From the Net

MercatorNet recently had a very interesting piece on the new Hungarian Constitution. It's worth a read.

Taki talks turkey about God and Science

The online journal Taki's Magazine this week includes a refreshing essay entitled Viva Christianity! by James Jackson. It's worth your time reading; below are snippets.

Albert Einstein’s damning-if-quirky verdict on Marie Curie’s character was that she “has the soul of a herring.” I am reminded of his words every time I hear yet another bloodless and desiccated scientist pronounce that God is finished and has no place in modern life. What spoilsports. And how cruel to the old man up there with the world-weary look and long white beard.

Without faith in something, it is hard to find meaning. In a changing world, a creed that is constant and unafraid to make moral judgment or declare there is such a thing as right and wrong is no bad thing. We may disagree—sometimes profoundly—but thank God for the conscience and dimension religion provides.

Read the whole article here.

Faith versus Religiosity

Hat Tip to Salt of the Earth for this all too accurate indictment of what passes for "faith" for too many. To learn more about Fr Alexander Men, check here and here.

Often what passes for Orthodoxy or another Christian confession is simply natural religiosity which, in its own right, is a kind of opium of the people. It functions as a sort of spiritual anesthetic, it helps a person adjust to his surrounding world, over which one can hang the slogan: ‘Blessed is the one who believes that it is cozy in the world.’ This is all wrong! …Your God is a consuming fire and not a warm hearth, and he is calling you to a place where all sorts of cold winds are blowing, so that what you imagine does not exist. You adapted and developed a completely different teaching to suit your own human needs. You transformed Christianity into a mediocre, popular religion. …Christianity can be authentic and it can be false. The false form is always more convenient. It always suits us better, which is why contemporary religious life is often characterized by a churchly falsehood when people prefer that which is convenient, calm and pleasant, conforms to their own ideas, consoles them, and which they enjoy. It is not at all to this that the Lord called us when he said ‘the gate is narrow’ and ‘the way is narrow.’ Again and again we need to understand that this Spirit is not warmth, but a fire. It is a fire.

Would that we all recognized the truth of this quote and took it to heart with seriousness and commitment. No one is immune from such temptations, the laity, the clergy, or the hierarchy.

Salvo on Sex - Right and Left and Wrong

Salvo Magazine has produced a provocative and bitingly accurate account of the modern relativistic views of sex and its real consequences. Hunter Baker's Facts Evasion: When It Comes to Sex, the Left Hates Science not only rejects the attempts by some to discredit any role for faith and religion in social discourse, particularly when science is involved, but also specifically notes the irrationality of the 'left' in its distorted understanding of sexuality and the consequences of society's championing this view.

As a sample:

Abortions continue to be performed in huge numbers despite the past assurances of some on the left that modern birth control would eliminate the need for the grisly procedure. And of the children who are born, an alarmingly high number
are born to single mothers. As a group, these children are substantially more likely to do poorly in school, abuse drugs, commit crimes, require governmental assistance, and serve time in jail—and to see the cycle repeated when they have children of their own.

Read the entire piece 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.

Neuhaus on the First Amendment

First Things' On the Square has a nice reflection by Fr Neuhaus on religious freedom and the First Amendment.

Pluralism is our continuing condition and our moral imperative until the End Time, when, as Christians believe, our disagreements will be resolved in the coming of the kingdom. The protection against raw majoritarianism depends upon this constitutional order. But this constitutional order depends, in turn, upon the continuing ratification of the majority who are “we the people.” Among the truths these people hold is the truth that it is necessary to protect those who do not hold those truths.

Read it all here.

First Things is On the Square Again!

First Things' On the Square today features a thought-provoking essay by R. R. Reno entitled The Offense of Piety. One paragraph follows to entice you to read the entire essay, which itself will certainly stimulate cogent reflection.

Christians should seek to enlist as many as possible in the cause of humanity. It is one of the central principles of Catholic theology that grace perfects rather than destroys nature. Faith fulfills rather than subverts reason. For this reason, the Catholic tradition (like most other Christian traditions) has never formulated sharp antagonisms between Christ and culture, between church and world, between revealed truths and the truths accessible by natural reason, or between men and women of goodwill and believers in Christ. As the Second Vatican Council made clear, we don’t all need to be believers in order to share and support a humane social order.

The essay is found here.

Jose Yulo on Atheism and the Beatitudes

Over at Ignatius, Dr Jose Yulo has written an article on Atheism, morality and his experiences teaching a Western Civilization class. It is well worth the time spent to read it.

Below is an excerpt.

But the topic that easily garnered the most attention in the class and generated spirited debate was a seemingly unlikely product of the Beatitudes. Christ warns His followers that they would be "persecuted for righteousness' sake," at the very least an intriguing notion. If the followers of Christ begin laying down the temptation of Agamemnon and all of those cut of the same imperial brocaded cloth, how could this lead to them being subject to ostracism, today often performed by the atheism advocate du jour?

Read the article here.

Brendan Sweetman on Politics, Religion and Secularism

Zenit.org has an interesting article by Fr John Flynn on Brendan Sweetman's book "Why Politics Needs Religion".

Excerpts are given below.

Religion in the Public Arena
The Vital Role of Spiritual Values

By Father John Flynn, L.C.
...
Brendan Sweetman explained his position in "Why Politics Needs Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square" (InterVarsity Press). Sweetman, a professor of philosophy at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, is convinced that attempts to remove religion from politics are based on a misunderstanding of modern pluralism.

....

Proponents of secularism, the book explains, wish to exclude worldviews founded on religion because they are supposedly based on sources that are not reliable or are irrational. In a pluralistic society is it not sustainable, according to secularists, to introduce religious arguments because this is imposing elements of a religion on others who do not share these beliefs.

...

"The secularist conveniently ignores the issue of the rationality of religious belief, or superficially denies that religious belief can be rational, or fails to compare the rationality of religious belief with that of secularist beliefs," Sweetman argues.

It is time, he proposes, that we move away from the view that religion is somehow a synonym for irrational. The religious view of the world in general, Sweetman maintains, has nothing to fear from rational scrutiny.

...

One objection raised by secularists, Sweetman notes, is the argument that religion introduces division and dogmatism, or even violence, into the political arena. It is true that religion can divide, Sweetman admits, but this is equally true of purely secular-founded arguments. The 20th century provides abundant examples of excesses committed in the name of secular ideologies.

...

It is the role of laypeople to work and act directly in constructing the temporal order, the Pope noted. Nevertheless, they need to be guided in this by the light of the Gospel and Christian love.

Christians who are active on the public sphere should, the Pontiff recommended, give public testimony to their faith and not live two parallel lives: one which is spiritual; and another which is secular, dedicated to their participation in social, political and cultural activities.

The entire article may be read here.

The book may be ordered from here or here.

Should Science Ally With Religion? Be Reasonable!

Oh those altruistic scientists! This is from the Guardian in the UK.

Speaking at a debate at the Guardian Hay festival, Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal who heads the Royal Society, said that science needed as many allies as it could find in the current climate. "If we give the impression that science is hostile to even mainstream religion, it will be more difficult to combat the kinds of anti-science sentiments that are really important," he said. "We need people like that as allies in dealing with extreme fundamentalism."

His fellow panellists, evolutionists Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones, disagreed. Prof Dawkins said that, though he had cooperated with the recently-retired Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, to complain about allowing creationists to set up schools, he urged a limit. "If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment."

Bishops themselves never killed anybody, but possibly made the world safer for "people who do kill people by extolling the virtues of faith as opposed to reason and evidence".

Prof Jones discussed the problems he comes across when teaching students with Islamic backgrounds. "To a man and to a woman, there are parts of science they will not accept. "That means that, in their early lives, they have been told deliberate lies by people who, I'm sure, know they are deliberate lies. I don't care how charming they are, I don't care how pleasant they are, these people are evil.

"What's true for imams is, more or less, true for bishops."

Read the whole article here.

One wonders where Professors Jones and Dawkins uncovered evidence of "evil" and "virtuous". That Dawkins actually asserts "extolling the virtues of faith" as the impetus driving murders would be ludicrous if not for the many who follow his lead unreflectively (i.e., unreasonably).

I'd love to read their replies to the Holy Father's book, Values in a Time of Upheaval.