unequal things proportionately and justly.  Treat access to government especially the courts as sacrosanct and never to be denied anyone, and do justice to all.

The counterfeit which has appeared instead has many of the narrow effects of what a just law would have provided to minorities, but by twisting the law so that the results end up looking correct.  A carnival mirror that you look at twisted lines through so they appear straight.  But it is cheating like looking in the Teacher’s answer book without doing the work to solve the problem.  Things like the dignity of real work aren’t required for the reward.  Real character is not rewarded more than bad character, often it is penalized.

The worst evils of “man’s law” were simply shifted so that instead of justice – which requires giving what is deserved for one’s actions – many are given hush money, others are still discriminated against and in even worse ways but using more subtle means (See “The New Jim Crow“).

St. Augustine wrote about “The City of Man” v.s. “The City of God”, and to an extent that is what Natural Law, the Higher Law, God’s Law is about. If Man’s Law is irrational and unjust, what would the law in the City of God be? And ought we not obey the law from right reason instead of robotically following the errant programming of Man’s law into a system crash?  When it says to segregate?  When it isn’t enforced for abused unpopular minorities?

In this world, in civil society, to follow natural law – God’s law – is to reject irrational and unjust provisions, fighting against them directly first and foremost by exposing them, but ultimately by not obeying them, but obeying what reason and a well formed conscience dictate.

“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.

Aquinas said civil law is to keep the peace – to prevent disturbances. “Peace officers”.  Not inquisitors.  “Justice of the peace”.  The witch craze (burning witches) was quenched in Catholic areas before it started as the hierarchy used due process and rationality to dismiss the bizarre claims immediately – they would not hold up under the slightest due process or rules of evidence.  In protestant areas it ran far too long because they couldn’t separate the various kinds of law, any bad event meant a curse because there was a witch somewhere.  (Catholics had other, far worse problems – for all its light and law the clerical rot precipitated the reformation so I’m not accusing, merely citing history).

The founding fathers, those who signed the Declaration of independence and the constitution were Bible Christians.  Except for a few they were NOT Deists, though the deists often made better philosophers and explained the points better.  The constitution itself  says there will be no religious test for public office.  They understood that once you let theological disputes, and this would include disputes about morality as defined by the church, into the government, that there could be no peace or stability in the law.  If you make baptism a precondition, is it infant or adult baptism?  If you prohibit gambling, do you include risky investments or lending at interest?  If you prohibit “astrology and witchcraft”, do you regulate telescopes, clocks, calendars, and have to run stings to make sure that the Quakers are doing it right?  The government is always overloaded when just trying to prevent violence, theft, and fraud, as well as managing contracts and insuring perjury is punished.  Going beyond is impractical.  That is the line.  Natural Law says what Law ought to be, but also what its limits are.  And we started off properly.  Adding morality – either biblical or secular (political correctness, drug use) makes Government a busybody.  And busybodies are condemned in scripture and the devil’s name of Satan means the accuser.

Someone from the bible belt who says “God’s Law overrides Man’s Law” can thus mean almost the opposite of what a faithful Roman Catholic means when he uses the same words. A fundamentalist will mean that the as-literal-as-possible interpretation of biblical text is always important to make law and overrides everything including the constitution. A Catholic will mean that when Man’s laws themselves disrupt the order, breach the peace, are irrational or unjust – basically what Martin Luther King Jr. said, Natural law – reason, justice, order – must override the erroneous law which might have had the proper formalities of being adopted followed.

Judges see this when someone contests a law. A lower law contradicts a higher one such as a restriction on free speech that violates the first amendment. But the Constitution itself consists of words, so grammar and reason have to be used along with knowing the context to understand what those words mean.  If we abandon reason, then the lower law would be forever valid no matter what it said as only reason can properly identify, isolate, and resolve a contradiction and can only do so with the sharp distinction of clear meaning and context of the words within the texts.  Reason – natural law – was the father of the Constitution and is what resolves disputes.

There is also an end, a teleology, a reason to use reason, to have the Constitution and civil laws.  It is to preserve rights and keep the peace.  Even if you can rationalize some pattern of words into a meaning so it won’t contradict a lower law, if it denies rights to the people, gives government privileges, creates disorder, or otherwise destroys the balance they sought to achieve,  it is more likely sophistry and the lower law is still invalid.  Law is not merely a word game, it is the foundation of civil society.  A “country of laws not men”.  The shortest sophistry is to merge and muddy the two by equating  “laws discovered by men” into “man’s law”.  Only the former is legitimate, using reason as the means.  To do otherwise is to ask the people to respect a monster instead of an elegant artifact.  And respect is not fear.