Old World Swine

Please Assemble

For Scott Walters.

This is the beginning of the only argument against homosexuality that I know of, Scott. It's about what used to be pretty commonly known as natural law, or simply "reason".

The exercise begins by imagining that someone has just given you a handful of nuts and bolts (as shown above) and asked you to please assemble them. What do you do? Why?

Moral Relativism's Unspoken Creed

I was asked recently what Christians, especially in America, seem to spend so much of their time thinking and complaining about homosexuality.

This was my off-the-cuff response;

The acceptance of homosexuality is right now the leading edge of the promotion of an ethics of relativism. If there is an agenda, it is to use homosexuality as a way of promoting this view of morality.

The idea is that all moral judgments are only subjective. Now, almost no one actually believes this, and absolutely no one lives that way, but that is the unspoken creed. It is generally formulated in the negative; "Who are you to judge what I do?".

But while holding to the creed in the abstract, we are in reality very happy to judge one another's actions many times a day. Because no one really believes or lives as if morality were subjective (it would be impossible), public morals under that philosophy work out always to a matter of mere brute politics. Through an elaborate public hypocrisy, fashionable vices are tolerated or promoted, less fashionable ones are frowned on or suppressed. If you can swing enough people into siding with you (through any means at all - social pressure, the threat of legal action, bullying, bribery, persuasion, flattery, etc...) you can gain at least some kind of official approval of your favorite sin.

So you have, among those who would like relativism to replace the more traditional Judeo/Christian moral code, a tacit agreement; "I won't criticize your vice (in public), if you won't criticize mine". So those who would like a little more latitude to cheat on a spouse, or do drugs, or unplug grandma's breathing tube, for instance, without all the bothersome public shaming, are more likely to support anything that advances a more relativistic moral viewpoint, even if they (at first) find it repugnant. Gay rights happens to be the flagship of moral relativism at present, which is why you hear of it so often.

Not only that, but homosexual behavior is so obviously opposed to reason (the natural law) that its acceptance sends a very potent message that the Old Law (traditional morality) is officially over and done with, has been completely overturned.

This is also why (from this point of view) Christians must be at least marginalized and taken out of public discourse; by not honoring the Code of Silence, they're getting in the way . Making things difficult. The very idea of a transcendent, absolute morality that applies to all people in all places threatens the whole relativist worldview. No one likes to feel ashamed, and there are two ways to prevent this kind of moral discomfort; Christendom works to continually conform society to the moral law. The New Enlightenment works to continually conform the moral law to the society.

No Pride Month for Bestiality?

Okay, according to the Women of Grace website, Senior Class President Obama has declared June to be "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month".

Can someone explain why Zoophiles were so glaringly left out? What goes on between a man and his hamster should be their business, right? RIGHT? Who are you to judge? STOP PUSHING YOUR MORALITY ON MEEEEEEE!!!!

Children will be after that.

I wonder what Malta is like this time of year?

Pick of the Litter

 

This piece from AFP news service in France (via Yahoo) announces the birth of the first ever "savior sibling" born in that country.

The baby's already born (lucky for him!) sibling has a rare blood disorder, which the parents and doctors hope to treat with stem cells from this new designer infant.

Here is how that happens; The couple goes through the in-vitro process we all know and tolerate, and from the multiple embryos (that's "little people") one is selected that is a good genetic match for whatever it is the parents and doctors wish to do with it. This embryo is allowed to live. The rest of the embryos are destroyed, without so much as a complementary toaster or even a Lowe's gift card... but, thanks for playing!

CODA: This is probably not likely to be a big problem psychologically or emotionally for any of the children, experts guess wildly, with a shrug. And, anyway, that kind of thing is not really within the scope of their research. Anyone wishing to look into that aspect of the process will therefore have to find their own funding.

"O, brave new world, that hath such people in it!" - Shakespeare

The Tortured Logic of Torture

A note I recently sent to Red Cardigan, the author and chief instigator of the anti-torture Coalition for Clarity blog;

 

Just wanted to add my name to your list of bloggers supporting the CFC.

 

I didn't jump in immediately because, frankly, it's not like I have a great deal of moral or intellectual weight to throw behind such a worthy project... I'm more like a fly landing on a battleship, but I wanted to declare my allegiance, anyway.

 

For a while, I was one of those very publicly concerned about the importance of a debate and a clear definition of torture, but the sheer audacity and absurdity of pro-torture apologists more or less forced me to come off the fence.

 

The patient exposition of Mark Shea, Zippy Catholic, and the influence of fellow comboxers like Richard Comerford helped me to sort things out.

 

Thanks for your efforts!

 

Tim Jones

"Old World Swine"

 

Part of the problem was that I was trying hard to get to the very bottom of exactly what it is that makes torture evil and sinful, rather than simply acknowledging what torture is according to plain common sense. We can't afford the luxury of ignoring the real, ongoing moral consequences of torture while we tease out every fine theological thread of the discussion.

 

Torture is bad. I knew that as a nine-year-old boy (we were in Vietnam, then), and it was confirmed for me again and again by adults; we Americans are different. Our enemies - the Nazis, the Viet Cong, the Red Army, the Soviets - use torture, and justify it with their ugly and inhuman philosophies. We do not.

 

I believed that then, and I believe it now, but the "we" has changed. Apparently, a lot of Americans, and most of our leaders, are busy cobbling together their own ugly and inhuman philosophy.

 

I can only ask myself; Who would Jesus torture?

 

Keep in mind, please, that I was an agnostic for quite a while regarding waterboarding, but I realized that the only real reason I took any trouble to defend the practice was that we, the U.S., were obviously, you know... already doing it. If it had been the Taliban or Al Qaeda doing it to our boys, I would have unhesitatingly seen it as torture, and would have condemned the torturers as moral monsters.

 

Have Al Qaeda and the Taliban done worse? Oh, yes. But since when do we take our moral cues from terrorists?

Moral Freefall

I have been in a discussion on another forum about In Vitro Fetilization (IVF) and other artificial methods of conception or reproduction (like surrogacy), and something occurred to me; as I was articulating the teaching of the Church and the reasoning behind it, I became aware that some people would probably criticize my thoughts as being a "slippery slope" argument.

What I maintained was that once we leave off natural reproduction (through good old coitus) in favor of unnatural reproduction methods (like IVF or surrogacy), we leave ourselves vulnerable and unable to offer any kind of reasoned and logical objection to any manner of technological jiggery-pokery, like human cloning or gene manipulation or even one day growing babies in neat rows of tanks to spare mothers the trouble and risk of pregnancy.

And I believe that is a valid point. A "slippery slope" argument may be used badly or used well, and I believe that, in this case, the slope is really very, very slippery.

Or, more correctly, I don't believe it is a slippery slope at all, but something more like a blind leap off a cliff. Once natural conception is abandoned, anything must be allowed, and the only objection we will be able to muster will be "Yuck!... no one wants babies grown in tanks! That's just weird!".

And it is weird, and it seems weird... now. But if we have no solid, immovable moral principle on which to oppose it, it will happen eventually. If enough people want it (it doesn't require anything like a majority), someone will devise a way to do it. Most people, at this point in history, find the idea of Fetus Factory Farming to be repugnant, but give it time. If the only thing that keeps us from factory farming infants is The "Yuck!" Factor, that obstacle will be removed eventually, just as it has been removed for homosexuality or abortion.

Abandon natural conception as the obvious, bright moral line we must not cross, and there simply are no other lines that are not arbitrary and based on human will and even whimsy. Passing "beyond" natural conception is not a slippery slope, it is a headlong plunge off a cliff, with no branches to grab on the way down, like in the movies. Accept the God-given limitations of nature, or accept anything and everything.

The same is true, of course, of defining when a new human life begins. From a cold and dispassionate scientific viewpoint, a new human life must be said to begin at conception, when a new, discreet, living human organism comes into being. It has a new genetic code, and it is most definitely not part of the mother's body (as evidenced by the fact that it could be removed from the mother's uterus any time before implantation and be placed in some other woman's body and grow just as well).

One minute there is an egg and a sperm, and the next minute there is a new, discreet human organism... a human being by definition.

Pass "beyond" this very natural and scientific definition to more nuanced and poetic definitions, and you find again that there is no other definition of "human being" that is not arbitrary and whimsical. It's when the fetus reaches a certain size, or a certain stage of brain development, or when the blood begins to circulate, or when the fetus can feel "pain"... these things are all completely arbitrary. The best that could be hoped for would be that we would all arbitrarily agree to the same arbitrary standard... a political reality, but not a logical or scientific one.

If followed to their logical conclusions, such definitions of "full" humanity would lead us to accept that small people are less human than large ones, or that the mentally handicapped are less human than smarter people, or that we are not fully human when we are under anaesthesia, or when we are drunk. People with poor circulation would be that much less human.

There is no slippery slope, here, there is the dry, scientific reality of conception... and there is everything else on the way to going "splat". There are dozens and dozens of milestones in the development of a fetus, any one of which could be chosen arbitrarily as the definition of the beginning of a new "fully" human life, but they are all nonsense, chosen for convenience rather than from any logical or scientific process. What in the world does "fully human" mean? It could be argued until the sun goes cold, with no right or wrong answer.

So, the next time someone calls this sort of reasoning a "slippery slope", I will remember to point out that there is no slope at all... only a sheer drop. It would be little comfort if I and a friend both fell from a cliff and he were to turn to me and say, "Oh, don't worry about hitting the ground yet... this is a very high cliff and we won't reach the bottom for several seconds, now.".

Domestic Partnerships

I've been wondering, lately, whether the possibility a legally recognized "domestic partnership" of some kind might not be feasible for any two people who just find that the arrangement makes practical sense.

In other words, any two people could set up housekeeping together... call them roommates. It has nothing to do with foggy notions of romantic love, or sexuality or with any emotional component at all. It has nothing to do with redefining marriage or the family, but is fair to people who want to establish legal ties for practical reasons.

Let's say for the sake of argument that it's two old guys who argue all the time. They just find forming a working partnership makes life easier. They can look out for one another. One might have a steady income, say, but be unable to keep up with household chores. The other takes care of the day to day chores, but depends on the income of the other, and maybe needs the health benefits, too.

It appears to be fair, but it may have implications for the traditional family that I'm not seeing. And, I have a feeling a lot of gay activists would reject it, even though it is what many of them have claimed to be after for so long. Redefining marriage and the family seems to be the real point with some.

Discuss.

But I Really, Really, Really Want To

"Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?"
G.K. Chesterton

Nihilism is where fulfilled desire becomes the sole aim of freedom.

Freedom is understood more and more in the abstract, nowadays, rather than in the concrete. The modern understanding of freedom means getting whatever you want - whatever you can imagine - even when what you want is a logical contradiction or an inherent impossibility... and where there are barriers or restrictions - any conditions at all impinging on your desires - they must be removed. Freedom is seen not as the ability to use what you have to accomplish all you can, but as simply the absence of restrictions of any kind, be they physical, moral, legal, or what have you.

A common, natural, sane individual will understand and accept that he is free in many ways, but not nearly in all. A free and sane man may step out of his door and run in any direction he likes, but he is not free to run like a horse, because he does not have the body of a horse. In trying to run like a horse he will find that he is no longer able to run even as a man, and is really no closer to running like a horse.

But the modern mind will see the man's ability to run in only one, limited way (that is, as a man) as a defeat and even an injustice. Freedom is practically worshiped as an abstract ideal, rather than being understood and welcomed as a real, vast panoply of concrete possibilities.

This is where the modern world turns everything on its head. The human body - that marvelous and mysterious engine of all our earthly freedom - has been perceived more and more in modern times as a hindrance and a restriction... almost like a cage of flesh. Whereas a sane man will give thanks for the gift of two working legs, an insane man will find it absolutely intolerable that he is not allowed instead to have fins or wings or a hundred legs like a centipede.

And so, we have for years heard of those unfortunate individuals who insist that they are really women trapped in the bodies of men, or men trapped in the bodies of women. This has passed, in my lifetime, from being seen as a disorder and a mental sickness (in need of treatment) to being simply another desire in need of fulfillment. Transsexuals are even legally recognized by most states as being whichever gender they choose for themselves, even going so far as to change their birth certificates.

"Oh, but how these people suffer", you might say... "they really find life intolerable until they can be set free by means of surgery and hormone treatments. They only need our acceptance and understanding".

Let's say that's correct. Let's say that a person's internal vision of themselves - their interior life and imagination, their desires - is what really makes them who they are, and that accidents of birth should not be seen as absolute, should not prevent them from pursuing their dream of happiness in whatever way they see fit.

In that case, one will need to give the same consideration to those who are said to have Body Integrity Identity Disorder... that is, those who feel they are amputees trapped in healthy and (intolerably) whole bodies. Inside, you see, they just know they were meant to have only one arm, or no legs. Oh, how they suffer (this I don't doubt). There are now more doctors (still only a few, but a growing number) willing to consider granting these people what they desire. By what modern, material philosophy can they be denied?

And then, there is the Cat Man. Formerly Dennis Avner, Cat Man (now his legal name) has spent countless hours and great amounts of money and says he has "transformed (him)self into a tiger". On what grounds, pray, would a proponent of legal transsexualism deny that the former Mr. Avner may really be a cat trapped in a human body? On what grounds would they argue the point? After all, only he can know how he really feels inside, which is all that matters. And that being the case, what cold-hearted prig would (should Cat Man ever desire it) deny him the bliss of mating with or legally "marrying" another tiger... one of his own kind? Why shouldn't he be happy on his own terms, as gay "married" couples wish to be happy on their own terms?

“I think the community of people with BIID are looking ahead to some future where this will become understood and people can accept it in some way — that this is a condition and there is a solution to their problem.”

A healthy man who wishes to amputate his own limbs is demonstrably insane (at least on that point), and any worldview that maintains otherwise is equally insane. We do the deluded patient no service at all when we confirm him in his delusion - when, instead of working to draw him out of his nightmare, we enter into his nightmare with him... or else we uncork his nightmare and loose it on the whole world.

We all want understanding and acceptance, but to understand and accept insanity as anything but insanity is ruinous, is cultural suicide. We are already headed down that road. The question is, are we too far down to turn back?

"In this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible (with any hope of a universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin. This very fact which was to them (and is to me) as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially diluted or denied. But though moderns deny the existence of sin, I do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a lunatic asylum. We all agree still that there is a collapse of the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house. Men deny hell, but not, as yet, Hanwell. For the purpose of our primary argument the one may very well stand where the other stood. I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits"
G.K.C.

The Torture Question

Esteemed reader Baron Korf asks (in relation to this post),

"Where does the paternal duty of a country to its citizens intersect with the humanity of its enemies? "

I had very similar thoughts on torture in the beginning, Baron Korf. Still do, to some extent. My concern was for the soldiers (or cops, or other peace keepers) in the field who, in a spontaneous fit of frustration (or fear, panic, anger) may rough up a prisoner or twist an arm in an attempt to elicit some information. I would be loathe to see such situations characterized as War Crimes, and so I think a clear definition of torture is important for that reason (among others).

This was debated for a very long time over hundreds of posts at Jimmy Akin's blog and at Mark Shea's, and I eventually arrived at/formulated a definition of torture that - to me - gets to the nut of the matter;

"Torture is the premeditated infliction of suffering on an individual, with the intention of breaking the will."

The breaking of the will is the key. Humane discipline techniques (like those we use on our children) are not designed to break the will, but to shape it or instruct it. God created each person with free will, and being the gift of God that most defines us as moral beings (rather than mere animals), it is not to be taken away by another. We may certainly restrict a person's movements or their ability to cause mischief, but we have no right to remove from them their fundamental status as free moral agents before God.

When a person is tortured, the idea is not to persuade or to discipline or educate (these all respect the fundamental free will), but to introduce such levels of pain or mental suffering that the ability to make moral choices is destroyed or removed. The intention is not to move the will, but to obliterate it. This is evil.

This may  occur not only in relation to securing some fungible commodity (information, say), but applies also to the sadistic types who simply enjoy witnessing the horror of a will being obliterated.

When we torture, we separate people from their humanity, and that is not to be done, no matter how many lives are at stake in the ticking time bomb scenario. Will that sometimes put us on the short end of the stick, in a practical, strategic sense? Very possibly (those intelligence professionals I have heard, though - all two of them - maintain that torture is a losing proposition, and that good intelligence is much better gained by other means).

But in the end, the practical considerations don't matter - can't matter - to the moral question, because that is consequentialism... the end justifying the means. We can't allow ourselves to get distracted from the basic moral choice by some perceived awful, unimaginable horror that might occur on account of our obedience to the moral law.

If that is the way we make decisions, then things like abortion and euthanasia become more difficult to argue against. I mean, the poor pregnant girl has a great career ahead of her as a gymnast... without an abortion, she will lose all that, will miss probably her only shot at the Olympics, after all her years of hard work.

The old man can hardly communicate. He can't walk, is practically blind and needs constant care, which is expensive and burdensome. He requires a feeding tube, is often agitated, is in constant discomfort, and his suffering is very hard on his family. How could you put him and his family through all this by denying them recourse to assisted suicide (or at least euthanasia through the withholding of nutrition)?

There are moral absolutes at he heart of these wrenching scenarios;

You Will Not Take Innocent Life. Stop.
You Will Not Cause Harm To One In Your Care. Stop.

The situations that surround these decisions will be more or less grave and awful to contemplate, which is why, without moral absolutes, there can be no morality at all but what we are in the mood to tolerate. When a difficult situation arises, we will move the goalpost to fit in our comfort zone. Get the girl an abortion. Kill Grandpa. Hang the prisoner by his wrists in a freezing cell, or turn the fire hose on him.

Prisoners are to be treated humanely. That is all. That is the moral responsibility we assume when we take prisoners.

When I was a boy, I remember well being taught, by various means, that  one of the most important reasons we HAD to fight the Nazis and the Russians and Viet Cong was because they lived by and were working to expand an ugly, alien and inhuman ideology, and that this was evidenced most strkingly by the way they treated their POWs... Nazis tortured. The VC and the Red Chinese tortured. The Russians tortured. We did not torture.

That may have been somewhat naive (torture has always gone on in the battlefield), but it was at least an understanding of our goals, of what made us different from our enemies, and why victory was important. If torture occurred on our watch (we believed), it was carried out by rogue operators, whereas for our enemies, torture was a matter of official policy and strategy. We were not like that. We were Americans, dammit, not savages or atheists.

In other words, I was taught that our battles were not fought mainly over territory or resources, but in defense of our principles, the moral and spiritual foundations that made us a great nation. If we compromise those principles in the defense of our country, we will find in the end that - even if we are victorious - we will not be the country we were. The country we went to war to defend will no longer exist, but will be more and more a reflection of those ugly ideologies we set out to defeat.

Will living by these principles be easy? No. Will it assure our victory?... on the earthly battlefield, no, it won't. In the eyes of heaven, though, the real battle lines will always be in the human heart. Victory there makes the results of any earthly battle irrelevant.

"He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death." - Revelation 2:11

Sophisticated Modern Christians - "Martyrdom is for Wussies!"

Martyrdom of St. Maurice & the Theban Legion - Jacopo Pontormo

I (along with many others) am delighted to note that Jimmy Akin is back to posting more frequently. Last week he jumped feet-first into the moral debate surrounding what kind of action is justifiable in wartime - the fires of which are stoked by modern consequentialist reasoning - and which touches on Hiroshima, terrorism and torture.

There is a virulent strain of thought among some modern Christians which concludes that behavior that is is evil for our enemies is okay for us because we, after all, are the Good Guys, and we must have every tool at our disposal - even some ugly ones - in fighting for Truth, Justice and the American Way.

I posted the following in his combox. It is a letter to the Emperor Maximian (circa 300 A.D.) from Saint Maurice and the Theban Legion, all 6600 of whom were consequently martyred at Maximian's order.

"Emperor, we are your soldiers but also the soldiers of the true God. We owe you military service and obedience, but we cannot renounce Him who is our Creator and Master, and also yours even though you reject Him.

In all things which are not against His law, we most willingly obey you, as we have done hitherto. We readily oppose your enemies whoever they are, but we cannot stain our hands with the blood of innocent people. We have taken an oath to God before we took one to you... you cannot place any  confidence in our second oath if we violate the other.

You commanded us to execute Christians, behold we are such. We confess God the Father the creator of all things and His Son Jesus Christ, God. We have seen our comrades slain with the sword, we do not weep for them but rather rejoice at their honor. Neither this, nor any other provocation have tempted us to revolt. Behold, we have arms in our hands, but we do not resist, because we would rather die innocent than live by any sin."

What a bunch of milksops, eh?

Those who say that we must sin a little now and then in order to get things done in the Real World (of which these Roman legionnaires clearly knew nothing, sheltered namby-pambys that they were) seem to me unable to believe God will look after them if they do his will in everything. They apparently cannot bring themselves to really believe that "in all things God works for the good of those who love him". They cannot see past the tomb to the resurrection... death seems the end of everything, for them, and so they will avoid it at any cost, even at the price of their own souls.

In the face of death, they forget the promises of God, and justify torture ("enhanced interrogation", for us), terrorism and spilling the blood of the innocent to protect themselves, their families, their country.

Even Joan of Arc, who was called by the Holy Spirit to kick a** and take names, never allowed her violent vocation to become a temptation to sin... "I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God's will".