Flit(tm)

Rehabilitating Williamson

Bishop Williamson of the SSPX has had his excommunication lifted. This has caused Israel's rabbinate to react rather negatively and, unfortunately, unwisely.

The Holocaust denying Williamson is wrong on the facts and very likely undertook his provocative recent interview in Sweden to make it more difficult for the Vatican to regularize him and bring about unity and a restoration of Vatican discipline.

What the Vatican understands and the rabbinate does not is that one can be a thorough loon with reprehensible views and not be excommunicate. Excommunication is a specific punishment for a specific act, in bishop Williamson's case a schismatic act of being raised a bishop in defiance of Rome. The way the Western Church works, this was punishment was imposed without due process. No trial, no defense, no airing out of issues. He was raised a bishop without the right paperwork so he's out.

Obviously Williamson has "other issues" and when he's actually back in the Church those issues can be addressed. If they are not, the rabbinate would have a point at that time. I strongly suspect a monastic life for Bishop Williamson inside the Catholic Church, a very quiet one.

Jihad or Irhab

Jim Guirard talks about establishing a counter-narrative to Al Queda with it's mujahadeen fighting for Allah and destined for Paradise. What struck me was how accessible this makes participating in the fight.

You don't have to risk your life to fight on Al Queda's side. You can promote the narrative, become a propagandist for them and improve their chances to win. Given Al Queda's remarkable lack of capability on the battlefield, the propaganda side is actually the more important of the types of activity.

But with the establishment of a counter-narrative, specifically:

(1) Hirabah (unholy war, "war against society'") and/or Irhab (Terrorism) by ruthless
(2) mufsiduun (evildoers, mortal sinners, corrupters) destined for
(3) Jahannam (Eternal Hellfire) as a proper punishment for their
(4) khawarij (outside the religion) violations of the Qur'an which are so serious, so
(5) shaitaniyah (satanic) and so willfully unrepented as to constitute
(6) al-Murtadd al Qaeda (the AQ Apostasy) against Qur'anic (not "Shari'a") Islam

it becomes just as easy for american patriots to participate in the fight and force the battlefield back onto our favored territory, the actual battlefield.

In a way, it's also religiously ecumenical, doing Islam the favor of separating out its horrible bits and calling them unholy on their terms, instead of sweeping them up together and tarring Islam itself with its most radical activists.

Sites like Jihad Watch have been doing the latter and there we get into something of a ticklish problem. Will these anti-al queda and company warriors agree to use the counter-narrative? It's not entirely clear that they will. They're invested that jihad is a bad thing, that those who use it in the al queda sense are fundamentally correct in its meaning. Without buy in from the jihadwatch crowd the counter-narrative has no hope for success. You have to have clarity among your friends before you can hope to strongly influence the neutrals.

Muslim Missionaries, Christian Missionaries

I've no idea whether this Pajamas Media story on breaking the oil/Al Queda link is accurate but this caught my eye:

The Saudis account for 1% of planet’s Muslims, but provide 90% of the funding for Islamic institutions and charities world-wide. In keeping with Saudi Arabia’s official version of Islam, the kingdom’s billions flow to mosques and charities that espouse a Wahabi doctrine.

If true, breaking Saudi Arabia's oil wealth by moving off oil is going to have a tremendous impact on the religious balance of the planet. Mosques will close, muslim charities will drastically cut back operations and the muezzin's call to prayer in some places may have to revert back to good old lung power. Christianity will not be similarly discomfited. That's going to be an interesting factor in the struggle over Africa among other places.

Am I Going to Hell over the Iraq War? I

Out of all the Catholic Bishops in the USCCB exactly 1, John Michel Botean forthrightly condemned the Iraq war as unjust. You can find a PDF of his 2003 condemnation at the Center for Christian Nonviolence. Bishop John Michael has a tiny flock. In the past, he himself has categorized it as "5000 souls, on a good day". I happen to be one of them.

The invasion of Iraq has, therefore, occupied my moral thinking at a somewhat different level than most. There aren't too many Catholics who had to call up their bishops and ask whether they were going to be excommunicated over this war. I did, and the question wasn't easily dismissed. In fact, it never really has been dismissed.

For various irrelevant reasons, this conversation has been suspended. Recently it reopened (again for reasons well known to me but irrelevant to the conversation) and I've been corresponding with my bishop. He gave permission to write about this and hopefully this will be of use more generally.

At stake is a couple of issues. If this truly is a demonic war (as Bishop John Michael recently called it in the diocesan newsletter "Unirea" (Union), this is not something to be sneezed at. What makes the war demonic and how are we to fix it? What is this war anyway? Who are the sides? What evil did and do they do to merit a war being fought at all?

The approach to use for Catholics is just war doctrine. The Catechism of the Catholic Church covers it in a nutshell in paragraph 2309:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

So why write about this? It, frankly, has been seriously impacting my blog output. I've been thinking a great deal about the subject and find that I'm very dissatisfied by the level of ongoing analysis. Other questions which normally grab my interest have paled lately and I find myself turning back to the question of justice in war. So far, I find the anti-war side relatively unhinged from reality because they generally simplify the evil that Saddam did to a question of WMD. The pro-war side is little better because, having lost the moral certainty that Saddam was in possession of WMD they have largely abandoned the field. So I remain pro-war but unsatisfied with the canned arguments of both sides and in a relatively unique position, being under the personal jurisdiction of the most anti-war Catholic bishop in the US who, coincidentally, is my personal friend.

The funny thing is that precisely because he cares for me that he will and has gone after me hammer and tongs. He wants to save me from Hell, you see. It's not only his job, his vocation, but also his personal desire.

My own friendship does not permit me to engage in quiet dissent either, though for other reasons. I find nothing wrong with his application of the moral law. But I see him applying that law to a set of facts that do not actually exist and this has led him to error. So we wrestle with each other.

Edging up to Virtue

Peggy Noonan does yoeman's work talking about Virginia Tech saying all sorts of common sense. The close is worth exerpting

The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.

People are starting to feel the spiritual emptiness, starting to look for a way to fill it. We are sidling up to virtue because we recoil from the horrors unleashed by its lack in the public square.

Indicting the West

Sometimes the worst indictments come from fans. Today's day by day disrespects the entirety of western religion. I suspect that Chris Muir didn't even mean to but he perfectly captured the reality for all too many people. For them, the west is science and religion is the outsider, the other, the mysterious east.

It's an alarming sign when even your friends kick you.

Never in the US

For the romanians among my readership, Spovedanie cu grade - SPP-ul, sub sutana. For the rest of my readership, the Romanian version of the US' Secret Service that were working over Easter got sent (SENT!) to confession. When asked whether there was any worry that something that shouldn't might come out during confession, the simple response was that of course not, the priest works for us, has for 10 years.

Just amazing, on so many levels.

The tragedy of Left-Wing Christianity

Andrew Martin writes as good a description of where religious belief is among the Left today, in the closet, ashamed of itself, and under attack from the secular faction that largely controls the Left these days. The attacks persist even as the come to a growing realization that they need religion to fight off attacks from truly anti-progressive militants like the islamists but they can't quite seem to let go of the church bashing. Even Mr. Martin is not able to personally invite people to Christ in his article. All that he can do is silently admire someone who is brave enough to give public witness to her own faith early on.

This is tragedy. Christ needs to be proclaimed to all and the left-religious seem to have largely given up the task.

HT: MadPriest (truly mad and not to my taste but he uncovered a gem)

Virtue Maps

Thomas Barnett has his maps, the Functioning Core and the Non-Integrating Gap. It is a map of connectivity and interchange of rulesets. It shows something real, useful, even vital for understanding our world. One of the things that it does not cover as currently developed is the problem of movement between Gap and Core. Why does one country decide to stay in the Gap and another to move to the Core? Why does a country backslide out of the Core (New or Old) and into the Gap?

There must be some mechanism out there but, up to now, I've not seen it described by any of the Core/Gap community. My stab at the problem is that virtue enhances the tendency towards connectivity. Where it is in advance, the chance that a virtuous tyrant (a Kemal Ataturk, for instance) will arise are enhanced. Where it is in decay, demagogues and rogues populate more and more of the high ground of society and people disconnect in horror at association with them. The entire society withdraws into smaller and smaller islands of connectivity until you get to the ultimate disconnection where only ties of blood are left. In pathological cases like N. Korea, sometimes even that fails.

But how does one measure virtue? How do you make its promotion a reality and not like the sick joke in KSA with its muttaween enforcing dress codes. What virtues promote connectivity? Does stoicism, for example? There's a lot of fertile ground here to extend Core/Gap, drilling down into the mechanism of movement.

Control your own nuts

It's not that Christians are nut free, but rather what nuts we have tend to get turned in by our own. This is the essence of extremist control. The Jews, atheists, muslims, didn't have to reach in to our community. We did it ourselves, and in doing so, proved that it can be done.

Gregorian Easter

For those many christians who celebrate the sacrifice and resurrection of our Lord on the Gregorian calendar. I wish you all a heartfelt and happy Easter.

Something of a relief

From The Cafeteria is Closed, a very reassuring picture that the worst is over on the Catholic priestly abuse scandal.

There's going to be an awful lot more pain and suffering exposed before we put this one to bed but the measures put in place *do* seem to be working.

Striking a Blow Against Islam

It's just a throwaway line in a larger story but here's another sign of Islam's brittleness:

"This land has had a great history for thousands of years that pre-dates Islam," I said.

"Yes," Nadir answered, "an immoral history."

I had never heard of such a thing, but Nadir's idea, like Khaldun's, was part of Islam's all-encompassing nature. If you had it, you needed nothing else. "If I find one thing," Nadir said, "one thing that the Koran doesn't cover, I will renounce the faith." But Nadir could never find that one thing because Islam served as the source of everything. Unlike Even, I was beginning to feel that this, not the hedonism of the west, was the real problem of limits.

Islam's blindness to what came before, it's insistence that the Koran has no history. These are weak points, points of brittleness that can be struck. These are points that should be struck.

From the Catholic Rumor Mill

From comments in an article on the coming end of the SSPX schism.

However, as I see it, the Pope's doing this for other reasons: his intention is to end the schism with the Orthodox this year or next; and they have made it very clear that they want him to end the schism with the SSPX first; and show them thereby how he would propose to end the Great Schism.

So this is a case study for that. And I think B16 has the same idea for both: that is a unilateral cancellation of disciplinary censures. He may ipso facto make the SSPX in communion, without requiring anythign from them; as a good will gesture, and then ask them in Christian Charity to make a Christian response in Charity. And likewith to the Orthodox.

On the one hand, this is going to cause a lot of confusion: because laws are supposed to be for guiding the practice of virtue and for the instruction in virtue, and until we se how he does it and if he does it this way, it is hard to say what the repercussions will be. On the other hand, the sins of heresy and schism remain, regardless of whether they are condemend in this particular person or church. And it is conceivable, for those who are ignorant that they are in sin, and have no malice (which even Christ admitted to St. Bridget in regard to the majority of the Orthodox), that such a unilateral step will only foster their acceptance of the truth, ultimately. In short, the pope will be treating them as poorly catechised children, with whom it is pointless to impose censures, since they are not yet ready for the responsibility of adulthood. It all seems highly unorthodox to me.

Ending schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy may seem to be obscure and inconsequential to many modern readers. I can assure you that it is not. It is the start of reforging an old Huntingtonian civilization, christendom. Stuff like this happens once a millenium and usually the process is the reverse, one civilization becoming two.

If this truly is the papal line, be ready for a few adjustments in practical terms. The calculation of Easter is a very likely concession of West to East. Protestants are going to have to decide denomination by denomination whether they want to go along with the Eastern formulation and then civil governments in protestant (like the UK) and split western nations (like the US, FRG, and France) are going to have to mediate.

Get ready to hear an awful lot about the Eastern Church fathers and their different approach to salvation. Even if you're a protestant or not even christian, the new preeminence of the eastern fathers are going to change the discussion in unexpected ways. Get used to thinking again because you're likely to hear some arguments that you haven't heard before.

Get ready for the first full apostolic council in a millenium whose first order of business will be reconciling the last millenia's thelogical developments between the major branches of apostolic christianity. God only knows what would come out of such a council but it will be the acid test of the new unity.

Apocalypse 2008?

A simple question, why does Arnaud de Borchgrave think that Iran's Ahmadinejad has set the date of the Apocalpse for 2008?

"The ultimate promise of all Divine religions," says Ahmadinejad, "will be fulfilled with the emergence of a perfect human being [the 12th Imam], who is heir to all prophets. He will lead the world to justice and absolute peace. Oh mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one." He reckons the return of the Imam, AWOL for 11 centuries, is only two years away.

This is the first article that I've seen that purports to have identified a particular year for the end of the world in Ahmadinejad's theology. It's quite important to figure out if this is actually true. The fate of the Middle East, and possibly far beyond may depend on it.

Towards a Sane Islam

The big problem with Islam is that it's wrong. The unlivable problem with Islam is that its crazies are relatively unrestrained by its moderates. Now the world can live with an awful lot of people believing in wrong things. We do so every day on all sorts of things. What we can't live with is even minor groups of people who actively war against the world order swimming in a sea of fellow believers who do not put down the extremists in their midst.

The problem of unlivable Islam seems to have a potential solution in a Malaysian initiative called Islam Hadari. Contrary to the Xinhua article, it's been kicking around for a bit but really hasn't made the front pages.

It's sounding all the right notes. It's not reacting to western pressure but is an internal development trying to further the Islamic faith and moving away from the errors of the middle east salafists and other extremists who bring Islam so much of its reputation for bloodiness and uncivilized behavior.

I wish it well and will be keeping an eye on it. So should anybody who's seriously interested in winning this WOT.

The Better Beer Prayer

The Better Beer Prayer

There is no occasion that cannot be improved by prayer. Any serious Catholic knows that we've got some odd ones in the backs of the prayer books. Here's one that's very good and born, appropriately, out of Marine Corps dissatisfaction with the brews available in Iraq. A master sergant asked a chaplain for a "better beer prayer". Here's what he got.

Dear God, Maker of the heavens and the earth: We know you are the creator of all good things. For that reason we come now before you to ask for a better beer. We request it have a taste like unto the sweet nectars of the Garden of Eden. May the blend of its flavor pour gently over our tongues and satisfy not only the thirst of our mouths, but the longings of our souls. Make this beer so good all who drink it will no longer drink the present beers which often lead people to bring injury to children, other drivers or themselves. Make it a beer that multiplies wisdom, instead of killing brain cells. Lord, you know we human beings really cannot afford to sacrifice many brain cells anyway.

Finally, Lord we ask this beer would be so good its consumption would never cause us to jeopardize or sacrifice our relationship with others or you. May the camaraderie generated by this beer make the celebrations and special occasions of our lives even more special by helping us to fully appreciate one of the most sacred dimensions of life-fellowship with our friends, loved ones and you.

Hear our prayer, oh Lord. Improve our lives with a better beer such as we have described and if you can think of any further improvements, by all means please act on our behalf.

By Your Leave, Sir
Written for U. S. Marines
Semper Fi

HT: One Hand Clapping

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

Countercolumn calls Anarchangel stupid for Team Infidel Koran urination. I think the criticism is irrelevant, and ultimately mistaken.

I don't know Anarchangel's intelligence. He might actually be stupid, for all I know. I somehow doubt it. Whatever his intelligence level, he's exposing an Islamist psychological warfare operation, one that most of us have slowly given in to without murmur, without protest, and for too many without even realizing it as it happens.

The aim of jihadists is for us to become dhimmi, to pay the head tax and agree to ritual humiliation, to agree to pull our own punches and only play defense spiritually, religiously, culturally. We can fight among ourselves over whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox is the true Church but woe to us if we examine islam with the same critical tools we apply to our own faith. Even worse, woe to those who would mock Islam, whether artistically as Theo Van Gogh did or in a bit of popular culture with target practice and bathroom breaks.

Muslims are going to have to live with the fact that 5/6ths of the planet doesn't think much of their holy book. If they think that they can pass death sentences over offensive speech and cow the rest of the world, they will find that koranic verse toilet paper is going to get quite popular.

On a personal note, I count myself among the cowed. I self-censor this blog because I have a family and won't put them at risk by pushing hard enough to get my own fatwa. That's why I talk about making a movie about mohammed instead of actually doing a 10 minute quicktime short. The latter is guaranteed to generate a fatwa if it circulates widely enough and I won't take the step. I don't think that there would be enough police to protect me.

Moderate Islam On the Move

I was very heartened by USA Today article which tells me that the moderate muslims are starting to get their act together. Unfortunately, they're moving glacially slowly and are not coordinating adequately yet.

British Muslim leaders said they were drafting a fatwa that would strip any bombers of the right to call themselves Muslims.

Unfortunately, this clashes with an equally promising development.

A conference of 180 top Muslim religious leaders issued a statement last week forbidding that any Muslim be declared an apostate. Bin Laden has frequently done this to sanction the death of Muslims he believes are too lax in their faith.

They will eventually sort it all out and pick an approach but it's painful to realize how slow a process this is likely to be. I hope that they have enough time to get their act together.

Where's Atta?

It struck me that an entirely promising line of questioning has gone largely unmined in dealing with islamic moderates. If they are muslims, they believe in Heaven and Hell. So where is Mohammed Atta right now? What is the resting place of a soul that was convinced he was going to get his 72 virgins, did not commit martyrdom, but rather the entirely condemnable crime the self-proclaimed muslim moderates no doubt already said he did. They either say he's in Hell and remain consistent in their moderate statements or they are caught in a lie and exposed as fake moderates.

For those who place Atta in Hell, a further question is warranted, what is the final spiritual destination of an imam that would lead a man into such error, assuming he did not repent his ways? Furthermore, how should such preachers be treated by the muslim community, their Ummah on earth where they are spreading their falsehoods and leading men into Hell? Should they be permitted to preach in the mosques and lead others astray?

Finally, what is the proper role that the civil authorities should take to mosques that not only do not condemn such false imams but let them lead their prayers and spread their poison? Should these houses of false worship be treated as mosques or are they something else? If they are something else, what is it and what should be done about them?

It has been 4 years since 9/11/2001. I've followed the international discussion on Islamism with great interest. I have yet to see any muslim moderate explain the theological consequences of Islamism. It's a shame because reputable clerics explaining that these people are going to Hell are the best immunization against the seductive promises of martyrdom and glory by Semtex.

Pray for London

London has been bombed, likely by terrorists, likely by Al Queda. I pray that the injured will pull through, that the dead have a quick trip to Heaven and that justice will swiftly find the perpetrators.

Advancing Freedom

I have to disagree with Mary Madigan posting on Dean's World that President Bush went wrong in his speech here:

The terrorists, both foreign and Iraqi, failed to stop the transfer of sovereignty. They failed to break our coalition and force a mass withdrawal by our allies.
The lesson of this experience is clear: The terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom

The muslim civil war centers around two visions of Islam, each of which thinks the other is heretical and whose adherents are going to hell. One of them, the Islamist party, kill the other side when they become too troublesome. The other side has a stronger theological case, is much more integrable in the world, and is much more likely to help its adherents live happy, productive, well adjusted lives.

The advance of freedom, as relates to winning the war on terror, is largely in stopping the Islamists from killing their opponents before their opponents convince the great mass of the Islamic middle that Islamists go to hell for their apostasy. Preventing a Sistani from being killed by a Sadr is crucial to our war aims. Sistani is not an innocent. He is an allied combatant, fighting on the religious front. Sistani puts out a pronouncement and hundreds of thousands turn away from terrorism as it is distributed throughout the Shia world. Mosques that spew hate suddenly get a bit less full, and the recruiting funnel for suicide bombers runs a bit drier.

We simply don't have the ability to substitute for the dysfunctional muslim world's police forces without instituting a draft and bleeding our country dry. The best we can do is to protect the force generating seed of these societies so that they can raise their own armies and clean up their own societies. The tree of liberty must be fed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Keeping the State Weak

I ran across an article on street cameras themed on the idea that they're really not such a bad thing for civil liberties. It's not a bad piece but misses the real problem of the cameras, they make the state too strong. A society where everything done by an individual in public is captured, stored, collated, and attached to a personal file makes it too easy to keep tabs on dissidents, on the loyal opposition, even on personal enemies of those in power.

The US has plenty of experience with corrupt governments. The municipal history of most major urban centers in the US can lay out entire corrupt eras where the city was controlled by this or that corrupt "machine". Corruption is not something that is of mere theoretical interest but a real, live concern that is a problem from the beginning of the Republic to today.

So what happens when those street cameras are controlled by a corrupt group that is technically savvy? There are no civil liberties problems per se with cameras but they make overthrowing the corrupt regime much more difficult. They are not a technology that can be turned off with a change in administrations. One bought election and they can be turned from a crime fighting tool serve an alternate role as a political discipline tool. Defy the machine and your business suffers as anybody in (or contracted with) city government who patronizes your store is caught on tape and given grief on the job. That sort of pressure could be done in the past by posting someone to watch a business and take down names but it was expensive, detectible, and embarrassing if the papers caught wind of it and snapped a picture or two of the political machine's spy.

People don't like to think about their government turning corrupt a few administrations down the road so the concern turns itself into a bogus fear about civil liberties. The problem of street cameras is real, though. They should be avoided where possible.

Bitter Schism

I regularly read Midwest Conservative Journal but I'm starting to think I'm getting most of what I can out of it and should move it back in the rotation. I use it to chronicle the nasty split in the anglican church and as a reality check for myself. Chris Johnson sounds an awful lot like a lot of people on the Catholic/Orthodox split, a religious fault line which I'm right on the active zone. Being able to see it from outside makes me realize that I don't want to join in in that sort of back and forth trashing. It can be fun, exhilarating, but ultimately not spiritually satisfying and that makes the back and forth of combat ultimately self-defeating.

Layered Cores

Reading the current NRSP newsletter I find myself in conflict with Tom Barnett's characterization of the Catholic Church. We're both Catholics so this is a bit of inside baseball but it's also useful to illustrate a general point.

Abstractly, The Core and Gap are useful tools for denoting connectivity of mutually acceptable rulesets. The rulesets themselves can be anything. Core/Gap analysis is a useful tool in explaining the propagation and interaction of the rulesets. Political/economic connectivity is pretty much all we generally talk about because these rulesets are crucial to war and peace, starvation or material plenty.

The Catholic Church does not consider war and peace, starvation or plenty to be the most important thing to worry about. They are secondary to its mission to bring Truth unto the world and save all our souls. Political reform, economic progress, these things are all very nice but you can't understand the Church if that's the lens you are looking through. The Catholic vision of community maps into connectivity but it's not economic or political in nature.

Looking through a spiritual lens, having a base of economically powerful nations aligned with your interests enhances the spiritual mission by providing the material base for the real work. Politically stable nations that permit the work of priests and missionaries are useful but they are not the goal.

Barnett's analysis (page 9 in the link above, a Word doc) is practically irrelevant because it applies the conventional map (politico-economic connectivity) to an institution that uses a different criteria in creating its own maps of connectivity and disconnectedness. Adding a new map layer is crucial and Barnett simply doesn't do that.

For the Catholic Church, the territory of the Romanian Orthodox Church has at least as much reality as the country of Romania and the two entities do not have exactly the same boundaries. The Romanian Orthodox Church, in a Catholic map is a seam state just as Romania is a seam state in the conventional politico-economic map. The reason why the two entities are seam states in the two map systems are quite different though. That difference makes any prospective analysis of what is proper to do to bring each into the Core crucially depend on which map you're talking about.

Romania gets into the Core by negotiating an entry into the global politico-economic rulesets that have been negotiated among the Core for the past century plus. The Romanian Orthodox Church gets into the Core by negotiating a mutually acceptable role for the Pope in the Church, something that has also been the subject of centuries of negotiation. These are two different Cores but the mechanism for admission, agreement on a common enough ruleset, are exactly the same.

The maps interact with each other. Most famously the Islamic map religiously is interacting with the politico-economic map in the Global War On Terror (GWOT) but it does it in less obvious ways too. The Romanian Orthodox Church is holding back Romania's admission into the Politico-Economic Core (PEC) because of its insistence on the government of Romania not honoring the rule of law with regards to properties it received in 1948 as part of an odious communist land/power grab.

More specifically, Barnett's analysis of this Pope mistakes the status of Germany. He's looking at the wrong map, where Germany is a solid part of the PEC instead of the Catholic Religious Core (CRC) where Germany is sliding backwards from Old Core to New Core and arguably is already a Seam state.

Germany's Seam or New Core status in the CRC is what fundamentally matters to the Catholic Church. Germany's status mismatch makes dealing with it difficult because the markers of PEC membership are much more visible than the markers for CRC membership and people tend to believe that there is a close match between the two (where they recognize the two layers existing at all as separate entities). Backsliding state analysis is probably the least developed part of Core/Gap analysis so this remarkable new toolset doesn't help as much as it usually would.

So is Benedict XVI an Old Core Pope? It really depends on which map you're talking about. If you're looking at the PEC, Benedict XVI is about as Old Core as you can get. If you're talking about the CRC, he's coming out of a backsliding state, trying desperately to retain the light and reverse the slide into spiritual darkness. His name pick for his papacy (a crucial early clue into the mind of any Pope) is much more in line with that second vision of his papacy.

So what does all this mean for us poor geo-political amateurs? It means the papacy is likely to surprise. Viewed from a politico-economic view, Benedict's papacy will be full of unexpected activity, vaguely disturbing moves that will be categorized left or right, conservative or radical, and there will be a heavy tendency to censor the reporting of his actions to fit a preconceived news filter.

Treat news reports on the papacy with special care during this pontiff's reign because Barnett's conflation of PEC with CRC is likely going to be the high point of most secular media analysis. For the media to catch on and understand this papacy, they will not only have to understand the Pentagon's New Map but also understand that Catholicism has one too and analyze the Church's actions on its own terms, something that has not happened for decades at the very least.

Waiting for Papal Heraldry

Pope Benedict's web page is up. In contrast with his predecessors his coat of arms has not been put up yet. No doubt, they're still working on it. This is a sign that it's not something he's just going to slap together just so his stuff can be differentiated from other popes' writings and objects. When Pope John Paul II picked a coat of arms whose saliant feature was a big M for Mary on it, it really meant something, that he was going to elevate Mary and push forward her style of femininity as a model for women. It's quite likely that Pope Benedict XVI is considering exactly that sort of symbology as well, we'll see. It's just another of those objective signs to look out for to see where this Pope is heading.

What Would you E-mail the Pope?

Pope Benedict XVI has email (benedictxvi@vatican.va). So what would you write to the Pope? Would it be a request, a complaint, a joke? Does it matter how you can reach him? Does papal e-mail make a difference at all?

I have to confess that it does make a difference for me. It makes me much less reluctant to contact Rome. If I were to use the address, it would most likely be in the form of a cc: or bcc: in the case of something that I felt strongly about. I'd also probably send him an e-card for his birthday and when he inevitably has health problems, a get well card.

I don't delude myself that he answers all his e-mail personally. Heads of state have staff for that. I'm sure that like everybody else at that level, he gets exceptional pieces forwarded to him and summaries of ordinary correspondence that got shuffled off to the appropriate subordinate (or /dev/null for the wacky stuff).

I really hadn't thought of papal e-mail until I read that Benedict XVI has it. It very much modernizes and humanizes the man in my eyes. I wonder how many other techno-geeks are thinking the same thing?

HT: Catholic Light

Habemus Papa

God Bless Benedict XVI, nee Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, our new Pope. He's moved from chief prosecutor of the Church to the top job, a career path that is quite familiar in an awful lot of free societies. May God bless him, keep him, and guide him in the maintenance and improvement of the world's oldest continuous bureaucracy, the structural skeleton called the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. May he provide an inspiration and guide the spiritual formation of the faithful to greater fidelity to the Divine Plan and greater wisdom among us all.

Habemus Papa
Avem o Papa

Parallel Legal Systems II

Here's a classic instance of completely ignoring Catholic Law, an editorial attacking a bishop for denying a notorious gay bar owner right to a Catholic burial.

To our knowledge, McCusker never has been accused of doing anything illegal. If Bishop Brom has information to the contrary, he should step forward with it.

McCusker was doing illegal things, but he did not violate secular law, but Catholic law. In this instance Bishop Brom is not a citizen who must report to someone else this illegality but a high judicial official who must render a decision in accordance with the law.

The legal code of the Catholic Church defines, among other things, who can be buried in a Catholic cemetery. Bishop Robert Brom is charged, as part of his duties, to enforce that legal code. What happens when he does his job? Know Nothings from the San Diego Union-Tribune call it intolerance and seem to think he enjoys doing this for fun.

This is the sort of thing that leads to laxity in applying the rules and a return to the "spirit of love and tolerance" of the recent past that gave us the pedophilia priest scandal. Pedophiles were to be shuffled around and sent back to ministry elsewhere instead of put into remote monasteries where they could contemplate their sins and spend the rest of their years in prayer and penance far away from children.

We all know where that led us, a horrible scandal that consumed the US church and destroyed so many lives. No doubt the Union-Tribune editorialized against episcopal laxity that succored priestly pedophilia as frequently as most other papers if not more but when the bishops actually do something and start tightening up legal enforcement of the rules, the instantly swap back to licentious scolds who want the bishop to just sit back and let the good times roll.

Evidence of Moderate Islam

I'm very glad I scrolled down to an older Donald Sensing item at One Hand Clapping. I completely agree that this moderate Islam article is both important and exciting. The $64,000 question for those who equate islamism with the whole of Islam has always been how such a dysfunctional ideology could have survived so many centuries.

The answer that this article comes back is that Islamism didn't because it isn't of ancient pedigree but a modern mutation that is less than fully rooted in the events that led to the writing of the Koran. Essentially, this article places modern Islamism within a tradition of Islamic puritan movements that crop up every once in awhile and then get beaten down by mainstream Islamic forces. Apparently there have been several episodes of this sort of thing in the past.

None of this is indicative of whether non Wahabbi/Salafist/puritanical is not also fundamentally incompatible with modernity. In fact, if it wasn't for mainstream Islam's long downhill slide, the Wahabbi/Salafist puritans would likely not be so advanced. That's largely a fight for another day, though.

The decline of mainstream Islam is going to have to be corrected internally or the religion is going to eventually disappear. Managing that decline is a delicate job, one that seems to have gone amiss lately. Hopefully in future they will do better.

Conspiracy

I just came across a neat bit from Karl Popper (who I have to get to reading one of these days).

The conspiracy theory of society ... comes from abandoning God and then
asking, 'Who is in His place?' -- Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations,
1969"

It really stopped me short because possibly the most conspiracy theory heavy locus on the planet is the muslim Middle East. Theorizing that obscure conspiracies are the fault of all that goes wrong in the world does seem to show a decided lack of faith in God.

Accommodating Faith

Andrew Sullivan really must be going on some sort of personal faith roller coaster. I can't imagine any other reason he's react so foolishly to a personal statement by President Bush regarding the personal challenges of the presidency. President Bush "see how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord." Sullivan sees that as a threat to atheists. It is no such thing.

I don't see how you can work at a garbage dump without nose plugs or how you can be a thin chef that's any good but if I saw such things appear before my eyes, I wouldn't lift a finger to correct the world but rather correct my impressions. I'm sure that President Bush would too if we ever would elect an atheist president in his lifetime and he did well.

The whole sad note is an assumption of intolerance and bigotry on Sullivan's part. I wondered what Sullivan had become after he renounced his Catholicism. I guess I've got a good idea now.

Letter to the Paper XXXVII

India Uncut has no comments, but you can email the author. In an article on euthanasia Amit Varma remarks

Is the possible, or even probable, misuse of a law reason enough to be against it if the law itself is just? (After all, isn't every law misused in India?) Would that not be injustice to those who would legitimately benefit from the law if it existed, as Venkatesh and his family would?

I wrote a letter back arguing that euthanasia is not the answer, that even in life's final moments, there is value, there is teaching, there is something worth doing.

What is a law? What is the rule of law? Is it what you see in books or is it the reality of how the books interact with human beings? You ask whether a mercy killing law would be just. I have to say that it would not. I point to the case of US Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole. He was horribly wounded in WW II. If he had been wounded a year earlier, it would have been certainly understandable for him to ask for mercy killing. His wounds were extensive, impossible to cure, and he would have suffered a lot before succumbing to infection. The future Sen. Dole was one of the early experimental patients who received the miracle cure of penicillin. His subsequent contribution to US political life would have been snuffed out without a stubborn, even obstinate attachment to life.

The case you bring up in your blog of K Venkatesh is even more clear cut. Here is a talented man, already proven in your own society. Let him fight, let him use his talents, let him teach a last lesson in how to die. As a younger person who has been on the receiving end of such a lesson, let me tell you that it is a profound thing, to be with a man near his last moments, to silently urge him to live, live, come back one more time, give one more smile, tell one more story, win one more fight, and know, in the end, the battle was well fought to the last gasp of breath.

Society is robbed of such lessons in a euthanasia regime. I assure you, it is the poorer for it. If I have the fortune of someone who cares to receive such a lesson from me in my last days, I will do my best to be worthy of my audience.

There IS a God I

At 81 a leading British atheist, a well respected philosophy professor, has decided that there is a God after all. Best line?

Prometheus [ed: his new book's publisher] specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."

HT: Mark LaRochelle, in email

The Temptation to Hate

Jeff Jacoby has a pro-hate column out extolling the virtue of hating evil. I can't say that I agree with him there. He recognizes the dangers though.

Hatred is dangerous even when justified, Soloveichik cautions, and must be directed only at the truly vicious and depraved. "We who hate must be wary," he writes, "lest we . . . become like those we are taught to despise."

The problem is that hate is a powerful emotion. It encourages carelessness in its further use. It is a simple solution to problems that are not always simple. Is somebody doing something bad? Just hate them and you need not give any further thought to the hard work of rehabilitation for the next world.

This is a very old jewish/christian fault line. I don't think that I'm going to resolve it here. The muslims, I believe, come down on the jewish side of this one and absolutely do suffer spiritually for it. That spiritual disfiguration comes out in some of their most egregious practices, like honor killing. Your very own child, the fruit of your highest dreams and aspirations, does something wrong and you hate them enough to kill them. You give them no chance to make things right with God. You just go out (or worse, send out their siblings) to their hiding place (they justifiably fear you already) and kill them.

When to hate is a potent question that even the tolerant nonreligious must face. A democracy that wanted to eliminate honor killings on the basis of the rule of law would be forced to make capital crimes out of the actions that provoke honor killings. Anything else would be religious oppression.

Private Tandey's Regrets

Michael Ledeen presents an important morality tale.

On September 28, 1918, Tandey participated in an attack against enemy trenches near the small French town of Marcoing. The British carried the day, and as they advanced, Tandey Cautiously peered into a trench. He saw an enemy soldier, a corporal, lying bleeding on the ground. It would have been easy for Tandey to finish off his enemy, as he had killed many that day; Tandey had played an heroic role in the battle and later was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest wartime decoration, for his great courage. But he felt it was wrong to shoot an injured man, and he spared the corporal's life.

In 1940, during the Nazi bombardment of Coventry, when Tandey worked as a security guard at the Triumph automobile factory, he gnashed his teeth. "Had I known what that corporal was going to become! God knows how sad I am that I spared him." The corporal was Adolf Hitler. Tandey's human gesture had led to the deaths of millions of people and, in a bitter irony of military destiny, had placed his own life at the mercy of the monster whose life he could have taken.

While Tandey gnashed his teeth, was he wrong to spare Hitler? If he was wrong, what moral responsibility does that place on those of us who oppose capital punishment for killers who end up killing again?

Hitler is, of course, an extreme case but his case is by no means unique. The killer who kills again in prison, who escapes and kills again, or who is released and repeats his crime, all of these are circumstances that confront us in reality, not only theory. Unfortunately, the anti-capital punishment side often does not seem to take responsibility for the consequences of their mercy.

The future is unclear, however. How many lives are spared and who reform themselves, contributing instead of further taking from us all? It's a difficult question which is why capital punishment is, rightly, not condemned by Catholics in the same terms that abortion is. Guilt, innocence, and the consequences of choosing humble even the most decisive of theologians and moral judges from making entirely hard and fast rules.

From the Depths to the Light

This is a true story. You may not believe it but this is my son, an extraordinary boy of 5. As usual he did not want to go to sleep. He hopped up on a stool and was trying to get to an icon we have put on his bedroom wall. It is a classic western icon of Jesus pointing to his sacred heart (it's a classic rendition with crown, thorns, flames and blood). George tells me he wants one. He further explains that he wants a real one. So I tell him to get into bed, I pull down the icon and explain to him, in very abbreviated form, Genesis, original sin, Calvary, the three days in Hell, the freeing of the imprisoned spirits, the Resurrection, and how Jesus' sacrifice completed a very long, complicated plan to redeem mankind from that original sin.

Wide eyed, he took it all in very calmly and repeated that he wanted his own heart like the flaming heart of Jesus. I told him that only God could give him that and that he should pray and talk to him frequently. Only God could do it. He seemed content and ready to go to sleep.

I found out a few minutes later that his window was open and went to close it. He turned, informed that he had decided, and said that he wanted to help God so that men would know Him. Then he turned and seemed to go back to sleep.

It was a false sense of finality. In the middle of writing this, he burst into my home office and informed me that we needed to house for God, informing me, in his most serious five year old manner, that there needed to be a place with doors and a lock that no man could come in but that God could come in because he would have the key.

We still haven't got him to sleep yet, but I'll close this note here about this extraordinary episode. God is still alive in the hearts of little boys. With all the scary, mad things going on in these times, it is a true note of hope.

Heresy Trials II

A small update by way of Catholic Light on John Kerry's heresy trial. The Catholic Church obviously doesn't want to inject itself into the US presidential campaign in this fashion but the unofficial response received strongly strengthens the orthodox Catholic hand in this long term confrontation between themselves and pro-choice Catholics. In short:

If a Catholic publicly and obstinately supports the civil right to abortion, knowing that the Church teaches officially against that legislation, he or she commits that heresy envisioned by Can. 751 of the Code.

The penalty for knowingly doing this is what Roman Rite Catholics call automatic excommunication.

Now I'm from a different corner of the Catholic Church. It actually has alternate canons and (at least according to my own bishop) lacks the concept of automatic excommunication. A bishop has to go and wrestle with a sinner and his conscience before you get to the point of excommunication. The idea of excommunicating yourself as a sort of paperwork saving device is one of those things that make me glad I'm a Romanian Rite Catholic where if my bishop thinks I need to be knocked on my butt for being a bonehead, he's quite capable and willing to do the deed himself (and, in the past, has though not on this serious a scale).

Sometime in the next decade, what is unofficial today is very likely to turn official and a good 5%-15% of the voting population is going swing with it. Even at the low end, that's going to be a huge change in voting patterns that will just devastate the Democrat party while inflicting no small amount of damage on pro-choice Republicans as well.

Preferential Suicide Tactics

Islam, supposedly, has a prohibition against suicide. Famously, this prohibition has become somewhat elastic with the suicide bombing campaigns in Israel and Chechnya. Thomas Friedman started me thinking about this in recent article.

There is some kind of suicide-supply chain working in the Muslim world and in Iraq that is able to draw recruits, connect them with bomb makers and deploy them tactically against U.S. and Iraqi targets on an almost daily basis.

What made me sit up and think about this is that it's becoming more and more obvious that any previous connection to Islamic justification has become more and more tenuous to the point of invisibility, that "suicide operations" far from being a last resort tactic of extremis are become tools of preference in the "global jihad".

This provides something of a theological dilemma. If suicide is a preferential option, if killing yourself in war even though you could escape and fight again is permissible, what is left of their suicide prohibition? And if the prohibition on suicide falls, what is left of their claim that Islam is unchanging?

At some point, the bulk of islamic scholars has to turn on this tactic and declare that some or all of the jihadi groups are apostate and the great Islamic civil war will unfold in the open. With each greater exception to the suicide rules we're getting closer to that day.

Iron Blog Subjects: Animal Rights

Going through the Iron Blog topic list:

Before I get to the topic at hand, A small personal job history note. I was an employee for Putting People First in the early 90s. I was their first network administrator. I also designed and maintained their database, oversaw a lot of their early direct mail operations, and did various work in other areas. Putting People First was an organization devoted to fighting against animal rights, a topic I hadn't thought about much prior to working for them but soon learned a great deal about while working for the group in a technical capacity.

The death threats in the mail were always entertaining as was the "what to do if they bomb us" disaster planning.

Animal rights is a travesty of an ideology. The idea that animals can claim anything as a right implies the ability to enter into some sort of social contract with the rest of us. But animals cannot do that. They are incapable of understanding such an agreement and keeping up with any obligations that would ensue from such a contract. Animal rights would be a precedent that you can have rights without responsibilities as a general case for an entire class.

Animal rights claims to raise the level of care and humanity we show towards animals to a level equal with what we show our own pre-rational children and the mentally retarded. In this, there is some truth but it is a bitter sort of truth. Since animals are not infants or retarded or senile, to equalize these categories is to justify the reduction of consideration of these vulnerable human groups to the level of animals. Peter Singer, probably the most famous of animal rights philosophers notoriously believes that infanticide should be legalized as should euthanasia.

The animal rights movement has spawned a loosely connected terrorist group, the Animal Liberation Front which, prior to 9/11 was considered one of the premier domestic terrorism threats in the US. Just because 9/11 has thrust islamist terrorism to the fore does not mean that ALF has ceased activity. It has not.

Animal rights claims to raise up animals and by doing so elevate human kind as well. In reality, it reduces us to beasts.

Iron Blog Subjects: Abortion

Going through the Iron Blog topic list:

Border conditions are among the most difficult (and interesting) to analyze. Sure, everybody agrees that they should have a right to life but going further out from the self, respect and reverence for human life starts to lose adherents. The mentally ill, the aged, the very young have all been subject to death in various societies and the further away from the average member of the polity's health and independence, the fewer still defend their right to life.

The absolutist position is the hardest to establish, but also is hardest to dislodge. People have a right to life is a powerful statement. Once you start making exceptions, you weaken it to the point where more and more exceptions can be carved out and down we slide along the slippery slope.

Abortion is not justified unless we believe in some very ugly concepts. If a life is created abusively, via rape or incest, to abort an unborn child conceived from that ugly situation is to say that the rapist, the family abuser, has worked a corruption of blood, that the child is guilty of the sin of the parent and deserves the death penalty. We don't even allow corruption of blood for traitors anymore. That sort of primitive vengeance went out with the Middle Ages but in our horror at the crime of the (usually) father, we want to wipe the innocent issue away, so perhaps the shame shall recede. Instead we create a greater shame.

The idea of genetic deformity as a cause for abortion creates a slippery slope because there is no accepted definition of what conditions should be repaired and what require abortion. At the very extreme, the "inconvenience" of a daughter has led to huge sex selection abortion totals in the PRC and India. This too is genetic selection as much as aborting hare lips and other correctible conditions. Even conditions that are not correctible, such as Down's syndrome, are no excuse for abortion. Many Down's syndrome sufferers can walk, talk, hold simple jobs, even get married and have their own families. Yet some people routinely recommend abortion in such cases.

Even for hopeless cases, one of the most overlooked contributions that they provide is, during disease shortened lives, they provide lessons to those around them in human spirit, dignity, and love. When you foreshorten those unpredictable, deeply moving lessons, you may relieve strong emotion and suffering but what is left is a shallower existence.

Andrew Sullivan's Religious Education Lapse Watch I

I've just about had it with Andrew Sullivan's misstatements of Christianity. He claims to have been a Catholic, though recently he seems to have put himself in the lapsed category. Whatever his current status, he shouldn't me making mistakes like this.

The entire idea of women being subordinate to men is half of a bargain. To mention just one half of a bargain, the cost, and not mention or even consider the benefits is to unbalance the thing and make any analysis a foolish exercise. Try doing it with a house mortgage and you'll see what I mean in short order.

Both sides of the bargain is laid out in the Bible in a couple of places but Ephesians 5:21-33 works quite well. The obligation of the husband is to take the subordination of the wife and do what is necessary so that she will spiritually become "holy and without blemish". Your job as husband is to do whatever it takes so that happens in imitation of Jesus' actions to create a Holy Church. In Jesus' case, he found that what was necessary was for him to be indescribably tortured, crucified, and die for the sake of the founding of the Church.

Yeah, husbands have a really sweet deal in that bargain. Boy, it's the easy life for us if we take on that role.

The key to the entire structure is in the first line "Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ." That really gives the game away in that it is a replay of leadership as servitude that happens so frequently in christian theology. The woman subordinates her wishes to the man and the man must sacrifice all for the project of sanctifying and preparing the woman for Heaven as Christ sacrificed all at Calvary.

Whoever Andrew Sullivan had for religious instruction was either entirely without talent in the area or AS never much paid attention. By pretending that only the female half of the bargain exists, AS is leading his readership astray about christianity. That's a real shame.

Dealing With Conspiracy Theorists

I found this story via Marginal Revolutions. The idea that not only would you refuse vaccines because you think there is an international infidel plot to transmit diseases via vaccination, but also that you don't even quickly arrange for muslim countries to supply your vaccine is simply appalling. But the western reaction in the original article shows its own blind spots.

Polio is very rare in the world today. Vaccinations, which are done worldwide, have managed to nearly eradicate the disease. If the ‘wise’ men of those regions of Nigeria had decided to see sense a long time ago, polio would most probably not exist in Nigeria today. Why didn’t they ask for batches from muslim countries a year ago? Why did they wait so long? Everyone, the WHO, their neighbours, even their own population was begging them to see sense.

Such condemnations will not move muslim conspiracy theorists one inch. What they care about is submitting to Allah. Yet nobody seems to be asking reputable imams to provide a fatwah regarding this case and the liability these people have in accordance with Islamic law. What liability do you have for unnecessarily condemning many children to the life of a cripple or even a cruel death because you let vaccinations cease?

The key point can't be repeated often enough. Talk in the language of your target. If you want strict muslims to be influenced by you, cloak your arguments in the language of faith. Insisting on avoiding religious talk is just a good way of upping the body count.

Heresy Trials

Andrew Sullivan's amazed that somebody still pays attention to that stuffy old document, the Catholic Code of Canon Law but apparently a plucky canon lawyer from Los Angeles has decided to bring the issue of pro-choice catholicism before the private courts the Church runs according to the Canon. In the complaint (filed in John Kerry's home jurisdiction, the Archdiocese of Boston), pro-choice position is labeled the Right-to-Murder heresy.

A layman can bring forward such a complaint but a bishop is not obligated to act on it. If the local Bishop passes, the complaint can be forwarded to the Vatican where it will likely sit for years before being adjudicated. Such complaints are apparently rare (the complainant claims that he's the first to do so under the current Code, adopted in 1983). Furthermore, as it's a class action suit that most anyone can join I'd expect the plaintiff list to expand quite a bit.

I won't be joining the suit, but not because I agree with AS that this is some cheap "theoconservative" stunt to influence the election. On the contrary, I take the entire process deadly seriously as a fight for the soul of one John Kerry who, whatever differences I might have with him politically, is a child of God and in the same struggle to get to Heaven as the rest of us. There is an entire cast of characters that are playing their part in that struggle on the side of good and I think it quite likely that this lawsuit is likely to jog their elbows, retarding Kerry's spiritual progress, not enhancing it.

I have no doubt that not only the lines between the Boston archdiocese and the Vatican are burning up but I also think that several calls are being placed to LA to get local Church officials to squelch the fuse on this dynamite accusation. No doubt, fairly soon there might be a UK component to this mess as defide.org (the organization filing the complaint) is registered to Bruno Quintavalle, a name that comes up in Google as the director of the UK Pro-Life Alliance.

Now there's a twist that I bet McCain and Feingold never thought about.

Muslim Condemnation of Terrorists

I think we should all highlight when muslims condemn muslim terrorists forcefully and point out that this is what we expect from other muslims who claim moderation but offer no such forceful condemnations:

At a Friday prayer meeting in Karbala, a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani told worshipers that Al Qaeda's top leaders are "filthy infidels". He names Osama bin Laden and the Jordanian-born terrorist purportedly operating in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. He says they are "bastards" who "nurture malignance" against Shiite Muslims. A prominent Shiite leader was assassinated in Iraq on Thursday night. Al Qaeda's leadership is made up of Sunni Muslims from the Wahabi sect.

I'd say that "filthy infidels" is just about the right tone. Moderates don't have to be wimps. They do have to draw broad lines that even us "people of the Book" can use to differentiate between them and the nihilistic death cultists they claim not to support.

HT: Real Clear Politics

Promoting Virtue II

SDB just put up his promoting virtue piece and has sufficiently adjusted his model of three women that I withdraw my previous suggestion to bump it to four. RTWT

It was SDB's original construct of Alice (where I thought he was too hard on the poor girl) that I was worried about. There is a rare case that is utterly impossible to create via human external action. This is the case where there is simply no temptation, not even in the most appealing circumstance. Alice, Betty, and Cathy can all shift to this fourth state, called sainthood by Christians. The historical ranks of the saints are mostly drawn from the Cathys of the world who work up to it but the Alices can have it from the start and the Bettys can reform and stick to it.

As I said, it is an utterly useless state when thinking about the promotion of virtue as there is no human method to prevent fleeting temptations that are not acted on, only divine intervention can accomplish that. It is the end state that all should aspire to and far too few actually achieve.

A society of saints makes a lot of things we normally worry about irrelevant. Saints don't lie, cheat, steal, or shirk so even the most defective of economic and political arrangements can work in a society exclusively made up of saints. Of course, utopians are always populating their imaginary societies with saints as it makes thinking up novel social arrangements much easier.

But in the real world, there is no reliable method to produce them. You just hope for them and try to shift as many people over to Cathy status as possible because the chance of Cathy moving to sainthood is somewhat larger and being a Cathy is a pretty good thing in itself.

Defining Islam

A story in Dhimmi Watch got me thinking. Turkey's prime minister Erdogan made a very strong statement when he stated that there is just Islam, that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. So when Al Queda blows up and kills muslims by other means, calling them apostate, that means that those dead (some of them Turkish) are either apostates or Osama bin Laden is. It's a pity that nobody asked the good prime minister that. The next time somebody says that there are no such things as moderate and radical muslims, somebody should ask. I would be fascinated by the answer.

Instilling Virtue

Steven Den Beste has an interesting article up highlighting correspondance with Daryl a correspondent from Singapore. They speak to each other about law and order but it seems wrong somehow. To my eyes, the discussion is less about revolution and more about virtue and how to instill it. Normally, I'd run this in email to the fellow in Singapore but since I can't seem to find his email...

Virtue, in the both Singapore and the US, is of concern by the state. But the liberal values of the US make instilling virtue largely something that the people do while in Singapore, the state works intensively in the field of promoting virtue. While this has good effects in some areas, it lays waste the entire field of intellectual exploration and creates a group of people who are much more vulnerable to cultural change by exposure to new ideas. Singaporeans may show higher levels of virtue in their controlled environment but they must stay small, stay inside that environment for the system to continue to work.

In contrast the virtue promotion system in the US is much more resilient. It will never achieve the high levels that a Singaporan style system can achieve but it can survive assault much better. I can't imagine how Singapore would handle the gay marriage situation that has arisen in the US where elements in the government are violating laws and issuing tendentious court decisions. I can't imagine it would be resolved without violence whereas I can hardly imagine it ending in violence in the US.

Both systems obviously are viable in the short run but I think that Singapore's the one that's really in trouble. It's handicapped intellectual class will continually need to import the results its freer colleagues are creating because they will continue to fall behind without reforms giving them more freedom. And they will be vulnerable to intellectual movements that are incompatible with the state system they have chosen because the third raters who remain in Singapore and work under the censorious government rules will not be able to forever reconcile Singapore's unique system with the progress the rest of the world is producing.

Singapore will have to change. I just hope that it's a gradual, peaceful shift.

The Billion Smartasses of Catholicism

Steven Den Beste has a very wide ranging article on the concepts of ethics, identity, and property. At one point, he talks about the discovered ethical problem of tissue and identity transference and how this leads to very unpleasant answers for christians. I suggest that this is an unlikely situation because of the billion smartasses of Catholicism.

An explanation is in order.

The Catholic Church runs one of if not the biggest school system on the planet. Like all schools, each one of them has their share of smartasses who ask questions like this because they're bored and they want to play "stump the teacher" or in this case priest. Over the centuries, there have probably been billions of smartasses posing an uncounted number of impertinent and improbable questions. Sometimes they just get the brush off, but surprisingly often not and there is a huge body of scholarship that resides in the bowels of the Vatican containing the answers to a lot of very unlikely questions, many posed by that great inspiration to research, the billion smartasses of Catholicism.

I claim honorary membership among the BSoC as poor Fr. Clinet can probably attest to from Heaven. Even though I never attended catholic schools, I made up for it by asking questions later. When I discovered Catholic Answers I really felt I'd discovered a little slice of Heaven. Even today, I'm looking with great anticipation as the Catholic Church takes all of that collected knowledge and documentation and (too slowly!) puts it up on the web. I've found it of invaluable use to differentiate between media spin as to what the Catholic Church's position is and the actual position. The two are not often in agreement.

But back to SDB's essay. Because he places his dilemma in the realm of science fiction, he seems to believe that this is some new uncharted realm. However, a much more mundane situation nearly fits the same challenges, the case of amnesiacs. If you have a murderer who becomes an amnesiac and the new personality is holy, do the prior sins count against him during final judgment? Since such cases have undoubtedly come up in the last two millennia plus the BSoC has undoubtedly posed the question numerous times, I feel confident that somewhere there are entire volumes devoted to such questions.

But I find the very idea that memory is necessary for guilt to be highly unsatisfactory. Imagine SDB's mad scientist did not go around switching brains but rather made a machine which could produce targeted amnesia. If an assassin is trained and has every one of his murders wiped from his memory, is he guilty of murder? He doesn't remember doing a single one. How satisfactory would a world be where this assassin would not be guilty?

Check.

Moderate Muslims Getting Their Act Together

Muslim women are taking courageous action to shake up Islam and start the process of reform in that faith. They are agitating to be able to pray in the main hall of mosques along with the men. I've spoken often in the past about the need of moderate muslims to clean up Islam and I view this as an important step. It's similar, in its way, to France's banning of veils in schools, a small act on the face of it that is exquisitely designed to provoke a foolish madness on the part of radicals that will weaken the radicals position and drive them out from positions of power.

This movement of praying in the main hall has the advantage of being an entirely intra-muslim affair. There is no hope of labelling this as anti-muslim, or a crusade and thus shutting down reason and thought. Bravo for the women and I look forward to more initiatives like this. Hopefully the Wahabbi import imams will either change their outlook or change their address and go back to Saudi Arabia and do one of the two soon.

How to Humiliate the US

Iraqi, and arab, humiliation seems to be a continuing issue. I've written previously about how to handle Iraqi humiliation. But for those who want more, a thought occurs to me. Run Iraq, run it as a free state and run it better than the US ever did, than the British ever did. Expose their efforts as 2nd rate and humiliate the West with your competence, with your brilliance. Go ahead, do it and not only restore your own pride but make the "democratizers swallow theirs.

Unforgivable Desecration

Juan Cole ladles the "woe is us" on pretty heavy:

Even if the shrines were not damaged, you can't imagine how much Shiites don't want to hear phrases like "American tanks and AC-130 gunships pounded insurgent positions near two shrines in the center of the holy city of Karbala early Friday . . . " I cringed when I saw it. I don't see how Iraqi Shiites are going to forgive us for this. Ever.

Perhaps he should ask christians how they have forgiven muslim fighters invading the Church of the Nativity. The ire in the christian world to that military desecration seems to be a realistic model for what is likely to happen regarding Shiite outrage over anti-Sadrist operations in Najaf and Karbala. Near does not mean in and it's pretty obvious that if only military considerations were being taken into account all the shrines (which are being used as strong points by Sadr's Mahdi army) would be leveled by now. The fact that the worst damage in most of them is the mess that the muslim cartridges make as they clatter on the floor after firing shows an extraordinary level of sensitivity to Shiite religious feelings. We're spending our blood to protect their buildings. I find it hard to believe that a billion muslims will tip over from their previous, more friendly attitudes to a more hostile one because of this.

Divine Border Conditions

Donald Sensing today refers to an older post of his which asserts that the God of Islam is not the same God that Jews and Christians worship. I have to stand in disagreement with the good Reverend because he ends up oversimplifying the criteria by which we must understand border conditions. A Catholic and an Orthodox mutually recognize that they each worship the same God. Their sacraments are valid. The differences between them, the borders that define the two faiths center on the role of the Pope (if you're Orthodox and want to argue I'm wrong, first go convince Patriarch Theoctist of Romania and then get back to me) in the Church.

But if you get much beyond Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism (though the latter is getting more dubious by the day) sacraments start not being recognized. The authority of most protestant ministers to conduct sacramental service is not considered valid by Catholics because the necessary conditions are not fulfilled. Every church has its own rules as to who is close enough so that the differences are viewed as administrative, and which differences are viewed as too big to be merely administrative.

Beyond that, the subject of Rev. Sensing's note, is the level of difference at which point you are talking about a different God. Again, the level of difference is somewhat arbitrary. Rev. Sensing's idea that both christian and muslim ideas about God cannot be simultaneously true is useful for him, but it is not a universal standard. The choice is one of sharpening differences versus blurring differences. Blurring differences between christianity, judaism, and islam permitted the victorious muslim conquerors to set up dhimma treaties with their christian and jewish subjects. This is a process that let sephardic jews and a variety of eastern christians survive, albeit in a second class status while living in muslim lands.

These communities, which exist to this day, are virtually forced to concede the commonality of their deity with muslims or they set themselves up for slaughter. For them, such blurring is not just a potential way to bridge differences, it is life and death.

But even for those of us who are not under muslim domination, we would do well to have a care in casting Muslims completely out of the family. Unless we, as christians, are really going to embark on a crusade to convert muslims, our duty to evangelize must come in the form of a softer road, persuasion. And that persuasion is made easier by the idea that it is the same God, wrongfully worshipped, rather than a different God, rightly worshipped.

In that vein, I'm more than ready to concede the sameness of the muslim and christian God. The differences are great and it's sometimes tempting to declare that they are not the same but it would serve little purpose but personal satisfaction to deny the muslim claim that they are the same.

Kerry Shifts on Abortion?

Bush's official blog is poking at Kerry's new abortion statements but I think that it's more aimed at the bishops than at the electorate. Kerry might have decided that he needs to at least feint pro-life to toss his hierarchy supporters a bone so that there is no unified opposition to him in the Church. He doesn't need to get all the bishops on his side but even having a few will greatly reduce the ability of the orthodox bishops to move forward in a way that affects Kerry personally.

Communion Controversy

The controversy regarding pro-choice politicians being banned from Holy Communion has got to puzzle the Orthodox. The Orthodox and Catholic Churches are so close that they recognize each other's sacraments for Holy Communion, a real rarity in the christian world. But Orthodoxy has always had a more stringent set of requirements to gain Holy Communion. My wife, who is Orthodox, is used to having to fast a minimum of seven days prior, confess her sins right before, and only then does she qualify. The Orthodox fast is a vegan fast, with no meat, egg, or milk allowed and you're supposed to reduce your calorie intake as much as you can.

The idea of going up every week for Holy Communion is viewed in the Orthodox world as something for the really hard core old folk and monks. Go to an Orthodox Church sometime and you might end up seeing nobody, or just one or two people come up for Holy Communion. Frankly, I think their bishops are going overboard but it's their right to do so. Each individual bishop, Catholic or Orthodox, can set criteria for qualifying to take Holy Communion. Some are more lax, others more strict. It is incredibly presumptuous for the laity of any stripe to lecture bishops on an intrinsic part of their job. For Catholics who are being challenged by their bishops to follow standard Catholic teaching on abortion to challenge this fundamental episcopal right is appalling.

One of the more interesting framing aspects of this controversy is the mainstream press' attempt to spin this as a partisan problem. Catholic pro-choice politicians exist in the Republican party. I have yet to see any news story that is sympathetic to Kerry's side of the story talk to any Republican pro-choice politicians who come under this decree just as much as their Democrat colleagues do. Republican pro-choice pols must remain invisible for now, otherwise it becomes clear that it's not a partisan issue and the hierarchy does not actually have it in for the Democrat party.

Excommunication

The Corner has an item on politician excommunication. Apparently, the last time it happened was in New Orleans in 1962. Three politicians defied the Archbishop's order to integrate the parochial school system and were excommunicated for it.

Two days later, President John F. Kennedy was asked at a press conference, "Mr. President, would you care to comment on developments in New Orleans where the Archbishop excommunicated three people for hindering school desegregation?"

He replied: "No, the action of the Archbishop related to private acts and private individuals, which did not involve public acts or public policy, so that carrying out the spirit of the Constitution which provides a separation between church and state, I think it would be inappropriate for me to comment on that."

Nowadays some find it amazing that bishops even consider lesser punishments for politicians. How far (and low) we have come in some areas.

Imam Questions I

I'm starting a new occasional series, putting questions to imams as a means of denying them grey areas where they can sit back, have their cake, and eat it two. Below is the first installment.

An article over at Solomonia on Iranian nukes got me thinking on a tangent. The biggest international threat that Iranian nuclear weapons would pose would be to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India from the fallout pattern after they are used to safeguard the revolution when the pro-democracy forces try to take over.

It would be an interesting question to ask imams in the Ayatollah Khameni faction under what circumstances would such domestic use be permitted under Islamic law? And if the answer is never, what would be the appropriate islamic response if such a thing were to happen?

What if They Weren't Crocodiles?

After reading Andrew Stuttaford's recent note in The Corner on arab condemnation of torture in Abu Ghraib I found myself in disagreement. Stuttaford talks about the crocodile tears of arab authoritarians and their lapdog presses finding their voices against torture only at Abu Ghraib and only when done by Americans against Iraqis.

But what if this isn't the case. What if we said instead that we salute and welcome the press and officials of the arab world in their forthright setting of a new and better standard on torture in the Middle East? What if we were to facilitate this new standard by assisting in the publicity and offering to further this welcome sign of cleanup of official abuse across the muslim Middle East?

In short, what if we were to take them seriously as honest expressions of a new reality and then moved to make the facts on the ground match the words?

You could set up a torture report hotline in every embassy and provide quick reporting to the press and ensure that at least Al Hurra did cover the stories. You could hold the press to their words by rating their coverage of domestic or even other foreign torture stories against their coverage of the Abu Ghraib stories. After all, a children's magazine in Egypt that didn't cover Abu Ghraib because it was inappropriate for their audience shouldn't be dinged for not covering such stories in other circumstances. But those that did cover the story have set themselves up as outlets where discussion and condemnation of such things is appropriate. They have set their own bar. They should maintain their new standards.

Walking Crabwise to Genocide

What a sad, morose day today is. The Belmont Club writes quite persuasively about my second greatest fear. My fear is that we will win and lose our souls in the process:

One day Ted Koppel will read, in addition to the names of American soldiers who died in Iraq, the names of friends who will have died in another attack on New York. One day Nicholas de Genovea, the Columbia professor who called for a "million Mogadishus" will understand that it means a billion dead Muslims. And then for the first time, perhaps, they will understand the horror of Abu Ghraib while we all raise our glasses,  sardonically like Robert Graves, "with affection, to the men we used to be".

My greatest fear is that we will be forced to look into this abyss and, in recoiling, lose the war entirely.

Self-Excommunication

Andrew Sullivan demonstrates how much he misunderstands Catholicism with the following:

But the Catholic wing of the religious right wants not simply for the Church to defend its positions and criticize Kerry's; it wants the Church to deny communion to Kerry, effectively excommunicating him for his political views, principally on abortion.

Now Sullivan's a Catholic and it's a big Church but not going to communion is not excommunication, not even effective excommunication in any branch of the Church that I'm aware of. At issue is the root Christian concept that the sacraments are something that you are not automatically qualified for. There are barriers that you have to negotiate to qualify to receive them. The barriers can be lowered or raised depending on the conception of your local bishop and do change. My own bishop raised the barriers for communion a couple of years back by requiring a somewhat longer period of fasting prior to communion.

What the argument is fundamentally over is whether Kerry, and many other Catholic politicians, is causing moral scandal in the Church by ignoring the barriers and effectively thumbing his nose at a Catholic central organizing principle, that priests and bishops are an individual's spiritual partners, guiding, encouraging, and occasionally bitch slapping you when you need it.

Normally, people don't go up and get communion all the time. In Sullivan's construction, they're self-excommunicating. They might have arrived too late for services, eaten to close to mass time, not be in the proper frame of mind, have a sin weighing down on their soul, the reasons vary. I've been guilty of infractions that keep me from receiving the sacrament myself. Most Catholics have. And most Catholics have the sense to stay in the pews and not show up for a sacrament they don't (at that moment) qualify for. Sometimes people who aren't qualified show up anyway and the priest doesn't know and gives it to them. That's a sin but not any fault in the priest. But if the priest does know, he has a firm obligation not to give communion to someone who is not qualified. This is for both parties' sakes as it is sinful to partake of communion when you aren't qualified and it's a sin to knowingly assist in the first sin.

For Catholics, this is obviously more important than for non-Catholics though some faithful might look askance at someone who's not right with his own church even if they don't share that faith. But excommunication is an extreme judicial punishment that goes far beyond mere loss of communion privileges. Nobody's talking about excommunicating Kerry which would make it a sin to associate with him, even to vote for him until he relents. Sullivan's either ignorant or dishonest in conflating the two sanctions.

A Call For Support

I read this email over at HughHewitt.com

Hello Everyone,

I am taking time to ask you all for your help.

First off, I'd like to say that this is not a political message. I'm not concerned about domestic politics right now. We have much bigger things to deal with, and we need your help.

It seems that despite the tremendous and heroic efforts of the men and women serving here in Iraq to bring much needed peace and stability to this region, we are losing the war of perception with the media and American people. Our enemy has learned that the key to defeating the mighty American military is by swaying public opinion at home and abroad. We are a people that cherish the democratic system of government and therefore hold the will of the people in the highest regard. We love to criticize ourselves almost to an endless degree, because we care what others think. Our enemies see this as a weakness and are trying to exploit it.

When we ask ourselves questions like, "Why do they hate us?" or "What did we do wrong?" we are playing into our enemies' hands. Our natural tendency to question ourselves is being used against us to undermine our effort to do good in the world. How far would we have gotten if after the surprise attacks on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, we would have asked, "Why do the Japanese hate us so much?" or "How can we change ourselves so that they won't do that again?" Here in Iraq the enemy is trying very hard to portray our efforts as failing and fruitless. They kill innocents and desecrate their bodies in hopes that the people back home will lose the will to fight for liberty. They are betting on our perceived weakness as a thoughtful, considerate people. Unfortunately our media only serves to further their cause.

In an industry that feeds on ratings and bad news, a failure in Iraq would be a goldmine. When our so-called "trusted" American media takes a quote from an Iraqi doctor as the gospel truth over that of the men and women that are daily fighting to protect the right to freedom of press, you know something is wrong.  That doctor claimed that out of 600 Iraqis, that were casualties of the fighting, the vast majority of them were women, children and the elderly. This is totally absurd. In the history of man, no one has spent more time and effort, often to the detriment of our own mission, to be more discriminate in our targeting of the enemy than the American military. The Marines and Soldiers serving in Iraq have gone through extensive training in order to limit the amount of innocent  casualties and collateral damage.

Yet, despite all of this, our media consistently sides with those who openly lie and directly challenge the honor of our brave heroes fighting for liberty and peace. What we have to remember is that peace is not defined as an absence of war. It is the presence of liberty, stability, and prosperity. In the face of the horrendous tyranny of the former Iraqi regime, the only way true peace was able to come to this region was through force. That is what the American Revolution was all about. Have we forgotten? Freedom is not free and "peace" without principle is not peace. The peace that so-called "peace advocates" support can only be brought to Iraq through the military. And we are doing it, if only the world will let us! If the American people believe we are failing, even if we are not, then we will ultimately fail.

That is why I am asking for your support. Become a voice of truth in your community. Wherever you are fight the lies of the enemy. Don't buy into the pessimism and apathy that says, "It's hopeless," "They hate us too much," "That part of the world is just too messed up," "It's our fault anyway," "We're to blame," and so forth. Whether you're in middle school, working at a 9-5 job, retired, or a stay-at-home mom you can make a huge difference! There is nothing more powerful than the truth. So, when you watch the news and see doomsday predictions and spiteful opinions on our efforts over here, you can refute them by knowing that we are doing a tremendous amount of good. Spread the word. No one is poised to make such an amazing contribution to the everyday lives of Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world than the American Armed Forces. By making this a place where liberty can finally grow, we are making the whole world safer. Your efforts at home are directly tied to our success. You are the soldiers at home fighting the war of perception. So I'm asking you as a fellow fighting man: Do your duty. Stop the attempts of the enemy wherever you are. You are a mighty force for good, because truth is on your side. Together we will win this fight and ensure a better world for the future.

God Bless and Semper Fidelis,
1st Lt. Robert L. Nofsinger USMC
Ramadi, Iraq

Remember this, the next time somebody throws around the label "chicken hawk" or trots out insults about "keyboard warriors" that this isn't a call to veterans, military, families of those who are serving or who have served. This is a call to all of us and all of us can respond.

We should respond and consciously fight the miasma of pessimism and defeatism that is rising up like swamp gas. It's the very least we can do.

Waiting For Condemnations

All churches have been ordered demolished in the Nigerian state of Zamfara as part of the governor's Sharia campaign. The Nigerian Constitution enshrines freedom of worship and his decision was condemned at the national capital.

I'm just waiting to hear the condemnations from all the forces of Islam who wish to coexist with christians and not launch a religious war. It doesn't come any clearer than this folks. He's not even giving them the traditional option of becoming dhimmis so even internally (internal to the worldview of Islam), his order doesn't make sense.

HT: Urban Onramps

Better Than Saddam is Not Good Enough

Twirling around the blogosphere, I'm starting to get the sense that some people who haven't thought through the issues enough are trying to justify the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in terms of at least we're better than Saddam. That's not good enough, not nearly good enough. The way we win is not being more tolerant tyrants than Saddam's Baathist thugocracy. That's a differentiation based quantitatively. It implicitly places us as a thugocracy and does the enemy's work for him.

The way we win is to be something qualitatively different. We are human beings who have created a free society and want others to join us. We fail, like all other human beings on the planet, to always uphold our principles but we do our best and excise the rot as soon and as thoroughly as we can.

To demand perfection of us is to deny the monotheistic constant that man is a fallen creature, born in sin and doomed to imperfection without the grace of God. But that does not excuse us from doing our best, making up for our deficiencies and striving to rise above our sinful natures and do what is right.

Muslims should be outraged at the torture. There is no excuse. But they should do more than be outraged. They should see what we do next. Because if they see the trials, see the punishments, and demand just that for their own societies, they will do more for themselves than a hundred invasions and the US will become vastly more secure.

Episcopal Courage

I think that Steven Bainbridge has it wrong when he questions the willingness of Catholic bishops to lay down the law and establish that they are serious about the admission requirements for holy communion. The rule is simple, if you're reconciled to the church and free from serious sin at the moment of communion it's ok, otherwise, you do your soul grave injury by fraudulently taking communion.

A commission on the subject will likely not rule before the election, and rightly so. This is not about politics but the souls of the various Catholic politicians who are taking a position that, according to Catholic theology, is tantamount to endorsing murder and facilitating millions of murders a year. No matter the ultimate rightness or wrongness of abortion, partaking of the sacraments is voluntary and most people are assumed to be right with God when they go to receive them. Where priests know that this is not the case they have a duty to prevent further injury by refusing to participate in a mockery of the faith.

I suspect that the list of courageous Bishops will be near complete, in the end.

A Saudi Civil War?

Are we seeing the start of the second Saudi civil war? The Religious Policeman thinks we are and condemns those who had the duty to speak out against the terrorists long ago but did not. I'm quite sure that there are an awful lot of Saudi's coming to the same conclusion.

So where does that put us? Where do we stand as Americans for this new found outrage and realization of Saudi error? I think that if we're as dumb as the EU thinks we are we won't take advantage of this grand opportunity. We'll get in our "I told you so" and feel sanctimonious and smug and we will not capture the Saudi people's hearts to fight on our side.

The truth is that we need to put aside the memory of 19 terrorists and worry about the next 19. Those 19 will, with Saudi aid, be converted away from their beliefs to a more pacific form of Islam. But we have to do more than cluck our tongues and grimly think "now see how you like it". If we're not going to end up in a genocidal conflict we're going to have to help muslims come to some sort of conclusion that excludes the nihilistic death cultists from among their ranks. We can't do it for them. But we can support them and watch their backs and flanks.

There's an opening here. We need to take it.

Anti-Catholic Bigotry Alert

There's not much to say about Matthew Yglesias' recent posting on Negroponte beyond this quotation "As we all know, the Pope hates fags."

No, we don't actually.

This is about as funny as a blackface minstrel show and about as illuminating. I don't know what was going on in his mind when he wrote it but he hasn't yet come out with a clarification that he was just kidding about the Pope.

Hamas Taking Tips From the Papacy

Apparently, the new Hamas leader has been picked but his name is a secret. The only other organization that I've heard of doing this is the papacy who will sometimes name a cardinal "in pectoris" or close to the chest to put off persecution and martyrdom in a particularly tough territory. Current "in pectoris" appointments include cardinals in the PRC, as an example. This does set up Hamas for some trouble though. What happened to their ideological taunts that they love death and martyrdom? Isn't the adoption of this Catholic practice a hypocritical nod to the culture of life? I'm sure Shin Bet is savoring the psy-ops possibilities of this as we speak.

It's Not Hopeless

Matthew Yglesias asks whether "it's hopeless". By this he means the war on terror and the remaking of the muslim world as tolerant, free nations that are at peace with modernity. He starts off by setting up the straw man of treason, that supporters of George W. Bush call any opposition to Bush administration policies treason and defeatism (being "with the terrorists"). I call this a straw man because you find criticism of Bush policies both from the left and the right and a certain type of criticism is never tagged as treason even by the biggest tinfoil hat types.

It's pretty obvious if you come at the question "can opposition be treasonous" objectively that certainly some of it can. Rolling grenades into your officers' and comrades' tents is many things, one of them being treasonous. Supporting treasonous actions in word and deed would also qualify though sometimes you wouldn't be able to get a formal conviction because of the high bar to treason prosecutions in the US. But aside from such obvious cases, treason is usually not used as a charge by serious people; stupid, counterproductive, and idiotic are much more appropriate labels. And it's up to the right wing to police our own misusers of the term.

It's also pretty clear that a huge chunk of the left simply has not gotten on side to the idea that we're at war. And until they are spanked soundly at the voting booth (possibly several times since 2002 clearly wasn't enough) they're not likely to do so. There is defeatism, there is an attempt to undermine morale on the part of some sections of the opposition, and there has been an appalling lack of effort on the part of too much of the responsible left to clean up after their own nutballs.

But what's really upsetting is Yglesias' second premise, the idea that public opinion in dictatorships is reliably measured by polling the people and that even where it's accurate, it means much. We've got a lot of experience with soviet bloc opinion measurements. It's unlikely that the arab dictatorships are any different in their attempts to manipulate public opinion. In fact, it's a central reality of the region that Israel is used as a whipping boy to distract the populace from focusing on their domestic leadership's culpability in the sorry state these countries find themselves in.

The opposition by the leadership of arab regimes to freedom and democracy in Iraq is palpable and completely understandable. They don't want to be shown up as the pathetic losers that they are. They wish to cling to their national myths that they are the necessary whip hand needed to keep their people in line. And the overwhelming weight of the state owned and controlled media in that part of the world is an active participant in this myth making.

But these are rotten, hollow governments, terrified of freedom in Iraq because they know that they could not stand the spectacle of day in, day out life in an Iraq that was free and progressed faster than they were. As Iraq stabilizes and Iraqis start learning the lessons and habits of free men, whether they agree with the US all the time or not, they will be a subversive force in the Middle East just by existing. And in a way Iraq will be worse than Israel because they are Sunni, they are Shiite, they are Christian, they are Arab, they are Kurd, they provide none of the excuses, the ability to demonize them as outsiders that Israel offers.

Can we do this? Sure we can. Will we do it? We will, despite the ankle biters in Europe and the ones at home. Fundamentally I think we've grown tired of cutting and running. The idea that a new face on the same old policy of liberation and democratization is going to get France et al to provide troops because of our new nuance is very much a non-starter. There is room for a loyal opposition to provide alternatives but they need to be realistic alternatives. Too much of what is coming out of the wall sounds and feels like advice to turn our face to the wall and die.

Church Burnings

Dhimmi Watch reports an Iraqi group is threatening church burnings as a tactic to get the US to lay off. There isn't much to say to that except that such things are unacceptable. If churches have become fair game, not because they hide combatants, but merely because they exist, there is no reason to think that even traditional muslim tolerance and protection in exchange for christian submission is viable anymore. Somebody needs to bring the subject of tolerance to Sistani and ask what the penalties are for muslims who violate them.

Women in the Church

In listening to services today, one thing struck me about the traditional resurrection story. God's plan, as set out in the Bible was for women to be the first to go forth and proclaim the resurrection of Jesus. For a supposedly patriarchical, woman suppressing Church it's pretty interesting that the first to hear, to be called to spread the word were devout women.

Traditional Romanian Greeting For This Day

Greeter: "Christ is risen!"
Response: "Truly, he is risen"

PETA's tin ear

I'm not quite sure in what way to get outraged by PETA's latest offensive campaign. Should I be pissed off that they've decided to update the golden calf and put it on a crucifix? Or should a cow in Pope regalia be the focus of my outrage? Nah, I think it's the complete distortion of christian vegetarianism that really gets my goat.

Christianity has no problem with vegetarianism as a sacrifice that we do for love of God. But PETA makes a mockery of such traditional sacrifices with their faux faith and faulty theology. They do lots of things wrong, from supporting violent terrorists to trying to suppress medical progress but no matter how wacky their beliefs are, do they really need to be raising a new heresy?

Democrat Anti-Catholicism Examined

Professor Bainbridge points out a perfectly disgusting Matthew Yglesias article that tendentiously declares that the left is trying to kill the Vatican and it goes downhill from there. After some of the commentors get through with the subject, we have accusations that the Catholic Church is authoritarian and fascistic.

This all started because John Forbes Kerry is a baptized, practicing Catholic. His positions on some issues have set him at odds with well-understood Catholic teaching and we're off. But it was the idea that Catholicism is fascistic that really got my creative juices flowing. Let's see how this would work in other areas. If Kerry was a current member of an organization that was racist, even if he, himself, was not racist, could you vote for him? For those who care about women in country clubs, you can make the same argument. It wouldn't matter your own personal opinion. If you believe that the organization is beyond the pale (and fascistic certainly should be beyond the pale) then a candidate who is a member of that organization should never get your vote.

I'm a Catholic. Clearly, I think that the idea that the Church is fascistic or otherwise 'not an admirable organization' as Matt Yglesias put it is simply false and insulting. But for those who do believe such things, how can they pull the lever for Kerry? Either they really don't believe what they say or they simply don't think that membership in a fascistic organization is all that bad. I'm not quite sure which is worse.

There are rich mines of hypocrisy waiting to be exploited on this theme.

Look Out! Things Are Getting Better

Francis Poretto notes the convergance of the death the death cults a phenomenon that I've quietly noted for awhile and the motivating spirit behind the Bush Administration's Axis of Evil construction. Fran (I know him from long ago though we've largely lost touch) throws the net very widely and talks about death cults from Catholic mortification groups to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, "senescence begins when growth ends" and no matter the source, there's quite a bit of truth to that.

Taking things a bit further, there is an important question implied by this convergence, why are they doing it? Why are atheists and Islmists converging? Why are old barriers between hated nihilistic rivals falling? I think that the reason for this gathering danger is fundamentally optimistic, things are getting better. The culture of death used to run an awful lot of the world and its grip is slipping. Human freedom, growth, choice, democracy, equal rights, all these antidotes to death cults of all stripes are gaining ground worldwide in a quiet assault that has panicked nihilists around the world. They can see the end of the road for all of them so they band together to put down these upstarts.

This sort of grand coalition to bring down any potential player who has the potential for world domination is a very common feature of geopolitics. Such strange bedfellows coalitions exhist in the fall of most dictatorships, the rise of world powers like Napoleon's France, and potentially against the US today in the 'multipolarity' movement. It makes sense that in a spiritual fight between the forces of spiritual growth and senescence, the same mechanism would function.

If we fail today (and most bids for persistent global domination fail) the forces of spiritual growth and light need to prepare better for the next push. The grand coalition of nihilists will be waiting for them.

Surveying Anti-Semitism

Well, the numbers are in for US moviegoers who saw The Passion of The Christ and it looks like Mel Gibson doesn't have to worry much about creating a wave of anti-semitism so far. By far the largest group is the 89% who say it doesn't change their opinion about jews, followed by 9% who say it made them feel more positive toward jews with the remaining two feeling more negative about jews.

HT: Posted by TMLutas at 07:55 PM