Shallow Atheism

I was watching a John Stossel clip, "The Commandments According to Penn," in which Penn Jilette discusses his book, "God, No!" He is a fundamentalist atheist along the lines of what Mark Shea encountered here, in that he expects the Bible to be read in a flat-footed, literalist manner.

I can agree with Penn that "agnostic" is a non-term. He claims that those who do not have an active faith, i.e. one where you trust God to keep his promises, then you are for all practical purposes an atheist. I agree with that, because trust is a major connotation of "belief" as it is used in the Bible. But beyond that, his theology is absurdly weak.

One of Penn's earlier silly statements was to the effect that "anyone who doesn't run a stop sign is displaying doubt, because a real believer would expect God to save him from all harm." He's buying the argument that the devil presented in Matthew 4:6, that God will send his angels to rescue us lest we dash our foot against a stone. Somehow he not only failed to notice Jesus' reply to this, but also doctrines saying that governments have authority from God to protect us, e.g. with stop signs and traffic laws.

God wants us to choose Him. To think that we should obey Him like mindless automata (or that we are unable to choose because of God's omnipotence) is to say that anyone's love for God is actually God's act of masturbation.

A later silly statement comes in the form of a favorite atheist straw man. "If God commanded you to kill your child, would you do it? If your answer is no, you've just put love and humanity above religion." And yet from the Catholic perspective, God = Love, and Love can nearly always be used as a substitute word for God. This understanding makes Penn's argument so irrational it almost cannot be described with symbolic logic. The closest I can come is, "If A is not-A, and you fail to behave as if not-A is A, then A is not-A." God asking or commanding me to murder my child is not God, because it is not love.

Of course he'll say, "Then what about Abraham and Isaac?" First, Abraham didn't know as much about God as we do. As far as I know, God never told Abraham that human sacrifice was repugnant to Him. Second, the Midrash strongly suggest that he was convinced that God would resurrect Isaac from the dead after he had been sacrificed. And third, God has never required human sacrifice from us; the only human He ever wanted to be sacrificed was His own Son, Jesus Christ.

The first of the Penn Suggestions is this:

1: The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity, and love.

There's nothing wrong with any of these ideals, especially not love. Love is the greatest of all virtues. But to say that human intelligence, creativity, and love are the highest ideals is idolatry. Both intelligence and creativity can easily be turned against love; furthermore, those who have less intelligence and creativity are necessarily devalued by this suggestion.

Finally, I'd like to know the philosophical basis from which these ideals spring. I see a clear line of deduction from the Christian valuation of all human life made in imago Dei to Penn's First Suggestion, but as a self-respecting atheist, he ought to find some other basis.

If Penn really wants to learn about Christianity, he really ought to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Revisiting Extraterrestrial Salvation

Way back in 2008 I wrote Salvation for ET?

Surprise, surprise, John C. Wright did it better, and in all likelihood long before I did.

A Splendid Course!

First, go and read The Screwtape Letters and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The article introduces a course that contrasts Screwtape's recommendations to Wormwood with relevant sections of the Catechism.

Buy the Catechism

or browse it online.

buy The Screwtape Letters

or browse it online.

Download Curriculum PDF

I WANT This!

Just watch:

revolights. join the revolution. from revolights on Vimeo.

Source Article

Revolights on Kickstarter

Towards More Civilized Discourse

I find myself a little dismayed when I check out a blogroll and I DON'T find These Stone Walls. Father MacRae is an excellent writer, a light to the world, and a stunning example of obedience and charity while under duress. Case in point: His post entitled, Holy Hostility, Batman! He ably decries the nastiness, name-calling, spite and vituperation prevalent in a fairly large number of blog comboxes and other online communities. He makes the case that it's not enough for the blogger to refrain from such behavior; it is also incumbent upon the blog admin to prune nastiness out of their comboxes as well. In fact, this is one of the reasons I moderate comments.

(another is so that I'll have notification of some sort that a comment has actually been posted. It's not something that happens a lot around here.)

And I fully agree that one of the hallmarks of a good blog is a good community participating in the combox. But what do you think?

On computing

Most people browse on Windows. I advocate free software, even for Windows users. One problem is that open source licenses allow malicious coders to download the source code, insert malware, compile it, and publish it. To counter this, I suggest looking for your free software at nonags.com, which certifies downloads as malware free and nag free. A second site that is very helpful for this sort of thing is ninite.com, which also has an app to automatically update your downloads when new versions are released. You can also use the H Security Update check to make sure all your windows software is up to date.

In other news, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a study demonstrating that information provided by default -- namely the combination of your browser, operating system, and plugins, along with their version numbers, uniquely identify 84% to 94% of web surfers, even those who completely disable all cookies. This is one reason why I use Firefox, SRWare Iron, Google Chromium, Midori, Arora, Opera, and w3m browsers with minimal plugins, and three or four different operating systems. I use at least one of these to misrepresent itself, in order to gain access to certain websites that absolutely refuse to grant access when I don't. According to the EFF, the only likely fix is to demand that publishers remove this behavior from browsers.

Blogrollin #78

On the off chance that you prefer my stuff to Fr. Longenecker's, what's wrong with you? I never come up with teh awesome, like this post on sponge words and square facts.

Also recommended: Why I Believe the SOLT Statement (Fr. Corapi's abandonment of SOLT threw up big red flags for me, too)

Look for the Little Ones and Fr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an interesting contrast between apparent and authentic holiness.

On Fr. Corapi

Only three really good things have been said on the matter.

First, Father Zuhlsdorf of What Does the Prayer Really Say? reminded us that a lot of what is being said is uncharitable, we don't really know the truth, and the best we can do is pray for all of those involved.

Mark Shea has decided to be quiet about it, and he has good reasons for this choice.

Jennifer Fulwiler reminds us: We don't have to worry about his previous teachings. I suggest that going forward, we may wish to examine them for an imprimatur before heeding them.

Mary Help of Sinners, pray for us!

Edit: and now a fourth, from Fr. Gordon Macrae.

Advertisers Filter Your Internet

Just in case you haven't seen this yet:


Are you cool with this? If so, why? If not, why not (and what should we do)?

Maybe as this guy suggests?

You Are Being Watched

It is becoming ever more clear that the only time our government cares at all about privacy is when it is ensuring you won't be prosecuted for sexual deviancy, contraception, or abortion. I recently read a description of the internet that certainly seems to apply: a borderless security and surveillance state.

So what has me going on now? I just ran across ZDNet's series on the ever-so-loathesome USA PATRIOT Act. The summary is here, and includes links to the entire four-part series. Another article there quotes Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) as saying "We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says," in an article titled "The 'REAL' Patriot Act is Classified." Here's ZDNet's source link. Apparently, the interpretation which the Department of Justice relies upon is classified, and cannot be debated openly in Congress without violating classification rules. And this thing has been passed more or less unchanged.

So who thinks the US government is nothing like a tyranny? Who thinks we are protected from it? Who thinks the Fourth Amendment is a dead letter?

Instead of Googling...

Duck it!

I was reading DWW today, and a screenshot in the OpenIndiana review showed what looked like a search engine I wasn't familiar with: duckduckgo.com . It has just taken the place of Google Advanced in my bookmarks. It may replace Wikipedia in my bookmarks; I can search wikipedia with DDG just by using !w [searchterms] in the search command line. They've got similar shortcuts for hundreds of sites. They also have a privacy policy that is vastly superior to Google's, and their normal search methodology is to find some specialized search engine suited to your query and use that, which I think is creative, clever, and elegant.

I'm going to investigate the command syntax to see how flexible it is. I think I'm even going to make it my firefox home page. If possible, I may make it the default search in Chromium. Much to do, much to learn.

Check thou it out!

Blogrollin again

Matthew Archbold relates the scariest conversation he's ever heard. He describes a moment when he looked in a metaphorical mirror and saw not the face of Christ, but of the culture of death.

Powerful stuff.

First to Exit the Blegroll

I am taking down the blegroll entry for Free the Notre Dame 88, a defense fund for the 88 protesters arrested when President Obama delivered the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame . . . because all charges have been dropped!!

Culture of Death, World of Lies

So, Planned Parenthood is complaining about hysterically denouncing any attempts to deny them their place at the federal trough, claiming that millions of women won't be able to get mammograms from them any more. But is that so?



Planned Parenthood provides breast examinations, in which the doctor, nurse practitioner, or unlicensed employee feels you up to see if there are any palpable lumps. But that's not the same thing as a mammogram, which is an X-ray of your breast tissue.

Women In Crisis

Go read this. Do it now. There is nothing I can say that will do anything but detract from the message, other than telling you that you will be glad you did.

video blogrollin

So Marc over at Bad Catholic (see the blogroll) has created a video that he's really proud of for a scholarship competition, promoting the Rite of Reconciliation. I like his video, and you can find it on his blog.

But he likes the following video better, and wants it to win. I understand why PERFECTLY. Watch.

Joyously stolen!

From xkcd, alt text and all:

Nolan Chart

Disaster is Disaster

I've seen opinion pieces talking about how nice it is that so much destruction has occurred in Japan and elsewhere; now we can all get rich helping them clean up and repair!

Walter Williams rightly calls that Economic Lunacy. Nope, the people in Japan are poorer now, and as a result, they are going to have to buy replacements for their homes, cars, clothes, and infrastructure, instead of producing other useful goods. More goods means more wealth and lower prices.

Another example of economic lunacy, by the way, is complaints about the trade deficit. The trade deficit is balanced, CENT FOR CENT, with a foreign investment SURPLUS. It means that foreigners are putting capital into our companies. Furthermore, it means that we are richer than the people we're importing from. Here's a sane explanation:

Oh, woe!

How could I live without filing taxes?



The song is available for free download AND BROADCAST from the Center for Small Government.

On Feminine Beauty

for reasons I don't intend to go into atall, I went back to Waiterrant today. I started from the beginning, clicking through his first few posts until I got to one entitled Leftovers. In it, the Waiter discusses what makes a woman beautiful and desirable, and some of the truly horrific damage some of them do to themselves in pursuit of the Main Stream Media norm of physical perfection, which is utterly divorced from reality. If you doubt it, watch the video.



Deo gratias, my wife is sane. She may not be aware of the Photoshop effect, but she does know how her skeleton is shaped. She eats like a human being, not a famine victim. I love her, she is as beautiful as she could be, and our marriage is a deluge of God's grace into my life.