Of Gandalf and Darwin

Salvo Magazine has a very interesting and thought provoking discussion entitled, Gandalf on Mars: What Bleeping Codes Say About Intelligent Design by Richard W. Steven. It is rational, entertaining, and persuasive. Give it a go! (Its even got Turing machines!)

Upside-Down Religion

Check out the offering by David Warren over at Real Clear Religion. It's entitled, We Have an Upside-Down Religion. I won't even quote it; I'll just say, Read it.

A Child's Voice is Silenced in Tripoli (and on Rutledge) as Planned

Where is the outrage?
Where is the shame at the continued slaughter?
Can we really pretend to be righteous
when innocents die,
murdered by those
who claim authority
and blasphemous right?

What has happened to our consciences
that we bray at the suffering of animals,
yet turn a blind eye to a massacre
taking place here in our sight?

How can we lay ourselves down
to hypocritical sleep
while blood stains the ground
and angels weep?

They cry out to God for help
and we, who claim to be His children,
refuse to hear
the dirge that will one day haunt our memory
and condemn us for complacency
for ever more.

And on that day we will mourn,
O yes, and bewail our inaction
laid naked as sin unto ages.

Let prayer be the start of our work,
not the excuse for our inaction.

Harsanyi Reconsiders Abortion

Over at Reason.com, David Harsanyi has contributed a piece encouraging a re-examination of the question of abortion. It is entitled Abortion, Religion, and Science. His basic thesis is that one should honestly look at the science as well as the religious issues involved. I have often made the pro-life argument solely on the basis of biology, genetics, and logic. The debate Mr Harsanyi proposes should be taken up on all sides as the impact on the Abortuary Business could be significant.

Here is a snippet to encourage you to read it:

Does life really begin on the say-so of a single person—even the mother? Does her position or mental state change what a fetus is or is not? That kind of elastic calculation grinds against reason. Even our intuitive reaction to motherhood agrees. As Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who is an ob-gyn, once explained, "people ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite."

Read the article here.

Children, Adults, Abuse and Experts

Offered for your consideration: two links to provoke reflection on the state of Western society.

Both deal with children and 'progressive' dystopic interference with their childhood development. We all know that physical, psychological and sexual abuse of children is immoral (or do we? See the second link). However, we should also be on guard against the societal abuse of children.

The first is from the New York Times: A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding

From this piece consider the following:

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

The second link is from the always poignant MercatorNet: Troubling theories about childhood innocence

And from our second witness:

In a paper on this theme, “Kiss and tell: Gendered narratives and childhood sexuality”, Mindy Blaise, a senior lecturer in the faculty of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, describes how she tested this theory on some three- and four-year-old children in an Australian childcare centre.

It is worth looking at this is some detail to understand her method.

Using a popular picture book aimed at 6- to 10-year-old children (Clarice Bean, That’s me by Lauren Child) Blaise focuses on a page where Clarice’s older sister Marcie is sitting on her bed reading a fashion magazine. The researcher points and reads out to the children (4 girls and 3 boys) thought bubbles saying: Do boys give you the dreamy eye? Are you a flirt? Have you ever kissed a boy?

Beyond the deadly serious issues both articles raise (and make no mistake, these reveal very serious matters, indeed), I am also led to ask the more prosaic questions:

Why do children need to 'schedule' playtime?

Is this not already a sign that something is seriously wrong with Western society's approach to child rearing?

Random Comments

"Christianity is going to, at some point, offend people in the secular world."

Professor Thomas Kidd
Baylor University

Boys to Men or Boys to Killers? A Home School Mom's Take

First Things has a nice little article on the gentle art of rearing boys - realities versus the pseudo/philosophical ideals of the experts of the last generation. It is entitled The Killer Instinct by Sally Thomas, a home school mom from North Carolina. Below are a couple of paragraphs from the article.

Girls may like weapons, but boys like the actions that weapons enable. They like shooting and slashing and stabbing at things, and if they don’t have anything to shoot, slash, or stab with, punching is good, too. Hand a girl a rock, and she will make a pet out of it. Hand a boy a baby doll, and—if no adult is looking—he will point its head at somebody and say, “Pow.”

The default mode of many parents is to be as alarmed by this proclivity in their sons as my friend was by the deer hunters. To be sure, it is wearying, sometimes, to live with a person whose way of greeting you is to line you up in imaginary sights. I can see that, after a while, if you didn’t just become oblivious to it, an obvious fascination with shooting things might come to seem like one of those warning signals we all read about: If Johnny does X, call Dr. Y. It used to be that parents waited for Johnny to start torturing the cat before they worried. My generation of parents seems to worry that owning a rubber-band shooter will make Johnny want to torture the cat.

From my own observation, I was perhaps of the last generation to be raised in the "boys will be boys" climate. The movement to 'equalize' boys and girls that has resulted in the documented stunting of young males' development over recent decades, was the result of a confusion between the materialistic parochialism that had developed in twentieth century Western society and the natural differences between males and females. This confusion influenced many areas of Western culture, particularly in anxiety that boys might actually behave like boys (a sort of 'cultural emasculation') and the consequent deforming of the 'ideal' of what young females should become (an equally healthy 'cultural defininization' of girls). As a former teacher, I have witnessed this unnatural exercise unfold in the classroom and on the playground, wherein boys instincts were stifled as 'aggressive'. To give food for thought, I recall it being raised as a concern when one year's class had only boys and members of the administration were desperate to remedy this potentially dangerous development. Of course, the boys did just fine; in fact, possibly becoming the highest achievers I ever had the privilege to teach.

Words from Fr Daniil the Martyr

I found the following profound words by "Fr Daniil Sysoyev, rector of the parish of the Holy Apostle Thomas in Kantemirovskaya, Candidate of Theology (a Kandidat (Candidate) degree is equivalent to a PhD, somewhat more rigorous: editor’s note)" reported last year on the Voices from Russia Web Log. The context was a series of quotations by particpants at a Conference in Moscow.

I think that one of the most important problems facing the Orthodox Church in Russia, and even beyond its borders, is the ideological rigor mortis of the Church. The Church is considered as a kind of dead body, it is thought to be frozen. According to some, nothing should be changed in it. It is understandable that we should not change dogmatics and Church Tradition, no one argues with that. However, the problem is that people try to preserve superstitions and false ideology, and, what is worse, they try to hang on to bad remnants of the Soviet period. I have travelled throughout the canonical territory of the MP, and I see one and the same picture everywhere. People do not know God, they think that their salvation is complete; and all of their time is taken with completely-unimportant matters such as the minutiae of this-or-that rite, the details of this-or-that church policy, or one regional view or another.

In my opinion, it is an enormous misfortune that people have lost their consciousness of Christianity. People have forgotten about the fact that we are, first of all, Christians, the children of God the Father, and that we must go to Christ for holiness and salvation. As a part of this, one sees a controversy over the frequent reception of Holy Communion, which connects us with the Lord. Some people do not consider Communion to be as important as it is to act in such a way as to “earn” one’s salvation. However, they do not realise that this is the heresy of Pelagius, that one can earn one’s salvation by one’s own efforts.

In other words, the standard of church life that they expound is sinful, pure and simple; it is a distortion of the real Church Tradition. For instance, one hears that Russians, because they are Russian, are already Orthodox. In one article that I read, I saw the assertion that even atheists are truly Orthodox, if they are a part of the Russian culture. This is nothing less than the displacing of faith with culture. Orthodoxy is God’s revelation, preserved for us in all purity from the times of the Apostles. One now sees efforts by some to replace the New Testament with national myths, including old ones that the Church has always fought against. They propagate heathen fables about the “mothers of the black soil” instead of seeing Christ as the basis of all culture.

Paganism often disguises itself in the Church under the mask of Christianity, and it is hidden under a façade of pietism rather than in overt exterior manifestations. People forget that their goal is to reach sanctity. Some of them believe it is a sin even to think of such a possibility, that they could reach sanctity, even though it is the fulfilment of a direct commandment of the Lord. We should spare no effort to overcome this problem. To overcome this, we must issue a new call for the people to return to holiness. For this, it is necessary for us to revive catechesis throughout the entire Church. Even those who are already baptised should study the faith. People must know in Whom they believe, in what they should do in order to approach Him. People coming to church see it as an assembly-line of spiritual services. They are not offered any spiritual growth; therefore, they go to the sectarians.

People think, in error, that the sects are easier than the Orthodox. Recently, I had a chance to associate with Pentecostals. I learned that it is their practise to pray five hours during the day. What Orthodox Christian prays for five hours a day? Sectarianism is the consequence of the Church not informing people of the commandments of the Lord, commandments that our Lord Christ expects us to fulfil. The Gospel is seen as nothing but a collection of pious sayings; it is not seen as a means of real contact with God. We so fear being seduced by the world that we end by doing nothing. This is a terrible spiritual problem. If we do not overcome it, very many Christians shall be ruined. It is an ideology of rigor mortis. It is not conservatism; rather, it is the murder of the Church.

Voices of Russia also has a biography entry on the martyred priest.

Below is one of several You Tube videos of Batushka Daniil noted from the Moscow Times report of his death.





Here is the You Tube Channel with what is said to be Fr Daniil's final sermon.


May his memory be eternal.

The Manhattan Declaration

Manhattan Declaration -

You can also read, download it and find out more about it here.

A Newly Martyred Priest

The Following two reports are from Interfax

First, this report...

2009-11-20 13:41:00

Famous Orthodox priest killed in Moscow

Moscow, November 20, Interfax – The famous priest Daniil Sysoyev, the rector of the St. Thomas Cathedral, has been killed in Moscow, a source in law enforcement agencies told Interfax.

The priest received gunshot wounds to the head and chest, his assistant Vladimir Strelbitsky was wounded in the chest, he said.

"I do not recall a priest being killed in Moscow, let alone shot at by an assault rifle," the source told.

The priest died on the surgical table at 0:15 a.m. Moscow time, a source in medical circles said. His aide is in very critical condition.

A criminal case has been launched over the priest's murder.

And this follow up....

2009-11-20 13:57:00

Moscow priest could have been killed by extremists, pagans – sources

Moscow, November 20, Interfax - Moscow priest Daniil Sysoyev most likely has been killed for his missionary activity among the non-Orthodox Russian population, a source at law enforcement agencies told Interfax.

"He had recently received constant death threats from some extremist organizations. Daniil Sysoyev complained about it several times to the Federal Security Service," the source said.

Fr. Daniil said he received anonymous phone calls and e-mails promising to "have his guts for garters," he said.

"Sysoyev received the last threat in early October. Someone called him and said he had been sentenced to a death penalty," the source said.

Rev. Daniil is known as an experienced theologian who had been in constant dispute with the extremist branches of Islam. He began receiving threats four years ago after holding a public debate with Vyacheslav Polosin, the former Orthodox priest who converted to Islam.

Fr. Daniil might also have been killed by members from the so-called sect of Rodnovers (Slavic Neo-pagans), the source told Interfax.

Investigators are following all lines of inquiry but this theory remains the main one, he said.

This is evidenced by the fact that the perpetrator did not leave the weapon at the crime scene, he said. "Rodnovers are not professional killers, which is why they count every barrel," he said.

The Rodnovers organization mainly consists of young pagans.

Earlier Rodnovers staged an explosion at one of Moscow's churches.

As horrible as this incident is, it causes me to wonder if I have ever proclaimed the Faith so clearly, so powerfully, with such dedication, grace and Love that I even seemed dangerous to the pagans and other non-Christians around me. I fear that the demons have found little of interest in me due to my own sinfulness and self-condemnatory life - they needn't bother.

Shame on me.

And as for Father Daniil, may his memory be eternal!

European Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics Unite ... on Crucifix Ban

This from the BBC. A few snippets follow:

Although the Greek Orthodox Church has been at odds with Roman Catholicism for 1,000 years, the judicial threat to Christian symbols has acted as a unifying force.

The Greek Church has ostensibly [italics added by the Rambler] intervened in this case in response to an appeal by a Greek mother whose son is studying in Italy.

Helsinki Monitor is urging trade unions to challenge the presence of religious symbols in Greek schools.

The socialist government here is also considering imposing new taxes on the Church's vast fortune, but at the same time is urging it to do more to help immigrants and poor Greeks.

Read the entire article here.

Oh, and while you're at it, check out Touchstone Magazine's Mere Comments for this note of interest: Lithuania to EU: We Will Not Give Our Minors to Homosexualist Indoctrination.

And then there's this "old news" from Germany as reported over at LifeSiteNews, also covered here at Sign of the Times.

And some quarters wonder why parents might choose to home school their children, and why conversions and membership in Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches are on the rise.

(Hint: We don't cater to the current corrupt culture.)

Is Darwin Compatible with Materialism?

Over at the First Thoughts blog of First Things, Joe Carter has a provocative quote from atheist philosopher Raymond Tallis asserting that in considering the question of consciousness one must either adhere to materialism or Darwinian evolution, but not both. The piece is entitled The Unnatural Selection of Consciousness.

Does the fact of consciousness exclusively drive us either to materialism or the modern interpretation of Darwinian evolution? It's an interesting question which, of course, ignores any place for a theistic position in relation to evolution.

Give it a read. Your comments are welcome here (as well as there).

Someone Must Have Been Praying to the Softener of Evil Hearts

This from KBTX' Web Page.
(Hat Tip to the Priestly Puglist - quite a srappy guy!)


Planned Parenthood Director Leaves, Has Change of Heart

Planned Parenthood has been a part of Abby Johnson's life for the past eight years; that is until last month, when Abby resigned. Johnson said she realized she wanted to leave, after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure.

"I just thought I can't do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that's it," said Jonhson.

She handed in her resignation October 6. Johnson worked as the Bryan Planned Parenthood Director for two years.

According to Johnson, the non-profit was struggling under the weight of a tough economy, and changing it's business model from one that pushed prevention, to one that focused on abortion.

"It seemed like maybe that's not what a lot of people were believing any more because that's not where the money was. The money wasn't in family planning, the money wasn't in prevention, the money was in abortion and so I had a problem with that," said Johnson.

Note especially the phrase: the money was in abortion.

Read the entire story here.

MercatorNet picks up the story

Mentioned here in February, MercatorNet has now added a piece about the problems of an Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization and the limits of freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. Read it here.

Ugly Truths

Hat Tip to + Papist + Filioquist + Azymite + Priest & Pilgrim + for a spot on discussion of the true history and motives of Planned Parenthood's founder, entitled The Ethic of Control: Margaret Sanger, Eugenics, and Planned Parenthood. To those who don't know the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey used to say), there just might be more to why Planned Parenthood seeks out certain neighborhoods to establish their clinics (read: Abortuaries).

Read it here.

As my Grandfather would have said, "Now, there's stem cells and there's stem cells...."

Real Clear Politics has an essay by Kathleen Parker regarding President Obama's recent "lifting" of the stem cell ban by the US Government. Here are a few pertinent excerpts:

Unfortunately, the stem cell debate has been characterized as a conflict between science (as though science is always right) and religious "kooks" (as though religious folk are never right). In choosing sides, it is, indeed, easier to imagine lunch with a researcher who wants to resurrect Christopher Reeve (whom Obama couldn't resist mentioning) and make him walk again, than with the corner protester holding a fetus in a jar. (Note: I don't believe I've ever heard of an abortion protester "holding a fetus in a jar".)

The insistence on using embryonic stem cells always rested on the argument that they were pluripotent, capable of becoming any kind of cell. That superior claim no longer can be made with the spectacular discovery in 2007 of "induced pluripotent stem cells" (iPS), which was the laboratory equivalent of the airplane. Very simply, iPS cells can be produced from a skin cell by injecting genes that force it to revert to its primitive "blank slate" form with all the same pluripotent capabilities of embryonic stem cells.

The iPS discovery even prompted Dr. Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the sheep, to abandon his license to attempt human cloning, saying that the researchers "may have achieved what no politician could: an end to the embryonic stem cell debate." And, just several days ago, Dr. Bernadine Healy, director of the National Institutes of Health under the first President Bush, wrote in U.S. News & World Report that these recent developments "reinforced the notion that embryonic stem cells ... are obsolete."

Many scientists, of course, want to conduct embryonic stem cell research, as they have and always could with private funding. One may agree or disagree with their purposes, but one may also question why taxpayers should have to fund something so ethically charged when alternative methods are available.

Read the entire essay here.

Book Burning Twenty-first Century Style - and more

The UK Religious Intelligence Website reports a disturbing instance of book burning. What printed work could be so offensive that it must be completely silenced? Political ideology? Scientific works that contradict ideological prejudices? And what organization would oversee the snuffing out of free speech? Rabid conservatives? Click here for the answer.

AND...

Last evening, the FOX News channel's Shephard Smith included a brief mention about Galileo and the Catholic Church. He repeated the same tired lies that the issue between Galileo and the Church was the scientific contradiction of the Church's "view" that the earth was the center of the universe. Mr Shephard would benefit from reading Thomas E Woods, Jr's How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. He might also read from the Network's own Fox Forum an article by attorney Tommy De Seno entitled "Darwin Day" is for Dummies.

Dr Kreeft Refutes Reductionism

Hat Tip to Vivicat for reference to an article by Dr Peter Kreeft, entitled "A Philosophical Refutation of Reductionism", at the Catholic Education Resource Center website refuting reductionism.

Reductionism is the philosophical attempt to explain something complex by "reducing" it to a simple, basic element. For an (admittedly simplistic) example, The Holy Bible's message might be reduced to "God wants us to be good".

Of course, this omits the complexity of nuance that constitutes the true meaning of such a reductionist statement. Ultimately, reductionism is a logical positivist variety of relativism in that to achieve the reductionist result of the deduction one must make choices of criteria that betray the presuppositions of the process.

Somewhat like statistics, or the speeches of politicians.

Anyroad, read the article here.

The Doctrine of Darwin

RealClearPolitics has an interesting article by David Warren on Darwin. Amongst highlights the article notes the following:

As Darwin himself realized, the fossil stratum corresponding to the beginning of the Cambrian geological period was potentially inimical to his hypothesis. In a blink of geological time, now dated by various means to 542 million years ago, all of the advanced body types of "modern" multicellular organisms suddenly and simultaneously appear. The event is now known as the "Cambrian Explosion," and Darwin hoped it would be explained away by the later discovery of gradual evolutionary developments through the eons before. Instead, the shock of the transition has been enhanced by all subsequent study.

Likewise, Darwin trusted that the gradual development of such "irreducibly complex" organs as the eye, ear, and heart would be explained in due course (i.e. these organs can't work at all unless and until all their many parts are present and functioning in perfect harmony). Instead, advances in genetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry over the last half-century have revealed a vast world of irreducible complexities within the single living cell, by comparison to which the engineering of an eye would be child's play.

The man himself was very much a product of his age: a bourgeois Victorian adapted to an intellectual environment in which such fatuities as Utilitarianism and Malthusianism were in the air. In retrospect, he is a redundant character, for Wallace already had the theory, and many others could have drudged out Darwin’s specific points.

Read the whole article here.

Twixt (Support for) Life or Death (PC="Choice")

Kathryn Jean Lopez, of the National Review Online reports on her attendance at last week's March for Life in DC, as well as reflecting on attending 2004's March for Women's Rights. March for Life is an annual protest march in Washington, DC, in support of equal rights for all human beings from conception to natural death. March for Women's Rights was a protest march in 2004 organized by the National Organization for Women in support of abortion and other political 'rights'. Below is an excerpt from Ms Lopez' article.

But I walked the whole March. I walked the March from the Mall to the Supreme Court after attending the pre-rally. I walked the March and hung around on the House side of the Capitol for a little while. The only display of anger I saw came from a woman walking a block away from the Supreme Court with a big round “Keep Abortion Legal” sticker from the National Organization for Women. She was furious, saying to a friend, “They don’t care about human rights. I can’t believe all these people. They just care about babies.”

Of course they care about babies. Some of them have had a lot of them, and brought some of them along; others look on with joy at the families. But it is because they know these babies are human—which shouldn’t be in dispute, though it seemed to be back when Obama was in the statehouse arguing that a newborn shouldn’t have the same rights as an older baby—that they care about this issue.

And that message—that this is a human-rights issue and men, women, and children deserve better than a culture that values the legal “choice” of abortion over all other values, including compassion and common decency—was emanating from the March for Life this year, and so many of the events surrounding it. “Healing” had a big presence there.

Read the whole article here.