Eric Johnson – Page 16 – Catholic Light

Anti-religious nut peddles his hatreds

You may have heard about the Duggar Family, the Arkansas couple who have 16 kids, ages 1 to 17. Although they are Evangelicals, they abandoned birth control after four years of marriage, embracing the idea that children are gifts from God and accepting as many children as God might give them.
The Duggars inspire mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, if they say that it’s God’s plan for them to procreate 16 people, who am I to say that it isn’t? Truly, they live lives of heroic sacrifice. On the other hand, nowhere does it say in Scripture that we are called to have as many children as possible. Apparently, after child #10, a doctor advised Michelle the wife that she probably shouldn’t have any more kids, which could be a serious enough reason to refrain from having any more. Also, their children’s names all begin with the letter J. But the Duggars are not living on public support, as the husband makes a good living in real estate, and their hearts seem completely focused on God.
But to Mark Morford, a lunatic columnist in San Francisco, the Duggars are a threat to all that is right and good:

Let us be clear: I don’t care what sort of God you believe in, it’s a safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables. God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them) lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet’s resources faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children, she’d have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door. Stop it now.

You gotta read the entire diseased essay. Morford’s columns are light-years beyond parody. He manages to pack all of the Left’s hatreds into a comparatively small space, screeching against chastity, marriage, Christianity, Wal Mart, etc. And where did the “repressed pedophilic priests” come from? If someone is pedophilic, wouldn’t it be good for them to be repressed?
Assuming he’s not truly insane, Morford does say a couple of things worth commenting upon. First, overpopulation, even if you believe in it, is a local problem. Arkansas is not overpopulated. It has 20 people per square kilometer, well below the density for the entire U.S., meaning that there are 33 states with higher densities. New Jersey’s population is 2,110% more dense, and somehow most of them manage to eat and clothe themselves, except perhaps in Newark. Even if Arkansas were “overpopulated,” it’s unlikely that one couple having 16 children is going to make much difference.
Second, Morford suspects that maybe in the long run, it’s people who have more kids who will inherit the earth, because his buddies on the Left aren’t producing many “funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring.” Those who are in love with sterility and death will eventually die out, like dinosaurs. Quite perceptive.

Oh, come on! Kids will have group sex no matter what! It’s only natural!

Every time I have the slightest twinge of doubt that Catholic school is worth the money, something like this happens.
Apparently, some athletes Osbourn High School in Manassas decided to have a “sexual incident” one afternoon, to use the clinical term from the article. And did the parents discipline their children, or move to another state? No — according to WMAL, a local station, they complained that their rutting children were punished too severely.
Whenever parents attack the authorities for punishing their misbehaving kids, one can only assume it’s displaced anger from shame. They think that by defending their children, they can refrain from blaming themselves. That’s the charitable interpretation — the less charitable one would be that they really think there’s nothing wrong with such an “incident.”
I will be completely happy to write that tuition check next month.

Edwards picks Wall Street over Main Street

Remember Senator John Edwards (D-Prell)? Okay, probably not. He was the guy who lost the presidential election along with that other guy, you know…the one with the gray bouffant hairdo and obnoxious wife.
Anyway, before running on the Al Qaeda Proxy Candidate ticket, Senator Edwards ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. He told voters that there are “Two Americas,” one with gold plated toilets, the other with no indoor plumbing, one that shops at Tiffany’s, the other that can’t afford to shop at Wal-Mart, etc. This clumsy quasi-Marxist theme didn’t play well, even with hard-core Democrats, who, if they believed in the death penalty, would limit its use to anyone making over $200,000 a year.
Nevertheless, without so much as a self-serving press release, John Edwards took a look at both Americas, and decided that the leather seats and martinis of Rich America looked better than the folding chairs and Pabst Blue Ribbon in Poor America. He’s joining a private investment group so he can “[develop] investment opportunities worldwide and strategic advice on global economic issues.”
Edwards was worth about $50 million when he ran for VP eleven months ago, so it’s not like he needs the money. The BusinessWeek article notes that other politicians have gone into the financial sector, but none of the examples they list had ever run on a haves vs. have-nots agenda before doing so.
Democrats say they’re for “social justice,” which is why far too many Catholics buy their rhetoric and vote for them. But that platitude translates into sordid things like racial set-asides and massive income transfers from working families to the often-undeserving elderly. And for all their talk about compassion for the “little guy,” when it comes to the littlest guys at all — babies in the womb — they have no compassion at all.
Bravo for John Edwards: he isn’t going to pretend to work for the wretched and the oppressed. He’s going to make buckets full of money and throw them on his pile. At least Jimmy Carter has done some demonstrably good things in his well-deserved retirement.
There are plenty of sleazy Republicans, too, but at least under their policies, we get to keep at least a little more of our money, and nobody ends up dead.

Nothing wrong with indoctrination

At a two-day training class I attended a couple of weeks ago, the students were mostly civilians, but there was a large contingent of Navy medical officers. In one session, groups of students had to hammer out a strategy for a fictional company we supposedly worked for. In the course of the discussion, one of the officers suggested that “indoctrination” would be a good idea for line workers.
The civilian half of the group assumed he was either joking or revealing himself as a crypto-fascist, but he was doing neither. “Indoctrination” is often used as a pejorative, but that is not its primary definition:
in·doc·tri·nate
1 : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH
2 : to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle
Or as one weapons instructor said to us in boot camp, “Indoctrination doesn’t mean brainwashing.” Immersing yourself in “fundamentals or rudaments” doesn’t mean you have to amputate your faculties of reason; if you’re really ingesting what you’re learning, the opposite is true.
Fear of “indoctrination” is, I think, at the heart of why adults today are reluctant to teach kids firm principles. But the only way you can get kids to learn something is to repeat it until they understand, and then reinforce it frequently. Kids don’t want, much less need, fine distinctions — they crave clarity. When they want a fuller explanation as to why it’s wrong to clobber your brother with a mallet, you can provide it when they are ready. Until then, mallet-clobbering is bad because it’s wrong to hurt people, period.

NEWSFLASH: CATHOLIC CHURCH SAYS BIBLE NOT TRUE!

Proving that shoddy religious journalism is not an American phenomenon, the Times of London has decided to tell us that the “Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible.”
“THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true,” the article begins. Yes, it’s true: Wisdom really isn’t a woman, and she doesn’t have teeth “like a flock of sheep that are even shorn.” Also, when Jesus said we should be like serpents, he didn’t expect us to grow scaly skins.
The article continues:

The document shows how far the Catholic Church has come since the 17th century, when Galileo was condemned as a heretic for flouting a near-universal belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible by advocating the Copernican view of the solar system. Only a century ago, Pope Pius X condemned Modernist Catholic scholars who adapted historical-critical methods of analysing ancient literature to the Bible.

There is an excellent, disinterested summary of the Galileo slander here, written by a non-Catholic. Somebody else can look up the Pius X quotation, but when I read it a few years ago, I remember that he was condemning the use of literary theories as the sole way to interpret scriptural truth. The Holy Father’s condemnation fell thus not on those who wished to place the Bible in its historical context, or apply textual scholarship to the Bible (which is absurd on its face — source criticism was invented to disintangle the early versions of scripture.)
“The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US,” Ruth Gledhill writes. The “rise of the religious Right” has been proceeding for three decades in America, so it’s nice of Ms. Gledhill to notice. Religion has played a starring role on the national stage since long before this country’s birth; the question is not why religion is a political factor now, but why it was so dormant for so long.
Gledhill and the Times can run such stories, even though their audience is largely right-of-center, because to British elites, believing Christians are freaks of nature. Nevermind that the Evangelical movement was started by the Brits, including the indominable Wesleys, today that movement is populated by otherworldly dolts who long to bring back the rack and the Iron Maiden (excellent!).
When I was in London last month, the BBC ran some footage of a couple dozen earnest-looking folks who gathered on the Supreme Court steps to pray for a good incoming justice on the court. Not my thing, really, and they did look a tad goofy, but so what? Anybody who works in downtown D.C. knows that there are always a few people demonstrating for this or that; nobody pays that much attention unless the demonstration is blocking traffic, in which case the demonstrators are courting murder.
But to illustrate their theme of the benighted fools who dare to pray in public, the BBC was so pleased with this footage that they were still playing it several days later. Were they aware that about a third of the American public identifies itself as Evangelical? And that means there are more Evangelicals than, say, viewers of network evening news programs?
It’s unfair to single out our British cousins, who are, after all, guided by the same constellation of class-based prejudices and hatreds as our American elite media. Such as the Washington Post: “Strong Grounding in the Church Could Be a Clue to Miers’s Priorities,” its headline blared Wednesday. Did they run an article called “Work as ACLU Lawyer May Indicate Future Rulings” when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was nominated?
As the headline indicates, the article attempts to rat out Harriet Miers for attending a church where they believe in the reality of Christ’s sacrifice, if you can imagine. They even seem to think that the Gospel says something about how humans ought to live their lives — “There are antiabortion pamphlets inside the church and literature opposing premarital sex,” the Post helpfully reports.
About ten years ago, Christopher Hitchens wrote a terribly unfair book about Mother Theresa, intending it as a hatchet job. His main theme — apart from the transparently absurd charge that she was a publicity-seeking fraud — was that secularists shouldn’t be taken in by Mother Theresa’s corporal works of mercy. No, that tiny Albanian nun did not do these things because of an Enlightenment-inspired ethos, but because she thought she was bringing souls to heaven. Hitchens’ book was wrong, but at least he bothered to take his subject seriously. The same cannot be said of practically any mainstream journalist writing about religion today.