Before you start junking all your Google™ stuff ...

Full disclosure: Blogger, of course, is a service provided by Google. So is AdSense. I also have a couple of Gmail accounts, and use Google's Calendar app, which coordinates with my Android smartphone's agenda app. And other things. Right now, I'm almost Google's Siamese twin.

So how should I feel about this recent message from LifeNews?

Google Bans Ads From Pregnancy Centers After Lobbying From “Pro-Choice” NARAL

by Steven Ertelt | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 4/28/14 4:53 PM

Google has banned ads from pro-life pregnancy centers that offer women and their unborn children abortion alternatives. The decision came after extensive lobbying from a national “pro-choice” group, NARAL, that appears to favor just one choice, abortion. 

Upset that pregnancy centers were allowed to bid on the keyword “abortion clinics,” along with facilities that kill unborn children in abortions, NARAL launched a national campaign to complain to Google. Now, the national search engine company has banned the ads.

According to NARAL, people using Google to search for “abortion clinics” got ads advertising the crisis pregnancy centers about 79 percent of the time — which cuts into the profit margins of abortion clinics.

So now many of my colleagues in the Catholic blogosphere are calling for a boycott of Google — or, at least, emails of protests. Some are even vowing to shed themselves of Android phones and tablets. Me? As I said about the various Chick-fil-A flaps, I'm not really one to man the barricades; the only boycott I've maintained successfully so far is against Starbucks. (And, believe me, it hurts — I do love their Fr'appucinos. *sigh*)

Catholic Stand: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"

This article originally appeared as two separate posts in The Impractical Catholic: "Good Friday" and "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Since the two posts complement each other, I decided to collapse them into one larger post.

*     *     *

Dear God.

First, the frenzied, howling Sanhedrin. Slapping, punching, spitting all the while … perhaps kicking him if he fell. During the night watch, his anxiety and fear for what he knew is coming is so great that the net of blood vessels around his sweat glands constricted, then hemorrhaged. Hematidrosis. As a result, his skin is extremely fragile and sensitive; every punch and slap is exquisitely painful.

The humiliation of the crowning as Rex Iudaeorum - not a wreath or circlet but a cap woven out of branches from the local thorn bushes, each thorn a nail in his scalp, with a staff made out of reed for a scepter,  a scepter with which he’s struck like a club.

But that isn’t enough. Two Roman soldiers with flagella - whips of leather, with small bones tied to the ends that rip the skin off his back and tear pieces of muscle out. Tied to a post, there’s no way he can move, even involuntarily, that could avoid the clawing fragments that shred his back. There’s no way I can not hear him screaming his agony; slaves have been known to die as a result of the forty lashes.

Then the crossbeam is loaded onto his shoulders, raw and bleeding from the whips, bringing a fresh agony. Weakened, his heart already beginning to be squeezed and his lungs filled by fluids, he stumbles along the travertine-paved road from the castra praetoria to the place called Golgotha. He has probably already lost a liter of blood, if not more: category 3 shock numbs his mind, but doesn’t deaden the pain. He stumbles once, twice, a third time … a passerby is dragooned into helping him, not for mercy’s sake—what Roman soldier chooses mercy over duty?—but to speed things up: the Galilean isn’t moving quickly enough.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

And you thought the "zombie apocalypse" was a joke

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

—Rubén Blades

Zombies are fictional undead creatures regularly encountered in horror and fantasy themed works. They are typically depicted as mindless, reanimated corpses with a hunger for human flesh, and particularly for human brains in some depictions. ...

Intimately tied to the conception of the modern zombie is the "zombie apocalypse"; the breakdown of society as a result of an initial zombie outbreak which spreads. This archetype has emerged as a prolific subgenre of apocalyptic fiction and has been portrayed in many zombie-related media after Night of the Living Dead (Paffenroth, Kim [2006]. Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco: Baylor University Press). In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. Victims of zombies may become zombies themselves. This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading "zombie plague/virus" swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilian society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness.

—Wikipedia, "Zombie (fictional)"

Take a good look at the sign the protester is carrying: Pro-life? Eating raped murdered animals makes u a hypocrite! It's not my purpose here to debate the morality of killing animals for food; nevertheless, somewhere in this person's arguably college-educated brain, it's logically and morally consistent to eschew eating unfertilized chicken ova for breakfast yet approve, instigate and even compel the medical murder of a developing baby ... especially her own. The sad thing is, her attitude is far too common to qualify for a Darwin Award.

And, by the bye, who rapes dead cows?

The futility of pride

I laugh at myself more than I laugh at anyone else. The sin of
pride most often begins with taking yourself too seriously.

One day I say, "I'm sick and tired of 'argument by meme'." The next day I produce one of my own or find a different one to continue the pointless trade-off.

 

Really, it's not so much that memes are simple; rather, it's that they often encapsulate, in a few choice words, the creator's failure to understand the other person's position. At minimum. At maximum, they often betray poor education, poor reasoning and poor wit as well.

 

The other day, a friend who works for eBay posted a meme in rainbow colors which had this admonition:

 

GAY PRIDE WAS NOT BORN OF A NEED TO CELEBRATE BEING GAY, BUT OUR RIGHT TO EXIST WITHOUT PERSECUTION. SO INSTEAD OF WONDERING WHY THERE ISN'T A STRAIGHT PRIDE MOVEMENT, BE THANKFUL YOU DON'T NEED ONE.

 

Which led me to ask, "Was I wondering?" There's really nothing more pompously asinine than to chide people for asking a question that's crossed nobody's mind. If sexuality is not a choice, then by right I should be no more proud of being straight than of having brown eyes or a hairline that has not merely retreated but fled the battlefield in a rout. No one wonders why there's not a "straight pride" movement ... but there may very well need to be something of a "Christian pride" movement in the not-too-distant future. Although it would have to be called something else, because "Christian pride" is an oxymoron.

@CardinalDolan: You CAN have a "used to be" Lent!

TO: Most Rev. Timothy J. Dolan
FROM: Anthony S. Layne
SUBJ: A "Used-to-be" Lent
DATE: March 21, 2014

Your Eminence:

Every now and again I get a chance to read your blog posts. Ordinarily, I come away from reading them refreshed, challenged and encouraged. In the main, you strike me as a successor to the apostles who is positive and embracing but not afraid to be a "sign of contradiction", a bishop who embraces the role of shepherd over that of administrator.

However, yesterday's offering, "A 'Used-to-be' Lent", left me dissatisfied; it struck me as almost a whine. And I don't take you for the whining type.

Let me give you an example of what I mean:

So, for instance, I’m at a great parish in the archdiocese and notice that they’re having a big dance on ... the first Friday of Lent!
So, I’m at a huge banquet for over a thousand men, mostly Catholics, where the liquor flows and the steaks are medium-rare on ... a Friday of Lent!
So, I’m at Mass in a parish where they sing the Gloria and have alleluias all over the place on ... a Sunday of Lent!
I admire how our Jewish neighbors take their “high holy days” in the fall so seriously, especially the days of penance, fasting, and contrition ...
Our Islamic neighbors fast all day and deepen their prayers for a month at Ramadan ...
And here, my Catholic people write me for a “dispensation” on one of the six measly Fridays we’re asked to abstain from meat (big sacrifice these days!), if they even bother with the dispensation at all.
Am I being too gloomy here?  You know me well enough to realize I’m hardly puritanical or a crab.  All I’m asking is:  have we lost Lent?  Is it all now nostalgia, a museum piece, in the attics of our souls, as we tell our kids and grandkids how Lent “used-to-be”?
Lent didn’t just used to be . . . it’s needed now more than ever!

Catholic Stand: Why You Ought to Come Inside the Church

G. K. Chesterton remarked once that the Catholic Church is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. Saints come from all walks of life, and pursue their sainthood in multifarious ways. They include such diverse personalities as the gentle, innocent Thérèse of Lisieux, the acid-tongued scholar Jerome, the mirthful mystic Teresa of Ávila and the hard-headed, combative Wilfrid. It includes people who were saintly their whole lives (Philip Neri), people who found sainthood after years of sin (Ignatius Loyola, Camillus de Lellis), at least one who was martyred before his hair was dry from his baptism (Genesius of Rome), and one who was promised heaven while he hung on a cross for thievery (Dismas). They come in both sexes and from all around the world in ethnicity.

They also come from “inside the walls” and “outside the walls”. That’s to say, the Church recognizes as saints not only clergy and members of religious orders but also laymen, people who lived their lives radically separated from the world (Antony the Great) and people who fully participated in the world (Thomas More), and many others in between these extremes.

Because we can encounter Jesus in so many different ways, often when we least expect it, I get suspicious when anyone seems to propound a Best Way to Encounter God. I get even more suspicious when, to sell that Best Way, the proponent seems to diss going to church. Such carelessness is hard to excuse in a time when people are making a false dichotomy between Christianity and “churchianity”, rejecting church membership altogether as if religion were a do-it-yourself project.

The “inside/outside the walls” dichotomy comes from an essay in The Huffington Post’s religion blog, “Why You Ought to Leave the Church (John 4:5-42)”, by Matthew Skinner, an associate professor of New Testament (studies?) at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul. Skinner’s piece is an exposition on the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, and has some interesting things to say.

Read more at Catholic Stand!

Another wrong reading of the First Amendment

I will if you will.

Some wag once said, "There are two types of people: those who believe people can be separated into two types, and those who don't."

In the real world, of course, people defy neat and easy categorization. Not all atheists are progressives, and not all progressives are atheists, just as not all black people are fans of hip-hop and not all fans of hip-hop are black. This is especially relevant when it comes to discussing moral values, because atheists, agnostics, secularists and secular humanists are not all of a piece. Nor are religious people, even people from the same faith community. Among political scientists this phenomenon is known as "cross-cutting cleavages" (please refrain from breast jokes).

Allen Clifton has posted a rather intemperate diatribe against conservatives on ForwardProgressives.com titled "Enough! This Nation was NOT Founded on Christianity". There are groups of conservatives who do argue that position. It's truer to say that the vast majority of the Founding Fathers were Christians of some strain, and that deists like Thomas Jefferson partook of cultural Christianity even while they rejected creedal Christianity. But it's also true to say that the "establishment clause" of the First Amendment was written to stave off the establishment of a state church, and that we give it a somewhat generous interpretation to avoid appearing to favor one religion over another.

But to fight against the America-founded-on-Christianity position, Clifton makes a mistake a lot of progressives make: "... the First Amendment clearly states that we're given the freedom of religion. It also says Congress can't make any laws based on religious beliefs."

Quacking the non-negotiables problem

If it quacks like a duck ....

You know MoveOn.org? The non-partisan PAC whose non-partisan agenda is pretty much the same as the Democrats'? The Catholic Church in America has a similar organization: Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. 

The folks who run CAGC are very, very good in talking the talk ... until they get to the very end, where they step left when a well-formed Catholic conscience should either step right or stay in the middle. It's like putting a duck in a chicken suit: sooner or later he opens his fowl mouth and the illusion is revealed. 

For instance, take a look at their mission statement:

... We envision a society shaped by the values of justice, human dignity and the common good, where faithful American Catholics can embrace the fullness of the Church's social justice teachings when participating in democratic society.

As Catholics, we inherit a rich tradition whose inspiration reaches well beyond our own faith community. The papal encyclicals and letters that make up this tradition are based on Jesus' call to love one's neighbor and serve the least among us, and the Hebrew Scriptures' prophetic commitment to justice and righteousness.

Our Catholic tradition calls us to participate actively in public life in the service of human dignity, social justice and the common good. These teachings — to put community before self, principle before profit, and the public interest before political expediency — are central to our Catholic tradition. Catholics in Alliance is committed to creating the necessary conditions for a culture of life that reverences the life and dignity of the human person at all stages over greed, materialism and the politics of division.

Too Dumb to Go to College 2: The Return of the Stoopid

By the way, if you're thinking of razzing me for misspelling "stupid", watch the first ten minutes of that under-appreciated Bruce Willis movie The Kid and you'll see where I got it from and why I use it.

So anyway, about a year and a half ago I wrote about a kid named Garrett Herschel, who wrote, "People only join the military because there to dumb to go to college." On Facebook. And his first response was from Marine Pfc. Jon Booth, who typed back, "They're*". At the time, I suspected that the "too dumb to go to college" trope is "handed down like an heirloom from senescent hippies to their quasi-liberal grandkids. Anyway, like heirlooms and hippies, this meme is outdated. It's also unbelievably bigoted."

 As if to prove that nothing, no matter how ignorant, ever truly dies on the Internet, we have Miley Hayes ("Another stupid Miley," one person sneered ... perhaps thinking of Ms. Cyrus?), who has repeated the trope almost word for word. Except that she got "too" right. And again, we have a Marine, Austin Turner, who corrects her typo. The poster of this screencap, "Uncle Sam's Misguided Children", remarks, "Well played, Marine ... Well played."

The Internet treats intelligent, well-documented statements of fact viciously, so there was no hope for this piece of snotty ignorance. The best of them came from retired sailor Bill Woods III:

Yes and my dumb retired Navy ass got more technical electronics training, more discipline, more life lessons all while completing my college with no student loan debt. Now I really regret just doing what I want to do, not having to worry about money, don't have to worry about medical care for my family or myself, get all kinds of other perks, watch my girls go to college a little better off than most, enjoy seeing my sons follow in my footsteps knowing my grand kids will be ok as well. Yea I guess I was dumb alright. Wish you the best young lady. Just remember when you lay your head down at night at least thank all the millions that served and still serve for your right to post your ignorance for all to see.

First Sunday of Lent

A couple of years back, I posted a video of the Tallis Scholars singing Gregorio Allegri's "Miserere mei, Deus", a polyphonic piece written for nine voices plus a tenth that chants certain verses. Here is the same work performed by a London vocal group, The Twelve; the chant verses are taken by the men of the main choir. It's very appropriate for today, as the psalm for today is, "Be merciful to me, O Lord, for I have sinned."

Allegri, like Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina before him (who founded the prima practica style of polyphony), arranged his pieces so that the choir could be split into separate positions, taking advantage of the acoustics of medieval stone-built churches. This is why the quartet is separated onto a balcony. The venue, according to one poster on YouTube, is St. Luke's in London, an old church renovated as rehearsal space for the London Symphony Orchestra.