Showing posts with label Hegelian Secularists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hegelian Secularists. Show all posts

Saturday, March 17, 2018

Google Can't Doodle a Saint?

Today is St. Patrick's Day and Google shows a fat guy with red side-burns in Wellingtons picking up stones while a black faced sheep reads an Ogham marker ( pre-Christian Druidic markers from the 4th Century A.D.) .  No indication that God ( All Three of Him) has anything to do with the day, much less the saint himself.

That should please Wiccans, Satanists and atheists, no end.

Googgle Doodles regularly sanitizes nasty pieces of DNA, like Stalin's favorite artist, film maker Sergie Eisenstein, or skin-flint plutocrats who helped build public schools by showing them hugging a diverse armful of children. Generally Google builds a progressive hagiography of second raters who pass the Progressive smell test and create non-existent secular feast days.

St. Patrick's Day now passes as a secular feast day, I guess.  In Ireland, the BBC and its ugly step-child Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE) call all of the moral and cultural shots these days and OXFAM dictates all public policy.

One of Ireland's best and most independent voices has been silenced by the PC forces of the UK and Ireland.  Kevin Myers wrote a column about pay and gender.  He was castigated as an anti-Semite and a misogynist. Myers retorted, "The issue is are we allowed to differ from the politically correct and consensual norm that dominates the media?"

Nope.  No Google Doodles for Kevin Myers.  He is too pro-Israel and therefore ( in BBC PC) an anti-Semite.

Like the United States, Ireland is now a firmly secular nation with all of societal ills that national mindset entails - disregard for life from womb to tomb, run-away drug abuse, increased suicide rates, senseless violence and a disappearing middle class.   Google wants America to be the Banana Republic that is Illinois.  Ireland seems to care even less about its becoming an oligarchy, where misery is checked only by Red Carpet events of its island Hollywood.

St. Patrick's Day is a religious feast day.  A Celtic Cross was too much for Google and its overlords and secular bishops.

I Google this, for now. 



Tuesday, February 14, 2017

The Young Pope and the Old Secularists



"I don't want any more part-time believers,"  Pope Pius XII on The Young Pope

HBO has very little use for God in all of His manifestations.  Unless, there is a political schtick and secularists stick whacking the global pious and opiated masses, HBO offers minimalist religion.

I was wondering who let The Young Pope slip by.  This is one very savvy and and less-tan PC presentation of faith, family and cynical folly.

Vanity Fair hates it. The New York Times calls it "Ridiculous." With reviews like tehse a show just can not miss!

The episodes are brilliant.  I was reminded of Frederick Rolfe's brilliant 1904 novel Hadrian VII The satire turns the pomp and pretentious around on the cynical minds that howl against faith in any form. 

 Here is a brilliant scene from an episode in which Pius XIII, who refuses to allow any 'exhibition' of Peter's successor dresses down an African dictator and a popularly 'sainted' nun who uses water as a weapon over suffering people and also all of us.


The chain smoking, opaque and delightfully orthodox Pope is a saint.


Others near him and against him also find themselves becoming more saintly. 


HBO - thanks.  No, really. 


Sunday, September 30, 2012

Fr. Bob Barron takes on the Cosmic Impiety of Our Times


Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the television pioneer holy man, wit, historian and priest, had it made - he spoke to very open ears and attentive minds.  For decades Bishop Sheen was welcomed into the homes of not only American Catholics on the tube ( Catholic Hour, Life is Worth Living and Fulton Sheen Program), but captured the hearts and minds of other Christians and Jews as well.  One of his major topics was the universal fight against Communism.  Like Satan, Communism managed to fool people that it never existed.  Families who lost sons at the Pusan Perimeter, Inchon, the Chosin Reservoir and Pork Chop Hill in Korea, gradually became comfortable with Reds.

Here is a program from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen Program (1961-1968)  from 1968 -  on this taping the Bishop lays the economic, political, psychological and religious advantage of communist keeping non-Marxist nations at war: He nails it at 3:01



Joe Stalin croaked and avuncularly cartoonish shoe thumpers took his place. Americans no longer worried about Reds in academia, the State Department, or organized labor, because, like Joe Stalin, Senator Joe McCarthy croked.  However, Bishop Sheen continued to offer sermons warning against Communism and the devil's co-equal until advertisers to his national television program was limited to MagicKist carpet cleaning and American Catholics, Jews, and Christians became more interested in Laugh In and The Smothers Brothers and the return of Pete Seeger and his Red Banjo from America's basement. How dangerous could a skinny old geezer with a banjo strapped on be to anyone?

Like the Devil, Communism was no biggie.  The very same mindset of Aw-Shucks American hospitality and fair-play bumped science up in place of religious worship.

Now, decades after Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's return to Christ another witty and scholarly priest has stepped onto the American scene -Chicago's own Father Bob Barron, rector of St. Mary of Lake University in Mundelein, IL. Unlike, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Father Barron plays to a very hostile audience.

Like Bishop Sheen, Father Bob Barron has used the communications media (television, radio, print and the web) to engage the Devil and all of his works.  One of the best tools of evil is science.  Science has a huge altar and an enormous pulpit, as well as very talented and very bigoted voices shouting down people of faith who are no less schooled in the arcana of science, yet retain humbled before the author of the cosmos - God.

In the 19th Century, faith was eliminated from the discussion via the usual suspects - Hegel, Dewey and Marx.  Curricula K-20 offers no consideration of thought ( philosophy, science, history or literature) that does not consider culture except through the lens of Hegel, Dewey, or Marx.  American literature in high school text books practically dominates Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Garrison over any other consideration in order to valorize the subsequent identity-politics light weights who string out the canon.   In philosophy of education future teachers of American children receive an eye-dropper of Plato's thin broth redacted of course and feast upon Rousseau, Fichte, Mann, Dewey and now, comically sad but true, William Ayers.

As for science, there is no search for truth, only solutions to problems.  You can go to the moon, but you can not recall why we went there . . .to beat the Commies, Remember?  Commies are not a problem they are our bankers; therefore, cancel NASA shuttle flights.  We are tickled to death that we are getting great pictures from Mars, but why are we there?  What's the plan, there Hawking and Dawkins?


Father Barron chats with a priest scientist Father George Coyne:



Man built cathedrals that attempted to match to awe and majesty of God's love of man.  Man illuminated and preserved the works of Aristotle, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Empedocles and the plays of Aristophanes in beehive stone cells of monasteries far from the reach of savages in order to justify God's ways to Man. That is called piety.  The opposite of piety is pride and pride on steroids is hubris. Hubris is what the Greeks worried about - if man forgets God, Man is screwed.  We like to forget that.   We need Fulton J. Sheens and Bob Barrons.

In my opinion, Father Barron has a tougher row to hoe.  Bishop Sheen's foes, Satan and the Soviets, were much more understood by people during the American Golden Age ( 1945-1972).  I mark the end of WWII and Nixon's Trip to China and the very next year Nixon cleared the way for Roe v. Wade and the American Genocide*.   Once Tricky Dick ate egg-rolls with Mao and chatted realpolitik with Chou En Lai, Americans put on their eatin' pants too, burped away bad thoughts and watched the Tube and nodded that abortion was health care.

Father Barron offers a genuine consideration of modern hubris, or what Bertrand Russell called cosmic impiety, in an article from RealClear Politics.  Here is a salient passage:

 Though the sciences might be able to explain the chemical make-up of pages and ink, they will never be able to reveal the meaning of a book; and though they might make sense of the biology of the human body, they will never tell us why a human act is moral or immoral; and though they might disclose the cellular structure of oil and canvas, they will never determine why a painting is beautiful.And this is not because "science" is for the moment insufficiently developed, it is because the scientific method cannot, even in principle, explore such matters, which belong to a qualitatively different category of being than the proper subject matter of the sciences. The claim that "science" could ever provide a total understanding of reality as a whole overlooks the rather glaring fact that meaning, truth, beauty, morality, purpose, etc., are all ingredients in "the universe."
But as is usually the case with scientistic speculation, Carroll's thought is designed, above all, to eliminate God as a subject of serious intellectual discourse. The first and most fundamental problem is that, like Hawking, Dawkins and Dennett, Carroll doesn't seem to know what Biblical people mean by "God." With the advance of the modern physical sciences, he asserts, there remains less and less room for God to operate, and hence less and less need to appeal to him as an explanatory cause. This is a contemporary reiteration of Pierre-Simon Laplace's rejoinder when the Emperor Napoleon asked the famous astronomer how God fit into his mechanistic system: "I have no need of that hypothesis."
But God, as the classical Catholic intellectual tradition understands him, is not one cause, however great, among many; not one more item within the universe jockeying for position with other competing causes. Rather, God is, as Thomas Aquinas characterized him, ipsum esse, or the sheer act of to-be itself -- that power in and through which the universe in its totality exists. Once we grasp this, we see that no advance of the physical sciences could ever "eliminate" God or show that he is no longer required as an explaining cause, for the sciences can only explore objects and events within the finite cosmos.
To demonstrate the relationship between God and the universe more clearly, it would be worthwhile to explore the most fundamental argument for God's existence, namely the argument from contingency. You and I are contingent (dependent) in our being in the measure that we eat and drink, breathe, and had parents; a tree is contingent inasmuch as its being is derived from seed, sun, soil, water, etc.; the solar system is contingent because it depends upon gravity and events in the wider galaxy. To account for a contingent reality, by definition we have to appeal to an extrinsic cause. But if that cause is itself contingent, we have to proceed further. This process of appealing to contingent causes in order to explain a contingent effect cannot go on indefinitely, for then the effect is never adequately explained. 
Hence, we must finally come to some reality that is not contingent on anything else, some ground of being whose very nature is to-be. This is precisely what Catholic theology means by "God." Therefore, God is not one fussy cause within or alongside the universe; instead, he is the reason why there is a universe at all, why there is, as the famous formula has it, "something rather than nothing." To ask the sophomoric question, "Well, what caused God?" is simply to show that the poser of the question has not grasped the nettle of the argument.

No, Father, we have settled all that.  Science says "toss up those big-ass wind-turbines (NIMBY Rules apply of course) and all is well."  Go to Mars!  "Why?"  Because, there was water there billions and billions and billions of years ago! " And?"  There was water there billions and billions and billions of years ago. 

Keep at them, Father!


REV. ROBERT BARRON, M.A. (Phil), S.T.D., .
Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., Professor of Faith and Culture
M.A., Catholic University of America; S.T.B., M.Div., S.T.L., University of St. Mary of the Lake; S.T.D., Institut Catholique de Paris. Former Associate Pastor at St. Paul of the Cross Parish. A member of the Catholic Theology Society of America, G.K. Chesterton Society, Paul Tillich Society. Author of The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path, Creation as Discipleship, A Study of the DePotentia of Thomas Aquinas in Light of the Dogmatik of Paul Tillich, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation, Heaven in Stone and Glass and Bridging the Great Divide and The Word on Fire: Proclaiming the Power of Christ and of the Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism. Articles on theology and the spiritual life have appeared in numerous journals.

*Planned Parenthood continues  to get one third( $ 345 Million dollars) of its funding to murder children from the Federal Government.
Forget Mars.  We got serious business here.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/622643main_FY%2013%20Budget%20Presentation.pdf



Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Baseball and Orestes Brownson Meet Tacitus and Darwin - Sox in 1st Place Again!




I was reading the Annals of Tacitus last night, as I could not get the Sox Game on Cable. I read until Clare came home and checked the web - Sox Win!  11-4 and back in 1st Place AL Central!


Had I not known that the Sox played the Minnesota Twins at home and relied solely upon my beliefe that that they, had, in fact played, the Chicago Tribune account would not have satisfied with conclusive evidence that that had been the case. The article is joyfully exuberant, but lacks a small but essential verity -Who Played????


Nowhere in the report by Chicago Tribune's Mark Gonzales are to be fund any veriable evidnce that Chicago White Sox had played the Minnesota Twins at Sox Park ( AKA The Cell to Sheep) on the evening of July 24, 2012. -By Mark Gonzales, Chicago Tribune reporter
11:51 p.m. CDTJuly 24, 2012


Absent is any idenification whatsoever to the professional baseball team from Minnesota:  the reader will not find the words Twins, Minnesota.  Other teams are mentioned: Detroit, Yankees, and Texas Rangers.  There is a hat-tip to Josh Willingham who plays for the Twins, but this was something that I believed prior to game itself, but could not verify upon reading the Tribune account of the Dunn,/Konerko/Ventura Victory Troika:
Konerko, who is 7-for-8 over his last two games and batting .536 with two doubles, two homers and six RBIs in his last eight games, gave plenty of credit to Dunn.
As I said above, I read Tacitus while game was played.  Tacitus wrote Roman history and the Annals
concentrate the reader upon the Empire -dominated by the Julio Claudian family.  Augustus (Octavian) was the first emperor. While he ruled Jesus was born. Tacitus talks about the Jewish carpenter's kid  when he gets into telling about the reign of Tiberius ( Tiberius Nero).  When old Augustus was about to die, all of Rome fretted that this would signal the start of a bloody fight for power.


August was married to a horrific old bitch who was a combination of revolutionary Bernardin Dohrn welded to hack loud-mouth Jan Schakowsky.  Livia was not above killing her step-children and grandkids to advance her agenda.  Livia and Tiberius( her son by a previous marriage) plotted to bump off the next in in line -Agrippa.


Give this long passage a read.


Thus thus the State had been revolutionised, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality. Stript of equality, all looked up to the commands of a sovereign without the least apprehension for the present, while Augustus in the vigour of life, could maintain his own position, that of his house, and the general tranquillity. When in advanced old age, he was worn out by a sickly frame, and the end was near and new prospects opened, a few spoke in vain of the blessings of freedom, but most people dreaded and some longed for war. The popular gossip of the large majority fastened itself variously on their future masters. "Agrippa was savage, and had been exasperated by insult, and neither from age nor experience in affairs was equal to so great a burden. Tiberius Nero was of mature years, and had established his fame in war, but he had the old arrogance inbred in the Claudian family, and many symptoms of a cruel temper, though they were repressed, now and then broke out. He had also from earliest infancy been reared in an imperial house; consulships and triumphs had been heaped on him in his younger days; even in the years which, on the pretext of seclusion he spent in exile at Rhodes, he had had no thoughts but of wrath, hypocrisy, and secret sensuality. There was his mother too with a woman caprice. They must, it seemed, be subject to a female and to two striplings besides, who for a while would burden, and some day rend asunder the State."


While these and like topics were discussed, the infirmities of Augustus increased, and some suspected guilt on his wife's part. For a rumour had gone abroad that a few months before he had sailed to Planasia on a visit to Agrippa, with the knowledge of some chosen friends, and with one companion, Fabius Maximus; that many tears were shed on both sides, with expressions of affection, and that thus there was a hope of the young man being restored to the home of his grandfather. This, it was said, Maximus had divulged to his wife Marcia, she again to Livia. All was known to Caesar, and when Maximus soon afterwards died, by a death some thought to be self-inflicted, there were heard at his funeral wailings from Marcia, in which she reproached herself for having been the cause of her husband's destruction. Whatever the fact was, Tiberius as he was just entering Illyria was summoned home by an urgent letter from his mother, and it has not been thoroughly ascertained whether at the city of Nola he found Augustus still breathing or quite lifeless. For Livia had surrounded the house and its approaches with a strict watch, and favourable bulletins were published from time to time, till, provision having been made for the demands of the crisis, one and the same report told men that Augustus was dead and that Tiberius Nero was master of the State.


The first crime of the new reign was the murder of Postumus Agrippa. Though he was surprised and unarmed, a centurion of the firmest resolution despatched him with difficulty. Tiberius gave no explanation of the matter to the Senate; he pretended that there were directions from his father ordering the tribune in charge of the prisoner not to delay the slaughter of Agrippa, whenever he should himself have breathed his last. Beyond a doubt, Augustus had often complained of the young man's character, and had thus succeeded in obtaining the sanction of a decree of the Senate for his banishment. But he never was hard-hearted enough to destroy any of his kinsfolk, nor was it credible that death was to be the sentence of the grandson in order that the stepson might feel secure. It was more probable that Tiberius and Livia, the one from fear, the other from a stepmother's enmity, hurried on the destruction of a youth whom they suspected and hated. When the centurion reported, according to military custom, that he had executed the command, Tiberius replied that he had not given the command, and that the act must be justified to the Senate.
As soon as Sallustius Crispus who shared the secret (he had, in fact, sent the written order to the tribune) knew this, fearing that the charge would be shifted on himself, and that his peril would be the same whether he uttered fiction or truth, he advised Livia not to divulge the secrets of her house or the counsels of friends, or any services performed by the soldiers, nor to let Tiberius weaken the strength of imperial power by referring everything to the Senate, for "the condition," he said, "of holding empire is that an account cannot be balanced unless it be rendered to one person."
Meanwhile at Rome people plunged into slavery- consuls, senators, knights. The higher a man's rank, the more eager his hypocrisy, and his looks the more carefully studied, so as neither to betray joy at the decease of one emperor nor sorrow at the rise of another, while he mingled delight and lamentations with his flattery. Sextus Pompeius and Sextus Apuleius, the consuls, were the first to swear allegiance to Tiberius Caesar, and in their presence the oath was taken by Seius Strabo and Caius Turranius, respectively the commander of the praetorian cohorts and the superintendent of the corn supplies. Then the Senate, the soldiers and the people did the same. For Tiberius would inaugurate everything with the consuls, as though the ancient constitution remained, and he hesitated about being emperor. Even the proclamation by which he summoned the senators to their chamber, he issued merely with the title of Tribune, which he had received under Augustus. The wording of the proclamation was brief, and in a very modest tone. "He would," it said, "provide for the honours due to his father, and not leave the lifeless body, and this was the only public duty he now claimed."


As soon, however, as Augustus was dead, he had given the watchword to the praetorian cohorts, as commander-in-chief. He had the guard under arms, with all the other adjuncts of a court; soldiers attended him to the forum; soldiers went with him to the Senate House. He sent letters to the different armies, as though supreme power was now his, and showed hesitation only when he spoke in the Senate. His chief motive was fear that Germanicus, who had at his disposal so many legions, such vast auxiliary forces of the allies, and such wonderful popularity, might prefer the possession to the expectation of empire. He looked also at public opinion, wishing to have the credit of having been called and elected by the State rather than of having crept into power through the intrigues of a wife and a dotard's adoption. It was subsequently understood that he assumed a wavering attitude, to test likewise the temper of the nobles. For he would twist a word or a look into a crime and treasure it up in his memory.
On the first day of the Senate he allowed nothing to be discussed but the funeral of Augustus, whose will, which was brought in by the Vestal Virgins, named as his heirs Tiberius and Livia. 


Tacitus, like your humble scribbler here, is limited by what he knows and yearns for what is knowable; when that is denied, like Mark Gonzales' account of the 11-4 victory over the Twins, who remain unmentioned, we must hold onto faith - Josh Willingham is on the Twins and my head is still attached to my neck.


History, Science and  Baseball  can be reduced to faith -belief a priori truths ( I knew Josh was a Minnesota Twin) and ontologogical issues. Consider this -
Does anyone really doubt that he has a head? Notice that the mere possibility of error is not enough to defeat this belief. Just because I could be a brain in a vat deceived by a mad scientist doesn’t give me any reason to think that I am. Until you give me some compelling proof that I do not have a body, I am perfectly rational to believe in a properly basic way that I have a head.
Similarly, the theist would need some compelling reason to think that God is deceiving him in order to abandon the belief that he has a head. Brian, turn the tables on the sceptic by asking him to give you a proof that theism gives you a defeater of your properly basic beliefs. About all he can say is, “God could be deceiving you.” But that provides no reason to think that He is. We could be deceived by a mad scientist; but that possibility is not sufficient to defeat our properly basic beliefs. At most, it shows that one cannot prove inferentially that one’s foundational beliefs are true. That’s right; that’s the lesson of Descartes. But that doesn’t imply that our properly basic beliefs are therefore irrational or unwarranted
Perhaps but Darwin said Descartes was wrong. Darwin is the Progressive pivot point and ontological prime mover.  If  you are au courante, have the New York Times delivered to your door daily, watch only PBS, and are so much smarter than everyone else ( Rubes, Tea-People, Catholics, devout Jews, Evangelicals, and working stiffs), Darwin trumps God.  In the 19th century, an American former-Transcendentalist and Catholic convert, Orestes Brownson, argued against Hegalian-Darwinian theology.  In 1873, Brownson wrote  
Say what you will, the ape is not a man; nor, as far as our observations or investigations can go, is the ape, the gorilla, or any other variety of the monkey tribe, the animal that approaches nearest to man.  The rat, the beaver, the horse, the pig, the raven, the elephant surpass the monkey in intelligence, if it be intelligence, and not simply instinct; and the dog is certainly far ahead of the monkey in moral qualities, in affection for his master and fidelity to him, and so is the horse when kindly treated.  But let this pass.  There is that, call it what you will, in man, which is not in the ape.  Man is two-footed and two-handed; the ape is four-handed, or, if you choose to call the extremity of his limbs feet, four-footed.  In fact, he has neither a human hand nor a human foot, and, anatomically considered, differs hardly less from man than does the dog or the horse.  I have never been able to discover any of the simian tribe a single human quality.  As to physical structure, there is some resemblance.  Zoologists tell us traces of the same original type may be found running through the whole animal world; and, therefore, the near approach of the ape to the human form counts for nothing in this argument.  But here is the point we make; namely, the differentia of man, not being in the ape, cannot be obtained from the ape by development.

This sufficiently refutes Darwin’s whole theory.  He does not prove the origin of a new species either by natural or artificial selection; and, not having done that, he adduces nothing that does or can warrant the induction, that the human species is developed from the quadrumanic or any other species. . . .Two-thirds of his work on the “Descent of Man” is taken up with what he calls Sexual Selection.  . . .
Mr. Darwin, though his theory is not original with him, and we were familiar with it even in our youth, overlooks the fact that it denies the doctrine of the creation and immutability of species, as taught in Genesis, where we read that God said: “Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth.  And it was done.”  “And God created the great whales and every living and moving creature which the waters brought forth, according to their kinds, and every winged fowl according to its kind.”  “And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and cattle, and everything thing that creepeth on the earth.” Genesis I, 11,21,25.  Now this doctrine, the doctrine of the whole Christian world, and which stands directly opposed to Mr. Darwin’s theory, is, as say the lawyers, in possession, and therefore to be held as true until the contrary is proved.  It is not enough, then, for Mr. Darwin to set forth his theory and ask us as Christians, as believers in Genesis, to accept it, unless able to disprove it; nor is it enough for him even to prove that it may be true.  The onus probandi is on him who arraigns the faith and convictions of the Christian world, which are the faith and convictions of enlightened and living mankind.  He must prove his theory not only may be, but is, true, and prove it with scientific or apodictic certainty, for only by so doing can he oust the Christian doctrine from its possession, or overcome the presumption in its favor; and till he has ousted and made away with that doctrine, his theory cannot be legally or logically entertained even as a probable hypothesis.  This he hardly pretends to have done.  As far as we can discover, he does not claim apodictic certainty for his theory, or profess to set it forth for ant(sic) thing more than a probable hypothesis, which he leads us to suspect he hardly believes himself.  But in the present case we must prove it to be true  and indubitable, or he has no right to publish it at all, not even as probable; for probable it is not, so long as it is not certain that the Christian doctrine in possession is false.
This principle, which is the principle both of ethics and logic, is disregarded by nearly the whole herd of contemporary scientists.  They make a point of ignoring Christianity, and proceed as if they were perfectly free to put forth as science any number of theories, hypotheses, conjectures, guesses, which directly contradict it, as if they were under no obligation to consult the universal faith of mankind; and theories too, not one of which, even if plausible, is proved to be true, or deserving the name of science.  We by no means contend that the general belief of mankind, or the consensus hominum, is in itself an infallible criterion of truth; but we do maintain that it is, as the lawyers say, prima facie evidence, or a vehement presumption of truth, and that no man has the moral right to publish any opinions, or uncertain theories or hypotheses, that are opposed to it.  It can be overruled by science that is science, by the truth that is demonstrated to be truth, and which cannot be gainsaid.  He who assails it may plead the truth, if he has it, in justification; but not an uncertain opinion, not an unproved theory, or an unverified hypothesis, however plausible or even probable it may appear to himself.  Sincerity, or firmness of conviction on the part of the defenders of the adverse theory or hypothesis, is no justification, no excuse even; and no one has any right to assail or contradict the Christian faith, unless he has infallible authority for the truth of what he alleges in opposition to it.  And this no scientist has or can have. (emphases my own) Brownson 1873 - Dawin's Descent of Man
Thanks to Mark Gonzales, I knew the score -Sox win 11-4 . . .over somebody.
Unlike your humble servant, Orestes Brownson knew not only the school but he really knew who was playing.


Friday, April 27, 2012

"Analyze This! " - God Responds to Latest Scientific Study: People of Faith Don't Think

Scientists have revealed one of the reasons why some folks are less religious than others: They think more analytically, rather than going with their gut. And thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane — for skeptics and true believers alike.
I was awakened again, thanks be to God. Said my prayers, fed the cat, and got to it.  Read the Tribune and the posted article and asked God what he thought of it. Here HE is!


God ( aka - Supreme Being, Dominus, Lord of Hosts, Yaweh, Allah, Prime Mover, Triun God, Original Gangstah! & etc. )

Hickey, do you know what time it is ?  Oh, ME!  You got Company? Sorry about the get-up,folks,  this goof wakes before I intended man to rise.  Hickey, you are really lucky I turned-in early, or you'd really be up $hit-creek for fair, Paddy Me Boy!  As it is you just added a few semesters to your stay in Purgatory. Take a walk or something - I sure Hell don't need you staring over my shoulders. Now, Blow!
Hi, everybody!  Again, sorry about my state of dress; I'm God for Crissakes, not Adolph Menjou.  He really is an inconsiderate pain in the ass, but he means well, I know. . . .before we get to the meat of the matter, let me first congratulate all the Leo Alumni who will be celebrating their commitment to Leo High School ( 1928-2012 Anno Mine) at the Lexington House in Hickory Hills tonight.  The doors will open at 5:30 P.M. and cocktails will be served between 6:30 - 7:30 Post Meridian central Standard Time.  If any of you guys are thirsty, just wait; there will be plenty of time to toss back a few and remember DUI laws are enforced.  I created the each human body differently - age, weight, gender, food intake prior to consumption of one ounce of alcohol must be considered.  For some of you gents who slept through Brother Finch's chemistry and physics class, which I dou . . .am certain never happened, remember an ounce of booze is an ounce of booze - beer, wine, or loudmouth.  Have fun but if you plan to whack down an inappropriate amount of cold ones, have a sober driver.  Remember to eat.

Leo Men!  You are my sons in whom I am very well pleased!

The weather is going to be a bit odd - Hey, you live in Chicago! 

That's about it.

Now, a group of smart kids used grant money to justify the current war on Faith.  This is a political gimmick that Bismark used in the 19th Century in order to consolidate the 101 German States and principalities under Prussian control.  Kant and Hegel were and still are used to make a case against me.  Knock yourselves out, Lads.

This current study is meant to Balkans folks.  If you believe in Me, all to the good.  If you choose to not believe in Me . . .see you in a few years; right Mr. Hitchens?  Any way. 

This new study, which is really as old as human arrogance, holds that Doubters are smarter than Believers. They use math and science to prove this using a series of John Dewey's tests and measurements.  These are the same class of  talented youngsters who measure and calibrated the wheels on the very expensive Bombardier Rail Car Wheels that the City of City bought like a pig in a poke last November.

Measure twice; cut once works only if the carpenter has learned which end of the rule which - remember that scene in This is Spinal Tap?  That was great!  The Stonehenge scene.  Where the stage manager wrote down inches ("s) instead of feet (')? Here, Watch This!




You guys kill me . . . and then I Resurrect!
Anyway, ever since Moses took his sandals off when I lit that bush on fire ( Charleton Heston!  Take a bow, Son!) you need proofs. Thomas the Apostle, that was a close one for you, Kiddo. No matter what I say, do, or demonstrate there will always be doubt - supposed to be.  I don't want you clowns stumbling around in the dark, or depending upon your trust of Kellogg's that there is exactly 16 ounces of corn-flakes in the box, or worse allowing science alone to be your guide - looks at how much weight Al Gore put on since he obsessed with glaciers and penguins.  That and his pretty wife gave him the gate.

I am perfect. Sorry, the job's taken.  Everything else is limited ( you can only drink so many beers, guys), fallible, disappointing, and in exact.  The earth is nice and round.  Water freezes at a some point, given certain circumstances, and it boils at some point, again given certain circumstances.  The NBA does not draft Pygmies - is that certainty, or what if Shorty Mnumbaka has a hang time measured in 0.58 minutes X Two and standard English yard ( 3') s times Seven?   Shorty will go into his freshman year at Brother Aman Prep School in Gungu, Uganda just a bit north central of Lake Albert.  Don't believe me?  Got Proof? just kidding.

Look, you have computers and they are all coded using 0s and 1s. You have DNA coded A, T,G, C with three billion of these letters in every human cell - math is limits.

I have been talking to you all for millions of years; some choose to believe on a few thousand of years, Whats a few numbers off between friends?  I AM. . . .don't just take my  Word for it. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner for quantum electrodynamics, said, "Why nature is mathematical is a mystery...The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle."

Here's the deal. No matter how many numbers, proofs, or tests, you all have Free Will.  No Charge! 
One caveat - There really is only One test, all the rest are Old Styles and Slim Jims, really.  It is Pass/Fail and really can not study for it - call it The Final.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/la-sci-religion-analytical-thinking-20120427,0,7996681.story

http://www.everystudent.com/features/isthere.html



Saturday, February 25, 2012

Cardinal George Lances the Obama Trimmer Dragon



Trimming morality to how we behave guts the Gospel call to conversion of life and rejection of sin. Francis Cardinal George

The Trimmer*s have been around for a very long time. Having taught John Dryden's closed couplet satire Absalom and Achitophel required a great deal of providing historical context to the great work. During the late Stuart Period of British History, Roman Catholics in England, Scotland and Ireland suffered great persecution at the hands of well-educated and rhetorically gifted bigots. Not until October, 2011, did Great Britain lift the ban on an heir marrying a Catholic; prior to this we had "Succession is also governed by the Act of Union 1800, which restates the provisions of the Act of Settlement 1701 and the Bill of Rights 1689. These laws restrict the succession to legitimate descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover and disbar those who are Roman Catholics or who have married Roman Catholics."

It is a Progressive thing, you see, Trimming! What?

Trimmer - a (1) : one that trims articles (2) : one that stows coal or freight on a ship so as to distribute the weight properly b : an instrument or machine with which trimming is done c : a circuit element (as a capacitor) used to tune a circuit to a desired frequency
2: a beam that receives the end of a header in floor framing
3: a person who modifies a policy, position, or opinion especially out of expediency

A trimmer- One who wants things done HIS way without question, compromise or consideration . . . like President Obama

Long before President Barack Obama followed the dictates of his base and presented HHS Coercion of Catholics and other Christians to violate their beliefs, another Trimmer, a bigot, forced Parliament with his soaring rhetoric to exclude Catholics from marriage to the Royal Family.

In 1674 he brought forward a motion for disarming "popish recusants," and supported one by Lord Carlisle for restricting the marriages in the royal family to Protestants; but he opposed the bill introduced by Lord Danby in 1675, that imposed a test oath on officials and members of parliament, speaking "with that quickness, learning and elegance that are inseparable from all his discourses," and ridiculing the multiplication of oaths, since "no man would ever sleep with open doors. . . should all the town be sworn not to rob." He was now on bad terms with Danby, and a witty sally at that minister’s expense caused his dismissal from the council in January 1676. In 1678 he took an active part in the investigation of the "Popish Plot," to which he appears to have given excessive credence, but opposed the bill that was passed on 30 October 1678, to exclude Roman Catholics from the House of Lords. . . . He readily accepted for himself the character of a "trimmer," desiring, he said, to keep the boat steady, while others attempted to weigh it down perilously on one side or the other; and he concluded his tract with these assertions: that our climate is a Trimmer between that part of the world where men are roasted and the other where they are frozen; that our Church is a Trimmer between the frenzy of fanatic visions and the lethargic ignorance of Popish dreams; that our laws are Trimmers between the excesses of unbounded power and the extravagance of liberty not enough restrained; that true virtue hath ever been thought a Trimmer, and to have its dwelling in the middle between two extremes; that even God Almighty Himself is divided between His two great attributes, His Mercy and His Justice. In such company, our Trimmer is not ashamed of his name. . . . ( Emphasis my own) He was Lord Halifax author of The Character of a Trimmer Concerning Religion, Laws and Liberties ,by a person of honour: George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, 1633-1695.

Lord Halifax was witty, loud, deceptively avuncular, rhetorically skilled and a devout bigot - George Saville would be a regular a on MSNBC today. MSNBC lards up its nonsense with Brits.

Francis Cardinal George has taken on the Trimmer Dragon of Secular Obstinacy - the Obama Regime.

In this week's New World Lenten Message, Cardinal George lances the Obama political Trimmer Dragon with the facts, context and the historical impact of Obama Regime's assault on Religious Liberty.

Since 1915, the Catholic bishops of the United States have taught that basic health care should be accessible to all in a just society. Two years ago, we asked that whatever instruments were crafted to care for all, the Hyde and Weldon and Church amendments restricting funding for abortion and respecting institutional conscience continue to be incorporated into law. They were excluded. As well, the present health care reform act doesn’t cover entire sections of the U.S. population. It is not universal.

The provision of health care should not demand “giving up” religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship-no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long cold war to defeat that vision of society.

The strangest accusation in this manipulated public discussion has the bishops not respecting the separation between church and state. The bishops would love to have the separation between church and state we thought we enjoyed just a few months ago, when we were free to run Catholic institutions in conformity with the demands of the Catholic faith, when the government couldn’t tell us which of our ministries are Catholic and which not, when the law protected rather than crushed conscience. The state is making itself into a church. The bishops didn’t begin this dismaying conflict nor choose its timing. We would love to have it ended as quickly as possible. It’s up to the government to stop the attack.

If you haven’t already purchased the Archdiocesan Directory for 2012, I would suggest you get one as a souvenir. On page L-3, there is a complete list of Catholic hospitals and health care institutions in Cook and Lake counties. Each entry represents much sacrifice on the part of medical personnel, administrators and religious sponsors. Each name signifies the love of Christ to people of all classes and races and religions. Two Lents from now, unless something changes, that page will be blank.
(emphasis my own)

Sadly, Cardinal George, that is the idea. The Trimmer Dragon will and has come at people of Faith not only from Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor ( St. Xavier University most recently) and the Military -ordering military chaplains not to read the letter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning the Choice Mandate.

The regime tells us that 99% of Catholics ignore their faith. Let's see in November.



Prayer to Saint George

Almighty God, who gave to your servant George boldness to Confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Father Bob Barron Exposes Obama's War on Catholics

The HBObama Channel's History of the Founding Fathers 2013, unless . . .


While the Chicago Sun Times offers a silly report on Vichy Priest(s) ( nod to Tom Roeser's genius) who refused to read Cardinal George's powerful condemnation of Obama's HHS Contraception Mandate ( only one priest is reported by-the-way), Chicago's Father Robert Barron presents a scholarly and pastoral expose of President Obama's secularist slight-of-hand within the larger secularist war on faith in general. Click my post title for this important article,

This might be a pretty good summary from Father Barron's work.

The secularist state recognizes that its principle enemy is the Church Catholic. Accordingly, it wants Catholicism off the public stage and relegated to a private realm where it cannot interfere with secularism's totalitarian agenda. I realize that in using that particular term, I'm dropping a rhetorical bomb, but I am not doing so casually.

There is a modality of secular liberalism that is not aggressive toward religion, but rather recognizes that religion makes an indispensable contribution to civil society. This more tolerant liberalism allows, not only for freedom of worship, but also for real freedom of religion, which is to say, the expression of religious values in the public square and the free play of religious ideas in the public conversation. Most of our founding fathers advocated just this type of liberalism.

But there is another modality of secularism -- sadly on display in the current administration -- that is actively aggressive toward religion, precisely because it sees religion as its primary rival in the public arena. Appreciating certain moral convictions as disvalues-think here especially of Catholic teachings concerning sexuality -- it seeks to eliminate religion or at the very least to privatize and hence marginalize it. In doing so, it indeed reveals itself as totalitarian, for it allows no room in the public space for anything but itself.

The reason that the Bill of Rights is so important is that it holds off the tendency, inherent in any government, toward totalitarianism, even if that means the totalitarianism of the majority. The very first amendment, of course, guarantees the free exercise of religion in our country. Our founders obviously feared that even a democratic system, predicated upon a repudiation of tyranny, could become so tyrannical itself that it would seek to intrude upon the sacred realm of the religious conscience.


That is a powerful quartet of paragraphs.

President Obama should be in for the fight of his political life. Vichy Catholics are with the President. The Catholic Church and others are all in for a nasty political and ideological brawl.

Thursday, December 01, 2011

A Precious Mixture - Progressive Posturing of Corsairs. Rebels, and Goofs






Billy Ayers and Byron -Aristocratic Rebels: One had sincerity and talent and wrote great poems and the other is Bill Ayers.









Trin. Coll. (Wednesday), Novr. 6th, 1805

My Dear Augusta, - As might be supposed I like a College Life extremely, especially as I have escaped the Trammels or rather Fetters of my domestic Tyrant Mrs Byron, who continued to plague me during my visit in July and September. I am now most pleasantly situated in Superexcellent Rooms, flanked on one side by my Tutor, on the other by an old Fellow, both of whom are rather checks upon my vivacity. I am allowed 500 a year, a Servant and Horse, so Feel as independent as a German Prince who coins his own Cash, or a Cherokee Chief who coins no Cash at all, but enjoys what is more precious, Liberty.

George Gordon, Lord Byron [Trinity, 1805-07], letter to his sister Augusta, 6 November 1805


'I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame Bear, when I bought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was "he should sit for a fellowship." Sherard will explain the meaning of the sentence, if it is ambiguous. This answer delighted them not, we have eternal parties here, and this evening a large assortment of Jockies, Gamblers, Boxers, Authors, parsons, and poets, sup with me. - A precious Mixture, and they go well together.'

George Gordon, Lord Byron [Trinity, 1805-07], letter to Elizabeth Pigot, 26 October 1807



During the Vietnam War, many blue-collar and minority kids went to fight. The sons of more affluent and influential fathers went to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Michigan and Berekley Universities and became radicals - rebels.

The high school classes of 1964-1969 took a pounding in Vietnam. Their Fortunate Son counterparts made war on American Involvement in South East Asia, Racism, Capitalism and Middle Class Mores. Dorms became he foxholes of a romantic revolution for American middle class and aristocratic rebels. Guys who sneaked a Schlitz in June, became Septemberists after a few tokes of weed. As Tom Hayden once said about the growing '60's drug culture, get a middle class square to break the law once, and you have a revolutionary for life.

All through their college years, some of America's Baby Boom generation played the role of Young Lord Byron. They repudiated the bourgeoisie lives of Ward and June, back home in Bloomfield Hills, MI, Winnetka, IL and Shaker Heights, OH. They bought East German Stassi great-coats, wore beads, long manes and facial hair. Some sported kaftans along with tied-dyed everything that matched classes on John Dewey,Thoreau, Rousseau, Marx, Hegel, Nietsche and sober sociology lectures on systemic racism.

Boot Camp over these young Robespierre's ascended the barricades and issued statements proclaiming solidarity with Nation Liberation Fronts Universal.

While the blue collar and minority running dog pawns went to Hines Hospital, Walter Reed and other Veterans Administration facilities to learn how to walk with prosthetic limbs, Childe Harold's matriculated to University of Michigan Law, Northwestern University Graduate Schools of Business, Johns Hopkins Medical School and other paths paved by Ward and June years before our Byrons took the ACTs.

Revolution is either for the miserable, or the very comfortable.

A peasant, slave or surf can only bear to see so many of his children starve. An Aristocratic Rebel can only stand to keep his/her views private in public for a non-second.

The Dead-head sticker on a Cadillac Generation had children and grandchildren now Occupying Time on Television and Editorial Pages.

Our Media is no longer made up of Chicago News Bureau shoe-leather investigators, but Medill School of Journalism Aristocratic Rebels.

Our Labor organizers are no longer articulate tough guys with visible scars and cauliflower ears, but University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work graduates trained by the generation of Aristocratic Rebels who fought the Vietnam War at Berkeley, Columbia, Michigan, Dartmouth and Yale.

Our Childe Harold's are being scooped up in Philly and L.A. and occasionally received a shot of pepper spray, or an old fashioned wood shampoo from law enforcement professionals. Here in Chicago, the iconic home of Underground Rowdies like Billy Ayers and Marilyn Katz, sadly enough the revolutionary spirit has done south for the winter - probably Naples, Fl. with gramps and granny, or to hotter climes.

Revolution is Romantic. Byron, Satan, Marx, Soros, Ayers, Code Pink, Daily Kos and OWS are the same.

The only thing difference being - Satan, Byron and Marx had some talent.

The aristocratic rebel, of whom Byron was in his day the exemplar, is a very different type from the leader of a peasant or proletarian revolt. Those who are hungry have no need of an elaborate philosophy to stimulate or excuse discontent, and anything of the kind appears to the m, merely an amusement of the idle rich. They want what others have, not some intangible and metaphysical good. Though they may preach Christian love, as the medieval communist rebels did, their real reasons for doing so are very simple: that the lack of it in the rich and powerful causes the sufferings of the poor, and that the presence of it among comrades in revolt is thought essential to success. But experience of the struggle leads to a despair of the power of love, leaving naked hate as the driving force. A rebel of this type, if, like Marx, he invents a philosophy, invents one solely designed to demonstrate the ultimate victory of his party, not one concerned with values. His values remain primitive: the good is enough to eat, and the rest is talk. No hungry man is likely to think otherwise.

The aristocratic rebel, since he has enough to eat, must have other causes of discontent. I do not include among rebels the mere leaders of factions temporarrily out of power; I include only m,en whose philosophy requires some greater change than their own personal success. It may be that love of power is the underground source of their disconte, but in their conscious thought there is criticism of the government of the world, which, when it goes deep enough, takes the form of Titanic cosmic sel-assertion or, in those who retain some superstition, of Satanism. Both are to be found in Byron. Both, largely through men whom he influenced, became common in large sections of society which could hardly be deemed aristocratic. The aristocratic philosophy of rebellion, growing, developing, and changing as it approached maturity, has inspired a long series of revolutionary movement,s from the Carbonari after the fall of Napoleon to Hitler's coup in 1933; and at each stage it has inspired a corresponding manner of thought and feeling among intellectuals and artists.

It is obvious that an aristocrat does not become a rebel unless his temperament and circumstances are in some way peculiar. Byron's circumstances were very peculiar. His earliest recollections were of his parents' quarrels; his mother was a woman whom he feared for her cruelty and despised for her vulgarity; his lameness filled him with shame, and prevented him from being one of the herd at school. At ten years old, after living in poverty, he suddenly found himself a Lord and the owner of Newstead. His great-uncle the 'wicked Lord,' from whom he inherited, had killed a man in a duel thirty-three years ago, and been ostracized by his neighbors ever since. The Byrons had been a lawless family, and the Gordons, his mother's ancestors, even more so. After the squalor of a back street in Aberdeen, the boy naturally rejoiced in his title and his Abbey, and was willing to take on the character of his ancestors in gratitude for their lands. And if, in recent years, their bellicosity had led them into trouble, he learnt that in former centuries it had brought them renown. One of his earliest poems, "On Leaving Newstead Abbey", relates his emotions at this time, which are of admiration for his ancestors who fought in the Crusades, at Crecy and at Marston Moor. He ends with pious resolve:

Like you will he live, or like you will he perish:
When decay'd may he mingle his dust with your own.

This is not the mood of a rebel, but it suggests "Childe" Harold, the modern peer who imitates medieval barons. As an undergraduate, when for the first time he had an income of his own, he wrote that he felt as independent as "a German Prince who coins his own cash, or a Cherokee Chief who coins no cash at all, but enjoys what is more precious, Liberty. I speak in raptures of that Goddess because my amiable Mama was so despotic." He wrote, in later life, much noble verse in praise of freedom, but it must be understood that the freedom he praised was that of a German Prince or a Cherokee Chief, not the inferior sor that mught conceivably be enjoyed by ordinary mortals.
Lord Betrand Russell History of Western Philosophy.
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
(1788–1824)

1812: Childe Harold, cantos 1 and 2.
1813–14: The Oriental tales, including The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara.
1816: Separation from Lady Byron; leaves England, never to return.
1818: Begins Don Juan.
1813: Joins the Greek war for liberation from the Turks.
In his History of English Literature, written in the late 1850s, the French critic Hippolyte Taine gave only a few condescending pages to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, and then devoted a long enthusiastic chapter to Lord Byron, “the greatest and most English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest together.” This comment reflects the fact that Byron had achieved an immense European reputation during his own lifetime, while his English contemporaries were admired only by small coteries in England and America; through much of the nineteenth century he continued to be rated as one of the greatest of English poets and the very prototype of literary Romanticism. His influence was felt everywhere, not only among minor writers—in the two or three decades after his death, most European poets struck Byronic attitudes—but among the major poets and novelists (including Goethe in Germany, Balzac and Stendhal in France; Pushkin and Dostoevsky in Russia, and Melville in America), painters (especially Delacroix), and composers (especially Beethoven and Berlioz).
These facts may surprise the student who is aware of the modern estimate of Byron as the least consequential of the great Romantic poets, whose achievements have little in common with the distinctive innovations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, or Shelley. Only Shelley, among these writers, thought highly of either Byron or his work; while Byron spoke slightingly of all of them except Shelley, and in fact insisted that, measured against the poetic practice of Alexander Pope, he and his contemporaries were “all in the wrong, one as much as another… we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself.” Byron’s masterpiece, Don Juan, is an instance of that favorite neoclassic type, a satire against modern civilization, and shares many of the aims and methods of Pope, Swift, Voltaire, and Sterne. Even Byron’s lyrics are old-fashioned: many are in the eighteenth-century gentlemanly mode of witty extemporization and epigram (Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos) or continue the Cavalier tradition of the elaborate development of a compliment to a lady (She Walks in Beauty and There Be None of Beauty’s Daughters).
Byron’s chief claim to be considered an arch-Romantic is that he provided his age with what Taine called its “ruling personage; that is, the model that contemporaries invest with their admiration and sympathy.” This personage is the “Byronic hero.” He occurs in various guises in Byron’s writings, but from the first sketch in the opening canto of Childe Harold, and in the verse romances and dramas that follow, his persistent character is that of a moody, passionate, and remorse-torn but unrepentant wanderer. In his developed form, as we find it in Manfred, he is an alien, mysterious, and gloomy spirit, immensely superior in his passions and powers to the common run of humanity, whom he regards with disdain. He harbors the torturing memory of an enormous, nameless guilt that drives him toward an inevitable doom. He is in his isolation absolutely self reliant, inflexibly pursuing his own ends according to his self generated moral code against any opposition, human or supernatural. And he exerts an attraction on other characters which is the more compelling because it involves their terror at his obliviousness to ordinary human concerns and values. This figure, infusing the archrebel in a nonpolitical form with a strong erotic interest, embodied the implicit yearnings of Byron’s time, as imitated in life as well as in art, and helped shape the intellectual as well as the cultural history of the later nineteenth century. The literary descendants of the Byronic hero include Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, and the hero of Pushkin’s great poem Eugene Onegin. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, gives a chapter to Byron—not because he was a systematic thinker, but because “Byronism,” the attitude of “Titanic cosmic self assertion,” established an outlook and a stance toward humanity and the world that entered nineteenth-century philosophy and eventually helped to form Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, the hero who stands outside the jurisdiction of the ordinary criteria of good and evil.
Byron’s contemporaries insisted on identifying the author with his fictional characters. But Byron’s letters and the testimony of his friends show that; except for recurrent moods of black depression, his own temperament was in many respects antithetic to that of his heroes. He was passionate and willful, but when in good humor he could be very much a man of the world in the eighteenth-century style—gregarious, lively, tolerant, and a witty conversationalist capable of taking an ironic attitude toward his own activities as well as those of other men. The aloof hauteur he exhibited in public was largely a mask to hide his diffidence when in a strange company; he possessed devoted friends, both men and women, and among them he was usually unassuming, companionable, sometimes even exuberant, and tactful; to his household dependents he was unfailingly generous and tenaciously loyal. But though Byronism was largely a fiction, produced by a collaboration between Byron’s imagination and that of his public, the fiction was historically more important than the poet in his actual person.
Byron was descended from two aristocratic families, both of them colourful, violent, and dissolute. His grandfather was an admiral nicknamed “Foulweather Jack”; his great-uncle was the fifth Baron Byron, known to his rural neighbors as the “Wicked Lord,” who was tried by his peers for killing his kinsman William Chaworth in a drunken duel; his father, Captain John Byron, was a rake and fortune-hunter who rapidly dissipated the patrimony of two wealthy wives. Byron’s mother was a Scotswoman, Catherine Gordon of Gight, the last descendant of a line of lawless Scottish lairds. After her husband died (Byron was then three), she brought up her son in near-poverty in Aberdeen, where he was indoctrinated with the Calvinistic morality of Scottish Presbyterianism. Mrs. Byron was an ill-educated and almost pathologically irascible woman who nevertheless had an abiding love for her son; they fought violently when together, but corresponded affectionately enough when apart, until her death in 1811.
When Byron was ten, the death of his great-uncle, preceded by that of more immediate heirs to the title, made him the sixth Lord Byron. In a fashion suitable to his new eminence he was sent to Harrow School, then to Trinity College, Cambridge. He had been born with a clubfoot, which was made worse by inept medical treatment, and this defect all his life caused him physical suffering and agonized embarrassment. His lameness made him avid for athletic prowess; he played cricket and made himself an expert boxer, fencer, and horseman, and a powerful swimmer. He was also sexually precocious; when only seven, he fell in love with a little cousin, Mary Duff, and so violently that ten years later news of her marriage threw him into convulsions. Both at Cambridge and at his ancestral estate of Newstead, he engaged with more than ordinary zeal in the expensive pursuits and fashionable dissipations of a young Regency lord. As a result, despite a sizable and increasing income, he got into financial difficulties from which he did not entirely extricate himself until late in his life. In the course of his schooling he formed many close friendships, the most important with John Cam Hobhouse, a sturdy political liberal and commonsense moralist who exerted a steadying influence throughout Byron’s turbulent life.
Despite his distractions at the university, Byron found time to try his hand at lyric verse, some of which was published in 1807 in a slim and conventional volume entitled Hours of Idleness. This was treated with unmerited harshness by the pontifical Edinburgh Review and Byron was provoked to write in reply his first important poem, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a vigorous satire in the couplet style of the late eighteenth-century followers of Pope, in which he incorporated skillful but tactless ridicule of all his major poetic contemporaries, including Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
After attaining his A. M. degree and his majority, Byron set out with Hobhouse in 1809 on a tour through Portugal and Spain to Malta, and then to little-known Albania, Greece, and Asia Minor. In this adventurous two-year excursion, he accumulated materials which he wove into most of his important poems, including his last work, Don Juan. The first literary product was Childe Harold; he wrote the opening two cantos while on the tour which the poem describes, published them in 1812 soon after his return to England, and, in his own oft-quoted phrase, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” He became the celebrity of fashionable London, enjoying an unprecedented literary success, which he soon increased by his series of highly readable Near Eastern verse tales; in these the Byronic hero, in various embodiments, flaunts his misanthropy and undergoes a variety of violent and romantic adventures that current gossip attributed to the author himself. In his chronic shortage of money, Byron could well have used the income from these publications, but instead maintained his status as an aristocratic amateur by giving the royalties away. Occupying his inherited seat in the House of Lords, he also became briefly active on the extreme liberal side of the Whig party and spoke courageously in defense of the Nottingham weavers who, made desperate by technological unemployment, had resorted to destroying the new textile machines; he also supported other liberal measures, including that of Catholic Emancipation.
In the meantime he found himself besieged by women. He was extraordinarily handsome—“so beautiful a countenance,” Coleridge wrote, “I scarcely ever saw… his eyes the open portals of the sun—things of light, and for light.” Because of a constitutional tendency to obesity, however, Byron was able to maintain his beauty only by recurring again and again to a starvation diet of biscuits, soda water, and strong cathartics. Often as a result of female initiative rather than his own, Byron entered into a sequence of liaisons with ladies of fashion. One of these, the flamboyant, eccentric, and hysterical young Lady Caroline Lamb, caused him so much distress by her frenzied pursuit and public tantrums that Byron turned for relief to marriage with Annabella Milbanke, who was in every way Lady Caroline’s opposite, for was naïve, unworldly, intellectual (with a special passion for mathematics), and not a little priggish; she persuaded herself that she could make Byron over in her own image. This ill-starred marriage produced a daughter (Augusta Ada) and many scenes in which Byron, goaded by financial difficulties, behaved so frantically that his wife suspected his sanity; after only one year, the union ended in a legal separation. The final blow came when Lady Byron discovered her husband’s incestuous relations with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. The two had been raised apart, so that they were almost strangers when they met as adults; also, Byron seems to have had one attribute in common with the Byronic hero—a compulsion to try forbidden experience (including, as we now know, homosexual love affairs), joined with a tendency to court his own destruction. Byron’s affection for his sister, however guilty, was genuine, and endured all through his life. This affair proved a delicious morsel even to the jaded palate of the dissolute Regency society; Byron was ostracized by all but a few friends, and finally forced to leave England forever on April 25, 1816.
Byron now resumed the travels incorporated in the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold. At Geneva he lived for several months in close and intellectually fruitful relation to Shelley, who was accompanied by his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and by his wife’s stepsister Claire Clairmont—a misguided girl of seventeen who had forced herself upon Byron while he was still in England and who in January 1817 bore him a daughter, Allegra. In the fall of 1817 Byron established himself in Venice, where he inaugurated various affairs that culminated in a period of frenzied debauchery that, he estimated, involved more than two hundred women, mainly of the lower class. This period was also one of great literary creativity: often working through the later hours of the night he finished his tragedy Manfred, wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold, and after turning out Beppo, a short preview of the narrative style and stanza of Don Juan, began the composition of Don Juan itself In the colloquial ottava rima, he finally learned to write poetry as well as he had written the prose of his superbly vivid, informative, and witty letters.
Exhausted and bored by promiscuity, Byron in 1819 settled into a placid and relatively faithful relationship with Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of the elderly Count Alessandro Guiccioli; according to the Italian upper-class mores of the times, having contracted a marriage of convenience, she could now with propriety attach Byron to herself as a cavaliere servente. Through Teresa’s nationalistic family, the Gambas, Byron became involved in the Carbonari plot against Austrian control over northern Italy. When the Gambas were forced by the authorities to move to Pisa, Byron followed them there, and for the second time joined Shelley. There grew up about the two friends the “Pisan Circle,” which in addition to the Gambas included Shelley’s wife Mary and his friends Thomas Medwin and Edward and Jane Williams, as well as the Greek nationalist leader Prince Mavrocordatos, the picturesque Irish Count Taaffe, and the flamboyant and mendacious adventurer Edward Trelawny, who seems to have stepped out of one of Byron’s romances. The circle was gradually broken up, first by Shelley’s anger over Byron’s treatment of his daughter, Allegra (Byron had sent the child to be brought up as a Catholic in an Italian convent, where she died of a fever in 1822); then by the expulsion of the Gambas, whom Byron followed to Genoa; and finally by the drowning of Shelley and Williams in July 1822.
Byron meanwhile had been steadily at work on a series of closet tragedies (including Cain, Sardanapalus, and Marino Faliero) and on his superb satire, The Vision of Judgment. But increasingly he devoted himself to the continuation of Don Juan. He had always been diffident in his self-judgments and easily swayed by literary advice. But now, confident that he had at last found his métier and was accomplishing a masterpiece, he kept on, in spite of persistent objections against the supposed immorality of the poem by the English public, by his publisher John Murray, by his friends and well-wishers, and by his extremely decorous mistress, the Countess Guiccioli—by almost everyone, in fact, except the idealist Shelley, who thought Juan incomparably better than anything he himself could write and insisted “that every word of it is pregnant with immortality.”
Byron finally broke off literature for action when he organized an expedition to assist in the Greek war for independence from the Turks. He knew too well the conditions in Greece, and had too skeptical an estimate of human nature, to entertain hope of success; but he was bored with love; with the domesticity of his relations to Teresa, and in some moods, with life itself. Also, since his own writings had helped to kindle European enthusiasm for the Greek cause, he now felt honor-bound to try what could be done. In the dismal, marshy town of Missolonghi he lived a Spartan existence, training troops whom he had himself subsidized and exhibiting great practical grasp and power of leadership amid a chaos of factionalism, intrigue, and military ineptitude. Worn out, he succumbed to a series of feverish attacks and died just after he had reached his thirty-sixth birthday. To this day Byron is revered by the Greek people as a national hero.
Students of Byron still feel, as his friends had felt, the magnetism of volatile temperament. As Mary Shelley wrote six years after his death, when she read Thomas Moore’s edition of his Letters and journals: “The Lord Byron I find there is our Lord Byron—the fascinating—faulty—childish—philosophical being—daring the world—docile to a private circle—impetuous and indolent—gloomy and yet more gay than any other. … [I become] reconciled (as I used to in his lifetime) to those waywardnesses which annoyed me when he was away, through the delightful and buoyant tone of his conversation and manners.” Of his inner discordances, Byron himself was aware; he told his friend Lady Blessington: “I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long—I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me.” Yet he remained faithful to his code: a determination always to tell the truth as he saw it about the world and about himself (his refusal to suppress or conceal any of his moods is in part what made him seem so contradictory) and a dedication to the freedom of nations and individuals. As he went on to say to Lady Blessington: “There are but two sentiments to which I am constant—a strong love of liberty, and a detestation of cant.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=xS3sqPSvALEC&pg=PA194&lpg=PA194&dq=bertrand+russell+on+byron+the+aristocratic+rebel&source=bl&ots=hddvzx7NwD&sig=DoM6dsQ7anKzOhMrhlBPVRoce6Q&hl=en&ei=laPXTpejM-702wWwhtSYDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=bertrand%20russell%20on%20byron%20the%20aristocratic%20rebel&f=false

Friday, November 25, 2011

Rahm's "Holiday Tree" - Cosmic Impiety On Display


Mayor Rahm Emanuel lit the Chicago Holiday Tree. The Holiday Tree will delight Secular Puritans - The Progressives. Will Rahm next light the Holiday Candle - that big brass receptacle for seven candles? How about that Old Devil Crescent Moon?

Mayor Rahm Emanuel continued a Chicago tradition by flipping the switch to light the 55-foot Colorado spruce in Daley Plaza Wednesday night, but unlike Mayor Daley, Emanuel will be lighting a "holiday" tree.

The city's first Jewish mayor originally abstained from calling the festive display a "Christmas tree," although the city refers to Wednesday night's event as the "98th Annual Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony" on its website.

Emily Soloff, associate director for interreligious and intergroup relations for the American Jewish Committee, told the Chicago Tribune that the mayor's word choice was admirable.

"Those for whom it isn't a religious symbol relate to it for the symbol of happiness and joy that we all as Chicagoans can experience this season," Soloff said. "That adds to our civic pride and our feelings of being a community that we all share in a part of this season."
Huffington Post naturalmente

We are enjoying Secular Puritanism's last kicks at the collective Christian Cat.

The other day Atheist activists and ACLU at some level of support and encouragement ventured onto Camp Pendelton to make sure that Marines removed a cross at a make-shift chapel to the fallen of Iraq and Afghanistan. Another Pyrrhic Progressive victory got notched up.

The Secular Puritans continue to put religion, largely Christianity, into the blocks and halters with the cheerleaders like Bill Maher and Hollywood types swinging the censers filled with Progressive frankincense. When President Barack Obama won in 2008, children of Dewey went dancing in the aisles. Obama ushered in an age dedicated to Science and Certainty and Logic, they argued. Children are tissues!

Things are not looking all that great for the Science, Certainty and Logical Presidency.

Here in the Obama 2012 epicenter, Chicago, Mayor Rahm lit the Holiday Tree. It was Rahm getting in the faces of people - little man disease. Little people, both physical and psychological go all terrier on people in an attempt to intimidate them.

People who are self-assured do not need to intimidate. Intimidation is generally attempted by persons with low-self-esteem. Little man's complex often goads a smaller person to swagger and act the bully with people perceived to be bigger than themselves or somehow an imagined threat. Little Intimidators go after the bigger targets, in the mistaken notion that there are no real consequences to their actions.

The Chicago Sun Times , with great regularity, features the front page story of a little man marinated with giant killer -Mr. Booze - who was punched by a larger man. Fatal error, that.

There are things larger than us no matter how big, or powerful we might be, or become - that's in Darwin by the way.

Darwin opened the door for Hegel, Fichte, Nietsche and Dewey. Where biology was once the province of Czech Monks looking to make better beans fro the Augustinian monastery and cashiered British Army officers, who robbed the regimental funds to pay off gambling debts and were now consigned to battalions of butterflies, Darwin allowed economists and romantic social engineers to play God.

Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is a book which contains the basis of natural history for our views.
Karl Marx on Darwin's On the Origin of SpeciesDecember, 1860


Karl Marx wanted to dedicate his Das Kapital to Darwin, but the Beagle voyager declined

Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep and important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin -Letter from Charles Darwin to Karl Marx
October, 1873


Sorry, Charlie, but I think you and Herr Marx merely fueled the fools.

Science was the means of overturning the study of metaphysics - the study of Being. What is there and what is it like? Spirituality can not be measured but we sure recognize that there is a there - there.

I never met my great grand fathers, but I have great faith in their existences - in County Kerry. If I trust public documents, I can reach a greater certainty on this issue, but again I am locked into trust or faith.

Getting rid of faith diminishes the individual. In the 19th Century, leading powers that have been, worked to diminish the individual and promote the community. That is the essence of Progressive ism -control.

Rahm lit the Holiday Tree, but the problem remains - HOLIDAY means Holy Day. There's that damn religion again!

Taking down creches, crosses and all manner of religious icon is the act of bullies and little people. They are impious. They not only get in the faces of people, but they thrust their noses and mouths heavenward. Piety is the recognition of something greater than our selves.

In his great History of Western Philosophy, an early example of Great Thought for Dummies, Lord Bertrand Russell, an agnostic, took John Dewey apart. The Father of American Education was a little man who never worried about consequences. Dewey believed that inquiry was the same truth.

Bertrand Russell called John Dewey's Hegelianism "'cosmic impiety,' the temptation to treat truth as a means of control, leading to an intoxication with scientific power, and the dismantling of checks on human pride and hubris. Russell called cosmic impiety the greatest danger of his time. It is a danger that shows no sign of passing and I think the new atheists are only deepening it" ( Mark Vernon).

Philosopher and agnostic Mark Vernon expanded on this scientific bit of data to underscore the meanness of Secular Puritanism, The parish churches of this country may or may not be emptying but the medieval cathedrals are filling up ??" because beautiful music and sublime architecture speaks to people of this ultimate mystery.

There is still alot of There, out There!

Light that Holiday Tree Rahm and then Light that Holiday Candle - learned ignorance is still ignorance and very bad manners. There are consequences - lots of them.

This I know, Darwin, Hegel, Fichte, Sorel, Marx, Dewey, and Progressives are the foundation for the Holiday Tree, X-Mas, and the Obama 2012 Campaign and that is a pretty shaky foundation. It ain't no Rock.

http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2007/08/22/696-the-rise-of-atheism


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics

Friday, October 28, 2011

Les Soeurs Baiser - A Tale of Halloween Deception


Men sholde nat knowe of goddes pryvetee [God's private affairs].
Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed [unlearned] man
That noght but oonly his bileve kan! [who knows nothing except the Creed]

Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales


Thanks to John Dewey, too many Americans have been duped. Lord Bertrand Russell, the father of Logical Positivism, and a celebrated agnostic, was a contemprary of the Father of American Public Education, who took a dim view of Dewey's dim philospophy of Education - Inquiry is Truth. Well it is not, Jasper.

Lord Russell tagged Dewey's will to power, via fundamentally unsound pedogogy, to be a "cosmic impiety." Because one insisits that 'it just is' does not determine an end.

Here is a seasonal object lesson that deconstructs Dewey's Inquiry, that I recently heard from Vietnam Hero and California Yeoman Iron Mike McQuade.


"A cabbie picks up a Nun. She gets into the cab, and notices that the
VERY handsome cabdriver won't stop staring at her. She asks him why he is staring..

He replies: "I have a question to ask, but I don't want to offend you"

She answers, " My son, you cannot offend me. When have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I' m sure that there's nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive."

"Well, I've always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me."

She responds, "Well, let's see what we can do about that -
1) you have to be single and
2) you must be Catholic."

The cab driver is very excited and says, "Yes, I'm single and Catholic!"

"OK" the nun says. "Pull into the next alley."

The nun fulfills his fantasy with a kiss that would make a hooker blush.

But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying.

"My dear child," said the nun, why are you crying?"

"Forgive me but I've sinned. I lied and I must confess, I'm married and I'm a Unitarian."

The nun says, "That's OK. My name is Steve and I'm going to a Halloween party!"

Quod erat Demonstrandum.