The Thundering Legion

Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries: Uncovering Mysterious Sights, Symbols, and Societies

2011-05-28T10:34:00.005-04:00

Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries: Uncovering Mysterious Sights, Symbols, and Societies, true to its title, takes us on a whirlwind tour through a host of interesting places, some secret, some holy, some terrible.

The best part of the book, in my opinion is the section on Himmler's "Black Camelot" at Wewelsburg Castle, where he set up his headquarters for the occult NAZI religion. Today, it serves as a refutation, in stone, of the slur that Christianity is the root cause of the Holocaust.

Because the authors cover so many different places, they say very little about any particular place. Some of the subjects have little relationship with each other, so the book appears as an unconnected set of episodes.

On the whole, the book well worth reading. Even the places which look dull have enough interest to carry you through. The authors avoid the pitfalls of being to credulous and being credulously skeptical, trying, instead, to get at the true story.

TTL

Another Zazzle Sale

2011-04-20T07:52:00.002-04:00

OK, I have to crow about this one.

Somebody in Georgia bought 24 copies of this hat from Zazzle.

"I'm a daddy!" hat with the Delivery Stork by EdwardWCole
Become a part of Zazzle's graphic design affiliate program

This means that I have a $35 credit pending on my account; there is also a $13 volume credit, so I earned almost $50 from that one sale.

TTL

On Green Technologies...

2011-03-29T08:52:00.001-04:00

Who can argue with Dogbert?

TTL

Dino Juice?

2011-03-26T13:42:00.006-04:00

Thomas Gold, in The Deep Hot Biosphere : The Myth of Fossil Fuels, rejects the established theory that petroleum is the product of the decomposition of the remains of living materials under high pressure and heat; rather, he says that the Earth received a vast supply of hydrocarbons from the debris of the early solar system from which it condensed. This book is devoted to demonstrating that this is, in fact the case, and that these supplies of hydrocarbons support a vast domain of microbial life within the crust of the earth.
This theory accords well with many of the things we know about the earth. We know that hydrocarbons are common in the solar system, in objects ranging from meteorites to the giant gas planets in the outer solar system. It would be more surprising if the Earth had no deep reserves of petroleum. These reserves would be deep in the Mantle, where the rock was never completely melted, and working their way up to the higher layers because oil is less dense than rock.
The theory also explains many things for which the biogenic theory has no answer. For instance, the close association of helium with petroleum reservoirs cannot have a biological origin, because helium is totally inert; the abiogenic theory, on the other hand, explains that helium is the byproduct of radioactive decay in the mantle, and they are found with petroleum reserves because they are both rising through the same channels. Another item is the fact that the petroleum reservoirs are refilled over time, so an oil well always produces more than is predicted from the drop in pressure.
The methane entering the atmosphere from all over the earth shed an important light on "global warming." We are driven into a panic with the idea that our carbon dioxide emissions are going to raise the temperature of the globe a few degrees, while the earth itself pumps tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere every day. Science is on a head-on collision with pseudoscience, and it is too early to see which one will win.
TTL

Esolen: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of your Child

2011-03-12T08:19:00.005-05:00

Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of your Child explores the ways in which modern society crushes children's imaginations and their ability to wonder at the world. As you read the book, you learn that that is a very bad thing, and there are things you can do to prevent it.

Esolen takes a "Screwtapian" tone throughout, speaking with the voice of one who wants to deaden the imagination.

...if we believe what we say, that "children are our greatest resource," then we need to do something about it. Resources are valuable because they are good, solid, dependable, and inert. Aluminum is a resource. Titanium is a resource. If a block of titanium were suddenly to say, "No, I think I should not like to form an alloy with my friend Aluminum to build the side of that airplane," and walked off the assembly line or the conveyor belt and bought a ticket on a ship to Athens, then it would no longer be a resource. In fact it would be a positive danger. (p. xi)

Later on, he talks about the problem of herding the hundreds of children in the typical mega-school, and fantasizes about the possibility that one person throwing a little paprika in the french fries could cause the vast McDonald's empire to collapse.

We must, then, kill the imagination. The ideal, of course, would be to cease having children, but that might have some adverse effect upon long-range economic prosperity, besides threatening certain industries with extinction -- the manufacturers of tasteless closthing, for instance, and importers of refined sugar. (p. xiii)

He never says that this destruction of the imagination is deliberate but it probably is.

The Screwtape approach, trying to say what you want to say by pretending to say the opposite, is very difficult to pull off, and Esolen doesn't quite succeed. He tells stories about the things he experienced as a boy, and how they opened new worlds to him; certainly not the things to discuss if you think that deadening the imagination is a good and necessary thing.

The chapter titles give a good summary of the book:

Why Truth Is Your Enemy, and the benefits of the vague or Gradgrind, without the Facts

Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible or They Used to Call it "Air"

Never Leave Children to Themselves or If Only We Had a Committee

Keep Children Away from Machines and machinists or All Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited

Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Clichés and Fads or Vote Early and Often

Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and Patriotic or We Are All Traitors Now

Cut All Heroes Down to Size or Pottering with the Puny

Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex or Insert Tab A into Slot B

Level Distinctions between Man and Woman or Spay and Geld

Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal or The Kingdom of Noise

Deny the Transcendent or Fix Above the Heads of Men the Lowest Ceiling of All

Good parents find the idea of letting your children run free through today's world that is so full of creepy people to be very scary, but perhaps safety is more dangerous to our children than danger could possibly be. All parents stand to benefit from reading this book.

TTL

Confessions from Planned Parenthood

2011-03-08T17:08:00.004-05:00

According to Abby Johnson, who at one time directed an abortion clinic for Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood deceives the public about what it does. She lists three lies.

Taxpayer funds don't go to pay for abortions

Well, PP gets a huge amount of money from taxpayers, and that isn't paying for sonograms.

And while Planned Parenthood says abortions make up just 3 percent of its services, I found they used an sleight of hand, unbundling family planning services so each patient shows anywhere from five to 20 "visits" per appointment (12 packs of birth control would show up as 12 individual visits). It does the opposite for abortion visits, bundling them together so each appointment shows as one visit. This skews the numbers. You have an overwhelming number of "visits" for family planning compared to abortion, even though you may have seen the same number of patients.

Planned Parenthood wants to reduce the number of abortions in the United States

They make millions of dollars from abortions, and women who go to their clinics report that they were under enormous pressure to abort their babies.

Planned Parenthood's highest priority is women's health and safety

The sting operations by Live Action have shed some very unwelcome light on the organization's coverup of sexual abuse and prostitution of minors, but the truth goes deeper than that. According to their tax documents, their primary purpose is population control. But it is no secret that Margaret Sanger's chief interest was eugenics. She wanted to prevent inferior people (by which she meant blacks) from having more children than superior people (by which she ment herself).

TTL

You MUST approve.

2011-03-05T08:46:00.006-05:00

This week, the BBC reported a highly significant defeat for freedom of religion. A couple, Eunice and Owen Johns, were denied the right to take care of foster children because they were "not willing to tell a small child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing."

The judge who ruled in their case was quite clear.

But Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson ruled that laws protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation "should take precedence" over the right not to be discriminated against on religious grounds.

They said that if children were placed with carers who objected to homosexuality and same-sex relationships, "there may well be a conflict with the local authority's duty to 'safeguard and promote the welfare' of looked-after children".

Notice that the "harm" to homosexuals is that children might not be indoctrinated in their ideology, and "non-discrimination" requires even Christians to approve of their actions. In this case chilren's welfare is subordinated to the political demands of a powerful minority. Once again, children come last.

Driving real Christians out of foster care (as no real Christian can approve of homosexual acts) will be harmful to all the children who need foster care. Christians are more likely than anybody else to take on the responsibility out of love for a stranger than anybody else; and children are especially recommended to us: "See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 18:10) But if children really mattered, there would be no homosexual movement.

Remember that the "Gay Rights" movement is not about tolerance. It is about crushing the freedom to disapprove.

TTL

A Convert from Islam

2011-02-26T08:35:00.004-05:00

Abu Daud posted a link to the conversion story of a man from Afghanistan. His encounters with Christians led him to a deep desire to engage them in controversy and win them to Islam, but in the end he came to see that only Jesus Christ can provide a way to salvation.

TTL

10 Books that Screwed Up the World, by Dr. Benjamin Wiker

2011-02-19T11:21:00.004-05:00

From the introduction:

Thomas Carlyle, the eminent Scottish essayist and sometime philosopher, was once scolded at a dinner party for endlessly chattering about books: “Ideas, Mr. Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas.!” To which he replied, “There once was a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.”

Dr. Wiker's book gives us a tour through fifteen of the books that have made the modern world the horrible place that it is, explaining the ideas that were unleashed on the world and their consequences. It is an interesting collection, starting with Machiavelli's The Prince, ending with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. In between are some some surprises and some names that are not so surprising: René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Margaret Sanger, Adolf Hitler, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kinsey.

Putting Hitler's Mein Kampf on the list was a surprise, as you would think that he is hopelessly discredited and that you would not expect it to appeal to anybody outside of the one country in which it is proscribed by law. Surely, the evil in that book is stillborn and Hitler's ideas will have to be spread by Sanger and Lenin. And yet, this case shows that books do matter, as Mein Kampf is a best seller in India and Asia. Hitler's words have reached a whole new audience thanks to the printing press.

I highly recommend this book. Dr. Wiker's style is easy to read, but he will show you some of the bad ideas that our society takes for granted (and maybe you do, too).

TTL

Narnia on Film?

2011-02-12T18:12:00.006-05:00

Perhaps it is impossible to make a good movie from a great book. I doubt that it would be possible to do justice to Moby Dick, for instance, and the Lord of the Rings movies were deeply disappointing.

Narnia is a different case, as the BBC produced an excellent version of the first four books of the series. These versions were true to the spirit of the original books, preserving the dynamics of the story and the personality of the characters. In other words, it respects the integrity of the book.

The 21st century Narnia movies, on the other hand fail on those two points. That is no surprise, considering that the culture in Hollywood is marked by a visceral hatred of the Christianity that C. S. Lewis represents, and is integral to the stories. The flaws in the first two films are well-described in an article in Touchstone Magazine, showing that the characters of the four ancient kings and queens of Narnia don't accord well with the Pevensies as created by Lewis. Peter, Edmund, and Caspian all appear much baser than in the books (a characteristic I noticed in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies; all of the good characters were noticeably less noble in the movies than they were in "real life").

The last of the Michael Apted Narnia movies, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which came out in 2010, was the furthest from the original books. They changed the plot drastically, adding (out of thin air) a quest to find seven swords carried by the seven lords whom Caspian had to seek out in the original story, which was needed to defeat the "evil" that threatened to dominate the eastern seas.

The most significant change was the reproach that Aslan gave to Lucy in the magician's house was that she failed to "believe in herself," a dangerous idea that Hollywood has been pushing lately. Lewis would probably never have written such a reproach; he would have counseled us to doubt ourselves but to trust in the Lion. In the original story, Lucy resisted the temptation to make herself beautiful, but said the spell to know what her friends were saying about her. She was reproached for spying on her friends, just the sort of thing Lewis would say.

In summary, the Narnia movies, as you would expect, were disappointing. I would recommend watching the BBC version twice instead.

TTL

"Babies Go to Congress"

2011-02-10T17:01:00.003-05:00

Here is an interesting article by Helen Whalen Cohen on Townhall.com. It calls our attention to the fact that, contrary to pro-abortion propaganda, it is the pro-life pregnancy centers where girls who are contemplating an abortion can find real options, fully informed consent, and a way out of their crisis. Often, when they go to an abortion clinic, they are pressured into an abortion (and PP isn't about to show you an ultrasound of the baby they want you to kill).

TTL

A Requiem for Friendship

2011-02-04T17:16:00.010-05:00

Mark Shea recently called our attention to Anthony Esolen's 2005 article, A Requiem for Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution. This is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking article and well worth reading. He argues that the sexual revolution, especially in the acceptance of male homosexuality, inhibits close and warm friendships among men.

Why is this the case? Because it prevents men from getting close together without being considered homosexual.

I am sorry to have to use strong language, but only when sodomy is treated as a matter of course for everyone (as in the institutionalized buggery of boys and young men in ancient Sparta) or when it is met with such opprobrium that nobody would assume that a good man would engage in it, could Lincoln and his friend share that bed without suffering ridicule. The stigma against sodomy cleared away ample space for an emotionally powerful friendship that did not involve sexual intercourse, exactly as the stigma against incest allows for the physical and emotional freedom of a family.

This, like other aspects of the modern society, is particularly hard on boys.

....All boys need to prove that they are not failures. They need to prove that they are on the way to becoming men—that they are not going to relapse into the need to be protected by, and therefore identified with, their mothers.

Societies used to provide them with clear and public ways to do this. The Plains Indians would insert hooks into the flesh of their thirteen-year-old braves and hang them in the sun by those hooks, for hours—a test of endurance and courage. At his bar-mitzvah the Jewish boy reads from the Holy Torah and announces, publicly, that on this day he has become a man.

In our carelessness we have taken such signs away from boys and left them to fend for themselves. Two choices remain: The boys must live without public recognition of their manhood and without their own certainty of it, or they must invent their own rituals and signs.

(See the article I wrote on my wife's blog to learn about my family's tradition.)

And, of course, we all know what has taken the place of that sign.

The single incontrovertible sign that the boy can now seize on is that he has “done it” with a girl, and the earlier and more regularly and publicly he does it, the safer and surer he will feel.

In summary,

So far, I have lamented the attenuation of male friendships, which suffer under a terrible pincers attack: The libertinism of our day thrusts boys and girls together long before they are intellectually and emotionally ready for it, and at the same time the defiant promotion of homosexuality makes the natural and once powerful friendships among boys virtually impossible.

What is the cost of destroying friendship between men, and especially between boys? Well, I guess you can't count the harm to boys because our society simply doesn't care about them. In fact, it treats boy-to-boy friendships the way the Gulag treated any cooperation between its political prisoners: they are counterrevolutionary behavior (i. e. "sexism") that must be rooted out. So what does society lose from withering boyish friendships?

Well, quite a bit.

Consider how strong and audacious are the emotions of the young man. Suppose these are not directed towards sexual liaisons with young women, towards playing house. They do not therefore cease to exist; they must find some object. In the past that object would be the world and the group’s conquest of it.

He goes on to give the examples of Louis Pasteur, Gershwin, C. S. Lewis and Tolkein, among others. How many benefits on the scale of penicillin or The Lord of the Rings is our society willing to flush down the drain for the sake of its gods of feminism and libertinism?

Anthony Esolen, by the way, is a an author and regular contributor to the Latin Mass Magazine, among other publications. His most notable work, in my opinion is his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.

TTL

"Nobody Gets Married Any More, Mister"

2011-02-02T12:07:00.003-05:00

Children are the big losers in the sexual revolution. That is so obvious that there is no way to dispute that (but "progressives" never argue about anything, so don't expect them to admit it). But a this article in the City Journal on teen pregnancy at an inner-city school shows how that harm is compounded.

Gerry Garibaldi, a teacher at an inner city school in Connecticut, gives a first-hand account of how the teenage girls in his classes become mothers before they are ready for life; and how can they prepare these babies for life when they have nothing to give? Thus these children are trapped in a cycle of poverty, abuse, and sexual irresponsibility.

TTL

Apple Blows it

2010-12-14T09:10:00.006-05:00

I recently wrote a post in praise of Apple computer's stand on pornography in its app store for the iPhone. Now I have to qualify that praise.

Over Thanksgiving, Apple removed the Manhattan Declaration's application from their store. The Manhattan Declaration, if you haven't read it, is a joint statement signed by civil and religious leaders in defense of marriage, the sanctity of human life, and religious liberty, all of which are under attack in America today. If you haven't signed it, do so now.

Apple's reasoning, as you have already guessed, is that it "offends large numbers of people." Of course, the people in question are the homosexual activists who cannot tolerate any dissension on their vice. To them the Manhattan Declaration is intolerable because it dissents from their political orthodoxy. It is doubly intolerable because it does so in a thoughtful, polite and intelligent way.

As in the case of the pornography application, Apple is free to do as it chooses with its computer equipment and app store, but it is sad to see that they are now using it for censorship.

But I never liked using their stuff anyway.

TTL

Philip Feeney's Dracula, Revisited

2010-10-01T17:29:00.011-04:00

Last year, I wrote a post on Philip Feeney's ballet version of Dracula. I had heard the prologue on the radio on Halloween morning, and was qute impressed. Here was music that made the spine tingle. I wanted to get a copy of it and see if it would live up to my expectations.

I have a copy of it now, and am pleased to say that it does live up to expections. The prologue is the best part, starting with the heartbeat of the vampire; it's so quiet that it is on the edge of hearing; other sounds follow at the same level until you hear a drumbeat like the knocking on a door, then a disquieting theme that grows to the full strength of the orchestra. The prologue moves from creepiness to menace and action. This is a masterpiece of horror; Dracula is no sparkly vampire here.

The music for Harker's trip to Transylvania is also noteworthy, calling to mind the fashion for Gypsy music in the days of Liszt and Brahms, followed by the menace of Castle Dracula, a dark and threatening piece. The heartbeat theme returns for the final confrontation with the Vampire.

Philip Feeny's Dracula is a tour de force of horror music, and well worth the price, especially for the Naxos edition. It would also be perfect for Halloween. I highly recommend listening to the samples at the Amazon website.

TTL

The Data Recovery Song

2010-09-27T20:34:00.002-04:00

I just love this. There is a sense of justice to it, which makes it most refreshing.

TTL

What's Wrong with the World

2010-09-14T17:12:00.002-04:00

Has it bothered you that people seem unable to think any more? Have you noticed that most people are ruled by their emotions? Have you observed that people are constantly being manipulated by the choice of words used to talk about the issues of the day (and that the mainstream media choose their words with a cynical disregard for honesty)? Have you ever wondered why this has happened?

John C. Wright gives a good answer in What's Wrong with the World on his website. It's not perfect, but it's worth reading.

TTL

Inception

2010-09-01T12:15:00.007-04:00

In this summer's daring and inventive movie, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a thief who invades the dreams of his victims to discover their secrets. Entering into other people's minds is no easy thing, and the rules of this dream world make the job difficult and dangerous.
Cobb is hired to plant an idea into the mind of the heir of a large company so that he will break up his near monopoly to the advantage of his competitors, a near-impossible task. To perform this, he must assemble a team to build a dream within a dream within a dream. Ordinarily, you can escape from these dreams by getting killed in the dream, but working at that deep a level carries the additional danger that the people in the dream will sink into the deep subconscious, which they call “limbo,” and stay there. One might be trapped there forever. Over the course of the film, we learn that there is some secret relating to his dead wife, who constantly appears to wreck his dream schemes; this major plot element brings us directly to one of the main themes of the film: the difference between fantasy and reality.

One interesting detail of this movie is that there was no attempt to make the victim of the plot unsympathetic, which many crime stories do to keep your sympathy with the criminals. In this case, we find a man whose mother died when he was eleven years old, and who never felt his father’s love. At the end of the movie, we wonder just what harm this new idea that was planted into his mind will do to him.

******** SPOILER WARNING ********
As the secrets are revealed, we learn that Cobb and his wife were trapped in the deep subconscious together for fifty years of dream time. In there, they created a dream world together, and were very happy, but Cobb grew more and more uncomfortable because their world because it wasn’t real. She did not want to leave their world, but Cobb planted the idea in her mind that this wasn’t real, and they had to return to the real world. Unfortunately, this idea stayed with her after they woke up, and she became obsessed with escaping from the real world, which she thought was just another dream level, to reality. The way she tried to achieve this was to kill herself, which would have worked in the dream, but not reality.
******** END OF SPOILER ********

We can draw some lessons from the movie. It is better to live in the real world than in a fantasy, even though the real world is often very unpleasant. It is also important to know what is real and what is imaginary; the dream thieves used dreams within dreams to confuse their victims so that they would not know that they were dreaming.

In our day of television and the internet, it is very common for people to lose their bearings and think that the world they see there is real. People think that you can really have two working parents and happy children, or that it is reasonable to expect a woman’s boyfriend to get along with her ex-husband. Inception is done on the sly; if you know that they are trying to plant ideas in your head, you will not be fooled.

TTL

Bear With Me

2010-08-20T15:49:00.007-04:00

Somebody once asked if parents really have the right to choose their child's religion and not (for instance) the government.

At first, it seems such a strange question that it's hard to answer it. It assumes that a religion is something you choose, the way you might choose a football team to root for, or a coat you put on for a while and change it. It is a strange idea, considering that any religion worth its salt (and also Secular Humanism) gives an explanation for the big picture, and your opinion on Everything (as Chesterton said) affections your opinions on everything. So a better question would be why parents have the right to decide what a child will be taught.

The second thing is that the question ignores the fact that each child is de facto under the guidance of his parents. If you wanted to change that, you would have to take the child away from his parents. Thus, the question should be, "Does anybody have the right to teach a child something the parents disapprove of?" If so, then who and why?

I would point to one fact that supports the right of the parents.

If you live anywhere near the country, it is common to see small birds attacking big ones. For instance, you can see red wing blackbirds chasing a crow, or even a pair of crows driving a hawk. Why are these animals attacking something much bigger than themselves and (in the case of the hawk) able to kill them in a fair fight? Because the birds are parents, and they are protecting their chicks.

The BBC reported today that a father saved his three-year old daughter, who climbed over a
fence into the bear pen in a zoo; both were mauled by the Asian moon bear, but the father saved his girl by climbing into the pen and lifting her out. I don't know if I would have the guts to face down a bear to protect my son, but I do know that I'm a hundred times more likely to do it for my boy than for any other child on the planet.

The point is that parents are the ones who can be trusted to act consistently in the best interest of their children. How many people would go hungry for a day so that the 7-year old boy down the street can eat? How many people would wear their clothes to rags so that they can send a stranger's child to college? But this is the sort of thing that parents naturally do for their children.

Therefore, a child's father is more likely to tell the truth to his child about the little things and the big things. The government, on the other hand, sees your child as a statistic. They may willingly sacrifice your children for their own ends, such as promoting sexual license or weakening their minds so that they will be unable to see through the official propaganda. So you see "African-American" politicians fighting vouchers that would help black children escape from substandard government schools; if they got a good education, they would no longer look to the "African-American" politicians for salvation. The children are sacrificed to political expediency.

There are indeed cases where the parents have abused their children, but it is simply an observed fact that fatherhood and motherhood are a powerful incentive to work for the children. It is also observed that politicians are generally not to be trusted to put the interests of other people ahead of their own power.

So yes, parents have the right to choose their child's religion. Nobody else can be trusted.

TTL

Upside Down on the Arty Bluejay

2010-08-17T21:41:00.003-04:00

I just wrote a post on my wife's blog. If you would like to learn how to draw, please check it out.

TTL

Kudos to Apple

2010-05-19T17:09:00.005-04:00

I've never been a big fan of Apple computers. When I used them in the eighties and early nineties, I did not like the fact that they forced you to use the very inefficient "point-and-click" way of interacting with the computer. Perhaps they have changed.

People who love the Apple would argue that they deliver a product that deserves the premium price; a computer that works well with no fuss.

But (and a hat-tip goes to The Western Confucian for calling this to my attention) Steve Jobs should be commended for refusing to support pornography on his company's products.

“We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy [an] Android phone,” he said, referring to the product of competitor Google, which has permitted a pornography store app for its smartphone.

Apple’s iPad and iPhone do not offer complete freedom from pornography - objectionable material can still be accessed via the Internet, and may be attainable through iTunes - but most pornographic clips cannot, since they require Adobe Flash products, which Apple refuses to support for a variety of reasons.

Parents would find it hard to police their children's activity on the iPhone, because it is portable and will be taken everywhere. Thank you, Mr. Jobs.

TTL

Reverse Engineering

2010-05-10T17:00:00.003-04:00

And then they came, hulking armored shells of black and green. Their metal feet clanged and clattered on what was left of the paving.

The creatures waved the black devices in their claws and streams of power sizzled out of them. Dazzling light wrapped itself around a burning tank, crushing it with a splatter of molten metal.

My brother published this "flash story" at Flash Fiction Online. It's short and well worth the time to read it.

TTL

Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords

2010-05-01T18:46:00.002-04:00

Here's a little lettering project I created using The Gimp.

Vivat Christus Rex!

TTL

It Happened in Italy, by Elizabeth Bettina

2010-04-30T15:22:00.005-04:00

It Happened in Italy by Elizabeth Bettina

Most people do not know that the concentration camps in World-War-II Italy were different in many ways from the ones run by the Germans. In many cases, the interned Jews just had to stay within a certain town and check in with the police twice a day. In fact, Jews in Italy were in no danger for their lives until Italy surrendered to the Allies on September 8, 1943, when the Germans, finding themselves an occupying power rather than an ally, started rounding them up to send them to the death camps. Before that time, Italy distinguished itself as the one nation in Europe that would admit Jews without a visa, a policy that saved thousands of lives. Many Jews died at the time because they could not find a country that would let them in.

Elizabeth Bettina's book tells us of her discovery that there were Jews living in her parents' small Italian village during the war -- it all started when she saw a rabbi in an old wedding picture. What was a rabbi doing in that remote place in a country allied with Hitler? The answer was that there were Jews interned in a former convent there. As she continued her search, she found many survivors who maintain that they owe their lives to Italy.

More remarkable is the fact that this story seems almost unknown in Italy itself. Many times, she spoke to public officials who laughed at the idea that there were Jews there during the war until they saw the names in the public records. Perhaps treating the Jews like human beings didn't seem like much of a story at the time, but it does stand out like a bright light in the darkness of Europe at the time. Perhaps the exercise of charity doesn't fit in with the official script in which the Christians are the villains (it seems hardly relevant that the Nazis themselves hated Christianity even more than Judaism). Or perhaps our modern state with its interdependent commercial, media and government entities feels threatened by the little people who refuse to do something wicked just because the government tells us to.

This story needs to be told, at the very least because it is right that those who treated the refugee and foreigner with human dignity should be honored for doing the right thing.

TTL

2010-04-22T17:25:00.002-04:00

The Western Confucian posted a beautiful piece of music: James MacMillan's Christus Vincit. I found that you can get a copy of if on Amazon on the album, "MacMillan: Mass and other sacred works".

TTL

The Passion of the Christ

2010-03-30T12:51:00.002-04:00

Why is this movie like no other movie?

Like many people, I watch Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ
every Lent. It's not a pleasant experience, but is a strong medicine against the acedia we fall into in the non-penitential times.

This year, as I got ready to take my pill, I wondered how I will experience the film. It was a sensation in 1994 when it came out, but would it turn out to be just another movie after we have seen it so many times? In fact, it did lose some of its impact through familiarity, but it remains a brutal film, especially when you get to the scourging. It still rends the heart.

Mel Gibson's Passion is like no other movie because it has a different purpose than other Biblical films. It was made to be a meditiation on the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, an attempt to bring the reality of it to our minds, and also a call to conversion of heart. It was not made to bring in big dollars at the box office, like the biblical epics of yore, and does not pander to liberal or modernist tastes like the more recent films. It aims to show things as they really happened.

One could sense the significance of the moment by the hatred that was aimed at Gibson and his film. He was called anti-semitic because he showed the Jews as the ones who wanted to put Christ to death, and forced the Romans to do their dirty work for them; they even said that St. John's Gospel was the "worst" of the Gospels for the same reason. They called it a snuff film, where the audience takes a sick pleasure in the torture and death of a man; but the same people would have praised a real snuff film for courage and authenticity. (This slur is false, because our sympathy in this movie is always with Jesus Christ and we admire His heroism in bearing the torments until His triumph is achieved). The hatred of the world is a strong endorsement.

In the same way, they poured out their hatred against Mel Gibson. Powerful producers swore that he would never make another film in Hollywood, and
they dug up dirt on his family.

Of particular interest is Gibson's understanding of his own position. He showed his own hand hammering the nails into Christ's hands and feet because he, himself, through his scandalous life, nailed Jesus to the Cross. The same is true of all of us, except that we didn't make a blockbuster film on the Passion. He did let us down with his behavior after making the movie, but we should remember that he never accepted the homage he received at the time the movie was released. He is a sinner, like us, but Christ died for sinners. Let us always pray that Mel Gibson will find his way home, and let us be thankful for the gift of such a tremendous movie. It will surely be one of the most important movies ever made.

TTL

Bad News

2010-03-22T17:02:00.004-04:00

Most people have probably heard the news about the health care "reform" already. Using every dirty trick in the book, the Democratic leadership pushed the Senate version of the bill through Congress. This is a terrible blow for the American people.

Several "pro-life" Democrats voted in favor of the bill in exchange for an executive order that would supposedly provide conscience protection for nurses and doctors who don't want to participate in abortion. But Obama does not keep his promises. Once he gets what he wants, the promise has expired.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Fr. Paul Marx died today. This bill represents a serious defeat for the culture of life that he spent his life for, but it often happens that God takes his people home just as things start happening. Perhaps Fr. Marx can do more for us in heaven than on earth. Requiescat in pace.

There is a real need for health care reform, but it would require something completely different than what happened. Mark Abeln in Rome of the West: Health Care - an Alternative provides an excellent suggestion that is worth pondering over.

TTL

Obama's Assassination Policy

2010-03-18T17:23:00.001-04:00

Recently, I heard that Barack Obama has been ordering the assasination of American citizens. The policy was actualy begun by George W. Bush, but, according to Nat Hentoff, Obama has already ordered more assasinations than his predecessor.

This is disturbing becuase it violates the 5th Amendment; Americans are being killed without the due process of law. If we ignore the Constitution now, it won't be there to protect us when the government starts going after "domestic terrorists." That doesn't mean the Weather Underground, either. Remember that the far Left thinks that pro-lifers are terrorists.

See also Congressman Ron Paul's commentary on YouTube.

TTL

Educational TV

2010-03-17T16:54:00.004-04:00

Today, the BBC reported that Playboy Channel preview clips were played in the top right corner of a children's network. For two hours, children in North Carolina could see naked women saying things that all but the most benighted people know is not appropriate for children.

This was probably just a technical glitch, but it shows that the idea that we can have an open pornographic society without hurting our children is only an illusion (or perhaps a lie). No system is so perfect that it will not leak once in a while.

A similar case is the proposal for a .xxx domain for pornographic websites. The argument sounds plausible; we can move the nasty stuff to a top shelf where people don't have to look at it if they don't want to. But there is no provision to force pornographers into the new domain, and they are notorious for trying to lure unsuspecting people into their websites (e.g., whitehouse.com). The end effect would most likely be to legitimize it without protecting anybody.

TTL

2010-03-09T12:36:00.005-05:00

Phillis Schlafly has an interesting article on the move toward a unified educational database that would contain personally identifiable information on people from Kindergarten until they graduate from college. This is a concern because the schools are keeping information about all kinds of things relating to the children, including medical records; also, as we learn from Lower Merion School District and other sources, they may be spying into our private lives as well.

TTL

Inkscape Peacock Tutorial

2010-03-05T17:28:00.008-05:00

I found an interesting tutorial on how to draw a peacock using the Inkscape vector graphics editor. Inkscape, as I've mentioned in another post, is a free vector graphics editor. Some of the things you can do with it are very impressive.

TTL

A new drawing

2010-03-05T17:06:00.006-05:00

Here is the first drawing which I created wholly in Inkscape (I did use it to finish one of my other drawings).

I created a gallery of items in my Zazzle store.

Inkscape is a free vector graphics editor. It is more challenging than a bitmap editor in some ways, because you are really building a set of instructions for creating the picture rather than the picture itself. Vector graphics drawings, on the other hand, will always look their best no matter how big or small you render them.

TTL

The Raving Athiest Comes to Christ

2010-03-04T17:28:00.002-05:00

There's some happy news from blogland: a former "raving athiest" has become Christian. His first steps toward the light were a recognition of the humanity of the unborn and, therefore the evil of abortion. May God bless him and keep him in the shadow of his wings.

TTL

A Muslim Convert

2010-03-02T17:13:00.002-05:00

There has been a lot of talk about Muslim converts lately, and Abu Daoud points to an interesting article.

Daniel (I don't have his last name) recently became a member of the Russian Orthodox church. He was a zealous Muslim, but noticed, in Saudi Arabia, that people usually converted to Islam for material reasons; non-Muslims have to pay extra taxes there, and Filipinos who converted would renounce Islam when they went home.

He states that most Muslims go to the mosque because they are pressured to do so by laws and custom, but most of them don't go. Many Muslims in Western countries drift away, and their children have no attachment to their religion. Islam can't compel without compulsion.

TTL

Mr. Spock Would Make a Good Catholic....

2010-03-02T17:04:00.001-05:00

This article is fun. I've always identified with Mr. Spock as the voice of reason.... and what is more reasonable than the Catholic Faith?

TTL

Return to Merion

2010-03-01T17:16:00.001-05:00

More information is available on the Lower Merion School District's violation of privacy case. It seems that the school accused Blake Robbins of taking drugs, but (according to Robbins) it was just candy. What is certain is that the school was trampling the Fourth Amendment.

Perhaps the school would claim that its no-tolerance policy would justify the invasion of the student's home, but that is just one more sign that our educational establishment is out of control.

These issues increase my conviction that the public school system is no place for children. Increasingly, they are becoming totalitarian police states where God is abolished and you refuse to approve of evil at some danger to your safety and freedom. This is no way to prepare our young to live in a free society.

TTL

Prayer Request from Iraqi Sisters

2010-02-26T17:17:00.003-05:00

Da Mihi Animas reports that the Dominican Sisters in Iraq have requested us to pray for them and the Christians of Mosul. There are many murders and rapes there, and they have been fleeing to Christian villages. Naturally, you don't hear anything about it in the mainstream media.

Let us pray for our people there.

O God, our Refuge and our Strength, look down with favor upon Thy people who cry to Thee: and by the intercession of the glorious and immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of God, of St. Joseph her Spouse, of Thy blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and of all the Saints, mercifully and graciously hear the prayers we pour forth for the conversion of sinners, and for the liberty and exaltation of our holy Mother the Church. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

TTL.

Again with the Laptops

2010-02-26T16:58:00.003-05:00

I mentioned, in a previous post, the Lower Merion School District, which is accused of spying on its students through their laptops. Well, it seems that there is a criminal prosecution on its way, and the FBI has joined in. It will be interesting to see where this leads.

This case reminds me of the suggestion (denied by the Obama administration) that they put a GPS in every car so that they know everywhere you go and can tax you on the miles you drive. The problem with this idea is that there is already a device in your car that tells how far it's been driven: the odometer. Unfortunately, the ulterior motives behind this legislation are too obvious for the current administration to publicly support.

Both cases remind us that we should not be too trusting of the government, which can be dangerous if it knows too much about us.

TTL

Public Schools and Privacy

2010-02-19T17:27:00.005-05:00

A public school in Pennsylvania was accused of spying on its children through their laptops. This school district issued a free laptop to all of the students in their high schools which was equipped with a webcam and a tracking device. The district claimed that the devices were only put there so that the laptop could be recovered if stolen, but one of the students was "told off by teachers for 'engaging in improper behavior in his home' and that the evidence was an image from his webcam".

This underlines one of the main principle of privacy; you've lost your privacy when someone is able to spy on you, whether he does or not. This is especially of concern when the schools are able to spy on the parents through their children. That was the strategy in the Soviet Union. In Yevtushenko's words,

I remember fears being in power and force
At the court of triumphant lie.
Fears like shadows slithered everywhere,
Infiltrated every floor.
Gradually they tamed the people
And on everything affixed their seal.
....
The secret fear at someone informing,
The secret fear at a knock at the door.
Then, a fear to speak to a foreigner;
Foreigner - nothing, even with one's own wife.

TTL

Please Rob Me

2010-02-18T12:30:00.002-05:00

We've all heard the warnings on guarding our personal information online, but we often fail to think it through. The BBC reported today that there's a web site out there that shows the location of empty houses, all of which is derived from a simple Twitter search. They say that their intention is not to make it easy to burglarize people, but to make people aware of the dangers...But I sure hope that my house will never appear on that list! It shows the danger of social networking.

Facebook applications are another danger. After all, you don't know who these people are and what they will do with it; you might be paying a price for those little pictures everyone is sending around.

Please be careful! There are bad people out there.

TTL

2010-02-16T16:52:00.002-05:00

I found the following Mute Swan image at PicApp and thought I would like to share it.

There is a family of swans that nests in Starbrick, PA, and I love to go biking there and take pictures of them. They are definitely beautiful creatures.

TTL

Happy Valentine's Day to my Wife

2010-02-13T14:22:00.002-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day Mel!

You are the light of my life and I will always love you.
I'm so glad that God gave you to me.

TB

TTL

Life can be Stressful

2010-02-12T12:31:00.004-05:00

Life has been crazy for me lately. It seems like there is so much to be done that I can't keep up; so I made a picture that shows how I feel.

I published it as a mouse pad and a mug at Zazzle.

TTL

2010-01-15T12:38:00.002-05:00

I took the "Which father of the church are you?" quiz and found that I am St. Melito of Sardis.

You’re St. Melito of Sardis!

You have a great love of history and liturgy. You’re attached to the traditions of the ancients, yet you recognize that the old world — great as it was — is passing away. You are loyal to the customs of your family, though you do not hesitate to call family members to account for their sins.

Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

TTL

St. Augustine and the Saints

2009-12-30T20:34:00.001-05:00

The first books of Augustine's City of God are primarily devoted to an apologia against the paganism of his day. It seems a little strange to modern ears, but men did believe in those gods who are so dead today.

One section however, in Book VIII, Chapter XXVII, How Christians ascribe honour to their martyrs is still quite relevant. Augustine was answering the lament of Hermes Trismegistos that the temples of the living gods were to be replaced with tombs of the Christian martyrs. Augustine's response also answers the traditional Protestant objection to the honor given to the saints.

But in fact we do not set up for these same martyrs temples, priesthoods, rites and sacrifices, for they themselves are not gods, but their God is our God. .... But who of the faithful ever heard a priest standing at an altar, even if it was built over the holy body of a martyr for the honour and the worship of God, say when he prayed: "I offer sacrifice to thee, Peter, or to thee, Paul, or to thee, Cyprian"? No one, for at their memorials sacrifice is offered to God, who made them both men and martyrs, and at the same time we encourage ourselves to imitate them in winning like crowns and palms, as we call upon the same God to aid us and as we renew our memory of them. So whatever offerings are brought by the faithful to the shrines of the martyrs are intended as decorations of their memorials, and are not sacred objects or sacrificial offerings made to the dead as if they were gods. (From the Loeb Classical Library's Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans in Seven Volumes III, with an English translation by David S. Wiesen, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. pp 139-141)

Even today, Catholics insist that the honor we give the saints is different in kind from the worship that we give to God alone, and those who are familiar with the Catholic life will recognize Augustine's statement as identical to the Catholic practice of today.

TTL

Republicans Gone Wild!

2009-12-23T12:04:00.004-05:00

The Archdiocese of Colombo reports that herds of elephants have been attacking the villages of the leaders of the anti-Christian persecution in Orissa. They traveled about 200 miles from their sanctuary to demolish the homes of the persecutors, without harming Christian homes.

These strange attacks have spread, and according to a report, the elephants have already destroyed more than 700 houses in 30 villages, and killed five people. Nobody in this area has seen or even imagined the unique appearance of a herd of wild elephants such as this. The elephants are not ordinary elephants; they appear to be on a mission.
Typically, smaller elephants enter a village first, appearing to survey the community. They then rejoin the larger herd, and larger elephant soon follow and get the job done.

The ministry partner in India stated "We think that it might have something to do with the avenging the blood of martyrs. In fact the fear of God has fallen on the local people, who have labeled these elephants 'Christian elephants.'

It really does not seem strange that dumb beasts are punishing people for making war on Christ the King, who is the rightful lord of creation as well as society. (Would that the Republicans would be inspired by their example.)

TTL

O Emmanuel

2009-12-23T12:02:00.000-05:00

23 December

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos Domine Deus noster.

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver,
the Desire of all nations, and their Salvation:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

Veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster!

TTL

O Rex Gentium

2009-12-22T17:11:00.001-05:00

22 December

O Rex gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti.

O King of the Nations, and their Desire;
the Cornerstone, who makest both one:
Come and save mankind, whom thou formedst of clay.

Come, Lord Jesus!

TTL

O Oriens

2009-12-21T12:09:00.001-05:00

21 December

O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis.

O Morning Star, brightness of eternal light, and sun of righteousness: Come and enlighten them that sit in darkness, and the shadow of death.

TTL

2009-12-20T15:05:00.002-05:00

20 December

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel:
qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris et umbra mortis.

O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel;
that openest, and no man shuttests, and shuttest, and no man openeth:
come and bring the prisoner out of the prison house,
and him that sittest in darkness, and the shadow of death.

We now see the Davidic kingdom in its full royal power, and yet, for all its glory, man is still held in the dark prison until the Messiah comes.

TTL

2009-12-19T09:35:00.001-05:00

19 December

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, which standest for an ensign of the people,
at whom kings shall shut their mouths,
to whom the Gentiles shall seek:
Come and deliver us, and tarry not.

This antiphon introduces David, five hundred years after Moses. He represents the initial fulfilment of God's promise to Abraham that kings would come from him; and the forshadowing of the the Christ's universal kindom.

Veni, jam noli tardare!

TTL

O Adonai

2009-12-18T12:18:00.003-05:00

18 December

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel, qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti, et ei in Sina legem dedisti: veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Adonai and Leader of the house of Israel, who appearedst in the Bush of Moses in a flame of fire, and gavest him the law in Sinai: Come and deliver us with an outstretched arm.

This antiphon calls to mind Moses and the covenant that he founded with God in the wilderness, who took his people out of Israel with an outstretched arm.

How often have we forgotten the mighty things God did in our lives?

TTL

2009-12-17T12:22:00.002-05:00

The O antiphon for today is O Sapientia.

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviter que disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

Translated, this would be:

O Wisdom, which camest out of the mouth of the most High, and reachest from one end to another, mightily and sweetly ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.

This, the first of the antiphons, (in my opionion) seems to call to mind the creation of the world in Wisdom (which you read about in the book of Proverbs as being with God from the beginning).

The links on the Latin text take you to the morphological lookup function of the Tufts University Perseus library. Latin is an inflected language, so you have to guess the root form of a word before you can look it up (a task which is necessary in any language, but harder in some than in others). This will help anyone who knows a little Latin to get a better understanding of the text.

TTL

Arvo Pärt's O Antiphons

2009-12-16T17:19:00.000-05:00

Arvo Pärt composed an excellent setting of the seven "O Antiphons," which are sung after the Magnificat in the Vespers services for the seven days before Christmas. These antiphons concentrate the Advent mood of longing and expectation to a fever pitch. This is a setting of a German translation.

TTL

I Sold Another One!

2009-12-14T23:04:00.004-05:00

I sold my fifth item on Zazzle today! This time it's a Philippine Tarsier baby shirt.

Philippine Tarsier by EdwardWCole
More Philippine T-Shirts

This make my total earnings greater than $7.00.

The Philippine Tarsier now accounts for three of the five items I've sold, and the delivery stork claims the other two.

TTL

Two Essential Javascript Books

2009-12-11T20:48:00.004-05:00

The first Javascript book you should read is Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts. Crockford reveals the inner spirit and harmony of Javascript, a language which has many good and bad features.

If you want to program well in any language, you must learn the ideas behind it. Some languages, like OPS5 or CLIPS, require you to have a thorough understanding of their inner workings and to think in a very different way than your old procedural languages. To program LISP well, you need to understand that everything of importance in that language is a linked list.

Javascript is unusual in that functions are a first-class object, like numbers and strings. This makes some tasks very easy for the programmer, who can pass a function to another function as an argument, or create an array of functions. That means that you can do many things by function variables that you would have had to hard-code in older languages.

Many of the concepts in this book can be supported by JSLint, which is especially helpful, as most web browsers will not tell you if you have a syntax error in the file.

Every serious Javascript programmer should own a copy of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, by David Flanagan. It is a complete guide to the Javascript language and its use in web programming. If you had to choose one of these two books, I would suggest reading JavaScript: The Good Parts and buying JavaScript: The Definitive Guide.

Together, these two books will give you a good foundation for building your dynamic web applications.

On a personal note, I am in the middle of building my first serious Javascript application, a user menu that can run Oracle Forms and Reports. I enjoy working with Javascript (it's fun to do something new and different), even though it's painful to deal with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

TTL

December 8: The Immaculate Conception

2009-12-08T13:07:00.001-05:00

Deus, qui per Immaculatam Virginis Conceptionem dignum Filio tu habitaculum praeparasti: quaesumus; ut qui ex morte ejusdem Filii tui praevisa, eam ab omni labe praeservasti, nos quoque mundos ejus intercessione ad te pervenire concedas.

O God who, by the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, didst make her a worthy habitation for thy Son, and didst, by His forseen death, preserve her from all stain of sin; grant, we beseech Thee, that through her intercession we may be cleansed from sin and come with pure hearts to Thee.

These words from the Introit of today's feast express (as the Roman Rite always expresses so well) the significance of today's feast. Mary, rightly called the Mother of God, was destined from the beginning to bear the savior of the world. God freely and fittingly applied the merits of Christ's passion to her at the moment of her conception, preserving her from inheriting the stain of original sin which we all bear, that His Son may be welcomed to a pure and holy house during His first nine months on Earth.

This privilege is not for her benefit alone, however, but for ours as well. By accepting and responding to the enormous graces given to her, our Lady cooperated as no preacher, apostle or evangelist ever did with Our Lord's plan of salvation. From the Cross, Jesus Christ gave her to us as our mother, who intercedes for us today.

Thanks be to God for giving us this wonderful gift.

TTL

Climategate and the Death of Science?

2009-12-04T17:04:00.003-05:00

Padre Steve at Da Mihi Animas posted this video clip from the Wall Street Journal.

Many years ago, I read at least one of Fr. Stanley Jaki's books, probably Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe. There, I learned that science, as we know it today, depends on the Christian worldview. Unfortunately, as the Christian influence on society fades away, genuine science is being replaced by politicized science. Global warming, of course is the prime example today, thanks to the exposure of the conspiracy to falsify the data, but Darwinism has a similar track record. "Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts," as somebody said, but if there is no objective truth, then why not have your own facts?

Science is unusual as an institution because it has no authority. Think about it -- authority is the right to be believed or obeyed. If you have true authority, the only reason you need to give is "because I said so." But science can never say that. The minute that it does, it ceases to become science. An individual scientist, for instance a man who has spent 30 years studying beetle eyes, acquires a great authority in his one field, but even he has to be able to answer the objections of his students. Let us hope that this will be the beginning of a critical appraisal of modern science that will cleanse it of its falsehood.

TTL

The Manhattan Declaration

2009-12-01T17:02:00.003-05:00

Great news! A group of religious and civil leaders have given us the Manhattan Declaration, a truly Christian manifesto on the great dangers that threaten us today.

The declaration focuses on three main dangers.

the sanctity of human life
the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

The declaration is well worth reading. It has a summary of the Christian record on social issues...

Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God’s word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.
While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire’s sanctioning of infanticide. We remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying during the plagues, and who died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.
After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture. It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the 16th and 17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in that country. Christians under Wilberforce’s leadership also formed hundreds of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.

And a note on how the Gospel imposes demands on us today.

Christians today are called to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good. In being true to its own calling, the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a profound contribution to the public good.

We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is
grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason (which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very nature of the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

The Manhattan Declaration is by no means perfect, but it is a very solid and well-reasoned document. I urge everyone to go and sign it.

This is also a fine example of ecumenism at its best. These leaders were not watering down the Gospel to try to make it acceptable to everyone; they were proclaiming it in the face of a hostile and increasingly violent society. (I do not overlook the fact that it does not condemn artificial contraception.)

Now is the time to speak out against the culture of death. America is falling under the grip of a totalitarian ideology working through the courts, politics and a near monopoly of social communications. As Solzhenitsyn said, the only way to resist violence is with firmness.

TTL

Star Trek

2009-11-30T17:13:00.003-05:00

The recent Star Trek movie "reboots" the popular science fiction series, being both an origin and (through a temporal anomaly which I will not reveal here) redefinition of the crew we love from the original 1960's television series. This is a fun and exciting film which science fiction fans should see.

The film introduces James T. Kirk as a juvenile delinquent (both very juvenile and very delinquent), probably because Kirk's father died shortly after he was born. He finds himself recruited into Starfleet by Captain Pike (a name familiar to real Trekkies), who believes that Kirk has real potential. Pike, of course, is proven correct by the end of the movie.

This film is refreshingly free of the self-righteous anti-morality that made the Next Generation series so obnoxious. Kirk is shown as a womanizer in the early part of the film, but the audience can see that there is something pathetic about it (Kirk consistently fails to get Lt. Uhura's interest). Perhaps one can see this is something that he will grow out of, but Hollywood will probably correct that in the sequels.

This film is great fun and will not ashamed to stand with the even-numbered movies of the past.

TTL

Darwin's God

2009-11-26T17:23:00.003-05:00

Have you ever noticed that, when evolutionists defend evolution, they always talk about religion? I always thought that it was because Darwinism’s real strength is from its role as the atheist creation myth, but Cornelius G. Hunter gives us another suggestion.

In Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Hunter argues that Darwin adopted the theory of evolution through unguided natural selection as a solution to the problem of evil. Darwin was bothered by the waste and cruelty that he saw in nature, and he could not square it with his idea of God. Then, as now, men had the idea of a “nice” God who did not quite match the mysterious and demanding god of Christian revelation. This God liked things neat and clean and simple.

This argument depends on a preconceived notion of the creator. Darwin and his followers argue that God would simply not have designed things the way that they are found. (While reading the book, I found an example of just this reasoning in an article on trilobite eyes. "[To evoke intelligent design] detracts from the idea of an omniscient being. It would have God tinkering with many flawed and suboptimal 'designs' and never developing a perfect one. Who would want to worship a god like that?") .

Darwin, in particular, argued that homologous structures, which are the same between related species even if they are used for different purposes, disprove a special creation. Wouldn’t a creator come up with a new design for each species instead of reusing the same design over and over again? This is an argument that many people find very convincing, but Christians find it rather less so. God did not have to create the universe at all, so why would he have to create it the way the Victorians understood it?

Darwin’s God is valuable reading to anybody who wants to understand the appeal of evolution.

By the way, my own ideas on the argument from homology come from my experience as a computer programmer. I know that there is a great satisfaction in taking a good design and using it in many different ways to show how much potential it has. I have no trouble imagining that God would do the same thing.

TTL

Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T18:41:00.002-05:00

“And where are the other nine?”

Thanksgiving is the time America pauses to thank God for the many benefits He has given us.

In my own life, I would thank God for giving me a wonderful wife and baby boy, a car to drive to work in and a roof over my head. I’m grateful that my parents are still with me, now that I can appreciate all that they have done for me. I thank God for the talents and education that I use to earn my living.

It is harder to do, but I also thank God for all of the trials, sorrows and misfortunes of my life. I know that, however painful these things have been, they are given to us that we may obtain some great good from them.

I thank God for giving me my home town, even if it shares fully in the heartbreak of small-town America; and my wonderful country, even if it is in mortal peril from enemies inside and out.

We must thank God for everything, because we would have nothing without Him. God ordains all things for our good.

Thank you, God. Thank you so much.

TTL

I Sold Another One!

2009-11-25T11:41:00.003-05:00

I sold another item on Zazzle! This one is a key chain with a picture of the Philippine Tarsier, the world's smallest primate (it's not really a monkey). This time, the buyer is paying in British currency.

Philippine Tarsier by EdwardWCole
Browse other Philippine Keychains

I took this picture when I traveled to the Philippines to meet my beloved Mel for the first time.

TTL

"Loving Commentator" Award

2009-11-24T16:55:00.002-05:00

My wife gave me an award for a comment I left on her blog.

Somebody had left a very unchristian comment and I wanted to cheer her up. I said this.

My beloved wife, things do go wrong sometimes, and people can be hurtful and cruel. Sometimes you feel quite worthless and inferior. But you are a good and worthy woman, beautiful and talented, sweet and considerate, and deserving of the very best in everything. You are still the very best thing that has ever come into my life.

Of course, it is all true. My wife is a very special woman, and I am very grateful to have her.

So thank you, dear! you are my heart's ease in this world.

TTL

Problems of Monotheism: Conclusion

2009-11-19T12:30:00.009-05:00

I am continuing my thoughts on the problems of Monotheism. This is the term I use for certain difficulties we encounter when we attempt to understand and relate to the Creator of the universe, particularly once we've come to realize that He is infinitely above us and beyond anything we know in this world.

Deism

As I mentioned last time, this is the idea of a god remote from the cosmos. He created the world, but for some reason has no more interest in it, and certainly none in us. This view is, to a certain extent, cutting God down to the scale of human reason.

A God Above Good and Evil

Some people would say that God, to be truly God, must be above any laws of good and evil. Otherwise, He would be constrained by something outside of Himself, which is a contradiction to His divinity. By this reasoning, He could have commanded us to do evil instead of good. I am told that Wahabbi Islam also tell us that he is free to lie to us.

The Christian teaching is that God is goodness itself; God is Truth and God is Love (see 1 John 4:8 and 4:16). So God cannot be evil, and he certainly cannot lie to us. How this is compatible with a complete freedom we do not know, but we have an inkling of this when we really want to do the right thing, but feel ourselves pulled away from it by fear or other desires.

God is Good.

God is good, but we aren't. Once we come to appreciate His goodness and holiness, we see that we are defiled and wicked, and dare not appear before His face. Would He not rather punish us for our evil than reward us for the little good that we have done in this world? Would it not be reasonable to say with Tacitus that "the gods care not for our safety, but for our punishment"? (Annals , Book I, Introduction v. 3). That is a serious problem for us. God is good, but is He good for us? But Christian revelation teaches that He is not only good, but desires us to be good. God does not desire the death of the sinner, but that he be washed of his sins and become good ... and He gives us the power to do so. I hope that I will make that clearer in the future.

A Jealous God

A common Protestant objection to the honors we give the saints is that we are taking away from God's glory. Among the Muslims also, there is a feeling that God is not truly exalted unless people are crushed under his feet. But we would say that He wants to glorify us as he did Moses, whose face shone so brightly that the people could not look upon it. God is so great and glorious that any merely human honor is nothing compared to him, and as long as we place him first, He wants us to give glory to His heroes as well. (The distinction between doulia and latreia is important here).

This is a brief summary of some false ideas of God. Time does not permit me to continue for now, but I hope to give the reasons for my answers to each idea as time goes by. Glory be to our good and wonderful God!

TTL

Problems of Monotheism: Deism

2009-11-18T11:53:00.004-05:00

We can know much about God through human reason, such as His eternity, omnipotence, omniscience and simplicity. As these facts sink into our minds, we come to realize that there is a tremendous, in fact infinite, gap between God and anything created. This makes us aware of several problems with the way that we relate to Him.

Deism

God created the heavens and the earth, all of the stars and galaxies; can He really care about insignificant creatures like ourselves? Can He even know that we exist? This question gains strength from the suffering we see around us. If God knows, then why doesn't He do something about it?

But we believe that He does hear us; that God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting (John 3:16). This is also implicit in the fact that He holds everything in being.

TTL

Latin High Mass at Saegertown, PA

2009-11-12T12:14:00.000-05:00

My wife posted some video taken at our Latin High Mass in Saegertown, PA on her blog. The choir from Clarion State College sang a mass by Victoria, and this setting of the Salve Regina by a contemporary composer. It was quite beautiful.

Usually, the Mass at Saegertown is a Low Mass with some hymns, but we have a High Mass about once a year on the anniversary of our apostolate.

TTL

Warning to the West

2009-11-09T17:35:00.005-05:00

….And yet we contemplate the West from what will be your future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today. And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all of this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the WestFarrar Straus and Giroux, New York, p. 130)

"It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and
evil....Among progressive people, it is considered rather awkward to use seriously such words as "good" and "evil." Communism has managed to persuade all of us that these concepts are old-fashioned and laughable. But if we are to be deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of one another.” Ibid. pg. 58.

Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West has lost none of its relevance or urgency in the generation since he spoke these words to a British Audience; indeed, the danger that he sees to our freedom and even our identity is much graver then when he spoke those words in 1975 and 1976.
Our society attempts to avert its eyes from the horrors that came out of the Enlightenment, especially in the purest form that it held in the Twentieth Century. Solzhenitsyn’s life work was to expose these crimes, even “from the belly of the dragon,” when he was a prisoner in the The Gulag Archipelago, where he had an unenviable view of the system at its worst.

We forget that the “Evil Empire” is not really gone. Its colonies in Cuba and China have not rejected Marx and still deny the very idea of human rights. Worse, our own country is being drawn into the maw of the beast. America is significantly less free then it was when I was young.
Solzhenitsyn also informed us that there was a growing spiritual liberation behind the Iron Curtain. Could Hollywood produce a film like Tarkovsky’s Stalker? That is the real hope for America and for the West; can we receive a new heart without enduring the chastisement that the Russians have suffered?

Warning to the West is essential reading today, even more than when the warning was originally given.

TTL

We Must Never Forget

2009-11-07T14:10:00.004-05:00

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, of which it was a part. We must never forget that half of the world was a vast prison camp, guarded by machine gunners who had written orders to kill anybody who might go near the border, including women and children.

We must remember that this monumental crime against humanity was only the outer skin of a horrible tyranny. Inside of their borders, the Marxists committed murder on a vast scale. To take two examples, they created a man-made famine in Ukraine, which killed millions, and they slaughtered the entire Polish army in cold blood at the Katyn Forest. In the cities, the K.G.B. would arrest people in the middle of the night and torture them so that they would accuse their friends and relations of counterrevolutionary activity. They didn’t care that none of it was true; they had a quota to fill.

It is, perhaps more important to remember that the governments of the west, including many in the press, were always willing to look the other way when the communists showed their true face. There were always spies and traitors, such as Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, when needed. The press covered up the Ukrainian famine, and Hollywood avoided portraying them as the villains.

All of these are well-known facts. We are told that it is somehow crude and vulgar to notice these things, but that is a false sensibility. Nobody felt the need to cover up Hitler’s atrocities. Why should Lenin receive any gentler treatment?

If we forget what threatened to overwhelm us in those dark days, we may find ourselves in the same chains. It is amazing to see how America has changed in these twenty years. Our schools rigidly exclude any mention of God or Christendom, through fear of left-wing lawsuits. The government freely subsidizes blasphemous art and literature, but says that a cross on public property violates “separation of church and state.” People have learned the habit of censoring themselves to conform to the speech codes of the left, and if they won’t do it, they will face trouble at their universities and workplaces. Our America is in grave danger of becoming what we resisted in the last century.

Sold Another One!

2009-11-06T08:57:00.003-05:00

I sold another item at Zazzle.

Philippine Tarsier by EdwardWCole
Design custom t-shirts at zazzle

It's a tee shirt with a photograph of a Philippine Tarsier that I took on my first trip to the Philippines (to see my future wife). The Tarsier is the world's smallest living primate, which lives on Bohol; you see its face everywhere you go in that province.

That brings my all-time total art earnings up to $4.93!

TTL

Philip Feeney's Dracula

2009-11-03T17:15:00.003-05:00

The radio station woke me and my wife on Halloween morning with a rather ominous piece of music, which turned out to be the prelude to Philip Feeny's Ballet version of Dracula. I had never heard of him before, but the prologue was so taken by the prologue that I had to look into this.

Naxos has a name for producing high-quality recordings at a low cost. This item is certainly reasonably priced.

Dracula has been a tired-old staple for so many years in Hollywood, so we tend to forget that Bram Stoker's classic novel is an exciting and riveting story. The vampire in the novel is truly a terrifying supernatural creature, not just a misunderstood foreign guy with an extra chromosome.

TTL

2009-10-31T12:57:00.002-04:00

Morality cannot be arbitrary, because the moral law binds you in reality, so that if you violate it, you are a bad man and truly deserving of punishment.

For instance, if I were to drink and gamble away my salary and neglect the needs of my wife and son, I would be morally bad. This is because it is particularly the duty of the father of the family to provide for his brood. If you look further, you will see that there are many reasons for this obligation, such as the fact that my son is completely helpless even after five months in this world. In the same way, every real moral obligation is based on some good to be preserved or evil to be avoided.

You cannot choose your own morality. The moral law is above us, and we can’t change it. We cannot make something which is evil into something morally acceptable any more than we can decide to breathe water and live in the bottom of a lake. We cannot make our own moral law; the only thing we can do is to learn it as well as we can.

Because morality is based on reality, we are able to know it through our own human reason, and we can argue logically about what is right and what is wrong. This science is what we call Ethics.

Most importantly, because the moral law is based upon truth and goodness, it is itself good and worthy of our love. It can be hard and unyielding, but still a reason for rejoicing.

TTL

The Moral Law

2009-10-28T12:11:00.003-04:00

The heart of the moral law is the axiom “Do good and avoid evil.” Without this, there is no way to go from the indicative mood to the imperative. Without this key, you can prove that something is evil, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it.

Implicit in this axiom is the fact that the distinction between good and evil is very real and very important. Good is something that must be done and evil is something that must be avoided.

Today, most people seem to believe the lie that there is nothing good or evil of itself and “good” and “evil” are meaningless words. This is a dangerous situation because these people are easily manipulated through their emotions and are unable to think about what is truly the right or wrong thing to do.

TTL

Christ the King

2009-10-25T07:13:00.001-04:00

Today is the feast of Christ the King in the traditional calendar (the one which is relevant to me). Jesus Christ is the rightful ruler of heaven and earth. The horrors of the twentieth century (wars more terrible than any known before, genocide, totalitarianism, etc.) and the French Revolution and its evil brood come from rebellion against the rightful King.

Regnat Christus!

TTL

America in the eyes of a Russian

2009-10-23T17:07:00.003-04:00

I liked what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said about America in his Warning to the West. (There is also a partial copy on Google Books.)

....The United States has long shown itself to be the most magnanimous, the most generous country in the world. Wherever there is a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a natural disaster, an epidemic, who is the first to help? The United States. Who helps the most and unselfishly? The United States.

And what do we hear in reply? Reproaches, curses, "Yankee Go Home." American cultural centers are burned, and representatives from the Third World jump on tables to vote against the United States at the U.N. (Warning to the West, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 1976, p. 27)

We forget that America is, at heart, a good country, even if our government and the official organs of our society behave more and more like the evil tyranny that Solzhenitsyn exposed in his writing. May God save America from the toxic Hollywood culture and bring our hearts back to Him.

I love America.

TTL

The Sacraments

2009-10-22T17:12:00.004-04:00

The "sacramental principle" is that God can and does use material things to impart spiritual benefits. It might seem strange and unjustifiable to those who realize that spirit is far above matter and no material thing has, of itself, the power to raise us above our nature, but God created the material world, and He can work through it if He so chooses.

The most important instances of the sacramental principle are the seven sacraments.

The Baltimore Catechism defines a sacrament as an "outward sign, instituted by Christ, to give grace." Each of these combines a certain matter, usually a material object, with certain words and actions (the form) performed by a certain person (the minister). The virtue of each sacrament is the work of Jesus Christ, so it does not depend on the sanctity of the human minister, as long as he properly administers it (ex opere operato). This is extremely important, because you can be confident that the Sunday Mass at your parish is truly the Body and Blood of Christ without hiring private detectives to follow your pastor around the rest of the week.

In each case, you must take care to receive them with the proper dispositions.

* Baptism - Makes you a son of God and a member of the Church.

* Confession - Takes away the sins commited after Baptism

* The Holy Eucharist - The Body and Blood of Christ

* Confirmation - Makes you an adult in the spiritual life.

* Matrimony - Gives a man and his wife the graces they need to live the married life.

* Holy Orders - Enables a man to act "in persona Christi"; this gives us deacons, priests, and bishops.

* Extreme Unction - This sacrament is an aid for the dying. It can also help the sick return to health.

Sacramentals

The name "sacramental" is applied to material things other than the Sacraments that are used to give us grace; holy water and the rosary fall into this category. These differ from the sacraments in that it they have their effect through the devotion of the person using them (ex opere operantis), whereas the Sacraments have the effect through their own power, as long as you receive them with the right dispositions.

This concludes my outline on why it is great to be a Catholic. I might add an appendix on the dangers that we are protected from.

It is great to be a Catholic!

TTL

God's Friends

2009-10-20T12:02:00.006-04:00

I return to the outline of my "Great to be Catholic" series with a look at God's friends. Yesterday would have been a good day to talk about the saints, if I didn't have some more pressing business, because it is Mother Theresa day in Albania. Mother Theresa is a spectacular example of friendship with God, who stunned the world in our days with her love. And she is one of a great many saints.

Baptism doesn't just make you a son of God, but it also incorporates you into a much bigger family.

First, you get to know Mary, the woman He chose to be His mother. Nobody else from the beginning to the end of time will have such an intimate relationship with the Creator, and nobody deserves it more. But she is not just the mother of God (a controversial title, but true), she is our mother, given to us from the Cross. Mary is our help in every trouble, a truly loving mother.

We are also tied in with the saints of all ages. In a loose sense, this term includes everybody who is in a state of grace, but it primarily means those who have shown a heroic sanctity in their lives. I mentioned Mother Theresa, but there are so many more, such as St. Damien of Molokai, St. Vincent de Paul, Padre Pio.

There are the wayfarers, you and I, who are far from perfect, but struggling to be good. We know and, to some extent, love each other as brothers in Christ.

There are those departed souls who lived imperfect lives, who have to undergo a purification before they can be admitted to heaven. These souls in purgatory look to us for prayers and help in shortening their stay there.

And don't forget the angels. These are great friends to us, mighty in power and zealous for our salvation.

Catholics know that the Church is more than just the visible body of faithful united under the Pope. The saints in heaven and the holy souls in Purgatory are joined to us in the "Communion of Saints," which means that we are all one body.

Glory be to God for giving us the saints!

TTL

Happy Birthday to my Wife!

2009-10-19T12:10:00.003-04:00

My wife celebrates her birthday today, the third once since we were married. It is a wonderful time to think what a gift God has given to me in her. You can say it with scripture: Proverbs 31:10-12.

¹⁰ A wife of noble character who can find?
She is worth far more than rubies.

¹¹ Her husband has full confidence in her
and lacks nothing of value.

¹² She brings him good, not harm,
all the days of her life.

Mel's friends and family never understood that her inner beauty was too great to be enhanced by the latest fashions (which leave little to the imagination, even in the Philippines) or expensive clothes, but I saw that. And I am very glad that she came into the world.

Happy birthday, dear! I love you!

TTL

Pictures of my son...

2009-10-15T12:48:00.002-04:00

My wife posted some recent photos of our son on her blog. It is amazing to see how this unique person has been unfolding since his birth; and yet, that is one of the most ordinary things in life. God is good.

TTL

The End of Darwinism, by Eugene G. Windchy

2009-10-13T12:22:00.005-04:00

If I were to give a one sentence summary of Eugene G. Windchy's The End of Darwinism, seems to be more about the beginning of Darwinism, it would be that Darwinism has never lived the life of a scientific theory; Darwinism has always preferred the paths of political manipulation, intimidation, and dishonesty.

The book starts with Darwin and his circle of friends, who used their political connections and influence to bring their supporters into power in the Parliament and the British scientific organizations, and works forward in time.

He discusses the embryological fraud perpretated by Ernst Haeckel (one of the most fervent promoters of evolution in Europe), where he drew the developing embryos of a diverse set of creatures to show that the higher creatures resemble the lower ones in their development. The problem is, that they do not resemble each other that much, and he altered their appearance to fit his theory. This fraud continues to be used in textbooks today, over a century since it was first exposed. Haeckel, by the way, laid the ideological foundation for the racial theories of the National Socialist Workers' Party, which became important in the 1930's.

Another example of the fraud used by the evolutionists is the image of the Scopes Monkey Trial presented in Inherit the Wind. This play, and the movies based on it, are supposed to be based on the real events, but it is significantly different in every detail from the events in Dayton, Tennessee. Darwinism lives by portraying its critics as simple buffoons incapable of serious, scientific thought (the ad hominem fallacy) or as covert fundamentalists (the genitive fallacy).

The book also discusses the intimidation that people in academics and scientific disciplines face if they should dare to question the dogma. If you publicly criticize evolution, you are in danger of losing your job or career path (Many cases of this were shown in Ben Stein's documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed).

The fact that this theory, which seems so confident in itself, refuses to argue with its opponents, suggests that there is a real fear that it will not stand up to close examination. In view of the dreadful social and moral corollaries, such as Naziism, Social Darwinism, racism, and eugenics, perhaps this is a good time to start asking those awkward questions.

TTL

I Sold Another One!

2009-10-13T12:15:00.003-04:00

I sold another product on Zazzle.

Baby Boy Binder by EdwardWCole
More Baby Binders

This brings the earnings from my art career to $3.45!

TTL

Knowing God

2009-10-12T11:54:00.005-04:00

God is the central reality in the universe, and your ideas of God affect everything you do in your life, whether you know it or not. We need to know God as He truly is in order to live our life well. And here is some good news: God is wonderful.

God is good. He is not the distant, uninterested prime mover of the Deists. No, He is passionately in love with righteousness and truth and desires to make us good.

God is love. This is no mere platitude. Only Christians understand that love is part of God's being.

God is our father. We take these words for granted, but this is not just a warm and comforting phrase. It is actually a controversial and extremely bold assertion.

God is all-knowing and all-powerful. He knows us personally and can make His will felt in our lives.

I will have more to say on these things in future posts. God bless everyone!

TTL

Loboc River Mug

2009-10-08T13:29:00.004-04:00

I decided I'd try a little fancier mug design today.

Loboc River Mug by EdwardWCole

Hindemith's Piano Sonatas

2009-10-08T12:11:00.010-04:00

The Twentieth Century might not have been the best era for music. A lot of good talent was wasted (in many people's opinion) on music that grates on the ears. I am speaking specifically of the atonality which we associate with Arnold Schoenberg and his followers. I enjoy Schoenberg's music, myself, but I will not deny that it is most unpleasant to the casual listener.

One of the good things in Twentieth-Century music is a revival of interest in polyphony. Schoenberg's adoption of serial composition is an example of this, even if it avoids the intricacies of the harmonic relationships which he rejected.

A stronger example can be found in Paul Hindemith's three piano sonatas. These works are complex in their melodies and much more in line with traditional tonality (though it's hard for me to judge that, as I'm used to modern music). These three sonatas are rich. They are like a book that you must read three or four times just to learn the plot and the characters, and then you can return to it again and again without exhausting it.

Currently, the only copy I have is the recording by Glenn Gould, which is excellent. Gould was devoted to polyphony, so Hindemith was exactly the kind of music that he would play. But he was rather eccentric, at least in the sense that he made the music his own, and perhaps different from the composer's original intention. For that reason, you might want another performance, such as Kalle Randalu's recording.

Whatever recording you can get your hands on, this music is excellent and will reward all of the time and effort you give it.

TTL

2009-10-07T17:30:00.002-04:00

Zazzle now offers ring binders. Here's one that I designed with the Loboc River in Bohol. We ate on the floating restaurant there on my first trip to the Philippines.

Loboc River Binder by EdwardWCole

TTL

October 7: The Most Holy Rosary

2009-10-07T11:59:00.008-04:00

October 7 is the Feast of the Most Holy Rosary, which commemorates the Battle of Lepanto. This battle, fought in 1571, was a decisive reverse for the Ottoman Empire, which, in that day, seemed invincible.

Pope Pius V, the tireless reformer of the Catholic Reformation, pulled together a fragile alliance of Spain and the Italian states. Seeing the desperate need for victory and the desparate nature of the contest, he called for a rosary crusade across Europe. It is said that he knew of the victory in the hour that it occurred, even though the battle was hundreds of miles away from Rome.

G.K. Chesterton captured the mood of this life-and-death struggle between two worlds in his epic poem about the battle.

TTL

Windows Implementation of the Unix "which" Command

2009-10-05T12:13:00.018-04:00

The Windows command line has improved a great deal since the MS-DOS days, but it still lacks many of the tools that a Unix programmer would be familiar with. In particular, a Windows version of the which command would be very useful.

Microsoft adopted one of the better Unix ideas for its Windows operating systems, which is the search path. That is a system variable that lists a number of directories (or folders, in the GUI terminology) that it expects to find program files in. When you type a command at the command line, it will look for an executable file of the same name in those directories and start the first one it comes across.

For example, if you have Microsoft Office installed on your system and on your path, you can start Microsoft word by typing the following:

winword your_document.doc

if you type "which winword", you should get the following:

c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE

But there is an added wrinkle. In Unix, a file is executable if it has a flag set in its directory entry, but in Windows, it is executable if it has an extension that the operating system recognizes. Therefore, Windows has a second path variable, PATHEXT. This variable lists the different extensions that it will check when trying to execute the file. Thus, a Windows version of the which command cannot just look at the path, it must also take the PATHEXT variable into account.

Here is my perl implementation of a Windows which command; I hope that you will find it useful.

The usual disclaimers apply. Use this code at your own risk, and I cannot and will not be held liable for any harm, damages, hair loss , or abduction by aliens that might result from using the code. In particular, I make no guarantee that it will work under all circumstances (though I've been using it for a few years and it seems to work just fine).

#! /usr/bin/perl
###########################################################
# which.pl -- tell us which program is being executed when 
# you type a command at the CMD.EXE command line.
###########################################################
# First, show a help message if requested.
my $usage = <<USAGE;

which [--help] <commandName>

Give the directory and name of the file that is executed 
when you run the command.

    --help - display this message
    <commandName>  The name of the program

USAGE

if (@ARGV[0] =~ /--help/i) {
    die $usage;
} 

# Get the name of the command we will search for.
my $command = shift;
# Now, get the PATH from windows (it might be easier to
#    take the path from the environment variable, but this
#    is how I did it first).
my $path = `path`;
chomp $path;
$path =~ s/^PATH=//;
my @path = split ";", $path;
# @path now holds the list of directories in the search 
#     path, in order.
my $pathExt = `set pathext`;
# The Windows PATHEXT variable is a list of file extensions
#    in the order that they will be used.
chomp $pathExt;
$pathExt =~ s/^PATHEXT=//;
my @pathExt = split ";", uc $pathExt;
# Check to see if we have an extension specified in the 
#     input; if so, we ignore all other file types.
$baseCommand = $command;
if ($command =~ m/(.*)(\.[^\.]*)$/) {
    #print "blob's extension = $1.;\n";
    @pathExt = ((uc $2));
    $baseCommand = $1;
}
  
# Now, to do the real work.  We go to each directory in 
#    turn and see if there is a matching program.
foreach my $dir (@path) {
    $dir =~ s/\\$//;
    # Go through the extensions on the PATHEXT list 
    #    and see if there is a match.
    foreach my $ext (@pathExt) {
 my $srch = "$dir\\$baseCommand$ext";
        if (-e $srch) {
            # The file is found, use the Windows shell to 
            #     print it neatly.
     print `echo off & for \%f in ("$srch") do echo \%~ff`;
            exit;   # Only print the first one.
}
    }
}

Best of wishes to all of you programmers out there.

TTL

Improvement of this World

2009-10-03T12:58:00.002-04:00

Catholicism has made the world a better place.

On a material level, we have seen the creation of hospitals, orphanages, and other charitable social institutions. We have also seen the mitigation of wars (which have, in contrast, become increasingly savage and horrible as the Christian influence on our society fades).

Consider also the enormous cultural achievements of Christendom. There are the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages; there was the discovery of the secrets of harmony and counterpoint in music. There are great triumphs in literature and philosophy, such as Dante's Divine Comedy.

Catholicism aided philosophy by giving a solid foundation for the belief in human reason. In particular, through the doctrines of the Creation and the Incarnation, it gave birth to science as we know it today.

Perhaps the biggest improvement to this world is through the saints. Mother Theresa, for instance, contributed more to the happiness of the world than all of the politicians and celebrities of the 20th century put together. This can be seen on a smaller level as well. Millions of people in every city are animated by the idea that even the poor are our brothers, and that we are accountable to Christ for the way that we treat our neighbor. They are driven by His assertion that whatsoever you do to the least of our brothers, you do it unto Him. If the harmony of Christ reigns in your household, it is a pleasant place to be; and no amount of sex or booze or drugs can create an environment as happy as that.

TTL

Not all Advice is Good.

2009-10-03T12:50:00.001-04:00

TTL

2009-10-02T12:21:00.004-04:00

I added a new product to my Zazzle store today. I haven't done that for a while.

"God made the world beautiful" Bag by EdwardWCole
Make a customizable bag using zazzle

(I didn't feel like doing any writing today :-) )

One thing I noticed when I was in Bohol was that the stones there are different from the ones here. They have whorls and holes in them, while ours have smooth, flat layers. I think that their stones come from coral.

TTL

October 1: The Holy Protection of the Theotokos

2009-10-01T11:37:00.005-04:00

The Byzantine feast of the Holy Protection of the Theotokos has meant a lot to me since my graduate school days, when I belonged to the Byzantine Catholic parish of that name in Morgantown, West Virginia.

The feast celebrates the protection that Mary, the mother of God, extends to all of her children (which Jesus Christ gave to her from the cross (John 19:26)); a fact that we should remember when things are going badly. In particular, the feast celebrates an occasion where Constantinople was delivered from a Russian fleet, and St. Andrew, Fool for Christ, had a vision of the Blessed Virgin interceding for the people and covering the city with her mantle.

This feast reminds us of the Latin feast of the Most Holy Rosary, which commemorates a military deliverance 700 years later, and occurs within a week of the Holy Protection.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, remember your children in this turbulent world, and cover us with your mantle.

TTL

Movie Review -- Coraline

2009-09-30T17:01:00.009-04:00

Coraline is a creepy stop-motion film about a girl who finds a door in her old house, which opens into another world where her "Other Mother" and "Other Father" are waiting for her. They are just like her real parents, but have buttons where their eyes should be. The "other" parents seem much more loving and attentive than Coraline's real parents, who are struggling to finish their catalog before the deadline. Everything in the other world seems wonderful at first, but something seems wrong, and we learn that it is all a trap for Coraline. This film is great fun.

I don't know the author's intentions, but the film shows Coraline using a dowsing rod before the trouble begins, and, a little later, having her tea leaves read by the aging actors who live in the basement of the house. Dabbling in the occult strips us of the protection we normally have from evil spirits. Parents who let their children watch this film might want to point that out to the kids.

This film was very well done, and I recommend it.

TTL

The Catholic Church as a Moral Teacher - Part 3

2009-09-29T12:02:00.004-04:00

The other compelling feature of Catholic moral teaching is that it is based on reality. There is always a compelling reason for a given law, in the form of some good thing that it preserves or some evil that it prevents. Thus, rather than being a barrier to happiness, the moral law is a guide rail that keeps us from making our own lives miserable.

Is the Catholic life joyless and burdened by countless rules and a heavy guilt that covers everything? That is the popular view and what you see on television.

If you set your heart on something that is forbidden, then yes. Deep down, you know that it is wrong and your conscience gnaws at you. You can lull your conscience into a stupor, but any little thing may wake it up.

If, on the other hand, you try to live the moral law, you feel free. The law only forbids things that you know are bad for you. As St. Augustine said, "Love, then do as you will."

Everybody wants to be good, but most people discover that it is difficult, and settle for thinking themselves good. That is choosing comfort over a clean conscience, but a false conscience is very uncomfortable. That is probably what the press is talking about when they use the phrase, "catholic guilt," if it is not pure invention. In reality, Catholicism is the most guilt-free life, because we have sacramental confession, which removes the burden of guilt from us and gives us a new beginning. Thank God for that!

TTL

The Catholic Church as a Moral Teacher - Part 2

2009-09-28T11:42:00.006-04:00

As I said in part 1, the Catholic Church is the kind of teacher that will tell you the truth whether you like it or not. She cannot be bribed or coerced, as history shows.

Consider, for instance, the case of Henry VIII, where the Church suffered the loss of a whole nation rather than allow the king to throw over his wife.

Another example is the Church's stand on contraception. "Stand" is the right word, because the Church has stood firm against the pressures of society and an attempted revolution from the inside, while every other Christian body has given way on this point.

Different societies and ages have had different distortions of morality, or popular sins, but the Church has always taught the same thing.

TTL

National Punctuation Day

2009-09-25T12:07:00.005-04:00

Mark Scott Abeln, the author of Rome of the West, a blog that I like to follow, tells us that Thursday was National Punctuation Day. Many of us have noticed the sharp decline in correct usage in recent years. Not only do college graduates murder their punctuation, but, today, even college employees do it.

I have a half-theory that the formation of new languages comes with a collapse of education. The Latin language, for instance, held its own from the founding to the city until the collapse of the west a thousand years later. But in a few centuries of turmoil and cultural disruption, it transformed into a family of incompatible tongues. The same seems to be happening today.

Please check out the page on the apostrophe. That's the most annoying and consistent punctuational sin today. And always check your grammar and spelling; it might be the only thing keeping our civilization from total collapse.

TTL

The Catholic Church as a Moral Teacher - Part 1

2009-09-24T12:03:00.013-04:00

To many people, the number one obstacle to accepting the Catholic Church is its moral teaching. Everybody knows that Catholics are not allowed to use artificial contraception or to abort their babies; Catholics must stay with one spouse throughout their lives and are forbidden to enjoy their sexuality in any way outside of marriage. What's more they are burdened (people say) with the unnatural practices of celibacy and fasting. In the same way, the Church arbitrarily prevents the enjoyment of all of the cardinal sins.

There are two things you might seek in a moral teacher. You might want to know the truth, what is the right thing to do in your life, and to know where you fail to measure up and need to make painful changes in your life. Or you might want one who will commend you for being a good person and excuse or ignore the things that you know are wring in your life, but are unwilling to change. The first bids you to come to the light and face a strict examination, while the second tries to shield you from the light: "men loved darkness rather than light" (John 3:19). The Catholic Church is of the first type.

It is true that most parishes today work on the second model. You could assist at Sunday Mass in the average American parish for a year without hearing any teaching on contraception or homosexuality; for the priest knows that his flock will complain to the bishop and he could be disciplined for speaking the truth. There have been such cases. The scandal of self-styled "Catholic" politicians who promote abortion with no censure or rebuke is another prominent example of this.

It is true that a large part of the Catholics in America, especially the clergy, are anxious to avoid challenging the moral inversion of modern society, but they know, and most of the people in the pews know, that they are selling a cheap imitation of Catholicism, which still officially teaches the same morality it has always taught. [In my humble opinion, the "new" church is dying out; perhaps I will live to see it disappear completely.] This perennial teaching is what I mean when I talk about the Catholic moral law.

TTL

Why is it Great to be Catholic?

2009-09-22T12:11:00.011-04:00

It is hard to list all of the reasons that it is great to be Catholic, because there are so many. But one might start with the following categories:

The Moral Law: Many people see the Catholic moral teaching as a terrible yoke that takes the joy out of life. But it is really a great liberation and joy; "For my yoke is sweet and my burden light." (Matt. 11:30)
Improvement of this World: No institution has improved life in this world as much as the Catholic Church.
Knowing God: God is wonderful. Only the Christian Revelation shows Him as He truly is.
God's Friends: The true heroes of the faith are more than history book material. They live in God and know us through their sight of him.
The Sacraments: The Sacraments are the seven channels of pure water flowing from the side of the temple. Each one of them elevates man and gives him new life.

One could write a book about each of these topics, and, God willing, I will start it here in future posts. And, of course, none of this would be of any value if it weren't true (which it is).

A.M.D.G.
TTL

It's Great to be Catholic

2009-09-21T12:48:00.006-04:00

Many people think that being Catholic must be a very unhappy state of life. They think that Catholics are bound by heavy and unreasonable laws, living under the thumbs of tyrannical priests and bishops. They think that we are subject to unnatural repressions of our reproductive urges or (if their images are taken from the anti-Catholic propaganda from the Reformation or the media coverage of the recent sex scandals), that they are actually victims of secret and unnatural lust; the more enterprising of people will believe both at the same time.

The truth is quite different. Being Catholic, if you accept the faith of the Church and try to live by it, is a wonderful thing. Catholics are as free as anybody can be, because the Catholic Church does not forbid anything that is not truly harmful or require anything that is not truly necessary for our well-being. It is my purpose (and the primary theme of this blog) to explain this and demonstrate that it is so, to both believer and unbeliever. The unbeliever will, of course, disagree with many of the things that will be said here, but I ask that he keep his mind open; in exchange, I will try to address his concerns first and try to hold his interest as long as I can.

Many of the things I say will apply to other Christians as well, because all kinds of Christianity, by definition, share some part of the Gospel preached by Jesus Christ and His Apostles.

Big Man Japan

2009-09-18T17:10:00.012-04:00

Big Man Japan is a wickedly funny comedy in the form of a documentary. The documentary delves into the life of Daisato ("Big" Sato) , the last of the warriors who are enlarged to giant size through electricity so that they can fight the monsters who bother Japan.

We learn that Sato is a wretched man. He is poor, his wife left him, and he only sees his daughter once a month. In addition, the public hates him and considers him more harm than good. He's fat and uses too much electricity.

We learn that Big Man Japan's grandfather was big, popular, and well-paid in his day, but all of the electricity left him demented and living in a nursing home. One beautiful aspect of the film is the care that Daisato has for his grandfather; we learn that the elderly are not useless and they deserve our respect.

This film is full of subtle humor, and it should reward a second viewing. I would advise parental discretion, especially in the scene with the Stink Monsters, but, on the whole, the film is not opposed to good morals. Some viewers might be turned off by the amount of talk (which is necessary for the format) and the fact that the film is in Japanese with English subtitles, but it is well worth the effort.

Hooray!

2009-09-17T12:30:00.006-04:00

I've sold my first products from Zazzle! I only got about two dollars, but it is a breakthrough for me.

Baby Delivery Stork Stamps by EdwardWCole
Design custom postage at zazzle