North Western Winds

These two articles are very interesting, especially when you compare them. Action - hypothesis: Americanism is Puritanism in our time, and as such it sees the US as the new Israel. This is a valuable idea. Only a puritan mind calls for a "war" on things like drugs or terror. I don't like those things either but the word "war" seems more than a little hyperbolic. If Americanism is the end-stage of political Puritanism, which in turn was the yearning to live in contact with God as a citizen of God’s new Israel, what is its creed? The idea of an “American creed” has been around for a long time. Huntington lists its elements as “liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property.” I prefer a different formulation: a conceptual triangle in which one fundamental fact creates two premises that create three conclusions. The fundamental fact: the Bible is God’s word. Two premises: first, every member of the American...

Brandon at Sirius has done up a little introduction to Sikhism . I was glad to read it and learn a bit about my neighbors. Here in Abbotsford, Sikhs are the second largest part of the population after the Christians (according to the Wikkipedia ). The division is about 61% to 13%. That doesn't sound like a lot, but plenty of the farms here are run by Sikhs and there is a large temple in the downtown as well. The Wikkipedia also says it is the oldest Sikh temple in North America.

Sancta Sanctis has a brilliant quote from G.K. Chesteron and, very interestingly, offers up the idea that George Orwell may have been a Chesterton fan .

I don't write about television much, mostly because it is an escape for me. I don't take it too seriously. I do, however watch some. I like - not surprisingly, given the focus of this blog - shows dealing with ethical ideas crashing into reality. I like Law and Order , and its spin off Special Victims Unit . The other spin off, Criminal Intent, is too formulaic for my tastes. I also like Third Watch and have been enjoying Lost . I have seen small parts of past seasons of 24 , but never got into it in a big way. This past weekend a new season of 24 began and thus far I'm inclined to say I might stick this one out. My only gripe so far is that there is too much infighting in Keifer Sutherland's anti terrorism unit. Teams don't fight among themselves like that when the heat is on. (when it's off, that's a different story). While watching the opening episodes I wondered what form the flak from the American Muslim community would take. There was never any doub...

Writing in The Western Standard , Father Raymond DeSouza tries to find something positive in " the bottom of the canyon ": Recognizing homosexual unions as marriages means, in principle, that marriage has nothing to do with the natural order of sexual differentiation and the procreation of children. That’s not a slippery slope. That’s the bottom of the canyon. Here [however] is promising ground for family policy reform. Now that there are no “barriers” to marriage for anyone, why not advance an agenda that seeks to strengthen marriage across the board? The best place to start will be to remove the equivalent-to-marriage treatment given now to common-law couples, whether opposite-sex or same-sex. The rise of common-law unions as equivalent to marriage has greatly weakened the incentive to marry and make permanent commitments. Now that we are all agreed that marriage is a good thing--so good that even homosexuals must have it--why not move ahead to restrict the benefits of ...

Q: "Have you ever in your career had a surgical abortion where the whole fetus came out without collapsing its skull?" A: "Yes, it has happened five to ten times, during the gestational age of sixteen to twenty-four weeks." Q: "If a woman was seeking an abortion, would it be a concern that the intact fetus could live?" A: "Yes, especially if the fetus was the gestational age of twenty to twenty-four weeks." ... The abortionist's testimony indicated that although the Plaintiffs continue to claim that there are health benefits from removing an intact fetus, and that a more dilated cervix is safer than a less dilated cervix, the abortionists intentionally reduce dilation in order to ensure that the fetal head does not come out, because then they would have a live birth instead of a termination. This is testimony from the partial birth abortion ban trial in the U.S. right now. Another article describing abortion procedures is here : ...

My folder of things I might post about is getting full. So I'm going to just share some of them. The Maverick Philosopher has a fascinating post up containing quotes from well known scientist Richard Lewontin and philosopher Thomas Nagel (Lewontin is a well known name in evolutionary debates) in which they recognize that science does not pre-suppose naturalism, but that they personally embrace it and use their scientific background to argue for it because they judge that to be the right thing to do. Wow. Thinking about Islam is very depressing. See here , here , and here . David Frum makes a great point here : The more children a woman has, the more dependent she is on the man in her life -- and the more vulnerable she is. Marriage laws that make marriage insecure together make child-bearing an increasingly dangerous choice for women. Many women respond by postponing child-bearing until they feel economically secure, until their middle or late 30s. But women who wait so ...

My critical comments on the Ivory Tower yesterday prompted some comments from readers and more thought from me. Thomas Sowell picks on the problems of the mainstream academy: our colleges and universities are content with whole departments consisting solely of people ranging from the left to the far left. In academia, "diversity" in practice too often means simply white leftists, black leftists, female leftists and Hispanic leftists... A student can spend four years at many colleges and universities and graduate with no real awareness of any other viewpoints than those on the left. College and university faculties do not simply happen to be leftist. Too often ideological questions are asked at faculty job interviews and ideological litmus tests are applied in hiring. One reason for the prominence of conservative think tanks is that so many top scholars who are not leftists do not find a home in academia and go to work for think tanks instead. Sowell ough...

My wife directed me to this quiz about how your brain processes information. It's basically a look at learning styles. The short of it is, I'm more unbalanced than she is . I'm sure she knew it too. ****** Auditory : 68% Visual : 31% Left : 58% Right : 41% Curt, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance. You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in. By and large, you w...

There's a new song on the radio that I like. The fella's name is Andy Griggs . If Heaven If heaven was an hour, it would be twilight When the fireflies start dancin on the lawn And suppers on the stove and mammas laughin And everybody’s workin day is done If heaven was a town it would be my town Oh…on a summer day in 1985 And everything I wanted is out there waiting And everyone I loved is still alive Chorus : Don’t cry a tear for me now baby There comes a time we all must say goodbye And if that’s what heavens made of You know I, I ain’t afraid to die If heaven was a pie it would be cherry So, Cool and sweet and heavy on the tongue And just one bite would satisfy your hunger And there’d always be enough for everyone If heaven was a train it sure would be a fast one that could take this weary traveler round the bend if heaven was a tear it'd be my last one And you’d be in my arms again repeat Chorus

Only in the U.S. you say? Pity. The Tiger in Winter is a fun read. Ben's always got interesting things to report from the university scene. The other day he remarked on how it is easier to find openly conservative students on an American campus than a Canadian. I greatly suspect that is true, although I'm inclined to think our cousins to the south might be taking a turn for the better. In some corners, at least. I have not been a university student since I left Simon Fraser University in about 1993 or so. I got a B.A. in five years - not because I was lazy or I toured Europe in order to 'find myself' (or some such bumf) - but because I finished with two majors and a minor and no debts. I had some help from home and I worked part time for almost the duration. When I was done I considered an M.A. in English Lit. I decided to upgrade with a few courses first and abandoned the project after the first course. This was the course in Literary Criticism in which my prof...

In response to my second excerpt from C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters , Babbling Brooks wrote up a nice post (which takes up scarcity from an economic angle that I'm not likely to cover anytime soon but which is quite valid) and tells us, as he winds up, that: I'm not a religious man, partly because I've always found organized religion falls back on fear all too quickly to motivate good behavior. Fire and brimstone, the wrath of God, and bad little boys go to hell - not my idea of spiritual inspiration. But I do believe in God. I want to take this up because it is a very common perception of Christian doctrine, as is the idea that Heaven is escapist, which I attempted to deal with here . People ought to be excused for thinking that judgment is a negative because there do seem to be churches that teach it that way. There are other interpretations, however, and once again I'll use Lewis to make the point - he's so much better at this than I am. The selection t...

I'm happy to say that there is no shortage of things to write about or people to debate with. I have been fighting off a strange cold since last Thursday and am happy to say that I seem to be well on the way out of it now. While I was under its spell I had my energy sapped, but the stranger thing is that my mind was a bit out of focus, like a camera in which someone has smeared vaseline around the edges of the lens. Uck. I made do with a bit from Lewis' Screwtape Letters , and I managed to get out one post that I'd been wanting to get off my chest for a long time - that was the one about The Prisoner's Dilemma as the common wisdom in some circles and it's iterated version as the more real model, and how that better model ties into traditional Christian views quite well. I now have, however, a number of things I'd like to attend to: Timmy the G has asked me about David Horowitz. As in, how can I stand him? Andrew has posted about the syllogism I...

Screwtape on Love and Trinity John Ray didn't find my comments on Arianism vs. the Trinity to be clear or helpful. I doubt this will help either (I was never really optimistic about that; I freely admit to being an amateur philosopher and novice Bible reader). From here, the stumbling block appears to be an unwillingness to acknowledge that not everything may be knowable, and/or an unwillingness to view the concept with an eye towards it's artistic merits. Put another way, the parables of Jesus need not be literally true. The truth of the teaching is not compromised by the use of parable. C.S. Lewis touches on the matter in The Screwtape Letters and so I'll leave readers with that to look over. For those new to Screwtape, he is a devil sending letters of advice to his Nephew Wormwood, a young devil struggling to corrupt the soul of an Englishman: My dear Wormwood, ... The Enemy's demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence o...

Two bloggers worth reading - Poretto and Burgess Jackson 1) Presumption and Naturalism Francis Porretto has an interesting post up today at Eternity Road. It's hard to grab a quote the does it justice, but he concludes like this : ... one must keep firmly in mind that a fully virtuous life is eminently possible to non-Christians, agnostics, and outright atheists, and that professing Christians have been known to commit every sin and outrage in history's catalog... It's true you know. You can go to church and it will not help you if you don't live your faith. Going through the motions won't do. A man in a cave with no contact with the faith can do his level best to find the faith even if he is starting from zero (or close to it). It's like any discovery. We know about say, electricity, but we could decide to ignore that knowledge for some reason. And the guy in the cave could discover it on his own. In truth it's hard to imagine anyone climbing that...

First the epigrams and then the fluff. These epigrams came to me through my e-mail and I think others might get a smile from them as well. The connecting text is not mine. The author is Karl Keating from Catholic Answers. "Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects" (Will Rogers). This is another thing that becomes more evident with age. Its corollary also is true: "Everybody is knowledgeable, only on different subjects." And there is a corollary to that corollary: "Academic letters after a person's name tell you nothing about his true intelligence. Some of the dumbest people are smart people." "Intelligence is almost useless to someone who has no other quality" (Alexis Carrel). See what I mean? Carrel was a scientist and physician who participated in the medical bureau at Lourdes. He discovered that when it comes to the supernatural, many intelligent people seem unable to apply their intelligence intelligently. "What is...

Moral Obligation in the Long Run vs. The Barrel of a Gun The Anal Philospher squashes Peter Singer like a bug: Singer is a consequentialist. That an act is of a certain type, e.g., homicide, torture, incest, bestiality, adultery, lying, or breaking a promise, is morally irrelevant to him. The only thing that matters, to a consequentialist, is an act's consequences. ... I find Singer's recourse to consent interesting. Consent is a deontological concept. It is linked to rights-possession, which Singer, qua consequentialist, disavows. If a particular act brings about the best overall consequences, it is irrelevant that not everyone affected by the act consents to it. Put differently, if consent has moral significance, then people cannot be used as mere means to collective ends as Singer wishes . As this shows, Singer is not only a bad philosopher; he's a bad consequentialist. Sometimes he appears not to understand his own theory. This argument is typical of almost all...

Can it be fixed? Jay Currie links to a discussion about the failings of the MSM at Columbia University. His response? Here's a hint - hire some writers. You know, people who don't give a rat's ass about Paris Hilton's underwear malfunctions, but really are willing to call Heather Mallick on just how dumb she is and make fun of the Leah's pretensions. People who will fisk Antonia Zerbiass and mock Jeffery Simpson. I couldn't agree more. I expect TV news to be rotten cheese and perky smiles and oooohhh, lookey there! Neato-O! But it might be nice if print media tried better to exploit their differences with the television, rather than emulate them. Jay says it well: the media itself exercises a startling degree of group think as to what constitutes acceptable opinion. Ask yourself this question, when did you last read a new idea in a MSM publication. Or even an old idea written in an original voice? The problem here is that the MSM is deathly afraid of offen...

Jonah Goldberg's column at NRO today is very good. What else is new? [Oliver Wendell] Holmes used the Pragmatic razor to trim the law's useless fat of morality off, leaving only the efficient muscle and sinew. But as any cook will tell you, it's the fat gives the flavor to the meat, the theme to the pudding. While it would be no surprise to a Hayekian that the common law was already efficient and useful, as Holmes argued, a conservative would also note that morality plays an important role in the law: It communicates to the average citizen that right and wrong is more than a matter of simply playing the odds. It may well be marginally more efficient to make the law into nothing more than a set of efficient rules for the efficient conduct of commerce (and Holmes's jurisprudence certainly greased the wheels for America's industrialization), but by doing so you undermine the role of law as an institution that teaches right from wrong. Sure, societies outlaw murder i...

C.S.Lewis' Screwtape Letters The Screwtape Letters has long been a favourite of Lewis fans. Yet the author found writing from the perspective of a devil to be difficult and unpleasant. He only returned to Screwtape a few times after writing the book, despite pleas for more. The book takes the form of letters from one Devil to another, with the older, wiser devil advising his nephew how to best go about corrupting the soul of an Englishman. What we want, if men are to become Christian at all, is to keep them in the state of mind that I call Christianity And.' You know - Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Age Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Physical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians, let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some fashion with Christian colouring. Work on their horror...