What? Me blog?

Chiesa reports -
Hemmed in by the two forms of aggressive fundamentalism, Muslim and Hindu, the "little flock" of Christianity in India is distinguishing itself by its refusal to resort to violence. It is calling for the use of force by the constitutional authority, but this is failing in its duty to exercise it. The international community is providing only weak and sporadic support. Not even the Christians around the world are strong in solidarity toward victims who share the same faith, whether in India or in other regions of the globe. On Thursday, November 27, during the same hours when Mumbai was under attack, Benedict XVI issued a new appeal for the release of two missionary sisters kidnapped two weeks earlier by Muslim gangs between Kenya and Somalia. Also during those same hours, in Cairo, ten thousand Muslims attacked, with impunity, a church full of Coptic Christians in prayer, whose offense was that they had opened a new house of worship.

Labels: Islam, persecuted Church, religion

In many respects, I understand Ron Paul's insistence that blowback vis American foreign policy is at least to some extent the reason for attacks on US and Western interests here and abroad by everyone from Russians to wild-eyed whackjobs in caves in Pakistan. Insofar as our foreign policy really does have consequences, Paul is exactly correct. As Samuel Huntington has noted, though, the borders of Islam are bloody.*

Rob Taylor at Red Alerts:

...the one religion on earth that can claim credit for more murders than Nazism and Communism combined** is the “Religion of Peace.” While the smoke had yet to clear on 9/11, when the train platforms still smoldered in Spain, while the British pulled bodies out of the twisted wreckage of double deckers, miseducated windbags from a thousand liberal Arts colleges were wagging their fingers at the rest of us for daring to think the inspiration for the holy war Muslims are waging comes from their “holy” book and the religion which spawned it.

And even now while the streets of Mumbai are awash in innocent blood there are those who cling to the delusion of peaceful coexistence with a religion designed to make peaceful coexistence impossible. Islam is not a “Religion of Peace” and Islam in fact means something closer to “submission” than peace. It is submission to Islam from the non-Muslim world that Muslims seek; to me this seems far from a peaceful goal. The West must decide if it will abandon thousands of years of social progress and embrace the depravity of Militant Islam or stand up and fight a foe more determined than any we have faced in the last 200 years. It is a delusion to think otherwise.

Muslims riot and burn churches and we do nothing. Muslims raised money for the Mumbai attacks in British mosques and Britain will do nothing. American Muslims are celebrating the attacks and we will do nothing. There is an “epidemic” of Muslim taxi drivers in England raping women fares, and England attacked the mother of a young girl who wanted to ensure her daughter’s safety rather than stop the rapes. Europe is allowing Islamic polygamy all in the vain hope that such wild accommodation will calm the excitable Muslim street and then we can finally get on with living together in harmony with our friends in the “Religion of Peace.”

As much as we've earned the approbation of the Muslim street for having taken on the terrrrists and supported Israel, we seem to get no points for coming to the aid of Muslims in Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere. I don't think that even were we to - properly - withdraw our forces to our own borders and cease to be the world's police force that we would get much "peace" from the religion of peace. Muslims do not coexist with other religions. They convert or conquer. Ask the Christians in Iraq, or "Palestine" or the many conflict zones in Africa. Ask the Hindus in India - not that they are above a little persecution of their own - about the "religion of peace" and you'll begin to get an idea of the extent of the problem with Islam.

I suspect that in the end, it will be them or us.

And most of "us" don't even know we're in a fight.
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Update: Up way too late cruising the net and I find -

Mark Steyn at NRO says, "It's the ideology, Stupid!" - "This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else."

*"While groups from all religions have engaged in various forms of violence and terrorism, the figures make it clear that in the past decade Muslims have been involved in far more of these activities than people of other religions. One of the things that attracted a lot of attention in The Clash of Civilizations was my use of the phrase "the bloody borders of Islam." But if you look around the Muslim world you see that in the 1990s Muslims were fighting non-Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Middle East, Sudan, Nigeria, and other places. Muslims have been fighting one another also. The International Institute for Strategic Studies surveyed the armed conflicts going on in the world in 2000, and its figures show that twenty-three of the thirty-two conflicts under way involved Muslims. Why is this?" - Huntington

**Given socialism's body count, I find this tough to believe.

Labels: Islam, politics, religion, Ron Paul

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It amazes me how I will be following a line of thought and - just like that! - I find articles and commentary in the same vein. It may just be that I'm more zoned in. Or maybe there really is zeitgeist. Who knows? Hat tip to Catholics for Ron Paul. Anyway, John Zmirak has this to say:

In an American context, given our constitutional heritage and the large
body of legal decisions solidifying its interpretation, on nearly any issue,
Christians of any denomination should reject the assistance of the State. Our
efforts to capture it, the courts have made it clear, will always fail. Any
attempt to infuse the activity of the government with the moral content of a
revealed religion will be rejected, in the end. Indeed, the more our own
institutions cooperate with the government, the more they will be compromised;
hospitals which take federal funds will be subject to secular ethics on issues
like contraception, end-of-life, and even abortion. Religious colleges accepting
federal grants will eventually be federalized, and so on.

It seems clear that the public sphere in America is irretrievably secular. So the only logical response of Christians must be to try to shrink it. Instead of attempting to
baptize a Leviathan which turned on us long ago, we’d do much better to cage and
starve the beast. We should favor low taxes—period, regardless of the “good” use
to which politicians promise to put it. We should oppose nearly every government
program intended to achieve any aim whatsoever. We can make exceptions here and
there: We can favor the protection of innocent lives, which would cover things
like fixing traffic lights and throwing abortionists into prison. But that is
pretty much that. Christian public policy should focus not on capturing
the power of the State but shrinking it, to the bare minimum required to enforce
individual rights, narrowly defined. Likewise, the share of our wealth seized by
the state must be radically slashed, to allow for private initiatives and
charities that will not be amoral, soulless, bureaucratic and counterproductive
(like the secular welfare state). Instead of asking for handouts to our schools
in the forms of vouchers, we should seek the privatization of public
schools—which by their very nature, in today’s post-Christian America, are
engines of secularism. And so on for nearly every institution of the centralized
State, which has hijacked the rightful activities of civil society and the
churches, and which every year steals so much of our wealth to squander on
itself that we can barely afford to reproduce ourselves. (So the State helpfully
offers to replace us with immigrants, but that’s another article.)

The social gospel needs to be rethought.

Labels: politics, religion

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I'd like for someone to point to the verse in the New Testament where Jesus makes that claim, or where he declares that His kingdom is of this world.

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Warning! I'm not teaching here - I'm questioning.

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I'm a Christian. I...

...believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

...believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he born of the Virgin Mary,became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

...believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.

...believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

...acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

...look for the resurrection of the dead,and the life of the world to come.

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I am a Catholic because I believe in the Real Prescence. I get infallibility. I get purgatory and all the other things that make Prots scratch their heads and go, "Huh?" Even indulgences - although I still ain't real comfortable with that one.

I'm not big on apparitions, Marian devotion, rosaries or a bunch of other popular stuff, and things like scapulars, medals, blessings of motorcycles* and throats, and asking saints to find car keys** I find frankly off-putting. I get the uncomfortable feeling that too many Christians think the faith is like "white" magic or something. Get the "spell" right and - Bingo! - long lost trinkets magically appear.

Let's face it - there's a lot about my Church I don't get. FWIW, I've attended innumerable mainline Prot, Fundie and other assorted Christian assemblies and have decided that silliness is nondenominational.

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One thing I surely don't get is the Church's social gospel. Oh, I know all about helping widows and orphans and what not, and I get loving my neighbor as myself - even though I must hate myself, based on my feelings*** for some neighbors.

What I don't understand is the Church's insistence on attempting to push it's social agenda through programs administered by a secular - even hostile - government. If the Kingdom of God is supposed to look like a left-wing Utopia - minus abortion - then I confess to missing the point.

More to come...****



*A nondenominational phenomenon. I've seen bikes blessed by everyone from a priest to a hirsute biker/pastor, presumably from the Church of Hog Heaven. Cue "Riders in the Sky" by Roxette

**I'd suppose that Saint Anthony has better things to worry about. I try not to bug saints. They're busy. I'd rather have them interceding for my sorry butt than worrying about where I put my Honda keys.

***Good thing Love is an act of will and not a feeling.

****Sorry!

Labels: blather, religion

# posted by hoosiertoo @ 7:56 PM 0 Comments

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One of the problems Christians have when confronted by atheists – assuming that the Christian is well-versed in his or her faith - is the instinctual appeal to the Bible in response. Appeals to scripture are fine in discussions between believers because even if they may disagree on interpretation they both agree that scripture is authoritative. Not so the non-Christian.

Atheists are rare; true atheists are rarer. Most of what passes for atheism in the US is merely snarky anti-Christian mutterings of perpetual adolescents rebelling against authority. Most of this type of atheist are, if irreligious, prone to a host of weird beliefs that make Christianity appear utterly reasonable in comparison.

Then there are those atheists who appeal to reason as the basis of their unbelief. Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are three of this latter sort. They have each written best-selling books and promote the cause of unbelief wherever the opportunity presents itself – evangelical atheists, if you will. It is this “unholy trinity” that Vox Day addresses in his book, “The Irrational Atheist.”

I've always said Vox is the thinking man's Anne Coulter - a rapier wit with a taste for blood and a talent for wordplay. Only not as attractive. TIA is laugh-out-loud funny in spots – the footnotes are a hoot – but the book is a deadly serious takedown of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens dissecting their own arguments and using them against them. It does so without recourse to Scripture and Day succeeds brilliantly; the “unholy trinity” have a lot to answer for, and they should answer. I suspect they won’t.

Readers of Vox Day’s blog are going to be familiar with most of the arguments. I found the “God as game designer” analogy to be dubious, if diverting, but overall this is a good read and highly recommended for atheists and Christians alike - Christians, for ammunition to use in defending the faith and atheists, because it is good to reconsider what you think you know from time to time. Be prepared to reconsider what you thought you knew about the Inquisition, the Crusades, Adolf Hitler and a host of other subjects. If you are hoping for a definitive argument for God’s existence, you won’t find it here. What you will find is definitive proof of the existence of irrational atheists.

Labels: books, religion

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The most misunderstood and misinterpreted - and by some reviled - passage in scripture is Ephesians 5:22-33:

22 Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: 23 Because thehusband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. He is the saviour of his body. 24 Therefore as the church is subject to Christ: so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church and delivered himself up for it: 26 That he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life: 27 That he might present it to himself, a glorious church, not having spot orwrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. 28 So also ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. 29 For no man ever hated his own flesh, but nourisheth andcherisheth it, as also Christ doth the church: 30 Because we are members of hisbody, of his flesh and of his bones. 31 For this cause shall a man leave hisfather and mother: and shall cleave to his wife. And they shall be two in oneflesh. 32 This is a great sacrament: but I speak in Christ and in the church. 33 Nevertheless, let every one of you in particular love for his wife as himself: And let the wife fear her husband.

****1/22/08 Update: I have modified this post considerably because I wanted to rethink the entire presentation and recheck references to the teaching of the Fathers. If and when I repost, it will be a) better researched and b) more coherent.****

In the meantime...please read Nancy Cross's wonderful article on the subject at Catholic Answers.

Labels: Fun with Ephesians, religion

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Media Master link: Click and play hoosiertoo's "radio station" in Windows Media Player. I'll update the albums periodically, likely music you've never heard, or at least not in a long time...

Anne Haslam is the featured album.
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Daily Mass readings from MyCatholic.com.
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Church Directory: Go exploring Christian blogs. The links change, so fresh links pop up every time you visit. I've already found a couple of blogs I like!

Being able to play with the code is the major reason I haven't switched to the new templates. Enjoy!

1/07/08 - update: Check out Fr. Sirico's Fox interview on entrepreneur-as-vocation on the YouTube video.

Labels: music, other fancy stuff, religion

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Even if the South had abolished slavery by 1888, like Brazil, that would have left a whole further generation of people to grow up in slavery. Usually, if we see someone being assaulted or robbed or raped, and we are able to protect them from the attacker, it is our moral duty to intervene. We do not comfort ourselves that in time the attack will "naturally" end, and so everything will be all right. No, everything will not be all right. Every moment of the attack is more harm and more of a wrong done. It is our duty, if we are able to do so, to come to the aid of the victim immediately. - Kelley Ross, PhD, here

Could the argument hold true for victims of abortion as well? While a limited protest, amounting to praying on street corners, has it's place, is there a time, actually an imperative, when one must go to the protection of the unborn? If so, when?

Should violence be ruled out? Why? Is violence even morally wrong in this narrow instance? If violence was necessary - acceptable even - to sever our ties from Britain and to free slaves, then how much moreso should it be acceptable to protect the life of the unborn?

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The report from the Evangelical Alliance says "violent revolution" should be regarded as a viable response if government legislation encroaches further on basic religious rights. The church is urged to come to a consensus that "at some point there is not only the right but the duty to disobey the state".

- Christians ask if force is needed to protect their religious values by Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Sunday Telegraph 5/11/2006

The only leverage the State has to compel your obedience is the threat of violence. If "at some point there is not only the right but the duty to disobey the state," then is violence in the defense of principle a duty as well? Hmmmm. Our Founding Fathers certainly thought so...

Labels: abortion, religion

The head of one religion weighs in on a tenet of the religion of Gaia:

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

The...Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

Labels: global warming, religion, silliness

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I originally received this in an e-mail message in October of '04. Given the approaching primaries and election and the ever increasing hostility to religion in the public sphere as seen in the recent rise of the "new atheists" - Dawkins, Harris and their ilk - I thought this was worth dusting off:

Our motivation in beginning the work of the Acton Institute almost 15 years ago was to make a concerted, intelligent and faithful effort to promote and secure what we have repeatedly called 'the free and virtuous society.' It is my conviction that both these elements are necessary if we want society to be worthy of human dignity.

The element of freedom is critical because the human person is created with a destiny beyond this world, which requires his liberty to seek and pursue. It seems to me to follow logically then that interventions of a political nature must be limited, not merely for reasons of efficiency - that things would work better - but also, and more importantly, for reasons of morality. Man must be free to pursue his destiny because that is what he was created for. Religious freedom, as well as the freedom of enterprise, logically flow from this idea. We call for the minimization of taxes, regulations and other forms of control, at the same time as we call for the freedom of expression and assembly and the like, even when, at times, we do not agree with those expressions.

This is where virtue comes in.

It is not enough for people to be free; the more profound question is: What ought I do with my freedom? In many ways, religion, faith, commitment to God and lives of integrity and virtue, help in the construction of a society that promotes generosity, moral accountability, stability and peace. For these reasons, it is astounding to me that in the course of the political discussion over the past few months, and especially in the last few days, numerous intellectuals, editorial writers and journalists insist on identifying the integration of faith, character, values and morality with theocracy.

There appears to be a literal panic in some quarters that if religion influences the social and political decisions that Americans make in the coming days, the values of tolerance and pluralism (rightly understood), will disappear. I believe the opposite is the case and that in order to protect so free and prosperous a society, a clear moral vision and commitment is an essential part of the political debate. In a land where liberty is prized, only the intolerant would forbid the expression of this clear moral vision.

I know enough about politics (though I am not a member of any political party) to know that you cannot bring the kingdom of God to earth by means of it; and as valuable as democracy is as a process, a majority vote cannot determine the truth of a thing.

So my rule of thumb in evaluating platforms, policies and candidates is: Will this promote liberty (which is the highest political end of man)? And will it protect human life, especially when vulnerable? This leaves lots of room for prudence, of course, and Lord knows, plenty of room for debate.

One of the greatest models of how to live the tension of being in the world yet not of it, was Thomas More, the great English statesman. In his life, writings and martyrdom we see a man who witnessed to the "inalienable dignity of man's conscience" while remaining faithful to legitimate authority and political institutions. It was he who said that "man cannot be separated from God, nor can the affairs of state be separated from morality..."

Rev. Robert Sirico

President & Co-founder

The mission of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.

Copyright (c) 2004 Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and LibertyActon Institute * 161 Ottawa N.W., Suite 301 * Grand Rapids, MI 49503Telephone: 616/454-3080 * Facsimile: 616/454-9454

Labels: Acton, economics, election, liberty, religion