timeimmortal

Please pray for the repose of the soul of Father Stan Lasko, who passed away last week at the age of 46.

Father Stan presided over my marriage to Grace, and was a faithful, earnest priest who brought God’s word to his parish in Vermilion, Alberta with a reverent love for Christ. He was also a gentle person, a giant teddy bear of a man. His funeral will be held today, August 15th, in Edmonton, at St. Joseph’s Basilica, and his ashes will be sent back to Poland following that for interment there.

His obituary can be viewed here; condolences and memorial testaments can be left there, if the Reader wishes.

Update: for all those who have asked me, I do not know the circumstances surrounding Father Stan’s passing. I only know that he passed away in Vermilion last Wednesday, in the rectory of Holy Name Catholic Church. I hope I speak for many when I thank you for your care and concern, but please understand that I only know that he has passed away, and that Bishop Richard Smith will preside over his funeral this coming Friday.

John C. Wright speaks very slowly to an atheist who thinks that the Vatican’s recent annoumcement — that belief in the existence of aliens is not at variance with Christian faith — is merely a cover for some deeper conspiracy to save faith in the event that Earth is contacted by an extraterrestrial intelligence.

Not that the belief in non-human sapient beings is really a problem for Christians anyhow. As I noted previously, Christians already accept that two sapient, non-human species of creature already exist: angels and demons. Adding a third to the list doesn’t really change anything.

But some who follow the ways of atheism seem to have deluded themselves into thinking that the discovery that aliens do exist, should it ever happen, would change everything, and would strip away, once and for all, the human tendency to express religious belief. The assumption — an old assumption, mind you — is that the aliens would necessarily be secular beings who would laugh at the primitive “tribal god mentality” of humanity and then lead us away from Religion into a new, golden age of secular enlightenment.

Gene Roddenberry, and others before him, did a great disservice to the thought processes and categories of many, many people.

One final wry observation: Mr. [Tom Flynn] takes the time to quote with approval one Jill Tarter. She says this:

“If we get a message (from a superior culture) and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that they have no organized religion — that they’ve outgrown it.”

This type of casual arrogance is typical of the Brights.

Speaking as someone who outgrew his own atheism, and as someone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the adolescent belief-system called Communism collapsed under its own logical absurdities, and as someone who saw the flourishing of religion in Poland, as that nation grew, developed and evolved out of the backward barbarism of the primitive Communist thinking and into the civilized and ecumenical thinking characterized by Christianity, I have the most sincere doubts, nay, I meet with gales of laughter, the idea that signals from the Morlocks of Outer Space will show that evolution and progress always points in the direction of increasing spiritual ignorance.

The Morlocks, for those of you who do not catch the reference, in the romance of H. G. Wells, are the cannibal troglodytes of A.D. 802701. The vile beasties have the honor of being evolved from the descendants of modern man, the peak of progress. The are the posthumans; the supermen. Nietzsche and Marx and every other believer that human evolution necessarily means progress rather than regress or retardation, is well advised to read Darwin and to contemplate the hungry Morlock.

By no coincidence, I wrote an article for the Catholic Herald of the United Kingdom, prompted by my own thoughts and speculations about Father Jose Gabriel Funes comment (speculations no more grounded than reality than Mr. Flynn’s, I suspect; but then again, I am a science fiction writer, so I am allowed).

If we receive a message from aliens that is secular in nature, that doesn’t tell us that much about their religious viewpoints, if they have any. It may mean that they are secular, or it may mean that they are hesitant about approaching us on a religious level. “Hi there,” is a secular message, in that it is a simple greeting which makes no specific mention of any metaphysical concept…but it is nevertheless used by the religious and irreligious alike.

Besides, it is equally possible that the first alien we meet might step out of his spacecraft and say: “We have come to bring him homage, the great Illuvatar, whose star we observed at its rising over two thousand of your years ago. Tell us of how you welcomed him, and of his teachings to you!”

I believe it was Mark Shea who noted that in the event that we are greeted thusly, we would do well to hope that the alien weapons are not sufficiently powerful as to scour all life off the surface of the Earth.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Update 2 - The Chronicles of Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

Islamist blogger (and Pickering, Ontario nuclear power plant worker) Shaukat Khawja — also known as Rehmat, owner/operator of the Rehmatpedia blog — has had some very…interesting things to say in the past, but I’ve a feeling that this latest offering of his (put not on his blog but in the IslamUnity.net forums) might just take the cake. If nothing else, it at least confirms a suspicion that I’ve had about the guy for a while: underneath any pretense he might have established about being committed to peace and mercy (the name “Rehmat”, if memory serves, means “mercy” or “kind”), he’s just your typical anti-Jewish bigot.

Choice samples from his latest include:

Jew elites always played a major part in great wars and reactionary movements. They’re known for tricking the both parties in a conflict. For example, Jews funded most of Crusades against Muslims and Jews; Jew sided on both sides of American Civil War; they were behind French Revolution and Communist Revolution in Russia – and they declared war on Nazi Germany, while 150,000 German Jews were serving Nazi Army and some Zionist terrorist groups were having honeymoon with Hitler and Mussolini regimes.

Jew elites, eh? You mean, like this?

Okay, Photoshoppery aside, Shaukat is here saying more or less the same thing that got Mel Gibson into trouble a couple years back: “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”. Now, to be fair, I’m sure that Jews probably did fight in e.g. the American Civil War, and then on both sides. But that is because such conflicts transcend religious considerations — neither the Civil War, nor the French or Russian revolutions or World War II were about religion, and did not have any real religious significance. Even the Crusades were more about politics and territory than they were about religion. And in such conflicts, people of the same religious stripe might well end up on opposite sides of the field of battle.

Case in point: there currently Muslims serving with e.g. NATO forces in Afghanistan, and who do battle with the Muslims in the Taliban.

Shaukat claims that he doesn’t need to prove this — or any other — statement made in the list of his that I have linked to, and yet the claim made above is hardly sufficiently self-evident to be able to stand on its own. Where is the evidence of Jewish funding of e.g. the Crusades against their own people?

Nazis never killed six million Jews. It’s 20th century’s biggest hoax – which has only flourished under government protection in several western countries.

Nazis are known for killing several million of Gypsies, Christians and Jews under their rule – but the largest victims were Gypsies. Even Auschwitz museum in Poland now have reduced the figure of Jewish killed by Nazis as 2.5 million.

Ah, Holocaust denial — pretty much a staple of Islamic discourse, unfortunately.

The problem with it is: the Nazis themselves were reasonably good book-keepers; we know from their own documentation that approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in various ways in the 1930s and 1940s. The figure of 2.5 million Jews that Shaukat gives is reflective of the number of Jews killed in Poland alone. And again, many of these deaths were documented and/or witnessed; the figures are not baseless.

Holocaust denial is ostensibly a punishable offence in Canada (not something I agree with, but that’s another matter). Strangely, however, I very much doubt that Shaukat is going to be charged with anything over this utterance.

September 11, 2001 attack on WTC and Pentagon was an inside terrorist job – conceived by Israeli Mossad, CIA and pro-Israel politicians and government officials.

Ah, the World Trade Center conspiracy. Another canard, and again a common staple of Islamic discourse.

There’s other stuff, some of it laugh-out-loud wrong, but these are some of the highlights. I think there’s room for one more, and that’s good…because of all the things Shaukat has asserted about Jews in his latest post, here’s my personal favourite:

Jews have the most powerful Jewish Lobby (AIPAC, ADL, AJC, etc.) in the US - which works for the interests of Zionist Israel instead of the US.

Here I had thought that the Hindu Jewish lobby was the most powerful. It appears, O Reader, that I have been grossly misinformed about the size thereof.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

You almost wouldn’t think they’re a minority government. Oh, don’t get me wrong: I’m upset at for refusing to boycott the 2008 Olympics (or even to not attend personally, as Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, and the Czech Republic’s president, Válclav Klaus, have done). But when it comes to domestic policy, the guy knows how to play hardball, and his chutzpah is admirable. The Conservatives have brought forth a lot of good legislation since taking office over two years ago, and one can’t help but notice that the fact that they don’t hold a majority in Parliament doesn’t seem to slow them down any.

One thing I don’t get, though, is why Health Canada was not empowered to issue product recalls by any of the previous Liberal governments — that sort of interventionist policy seems a bit more their style, doesn’t it? Not that I’m complaining in this regard; even a hard-nosed conservative like me can see the need for the government to step in every once in a while. Consumer protection is an important aspect of a modern market-driven economy, especially in an age where almost everything is made in places like China (which has been caught in several high-profile acts of dangerous cost-cutting recently, such as using antifreeze as an alternative and cheaper ingredient in toothpaste).