Condom portrait sparks wrong conversation

Niki Johnson, “Eggs Benedict”. (© Niki Johnson)

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The decision by the Milwaukee Art Museum to acquire and prominently display a controversial portrait of Pope Benedict XVI fashioned from 17,000 colored condoms has created outrage among Catholics and others who see it as profoundly disrespectful, even blasphemous.

Many suggest that if a piece were as offensive to other faith traditions or communities it would not be tolerated, much less embraced.

Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki blasted the decision as insulting and callous. The museum acknowledged it has fielded about 200 complaints. A handful of patrons dropped their memberships; one longtime docent tendered her resignation; and at least one donor vowed never to support the museum financially again.

Museum officials said an equal number of people have voiced support for the piece and that memberships and pledges in general are growing. They said they regret that the portrait, by Shorewood artist Niki Johnson, has elicited such enmity. But they insist it was not their intent — nor the intent of the artist — to offend Catholics or anyone else. And they said they continue to enjoy the support of people of all faiths, including Catholics.

"This was never intended to be derisive, mocking or disrespectful of the pope," said museum board of trustees president Don Layden. "It was to have a conversation about AIDS and AIDS education. And my hope is when the piece appears in the museum that will be the focus of the discussion."

Catholic Stand: Christianity “Found Difficult and Left Untried”

Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. … [T]he great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. (G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (1910), ch. 1.5)

Although this passage was written some years before Chesterton’s formal conversion to Catholicism, one can be very certain that at no point after his conversion would he have taken a single word back; most likely, he would have restated it in a different yet equally blunt way. He also knew the Church wasn’t established for the sake of the righteous, but for sinners (cf. Mark 2:17): “The Church is justified,” he would write in The Everlasting Man (1923), “not because her children do not sin, but because they do.” His point was that Christian hypocrisy made the Christian ideal appear unachievable and not worth attempting.

To read the body of Chesterton’s work is to get quick baby pictures of the monster ideologies that plague our culture — free-market capitalism, socialism, modernism, and progressivism — before they climbed out of their cribs to eat our souls. Taken a century ago, the baby pictures are a marvelous corrective to the temptation to blame everything on the Sixties (or any of the last five presidents). However, the above passage reminds us that it more likely began five hundred years ago, with Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, Henry VIII’s dynastic concerns, the trial of Galileo, and the widespread publication (thanks to the printing press) of classical literature.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

God Bless America

Zach Braff's sarcasm fail

Has anyone been mocked out of faith who wasn't already on the precipice of doubt?

As stated, Zach's supposed zinger isn't an atheist/agnostic argument per se. It could be merely an argument for religious tolerance ... except that it's from a Facebook page titled DoubtGod. So is he a skeptic only where Yahweh is concerned? Oops — send it back to the script department for a rewrite.

The skeptic's argument, as I've seen it, is, "The world's religions can't all be right, but they can all be wrong." That doesn't exhaust the possibilities, though. One can be the closest to the truth of the Way Things Really Are, and others can be further away to varying degrees. One of the gods can be real, and the rest shadows and reflections of him (or Him). This is what a better-educated believer will say in response; the simpler believer will merely assert that all the others are false. Either way, the skeptic's argument is a kind of cross of St. Anselm's ontological argument turned upside-down and Murphy's Law: "If all religions can be wrong, they are all wrong." The consequent doesn't necessarily follow from the antecedent.

If a person has what he believes are good and sufficient reasons to believe that a particular god — or pantheon of gods — is the only one that's real and true, then pointing out that there are 4,999 other gods he could worship is useless; it's like pointing out that there are over 200 other countries in which he could live, or 500 other microbrews he could prefer, or 60 million other women he could love. So what? What compelling reasons can you offer that will cause him to move, or switch brands, or get a divorce? Even better, what compelling reasons can you offer that will get him to stop drinking, or stop loving women, or commit suicide?

In any event, Zach, this isn't a one-line wrecking ball; it isn't even the beginning of an argument. It's a rather pitiful and immature sneer.

From the "'Slippery Slope'? What 'Slippery Slope'?" file

This, my pal Justin Brink tells me, can also fit in the "Never Saw This Coming" and "Tolja So" files. From the Associated Press (via The Blaze):

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A Montana man has applied for a marriage license so he can legally wed his second wife.

Nathan Collier of Billings said Wednesday that last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage inspired him to try to force the acceptance of polygamous marriages.

He says he’ll sue the state if his application is rejected.

Collier says Yellowstone County Courthouse officials initially denied the application Tuesday. When he told officials he planned to sue, they said they would consult with the county attorney before giving him a final answer.

Collier married his first wife, Victoria, in 2000. He and his second wife, Christine, had a religious wedding ceremony in 2007 but didn’t sign a marriage license.

The trio recently has appeared on the reality cable television show “Sister Wives.”

Dear “Occupy Democrats”

Of course, if that message isn't quite clear enough, then perhaps I could offer the following substitute:

FUCK YOU. WE’RE AMERICANS, TOO.

Did I mention I've declared my independence of the Zeitgeist?

Semper Fi. Carry on.

My Facebook declaration of independence

Since I normally use Facebook to maintain my relationships, I don't indulge in a lot of commentary or proselytization there ... just the occasional quip or grump over some headline, article, or event. When I was younger, I decided I didn't want to risk my friendships by being too obnoxiously opinionated.

I can't do that anymore. But I couldn't just say, "F**k you, I'll be opinionated if I want to be." So I posted the following warning last night:

This is gonna be a long one:

In Robert Bolt's "A Man for all Seasons", St. Thomas More tells the court which has just convicted him of treason, "I do none harm; I say none harm; I think none harm. And if that be not enough to keep a man alive, then in faith I long not to live."

I've been blessed in that my friends and family are wise enough to know that to love someone in spite of their faults is not to pretend that they have no faults. However, the rhetoric in the public square has been devolving over the last few years. Commentators on both the left and the right almost compulsively reduce each other to two-dimensional comic-book villains without any redeeming human traits. Conservatives are big, mean poopy-heads out to repress and enslave everyone (except the one percent); while liberals are jack-booted statists who want to micromanage all human actions (except sex). Nobody on the other side can be granted to have good intentions, let alone good ideas.

To paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas, society can't function if people can't trust one another to tell each other the truth. However, according to the Zeitgeist, we're losing any sense of a common truth; and it's becoming more important to protect each other's feelings of self-worth than to speak the truth in love. Moreover, to do any less than give full-voiced approval to the Zeitgeist is to risk being damned and marginalized as a "hater". Yet, as the Latin maxim reminds us, to be silent is to consent; and to remain silent in the face of error is to endorse it.

So I guess I'm saying that, in the future, I will continue to speak the truth as I best understand it, fully realizing I'm a flawed, failing mortal, that I'm not omniscient or omnicompetent. If I offend you, I'm sorry; if you feel you must block or unfriend me, I should regret it. But I'm not really entitled to my own opinion if the only opinion I can say in public, the only opinion I can base my votes on, is that which the Zeitgeist says I must have.

Semper Fi. Carry on.

Yabba-dabba-D'OH!

“One woe doth tread another’s heel, So fast they follow.” As if things weren’t already looking bad enough, here comes some more embarrassing news: 

“Jurassic World” may have been a documentary as far as millions of Americans are concerned.

A recent survey by YouGov — a for-profit research firm that conducts all sorts of online polls — found that 41 percent of those queried think dinosaurs and humans “probably” or “definitely” once co-existed on Earth at the same time.

The online poll (PDF) of 1,000 adults was conducted between June 15 and 17 and has a 4.4 percent plus-or-minus margin of error. ...

Note that with 16 percent “not sure,” it’s entirely possible that I’m actually living in a country where most people disregard the scientific consensus that dinosaurs lived tens of millions of years ago and tens of millions of years before the first humans emerged.

Perhaps these results shouldn’t be so shocking when we consider that there are entire museums, like Kentucky’s Creation Museum, devoted to showing how dinosaurs fit into the biblical timeline of history, complete with this animatronic display of a dinosaur hanging out with an Old Testament kid tending a fire.

YouGov also notes a clear religious split in the survey results. Most Americans who identified themselves as “born again” (56 percent) for the survey said that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, as opposed to just 22 percent who did not identify that way.

(This is all a little confusing, though, when you consider that there are also groups out there, such as Christians Against Dinosaurs, that consider the very existence of dinos to be a Jurassic-size hoax.)

Post-Charleston liberal screaming at imaginary conservatives

Dylann Roof, Thursday afternoon.
(Image © Reuters/Jason Miscek.)

One difference between liberals and conservatives: Liberals tend to think that mental illness excuses crime. Conservatives don’t agree; to them, it’s just another reason the perp should be off the street. Hence the liberal uproar over one guy — one guy — saying that mass-murderer Dylann Roof “probably has some mental issues”.

Of course Roof has mental issues. He’s also a racist. The one doesn’t preclude the other ... unless you have a political agenda which requires certain facts to be bent or ignored.

Conservatives tend to make fun of the degree to which certain liberals obsess over the prevalence of racism in society. Even a knee-jerk liberal rag such as HuffPo is occasionally amused and bemused by the reductionist silliness which allows academics to find racist microagression in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Conservatives don’t deny that racism can be an issue, or that it’s an ongoing social problem; they simply resent the extent to which certain liberals cram every example of human conflict into the racism paradigm.

But that Roof killed nine members of an AME congregation precisely because they were black, that Roof's killing spree was racist by definition, no one denies. No one has begun to deny it. No one has begun to begin to deny it. As Charles C. W. Cooke points out in the National Review, liberal pundits like Anthea Brown and Arthur Chu are vigorously, viciously taking conservatives to task for denying what no conservative has denied, for excusing what no conservative has excused, for failing to condemn what conservatives have roundly, loudly condemned. Such liberals are screaming at phantoms of their own imagination, products of their own stereotypes.

Requiescat in pace, Cardinal George

Cardinal Francis Eugene George, OMI once said, "I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history."

I don't know how true that will turn out to be; I'm sure Abp. Blase Cupich isn't in any danger of residing in the hoosegow just yet. Nevertheless, for a man who braved many dangers in his seventy-eight years of life, that Cdl. George passed away in his own bed must seem as strange as John "Doc" Holliday dying with his boots off in a Colorado Springs sanatorium.

I’ve always said that the only thing I’d like people to remember about me is that 'he tried to be a good bishop.' I think I have been a good bishop, in many ways, and I take some pride in at least having tried my best. That’s enough. (from a 2014 interview)

I think it's fair to say that, in the seventeen years he reigned as the archbishop of Chicago, the first such archbishop to have been Chicago-born and -raised, he was a good bishop. Certainly he was a culture warrior; however, fighting the culture wars wasn't at the top of his priority list — it was just something that came with the seat and the miter. More important to him was the revival of the spirit of faith that lies at the heart of the Marian Oblates' mission. If more of our bishops were like Cdl. George, the conversion of the nation would follow quickly.

Euge, serve bone et fidelis. Intra in gaudium Domini tui!