Fr. Hans

“We Kill Babies”

Australia’s bad conscience about abortion has spilled over into contentious public debate. He is one article that brings the discomfort forward.

The abortion debate provokes mixed feelings, but leaving late-term babies to die in dishes or bins is wrong. Silence is no longer an option.

THIS country has a bad conscience about abortion. You can tell this by the frantic attempts to make us shut the hell up about it.

Health Minister Tony Abbott, who mourned the “unambiguous moral tragedy” of up to 100,000 abortions a year, has been warned by rivals in the Liberal Party this “foray into morality politics” has ruined his chance of ever becoming leader.

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,11333761%255E25717,00.html

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Religious Left Denounces “Moral Values” Voters

Mark Tooley, November 10, 2004
http://www.ird-renew.org/News/News.cfm?ID=991&c=4

At a press conference organized by the pro-abortion Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), representatives of the Religious Left expressed deep angst about the recent U.S. election results. And they warned the Bush Administration not to heed the agenda of socially conservative voters.

The RCRC officials were clearly disturbed by exit polls showing “moral values” being the number one concern of a plurality of voters, ahead of the economy, terrorism and the war in Iraq. These moral values voters, motivated by issues such as abortion and same-sex “marriage,” strongly favored President Bush’s reelection.

“The leaders of the Religious Coalition are outraged at the underlying message of the election story—that religion and morals are the exclusive property of social conservatives,” exclaimed RCRC president Carlton Veazey. RCRC, founded 30 years ago, is a coalition of mostly mainline church agencies that lobby against all potential restrictions on abortion.
[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Rules for writers

I shamelessly lifted this from This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis.

Important Rules for Writing Good

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Be more or less specific.
15. Understatement is always best.
16. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
17. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
19. The passive voice is to be avoided.
20. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
21. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
22. Who needs rhetorical questions?

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Bishop Tikhon of the OCA quotes Noam Chomsky

A readers sends a quote by Bishop Tikhon of the OCA:

One might very well agree with Noam Chomsky that terrorism is nothing new, and that what made 9/11 particularly painful was the realization that for the first time we were the victims, rather than the perpetrators of it. Having terrorized Kossovo and Serbia, before that Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, the Phillipines, etc., etc., one would think that “with-it” Americans would have admitted, “What goes around comes around,” no?
I wonder what the citizens of Falloujah think when it is explained to them that they are now being subjected to an attack against terrorism?
Love,
+B.T.

Let me direct the good Bishop to some articles examining Chomsky’s ideas in a brighter light: What Noam Chomski Really Wants, or the antichomsky website.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

The problem with Democrats is that they’ve become the party of moral absolutism

This ties into a theme I’ve been working on: secular leftists are moral absolutists. I’ve been trying to sharpen this into an essay but haven’t found the nub yet. I mentioned this idea in several comments upstream.

The Weekly Standard

Winning the “I Don’t Know” Crowd

Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush have questions about when life really begins and don’t want to support a party that refuses to acknowledge those concerns.

Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush wonder just how much involvement between church and state constitutes an infringement on First Amendment proscriptions against state-sponsored religion. Maybe they are troubled by absolutists who want to wipe faith out of every aspect of public life.
[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Peggy Noonan. So Much to Savor: A big win for America, and a loss for the mainstream media

Thursday, November 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST Wall Street Journal

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor.

Let us get our heads around the size and scope of what happened Tuesday. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

On this day: Washington’s Farewell Address

It’s fitting to remember this on election day.

After defeating the British, General George Washington resigned and returned to farming at Mount Vernon.

On this day, November 2, 1783, he issued his Farewell Orders to his troops. “Before the Comdr in Chief takes his final leave,” he wrote, “he wishes…a slight review of the past…. The singular interpositions of Providence in our feeble condition were such, as could scarcely escape the attention of the most unobserving; while the…perseverance of the Armies of the U. States, through almost every possible suffering…for the space of eight long years, was little short of a standing miracle.”

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Media Bias

November 1, 2004 — If President Bush is re-elected tomor row, the victory will have come de spite the best efforts of two erstwhile American journalistic icons — the Grey Lady of Times Square and Edward R. Murrow’s Tiffany Network: The New York Times and CBS News.

If nothing else, the notion that “objectivity” animates America’s media elite has been exposed this year for what it truly is — at best, a quaint myth; at worst, a pernicious lie.

Meanwhile, a new element has been injected into American politics: the Web-based truth-squadders who exposed Dan Rather for the sad partisan hack that he has become while deconstructing one elite-media hit after another throughout an agonizingly long election season.

Read the entire editorial on the New York Post website.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Answer to James’ question on the sacrifice of Isaac

Upstream James asked about the scriptural passage concerning the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham:

I’ve always wondered this about Abraham: if he would obey the command to slit the throat of his innocent son, how exactly are we to suppose he was able to discern the voice of God from the voice of Satan?

This also raises the question as to whether he obeyed God not because He was good but because He was powerful and if he would have obeyed the dictates of an equally omnipotent Fiend.

If the story is simply a parable and a myth, could not the moral have been better served through a less literal take on “sacrifice”?
[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Fr. Pat Reardon on Genesis 22

Genesis 22, which narrates Abraham’s obedience to God in sacrificing his son Isaac, provides a singular example of a trial of faith. In the preceding chapter God had promised Abraham that his true posterity would come through Isaac (Genesis 21:12), but now He commands him to offer up his “only son,” this same Isaac, as a holocaust (22:2).

It is important to the dramatic structure of this story that Abraham does not know he is being tried. Nor does Isaac. Indeed, only God and the reader know it (22:1). In this respect, the story of Abraham resembles the Book of Job, where the reader, but not Job, is instructed that a trial is taking place. In the case of the Abraham story, this notice to the reader is absolutely essential, because both the Jew and the Christian know that the God of the Bible hates human sacrifice. A trial of faith, on the other hand, is exactly what we should expect from the God of the Bible (cf. 1 Peter 1:6-7).
[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail