North Western Winds

free enneagram test Type Five The Investigator The perceptive, cerebral type. Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation. At their Best: visionary pioneers, often ahead of their time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way. I'n no nihilist, I'm not bothered much by isolation, and I'm not sure if I'm eccentric or not. Hat Tip: Moscow Metro .

John 6 and First Corinthians A fellow Red Ensign blogger and blogging friend left a question on Rebecca's blog on the subject of why Catholics take the Eucharist to be not just a sign of God's presence, but also God's real presence. I started to give an answer there but quickly realized that Haloscan would not give me enough space to do it justice so I invited him and anyone else who's curious to come here. I have readers of all sorts, not all are Catholics by any means, so this is probably a common question. Here's Temujin's comment: Uh oh... an evil trolling Baptist comes to troll! Jesus also said "do this in remembrance of me". The point being that we are to remember him. Why would he tell us to remember him if he was physically present in the elements? Paul says further in Corinthians that everytime we drink the cup and eat the bread we proclaim the Lord's death until He comes (although my thoughts on the parousia are different than the...

The Maverick Philosopher hits one - in this case anti-religious bigot Sam Harris - out of the park. I've made arguments like this on NWW before but I consider it to be so important to an open and free society that I'm happy to include the conclusion of Bill Vacellia's post here. This is the gist of it: [Sam] Harris appears to be inferring a normative conclusion from a nonnormative premise. Thus, he appears to be moving from 1. Evidence is what makes a belief a belief about the world to 2. We may hold only those beliefs for which we have evidence. Now even if (1) is unproblematic, how does one validly infer the normative (2) from it? But there is a second way to read the above passage, and that is to take Harris to be reasoning from (1) to the nonnormative 2*. We can (are able to) hold only those beliefs for which we have evidence. On this reading we avoid the Is/Ought fallacy, but trade it in for something just as bad: a false conclusion. Surely, (2*) is false. Peopl...

Oh my! Via Amigo Boom .

But Daddy, I want it! Mark Peters asked about the ceremony on the St. Lawrence River yesterday, in which nine women were "ordained" as priest and deacons. I was going to comment on this even anyway, and my POV is pretty simple. These folks had themselves a little to-do on the river, during which they imitated priests. It's about as valid as the RCMP swearing ceremony I had in my backyard on the weekend, during which I gave myself the right to make a jackass of myself until the wee hours. It seemed to work quite well until the "real" RCMP showed up and shut the whole thing down, the dirty fascists. "We are worker priests," she said. "We will not be able to have parishes and that sort of thing because the church clearly forbids that, but we are doing our work in the world for humanity so we'll move forward with our work." The ordination was carried out by three of the women who were ordained in the European ceremony and later excommuni...

If you want to understand what motivates suicide bombers, watch the recent movie Downfall . Based on eyewitness accounts, it chronicles the final days inside Hitler's bunker. In a particularly harrowing scene, Joseph Goebbels and his wife are given the opportunity to have their six young children flee to safety. But Magda Goebbels refuses and instead drugs the kids to sleep. Then she inserts a cyanide capsule into each child's mouth and presses the jaws until the capsule breaks. When explaining why she won't allow her kids to escape, Mrs. Goebbels explains, "I can't bear to think of them growing up in a world without national socialism." That chilling opening makes a good point. Ideological hatred is not confined to one group or region of the world - although it may take different forms depending on the soil it finds itself in. Fareed Zakaria's article on ideological hatred at Newseek is worth a moment of your time, regardless of your views on the Iraq c...

Just a short note so no one thinks I've tripped over the sprinkler and injured myself. It's been pretty warm this weekend and I've been working in the yard lifting sod and placing cement pavers that are something like 50 lbs. each. There were only nine of them to do, but doing the job in the heat has left me pretty drained this weekend. Maybe I'm just wussy, I dunno. I'll probably be lifting more sod next weekend, as we want to create a bed beside the pavers. If I'm out of touch here then, you'll know why. On a different note, the driver of that garbage truck who died in the accident I posted about was not my friend from high school. There are still three kids out there who lost their Dad, so our thoughts and prayers go to them in what is likely to be a diffuicult time. On a different note still, my blogging friend Andrew has created a new way of following the posts of the ever growing (so it seems) number of bloggers in Canada.

Summing up what he takes to be Socrates' greatest achievement, Frederick Copelston writes that the most famous of the ancient Greeks philosophers was one of the first to recognize the existence of a universal Human Nature, and relatedly, the Natural Law: While we cannot accept the over intellectualist attitude of Socrates, and agree with Aristotle that moral weakness is a fact which Socrates tended to overlook, we willingly pay homage to the ethic of Socrates. For a rational ethic must be founded on human nature and the good of human nature as such. Thus when Hippias... remark[ed] that the prohibition of sexual intercourse between parents and children is not a universal prohibition, Socrates rightly answered that racial inferiority which results from such intercourse justifies the prohibition. This is tantamount to appealing to what we would call "Natural Law," which is an expression of man's nature and conduces to its harmonious development. Such an ethic is indeed i...

Your Intellectual Type is Insightful Linguist . This means you are highly intelligent and have the natural fluency of a writer and the visual and spatial strengths of an artist. Those skills contribute to your creative and expressive mind. And that's just some of what we know about you from your test results. I took another online IQ test this afternoon and scored 129. Not bad after a busy day of heavy yardwork and some errand running! If you want to try it, it's at Tickle.com . Be warned that for more detailed reporting than the kind I posted above, they'll want some money from you.

Rebecca and I have cleared - finally! - all of the obstacles preventing us from being fully accepted into the Catholic faith. We got the needed annulment a while back and now we have been cleared to arrange the ceremony to bless our wedding. A happy day. First Confession and First Communion will probably be on the same day as the blessing. From the Catechism : Marriage in the Lord 1612 The nuptial covenant between God and his people Israel had prepared the way for the new and everlasting covenant in which the Son of God, by becoming incarnate and giving his life, has united to himself in a certain way all mankind saved by him, thus preparing for "the wedding-feast of the Lamb." 1613 On the threshold of his public life Jesus performs his first sign—at his mother's request—during a wedding feast. The Church attaches great importance to Jesus' presence at the wedding at Cana. She sees in it the confirmation of the goodness of marriage and the proclamation tha...

One - The Independent has an interview with Roger Scruton that includes this: When I arrive at the farm in Wiltshire where Scruton and his wife Sophie raise their two children, Sam, six, Lucy, four, and their various animals, there is little sign of the suffering, sensitive Scruton. As he is just back from America, I ask if he is suffering from jetlag. "Jetlag is a proletarian defect," comes the crisp answer, as he leads the way into a book-lined living room stuffed with tatty furniture and a Bakelite telephone. After a drink, we move through to begin lunch, components of which have been produced on the Scruton farm. "That's Singer," declares Roger, pointing at a plate of leftover sausages. Singer the pig, mischievously named after Peter Singer, the philosopher and animal-rights theorist, has been "ensausaged" personally by his former owner. Roger beams as another lunch guest, his publisher Robin Baird-Smith, asks if he can take the final morsel. Si...

Alvin Plantinga on Christian scholarship . a Christian philosopher may be interested in the relation between faith and reason, and faith and knowledge: granted that we hold some things by faith and know other things: granted we believe that there is such a person as God and that this belief is true; do we also know that God exists? Do we accept this belief by faith or by reason? A theist may be inclined towards a reliabilist theory of knowledge; he may be inclined to think that a true belief constitutes knowledge if it is produced by a reliable belief producing mechanism. (There are hard problems here, but suppose for now we ignore them.) If the theist thinks God has created us with the sensus divinitatis Calvin speaks of, he will hold that indeed there is a reliable belief producing mechanism that produces theistic belief; he will thus hold that we know that God exists. One who follows Calvin here will also hold that a capacity to apprehend God's existence is as much part of o...

Here's a terrific column from the Toronto Sun , written by Lorrie Goldstein . When can we get people like this to help out on the CPC campaign? Liberals always accuse conservatives of having sinister motives. You know, Harper has a "hidden agenda." the Canadian right wants "American-style, two-tier health care" and now, conservatives hate Canada. The problem with conservatives is that they get all defensive when these silly allegations are made and start whining. Worse, having allowed liberals to frame the debate as in -- "Do conservatives hate Canada? -- Discuss" they've already lost before they even begin to respond. That's why I will now redefine this debate by proving to you that it is liberals (and Liberals) who hate Canada with a passion. Liberals hate Canada because they see it as a dark and evil place where there are Nazis, Klansmen, Holocaust deniers, bigots and racists hiding behind every tree. Liberals worry that Canada is ready...

If I had been twenty minutes ahead of where I was, I would likely have been a witness to a terrible automotive accident that took place yesterday in the late morning. From The Vancouver Sun : According to police, witnesses saw the front forks of the eastbound garbage truck lifting as the vehicle approached the overpass. The forks hit the overpass, shearing it from one of two concrete supports and causing the collapse. The driver was trapped inside his cab as the heavy structure crashed down. "I saw his body get smaller, and [I] stopped my truck inches away from his and jumped out and tried to help him," one witness told BCTV News on Global. "I grabbed him by the hands and tried to tell him help was on the way. He said "help" to me one more time and then died in my hands. A more recent news story on the accident is on the local CBC News webpage. The clearest picture is this one, from the local newspaper's website, where you can get the best idea of what ...

It is not very well known , even among Catholics, that the word 'Roman' in 'Roman Catholic' is a modifier describing a rite and not an entire Church. The word 'Catholic', of course, does mean 'universal', but there is more to the universal church than the Roman rite. When Christ founded His Church, He commissioned the apostles to go out into the world to preach and baptize. Most Catholics are familiar with the founding of the see of Rome by Peter. The primacy of that Church was sealed with the blood of Peter and Paul, and the succession of bishops continues to the present day. What many do not know is that the other apostles themselves founded churches, and that their own successions of bishops continue as well . As presently defined, there are 24 Catholic Churches that can be grouped into eight different rites. A rite is a liturgical, theological, spiritual, and disciplinary patrimony of a distinct people manifested in a Church. While each Catholic C...

Mark Steyn : It was Prime Minister's wife [Cherie Blair], you'll recall, who last year won a famous court victory for Shabina Begum, as a result of which schools across the land must now permit students to wear the full "jilbab" - ie, Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. Ms Booth hailed this as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry". It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of Miss Begum's Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Nor, incidentally, is Miss Begum "preserving" any identity: she's of Bangladeshi origin, and her adolescent adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabisation of South Asian (and African and European) Islam that's at the root of so many problems. It's no more part of her inherited identity than my five-year- old dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth ...

On a lighter note... Wal-Mart, love or hate? Hate. Martha Stewart, love or hate? Love. CBC, love or hate? Hate. The Dukes of Hazard? Love. Paris Hilton, love or hate? Hate. Honeymooners or I love Lucy? Honeymooners. Globe and Mail or National Post ? National Post . Coffee or tea? Coffee. Salty or sweet? Sweet. Food fast or slow? Slow. Mornings or evenings? Mornings. Phone or e-mail? Hate them both. City or Country? Country. Church, high or low? High. GM or Ford? Ford Dogs or cats? Dogs. Ginger or May-Ann? Mary-Ann. Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Anniston? Angelina Jolie. Scarlett Johansson or Maria Sharapova? ... don't make me choose...

Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell on the BBC, 1948 The BBC aired this this debate between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston back in 1948. It's an interesting debate, if a little jargon laden at the beginning. I've tried to quote a section with less jargon, allowing readers to decide which one of these men is advocating a position akin to a timid flat worldism, and which is eager to set out on a course of discovery. The topic is the contention that there exists a being whose existence is not contingent on anything else, and this quickly becomes a discussion of how it we know anything at all. What are we permitted to assume when we open the shutters of our minds and look out at the world? Russell : But when is an explanation adequate? Suppose I am about to make a flame with a match. You may say that the adequate explanation of that is that I rub it on the box. Copleston : Well, for practical purposes -- but theoretically, that is only a partial explanation. An...

We had an excellent homily on the parable of the weeds this morning, but these two lines from today's reading from Romans struck home with me today: We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with sighs too deep for words. I think religious faith is not, for most of us, written large, with a boom. It's not an action flick with the DTS sound turned up too high. It's more like being struck dumb for the most fleeting of moments, and if you are very attentive - very, very attentive - you might find that your heart has been reoriented just the tiniest amount. It's like Keats' Joy, "ever biding adieu." To know it was ever there you have to find the time and make the effort to be receptive rather than active. The alternative is what Francis has called the "Conundrum of Happiness": Happiness, in Aristotle's definition, is that which we seek as an end in itself, and for no other reason. Everyone wants to be happy. Ho...

Copleston and the Pre-Socratics I'm enjoying the first volume of Copleston's A History of Philosophy right now, and am working through the very early Greek philosophers, which can be lumped under the name Pre-Socratic. It's very interesting to see these men (they are all men) fumbling along. We remember them, not because they got the right answers to their questions, but because they asked good questions. One of the important questions is, 'Is the world made of one substance or many?' The solution that wins out is that the world is in fact one substance and this leads to the question, 'what is the one substance that the world is made of?' Thales suggested that the one substance was water. We might snicker at that, but he had his reasons. Heraclitus thought that the one substance was fire. Again, this looks silly in the twenty first century, but Heraclitus ' efforts were an advance on Thales. Copleston writes that Heraclitus' contribution is in: ...

I'm toying with the masthead again. Anyone know how to remove the border? Correct answer wins a "no prize".

But I like football better anyway Tip: Fox and Corkum

Dean Barret at The Daily Standard on why Daily KOS' readership numbers have not dipped after the US election, while right leaning blog numbers are down: The Daily KOS should provide the party's most devoted adherents with a constructive outlet for their energy; indeed it does. The site has raised bundles of money for Democratic politicians and its patrons certainly have a surfeit of passion that they're willing to bring to any political conversation. The problem for the Democratic party is that, like much of the country, it has a dim understanding of the blogosphere. The party is not alone in its denseness here. Much of America's existing power structure still has no idea what to make of blogs. This trait was recently put on embarrassing public display in an obtuse Doonesbury strip. In the piece at issue, Garry Trudeau suggested that bloggers were "angry, semi-employed losers"... The Democratic party, on the other hand, errs in precisely the opposite fas...

Blogger James Kalb has an interesting essay published in The New Pantagruel , a webzine that looks like it is gaining steam. If you like this essay you may also want to check out Wesley J. Smith on bioethicists: Harsh Medicine . Here are a few bits from Kalb's provocative essay: The difficulty is that when preferences clash, the liberal demand for equal treatment means in the end that the dispute has to be resolved by someone other than the parties, and the resolution has to pass itself off as something that isn’t a substantive decision. Anything else would be oppressive, since it would allow one party’s preferences to suppress another’s. That squeamishness about power makes normal political life impossible. A political issue, by definition , involves a conflict of preferences. Liberalism must therefore (at least ideally) depoliticize all serious political issues and determine them by an allegedly neutral process. It needs to rule by denying that power is being exercised, claim...

I was waylaid last night by upgrading Firefox from 1.04 to 1.05. Firefox lost all of my bookmarks (most of which can be replaced) and forgot my toolbar customizations (easy enough to redo). It also started to do some other annoying things. It took a bit of time to get it all sorted and so, no post last night. The lost bookmarks also means that some of the things I had intended to write about might be lost if I can't find them again (or remember what they were). I may be busy for the next day or two as well, but you never know. I might sneak in here and put something together. While I'm here telling you stuff, I might as well tell you I got my latest package of books last week, including: Augustine's Confessions The Viking Portable Plato You Can Understand the Bible , Peter Kreeft's latest. and, finally, Volume One of Federick Copleston's A History of Philosophy I picked up Augustine because I've never read anything he wrote and figured it was time to pu...

Schutzgefühl The fallout from C38 continues as we hear more stories like the one Angry is reporting on . Here in BC, the Teachers are getting ready to roll out new SSM positive curricula, and are making noises to the effect that independent schools must (must!) be forced to comply with it. After all, they argue, these schools recieve public tax money. It's like we own them , isn't it? What are our schools producing? Our kids are really smart in many ways, that I don't dispute. We tend to overlook that we shortchange them in others. As this writer says: state education is not a failure from every point of view. It mass produces exactly the kind of citizen that is now in demand: one who is capable of exercising managerial responsibilities within a pluralistic, hedonistic, atheistic setting, but who would never question the goals and commitments of the enterprise he manages. In the second place, the state is more than just indifferent to children of the kind we wish to ra...

You scored as Anselm . Anselm is the outstanding theologian of the medieval period.He sees man's primary problem as having failed to render unto God what we owe him, so God becomes man in Christ and gives God what he is due. You should read 'Cur Deus Homo?' Anselm 93% Augustine 80% Friedrich Schleiermacher 73% Karl Barth 73% John Calvin 60% Martin Luther 60% Paul Tillich 47% Charles Finney 40% Jürgen Moltmann 20% Jonathan Edwards 7% Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com Tip: Sirius

An interesting comment in a rather biased article from MSNBC on the woes of Germany's Green Party . If Cologne University sociologist and Greens expert Markus Klein is right, Germany is in the grip of a "values rollback," away from the post-materialist values of the comfortable 1970s and '80s—including concern for the environment and minority rights—to a more conservative emphasis on achievement, responsibility, family, career and, to a small extent, even religion. Young Germans who grew up in the economically insecure 1990s, he says, worry about jobs and education, not the second-tier issues with which the Greens are identified. Already, says Klein, Green voters are concentrated in the 40-to-49 age bracket, while young voters are increasingly flocking to conservative and liberal-democratic parties. "The Greens are a one-generation project," says Klein. "Their core voters will just die out." ***** More from Germany: David's Medienkritik on ho...

Bloggette finds part of Paul Martin's diary . Hilarious! then schorder looks at us all like screw both of u so i stick my tung out at him becose who made him the boss of the g8 anyway? so after that we sat around a bit and then sign som stuff and blah blah and all that. and then there was a bunch more stuff happened and then i ask the guy who does the goodbye dinnur if he can play hot in herre insted of god save the queen and he says no. Check out the fights in the comments sections of these two blogs - here and here - and then check out Greg and I at (some) loggerheads over the NYT's description of the relationship between Catholic Church and Darwinism. Greg and I aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer but at least we're not petulant children either. Starts here then moves here . Angry in the Great White North , probably THE best conservative poli blogger going right now, continues to offer insight into the fallout from Bill 38, the SSM Bill. See here , here , ...

Links! There is some beautiful music to be found here , "in the Mp3 format." The Maverick Philosopher alerted me to this large collection of philosophic writings . The collection includes the Chesterton essay I found this quote in: The advantage of an elementary philosophic habit is that it permits a man, for instance, to understand a statement like this, "Whether there can or can not be exceptions to a process depends on the nature of that process." The disadvantage of not having it is that a man will turn impatiently even from so simple a truism; and call it metaphysical gibberish. He will then go off and say: "One can't have such things in the twentieth century"; which really is gibberish. Yet the former statement could surely be explained to him in sufficiently simple terms. If a man sees a river run downhill day after day and year after year, he is justified in reckoning, we might say in betting, that it will do so till he dies. But he is not...

As if we needed more proof that orthodoxy is a far cry from fundamentalism. I just can't take that Left Behind stuff seriously. You scored as Amillenialist . Amillenialism believes that the 1000 year reign is not literal but figurative, and that Christ began to reign at his ascension. People take some prophetic scripture far too literally in your view. Amillenialist 85% Moltmannian Eschatology 70% Preterist 60% Postmillenialist 25% Dispensationalist 20% Left Behind 10% Premillenialist 0% What's your eschatology? created with QuizFarm.com