(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 »

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. Read the rest of this story »

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.” Read the rest of this story »

by TZ

This is from “A Man for All Seasons”, but it is the central point:

Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

In the previous post I noted Martin Luther King Jr. was a big proponent of the natural law because that is the only way law can protect the weak.  If law becomes merely “Man’s Law”, it will become the law as defined by the rich and powerful, and as the Occupy movement is protesting, the 1% will not hold themselves to account, but find every petty violation they can think of to oppress those that aren’t part of the oligarchy. The petty violations make them “convicts” with an arrest record.  William K Black (author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One) has pointed to blatant fraud, Karl Denninger (author of “Leverage”). Both constantly ask “Where are the Handcuffs?” for those who looted the system in the big banks and wall street

It is even worse than that. Read the rest of this story »

LORICA
The early Celtic church had many
‘breastplate prayers’, or ‘lorica’, which
Declared the surrounding and
Encompassing of God. Such prayers were
Not to make God come – He is already
There – but to open our eyes to the reality.
In breastplate prayers, the person who
Prays seeks to become aware of what is
Already a reality.

(The lyrics are 4th century Irish, attributed to St Patrick)

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead
His eye to watch, His might to stay
His ear to hearken to my need
The wisdom of my God to teach
His hand to guide His shield to ward
The word of God to give me speech
His heavenly host to be my guard

TARA
(Tara, the ancient capital of Ireland)
At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power
And the sun with its brightness
{ From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/i/iona-lyrics/encircling-lyrics.html }
And the snow with its whiteness
And the fire with all the strength it hath
And the lightning with its rapid wrath
And the winds with their swiftness along the path
And the earth with its starkness.
All these I place by God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness

The wisdom of my God to teach
His hand to guide His shield to ward
The word of God to give me speech
His heavenly host to be my guard

CAIM
Along with the prayer of encompassing,
The Celtic Christians had a practice called
The ‘caim’, in which they drew around them
A circle … this was a symbol of the encircling love of God.

The Mighty Three
My protection Be
Encircling me
You are around
My life, my home
Encircling me
O sacred Three