Maverick Philosopher – Page 291 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Three Reasons the Left Wants Ever More Immigration

The first and most obvious reason is political. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, chain migration, sanctuary cities and citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally will give the left political power. An estimated 70% to 80% of Latin American immigrants will vote Democrat. So, with enough new voters from Latin America alone, the Democrats would essentially be assured the presidency and Congress for decades.

[. . .]

The second reason for the left's support for virtually unlimited immigration is that one of the most enduring tenets of the left — from Karl Marx to the present-day Democratic Party and left-wing parties in Western Europe — is that the nation-state is an anachronism. [. . .] That's why the left opposes a wall at America's southern border. The wall signifies the affirmation of America as a distinct nation.

[ . . .]

The third reason is the power of feeling good about oneself. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of feeling good about oneself as a primary factor in why people adopt left-wing policies.

Those who support bestowing American citizenship on the children of illegal immigrants — the so-called "Dreamers," based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — feel very good about themselves. They are the compassionate, the progressive, the enlightened.

This is why German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought a million refugees into Germany, a majority of them Middle East Muslims: She wanted to feel good about herself and Germany — especially in light of Germany's evil history — "Look, world. We Germans really are good people."

Why do Democrats support sanctuary cities, and even sanctuary states? Because, in addition to first two reasons, it enables them to feel good about themselves. In their eyes, they are moral heroes protecting the stranger, the oppressed, the marginalized, the destitute.

Lunacy in excelsis at the ‘Universities’

This from a reader:

You might be interested to know that a Canadian university recently had a job ad that might be even worse than the one you mentioned from the University of California at San Diego:

. . . candidates shall demonstrate a capacity for collegial service and a commitment to upholding the values of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as it pertains to service, teaching, and research activities.

So not only will the successful applicant spit out Far Left idiocies in class but, in addition, he'll make sure that his philosophical research demonstrates his commitment to Far Left idiocies. It's okay to argue that God doesn't exist, or that no one knows that the external world exists, or that Bruce Jenner is a woman. It's not okay to argue that Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are questionable ideals. It's not even okay to hold on to a few shreds of dignity by just ignoring the topic. No. The successful applicant will demonstrate his commitment to these idiotic "values" in published work.

They didn't explain how to do that if you only do research on vagueness or compatibilism, say. I'm guessing it would be enough, for now, to choose the right kinds of examples. Maybe if you wanted to illustrate some point about vagueness you could say this: "Satumbo is counting the pink hairs around Bruce's pierced nipple, in Arabic…" Or if you were writing about compatibilism: "Suppose that Sally is trying to decide whether ze will come out as genderqueer on Facebook. Suppose ze has a higher-order desire not to desire to come out…" I don't know. Just guessing. Maybe in the future it won't be okay to write about these topics at all, since they make it hard to demonstrate one's Far Left commitments.

What Have You Done for Diversity Lately?

Are you thinking of applying for a faculty position at the University of California at San Diego? As part of your application you will be required to submit a statement detailing your work on behalf of diversity and inclusion.

A bit more evidence that the universities of the land have become leftist seminaries.

It is a curious development. The private universities in the United States founded by religious orders have almost all been stripped of their religious character. It survives only as window dressing. But the move has not been in the direction of ideological neutrality, but toward a substitution of leftist indoctrination for religious indoctrination.

The public universities too have become seed beds of leftism, at least in the non-STEM disciplines.

The sad upshot is that indoctrination dominates inquiry in all the institutions of so-called 'higher' education in the land. There are a few holdouts, of course, and again I am speaking of the non-STEM fields, or most of them: climate science has become highly ideologized.

So I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that university is dead. It is dead in its idea, in its classical understanding.

Part of what killed it is the levelling consequent upon the foolish notion that everyone can profit from university studies. But that is a large separate topic.

Hat tip: Rod Dreher

On the Promiscuously Commendatory Overuse of ‘Democracy’

'Democracy' is one of those words that is almost always used in a commendatory and non-pejorative way, even though a little thought should uncover several negative features of the term's referent.

This is a large and important topic. I will just touch on one point this morning.

In today's Washington Examiner we find an opinion piece entitled 'A people without borders' is a people without democracy.

The title is instructively false. If the people north of the Rio Grande, both U. S. citizens and illegal aliens, decide to do away with political borders, then we would have a people without borders that is a people with democracy.

Is that not obvious?

Just give everyone who lives in the U. S. the vote, regardless of citizenship status, and at the same allow all who want to come into the country to come. You will then have achieved, by democratic means, a borderless country and a borderless people.

Isn't this what the Democrat Party wants?

If the people decide, then they can decide to do away with political borders, or their enforcement, which for practical purposes amounts to the same. (A political border that is not enforced is, practically speaking, no border at all. It is like a speed limit that is not enforced. Unenforced speed limits limit no one's speed.)

So why does the above-cited opinion piece have such a moronic title? It is because people foolishly think that democracy is this incredibly wonderful thing about which no on must ever speak a critical word.

But if you can think at all, you must be able to grasp that there are certain principles and values that ought not be up for democratic grabs. One of these is that a nation without enforceable and enforced borders is no nation all, a corollary of which is that there is a distinction between citizen and non-citizen.

The U. S. is not a democracy but a representative republic.

Addendum (4/4)

Here is another example of the fetishization of the word 'democracy' in an otherwise good article:

Nations that don't control their borders cease to exist. Their laws no longer mean anything. Democracy ceases to function. It's a constant lesson from history, one the U.S. would be wise to heed.

It is not democracy that ceases to function but the constitutionally-based representative republic. If the people decide to do away with the rule of law, how is that undemocratic?

If the people decide, then they can decide who the people are. They can decide that the people are those present in a given geographical area, whether citizens or non-citizens. Or they can decide that only 'people of color' are real people and that whites are 'racists.'

Remember how George W. Bush used to go on about bringing democracy to the Middle East? The knucklehead just loved that word 'democracy.' Sounds good until the people decide for Sharia. Does democracy then become undemocratic?

Opposing as I do pure democracy, I am not advocating monarchy or anything like it. I am advocating a return to the principles of the American founding.

Miracles and Resurrection

Thomas Beale writes,

Quoting from your quote of Ian Hutchison:

…Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

I think this is pretty hard to swallow from a scientific perspective – the first statement more or less says that miracles are by definition 'abnormal' and thus unprovable, but in fact science does pretty well with all kinds of abnormal. He really means 'law-breaking', and is thus saying that miracles by definition must confound science. But science isn't generally confounded by having its current set of laws broken; its usual way of responding (at least in the modern era) is to try to find new paradigms or at least theories that accommodate the new evidence, just as we had to wait for Einstein to explain the lensing of starlight around heavy bodies. If his statement still holds, then all it means is that completely arbitrary things can happen.

BV: Hutchison may be confusing laws of science with laws of nature.

There is a distinction between a law of nature and a law of science. If there are laws of nature, they have nothing to do with us or our theorizing. They are 'out there in the world.' For example, if we adopt a regularity theory of laws, and I am not saying we should, the regularities, and thus the laws, exist independently of our theorizing. Surely, if there are physical laws at all, and whatever their exact nature, their existence antedates ours. Laws of science, on the other hand, are our attempts at formulating and expressing the laws of nature. They are human creations. Since physics is a human activity, there were no laws of physics before human beings came on the scene; but there were physical laws before we came on the scene. Physics is not the same as nature; physics is the study of nature, our study of nature. It is obvious that physics cannot exist without nature, for it would then have no object, but nature can get on quite well without physics.

The laws of science are subject to qualification, revision, and outright rejection; the laws of nature are not. For example, the Additivity of Velocities was once thought to hold universally, but now the qualification is added: at pre-relativistic speeds. Nature didn't change, but our understanding of nature did.

The concept of miracle is very difficult. Here is a conundrum for you. John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford 2000), p. 8:

. . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

Now consider:

1. A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2. Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (though not conversely).
Therefore
3. A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
4. Miracles are logically impossible.

This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood? Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity. Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities. The idea is that any theory of (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

The second part gets into the debate about whether laws are natural, or human inventions. One such law that does appear to be part of the universe's functioning is the second law of thermodynamics, which happens to be the one that ultimately prevents biological cells reversing their death state, and thus dead organisms reviving. For those who believe that God directly created the universe the way it is, i.e. with its law-like behaviours, quarks weighing what they do, the speed of light being what it is, and Planck's constant as we know it, it seems hard to claim that arbitrary abnormalities can occur without disturbing the space-time fabric so to speak, because everything is so strongly interrelated (try changing c …). Reversing the arrow of time in order to resurrect someone is likely to have catastrophic consequences for a patch of the universe around it.

BV: Yes, there is a problem here. Augustine was on to it. See Augustine and the Epistemic Theory of Miracles.

Another way of looking at the whole thing for the scientifically oriented might be to think more in terms of inference to the best explanation (admittedly dodgy territory). If we thought that no natural laws could be broken, we might theorise that Christ had not really died (undoubtedly he looked as if he had), and that therefore he could rise again three days later, with good care. Alternatively we might believe that he really died, and that the person presented as the risen Christ was someone else; from there, numerous variations on a theme become possible.

BV: The first theory is called the Swoon Hypothesis.

I have often wondered if the first theory would really harm Christianity. The idea that a man (at least connected to the divine, if not incarnating it) sacrificed himself for humanity, was crucified by the Romans, nearly died from his injuries and pain, but survived just long enough for friends to take him down in the storm, was cared for and then 'rose' again three days later. That takes nothing away from the heroic act, and perhaps showed that even the Roman empire couldn't kill this man. Would this Christ be any less than the one we are taught today?

BV: Would he be any less? I should think so. No orthodox Christian can gainsay what Saul/Paul of Tarsus writes at 1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV) See Is Christianity Vain if not Historically True?

Ignorant Liberals

NPR writer doesn't understand what Easter celebrates.

Articles of mine urging the defunding of NPR. Should the NRA receive tax monies? Of course not. Then why should organs of leftist propaganda – – and in the case of Planned Parenthood, propaganda and butchery — get them?

But there are too many pussy-wussies among the GOP ever to stop these outrages.

As I have said before, we need the separation of Leftism and State.

UPDATE (4/3):

Mark Steyn weighs in:

You don't publicly flaunt what NPR and Todd wrote because you're an atheist or agnostic; you do it because you're entirely severed from your civilizational inheritance. The old joke is that Nietzsche respected God enough to kill Him. To respect Him enough to kill Him, you have to know something about Him – as nineteenth-century atheists certainly did. Today we have know-nothings, cut off not so much from scripture but from all that derives therefrom . . . .

A Couple of Important Points About the Second Amendment

1) The first is that is that it is not reasonably interpreted as a group right, a right one possesses only as a member of a group such as a militia. This mistaken reading is suggested by the Amendment's unfortunate wording:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

It is obvious, however, that a reason for X needn't be the only reason for X. So if a reason for the right is militia-related, there could be others, and it is obvious that there is another, namely, the right to the means of the defense of one's life, liberty, and property, and that of one's family.

The right to life is in every case an individual's right to life; it is plainly not a group right. Now if you have a right to life, then you have a right to defend your life and the right to the means of defense which, in this day and age, won't be an 18th century musket.

Ask yourself: Is the right to free speech mentioned in the third clause of the First Amendment a group right? Of course not; it is an individual right. And the same goes for the right against "unreasonable searches and seizures" mentioned in the Fourth Amendment. The right to the means of the defense of one's individual right to life is also — wait for it — an individual right.

Even SCOTUS, mirabile dictu, came around to this eminently reasonable view in District of Columbia v. Heller.

2) The second point is adequately made by the following cartoon. It is an indication of how moronic 'liberal' positions are that they are refutable by cartoons.

The Afterlife of Habit Upon the Death of Desire

Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification. Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the habit wouldn't exist in the first place. Memories of pleasure conspire in the maintenance of habit.

The ancient rake, exhausted and infirm, is not up for another round of debauchery, but the memories haunt him, of pleasures past. The memories keep alive the habit after the desire has fled the decrepit body that refuses to serve any longer as an engine of pleasure.

And that puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's advice. "Abandon your vices before they abandon you."

Want to Repeal 2A?

Stop talking and do it.

From the Pretty to the Pedestrian

Philippa Foot's maiden name was 'Bosanquet.' Her grounding of the normative in the natural, however, is decidedly Aristotelian, and thus peripatetic, and therefore pedestrian, in keeping with her married name.

Running with the pun, my Foot notes are accessible here.

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies: Render unto Caesar . . .

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's . . .

Have you stateside readers settled accounts with the Infernal Revenue Service? If yes, order up one scotch, one bourbon, and one beer and enjoy this live version of Taxman featuring Harrison and Clapton. Stevie Ray Vaughan's blistering version.

. . . and render unto God the things that are God's.

Herewith, five definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth. Lennon was the radical, McCartney the romantic, and Ringo the regular guy.

Good YouTuber comment: "Immortal song, even if all things must pass . . . "

Easter Sunday happens to coincide with April Fool's Day this year.

So for your further auditory amusement here are some tunes in celebration or bemoanment of human folly the chief instance of which is romantic love. Who has never been played for a fool by a charming member of the opposite sex? Old age is the sovereign cure for romantic folly and I sincerely recommend it to the young and foolish. Take care to get there.

Elvis Presley, A Fool Such as I

Ricky Nelson, Poor Little Fool. Those "carefree devil eyes" will do it every time.

Brenda Lee, Fool #1

The Shirelles, Foolish Little Girl

Ricky Nelson, Fools Rush In. "Fools rush in/Where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love/So how are they to know?"

Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise. Sage advice.

Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Fool

Incarnation, Resurrection, and Rational Acceptability

A while back I was talking with my young theological friend Steven about Christianity. I had remarked that its essence lies in the Incarnation. Without disagreeing with me, he offered the bodily resurrection of Christ as the essential pivot on which Christian belief and practice turns. This raises a number of questions. One is this: Can, or rather may, a scientifically-trained mind accept the literal truth of Christ's bodily resurrection? I don't think that there is an insurmountable problem here. But there may be an insurmountable problem when it comes to accepting the literal truth of the Incarnation. This entry, then, falls into two parts.

A. The Rational Acceptability of Christ's Resurrection

Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, writes:

We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT – and millions of other scientists worldwide – somehow think that a literal miracle like the resurrection of Jesus is possible. And we are following a long tradition. The founders of the scientific revolution and many of the greatest scientists of the intervening centuries were serious Christian believers. For Robert Boyle (of the ideal gas law, co-founder in 1660 of the Royal Society) the resurrection was a fact. For James Clerk Maxwell (whose Maxwell equations of 1862 govern electromagnetism) a deep philosophical analysis undergirded his belief in the resurrection. And for William Phillips (Nobel prize-winner in 1997 for methods to trap atoms with laser light) the resurrection is not discredited by science.

To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is actually quite simple. Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. It does not take modern science to tell us that humans don’t rise from the dead. People knew that perfectly well in the first century; just as they knew that the blind from birth don’t as adults regain their sight, or water doesn’t instantly turn into wine.

Maybe science has made the world seem more comprehensible – although in some respects it seems more wonderful and mysterious. Maybe superstition was more widespread in the first century than it is today – although the dreams of today’s sports fans and the widespread interest in the astrology pages sometimes make me wonder. Maybe people were more open then to the possibility of miracles than we are today. Still, the fact that the resurrection was impossible in the normal course of events was as obvious in the first century as it is for us. Indeed that is why it was seen as a great demonstration of God’s power.

To be sure, while science can’t logically rule miracles in or out of consideration, it can be a helpful tool for investigating contemporary miraculous claims. It may be able to reveal self-deception, trickery, or misperception. If someone has been seen levitating on a supposed flying carpet in their living room, then the discovery of powerful electromagnets in their basement might well render such claims implausible. But if science fails to find defeating evidence then it is unable to say one way or the other whether some reported inexplicable event happened, or to prove that it is miraculous. Science functions by reproducible experiments and observations. Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

So if science is not able to adjudicate whether Jesus’ resurrection happened or not, are we completely unable to assess the plausibility of the claim? No. Contrary to increasingly popular opinion, science is not our only means for accessing truth. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, we must consider the historical evidence, and the historical evidence for the resurrection is as good as for almost any event of ancient history. The extraordinary character of the event, and its significance, provide a unique context, and ancient history is necessarily hard to establish. But a bare presumption that science has shown the resurrection to be impossible is an intellectual cop-out. Science shows no such thing.

I agree with Hutchinson.

B. The Rational Acceptability of the Incarnation?

Please note that if a man was raised from the dead by the power of God, it does not follow that the man so raised was God. So if Jesus was raised bodily by the power of God it does not follow that Jesus was or is God. The orthodox Christian narrative, however, requires the doctrine of the Incarnation codified at Chalcedon according to which God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, became fully human, body and soul, in Jesus of Nazareth while remaining fully divine. Given the identity of the Second Person and the man Jesus, if a man was raised bodily from the dead by the power of God, and this man is God, then God raises himself.

This doctrine violates our ordinary canons of reasoning. It is, to put it bluntly, absurd in the logical sense of the term: logically contradictory. (Tertullian, Kierkegaard, and Shestov would agree.) Or so it seems to me and Dale Tuggy and many others. But others, equally sharp and serious and committed to the truth, think that if one makes the right distinctions the Incarnation doctrine can be shown not to be in violation of the ordinary canons. I think their fancy footwork avails nothing. Tuggy thinks the same.

Well, suppose Tuggy and I are right. Then it seems there are two ways to go, the Tuggy way and the way of mystery. Tuggy, if I undertand him, rejects the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Standing firm within what I call the Discursive Framework he argues cogently that the doctrines in question are logically impossible.

But there is this 'possibility.' There are true propositions that appear to our intellects as either logically self-contradictory or as issuing by valid inferences in logical contradictions. They are not contradictory in themselves, but they must appear contradictory to our fallen intellects here below. It is not just that these propositions are true, but we cannot understand how they could be true; it is that they seem to us as evidently not true. And yet they are true, and contradiction-free in themselves.

A similar sort of 'possibility' is invoked by materialist mysterians. If a non-eliminativist materialist tells me that a sensory quale is real but identical to a brain state I will say that that is logically impossible since the two items differ property-wise. (These items are in the same logical boat with the man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity: they cannot be numerically identical since they differ property-wise.) The materialist might just insist: quale and brain state are identical — it is just that we don't know enough about matter to understand how the identity could hold despite the discernibility. It's a mystery!

Are mysterian moves kosher ploys for showing rational acceptability?

I don't know. But I do know it is Saturday Night, time for a drink, and my oldies show.

On Being Prudent in a Post-Consensus, No-Trust Society

The young especially need to be very careful about what they say and to whom they say it. The U. S. is becoming the S. U. To be on the safe side, never associate with leftists. (This is good advice even for leftists since they are famous for turning on their own for the 'sin' of not being sufficiently left.) Practice the political equivalent of divorce to the extent that it is possible. If you must associate with leftists, limit your contact with them and keep your mouth shut. Rod Dreher has some advice for you:

I told the professor that I try never to talk about anything controversial in personal company unless I’m sure that everyone around me already agrees with me. It’s not simply that I don’t want to get into it with a screaming SJW who wants to have it out with me at a cocktail party because I don’t share her view of some political issue. That’s part of it, but I am a public figure, and say lots of controversial things in this space. I try to leave work here on the blog, and not take it into private life. With me, it’s more the case that I don’t want to say something controversial that I wouldn’t say on the blog, and have someone overhear it, send it out on social media, and ruin me.

I can’t think offhand what kind of remark that might be, but these days, who knows? The word the professor in last night’s conversation used was completely ordinary, and not used by him in a racial context. But in our emotivist world, the student felt that it was racist, so the professor had to face something he never should have had to face.

So now you have a professor who has to see students as potential destroyers of his career on spurious grounds. You have to go to cocktail parties and social gatherings being very conscious of what you say and don’t say, because some angry person might put it on social media. Everybody is potentially working for the secret police.

I’m not being as hyperbolic with that remark as you think. When I was in Hungary recently, my friend A. told me that her country still hadn’t recovered the social capital plundered by the communists. That is, Hungarians — like everyone living under communism — had to learn not to trust anybody. You truly didn’t know who was a secret police information. An ill-considered word could cost you your job. A thoughtless joke overheard by the wrong set of ears could land you in prison. We don’t have a totalitarian state here, but we are creating that kind of society.

"But aren't you big on civil courage?"

I am; but I cannot in good conscience urge it on the young and naive. It is easy for me to display a modicum of civil courage: I've made mine. But if you are trying to find a foothold, and especially if you have dependents, be careful. Once you establish yourself you will be a position to punch back effectively.

Now, as Rod would say, read the whole thing.

On the Folly of the Vatican II ‘Reforms’

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view.

Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have its immanent life-enhancing role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy.

Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.' And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule. Why re-name confession 'reconciliation? What is the point of such a stupid change?

A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need. Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant. Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were? And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.

The church should be a liberal-free zone.

To Hell with Bergoglio

My title, not Buchanan's.

I'll have to check, but I don't believe that Canon Law allows for the ecclesiastical equivalent of impeachment and removal from office for popes. Perhaps it ought to.

As for hell, here is an amateur theological consideration. Suppose a rebellious nature such as Bertrand Russell or Jean-Paul Sartre or Christopher Hitchens finds himself in the divine presence and yet continues to refuse to acknowledge reality, which includes the rebel's creature status. Hitch, or whoever, continues to assert himself madly with Luciferian pride and egomania against the Source of all being, truth, intelligibility, personhood, and value, making of himself an absolute when there can be only one Absolute.

How could such a rebel be admitted into divine fellowship, or even into a purgatorial condition preparatory to divine fellowship? No God worth his salt could allow such a thing.

There has to be hell for rebels who freely choose it. Allowance must be made for the rebels and their shouting of the eternal No!