Religion in General

For a long time I have been seriously annoyed by people who think religious believers should defend religion in general, or religion in the abstract.  Often this is initiated by atheists, and from their perspective this makes sense, both because they believe all religion is false and because it works as a tactic to make their debate opponents defend absurd positions.  It is much less excusable, though, for believers to internalize this way of thinking.  It is much less excusable, yet it is commonly encountered.

In most areas of life, this kind of confusion is not tolerated.  We do not, for instance, expect the makers of a serious anti-cancer drug to defend "cancer treatments" in general -- and by "in general", I mean everything marketed as a cancer treatment on the Internet.  If you think major drug companies are (at least sort of) honest, this can be because the Internet is full not only of "treatments" that are useless, but of "treatments" that are directly harmful; if you think they are not even marginally honest, this can be because they have no incentive to defend their competitors; but either way, no one expects pharmaceutical companies to defend every purported treatment.  Nor should we expect those who claim to have the cure for spiritual sickness to defend every purported spiritual cure.

And yet we do.  Why?

Certainly one reason is the Scandal of Particularity.  Our culture and our time is particularly offended by this scandal.  The cultural impact comes largely from developments in science.  Copernicus (and his immediate successors) showed that the solar system can be greatly simplified if we consider the sun its center rather than the earth.  (Note:  In the ancient and medieval interpretation, the earth was better described as being at the BOTTOM of the universe than at its CENTER, so its unique status was not exactly a compliment.)  Darwin argued convincingly that there is no sharp BIOLOGICAL distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.  Einstein authored a compelling theory that nature does not favor any one frame of reference.  All these ideas -- which are supported by reams of observational and experimental data -- seemed to reinforce the idea that no place or species is really better or more important than any other (but it is extremely important to understand that that is reading a deeper meaning into the science than science itself can bear).  History seems to back this up, as it becomes clear that there never really was a golden age, our childhood heroes were more flawed than we had imagined them, and people just like us have committed shocking atrocities.  Consequently, a rejection of the particular in favor of the general is an inescapable part of the Zeitgeist.

But then, the Zeitgeist is by definition a feature von unserer Zeit -- of our time.  It is also largely confined to what has usually been called Western civilization.  There is a degree of irony in passionately asserting that we live in a very special time and place, otherwise we would not realize there is no such thing as a special time or place.  Even setting that aside, the Scandal of Particularity is an example of a logical fallacy:  the rash generalization.

And the fact is, we need particularity.  What is real is a particular case of what might have been, and, contrary to what the Walt Disney Corporation would have us believe, reality is better than fantasy.  The West is dying because it has rejected this truth.

Monuments

We have known for millennia that there is power even in a mere list of names.  There are, after all, lessons to be learned from the genealogies of the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. Matthew and the third chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke.  Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon are all prominent for their virtues -- and for their flaws.  Even King Manasseh, who is probably best known as the idolater who (likely) had the Prophet Isaiah sawed in two, converted after he was carried off to Babylon, and a penitential prayer attributed to him is a part of the Church's liturgy to this day.  What is more, even Queen Jezebel, about whom little good can be said, was in the ancestry of Jesus, since her daughter Athaliah married King Jehoram of Judah and was the mother of King Ahaziah.  One moral of all these stories is, perhaps, that there is some good and some bad in each of our histories; this is the condition of the human race that Christ came to save.  This lesson only exists, though, because so many names and stories have been remembered, rather than being conveniently hidden and forgotten.

More recently, lists of names have been used to commemorate the victims of crimes and tragedies.  It is easy to find readings of the names of those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, in the 9/11 terror attacks, in the Vegas shooting spree, in the Boston Marathon bombing, in the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, in the Dayton mass shooting, in the Charleston church shooting, etc.  Perhaps the most famous such list of names is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, its name not withstanding, primarily honors those who died in that controversial and divisive war, not those who returned to live as veterans.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not literally a gravestone, but it is something similar to the Cenotaph World War I memorial in London -- something like a tombstone much farther than normal six feet from the actual mortal remains.  And it still seems to be understood -- or at least it was understood not long ago -- that only a real creep desecrates graves; thus when Jewish graves were vandalized in 2017 in Philadelphia and St. Louis, it was rightly expected that everyone would be outraged -- whether or not one agrees with their religion or shares their ethnicity.  If we owe the benefit of the doubt to those who are still alive and able to defend their reputations, we all the more owe it to the dead.

It is within this context that you should be able to understand my reaction to the decision of the current administration of the University of Alabama to remove the monuments shown below.

A university is a kind of family, so this is something like seeing that your first cousin's son, whom you barely know, has kicked over your grandmother's tombstone to win the approval of his bratty friends, that he has posted a video of it online, and that the video shows him doing it in a smug, self-righteous, and self-congratulatory way.  The familial relationship remains, but it makes the offense all the greater.  No matter what happens afterwards, the offense will be remembered, and there will be AT LEAST a scar remaining on the relationship.  At the bare minimum, you would not be cheering the kid on at his upcoming football games.  That grave marker he made such a show of kicking over would mean more to you than all his sports trophies put together.

My Suggestions for an 8-Team Playoff in College Football.

1. Each conference champion from the power 5 conferences (SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and Pac-12) gets an automatic invitation.
2. The "best" conference champion (in the opinion of the selection committee) from a non-power 5 conference also gets an automatic invitation.
3. The remaining two slots are to be filled by the selection committee, BUT no conference is allowed to have more than two teams in the playoff.  If an independent like Notre Dame gets in, it will be through one of these two slots.
4. If a conference has two teams in the playoff, they must be seeded so that they would face each other in the quarterfinal or semifinal round, NOT in the championship game.

Book Review: Why Does the Heathen Rage?

I recently completed Why Does the Heathen Rage by J. Stephen Roberts.  On the whole, my impression is that it is a decent attempt by a skilled amateur.  The book has two things in its favor.

1. It provides insight into a period of history about which most people have at best cartoonish ideas.
2. It provides a sympathetic perspective to the Crusaders, something in very short supply these days.

Both of these are important, and I am strongly inclined to favor this book ... but it still comes across as the work of an amateur due mostly to the stiff characters.  There is no arc of meaningful character development in the book.  There is no temptation, fall, and redemption.  There is not even a heroic resistance to temptation; there are temptations of various kinds, but the characters always seem to have, or to accept, pat, pious answers.  Think how The Empire Strikes Back would have unfolded if Luke had sadly but meekly accepted Yoda's insistence that Luke was not ready to face Vader but should abandon his friends to their fates while he completed his training.  That would have made a poor movie, but it is more or less how the book plays out.  A knight flirts with a princess, but it really never gets beyond flirtation, and they both conclude the romance is politically impossible and just get on with their lives.  Of course, history strongly constrains the plot, but the author had the freedom to choose his main protagonist.  If the protagonist had been a sinful aristocrat who went on the Crusade as a penance, rather than a goody-two-shoes knight born in the Holy Land, there would have been much more opportunity for character development that would have breathed life into the historical events.

The dialogue is also a bit off.  This is a bit hard to judge, since of course Medieval knights were neither Victorian prudes nor as crude as today's potty mouths, and some of their cussing might seem odd to us today.  I know that "God's Body", "God's Blood", and "His Wounds" were actually used, but then the Body and Blood are of course presented in the Mass, and devotions to the Wounds of Christ were widespread, so these would naturally be prominent in the Medieval mind; and to use such a phrase for cussing would have been considered blasphemous even in my non-Catholic Christian elementary school.  The characters in the book, though, use strange combinations, like "God's Feet" and "God's Bones", which somehow combine silliness and blasphemy in a character meant to be serious and pious.  Beyond this, the characters are supposed to be aristocrats, but they lack the eloquence that should mark their rank.  Twitter has not been kind to language -- or to the thoughts language conveys -- and something of the shallowness of our current era seeps through.

Would I recommend the book?  Yes, to the right people.  I doubt it will change a reader's mind about the propriety of the Crusades, and I think there are other books that give better insight into the Medieval Catholic mindset, so it should not be the first, let alone the only, book one reads or gives to a friend on the subject.

High-level statements about the death penalty

As you probably know, Pope Francis has revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to present a much more forceful opposition to the death penalty.  Briefly, I find Dr. Edward Peters's take on this to be very reasonable, as his opinions are with extraordinary reliability.  In addition to his take, and to points I have made previously, I have just two additional comments on the changes to the Catechism.

1. Any opposition to the death penalty from a Christian, let alone a Catholic, is woefully incomplete without a discussion of the virtue of charity (love), mercy, and forgiveness.  None of those words appear in the revision.
2. The revised version claims, "Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes."  That is a very, very dubious claim.  (a)  Previous generations would have recognized that the dignity of the person has its origin in our creation in the image of God, in the Christ's Incarnation as true man, and in Christ's atoning sacrifice for our sins; and indeed, they would have understood quite well that none of these are changed even after the commission of very serious crimes.  The difference is that they also obviously understood that there is no direct connection between "the dignity of the person" and "no death penalty".  (b)  It is very hard to see this sentence in the Catechism as anything other than chronological snobbery, as though it were self-evident that Popes and bishops over recent decades are smarter or holier than those of previous generations.  It also tends to confuse the Zeitgeist with the activity of the Holy Spirit.

You might think, then, that I would be a big fan of the "Declaration of Truths" that, among other things, defends the possibility that the death penalty may be proper under some circumstances.

28. In accordance with Holy Scripture and the constant tradition of the ordinary and universal Magisterium, the Church did not err in teaching that the civil power may lawfully exercise capital punishment on malefactors where this is truly necessary to preserve the existence or just order of societies (see Gen 9:6; John 19:11; Rom 13:1-7; Innocent III, Professio fidei Waldensibus praescripta; Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent, p. III, 5, n. 4; Pius XII, Address to Catholic jurists on December 5, 1954).

Notice, however, what is missing:  any discussion whatsoever of justice!  Has any government ever massacred innocents without claiming it was "necessary to preserve the existence or just order of societies"?  No doubt that was what Herod would have said about the infants of Bethlehem, what the Hutu would have said about the Tutsi, what Stalin would have said about the kulaks.  Unless the "malefactor" has committed a crime so grave that it justly merits death, no prudential consideration can justify the death penalty.  In other words, prudential considerations can never be the primary reason for capital punishment; they can only limit the freedom of rulers to apply more lenient punishments.

What Can I Say?

Just this morning I (along with millions of other members of the Knights of Columbus) received an email from Supreme Knight Carl Anderson that begins,

Dear Brother Knight,
I urge you to contact your U.S. Senators today, and ask them to support the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

Don't get me wrong:  I support the act, minimal though it is, and years ago, I definitely would have acted on Anderson's suggestion.  So why am I reluctant to now?

• I find it impossible to believe that any adult does not know, deep down at any rate, that every baby has a right to live -- not just a negative right (a right not to be actively murdered) but a positive right (a right that morally compels us to see to it that the child has food, shelter, etc.) -- and that this right is inherent in the baby's nature (so saying, "If the baby wants to eat, let him get a job," is not an answer).  And whatever mental gymnastics might allow one to imagine that a baby in the womb is not really a baby, but something else (e.g. a "potential person"), it is clear that if a baby after birth is not really a person, no one is.
• If an adult genuinely did NOT know that, what could I say to him?  Where would be the common ground on which I could construct an argument?  It would be easier to try to persuade a person deaf from birth of the beauty of a Beethoven symphony -- at least the deaf person could feel the vibrations.  Someone insensible to even the most basic moral principles is far more unreachable.  This is not something about which morally sane people can disagree, like how high the minimum wage should be.
• Alternatively, suppose the adult DOES know that the baby has a right to live, but pretends to be ignorant of this fact.
• I would find it extremely distasteful to interact with this person at all.  Friendly relations are out of the question as long as this behavior persists.
• The only way I would be able to influence such a person would be through some sort of bribe or some sort of threat.  I do not, however, command vast wealth or political power.   All I can do is offer to give or withhold my vote.  Even this is out of the question, though, both because there are other minimal standards the politician is unlikely to meet, and because it would be foolish to trust someone who requires a bribe or a threat.
• I should add that I have written to senators and other public officials before.  Their responses have been very, very dissatisfying.

There seems to be little point in saying anything to my senators.  All I can really do is to watch what they do, and to remember the choices they make.

University of Alabama Campus Photos (1)

Here are some pictures I took on the campus of the University of Alabama.  I think these were from the weekend of the Iron Bowl in 2017.

The white building near the center is the President's Mansion.  My dorm was Byrd Hall, which used to stand right behind the mansion (to the left as seen in the photo).  This road shows that Byrd Hall has indeed been torn down, though it is still one of the more common real-world locations featured in my dreams.  Of course there was no going back, but I hate to see my dorm is gone.  I have some good memories from that place (August 1986 -- May 1990).

Between Byrd Hall and the President's Mansion there had been a few oak trees.  They are also gone, as can be seen more clearly in this photo.

We used to have "war games" in the spring, which was a competition involving shooting each other with dart guns -- the cheap, spring-powered plastic toys -- outside the dorm.  According to a story I was told, a student years before had gotten into trouble by climbing one of the trees at the back of the President's Mansion in order to ambush another player.  The problem was that the President of the United States (I think it was Nixon) was staying in the President's Mansion at the time.  If there was any truth to the story, it was stupid to be playing that game anywhere NEAR the Secret Service, but the kid was lucky and was scolded, not shot.

Here the President's Mansion is off the left side of the photo (behind the fence), the Rose Administration Building is to the right, and Butler Field used to be straight ahead on the other side of a girl's dorm that was also torn down.  Yes, I know the Million Dollar Band still practices on a Butler Field, but it is not the one that was used when I was a freshman.  To get to Byrd Hall, I would take a left at the end of this sidewalk.

This is the view facing 180 degrees from the previous photo.  At least this view looks just like it did when I was a student.

This is looking across University Boulevard from the base of Denny Chimes back towards the President's Mansion.  To me, the mansion looks sort of "naked" without the trees in the back to help frame it.  That big patch of empty sky just above it seems wrong.

That's enough for now.