timeimmortal

I’m not a convert to Catholicism, so I don’t get deluged with emails urging me to revert to the “true”, “Biblical” faith that I abandoned by becoming Catholic. So in that way, I can’t relate to what Mark Shea is talking about in this article.

But in the web forums I post to, I am unapologetic and open concerning my Catholicism, and I find that on a cycle almost as predictable as the cycle of atheistic commentators here at Time Immortal, I am periodically deluged by well-meaning, if misinformed, fundamentalists urging me to abandon the false, man-made teachings of Rome in favour of true, “Biblical” Christianity and the inerrant, preserved Word of God that is the King James Version of the Bible.

And in such matters, I take Mark Shea’s response as my own:

Almost every other day, it seems, I will open my e-mail and find something like this specimen (culled from my “deleted” file):

Dear Mark, just came from your Web site and have some questions. It sounds like you were a “Protestant” before becoming a Catholic? I don’t know which church you were in but I have to question whether you were ever taught the Word of God there? If you had been in a church which taught the truth concerning Baptism according to the Word of GOD and not the “traditions of men” you would have learned that not only does baptism NOT save nor “grant justification” but it is ONLY for those who ARE BORN-AGAIN by the SPIRIT of GOD by placing their faith in the LORD JESUS CHRIST! It is to be symbolic of the new birth ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED by GOD as Romans 6 clearly teaches! PLEASE READ the Gospel of John and pray asking GOD to show you HIS TRUTH — HE LOVES THE WORLD and DESIRES TO SAVE the LOST — which we all are apart from the New Birth which IS FREELY offered to ALL! Please read and be saved! I will be praying for you in JESUS Name. Carolyn

You have to wonder what is going through the minds of people who write such stuff. What do they think they are accomplishing?

One is terribly tempted to reply: “The Word of God? What’s that? Never heard of such a thing. Is that, like, the Bible? We used to read something called a ‘Bible,’ I think, at our old Church. But that was an awfully long time ago.

“Boy, thanks for setting me straight. I have never ever ever heard before that Jesus Christ loves me and desires to save the lost with His free gift of grace! I always thought that I had to perform magical rituals to make God love me. But now that you have so thoughtfully set me straight, I see clearly that when that big black book we used to read in my old church-that-never-taught-me-the-Bible says ‘Baptism now saves you’ (1 Pet 3:21) what it means is ‘Baptism does not save you.’

“And thanks also for explaining that when Romans 6 says, ‘All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death,’ and ‘We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life,’ this has absolutely nothing whatever to do with Baptism. I really appreciate your setting me straight on that as well.

“And finally, thanks for making me see that all that stuff in John 3 about being born again of water and the Spirit really means water and the Spirit are complete opposites.

“Golly. It is so good to finally — after all these years — have somebody who really teaches the Word of God clue me in. Who would have thought that all those years of studying . . . what’s that big black book called again? Ah yes! ‘The Bible.’ Anyway, who would have thought that all those years of studying the Bible could have left me so totally ignorant of what Scripture really means? Thanks ever so much for enlightening me.”

Yes, kind of facetious and tongue-in-cheek. But sometimes, that’s all one can do to respond to the misguidedly overzealous persons one encounters on this big, wide internet.

For those who labour under the delusion that science and religion are in some way opposed and/or irreconcilable, it might do well to take a look at history:

History shows that the natural sciences grew out of Christian culture. As the sociologist Rodney Stark has so convincingly shown (See especially For the Glory of God: How monotheism Led to Reformations, science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery), science was “still-born” in the great civilizations of the ancient world, except in Christian civilization.

Why is it that empirical science and the scientific method did not develop in China (with its sophisticated society), in India (with its philosophical schools), in Arabia (with its advanced mathematics), in Japan (with its dedicated craftsmen and technologies), or even in ancient Greece or Rome?

The answer is fairly straightforward. Science flourished in societies where a Christian mindset understood nature to be ordered, the work of an intelligent Creator. Science grew where people assumed that the natural world is intelligible and bears the handwriting of its author.

Far from being an obstacle to science, Christian soil was the necessary humus where science took root.

Christianity’s unapologetic support of science is borne out by the immense direct contribution of the Church to science itself. To take but one area — that of astronomy — J. L. Heilbron of the University of California-Berkeley has written:

“The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.”

…

Just as the Christian church patronized the arts, so it vigorously supported scientific research. The caricature of an obscurantist, ignorance-promoting church simply doesn’t correspond to historical truth.

Some of history’s greatest scientists — Newton, Pasteur, Galilei, Lavoisier, Kepler, Copernicus, Faraday, Maxwell, Bernard and Heisenberg — were all Christians, and the list doesn’t stop there. Some important scientists, such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, were actually Catholic priests!

Christianity is not against science, but against an absolutist reading of science. The empirical sciences cannot do everything, and hold no monopoly on knowledge and truth. Many important questions — the most important, really — fall outside the purview of science.

What is the meaning of life? How should people treat one another? What happens to us when we die?

No matter how long a white-coated scientist toils and sweats in his laboratory, his instruments will never reveal the answers to these questions. Science is the wrong tool for the job.

The saddest part, I think, is that this sort of thing was, at one time, obvious.

I’m dead tired this morning, so this will kind of just be a list of things that I noticed on my morning browse through a few parts of the internet. Regular posting will resume tomorrow, ideally.

Apparently, the Milky Way is twice as thick as was previously thought — 12,000 light years, instead of 6,000. That’s kind of interesting, admittedly, although also rather “ho hum” — given the massive distances we’re talking about here, what’s a factor of two? Apparently, the researchers at the University of Sydney were just doing some basic fact-checking on internet-available data and realized the error after a few hours of computation. Guess it just goes to show: science is never 100%.

Moving on to more terrestrial matters, it appears that Danish “youths” — “mainly with immigrant backgrounds” — are burning things again, mainly cars, but also schools and trash bins. Officially, it’s not clear what caused the riots to trigger. Personally, I’m thinking that this is another case where we can strike out the words “immigrant youths” and replace them with “Muslims.” Probable cause? Here’s one guess:

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: RightGirl)

Speaking of Terrorism (since really, what else can we call it when Muslims are rioting and burning things?), the possibility is emerging that those undersea cables that got cut, thereby denying Internet access to millions of users across the Middle East and Africa, may have been destroyed in an act of sabotage, not in an accident as previously thought.

I hope nobody is too surprised by that.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about demographic winter, I see that Vox Day has added his own thoughts on the phenomenon to the virtual din.

You can’t completely grasp the extent of Europe’s post-Christian decline until you walk through the ghost towns of Italy, populated by no more a dozen elderly women and one old man sleeping in the sun. It’s not something that any tourist is going to see in Florence, Venice or Rome, much less Milano, but go outside the tourist tombs and the desolation of demographic winter is impossible to miss. And the imported African hookers scattered along the truck routes in the countryside are hardly adequate compensation for what were once famously vibrant family units.

There’s a large and spectacular church on the outskirts of a town near which we like to wander. Its doors are only unlocked for an hour or so every month, because despite its gorgeous interior architecture and painted ceilings, there’s not only no one around to attend it, there’s not even anyone left to visit it.

There is no cause of the demographic decline that is now afflicting much of the West that has done more to exacerbate the problem than secular progressivism and related ideologies. Put plainly, the societies we have built for ourselves (and, indeed, most human societies in general) are predicated on the expectation of a populace that maintains an almost “Catholic” birthrate — an average of 2 to 3 kids per woman. Our present fad of 0 to 1 kids per woman, and then usually one “designer” baby at age 35 (I shamelessly crib Mark Steyn’s phrasing here) is, quite frankly, insufficient to sustain Western society. To keep up our end, we need immigration.

That will, I think, be our untimely end.

Should Canada require its immigrants to “earn” their citizenship?

In the past, simply having lived in Britain for a sufficient length of time was enough to qualify a person for citizenship there. Now, a move is afoot to have immigrants “move on” through a system that encourages citizenship by encouraging the adoption of national traditions and values (possibly at the expense of the traditions and values those immigrants have brought with them from the “old country”), at the end of which they may achieve citizenship…or may be asked to leave, if in fact they do not integrate satisfactorily.

Methinks we need something like that in Canada.

According to the Associated Press, pro-lifers and other ‘domestic’ extremists account for “most of the damage” from terror-type attacks committed on American soil, to a larger degree than even Islamic terror.

As a pro-lifer, I’m pretty accustomed to having all manner of lies told about me and my beliefs — it comes with the territory. But the above assertion is pretty egregious, if somewhat easily refuted. Just for context, Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in one day back in 2001, and destroyed two of the tallest skyscrapers in America in the process. Since 1973 (the year of Roe vs. Wade), misguided pro-lifers have killed just seven people in the U.S.

But clearly, those pro-lifers account for “most of the damage” done in acts of terror on American soil. The newsman says so!

Ezra Levant remarks that since it’s clear that Stephen Harper is gunning for an election, the Conservative government might as well try passing a few different pieces of increasingly more ambitious legislation, all via confidence motions, until Stephane Dion finally slips up and stops trying to avoid bringing the government down.

Gun control, the Wheat Board, tax cuts — and how about a gentle amendment to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act?

The irony is that last bill wouldn’t be controversial at all. Other than a lone Liberal lobbyist who hasn’t been in the party’s good graces for four years, and a fringe ethno-political special interest group, I don’t think anyone in the country would even consider such an amendment controversial.

As they say in the funnies…”it’s just crazy enough to work!”

And speaking of pro-life issues, the ladies of ProWomanProLife are suggesting contacting the Governor General directly to let her know that Henry Morgentaler does not deserve the Order of Canada. Fully 85% of online respondents to the Globe & Mail’s poll on the issue said “no,” and while that can hardly be called a truly “representative” number, I think it does indicate rather clearly that a majority of Canadians think that giving Morgentaler this sort of official recognition is a very bad thing.

The PWPL ladies also provide the names of the various people who sit on the “independent” advisory council that considers nominations for the Order of Canada.

Update: Suzanne Fortin sends in the following additional information by email. Here’s the process one can follow to contact the Governor General’s office:

It’s easy.

First call the Governor-General’s Office. Phone numbers:

Ottawa: 613-993-8200

Rest of Canada: 1-800-465-6890

You will get a receptionist.Ask to speak to Madeleine Proulx (pronounced “Prew”). She deals with the Order of Canada. When I phoned today, I got a voicemail and I have been told by another pro-life caller that calls about Henry Morgentaler are being re-directed to her voicemail. State your name. Tell her that you want to register your objection to Henry Morgentaler receiving the Order of Canada. State the reason why. Please try to be neutral in your tone– calling him a bloodthirsty murderer probably won’t gain us a lot of credibility. I stated that he’s a symbol of inequality as he is the reason that unborn children have no legal status today and that I believe in the equality of all human beings, and that he fought this struggle in my name as a woman, and I resent that.

And that was it.

If you’re a pro-lifer, O Reader, or even if you aren’t but nevertheless think that Henry Morgentaler doesn’t deserve the Order of Canada, I encourage you to follow the steps above. Be civil and be articulate, and choose your words carefully. Calling him a murderer with blood on his hands might seem like a reasonable objection to raise, but it’s also a very good way to ensure that your phone message gets ignored. Present your case fairly and without appeal to emotion or horror, and it will be listened to.

More than 100,000 people filled St Peter’s Square on Sunday in a show of support for Pope Benedict XVI after protests by scientists forced him to cancel a university speech. The pilgrims gave a roar of approval when Pope Benedict, speaking after his weekly blessing, said: “I encourage all of you, dear academics, to always be respectful of the opinions of others, and to seek the truth and the good with an open and responsible mind.”

The 80-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church cancelled a planned speech at Rome’s La Sapienza university Thursday after dozens of professors and students protested his presence at the secular school.

Fifty to a hundred socialist busybodies at La Sapienza planned to disrupt the Pope’s speech, so the Pope delivered his address to the world instead. Now a thousand times as many people rally to support him.

P.R. victory? Absolutely. Testament to just how misguided those people are who insist that science and Religion are in conflict? Most certainly. Just plain cool to witness? Yeah…that too.

Italian political leaders have expressed their dismay that a noisy protest at La Sapienza university in Rome prompted Pope Benedict XVI to cancel his planned appearance there.

Italian president Giorgio Napolitano released a statement condemning the “inadmissible intolerance” shown by the campus protestors, who had planned to greet the Pope with loud rock music, anti-clerical posters, and parades of militant homosexuals. Prime Minister Romano Prodi said that the protests had “provoke unacceptable tensions and created a climate that does not honor Italy’s traditions of civility and tolerance.”

Rome’s Mayor Walter Veltroni added his perspective that the Pope’s appearance on campus would have been “another great opportunity for the city of Rome to show itself as the center of civil dialogue.” While intellectual debates are welcome, he said, the “intolerant behavior” of a minority at La Sapienza was “bad for democracy and liberty.” The former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, went further, saying that the incident was “humiliating” and a “shameful day” for Italy.

Pope Benedict withdrew from his scheduled appearance on January 17 after a group of about 100 leftist students occupied to office of Dr. Renato Guarini, the dean of La Sapienza, demanding a withdrawal of the invitation extended to the Pontiff. Earlier a group of 67 professors– a small minority of the faculty– had signed a statement charging that a papal appearance would be inappropriate because, they said, the Pope is hostile to science.

What is it about left-wing students that makes so many of them act like arrogant brats?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of freedom of expression…but that’s where I part company, and cannot agree, with the arrogance of these students. Ultimately, they were denying someone else (the Pope, in this case) his legitimate right to freedom of expression by their actions, and what’s more were distorting facts in order to advance what appears, on its face, to be a secularist agenda that seeks to drive an unnecessary wedge between science and religion. The actions of the students were an act of freedom of expression as much as they were an act of censorship.

The Pope is called, above, “hostile to science”. The reason for this charge stems from a comment that Joseph Ratzinger made in 1990, in which he quoted Paul Feyerabend’s statement that the Church’s handling of the Galileo affair had been “rational and just”. Feyerabend was very critical of naive falsificationism, and one of his more oblique examples in defence of his critiques was that of Galileo (his argument was that in Galileo’s time, optical theory was unable to explain some phenomena that could be observed by telescope (this is true: think, for example, of the convoluted explanations that were concocted for explaining the reason why Mars appears to loop backward on itself in its orbit, when observed from Earth) — the conclusions drawn by astronomers were, therefore, based at least in part on “ad hoc” assumptions. In the specific case of Galileo, the “ad hoc” assumption made was a rejection of the Aristotelian notion that the stationary nature of the Earth could be observed by the fact that objects fell in a straight line toward its surface. Theories of gravity, which would fully explain away Aristotelian assumptions, did not emerge until about a century later.

All of which, Feyerabend concluded, meant that in a certain sense, the actions of the Church at the time were justified — while later theories would prove Galileo right, at the time all that Galileo had to go on was a guess, an assumption, and the Church was not willing to stake what were, in its view, the serious theological implications of heliocentrism on a guess. Of course, heliocentrism was eventually shown to be no serious theological issue at all…but I’m not sure that anyone living almost 400 years ago could be faulted for not having the same level of education — nor could the world at large 400 years ago be faulted for not having had the advantage of as many scientific discoveries — as we in this modern era possess.

(And at any rate, in 1992, the Pope at the time (Pope John Paul II, not Benedict XVI), articulated the Church’s regret for the way the Galileo affair was handled, and issued a formal apology on behalf of the entire Church.)

Now, interestingly, let’s compare here. This is not the first time, incidentally, where Joseph Ratzinger has quoted the writings of another philosopher and had his citation misinterpreted as his own opinion (for example, consider the Regensberg lecture). But I think it’s nevertheless worth observing that at the time the statement was made, Joseph Ratzinger was merely a cardinal — no utterance from him carried the weight of law or doctrine within the Catholic Church. Indeed, two years later, a statement that did carry the full weight of infalibility was uttered, and that statement (from the Pope of the day, not from a cardinal) came down on the side of Galileo. That is the official Church teaching on the matter, and Joseph Ratzinger — as Benedict XVI — must uphold that teaching.

To call the man hostile to science is, at best then, specious and misleading. At worst, it’s an outright lie.

But then…when did left-wing secularists ever let truth get in the way of the Very Important Statement [tm] they are trying to make?

Not only are the actions of the students and faculty that engaged in militant actions to block the Pope speaking an affront to freedom of expression, but they are also a lie and a travesty, and promote a false dichotomy between science and Religion. As
has been previously discussed, that is not the Catholic view of the relationship between science and faith. And to call the #2 man in charge of such a church “hostile to science” is very far from the truth. The actions of the students and faculty were the height of intolerance, and should be condemned as such.

So Grace sends me this email which states that March 15th is the Ides of March. Which, as most of you hopefully know, it is. But what happened, she then asked, on that day, that fateful day?

As a follow-up, she asked if anyone (she sent the email to a whole group of people) also knew what the Feast of Lupercal signified.

Anyhow, here’s what’s up with that: