North Western Winds

And they're not by me (as if!). The first is a satirical post on the good hands team and the second is a not so funny post on lies of omission . Is there a theme here? Trust but verify?

Speaking of amateur philosophers - and I assuredly am one - here is a bit from Bill Vacellia (who is not an amateur) that is the sort of writing that separates those who've given some thought to thinking from those who spout when reflexive and physicalism is questioned: "To be is to be physical" is both contingently true (because it is an empirical generalization) and not contingently true (because it entails a necessary truth). But this is a contradiction, so [the statement] is not an empirical generalization. Once one appreciates this, one sees that physicalism cannot be supported by natural science . In general, metaphysical propositions about being qua being cannot be supported or refuted by naturalistic methods. Natural science cannot take the place of first philosophy. Got it? Good. It is frightening how many supposedly educated people spout fundamentalist nonsense in Darwin debates - and I don't mean just the creationists. More detail here .

Edward Fesser shares a few thoughts and criticisms of Ayn Rand at The Conservative Philosopher : To be a social animal is not to be a socialist animal, though it certainly is to recognize that our relations to one another are not, at the deepest level, the product of a social contract or worthwhile only because of the mutual benefit we might derive from them . The correct alternative to Randian capitalism is not socialism, but rather the sort of market economy Burke would have favored, i.e. one balanced by robust moral and religious institutions and conservative government. Not to recognize that we are social animals is quite obviously bound to lead to all sorts of distortions in one’s conception of what human life is like, can be like, and should be like. Her novels illustrate this perfectly. Notoriously, there does not seem to be any clear place for children and family life in the ideal world she tries therein to describe. The perfect society, she seems to think, would be popu...

It's fall. Kids are back in school, and students are back on campus. It's a good time to consider why they're there . Just a few weeks ago, I read in the D about PJ Halas, Class of 1998. His great uncle George founded the Chicago Bears, and PJ lived up to the family name, co-captaining the basketball team his senior year at Dartmouth and coaching at a high school team following graduation. He was also a history teacher, and, this summer, he was arrested for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old student. These stories demonstrate that it takes more than a Dartmouth degree to build character. As former Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey said, at Dartmouth our business is learning. And I’ll have to agree with the motto of Faber College, featured in the movie Animal House, “Knowledge is Good.” But if all we get from this place is knowledge, we’ve missed something. There’s one subject that you won’t learn about in class, one topic that orientation didn...

Brandon, always interesting and always Sirius , has some light to shine on both the breadth of the Muslim community and on how to read a religious text: There is the further absurdity of going around and telling people that they're reading their own holy book incorrectly. It would make sense if the problem here were ignorance of the actual text of the Qur'an itself, but that's clearly not the problem. Indeed, there is no problem here at all except a made-up one. The meaning of any holy book is not how any Tom, Dick, and Harry think one can read the book, but how the religious community itself orders its own reading of the book . In Sunni Islam, the interpretation of the Qur'an is communal, not individual; the authority on what the Qur'an means is the consensus that builds up over time. It is a slow, hard way of reading a text, since your own reading is never complete until by the slow process of dialogue, prayer, and debate it passes into the community and comes bac...

This will surprise no one... You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. You are a fountain of endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and never fail to impress at a party. What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their grammar and insult their paperbacks. What Kind of Elitist Are You? brought to you by Quizilla

Get Religion , a blog dedicated to two things I have a real interest in - religion and the press - is always, always worth a visit. There is this interesting little recap of the paper currently circulating in the Vatican regarding how to deal honestly and justly with the sex scandal. I'm still trying to form an opinion on this one, btw, but the intriguing point lies at the end of the post. What is the effect of anonymous sources on the telling of this story? It does seem to muddy the waters on both sides, allowing the spin machines a free reign. Then there was this post of the subject of ' cafeteria Catholics ' - something that I think, incidentally, all Catholics are to some degree, no matter what side of the aisle they sit on. That's because most of us are not saints and we have more difficulty with some parts of what we are called to do than others. Rationalizing the parts we have trouble with should not be a surprising thing to see. It's probably an inevitabl...

Upper Canada Catholic, still what I think of as a new blog, has a recap of Aquinas' five proofs for the existence of God. They're interesting, so give it a look. Proving 'Panzerkardinal' is a misnomer, Benedict has been meeting with dissidents on the right (SSPX) and the left (theologian Hans Kung) . Nothing has come of it yet, but surely nothing can happen without dialogue.

Gates of Vienna has the lowdown on the Green fringe in Charlotte. His account is fascinating in that car wreck kind of way. What about population? Anarchists have long argued that in a free world, social, economic, and psychological pressures towards excessive reproduction would be removed. There would just be too many other interesting things going on to engage people's time! Feminist primitivists have argued that women, freed of gender constraints and the family structure, would not be defined by their reproductive capabilities as in patriarchal societies, and this would result in lowered population levels too. So population would be likely to fall, willy-nilly. So that's how it will work: feminist primitivists will have control over their reproductive lives. And they will do so, presumably, without birth-control pills, diaphragms, condoms, etc., because industrial technology is required to make those luxuries. One assumes that anarcho-primitivist guys will just have to d...

My friend Kate at The Last Amazon has the latest Red Ensign Roundup . It's a pretty big job, putting all of those links together, so go on and have a look see.

The following text is from Plato's Phaedo . The scene is Socrates' cell, in which he awaits his death, and the subject in this excerpt is how we attain Truth - absolute truth with no distortion of any kind. The yes man's name is Simmias and the main speaker is of course, Socrates. My comments are in the text and are coloured. When does the soul attain truth?--for in attempting to consider anything in company with the body she is obviously deceived. True. Then must not true existence be revealed to her in thought , if at all? Yes. And thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her--neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any pleasure,--when she takes leave of the body, and has as little as possible to do with it, when she has no bodily sense or desire, but is aspiring after true being? Certainly. And in this the philosopher dishonours the body; his soul runs away from his body and desires to be alone and by herself? Tha...

So much silliness, so little time... Via Tremendous Trifles , here is something funny . It takes a bit to load and it's wee bit juvenille, but it gave me a few good laughs.

Frederica Mathewes-Green picks up on the subject of extended adolescence and delayed marriage . Her short essay is worth a moment or two and it is not unsympathetic to the Boomers, who were themselves sheltered by well meaning 'greatest generation parents' seeking to keep from them some of the hardship they had seen. I think her suggestion that we might learn about phasing kids into adulthood from the past is a valuable one. Ours is not the first to lack the ability to keep kids from coming across things we'd rather they did see until later. This is not a conservative lament for 50's era purity but an sober reflection that things tend to run better when you face them maturely. The World War II generation envisioned a sharp contrast between childhood and adulthood: Childhood was all gaiety, while adulthood was burdened with misery and toil. The resulting impulse was to place children in a hermetically sealed playroom. Childhood, once understood as a transitional stage...

Another quiz from the same site. Hat tip once again to Andrew . Genghis Khan You scored 73 Wisdom, 78 Tactics, 61 Guts, and 44 Ruthlessness! Genghis Khan was a Mongol conqueror, originally named Temujin. He succeeded his father, Yekusai, as chieftain of a Mongol tribe and then fought to become ruler of a Mongol confederacy. After subjugating many tribes of Mongolia and establishing his capital at Karakorum, Temujin held a great meeting, the khuriltai, at which he accepted leadership of the Mongols and assumed his title. He promulgated a code of conduct and reorganized his armies. He attacked the Jurchen-ruled Chin empire of North China and by 1215 had occupied most of its territory, including the capital, Yenching (now Beijing). From 1218 to 1224 he conquered Turkistan, Transoxania, and Afghanistan and raided Persia and East Europe to the Dnieper River. Genghis Khan ruled one of the greatest land empires the world has ever known. He died while campaigning against the Jurchen, ...

This is an interesting quiz. Too bad it's hosted on a quasi pornographic website (that's why I broke the links in the table; I'm sure you can find it anyway). Interestingly, Andrew and I had similar levels of capitalism in our blood (68 vs. 61%). It just happens that I'm more socially conservative. Maybe it's because I'm older? Nah, it's probably because I'm superstitious. You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness. ie. My position was firmly Reaganite according to the quiz maker. You are a Social Conservative (30% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (61% permissive) You are best described as a: Republican ...

I posted the following at Boundy by Gravity today, in response to a thread on this weird Spaghetti religion thing that's popping up all over the net right now. I'm posting it here for my own future reference. Since it's a comment and not a post, it's a bit rougher than I like my posts to be, but it'll do for now. "I will comment that religion once provided the answers to a number of questions once judged to lie within their domain...what causes disease, what is the sun, where do babies come from, how was the earth created. In my opinion, science provides better, more durable answers to those questions than religion did." Are we so ill informed about religion that we take it for granted that all religion is literalist and fundamentalist? That's testable - and false. Religions do in fact evolve. People's understanding of a text and tradition can grow and change with the input of new experiences and new knowledge. What I really want to get a...

File this under "I didn't know this but I'm sure it'll come in handy at some point": The fact is that Allah is simply the standard Arabic word for "God." It is used by Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians alike--including Arabic-speaking Catholics. If you read an Arabic New Testament, it's going to have Allah where "God" appears in the English version. When they say prayers in Arabic (e.g., the Rosary) and the prayer refers to God, they use the word Allah. I have more experience on this point than many English-speakers do since I have a lot of Arabic-speaking Catholic friends (Chaldeans, Maronites, etc.). I hang out with their priests, go over to their houses, spend time at their churches, go out to lunch with them, work on projects with them, discuss the situations in their home countries, inject snatches of Arabic into talks I give at their parishes, etc., etc., etc. And this is just not a big deal. Not only do Arabic-speaking Chris...

I try to be fair in my use of sources on this site. I'm not a fundamentalist or a fideist , holding that faith and reason are two rivers that never cross. For example, I used Micheal Ruse , a Darwinist, to make some points about the potential abuse of science a few weeks ago. I've avoided ' God of the Gaps ' arguments and have steered clear of Micheal Behe , for example, because his argument looks to me to be exactly that. I'm happy to have another example of mostly good writing on the subject. The following is taken from Talk.Origins , a pro Darwin site that tries to play fair. The article is in responds to the question, are Evolution and The Bible strictly in opposition ? Q4. If evolution is true, then isn't the whole Bible wrong? First let me repeat that the underlying theme of the first book of Genesis can't be scientifically proven or disproven. No test has ever been found that can tell the difference between a universe created by God, and o...

Bill Vacellia is speaking my mind once again: So this is what I am interested in discussing: Can naturalism explain everything that needs to be explained? If it can, then we ought to be naturalists, or at least the pressure is on to accept naturalism. God might still exist even if everything apart from God could be explained without reference to God. But then what reason would one have to posit God? Mystical experience of God? God's self-revelation through his prophets as recorded in scripture? Perhaps, but then the question of the veridicality of these sources of putative knowledge becomes very pressing indeed. Metaphysical naturalism will most like bring epistemological naturalism and scientism in its train and thus a foreclosing on all sources of knowledge apart from science. So I say that the pressure is on to accept naturalism if it can explain what needs to be explained. Of course, I don't think it can explain what needs to be explained, which is why I am an anti-natu...

Jay has the latest Catholic Carnival at Living Catholicism .

David Warren's latest column is hilarious: Turning now to The National Ledger , I learned this week that 27 percent of 1,639 women polled online by StrategyOne "would most like to be like Angelina Jolie in the bedroom" .... [The result] raised more questions than it answered. Perhaps I am obtuse, but it strikes me a sceptic must ask, "How would 27 percent of women know what Angelina Jolie's like in a place like that?" I mean, even I don't know, and I'm a man; and maybe Brad Pitt doesn't know, either. In another of my tabloid trawls, I had encountered the provocative suggestion that Ms Jolie "swings both ways". But is it possible that, at the minimum, she has had intimate relations with 27 percent of the female population? Alternatively, as a person with political interests, I might note a certain fallibility in the art of polling. And here I am thinking less about the danger of unrepresentative sampling, than of irregularities in po...

Strange comforts my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts. - Isaiah We saw The Excorsism of Emily Rose on Friday night, after reading about it on a few blogs over the week. The whisper was that the film was not a stock horror story, using religious iconography as a prop, but a more sober and thoughtful look at uncomfortable aspects of Christian theism. Godspy provides a rundown on the director of the film and why his treatment of the subject is more thoughtful than a standard genre film. Scott Derrickson [is a] a graduate of the artsy Christian liberal arts university, Biola , calls himself an "orthodox Christian" and confesses that he's addicted to the novels of Walker Percy , and to reading and re-reading G.K. Chesterton 's Orthodoxy . In fact, as Derrickson told me in an interview, Catholic screenwriting mave...

Look what turned up in the pages of GQ. An interview with Miuccia Prada . GQ: You know that show Sex and the City ? MP: Embarrassing! I was thinking New York is like that. I have the impression that the people are like that—the women, the bitchiness. GQ: The thing is, too many women see that show and they think that’s how their life should be. Rather than create their life, they imitate a stupid show. And that’s the worst thing you can do. Right? MP: Oh no, it’s terrible. Also the way of total and sure unhappiness. It’s what I say all the time to my girls in the office here: The more they dress for sex, the less they will have love or sex. These girls throw away so much energy in this search for beauty and sexiness. I think that the old rules were much more clever and better than the rules now. The trouble is, most people are not so generous. Everybody wants love for themselves. I hear this all the time from the women I work with. I hear them say, ...

2005 Mustang GT From The Truth about Cars : You could no more chronicle America’s automotive past without discussing the Ford Mustang than you could list Germany’s automotive achievements without mentioning Hitler’s Volkswagen. Strangely, thankfully, the new Mustang is no mere evolution of the Pony Car’s seemingly endless legacy. No, the GT is a nostalgic Mustang “re-imagining”. The new shape combines the best bits of the best versions of the brand’s mostly dire design heritage, and throws in a barrel-chested V8 for good measure. In other words, the Mustang GT looks great, sounds like sex and goes like stink. I could never afford to buy this car new... but my parish IS raffling one off and yes , I am planning to stock up on tickets.

There is a very interesting read to be had at Albert Mohler . It's about an article in a new publication, on the pleasures and the pains of the intellectual class. Mostly on the pains. "Why do intellectuals get things so wrong, so often?," [Owen] Harries asks. "The question is worth asking because they are still with us, still vocal, still taken seriously by many as interpreters of the course of human history." In answering his own question, Harries suggests that intellectuals are often wrong because thinkers tend to demand coherence in human affairs, looking "for pattern, meaning, and consistency." Since intellectuals tend to be overwhelmingly secular, Harries observes that most intellectuals attempt to find such consistency in the form of ideology. "Ideologies vary a good deal, but among the things they have in common is that they all require great selectivity with respect to empirical evidence," Harries suggests. "That which support...

Mark Shea chimes in on holwling din of those who hold to materialistic Darwinism and who really, really want you to too: This ringing endorsement of the High Priesthood Theory of Scientific Enlightenment is all well and good, but it's a bit hard to square with the commonly heard complaint that what the scientifically ignorant American Joe Sixpak needs to do is stop believing Authority and learn to think for himself by learning about science. In effect, this is a demand that ordinary people just shut up and accept what their more enlightened betters tell them about The Way Things Are , and if some Intelligent Design guy makes a case that makes more sense to them, then the ID guys are to be treated as publicans and tax collectors because the High Priest has so willed it. We are to walk by faith in the Priesthood, not by sight. It is not the task of the High Priest to show clearly *why* his account of The Way Things Are makes hash of ID. It is, rather, the duty of Joe Sixpak to h...

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on August 26 and here it is mid September and I've yet to even mention it. It isn't because I have no interest. On the contrary, I was one of the many who sat for many hours in front of the television in the days afterwards, wondering how it is that such a mess was allowed to happen. And by mess, I mean the human reaction to the storm both before and after it hit. (Don't get me started on that silliness about how "God struck that evil city / country / president." The aftermath of a major is storm is no time to get puffy and self righteous. God is the ultimate cause of everything that exists, including the laws of nature. There is nothing to be gained by claiming that Katrina was not a normal storm, but one caused miraculously by God.) I have been reluctant to jump into the waters on this one because New Orleans is a very long way from the west coast of Canada. I have no burning need to either jump in with a "me too!...

The latest Catholic Carnival is up at Our Word and Welcome to it . There are two entries I enjoyed and wish to point out - and I don't mean my own , or Angry's , although they are worth checking out. Kate Cousino's response to Galmour magazine's artcile, "Where have all the pro choice women gone?" is wonderful. I so love to see people, espeically young people, with courage and smarts like this. The more bookish response to the same subject is at Deo Omnis Gloria . America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominal...

Pope Benedict, speaking while still Cardinal Ratzinger, on the subject of evolution : Has the last word been spoken? Have Christianity and reason permanently parted company? There is no getting around the dispute about the extent of the claims of the doctrine of evolution as a fundamental philosophy and about the exclusive validity of the positive method as the sole indicator of systematic knowledge and of rationality . This dispute has therefore to be approached objectively and with a willingness to listen, by both sides -- something that has hitherto been undertaken only to a limited extent. No one will be able to cast serious doubt upon the scientific evidence for micro-evolutionary processes ... Within the teaching about evolution itself, the problem emerges at the point of transition from micro to macro-evolution, on which point Szathmary and Maynard Smith, both convinced supporters of an all-embracing theory of evolution, nonetheless declare that: "There is no theoretica...

Lewis on marriage... at Inklings .

This caught my attention when it came across my radar this afternoon. It's from the dictionary.com entry for the city, although I heard it from Fr. Corapi first. Bethlehem: house of bread . (1.) A city in the "hill country" of Judah. It was originally called Ephrath (Gen. 35:16, 19; 48:7; Ruth 4:11). It was also called Beth-lehem Ephratah (Micah 5:2), Beth-lehem-judah (1 Sam. 17:12), and "the city of David"(Luke 2:4). It is first noticed in Scripture as the place where Rachel died and was buried "by the wayside," directly to the north of the city (Gen. 48:7). The valley to the east was the scene of the story of Ruth the Moabitess. There are the fields in which she gleaned, and the path by which she and Naomi returned to the town. Here was David's birth-place, and here also, in after years, he was anointed as king by Samuel (1 Sam. 16:4-13); and it was from the well of Bethlehem that three of his heroes brought water for him at the risk of their ...

What follows are choice quotes I've come across in this weekend's readings on Darwinism. This debate is what it is in part because the real problem at the core of it so often unidentified. It is, namely, what is known in philosophy as the Demarcation Problem . The group on top has a vested interest in drawing that line in such as way that they are secure in their position, and in getting others to buy into that division. It's a bit like a tax collector plucking as much as he can, just shy of the point where his victim notices and questions the whole process. In this case, the spin is that science and religion (or, philosophy, if you prefer) are like oil and water. That's a metaphysical proposition - and a dubious one at that. James Franklin : it is uncontroversial to assert that Darwinism is a logically complex theory, and that its relation to empirical evidence is distant and multi-faceted. One does not directly observe chance genetic variations leading to the develop...